The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I would like to connect and amplify individual observations that we have made in the course of our studies with this or that detail. If you follow the times attentively, you will have been able to notice here and there that, in the thoughts, experiences, and impulses that in the past man felt had “brought him so wonderfully far,” he can no longer find what can help him reach into the future. Yesterday, one of our members pressed into my hands last week's issue of the Frankfurter Zeitung, dated November 21, 1917. In that journal is an article by a very learned gentleman—it must have been a very learned gentleman, because he had in front of his name not only the title Doctor of Philosophy but also the title Doctor of Theology, and in addition there is also Professor. He is thus Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy. He is therefore, of course, a very clever man! He has written an article that deals with all sorts of contemporary spiritual needs. In the course of this article there is a section that is expressed in the following way: “The experience of being that lies behind things has no need of pious consecration or religious estimation, because it is in itself religion. Here it is not a matter of the feeling and comprehension of one's own individual values but of the great Irrational that is hidden behind all existence. He who touches it so that the divine spark leaps across undergoes an experience that has primary character, the ‘primeval experience.’ To experience this, along with all that is moved by the same stream of life, endows him with, to use a word beloved in modern times, a cosmic feeling for life.”

Forgive me, dear friends. I am not reading this to arouse within you some particularly lofty mental pictures to correspond with these washed-out sentences but rather to lead before you a symbol of our time. “A cosmic religiosity is in the process of growing among us, and the extent of the longing for it is shown by the perceptible growth of the theosophical movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses.” It is indeed difficult to stagger over all these washed-out concepts, but is it not nevertheless true that as a symbol of our time this is quite peculiar? Further on he says, “In this cosmic piety, it is not a question of mysticism that begins with rejection of the world . . .” etc.

One cannot conceive of anything clever in these sentences! Since the Professor, Doctor of Theology, and Doctor of Philosophy represents it, however, one must naturally consider it as something clever. Otherwise one would perceive it as something that is brought falteringly to expression in an unclear tirade, reminding one of the learned gentleman who can no longer continue on the path on which he has traveled and who feels obliged to point to something that is there, something that apparently seems to him not completely hopeless. One should not be at all delighted with these utterances; such things must not lull us into slumber just because we notice that from some direction someone has again observed that something lies behind the spiritual scientific movement. That would indeed be very harmful, because those who make these remarks are often the same ones who feel satisfied with such utterances, who do not go further. They even point with these washed-out things to an event that will enter the world, and this would thereby belong precisely to those who are altogether too comfortable to become involved in something that requires earnest study of spiritual science. This event must really break in and take hold of human feeling (Gemuet) if what is bound up with reality is to flow into the time-stream of evolution so that healing forces are able to rise from it. It is naturally easier to speak of the “surging waves” and of “cosmic feelings” than to enter seriously into the things that are demanded by the signs of the time and that must be made known to humanity. For this reason it seems to me necessary to say things here that have been stated previously in public lectures but that will be spoken of further, now with a strong emphasis on the difference between what is worn out, what is no longer capable of life, which has led to these catastrophic times, and what must really take hold of the human soul if any progress is to be made.

With the old wisdom by which human beings have reached the present, thousands of congresses can be held—world congresses and national congresses, and whatever—thousands of societies can be founded, but one must be clear that these thousands of congresses, thousands of societies, will not be effective unless the spiritual life-blood of the science of the spirit flows through them. What man is lacking today is the courage to enter into the real exploration of the spiritual world. It sounds strange, but it must be said that all that is needed to begin with is to circulate to a broad public, for example, the small brochure, Human Life in the Light of Spiritual Science. Something new would be achieved through this in calling forth knowledge of man's connection with the cosmic order. Attention is drawn precisely to such knowledge in this brochure. Concrete attention is drawn to the way in which the earth annually alters its conditions of consciousness and the like. What is said in this lecture and in this brochure is said with particularly full consideration of the needs of our time. To receive this would be of greater significance than all the wishy-washy talk of “cosmic feeling” and of entering some sort of “surging waves,” or what have you. I have only quoted these things to you, because to reword them is impossible for me, as they are too senseless in their formulation.

One is not hindered, of course, by being attentive to these things, because they are important and essential. What I wish to draw to your attention is that we must not “mystify” ourselves, that we must be clear. Utter clarity is necessary if we wish to work for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

I wish to point out once again that what is essential for humanity in this fifth post-Atlantean period is to enter into a special treatment of great issues of life that have been obscured in a certain way through the wisdom of the past. I have already pointed this out to you. One great issue of life can be characterized in the following way: an attempt will have to be made to place the spiritual etheric in the service of outer practical life. I have brought to your attention that the fifth post-Atlantean period will have to solve the problem of how human moods, the motions of human moods, allow themselves to be translated into wave motions on machines, how man must be brought into connection with what must become more and more mechanical. For that reason I called your attention a week ago to how superficially this mechanizing will be accepted by a certain portion of the surface of the earth. I presented an example to show how, following the American way of thinking, an attempt was made to extend the mechanical over human life itself. I presented the example of the pauses that were to be exploited so that, instead of far fewer tons, up to fifty tons could be loaded by a number of workmen. For this one need only carry the Darwinian principle of selection actually into life.

In such situations the will is there to harness human energy to mechanical energy. These things should not be treated by fighting against them. That is a completely false view. These things will not fail to appear; they will come. What we are concerned with is whether, in the course of world history, they are entrusted to people who are familiar in a selfless way with the great aims of earthly evolution and who structure these things for the health of human beings or whether they are enacted by groups of human beings who exploit these things in an egotistical or in a group-egotistical sense. That is what matters. It is not a question of the what in this case; the what is sure to come. It is a question of the how, how one tackles these situations. The what lies simply in the meaning of earthly evolution. The welding together of the human nature with the mechanical nature will be a problem of great significance for the remainder of earthly evolution.

I have deliberately drawn attention often, even in public lectures, to the fact that the consciousness of the human being is connected with the forces of disintegration. On two occasions I have said in public lectures in Basel that within our nervous system we are dying. These forces, these forces of dying away, will become more and more powerful. The bond will be established between these forces dying within man, which are related to the electric, magnetic forces, and the outer mechanical forces. Man will to a certain extent become his intentions, he will be able to direct his thoughts into the mechanical forces. Hitherto undiscovered forces within human nature will be discovered, forces that will work on outer electric and magnetic forces. The first problem is to bring together human beings with the mechanical, which will have to prevail increasingly in the future. The second problem consists in calling upon the help of the spiritual circumstances. This can only be done, however, when the time is ripe and when a sufficient number of people are prepared for it in the right way. The time must come, however, when the spiritual forces are made mobile enough to master life in relation to illness and death. Medicine will become spiritualized, intensely spiritualized. Of all these things, caricatures are being made from certain directions, but these caricatures show only what really must come.

Again it is a question of whether this problem is attacked from the same direction to which I pointed regarding the other problem, in an outer egotistical or group-egotistical way.

The third problem is to introduce human thoughts into the actual evolution of the human species, in birth and education. I have pointed out that conferences have already been held on how in the future a materialistic science would be founded regarding conception and the relationships between man and woman. All these things indicate to us that something most significant is in the process of evolving. It is still easy today to say, “Why is it that people who know about these things in the right sense do not apply them?” In the future it will become clear just what is involved in this application and which forces are still actively hindering the foundation of large-scale spiritualized medicine or spiritualized national economy. No more can be accomplished today than to talk about these things, until people have enough understanding of them, people who are inclined to accept them in a selfless way. Today many people believe that they are able to do this, but many circumstances of life hinder what they are able to do. These life circumstances can be overcome in the right way only when a deeper and deeper understanding gains ground and when there is willingness to renounce, at least for a time, the immediate, practical application of these things on a larger scale.

These things have all developed in such a way that one can say that little has been retained of what was once hidden behind the ancient, atavistic strivings until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is much talk today about the ancient alchemy. The proceedings of the procreation of Homunculus are also recalled at times, and so on, but what is spoken of here is for the most part groundless. If one once understood what can be said in connection with the Homunculus scene in Goethe's Faust, one would be better informed about these things, because what is essential is that, from the sixteenth century on, a fog has been spread over these things; they have receded in human consciousness.

The law that governs these things is the same as the law that regulates within the human being the rhythmical alternation of waking and sleeping. Just as man cannot rise above sleep, so, in regard to spiritual evolution, he cannot disregard the sleeping of spiritual science that has marked the centuries since the sixteenth century. It was necessary for humanity to sleep through the spiritual for a time in order that it could appear again in another form. One must comprehend such necessities, but one must also not allow oneself to be depressed by them. For this reason one must be very clear that the time of awakening has come and that one must take an active part in this awakening, that events often hurry ahead of knowledge and one will not understand the events that take place around us unless one accustoms oneself to knowledge.

I have repeatedly pointed out to you that certain egotistical groups are striving esoterically, and their influence is active in the ways that I have often indicated in these studies. First of all, it was necessary that a certain knowledge should recede within humanity, a knowledge that is designated today with such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, and so on. This knowledge had to recede, fall into a sleep, so that man would no longer have the possibility of drawing what pertains to the soul out of observation of nature but would have to become more dependent on himself. Through this he would awaken the forces within him, for it was necessary that certain things appear first in abstract form and later take on again concrete, spiritual form.

Three ideas have gradually arisen in the course of evolving during the last centuries, ideas which, in the way they have entered human life, are essentially abstract. Kant has named them falsely, while Goethe has named them correctly. These three ideas Kant called God, freedom, and immortality; Goethe called them correctly God, virtue, and immortality. When one sees the things that are hidden behind these three words, it is clear that they are exactly the same as what modern man views more abstractly but that were viewed more concretely until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In the ancient atavistic sense they were also viewed more materially. They experimented in the ancient way, indeed, they sought at that time with alchemical experiments to observe the processes that showed the working of God in process. They tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Behind all these things is hidden something concrete. This Philosopher's Stone was to present human beings with the possibility of becoming virtuous, but it was thought of more materially. It was to lead human beings to experience immortality, to put them into a certain relationship to the universe, through which they would experience within themselves what goes beyond birth and death. All these washed out ideas with which one seeks today to grasp the ancient things no longer coincide with what was intended at that time. These things have become simply abstract, and modern humanity speaks from abstract ideas. They have wished to understand God through abstract theology; virtue is also regarded as something purely abstract. The more abstract the idea, the better modern humanity likes to use it in speaking about these things, even immortality. One speculates about what could be immortal in man. I spoke about this in my first Basel lecture, saying that the science that occupies itself today philosophically with questions about immortality is a starved science, an undernourished science. This is only another form of expression for abstract thinking in which such matters are pursued.

Certain brotherhoods in the West, however, have still preserved a relationship to the old traditions and have tried to apply them in a corresponding way, to place them in the service of a certain group egoism. It is really necessary for these things to be pointed out. Naturally, when these things are spoken of in public, from this comer of the West, in exoteric literature, then God, virtue or freedom, and immortality are also talked about in an abstract way. It is only in the circle of the initiates that it is known that all of this is only speculation, that these are all abstractions. For themselves, they seek what is being striven for in the abstract formulas of God, virtue, and immortality in something much more concrete, and for this reason, these words are translated for the initiates in their respective schools. God is translated as gold, and one seeks behind the mystery to come to what can be described as the mystery of gold. Gold, representing what is sun-like within the earth's crust, is indeed something within which is imbedded a most significant mystery. In fact, gold stands materially in the same relationship to other substances as within thinking the thought of God stands to other thoughts. It only matters in which way this mystery is understood.

This relates to the egotistical group exploitation of the mystery of birth. One is striving to wrestle here with real cosmic understanding. Modern man has completely replaced this cosmic understanding with a terrestrial understanding. When man today wishes to examine, for example, how the embryo in animals and man develops, he examines with a microscope what exists precisely in the place on earth onto which he has cast his microscopic eye; he regards this as what is to be examined. It cannot be a matter only of this, however. It will be discovered—and certain circles are coming close to this in their discoveries—that the active forces are not in what one meets with the microscopic eye but are rather within what streams in from the cosmos, from the constellations in the cosmos. When an embryo arises, it arises because into the living being in which the embryo is being formed are working forces from all directions of the cosmos, cosmic forces. When a fertilization takes place, what will develop out of the fertilization is dependent upon which cosmic forces are active.

Diagram 9 Click image for large view

There is one thing that will come to be understood today that is not yet understood. Today one looks at some living being, let us say a chicken. When in this living being a new embryo arises, the biologist examines how, so to speak, out of this chicken the egg grows. He examines the forces that are supposed to allow the egg to grow out of the chicken. This is a piece of nonsense. The egg does not at all grow out of the hen; the hen is only the foundation; the forces work out of the cosmos, forces that produce the egg on the ground that has been prepared within the hen. When the biologist today works with his microscope, he believes that what he sees in the microscopic field also includes the forces on which what he sees depends. What he sees there, however, is subject to the forces of the stars that work together in a certain constellation, and when one discovers the cosmic here, one will discover the truth, the reality: it is the universe that conjures the egg from the hen.

All of this, however, is connected above all with the mystery of the sun and, observed from the earth, with the mystery of gold. Today I am offering a kind of programmatic indication; in the course of time these things will become clearer.

In the same schools about which we are speaking, virtue is not called virtue but is simply called health, and one endeavors to acquaint oneself with those cosmic constellations that have a connection with the health and illness of human beings. Through acquainting oneself with the cosmic constellations, however, one learns to know the individual substances that lie on the surface of the earth, the juices and so on, that are connected with health and illness. From certain directions, a more material form of the science of health is increasingly being developed, one that rests, however, on a spiritual foundation.

The notion will also spread from this direction that man becomes good not by learning all sorts of ethical principles, through which man can become good, but rather by, let us say, taking copper under a certain constellation of stars or arsenic under another. You can imagine how these things could be exploited for power by groups of egotistically inclined people. It is only necessary to withhold this knowledge from others who are then unable to participate, and one has the best method of ruling over great masses of people. One does not need to speak about these things at all; one need only introduce, for example, some new delicacy. Then one can seek a market for this new delicacy, which has been tinged appropriately, and thus bring about what is necessary, if these things are comprehended materialistically. One must be clear that in all matter there are hidden spiritual workings. Only one who knows in the true sense that there is nothing really material but only the spiritual will penetrate beyond the mysteries of life.

Likewise, the attempt will be made from this direction to bring the problem of immortality into materialistic channels. This problem of immortality can be led into materialistic channels in the same way, by exploitation of cosmic constellations. One does not, of course, attain through this what is often speculated as being immortality, but one attains a different immortality. One prepares oneself—so long as it is impossible to influence the physical body to prolong life artificially—to undergo soul experiences that will enable one to remain in the lodge of a brotherhood even after death, to help there with the forces that one has at one's disposal. Immortality is simply called prolonging life in these circles.

You can see outer signs of all these things. I do not know whether some of you have noticed the book that for a time provoked a sensation, a book that also came from the West bearing the title, The Disturbance of Dying (Der Unfug des Sterbens). These things all move in this direction. They are only the beginning. What has gone further than the beginning is carefully preserved for the group egotism, is kept very esoteric. These things are actually possible, however, if one brings them into materialistic channels, if one makes the abstract ideas of God, virtue, and immortality into concrete ideas of gold, health, and prolonging life, if one exploits in a group-egotistical sense what I presented to you as the great problems of the fifth post-Atlantean times. What is called in a washed-out way “cosmic feeling” by Professor, Doctor of Theology, Doctor of Philosophy, is presented by many—and unfortunately by many in an egotistical sense—as cosmic knowledge. While science for centuries has beheld only processes occurring on earth, has rejected all study of what is approaching as the most important extraterrestrial occurrence, it will be precisely in the fifth post-Atlantean time that exploitation will be considered of the forces penetrating in from the cosmos. Just as it is now of special importance for the regular professor of biology possibly to have a much-enlarged microscope, possibly to use much more exact laboratory methods, so in the future, when science has become spiritualized, what will matter will be whether one carries out a certain process in the morning, evening, or at noon, or whether one allows what one did in the morning to be somehow further influenced by active factors of the evening, or whether the cosmic influence from morning until evening is excluded, paralyzed. In the future such processes will prove themselves to be necessary; they also will take place. Naturally much water will run over the dam until the materialistically oriented university chairs, laboratories, and so on, are handed over to the spiritual scientists, but this exchange must take place if humanity is not to come completely into decadence. This laboratory work will have to be replaced by work in which, for example—when it is a matter of the good that is to be attained in the future—certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day; the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening, and this is preserved rhythmically until it is morning again. The processes are conducted in such a manner that certain cosmic workings are always interrupted during the day, and the cosmic processes of morning and evening are studied. To achieve this, manifold arrangements will be necessary.

You can gather from this that when one is not in a position to participate publicly in what happens, one can only talk about these things. From the same direction that wishes to put gold, health, and prolonging life in place of God, virtue, and immortality, the effort is made not to work with the processes of morning and evening but with something totally different. I called to your attention last time that the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha was to be eliminated from the world by introducing another impulse from the West, a kind of Antichrist; from the direction of the East, the Christ impulse, as it appears in the twentieth century, is to be paralyzed by directing the attention, the interest, away from Christ appearing in the etheric.

Those concerned with introducing the Antichrist instead of the Christ have endeavored to exploit what could work especially through the most materialistic forces, yet working spiritually with these materialistic forces. Above all they strive to exploit electricity and especially the earth's magnetism to have influence over the entire earth. I have shown you how, in what I have called the human double, earthly forces arise. This mystery will be penetrated. It will be an American mystery to make use of the magnetism of the earth in its “doubleness,” to make use of the magnetism in North and South to send guiding forces that work spiritually across the earth. Look at the magnetic map of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe the course of the line where the magnetic needle swings to East and West and where it does not swing at all. (I can only give indications at this time.) From a certain celestial direction, spiritual beings are constantly at work. One need only put these spiritual beings at the service of earthly existence and, because these spiritual beings working in from the cosmos are able to transmit the mystery of the earth's magnetism, one can penetrate the mystery of the earth's magnetism and can bring about something very significant of a group-egotistical nature in relation to the three things, gold, health, and prolonging life. It will simply be a matter of mustering the doubtful courage for these things. This will certainly be done within certain circles!

From the direction of the East, it is a matter of strengthening what I have already explained: the in-streaming and actively working beings from the opposing sides of the cosmos are placed at the service of earthly existence. A great struggle will arise in the future. Human science will move toward the cosmic. Human science will attempt to move toward the cosmic but in different ways. It will be the task of the good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces that, through the working together of two cosmic streams, are able to arise on the earth. These two cosmic streams will be those of Pisces and Virgo. It will be most important to discover the mystery of how what works out of the cosmos in the direction of Pisces as a force of the sun combines with what works in the direction of Virgo. The good will be that one will discover how, from the two directions of the cosmos, morning and evening forces can be placed at the service of humanity: on the one side from the direction of Pisces and on the other side from the direction of Virgo.

Diagram 10 Click image for large view

Those who seek to achieve everything through the dualism of polarity, through positive and negative forces, will not concern themselves with these forces. The spiritual mysteries that allow the spirituality to stream forth from the cosmos—with help from the twofold forces of magnetism, from the positive and negative—emerge in the universe from Gemini; these are the forces of midday. It was known already in antiquity that this had something to do with the cosmos, and it is known even today by exoteric scientists that, behind Gemini in the Zodiac, positive and negative magnetism are hidden in some way. An attempt will be made to paralyze what is to be won through the revelation of the duality in the cosmos, to paralyze it in a materialistic, egotistical way through the forces that stream toward humanity especially from Gemini and can be put completely at the service of the double. With other brotherhoods, which above all wish to bypass the Mystery of Golgotha, it is a matter of exploiting the twofold nature of the human being. This twofold nature of the human being, which has entered the fifth post-Atlantean period just as man did, contains the human being but also, within the human being, the lower animal nature. Man is to a certain extent really a centaur; he contains this lower, bestial, astral nature. His humanity is somehow mounted upon this astral beast. Through this cooperation of the twofold nature within the human being there is also a dualism of forces. It is this dualism of forces that will be used more by the egotistical brotherhoods of the Eastern, Indian stream in order also to mislead Eastern Europe, which has the task of preparing the sixth post-Atlantean period. For this, forces from Sagittarius are put to use.

The question standing before humanity is whether to master for itself the forces of the cosmos in a doubly wrong way or simply to master them in the right way. This will give a real renewal to astrology, which was atavistic in its ancient form and would not be able to continue in this form. There will be a struggle among the knowledgeable ones in the cosmos. Some will bring about the use of the morning and evening processes, as I indicated; in the West, the midday process will be preferable, excluding the morning and evening processes; and in the East the midnight processes will be used. Substances will no longer be prepared according to forces of chemical attraction and repulsion; it will be known that different substances will be produced depending upon whether they are prepared with morning and evening processes or with midday or midnight processes. It will be known that such substances work in a totally different way upon the three-foldness of God, virtue, and immortality—gold, health, and prolonging life. From the cooperation of what comes from Pisces and Virgo one will not be able to bring about anything harmful. Through this one will achieve what in a certain sense loosens the mechanism of life from the human being but will in no way found any form of rulership and power of one group over another. The cosmic forces that are called forth from this direction will beget strange machines but only ones that will relieve the human being from work, because they will have within them a certain force of intelligence. A cosmically oriented spiritual science will have to concern itself so that all the great temptations that will emanate from these mechanized beasts, which man creates himself, will not exert a harmful influence upon the human being.

To all of this the following must be added: it is necessary for human beings to prepare themselves by not taking realities for illusions, really entering into a spiritual conception of the world, into a spiritual comprehension of the world. What is important is to see things as they are. One can only see things as they are, however, when one is in the position of applying to reality the concepts, the ideas, that emerge from an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. The dead will actively participate for the remainder of earthly existence. How they will participate is what matters. Here, above all, the great distinction will appear. Through man's conduct on earth, the participation of the dead will be guided from a good direction in such a way that the impulses of the dead to work will be able to originate from themselves, impulses taken from the spiritual world that the dead are experiencing after death.

Opposing this will be many endeavors to lead the dead in an artificial way into human existence. By the circuitous route through Gemini, the dead will be led into human life in such a way that human vibrations will reverberate in a definite way, will continue to vibrate within the mechanical performance of the machine. The cosmos will bring motion to the machines through the circuitous route that I have just indicated.

For that reason, it is important that nothing inappropriate be applied when these problems appear; only elementary forces that are part of nature should be applied. One will have to renounce introducing inappropriate forces into mechanical life. From the occult sphere one must refuse to harness human beings themselves into mechanical factory work, a practice through which the Darwinian theory of selection is used for the determination of the work force, as I presented to you as an example last time.

I make all these suggestions, which naturally cannot exhaust the subject in such a short time, because I think that you will meditate further upon these things, that you will seek to build a bridge between your own life experiences and these things, above all those life experiences that can be won today in these difficult times. You will see how many things will become clear to you when you observe them in the light that can come to you through such ideas. In our time, we are not really concerned with forces and constellations of forces confronting one another, the sorts of things about which one is constantly speaking in outer, exoteric life, but with entirely different things. Some intend actually to cast a kind of veil over the true impulses that are involved. There are bound to be certain human forces at work to save something for themselves. What is there to be saved? Certain human forces are at work to defend impulses that were justified until the French Revolution and were even defended by certain esoteric schools; they are being defended now in the form of an Ahrimanic/Luciferic retardation, being defended so as to maintain a social order that humanity believes has been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

There are mainly two powers that stand in opposition to each other: the representatives of the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the representatives of the new age. It is quite clear that a large number of people instinctively are representatives of the impulses of the new era. The representatives of the old impulses—still of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries—must therefore be harnessed to these forces by artificial means, to forces emanating from certain group-egotistical brotherhoods. The most effective principle in the new age to extend power over as many people as one needs is the economic principle, the principle of economic dependency. That is only the tool, however. What is involved here is something entirely different. What is involved is something that you can deduce from all my suggestions. The economic principle is bound up with all that is involved in making a large number of human beings from all over the earth into an army for these principles.

These are the things that oppose each other. The one points essentially to what is fighting at present in the world: in the West, a rigid, ironclad principle of the eighteenth, seventeenth, sixteenth centuries, which makes itself noticeable by clothing itself in the phrases of revolution, the phrases of democracy, a principle that assumes a mask and has the urge to gain in this way as much power as possible. It helps this endeavor when as few people as possible exert themselves to see things as they are, when they allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again in this realm by maya, by the maya that one can express with these words: there is a war today between the Entente and the Central Powers. There is nothing at all like this in reality. We are concerned here with entirely different things that exist behind this maya as the true realities. The struggle between the Entente and the Central Powers is only maya, is only illusion. One can see what stands side by side in the struggle if one looks behind these things, illuminating them in the way that I, for certain reasons, have only suggested. One must at least endeavor not to accept illusions for realities, because then the illusion will gradually dissolve, in so far as it must be dissolved. One must endeavor today above all to consider the things as they present themselves to truly unprejudiced thinking.

If you consider in a coherent way all that I have developed here, then a seemingly incidental remark that I made in the course of these lectures will not seem to you to be merely incidental. When I quoted a certain remark that Mephistopheles made in confronting Faust, “I see that you know the devil”—he would definitely not have said this about Woodrow Wilson—it was no incidental remark. It is something that should illuminate the situation! One must really study these things without antipathy and sympathy; one must be able to study them objectively. One must be able above all to reflect today about the significance of constellations in something that is at work and the significance of individual strength, because behind individual strength often lies something completely different from what lies behind the mere constellation. Think for a moment upon the problem, “How much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if this brain were not sitting in the Presidential chair of the United States?” Assume that this brain were in a different constellation: there it would show its individual strength! It all depends upon the constellation.

I will now speak abstractly and radically—I will not, of course, characterize the aforementioned case; it would never occur to me to do that in such a neutral country—but independent of that there is a very important insight in relation to the question, for example, about the brain. Does it have value because it is actually illuminated and made active by a particular spiritual soul force—does it thereby have a spiritual weight in the sense that I have spoken in these studies of spiritual weight—or does this brain actually have no more value than would show if one laid it on a scale and on the other side placed a weight? In the moment in which one penetrates beyond the mysteries I presented to you last time concerning the double, one arrives at the point (and I am not speaking of something unreal) of bringing value to the brain, which before had value only as a mass on the scale, because one is capable, if the brain is to be revived, of allowing it to be revived merely by the double.

All these things strike human beings today as being grotesque. What seems to them grotesque, however, must come to be something self-evident if these things are to flow into a healthy stream from an unhealthy one. And what use is it if one only chatters about them constantly? You must accept the idea that all this wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “the extent of the longing for it” or “the movement that undertakes to discover and unveil the circulation of life behind the senses,” and so on, does nothing but spread a fog over things that must come into the world only in clarity. They can be effective only in clarity, and they must be carried in clarity above all as practical, moral-ethical impulses in humanity.

I can only make single suggestions. I leave it to your own meditation to build on these realms further. These things are in many respects aphoristic, but you will have the possibility of gathering a great deal from such a summary as this picture of the Zodiac if you truly use it as the substance of meditation.

Roman Boos: Before Dr. Steiner's lecture on the problems of threefolding, I would just like to make the announcement that there will be an opportunity to ask questions after the lecture. I would kindly ask you to make use of this opportunity and ask any questions that arise in relation to these problems of threefolding.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! It is not out of any personal or social arbitrariness that from this Goetheanum, or rather from the spiritual movement, of which this Goetheanum is to be the representative, a stimulus is also going out in the newer time with regard to the social question of the present and the near future. It is an inner necessity that, out of the seriousness with which the spiritual affairs of humanity are to be treated here, suggestions must also flow about the most important, that is, the social problems of the present and the immediate future of humanity.

Now, the suggestions that come from here have often been misunderstood in the strangest way. And by pointing out some of the principles of the social question that arise from here, I would like to take this opportunity to clear up misunderstandings either immediately in the discussions or afterwards, by linking them to questions.

When we look at the social question today, it is basically a misunderstanding that is actually quite old. The fact is that this social question was not seen in its true form during the period when it first began to arise most vehemently and when it developed most intensively. It only really emerged in its true form after the terrible war catastrophe of recent years, or perhaps during it. Before that, people had basically come to terms with it, talking about the social question from a wide range of party standpoints, or from one or other understanding – but mostly very limited understandings – that had been developed for this question, trying out this or that means of providing information, this or that institution, which were supposed to provide a remedy for one or other of the ills that arose in the course of the social movement. But a real, in-depth understanding of what is actually at stake in what we call the social question has not emerged in recent decades; it has not emerged since the middle of the nineteenth century, when it should have emerged. Today it turns out that this social question cannot be tackled without considering it as a human question, as a question of the life of our entire social existence within European and American civilization. And as long as we do not find a way to understand this [social] question as a human question, we will not arrive at views or institutions that can be of any significant help in finding a solution to this question that is as humane as possible.

There has been a lot of talk about the social question for a long time, and it must be said that at present people do not really have any idea of how this question has been in people's minds in the last decades of the nineteenth century, or how it has affected people's lives. It is the case that today people think relatively briefly, that they only see what is immediately in front of them, and that they are not given the opportunity to see larger connections. One does not, my dear audience, come to an understanding of this social question without seeing the larger context.

Now, the deficiency that is being pointed out here is actually present in all our current education. It is also present in the way in which our current education has taken hold of people from the most diverse social classes through the particular development of the civilized world in the second half of the nineteenth century. Spiritual science, as it is to proceed from this building here in Dornach, is not meant to be merely an uplifting of the human soul to spiritual worlds, nor is it meant to be merely the bringing of knowledge related to the spiritual world. Rather, it is meant to permeate all human activity with the fruits that can be obtained from this spiritual science. And now, in public lectures, I have emphasized for two decades that the most important thing in this spiritual science is not what one absorbs in terms of content – it is important, but it is not the most important thing, it is, so to speak, the precondition, but it is not the thing to stop at. It is not the most important thing to absorb the knowledge that the human being consists of these and those physical and spiritual elements, and that, from a spiritual point of view, human life proceeds in such and such a way. Rather, the most important thing is to progress from this spiritual-scientific foundation of human knowledge to something very much alive. That is how one must think of this progress. If one hears about the insights of spiritual science, if one reads about it – one can already read a lot about this spiritual science in numerous works of an authoritative literature – if one reads and hears about what it presents, one is forced to think quite differently from what one has been accustomed to thinking in the last three to four centuries. Everyone must feel that: If you want to understand what is offered here as spiritual science, you have to acquire different ideas, different concepts, from those that have been common today and for some time. But by acquiring these other thoughts, these other concepts, our thinking first becomes much more agile. Because the immobility of thinking is a hallmark of newer education. Thinking becomes much more agile. In order to even begin to grasp the larger contexts presented by anthroposophy, one must absorb more comprehensive concepts and, above all, concepts that do not get stuck in the details. So, to a certain extent, one first trains one's thinking to take in larger life scales. One also makes one's thinking more agile.

That this is so is actually corroborated by an external circumstance, ladies and gentlemen. You can hear time and again, when public anthroposophical lectures are given and the illustrious gentlemen of journalism deign to write something about them, you can always hear again: “In the hall there was mainly a female audience” — whereby the esteemed ladies present are not always paid compliments with regard to their spiritual and other constitutions. But in a sense it is not always untrue that the audience at such lectures is mainly an “audience of women”. But perhaps there is another side to this than is usually meant when this is raised as an accusation against the spiritual science movement; perhaps one could also say what I have often said in response to this statement, which is meant as an accusation: Yes, why are the men not there? They could come just as easily as the ladies, and perhaps it is not exactly because of the humanities that these men are not there, because after all - as you will admit, you usually cannot talk to those who are not there!

Now there is also an inner reason for this, and here I must ask you to really take what I have to say sine ira and without emotion. I am never pleased that – forgive me – the majority of the audience usually consists of ladies. I would very much like it – the ladies may not see this as any kind of allusion to anything – I would very much like it if, so to speak, every lady could have her gentleman at the lecture. But that is not the case, and it is not just an external reason, but there are deeper reasons.

You see, our entire modern education is basically a male education. How long has it been since women were able to participate in a certain way in what the educational means of modern times have to offer? Our entire civilization is more or less a male civilization. This was something I was confronted with very strongly in all the discussions in which I, for example, had to confront people like Gabriele Reuter with the fact that, yes, the women's movement can basically only have any significant impact on the entire social life of modern times if women do not simply enter into what is, after all, only a male education in our time. What would ultimately be the result if women all put on tails, trousers and top hats? They would just be going along with the men's tastelessness. But basically the same thing has happened in the intellectual sphere! Women have not brought what was in them into modern life, but have conformed, they have donned the intellectual trousers, that is, they have become the same kind of doctors as men have become , they have become lawyers or philologists just as men have become lawyers or philologists, and they are now even striving to become theologians just as men have become theologians – they have simply put on the intellectual trousers. It is the case that one must say: the women's movement will only become something when women contribute their special element – I do not mean the feminine at all now, but the special element – to our intellectual civilization, which comes from the fact that – well, I will express myself drastically, although it not always meant to be so drastic — that their brains are not constricted in Spanish boots, which come from the various faculties of the present day as well; for men's brains have been trained in these Spanish boots for centuries. They have become those thoughts that cannot overlook any great connections, that are above all immobile, rigid, and that can only view something like spiritual science, because it demands longer thoughts, as something fantastic. Thus women, protected by their naivety, come to the anthroposophical lectures through the fact that the false boot element of male education has not yet entered their brains. They come because, if I may express myself figuratively, their brains have remained even softer. It can still absorb more than the male brain. This is also a deeper reason. So I do not want to compliment the ladies that they have the better brain; they just have the one that is less deformed. I do not want to pay the ladies a compliment either, that they understand anthroposophy better because they are ladies, but only that they understand it better because they judge from the heart and have learned less of what one has been accustomed to learning in the last four centuries.

Spiritual science consciously opposes the education of the last four centuries and simply demands more comprehensive thoughts, which initially also make the imagination more agile, but from the imagination they make the whole person more agile. So it can be said that someone who has undergone training in spiritual science will more easily see through a reality, including its economic context, than someone who has only emerged from the education of the last few centuries.

I have already pointed out how little this education of the last few centuries was suited to looking at the essentials of the matter. I have pointed out how, in a certain period of the nineteenth century, the gold standard was introduced in place of the previous bimetallism. Those who advocated the gold standard claimed everywhere – you can read about it in the most diverse parliamentary reports – that free trade would be established through the gold standard. The customs barriers of the various countries would fall. Well, there is no doubt that if these tariff barriers had fallen, we would be in a different position today. But not only have the tariff barriers not fallen, anyone crossing borders today knows that many other barriers have been erected. None of the predictions of learned economists and practitioners of life have come true as a result of the gold standard, of monometallism. None of it has materialized; everywhere the opposite has happened: customs barriers have been erected. That means that the esteemed practitioners in all areas of life have been thoroughly mistaken; they have not foreseen anything of how reality works. What has come to light on a large scale – in business life – has come to light on a small scale everywhere and is still coming to light everywhere. What is meant by an overview of circumstances has not been taught to people. What could be learned in the highest schools did not result in an education of the human soul for an overview of the larger contexts of practical life.

But please do not think that I consider all the practitioners or the learned economists who have stated what I have just indicated to be fools. On the contrary, I find that the people who spoke in the European parliaments and wrote in the European newspapers, especially in the 1960s and 1950s, were very clever people. Very clever people predicted the wrong things, because you couldn't predict anything right under the circumstances that existed. Because, my dear attendees, cleverness doesn't help you if you can't gain life experience through that cleverness. And the conditions as they were in industrialism, in commercialism, they just offered only the possibility to see the next; they did not offer the possibility to also tie the most clever thoughts to that which lives in reality. One had become accustomed to seeing through the microscope in science, to magnifying the smallest, so that one would not have to judge something larger. This has trained people to see the smallest relationships. This is only a comparison, an analogy, but the analogy is valid.

Spiritual science, therefore, does not want to consider as important that which can be learned as content, but it wants to consider as most important the education that a person acquires through the thoughts that he must make if he wants to understand spiritual science. And that is why there is an inner necessity for this spiritual science to be applied today in the practical areas of life, because it aims to develop the kind of education that enables people to look clearly and without illusion at the practical areas of life.

And so we can say: because people were not able to look at the social question from such a broader perspective, they have not really seen it for what it is. Today, after the catastrophe of the war, we can actually see: all the discussions that have been held, all the fine theories that have been put forward, they are actually for nothing, they basically lead nowhere; because it is not at all about the wickedness of institutions; it is not at all about that, not in the big picture, of course it is in the details, but not to the extent that the illusionary theories of socialists and anti-socialists would have us believe. We are not dealing with something remotely similar to the antagonism between capital and labor – on which entire broad theories are built. No, we are dealing with something completely different. We are dealing with the fact that feelings and urges have grown in broad masses of the population of civilized humanity that have been ignored for decades and that should be understood. One should humanly understand what is surging up. One should ask oneself: What are the natures of the people who today demand revolution or something else, who today aspire to political power or the like? How did this come about in these human souls? One should look at what is a social question as a human question, then one could gain ideas about how to deal with what is before us. Again and again, the question was not: What are the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat made of? Rather, the question was: What are the living conditions of the broad masses of the proletariat, since the proletarians themselves, under the influence of bourgeois education, formed only concepts that had actually been trained in the economic science of the bourgeoisie. We do not have anything at all in today's general world education that realistically captures the social situation.

It can be said, ladies and gentlemen: The thing that weighs most heavily on the heart of anyone who is truly concerned about the social question today is that so few want to see clearly and distinctly the guilt that the leading circles have incurred in modern times, a real guilt, truly not so much in the sphere of external economic life as in the sphere of educational life, in the sphere of intellectual life. We have seen a whole new class emerge in the last few centuries. We have had this new class alongside us; we have seen how this new class has a completely new language for soul development that we have not looked at. We have continued to speak the old language of tradition in the educational life of the leading circles. No effort was made to bridge the gap between the leading classes and the classes that emerged in the proletariat. No real interest was paid to what was emerging in humanity as a human question. At most, institutions and facilities were set up to provide for the broad masses in the sense of the old-oriented charity, to provide for stomachs, clothing and housing, and so on. But no thought was given to the fact that it had become necessary to achieve a world view in which all people of the modern age could come together in understanding. Today we have the fruits. You read today in the newspapers of the proletariat, full of omissions about everything that has come from the leading, from the formerly leading classes. They read that actually all the thinking about capitalism in earlier times, you read that all that is useless, that a completely different spirit must come, the spirit of the great masses, the spirit that rises out of the great masses like smoke out of a chimney. The most abominable abstraction has become the idol of the broad masses of the proletariat; an indefinite spirit that is supposed to arise from the totality.

Two questions can be asked; one that must be answered from a deeper understanding of history, which says again and again that the spirit, if it is to work in life, must go through personalities, that a spirit never flies around without working through personalities. But the other question - it can be asked very specifically today. First, a practical realization of what can be meant in social terms has gone out from Dornach and from our friends in Stuttgart.

You know that our friends Molt, Unger, Kühn, Leinhas and others have joined forces in Stuttgart to translate into practical life what can come from Dornach in social terms. We then – I will of course omit the details – we then began to work in about April 1919. Of course, such work – where one is not dealing with wax figures but with the living humanity of the present – can only be done step by step, with exact consideration of the real conditions. And it may be said that, in particular, in the first 14 days of our work at that time, everything actually went quite well. To a certain extent, what had to be achieved was achieved: winning broader sections of the proletariat over to reasonable social ideas. If something else had been achieved at the time, namely to win broader circles of the bourgeoisie, the leading class, for these ideas, namely to win over those who were then leading, then something that could have been fruitful would certainly have happened. But the broader circles of the bourgeoisie basically failed at first because they did not know that they were dealing with a human issue. At the time, I said to many people in Stuttgart who could have been in a position to understand such things: Yes, you see, the fact that you and I are talking about social theories can certainly have a good theoretical and later also a practical value, but that is not what matters now. What matters is that we can do something, that we can bring together people who can really do something together. To do that, it is necessary, for example, to speak to the workers in a way that they can understand, so that you first have the workers. I even said: if you don't like some of the things that have to be said in the language of the proletariat to the proletariat, it doesn't matter at first, but what matters is that you bring people together. Just have the patience to bring people together.

There was really very little understanding of the fact that the modern social question is a human question. And so it could happen that one day the so-called leaders of the proletariat noticed – it is always the worst when the leaders of any party or class or religious community notice that followers are being acquired among their flock; that is always the most dangerous thing, actually. They are not very interested in things if you talk cabbage and don't win any followers. But when people realized: Yes, something is happening here, they appeared on the scene, and it soon became clear that through all the foolish warming up of old socialist theories and Marxism that could be done, it was done, people were persuaded that one did not mean well by them, but that one was also something of a disguised capitalist or at least a capitalist servant. In short, a few leading personalities appeared on the scene, and the masses quickly evaporated. This is something that teaches in a very concrete sense that the spirit is not something that comes out of the masses and flies around, but by showing us that the Stuttgart workers are more Catholic in their method of obeying than have ever been Roman Catholics, one could see that all this is a fuss, a phrase about the “spirit” that comes “from the masses,” that even today the masses, as they have always done, follow a few bellwethers. Not only does history teach this, but experience also teaches it. Because it would have been [therefore] a matter of undermining the ground - I say it quite sincerely - undermining the ground of the leaders. Until one admits to oneself that nothing can get better if the leaders do not get away from this leadership of the broad masses, who have emerged from the circumstances of the last decades, things will not get better. That is the crux of the matter. Therefore, one had to – and in this respect we too have made mistakes – one had to approach the masses directly, leaving out everything that the leaders did. It is a question of humanity, and it has basically arisen as a question of humanity, and it has been noticed here and there: it is not a matter of achieving individual institutions, but of achieving a world view and conception of life through which a bridge can be created between the people who emerged as the leading class from the old world order and those who are digging so wildly in the proletariat. But that is the strangest thing: those people who have seen something have always been like preachers in the wilderness. One can indeed make the strangest experiences through appropriate retrospectives.

When I wrote my first appeal, which was then published as an appendix to my “Key Points of the Social Question” and which so many people signed, some people were furious about it because I pointed out how the last decades, especially in Germany, were not at all suitable for setting and solving realistic tasks; and even today I still receive angry letters from “well-meaning” people about this first appeal. And yet, these people are all unaware of the facts. Facts are only reflected in something like the following.

V[iktor] Alim&] Huber wrote the following in a magazine in 1869 – I ask you to take note of the year, I choose this year and this quote quite deliberately because what was written here predates the reestablishment of the German Reich – Huber wrote the following in a magazine published in Stuttgart in 1869, for example, by first pointing out how the labor question arose , how the social question shines in through the windows; after he has explained how one should try, as he calls it, to create some alleviation of the contradictions that are bound to arise through the “corporation route”, through the route of appropriate union; after he – in 1869, my esteemed audience – after he has said: If the spirit that has been developed so far in view of the social question is further developed, the time will come when the military state will reveal this question in a terrible way as “to be or not to be”. These words appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper in 1869! I would like to know how many people have thought about this, now or after the so-called German revolution, where the words “to be or not to be” were used again and again, how many people have considered that a somewhat more clairvoyant person had already written this in 1869, at a time when people were confronted with completely different facts than they are today. The man wrote, after he had dealt with such things:

Here, too, we are ultimately referred to a reform, strengthening and multiplication of all institutions and means of social education of the people at all, but here in particular at the higher levels, as an indispensable condition of social reforms.

The man realized that it is a matter of spreading a particular intellectual life, which, however, did not yet exist at the time. But an understanding of intellectual life could have grown out of such foundations if people had listened to such people at all in the frenzy of the following decades. And this man spoke even more precisely in 1869:

It goes without saying that this cannot be the case without a fundamental change in the spirit of our universities, and all the more so the less one

— namely at the universities —

have any inkling or even understanding of this need and this profession.

Now, my dear attendees, while the man said in 1869: It must begin at the universities, something else must be introduced into the lecture halls, because it is far removed from the spirit must take hold in humanity if improvement is to occur –; while the man said this in 1869, today the people who “mean well” come and say: So we are founding adult education centers! That is to say, we take what has been concocted at the universities, cook it in somewhat more favorable preparations that it may benefit the masses, and administer the same stuff in smaller doses. What does that really mean? What it really means is that what was no good when the leading classes did it, now carried into the broad masses, should be good. The issue is not that we carry what has been taught further into the broad masses, but that we replace what has been taught and has brought us into the catastrophe with what is emphasized here, what is taken as a starting point here: we must first find the kind of spiritual culture that leads to the adult education center. We will not find this if we do not make an effort to find our way out of materialistic science and into spiritual science. What comes from the old science is what the leaders of the proletarians have learned, what the Trotskys, Lenins and so on have learned. This has led to what these people preach to the proletarians, what they set up. That, that is sufficiently widespread. That is the kind of thing you can't do anything with. What we need is what comes from spiritual science. It is not something that tells people, for example in the social sphere: let us set it up like this and like that, militarize work, and then a paradise will arise on earth! You will not find such a sentence in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. In the 'Key Points of the Social Question' you will find this as a starting point: We want to have a possible social and viable social organism, that is, we do not want an earthly paradise, such a thing is perhaps quite impossible. It is not at all a question of whether one should strive for this or that, because of course people strive for something higher when they are offered something; because what one has once striven for as the highest is immediately the lowest in the next moment. What is important is not to promise people heaven on earth, but to study how the social organism becomes viable, how it can best be brought to life. Then it may turn out that not all of people's wishes can be fulfilled, but an especially ingenious person might say – I have known such people, I have met many a freeloader in my long life – it might occur to people, for example, could occur to people to say: It is a highly inappropriate arrangement that beings move on two legs, it could all be arranged differently; this physical human organism, there is so much that is inappropriate, and so on, and so on. There could well be specially designed heads that could imagine the human organism very differently from how it is. Of course, the imagination would not be a realistic one. But there are people like that, I have met them. Of course, there are also people who promise others paradise on earth. But that is no proof that it is possible to realize what people promise and in which they find understanding, because, of course, you only have to promise people what they want and desire, then you will find understanding in broad circles more easily than if you only talk about what is possible, if you only talk about what the social question can really achieve. That is what the “key issues of the social question” are all about.

That is why, because only this can be spoken of, we have arrived at the threefold social organism, which seems utopian only to those who look at it superficially, because wherever you look at life, if you are not blinded by preconceived theories, you will see that the main structure of our present-day intellectual life, so-called intellectual life, has been built up and promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened – has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state has has been promoted by the fact that the unified state has blessed this intellectual life with its principles, that the unified state, certainly under the compulsion of confessional necessities – at the time when it happened, it was a necessity, today we can go beyond it – that the unified state has shaped this intellectual life by taking over the schools. It educates its people as it needs them. It educates theologians as it needs them, it educates lawyers, doctors, as it needs them. Switzerland, for example, needs doctors who have only been educated in Switzerland, at Swiss faculties, because a doctor educated a few hours away cannot practice medicine in Switzerland; and it is the same with philologists, it is the same with everyone. The state, when it has control of education, must of course impose its point of view.

Now imagine, instead of such a state education, an education system that is completely self-governing, an education system that, from the lowest to the highest schools, has as administrators those who are actively involved in this spiritual — the teacher teaching only enough to have free some hours in which he can devote himself to the administration of the educational system; no one else is involved in this administration of the educational system except those who are actively involved. No corporate body has a say in it, no parliament; for what is to be said regarding the training for intellectual life requires specialized training and expertise, requires certain abilities and could only be trained if intellectual life stands on its own ground. As soon as something that arises from majority opinion or from the average view is decreed as law and then passes over into the administrative sphere, the sphere of spiritual education must wither away. And there is an inner connection between the materialistic type of our modern spiritual life and the nationalization of that spiritual life.

You see, you can experience special things there. People cannot always see immediately if they are not familiar with spiritual science, which shows itself through itself, through its entire being: what must be striven for through it can only be striven for in free spiritual life ; it can only be striven for if it comes solely from the personalities, if it is only as good and as bad as the personalities of an age can make it, if one does not succumb to the illusion that There are laws that prescribe how teaching should be done. What use are laws! It depends on the teachers, on the real, concrete teaching personalities; it depends on the people who are involved in teaching, in the spiritual realm, that they also manage this at the same time. If we were to hypothetically assume the sad case that in an age, in a generation, there were only stupid teachers, then this generation would have to be educated in a stupid way. That would still be better than having good laws for the teaching system, and these good laws being treated even worse than when stupidity springs from within the human being. In the spiritual sphere it is necessary that what happens should come out of the abilities of the human being, for in this way it will always be the best conceivable for a given age. That is what matters. That is why it is not immediately apparent that this freedom, this emancipation of spiritual life as one of the links in the social organism, is a necessity. It may happen that very well-meaning, very clever people raise the objection – it comes up again and again – let us say, for example, it is someone, I will say now, in State X – so as not to offend anyone – it is someone in State X, and they are told that it is necessary, the threefold social order, the freedom of spiritual life. He will perhaps say the following: Yes, in the other state Y, Z and so on, it is already as you say, but with us in X, there, there we notice nothing of the dependence of teaching on the government, on the state powers; with us, the education system is not disturbed by the state powers.

Yes, my dear attendees, I would like to say: That is precisely the problem, that people say so, because by saying so, they no longer realize how dependent they are. They are so dependent that their dependence appears to them as freedom. Only dependence goes through their heads. They approve of everything that is put into their heads, and because they obediently follow the state's orders as a matter of course, they do not feel in the least confused by them. They do not even realize what the matter is. That is perhaps the very worst of all, that especially in the intellectual field, but especially in the educational field, it has already come to such a pass that people no longer feel at all how they are dependent, that they glorify this dependence as freedom. Of course, if someone thinks like the pastor who had just preached a sermon and in which he explained that, according to the wisdom of the world, man is best built, a hunchback was waiting for him at the church exit and asked the pastor: “Yes, Reverend, can you tell me that I am also best built?” He replied: “For a hunchback, you are built very well indeed.” Yes, you see, when we speak of freedom of thought to people who perceive dependency as freedom, they tell us: “Yes, we have complete freedom!” That is the one link in the threefold social organism, the free spiritual life.

Just as little as spiritual life can tolerate the schematic classification of the democratic state, in the least because democracy can only lead to the manifestation of average opinions, and average opinions are most intolerable in the free development of intellectual life, just as little as intellectual life tolerates the schematic principle of the state, just as little does economic life. Economic life can only be based on real conditions, just as intellectual life can only be based on human abilities. Spiritual life must work in the way that is possible from the talents of the people of an age; economic life must work in such a way that it can develop fully in this economic life, with expertise, professional competence and involvement in a branch of economic life, so that others who have to do with this branch of the economy can have confidence in those who are involved in it. This means that economic life is only possible if it is built on associative lines, if it is built in such a way that what belongs together in economic life joins together, that economic circles - be they professional circles or circles that face each other, such as production circles, consumption circles, and so on - join together in such a way that they are associated.

Of course, not every circle can be associated in every circle; but it is possible for the whole economic life to be associated in an indirect way. But because the individual economic circles are associated with each other in this way [see blackboard drawing, p. 596], the person who is in any association stands [opposite another] and can gain from the circumstances he faces, through contracts or similar, what is necessary to have the basis for a proper economy. You can never organize economic life, but only associate it. You cannot organize how the individual professions should work and so on from a central location, as Lenin and Trotsky wanted to do, but you can only, by having the professional associations, try to bring them into such economic associations that one supports the other, that one gains trust for one's work from what one learns from the other.

To look at the circumstances realistically is so terribly far from the people of the present. Oh, what irony of facts we are experiencing in our time! We have seen, my dear ladies and gentlemen, that in certain states the blessing of militarism has been pronounced by parliaments, that no one but at most smaller parties has raised objections. It is decades behind us. We have seen, especially during this war, that those who have the least understanding of the situation have once again let loose their decrees out of anti-militarism!

It does not matter at all whether one was right or not, but rather that one knows why one can be right, that one knows the circumstances. And we have seen that today in socialist Germany, for example, a thunderstorm is brewing over militarism, and we see a man who now, in a legislative assembly, says, “Militarism has not only had dark sides, but militarism has brought great benefits to humanity. We have seen how those who went to war learned how to organize; and when they came back, we found that the people who had gone through the school of this war were the best people to organize work in the factories in a military sense. We have experienced that we have obtained a correct hierarchy of people through the training of this war, in that the people of this war have learned to work systematically and to subordinate themselves. We have come to understand the victory of the military order for social life.” – And just a few weeks ago, this man continued in this vein! Who was it? Trotsky in Moscow, justifying the militarization of Russian labor!

Yes, one would like to ask in the face of such things: Is there really no spark of alertness left in humanity today, when it does not look at this stark contradiction of life? Should life go on when these stark contradictions are part of this life? The point is really that, for example, in these 'key points of the social question', nothing else is striven for than that which can arise – it is clearly emphasized at one point in detail – which can arise precisely out of the present institutions. If the people who are involved in these current institutions only begin to set themselves the goal of what the meaning of threefolding is, then one can work in the spirit of threefolding everywhere, if one sets oneself the goal of threefolding, if you know that it can only be a matter of achieving, on the one hand, a free spiritual life, as I have characterized it, and, on the other hand, an economic life that works only out of economic necessities.

You see, it has even become possible to have people together in Stuttgart for a few weeks with whom one could talk about the next requirements of a non-state, free economic life. Not just once, but many times, I said to the people there: Those who will now be called upon to work on this free organization of economic life will soon, when the going gets tough, see that they cannot stop at socialist phrases, at Marxism and so on, but that they will have to work from the specific demands of economic life, and each in his own place; the plant manager, the labor manager, as well as the proletarian, they will have to work, each from his own place, from the point of view of economic life itself. This will bring to light completely different questions than those that are usually raised today, and especially those raised by practice. Just now, people were beginning to realize that, among many other things, it is necessary, for example, to figure out how a certain article in a certain economic area must have a very specific price, a very specific price range, and that the institutions must be set up in such a way that a certain price range is available. I showed people how to achieve these price ranges through arrangements, not through things like, for example, the monetary theorists with their statistics, with their state office, which is all utopian, but how to achieve it through the actual social structure, through what arises from the interaction of the associations. What is the practice today? Today it is practice that something becomes more expensive due to certain circumstances. More pay is demanded, or there is a strike. Because more pay is demanded, other things become more expensive, of course, and then more pay is demanded again. And so what is most important must be taken into account: a certain price level, that which is considered the most trivial by our social circumstances. Today, most people view any price increase with indifference, even if it is ruinous for our lives as human beings.

We were just about to enter into the practicalities, and we cannot make any further progress, ladies and gentlemen, unless as many people as possible develop an understanding of the specific issues. What do you expect to achieve with people who understand nothing of what needs to be done, who only understand what their agitators tell them? Do you think you can bring about a new economic order with them? You can only bring about a new economic order with those who have first gained an understanding of the demands of life itself. Everything else that the “key points of the social question” for a free economic life demand is already contained in this. For what individuals have spoken of, where it has been recognized – and after all, it must be said: the idea of threefolding, a part of it, is recognized – that is even made into an objection by theorists; people always come to me and say: Yes, what you are saying is already wanted here and there! I can only say to people: I would love it most of all if everything I say were already wanted. I am not at all striving to say something new, but rather what follows reasonably from the circumstances!

But that is the essential thing, that the details are demanded here or there, but that it is a matter of summarizing these very details. It is the big picture that is at stake. That is why spiritual science must intervene, because it educates in the big lines. It is right that here and there understanding arises for this or that, but then one must have the opportunity to bring it to bear. And so it also becomes clear to individuals how nonsensical it is when, for example, a judgment is to be made about an issue that should interest industry. Now, in the branches that have been nationalized, judgments are made by the state central representation or the like. That is, a majority of people make judgments that can, under certain circumstances, overrule that small minority who actually understand something about the matter; apart from everything else that is being developed in terms of reciprocity and so on, about which individual, namely western states, provide wonderful opportunities for study, as do southern states. Therefore, some have suggested: Well, we must have parliament, we must have the unified state; so at least for economic life we need industrial committees, professional representations in parliament. Yes, but what matters is that these professional representatives in parliament can first of all really assert for themselves what can then be decided from professional association to professional association, what is necessary; not that everything is mixed up again in one parliament, so that perhaps what is to be decided for this group is decided by the others, who have no say in it. Sometimes one has experienced very strange things in relation to majorities, for example in Austria, which is of course the “model state” for the downfall of the state. Because this Austrian state, one has seen it perish – I lived there for three decades – one has seen it perish if one has seen with open eyes what was actually going on there. In this Austrian state, there was a time when they wanted to revise the existing school law. They wanted to replace the existing school law with a reactionary one. This school law would have been rejected by a minority if conditions had been normal. The only way to achieve a majority was to get the Poles to vote with the other people in favor of this reactionary school law. The Poles had to form a majority with the other reactionaries. The Poles said at the time: “All right, we'll form a majority with you, we'll make the bad school law with you, but our Galicia must be exempted from this bad school law!” So the people came together in the common parliament. There was one community, the Polish delegation, that worked with the others to give the countries of the others, those who did not want it, a school law from which they exempted their own country. Krass stood out in particular at the time. But how could this not be the case in many other areas in a parliament like the Austrian one, which actually only had economic representatives? Because, you see, when a minister in Austria, Giskra, said at about the same time as Huber [in Stuttgart] set out his views: “There are no social issues, they stop at Bodenbach” – this has been discussed several times – people in this country were dreaming of a new era. Dreams came that a new era was needed and that a parliament had to be set up. So they set up the parliament based on four curiae: the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial centers, the curia of the rural communities and the curia of the chambers of commerce – which, due to their special nature, were all economic cooperatives, all economic communities. They then formed the parliament, which made Austrian laws, fabricated rights. It is quite natural that a majority could not be formed by the representatives of the chambers of commerce and the large landowners, and that they made laws that were in their interests, not laws that would have emerged from what has been dawning more and more in humanity in modern times from the feeling of democracy. It is precisely those who take democracy seriously who must separate economic life and intellectual life, which cannot be based on democracy at all, but which arise from factual and specialized knowledge. They must separate economic life and intellectual life must separate economic life and intellectual life from what is legal life in the broadest sense, which can only develop when the mature human being opposes the other mature human being as an equal in parliament. But then only that which concerns every mature human being in relation to every other mature human being as an equal may be decided in this parliament. And the question must always be: it cannot be a matter of professional committees being formed in a democratic parliament and then the decisions being brought about by majority vote, but rather that what is the future action in economic life should emerge from negotiations, from the direct negotiations of economic associations, that which develops out of the essence of economic life itself.

What appears as the threefold social order is not a theory at all, it is not a program at all. I have experienced enough programs. In the 1880s, I used to drink my black coffee after dinner at the Viennese writers' café, the so-called Café Griensteidl. In addition to writers and authors of all sizes, poets, painters and sculptors – each was a great talent, which everyone else denied – social reformers and Marxists also met there. Viktor Adler was always there too. There you could experience the programs at noon and in the evening and at midnight in the most diverse forms. Everyone always knew what was best, and everyone thought the world would become a paradise when their social program was implemented. The opposite of all this program-making is what is striven for by the threefold social organism. Put in a simple formula — what does it actually mean? It means that there are three distinct and separate spheres of interest in the social life of humanity. One of these is the spiritual life. No one has the right to claim that they know how this spiritual life can best be administered; no one has the right to say: I prescribe a program for this spiritual life. If you are grounded in reality, as you are in spiritual science, you will not say this. But one does say: Let this spiritual life be administered by the people who are called to do so, who are actively involved in it, then you can spare yourself your program; then the right thing will come about through what life brings forth. The point is not to set out programs for the threefold social order, but to point out how people must find themselves in life so that from week to week, from year to year, the best arises in life itself. And in the same way, it is a matter of giving economic life a form such that, through economic activity, that which must arise again and again arises. For you see, the most absurd thing of all is to draw up social programs that are supposed to apply forever. Because the social question arises once and for all, but it cannot be solved overnight. The social question is a certain kind of living condition, it is a human question, and the only way to solve it is to organize life in such a way that it is continuously resolved, so that from week to week, from year to year, from decade to decade, there are always people who can bring about what can solve the social questions. The social question cannot be solved all at once, but must be solved continually throughout life. But for this it is necessary that this life should be such that the people who are called to solve it develop out of this life.

Apart from economic and spiritual questions, there are still those that simply arise between people who have come of age. These are decided democratically. They are the legal questions in the broadest sense. That is what life itself demands: that is, we must not formulate a program or develop a theory, but we must reflect on how people should live together so that life can be shaped. Today we cannot discuss whether it is already too late for European civilization, or whether there is still time for people to come together in this way. But we should keep saying to ourselves: the social question has not been grasped in its true form because the essential thing has never been expressed at all, because it was always believed that programs had to be found or institutions had to be devised, whereas it would have been necessary to communicate in such a way that humanity would have formed common interests where life demands common interests. If economic life is, of course, to stand on its own feet today – we cannot demand that tomorrow the people who are inside, who are now full of liberal, socialist or conservative ideas, should judge from the point of view of economic requirements. In the 1950s and 1960s, this would have been possible to a high degree. Today, far too much confused stuff has entered people's heads. But that is not for us to decide; instead, we muster the will to ensure that the right thing happens even today. But we should keep an eye on how, by diverting attention to completely different areas instead of coming together in the face of aligned interests, we have to divert things to completely different areas. Let us assume, hypothetically at first – which, of course, is a hypothesis today – that people, regardless of whether they are supervisors or employees, are fully involved in economic life and have been accustomed to deciding economic issues based on economic facts for some time. Then, even if it took a generation, a commonality of interests would have formed, which must exist, for example, when those who are producers have to work together. The worker and the foreman both have the same interest, if only the same interests are cultivated. The worker and the foreman do not have different interests with regard to, for example, remuneration; they have the same interests. But in order for their feelings to be fulfilled by these same interests, they have to oversee economic life. You can only oversee it if you can learn about one association by having something to do with the next association, which in turn has something to do with the next one [and so on], so that a network of relationships of trust is formed. You can only learn what the true interest is in this way. Instead, true interests are carried out of all this. The people who are work managers stand there [in the blackboard drawing: filled circles

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These things are found difficult to understand. Those who find them difficult to understand say: Yes, it is not clear. Yes, my dear audience, this is just life, and what is from life requires that those who want to understand it look at life. But today people no longer look at life, today they look at their prejudices. One person has acquired his prejudices from Marx, another from the liberal or social-democratic leaders, a third from the pastor, and so on and so forth. Today they only look at what is theory, what they only call practice. And so today one senses something of what individual people have actually felt for a long time.

You see, something strange happened to me. I gave a lecture in Stuttgart and also here in various places in Switzerland, in which I said, based on the matter: Today, instead of an original spiritual life, we have a phrase that is very close to the lie; instead of a real legal life, we have only convention. Something similar could perhaps still happen in relation to these things. But now I have spoken about the third area, about the economic, and I have said: in the economic sphere we do not have a real practice of life, not that which grows out of economic conditions, but mere routine. Now you think that is what I said, and today I read – namely, only today I read this Huber, really, I am not trying to pin something on you that is not true, I really read him today – and there I read in this Huber – he has invented certain corporate interests, I read in this Huber: “But where in our empire?” — says the 1869 in Stuttgart —, “where are the men who can make these arrangements?” And then he continues and says: “Least of all do we find them among practitioners, among those who call themselves practitioners, because today nothing but routine prevails there.” And – he says – we would need at least ten [men]. “But when I look around,” he says, “I want to exempt his majesty right away (he is, as people were then, loyal, a very loyal gentleman), but since he is out of the question anyway, not only are there not ten, but around the steps of the throne and everywhere outside there is not even one.”

I don't know, I couldn't quickly examine the extent to which the man was right for the year [18]69; but in our present circumstances, one has every reason to seek out those who at least have a heart and mind for studying and responding to the real circumstances. That is what is at stake today. We need people who recognize that a renewal of intellectual life and a reorganization of economic life on its own foundations are absolutely necessary. We need this because we have to relieve the state, which then forms the third link of the threefold social organism with its legal and related relationships. Everything in more detail can be found in my book “The Key Points of the Social Question”. We need this third link, which throws the others to the left and right; in short, we need the structure of the social organism from which a structure of the human being can emerge that is suited to the difficult, extraordinarily complicated and difficult conditions of the present, which will become even more complicated and difficult in the near future.

That is why I wanted to draw attention to this again today: that an impulse in the social sphere does not come from Dornach here with a spiritual-scientific movement through an arbitrary act, not through the arbitrariness of an individual [person] and not through the arbitrariness of the Anthroposophical Society, because it is actually true what individual people have repeatedly and repeatedly come to realize in recent decades: Things can only improve if we undertake a fundamental transformation of our entire spiritual life. But this transformation must not remain a mere theoretical demand, it must not be expressed only in idealistic terms, it must not shrink back from really presenting to the world a spirit such as has not been known before. Many people today can talk about the spirit. But it is not a matter of talking about the spirit, but of giving positive, concrete spirit. Positive, concrete spirit must be creative, creatively also in economic life. The time must be considered over when people said: Economic life is external, the spiritual world is not involved in it, it is found precisely when one departs from economic life, when one leaves the coarse material, when one ascends to the spiritual in higher regions. The time when people spoke in this way, that is the time that brought about rivers of blood in Europe. And the people who still speak from their pulpits today: 'Return to the old Christianity!' — to them we must say again and again: If we return to you, we can indeed start again — with the things that finally led us to 1914. It is a matter of having the courage to really present the new spirit to people. But then we must also be serious about it. Today, people approach us and say, 'So, what is being done in Dornach in the economic sphere?' Let us say, for example, that someone who is involved in economic life in America says, 'It's all very well to be working on the economy in Dornach; if they know how to do it, they should tell us.' This would imply that we are demanding a program. But here we are not working with programs, with things that are alien to life, but here we are seeking to create life. Therefore, no one can demand of us that we find a program to be implemented by this or that American bank, but here it is a matter of creating a center of life that is a real, living center around which people must organize themselves. Therefore, the American bankers must be told: It does not depend on you working out your program through your bank, which is given to you from here; but it depends on you centering what you do around Dornach, that you seek union with Dornach. Because it is not about issuing lifeless programs, but about creating a real center that must create as such. Here one cannot merely study; from here one should work.

The essential thing is that everything that comes from here is seen as life, not as theory, not as thought, not as idea. Therefore, those who go to Dornach or to the Waldorf School to see how things are done, how they themselves can do it, will not get it right. Rather, those who understand: Here a beginning has been made, here a start has been made. One must work together with that with which the start has been made, not with a theory but with life. In working together, ladies and gentlemen, we can find ourselves with all the people of the civilized world today - but in living together.

We must once and for all make it clear that the spirit does not live in empty thoughts, not in abstractions. And because we want to assert here that the spirit does not live in abstractions, that the spirit is a living thing, we cannot satisfy the person who only wanted to seek out what abstract thoughts are, which could now be realized in any way , but we can only satisfy those who understand that we must work together in the sense in which it is characterized, as it is suggested - but not programmatized - in the “Key Points of the Social Question” and the next issue of “The Future”. Not just lecturing from here that the mind is a living thing, but the living mind should be sought. We will see whether there is enough understanding in the world for the fact that the living spirit, not the abstract spirit, must be sought, that we must seek for an improvement of the future, for a true construction not just any abstract idea, but [that we must seek] the living spirit. (Lively applause.)

Discussion

Rudolf Steiner: Ladies and Gentlemen, is there perhaps someone here who has a question to ask orally or something to say? Two questions have been submitted in writing (about the “threefold state”; question of whether a school association should have a say in the free spiritual life of the “threefold state”).

Now, esteemed attendees, sometimes it is necessary for me to become a terrible pedant, which I otherwise abhor, for the sake of the matter! The state is conceived of as one of the three limbs of the threefold social organism, and it is actually impossible to say: the threefold state. It can be tolerated for the sake of expediency, but attention must also be drawn to such things from time to time. I am saying this because the question here explicitly mentions “the threefold state”.

Now, questions are understandably asked from the present consciousness, and that is ultimately quite right. But if you want to look at life, you have to realize that life is a process of becoming, and that some things that are desirable may only happen after a long time, but that, if the courage is there, they may also happen relatively quickly. And so one must also consider the questions a little, must consider that questions are asked from the circumstances of the present, perhaps even from the very close circumstances of the future, but in a form that can no longer be asked. Not this question, in particular. Because, believe me, it will be a matter of the spiritual life being administered by those who are alive in it. Those who are truly alive in it will naturally have to ensure that all that can in any way be favorable to their decisions is fully incorporated into them. Now imagine that I am a primary school teacher and a child enters the first class at the Waldorf School. It would be perfectly natural for the school to proceed in the same way as a sensible doctor would, who, when a case of illness arises, does not make a snap judgment but familiarizes himself with the biography of the patient. You have to get to know and read the biography when you get a schoolchild in order to know what the child has been through so far. The best way to get to know the child is, of course, to talk to the mother, although the father should not be left out completely. But here only the mothers are asked. Take just one small point from what I said today about the free spiritual life. Take seriously the fact that this free spiritual life will bring to fruition all those factors that make this free spiritual life possible. What follows from this? It follows inevitably that mothers will be drawn into it. This is self-evident! But we should not want to transfer to the free spiritual life what has so terribly emerged bit by bit in the old spiritual life. When something occurred somewhere, no matter how trivial, you could hear everywhere: Yes, a law should be made. People had nothing else on their minds but: a law should be made. A law should be made for everything! So I took the liberty of saying in a lecture in Nuremberg: What is the ideal of the modern person? And I characterized this there in such a way that I said: Man actually only wishes nowadays that he is always accompanied in his life by a policeman on his left and a doctor on his right; so that he has the doctor for the time of illness, and the policeman or another faculty takes care of the other half of life. That is precisely what we want to achieve with such a social organism: to enable people to take care of themselves, to produce, as a matter of course, what is needed for the laws that the philistines want everywhere. I know that today people usually say in such a case: Yes, but people are not yet mature enough for that. For me, this and many other things are precisely the reason why, when someone tells me: People are not yet mature enough for that, I answer that two things result from this; firstly, that he considers himself mature, and secondly, that he is certainly not mature when he thinks that he understands this, but that the others are not yet mature for it, that he is therefore judging from a subconscious self-knowledge that is not alive in his consciousness. It is not a matter of waiting for people to mature, because we can wait until the end of the days on earth, but rather of seizing the moment and then waiting to see what happens under the circumstances. When people mature, some questions simply resolve themselves out of the circumstances.

The other question that has been asked here is: “Can any of the forms of association that are common today, a labor cooperative or an individual company, be considered particularly suitable as a starting point for the associative form?”

Now, my dear attendees, consider life in its becoming again. Consider it in such a way that it is constantly transforming itself, just like the organism itself, until a certain degree of stationarity is initially achieved in one area or another, then remains for a period of time, and then dies off. You will find it already hinted at in the 'Key Points of the Social Question'. What we have today should initially be the starting point. It cannot be any different. Today we have joint-stock companies; indeed, we even set them up. We have set one up in Stuttgart. So we set them up ourselves, are in the process of setting one up here, as humanities scholars. We are building everywhere on what already exists. We are not talking about some utopian fantasy, but want to build on what already exists. Then we might have all sorts of associations emerging from what already exists: cooperatives, joint-stock companies, I don't know what all, and we are only looking for the associations. [See blackboard drawing, p. 597]

But the fact that these associations enter associative life means that they change again, and that the joint-stock companies will take on a different form when associative life awakens. The cooperatives will also take on a different form. It does not matter - suppose there were a corporation here that was abominable, it would also associate. By itself it is abominable; but by being placed in the network of association, it is constantly influenced, gradually carried along by what arises from associating, and in time becomes something quite different, or perishes. For us, it is not a matter of abolishing something, but of accepting things as they are. And if something is bad, then it naturally perishes. But to abolish something through laws can never be the issue.

That is what weighs most today, that healthy thoughts must first enter human souls! You see, I would like to say this, although it was already hinted at in the lecture: the fact is that what hurts most today is that for a long time no effort has been made to build the bridge across the gulf between the classes. What concern did they have for the fate of the proletariat during the long decades of the second half of the nineteenth century? Basically, they watched what was happening; they didn't care much about it, except that they sometimes heard in larger cities that people said: There's a house again where they're having thicker shutters made because they're afraid something will break out soon! – At most, people were concerned about such things in this way. But no one sought to create a vibrant life that would have been the basis for understanding.

In my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future,” you will find an indication of how the worker in each factory should actually be led through the entire process of production, introduced to the knowledge of the raw products, and made familiar with the path the product takes, so that he has a common interest with the plant manager and takes an interest in it. Today, of course, this is still very difficult, and even if it is aspired to, it cannot be achieved overnight! It is still very difficult today for the very reason that you can experience being in a company and getting along very well with one or two workers; you get along very well with them. But when it comes to making a decision, they say to you: Yes, but I can't have the same opinion, I have to have the opinion that my union dictates to me. That's just how people are today. But why have they become like that? They have become like that because in the leading circles, where leadership should have remained, there was no desire to get to know the world. Yes, they said they wanted to get to know it, they gradually did something out of their ideas. But the one who has gotten to know it knows even more about the things.

From the years when I was a teacher at the Workers' Education School, which was basically a Social Democratic institution, I could see how the plant managers knew absolutely nothing about what was going on among the workers, and I could see how they were not interested in it either. What I am saying now may be seen as an exaggeration, because one is in the same case as the one who says that laws should... [illegible in shorthand] and so on, and so on. The states may want to stifle intellectual life, but here in X we feel no such oppression. Just as they closed their eyes there, closed for decades to what was actually coming! At most, they locked people up. But what matters is that a person really gets to know life. And that is still missing today to the utmost degree. That is one thing I would like to say in response to such questions.

From what is said, one can tell everywhere that people only know a small circle. That will change. Just consider what I said in response to...; the people were not stupid at all: here he comes and asks, and the arguments that were put forward were very clever; but they could not know anything about what is explained when one is inside a factory. Through the associations that arise more and more, where one is in a lively exchange, where one does not have to check first, but where one knows how far trust can be placed in things, one's own experience teaches what can be learned. That is what you need for your judgment. Until now, you could only judge according to prejudices and therefore judged by the by. And economic experience is given by those principles of association that I spoke of in my “key points”. That is what matters.

Does anyone still have a question?

Emil Molt, Stuttgart: I don't know whether it is allowed, whether there is still time to ask a few questions, because I don't know whether here in Dornach there is a rule that when social questions are discussed there is neither time nor clocks; but for us in Stuttgart it is the case that we can really talk without time. I would now like to tie in with what has just been said.

Especially if you are a working person involved in the threefold order, then it weighs heavily on your soul, especially in recent times, that you have had so few points of attack to implement the threefold order in reality. Last year, as has also been mentioned this evening, we tried to to put the threefolding into practice through the proletariat, and in doing so, we did not, however, disregard the fact that bourgeois circles, above all among these circles, should also become acquainted with the matter. The success has been described this evening. The parties have withdrawn their sheep, and the employers have rejected us from the start. Our work continued. Something left over from working with the proletariat is always like this: the proletarian side in particular is still showing us the judgments that, for example, all the meetings that have now been held by associations, parties and so on are so terribly boring and full of empty phrases. We are told this by the proletariat in particular, that it was a different time, when Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart still had something to tell us about the issues, about the social issues.

But we do find that the proletariat in general is not sufficiently mature to fully grasp the core issues. And we find, on the other hand, that the business community simply makes it impossible by dismissing anyone who works intensively in this direction as a Spartacist or Bolshevik.

We always ask ourselves: What can be done, especially now, not only to get the threefold order into people's heads, but above all to introduce it into practice? And here I would like to, because the question is actually always coming up again and again, especially now that in Germany [...] is such a way that employers would rather cling to big capitalism than to implement social progress, and on the other hand, the trend is so strongly to the right that we have to take that into account. They have a completely different view of things. In these times, people who dedicate their entire being to the threefold order are repeatedly shaken by the question: What has to happen to implement the threefold order of the social organism before it is too late, before it is impossible, before civil wars and economic chaos occur? In this regard, the one who is asking the question feels a particularly heavy burden on his soul from posing this question, and he would be grateful for an answer.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have understood the question correctly, it is this: How is it possible today to introduce anything practical at all into the world in the field of threefolding, given the resistance that is ultimately brought from all sides to the threefolding of the social organism?

This question is, of course, the one that weighs on one. But on the other hand, this question is based on a completely different one that must not be ignored. That is precisely the question: how do you approach something in a truly living way? And I have basically already hinted at something in answer to this question very quietly between the lines in the lecture, by saying: Of course we have also made mistakes. And that is true. We have not yet grown out of the child's shoes in the practice of the threefold social organism. For example, I want to draw attention to the following.

If you want to have a living effect, if you want to promote something in life, then it is important to really work out of life and try to understand life. Now, the situation today is that when one speaks before a proletarian assembly, one has the choice of either speaking in the language of the proletarians about what is ultimately for the good of the proletarians, developing it out of the ideas that the proletarians have. And I have always tried to do that. Or you can do the other: you talk from a general theory, you say this and that must happen – then you are thrown out the door! Because the proletariat today is very quick to make its decision.

Now, that actually never happened in Stuttgart, that we were thrown out the door; but something else happened. You see, I naturally spoke in such a way everywhere that I was not thrown out the door, because I would not have considered it very beneficial – I don't just mean because of the small abrasions that can happen, but because then you can't achieve anything, right, you can't achieve anything from outside the door! I didn't speak in such a way that you were thrown out the door. But then it is known that I said this or that in this or that meeting. Then I spoke to someone who was even a minister, and to him I said in all my innocence: Just wait and see what comes of it. It's not about throwing things in people's faces that make them angry, but about getting people to work with you.

So we wait until we are ready to work together. Then what must be the arithmetic mean of one opinion and the other, will perhaps emerge, or the others will be converted to your opinion, and so on. But we have to work from life.

And I was inclined to do that too! So you just face things like that. You get angry when you hear that something has been said somewhere that only differs in form from what you are used to hearing; and in this regard, you see, we really have made mistakes. For example, I gave a lecture to the workers at the Daimler factory that could only have had a favorable effect if it had been understood in this way – it was spoken for the workers at the Daimler factory, it was spoken in their language.

Well, unfortunately it is the custom in our circles that it is always demanded, and it cannot be resisted, that everything that is spoken in front of any audience should now be printed with skin and hair and should also be readable for everyone else out of context.

Yes, my dear attendees, that is simply not on! And you should realize that it is not on. It is not possible for something like that to happen. We should refrain from broadcasting what I say to a particular audience to the whole world lock, stock and barrel, because it can only be understood in context. Therefore, I understand very well that I received a letter from Nuremberg from a bourgeois pastor who, of course, could not think the way a worker at the Daimler factory can think now, for example. It may happen that people come together when they really work. But it is quite natural that he was angry about the lecture at the Daimler factory, that it is so and must be so! But it is really not about me giving a lecture to excite the delight of a Nuremberg bourgeois pastor, but about working in a lively way, about bringing the proletariat to where it should be for its own good, in cooperation with the other circles, someday.

That is what we want to put into practice. It must be clearly understood that we are not speaking theoretically here, but as life demands, never taking anything for granted that misses the truth, but saying what life demands.

But now, I would say, everything of this kind must not be schematized. It would also be wrong to schematize it. Suppose I were to give a lecture here on Thomism, on Thomas Aquinas, and a socialist were to come who had never heard of the context. Well, he would naturally be furious about it. There is no way to prevent him from becoming angry at the public lecture. But the practical work must nevertheless be done differently than we have done it so far. One has to understand that there is differentiation in life. And so it is important that we first really agree on this preliminary question: How do we get together a number, a sufficiently large number of people – we don't have that yet – who really show that things have now reached the point where it can be seen that people no longer even speak a language that can be understood by each other, and that one must rise above what is spoken on the one side and on the other side on the party sides. Above all, we must work to spread our views, and only when we have a sufficiently large number of people will we be in a position to introduce our views further into contemporary universal life.

It is the same with all things that depend on willpower. You can see that life can only give you opportunities to become pessimistic from day to day. But one must will optimistically; one must will in such a way that what one sets out to do will happen. After all, free human will does not consist of always saying, “This cannot happen and that cannot happen”; rather, it is a matter of knowing what one wills and working in the direction of that will. And that is the only thing we can really do in the first instance, each in our own place. Then an extraordinary amount will happen; there is an objective difficulty in putting the threefold order into practice as a whole.

You see, my “Key Points of the Social Question” have grown out of decades of observation of European life in all its aspects. They have grown entirely out of practical life. And I am convinced that if the practitioners were to take them up, it would be best to reach an understanding. The reason why no agreement can be reached is not that the practitioners have not got into the habit of checking what is said on the basis of practice, but because they say: reform ideas in a book! Books contain theories, so it is a theory. People do not read the book. If they read and study it, they would see that it is different from other books. So this objective difficulty is a factor. Unlike all other similar books, this book, 'The Core of the Social Question', is a book of life. It is the product of decades of observation; there is nothing invented in it. Therefore, it does not come across in such a way that one could say it is easy to understand, like a newspaper article. But I would never want to admit that this book, for example, cannot be made understandable to everyone in serious work. I think it is also the case with this book that I found that theater directors always said: Yes, we won't get an audience with this play, we have to give other plays - which they imagined should get an audience. I have had the most extraordinary experiences there. For example, I met a theater director who was talked into a play; he gave it a try, and he was completely convinced, he only did it out of complaisance. And one evening he did it – and it was a failure. He bet his wife, who had a different opinion, he bet her the entire royalties that were coming to him. The wife bet him that if the play went well, she would get the royalties. Well, the man lost his bet, the play became one of the best-visited plays. So he said in his theater language: At the theater, you can fake everything, you can fake criticism, you can fake approval, you can fake everything, just not the box office. You can't fake the box office. At least it doesn't help if you fake the box office.

This is basically how it is when you say that something cannot be made understandable. It can be made understandable if you just find the right way of doing it. And I can't really go into the question of why it was said in Stuttgart that the evenings were interesting back then when I was there and then they became boring; but I would like to bring this matter into what I would call a direction of will. It is really not a matter of brooding over why things are the way they are, but of trying to find ways and means to make things understandable, to make things popular, and above all, not to harbor illusions. It is no different than that we first need a sufficiently large number of people who understand our ideas; then it will work. But we must never sit back and do nothing; we just have to work. And I believe we will find understanding if we do not shut the door on ourselves too easily by acting not out of life but out of our prejudices. We must not throw every theory in everyone's face, but we must speak to everyone in their language; not because we think they are more stupid than we are, but because it is sometimes difficult for us to speak in their language when they are cleverer than we are; but even then we should try to speak in their language, even if they are much cleverer than we are in their field.

Perhaps it is necessary for us to develop and maintain a real life practice for the promotion of the threefold social organism.

Emil Molt: Perhaps I can correct something about the boring evenings that were party meetings. The proletarians have learned to see that party meetings in particular are full of the most outrageous nonsense, and that it was different in the old days at the trade union building than it is now, when we still organized lectures for the public.

Rudolf Steiner: I just wanted to say that I understood that the evenings back then were interesting and that afterwards the party line was followed, of course not by our people. That's not what I meant, but what I meant was that it doesn't help us if people realize that they have got to know something better. It does speak well for the people when they realize this, but it does not help us if they do not follow us. We only have an influence on them if they put into practice what they have decided. Don't you agree, you see, with us the meetings were interesting. But they don't go to us, but to the others. This just goes to show that, above all, it must be considered how people are like a flock of sheep, how they simply follow their leaders, no matter whether they talk boring stuff or not. They also vote for their leaders when it comes to something, and they follow the training. And we have no illusions about this. It is no use just holding interesting meetings for the people; it only helps if we manage to throw out the leaders and lead the people. That is the experience. Of course, it takes time, and many other things are needed; but here too we have made mistakes, we have negotiated too much with the leaders. We should not have done that. Because we should have been clear about it from the very beginning: the people do not want to understand us and cannot understand us. And so it is in many different ways that we should and want to first acquire the full practice of life.

So I beg you not to think that I meant that our meetings have become boring; rather, I meant that this judgment is of no help to us. What good does it do to enter into a discussion about a judgment that is unfruitful in people? It doesn't help at all.

You see, I knew a Catholic priest very well. He often walked with me – I was still at school – for almost an hour, the way I had to make from school to home. In that place, there were often Jesuit sermons. And the pastor talked with me, even though I was still quite young, actually quite sincerely. I said to him at the time, out of all naivety: Yes, Reverend, how is it that you don't preach the sermons yourself? You only need to do that for the same community every Sunday. Why do you bring the Jesuits over for that? That's not necessary. - He replied: That's right, but it is necessary to talk the cabbage into people; only in this way are they good. And I won't talk it into them myself, they can't ask me to!

So what use is it for a person to understand something if they act differently because of the social structure in which they live! That is precisely what we have to come to, to understand life without illusion, completely soberly, even though we aspire to the highest heights of spiritual life. - I don't know if I have answered the question exhaustively.

Emil Molt: Certainly, Doctor.

Rudolf Steiner: Is there anything else that needs to be asked? Emil Molt: I have already pointed out that in Stuttgart it was not the custom to go home so soon after meeting someone.

Rudolf Steiner: Well, here there seems to be a tendency to

go home and go to bed. So I bid you all good night.

Dear attendees! When I published my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Near Future” in the spring of 1919, the public life of the West was somewhat different from what it is today. It should actually be made perfectly clear how fast the pace of current events is. We should realize how much the configuration of Western civilization has changed again in the last two years. In the spring of 1919, there was sufficient reason to hope that a sufficiently large number of people would unite in the belief that spiritual impulses could counteract the forces of social decline. The terrible experiences of the war years lay behind the Western world's humanity. These terrible experiences, which at the time many people felt were incomparable in the historical life of humanity. And from these terrible experiences had emerged the opinion that something very drastic had to be done, something that had to be brought about from the depths of intellectual life, so that the forces of decline could be paralyzed in an appropriate way and humanity could be brought out of the rising forces through work.

One would like to say: After only a few months, one could see that this opinion, which was very much present in the broadest circles, had actually receded considerably. Therefore, in February, March, April and May of 1919, one could have believed that by asserting such ideas, as they were presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as they were summarized in my appeal “To the German People and to the World of Culture,” one could have believed that by putting forward such ideas one could reach those people who held the opinion just characterized. It was not necessary to cherish the arrogant opinion that the right ideas had been hit upon if they were put forward in this way. It was enough to believe that the ideas had been honestly drawn from the depths of existence, from the legitimate depths of of existence, such ideas had been brought up, and then one could believe that from the experiences that had just arisen, a sufficiently large number of people would be found to support the whole ductus, the whole will of such ideas, with understanding and energy.

One could see how very soon people again believed that humanity would be helped by first gluing together these or those old impulses that had been torn apart. One could see how the energy that had been noticeable for a while back then was gradually paralyzed and so on. At that time, in the spring of 1919, what I called “The Threefold Social Organism” had to be thrown into the situation, as it were. As I said, it might need to be corrected, as always, but it had to be thrown into the situation because it arose out of two presuppositions.

The first prerequisite is an historical one, a spiritual-historical one, one that is gained from observing the course of human development as it emerges from the spiritual-historical observation that is carried out here as anthroposophical.

The other prerequisite arose from decades of observation of the impulses that were striving from the undergrounds of spiritual, state-political and economic life everywhere towards the surface. The second prerequisite arose from the observation of what actually wanted to be realized, to which one should only help to realize, from this observation, from the directly practical observation of the three different formations of life. The first premise was not theoretical either. The purpose of spiritual science, as it is here, is to lead to full reality. Therefore, all its considerations, including those on the development of humanity, are imbued with a sense of reality. Who could not recognize the democratic principle by an unbiased observation of that which has asserted itself more and more intensely in the emergence of modern humanity?

I do not need to define this democratic principle. Of course, one person understands one thing by it and another person something else. But in general, one has a sense of what has been emerging in recent history as the democratic principle, the principle that man, simply by being man, must assert within the social community, that as much as the judgment of the individual human being is worth, this judgment must also mean in social events. This urge for democracy had been there for a long time, expressed through the most diverse movements and convulsions of the newer historical life of Western humanity, with its American offshoot.

But on the other hand, it could be seen that this democratic life cannot actually be realized in all respects. And it becomes apparent to the unbiased observer of human society that there is only one area of social life that can truly become democratic, and that is the political-state area. But the political-state area, if it wants to become democratic, can only include those matters on which every person who has come of age is capable of judgment. And if you think practically, you can clearly define the area of social life that can be subject to the judgment of every person who has come of age. On the other hand, there are two areas that simply cannot be democratized because they can only develop if they develop in terms of the expertise and specialist knowledge of the people, of the individual human individuality. This is, on the one hand, the entire area of intellectual life, namely that area of intellectual life that is actually public, the area of teaching and education, and, on the other hand, that of economic life.

Spiritual life and its main component, the system of teaching and education, can only develop properly if it arises from the professional judgment and expertise of the individuals active in this field and is also administered, administered in complete independence. Not every person who has come of age can judge in this area. Therefore, in this area there can be no such thing as a democratic constitution and democratic administration. Nor can there be democratic constitution and democratic administration in the field of economic life.

In this connection I should like to call attention to a fact which may be multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold by the experiences of life, a fact which has taken place in modern times. About the middle of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it, the question of the gold standard, the actual gold standard, became particularly pressing, I might say. And one can make a very interesting observation if one considers everything that was said for and against the gold standard by very clever people in parliaments, trading companies, associations of entrepreneurs, industrial associations of entrepreneurs, and so on, up to the second half of the nineteenth century and towards the last third of it. I do not mean any irony when I say that in those days a huge amount of cleverness was raised for and against the gold standard. And in particular, a conclusion-type played a major role back then, namely that if one really came to this unified gold currency, then the pursuit of free trade and the realization of free trade would prevail everywhere. Free trade will finally triumph.

You can tell, my dear audience, when you read what was said at the time, what was said at the time, it is really clever, it was not said by stupid people, but it was said by extraordinarily clever people. But reality soon said the opposite. Reality has shown that everywhere the gold standard has led to efforts to establish protective tariff systems and to close the individual national borders. That is to say, the cleverest people, those people who, out of their industrial cleverness, said the most sensible things, had to be taught by reality that, in line with reality, the opposite should have been said! As I said, I am not being ironic when I speak of “cleverness”; I mean it quite seriously. For this fact - and it could be multiplied a hundredfold - points us in many directions. What does it point us to? That in the economic field the individual cannot be decisive at all, that he can only be decisive if his judgment coincides with that of others who, in turn, are experienced and skilled in another area of economic life, that is to say, that the individual with his judgment has only one value within the association.

And so we have two areas: the spiritual area of teaching and education, which must be placed in the power of the individual human individuality; and the economic area, which must be placed in the power of the association, the association of the appropriate cooperation of the individual economic sectors, of production, consumption, and the circulation of goods. The proper form of interaction that results from all of this, from the judgment within the associations, must shape economic life. So that we have three links, not parts; by speaking of the tripartite division of the social organism, one has given rise to many misunderstandings; one cannot speak of the three-part human being either, one cannot divide the human being into head, trunk, limbs and metabolism, whereas the human being really consists of these three parts; so one cannot speak of the three of the social organism, but only of the threefold social organism, because these three members should not go their own way, as it were, the head, the circulation system - the rhythmic one - and the metabolism system can go their own way, but precisely because of their relative independence, they also work together in the most economical and rational way. If you take this threefold social order seriously, you can be honest as a democrat, because then you can really implement democracy in the area where it should be implemented, in the area of state and political affairs, where the mature human being faces the mature human being, and where only that which can be judged by a mature human being is decided and administered. It is entirely possible to find the detailed, concrete form of how to work towards this threefold social organism.

However, you see, conditions have become so unnatural in this respect that sometimes, even back in the spring of 1919, when the threefold social organism was taken much more seriously than it is today, sometimes you had to give strange answers. In one country, for example, where a so-called Ministry of Labor had been set up, I was asked by the Minister of Labor: “Yes, but if the social organism is to be threefolded, where do I actually belong?” He meant as Minister of Labor. Well, if you think about the necessities very concretely, the Ministry of Labor is a hybrid between economic life and political life. That is why I said to the minister in question: Yes, unfortunately for you, you have to be cut in half. - Like the brave Swabian who was not afraid and cut the Turk in half, so a half labor minister should have fallen out of our unnatural present circumstances on both the left and the right. But it is precisely these things that prove how things are, and how everything is mixed up, confounded.

And so we have to say: the necessity of the threefold social order arose out of the historical, spiritual-scientific observation of the emergence of democracy. If we observe the quite radical change that occurred in the second decade of the twentieth century, we can also see that that experiences are now possible that could lead people to take such a thing seriously and understand it. One could also say that it was basically only the final consequence of what had already emerged at the end of the eighteenth century in the call for liberty, equality and fraternity. This appeal for liberty, equality and fraternity, which emerged from the French Revolution, is such that it cuts deep into the hearts of all unbiased people, that it must be taken for granted, that it must be striven for. But anyone who is even slightly familiar with the cultural-political literature of the nineteenth century knows how much has been said – and again not by stupid people, but by very clever ones – against these three ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

Just read the extraordinary multi-volume work of the very talented Magyar [Eötvös] from the 1850s, and you will see how it is proved in a very subtle philosophical that the idea of equality cannot be realized alongside [the idea of] freedom, and that, in turn, the idea of fraternity cannot be realized alongside the idea of absolute equality, and so on. It must be said: what is being put forward here is clever. One sees at last that these very ideas, in the course of the historical development of mankind, well up from the underground to the surface as something quite justified, but that nevertheless the whole of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century were still under the sway of the suggestion of the unitary state. This suggestion of the unitary state was so great that people worked more and more, especially in Central Europe and also over Western Europe, with the exception of England, to shape the unitary state more and more intensively in terms of its agents. One was under the suggestion of the omnipotence of the unitary state, which had to extend over everything. And into that one could not then fit the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity.

If we recognize that this unified state is striving towards threefold order, then we also very soon realize that spiritual life is striving towards freedom, state and political life towards equality of all mature human beings, and economic life towards true brotherhood in associations, and from there out into all of life.

As soon as one has the idea of threefolding, one also has the agent for realizing freedom, equality and fraternity. Now, of course, there have been many people, my dear audience, who, when they heard something like the threefolding of the social organism, spoke of utopia. But it is not utopian. Just as it emerged from a spiritual-scientific-historical observation, on the other hand, it emerged from a practical observation of life itself, and it is simply not true that this threefold social order would be about imposing over humanity, which has become somewhat chaotic, but rather it is a matter of the fact that for the person who understands this threefold social order, it can be tackled from every single point of life. You can start anywhere, and then the individual beginnings will flow together into a whole by themselves. This is how we started with the threefold social order in the realm of spiritual life.

We started at our Stuttgart Waldorf School, because it is just a school like any other, but a school that has been created out of a truly free spiritual life, I want to mention it first. However, it is difficult to get through today, especially with views on the school system. In this regard, one also experiences strange things. I recently read an article in a magazine that was somewhat critical of the 'National Assembly' that took place in the city of Goethe and Schiller, Weimar, after the so-called German Revolution; of course I have nothing against criticizing this National Assembly, because basically one can say: it is really hardly an exaggeration to describe this national chatter – parliamentarism always has something to do with a chattering association or talkativeness, doesn't it, the special way of talking together! I have nothing against holding up a proper image of this National Assembly. But something strange was said. It was said that this Weimar National Assembly had actually only caused havoc in all areas of public life – with the exception of a single area where it had delivered something useful, namely in the area of schools, through the creation of the so-called primary school, the so-called unified school, and so on.

Now, this essay is based on nothing more than the fact that it is easier to see what nonsense the “Weimar National Assembly” has inaugurated in other areas of life than in the field of education, where everyone can prattle on for a very long time before the nonsense is noticed.

Now, when our “Freie Waldorfschule” was founded in Stuttgart, it was important that the spiritual life itself should be the foundation and soil with its own requirements, from which teaching and education are derived here. Of course, anthroposophical spiritual science is the source of the pedagogy and didactics of the Waldorf School. I gave the seminar course for the teachers of this Waldorf School based on anthroposophical spiritual science before the opening of the Waldorf School. But this Waldorf School was not misused to instill dogmatic anthroposophy into children in a school of world view. The founding of the Waldorf School was quite the opposite of this. The aim of the Waldorf School was to apply a pedagogy and didactics in which anthroposophical spiritual science can be practically demonstrated right down to the skill of the fingers; from the application of pedagogy and didactics and from what one did, one wanted to show the fruits of anthroposophical feeling and thinking, not by instilling any dogmas. That is why they almost, I would even say radically, refrained from making the Waldorf school a school of world view. That is why religious education was separated from the other subjects. Religious education for Catholic children was entrusted to the Catholic priest, and for Protestant children to the Protestant pastor.

And then, in the course of the school's effectiveness, it became apparent that there was a large number of children, dissident children, who did not attend any lessons, neither Catholic nor Protestant. What should be done with these children?

Initially, the children's group at the Waldorf School was made up of the children of workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory; after all, it was our friend Emil Molt in Stuttgart who founded this Waldorf School, and initially the children were “the children of workers” at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory. Now, there were a great many parents who did not want to send their children to any of the religious lessons; but they felt that their children should not grow up without religion, without being introduced to spiritual things. And so we were obliged to set up a kind of anthroposophical free religious education alongside the other lessons, which we then also developed in terms of pedagogy and didactics, and which now stands as a third one, on an equal footing with the other two.

The Protestant religion teachers in particular had to state that they feared that the children would run away from them and run over to the anthroposophical religious education, didn't they? But as I said, it was precisely in this treatment of the religious education questions that it should be shown how far the Waldorf School is from wanting to be a school of world view.

On the other hand, anthroposophical spiritual science is able to answer the question: What are the forces that have taken on physical form in the child after it has descended from the spiritual world, and what are the forces that are particularly active in the child up to the year in which the teeth change, around the age of seven?

They are mainly powers of imitation, and everything that is to be brought to the child at this age must be achieved through a certain study of these childlike powers of imitation.

Other powers then emerge from the background of the child's mind around the seventh year. One has to take these powers into account. One then sees how one has to approach reading, writing and so on; from what one knew from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, a pedagogy and didactics were formed, a real art of education that works towards not introducing reading and writing to children in an abstract way, but in such a way that reading and writing are brought out of a certain artistic, holistic humanity.

Between the ages of six, seven and nine, teaching is such that nothing abstract, nothing that engages the mere head, the mere intellect, is presented to the child. Our mere numbers and letter signs engage the mere intellect if they are not taken from the full activity of the human being. And so it was particularly important for this childhood age to have a great deal of light shed on it through anthroposophical observation of human development. The corresponding pedagogy and didactics were based on this.

Between the ages of nine and ten, there is an important point in a child's development that must be taken into account by educators and teachers. Something occurs that usually goes unnoticed. Before that, the child hardly differs from his or her surroundings. It is best to teach the child in a way that appeals as little as possible to its sense of self. But between the ages of nine and ten, something breaks into the child's mind, the main development of which lasts only a short time. One must be grown to observe what is happening in the child's development, because sometimes it depends on a few days to find the right words, the right encouragement for the child, to bring the right thing forward in the right way.

And so it is important to know what human nature wants every year, every week. And so you bring the child up, and we have developed this pedagogy and didactics to bring the child up to the age of 13, 14, 15, where something completely different occurs in child development.

Eight days ago, I was obliged to ensure in an evening course for teachers that our so-called tenth class could now be opened in the appropriate way. This is the class that children enter when they have reached sexual maturity, or, as we say in anthroposophical spiritual science, at the age when the childlike astrality, the astral body, as we say, the actual spiritual-soul body, is born. This requires a very special deepening into this important age. And in opening this class, the pedagogical-didactic maxim had to be found again to guide young people into this age.

You see, you have to feel the full weight of the age on your soul in a certain way if you really want to practice contemporary pedagogy and didactics in this way. Because you have seen it: in the last few decades – I would say it is an international affair – the so-called youth movement has emerged in the most diverse forms. What did this youth movement mean? The young suddenly demanded something completely new and were aware that the old could not give them what they were demanding. The wanderer instinct and so on, as they are all called, have become known to people.

Now this youth movement has clearly shown that the old were no longer able to be the right authority for the young. The young no longer expected what had previously been expected of the young by the old, and a terrible yearning went through the young. I would like to say: In this yearning, however mistaken and nebulous it was in certain respects, the call for a new pedagogy and didactics is clearly expressed. There is no need to [see] whether something that comes up with such elementary power from the depths of life, whether it is more or less right or wrong, but you only have to look at it in its actuality, then it can already prove this or that to you. In particular, anyone who has seen the latest phase of these youth movements, which have only emerged in recent years, must admit that this youth movement first expressed itself in such a way that the nebulous, chaotic urge of one person to join another emerged. I would like to say – the young lived out their lives in packs, in cliques. Then suddenly a strange turn occurred, only in the last few years and especially among the best members of this youth movement a colossal turn occurred. They got tired of connecting one to the other in small cliques. And those who had previously had a strong urge to join one another in small cliques began to feel a kind of disgust for being together. A certain hermit-like behavior asserted itself, youthful hermit-like behavior. They closed themselves off, they encapsulated themselves, the young people. A complete turnaround has taken place. This is also deeply significant. And again, it is not a Central European, but an international issue that has taken hold of all possible youth groups in the civilized world today. It is a matter of the necessity today to provide for spiritual life from the very depths of all of life.

Something like this should be created by the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which, I would like to say, was also created out of social circumstances. All the blustering about the unified school, which arises from all kinds of enmity and antipathy and sympathy, is of course immediately lost in the objective when one teaches and educates out of the nature of the human being. There, of course, people are taught and educated uniformly. But the matter is brought into being appropriately, not out of political proposals or antipathies and ranklings and räsonnements. The fruitful further development of humanity depends on this, that out of the factual the factual be founded.

But to achieve something like this, to really have teachers who can approach young people in such a way with such a pedagogy and didactics, you need a free spiritual life, because you have to be able to use the full power of the teachers. My dear attendees, many a person has thought for a long time, especially in times of liberal ideas, when freedom has been so greatly undermined, many a person has thought: we need programs, we need comprehensive ideas. Many programs have been devised about the best way to teach, especially about curricula.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, when you put five, six, twelve not particularly clever people together – forgive this somewhat delicate or undelicate allusion – when so and so many people sit down and let their abstract minds , then they come up with the most ideal programs, all of it perfect; Clause I, the teacher has to teach this in class, Clause II, the teacher has to treat the students in such and such a way, Clause III, this or that has to happen. For the eighth year, this is how it has to be done, and so on. In the greatest perfection, paragraph I to x, everything can be presented in this way, and you can get an ideal program out of it, with the average intellectual predisposition of the twelve people who sat down together. Not much is needed to define anything in abstracto. Only because these people have the urge to disagree, we have received not one, but many programs. There are programs and cleverness buzzing through the world. When would there have been more programs and cleverness – whereby the word “cleverness” is not even used ironically – buzzing through the world than precisely in the nineteenth century.

But you see, that is not what matters, what matters is what happens in reality. What matters is real, practical life. Well, we have indeed gradually entered into strange realms of abstraction. Today, people even think about very strange theories in theory. For example, they think about the fact that if they travel from point A to point B at ordinary speed, and a cannon is fired at point A and another cannon is fired at point B, they will hear the cannon that was fired later than the one that was fired earlier. But if they move faster and faster, the interval changes; and then they work out that if they move at the speed of sound, they even hear the one cannon that is fired later at the same time. And if they move faster than the speed of sound, they even hear the cannon that is fired later earlier than the one that is fired earlier!

Now, you see, that may seem quite correct in theory, and there is nothing to be said against it. But someone who thinks in a spiritual sense, thinks realistically, not just logically, has something to object to, because that is only one way to get to the truth, and he wants to think realistically, and then he also has to imagine what such a person would look like who would now move faster than sound. Einstein even calculated what a clock would look like if it were to fly out into space at the speed of light and then come back again. Theoretically, all this can be done, and of course it is all theoretically correct. It has been much admired. But just imagine what the clock would look like when it comes back, or what a person would look like if he were to move at the speed of sound! One thing is certain: one would not be able to judge the differences in the speed of sound, because the human being would have to become sound himself. This would lead one to the conclusion that one cannot help but let concrete reality flow into one's soul, not abstract theory. Only then are we on the right path to truth. But then we also realize that a dozen people can work out very beautiful programs. But a dozen teachers can only realize what lies within the power of these teachers. And the most beautiful ideals have no value at all compared to what really lives in people. Therefore, what is to be achieved must be taken from the reality of the human being. You simply have to create this school republic out of the individual personalities of the teachers, you must not want more than the teachers can achieve, who you can put in their place. You have to take the specific teachers into account, and the school program emerges from this specific teaching staff. But this is only possible in a free spiritual life, in a spiritual life such as is striven for in the threefold social organism, where the individual human being is actually directly confronted with the spiritual world, and feels responsible for what he has to achieve in the field of spiritual life, directly responsible to the spiritual world, not to the school inspector, or through him to the minister of education and so on, but directly to the powers of the spiritual world. For an education and training system such as I have just described can only be developed if one does not merely have an abstract, intellectual spiritual life, but a real spiritual life, when it is the spirit itself that reigns on earth through the deeds of men, when one appeals to the living spirit, not merely to concepts and ideas, not merely to the intellectual and the intellectualizing. But you can only bring it out, bring it forth, this living spiritual life, this active spirit, from the individual human personalities themselves. From the teacher of the lowest elementary school class up to the teacher of the highest school system, each one is integrated into the independent spiritual organism, so that each one can only follow himself, and has so much teaching to do that he still has time to perform administrative tasks, so that everything that is administered is done by those who are still teaching, who really still teach, not by those who have retired or been taken out of the school system. The administration of the school system is the responsibility of those who are still actively teaching. There would be no authority, people say. No, that is precisely where the true authority of spiritual life would be found, namely, the self-evident authority. In no other field can authority arise except that which arises of its own accord. I would like to know how authority can fail to arise when someone really has the will to do something beneficial and knows that someone else can give them advice, then it will come, and then the one who can give the advice will have the self-evident authority.

I have the task of running the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Each teacher is independent in his or her class. The person who does something in class does so on his or her own initiative. The opinion has never been expressed that I have ever ordered anyone to do anything at the Waldorf School. On the other hand, everyone seeks advice on all kinds of matters, and there is a unified spirit in this Waldorf School. The authority is there, as a matter of course. And one could see it grow, this self-evident authority, on the spirit of the Waldorf School in the last two years since this Waldorf School has existed. One could start in this school, which started two years ago with not quite 200 children, which now has over 500 children, who are once again facing difficulties because they do not want to increase the size of the classes, the lower four classes, there should only be as many children admitted as were there before the Elementary School Law was passed. Recently, however, it has become clear that parents will not put up with this. Now, [in] this Waldorf School, there is a place where you can actually realize in a certain area what you can know from the free spiritual life. Sometimes one has strange experiences there, which I perhaps, for easily understandable reasons, in so far as they arise from the interaction, in the social interaction that we do not, however, let into the teaching, with the official life, about which I I prefer not to make any comments on now; but it is already possible to see how the individual things that lie in this threefolding of the social organism can be tackled from the practical, concrete point of view, and how one does not have to deal with some utopia.

Likewise, this can be done in other areas of spiritual life. And in fact, the anthroposophical worldview will not impose itself dogmatically, but will prove its right to exist through its viability. Because, my dear audience, one should not believe at all that someone who writes something like 'The Key Points of the Social Question' from such a basis, from a realistic basis, is thinking of anything utopian. There is no question of that, not even in the choice of expressions: threefold social order. In recent years, when many people have made the threefold order into a sect, which of course it was certainly not meant to be by me, I have had to experience it again and again, especially in Germany: how is it to be organized? How this, how that? It is really quite bad when, even in the post-war period, you are always confronted with the word “organize,” and especially when you call something you would like to see realized an organism, and you still hear the words: “organize, organize”; you organize where there is something mechanical; an organism is precisely there so that you cannot organize it. You cannot organize the organic. That must appear as an organism. Where you want to organize something, you only have the [inorganic] at hand. You cannot organize an organism. You have to let it become.

You can see the thoroughly misunderstood nature of things when such things occur. And so the threefold structure of the social organism is based on the fact that things must form, that one only has to develop the formative forces, that the threefold social organism must arise. Therefore, it cannot be described in the abstract. Especially those who have spoken of utopia would actually always like to have utopias. When speaking of such things, one can hear it asked, well: what then will be the position regarding ownership of a sewing machine in the threefolded social organism? This question has been asked here at this place, and so on.

Now, my dear attendees, a free spiritual life is only possible under the condition of a real spiritual life. Once, when I was talking about such things in a Swiss city, a university teacher replied to me: Yes, but we already have the freedom of the spiritual life, because in all state constitutions it says: Science and its teaching are free. But, ladies and gentlemen, the point is that science, which is free, should only be there as a free science. If, from the outset, science is raised in such a way that people are trained who are suitable for this or that office, and who are taught the program of their office, then you can safely decree that science and its teaching are free. If science itself is enslaved, then enslaved science naturally feels very free when it is allowed to develop as a slave.

And so it was often replied: In such and such a country, the state does not interfere in schools at all. That is the worst thing to say, because then you no longer notice it, and that is much worse than when you notice it and rebel against it, than when you no longer even notice how what flows in is only based on state principles arising without factual or specialized knowledge from the incorrect democratic, when one no longer even notices what should arise from the abilities for each new generation, what the human being still brings with him from the spiritual world by entering into physical existence through birth. We simply need teachers and educators who stand with holy reverence before the child and say to themselves: something from the spiritual world has been entrusted to me in this child, which I have to fathom and solve as a mystery. I must inquire what message from the spiritual world they have given him. Knowledge of the spiritual world must be alive in teaching and education; this spiritual world must be real in teaching and education. When the coming generation is tyrannized by that which is already there, by the living generation, then the spiritual life is made unfree. And to a large extent, the question of teaching and education in a free spiritual life is a question of teachers, the question of finding the right teachers, those who stand before the growing children as I have just characterized it.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I wanted to use a few strokes, which of course must always remain fragmentary, to point out how the free spiritual life is to be thought of in the threefold social organism. As I said at the beginning of my talk, today we are actually facing a different time from that in the spring, in the spring of 1919. At that time one could believe that there would really be a sufficiently large number of people who would support the realization of the threefold social order. Today one would be out of touch with the times if one had the same faith as one had then. Threefolding must not become a sect either, something that one can believe in and advocate everywhere and at all times, theoretically as one's opinion. Today it is quite clear, however heavy-heartedly one has to admit it, that within European civilization the people who actually do the economic work have no sense of progress, no insight into real needs, that one is preaching to deaf ears if one wants to work into economic life with reasonable foundations. Today it is clear that one can present individual productive examples to the world, as we tried to do in “The Coming Day” and “Futurum”. These examples will exist as individual white ravens, they will be careful to survive, and they will fulfill the expectations placed on them, at least as individuals. But today we cannot speak of the fact that one comes across an insight in general economic life in order to be able to grasp such things with such ideas, as one could still believe in the first urge of human experiences and results in 1919. In the meantime, people have become accustomed to glossing over the old declining forces. They are still downward forces, after all, and the collapse is still coming. They have only decided to delay the collapse a little, to let everything slide, so that they do not have to expend the energy to move forward to new ideas. And humanity is largely asleep and does not notice how the downward forces are actually raging, and how, with each quarter, civilized humanity is drawing closer to this decline. People would much rather face the convulsions and terrible upheavals that lie in wait for the future in the present if they cannot warm to ideas in the immediate present that could be properly extracted from reality in a calm development, which will nevertheless be needed in the future.

And so we can say that there is little hope to be placed in economic life today. People will have to be forced to take up the new ideas, through their own need, through the effect of the forces of decline. But in the spiritual life we must work unstintingly to develop the free spiritual life as a member of the threefold organism. This is what must not flag, what must be cultivated unconditionally, because the time in which we live is such that people's souls are becoming emptier and emptier, more and more desolate. They are too lazy to admit this to themselves today, but we are heading for terrible times in terms of people's mental state, which will also be reflected in their physical condition.

I have spoken of this often, including in public lectures. The spiritual life must save us through to the times when reasonable people will also see something on the economic front. It is necessary that this spiritual life be cultivated in its freedom wherever it can be cultivated. Anthroposophical soil is the best soil imaginable for this, because then work must be done out of complete freedom. For what needs to be worked out is not yet there. And since it is spirit, it can only be worked out through freedom. And so, especially in the near future, anthroposophical striving and true social striving will increasingly coincide. And we will have to face the souls with the fact that the economic will have to lag behind, that the spiritual simply has to go ahead today.

This is also shown by the qualities of our opponents; in Central Europe, a strange, well-organized opposition is now asserting itself. This well-organized opposition had already worked its way up to the point that at the time, on printed slips of paper distributed to all the people in this packed, largest Stuttgart hall, it was written, not only in allusions, but quite clearly, that it was actually my fault that the Battle of Marnesch was lost in 1914, and that Minister Simons in England has done poorly in recent times. It was not just in innuendo, but it was written on the slips of paper in a very crude way! You could see how it is here with widely extended parties that do not want to admit what has actually happened, that need scapegoats because it no longer works to say that the stab in the back, with which one first wanted to cover up a really eminently lost war, a war that was lost by every trick in the book, they wanted to cover that up with the 'stab in the back'; now they wanted to cover up the absolute incompetence of anyone who has ever led an army, of Ludendorffism, that's what they want to cover up. Today they want to make great geniuses out of people who are quite incapable. A cultural life steeped in lies is a cultural life in decline.

And the situation is no different in the West, no different in America. There, everything is a little more pronounced, where defeat makes things stand out more sharply. Everywhere we need to extract a real, a true, a free spiritual life from the corruption of humanity, which is suffocating in lies and untruthfulness today. For this is identical with truth, and this is at the same time identical with a striving that is in keeping with reality. Therefore, even if there is little prospect of success today, we may still believe that a sufficiently large number of people can warm to a full understanding of the idea of threefolding. Those who can muster the necessary enthusiasm and courage for a free spiritual life will help the threefold social organism to get back on its feet. Then a truly free spiritual life will become a reality. If it becomes a reality in people's hearts, in their powers and in their actions, then the threefold social organism will most certainly follow of its own accord out of the necessity, out of the need of the time. (Lively applause!)

Discussion

Question: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Rudolf Steiner: The question that was asked here first is: How can an ordinary person, who has no influence on public institutions, work in the spirit of threefolding? Well, firstly, it is not quite clear to me how someone can be without influence on public institutions. Unless he is in prison or in some other place where he can hardly move, he is actually always subject to a certain influence on public institutions. The outside world ensures that one is never completely without influence on public institutions; one has to pay taxes and so on, so one always has some influence on public institutions. So the question cannot really be put that way.

But then, if perhaps what is meant is: How can one work in the sense of the threefold social order, when one perhaps does not have the opportunity to speak, to speak freely somehow, when one does not have the opportunity to be, let's say, a member of parliament or something similar, how can one work in the sense of the threefold social order of the social organism? Then you have to say: Well, this impulse for threefolding is something very concrete. And that is why you can actually only talk about it in concrete examples. You see, I want to say the following, for example. There are institutions everywhere in the sense of nationalization, partial or more or less extensive nationalization - let's say, of medical matters, of nursing. Now, it has happened time and again that good people – who, in their own opinion, are “good” followers of our philosophy – come and say that they would like to have this or that remedy, and so on! So they would actually like to encourage quackery and to violate the law! They can be won over for that, those people! They don't need to have any influence on public institutions, but when they lack something, they don't recognize - perhaps with more or less justification - the state-recognized doctor and want to cure somehow from behind. I have even known ministers who appeared in public parliament to speak out against quackery and for the protection of the medical profession by law, and afterwards, when they themselves became ill, or anyone else became ill, they turned to someone who was not a state-recognized doctor! It is terribly difficult to persuade people to really join those movements that simply correspond to the introduction of such institutions, which are necessary if one wants to have a free spiritual life, or in general, if one wants that which one professes! Many such examples could be cited, where everyone, in their place, by not being afraid to speak out wherever it is possible for them, takes a stand against what they recognize as evil. If you recognize the state protection of medicine as an absurdity, then speak up for it! Or, ladies and gentlemen, is it not an absurdity that over there, across the border, at Leopoldshöhe, there must be a different art of healing than here just a few steps away? But a doctor who is licensed over there is not allowed to help here. If you give in to reason, you will immediately see the matter as an absurdity. But if, let us say, for example, you are a member of the Federal Council or something similar, then you do not see this absurdity! And if you do see it, then you do not find it opportune to represent it. But if one person finds another, there will eventually be enough people to really come to reason. And instead of asking: How can an ordinary person, who has no part in public affairs, become active in the spirit of threefolding, do what one finds in every step and turn of life, in order to carry it out in the spirit of threefolding. Then one will see that every hour, every day, one finds opportunities to become active in the spirit of threefolding.

Question: In Holland, the constitutional ban on official Catholic processions is now to be lifted, which is causing quite a stir. Would this actually be a question of the free spiritual life or also of the public legal life? Rudolf Steiner: With some questions it is so with the threefold social organism, although the idea is quite right, of course: How does the blood of the chest or the head come to play this or that role in the migraine? The blood simply circulates, and so one cannot say that the blood of the chest organism is different from the blood of the head, but one can only speak of the blood in general. And so it is not easy to categorize things again. The threefold social organism is precisely manifested in the fact that things cannot be categorized. However, one does experience very strange things. In recent years I have always had to speak of the three-part human organism, the sensory organism, the rhythmic organism and the metabolic-limb organism, and in recent years a great deal has been done by myself and our medical and scientific friends to develop this idea of the three-part human being. But recently a book was written by someone called Kurt Leese, I believe. He has now, because I said that things should not be put together in boxes, but that the whole human being is head, nevertheless the human being is mainly head in the head, the whole human being is head. Things go into each other. The head is also taken care of and dependent on the limbs. Things all go into each other. Kurt Leese can no longer think this. He can only think of three if it is nicely next to each other, but he cannot think it when it goes into each other. He says: It's a shocking idea.

But we will have to get used to such shocks, even in the tripartite social organism, if we are to imagine, through the effect of abstractions, what a clock looks like when it flies away at the speed of sunlight and returns after years, is difficult to verify for a variety of reasons: firstly, because of the nature of the clock; secondly, because of the person who would then have to check it when the clock returns, and so on. So the present is not shocked at all by such ideas of the abstract. But it is shocked when something that is in line with reality is placed before it. So it is necessary not to press things so much that one now asks: Is this a matter of the free spiritual life or of the legal life? One can say: If one begins to prohibit any expressions or revelations of the spiritual life at all, to make legal provisions about it, then one is on a slippery slope with regard to the spiritual life. I must say, you see, with regard to those institutions, that I once showed you here – those who were there – a peculiar document, the document that was once issued as a patent in 1847, I believe, in Switzerland, where it says: It was through the power of the Almighty that the brave Swiss general Dufour succeeded in expelling the Jesuits from the country. Then it is explained in more detail. Today, in free Switzerland, it seems a little strange that the eradication of the Jesuits is attributed to the grace of God and the power that God has given! But it is preserved that way; I had the document photographed because it is so beautiful. I will show the photograph again on occasion. It is, after all, quite good to occasionally bring things home to people face to face. But even with regard to Jesuitism, I am not in favor of combating it by law. Those who want to fight it should fight it with intellectual weapons. One should not spare oneself the inconvenience of having to fight against everything intellectual with intellectual weapons, not by making laws. Laws can be made with majority decisions. One does not need to say that the majority is always nonsense, because then reality, social reality, would always be nonsense. Now, as I said, one does not need to go that far, but in any case one cannot say that the majority is always wisdom. And laws can be made in a democratic state, especially with majority decisions. But certain things just cannot be done by majority vote. They have to live out. And so everything that is regarded as the erring spiritual must also live out. Therefore, one must say: It is a matter of freedom and not of compulsion when efforts are made to reintroduce the banned Catholic processions and to lift the bans against Catholic processions. The only remedy is to show that these processions are not reasonable, and to educate people to this effect, so that they do not take part in them; then they will stop of their own accord! This is the only remedy in spiritual life, just as one can teach a person good taste and he will do the right thing of his own accord, but not by passing laws against it.

That is what a free spiritual life must demand. The one who has to resort to laws in the spiritual realm is on the path that I once described in Nuremberg in 1908 in a lecture cycle, where I said - it is not said without significance, using strong inks, but these strong inks should characterize adequately – I said at the time: Actually, today's humanity no longer strives to go out on the street without a doctor on the right and a police officer on the left, the doctor for physical protection, the police officer, well, for protection in materialistic times, yes, for physicality too! That has gradually become the ideal. I have heard many things in my life, but time and again I had to shrink back a little inside when I heard, with increasing frequency, over and over again: “That should be prohibited by law.” That had gradually become an awfully common saying – instead of taking the trouble to teach people good taste themselves, so that these things would stop of themselves – 'it should be banned by law', 'by majority decision' or something like that should be done. That is the one thing that must be asserted in principle. Therefore, all prohibitions against processions and the like should be lifted, and things should be allowed to run their course. Then spiritual life will also be able to express itself freely

It is absolutely essential that stupidity, folly and evil be conquered by cleverness and kindness, that ugliness be conquered by beauty, and that nothing be legally eradicated in the realm of spiritual life.

Question of the youth movement: The speaker explains that the individual members of the youth movements want and need to experience truth and reality; the economic sphere seems to them to be the area where everyone has a say, where everyone should be active and engaged. Later, the individual often withdraws again to reflect or simply to get away from society. It is almost impossible to reach a solution. Soon it is the economic that provides a value system; there is no recognition of the state or the political, but everything is conditioned by the economic. Individuals are diverted from their spiritual nature by economic life - or they withdraw into solitude].

Rudolf Steiner: In essence, the Lord has characterized what I have already said in the lecture: the phenomena of the youth movements of recent decades. But it would not be entirely correct to stop at this phenomenon of the youth movement. I have already found some understanding among members of this youth movement when I have struck what lives in the deeper foundations of the whole development of time. I had to say to some members of the youth movement, to which you yourself seem to belong and know very well: Yes, the year 1899, for example, is an extraordinarily important one for the development of humanity as a whole, and in particular for the development of Western civilization. And anyone who has an eye for such things knows how fundamentally different those people are who either lived through their childhood before 1899 was around, so they were a few years or ten years old, or those people who, let's say, were even born later, so they are hardly in their twenties now, and those people who were born before 90 and so on. At the bottom of their souls, very important things were going on, I would say, from the very source of existence, and that is connected with the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century, gates to the supersensible world were opened for the first time in the Western world. It was no longer possible, let us say, in the 1880s, to lead a different life, even with a powerful urge for the spiritual life; the Nietzschean life is more or less that life, which one must present as one that has become ill from the decline of Western culture because it could not find what it was looking for: the spiritual basis in everything phenomenal, in everything external, in everything sensual. The life of Nietzsche is therefore extraordinarily interesting to study from this point of view. He participates in Schopenhauerism, becomes ill from Schopenhauerism; he participates in historicism, becomes ill from historicism; he participates in Wagnerism, becomes ill from Wagnerism. He participates in naturalism, in positivism, becomes ill from it. He participates in the Darwinian molding of the idea of humanity, becomes ill from it, and so on, and so on. Instead of the idea of repeated earthly lives, he comes to the idea of the return of the same, becomes ill from it. Nietzsche could not help but fall ill from his urge for the supernatural world. It was simply not possible to achieve this directly and fundamentally at the end of the nineteenth century or before the end of the nineteenth century. The gates have opened, and today we cannot help but turn to the revelations of the spiritual world if we want to achieve an inwardly satisfied existence. Speaking of nature in the way that was justified in the 1880s is no longer justified today. Today we can point out how there was a current of opinion favoring an 'ignorabimus', how a naturalist, Du Bois-Reymond, spoke of 'ignorabimus', how Ranke, the historian, by seeking to present history as an event with the exception of the Christ event; that this comes from the primal forces, that history does not belong there - so 'ignorabimus'. Today we cannot do that. Today we are on the threshold of the supersensible world wanting to enter, and it is only the dull reluctance that is still bracing itself against the acceptance of a spiritual world view. And what is rumbling in the youth, that is the deeper thing, that is rumbling inside. And therefore, no matter how much individual members of the youth movement may say, “We do not want the abstract, we want the emotional,” they will still have to realize: What spiritual science in anthroposophy wants to be is precisely not something abstract, it is the full human being, it is what comes out of the whole human being, it is what expresses itself as art and as religion and as science, and it is the point at which the whole, full human being can come to his inner realization. And today we are only suffering from the fact that economic routine does not want to take leave of economic reason and that we must first begin to work on the recovery of spiritual life, until the unreasonableness of economic life must follow through necessity. And I am convinced that something good and right will come out of the youth movement, just as I do not despair when people keep saying, for my sake, that they cannot distinguish between expressionism and a windmill, a towel just pulled out of the water and hung up to dry, or a human portrait, say, for example, a boot heel. Of course, sometimes you can't distinguish that with the expressionists, but nevertheless, there are approaches to something in it, which, if it is refined in the most diverse places where it appears, will lead to that in which spiritual science, as it is represented here, only wants to be a guide and a leader and to work from the very most elementary.

But of course, sometimes you experience the fact that, despite the fact that you mean it to be so concrete, the opposite is held against you. I just want to say that last as a joke. The day before yesterday I had a lecture in Zurich. I spoke with slides about this building here. Then afterwards, one of the audience stood up and said: Yes, why do we need such a building, why do we need a Christ's head and Christ at all, why do we need it today? I was walking on the street this afternoon, there was a very drunk person, I followed him, and I joined him. This is a temple of God, this is a real temple and we do not need built temples. — On this occasion, I only regretted that no friendly spirit was found to find the right door with the person in question. But in view of the unnatural conditions of the present time, one may meet people who do not mean, as I say, that we should not build temples, but who mean that we should follow drunkards. They really want to work from the elementary, and they deserve, so to speak, to have spiritual science brought to their full understanding, because they can understand it. For the youth movement is connected with a very great change that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century and that is actually based not only on superficial historical forces but on profound cosmic forces.

On the occasion of the course “Anthroposophy and Scientific Disciplines”

Roman Boos will give a lecture on “Anthroposophy and Jurisprudence” as part of the course “Anthroposophy and Specialized Sciences”. In connection with his lecture, he will ask Rudolf Steiner a question.

Roman Boos: How can the principle of establishing legal norms through codification develop in the future? How can the legal effect be exercised from the parliamentary centers without paralyzing or killing the principle of codification, as is the case today?

Rudolf Steiner: The vitalization of the legal life, of which Dr. Boos spoke, will, it seems to me, be brought about in a very natural way in the threefold social organism. How should we visualize this structuring of the threefold social organism in concrete terms? — Not in a mere analogy, I mean — but in a similar way to the way in which we should visualize the organic threefold structure in the natural human organism.

The view, which Dr. Boos also criticized today, that the heart is a kind of pump that drives blood to all possible parts of the organism, this view must be overcome for physiology. It must be recognized that the activity of the heart is the result of the balanced interaction of the other two activities of the human organism: metabolic activity and nerve-sense activity. If a physiologist who is grounded in reality sets out to describe the human organism and its functioning, then in general it is only necessary to describe, in a truly selfless way, the metabolic activity on the one hand and the nerve-sense activity on the other, for it is through their polar interaction and interpenetration that the balancing rhythmic activity arises; this is already literally within one's grasp. This is something that must be taken into account if we want to imagine life in the threefolded social organism. This life in the threefolded social organism can only be truly imagined if one still has a sense of the practice of life.

When I had published a few things and spoken in the most diverse ways about threefolding, the objection was raised that it is indeed difficult to imagine how the law comes to have content when it is supposed to be separated in life from the spiritual part of the social organism on the one hand and the economic part on the other. Especially people like Stammler, for example, who has been mentioned several times today, they understand the law in such a way that, on the one hand, they only recognize a kind of formalism. On the other hand, they believe that this [formal system] acquires its material content from the economic needs of the social organism. On the basis of such views, I was told that law cannot be separated from economic life for the simple reason that the forces of economic life must produce the legal statutes by themselves. When one includes something in one's concepts, one constantly thinks of something inanimate, of something that just amounts to making statements, for example, from economic forces, which are then codified and can be used as a guide. One mainly thinks of the fact that such codified statements exist and that one can look them up.

In the natural, living threefold organism, we are dealing, I might say, with two polar opposites: on the one hand, with spiritual life and, on the other, with economic life. Spiritual life, which arises when people are born and develop into existence through their own actions, represents a reality through its own content. The fruitful side of intellectual life will develop if no restrictions are imposed by any standards that limit what one can do. The fruitful side will develop quite naturally simply because it is in the interest of people that those who can do more and have greater abilities can also achieve more. It will be a matter of course that, let us say, a person is taken on as a teacher for a number of children, and those who are looking for a teacher can be sure that he can achieve the desired results in his sphere. If intellectual life is truly free, the whole structure of intellectual life arises out of the nature of the matter itself; the people who are part of it work in this intellectual life. On the other hand, we have the economic part of the threefold social organism. Here the structure of economic life arises out of the needs of consumption and the possibilities of production, out of the various interrelations, out of the relationships that arise. Of course, I can only briefly hint at this in this answer to the question. But the various relationships that can play between people and people or between groups of people and individuals or between different groups of people also play a role. All of this will move economic life. And in these two areas, what is called “law” is actually out of the question, insofar as these two areas manage their own affairs.

If we think realistically – of course people today do not think in real terms but in theoretical terms, proceeding from what already exists, and so they confuse the legal ideas that the realm of the spirit already has with the legal ideas of the economic realm – if we think realistically and practically, then in the free spiritual life it is not legal impulses that come into question at all, but impulses of trust, impulses of ability. It is simply absurd to speak in the free spiritual life of the fact that someone who is able has a right to work. There can be no question of speaking of such a right, but one must speak of the fact that one needs him, that he should work. The one who can teach children will naturally be taught, and there will be no question of whether or not there is an entitlement; it is not somehow a question of right as such. It is the same in economic life. Written or oral contracts will play a part, and confidence in the observance of contracts will have to play a part. If economic life is left to its own devices, the fact that contracts are being observed will be seen in the simple fact that economic life cannot function if contracts are not observed.

I am well aware that when such practical matters are discussed today, they are considered by some to be highly impractical because they bring in highly impractical matters from all sides and then believe that what they have brought in and what is supposed to have an effect is practical, whereas what has been described here is impractical. But now we must bear in mind that in these two spheres, in these organs, in the economic sphere and in the spiritual sphere of the threefolded social organism, these things live side by side. If we now honestly consider how this coexistence can be organized democratically, with people living side by side in the two areas - in the economic structure and in the spiritual structure - then the necessity arises for the relationships to be defined from person to person. Here the living necessity simply arises that the one who, let us say, stands at some post of spiritual life, has to establish his relationship to many other personalities and so on. These living relationships must arise between all mature people, and the relationships between mature people and non-mature people arise precisely from the relationship of trust in the field of spiritual life. But all the relationships that arise from the living forces on the one hand of economic life and on the other of spiritual life, all these relationships require that, to a certain extent, people who have come of age begin to define their relationships in their spheres of life among themselves. And this gives rise to a living reciprocity, which will certainly have the peculiarity that, because life is alive and cannot be harnessed to norms, these determinations must be flexible.

An absolutely codified law would appear to be something that contradicts development. If you had a rigidly codified law, it would be basically the same as having a seven-year-old child whose organic life forces you would now determine and, when the child turns forty, would demand that it still live by them. The same applies to the social organism, which is indeed a living organism and will not be the same in 1940 as it was in 1920. In the case of land, for example, it is not a matter of establishing such codified law, but rather of a living interrelationship between the soil and the personalities who stand in the two other characterized areas - the spiritual and the economic - and work in such a way that everything can be kept in flow, in order to be able to also change and metamorphose the true democratic soil on which all people live their present relationships. That is what must be said with regard to the establishment of public legal relationships.

Criminal relationships arise only as a secondary consequence when individual personalities act in an anti-social manner against what has been established as the right relationship between people who have come of age. However, when considering criminal law in the context of the threefold social organism, it becomes clear that it is necessary to take a closer look at the justification of punishment in a practical and real way. I must say that the much-vaunted jurisprudence has not even managed to achieve a clear legal concept in this area. There is a now rather old work, 'Das Recht in der Strafe' (The Right to Punish) by Ludwig Laistner. In it, the introduction gives a history of all theories about the right to punish: deterrence impulses, educational impulses and all the others. Above all, Laistner shows that these theories are actually quite fragile, and then he comes to his own theory, which consists in the fact that one can only derive a right to punish from the fact that the criminal has entered the sphere of the other person through his own free will. Let us assume, then, that one person has created some circle of life for himself, and this is also hypothetical; the other person enters this circle of life, for example, by entering his house or his thoughts and robbing him. Now Ludwig Laistner says: He has entered my sphere of life, and thus I have power over him; just as I have power over my money or over my own thoughts, so now I also have power over the criminal because he has entered my sphere. This power over him has been conceded to me by the criminal himself by entering my sphere. I can now realize this power by punishing him. The punishment is only the equivalent for the fact that he has entered my sphere. That is the only thing that could be found in legal thinking about the justification for punishing a criminal. Whether this happens directly or in a figurative sense, by having it carried out by the state, these are secondary questions.

But why are these things actually unclear? Why is there something here that continually prevents us from having really sharply defined concepts? Because these concepts are taken out of social relations that are already full of all kinds of lack of clarity about life. It presupposes, in fact, the right that first an organism is present and through the organism living movement and thus a circulation is present - just as it presupposes the heart that first other organs are there so that it can function. The legal institution is, so to speak, the heart of the social organism and presupposes that other things develop; it presupposes that other forces are already there. And if there is any lack of clarity in these other circumstances, then it is also quite natural that no clearly defined legal system can exist. But a clearly defined legal system will come about precisely because the other forces that are inherent to the other members of the social organism are allowed to develop in this three-part social organism. Only in this way can the foundations be laid for the development of a true legal system.

Above all, we have not even clearly raised the question today: What is the actual content of the legal system? Yes, you see, in a certain sense, a legal science must be very similar to mathematics, to a living mathematics. But what would we do with all our mathematics if we could not realize it in life? We must be able to apply it. If mathematics were not a living thing and we could not apply it in reality, then all our mathematics would be no science at all. Mathematics as such is, first of all, a formal science. In a certain sense, a properly elaborated jurisprudence would also be a formal science first of all. But this formal science must be such that the object of its application is encountered in reality. And this object of its application in reality is the relationships of people who have come of age and live side by side, who not only seek a balance between their spheres of life here, but are also still within the spiritual and economic links of the social organism.

Thus, only this threefold structure of the social organism will really make it possible for public thought to be formed, and a right that is not publicly thought is not a naturally established right. This would make it possible for legal concepts to be formed publicly, which are then flexible, as has rightly been demanded today. Therefore, I believe that it was very good that Dr. Boos called for the reform of legal life precisely from the realization of the threefold social organism.

Emil Leinhas opens the meeting. Various speakers then take the floor, including Emil Grosheintz. Finally, Rudolf Steiner answers some of the questions raised.

Rudolf Steiner: So a number of questions have been asked. We can continue the discussion afterwards. I can take up some of the questions that have been asked here and would like to come back to the last one, the one from Dr. Grosheintz.

It is understandable that, especially in recent decades, efforts have repeatedly emerged from various social ideas to determine how much work humanity [as a whole] has to do if humanity is to make progress with this amount of work. Naturally, labor would be best utilized economically if only as much labor were performed as is necessary for what humanity wants to consume. And it is indeed very difficult to provide more than rough estimates of these things. But in various circles in which efforts have been made to get to the bottom of this question – it is not particularly easy – it has been possible to form an idea of how much manual labor, that is, simple human labor, is being squandered in the present. Of course, it is not possible to know for sure if one approaches the question not in a dilettantish but in a proper manner, but we can at least say the following for a part of human labor, for physical labor. If we assume that everyone would perform physical work according to their physical abilities, then it would be necessary for every person within the civilized world – excluding the “savages” – to work about 2½ to 3 hours a day. This means that if every person works physically about 2½ to 3 hours a day, the necessary labor for humanity would be provided. Of course, this is only an approximate principle to give a general direction, because in practice it turns out that some people have to work more physically and others less. For example, someone who has to do particularly intellectual work may not be burdened with physical labor; then someone else will have to work more. But if you compare that with the amount of physical labor that is done today, then it can be said that by far the greatest part of humanity has to work so long that much more is expended in labor than would actually have to be expended, probably — and again this is an approximation — five to six times as much physical labor. So you see how much human labor is actually wasted today due to the inefficiency that exists. Much more than one might think is wasted. This is what would come about today through the [realization of the] threefold social order and what those who have no practical sense are so reluctant to accept.

How little people today have a practical sense is evident at every turn, particularly in the judgments that are brought to bear on the impulse of the threefold social organism. What is not at all willing to be understood is that today, in the face of what is going under, it is necessary to develop new spiritual forces; and because it is not understood, these spiritual forces must today, I would say, penetrate through the cracks of the social order if they are to be effective at all. For no cultivation of the spirit can arise from that which a state can order and organize. It is a complete illusion to believe that any cultivation of the spirit can arise from state administration. All state decrees regarding intellectual life are partly a desire for recognition and partly commercial profiteering, and what is then actually achieved intellectually is achieved despite these decrees. Roughly speaking, if there are still children learning something today, they do not learn because of the state, but in spite of the state, because a great deal can still be done in schools against the school laws. And what happens in the sense of the school laws does not develop the spiritual forces, but hinders spiritual development. In a free spiritual life, on the other hand, the forces of human beings would first be revealed, above all by the fact that people who have been educated in such a free spiritual life and then introduced to legal and economic life would really have an overview of the individual areas of life, would be able to act economically and would be able to organize that which cannot be organized today. Today, one can indeed despair when one sees, for all I care, how businesses are organized. Anyone who can think a little and is forced to follow the way in which business is conducted will immediately see that in these cases ten times the amount of energy is wasted because there is nowhere enough will to contract and combine the forces economically, but because one approaches things as broadly as possible. Above all, it is a matter of really recognizing the people who work together through associative life – one must first recognize them if one wants to establish economic life. It is only through the threefold social organism that this economy becomes possible, and the waste of resources will gradually cease.

Some questions – especially those that have been put to me here – show how difficult it actually is for people to find their way into a way of thinking that is completely in line with reality, as it underlies the impulse of the threefold social order. You see, people today are actually as if they did not stand with their feet on the ground at all, but as if they were constantly hovering above reality and stretching their heads up so that they feel as little of reality as possible. The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore used a very apt image for today's Western European cultural man, comparing him to a giraffe, whose head extends far above its body and detaches itself from the rest of the human being. And so it happens that one cannot imagine how this impulse of the threefold social order is derived from a real life practice and how it can never depend on doing any kind of purely theoretical foolishness in these areas.

I would like to say this in advance when I now read the following question to you:

Could a form be conceived within the three-fold social organism that would be suitable for absorbing the feelings of that part of the people who, by the nature of their character, voluntarily submit to and trust a monarchical principle?

Were not the ideas of the threefold social organism first offered to the old regime?

Well, I would have to give a lecture if I were to answer the question appropriately. I will only hint at a few things: “Could a form be imagined within the threefolded social organism that would be suitable for absorbing the feelings of that part of the people who, by nature, voluntarily submit to and trust a monarchical principle?” I would like to know how much of the content of this sentence is taken from true, realistic thinking! If one wants to follow the impulse of the threefold social order, then one must think practically, that is, realistically. Now, of course, one must take something concrete. Let us take the former German Reich. Let us take the last decades of this former German Reich, of these people who “out of their feelings or out of their nature voluntarily bring subordination and trust to a monarchical principle”. I would like to ask you: where did they exist? Of course, there were those who, in the upper reaches of their intellect, gave themselves over to some illusions in this regard. But take the “monarchical principle” of the former German Reich: who ruled there? Wilhelm II, perhaps? He really could not govern, but it was more a matter of the fact that there was a certain military caste that maintained the fiction that this Wilhelm II meant something - he was, after all, only a figurant with theatrical and comical airs, who comically paraded all sorts of stuff in the world. It was a kind of theater play, maintained by a military caste, which did not act out of mere “nature” and “voluntary subordination and trust,” but out of something quite different, out of all kinds of old habits, conveniences, out of the belief that it just had to be that way - a belief that was not, however, deeply rooted in the human breast. So this whole thing lay, and it was held more than that it really ruled. That has become apparent in the last week of July 1914. I have only hinted at this in my “Key Points” by saying that everything had come to naught. But it is thoroughly grounded in the facts. Then, in addition to what came out of the military chests, this comedy was held together in the last decades by the even more disgusting nature of big industry and big business, which added up and which, from a completely internal point of view, was based on dishonest impulses and thus maintained this monarchical principle.

Now let us again take a single specific moment from which we can see what is actually meant in reality, apart from the conventional lies that maintain something like this out of people's prejudices – which is called the “monarchical principle”. On a certain day in 1917 – you all know it – Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was dismissed as German Chancellor. If you follow this dismissal down to the last detail, you will find who dismissed this man – this man who, of course, played an almost monarchical role in this ill-fated Germany for quite a long time before and after. Who actually dismissed Theobald von Bethmann? You see, it was the fat Mr. Erzberger – and not Wilhelm II, who did not play the slightest role in this. Very few people know what actually happened back then, what fat Mr. Erzberger actually did, how he actually exercised monarchical power in those days, because very few people actually care about what is really going on, but let themselves be lulled by all sorts of things.

When one reflects on something like the “principle of monarchy”, then one must start with the concrete facts, and then one must be clear about what reality consists of, whether it is monarchism or not. Do you think that in today's England, that personality reigns who, in the pictures we get to see, does not really make a very intelligent impression and who is always referred to in government decrees as “His British Majesty's Government”? No, look at England today, and see how the whole country is following Lloyd George and how he is actually exercising monarchical power. Please look at how things are in the so-called republics, see how things are really quite different from the way people believe them to be according to clichéd words and caricatured concepts. But it is essential that, if truth is to take the place of lies, questions must be asked from the basis of reality. Therefore, when speaking of the threefold social organism, the question cannot truly be raised: Would any Lloyd George with monarchical airs be conceivable? The threefold social order says something very definite about its three members: spiritual life, legal life and economic life. The things will already arise; just as the other people in such an organism get the position appropriate to their abilities, so will there also be “monarchs”.

But it seems as if the crux of the question lies in the last few lines: “Were the ideas of threefolding offered for the first time to the old regime?” Yes, but to whom should they have been offered? They had to be offered to those who could do something. What would have come of it is another matter. The point was to look for people from all over who could base what they did on the impulse of threefolding. Yes, what use would it have been, for example, when the Peace of Brest-Litovsk was in prospect, to somehow shout out to the world in those days: abstract principle! What use would it have been; it would not even have been possible. The point would have been to incorporate the threefolding idea into the actual deeds of the Peace of Brest-Litovsk; the point would have been to conclude this peace in such a way that it would have been concluded under the influence of this impulse.

My dear attendees, it was shortly after the Peace of Brest-Litovsk that I came to Berlin and spoke to a gentleman who was in many ways Ludendorff's right-hand man. At that time, it was already clear to those who could know such things what devastation the entire peace agreement of Brest-Litovsk would cause. Furthermore, it was clear that a major spring offensive would begin in the spring.

And I traveled to Berlin via Karlsruhe. It was in January. At that time, it was well known that if there was a crash in former Germany, Prince Max of Baden would become Chancellor of the Reich. I also spoke with Prince Max of Baden in January about the threefold

of the social organism, because it would have been a matter of the power of the impulses of the threefold social organism naturally having an effect on the directly concrete, real facts. Before the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a long time before, when there was truly still enough time, I put forward the whole idea of the threefold social organism to Mr. von Kühlmann in such a way that I made it clear: From America come the crazy ideas and proposals and crazy ideas, the crazy Fourteen Points, which are absolutely abstract and will lead the world into nothingness, and the only thing that could really be done from the European side would be to counter this with this great world program of the threefold social order.

I would have liked to have seen, my dear audience, what it would have meant in those days if someone in an authoritative position had had the courage to counter the zero program of the West with a real, substantial, real-political program, such as the impulses of the threefold social organism! And even if some people to whom I presented the matter said: “Well, write a pamphlet or a book about it!” – [So I had to answer:] ”What really matters is not whether things are published, but how they enter the world of facts.

Now, the conversation I had with Mr. von Kühlmann – the content of which can still be proven today, because the gentleman who was with me is still alive, thank God, and hopefully will be for a long time. The conversation ended with Mr. von Kühlmann telling me in his own way: I am just a limited soul. Mr. von Kühlmann meant, of course, that he also has other statesmen around him and that he is limited in his resolutions; but I thought of a different interpretation of this saying.

Well, I came to Berlin in the spring, and spoke with a gentleman who, as I said, was very close to Ludendorff, and I wanted to make clear what an absurdity it is to undertake the spring offensive, which he spoke of at the time as one was allowed to speak about it. I said: Of course one cannot and must not interfere in strategic matters if one is not a military man, but I am proceeding from all the preconditions that do not play any part in strategy. I assume that Ludendorff achieves everything he can possibly imagine achieving, or if all of Ludendorff's ideas are not achieved, then if he does not achieve them, the effect of the unfortunate war is still the same. At the time, it was possible to clearly show that the effect would have to be exactly the same; and that is what happened later; it is the case now. Then the Lord said to me, although I was constantly afraid that he would return to his chair, from which he had jumped up, he was so nervous: What do you want? Kühlmann had the threefold order in his pocket, and with it in his pocket he went to Brest-Litovsk. Our politicians are nothing, our politicians are zeros. We military have no other obligation than to fight, to fight. We know nothing else!

You see, in the old days things were really offered to the old regime first – it is not a matter of coming up with ideas out of the blue, but really of looking for ways in which they can be realized. Then, ladies and gentlemen, there was the time when I only had access to those parts of the world where it gradually became a rather impractical question to ask how one should behave towards monarchs and what one could do there in regarding the threefold order – other areas are not initially available to me; I am not yet allowed into pseudo-monarchical England, hyper-monarchical America and thoroughly republican-monarchical France, and so on. Those who are grounded in reality will truly not continue to discuss the highly impractical question of how one should behave towards the monarchical principle, because this monarchical principle will not be able to dominate in any way, it will sit in completely obscure corners and will certainly not necessitate a serious discussion in the near future - on the contrary, today completely different things are in need of discussion.

And I only ask you, dear readers, to read my essay on “Shadow Coups” in the threefolding newspaper, in which I tried to show how unnecessary the agitation of the more left-wing pages was against the whole Kapp comedy. Because ultimately, the way things were at the time, the left was no better than the right, and it didn't matter which side was doing the absurd. Now it is a matter of seeking reality only and exclusively, of bringing the threefold order into as many minds as possible, so that they can then carry the threefold order idea. That is the only reality. It may take a very long time if adversity does not shorten it. But more care will have to be taken to bring this threefold order idea into the minds of those who are capable of it. That it has not yet taken root in the minds of the leading figures is shown, for example, by the fact that on the German side, even in Spa, those who are still regarded as leaders are still those who were also regarded as leaders in the past and in whose heads the idea of threefolding certainly does not enter. So you see, it is really not a matter of wasting thought on asking such unrealistic questions, but it is really a matter of working in the spirit of the threefolding idea, so that this threefolding idea enters as many minds as possible. The question today is not whether we should think about how people voluntarily submit, not even to a monarch, but to a monarchical principle, placing their trust in it and so on; whether or not we think about it seems to me to be a matter of indifference. It is completely unnecessary to devote oneself to such false thoughts when one is really dealing with something that wants to work entirely out of reality. I will only touch on the other questions very briefly, as this closing statement has undoubtedly taken too long already:

Will it be possible to have associations without spiritual research? Is it possible to recognize whether someone will develop an invention after years or whether he is just a botcher?

Now, you see, these questions are not based on a proper examination of what the associations will be. Of course, the difficulties that lie in human nature will always be there. The pure belief that one can build earthly paradises is erroneous. Certain difficulties will, of course, always be there. But the decision as to whether or not an invention has any prospects of success must be made by the individual, today as much as in the future. The only difference is that today the individual is dependent on himself or on some traditions. If associations are present, however, he is connected with everything that is associated and what can come out of the people connected with him through their associations. So the judgment that has to be made about such things is essentially supported and carried by the fact that people are connected through associations.

Recently, I have often used an example to show how one can be a very clever person today without coming to a judgment about the capacity of this or that. I then gave the example that there have been people in all kinds of parliaments, educated in practice, who, from the mid-19th century onwards, advocated the gold standard by claiming and substantiating that the gold standard would lead to free trade and thus to such a configuration of trade that they imagined it would be particularly favorable for international human relations. The opposite has occurred: the gold standard has led everywhere to the system of protective tariffs. I have said that I do not claim that the people who predicted that the gold standard would lead to free trade were all stupid, even though it has led everywhere to protective tariffs. For the most part, they were very, very clever people. Read the parliamentary speeches that were delivered in large numbers in the most diverse parliaments about the gold standard, and you will see that very clever things were said about the gold standard. But the whole mechanism of public economic life was individualized, and the individual was not in a position to see the bigger picture. No matter how clever he was, he was not in a position to gain his own experience.

This experience can only come from being part of the whole fabric of associations, from knowing who knows something about this, who knows something about that, yes, who knows anything at all as an individual - not just because the person concerned has been appointed from some position, but because you have dealt with him in the fabric of associations in so-and-so many cases. The connecting element of this associative fabric is something that must arise out of trust. And so one can say: there is no either/or at all in life. But what makes it difficult for people today to recognize whether something that is invented will bear fruit in human life will, to a large extent, be lost in associative life. One must think of things in the big picture. It is truly disheartening when someone says to you, “Well, I agree; everything must become new, everything must take on different forms, and you tell me what these different forms should be.” But then tell me, what will my grocery store look like when these new forms are in place? Yes, my dear audience, it might perhaps be necessary to tell him that such a shop would no longer exist in that form. Then, of course, he would be quite dissatisfied with the answer. The threefold order is concerned everywhere with something that can be tackled directly every day and that will progress as quickly as the people capable of doing so are available. It could happen very quickly.

Only, if you want to tackle it practically, you cannot ask:

Where does a device begin to be a means of production, for example a sewing machine? Does it become a means of production only when I no longer use it just for my own use, and am I then no longer allowed to use it as something for myself?

Yes, my dear audience, when such big questions are at stake as they are today, you really cannot take the answer from a very limited circle; that is impossible. I guarantee you that when the threefold social order is realized, you will have a relationship to your sewing machine that is satisfying. For one usually does not even consider that the sewing machine and the like, for all I care hair combs or the like, can indeed be means of production, because means of production is everything that enables me to carry out my profession. So, you cannot limit the concept of means of production in that way. What it is about is that one should not think so narrowly at all. Just think about it, here is a church, here is the second church - I am choosing an example that is common in Catholicism. Let us assume that Father N lives here (he is drawn on the board). This priest says mass every day, says vespers on Sundays and so on; that is when he puts on his vestments. These vestments that he puts on as vestments all belong to the church. If the pastor N. is transferred, for example from church A to church B, he does not take any of the chasubles with him; it all stays with church A. And there, in church B, he again puts on the chasubles that belong to that church, if one can speak of “belonging”, but you know what I mean.

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When it comes to chasubles, you have a completely different relationship to the things associated with the profession than you do to a sewing machine or typewriter that you take with you when you travel from one place to another. I am not saying that the same order should be introduced for the sewing machine in the future as applies to chasubles. As you can see, there are various possibilities for getting what you need to do your work. So we should not think narrowly when it comes to the great issues of the world today. We should not let our concern for our sewing machine confuse our thinking about the threefold social order. The third question is even stranger:

What happens when someone does not want to step down, when they can no longer manage the means of production themselves? Or, if they do not want to step down, will they be forced out? Who will be able to see through it and tell them that they should leave?

Well, these are such terribly abstract questions that they do not arise for anyone who sees the course of events in the reality of the threefold social order. Read my “Key Points”; in the reality of the threefold social order there are innumerable means of forcing someone to resign. And besides, one must only bear in mind that with the threefold social order – and this is the essential point – the whole relationship of the human being to society changes. One thinks, doesn't one: How will it happen at all, that one now appoints one's successor? One should not ask such questions, which are so far removed from reality. One must ask such questions in a very concrete way, based on the experience of the facts. Let us say that someone becomes incapable, incapable due to mental deficiency, and due to this mental deficiency he reaches the point where he can no longer manage any business. Now, in most cases, someone who sees that he is reaching the point of mental deficiency and can no longer find his way around will hire someone to help him. Then the succession will already emerge from this relationship. If the situation is not as I have described, then in real life quite different, but always quite specific circumstances will arise. So if someone does not want to go, life will show him that he must. Because the one who is not capable will no longer find anyone who wants to work with him, and he will then no longer be able to run his business profitably.

So things turn out quite differently in real life than in theory. And that is why it is important to approach things with realistic thinking that puts oneself in the position of real, practical life. If you hear people talking about such things at a socialist meeting today, you will hear all sorts of things being said, because no one is talking about reality. And how could the proletariat, which had been allowed to grow up in this way, without anyone taking an interest in it, which had been put to the machine, which had not got to know real life, real connections, how could the proletariat have an understanding of anything other than completely unworldly theories? But that is the problem: the world has ended because of such unworldly theories, and no new structure is emerging. That is the problem: we must use every possible means to point to reality and grasp everything from reality. That is what matters.

Richard Eriksen will give a lecture on 'The Philosophical Basis for the Threefold Social Organism'. This will be followed by a discussion, at the end of which Rudolf Steiner will comment again on various questions.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear participants, the questions that have been asked and that I would like to address are as follows. First, the first question:

What should be the answer when the outside world asks us the practical question: How should the worker in the threefold social organism get his money?

Now, I believe that this question in its purely external nature is clearly answered in the “Key Points”. The point is that, in the sense of the key points - from those conditions that are stated there - the structure of the social organism must be such that there is a manager for those who need such a manager and work under his leadership, and that the manager will essentially also be the mediator for how the products produced jointly with the worker are to be brought into the market. This will naturally also bring about a different attitude in the administration of what figures as money in the threefold social organism. In accordance with those contractual agreements, which are also characterized in the “key points”, the worker will receive his money from the supervisor. This is a purely external process, which, as an external process, will hardly differ much from what is customary now. But, ladies and gentlemen, we are not concerned with such external processes, but with the question of what functions money will play in the threefold social organism. Today, when it is paper money, money itself is a commodity inserted among other commodities. In the threefolded social organism, money must gradually lose this character. And of course, pricing can only take place within the economic part of the social organism. The banknotes must increasingly become part of the large accounting that takes place between all people who are involved in economic life - and that includes all people in any closed area. When this large-scale bookkeeping comes about of its own accord, then the banknotes simply represent what is to be recorded on the assets side. Those who think in the abstract, who think in the way that one thinks in bourgeois circles, think that such bookkeeping already exists. This is nonsense, of course, because it is not desirable as it is. But such an accounting, as one will need it, it forms itself completely by itself, it will not be abstractly a large accounting somehow, but it is then simply present in reality. And what matters is that a certain relationship arises between the work manager and the person who has to work under the direction of the work manager. And for such a relationship it is meaningless if the worker receives the money from the foreman, just as it is meaningless now if, say, you are a civil servant somewhere and receive the money from the till. These things must be seen in the context of the whole complex of questions of capital and human labor; only then does it, I would say, acquire the right nuance.

The second question:

How should one imagine the transition from today's social and economic conditions to the practical realization of threefolding?

Actually, the basic ideas of my “Key Points of the Social Question” do not allow for such a question to be asked. This is because what is advocated in the “Key Points” is not some utopia that is to take the place of what is there now and where a transition would have to be created between the present conditions and those that follow. Rather, the point is to bring about this threefold order, if only the threefold idea is understood by a sufficiently large number of people, and if, out of this understanding, people will take care of their spiritual, state and economic conditions. This threefold social order comes into being in the same way that a skirt comes into being when a tailor has learned how to sew a skirt; then he can also realize it. And so, because it is conceived as something thoroughly practical, the threefold social organism will be realized. There is no need for a transition. That is why I said in the key points: what is meant here can be tackled at any moment, and there is no need to worry about a transition. It is just as unnecessary to think about a transition as it is to worry about the question: Yes, I have a person who is now 17 years old and will be 18 next year; what will the transition be like between the 17th and 18th year?

There is no need to ask such questions when one is concerned with a practical idea that simply looks at what is now and asks: What do present conditions demand? If they are to develop naturally, not unnaturally, they demand precisely what threefolding gives; and there is no need to think of a special transition. Today's social and economic conditions are such that one can either continue to treat them unnaturally or set up some utopia, such as Leninism or Trotskyism, and try to shape them from that starting point. Or one can approach them naturally, and then one has threefolding. And that is what it is really about. So you cannot ask how the transition to practical realization happens, but you must always grasp these things in the concrete. But, you see, in the concrete, people do not like to grasp things.

During the time when the threefold social order was still the subject of discussion within a relatively small circle, the question was posed somewhat differently than it is now, because at that time there was a terrible fear that everything could be broken. The question was: What should the government actually do? You simply had to say what was practical for the government: namely, simply to acknowledge that the spiritual and economic life should be more free. When a labor minister once asked me what he should do, I had to answer: You see, the difficulties arise from the fact that the three limbs of the social organism have been thrown together; they now stand in such a way that on the one hand they have mandates that only belong in the state under the rule of law, and on the other hand only in economic life. And so one would actually like to see — which I do not exactly want to happen to you personally — one would actually like to see you beaten in half by the honest Swabian in the middle, like the Turk. The division would have to begin with the labor minister in question. Now you see, these are the things that must be pointed out again and again: that threefolding must be thought of as an eminently practical matter. Then people will not ask questions like the one about the transition from today's conditions to the practical realization of threefolding.

A third question:

A member of the Group for the Threefolding of the Social Organism is an authorized signatory for a large corporate society whose activities span a network across the north of England; it has 10 million members. He would like to know to what extent such a corporate society is in line with the principle of threefolding and where it deviates from it.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the person in question will probably only be able to answer that for himself personally, because he will very soon notice that this company, for which he is an authorized signatory, has very little to do with the threefold social order; he will either be able to be an authorized signatory for that company or want to work for the threefold social order. The two will not easily go together. Whether he will be able to propagate the threefold social order within the corporate society will depend entirely on whether he is able, through the strength of his spirit, through everything he has to say to found the threefold social order, to win the 10 million members over to the threefold social order. If he can win them over, then his work as a procurator is fully justified within these 10 million, and then one would like to congratulate him as a staunch representative of the threefold order. But I don't think these two activities can be reconciled: being a representative of the threefold order and a procurator for a corporate society. But, of course, sometimes they are compatible; in the threefold social order, it all depends on the people involved. We in the threefold order have seen and experienced this over and over again.

Now a few words; it is too late to elaborate on some things today that I would like to. You see, it is indeed the case that certain things are always approached from the wrong angle.

For example, it has been demanded that the proletariat should be spoken to in a way that is understandable to the masses. Yes, you see, the way the proletariat was spoken to in Stuttgart from April 1919 onwards was so understandable to the masses that very soon thousands and thousands of workers came together and found the language to be perfectly understandable. Then people came along who spoke in old Marxist phrases. Yes, my dear audience, if an audience, I would say a socially inexperienced audience, an audience that had not yet been stuffed full of Marxist buzzwords, had listened to what these leaders sometimes said to their flock in Marxist phrases and the like, then these people would have said: totally incomprehensible. They only found it understandable because they sometimes picked up a word – “surplus value” and so on – that the people who were the leaders at the time poured into a socialist sauce that was truly not meant to be understood by the masses; it was often incomprehensible because it was nonsense. Yes, but “common understanding” – a lot of nonsense is done with such things. It must be said that what is often referred to today in working-class circles as “common understanding” is actually something - I have indeed shown such heirlooms in my “Key Points of the Social Question” - that the proletariat has received from the bourgeoisie. What is called incomprehensibility there is also something that the proletariat has taken over from the bourgeoisie.

This common understanding, yes, you see, that too must have been experienced in practice. Once, many years ago, I was invited to Berlin to speak about Goethe's “Faust.” The audience included people who truly were not workers, but rather citizens with wallets and many others who were not workers either. At that time I had tried to speak about Goethe's “Faust” in the way one must speak. There were also people who said afterwards: Yes, Goethe's “Faust”, you can't really have that in the theater in the evening; that's not a play the way Blumenthal makes plays; that's a science; you don't want that in the evening, such a science. And when one remembers the viewpoints from which popular education is and has been practiced, especially in the last few decades, let us say, for example, by theater poets who made in popular understanding – but actually only for their pocket – then one only gets a historical idea of what is meant by popular understanding. And you realize that this demand for popular understanding is something that the working class still has to get rid of as a remnant of what it has inherited from the bourgeoisie, from this comfortable, sleepy bourgeoisie that does not want to think. For common comprehensibility is actually the demand to listen to something that does not require thinking. But we have come into this catastrophic time precisely because people do not want to think. And we will not get out of it until people decide to think.

Now, basically, what is called socialism today is the ultimate in abstraction. Isn't it true that we often hear people grumble about “-ists” and “-isms.” In addition to “idealism,” “spiritualism,” “realism,” “mechanism,” “idealists,” and “spiritualists,” in more recent times we have also been given: “Bolshevism” and “Bolshevists,” “Marxists” and “Marxism.” At least one concept can be associated with 'mechanism': 'mechanical'; 'spiritualists', 'spiritualism' can be associated with the concept 'spiritual'; 'idealism' still contains the word 'ideal'. But 'Bolshevism' and 'Bolshevists', 'Marxists', 'Marxism' — there is nothing at all left in the words. It is the “ism” of Marx, Marxists are those who want Marx. It is the bitterest irony, the ultimate in abstraction that one could ever have pushed; it is indeed something grotesque when one considers how far abstraction has come precisely in a movement that wants to be universally understood.

And now, in conclusion, something about what has been said about the two social laws, as I formulated them, the law of individualism and the law of socialism. I formulated one of these laws in connection with a book by Ludwig Stein. At the time, I had to discuss a book by Ludwig Stein, a thick book about the social question from a philosophical point of view. It was not easy to wind one's way through the web of Ludwig Stein's thoughts, this typical philosopher of the present day. It is the same Ludwig Stein who, because he had written so much, had to write so quickly that the following once happened to him: When he wanted to prove in a book that only people in the temperate zone of the earth can develop a culture, he said that it was quite natural that only people in the temperate zone can develop a real culture, because at the North Pole they would have to freeze to death and at the South Pole they would have to burn. Well, you see, that is the enunciation of a philosopher who taught at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bern for many years. And that philosopher enjoyed a certain reputation.

You see how grotesque such abstractness can become, that occurred to me once in Weimar. Another Bernese professor worked with us in the Goethe and Schiller Archive, and this other professor told the following story. We got into a conversation about the early works of Robert Saitschick. Saitschick really did produce some first works that were quite respectable; it was only later that he became such a “Kohler” as he is now. Robert Saitschick was a private lecturer at the University of Bern at the time, the Ludwig Stein Professor. Robert Saitschick was a poor fellow; and Ludwig Stein, in addition to being a professor at the University of Bern, owned a whole row of houses on Köpenickerstraße in Berlin. And that is why this Professor Ludwig Stein was also known in Berlin. For example, I couldn't get rid of him at all; when I was in Berlin from time to time, Stein also came, who then, after I had written this review, said to me: I would like to speak as their positive with my comparative again. - That was the constant joke he made. Well, Stein was a full professor in Bern, Saitschick a private lecturer, and the professor who told me – he was, by the way, a very honest, dear gentleman, but still very much caught up in university ideas – said: That Robert Saitschick, he's a completely unqualified guy, you can't talk about him at all. I said: He actually wrote some pretty nice books. “Yes,” said the professor, ”but just think what he did. He's a very poor fellow, and he asked his professor for a loan. The professor gave him the money, and when it took too long, he asked Saitschick to give the money back. And this is what he did: he said, “Professor, now that you have said that, I demand that you sign a document stating that you are a mean fellow.” And the professor signed this document! The professor told me that; I am only repeating what he told me: Well, you see, a private lecturer who forces his professor to issue him with such a document, that's a pretty mean guy. — That's just the university's view.

Yes, well, I had to review this book by Ludwig Stein, and I had to point out that the natural course of human development in social terms is that people first live in bonds, in associations, and then the individual works his way out of the associations to achieve individuality. Later, I tried to formulate the other law, the law of social life, from an independent point of view, and showed that the whole social constitution can only develop if the individual, in the economic context, does not live on what he himself but when he gives what he earns to the community and when he in turn receives from the community - how this happens is shown by the “key points”, and I have explained this in Zurich. Now, anyone who can see through social connections today knows - even if it looks different at first - that the one who makes a skirt for himself today does not actually produce it in reality. That he produces it – in a field where we have such an extensive division of labor today, that is only an illusion, because what he produces is consumed by himself. But this law of social life is absolutely valid. The situation is such that this law can only be consciously realized by those who break away from the associations and become individuals. These two things are perhaps in contradiction in the abstract; in reality they demand each other, they belong together. First the individuality must free itself from the associations, so that out of the individuality the social can be realized. That is the solution of the riddle in this case. And so various apparent contradictions would be resolved if one were willing to go into them.

Of course there would be an enormous amount to add to what has been said today; but time is so advanced and I believe that these threefolding evenings will continue, so that we may be able to talk about such things next time.

Roman Boos: Dear attendees, the question of how judgment is formed in the threefold social organism is to be addressed this evening. Dr. Steiner will give the introductory lecture. I would like to ask you now to take an active part in the discussion, and especially those of you who have something to say about the problems that will be presented today, to speak up then. I now ask Dr. Steiner to begin his lecture.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear attendees! I would like to introduce this evening's discussion with a few remarks about how a social judgment, on which a new social order must be built, can come about. I should say at the outset that it will not be easy to speak about this subject in a popular way. One should actually recognize the impossibility of speaking about this subject in a popular way from the facts that we now live in.

You see, our time is basically in many ways quite opposed to man forming a healthy social judgment. It is true that much is said today about man as a social being, about social conditions and social demands in general. But this talk about social demands is not really based on a deep understanding of what a social being actually is. We need not be surprised at this, because it is only in the present time that we are at the beginning of the time in which humanity is to mature to form a social judgment. In a sense, humanity has not needed to form a social judgment until now. Why? Of course, human beings have always lived in some kind of social circumstances, but basically they have not – not until now – organized these social circumstances out of their social consciousness, out of a real understanding. They have, if I may say so, received them in an ordered way through a kind of instinctive activity. Up to the present form of the state, which, in Europe, is basically no more than three or four hundred years old, people have formed connections more out of their instincts, and it has not actually come to grouping people out of judgment, consideration and understanding. Out of this understanding, out of a truly clear judgment, the threefold social organism wants to tackle the social question. In doing so, it is basically doing something that is still quite unfamiliar to people and that is highly uncomfortable for the vast majority of people today.

What has actually happened? The earlier social associations and the present state association have developed from human instincts, and people today simply accept this association, which is still combined with all sorts of national instincts. They grow into this association. Instinctively, they grow into this association and avoid thinking about it – or at least they avoid thinking about it to a certain extent. At most, one thinks about the extent to which one wants to have a say in the affairs of the state, but the framework of the state is accepted. They accept it, even the most radical wing of the socialists; Lenin and Trotsky also accept the state, the state that is put together out of all sorts of things, but instinctively, the state that was ultimately worked on by the old tsars. They accept it and at most wonder how they should shape what they want within this state. The question of whether the state should be left as it is or whether a different structure should be adopted that is based on understanding is not even raised. But you see, this question – how can the instinctive nature of the old social life be transformed into a social life that is born out of the human soul? – is the main question underlying the impulse for the threefold social organism. This question cannot be resolved in any other way than by the emergence of a more thorough knowledge of the human being, more thorough than the knowledge of the human being that has existed in recent centuries and that exists in the present.

One can say that the impulse for the threefold social order arose directly from the question: How should man come to a judgment about how he should live together with other people? It arose from a correct observation of what man must demand in the present. But most people do not seriously want to respond to the demands of the present. They would prefer to take the existing situation and make more or less radical improvements here and there. For example, it is probably easier to talk to an Englishman about anything but the threefold social order, since he usually takes it for granted that the unified state of England is an ideal that must not be challenged. Wherever you touch on the subject, you notice this prejudice. But this is nothing more than the persistence of the old human instincts in relation to social coexistence, and we must get beyond them. We must come to a conscious coexistence. This is highly inconvenient for people today, because they do not really want to come to a judgment out of an inner activity, out of an inner activity. They would basically like, as I said, to have a say in what is already there, but they do not really want to think thoroughly about how to deal with what is there and how to rectify what has been led into the absurd by the last catastrophes. This absolutely new aspect of threefolding is something that people basically do not want to see. They are not willing to make the effort of forming a social judgment.

You see, the question: how does a social judgment come about? - immediately breaks down into three separate questions when approached in the right spiritual-scientific way. And the sources from which the threefold social organism flows are actually based on this, that the question of how to form a social judgment is immediately divided into three separate questions. It is impossible to arrive at a judgment in the same way in the common spiritual life, in the social spiritual life, as in the legal or state life or in the economic life. Recently an essay appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt entitled 'Political Scholasticism'. In it, a very clever gentleman – journalists are usually clever – makes fun of the fact that in contemporary public life, people strive to separate the political from the economic. He would, of course, also make fun of it and call it a scholastic hair-splitting if one wanted to separate public life into the three parts, the spiritual part, the legal or state part and the economic part, because he has a very special reason, a reason that is so very easy for the man of the present time to understand. He says: Yes, in real life the economic, political and intellectual life is nowhere separated; they flow into each other everywhere, so it is scholastic to separate them. Now, my esteemed audience, I think one could also say that one should not perceive the head and the trunk and the limbs of a person separately, because in real life they belong together. Of course, the three limbs of the social organism also belong together, but one cannot get by if one confuses the one with the other – just as little as nature would get by if it grew a foot or a hand on the shoulders instead of a head, if it were to shape the head into a hand. It is a particular characteristic of these clever people of the present day that they have taken the greatest happiness with the most stupid of our time, because the most stupid today appears to be the most intellectually clever of the great multitude.

What matters is that at the moment when humanity is no longer to enter public life instinctively, but more consciously than before, the whole way in which man stands in the spiritual life of culture, how he stands in the life of law and the state, how he stands in the life of economics, is different. It is just as different as the blood circulation is different in the head, in the feet or in the legs, and different in the heart - and yet the three work together in just the right way when they are organized separately in the right way.

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And we too, as human beings, have to form our social judgment in various ways in the field of intellectual life, in the field of legal or state life, and in the field of economic life. But we have to find ways to arrive at a truly sound judgment in the three fields. In general, this path - basically there are three paths - is really quite heavily obstructed by the prejudices of the time. Many obstacles must first be removed from the way.

In order to arrive at a sound social judgment in spiritual life, it must be clear that today's man is utterly incapable of even posing the question: What does social mean in spiritual life? What does human coexistence mean in spiritual terms? We still do not have a knowledge of man that, I would not even say, provides answers to such questions, but I would just say that it encourages such questions. This knowledge of man must first be created by spiritual science and made popular among mankind. One must raise the question properly and reasonably: What difference does it make whether I am facing a human being or whether I, as a lonely observer of nature, have only nature facing me, thus gaining knowledge of this nature by directly facing nature as an observer? I enter into a certain reciprocal relationship with nature; I allow nature to make impressions on me; I process these impressions, form inner images about these impressions by entering into a reciprocal relationship with nature; I take something in from outside, process it inwardly. That is basically the simple fact. It looks the same on the outside when I listen to a person, that is, enter into a spiritual relationship with him, find in his words the meaning that he puts into them. The words of the person make an impression on me; I process them inwardly into ideas. I enter into interaction with other people. One might think that whether I interact with nature or with other people is basically the same. But it is not. Anyone who claims that it is the same has not even looked at the matter in the right way. You have to pay attention to these things.

You see, I would now like to give a specific example. There is a fact in German intellectual life without which this German intellectual life is inconceivable. When one describes the intellectual life of a certain area, then one usually describes – depending on what one has reason to do – either the economic conditions of the time when this intellectual life developed, or one describes individual great personalities who, through their ingenious achievements, have fertilized this intellectual life. But now I want to mention a fact of a quite different nature, without which the special character of German intellectual life in the 19th century is inconceivable. I would like to speak of an archetypal phenomenon of social intellectual coexistence: the ten-year intimate relationship between Goethe and Schiller. One cannot say that Goethe gave Schiller something or that Schiller gave Goethe something and that they worked together. That does not capture the fact that I mean, but it is something else. Schiller became something through Goethe that he would never have become alone. Goethe became something through Schiller that he would never have become alone. And if you only have Goethe and only have Schiller and think about their effect on the German people, you do not get what actually happened. Because if you only have Goethe or only have Schiller and consider the effects that emanate from emanating from both, there is not yet what has become, but a third, quite invisible, but of tremendously strong effect, arises from the confluence of the two (It is drawn on the blackboard). You see, that is an archetypal phenomenon of social interaction in the spiritual realm.

What is the actual basis for this? Today's rough science does not study such things, because today's science does not penetrate to the human being at all. Spiritual science will study such things and only through this will it bring light into the social and spiritual life of people. Those of you who have heard something about spiritual science know what I am only briefly hinting at now. Spiritual science shows that the development of the human being is a real, actual fact. It shows that as a person develops, he becomes ever more mature and original, ever bringing forth different and different things from the depths of his being. And if social life suppresses this bringing forth, then that social life is wrong and must be brought into line.

Now, Goethe and Schiller were both individuals and personalities who were socially blessed in the highest sense. When did it happen that one can say that Schiller understood Goethe best, and that Goethe understood Schiller best? They were able to converse with each other best, to exchange their ideas best, and to achieve something together, this invisible something, which in turn had an effect and is one of the most significant facts in German intellectual life. I have tried very hard to determine the year of the most intimate period of their lives together, the time when the ideas of one, I would say, most thoroughly penetrated the ideas of the other. I think it was around 1795 or 1796 (written on the board). 1796, there is really something very special about this collaboration between Goethe and Schiller.

If one now investigates why Schiller of all people understood Goethe best in this year and why Goethe allowed himself to be understood best by Schiller in this year, one comes to this. Schiller was born in 1759; so he was thirty-seven years old in 1796. Goethe was ten years older; so he was forty-seven years old. Now spiritual science shows us that there are various life junctions in human life; they are not usually taken into account today: the change of teeth - the human being becomes something else by surviving the change of teeth, also in the spiritual-soul relationship -, sexual maturity, later transitions - these are less noticeable, but they are still there in the 28th year, again in the 35th and in the 42nd year. If one is really able to observe this inner human life, then one knows that the beginning of the 40s, I would say on average the 42nd year, when the human being develops inwardly, when he undergoes an inner spiritual life, this 42nd year is something very special. Between the 35th year and the 42nd year, what can be called the consciousness soul matures in the human being. And it has become fully mature, this judging consciousness soul, this conscious soul that enters into a relationship with the world entirely from the ego – this consciousness soul becomes mature at that point. Schiller at 37 was five years younger than 42, Goethe at 47 was five years older than 42. Goethe had passed the 42nd year just as much as Schiller was below it.

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Schiller was at the same stage in the development of the consciousness soul, Goethe was beyond it; they were at the same distance from it. What does that mean? In relation to the soul, it means a similar contrast. I know that such comparisons are daring, but our language is also coarse, and therefore one can only use daring comparisons when one has important, fundamental facts to cite. For the soul-spiritual, it means a similar contrast as the male and female for the physical-sexual. In relation to physical development, the sexualities are unevenly developed. Out of courtesy to the ladies, and in order not to make the gentlemen arrogant, I will not say which sexuality is a later development and which sexuality is an earlier development, but they are of a different temporal development. It is not the whole human being, the head does not take part in it, so those whose sexuality must be thought of in an earlier stage of development need not feel offended. But it is not so in relation to the soul; there the earlier can come together with the later, then a very special fertilization arises. Then something arises that can only arise through this different kind of combination at different times. This is, of course, a special case; here, in social life, the interplay of soul to soul is formed in a special way. Whenever people influence each other, something arises that can never arise from the mere interaction of human beings and nature. You see, you get a certain idea of what it actually means to let something that comes not from nature but from another human being take effect on you.

This became a very particular problem for me when I immersed myself in Nietzsche, for example. Nietzsche had something that a whole range of people with a similar background to Nietzsche's now also have; it's just that he had it in a particularly radical sense. For example, he looked at philosophers, the ancient Greek philosophers, he looked at Schopenhauer, he looked at Eduard von Hartmann and so on. It can be said that Nietzsche was never really interested in the content of a philosophy. The content of the philosophy, the content of the world view, was actually of no great importance to him; but he was interested in the person. What Thales was thinking as the content of his world view is of no importance to him, but how this person Thales lives his way to his concepts is what interests him. This is what interests him about Heraclitus, not the content of Heraclitus' philosophy. It is precisely that which comes from a human being that has an effect on him, and in this way Nietzsche shows himself to be an especially modern character. But this will become the general constitution of the human soul life. Today people still argue about opinions in many ways. They will have to stop arguing about opinions for the simple reason that everyone must have their own opinion. Just as if you have a tree and photograph it from different sides, it is still the same tree, but the photographs look quite different; so everyone can have their own opinion, depending on - it just depends on the point of view they take. If he is reasonable in today's sense, he no longer argues about opinions, but at most finds some opinions healthy and some unhealthy. He no longer argues about opinions. It would be the same as if someone looked at different photographs and then said: Yes, they are quite different, these are right and those are wrong. At most, one can be interested in how someone arrives at their opinion: whether it is particularly clever or foolish, whether it is low and bears no fruit or whether it is high and beneficial for humanity.

Today it is a matter of really clarifying how people relate to each other in their spiritual and social coexistence, and how one person has something to give to another. This is particularly evident when we see what a growing child must receive from the other person who is his or her teacher. There are quite different forces at work than between Goethe and Schiller, even if they are not placed in such a lofty position, but there are more complicated forces at play. What I am developing here now provides a way to find the path to how one can rise to a truly social judgment in the realm of spiritual life.

You see, I said before that I cannot speak in a particularly popular way today, because if I want to discuss these questions from the point of view of an as yet unknown human science, at least in wider circles, I have to start from that point of view. In my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul) I have pointed out how the human being is a threefold being: he is a head human being or nervous-sensory human being, a rhythmic human being, and a metabolic human being. The nerve-sense human being encompasses everything that is the senses and what the organs of the head are. The rhythmic human being, the trunk human being, could also be said to encompass what is rhythmic in the human being, what is the movement of the heart, the movement of the lungs, and so on. The third, the metabolic human being, encompasses everything else.

These three aspects are found in human nature; in a sense they are fundamentally different from each other, but it is difficult to pinpoint their actual differences. In the case of the rhythmic person, the following can be emphasized. You will hear more about the rhythmic in the human being later on this evening when Dr. Boos speaks about the formation of social judgment in legal or state life, which will then make up the second part of the introduction. Dr. Boos will speak about what is particularly close to him, about the formation of social judgment in the second link of the social organism, in legal and state life. But now I would like to emphasize the following: the rhythmic activity in man is particularly evident when we consider how man breathes in the outer air, processes it within himself, how he breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbonic acid. Inhalation – exhalation, inhalation – exhalation: this is one of the rhythms that are active in man. It is a relatively easy process to understand: inhalation – exhalation = rhythmic activity.

The other two activities can perhaps only be understood by starting from this rhythmic activity. In a sense, the whole human being is actually predisposed to rhythmic activity. But with ordinary science, we do not recognize the nervous sensory activity, the actual main activity, at all. It cannot be compared with the activity of the lungs and the heart, with rhythmic activity. I can only mention something that may seem paradoxical to those who are less familiar with spiritual science, with anthroposophy, but which will be confirmed by a real science. In the future, what I am saying now will be known to the world as a completely exact scientific fact when the necessary conditions are understood. During inhalation and exhalation, there is a certain equilibrium. This equilibrium that exists could be depicted as a pendulum that goes back and forth. It goes up just as high on one side as on the other. It swings back and forth. There is also an equilibrium between inhalation and exhalation, inhalation and exhalation and so on.

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If a person did not live together with other people in a spiritual and soulful way, if a person were lonely and could only observe nature, that is, could only enter into an interrelationship with nature, look at nature and inwardly process it into images, then something very special would happen to that person. As I said, today this seems highly paradoxical to people, but it is nevertheless the case: his head would become too light. By observing nature, we are, after all, engaged in an activity. We are not doing nothing by observing nature; everything in us is engaged in a certain activity. This activity is, so to speak, a sucking activity at the head of man – not at the whole organism, but at the head of man, a sucking activity. And this sucking activity must be balanced, otherwise our head would become too light; we would become unconscious. It is compensated for by the fact that the head, which has become too light, undergoes a metabolism, blood nourishment, and all that is deposited in the head. And so, by observing nature, we continually have a lightening of the head and a subsequent heaviness due to the digestive activity going up into the head.

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This balancing must take place. It is a higher rhythmic activity. But this activity would become extremely one-sided if the human being were only in contact with nature. Man would indeed become too light in his head if he were only in contact with nature outside; he would not send enough balancing metabolic activity up into his head from within. He does this to a sufficient extent when he enters into a relationship with his fellow human beings.

That is why you feel a certain pleasure when you enter into a relationship with your fellow human beings, when you exchange thoughts or ideas with them, when they teach you or the like. It is one thing to walk through nature alone and quite another to stand face to face with a person who expresses his ideas to you. When you are confronted with a person who expresses his ideas to you – you should just consider this carefully in self-observation – then you have a certain feeling of well-being. And he who can analyze this feeling of well-being will find a similarity between it and the feeling he has when he digests. It is a great similarity, only one feeling goes to the stomach, the other goes up to the head. You see, that is precisely the peculiarity of materialism: these subtle material processes in the human body remain closed to materialism. The fact that a hidden digestive activity takes place in the head precisely because one is sitting opposite a person with whom one is talking, with whom one is exchanging ideas, is something that people do not notice through today's crude science. Therefore, they cannot answer social questions, questions about the human context, even if they are quite trivial.

For the spiritual scientist, the anthroposophist, it is quite clear why the coffee sisters are so keen to sit together. They don't just sit together because they like coffee, but because they then digest themselves. The digestion goes to the head, and they feel that as a sense of well-being. And when coffee sister sits next to coffee sister, or even, I can't say coffee brother, but skat brother sits next to skat brother at the twilight drink, and so on, the same thing naturally takes place among men. I don't want to offend anyone, but when people sit together like that, yes, they feel the digestive activity going on behind their heads, and that means a certain sense of well-being. What happens there is really necessary for human life. It is really necessary, but it can be used for higher activity than just for the evening drink and for being a coffee nurse. Just as the blood must not stand still in the human being, so must what happens in the head not stand still. A stunted rhythm would occur in the nervous system if we did not have the right kind of spiritual connection with people outside. Our right humanity, that we become right people, depends on our coming into a reasonable connection with other people.

And so one can only form a social judgment when one realizes what is necessary for the human being – just as necessary as being born. When one realizes that the human being must come into a spiritual and soul connection with other human beings, only then can one form a correct social judgment about the way in which the spiritual element of the social organism must be formed. For then one knows that this social life is based on the fact that man must come into a right individual relationship with man, that no abstract state life must intervene there, that nothing must be organized from above, but that everything depends on the fact that the original original in the human being can approach the original in the other human being, that there is real, genuine freedom, direct freedom from individual to individual, be it in the social coexistence of the teacher with his students, be it in social coexistence in general. People wither away when school regulations or regulations about intellectual social life make it impossible for what is in one person to have a fertilizing effect on what is in another. A truly social judgment in the realm of spiritual life can only develop when that which elevates one person above themselves, when that which is more in one person than in another, can have an effect on the other person and when, in turn, that which is more in the other person than in oneself can have an effect on oneself. One can only understand the necessity of freedom in spiritual life when one realizes that this human coexistence can only develop in a spiritual and psychological way if what comes into existence with us through birth and what develops through our abilities can freely influence other people. Therefore, the spiritual element of the social organism must also be administered only within itself. The person who is active in the spiritual life must at the same time be in charge of the administration of the spiritual life. So: self-administration within this spiritual realm. You see, that is what is very special about this spiritual life, which arises from a true understanding of the human being.

Dr. Boos will then describe the legal life in more detail from the same point of view. The legal life proceeds as follows: when humanity, through the demands of the present, is increasingly moving towards a democratic state, so that the mature human being is confronted by another mature human being, we are not yet dealing with what works across from one person to another in the way I have described for the spiritual life, where the digestive activity shoots up into the head. In the sphere of right living, where one fully developed human being is confronted with another, no such changes take place as in the spiritual life, but only interactions between human being and human being. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect flows over in such a way that something new arises in the other person. In the sphere of right living, the effect I will now omit this middle aspect and move on to economic life, to the third link in the social organism. This economic life is not really understood today in such a way that a real social judgment can be formed from this understanding. What, in fact, can be called economic life? You see, you can clearly define economic life when you think of it in terms of the social organism. If we take any kind of animal, we cannot say that it lives in a social community in the human sense, because the animal finds what it desires in nature itself. It takes what it needs to live from the external nature; what is initially outside in nature passes into the animal, the animal processes it and releases it again – another kind of interaction. You see: here we have something that, I would say, is organized into nature. Such an animal species, so to speak, only continues the life of nature within itself. Nothing is changed in nature. The animal takes in what is in nature for its nourishment – just as it is in nature. We can find a complete opposite to this, and this contrast is present in zoo animals, which receive everything they eat through human intervention. Here, human reason supplies the animal with nourishment, and the human organization first assesses what the animals then receive. As a result, the animals are actually completely torn out of nature. Domestic animals are also completely torn out of nature; they are, so to speak, so changed that they not only absorb natural food substances into their inner being, but that food prepared by human reason is grafted into them. Domestic animals become a means of expression of that which, so to speak, has been processed spiritually, but they themselves do nothing to it. Animals are either such that they take in what is in nature unchanged in their own activity, or, when humans feed them something, they cannot contribute anything to it; they do not help to prepare what is fed to them.

In the middle, between these two extremes, is human economic activity, insofar as it lives in the social organism, at most not when man is at the lower level of a hunting people, when he still takes what is in nature unchanged, if he enjoys it raw, which he actually no longer does today. But the moment human culture begins in this respect, man takes something that he has already prepared himself, where he changes nature. The animal does not do that, and if it is a domestic animal, something foreign is supplied to it. That is actually economic activity: what man does in communion with nature by supplying himself with changed nature. We can say that all economic activity of man actually lies between these two extremes: between what the animal, which is not yet a social being, takes unchanged from nature, and what the domestic animal takes in, which is now fed entirely in the stable, only with what humans prepare for it. And when man works, he is involved with his economic activity between his inner being and nature. And this economic life that we know in the social organism is actually only a systematic summary of what individuals do in the direction that I have characterized.

Let us compare the economic life in a social context with the spiritual life that we have just characterized. The spiritual life is based on the fact that the individual human being, so to speak, has too much. What people possess spiritually, they usually give away very gladly; they are generous in this way and gladly hand it over to others. In contrast to material possessions, people are not as generous in the same sense; they prefer to keep material possessions for themselves. But what they possess spiritually, they are very happy to give away; they are generous in this way. But this is based on a good universal law. Man can indeed go beyond himself in a spiritual sense; and in the way I have just described it, it is beneficial for the other person when man gives him something, even if he in turn does not accept anything from the other. That is to say, when a person enters social life in a spiritual way, I would say that, in his inner being, he has too much judgment, too many ideas; he is compelled to give, he must communicate with others.

In economic life, it is exactly the opposite. But one can only come to this conclusion if one starts from experience, not from some kind of theoretical science. In economic life, one cannot arrive at a judgment in the same way as in the life of the spirit, that is, from person to person. Rather, in economic life one can only come to a judgment when one stands as an individual human being or as a human being placed in some association in relation to another association. Therefore, the impulse for the threefold social order demands the associative: people must associate according to their occupations or according to producers, consumers and so on. In the economic sphere, the association will be confronted with the association. Let us compare this to the individual human being, who, for my sake, has a lot of spirit in his head; he can share this spirit with many people. One person may absorb it better, another worse, but he can communicate this spirit that he has to many people. So there is the possibility that a person can give what he has of spirit to many people. In economic life, it is exactly the other way around.

At first we have no idea about economic life at all. What I said to some of you yesterday is absolutely true: if you want to judge what is right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy in economic life, and you just want to deduce it from the inner being, then you you are just like that character in a Jean Paul novel who wakes up in the middle of the night in a dark room and thinks about what time it is, who wants to find out what time it is in the dark room where he can't see or hear anything. You can't work out what time it is by thinking about it. You can't come to an economic judgment through thinking or through inner development. You can't even come to an economic judgment when you are negotiating with another person. Goethe and Schiller were good at exchanging spiritual and psychological ideas. Two people together cannot come to an economic judgment. One can only come to an economic judgment when one is faced with a group of people who have had experiences, each in his own field, and when one then takes in as judgment what they, as an association, as a group, have worked out. Just as you have to look at your watch if you want to know what time it is, in order to arrive at an economic judgment, you have to take on board the experiences of an association. And one can hear very beautiful things about the duty of one person towards another, about the rights of one person towards another when they are face to face; but one cannot come to an economic judgment when only one person is confronted with another, but one can only come to an economic judgment if one understands what is laid down in associations, in groups of people, in mutual economic intercourse as economic experience. There, the exact opposite of how one lives together socially, spiritually and soulfully must be present. In the spiritual and soul realm, the individual human being must give to others what he develops within himself. In the economic sphere, the individual must absorb the experiences gained by the association. If I want to form an economic judgment, I can only do so if I have asked associations what experiences they have had with this or that article in production, in mutual dealings, and so on. And this is what it comes down to when forming a social judgment in the economic sphere: that such associations make up the economic body of the threefold social organism and that each individual belongs to such associations. In order to arrive at an economic judgment, from which one can in turn act, the economic experiences of the associations must be available. What we are meant to learn scientifically, cognitively, we must acquire in the free spiritual life through individual experiences. What is to inspire us in our economic will must be experienced by the individual through the experiences handed down to him by associations. Only by uniting with people who are economically active can we ourselves arrive at an economic will.

The formation of judgment in the spiritual-mental and economic spheres is radically different. And an economic life cannot flourish alongside a spiritual life if the two spheres receive orders from one and the same place, but only if the spiritual life is such that the individual can freely hand over to another what he has within it. And economic life can flourish only when the associations are such that the economic branches related to one another by production or consumption are united associatively, and thus the economic judgment, which again underlies the economic will, arises. Otherwise, it becomes a muddle, and we end up with the reactionary, liberal or social ideas of modern times, where we never realize how radically different human activities are in the spiritual, economic and, in the middle, legal or state spheres.

Basically, it is so difficult for people today to arrive at a sound judgment in this area because they have been led astray by the traditional creeds from seeing the real structure of the human being in body, soul and spirit. Man is said to be only a duality, only body and soul. As a result, everything is mixed up. Only when we divide the human being into spirit, soul and body, only when we know how the spirit is that which we bring into existence through birth, how the spirit is that which brings forth the potential for development within us, which we must bring into the social sphere, only then will we get an idea of how this spiritual part of the social organism must have a separate existence. When we know how everything that springs from the soul, which is intimately connected with our rhythmic life, is the product of human beings living together in circles of duty, work and love, then we can see what must be present in the democratic state as the legal organization of the threefold organism. And when we realize that we cannot arrive at an economic judgment and therefore cannot engage in economic activity without being integrated into a fabric of associations in the threefold social organism, then we come to see how only that which is a special kind of judgment in the economic field can lead to help in the future.

It is the task of the present to achieve a true understanding of the human being and, on the basis of this true understanding of the human being, to then arrive at an understanding of what today is striving for a true understanding. Man judges quite differently in the social life in the spiritual realm than in the legal realm, and it is quite different again than in the economic realm. Therefore, if these three very differently structured social contexts are to develop in a healthy way in the future, they must also be administered separately and then work together. Just as in the individual organism it is not possible to form anything other than the shape of a head where the head is to be, nor a hand or foot or heart or liver, so the spiritual organism must not be systematized in the same way as the economic organism or the legal organism. But precisely when they are properly organized in the right place, they work together to form a whole, just as the hand and foot and trunk and head of the human being work together to form a whole. The right unity arises precisely from the fact that each is properly organized in its own way.

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, the idea presented to humanity in the form of the threefold social organism is truly not a frivolous one, but one that has been extracted from a real science. This science must, of course, first be fought for against all the scientific chaos that prevails today. But it is, I might say, not only a wall, it is a thick barrier of prejudices through which one must first fight, first fight with what must underlie the science of man, and then with what emerges from this true science of man as an impulse for a real social reconstruction. One can say: It makes one's heart bleed when one looks today into this chaos of social misconceptions that reigns everywhere, and at the social drowsiness. And one must say: It is indeed not possible for everyone to make a social new order out of what has been taken up by this European humanity as a prejudice from a mistaken science for three to four centuries. It is a terrible thing when people talk about a social order based on a science that can never justify a social judgment because it does not know man. That science, ladies and gentlemen, does not regard man as man, but only as the highest link in the animal series. It does not ask: What is man? - but: What are the animals? It only says: When the animals develop to the highest level, that is precisely the human being. One does not ask what the human being is, but the animals are there, and in the series of animals, the human being is added as the last one, without saying anything different about the human being than what is said about the animal being. Such a science will never create a social reconstruction.

What is so distressing is not that people today are not radical enough to say to themselves: We must first demand real knowledge, real science – but that they are more faithful today to external scientific authority than Catholics ever were in the past to papal authority. At that time, at least some still rebelled against this papal authority. Today, however, everything is subjugated to scientific authority, even radical socialists like Lunacharsky; when it comes to defending the old science against a renewal of science, he crawls under scientific authority because he cannot imagine that science itself needs to be transformed if we want to make progress. These things must be taken very seriously and they must be said. And no matter how many social clubs, liberal communities, development communities, women's mobs or women's clubs people join, nothing will come of it if the matter is not approached radically, if one does not start from the point where one can arrive at a real social judgment: And this is only a social human knowledge that can give what today's science cannot give. And only a real spiritual science can give a renewal of science.

That is what I wanted to say in introduction to this evening. I now ask Dr. Boos to speak about the second part of the social organism, about the life of rights.

Roman Boos speaks about “The formation of judgment in the legal aspect of the social organism.” After that, a discussion will take place.

Roman Boos: Perhaps someone still has a question to ask, or perhaps someone would like to add something? - That does not seem to be the case. I do not know if Dr. Steiner could be asked for a final word. It is very late and I do not know if there are any other questions that Dr. Steiner would like to address.

Rudolf Steiner: Taking into account the lateness of the hour, I would just like to add a few words, because a closing word is customary at a discussion. This evening's two topics, the demand for a social reorganization on the one hand and on the other hand the necessity to penetrate to the sources of spiritual science, because only there can the forces be found to do justice to the demands of the day, these two things must always be emphasized again in all seriousness from this point of view. This has often been said, but it cannot be said too often.

I began by saying today that people have grown instinctively into the present social orders, and in fact the materialists would also instinctively like to remain in them. They do not want to take into account that today is the time to move on to the activity of judgment, that is, to consciousness, and to create a new social world out of consciousness. But we must penetrate to this consciousness if we do not simply want to continue the disastrous policies of recent years, which have taken hold in such a terrible way and are now being continued within European civilizational life and its appendages. I have already pointed out here how a mind like Oswald Spengler's, which is, after all, ingenious on the one hand but sick on the other, can seriously attempt to prove scientifically that the Occident must have arrived at barbarism, at complete and utter decline, at the beginning of the third millennium. One gets the same pain that I spoke of at the end of my introductory words today when one sees how extraordinarily difficult it is to instill in the minds of the present the sense of the seriousness of the times, and how much more difficult it is to instill the sense of the necessity to carry out a real transformation with the knowledge of the present.

My dear audience, do not say that this knowledge of the present is only found in a few scholars or in some contemporary views of people. No, this knowledge is everywhere, only people do not admit it to themselves. What matters is not whether one holds this or that hypothesis, this or that scientific theory, but whether one's whole life of ideas and feelings is moving in a certain direction, which ultimately amounts to this scientific life of the present, which impoverishes and empties the human being. Of course, some people may not be concerned that it is the consequence of contemporary science that the earth originated from a nebula and will end up in some final state of heat in which all life will be destroyed. Perhaps there are even some who say: That may be, but I don't care. — But, my dear audience, that is not the point. Open any chemistry, any physiology, any zoology or any anthropology today, read five lines in it and take these five lines – it says something along those lines. Regardless of whether you open this or that and take this or that, you are in the direction that leads to these views. Of course, today it is convenient when you want to know something about this or that to resort to the usual things and not to think that even something like this needs a thorough transformation. Today it is convenient if you want to learn something about malachite, to go to the encyclopedia, take out the volume with “M”, open “Malachit” and read what is in there. If you accept it uncritically, regardless of what you otherwise think, and if you are not aware that you are living in a serious time of transformation, then you are asleep, then you are not prepared for what is necessary in today's world. Today it is a matter of not just becoming aware of the seriousness at some times when reflecting on the ultimate problems of world view, but today it is a matter of being aware every minute of the day that it is our duty to work on the transformation, because we live in a thoroughly serious time. And just in these days we are again experiencing the tragedy that the most important problems are unfolding, perhaps even more important than during the external years of war, and that people are trying to sleep as much as possible, not even participating with their consciousness in what is actually taking place.

To accept anthroposophy as a confession does not mean merely to advocate this or that in theory, to speak of etheric body and astral body, of reincarnation and karma. To accept anthroposophy means to be connected in one's feelings, with one's whole being, to that which is now taking place in the day and now in the great epoch as the impulse of a significant transformation. And when you look into the sleeping people today, your heart bleeds. Because today it depends on waking up. And again and again I would like to say, and I would like to conclude every discussion with it: try to get to the sources of spiritual knowledge, because with the water that comes from these sources, you splash yourself from a real source of consciousness. This knowledge touches one's own personality in such a way that one, I would say, takes it up from the deepest depths of one's earthly nature and into one's human inner being: wake up and fulfill your tasks in the face of the great demands of the time.

Roman Boos: It will be announced what will be discussed here a week from today. This concludes today's event.

Ludwig Polzer-Hoditz will give a lecture on “The Testament of Peter the Great”. After the discussion, Rudolf Steiner will give a concluding word.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear attendees! There would, of course, be an enormous amount to say in connection with the very stimulating remarks of Count Polzer and the various questions that have been raised by this or that in the discussion. However, due to the late hour, we will probably have to limit ourselves to a few points.

I would first like to point out that Count Polzer obviously wanted to emphasize the importance for European politics of the legacy of Peter the Great rather than the details of the effectiveness of this legacy of Peter the Great. And with regard to this, I would like to say that things like this legacy of Peter the Great can only be judged from the overall context of the events in which they somehow came about. It just so happens that in the years referred to by Count Polzer, in the 1870s, in the years following the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, and then in the years of Count Taaffe's government in Austria, a great deal happened in Austria that was along the lines of the effect of Peter the Great's testament. One could single out various events from the abundance of these events, each would be just as good as the other to illustrate what one wants to say. I will only highlight a few events that seemingly have nothing to do with Peter the Great's testament at first, but in which this testament is definitely effective.

Let us take the end of the period to which Count Polzer has drawn particular attention: the period during which Austria had received the mandate from the Berlin Treaty to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. The occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina led to a very significant dispute within Austrian politics. As Count Polzer has already emphasized, there were fierce opponents of this shift of the center of gravity, which pushed Austria eastward, and there were supporters of this occupation, this shift of the center of gravity eastward, in Austria. Supporters were actually essentially those who, in some way, had very special reasons to make themselves servants of Habsburg domestic politics. One must just bear in mind that Habsburg domestic policy at that time had already sunk to such a point of decadence that it was basically a mere prestige policy even then. What had been in preparation for a century had indeed been fulfilled with the Austro-Prussian War, and the Habsburgs needed some kind of compensation for it. They therefore resorted to what was now offered to Austria. Now, however, we can fully consider everything that was basically contained in that point of Peter the Great's testament, which indicates how to bring more and more discord and quarrel to Austria by seemingly giving it something. The occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was a real bone of contention, and it was only saved because the so-called Bosnian Left split off from the so-called German Left in the Austrian Reichsrat, which was still a factor at the time.

You see, the leader of the German Left Party in the Austrian Reichsrat was the deputy Herbst. Herbst's policy developed out of the policy after 1866; it was a policy that was welded together out of a certain aspiration to give Austria a kind of German character, but at the same time to give it a kind of abstract liberal character. This policy resisted the occupation of Bosnia, particularly in the person of Deputy Herbst, because the Herbst people said to themselves: If Austria gets any more Slavs – and it was an addition of Slavs that they got there with Bosnia and Herzegovina, except for the Turkish element, which was also found there. If Austria gets more Slavs, it will be all the less possible for the German element to be given special priority in Austria in the future. Well, this fall was indeed an epigrammatic rebuff by Bismarck. Bismarck was determined to create some kind of confusion in Austria, to make Austria shift its center of gravity to the east, so that no more aspirations could arise on the part of the Habsburgs against the aspirations of the Hohenzollerns. For a large part of 19th-century Central European politics, especially in the mid-19th century and the second half, was actually a dispute between the two dynasties, the Habsburg and the Hohenzollern dynasties. Bismarck, who wanted to expand the Hohenzollern power base, wanted to push Austria towards the Slavs, towards the East, and so it suited him very little that these Herbst people in Austria were working against him. Bismarck then also coined a witty epigram, as was his way, which was one of those epigrams of political life that killed the one they hit. He called the Herbstleute the “Herbstzeitlosen” (autumn daffodils), maintaining that the time simply demanded that Austria's center of gravity be shifted eastward, out of Austria, and that anyone who did not know how to adapt to this temporal imperative was an “Herbstzeitlose,” because the leader of this Austrian German liberal party was Herbst. Well, the whole thing was saved by the fact that at that time the younger Plener, while he was previously fully immersed in the party of the Herbst people, emerged with a certain following, which could form a majority in the Austrian Reichsrat for the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Plener formed the Bosnian Left at that time.

Ernst von Plener is precisely the kind of person that Count Polzer wanted to talk about today. Plener was a speaker in the Austrian parliament who was very much in the style of the liberalist average speaker, a man who spoke in the Austrian Reichsrat in such a way that he would have put forward what he put forward much more correctly in England. Plener had been attaché at the Austrian Embassy in London for many years and had become very familiar with what is called English parliamentarism. This English parliamentarism, which had grown out of the English element and fitted it very well, was now more or less successfully transferred to the whole of Europe, and it is one of those factors that prove how much the Western impulses gradually gained influence over Europe. I would like to say: when Plener spoke in the Viennese Parliament, he was actually speaking as a politician who had been thoroughly trained in the English political mold. Of course, for Austria, to which it did not fit at all, this had something extraordinarily abstract. One has only to consider what was thrown together in this Austria from the most diverse nationalities, but held together by the clericalism of the Habsburg power base. The English stereotype of opinion with its pendulum system of left and right actually fitted into this like a completely abstract element. And for someone as abstract as Plener, it was never a matter of thinking from the perspective of the specific effective forces, but he could always do otherwise. And Herbst, who was stubborn and bullish in certain respects, stuck to his German liberal point of view. On the other hand, Plener, who was a kind of man of the world – I can still see him before me today: he never came to parliament in anything but light-colored trousers, which were always turned up at the bottom, and with a kind of beard that was halfway between a mutton-chop and a diplomatic goatee – Plener could always do otherwise. He formed the Bosnian Left in order to do a service to Emperor Franz Joseph and the Habsburg power base that could be honored later. I must say that there always seemed to me to be a certain connection between two events: the formation of the Bosnian Left in the Austrian parliament by Ernst von Plener on the occasion of the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and a later event that seems insignificant but must be considered symptomatic. Plener then became finance minister for a short time when the Taaffe Ministry was replaced by the coalition Windischgrätz Ministry; he had always striven for this. But the glory did not last long. Then something happened that actually always indicates that underground forces are at play. Plener became president of the Supreme Audit Office and then, oddly enough, withdrew from politics when he had become president, despite always having played a prominent role in his party. And when he was interviewed about why he had withdrawn, he replied: “This is something that concerns only me and my emperor, it is a secret I will not discuss.”

I have always seen a certain connection between the events that took place during the formation of the Bosnian Left in the 1970s and this event, which did not take place until the 1990s. Let us now take a look at the situation after the Bosnian occupation. In Austria, the second Taaffe Ministry was formed after the last phases of the system of concessionary governments, which had come about precisely because of the attempt, after the Austro-Prussian War, to see whether one could manage with the German element in Austria or not. This was attempted with the so-called Ministry of the Bourgeoisie from 1867 to 1870, first with Prince Carlos Auersperg, then came the episode under Potocki and Hohenwart, where the Slav element asserted itself. But then, from 1871 until the end of the 1870s, there was the ministry under Adolf Prince Auersperg, which was again a kind of bourgeois ministry, and which, as I said, formed the last phase of what was attempted there. Then came the Taaffe Ministry. Let us take a look at this ministry. It managed the affairs of government in Austria for more than a decade, one might say, in the 1880s, and there, I would say, everything that is a compendium of European politics took place. Taaffe is Prime Minister; he remains at the head of the ministry despite being quite an incompetent head. He mainly stays in the ministry because he is particularly good at projecting rabbits on the wall with his handkerchief and fingers during the evening entertainment at court. The ladies at court liked it so much when Count Taaffe made rabbits and other similar tricks, and that is how he stayed in the Austrian government for so long. Now one can say that in the 1880s, Germanism was pushed back in Austria. The countries on this side of the Leitha – yes, this area didn't really have a name. This area, what was on this side of the Leitha, was called “the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Reichsrat”, and the lands over there, on the other side of the Leitha, at least had a more comprehensive name, they were called “the lands of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen.” The lands on this side of the Leitha, that is, “the Kingdoms and Lands represented in the Reichsrat,” were ruled at that time by the ministry headed by Taaffe. Certain humor magazines wrote about Taaffe in a very strange way: Ta - affe (it is written on the blackboard).

Now, it was also difficult to find a common name for these countries, because what did this area of “the kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat” include? First there was Bukowina, then the adjoining Kingdom of Galicia with Ruthenia and Lemberg as its capital; Krakow would be there (drawn on the board). This Galicia was mainly inhabited by the Polish element (shaded, left), but here it was inhabited by the Ruthenian element (shaded, right) – the Ruthenians a kind of Slav, the Poles a kind of Slav. Further on was the Silesian area, the Moravian area and the Bohemian area – Slavs and Germans thrown together everywhere. Then comes Lower and Upper Austria, Salzburg, Vorarlberg, Tyrol, Styria down to Brunn – mostly German; then South Slav, Slovenian near Carinthia and Carniola; down here Istria and Dalmatia. Over here, on the other side of the Leitha, were the lands of the Holy Crown of St. Stephen: here Hungary with Transylvania, then Croatia with Slavonia. We would have to look for the Leitha somewhere around here; everything that was over here, all these motley groups of people, they formed the “kingdoms and countries represented in the imperial council”.

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Now, what was the representation of the “kingdoms and countries represented in the Reichsrat” in Vienna like? It was, in fact, remarkable enough. You see, if you looked at the ministerial bench: in the middle sat the rabbit manufacturer Taaffe, with his receding forehead, at his side on the right Dunajewski, the finance minister, a Pole, then there was a striking personality, Minister Prazäk, a Czech, then Smolka, another Pole, one of those Poles who were once beheaded in effigy in Austria because they were traitors, but who had then risen [politically] again. One can say: when these personalities were spoken of, it was, in a sense, extremely interesting.

On the first bench of the left - let's say, for example, that it would have been a budget debate - sat a good German, Carneri; you know the figure of Carneri from my book “The Riddle of Man”. He began the debate in a Central European sense; he hurled the most terrible accusations at this Taaffe ministry. One of his most effective speeches ended with the words – it was perhaps in 1883 –: Poor Austria! – Then a little further away sat Herbst, Plener and so on. But all the speakers in Austria spoke as people of a perished trend spoke. What Carneri spoke, for example, was beautiful, spirited, great, but it was not something that could live. But something else lived in Austria in those days; something really lived in Austria when, for example, the Polish deputy Otto Hausner spoke. In Austria it didn't matter if a member of parliament had a German name; because if, for example, your name was Grégr and you were a young Czech liberal member of parliament, then you had a name with a catch, because before you became Czech you were called Gröger; such metamorphoses happen. When Otto Hausner spoke, he emphasized at the same time that he was speaking from the Polish element, and he did so, although he emphasized that he had Rhaetian-Alemannic blood in his veins - although I don't know what Rhaetian-Alemannic blood is. He was not a person I liked. I still vividly remember: when you walked down Vienna's Herrengasse and old Hausner came along, this old dandy with his monocle, who still cleaned himself, even though he wasn't really a cute-looking old man; he wasn't exactly a particularly likeable personality. It must be said that when Hausner spoke during these crucial years, he spoke in such a way that world history rolled through him. And I would like to say that when Otto Hausner spoke, one could hear the words of Peter the Great's testament rolling. One could hear them roll when he spoke of the fact that the people of Austria should not allow themselves to be duped by Berlin, by Bismarck, that they should not accept the Berlin Treaty. Time was speaking, the rolling time, when Otto Hausner spoke about the Arlberg railway, how he saw it as a strategic railway to make an alliance between Austria and France possible against German politics. And one would like to say that in the speeches of Otto Hausner from that time there was something prophetic that foretold everything that would come later. In particular, however, one of Hausner's speeches was effective: on “Germanness and the German Reich”, in which he rhetorically gave a wonderful characterization of all the dark sides, especially the dark sides of Germanness and the German character, never the light sides. Everything in Central Europe that was actually working towards its downfall, this Polish deputy, Otto Hausner, knew how to explain in a wonderful way in his speech at the time. Apart from him, there was another strange character who often spoke, his name was Dzieduszycki. It was extraordinarily strange, because when he spoke, one had the feeling that he had not just one, but two lumps in his throat, running after each other and back again. But still, when he spoke, world history rolled through what he said. It was world history that spoke – and so did many of those sitting there. And yet, when these people spoke only from their personalities, it was not world history at all.

At the time when the school law in Austria, which had already been ruined by the liberals, was to be completely ruined, how did the majority come about? I will tell you a great secret: despite Austrian politics, Austria actually had the best grammar schools until the 1970s; and it was only with great difficulty that the later Minister of Education, Gautsch, managed to destroy these grammar schools, which were good from a certain point of view. And do you know who was to blame for the fact that these good grammar schools in Austria - good for the time - had been founded? It was the arch-clerical Leo Graf Thun who introduced these grammar schools in Austria. It was just the case in Austria that, strangely enough, objectivity sometimes interacted with very bullish politics. This Leo Count Thun, who was a cleric and was completely black in many respects, he brought about a brilliant school system in Austria, but it was then dismantled by the liberals, and what the liberals left behind was to be ruined even more later on. How did the majority in the Reichsrat develop in these matters? Yes, these majorities came about in a strange way. There were the Ruthenians, and there were the Poles. If one wanted to push through certain things that were easier to implement with the Poles, then one formed a ministry consisting of Germans and Poles. And if one wanted to push through something else, then one excluded the Poles and formed a majority of Germans and Ruthenians. The Ruthenians and the Poles, who then fought each other terribly, were used to tip the scales. And depending on what was thrown into the scales in the end, the opposite result was achieved. Now, at that time, when the school law was to be completely destroyed, the Poles were the tip of the scales; something was to be negotiated between the clergy and the Poles. If the clergy went along with the Poles, it was said, then the school law could be destroyed. But the Poles were intelligent enough to object that this could not be done to Galicia, to impose such a [new] school law on their country. And so they resorted to a way out and said: Yes, we will go together with you, we will eliminate the [old] school law, only Galicia will be excepted. The strange thing about this was that a Slav element was used as a cover, but this Slav element excluded itself from what it clearly admitted it wanted to exclude from its own country. Such were the special circumstances in Austria at that time.

There was also the characteristic figure of the old Czech Rieger. While the Germans ruled in a liberal, formalistic and abstract way, the Czechs did not come to the Viennese parliament; they absented themselves. Count Taaffe had now earned the great external merit of bringing the Czech Club back into the parliament. So now Rieger was also among these Viennese parliamentarians: an extraordinarily characteristic figure full of inner fire, a somewhat shaky little figure, but with a powerful head, with eyes from which one believed that not just one devil, but several devils, spitting fire, would come out at the end. There was indeed something extraordinarily lively in him.

You see, that was the situation. You could say that you knew there was an element that you couldn't grasp, but it was clear to see that this peculiar configuration in Austria was really the result of Peter the Great's legacy. When you had these concrete circumstances in front of you, you knew that something like that existed. In fact, one knew exactly why, for example, Count Andrássy's policy – who, despite being Hungarian, was Austrian Foreign Minister for a while – was difficult to implement: because people could not imagine that Austria should shift its center of gravity to the east, to the Slavic countries. One could see that the Slavic element was asserting itself, but one could not say anything other than: Yes, what will actually come of it all? What will come of it? What is it, the whole? And you could actually see the Slavic element at work, especially under this Taaffe, the incompetent Taaffe – he did have some very capable Slavic minds among his ministers, such as Dunajewski, the Polish finance minister, or Prazák. But it was through the Slavic element that confusion reigned; capable minds, quite excellent minds in some cases, but confusion reigned throughout. And it was even more the case when combined with the German element.

Now, please, imagine this together with something else, imagine that Peter the Great is the person who goes to the West, to the Hague, in his youth, and comes back to St. Petersburg from the West, that he is the person who strives to introduce Western ways into Russia against the efforts of many who believed they were truly Russian, Orthodox Russian people. Try to realize what the relationship is in this story between what it means to be Russian and what Peter the Great brought into Russia. What he brought in, Peter the Great, was not something that would only have an effect in the short or even medium term; it was something that provided an impulse that extended over the centuries. One could say that one knows what Slavdom rooted in Russia wants, one knows how it interacts with differentiated Slavdom, but there is still something in it that was brought from the West by Peter the Great. Now, Peter the Great did not write anything down, but he did pursue a certain course in his government activities; what he did is oriented in a certain direction, in a certain style. And so that which comes from Slavdom alone rolls along in parallel and interweaves with the other, which was brought from the West through Peter the Great, who had become powerful in soul there. Now imagine yourself in any period after Peter the Great and look at European politics – can you not say: Yes, in what continues to have an effect from Peter the Great, there are concrete factors in it that have an effect? – Anyone who has seen things like the ones I have described to you now knows that they are there.

Now along comes a Sokolnicki, and he meditates on the conditions under which he lived. There, in the depths of his soul, he turns to what is called the “Testament of Peter the Great”. He asks himself: What forces lie in what Peter the Great started? What will happen if this comes to pass? What would it be like to write down the unwritten testament of Peter the Great, to think it written down from what partly results from inspiration, partly from state papers and the like? - Do you have to ask how the person dipped the pen in the ink or what ink he used or how he held the pen when you ask about the origin of a document? It is not so in world history.

I have often related a small matter that happened to me. I have tried to show how Goethe's essay On Nature, the Hymn to Nature, came into being. I proved that Goethe went for a walk along the Ilm with a Swiss man named Tobler and spoke this essay to himself. Tobler had such an excellent memory that he went home afterwards and wrote down what he had heard from Goethe and had it published in the Tiefurter Journal, which was just found at the time I was in Weimar. In the 7th volume of the Goethe-Jahrbücher, I have now tried to prove, for internal and intellectual reasons, that this essay in the Tiefurter Journal was by Goethe, despite the fact that this essay “Die Natur” is printed in the Journal as literally as possible according to Dobler's manuscript.

The point is that one cannot get along historically if one asks about the origin of the most important things in a, I would say prosaically philistine, literal, philological way. Certainly, with regard to the writing, the testament is a forgery - but it is a true reality. And we have the real origin of the Testament, precisely that origin that Count Polzer tried to prove, when we say to ourselves: Sokolnicki, in a kind of meditation and inner contemplation, wrote this down in connection with what was there, with what happened. But he did not conjure it out of thin air or experience it through some kind of inner mysticism; rather, he saw it in the context of world events. And one could say: he wanted to achieve precisely what had been inaugurated by Peter the Great, what he had brought from the West, but what had not yet happened.

And now let us take a look at this Babylonian Tower of the Austrian Reichsrat under the Taaffe Ministry, as I have just described it. Let us see how the Slavic element is represented, how it is precisely the talented element, but can only bring confusion. And if you get to the bottom of it, you find in what is expressed there something like a continued effect of this testament of Peter the Great. So you can say: Yes, this testament of Peter the Great, it works as an historical force, but at the same time, if you look at the concrete facts, it works in such a way that it confuses. Now, add to this what I have often said on other occasions, namely, that the West inaugurated a later policy, of which I have said that it can be traced quite well back to the 1660s. This policy consists in the fact that it was sought to bring about in the East that which was then sufficiently fulfilled in all its details, and which then basically produced the world war catastrophe. Then one can say to oneself, if one is now able to think historically, inwardly historically: Yes, is not the whole thing with Peter the Great a wonderful prelude, a grandiose prelude to what came later? I would like to say that if some spirit had wanted to produce what came later in the 20th century, it could not have done better to cause the confusion that emanates from the East than by letting Peter the Great come to The Hague, where various things were concocted in relation to the interconnections of European politics, because there is a short way to the Anglo-American one. But Peter the Great then went back to St. Petersburg, and there he inaugurated what was to have a lasting effect as the “Testament of Peter the Great,” whereby one initiated in a wonderful way that which created the very conditions needed to bring about what happened later.

Of course, when one says something like this, it always sounds as if things were deliberately being dragged into paradoxes; but when one has to summarize something, one cannot avoid putting some things more sharply than others. But I wanted to show – if you wanted to describe it exactly, you would have to say some things differently – how Peter the Great's testament is actually a real historical force, even though, as Count Polzer said, it is a forgery and Peter the Great never wrote anything like this testament or the like. I have shown you how it has had an impact, as can be seen from the example of the kingdoms and countries represented in the Austrian Reichsrat. I have shown you how one can say that when one takes Hausner's speeches about civilization and reads all the speeches that were delivered by Prazák and others, one can feel, I would say feel the wind that comes from this Peter the Great. In all the speeches that were held for and against the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, you can feel how something had to be done in the struggles that took place at the time. One tried to bring meaning into Austrian politics: no meaning could be brought in because that which was supposed to take away the meaning was at work, that which was supposed to cause confusion in order to be able to bring about that which then came in the 19th century and later.

Unfortunately, there was not enough time to discuss these matters in as much detail as would be necessary to present them as evidence. However, it is clear that we can see the effects of Peter the Great's legacy and that it is essential to understand the impact of this legacy. For this testament – I am not saying this now with a moralizing nuance, but purely as a fact, without emotion – this testament of Peter the Great actually destroyed Austria, of course in addition to the inability of the Germans in Austria to understand this testament.

And therefore one can already say: Whoever really wants something promising must simply replace the testament of Peter the Great with another document. And for that it is necessary to seek out the forces that were just described by those theses to which Count Polzer has already referred. I do not want to go into this matter now. I just wanted to give a few brief indications of how one has to imagine how Peter the Great's testament is a reality that has drawn circles, and how these circles are also political-historical realities.

Ernst Uehli speaks as an introduction on the topic “The Artist in the Threefold Social Organism”. This is followed by a discussion in the course of which Paul Baumann asks Rudolf Steiner the question:

Paul Baumann: What is the relationship between the artist or his work and the social cell? Does he not also have to do preparatory work?

Rudolf Steiner: When it is a question of art and social life, I actually always have a certain unsatisfactory feeling in a discussion concerning these two things, for the simple reason that the whole way of thinking, of soul-attitude, comes into question when one speaks of social organization, of social structure, must be somewhat different than that which one must have when one speaks of art, of its proper emergence from human nature and its assertion in life, before human beings.

In a certain respect, the two areas are not really comparable. And precisely because they are not comparable — not because they are comparable but because they are not comparable — it seems to me that the whole position of art in relation to the artist and to humanity can be illuminated from the point of view of the threefold social organism. When speaking of art in the social organism, we should never forget that art belongs to the highest blossoms of human life and that everything is harmful to art that makes it impossible to count it among the highest blossoms of the development of human life. And so we must say: If it becomes possible for a threefold social organism to shape life in general in such a way that artists and art can emerge from this life, this will be a certain test for the correctness, and also for the inner justification, of the threefold social organism. But the question will not be posed in this way: How should one or other thing be organized in the threefold social organism in order to arrive at a right fostering of art or a right assertion of the artist? Above all, the question will be: How will people live in the threefold social organism? One could say that if the idea of the threefold social order were some kind of utopian idea, then one could of course say what one says about utopias: people will live happily – as happily as can be. Now the idea of the threefold social order does not start from such utopian conditions, but simply asks: What is the natural structure, the self-evident structure of the social organism? One could well imagine that some person might have the idea that man as such could be much more beautiful than he is, and that nature has not actually done everything to make man beautiful enough. Yes, but the way the world is, man had to become as he is. It may be, of course, that some Lenin or Trotsky says: the social organism must be so and so. But that is not the point. It matters just as little whether someone imagines a different nature of man than can arise from the whole of nature. What matters is what inner laws the social organism must have. And if we understand the threefold social organism from this thoroughly practical point of view, we can then also gain ideas about what will be possible in this threefold social organism. Above all, a certain economic utilization of time will be possible in the threefold social organism, without the need for compulsion at work or similar fine things that would thoroughly eradicate all freedom. It will simply be impossible, due to the way things work out in the three-tiered social organism, for as many people as now to loiter around uselessly. I know that these words “loitering around uselessly” may cause misunderstandings, because people will say: Yes, the actual loiterers, the actual life-dawdlers, are very few. But that is not the point. The point is whether those people who do a lot, do something that is absolutely necessary for life, whether they do something that is rationally and fruitfully integrated into life.

If you consider any branch of life today – I will immediately highlight the one that is most fragile in this life today – if you consider journalism, for example, and see how much human labor is required, from the typesetter to all the others who are involved in producing newspapers. Take all the work that is done there – the majority of this work is done by people who are drifting through life, because the majority of this work is actually unnecessary work. All this can be done more rationally without employing so many people. The point is not to have as many people as possible doing something so that they can live, but rather to carry out those activities that are necessary for the fruitful development of this life, this social cycle, in the sense of a truly social life cycle. All the chaotic developments that are taking place today with regard to the utilization of human labor power are connected with the fact that we do not really have a social organism, but rather a social chaos caused by the deification of the unitary state. I have often emphasized examples of this social chaos. Just imagine how many books are printed today, of which fewer than fifty copies are sold. Now, take such a book – how many people are involved in its production! They make a living, but they do unnecessary work. If they did something else, it would be wiser and countless other people would be relieved in a certain way. But as it is, countless typesetters and bookbinders are working, making piles of books – mostly lyric poems, but other things are also considered – piles of books are being produced; almost all of them have to be pulped again. But there are many unnecessary things like this in today's life; countless things are absolutely unnecessary.

What does that mean? Imagine for a moment that our human organism were not properly structured into a nervous-sensory system, which is localized in the head, and a rhythmic and appendage system, which interact in a regular manner and thus function economically. Just imagine if we were a unified being that goes haywire everywhere, that produces useless things at a rapid rate: the amount of useless things that humans produce today would not even be enough. We must bear that in mind. We must realize that it is essential that this social organism be structured, that it be designed in accordance with inner laws; then it will also be economical. Then human labor will be in the right place everywhere, and, above all, no useless work will be done.

What follows from this? People will have time. And then, my dear audience, the basis will be given for free activities such as art and similar things. Time is part of this. And out of time will come that which must be there for art, and art will then work together with something else, it will work together with the free spiritual life. The aim of this free spiritual life is to develop the talents together with the time present in the threefold social organism, not in the perverse way it is done today, but in a way that is in keeping with nature. When the free spiritual organism is truly separated from the other organisms, the number of unrecognized geniuses will decrease considerably, because there will be a much more natural development. There will be much less pursuit of idle dreams of some kind or other. So the development of talent will simply be placed on a more natural footing by the development of the free spiritual life. And something else is necessary if art is to develop: an artistic sense, an artistic need, a natural human desire and aspiration for art is necessary. All this must arise out of the threefold social organism as something that comes into being when there is organized social life together, not chaotic social life as there is today. You see, above all, in recent times we have come into the chaos of artistic feeling. The original artistic feeling, which wells up with elemental power out of human knowledge, has completely disappeared under modern education. It would come again if we developed in the sense of the threefold social order. And so one must now think of the whole thing that is emerging.

If we speak from the point of view of the threefold social organism, we must speak only as practitioners and not as theorists. We must not ask about principles, but about facts, and then we must say that what I have now indicated can come much more quickly than one might think. And what happens then? Then associations arise for the most diverse things - partly from intellectual life, partly from economic life. And one should not imagine what these associations will do somehow boxed in paragraphs and principles. In these associations, there will again be people who will be able to make judgments out of the full warmth of human feeling and experience. People will emerge from the associations who, through what they otherwise do in life, will achieve a certain validity in life that is not guaranteed to them by the state, that is not guaranteed to them by a title. Whether people are privy councillors, works councillors, medical officers or the like, they will derive their worth from the threefold social organism, not from these abstract things, but from what they do, from what lives continually. It is not paragraphs that will live, but what the people who rightly hold sway in the associations negotiate with each other; it will result in what is now present in caricature as so-called public opinion. One must only imagine very concretely what can come about through the living interaction of the associations.

Associations also include those that come from free spiritual life. Yes, here again something will be given to the life experience in a person, which can establish things as justified judgment. And if you just take that in its full concrete meaning, the following will emerge: the artist will really be able to achieve something materially for his work of art out of this public judgment, but what will come into its own out of the associations. Out of these conditions, something will really be able to develop that will make it possible for an artist, even if it takes him thirty years to create a work of art, to still be able to receive enough for this work of art to satisfy his needs for the thirty years it takes him to create a new work of art – which, in any case, might no longer be an option if he is already sixty or seventy years old. That will work out. It will actually work out – if one does takes the whole thing in a philistine manner – that the artist can be compensated for his work of art from within such a tripartite social organism in the sense of the economic cell. He cannot be compensated today for the reason that there are such unnatural prices. In fact, people today cannot pay the artist what he would actually have to demand if he only thought about himself for a moment. But today he thinks: I have managed to create some picture or other, and yes, if I only get enough to last me for the next three months, then I'll take it – of course I won't be able to finish a decent work in three months, but people don't understand that either – and I'll just pump it up again in three months.

Now, I would like to say that these things will only arise as the highest extract; therefore, one cannot really discuss these things well from the outset. I always find it a little awkward to discuss these things. It is true that, according to the Pythagorean theorem, the square above the hypotenuse is always equal to the squares of the two legs, but once you have this theorem, it is impossible to talk in advance about all the possible degrees of application. It is the same with the threefold social organism. It is not possible to specify what will now develop as the highest flowering of social life. That is why a discussion of these matters is actually awkward, because they are too disparate areas – social life and artistic life. But if we now take things in detail, we have to say: something like this building in Dornach had to be built, it had to arise out of a certain cultural and civilizing task of the present, out of the recognition of this task. And I would like to say: if there were even fewer people who have a thorough knowledge of what has actually been built and sculpted and painted here, it would still have to be built in some way. Of course, this building could only come into being because the material means were there, but it will only be possible to complete it if further material means are provided. These questions cannot be discussed by saying, “Yes, something must be done,” because, when talking about these things, “must” has a fundamentally quite different meaning. And so I think: above all, it should be quite clear that the freedom of human movement necessary to give art its proper foundation will be brought about by the threefold social organism. And only when natural foundations for social life are in place will each person be able to take proper root in that social life. Ultimately, it is really more about the thing than the words.

You see, I remember, for example, the 1880s. We had just passed through that period in the external bourgeois development of art when the theater was dominated by the comedies of a Paul Lindau, a Blumenthal, in other words, by those who put all manner of farcical, tragic or dramatic straws on the stage. We had the last phase, hadn't we, of conventional painting and so on. At that time, a book was published by a boundlessly narrow-minded person - a person of whom, when you saw him, you really couldn't say anything other than: he can only be narrow-minded. - And this book, what did it demand? It demanded nothing more urgently than, yes, than this art that we have had, this theater art, this sculpture, this musical art, and so on. All of this has no social foundation; it is uprooted, and everything must be rebuilt from the social. They were terribly beautiful phrases, but it was actually terribly bleak stuff, because it was rooted nowhere in life. And so I would like to say: what matters today is not that we say the right things about such things, but that we feel in the right way out of the real necessity of life, and that means: we must feel the necessity of transformation, of the new formation of life. This makes it especially necessary in this area to draw attention to the fact that we must, above all, get away from the phrase. And so, when we speak of the threefold social order, it is important that we first understand this threefold social order ourselves; the other things will then follow.

I believe that basically one speaks about art incorrectly, if one speaks about it at all. In art one should paint, in art one should chisel, in art one should build, but one should actually talk about art as little as possible. Of course there are certain ways of talking about art, but that itself must then be something artistic. There is, of course, also a thought art. Something equally justified is constructed in works of thought art as in the other arts, the art of painting and so on. But when you look at the creative process, what is brought forth artistically is something that cannot be said to be produced in one way or another or to be received in one way or another. Rather, all the necessities of life must be transformed into a kind of matter-of-factness. It is necessary to familiarize oneself with the idea that if there is no genius, there can be no proper art. In this case, all the discussions about how the social organism should be organized in order to allow the artist to be properly appreciated are in vain. At best, one can say: in an otherwise well-functioning social organism, art will be present when there are as many geniuses as possible; then the right art will be there. But first these geniuses have to be there. And how they are to be realized – well, it is certainly true that the lives of many people of genius have been extraordinarily tragic. But for geniuses to be able to have a real effect on the world, for geniuses to be able to realize their potential in accordance with the gifts they have been given at birth, that can only happen in a free spiritual life, because only there will there be real spiritual life.

Then we will also go beyond what is most eminently inartistic today. No, something like the Renaissance and Gothic, these were categories that were basically taken from a fully living reality. It was life, and life is always universal. And so Mr. Uehli was absolutely right when he said that something like Gothic and Renaissance was born out of the whole social context of the time. The divisions that we have recently in the field of art have actually, I would say, arisen more and more purely artificially, and they have arisen because the principle of bourgeois life has continued into intellectual life. Isn't it true that bourgeois life has produced rentiers, that is, idlers who live on their property rents. I mean it like this: if they had just enough ambition, they became artists. But that's not the point, because the point is not to create something that is a kind of human necessity, but to create something out of human ambition, which, although it is usually denied, is still there. And that is where, as Mr. Uehli quite rightly said, the actual artistic endeavor becomes uprooted.

The inner artistic striving, which is completely honest and true, cannot be uprooted, but the artistic life can of course be uprooted from everything abstract in life – if life is uprooted at all. And in such an uprooted artistic life, things come that have their basis in the tendrils of life, not in life itself; the slogans 'Impressionism', 'Expressionism' and the like come. These are things that always have to be brought together again because they have been carved apart. When we talk about impressionism and expressionism, these are only templates, words. But when we talk about our eurythmy, then we have to — not because these things are there — but because these things are there, then we have to turn expressions into impressions and impressions into expressions again in eurythmy. It is extremely important to realize that such catchwords, such didactic abstractions as 'impressionism' and 'expressionism', always arise when the original life is not there. For such words can be applied to anything. What is not an expression? If someone writes a bad poem, that is also an expression; if someone sneezes, that is also an expression. And so, in the end, everything, even the Dornach building, can be called an expression. But that is not the point. The point is to characterize things out of a concrete life document. Then one will not resort to catchwords, but arrive at things that can somehow be seriously meant.

Let me make a comparison: in the Theosophical Society, people talk about the “equality of religions”. When someone starts talking in such abstract terms as the equality or unity of religions, then one also comes across such terrible abstractions in other areas, so that one might say, for example: Well, everything on the table is “food ingredient”. Just as you can find the same thing in Hinduism, in Persia, in Theosophy, in Judaism, so you can also find the same thing in pepper, salt, paprika and other things, namely “food ingredient”. But then you soon see that it depends on the specifics, otherwise you might add salt to coffee and sugar to soup. What is important is to have the will to go into the specifics. But then again, when it comes to the artistic, the categories that have emerged in recent times are basically perceived as something particularly tendril-like. I am certainly not of the opinion that everything that individuals who call themselves expressionists achieve should be condemned. On the contrary, I believe that I can have a very broad heart and that I can even have a heart for such expressionist achievements that other people see as something that has been stuck together. But the theorizing that is attached to such things really seems to me to lead people away from a healthy basis for life. And it is indeed the case today that many people actually only know life from the derived sources. There are people who do not know life but know Ibsen or know Tolstoy or know Rabindranath Tagore, who is now beginning to become a kind of fashion in circles that cannot acquire their own judgment. And when we look at all these things today, when we see how people are caught up in the tangles of life, then we feel it is indeed necessary to emphasize once again how, in a healthy social organism – and that should be the threefold social order – this sense of being uprooted must cease. From this point of view, many of Mr. Uehli's remarks seemed to me to be of particular importance.

Unfortunately, although I have spoken for long enough, I have not been able to add much in concrete terms, because anyone who talks about these things with artistic sensitivity - as was also evident from Mr. Baumann's speech - must talk in such a way that talking about all the questions that are floating around today about the position of the artist - for example, whether or not to exhibit or whether or not geniuses fail - is actually quite futile. I think people should realize this more; then it will lead to the right thing. If someone is an artist, then he can also starve, then he can also have a job that occupies him from morning to evening; he will still develop his artistic genius at night. This cannot be suppressed. If someone is an artist, then he will live his artistic life, even if he has to chop wood or shine boots for the rest of his days – he will live his artistic life, even if he only lives it for his own room, for his own closet. These are things that absolutely cannot be rationally treated, that should be treated, I would even say, a little artistically themselves. And being treated artistically basically precludes philistinism; it cannot be made to look sophisticated. And now it is actually the case, isn't it, that if you are to bring general humanity into a social order, then you cannot integrate that which depends only on personal genius into a paragraph or principle. Even when discussing the position of art in life, one must always have some artistic feeling, and then things will actually always flow into free speech, into free creation; one cannot circumscribe them. The things that are so necessary for life must not be circumscribed.

I would like to say that it is necessary to talk about art from an artistic point of view and that one should have at least a little philistinism in one's veins – one need not make it too bad – if one is to talk about what is universally human. Because, ladies and gentlemen, it would be a bad thing in life if there were only those who were artists, or if all those who believe that they should achieve recognition as artists actually did achieve it. I would like to know what would become of life then. What is necessary for life is genius, but what is also necessary for life is philistinism. And if there were no philistinism, there would probably soon be no more genius either. The categories of “good” and “bad” cannot be applied to life so easily, but life is multifaceted. You can talk a lot, but you should actually talk nothing but what is taken from life itself.

Paul Baumann introduces the evening of discussion with a lecture by “Social Illness and Socialism”. Following this lecture, Rudolf Steiner explains:

Rudolf Steiner: I would like to create a mood, but also something from which you can see how far shamelessness has already gone in relation to the fight against everything that comes from me, and how this shamelessness is already spilling over into smear sheets like the Lorcher Nachrichten. It is the paper published in Lorch, Württemberg, the 'Der Leuchtturm', which has published an article entitled 'The Stolen Threefold Order'. If such a paper were to reveal itself as shameless only through such an article, then it would characterize itself precisely as a shameless rag. I mention this so that some of what has been said often, especially in connection with our followers, can be illuminated, because this “beacon”, which, among other things, “leads the fight against Dr. Steiner and Theosophy”, is subscribed to by numerous of our anthroposophists. In a lecture in Stuttgart, I had to publicly call the editor of this journal, whose real name is Rohm, a “pig” in a kind of comparison. I would like to emphasize this here, but today we have no other means at our disposal against the lies that are being spread on the worst possible grounds than this kind of means.

And this Rohm writes in the “Leuchtturm” of June 1, 1920 under the heading “The Stolen Tripartite Division”:

Mrs. Elisabeth Mathilde Metzdorff-Teschner of Sooden an der Werra goes public with a small brochure (the booklet is titled: “3:5, 5:8 = 21:34. The secret of being able to pay off the debt in the foreseeable future”) that she self-published. This woman has something to say. The booklet deals with the divine proportion of the golden section and derives from it a morphological threefold structure, the practical effect of which is supposed to be the possibility of repaying the German people's war debts in the foreseeable future. The few pages of this writing contain a surprising wealth of ideas; one gets the impression that the woman has taken the best bits of her knowledge and presented them in extract form in order to be heard, to prove that she has the right to be heard.

The little booklet that I received through Mr. Uehli eight days ago gives the impression of absolute nonsense -— absolute nonsense! And if “threefolding” can be stolen by stealing the number “three”, then threefolding can of course be stolen in many ways. However, one type of threefold order is also in that little book, and it is called: state, cultural realm, church. That is the name of the threefold order there, and the thing about the golden ratio boils down to this – you know that the golden ratio consists in the whole being related to the large as the large is related to the small – that the state as the whole must be related to the cultural realm as the cultural realm is related to the church. So we have the unified state again in this completely nonsensical “threefold order”.

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The Lighthouse article continues:

We learn the following: there is an international order for ethics and culture, founded by Alfred Knapp, the son of a German pastor, and chaired today by Professor August Forel.

— the same Knapp, an individual who belongs to about the worst shades of the present-day parties and who, as far as I believe, is staying in Zurich. And further:

Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner worked in the Munich home of this order on the unveiling of the “morphological tripartite division” according to the law of the golden section. She approached various offices with the results of her research, which she felt were suitable for exploiting her discovery for the benefit of the German people; among others, the press office of the Ministry of War in Munich, the author of “Fürsten ohne Krone” (Princes without Crowns), the Freybund Nienkamp, and - a “philanthropic society” whose headquarters are in Stuttgart and which turned out to be the - Steiner Society. This famous “philanthropic society” received the manuscript from Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner on loan for eight days; then requested an extension of at least two weeks “because the head of the society was not always present”; “the request to give credit to the head of the society was denied with the urgent request for trust”; instead of the granted two weeks, the manuscript was kept for four weeks. And soon afterwards the head of the “philanthropic society” in question, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of the “Anthroposophical Society”, came forward with a brand new idea, the threefold social order, and kept it secret from the public.

In short, it is all a pack of lies, not a word of it is true.

It is all absolute nonsense. It may well be that some fanatic, who may even be a member of our Society, was shown the nonsense manuscript in Stuttgart; in any case, I never saw it and never bothered about it. And then this nonsense manuscript is said to have been transported to Hamburg by some sort of swarm spirit – or so Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner writes. Well, in Hamburg, all sorts of swarm spirit activity is not entirely foreign to the Anthroposophical Society either. But none of this concerns me, and it is also completely irrelevant.

So far you have heard that the threefold social order, as it is cultivated here, is said to have originated from Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner. The last section of the Leuchtturm article says the following:

So Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner accuses Dr. Steiner of stealing the idea of threefolding; her booklet is a polemic in favor of the priority of the threefolding idea, and the most remarkable thing about it is that Mrs. Metzdorff-Teschner says, in essence: ” Not only did Dr. Steiner steal my idea of threefolding, he did not even grasp it correctly and botched it, he turned a useful idea into an unusable one, which is not suitable for helping our people out of their misery, but only for lining his and his society's pockets.

So you see, here the grandiose, ingenious idea is being recycled: he took my watch – but then he got hold of a completely different one. So you see, this is how they fight today. It is of course necessary that our friends know in the broadest sense what methods are used in the world today for fighting. It is not even so interesting that it is directed against us, but the interesting thing is, after all, in what a quagmire of lies we are stuck in the world today. And you see how necessary it is that this quagmire of lies be fought very seriously. For the time being, I have only been able to ascertain that there are a whole series of members of the Anthroposophical Society in Stuttgart who always subscribe to these kinds of leaflets when they throw mud at me.

I would now like to move on to answering the questions that have been asked. First of all, the question:

We keep hearing from the Socialist side that only violence can save humanity. — Does it not almost seem that this is true?

Dear attendees, I would like to say a few words about the point of violence, of mere display of power. It is perhaps not without significance to reflect today on the various human instincts that appeal to this means of violence to establish a humane condition. It is particularly interesting from a social-psychological point of view to pursue this quest for solutions to important questions through violence. It is a fruitful idea, which unfortunately is pursued far too little, to ask ourselves: where do the worst phenomena and excesses of the present day come from? These phenomena have lived right up to our catastrophic times, but below the surface, they were latent passions, they were restrained longings for violence. They were suppressed, and the social condition, the social state, was something like an enormous lie. This lie, which permeated the entire civilized world, which was suppressed in the underground, could no longer be held back in 1914. The whole system of lies, which existed under a thin layer, broke out. The sleeping people, I mean the spiritually sleeping people, they clung to this upper layer; they held it for the world, for human life, and they did not believe those who spoke of what was actually hidden beneath this layer. It is the same again today. Whenever anything needs to be discussed, the lying spirits come and cast their worst, filthiest webs over what would be truth. But it is of no use to humanity, which seriously wants to participate in anything that is to be created for the recovery of social conditions, must look with open eyes at what is actually coming to the surface today.

And here I would like to give you a small example from the very recent past, from which you can see what is happening now that the spirits have been released, so to speak, where the spirits are appealing to power wherever possible.

Rudolf Steiner reads a newspaper article which shows how General Lüttwitz and his troops used corporal punishment and other violent measures against their German fellow citizens. The article describes the case of a man who was called upon for walking on a path that had recently been closed. He was thrown to the ground, arrested and beaten. When the higher authorities were called upon to punish the brutal soldiers, the plaintiff was told that the soldiers had permission to act in this way against people who opposed them. This answer had been signed by the commander himself.

Rudolf Steiner: So you see, my esteemed audience, this is how far modern civilization has come. You know, of course, that corporal punishment has been introduced in Hungary, that Poland has introduced corporal punishment. So you see, corporal punishment is migrating from east to west. And if humanity continues to sleep and behave as it is currently behaving, then it will come as no surprise what we will still be able to experience.

But, my dear attendees, we also live in a time that engages in very strange discussions. I will share with you a small sample of this type of discussion in which we are immersed today. It is about how a publicist criticizes his government. You may know from those times, when sleeping was cultivated, how sharp expressions were used when an opposition member attacked the government. Not every opposition attacked the government in such a polite manner as, for example, the Austrian radical opposition did in certain times, signing with the signature “Your Majesty's most loyal opposition”. (Laughter!) But for several decades things have changed, and today, in an age in which so many people long for power, people in government are publicly referred to with the beautiful names: murderer, crook, racketeer, lawbreaker.

A newspaper cutting about Gustav Noske, Governor of Hanover, is read out by Rudolf Steiner.

These are the words of opposition used today to criticize the government in public newspapers, and nothing is stirred that those in government can do anything about. So we are familiarizing ourselves with the tone that is struck today when those in government are referred to as murderers, crooks, profiteers, and lawbreakers of all kinds.

I believe that the facts that occur here and there do not speak against what has often been said from this point of view, namely that we are heading towards decline at a rather rapid pace and that, basically, this is no time for souls to sleep. What the instincts that crave power bring about is expressed in these things, and it is expressed, for example, in the by no means isolated case of Hesterberg, which I read out earlier. And it is also expressed in many other things that are reported today from all parts of the “educated” world - I put “educated” in quotation marks - from all parts of the “educated” world. And I ask: Who dares to believe that anything could be painted too black, that speaks today of the decline, not only of our economic, but above all of our moral life. But these things show quite clearly how the rule of such forces leads to those unhealthy conditions, which Mr. Baumann has so aptly described to you today. For these unhealthy conditions express themselves, for example, in something like the survey conducted in a primary school in Berlin that is attended by 650 children. The following conditions were revealed: 161 of these 650 children have neither shoes nor sandals; 142 children have no warm clothes; 305 children have no underwear or only rags; 379 live in apartments where not a single room is heated; 106 come from families that do not even have the money to buy only the rationed food. 341 of 650 children have never had a drop of milk; 118 are tubercular; 48 are behind schedule due to malnutrition. Of the 650 children, 85 have died over the course of a year due to deprivation and malnutrition. There you have the influx of what is today's attitude, what is today's belief in physical health conditions, that is, in physical disease conditions. It is time to listen when someone says that a feeling is needed for what is healthy, for that which has within it the healthy breath of life in physical, mental and spiritual terms. And what matters is that we really engage in this feeling of health and do not chase after things like the longing for power, which is truly there where people who indulge their baser instincts, whether they are given free rein as thieves and muggers or as officials and ministers who crave power from the same source. And it is from these instincts for power that the unhealthy conditions have arisen. One must recognize what the human condition is today and how it is necessary not to call for power and such things, but merely for the conditions in which there is a real feeling for recovery according to the spirit.

Among those commenting on Rudolf Steiner's remarks are Roman Boos and Paul Baumann.

Rudolf Steiner: There is still the question:

What is the mission of the small intermediate peoples such as Livonians, Estonians, Lithuanians and so on?

When we speak today of the tasks that directly affect humanity, we must speak of tasks that concern all of humanity. For we are on the verge of looking beyond narrow national and ethnic borders to the great tasks of humanity. And when I have spoken of the various differentiations of people across the civilized earth and said that in the East, but what I sometimes mean to include Asia, there is above all the home of intellectual life - that intellectual life which, in its purity, emerged and and then went into decline and is still in decline today, but which also lives on as an inheritance in Central Europe and in the western regions. When I said that the Central European regions have primarily possessed the folk abilities of the legal and state spheres since ancient Greek times, and if I have said that in the western regions the talent for economic thinking has been predominant since the beginning of modern times, I mean that the particular aptitude for one or other of these talents arises out of the nature of the peoples spread over the respective areas.

Today, however, we have the task of appealing to the humanities, which then evoke the more universal abilities, the threefold abilities, to appeal to the humanities, so as not to cultivate things in this one-sidedness any longer. We must remember today what happens when the Oriental remains one-sided, we must remember what happens when the Central European remains one-sided, and we must remember what happens when the Westerner remains one-sided. Development cannot go forward if one-sidedness persists. Therefore, we should not really be asking what tasks the individual peoples will have in the future. It is not the peoples who will have tasks – it is humanity that will have tasks! Only in order to understand these tasks better, only to understand how these tasks have been prepared in the course of history and how what has emerged particularly strongly here or there must now be united with other human abilities, only to understand how what is happening today is to be shaped more universally out of the differentiated development of humanity, it is necessary to engage with the particular tasks of the individual peoples. It is of the utmost importance to engage with this, because it is precisely what is there and what must be overcome that must be thoroughly and precisely understood.

Now, what have remained are, I would say, “splinters of the people” with a multifaceted nature, from among those peoples who actually make up, so to speak, the basic nature of one of the three world territories.

It is not at all easy to speak of this basic nature in anthropological terms; only anthroposophical observation provides the right categories. Only through anthroposophical observation can we say correctly: what is developing in the East has these abilities; what is developing in the West has these abilities; what is developing in the middle has these abilities. If we proceed anthropologically, that is, we look more at the blood, then we immediately come across questions that are quite impractical and do not reveal anything of practical life with any particular clarity. If, for example, we wanted to replace the expression “European East” by saying “the Russian people”, then we would be saying something that has no practical significance in life. The point is that we have to start from completely different categories than from these purely anthropological or ethnographic categories.

The small splinters of the people now, of course, have the most diverse predispositions precisely because of the way they came into being. Consider, for example, a small people such as the Magyars, who have a kind of Turanian racial identity but who have undergone the most diverse experiences, who are pushed together like a geographical triangle on the Danube. Of course, one could come up with all kinds of nice missions if one wanted to address the mission of such a splinter of a people. But one would have to start from completely different points of view if one wanted to speak, for example, of the Bulgarians, who are related to the Magyars in a certain way. The Bulgarians have undergone a Slavicization metamorphosis; they are related to the Magyars by blood, but they are not related to the Magyars by language and ethnography, so that the Slavic element has, to a certain extent, been instilled into the Turanian blood, even in terms of language. Here, of course, we enter into realms that must be considered from completely different points of view if we are to deal with these non-anthroposophical, anthropological elements.

The only thing that arises from an anthroposophical point of view in the right way is something like this: quite apart from certain things that have not been brought about by history, which live more in such splinters of the people than in the great nations, something of an international element lives very strongly in such splinters of the people, at least in terms of its potential. And it can be said that if these individual peoples, these small peoples – many of them are peripheral peoples and the like – if they were to familiarize themselves with the great tasks of humanity, they would have the easiest time of it. For example, it would be an extraordinarily beautiful thing if the Baltic peoples were to devote themselves to developing the many abilities that lie within them, precisely as an international task. Instead, they have often preferred to cultivate the extreme reaction within themselves. And they have happily brought it to the point that, for example, in relatively recent times a motion was tabled in a Baltic parliament to reintroduce slavery in its entirety. But as I said, these marginal peoples have all the prerequisites for cosmopolitanism and for stripping away all forms of chauvinism if only they would develop these talents. But today we live in a time when people are terribly fond of being befogged, when people with a great longing, an unconscious, unhealthy longing, want to enter into a nebulous atmosphere and where they like to create all kinds of illusions for themselves. Then there is talk of this or that mission that this or that small nation should have. Well, it is certainly possible, if one proceeds anthropologically, to find much in the depths of the national soul. But it is precisely among the smaller nations that this talent should be expressed: to combine the talents that are present into a great cosmopolitan style, which we so urgently need.

I always think – perhaps I may say this here, it has been said by me many times since the beginning of the war catastrophe to the most diverse people – I always think what it would have meant if a great, international, cosmopolitan task had been taken up by the Swiss people in 1914. The taking hold of such a great task in a relatively small country could have stood in the spiritual evolution of the world much as a center around which many things revolve, just as today European currencies revolve around the Swiss currency. But today everything is covered with a fog, and people do not engage with things that have real value at the moment when a person engages with them. Unfortunately, however, there is still far too much of an attitude that says: What is the task that I have because I belong to this or that people, because I was born in Hamburg or in Breslau or in Berlin or in Vienna or in Rome? What mission has been given to me precisely because of this? — The other question is more important: What strengths does my birth here or there give me, what strengths does it give me for the common, international, cosmopolitan mission of all humanity, which is so necessary today? People would like to delude themselves and ask themselves something like: What is my mission? Then they wait. They wait somewhat like the man who opened his mouth and waited for the roast pigeons to fly in.

But today is not about waiting for our mission, but we must be clear: we are at a point in human development where the destiny of the world must be born out of the human being, where the old talk of the mission of that which is not directly born in the human being must cease. We are at a point in human development where the human being is called upon to give destiny a content out of himself. If we do not begin to abandon this passive talk about what our mission is, or if we do not stop appealing: Yes, but the gods must help, it cannot go that way, it is unjust, the gods must help, if we do not give up this, then we will not make any progress in the present moment of human development. Today it is important that we are clear about the fact that we have to seek the gods through the inner being of man – I do not say in the inner being of man, but through the inner being of man – and that the gods count on us to help determine their destiny.

Today we do not have to answer the questions from the observation of this or that rooted here or there, but today we have to answer the questions from the point of view of the will. The earlier contemplative questions are now questions of the will. In the past, one arrived at contemplation by immersing oneself in that which had surrendered to reflection; today, our occult task is to take up into our will that invisible and supersensible spirit, so that that may be born in humanity which goes beyond all individual limitations. The external structures of the state have been brought to such a state that it is almost impossible to cross borders today. If we keep talking about What is the task of this or that part of the people? - then we erect such boundaries in our minds and cannot go beyond these boundaries to grasp the overall task of humanity.

It is basically - although it is terrible - even less significant if these are the boundaries that are now so difficult to cross, the boundaries that have been fought over so bloodily in the external space. It is terrible, but it is worse for the development of humanity if we shape our minds in such a way that we ask: What is the mission of this splinter of the people? What is the mission of that splinter of the people? — We must go beyond the boundaries. We must erase them. We must find the common humanity. That is why we must, above all, deliberately place ourselves on this ground of the common humanity. Then we can say: Those who do not belong to a great nation have it better, because when they reflect on their deepest powers, they can contribute much to the internationalization and cosmopolitanization of humanity.

This is above all the task of those who can be called, so to speak, the small states or peripheral states or the like.