The Rudolf Steiner Archive

1. The Various Stages of Human Development and Their Impact on the Human Constitution

[ 1 ] It has been some time since we were able to hold a branch meeting here in Mannheim, and today we are once again able to fulfill this task. Now, my dear friends, you have recently been attentively and eagerly acquiring the knowledge that can be called the more important ideas and insights of our spiritual-scientific worldview. Therefore, it is perhaps not inappropriate if we speak today about something that, on the one hand, turns our gaze toward the whole of our spiritual scientific movement and, on the other hand, also gives us the opportunity to make use of the spiritual knowledge we have acquired—namely, regarding the human being and his development—to put it to use, so to speak, in the service to which every human being should be devoted, and which, especially for anthroposophists, should take on a particular form through their insights, through what they can gain in terms of feelings from the spiritual-scientific worldview. You know, my dear friends, that the development of humanity is moving forward, that epoch follows epoch, age follows age, and every age has its own special task. We can distinguish between greater and lesser ages in the historical development of humanity, and within each age there are, in turn, very specific moments when it is essential not to fail to grasp the true task, the true mission of that age. We may observe that in successive periods, tasks are set for humanity from the spiritual worlds—tasks that are quite specific to this or that age—and for us humans, it is then a matter of doing what is right, of gaining some knowledge of these tasks, of taking into our souls an understanding of these tasks. We truly live in an age where it is urgently necessary for a number of people to once again acquire knowledge of what needs to be done, particularly in the spiritual realm, today or in our present time. I would like to begin by bringing just two periods that are very close to us before your soul—two periods that are close to us because one belongs to the past and much of its spiritual wealth and spiritual products still extends into our present; the second period, however, is barely beginning. We stand at the beginning of a new period, a smaller cycle or epoch of humanity; we stand, so to speak, at the watershed. That is why it is of very special importance to gain some insight into these two periods. One period encompasses roughly the era that began with Augustine and ended with the approach of the 16th century. In occult science, it is said: This period encompasses the time from Augustine to Calvin. Then, following this, we have another period that spans the time from Calvin to the last third of the 19th century. And we stand once again at the starting point of a period with new tasks, the fulfillment of which is of extraordinary importance for the near future of humanity. Now let us first get a brief sense of what happens quite specifically at such starting points of new periods. When one period gives way to another, something is old, and something is young. Something is heading toward decay, and something else is still in its embryonic stage, present as if in a root, like a new dawn for a ray of sunshine that is preparing itself as the sunshine of a new age. And the distinctive feature of such a transitional era—you know, people speak of transitional eras in various senses, but we are truly dealing with a transitional era today in a very significant sense—is that new forces must be added to the culture of humanity.

[ 2 ] To illustrate this, I would like to consider a major challenge for all of humanity: the rise of Christianity. When we try to picture how Christianity emerged, we must acknowledge that it was actually rejected by those who were at the forefront of culture. But at the same time, those at the pinnacle of culture had reached a point of decline. Try to picture Roman culture as it was in decline, and try to picture the nature of the communities to which Paul preached. These were people who, so to speak, were naive but faced culture with fresh energy, with a lively sense of what was to come—people who were not really counted among the highest flowering of the culture of that time. These were the new forces, but sometimes even born from the lowest strata of the people. Because the complicated social life of the upper, influential circles, once it has developed for a time, must decline—and especially because science, with its concepts, ideas, and so on, reaches a point where it can no longer develop further—something new, something popular, must intervene. Here we have a great upheaval before us. In a certain sense, we are facing a turning point again today. That which has been achieved with great dedication as scientific thoughts and ideas has in fact reached a point at which every discerning person must say: it really cannot go on any further—the scientific concepts and ideas that are being driven today by official currents are facing a decline. And indeed, the entire way in which spiritual life is approached where the great currents of this spiritual life flow is in a state of complete decay. I would like to describe in a few stark words how this decay could actually be observed with relatively rapid steps by those who observe such things at all.

[ 3 ] If one took part in life as it unfolded in literature—through books and the like—and in academia, one grew up with a sense of seriousness, a certain seriousness that is now regarded as old-fashioned and that we no longer understand at all. The overall tone of weekly journals, for example, was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. It was, if we may use the expression, much, much more dignified. Back then, there were very specific views within this intellectual movement regarding how one should approach drama, poetry, and so on. That has been lost, as people thought back then. Back then, there was also a certain way of writing poetry that met less stringent requirements—for example, writing plays for small festive occasions, more for fun, as a joke. There was sometimes quite a bit of talent in that. Students in particular staged plays at their gatherings that showed quite a bit of talent. Now, as one grew a bit older and could survey the literary movements, one found among them esteemed works that were, however, exactly the same as what one had previously considered only suitable for the day. That became literary-worthy for the intellectual movement. So as not to cause too much offense, I would prefer not to name any names. Today we have already reached the point where, far and wide—entire bookstores are filled with them—we have nothing but printed trivialities. Thirty or forty years ago, one would have been too sparing with the ink to write them down. When a person is in the midst of such a radical shift, they do not judge things harshly enough, but this is how cultural history will one day have to characterize our late 19th century. Thus, we are indeed facing a decline of traditional intellectual life, and this could easily be demonstrated by the decline of scientific theories. Therefore, we must not be surprised if what is to emerge as a new spiritual movement—what is to bring something new to human development—finds little support among what is today called official intellectual life; if members of these circles say: There are such associations of half-fools who call themselves Theosophists; they are, for the most part, quite uneducated people—and so on. — These are necessities that exist in every age of transition. Fresh forces must arise from below, and what sprouts in this way will then become, for the later age, what is necessary to truly bring about an upward movement. Now I told you: we have seen two ages pass. The era from Augustine to Calvin, for example, was an era that sought above all to internalize all the soul forces of the human being, all the human forces. Internalization was evident in all fields during this time; external natural science was pursued less, and human attention was less directed toward the external laws and phenomena of nature. In the very starting point of Augustine himself—in whom we see, in a certain sense, a foreshadowing of our spiritual-scientific structure of the human being—we find the idea of a working-in of supersensible powers that make use of the human being as an instrument. As this epoch progresses—what remarkable phenomena do we encounter there? The mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Suso, Johannes Tauler, and many others. Even though external science receded into the background during this epoch, we find in it another remarkable way of embracing nature with a brilliant, intuitive gaze. We see how this is elevated in such figures as, for example, Agrippa von Nettesheim. Figures such as Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme appear to us as the fruits of this deepening of the human soul in those centuries. Such a current can only last for a certain period of time. It has an ascending direction, a culmination, a high point, and a descending line. As a rule, such a direction is succeeded by something that, in a certain way, appears as a counter-image.

[ 4 ] In fact, the centuries that followed stand in stark contrast to this trend. The internalized image of the human soul is gradually forgotten. We enter an era in which the natural sciences have achieved such immense triumphs. Great figures such as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo emerged, followed by those of the 19th century, such as Julius Robert Mayer, Darwin, and so on. A vast amount of external facts was brought to light.

[ 5 ] And yet, the people at the dawn of the new era differed from those who came later. A man like Kepler, for example, who had such a profound impact on the physical sciences, was a devout man, a man who felt deeply, deeply connected to Christianity in his innermost being. And Kepler, the discoverer of the three Keplerian laws—which are essentially nothing more than laws of time and space clothed in mathematical formulas, that is, something entirely mechanical—oh, this Kepler—he spent far more time than on such discoveries explaining how things were in the wider world at the time when the mystery of Palestine was unfolding on Earth; how Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars were positioned in relation to one another when Christ Jesus was born. That was what the great Kepler’s thoughts were focused on. He was able to give to humanity what he had to say about the science of the starry realm in purely mathematical terms. What he carried in his heart, in the deepest part of his heart, remained his own in an age that served only outward life.

[ 6 ] Or take Newton. Where is Newton not cited as the discoverer of the laws of gravity? But where, then—when Haeckel, for example, speaks of Newton’s epoch-making appearance—where would it be emphasized that Newton was so Christian that, in his quietest and holiest hours, he wrote, in his own way, a commentary on the Apocalypse? Yet he could not give that to humanity. He was able to give humanity the purely mechanical law of gravity in an age devoted to the external systematization of natural phenomena. And this age came to an end precisely with the last third of the 19th century.

[ 7 ] Now an era is beginning that must necessarily present a counter-image to the previous one. And the task of preparing this counterpoint, which is to continue working in such a way that everything we have often spoken of can come to pass, is the spiritual-scientific worldview, which in turn must bring about a deepening of the human soul. But every age must work differently from the preceding ones. It would be wrong to simply study as was correct from Augustine to Calvin. We may allow such phenomena to take effect upon us, but we must know that today, after such an age of natural science has passed, we must seek the spiritual world differently than in those days. Is there, then, apart from what the human being can conceive of in the abstract, anything else from which one can recognize that the human being is truly placed in a state of necessity, that the human being is compelled to grasp the world anew in every age?

[ 8 ] If, for example, one delves into Paracelsus today, he truly appears as an unfathomable mind to today’s superficial, external research—a mind that looked particularly deeply into the very essence of the mysteries of healing and medicine. And anyone who delves into what he had to say about the healing of this or that form of illness will be able to learn something truly powerful and magnificent from Paracelsus. Let us suppose that a physician standing at the height—the true height—of the spiritual life of our time were to delve so deeply that he wished to put this study into practice, to apply what would result from Paracelsus’s instructions—for certain great things, quite appropriate results would still emerge; but there are many things the physician of the present could no longer make his own. For if he were to apply some of the remedies specified there, it would be of no help, because human nature has changed since the 16th century, because everything in the world changes and everything progresses. The things out there do not obey our arbitrary, step-by-step knowledge. They move forward, and we have the task of investigating with our knowledge, our insight. We must learn anew, just as Paracelsus learned. And if we follow his example as faithfully as possible, we will find something quite different in many respects. Thus, we have very special spiritual tasks in our time.

[ 9 ] Now I would like to outline in broad strokes how it is written in the stars that human culture must progress in the near future. It is not solely in the hands of human beings to set the course for this culture. The old views would simply not fit with the upheaval in actual conditions. Things take their course, and spiritual science has the task of telling us what course things are taking; it gives us the guidance to understand our time.

[ 10 ] We are standing at the dawn of a completely new way of human life and thought. Three things are of particular significance and importance in human spiritual life, and these are: first, religion; second, science; and third, human coexistence in general—the feelings and emotions that people develop for one another, that which takes place in social relationships. These three are the most important, so that it is of particular importance to trace, across successive epochs, the forms these three must take—that which comes into consideration as religion, as science, or as social life. And there are certain demands that human beings simply must understand, demands that are beyond their control.

[ 11 ] Why must religion, science, and social life change from one era to the next? Simply because human nature changes. We do not learn for no reason that human nature consists of various parts. We do not learn merely for the sake of a theoretical enumeration that the human being consists of a physical body, a life body, and an astral body, with a soul of feeling, a soul of understanding, and a soul of consciousness, so that a few people might have something to do and can master these classifications. We learn these divisions because they have a profound significance for human life. And you can sense this profound significance if you think back, for example, to the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, where the emphasis was primarily on the soul of feeling. There, the higher beings acted upon this aspect above all. And in the Greco-Roman era, the era in which Christianity arose, everything that worked into humanity from the divine-spiritual heights acted upon the intellectual soul. And today it acts upon the conscious soul. We understand nothing at all of humanity’s relationship to the great forces of the world if we do not know how human nature is structured. What, then, are we preparing by devoting ourselves today to spiritual scientific insight? In our time, it is especially the conscious soul that is being cultivated. All external thinking and knowledge, all utilitarian thinking—this thinking based on the principle of utility—rests, in a certain sense, upon the development of the consciousness soul. But something like a distinct light of the spiritual self is already forcing its way into this. Now the remarkable thing is that in our time we have two parallel currents, one that is hurtling down into decay, and one that is rising toward future flowering. The one that is hurtling down into decay has not yet arrived at that decay. It is also the source from which the great discoveries emerge, discoveries that still have an immense future. This, too, has its beneficial effects. Certainly, humanity will long continue to benefit from that which is, after all, heading toward decline. But the kind of thinking that invents hot-air balloons is the thinking of decline. And the thinking that concerns itself with the structure of humanity is the thinking of humanity’s future.

[ 12 ] But these two do share a common transition. We can see this in all areas. I would like to start by giving you a very practical example: the field of monetary transactions. This changed quite significantly in the 19th century. A tremendous shift took place. If you look at the period immediately preceding the last third of the 19th century, all monetary speculation was tied to individuality, to the personality. It was the purely financial-speculative genius of the Rothschilds that channeled money in and out of the financial centers. And if we trace the history of the great banking houses, we find everywhere at that time prime examples of how monetary transactions proceeded entirely out of the nature of the human being, based on the consciousness soul, on the individual human being. That has changed. But people don’t talk much about it yet, because it is only just beginning. Today, the soul of consciousness no longer reigns exclusively in monetary transactions; today, something of a kind of synthesis reigns: share capital, the corporation, the association—that which is supra-personal.

[ 13 ] Try to follow what is only just beginning to emerge today, and what will continue to grow. Today, it is almost irrelevant who stands here or there as a personality. What people have worked into the circulation of money is already operating without personality; it is already operating on its own. There, in a descending current, you have the transition from the soul of consciousness to the spiritual self.

[ 14 ] Here we find it in the current of decline; and we find it in the current of ascending life, where we seek what the capable individual has accomplished, where we seek, through inspiration, to gain the help of those powers that will return inspiration to us from the spiritual world. Here, too, we ascend from the personal to the transpersonal. Thus, there are characteristics common to the ages with regard to both the currents of decline and the currents of ascent. One must, however, be particularly careful not to take into account, in any given age, whatever happens to be regarded as authority in that age. As long as one lacks spiritual insight, one is liable to go very far astray in this regard.

[ 15 ] This is particularly true in one area of human culture, the field of materialistic medicine, where we see how what matters most is precisely what authority holds in its hands and increasingly claims for itself—a situation that is leading to something far, far more dreadful and terrible than any authoritarian rule of the much-maligned Middle Ages. We are already in the midst of it today, and it will only grow stronger and stronger. When people mock the ghosts of medieval superstition so terribly, one might well ask: Has anything really changed in that regard? Has this fear of ghosts perhaps disappeared? Do people not fear ghosts much more today than they did back then? - It is far more terrifying than is generally thought what goes on in the human soul when it is told: “There are 60,000 colonies of germs on the palm of your hand.” In America, calculations have been made as to how many such germs are in a single man’s mustache. Shouldn’t one therefore resolve to say: These medieval ghosts were at least decent ghosts, but today’s germ-ghosts are too puny, too indecent to justify the fear that is, moreover, only just beginning, and which is causing people, precisely here in the realm of health, to fall into a belief in authority that is terrible. Here we must say that we see the character of the transitional era everywhere. One need only look at the phenomena in the right way; everywhere we see this character.

[ 16 ] Now let us ask ourselves: What do the stars, the teachings, and the revelations of Theosophy tell us about further development in these three most important areas of life? What must the future be like, and how must we work so that the creative, fruitful spiritual self can be properly conveyed into the conscious soul in the spiritual sense? Regarding this future form, the prophetic stars—that is, the teachings of spiritual science—tell us roughly the following: Religion, in the manner in which attempts have been made to introduce it into the currents of human life over the past centuries, is a fusion of two things, one of which, in the strict sense of the word, cannot actually be called religion; the other is religion.

[ 17 ] What, then, is religion in reality? It is something we must characterize as a mood of the human soul: a mood for the spiritual, for the infinite. Essentially, we can characterize it well if we begin with the basics of these moods, which then need only be heightened to the highest degree. When we walk across a meadow and have an open soul for what is green and blooming there, we will feel a sense of joy at the splendors revealed through the flowers and grasses, through what is reflected in the landscape, what glistens in a dewdrop. When we summon such a mood, when our heart opens in the process, that is not yet religion. It can only become religion when this feeling intensifies toward the infinite that lies beyond the finite, toward the spiritual that lies beyond the sensory. When our soul feels in such a way that it perceives communion with the spiritual, then this mood corresponds to what lives in religion. The more we can intensify this mood for the eternal within ourselves, the more we foster religion in ourselves or in other people.

[ 18 ] But now the inevitable course of time has led to a situation where what are essentially meant to be impulses directing human perception and feeling from the transitory toward the eternal have become intertwined with certain ideas and conceptions about what the realm of the supersensible looks like and what it is like within. Consequently, religion has, in a certain sense, become linked to what is actually spiritual science—to what must actually be regarded as science. And we see today how, within this church-based faith, religion in one form or another can only be maintained if very specific doctrines are upheld at the same time. This, however, gives rise to what might be called a rigid, dogmatic clinging to certain conceptions of the spiritual world. Such conceptions would naturally have to evolve, because the human spirit evolves. A truly healthy religious sentiment should rejoice most in such evolution, because this evolution reveals the glories of the divine-spiritual world as all the greater and more meaningful.

[ 19 ] True religious feeling would not have condemned Giordano Bruno to the stake, but would have said: Oh, how great is God that he sends people of this kind down to earth and reveals such things through them. - This would have necessarily recognized, alongside the religious realm, the realm of scientific research, which extends to both the external world and the spiritual world. This must progress; it must be adapted from epoch to epoch to the human spirit, which is advancing. With regard to this scientific research, a great upheaval occurred as the 16th century approached. Before the age of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, things looked quite peculiar in schools and universities. Aristotle is certainly a great sage, but what he did was the greatest achievement of his time. What the Middle Ages did with him was a profound misinterpretation of his spirit, and in the end, people no longer understood him at all, having lost all sense of what he meant. Nevertheless, people continued to teach according to his principles.

[ 20 ] To help you see how knowledge must change from epoch to epoch as the human spirit progresses, so that misunderstandings do not arise, I would like to discuss in more detail an event connected with Aristotle. Aristotle worked in an era when people were still aware that an etheric body is also present in human nature, not just blood, nerve strands, and so on. If one were to draw the etheric body, for example, one would obtain a completely different drawing than what today’s anatomists find and depict in humans. The way people depict the human body today was not considered very important in Aristotle’s time, because people were still aware of the etheric human being. If one were to depict that, one would have to see a center here, where the heart is, and draw rays emanating from there—important rays that then go to the brain and are connected to the entire way in which a person thinks. When we look at the etheric body, thinking is regulated from a central point located near the physical heart. And Aristotle depicted this to illustrate the distinctive nature of thinking. Later, people no longer understood what Aristotle meant, and they began to confuse the term corresponding to our word “nerve”—that which is the determining factor for the organism of thought within the organism—with the material nerve. It was believed that Aristotle was referring to the physical nerve strands when he described what he called the etheric currents. With the transition to the materialistic era, Aristotle was no longer understood. So you can see that people learned something completely wrong. It was said that the main nerves originate from the heart. Then came scientific materialistic research, as inaugurated by Copernicus and Galileo, and people realized that the nerves originated from the brain—namely, the physical strands. And so they began to say: Aristotle is wrong. Thus, Aristotle’s opponents were Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno. The medieval Aristotelians did not adhere to Aristotle’s teachings, but rather to what they imagined Aristotle to have said. Thus it came to pass that when Galileo showed a friend, who was an Aristotelian, on a corpse how the nerves run toward the brain, this friend nevertheless preferred to trust Aristotle rather than his own observation. He believed in what he imagined Aristotle’s teachings to be. We see, then, how in those days the current of spiritual science—the science of the etheric body—was transformed through Aristotle into material science, whose merits are not to be denied, for it has worked and continues to work for the blessing and healing of humanity. But now we are in an age when we must ascend into the spiritual.

[ 21 ] We are on the very threshold of an era in which science will once again have to learn to understand what is truly spiritual, in which science will have to become what is known in occultism as pneumatology, that is, the study of the spirit. What was science in the past century? The study of abstract ideas and natural laws that no longer had any connection to real spiritual life. Science stands at the point where it must become pneumatology, where it must return to the spirit. This is written in the stars of theosophy. And since religion must always create the mood for the spiritual, science and religion can really only work in harmony in those ages where science incorporates the spirit into Pneumatology. There, science can be the true interpreter of spiritual life and support the mood that should in turn live in religion.

[ 22 ] What is beginning stands in such stark contrast to what has passed. Take, for example, what has transpired in the various Protestant confessions of faith: how hard people have tried to keep scientific thinking out of the realm that is supposed to be devoted to faith. Think of Luther and Kant. Kant says he must set aside knowledge so that he has a clear path for faith in freedom, immortality, and God.

[ 23 ] At that time, science was focused on the external, sensory-physical realm; it had no concept of interpreting the supersensory, spiritual realm. Therefore, it was necessary to preserve as faithfully as possible what had been handed down in sacred texts. This had its good reason. Now we are facing a different age, in which theosophy leads us into the spiritual world, and now we shall see how, little by little, a time is approaching when what is taking shape is to be attained precisely through theosophy supporting and illuminating science. Religion and science will once again work together in the coming age. Science will become something that must gradually apply to all people. It will become understandable to every person. Therefore, what is emerging as a parallel development of religion and science will, in the broadest sense, give rise to what one might call individualism in religion: every single heart will find its way into the spiritual world in its own individual religious manner. It is foreshadowed for our age that, in the most individual and personal way, that which can be common science in the spiritual realm will serve as an explainer and guide in the religious sphere.

[ 24 ] Once again, it is strangely evident how, even here in the process of decline, the personal element points to something transcendent. The signs of decline also demonstrate this. And how does this pointing to something supra-personal manifest itself in certain church circumstances? What was it, after all, when in a certain church those who are its guardians appealed to inspiration? [... gap] Things must certainly be viewed in terms of their spiritual character. Much of what is evident today, particularly in the realm of religious life across various denominations, points to this shining in of the spiritual self into what we call the conscious soul, in both the ascending and descending senses.

[ 25 ] This is particularly evident in the third of the three spheres of human spiritual life. There, a new understanding will take hold—an understanding of which today’s way of life has, in fact, not the faintest inkling. A fundamental principle of this insight will be that the happiness of a single individual can never be purchased at the expense of the lesser happiness of others. In the future, the personal will be transformed into the transpersonal, and the egoistic into the supra-egoistic—into that which unites human beings. Gradually, a person will no longer want to be happy without knowing that others are happy to the same degree. This attitude—the opposite of which is today’s way of life—is taking shape. There is only one way to bring about this attitude, and that is through the understanding of the true core of the human being and its composition, as spiritual science reveals it to us. One must know the human being if one wishes to be human.

[ 26 ] We see these three things at the very beginning of their development. What is the purpose of spiritual science? It is to teach us to understand everything that must come to pass. Now I want to speak frankly about how people might approach this. I will hypothetically assume for a moment that what is today called Theosophy—and which still represents only a very small movement—would be regarded by those who come into contact with it as a fantasy and a daydream, and that it would be suppressed. Those who stand on the side of anti-sophia would simply make it impossible for theosophy to flourish, for science is heading toward anti-sophia. Then one would be unable to gain an understanding of what has been described to you as the necessary, star-written development of science, religion, and human life practice. Then people would shut themselves off from understanding these things. In what state would humanity then find itself? Humanity would then be on Earth like a herd of some animal species that had been thrust into entirely alien climatic conditions, conditions it cannot adapt to. The consequence of this would be that the animals would wither away, gradually perishing. Thus, all of humanity would fall prey to decay, decadence, and premature ruin. Not through extinction, for instance. They would become animalistic, which would be far worse than extinction, so that only the base passions, instincts, and desires would truly still be alive; that people would only crave to eat this or that, and they would devote all their thinking to being able to produce precisely this food. They would build factories to produce the finest flour, the finest bread; ships and airships to bring fruits from the farthest regions and deliver the products they wish to enjoy. They would employ immense ingenuity for the “advancement of culture”—for that is what they would call it. They would devote infinite intelligence and mental power to this, yet only to ultimately set the table. One should just consider from this perspective what the phrase “the rise of culture” means! Is not the essence of it that infinite mental power is devoted to it? If we use it only to telegraph: “I need so many sacks of flour”—then great mental power is expended to produce something that ultimately serves only what one might call the animal in man; spirituality and intelligence are two totally different things. The materialistic age leads to a peak of intelligence and intelligent culture. But that has nothing to do with spirituality. Let us suppose that people were to be eliminated in this way. What would the gods have to do? They would say to themselves: “Now we have had a generation that did not understand what the Earth mission is. We must send down another generation, a generation of souls who will then bring the Earth mission to fruition.”

[ 27 ] Small circles, however, will already find understanding for what the spiritual life of the future must be, and therefore the Earth mission will be brought to completion by human beings; and that which will succeed our fifth post-Atlantean culture—dedicated to the soul of consciousness—as the sixth, will already be accomplished by a small circle of people who will spread out among the rest of humanity. But this can only be accomplished if human free will intervenes. For once the “I” has taken root in human nature, the human being must also develop free will for the unfolding of the “I.” Thus, it depends on each individual whether they wish to show understanding for becoming spiritual, or whether they wish to head toward the decline that humanity is undergoing today.

[ 28 ] We must develop a way of life that upholds the principle that the happiness of one individual cannot be achieved at the expense of another’s happiness. If humanity refuses to understand this, it will contribute to the downward, withering, and animalistic decline of humanity. Today, as human beings, we face this decision in a certain sense: to want spiritual science or not to want it, and that means to want either the ascent or the decline of humanity. We should feel this in everything we do in our individual lives; we should feel that we have been placed by our karma as a new element in the development of humanity, like those who are to contribute their powers as elemental forces that must work their way upward.

[ 29 ] When we feel this way, theosophy becomes a practical sensibility, a practical feeling, within us, and the awareness of what we are actually doing settles into our hearts as we engage in the seemingly insignificant activities we pursue in such anthroposophical branches. Not as a hobby or a quirk of individuals, but as an understanding of the deepest needs of a new age dawning.

[ 30 ] I wanted to show you how things are interconnected so that we can truly understand the progress of humanity. Consider for a moment the statement that human beings are self-conscious beings, that they must therefore know what they are, and that only by knowing their own nature can they fulfill their purpose in the world; that, therefore, all those who wish to know nothing about the nature of human beings lack the will to position themselves correctly within the world. Recall how a thinker spoke who had intuited much of what is now emerging as theosophy. Johann Gottlieb Fichte once spoke of his lofty ideas in the lectures “On the Vocation of the Scholar.” When he wanted to write a preface to these lectures, it occurred to him that this would now go out to people, who would, however, only say: Yes, very nice ideas, but impractical. How can one introduce into life what is said there? — Yet Fichte was fully aware that life is continually guided by ideas.

[ 31 ] Let us consider an example here. Who built the Simplon Tunnel? No engineer today can work without differential and integral calculus. Leibniz, who invented differential and integral calculus, is essentially building all the tunnels and bridges of our time. The spiritual is the guiding force in everything in life, and we can learn from what Fichte wrote to strengthen our theosophical consciousness when people say: Oh, those are such eccentric ideas, nothing practical. — Fichte says on this: That ideas cannot be so directly put into practice in life, we others know that too, just as do those who hold it against us. Perhaps we even know it better. But that the others therefore want to know absolutely nothing of ideas merely proves that the wise guidance of the world, the divine world government, will not be able to count on them. May a benevolent nature, in which they believe, therefore grant them rain and sunshine at the right time, good digestion, and, if possible, some good thoughts as well. In a certain sense, we can strengthen ourselves by saying: we do know that, as theosophists, we must cultivate an understanding of what is to come. May a benevolent nature grant the others what Fichte spoke of, but also that which they need in spirit—that very thing they believe they do not need. May the Spirit grant them ever wiser and wiser thoughts, so that they too may not regard spiritual science as mere daydreaming, but recognize it as an important impulse for humanity!