The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Lecture III

Yesterday I drew attention again, but from a different point of view to the one we have taken for some time in the past, to the differentiation that exists among the peoples of the present civilized world. I indicated how the individualization of the human being in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is guided by spiritual beings: how, on the one side, certain beings interfere through individuals of the West—beings that have progressed in an irregular way, that are more advanced than humanity, but for their own interests incarnate into human beings in order to work against the true impulse of the present, the impulse of the threefolding of the social organism.

I also drew attention to how, in a different way, we find in the East that certain beings, that had their real significance in the far distant past, but wish now to work into and to influence human lives, assert themselves; not, indeed, through human beings themselves, but by appearing to them. We spoke of how these beings influence Eastern human beings, be it more or less consciously, by virtue of the particular soul-configuration of the people living in the Orient; by working as imaginations into the consciousness of certain human beings of the East—perhaps by working during sleep into the human 'I' and astral body—and then asserting themselves, without the people realizing it, in the after-effects during waking. And in this way they bring in everything they wish to pit against the normal progress of humanity in the East. Thus we can say: For a long time in the West a kind of earth-boundness has, in a certain sense, been prepared in such human beings as I described yesterday, who are dispersed there, and who take leading positions, particularly in sects and in secret societies and the like. In the East there are also certain leading personalities who, under the influence of beings from the past who appear to them in imaginations, put into practice in present cultural development what these beings introduce. If one wants to understand how the human beings of the European Centre are wedged in, as it were, between the West and the East one must look more closely into the underlying spiritual conditions and at everything in the physical-sense world that expresses itself out of these spiritual conditions.

I have drawn your attention, from the most varied points of view, to how the life of the ancient Orient was, in the main, a spiritual life; how the human being of the ancient Orient had a highly developed spiritual life that flowed from a direct perception of the spiritual worlds; how this spiritual life then lived on as a heritage; how it existed in Greece, primarily as artistic beauty but also as a certain insight; and how already in Greece there mingled in with it what then became Aristotelianism, what was already intellectual, dialectical thinking. So what came from oriental wisdom penetrated then into Western civilization, and, with the exception of what stems from natural science and what can stem from the modern anthroposophically-oriented spiritual science, everything that exists in Western civilization as spiritual life is basically an inheritance from the ancient Orient. But this spiritual life is, in fact, completely decadent. This spiritual life is of such a nature that it lacks strength, lacks impetus. The human being is, to be sure, guided to the spiritual world through it, but can no longer find a link between what he believes about the spiritual world and what happens here on earth. This shows itself most strongly in Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, in which a faith, completely estranged from the world, has secured itself a place alongside worldly activities. It is directed towards entirely abstract spiritual regions, and basically does not take the trouble to confront and come to terms with the external physical world of the senses.

In the Orient even completely worldly aspirations—aspirations of the social life—take on such a spiritual character that they have the appearance of religious movements. And the momentum of Bolshevism in the East, for example, is to be traced to the fact that it is actually conceived by the people of the East, even by the Russian people, as a religious movement. The impetus of this social movement in the East lies not so much in the abstract concepts of Marxism, but essentially in the fact that its bearers are regarded as new Saviours, as the continuers so to speak, of earlier religious-spiritual striving and life.

From the Roman culture, and even already from the Hellenistic culture there developed, as we know, what took hold of the human beings of the Centre most of all—the dialectical element, the element of political-legal-militaristic thinking. And one can only understand the role played by what then developed out of the Roman culture when one considers at first that all three branches of human experience—the experience of the spiritual, the experience of economics, the experience of the civic-political in which Rome developed to particular splendour and in which the Roman Empire arose—were mixed up and at cross-purposes in much the same way that is the case today over basically the whole civilized world. Rome ended in complete decadence, brought about essentially by the fact that in the Roman Empire the untenable situation arose which always arises when these three human activities—spiritual life, political life and economic life—get mixed up chaotically with one another. It can truly be said that the Roman Empire and particularly the Byzantine Empire were a kind of symbol of the decay of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, the Graeco-Roman epoch. We need only consider that of 107 Eastern Roman Emperors only 34 died in their beds! The others were either poisoned or maimed and died in prison, or left prison to join monasteries or the like. And out of the decline of the Roman world in Southern Europe developed something which then streamed northwards in three branches (see diagram).

Here, to begin with, we have the Western branch. I shall not go today into the historical details of what developed throughout the Middle Ages out of the older development of humanity, but I should like to draw your attention to a few things. The characteristic phenomenon of Western development, of development in the more southerly Western regions to begin with, is that Roman culture spreads as a sum-total of people towards Spain, over present-day France, and also over a part of Britain. These were Roman people who developed in this direction. But all this was interpenetrated by what entered into these Roman peoples through the migrations of Germanic tribes of various kinds.

And here we find a singular phenomenon. We find that Germanic peoples force their way into the Roman element and that something then arises there which can only be characterized by saying: Human beings of Germanic nature penetrated into the Roman element. Rome as such, the Roman human being, went under. But what remained of the Roman culture—what took shape, that is, through the intersection of these two lines (see diagram) and formed the Spanish, the French and also a part of the British population—is essentially Germanic blood overlain by the Roman language-element. It can only really be understood by looking at it in this way. This human being, as regards his soul-configuration, his direction of perceiving, feeling and willing, is descended from what, as the Germanic element, moved in the stream of the migrations from East to West. But it is a peculiarity of this Germanic element that when it comes up against a foreign language element—and there is always a culture embodied in a language—it dissolves into it, assumes it. It grows into this foreign language as though, if I may put it so, into a garment of civilization. What lives in the West of Europe as the Latin race has, fundamentally, nothing in it of Latin blood. But it, has grown into what, embodied in the language, has streamed up to it there. For it lay in the nature of the Latin, of the Roman, element to assert itself beyond the purely human in the course of world evolution. This is why the concept of one's will and testament first arose in Rome—the assertion of egoism beyond death. The wish to extend one's will beyond death led to the concept of the will and testament. Thus, too, the continuance of the language worked an beyond the continuance of the human element in the people.

And other things, too, were preserved apart from the language. Thus, in this stream here (see diagram), there was preserved for the West the ancient traditions of the different secret societies, (the significance of which I have frequently referred to in the course of the past years). These are traditions stemming from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, from the Graeco-Roman times, which, to be sure, are borrowings from the East—from manuscripts—but have passed thoroughly through the Roman, the Latin, culture. Thus, in a certain respect, in so far as Western humanity is submerged in the Roman language-element that has endured beyond the actual Roman people, one finds the human being in the cloak of a foreign civilization. One also has the human being in a foreign cloak in as much as in the ancient Mystery truths—which have become abstract and which, in the ceremonies and ritual of the Western societies, have become more or less empty forms—one has something in which the human element is submerged and which is capable of touching it.

Now, if other conditions are particularly favourable, then this situation [of the human being being penetrated from without by everything that arises from language] provides a foothold for beings of the kind I described yesterday, enabling them to incarnate into the human being. But particularly favourable for this incarnating process is the Anglo-Saxon element. This is because it was a thoroughly Germanic people that moved across to the West and because the Germanic element has been strongly preserved in these human beings who have permeated themselves to a lesser degree with the Roman element than have those whom we call the Latin peoples. Thus there is a far more malleable balance present here in the Anglo-Saxon race, and because of this those beings which incarnate here have far greater freedom of action, far greater room to move in as it were. In the Latin countries proper they would be extremely constricted. Above all, however, one must be clear that what can then manifest in individual, personalities depends an configurations of folk psychology such as these. Although Puritanism certainly represented an abstract sphere of belief, this freer element was pre-eminently suited to adopting and Anglo-Saxon developing natural-scientific thinking and to forming a concept of the world and of life based upon it. The whole humanity of the human being, certainly, is not engaged here—only part of man's being is engaged through the incorporation of languages, through the incorporation of other elements of the human being—which makes it possible for such beings as I described yesterday to incarnate in these people.

Let me state expressly that what I am talking about at the moment concerns only certain single individuals who are scattered amongst the mass of other human beings. It does not refer to nations; it does not refer to the vast masses of people but only to single individuals who, however, have an extraordinarily strong position of leadership in those regions I have mentioned. What is primarily taken hold of in the West by these beings, who then secure for the human body in which they incarnate a certain position of leadership, is the body and soul—not the spirit to which less attention is paid.

Where, for example, does the whole magnificent but one-sided elaboration of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution come from?^{1 Charles Darwin (1809–1882).} It comes from the fact that, in Charles Darwin, body and soul, and not the spirit, were particularly dominant. He, therefore, also considers the human being only according to body and soul and ignores the spirit and that which lives into the soul from the spirit. Anyone who looks without prejudice at the results of Darwin's research will understand that something was present there which was unwilling to consider the human being from the aspect of his spirit. 'Spirit' was only taken from more recent science—which is international. But what coloured his whole conception of the human being was the emphasis put on body and soul and the disregard for the spirit. In fact, the most faithful pupils of the Ecumenical Council of 869^{2 In the year 869, the 8th Ecumenical Council of Constantinople under Pope Hadrian II, decreed, against Photios, that the human being has a rational and intellectual soul—unam animam rationabilem et intellectualem—so that it was no longer permitted to speak of a separate spiritual principle in the human being. The spiritual was henceforth seen more as a quality of the soul.} were the people of the West. Initially they left the spirit out of consideration, taking body and soul in the way they are represented particularly in Darwin's descriptions and simply put an artificial head on top as spirit, in the materialistic way of thinking that arises out of science. And because people were ashamed, as it were, to make a universal religion out of natural science, there remained, as an external appendage, leading an abstract existence of its own, what lived on as Puritanism and the like but which had no connection with the real world culture. We see how here, in a certain sense, body and soul are overwhelmed by an abstract scientific spirit which we can clearly observe even into the present.

But let us suppose that something else happened. Let us suppose that what lives on in language—what lives on in the spiritual world of forms of the fourth post-Atlantean epoch—were to be stronger. What would arise then? There would arise a strong fanatical rejection of the modern spirit; and rather than emphasizing that an 'artificial head' of natural-scientific concepts be superimposed on the bodily-soul element, the old traditions would be superimposed: in fact only the physical and the soul element would really be cultivated. We could then imagine that, in such a crude way, some individual might work on everything that is only body and soul and devise a doctrine that wished only to consider body and soul; which outwardly did not use science for this but rather the external part of a revelation from an earlier time carried over into a later one. And then we have Jesuitism, we have Ignatius of Loyola.^{3 Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), the founder of the Jesuit Order in 1534.} We may say that, just as minds like Darwin arose of necessity from Anglo-Saxondom, so from later Romanism there arose Ignatius of Loyola.

The characteristic of the human beings of the West, of whom we have to speak here, is that through them those spiritual beings I described yesterday make themselves felt in the world. In the East this is different. A different stream moves towards the East (see diagram). But we will first look at something that goes out from ancient Rome as a second stream—which does not carry the language but which carries the whole trend of the soul-constitution, the trend of thought. The language goes more to the West and, through this we get all the phenomena of which I have just spoken. The direction of thought, on the other hand, moves more towards the centre of Europe. But it unites there with what lies there with the essential Germanic element; namely, a certain wish to be one with the language. But it is possible to maintain this wish to be one with the language only as long as the people who live in that language remain together. When the Goths, the Vandals and so on moved westwards they were immersed in the Latin element. This 'being one with the language' only remained in the centre of Europe. This means that in Central Europe the language is indeed not bound particularly strongly to human beings but is nevertheless bound more strongly than was the case in the Roman people, who are now lost but who have passed their language on. The Germanic people would not be able to pass on their language. The Germanic people have their language as something living in them and would never be able to leave it behind as a heritage. This language can only continue to live as long as it is bound together with the human being. This is connected with the whole nature of the human constitution of those peoples who have gradually asserted themselves in the centre of Europe. This has the effect that human beings came to the fore in Central Europe who were not suitable for such beings to incarnate into, as was the case in the West. But they could nevertheless be taken hold of. It was quite possible for the beings of the three types I described yesterday to assert themselves in the leaders of the people of Central Europe. But this also makes it possible for those people to be accessible to the phenomena which appear to the people of the Orient as imaginations. But in the people of the Centre these imaginations remain so pale during the day that they appear only as concepts, as ideas. The same applies also to what has its origin in those beings who incarnate in human beings and who play such a great role in individuals of the West. They cannot have the same effect here, but nevertheless give the whole human being a certain tendency. It is particularly the case in human beings of the Centre that over the course of centuries it was barely possible for any individual who attained to any sort of significance to save himself from the embodiment of the spirits of the West on the one side, and from the spirits of the East on the other. This always caused a kind of schism in these people.

To describe these human beings [of the Centre] in their true nature we can say: When they were awake there was working in them something of the attacks of the spirits of the West which influenced their desires, their instincts, lived in their will, and crippled it. When these individuals slept, when the astral body and the 'I' were separated, beings asserted themselves in them of the kind that often worked unconsciously on human beings of the Orient, appearing in imaginations. And one only needs to choose a highly characteristic personality from the civilization of the Centre and one will be able to touch—almost, as it were, with one's bare hands—the fact that this is as I have described it. One only needs to take Goethe. Take everything that lived in Goethe from the attacks of the spirits of the West that asserted themselves in his will, that surged particularly in the young Goethe and which one senses strongly when one reads the scenes, which gushed from Goethe in his youth, of Faust or The Wandering Jew. And then you see how, on the other hand, Goethe reached calm inner clarity—for the element of the Orient that tends merely to the spirit and soul was mastered in him, was permeated with this will element. You see how in old age he turns, in Part Two of Faust, more towards imaginations. But a cleft is nevertheless there. It is difficult to find a bridge between the style of Part One of Faust and the style of Part Two.

And look at the living Goethe himself, who grows from the impulses of the West; who, as it were, is tormented by the spirits of the West and who, as a young man, comforts himself with what after all also contains a great deal of the West: the Gothic style. But here there emerges a striving towards the spirits of the past, to those spirits which were at work in Greece—and also, most especially, in the Gothic style—but which nonetheless were basically the successors of those spirits which once inspired the oriental at the time when he came to his great ancient wisdom. And coming to the 1780s we see how he can no longer bear the spirits of the West, how they torment him. And he tries to balance this by moving to the South in order to absorb there what can come from the other side. This is just what gives the leading personalities of the Centre—and the other human beings, of course, follow these leaders—their characteristic stamp. The human beings of the Centre were thereby particularly prepared for the coming to prominence of the one thing that is important for the whole evolution of humanity. One can observe this best in a mind such as Hegel. If you take Hegel's philosophy, you find—I have often mentioned this here—that this philosophy develops in every respect towards the spirit. Yet nowhere in Hegel do you find anything which goes beyond the physical-sense life. Instead of a real teaching on the spirit you find logical dialectics as the first part of his philosophy. His philosophy of nature is merely a sum of abstractions of what lives in the human being himself; and you find what is supposed to be treated by psychology presented in the third part of Hegel's philosophy. But what comes out of it is nothing other than what the human being lives through between birth and death, which is then compressed into history. Nowhere in Hegel is it a matter of the eternal in the human being entering into an existence before birth or after death. Nor can its justification be found anywhere.

This is the one thing that the human beings, the most outstanding human beings, of the Centre give weight to: the fact that the human being, as he lives here between birth and death, consists of body, soul and spirit. For the human beings of the sense-world—for our physical world—soul and spirit should be made manifest by these people of the Centre.

As soon as we move to the East we find that soul and spirit predominate, just as, in the West, it is primarily body and soul. Thus, this rising up to imaginations is natural and, even if they do not come to consciousness, they nevertheless still work into the consciousness. The whole disposition Anlage) of thinking in the human being of the East is such that it tends towards imaginations: even if, at times, these imaginations are taken hold of in abstract concepts, as in Soloviev.^{4 Vladimir Sergeyevich Soloviev (1853–1900), Russian philosopher and poet.}

And a third branch extends from Rome towards the North and into the East via Byzantium (see diagram). What was together, though chaotically, in Rome now divides to a certain extent into three separate branches. It diverges and moves to the West where a new element of economics establishes itself as something especially appropriate for the new age, finding dose affinity with natural science. It moves also to the East and progresses from the ancient primal wisdom into decadence. There develops that which is the spiritual, in religious form. All this happens, of course, in parallel. And towards the Centre there develops what is political-militaristic, civic-judicial, which also naturally spreads into different areas. But we must keep the characteristic branches in mind.

The further eastward we go, the more do we see how the people of the East are not bound up with their language in the same way that the Germanic peoples are. The Germanic peoples really live in their language as long as they have it. Just study the strange course of the Germanic humanity of Central Europe. Look at the two branches of Germanic population which moved, for example, towards Hungary into the Zipser region; as Swabians down into the Banat; as Siebenbürger Saxons towards Transylvania. In all these places it is, if I may put it so, rather like a fading away of the actual language element. Everywhere these people allow themselves to be absorbed by the [foreign] language into which they merge. It would be a most interesting ethnological study to see how, in a relatively short time during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, the German element in the area around Vienna has withdrawn, has been swamped. This would be tangibly apparent if one looked at this matter with understanding. One saw how the German element evolved into the Magyar in an artificial way and into the Slavonic in a natural way.

In the East the human being is intimately bound up with his language. There the spirit-soul element lives in the language. This is often disregarded. The human being of the West lives in language in a completely different way—in a radically different way—from the human being of the East. The human being of the West lives in his language as though in a garment; the human being of the East lives in his language as though in himself. This is why the human being of the West could adopt the natural-scientific view of life, could pour it into his language, which is only a vessel. The scientific world-view of the West will never find a foothold in the Orient because it simply cannot get into the oriental languages. The languages of the Orient reject it; they do not adopt the world-view of science. You can sense this if you let the—albeit rather coquettish—writings of Rabindranath Tagore^{5 Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), Indian philosopher and poet.} work on you. Even though, in Tagore, it is all permeated with coquetry, one nevertheless sees how the whole nature of his existence consists in an experience of the forceful impact of the Western world-view, and then, through living in the language, an immediate rejection of it.

The human being of the Centre was thrown into all this. He had to take in everything he experienced in the West but did not absorb it as deeply as the Westerner; he suffused it with what also came from the East. Hence the more malleable equilibrium in the Centre; but hence also the inner strife, the duality in the individualization of the souls of human beings of the Centre. The striving to find a harmony, a balancing out of this duality—which is so classicially, so magnificently, portrayed in Schiller's Letters an Aesthetic Education in which two driving forces that are to be united—that of Nature and that of Reason—points clearly to this duality. But one can point to something much deeper. You see, when one looks to the West one finds primarily a certain inclination in the whole people to adopt the natural-scientific way of thinking, which is so exceptionally suited to the economic life. I have shown you how this scientific way of thinking has entered even into psychology. It has been adopted there completely. And it is there that Puritanism lived like an abstract appendage (Einschlag), like something that has nothing to do with real outer life—something that one locks away, as it were, in one's soul house—something one does not allow to be touched by outer culture.

The nature of what is developing in the West is such that we can say: There is a tendency here to take into oneself everything that is accessible to human reason in as much as this is bound to body and soul. Everything else—Puritanism—is only the Sunday coat of what is the body, what is accessible to reason. Hence the deism—that squeezed lemon of a religious world-view—in which there is nothing more of God than the fairy tale of a generalized, completely abstract, cosmic first cause. Reason, bound to body and soul, is what is asserting itself here.

If you go to the East there is no understanding at all for a rationality of this kind. This already begins in Russia. For, has the Russian any understanding at all for what is called rational in the West? Let us be under no illusion here. The Russian has not the slightest understanding for what, in the West, one calls rationality. The Russian is open to what one could call revelation. Fundamentally, he takes up as the content of his soul everything that comes to him by virtue of a kind of revelation. Reason—even when he says the word, copying it from Western human beings—is something of which he understands nothing; that is, he does not feel in this word what Western people feel. But what can be felt when one speaks of revelations, of the descent of truths from the supersensible worlds into human beings—this he understands well. Through the nature of what is spoken of in the West—and Puritanism is indeed good proof of this—one sees that there is by nature not the slightest understanding for what one must refer to as the relation of the Russian—and even more so of the oriental, of the Asiatic human being—of the relation in general of the human being to the spiritual world. In the West there is not the slightest understanding for this. For this is something quite different from what is given through reason. It is something which, going out from the spirit, takes hold of the human being and permeates him in a living way.

And in the human being of Central Europe the situation is this: as the fifth post-Atlantean epoch was approaching—around the tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries (it came then in the fifteenth century)—the outstanding spirits of Central Europe were faced with an immense question, a question that was set them as human beings placed between West and East—a West that pulled them towards reason and an East that pulled them towards revelation. Just study later Scholasticism, the brilliant age of medieval spiritual development, from this point of view. Just study, from this standpoint, such spirits as Albertus Magnus,^{6 Albertus Magnus (1193–1280), Scholastic philosopher, called 'Doctor Universalis'.} Thomas Aquinas,^{7 Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Scholastic and pupil of Albertus Magnus; called Doctor Angelicus. Canonized in 1323.} Duns Scotus^{8 Johannes Duns Scotus (1266–1294), Scholastic.} and so on. Compare them with such spirits as Roger Bacon^{9 Roger Bacon (1214–1294), Franciscan, taught at Oxford University.}—I mean the elder, who was more orientated towards the West—and you will see that a great question arose for the spirits of later Central-European Scholasticism, from the working together of what pressed from the West as reason and what pressed in from the East as revelation. This pressure came, on the one hand, from those spirits who wished to take hold of the human body and soul through the will and from those spirits, on the other hand, who, in the East, wished to take hold of spirit and soul through imaginations. It is from this that the tenet of Scholastic teaching arose that both were valid: reason on the one side and revelation on the other. Reason for everything on the earth which can be acquired through the senses and revelation for the supersensible truths which can be drawn only from the Bible and from the traditions of Christianity. One comprehends the Christian Scholasticism of the Middle Ages when one perceives its most outstanding spirits as being those in whom reason from the West and revelation from the East came together. Both influences were working in the human being and in the Middle Ages people could only bring them together by feeling the split, the duality in themselves.

In that place high up in the small cupola,^{10In the first Goetheanum. A presentation of the individual motifs of the small cupola can be found in Der Baugedanhe des Goetheanum (The Architectural Concept of the Goetheanum), Dornach, 1952.} where the Germanic element is meant to be shown with its dualism, you see the elements of this duality clashing against one another in the red-yellow and the black-brown—the red-yellow of revelation and the black-brown of reason. You see there, felt in colour, revealed through colour, what has inspired and worked through different human cultures and has thus come to the human being.

Thus we could say that what we have now, spread over the civilized world, is taken hold of in the West by economic life—the element that has actually arisen only in modern times. For economic life was never such a topical question in earlier epochs as it is today. It is actually appropriate to our times. In contrast, matters of state and politics are already fading. And what was founded in the last third of the nineteenth century as the German Empire took into itself just this fading element of ancient Rome and fell to pieces because of it. This was already so at the beginning in the way it was structured but even more so in the way it then developed. Fundamentally, this German Empire was nothing but a continuation of the civic-judicial, the political element, which excelled in organizing everything—indeed, had great geniuses of organization. But it wanted to also take over the economic life without having economic thinking. For everything that the economy did in this Empire wanted more and more to creep under the umbrella of the State. Militarism, for example, which basically orginated in France and also in Switzerland but which had quite different forms, was 'politicized' (verstaatlicht), as it were, in Central Europe. Central Europe could therefore take up neither an economic life nor a spiritual life truly alive in itself and arising out of its own roots. The anti-spirituality that has been organized in Central Europe in recent times is of the most terrible kind! We see everything pertaining to the spiritual life becoming more and more part of a political State. And so it came about that in Central Europe in the second decade of the twentieth century there was not a single individual left who wrote about history or similar things except as a 'party-political man'. Everything which came out of the universities was not objective history but party-wisdom, distinctly politically coloured. And even more decadent is the spiritual life which originates in very ancient times in the Orient. It mingled with the deluge from the West, from the Centre, in the measures of Peter the Great with the native spirituality that was already in a state of decadence, expressing itself in Pan-Slavism, in Slavophilism. And it led finally to the creation of the present conditions from which a new spirit wishes to arise, for the old is completely decadent.

Thus we see, spread out over the world, a new economy, jurisprudence and political life coming to an end, and a spiritual life which has come to an end.

In the West we see how the political element has been completely absorbed by the economy and that the spiritual element, if one disregards the unreality of Puritanism, exists only in the form of natural science. In the Centre we have had an already aging State which tried to absorb both economy and spiritual life and was therefore unable to survive. And in the East we have nothing but—the dying spirit of ancient times which the West tries to galvanize through all manner of measures. No matter whether tried by Peter the Great or by Lenin, what wishes to come from the West galvanizes the corpse of the Eastern spirit. Salvation lies in clearly seeing that a new spirit must permeate humanity.

This new spirit, which cannot be found in the Orient but only in the Occident, must put economic life, political life and spiritual life side by side, quite distinct from one another. Then the economic life of the West, for which the West is particularly organized through its natural qualities, can be complemented by the political and the spiritual life. Then the Centre can take up beside its political life—which will be improved through quite different principles than were there in the past if it is anthroposophically-oriented—an economic and spiritual life. And then the Orient can be re-fructified. The Orient will understand the spiritual life that blossoms in the Occident only if one introduces it in the right way. As soon as artificial barriers are no longer created, which do not allow the movement of the truly anthroposophically-oriented spiritual life of the Occident; as soon as this is allowed to cross into the Orient, it will be understood there, even if it enters at first through such coquettish spirits as Rabindranath Tagore or others. The point is that natural science as such is rejected by the Orient. But that science which is illumined by true spirituality, which we have wanted to present here in our courses of the Free School of Spiritual Science, will also be taken up in the Orient with great eagerness. The Orient will then have a great deal of understanding for an independent spiritual life. And it will also take up an independent civic-political life and an independent economic life which it will be able to run in independence. Thus, in this threefold form of the social organism, there is a fulfillment of that which, from a rational but at the same time also spiritual view, represents the development of the European and Asiatic world since the decline of Rome.