Freedom - Immortality - Social Life
GA 72
X. Moral, Social Life and Religion from the Viewpoint of Anthroposophy
11 December 1918, Basel
Today I would like to speak about the relation of the supersensible knowledge to the moral, social, and religious life of the human being.
The naturalist Wallace (Arthur Russel W., 1823-1913) who tried to create a worldview in similar way as Darwin made an important quotation about the moral development of humanity. Haeckel and many other researchers also agree to this quotation. Wallace said, as big the progress of humanity is with reference to the knowledge of nature and its backgrounds, as little is on the other side the progress of the moral life. From stage to stage, one realises the world knowledge developing. If one looks at the moral development, one cannot say that humanity has made substantial progress since ancient times.
Indeed, such a quotation is of particular significance. Indeed, someone who tries to get a deeper insight in the course of the human development will not be able to agree with this thinker for ever and ever; but for the recent, by the natural sciences determined time for which Wallace as a naturalist has a sharpened eye one will be able to maintain this quotation. In older times that the mentioned thinker can less survey, it is not right that the intellectual knowledge hurries forward in such an essential way compared to the stages of the moral development.
However, just for our time in which the scientific knowledge has advanced brilliantly one has to consider what this thinker states. Someone who looks at the catastrophic events of the last years with understanding, with empathy will admit that that which one has experienced does not give evidence of a special moral progress, which keeps up with the intellectual progress of humanity.
There seems a very important question to be which is more urgent because on the other side the desire exists just today to become aware of the areas of morality. However, someone who gets to know the real character of the scientific research in that way, as I have characterised it the day before yesterday from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint, knows while he experiences the border of this scientific cognition that it is not an accidental meeting for the last centuries, but that a causal connection is to be found. I had explained the day before yesterday how just the essentials of scientific knowledge consist of the fact that it finds its way to its progress, while it takes no account of the capacity for love which just enables us to produce the right relation to human beings. However, because this capacity for love continues having an effect in the human being, it must be retained so that scientific knowledge can be obtained, that is why the human being arrives in the scientific cognition at a certain border.
As one can easily understand, the development of the capacity for love is associated with the progressive life. If by contrast one considers those spiritual abilities that the human being just applies if he practises natural sciences, one finds that the forces that play a special role in this research cannot be directed to the progressive life, but to the dying life. While we look into life with these scientific forces, we do not look into life, but into that which dies.
It is not detrimental to the scientific research if just the strict naturalists repeatedly argue against concepts like “vitality” in science. In the course of the nineteenth century, scientific research has rightly eliminated what one called “vitality” once. However, some people believe, it is only a temporary defect that the human being cannot look into life, but is only able to look at the dying.
However, it is not in this way. The ability of knowledge that is directed to nature has to search the dead within the living. Hence, the trend is to expel life in order to search just that what does not live. One cannot say that one can also understand life with the advancing way of scientific thinking. No, this way of thinking will be great just because it does not understand life but looks for the dying.
Hence, the understanding of such soul qualities that are associated with the capacity for love has decreased in that time in which this way of thinking has reached a special height. With it, the whole moral life is connected. Love is the basic force that has to develop, so that moral life exists.
Outer events also prove what I have just explained. One experiences quite strange things in this area. I have repeatedly pointed in my talks of the last years to an excellent book by Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), The Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). I had to appreciate this book almost as a brilliant achievement because Oscar Hertwig refutes any hasty conclusion of the materialistically minded Darwinists with conscientious scientific methods.
Now something extremely strange happened. Oscar Hertwig published another, minor writing that dealt with moral, social, and political questions. Lo and behold, this writing contains the purest nonsense. A way of thinking pervades the writing that is suitable in no way for the solution of the put questions. Thus, we see a brilliant naturalist completely failing where he wants to consider social, moral, and political phenomena.
I could increase these examples. However, you need only to point to one thing to show how the modern times have become infertile concerning the understanding of the moral life. I have to become somewhat heretic if I characterise these things because people do not yet want to believe this today,—heretic in this case not against the church but against quite different directions.
If you consider philosophical worldviews that are not superficial and arise from the mere scientific way of thinking, one likes to point to Kant and Kantianism. Just Kant was often quoted in disgusting way in the last time, I would like to say. Since one could realise that the worst hawks and the most radical pacifists quoted Kant. There are those who have changed during the last weeks just from furious hawks into radical pacifists—such persons do exist—, quoted Kant once and quote Kant now in the nicest way according to their respective opinion.
Indeed, Kant is typical in many fields for the form which modern thinking has assumed. He is also typical for how people often assume that what faces them in the spiritual life. By his way of writing, one considers Kant as an author who is somewhat hard to understand. However, because some people bring themselves to understand him and consider themselves as very clever, they find, because Kant said something clever that they can just still understand that Kant is a particularly great man.
Well, concerning the moral life Kant put up a principle that one quotes very often, indeed, it is sometimes only called, while one says, Kant put up the “categorical imperative” concerning the moral life. This “categorical imperative,” put into words, is as follows: act in such a way that the maxims of your action can become a guideline for all human beings.—This has seemed to me always in such a way, as if anybody says, let a tailor make such a jacket that all human beings can wear it.—The immediate moral impulses can be grasped only with the most individual of the human being and can enjoy life only this way. These are pressed in the empty phrases of extreme abstraction that should be applied to all human beings in the same way.
It is important to realise that one has to strive for abstractions in the area of physical laws, but this way of imagining leads away from the field in the human being that wants to be grasped if one wants to envisage the moral impulses what carries the human being immediately in the moral life and strengthens him. Since that by which we are moral human beings has to catch fire in the immediate living conditions, in the immediate relation from human being to human being. This is something very individual in every single case. The human soul must have the possibility to develop a very individual impulse from himself that cannot be characterised by the fact that one says, it should be a maxim for all human beings. No, that what can be a maxim for all human beings has the least moral impact, does not carry the human being morally through life, but that what directly obliges him in the most individual sense to behave one way or the other.
In the immediate life, no concept or mental picture carries the human being in the moral sense but love. I have already tried 25 years ago to found this teaching of individual morality in my Philosophy of Freedom struggling against the abstract trend of Kantianism. This is penetrated above all with the knowledge that the moral action can only arise from such a love of the concerning action to be done which equals the love for a single human being. Love must prevail in the action that should be a moral one, love which is not self-love, but which forces back the self and replaces it with that what should take place from pure love. The individual insight that I should carry out the action, which is up to me, changes the action into a moral one.
I have said the day before yesterday that in the characterised supersensible consciousness just the force of love prevails which does not prevail in the usual abstract thinking. Of course, I have not stated with it that the activity of the spiritual researcher is identical with that what the soul accomplishes if it feels morally. It is not identical, but it is of the same kind. As well as the soul works in the usual life in a certain area, while it feels morally, it is just active in another area, while it raises a force which normally slumbers, while it beholds into the spiritual world and develops the final goal of the supersensible knowledge, the Intuitive knowledge.
One ascends from the Imaginative to the Inspired, to the Intuitive knowledge. The Intuitive knowledge of supersensible beings and events is not like the love in the moral area, but the situation is the same in which the soul is as in the physical area while it feels love morally. The state of the soul is the same. Hence, spiritual science is allowed to say, within its own activity just that ability of the soul that is realised in the moral life is maintained on higher spiritual level.
That is why spiritual science especially cultivates that what has been eclipsed just by the glorious development of the scientific knowledge, the trend to that soul force which is necessary to the moral action. Thus, one may say, if one considers Kantianism and the scientific ways of thinking, they have pushed down the former, more instinctive life, which delivered the moral impulses as it were into the unconscious. However, spiritual science raises these forces again which are related to the moral feeling. Spiritual science will raise that into full consciousness what lived once as instinctive moral sensations in the human being.
Thus, one can understand that just in the time in which humanity left a more instinctive soul life and developed unilaterally in the area of intellectual knowledge of nature at first, the sense withdrew which is immediately directed to that what lives as moral in the human being. Thus, the conscious sense for moral impulses is not maintained just during this scientific age. It will appear if just in the centre of the soul life that force for the knowledge of higher supersensible worlds emerges which must live on another level in the normal moral feeling of the soul.
Spiritual science brings about these mental pictures of the supersensible worlds. If humanity assumes these spiritual-scientific mental pictures as well as the scientific mental pictures, they will have another significance in the soul life than the scientific mental pictures. These spiritual-scientific mental pictures are brought from such areas of the soul where the soul force related with the moral is maintained. Hence, they react upon the capacity for love and with it upon the immediately individual impulses of the moral life. While the age of abstractions could give a general definition only, spiritual science will be able to intervene immediately in life, so that the human being faces life understanding and gets the moral impulse from the intuition of life. Then another kind of moral influence than from any abstract moral theory or a sum of moral principles will originate from spiritual science. That will originate what does not only make the maxims immediately moral because one can experience them in life: moral sermons do not help much in life.
Of course, some people regard it as a requirement of our time to stress always again, the human beings should love each other.—However, this is only pointless rhetoricalness, if not even nonsense, if not even a mask for the fact that one just has little love and stresses it, hence, all the more. The less spiritual science talks about love, the more the special imaginations arising from the force of love arouse the understanding and—I would like to say—the capacity to unfold the moral in the individual situation, while they settle in the soul. Hence, spiritual science hopes if it finds the access to the human beings that it does not give moral maxims only but even moral heating fuel. Hence, spiritual science will revive that what has withered under the influence of the scientific knowledge.
Concerning the moral life one will note if one has tried to implement scientific thinking also in the moral world that this thinking in the moral area can lead only to concepts of decline because it considers the dying life only also towards nature. However, because spiritual science is related in its searching with the productive force that expresses itself in love, it will be also able to bring productive morality to humanity again. It will spread something again among the human beings that they will not despair of the question: what should I do, actually? What is my task?-, but it will work among the human beings that they receive the suggestion from it to do this and that in life and to be carried morally thereby through life. The number of those who labour and are heavy laden will decrease who suffer just from it emotionally and suffer as a result of it also physically that they cannot use life because they have nothing in their thinking, in their mental pictures and ideas that lets the moral task arise.
In spiritual science just a knowledge, a sum of qualities will exist which does not betray the human being if he envisages his life tasks, but fulfils him with moral impulses, so that he can say to himself at every moment of life, I deal with this or that. Then he finds no time to ponder with the empty soul and not to know what he should do with his life, to have to go to sanitariums, to be stimulated from the outside, so that his soul is filled, while it can only be filled really if one can get the life tasks from the depths of the own inside. One can easily argue, one does not note with some followers of spiritual science that these fruits of which I have just spoken appear with them; on the contrary, one realises that with them often above all selfishness and egoism, sometimes an ingenious egoism develops that one can find little love just with them. One should still admit this for today. That what should develop has to struggle through some obstacles. However, it is inherent in the nature of the matter that the things develop this way. It is also very much reasoned that at first something else appears.
Those are not wrong who say, yes, spiritual science also thinks that the present life points to former lives on earth and to future ones and that the human being lives during the intervals in the spiritual world—that the destiny which now the human being experiences in spite of his freedom is dependent on that what he brings with him from former lives and that that which he accomplishes in this life works again on coming lives.
Indeed, I have heard, how full persons if one has made them aware of starving and miserable people who believed, however, to be rather good followers of any spiritual-scientific direction, said, well, this is okay, we have deserved that in the former life, and he has deserved his hunger in his former life.—This is only a radical expression of that which often appears while people use what they receive from spiritual science to justify their materialist sensations. Of course, if one has to extend the human individuality beyond this single life if one has to point to that what develops as something transpersonal in the human individuality in his lives on earth, egoism can be thereby stirred up, as the theoretical egoism is often stirred up with the numerous supporters of spiritual science who are concerned with nothing more important than to invent who they were in their previous lives on earth. There are often such people. However, what forms the basis there is the following.
The human being experiences two levels if he is concerned with spiritual science. The first level consists of the fact that he accepts that what he receives from spiritual science for his own satisfaction. He is happy to find out something with which he can live. This is the first level.
The second level is that where one exceeds what generates just a subtle egoism where one goes over to that point where the will, the whole human being is stimulated in his relation to life from that what spiritual science can give.
Then egoism stops, then the worlds are woken in the human being that carry him beyond his narrow vicinity, which consist of pondering in his soul. Then the human being is directed away from himself just to other human beings. An individual-moral feeling changes into the social feeling from which then the moral action arises.
With it, we touch something that deeply penetrates into the crisis of our time. At the same time, we touch an area, in which, although it is so burning, the biggest ambiguity prevails. While I go over to the social area, I would like to point introductorily to the most important. One has the impression very easily if one speaks how the human being attains such supersensible knowledge: this is something very remote; this is something that is very strange to the usual life on earth.
That is not completely true. If one does not misuse the expression, one may say, the owner of supersensible knowledge is just a seer. Then one can have the opinion, he is proud to have acquired something that, otherwise, all other human beings do not have. However, this is not true. Every human being is in one area always—save that one does not know it in the usual life that one cannot even connect a sense with it if it is stated—, in the spiritual condition, which one can appropriate for the other areas of spiritual science only laboriously as I have characterised it the day before yesterday, so that you get to the supersensible knowledge. You are in one area always in this spiritual condition; else, you would be simply blind in this area. This is the one area if you enter just into a loving relationship to your fellow human beings. One considers the other human being from the same soul viewpoint—but just only the human being—from which you have to look if you want to have supersensible knowledge. However, you must develop the capacity first to cause the same situation in your soul concerning the other things, which the instinct or life simply causes if you face another human being with understanding love, with interest. In this case, you become clairvoyant in the usual life. It is just assigned to the human being in the usual life to become clairvoyant in this one case; for the other cases he has to appropriate the suitable abilities laboriously and methodically.
The ability to face the fellow human with understanding, with interest, to become engrossed in the characteristic of the other human being forms the basis of the true social life in spite of all objections. Because the ability must be there instinctive in the human being if he wants to establish a relationship to the fellow human because it is the ability with which one manages just the most significant investigations of spiritual science, just spiritual science works on the social life. That knowledge, which one must appropriate for the supersensible world, reacts upon the social feeling and wakes real understanding for the fellow human. This is significant.
Hence, just in that time the social demands originated in which on the other side scientific thinking celebrated the biggest triumphs with its intellectuality. Before the sixteenth century, we do not realise that the human being thought thoroughly, in particular not scientifically, about any social demand. The entire social life was instinctive.
With the emergence of the scientific habitual ways of thinking, it becomes necessary to appropriate social concepts, to assert conscious social sensations. If we see where in the most radical way the social demands appear, in the industrial proletariat, we find that this proletariat has developed its habitual ways of thinking with the help of natural sciences.
What the proletariat has experienced in the externally realised scientific way of thinking has generated the special way of dealing intellectually with the social demands. While just the position of the human being to his fellow humans that is related to clairvoyance was forced back, the social element withdrew substantially during the last centuries. Because it has withdrawn, because the social instincts did no longer exist, the intellectual social demands originated.
If we consider the human being not only concerning his physical body but if we become aware by spiritual science that he is as a soul in spiritual surroundings about which he knows nothing with his usual consciousness, then the whole human being splits up in the physical world and the spiritual world. He splits up in a peculiar way.
If we consider our view of nature, natural sciences and that what is associated with them at first, what holds true? It is peculiar that all questions for that what natural sciences give originate from the spiritual. The questions come from the spirit; indeed, one can get them from the spirit as it was done in old times, or as in recent times the naturalists do, they can be taken as heritage from the times when they settled down instinctively in the human mind. What we observe experimenting is answer only in the area of natural sciences. Questions arise from the spirit. The answers are here in the physical realm. This is a very interesting connection.
Because in old times an atavistic, instinctive spiritual life existed, scientific questions arose instinctively from the human soul. These questions were much more comprehensive than that what with scientific observations and experiments the human beings could obtain as answer. This ability to feel questions instinctively withdrew. The insight into the supersensible worlds did not yet exist; hence, one only had the heritage in the scientific questions just in the age in which one developed the methods of observing and experimenting et cetera.
Someone who looks with understanding at natural sciences, finds out for himself that all the questions are handed down from old times and become paler and paler what impairs the answers. If spiritual science did not appear that can deliver new questions for natural sciences from the spiritual world, so that that which the observation finds experimentally can be lighted up properly, one would have gradually to experience an entire paralysis of the scientific life in spite of any external methodical activity as you can already experience it very clearly today if you only have sense of it.
This holds true with reference to the view of nature. With reference to the social and moral life, the reverse holds true. The questions, the demands manifest within the physical world; and only within the spiritual world, the answers arise. There the reverse holds true.
The human being had an instinctive spiritual life once that gave the answers from the spirit to the demands, which the social moral life puts here in the physical world. He produced the moral and social maxims instinctively. The time of that is over. We live in the age where the human being has to change into the consciousness where the human being has progressed concerning intellectuality. However, this intellect works in its initial naivety in an instinctive way, I would like to say.
Thus, the social questions, the social demands appeared at first. One can find the answers only, while one ascends to the world of the supersensible from which the answers can only come. For a real social science, we need the spiritual-scientific deepening because it will be able only to give these answers. Our age proves what I had just to say in this direction.
We saw a dreadful disaster passing by during the last four and a half years. Today we see in vast areas of the earth spread what has arisen from that dreadful disaster which still contains something in its bosom that lets us look with concern at the next future. Somebody who observes these conditions impartially does not put a question in such a way as it is normally put in the abstract: what has this warlike disaster brought to the whole world, actually?—Someone who thinks spiritual-scientifically does not think in theories, not in abstractions, but points everywhere to realities. The results of this dreadful disaster appear in that what has remained now. The temporary outcome of this disaster has removed a veil, and now the truth appears naked in Eastern Europe and Central Europe and probably also in other areas. What appears now as social chaos, was also there before, it was only covered. The disaster has only removed the veil. We see that what exists as social demands and what cries for answers. Those who go forward after the pattern of scientific concepts just from the sensory life will not give these answers, but only the sources of spiritual life can give these answers.
This also results from the immediate observation if one studies conscientiously and carefully what comes to light so hopeless in this or that point, with these or those leaders of the today's social chaos because they are only robbing. What can these leaders of the today's social chaos have only in mind? They believe to overcome old classes; however, they have only borrowed the thoughts of these classes. They believe to create a new human life, but they are able to do that only with the thoughts that they have borrowed from the old human life. Karl Marx himself said mocking about the philosophers, they would always have been busy only to arrange life with thoughts; however, it would matter to transform life with thoughts.
If he had thought that through to the end, if he had done the step from the physical life to the supersensible, he would still have had to say something else. Then, however, something quite different would have resulted. Then he would have had to say, the previous thoughts are only suitable to let the physical life in such a way as it is; if one wants to transform this life and find answers to the questions that originate from the social chaos, then one needs other thoughts; since the old ones show that they cannot transform life.
Such a spirit like Karl Marx may rail against bourgeoisie or criticise it for long. It is evident to the proletarian of course. One must have experienced how it is evident to the proletarian. For years, I worked as a teacher at a school of the social-democratic party for workers. I know what makes sense to the today's proletarian; I had opportunity to get to know what lives in these souls. Big parts of the population do not have any idea of that today.
However, humanity, the proletariat too, has to get to know that what it really concerns, at first. Since we live in an age that can no longer get along with the old instincts from which the moral and social life originated that must change rather into a clear supersensible knowledge of the answers to the social and moral questions.
With it, one arrives again at that viewpoint of reality that got lost to humanity, which believes today just to be in reality. Humanity appears sometimes as someone who sees a horseshoe-shaped iron and to whom someone says. that horseshoe-shaped iron is a magnet.—Oh, says the first one, this is only iron, with it I shoe my horse.—He does not believe in the reality of that what he does not see with his eyes. Thus, it is the same as with the materialist thinking. One believes in something abstract if one just believes to look into reality. One is far away from reality because that belongs to reality what forms the basis of the things, the processes and the beings as a spiritual supersensible life. One diverges from reality with his habitual ways of thinking, sensations, and will impulses; one diverges from the moral and social life if one does not allow to be impregnated with spirit.
While with instinctive faith people lived in clear conditions that showed them how everything is connected with reality, today they live in a world order that has been complicated in which in many regards they do not even search the immediate relationship to reality. The human being knows at first what a farm product is what cabbage or wheat are, and which weight cabbage or wheat carry as products with the human being. He still knows what human work means from human being to human being; he still knows what a spiritual achievement means because he wants to accept spiritual achievements to satisfy his soul needs. As long as the human being is within the vicinity of such things, he connects the mental pictures which he obtains and that what he makes of life as a result of these mental pictures, with the immediate reality.
However, life has become more complex, and today there are many things in the outer life for which the human being hardly has the possibility to remember even how these things are connected with the immediate reality. As odd as it sounds, it holds true for the most important things. What does the human being know how capital, interest, annuity, money or even loan are associated with that what goes forward by capital, by annuity, by interest, by loan, by money in the life in which he lives?
The human being gives piece of money from one hand to the other; he uses the bank transfer, the annuity for his life. Where does he have the possibility today to remember, what it means: passing money from one hand to another that one thereby lets pass an amount of labour power from one hand to the other.
One needs only to remind of something else to realise how people have lost the connection with reality. The official economists are often so helpless if they want to find social impulses; they can answer to the question just as little what money is in the social process. There are so-called “metalists” (gold standard) and “nominalists” (paper money) in the economics concerning money. The metalists state that the metal value comes into question. The nominalists state that only the assessment which the state or other corporations ascribe to the concerning piece of money is important in the social life without considering the metal value. Science does not know at all how these things are connected with reality.
Just on this field, it becomes apparent how time urges to find reality again. Spiritual science can give the human beings another kind of mental mobility and spiritual necessity. It is true that many people regard spiritual science as difficult because they have to exert themselves; today one does not like to exert himself mentally. If one observes scientifically, does experiments, one observes the processes, and the thinking is only something like a concomitant. This proceeds parallel to the outer processes. One likes this generally today in the time of cinemas where one likes something to be shown that one only accompanies with thinking; where one does not need to think very much.
Indeed, spiritual science already demands efforts, soul activity. That is why it is hard put to become established, why it finds so many opponents. However, there is also the counter-image. Spiritual science makes the concepts nimble, so that they penetrate into reality.
Hence, spiritual science can establish order just in those fields of knowledge that lead by the only accompanying thinking to nothing right, in particular in the economics, in the social science and in the social life. It will be able to go the long ways that lead from such things like money, capital, interest, annuity, loan to reality.
Indeed, there are many people who say, spiritual science should deal with spiritual things and not aim at such materialist things like capital, interest, annuity, loan et cetera. One has to overcome just this if one soars spiritual heights. This may be quite right on one side, nevertheless, it satisfies, at least for this life on earth, selfish instincts of the human being only. It matters that spiritual science can be just the most practical for this human life.
Thus, I would especially like to point to one thing because time presses. Someone who knows the proletarian thinking knows that one statement of Marxism particularly makes sense to proletarians. Karl Marx could make plausible to the people that there are goods on the world market, which are bought after supply and demand. There is a certain law. However, there is also a special commodity because of the modern social order, the human labour power, which the enterpriser buys. Other people have other goods that they bring to the market and sell, objects that satisfy human needs.
The proletarian cannot sell such things; he can sell his labour power only. He carries that to the market, it is bought from him only for so much money as it is just necessary to support himself and his family. He receives only so much that he can carve out his existence, while the enterprisers pocket the surplus value—this is the Marxist term—or it is transferred into the remaining social circulation. The sensation that he has to carry his labour power to market lives in the proletarian, this is that what he just wants to abolish by the so-called socialisation of the means of production.
This idea will cause big moral detrimental effects. It must be pointed to it with that mental capacity, which is attained by the sense of reality which spiritual science gives that not in the way, as it appears with Auguste Comte (1798-1857, French philosopher, sociologist), but in a quite different way something is as trend in the development of humanity that demands the reorganisation of something particular. This is in such a way: we can look back at the Greek culture that was connected with slavery. Slavery disappeared gradually. What was transferred to the other person by slavery? The whole human being. This also applies to serfage where almost the whole human being was transferred to the other.
This was contained in the human development and corresponded to the instincts of that time. If one knows on one side that Plato regarded slavery as necessary, one has to imagine as compensation what is always connected with it that the slave did not regard slavery out of his instincts, his patriarchal feeling as that which we feel in the retrospect today. At that time, slavery was a normal phenomenon of the human evolution.
The trend of the development is that the human being gives away less and less from himself; as a slave he gave away himself, then the time came where his labour power is bought from him like a commodity. It will be also overcome that the human being gives away only a part of his being, his labour power.
This feeling that this has to be overcome expresses itself while the proletarian appreciates the Marxist theory of labour power as a commodity et cetera. However, it holds true that first the whole human being, then his labour power, and now as a third, something else is transferred from one human being to the other. The social life will be abolished, but something else replaces it. If one understands the social reality once in such a way that one can speak of this other, then one will find understanding if one has the new thoughts that are coming up to meet the social life.
The spiritual-scientific Intuition says to us, we live in the time in which the social structure of humanity wants to change in such a way that one cannot exchange the labour power for any means which one also gives away for an objective commodity, but that the labour power is freely used while the human being is put in a certain social position which the human society assigns to him, and he also provides his time to the human society. At first, it was the whole human being who had to sell himself or who was sold; then the human labour power; and as the third, it is time and place. In certain areas, it is already this way. It is not in such a way that we can say, we ourselves who we are in other life positions than a proletarian and give away our labour power, our achievements or anything else. We are not paid for our labour power, but we are paid at most for the fact that we work at a certain place and sacrifice our power to humanity for some time. That what does no longer belong to the human being himself, his social position which today more or less is determined by the social structure only with the officials—but that leads to other detrimental effects—this will replace payment and labour power which changes into a commodity.
You realise that if you observe the future human development from the spiritual impulses. If you understand that, you will work in such a way—if one speaks from authoritative place and works in the institutions of the public life—that one aims, for example, at such social principle, and then one will be coming up to meet what lives as a social demand today in humanity. Time presses, and I cannot state more from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint.
One may well say, in the proletarians' heads something else lives now, just the Marxist ideas; one is concerned with these people. No! I myself who taught for years among these people was not expelled by these people, but by their leaders against the will of the students. These leaders, however, will not be leaders for long. That what remained as a desert after this war disaster and on which these leaders can work for a while will see these leaders disappearing. Since they will be able to do nothing with their ideas. With the trust in the leaders' the trust in the old ideas will get lost.
One would like to long that—if the possibility is there—ears will be there to hear the real social ideas that then enough people will be there who are inclined to bring in such social ideas really in humanity instead of those who are robbing today—like Lenin (1870-1924), Trotsky (Leon T., 1879-1940) and others—and bring destruction and death on humanity. One has to regard this above all. I wanted only to indicate what one could elaborate for other fields of the social life, I wanted to indicate it only, so that one understands fundamentally that spiritual science is coming up to meet the most important demands of the present social life.
At the end, I would still like to point out that spiritual science also wants to find in the third area, in the religious life what just a goal in this field is. One can easily hear the objection: this is a sectarian movement, it wants to found a new religion—and the like. Spiritual science wants to form neither a sect nor any new religion. It wants to be the science that is demanded from the impulse of time itself. It is not in contrast to natural sciences, but it takes the view that has been inaugurated just by the scientific direction.
However, something else holds true. Spiritual science tries to understand the religious needs in the way according to the demands of the present how they will have to be understood now considering the changed conditions. Spiritual science wants to be a science. Science leads always away from the human individuality even if it puts the individual across in moral and social area. However, as a science, as a knowledge, it makes the human being unselfish, leads to the universal. However, for his full person-hood the human being always needs an immediately individual relationship to the supersensible that he can realise immediately subjectively. The human being needs not only the connection with the supersensible world, as well as spiritual science can offer it, the human being needs the connection with the religious founders by the cult, the sacraments et cetera and with the outer sense-perceptible development of decades and centuries which are connected with the religious founders and the outer manifestations. Spiritual science will deepen this spiritually and show how the supersensible manifesting in the sense-perceptible world appears if one penetrates it with supersensible knowledge.
Spiritual science will prepare the human being in modern sense to have religious needs. Nevertheless, these religious needs can only be satisfied while one looks at the old religions.
It was strangely enough a Catholic cardinal, Newman (John Henry N., 1801-1890), who said at his investiture in Rome, he sees no other salvation for the Catholic Church than a new revelation.—The Catholic cardinal showed with it only that he could not take the previous position of the human being to the old revelation because he announced just what should come up by spiritual science. It takes the world in its reality, and it knows that laws appear in the whole human development as well as in the single human being. These development laws are in such a way that that which the human being experienced at the age of 50 years cannot be a repetition of that what he experienced, for example, at the age of 25 years. One cannot experience the same at the age of 50 years in the same spiritual condition what one has experienced at the age of 25 years. To every age something else appertains and in other form.
Well, the development in the course of humanity is something else. It is not the same as with the single human being, and it is amateurish and wrong to search the analogies between the single human being and the historical development. However, spiritual science finds such laws after which the entire humanity develops and knows that the religions were founded in particular ages which are far behind us that that was summarised in Christianity what was distributed in the other religions that Christianity as a religion is in certain sense the end of the religious forms that one has not to wait for a new revelation in the sense of Cardinal Newman, but that one can understand only that revelation transformed in higher sense which appeared in Christianity as a religion among other religious revelations. Just because spiritual science thinks in the sense of reality, it does not want to found a new religion. It would do the same with it, as if it wanted to make a 50-year-old human being again 30 years old. Since the kind to position itself to the religious revelation changes with time, so that new inner bases have to be created.
Spiritual science creates these new inner bases for the modern human being and his demands that remain unaware to many people. The official representatives fear or fear supposedly that spiritual science could make the human being irreligious, they should ask themselves above all whether they themselves do not contribute more to irreligion than spiritual science does which will lead the human beings back again to the religious life in the right way.
Somebody who wants to retain the religious life as religious confession on a certain level does not want that that pushes its way through which has to push its way through necessarily from the new spiritual condition of the human beings. He is rather an opponent of religion, even if he appears as a priest, than someone who asks himself, how can the human being with his deepened inside also develop that trait again in his soul that makes him understand the religious life?
Spiritual science is no religion but science of the supersensible life. Therefore, it leads the human being also to deepening those instincts with which the religious life that has decreased under the influence of the knowledge of nature becomes again living and fertile.