The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This is a part of Steiner's Lectures on Spiritual Essence and its Working. It is the fifth of a cycle of nine lectures, From Symptom to Reality in Modern History. This lecture is also known as Concerning Death and Evil, or The Supersensible Element in the Study of History. It is from the volume titled: Historical Symptomology.

Even within the limits in which it is permissible to speak to-day, we in the fifth Post-Atlantean period of civilisation this period of the Spiritual Soul¹ in which we are living cannot refer without deep emotion to those things which concern the mystery of evil. For in so doing we touch upon one of the deepest secrets of this fifth Post-Atlantean period, and any discussion of it comes up against the immaturity of human facilities: the right powers of feeling for such things are as yet little developed in present-day mankind. It is true that in the past certain hints or indications of the mystery of evil, and of that other mystery which is connected with it—the mystery of death—were attempted again and again in picture form. But these pictorial, imaginative descriptions have been taken very little in earnest, especially during the last decades—since the last third of the nineteenth century. Or else they have been cultivated in the way of which I spoke here nearly two years ago, in relation to very important events of the present time. What I said then had also a deeper motive, for anyone who has knowledge will be well aware what untold depths of the human being must be sounded when one begins to speak of these things. Alas, many signs have shown how little real good-will there is even now for an understanding of such things. The will to understand will come in time, and we must see that it does come. In every possible way we must see that it does come.

In speaking of these matters, we cannot always avoid the appearance of wishing to pass criticism on the present time in one way or another. Even what I lately said about the configuration of philosophical strivings within the bourgeoisie or middle class, especially since the last third of the nineteenth century (though it also applies to a considerably longer time)—even this may be regarded as mere criticism by those who wish to take it superficially. Nevertheless, all that I bring forward here is intended not as mere criticism, but as a simple characterisation, so that human beings may see what kind of forces and impulses have been holding sway. From a certain point of view, they were after all inevitable. One could even prove that it was necessary for the middle classes of the civilised world to sleep through the period from the eighteen-forties to the end of the eighteen-seventies. This cultural sleep of the bourgeoisie could indeed be presented as a world-historic necessity. Nevertheless, a candid recognition of the fact should have some positive effect upon us, kindling certain impulses in knowledge and in will—true impulses towards the future.

Two mysteries (as I said, we can speak of these things only within certain limits)—two mysteries are of special importance for the evolution of mankind during the epoch of the Spiritual Soul, in which we have been living since the beginning of the fifteenth century. They are the mystery of death and the mystery of evil. For the present epoch, the mystery of death is closely connected, from a certain side, with the mystery of evil. Taking the mystery of death to begin with, we may ask this very significant question: How stands it with death altogether, in relation to the evolution of mankind?

As I said again only the other day, that which calls itself Science nowadays takes these things far too easily. Death, for the majority of scientists, is merely the cessation of life. Death is regarded merely from this standpoint, whether it be in plant or animal or man. Spiritual Science cannot take things so easily, treating all things in the same standardised way. After all, we might even conceive as death the stopping of a clock—the death of the clock. Death, for man, is, in effect, something altogether different from the so-called death of other creatures. But we can learn to know the phenomenon of death in its reality only when we see it against the background of the forces which are active in the great Universe, and which—inasmuch as they also take hold of man—bring him physical death. In the great Universe certain impulses hold sway. Man belongs to the Universe; these forces therefore permeate man, too, and inasmuch as they are active within man, they bring him death. But we must now ask ourselves: These forces which are active in the great Universe—what is their function, apart from the fact that they bring death to man? It would be altogether wrong to imagine that the forces which bring death to man exist in the Universe for that express purpose. In reality this is only a collateral effect—as it were a by-product of these forces.

After all, in speaking of the railway system it will occur to no-one to say that the purpose of the engine is to wear out the rails! Nevertheless, the engine will spoil the rails in course of time; indeed it cannot help doing so. But its purpose in the railway system is altogether different. And if a man defined it thus: An engine is a machine which has the task of wearing out the rails—he would of course be talking nonsense, though it cannot he disputed that the wearing out of the rails belongs to the essence of the railway engine. It would be just as wrong for anyone to say that those forces in the Universe which bring death to man are there for this express purpose. Their bringing of death to man is only a collateral effect—an effect they have alongside their proper task.

What then is the proper task of the forces that bring death to man? It is this: To endow man with the full faculty of the Spiritual Soul. You see, therefore, how intimately the mystery of death is connected with the fifth Post-Atlantean age, and how important it is that in this fifth Post-Atlantean age the mystery of death should be quite generally unveiled. For the proper function of the very forces which—as a by-product of their working—bring death to man, is this: To instill, to implant into his evolution the faculty for the Spiritual Soul. I say once more, the faculty for the Spiritual Soul—not the Spiritual Soul itself.

This will not only lead you towards an understanding of the mystery of death; it will also show you what it is to think exactly on these important matters. Our modern thinking—I say this once again not by way of criticism, but as a pure characterisation—our modern thinking is in many respects (if I may use the unpleasant term—it is an apt one) altogether slovenly. And this applies especially to what goes by the name of science and scholarship. It is often no better than saying: The object of the railway engine is to wear out the rails. The pronouncement of modern science on one subject or another are often just of this quality—and this quality simply will not do if we are to bring about a wholesome condition for humanity in future. And in the epoch of the Spiritual Soul this can be achieved only in full consciousness. Again and again I must emphasise this; it is a truth deeply significant for our time.

How often do we see men arising here or there, making this or that proposal for the social and economic life out of a specious wisdom, and always with the mistaken idea that it is still possible to make constructive proposals for the social life without calling in the aid of Spiritual Science. He alone thinks in accordance with the times who knows that every attempted proposal concerning the social configuration of mankind in future is the merest quackery unless it is founded on Spiritual Science. Only he who realises this, in all its implications, is thinking truly in accordance with the times. Those who still pay heed to all manner of professorial wisdom on social economics—arising on the basis of an unspiritual science—are passing through the present time asleep.

The forces which we must describe as the forces of death took hold of the bodily nature of man in a far distant epoch. How they did so, you may read in my book, An Outline of Occult Science.

Only now are they finding their way into his soul-nature. For the remainder of earthly evolution, man must receive these forces of death into his own being. In the course of the present age they will work in him in such a way that he brings to full manifestation in himself the faculty of the Spiritual Soul.

Having put the question thus, having spoken in this way about the mystery of death—that is, about the forces that are at work in the great Universe, and bring death to man—I may now also refer in a similar manner to the forces of evil. These, too, are not such that we can simply say: “They bring about evil actions within the human order.” This again is only a collateral effect.

If the forces of death did not exist in the Universe, man would not be able to evolve the Spiritual Soul, he would not be able to receive,—as he must receive, in the further course of his earthly evolution—the forces of the Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. Man must pass through the Spiritual Soul if he wishes to absorb in his own way the forces of Spirit-Self, Life-Spirit and Spirit-Man. To this end he must completely unite the forces of death with his own being during the course of the fifth Post-Atlantean age, that is to say, by the middle of the third millennium A.D. And he can do so. But he cannot unite the forces of evil with his being in the same way. I say again not in the same way. The forces of evil are so ordered in the great Universe in the Cosmos that man will be able to receive them into his evolution only during the Jupiter period, even as he now receives the forces of death.

We may say therefore: The forces of evil work upon man with a lesser intensity, taking hold only of a portion of his being. If we would penetrate into the essence of these forces, we must not look at their external consequences. We must look for the essence of evil where it is present in its own inherent being; that is to say, where it works in the way in which it must work, because the forces that figure in the Universe as “evil” enter also into man. Here we come to something of which I said just now that one can speak of it only with deep emotion and then only under one essential condition: that these things are received with the deepest, truest earnestness. If we would seek out the evil in man, we must seek for it not in the evil actions that are done in human society, but in the evil inclinations—in the tendencies to evil. We must, in the first place, altogether abstract our attention from the consequences of these inclinations—consequences which appear in any individual man to a greater or lesser extent. We must direct our gaze to the evil inclinations. If we do so, then we may put this question: In what men do these evil inclinations work during our own fifth post-Atlantean period—those inclinations which, when they come to expression in their side-effects, are so plainly visible in evil actions? Who are the men concerned?

My dear friends, we receive an answer to this question when we try to pass the so-called Guardian of the Threshold and learn truly to know the human being. Then we receive the answer, and it is this: Since the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean period, evil inclinations—tendencies to evil—are subconsciously present in all men. Nay, the very entry of man into the fifth Post-Atlantean age—which is the age of modern civilisation—consists in his receiving into himself the tendencies to evil. Radically, but none the less truly, spoken, this may be stated: He who crosses the threshold into the spiritual world will undergo the following experience: There is no crime in all the world, but that every single human being, inasmuch as he belongs to the fifth Post-Atlantean age, has in his subconsciousness the inclination towards it—I say again, the inclination. Whether in one case or another the inclination to evil leads to an external evil action depends on quite other circumstances than on the inclination itself. You see, my dear friends, if one is obliged in our time to tell humanity the plain unvarnished truth, the truths one has to tell are by no means comfortable.

What, then, is the real purpose of these forces which bring about the evil inclinations in man? What do they seek to achieve in the Universe, when to begin with they instil themselves into the nature of man? Of a truth, they are not present in the Universe for the express purpose of bringing about evil actions in human society. They do bring them about, for reasons which we still have to consider. But just as little as the forces of death are there in the Universe in order to make man die, so, too, the forces of evil are not there in the Universe in order to entice him into criminal actions. They are there in the Universe for a very different purpose: when man is summoned to develop the conscious Spiritual Soul, their function is to call forth in him the inclination to receive the spiritual life. In the great Universe these forces of Evil hold sway. Man must receive them, and in receiving them he implants in himself the seed, the tendency to experience the spiritual life through the conscious Spiritual Soul. These forces, therefore, which are perverted in the human social order, do not exist in order to call forth evil actions. On the contrary, they exist in order that man, when he reaches the stage of the Spiritual Soul, may break through into the spiritual life. If man did not receive into himself those inclinations to evil of which I have just spoken, he would never come to the point where, out of his own Spiritual Soul, he has the impulse to receive from the Universe, the Spirit: which from henceforward must fertilise all cultural life, unless indeed this is to die away.

We shall do best if, to begin with, we turn our attention to what is intended to become of those forces whose caricature you see in the evil actions of man. We shall do best to ask ourselves: What is intended to take place in the future evolution of mankind under the influence of these very forces which are at the same time the forces responsible for the evil inclinations of man?

You see, when we think of these things we come very near the central nerve of the evolution of humanity. At the same time, all these things are connected with the disasters which have overtaken mankind to-day. All the disasters that have come upon us at the present time, and are destined to come in the near future, are like the signs of an approaching storm. They are merely the signs of quite other things that are about to come over humanity—signs which at the present stage often show the very reverse of what is coming. These things are said, not to encourage pessimism, but as a call to awakening, an impulse to strong actions.

Perhaps the best way of attaining our present purpose is to start from something concrete. I recently said: An essential impulse in human evolution during the age of the Spiritual Soul must be the growth of interest between man and man. The interest which one man takes in another must become ever greater and greater. This interest must grow for the remainder of earthly evolution—and especially in four domains. The first is this: Man as he evolves towards the future will behold and see his fellow-men in new and ever changing ways. To-day, although he has passed through rather more than a fifth of the age of the Spiritual Soul, man is little inclined as yet to see his fellow-man as he must learn to see him in the course of this epoch, which as you know, will continue into the third millennium. To-day men see one another in such a way that they overlook what is most important; they have no real vision of their fellow-men. In this respect men have yet to make full use of all that has been instilled into their souls, through various incarnations, by the influence of Art. Much can be learned from the evolution of Art; I have often given indications as to the lessons we can learn from it.

It can scarcely be denied—if we cultivate the symptomatic understanding of history which I have called for in recent lectures—that artistic creation and enjoyment are declining in almost all domains of Art. All that has been attempted in Art during the last few decades reveals very clearly, to anyone who has true feeling, that Art as such is in a period of decay. The most important element of the artistic life which must pass into the evolution of humanity in future is the education which human beings can receive from it for certain ways of understanding which will be necessary for the future.

Needless to say, every branch of culture has many different branches and concomitant effects. We may say, however, that all Art contains an element tending towards a deeper and more real knowledge of man. Anyone who truly enters, for instance, into the artistic forms created in painting or sculpture, or into the essence of the inner movements pulsating through music and poetry—anyone who experiences Art in a truly inward way (which artists themselves often fail to do nowadays) will imbue himself with something that enables him to comprehend man from a certain point of view—I mean, to comprehend him pictorially. This must come to humanity in the present age of the Spiritual Soul: the faculty to perceive men pictorially. You have already heard the elements of this. Look at the human being—behold his head: it points you back into the past. Even as a dream is understood as a reminiscence of outer physical life and thence receives its signature, so for one who sees things in their reality, all physical things are as pictures—images of something spiritual. We must learn to see through the picture-nature of man to his spiritual archetype. And this will happen as we go on into the future; man will, as it were, become transparent to his fellow-man. The way his head is formed, the way he walks: all this will be seen with an inner insight and sympathy altogether different from what the men of today are as yet inclined to evolve. For the only way to learn to know the human being in his Ego is to cultivate this understanding of his picture-nature, and thus to approach him with the underlying feeling that everything outer physical eyes can see of him is related to the true super-sensible reality of man, as a picture painted on canvas is to the reality it represents.

This underlying feeling must be gradually developed; this must be learned. Man will meet man not so as to perceive in him merely the organisation of bone, muscle, blood and so forth. No, he will learn to feel in the other man the image of his eternal and spiritual being. Behold, the human being passes by us, and we shall not imagine that we can understand him unless this that passes by us awakens in us the deeper vision of what he is as an eternal and spiritual man.

In this way we shall learn to see the human being. And we shall really be able to see him thus. For everything we see when we perceive human forms, human movements, and all that goes with them as a picture of the eternal, will make us either warm or cold. It will have to fill us either with inner warmth or with inner cold. We shall go through the world learning to know men in a very deep and tender way. One man will make us warm, another will make us cold. Worst of all will be those who make us neither warm nor cold. Thus we shall have an inner experience in the warmth-ether which penetrates our etheric body. This will be the reflex of the heightened interest which must be evolved as between man and man.

The second thing to which I must now refer will call forth still stranger feelings in the man of to-day, who has indeed no inclination at all to receive such things as these. (Although, in a none too distant future, this very antipathy may change into sympathy for these things). The second is this: men will understand one another quite differently. In the two thousand years which still have to pass until the end of the fifth Post-Atlantean age, this, above all, will happen—it is true the two thousand years will not entirely suffice; what I now refer to will continue into the sixth Post-Atlantean age—but during the present age the following development will occur: Besides the recognition of the Ego, of which I have just spoken, there will arise a faculty to feel and apprehend in man, even as we meet him, his relationship to the third Hierarchy—the Angels, Archangels and Archai. This will come about through a growing recognition of the quite different way in which men are now related to speech and language, compared with how it was in earlier times.

The evolution of language has already passed its zenith. Language has indeed become an abstract thing; and all the efforts that are being made to classify societies in accordance with the languages of peoples represent merely a wave of deepest untruthfulness now passing over the earth. For men no longer have that relationship to language which sees through the language to the human being—to the inner being of man.

On various occasions, as a first step towards an understanding of this matter, I have cited an example. I repeated it recently during a public lecture in Zürich, for the time has come to bring these things before a wider public. In Dornach, too, I have drawn attention to the same point—how surprising it is to compare the essays on Historic Method by Hermann Grimm, who stood so fully within the German mid-European culture of the nineteenth century, with essays on the same subject by Woodrow Wilson. I have carried out the experiment with great care: it is possible to take over certain sentences from Woodrow Wilson and insert them bodily in Hermann Grimm's essays, for they are almost word-for-word identical with sentences in Hermann Grimm. Again, whole sentences on Historic Method by Hermann Grimm can be transplanted into the lectures subsequently published by Woodrow Wilson. And yet there is a radical difference between the two—a difference which we notice as we read. Not indeed a difference in content: literal content will be of far less importance for mankind as we evolve towards the future. The difference is this: in Hermann Grimm, everything—even passages with which one cannot agree—has been struggled for, it has been conquered step by step, sentence by sentence. In Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, it is as though his own inner demon, by which he is possessed in his subconsciousness, had instilled it all into his consciousness. On the one hand the things spring forth directly, at the surface of consciousness; on the other, they are “inspirations” imparted by a demon out of the subconscious into the conscious life. Indeed, we must say that what comes from Woodrow Wilson's side derives from a certain state of possession.

I give this example to show that word-for-word agreement is no longer the important thing today. I always feel it with intense pain when friends of our cause bring me quotations from this or that person, or this or that professor, saying, “Look, this is quite anthroposophical—I beg you to see how anthroposophical it is.” In our period of civilisation it is even possible for a Professor, dabbling in politics; to write on an important matter something that agrees word-for-word with that which springs from a knowledge of realities; but the word-for-word agreement is not the point. What matters is the region of the human soul from which things spring. We must look through the words of speech to the region whence things derive.

All that is said here is said not merely in order to formulate certain statements. The important thing is that the way of saying it is permeated by that inner force which proceeds directly from the Spirit. Anyone who discovers word-for-word agreements without feeling how the things here said proceed from the fountain-head of the Spirit, and are permeated by it inasmuch as they are placed into the whole context of the Anthroposophical world-conception—anyone who cannot detect the how of what is said—has utterly failed to recognise what is here intended, even if he notes a word-for-word agreement with some choice pronouncement of external wisdom.

It is of course not very comfortable to have to point to such examples, for the inclinations of mankind to-day frequently go in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, it is a duty and responsibility laid upon one to-day, if one is speaking in all earnestness and does not want merely to call forth a kind of torpor, making the lectures a pleasant soporific. One must not shrink from choosing such examples as are unpleasant to many people. Surely there should be willingness to listen to a serious warning of what it will really mean for the world if people fail to notice that the world is about to have its order drawn up for it by a weak-minded American Professor! It is indeed uncomfortable to speak of actualities to-day. Many people find the very opposite convenient and pleasant. In any case, one speaks of actualities only in those domains of life where it is absolutely necessary, and where it concerns men closely—or should do so any rate—to listen to these things.

To see through the veils of language: this must come over humanity in future. Men must acquire the faculty to perceive the inner gesture in speech. This age will not come to an end—certainly the last stages of it will go on into the following epoch—but the third millennium will not pass by till men have come to this: they will no longer listen to another man who speaks to them as they listen to him nowadays. They will find expressed in speech and language the human being's dependence on the third Hierarchy—on the Angels, Archangels and Archai. In speech they will find an expression of that whereby a man penetrates into the spiritual—into the super-sensible. Then they will hear through speech into the soul of man. Needless to say, we shall have an altogether different social life when men can hear through speech the inner soul of man. Much indeed of the force of so-called evil will have to be transmuted in this way, by man becoming able to hearken to the things another man is saying and to hear, through his speech, his soul. Then, when the soul is heard through speech, there will come over man a wonderful feeling of colour, and through this feeling of colour in speech men will learn to understand one another internationally. Quite as a matter of course one sound will call forth the same feeling as the sight of a blue colour, and another sound the same feeling as the sight of a red colour. Thus, what will only be felt as warmth when one sees the human being, will grow as it were into colour when one listens to his speech. One will have to enter with intimate sympathy into the sound of the speech which is borne from human lips to human ear. That is the second thing which is approaching.

The third thing is this: Men will experience very intimately in themselves the expressions of and configurations of feeling in other men. Much of this will be brought about through speech, but not through speech alone. When one man meets another, he will experience the state of feeling of the other in himself, in his own breathing. As we approach the future of earthly evolution, in the time to which I now refer, our breathing will attune itself to the life of feeling of the other man. One man will cause us to breathe more quickly, another man more slowly;and according as we breathe more quickly or more slowly we shall feel what kind of a man we are meeting. Think how the social community of men will live and grow together; think how intimate the social life of man will tend to become! Certainly it will take still longer for this kind of breathing to become a part of the soul of man—the whole of the sixth epoch of civilisation and part of the seventh. And in the seventh epoch a little will be achieved of the fourth thing, to which I will now refer.

In so far as men belong to a human community by their own act of will, then in the realm of will they will have—forgive the hard saying—to digest one another. Inasmuch as we shall have to will, or will to will, one thing or another in association with this man or that, we shall have inner experiences similar to those we now have, still a very primitive form, when we consume one food-stuff or another. In the sphere of willing, men will have to digest one another. In the sphere of feeling, they will have to breathe one another. In the sphere of understanding through speech, they will have to feel one another in living colours. Lastly, as they learn really to see one another, they will learn to know one another as Ego-beings.

All these forces, however, will reside more in the inner realm of the soul; for their full development, the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods of evolution will have to follow. Nevertheless, Earth-evolution will require of mankind the first suggestions of these things—suggestions in the soul and spirit. And the present time, with all its strange catastrophes, is but an inner rebellion of mankind against what is to accompany the things I have now mentioned. In future, all the tendencies making for social separation have to be overcome, and mankind to-day, rising in rebellion against this need, is flinging out over the world the cheap catch-word that men should group themselves in nations. It is an instinctive rebellion against the Divinely-willed course of human evolution; a distorting of things into the very opposite of what will none the less ensue. We must see through these things if we would gain a foundation for understanding the so-called mystery of evil. For evil is in many ways a collateral effect of what has to enter into the evolution of mankind. An engine making a long journey will smash the rails if it comes to a place where they are badly laid, and for the moment its own progress will be delayed. Humanity is in course of evolution towards such goals as I have now described. It is the mission of the age of the Spiritual Soul to recognise these goals, so that humanity may strive towards them consciously. But for the moment the permanent way is badly laid, and a fairly long time will pass before it gets better, for many people are setting to work just now to replace the faulty rails—and not by any means with better ones.

Yet, as you see, Spiritual Science tends to no kind of pessimism. Its aim is to enable Man to recognise the path of evolution on which he really is. It does, however, require, at least for certain special occasions, that one should lay aside some of the habitual inclinations of to-day. Alas, almost at once, everyone falls back into the old ruts, and that is what makes it so very difficult to speak of such things without reserve. For in doing so—and this lies in the very nature of our time—we touch upon public issues in respect of which mankind is bent on hurling itself into the abyss, and we must continually utter this warning, this call to awakening.

• 1. Bewusstseinsseele, sometimes translated also as Consciousness Soul.

It is quite plausible, and probably also plausible to you, that at this moment many things are being prepared that will have a significant impact on European development, that, so to speak, decisive turns are imminent. This may justify our discussing today, both in retrospect and in aphorisms — I must emphasize that it is not possible otherwise in terms of the development over time — some of the events that are connected with the bringing about of the current catastrophic events. We will certainly try, because it is appropriate within our anthroposophical movement, to use what I will have to say, so to speak, as a summary of aphoristically presented historical remarks, in order to then perhaps tie in more far-reaching spiritual-scientific, spiritual-scientific-historical considerations tomorrow. However, it cannot be assumed that each of you has at hand the material for further perspectives, insofar as they can be gained from spiritual-scientific foundations, the actual, outwardly evident material. Therefore, I would like to discuss some of this actual material here today, without making any demands on you. It is indeed necessary that a feeling develops for the fact that humanity will gradually have no inner right to pass over contemporary history indifferently and to let happen whatever happens, but that in our age of the development of the consciousness soul, the other feeling must assert itself, namely that each of us should have our eyes open and, with an alert consciousness, should at least follow the events that are happening without prejudice. It is natural that not everyone is placed in a position from which they can somehow make use of such knowledge. But none of us can know when we might be called upon, on a smaller or larger scale, to advise or influence this or that, for which we then need an open, unprejudiced knowledge of events.

Now, however, much of what are recent events will quickly become obsolete in their connection with the rest of historical development; some of the most significant recent events will be of little importance for the further progress of even the external history of civilization in the world. But in the future it will be necessary to face what is happening with open eyes and an alert mind. Therefore, it will be good to follow some of the past events in order to get a feeling, a sense of how to face the events.

By way of introduction, I would just like to say that over the course of time during which these catastrophic events have been taking place, outwardly visible, clearly visible even to the sleepy, in the form of the so-called war of the last four and a half years, I have spoken many a word to you, here or there, to shed light on this or that. And so I would like to say by way of introduction that I now, at this moment, at this time, when decisive facts are taking place that are crucial for the assessment of the whole situation, although not decisive in the sense of bringing about a conclusion - I would certainly not want to bring about that belief that we are on the verge of a conclusion - but where, in a certain sense, decisive facts are taking place that are crucial for the assessment of the whole situation, I would like to emphasize that I am exactly in the same position with regard to the illumination of events as I was at the beginning of the onset of the so-called war catastrophe. For one of the most significant facts that mankind has been able to observe in the course of these last few years is this: how endlessly strong, how immeasurably strong it was possible to corrupt human judgment in all its aspects, to lead this human judgment into wrong channels, namely by always endeavoring from different sides to get the maxims of judgment, the directions of judgment, from the wrong quarters. It is true that during the course of these years judgments have been passed from the most diverse areas of interest. Every so-called nation had its own area of interest and passed judgment with more or less, but mostly with less, knowledge of the facts that had taken place. And this false direction, in which these judgments were moving, was often nourished and often used by the relevant authorities, at least by the questionable relevant authorities – but one could ask: where were the others in the last four and a half years? — this false direction, in which these judgments were moving, was often nourished and often used to achieve this or that.

Above all, from the outbreak of this so-called war to the present day, the so-called question of guilt has played a major role in these events from the most diverse points of view, one could say from the most diverse interests. In the judgments of people here and there, this so-called question of guilt has played a significant role. But it cannot be said that this so-called question of guilt has played any kind of favorable role. It is precisely this question of guilt and the way in which this question of guilt has guided public judgment that has had such an enormously corrupting effect on the intellectual and moral judgment of people. And there is an infinite amount to be made good, and it can only be done by spiritual science if the corruption that has occurred in relation to intellectual and moral judgment throughout the civilized world is to be even partially corrected. In this context, one thing must not be left unmentioned. Among the various judgments that have been passed, there are some that have been passed in so-called good faith, if not always with a true conscience, with a true conscience that is aware of the responsibility towards the word. They are judgments that have been passed in so-called good faith, even on the basis of what was known at the time, so that no charges should be brought against either of the judges. But above all, the course of events itself will not initially have a corrupting effect on the judgment. The course of events will perhaps be more likely to influence the judgments in an unfavorable sense, and it would be particularly appropriate for an anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement to correct many things in itself and in others simply by really moving the whole level of judgment, the whole level of assessment, out of those spheres in which judgments have been made about the whole world so far and to place them in a completely different light.

Above all, it is important that, encouraged by the course of events, a large number of people will now agree with those who can say: We have always said it, on the part of the Central Powers of Europe, a war has been staged without them being provoked in any way. The Central Powers must be blamed. Well, directing the judgment in this direction has not the slightest meaning in view of the real facts. And if one wanted to start from the immediate question of guilt – I am now talking about an immediate question of guilt – then a fair judgment would certainly not be able to address the question from the point of view just mentioned. The question: Did the Central Powers bear any blame for the outbreak of this war? – this question actually has no serious meaning in reality. And if one objects to it, it is mainly because bringing the verdict in this direction has no actual tangible content and meaning.

It makes least sense in terms of the facts, which must come to light at some point. For example, the fact that the Central Powers were planning to wage a preventive war, that a so-called preventive war was to be waged. This point of view, which would have the Central Powers say: the war will come anyway, so it might as well come under less favorable conditions for us, so we'd better start it sooner, because then we have a certain advantage – this point of view does not make the slightest bit of sense in the face of the facts. There can be absolutely no question of arriving at a judgment about the situation by directing one's judgment in this direction. In such a matter, it is really a matter of looking the facts in the eye without prejudice. And there one must - and I do it today aphoristically - of course point out details, those details that are symptomatically serious. Of course I cannot go back to Adam and Eve. In order to give a historical account, one is always tempted to do so to some extent when one wants to express something. But I cannot go back to Adam and Eve. I will say only a few things at first and extend my considerations over a short period of time.

This leads us to a kind of disposition of our aphoristic reflections, in that the starting point, I might say the impetus for this so-called war, was the ultimatum fabricated in Austria and sent to Serbia. It may therefore be useful to link the historical symptoms to this starting point of the so-called military events under consideration. Well, this starting point leads us back to the 1870s. We cannot look at what happened between Austria and Serbia without going back to the so-called occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1878. This occu of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1878, which marked the beginning of a certain Austrian policy, which in its further course actually led to what can be called the Austro-Serbian ultimatum. The so-called Congress of Berlin had emerged from the turmoil that had arisen in Europe as a result of the Russo-Turkish War in the 1870s. And this Congress of Berlin, among other 'deeds, and mainly under the influence of British policy at the time, also gave Austria the mandate to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina for the time being.

Basically, much of what has happened in the Balkans is connected with this occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary. Therefore, the question must be raised: How did it actually come about that Austria could be induced to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina? — This even has something to do with the causes of the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War. To the southeast, Balkan Slavic peoples border on Austria-Hungary. But Austria-Hungary itself has a Slavic population to the southeast. It has the southern Slavs, it has the Croats, it has the Slavs, who, especially the latter, the Croats and the Slavs, feel very close to the Serbs. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, which until the 1770s were in a somewhat dubious, but nevertheless in a relationship of subservience to Turkey, the Slavic and Turkish populations were mixed. This led to unrest, which initially appeared to the European world as unrest directed against the rule of the Turks. Of course, I would have to be much more detailed if I wanted to do more than sketch, but I just want to sketch a few things for you. Now it is interesting to find out how these riots actually came about at the time, the last suppression of which was to consist in the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria. Because the way these unrest came about is of extraordinary importance in terms of contemporary history.

If the Herzegovscans and the inhabitants of Bosnia, the Bosniaks, had been left to their own devices at the time, it is unlikely that the unrest that particularly worried Europe would have broken out. But such things happened often under the old regime, which was not just the old regime in that place, but was basically the old regime throughout the civilized world until now. Certainly, unrest had broken out among the Bosniaks and the Herzegovans; they were not satisfied with Turkish rule. But if they had been left to their own devices, there would have been no need to stir up unrest in Europe. What actually happened was certainly the result of the instigation of numerous meetings held in Vienna by generals and sub-generals of the most diverse, and in particular Slavic, nations. For those who were mainly involved in the uprising that preceded the Russo-Turkish war in those questionable provinces were mostly people from neighboring Austria and Dalmatia, that is, Dalmatians and Dalmatian-Austrian Montenegrins who had been sent to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Vienna arranged it so that the Dalmatian population was sent to neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, causing unrest. The necessary ammunition and war material were also transported through the numerous passes. The government behaved in such a way at the time that, in order to be justified in the eyes of Europe, it stationed gendarmes at a pass to intercept any person carrying a little ammunition who was crossing the pass into Bosnia , at the same time that people were sent over from Dalmatia and also from Trieste and were allowed to pass quietly through other passes with ammunition and war material.

Then the unrest was staged, and the corresponding stock exchange telegrams were always sent from Trieste to Europe about the course of these terrible riots. And when the journalists of the “Neue Freie Presse” - you know that journalists not only want to interview important personalities, but also events - came over, the events were staged for them. They were placed in a place where it was possible to present large rebel masses, more than had been sent. But that was arranged, you see – I am drawing a plan (it is being drawn) –: the brave journalists are standing there, and the insurgents are passing by. But the arrangements were made in such a way – you know, like in the theater: they go out there and in there again – that they were led past three times. That is how such an earth-shattering uprising was staged! Of course, the journalists could also state the enormous number they saw there. What else could the European public, which does not believe in authority but does believe in newspapers, do but know that there are enormous numbers of insurgents and that something must be done about it.

Well, things then led to the military involvement and to the Berlin Congress. And so Austria-Hungary was given the mandate to restore order in these provinces, where everything is so restless and where one must always fear that unrest will break out. And it was not given the annexation – it was already the time when one could not bring oneself to make radical decisions – it was given the occupation. That is such a half or quarter thing. It was the beginning of something that in a sense was bound to happen in Central Europe, as a result of the differences that had arisen between the Central European population, the North German population and Austria, and the South German states in 1866, which had led to a situation in which Berlin's policy was to push Austria, as the Habsburg Empire, more towards the east, towards the Slavs. And you can believe that a man like me, who was right in the middle of it, just when the decisive feelings among the Germans of Austria were developing about these events, that he is now, after so many years, I can almost say decades, able to talk about this matter in an unbiased way. The fact that the Germans of Austria were being pushed to the wall had to be seen as a side effect of this pushing over of the Habsburg Empire to the Slavic East. This was, of course, in the spirit and style of Berlin politics, again for the reason that there cannot be two empires in Central Europe with a decidedly German coloration; therefore, Austria was to be given a more Slavic coloration.

But this meant that certain preconditions were in place that, if they had been steered in the right direction, would have been extremely suitable for turning this so-called Danube Monarchy into a European entity with a grand mission. One could not imagine anything more beautiful than to see the Austrian Germans pushed against the wall by this tendency to slowly push the Habsburg monarchy over to the east – but they would have been able to create their own destiny – if, at the right moment in world history, a true mission had been instilled into this framework that had emerged. It can truly be said that this would have been of the utmost importance, not only for Europe, but for the entire civilized world. Because there was good material in this area of Europe. We must not forget the following: the Germans of Austria themselves are so predisposed – I have already pointed out some of their character traits – that any imperialistic impulse is as far from them as possible. It is perhaps no exaggeration to say that one could hold a vote, not only on the word, but on what imperialism as an impulse is: one would truly find very few people among the real German-Austrian population who have any idea that one could turn to such a thing. That is why the German-Austrian population resisted the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina with all their might, which, albeit a kind of sham, was still a kind of attack on an Austrian-imperialist policy that was actually an historical impossibility because Austria is not such that it could ever have developed an imperialist policy out of its own essence. This German-Austrian population, as I said the other day, lived, corrupted by clericalism, in many respects a kind of plant-like existence. But it is precisely from this vegetative existence that strong individualities have the potential to develop. And in terms of spirituality, not a little has developed in individualities precisely from these German areas of Austria, even in the period when, from Germany, German-Austria was pushed to the wall because they wanted to Slavicize the Habsburg Empire.

Now we must not forget that within this territory there is an exceptionally strong chauvinistic element that bears the specific character of chauvinism: this is the Magyar element, which has always sought to implement its chauvinism in the most ruthless way and has also known how to implement it. This has always been a very bad addition, and it would have been so even if the Austrian framework had been filled with a mission of some kind. But then, for Austria, there are the most diverse Slavs, the most diverse Slavic population, and this Slavic population of Austria has not in the least had any imperialistic policy in its tendencies in the period under consideration for the preparation of the present catastrophic events, in which it certainly plays a very large part. The Slav population, including the Polish part of the Austro-Slav population, was very far from any imperialistic policy. And I will never forget the speech that Otto Hausner, the Polish liberal member of parliament at that time, held in 1879 against the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, precisely from the point of view of condemning imperialistic policy.

What the Slavs in Austria were doing was essentially always, however, national – that is the bad thing about it – but national cultural policy. They wanted to advance as nations, to develop what lies in their nature as peoples, not in a chauvinistic way – that distinguishes them or at least always distinguished them from the Magyars. If someone had known how to combine everything that was in the nature of the various peoples of Austria and what was included in the framework of Austria into one mission, then something really great and significant could have come of it. Because the Slavic population of Austria was never, not even at the beginning of this world war, inclined to enter into any kind of confederation with the Slavic population of Russia. The Slavic population of Austria, perhaps with the exception of the Poles, who would have liked to have their own separate empire, but the other Slavic population of Austria, was, especially in the early days of the war – and this war had various phases that are not yet being taken into account and distinguished – not at all inclined towards Russia. What the Slavic population of Austria wanted, as expressed by their leaders, was a Slavic cultural policy of the Austro-Slavic peoples, perhaps with some extension to the Balkan Slavs, but decidedly directed against tsarism. Of course, individual phenomena deviate from this, but on the whole they are not important; but that is why, basically, the rapid and major turn of the Austrian Slavs towards Russia only happened with the fall of tsarism. The fall of tsarism had an enormously decisive effect for Austria, because with a tsarist Russia, the Slavs of Austria could never have been united in their sympathies, and that is what mattered; because the Czechoslovak question became one of the most important in the course of events.

Now Austria did not understand how to see all this and unite it into one mission, and that was Austria's tragic fate. They just did not understand it at all. Now, of course, there was a great ferment among the Slavic population of Austria, which aimed to realize what I have just hinted at: liberation of the Slavs as a nation in such a way that they could freely develop their talents within the framework of Austria. Unfortunately, all this was not turned into a great cultural mission, but in Austria, under the influence of the Habsburg power politics and clericalism, it was forced into a policy that Moriz Benedikt, not without reason, called an “Aryan policy”. It is hard to describe it differently. It is a policy that is a confused mixture of sloppy military organization, even sloppier bureaucracy, a not quite completed but also rather sloppy pedantry, and so on.

This is precisely the kind of thing that I could recently say was none of my business. But now, we must not forget: such fermentations, which then know no territorial boundaries, are material for coming events. Isn't it true that if, say, the Czechs are fermenting somewhere, if you want something there, then some great powers can, as it were, race for the sympathies of such a community — also for the real sympathies that then lead to something. Great Powers that have nothing to do there take possession of such a region. This gives rise to unnatural conditions in the world. In the example I have chosen, the Czechs sympathize with a Great Power from which they expect support in their aspirations, with a Great Power with which they could not otherwise develop any further sympathy. As a result of these given preconditions, those who were clever, those who understood politics in the old sense, had numerous opportunities for scheming, if one wanted this or that. This created fuel for conflicts, which one could then use. Well, the long-standing Austrian Prime Minister, Count Taaffe, who was entrusted with the task of bringing about a so-called policy of reconciliation between the various peoples of Austria, himself described the basic character of his own policy: “fortwursteln”. Yes, it is perhaps difficult to translate, “fortwursteln”; so it means: to carry on as before, without any idea of how to proceed. You just go on and on and on until the cart can go no further.“—”Muddling through” was what Count Taaffe called the essence of his own policy. Then others came and took over from Count Taaffe, but they also muddled on. They always looked upon conciliation in such a way that they granted a university to one nationality, and some other time granted some kind of a provincial committee or something similar to the other nationality, founded a bank or the like. In this way they only confused the nationalities more and alienated them from a real mission that could have been found and would also have been understood if it had only really been carried out.

And so it went on until the unfortunate year of 1914. It cannot even be said that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was much more than an external cause for what was then presented as a so-called ultimatum from Austria-Hungary to Serbia. For it had long since ceased to be the case that such events as those that had now befallen us were directly decided by the fact that these or those contradictions existed. These or those antagonisms were only used to achieve quite different things. Now, if one wants to answer the question: Did anyone within Austria want the war that came? — then one would direct the question in the completely wrong direction if one wanted to accuse one or the other people of Austria, or even if one wanted to accuse the Austrian government. For the Austrian government in 1914: an emperor well over eighty years old, no longer capable of thought, for whom waging war was not really a priority; a pathologically incompetent foreign minister, Count Berchtold, who was well suited to being pushed around, but who could not be expected to have the initiative to unleash any kind of war. And those who surrounded him as his creatures, especially in his more immediate office, were certainly not very likely to start a war either. So anyone looking for blame for this war within the Austrian government or within the Hofburg in Vienna is actually taking the question in a completely wrong direction, because such incompetence does not start wars. I am not saying this out of emotion, nor am I saying it to pass judgment on anything, but as a summary of facts.

But we must not forget the other side. We can also look at the situation from a different perspective. We must be clear about the fact that underlying everything that has happened in recent years was the possibility of war, a possibility of war that could have been realized in a variety of ways. And this possibility of war lies, I would say, in an historical development itself. I have often spoken of this here. It simply lies in the fact that the English-speaking population of the world, under certain conditions, strives for world domination. This is a fact that must be accepted as a fact. But it is not true that, in the face of such a fact, all people who do not belong to it do not strive for world domination, but they have all sorts of aspirations, and thus many things can happen. So that simply through the presence of English imperialism, which has emerged ever more visibly and visibly in the twentieth century in particular, of course, all sorts of opportunities for war have arisen. These opportunities for war were, of course, always something that could be used by those people who needed wars. Now the situation in Austria was such that there were financial circles in Vienna and Austria which for several years had been hoping to be able to boost their economy by means of a war. It may be said that it is, of course, extremely easy for the Entente governments to prove that they did not cause the war. Nothing could be easier than that, but it does not mean much, because that is not the issue. The real instigators of the war, especially in this period, were not those in government office in any country, but the powers behind them. I spoke at length here a year ago about the major powers that were now completely behind it.

Now these big business circles could use all kinds of differences and disharmony that existed to direct world history, so to speak. Of course, there were such consortia in Vienna as well. They were the real driving forces there. I would not even want to examine the origin of such consortia. Such consortia do not even have to be from one's own country, they can come from elsewhere. But territorially, such consortia were there in any case. In a certain respect, they were the driving forces. And since everything that was fermenting in the Slavic population of both Austria and the broader East could always be used, and the whole non-existent mission of Austria could be used, it was of course possible to exploit such existing tendencies if one wanted to contribute something to bringing about some kind of war. The differentiations and aspirations of the Slavic peoples of Austria and the East were certainly very, very strongly involved in this, but basically they were also only used as objects, as what one used.

If we look at the next ones to push, then basically they are financial powers, capital powers, not so much in the usual sense as big capital powers, founding capital powers and the like. That was what was behind it. Of course, for decades this has been the ruling force in contemporary humanity. More than anyone who is asleep can believe, the international world of finance, the world of the founders in the big, stands behind the events of the last decades. Isn't it true, the powers I have spoken of here, in turn used the world of finance, but the world of finance gave the next pushes. And it was from this financial world that what had been present for years as a combustible material in Austria also went off. There was a favorable time for the possibility that financial powers, who were very clear about their chances of winning but otherwise very, very much in the dark, could arrange something. A propitious time had arisen. And the way in which this catastrophe occurred shows that an extraordinarily propitious time had arisen for these powers. They also knew how to exploit this propitious time in the right way. One has only to think of what it means when the machinery of entire empires can be set in motion to achieve something purely commercial. In modern times such things have been prepared for a long time, and the time was particularly favorable just at the outbreak of our military disaster. Much has been stirred up that had been lying dormant in the subconscious of the nations, but one cannot imagine anything more devilishly ingenious than the exploitation of the world economic situation in recent decades by international financial powers.

You see, the power of the Central European empires and, in fact, of the Russian Empire – for England not the power of the empire, but the power of finance – has actually gradually become impotent. The empires did not really mean anything special, nothing that brought about decisions in the course of world history. Decisions in the course of world history were brought about by the transactions of the great capital powers, the international great capital powers, which used the empires as instruments. And for that, just as 1914 approached, the world economy was extremely favorable. Austria gradually came to be only the instrument of financial consortia. But Germany, too, came to be only the instrument of financial syndicates. This was brought about by the fact that in Austria an old man sat on the so-called throne, who was hardly capable of taking in what was going on around him, who no longer knew what was going on around him, who could be persuaded could be persuaded to do anything that was made to appear plausible to him from the outside. These circumstances, as I have described them to you, this muddling through, had gradually made it possible to install the most absolute incompetence in the ministries. For if one wanted a menagerie of nothing but incompetents, one needed only to put together the various Austrian ministries of recent times. That was a good field that could be used as an instrument. For one needed only to direct things so that a respectable army organization was used in such a way that a financial consortium could promise itself a corresponding world transaction through this use. Behind what happened in Austria in July and August 1914, there were financial powers, which perhaps did not even originate in Austria itself, but for whom Austria was an instrument to achieve certain things. Count Berchtold could really be pushed wherever you wanted, like a chess piece, if you were a real financial chess player. That was one thing.

The other thing was that, due to the unfortunate circumstances of the last few decades, the German Reich had gradually become an instrument for financial and industrial operations. The most erroneous thing that one can do when raising blame or other questions on this occasion is to believe that a German government was a powerful government that wanted something on its own. It really did not want anything special. For most of those in Germany, in the so-called government of Germany, could be added to the others I have just mentioned, and they would not differ so much from them, especially in terms of their political qualities. In addition, there was another circumstance. The fact that a very insignificant, actually highly insignificant ruler in terms of his intellectual qualities, was staged in a kind of - one may use the word again, which has been used frequently today - theater policy. And no less than the old Austrian emperor, the German emperor, who is quite wrongly regarded by many as important, was the appropriate instrument within the world economic situation that I have indicated and characterized. The greatest error to which civilized humanity has succumbed is that some important personage would have sat on the German imperial throne – one cannot speak of a German imperial throne under constitutional law, but you know what I mean. That was definitely not the case. So here, too, the industrial world, which is more to the fore here, but in conjunction with the financial world, provided the actual pushers. Thirdly, of course, it should be noted that no less insignificant was the Russian ruler, who was an instrument in just the same way and could now be used for all sorts of not only financial and industrial powers, but also for many other dark forces. In addition to all this, the expansion of imperialism of the English-speaking empires was behind all that was taking place in the world economy. This must not be overlooked. Because all the contradictions that I have just listed are influenced by other contradictions, such as the European impasse, which can be described as the Alsace-Lorraine question, and the like. These factors all play a role to a certain extent. But the thing that could have led to war from all these angles, if one had wanted it, is the transformation of English politics, which had become so liberal in the mid-nineteenth century, into English imperialism in the twentieth century.

Now, of course, all this created all sorts of, I might say, powder kegs, into which one only had to add the spark. It also created those peculiar ideas with which the financial chess piece pushers mainly count. You see, one must not forget: when the idea came more and more to certain financial people in Austria that a war would be good for us, they thought above all of this: we can achieve what we want in business transactions and their consequences, and what will follow from them if we wage a Balkan war. There were, of course, two significant eventualities in the prospect of a Balkan war. One of these was this: how could such a financier in Vienna, for whom war was quite pleasant, for example, how might he speculate? He said to himself: Is it likely that we, if we use Austria as our instrument, will be attacked by Russia? Is that likely? It is just as likely as it is unlikely. It does not have to be. You take a risk, but it is not unreasonable to take that risk, because it is not impossible under all circumstances for us to be left alone by Russia if, for example, we invade Serbia. That was the one thing that had to be considered. The person in question said to himself: It is not at all certain that Czarist Russia will attack us, because there is a certain solidarity of dynastic interests, and if no other powers intervene in Russia, which perhaps cannot be taken into account to such an extent , it is not entirely unlikely that the Tsar, out of dynastic solidarity with the Emperor of Austria, with the Austrian dynasty, will indeed mobilize and make a huge show of force, but only so that he can say that he is the protector of the Slavs. He will not strike anyway. He will perhaps, however, take the risk that his mobilization will prevent the Austrians from going too far. But you also know that in 1914 there was much talk of a private letter that the Austrian Emperor had written, or that was written to the Austrian Emperor – how can one say? You can't say, but you might understand from what I mean – wasn't there much talk of such a private letter being written to the Russian Tsar? That is in line with such considerations. Well, that was certainly the consideration of such a financier.

Then such a financier said to himself: Yes, so we must try everything to make possible what can be, to use the instrument of government, the Reichsinstrument. — But now, isn't it true, Count Berchtold certainly didn't have great abilities, but he certainly had a terrible fear. By being pushed in this way, he must have been terribly afraid. And now, from an external point of view – of course, one must always consider the deeper motives in such matters, the historical motives, but one must first gain an external understanding of these things – what happened was disastrous. Not true, I must point out the other nasty thing that such a financier had to consider. He had to say: Yes, but what will happen to this German Reich, with which we are allied? To risk that this German Reich realizes the alliance, is actually disastrous for Austria. Because if the German Reich strives to realize the alliance, then there is a world war. Then you are crushed, then you risk too much. It was certainly much more important to the financial circles not to bring the matter into any kind of confusion with the German Reich. But there is a certain distance between the intention of the financial people and what Count Berchtold was supposed to do, who was seized by fear. And the other people who had to deal with Count Berchtold were naturally no less afraid, were they? Well, there is a certain distance, and in the pursuit of this distance, the question arose in Berlin as to whether, if Russia were to attack, the alliance would be considered as given. They asked the very person who was always in the hands of German and international industrialism and international and German financial circles; they asked the Kaiser. Now one of this Kaiser's peculiarities was to speak without thinking, to blurt things out, to blurt things out for the sake of prestige. And here too, of course, the intention of industrialists and financiers lay behind the matter.

This whole constellation led to the fact that, of course in a non-binding way, because it was not a government act, the emperor performed a great deed, he would not allow himself to be belittled this time, and he would, if Russia was to be mobilized in any way, certainly mobilize and so on. Now, one must not forget that this particular person could very easily be made into an instrument of other circles, because there were whole circles around this person who were constantly concerned with keeping this person in a good mood, distracting him from what he should be doing.

Not true, whoever was sensible among the German people never gave much credence to the words of this person. The foreign countries have done the German people the greatest injustice with all these judgments about this imperial capital, regardless of whether some were enchanted by the German Emperor or whether some later, especially during the war, considered him a devil – he was much too insignificant for both, he is much too insignificant. The foreign countries have done the German people the greatest injustice with all these judgments, and will presumably continue to do so. For even the most devoted surroundings, those surroundings that are particularly accustomed to the not quite straight back, this loyal environment testified in its behavior best of all to how things actually are. One need only recall the palace revolution in Berlin in 1908. This palace revolution in Berlin in 1908, which has an extraordinary amount to do with this world conflict when one considers the external historical events, actually expresses, I would say, everything that has to be said at this point in the discussion. It is what I mean, the famous Daily Telegraph affair. An English journalist from the Daily Telegraph wanted to interview Kaiser Wilhelm. Perhaps Kaiser Wilhelm found this a little boring, and so he told the journalist: oh, he has already talked so much about his relationship with England. He then told him a few things and advised him to put together the other things he had already said about England. And so the journalist put together a detailed interview.

This interview is a masterpiece of politics. In this interview — I can only characterize it in terms of its meaning, otherwise it would be too detailed — it was said: You English are actually all crazy chickens, because you judge me and my politics quite wrongly. If you wanted to get the truth, you would have to realize that there is only one real friend of the English in the whole of Germany, and that is me; otherwise you are actually the most hated people in the rest of Germany. And you should not believe that I have ever done anything against English politics. Because just think about this: When the Boer War broke out, I took a look at the situation with the Boers, then I took a pen and quickly sketched out the campaign that the English would have to wage against the Boers in order to bring it to a successful conclusion. Then I handed the map I had drafted to my general staff. They further elaborated it; you can still find it in your archives over there. I was actually able to see how the English war against the Boers was waged and how it progressed according to the map I had drawn up. Besides, you should not believe that I have ever done anything against English politics, because I have been offered alliances by France and Russia; they have given me the order not to talk about it, but I told my grandmother, and from that you can see how I actually love the English and how I really am England's only friend. It is only thanks to me that this alliance between France, Germany and Russia has not come about. And if you think that I am building a fleet against you, you are mistaken; my fleet is to serve the interests of Japan in the Pacific Ocean. Well, this whole interview was written up by the English journalist and shown to Wilhelm II, who liked it very much. He sent it to Prince Bülow, who was his so-called Chancellor at the time. Prince Bülow was just on summer vacation in Norderney and said: Oh yes, that's a thick interview from H.M.; he can't expect me to spoil my summer vacation reading his superfluous remarks. What H.M. says, I don't need to deal with that first. He gave it to a junior official without any special instruction. And the matter soon came to light because the English journalist actually published it in the Daily Telegraph. And now the story was complete, wasn't it, a prime example of German politics. It then came about that even the conservatives revolted against H.M., and that it was very close to abdication at the time. But then he declared himself willing to say no more, which was expressed in such a way that he would continue to ensure the continuity of politics. It was just a different way of putting it. Well, that lasted three months, then he started talking again; it was the same old story. That's just to give you a sense of his character. But now we must not forget: All these things had led to a situation that can be characterized as follows: financial syndicates in Central Europe, who had become very familiar with the history, had carried out machinations in which Austria and Germany were to be used as instruments. These machinations were quite ordinary business machinations, and they competed with English business combinations. That was the antagonism. That antagonism was there. It is quite natural: in England no one could understand that Central European financial consortia wanted to make transactions, wanted to make enterprises, which only England is entitled to make. No, that is quite natural, no one there can understand it! One also understands that no one can understand it.

But all these things had led to the Russian mobilization, of which one could not really know what was wanted. How could one have known what was wanted there! The tsar certainly did not know what was wanted; others wanted this, others wanted that. Things went haywire.

Now, one must not forget: in Berlin, a government that was actually non-existent, that was completely out of touch with the course of events, that had been pursuing such bad policies for years as was somehow possible, and that had arrived at the point in 1914 that it did not govern at all, that it allowed to happen what happened. A terrible situation was there; a truly terrible situation was there. Actually, the entire burden of the events was now dumped on the German military leadership. One must not forget that: the entire burden of the events and the entire responsibility for the events was dumped on the German military leadership. Because whatever is said about any conference proposals and the like that have been made by the Entente Powers, all of it is nonsense, it could never have led to anything, because what it could have led to could never have been accepted by the Central Powers in their then condition. Of course, it is very easy to prove from the course of these conference proposals and so on that the governments of the Entente are innocent of the outbreak of war. But this proof does not do the slightest bit of good. It is a 'triviality with which you can go peddling, claiming all sorts of things, but in doing so you take all the questions at issue in absolutely the wrong direction.

We must know exactly, hour by hour, what happened in Berlin in the last days of July 1914 and perhaps even in the first days of August. And the opportunity will arise to speak to the world about what happened in Berlin from hour to hour, and it will be seen that what happened there happened under no impulse other than that of: What should be done in this terrible situation that has arisen? — If there had been a government that had an overview of things, the circumstances would naturally have been quite different. If there had been a monarch who had done the least, who had even participated in the slightest in the decision, who had not kept himself completely aloof from any initiative, although he was present, then of course everything would have turned out differently. But everything was left to its own devices, except for the military command, which of course could only have the single obligation of doing its duty. So that what has been done, if normal conditions had existed, could never have looked like any declaration of war.

It has been said many times recently - but there are very few people, actually really terribly few people, who know the circumstances exactly - that in Berlin they slid into the war more than they wanted it. It is true that we did slip into it. We must not forget that in a certain respect it was only natural that the military command, at the moment when the entire responsibility was resting on it, said to itself: Every hour lost means an enormous loss. One must take into account that the German army was still in no way in a condition to be able to carry out what an expert could have great confidence in, that it would come through what was bound to happen. For it was known that at the moment the alliance was invoked, everything else would follow automatically. — And it did follow automatically, and it was taken for granted that it followed automatically. But one must not forget that precisely those who knew the circumstances well thought that not a moment could be lost, could not afford to lose a moment, for the simple reason that after all that had happened in the various preceding years, one could not possibly believe that this army could have grown in any way. The most formidable world coalition, which one conjured up, of course, when one decided to go to war. One must not forget: By the end of September, this army had already run out of ammunition! Two days before the declaration of war on Russia, an urgent request had been received by the Ministry of War from the Foreign Office to reduce the orders for ammunition. After all, these are not things that you do when you are planning a preventive war, are they? And such things could be listed by the hundreds and thousands if one did not know anyway that no one was thinking of a preventive war.

But it comes into consideration, because it was taken for granted in this terrible situation of the mobilized Russian Empire with the allied France, that this German army was indeed a dubious instrument. Because one must not forget: For many years, under the aegis of General von Schlieffen, the training of this army was carried out in the most incredible way. The matter was only improved as nonsense when Moltke became Chief of General Staff. Because this army was drilled in such a way that the Kaiser always led divisions under General Schlieffen during the large maneuvers, without having a clue about anything in the conduct of war or the like. All the orders were given in such a way that, of course, His Majesty would win. So you just have to imagine how you could train an army if you had to make those theatrical coups, so that everyone in the division where His Majesty was not present would necessarily have to order things in such a way that he would suffer a defeat so that His Majesty could win. Such things cannot be improved in a short time, but rather require a great deal of work. This, of course, creates the mood that one must take action when one is dependent on it, yes, to do something where the appointed authorities do nothing at all. So that what happened in Berlin in July 1914 also happened in the first days of August 1914 is not even remotely what one might consider, as Harden does, a textbook case of a preventive war, but rather, in the most eminent sense, it is what must be called: something happens through people who have been pushed into impossible situations under tremendously difficult circumstances. One may condemn as one wants: since in warfare success decides when one is victorious, so of course failure decides when one is defeated, when one does not achieve what one expects with any military cause. It is quite natural that from that moment on – I say this quite impartially, perhaps also exposing myself to the danger that such a judgment will be found strange – when the invasion of Belgium could not achieve anything, when it was destroyed by the days of the Battle of the Marne, this invasion was a mistake. Someone may think so from some philistine point of view, but it has never been judged differently. And when America and the Entente conclude a peace—well, it won't be peace, but something like that, we would have to find a new name for the things—then we will see that it is not about different points of view, but about the points of view that have always been at stake in the course of human development, when such things were considered, where questions of power and the like were decided. The other thing corrupts judgment in the most terrible way. But one must not forget that it is historically verifiable, as I have emphasized here several times, and that will have to be historically proven one day, and it can be historically proven. And I dare say that I should not be afraid to say that, among the many things I have endeavored to do in the last years, was that a simple presentation of the real events of July 28, 29, 30, 31 and August 1 in Berlin should be given to the world without judgment. I did not achieve it. But much would have been achieved if this simple presentation had actually been given.

One can prove with such evidence, as I have already shown here, to the point of almost indisputable certainty, but with this simple presentation one would be able to show to the point of full certainty, to the point of the most absolute certainty, that if the English government had seriously wanted to, the invasion of Belgium could have been avoided. Please, not in any other way than how I say it! I have always been careful not to express this in any other way. I am not saying that the English government did anything different with regard to this question, and above all I am not saying anything about Germany's relationship to the invasion of Belgium. But that is what can be strictly proven before the world, that if the English government had wanted, if above all Sir Grey, Lord Grey, who does not exactly resemble Count Berchtold, but who was also quite foolish, had wanted, the invasion of Belgium would not have taken place. That is something that can be proven simply by a straightforward account of the events.

Of course, this does not blunt what one can form as an opinion about this incursion into Belgium, but it perhaps raises the question in the other direction: why was it not prevented, since it could have been prevented? - Because it is precisely after this moment, when it became clear in Berlin that the incursion into Belgium would not be prevented from England, that all events actually begin to take on an irrational character. From that point on, it is no longer possible to follow events with any kind of rationality.

These are a few aphorisms. It is getting late; we will continue the discussion tomorrow.

Today I will again present similar reflections as yesterday. From many points of view, these reflections are certainly not what is called purely anthroposophical, but I think we live in a time and in circumstances where the very ground of the anthroposophical spiritual science movement on which we stand is the ground on which such reflections must be made — not only should and can be made, but must be made in the present. I would like to refrain from passing judgment on this occasion as well – I say: as far as possible – and only provide material for assessment, insofar as such an assessment seems necessary to me, for those who feel compelled to judge the current conditions. Yesterday I started from the assumption that in view of the present catastrophic events, the question of guilt, in the usual sense of the word, tends to divert the whole judgment into false and incorrect channels. For judgment is led astray the moment emotions, sympathies and antipathies of any kind are allowed to enter into such momentous matters as this catastrophe. This must be said, although it is so natural that such sympathies and antipathies should enter in, so natural, indeed, that I would almost say it is self-evident. But one can still try to find at least some directions from the facts in order to judge, to find directions to the judgment that must develop gradually, to the judgment that seeks its basis in the tragedy and in the doom of current events, and not always again and again only by asking: “Was there or was there not at such and such a time and place any thought of the coming war, or any intention of making war?” or similar questions.

When considering such matters, it must be clearly understood that in most cases such a judgment has no real substance. For what does it mean when someone somewhere has heard – one has, of course, heard many such things – that a war must come out of these or those conditions? The question in such cases is always whether at some point, where, for example, there is a desire for war, one is also in a position to carry that desire through, to bring about the war, or to do anything significant to bring it about. Innumerable people here and there may have desired war; if they were incapable of doing anything to bring it about, then their words are mere verbiage. In order to understand the events of the present, it is necessary to understand what it really means to view history symptomatically. No one can weigh the motives and the facts and get a healthy direction for their judgment if they do not at least strive in this direction, because in the present, all events are extremely complicated. And when you pick up a fact here or a rumor there, it is always a matter of assessing the weight that such a fact or such a rumor can have within the context of events. Even when listing the facts, one must pay particular attention to what I have in mind.

You see, for anyone who wants to recognize – and actually everyone in the present should strive to recognize the right thing in this area – it was also a matter of worrying about the right things, of asking the right question about the events, which of course prevented some people from using the measure of passion they had within them.

I have had many opportunities to ask questions and learn about things in this regard. For example, I have genuinely waited for a definitive answer wherever possible, and I have asked the question not just a few times within the borders of Germany but also to Austrian people: What is actually the real goal of this so-called war, as stated by the responsible authorities? — Only once did I get a very vague answer from any responsible authority, and I saw that actually everywhere within the German and Austrian borders where one could ask about a so-called war goal, one knew nothing about a war goal. The only thing I was ever given as a vague answer was that people wanted freedom of the seas. That is the only thing I was ever answered.

Now, of course, I know that one can answer: Yes, but the Pan-Germans, what extensive war aims they had set up - and so on. Yes, one must not forget that in such times many people say many things, that agitation is carried out. But there was never any possibility that what was said, for example, by the Pan-German side, could be taken seriously for any other purpose than to incite and spread folly. It is extremely important to weigh things up, to know, for example, that in Central Europe, especially at the beginning of the war, those who were in a position to contribute something, to do something in the direction of the war or to refrain from doing something in the direction of the war, had no real war aim. This fact alone gives a direction to the judgment when one knows that, especially in the early days of the war, people had absolutely no idea what they were actually fighting for. Who would be in a position to imagine that one would decide to start a war out of the blue when one has no idea what to do with that war! Because even the vague answer I got, about the freedom of the seas, was actually just a makeshift answer because the person in question didn't know anything else and this was something that could at least be said in shame. That is one thing that I would like to put before your soul like a factual context.

Another thing seems important to me and will become more and more important and more and more important when assessing the situation, the more one wants to judge objectively about things. Yesterday I explained that the actual decision on what should or should not be done in Germany at the end of July and the beginning of August was unfortunately entirely in the hands of the military leadership, which could only make the decision based on strategic considerations, namely according to the circumstances and the situation. Thus one cannot even speak of a single will in German politics, for example, in late July and early August and the period before that. One cannot speak of an overall will or of any single will that was somehow connected with this catastrophe. One can say, quite simply, that there was no political goal, no political thought, no political idea at all in Central Europe. That is certainly a strange fact. But it is a fact that must be taken into account. There were military ideas about how to wage war if it came. True, military ideas in a healthy situation are always based on so-called conditional sentences: “if it comes,” because the military should never have to decide whether or not to take action when war breaks out. Sound thinking about the relationship between politics and warfare is something that has certainly not been cultivated in the last four years. For example, I have repeatedly heard to my dismay that in the area of the Central European states, Clausewitz's sentence has been repeated: war is the continuation of politics by other means. Well, there is no more foolish sentence than this, because it is constructed according to the logical pattern of the sentence: Divorce is the continuation of marriage by other means. But this sentence was quoted everywhere as a clever sentence – I mean the former – and understood everywhere as a clever sentence.

In view of this relationship between politics and warfare in Central Europe, it seems important to me that the world be made aware of what the German military leadership actually wanted if it came to war. The German military leadership had its assumptions, the assumptions for a strategic undertaking if it should come to war, based on the following information. The basis for the army command was this: if war should break out due to some European complication, the alliance relationships are such that two alliance areas will face each other and automatically join forces; the Central Powers – which Italy was always believed to be part of, in a foolish but honest way – will face the Central Powers – Russia-France-England on the other side. One could not think differently, given the various alliances, as far as they were known. After that, the strategic plan had to be formulated, so to speak. And where did this strategic plan go? It is important to bear in mind the fact: What did the military leadership want? The military leadership wanted the following: it wanted to penetrate France through Belgium as far as necessary to render the Russo-French alliance ineffective. The army command did not want to do more than cause France to renounce the alliance with Russia with regard to the conduct of the war. In view of the structure of the German military system, which I partially characterized yesterday, nothing more could be expected than a purely strategic transit through Belgium, which would naturally result in Belgium being fully compensated for this transit, and nothing more than a likewise, in so far as it caused destruction, indemnifiable incursion into France, such as annexation of French territory and the like. It was only a matter of, as it were, keeping France out of a possible two-front war. Strategically, nothing more was to be gained from the west.

Of course, this was only to be carried out as long as there was no effective connection between France and England. In this respect, the responsible German people indulged in the indeed irresponsible thought that they would succeed in preventing England from establishing any kind of connection with France. The moment that connection was established, the whole plan of campaign to the west was of course thrown overboard. This is the one thing that must be taken into account. And one must bear in mind that for someone who was subject to any kind of responsibility at all, this was the only thing that mattered. On the other side, to the east, it was also not a matter of annexation, but of maintaining what was philistinely called the status quo ante. So that - it may or may not be contested - in the first period after the outbreak of this catastrophic military involvement, in the center of Europe, no one thought otherwise than that it was a defensive war. Then various events occurred which, I might say, have completely clouded the judgment.

You see, there are various things to be touched upon, which, of course, can only be properly considered if one has the will to deal with them appropriately. First of all, I would like you not to lose sight of the fact that, quite apart from the machinations of the forces to which I referred yesterday, of financial and industrial groups and the like – but you may believe that in all parts of the world one is no more innocent or guilty than the other, quite apart from these things, as a result of the various antecedents, I would say, the outbreak of war was looming before Europe, and when it came to the question: must the German army, in purely military terms, intervene? — then one must not lose sight of a scene, for example, which has also become publicly known, although I do not know whether it has been given much consideration. On July 26, the Chief of Staff of the German Army returned to Berlin from an extended stay at a spa in Carlsbad. This must be borne in mind, because it provides a basis for judging the situation when the person who, due to the circumstances, was solely responsible for the outbreak of war – because that is how the matter stands for Germany's involvement in the war – is simply caught off guard until four days before the decision; and the fact that this personality was taken completely by surprise by the events is one of those things that can one day be proven historically. One would hope that the time for the historical proof of this fact comes quite soon. For me, it is to a great extent a basis for judgment when I know that the personality who then decided solely and exclusively on the basis of the circumstances: Do we have to attack now or not? – is in a position four days before not to be able to care about the whole situation in Europe, but to be in the bath, carefree and unconcerned about the circumstances outside the state. He was also outside the state at that point in time, July 5, 1914, which is considered to be a particularly decisive one, when a conference is said to have taken place in Potsdam and at which the German military leadership is said to have issued an ultimatum, as it were, regarding the war. Yes, he was already absent at that point in time, was not in Berlin. With regard to this July 5, I have tried very hard to find out what it is all about. I have only ever been able to find people who were said to have been present at this conference. I do not deny that something took place on July 5th; but I absolutely deny that something took place that was an inauguration of the war, that had the prospect of success if it had not been for the constellation that I characterized yesterday. For many threads run side by side. The thread that led to the involvement of Central Europe, let us say Germany, in the war does not tie in with any earlier day than July 28 at the earliest. Other threads go back further. However, what has happened does not lie in the continuation of these threads, although it is very easy to be tempted to look for what should have happened in their continuation.

I will then show such a thread as an example, but I want to say beforehand: people have been named who are supposed to have taken part in this conference on July 5. - All one could find were alibis for these people! One was somewhere in the Black Forest on July 5, the other was at the North Sea, and so on; although I am not denying that others, whose alibis were not sought, were present. But I just want to point out the wrong track that the judgment very often moves along. Look, I will give you an example of how easy it is to go astray if you are not objective and want to go down the wrong path with such things. It is the following: In Berlin, as indeed all over the world, there was of course a warmongering party. This warmongering party worked through its organs. On a certain day, close to the outbreak of war, a special edition of a newspaper appeared in Berlin that was published by a warmongering party and that contained information to the effect that war had been decided upon by the Crown Council. That was an extra edition that was distributed. This extra edition was quickly telegraphed to St. Petersburg at the moment it was distributed, so that a certain mood was created in St. Petersburg by the publication of the content of this paper. It is now peculiar that as soon as it became known in government circles, in these absolutely inactive government circles, in these incompetent government circles: This paper has been published – it was immediately confiscated everywhere. It was immediately corrected that no such decision had been made, that there could be no question of such a Crown Council, that in fact no decision had even been made on mobilization for the time being. This telegram, which contained the denial of the telegram that had been sent to create a mood, was held up at the Berlin main post office for six hours, and only sent to St. Petersburg after six hours.

So you see that there were indeed all sorts of people at work who also had good connections and who could also ensure that what they wanted to create as sentiment in St. Petersburg, but which had no basis at all in the relevant place, had time to create sentiment. And yet the whole clique involved was incapable of spinning a thread that could have led to war if it had been continued. For in the end, the only thing that really moved Germany to proceed with mobilization was the news – one only has to put together the bare facts, without embellishing them with the kind of things one likes to embellish the facts with – that Russia was mobilizing its entire army. It has become known through its connection with the telephone exchanges at the borders. I say: it has become so well known that three such messages were received. It was only after three messages had been received, all stating the same thing: Russia is mobilizing, that the following occurred, which must be presented as a very dry, sober fact if one really intends to get to know the facts. The fact took place that some kind of aide to the Chief of Staff was called upon to draw up a memorandum for the Emperor, in which the necessity of mobilization in the face of the Russian mobilization was to be discussed. In the room where this happened, there is a desk set into the corner of a niche so that one can stand behind it. The Chief of Staff stood in the niche with his hands clasped, saying, “If we are now forced to strike, then we must be clear about the fact that the nations of Europe will tear each other apart for years.”

This is a simple scene. You can, of course, trace it back to ways of thinking within military circles or the like. But that is really not what is important when weighing the facts. What is important is to be able to look at the facts calmly and objectively. When I am in a position to present the facts to the world step by step – it can be done hour by hour – purely and simply, without any judgment, only then will it be possible to consider a judgment on this tragic matter for humanity in general. For this, however, it is necessary that one relate the facts from hour to hour, especially on the fateful Saturday before the outbreak of war in Berlin in the period between half past three in the afternoon and half past ten at night. There one can follow every step, there one can follow all the details. And the simple narrative is the only thing that is suitable to make judgment possible for the world. Perhaps I may say today that, among the various efforts I myself have made and which I have outlined, the first point was to decide to present these facts to the world in Central Europe, without saying anything other than: This and this has happened. In addition to everything that went with it, this has been presented to various people – I will have to prove this in a documentary way – presented to various people in all its details. People capable of judgment have said something to me with reference to this first point, which of course I had to judge differently than those “people capable of judgment” who said it. But today there is absolutely no reason to keep quiet about such judgments that have been made, the judgments that have been made about it, when I have said again and again: Just think how the whole situation would have to change for the world if what was being prevented were to happen, including in Central Europe. People in positions of responsibility answered me that all this could perhaps come to pass, that tremendous disaster would be averted, but if one did what I actually wanted, then something else would have to happen. And that which they described as being bound to happen has now occurred after a long time – namely only yesterday!

For the person who is dealing with reality, if things are approached at the right end, they contain that which then takes place of its own accord through the logic of the facts. Things are more complicated in this area than the careless judges, who have often spoken or still speak about these things, are in any way aware. And anyone who would like to go into these things in the sense of an appropriate, realistic judgment must unflinchingly go into what was and what is, and not into what one or the other sympathy or one or the other emotion gives. |

Furthermore, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the entire decision that was then brought about had already been taken after the Battle of Marne on September 9, 1914. I am not afraid from calmly admitting that I did not immediately see that it was like that, that I did not see right after the Battle of the Marne that what had been brought about was really meant to bring about what has now been brought about. I only realized this at a later point in time, at the point in time when I then tried to do this or that in order to give events this or that direction. I must say that I do not shrink from admitting that it only became clear to me later. For it was not at all easy, historically and truthfully, and at the same time in such a way that the matter in question was properly done at the relevant time within this catastrophic period, to behave. When I published my 'Thoughts During the Time of War', I compiled what could be written without taking into account underlying occult knowledge, what could be deduced from a simple modern historical perspective. You will probably notice that I had stopped writing – although at the time I still believed that I would be able to continue writing at a later point in time – when I came to Italy in the presentation. But I want to suggest that it is not so easy for someone who takes things seriously and realistically to come to a judgment as it is for many other people. I have only outlined what was possible to judge. And I would like to say: It simply did not succeed in penetrating with the judgment into what the position of Italy resulted. I wrote this little book, 'Reflections on the War', mainly for the people of Central Europe, not to achieve anything in the world, but for the people of Central Europe, and soon after I had written this little book, the situation became clear to me as a result of the Marne defeat. And I resisted with all my might, ever to let a further edition of this booklet appear, although it was not only suggested to me, but the incentive was also very present. But anyone who seriously reflects on such matters knows that in such a world situation as it is, in which we were and still are, it is not only a matter of saying what is right, but also of doing this or that at the right time or refraining from doing it at the right time. It is not just a matter of having the urge to speak one's mind, but rather of saying not only what one means, but also paying attention to whether what one means should be said or not.

With this, I would also like to point out to you how necessary it is to limit and restrict yourself when it comes to gaining the right judgment about this terrible catastrophe for humanity or to bringing it in the right direction. We must not forget that this war – as I already mentioned yesterday in a sentence – has different phases, that actually since 1916 this war is no longer the same as it was at the beginning, at its starting point. It has become something quite different. And I have often suffered from the fact that during these four years people have ultimately held the same views as they did at the beginning, even though world events have changed completely in many respects. This so-called war has gradually been steered in a completely different direction. We must not forget: If you want to follow the paths into which this war has been steered, then you must not forget another eventuality, which the Viennese war party in particular had in mind. Didn't I tell you yesterday: those people who stood behind the completely incompetent government and the decrepit emperor, those people who were actually responsible for what happened in Austria, those people who are purely financial circles, they reckoned that the dynastic circumstances in Russia would lead to nothing more than a mobilization in Russia. They thought they could do their little deals in the Balkans, and Russia would not seriously mobilize after all. And if it did mobilize, they thought, it would only — well, you know, there is a terrible expression that is used over and over again in politics — it would only be intended as a “bluff”. They would say “bluffing”. It is the most frivolous thing one can imagine, but the expression “bluff” is something that is quite common in diplomacy, for example. Only there, in this area, was there a certain difference between Austria and Germany. As you know, Austria did not declare war on Russia until August 7, almost a week after Germany declared war on Russia. All this points to machinations, which I cannot go into here for lack of time, but which will all come to light one day. It does, however, indicate that Austria was reckoning with a completely different kind of behavior than Germany. In Germany, they were counting on nothing other than: if Russia mobilizes, we must mobilize as well. But given the nature of the German military administration, mobilization today means starting a war tomorrow. There was no other way to look at it. Anyone familiar with the circumstances knows that Germany should either not have mobilized at all as a kind of response to the Russian mobilization, or it should have proceeded with a declaration of war the following day.

From a military point of view, which unfortunately was the only one considered, this was simply a matter of course. But that was only the case at the beginning. In the course of time, a different eventuality presented itself, especially for those in Austria who were pursuing a warlike policy. They were counting on being able to come to an agreement with the Entente and to stop the matter at the right moment. And the various negotiations that have taken place, especially between Austria and the Entente, if fully described, could fill books. These negotiations began relatively early. As you may have gathered from the newspapers, these negotiations have not yet reached their conclusion, because the Habsburg dynasty hopes to be reinstated in some form or other with the help of the Entente. The only question will be whether the Entente finds it in its interest to support the Habsburg dynasty in any way, because all the questions that will be decided will be decided on the basis of power. find a term for something that is not there, to reinstate the Habsburg Dynasty in some way for some reason in this context of nations that were formerly united under Austria. If that should be in the interest of the Entente, then it will naturally also happen in some form. One must not forget that. But that started very early on, and that means a substantially different phase of the war when something like that happens. Anyone who considers how this war ended for Austria will not be surprised when they are told that it was already clear in 1916 that Austria needed peace under all circumstances. There could be no doubt about that, under all circumstances and under all conditions, that it is simply nonsense to continue the war in any way, even if the conditions are the harshest. That is shown by the course of events, I don't mean so much what has happened, but I simply mean the state in which the Austrian army returned. All these facts, taken together, naturally made it clear even to well-meaning people in Austria that they could expect a great deal if a rapprochement with the Entente could be achieved to save Austria from a great disaster. One person sees what well-meaning people let go, the other sees what ill-meaning people let go and forms their judgment depending on the direction of their emotions at the time.

Another fact comes into consideration for this alone. It comes into consideration that such things essentially influenced the whole direction, the whole movement of the military catastrophe, that naturally factions also arose within Austria. Some wanted to relate to Germany in one way, others in another, mutual resentment, to name only a few factors, which of course there is not enough time to enumerate today. The result was that from the moment just characterized, one had to deal with a completely different phase of the war catastrophe than before. One could not simply continue with the convenient judgment: Well, the Central Powers are just allies, and the circumstances under which they were involved in the war as allies in 1914 must be adhered to even after the continuation of the war. — That was simply not true. The tragedy for Central Europe lies in many things. For example, it lies in the unfortunate alliance that then emerged with Turkey. The dissolution of this alliance, both with Turkey and with Bulgaria, has taken place slowly and gradually. Anyone who was aware of the events knows that the Turks could just as easily have disengaged earlier, and the same goes for the Bulgarians. The time came when the Turks withdrew, even after they had been given 40 million in gold, because 40 million in gold was given to the Turks by Germany before they withdrew. Before retreating, Bulgaria was supplied with 250,000 uniforms. All these things were done just like that. They show how little people really understood the situation, because it seems to me unlikely that they would have given the Turks 40 million in gold if they had known what they could have known with a little reflection: that the Turks would soon retreat.

I am only hinting at this – because I would have to multiply what I am saying a hundredfold – that this whole military catastrophe has gradually entered a channel that is quite different from the starting point; which made it necessary to completely reverse and transform the judgment if one wanted to be guided by the facts. And soon it became clear that in the course of this military catastrophe all, all the drowsiness and misdeeds of the bourgeoisie, which had been dormant for decades, came to light. And that is an important thing. Trotsky talked a lot of nonsense and did even more harm in the world, but he uttered one sentence with regard to this military catastrophe that began to come true relatively soon. That is the sentence: “The leading circles” – by which he meant those who, throughout the world, of course, not just in Central Europe, were involved in this outbreak of war – “have only the choice between permanent war or revolution; there is no third way.” It is true that world events have been so shaped and directed – and this is where the responsibility of the masses of the civilized world begins – that we have finally been driven into a dead end, where there is only one choice: either hold on tightly or face revolution. Well, you have seen how tenaciously they held on to the war, because as long as it lasts, the revolution is not there. The moment it is over, the revolution will show itself here or there.

You may remember that I have often said something along these lines here over the past few years. I told you, for example, a very, very long time ago, at the very time when it was appropriate: in contrast to what people are now saying, it is much more important to emphasize what happened in Russia, for example, within Russia. — What happened within Russia immediately after the overthrow of the tsarist regime was much more important than what happened on the so-called scene of the world war. And so it became more important again to look at what stood out from the Czechoslovaks who asserted themselves in Russia, as I emphasized in another place where it was appropriate, than to look at all the other things that one looked at in a convenient way, even though, of course, this convenient way was of course challenged by many a tragedy or in other ways.

And this brings me to a question that I have been asked again and again recently, and from a wide variety of quarters: about the possible course of action that could be taken now that things have come to this pass. I do not believe that what I say today will fall on more fertile ground than what I have said over the years; but still, everyone has their task. My task is to say things, and I will not fail to take the opportunity to say what I not only consider to be right, but also appropriate to say, to you and also to the world, when it is appropriate.

You see, what is approaching – we can speak quite freely about this matter here, where we are among ourselves, so to speak – is undoubtedly a conflict between the proletariat, which, as I myself mentioned in my recent public lecture in Basel, has grown out of modern industrialism in the last few centuries, and the old classes of humanity. Well, I have already expressed myself to some extent when I said, in connection with my Philosophy of Freedom, what I would have considered most necessary in recent years and still consider today. But I would like to say the following: The point at issue is to recognize that a current is emerging as if with a certain elementary necessity. By this current I mean the social movement, or the sum of social demands that arise from the proletariat. It is not a matter of passing judgment on this current, but rather of really delving into what is drawing it, what is simply drawing it as a fact. That is what it is about. Criticizing it is something one can do if one wants to, but it is not much more valuable than a perhaps very justified but still only private opinion. What really matters is that a way be found for the masses of the non-proletarian population of the entire civilized world to gain a perspective on what is looming. Many questions that have been put to me have been along these lines. And that is what must now lie before the souls of men: to gain a position. Now, I can only say: with regard to the social movement, as it has developed out of this catastrophic war, we have only developed out of it in its present form, entered a stage where it can truly no longer be a matter of making abstract programs, putting together so and so many points, saying one should do this or that. That might have been a possibility three, two, or even one year ago. Today, it is no longer an option. Today, I can only answer someone who asks me about this by saying that today it can only be a matter of finding out what needs to be done at each individual place where one is employed, especially if one is a humanities scholar, by looking at the situation realistically, and that one also finds the means and ways to do what needs to be done.

In this situation, it is of course a good thing to consider objectively and carefully what has been neglected, especially by the bourgeois circles. It is easy to understand the abstract sentence: the bourgeois circles must find a way to align themselves with the proletariat if there is to be no terrible catastrophe. But the sentence is quite abstract, it does not say anything specific. What it is about is something completely different. This maneuvering, which is necessary and must happen, will not be easy. For the bourgeois classes, in particular, have, over the years, neglected to do tremendous things, which has led to their now lacking much in order to directly maneuver with the proletariat. The bourgeois classes, in their majority, have no idea of the mental state of the proletariat. What draws them together are mass instincts. But these mass instincts must be truly understood; they must be truly considered as they are by nature. And in the face of this situation, one must not have the belief that understanding of these mass instincts, which are coming to the fore today, will come by itself. With a patriarchal way of thinking, with what bourgeois circles today call understanding of such things, not even the slightest thing is being done. Bourgeois circles understand little more about social issues, even after they have dealt with them in one direction or another, than that people are hungry and cry out for bread because that is what they do when they are hungry. That is what they have in common with the proletariat today. They have done nothing at all in recent decades to truly strive for spiritual community with the proletariat, to initiate spiritual community. I may consider myself an expert in this matter because I do not just say what I say out of study; for anyone who, like myself, has emerged from the proletariat knows how the proletariat lives and thinks, I might say in all possible fields; and anyone who has then occupied himself with as much as a human being can occupy himself with the thoughts that have formed the proletariat over decades, and with the feelings that emanate from this proletariat, may speak about this matter.

It must be borne in mind and well taken into account that in the course of the last decades, the proletarian circles have used every free moment from their work to acquire ideas, concepts, and then also feelings and impulses about capital and the capitalist economy, about wages and surplus value, about materialistic historical development, about entrepreneurship and working-class identity. And one must not forget, if one wants to steer one's own perceptions in the right direction, that in the last decades, in the time when workers, insofar as they come into consideration, sat evening after evening acquiring economic concepts for something they call a revolution, but which could also have been a reform - in the time, what did bourgeois circles do? During that time, the bourgeois circles played cards or listened to so-called entertaining plays or read newspapers, well, or had similar useful pastimes. As a result, the bourgeois population has finally reached the state that exists today in terms of human understanding: the state of complete inability to understand the proletarian.

This situation could be maintained as long as elementary mass instincts were not unleashed. It cannot be maintained if elementary mass instincts are unleashed. For the whole course of the movement is such that one cannot think of a shunting without being inside the soul of the proletarian. He who has really been able to follow the development of the proletariat knows that all the various patriarchal machinations that have emanated from the economic leaders have been most intensely rejected by the soul of the proletarians. What people in bourgeois circles thought they were doing for the benefit of the workers has been firmly rejected in the depths of the proletarian soul and even perceived as a kind of insult if it has a patriarchal character. But in the field of economic interrelations, the proletarian has acquired knowledge that he has today, has acquired a judgment with which he walks around as a content of his soul, and of which the member of the bourgeois class has not the slightest idea, not the slightest inkling. For it has come about that today the proletarian laborer knows more about the functions of capital, about entrepreneurship and wage relations, about materialistic historical development than a university professor of economics, whose profession it is to know something about these things.

This is the situation that must be properly understood before anything else. For only if we look at it correctly will we understand what is meant when I say that anyone who wants to come to terms with what is emerging now needs to speak a completely new language. Everything that has been thought in bourgeois circles so far must be transformed into a completely different language; because what must be established must be trust. They must be able to speak from the soul of the people, and in every single place they must be able to speak from the soul of the people and, above all, act. They cannot do this with abstract program points, but only if they place themselves in the context of what is happening today, or are placed in it, if that is the right thing to do. But for the time being everything that is right is rejected, no preparations are being made on any point to undertake anything in this direction. Because today it is not about demanding abstract programs, but today it can only be about developing the most personal work out of an understanding of the situation in the specific individual case. That is the only thing that can be done.

What can be said in general is as follows. You see, because everything that bourgeois circles have overslept has been done in proletarian circles, and was neither the subject of school education nor of salon conversations or the like, most people today do not know much about the things that one must be able to think about. Now only two things are possible today: either you reflect on certain social values from the point of view of the proletariat of today, or you reflect on them from the point of view of spiritual science. If you have been involved in the spiritual science movement for years and have applied your time correctly in it, then you are simply thinking correctly about what can confront you today in a concrete case, and only then are you in a position to establish a relationship of trust, which is of primary importance. Because with what the commoner can say today, he must be rejected everywhere, because the proletarian speaks a much more advanced language. The bourgeois must learn to speak an even more advanced language. But first he must want to do so.

You see, what is necessary is to focus on the three types of economic values, which are the three main types and around which the real issues revolve. What must be dealt with today through thought and action are these three types of economic values. But you can only communicate with each other, and only act in accordance with what emerges as an elementary current, if you have the will to engage with the language that the proletariat speaks and if you can consider and apply your truly more appropriate and realistic judgment. The three types are the so-called entrepreneurial profit, capital gain, rent and wages. There are no other types of economic values. All economic values fall properly into one of these three categories: either entrepreneurial profit, rent or wages. The proletariat is opposed to these three types of economic values to a certain extent. It wants to eliminate the harmful aspects – in its opinion harmful aspects – that these three types of economic values have, by bringing about the socialization of the means of production and land, and by transferring control to the actual proletariat, control in the various social spheres, because the proletariat has lost confidence in the other classes. Yes, today one cannot speak about this merely theoretically, one can only speak about it realistically. One can only speak in such a way that one considers: How far have the conditions developed? – And by conditions I mean in particular: How far have the thoughts and feelings of the proletarian masses developed? One can, if one has gone through this or that economic theory, consider one or the other to be correct, but that says nothing at all about reality, about what is to be done. For what has to be done today, only the fact that is in the minds of the proletarian masses says something unique. And that is very uniform, it has developed very uniformly over decades, and above all, it must be reckoned with.

Above all, it must be clear that certain things must be pursued sympathetically if the bourgeoisie is to come to terms with the proletariat at all. Entrepreneurial profit – the tendency of the working class is to shape entrepreneurial profit in such a way that nothing flows from it into private gain. But this is one thing on which it would be entirely possible to reach an understanding with the proletariat. If you were to follow all the channels, all the rivulets into which that which is capital pours in the economic body, and then, when capital takes the form of entrepreneurial profit, if you follow all that, and if you say to yourself at the same time: This has has caused the most bitter mistrust of the proletariat towards the bourgeoisie, namely towards the big bourgeoisie, that the entrepreneur's profit has been included in the private acquisition to the greatest extent possible - there will be no arguing about that in the future - then you are on the right track. But then, if we show understanding for what the proletariat wants on this point, we will also find ways and means to prevent the serious social damage that will inevitably follow if the proletariat's radical demands for a reduction in entrepreneurial profit are met. Unfortunately, the situation is such that, based on the knowledge that the bourgeoisie has of these things, it is usually not possible to discuss with the proletariat, because this knowledge is not available, because the bourgeoisie today knows nothing about the channels and functions through which something like entrepreneurial profit – the profit of the entrepreneur from a factory, or the profit of the entrepreneur from something else – is poured out. Since the proletarian necessarily lacks the foresight into which one or the other social arrangement leads, he only fights the damage that has gradually been caused by the behavior of the bourgeoisie in relation to entrepreneurial profit, but he certainly only causes destruction and ruin. It would be the task of the bourgeoisie to come to an agreement on these points. If they could agree on these details, then those who, because of their previous position in the economic system, held leading positions in the economic system and therefore alone had the knowledge to continue the continuity of economic life, would automatically be placed in leading positions by the will of the proletariat; whether through workers' and soldiers' councils or other councils, they would automatically get there. But there must be the possibility of really negotiating with the people. If there is the possibility of negotiating, so that the people know: Aha, he himself knows what we actually want, but he knows even more - then comes what must come: trust, which cannot exist today. Because the situation can never arise that, when the proletarians simply have to believe: Well, now they have the upper hand, and the bourgeois, who have behaved in such and such a way so far, now want to sit down at the table too — that they will immediately let them sit down out of good nature; that will not happen, but it must be supported by trust. And the difficulty is that in the broadest circles there is actually no possibility of speaking a common language. One can have the most diverse views, but one must be able to speak a common language.

Then, however, it must be clear that not only the entrepreneur's profit, but also the rent will be substantially contested. Now it is precisely the rent that has led to the worst excesses, and out of the instincts of the masses, not only the entrepreneur's profit will be fought, but of course the rent will also be fought. Now it is quite clear that only someone who has an overview of the functions of rent can see into these things again. And the point is that today it is easy, if you speak the language of the proletariat, to at least get it to the point of discussion – understanding will develop only slowly and gradually, mutual understanding – and to get it to a certain kind of trust.

Isn't it the case with entrepreneurial profit that one realizes that one really does not consider the entrepreneurial profit as a basis for private gain, but that everything that is entrepreneurial profit is only related to one relationship that one has to manage the matter, that one has to economize with the matter, and that the entrepreneurial profit must not in the future be allowed to enter into private acquisition, into all that which is private acquisition. The point of the pension is that the world cannot live without it, because the whole of spiritual life, education, teaching and everything must be maintained from the pension in the broadest sense, and in addition, people who are unable to work and the sick, the elderly and the like must actually be maintained from the pension. If we talk about these things in an appropriate way, it would of course be important to at least get into a fruitful discussion, but we must also be clear about the fact that it is impossible to get into a fruitful discussion if we do not know that the only real justification for a pension is that it is directed in the ways I have just mentioned.

The third is wages, which the proletariat wants to regulate in such a way that no surplus value arises that flows into anything other than the entrepreneur's profit, which cannot be converted into private income, and the justified rent. Of course, it is a horror for the bourgeois population, who are completely ignorant in this area, to gain insight into the fact that no one really has anything to fear, even in the slightest, if the following really exists in principle: that everyone receives the proceeds of their labor, that the economic structure is actually such that every worker transforms labor into the proceeds of their labor. It is not an ideal, as you can see from my essay 'Geisteswissenschaft and the Social Question'; but today it is not a question of an ideal, but of what alone can be achieved in the immediate future. And there it is a matter of actually awakening an understanding of what the minimum of added value is, and withholding only the minimum of added value from the wage, which will then no longer be a wage, but simply compensation for labor.

In the most just way, one might even say, in the most equitable way, the social structure would be formed, of course, little by little, if one wanted nothing else but to maneuver with real understanding in these three directions. For one would then, first of all, bring about what is most necessary: one would bring about the possibility of a continuity of economic life. And that is above all necessary. That is the one thing that was not possible in the field of Bolshevism in Russia and that will never be possible unless there is a change in the sense indicated. It is not possible otherwise than in the sense indicated.

In these three directions, it is important, above all, to create such an understanding that a movement according to the rule occurs in these three directions. Only in this way is it possible for the capable leaders of economic life – and this is urgently necessary if immense disaster is to be averted; the capable, not the incapable, must of course be excluded – to really remain in this economic life. It is impossible to win over the proletariat for the continuity of economic life under any other circumstances than when one is able to speak to them in a language they understand. The continuity of economic life must be maintained. And then an understanding must be created for what the inner connections are.

You see, one connection that must play a particularly important role in the near future, if we are to avoid immeasurable misfortune that can and may be prevented despite the course of the world, is this: Everything that is proletariat today is nourished in its thinking by the perverse scientific and other arguments of the bourgeoisie in the last few centuries – and especially in the last century. The proletariat has inherited everything that the bourgeoisie has produced in terms of thinking and imagination. The proletariat is only in the world in a different way and draws different conclusions from it. The origin of what the Bolsheviks do lies in today's university education, in the form that the education system has taken, precisely because of the bourgeois classes. For the proletarians have learned nothing other than what the bourgeois classes have produced. They are simply drawing the consequences from it in their own way. Therefore it is necessary, above all, to create an understanding for this in the proletariat itself, how they actually live on the fallen chunks of useless bourgeois thinking and now want to create a movement that can only be impotent because it arises from the barren bourgeois thinking. This understanding must be awakened, but it cannot be awakened in any other way than by realizing that a complete reversal must now take place in the bourgeoisie itself, precisely with regard to this point, with regard to the intellectual life, with regard to the educational system. The whole way in which the educational system is organized is simply unsuitable for the new era, and it is imperative that the continuity of economic life be maintained until everything that interferes with our economy in an unhealthy way has been overcome by the unhealthy bourgeois hustle and bustle of life.

You have to take into account the fact that people need to understand the issues in an understandable way. You have to realize that money as such is nothing at all. True values are only labor. Money is never anything other than a labor voucher. But the final consequences of these things are not drawn. I will take an example from the education of today itself. You see, there are the young foxes, the students, I mean, who have to – well, I will pick out one example – write dissertations. It is really the case that dissertations have to be written, for my sake about the dot over the i in the documents of Innocent IV. I know a man who has had a certain reputation all his life for having written a dissertation on the swear words in Properz, or on the parentheses of the Greek playwrights, and so on. I could give you countless examples. But these are only examples that could be multiplied a million times over, not only increased a hundred or a thousand times over in the most diverse fields. Yes, these things must no longer be treated as belletristic, but must be placed in an economic perspective in accordance with the demands of our time. The young fox sits for a whole year over his dissertation, which, parenthetically, is about Homer, for my sake. Isn't it? He sits over it for a whole year. It can be a so-called diligent, clean piece of work. But what does that mean? It means that the student spends a year working on it, eating and drinking and dressing. What he eats and drinks and with what he clothes himself, that must be worked by so and so many people. The social structure must be there for real work to be transformed in such a way that this young student, who is busy with oxen, can eat and drink and clothe himself for a year in order to write about the swear words in Properz or about the parenthesis in Homer. If someone could give you even a rough idea of how real human labor is transformed in this way into absolutely useless stuff, worthless in every respect, then you would be doing a tremendously charitable deed. But these are the things that need to be understood, that what one does not even think about, except to treat it with a smile, that this must be put into an economic perspective. Because we have arrived at the time when all things must be put into an economic perspective. The commoner who does not understand what it means to abuse human labor in order to make it possible for a young person to eat and drink and clothe himself for a whole year over the act of putting Properz's swear words into a system, the person who does not grasp this also does not find the way to effect the shunting I spoke of.

But this also testifies to the other thing that is necessary: on the one hand, to arrange things so that there is real continuity in economic life, and on the other hand, to create understanding, especially among the proletariat, that one wants to cultivate such a spiritual life together with the proletariat, which does not find economic expression in an unhealthy way, but in a healthy way. Once this basis has been established, when, for example, the proletarian knows: You agree with me, I can use you, because you know how to do this or that because you have learned what I have not yet learned – otherwise people people need you, they won't let you sit with them. Once the proletarian realizes that the bourgeois understands such things, then he will bring about the possibility of establishing the continuity of economic life, simply for such reasons. There is no other way, no other way to do it. But then he will be amenable if he agrees that entrepreneurial profit should not be allowed to become private gain in an unhealthy way, because it is only because entrepreneurial profit can become private gain that it is possible for foxes at the universities, by converting entrepreneurial profit into their food and drink – entrepreneurial profit, which is surplus value of labor – the swear words in Properz or the parenthesis in Homer can be brought into a system. But that is only said comparatively, because it could be multiplied a thousandfold or a millionfold.

But only by doing so will one evoke understanding, understanding then in a roundabout way, for that which is particularly necessary on a spiritual path and which is in danger of being completely destroyed if one does not take action – because the opposite of what is necessary on the spiritual path will follow from the proletariat – and that is: the freedom of individuality. It is being crushed out of the proletariat. The freedom of individuality, which makes it possible for abilities to be used, for talents to be realized, for man to be a free human being in relation to everything he produces or participates in spiritually, all this cannot be realized from the premises of today's proletarian views. But it could be made comprehensible if one were to decide to really speak the new language that is necessary. This is what should be clarified today, I would even say, is urgently necessary, and insight should be gained into it. And if you gain insight, you will see what has been neglected, creating a deep divide between the proletarian, who used his time as I have indicated to you, and the bourgeoisie, who basically remained ignorant of these things.

This shows you, however, that you can't do anything with abstract programs and so-called ideals, no matter how beautiful they sound, today, that today you simply have to get to know what people want. But you don't get to know that by negotiating with them, because they are, of course, far from revealing anything about themselves when you negotiate with them. One must not only negotiate with them, not only live with them, one must learn to think with them, one must learn to feel with them. And then one must have a sense of obligation and duty to actually use what one has been given by karma in the right way. The extent to which the terrible storms that are now upon us can become good will depend entirely on whether or not people begin to understand things like the ones I have inaugurated with my Philosophy of Freedom or the like. Isn't that right, everyone does what they can, what lies within their karma, within their direction. Of the things I have done myself, I would like to emphasize the production of thoughts that can give structure to social life, and which I hoped at the beginning of the nineties, a quarter of a century ago, would resonance, and today, after a quarter of a century, I hope again that they might find a resonance, now that the second edition has been published, and perhaps find a resonance not only despite, but because of the difficult times that are now beginning.

The other thing I do not want to leave unmentioned is that I was only able to gain insights in the field of which I have been speaking to you today, as indeed in the field of spiritual science in general, because I never in my life sought any position that was connected with the failing state enterprise. I have never been associated with any external employment in a state, nor with any social position based on the monopolization of education. Because the monopolies on education must all be seen as fundamentally contributing to today's catastrophe, the monopoly of doctors and so on, and whatever else is associated with it. Because freedom in relation to the spiritual is only not harmful if the spiritual remains in the spiritual. As soon as, which is happening today and has been happening for a long time, the spiritual, that is, the acquisition of abilities, is somehow conflated with the possibility of making private profit from entrepreneurial profit, so that private profit drawn from entrepreneurship can somehow play a role in the utilization of the spiritual – all that happens in this way is something that can only cause the deepest damage to what is necessary in the future. All these things that I am touching on are in turn connected with fundamental things that play into all of life. The most intimate connection has been established between intellectual abilities and entrepreneurial profit in the field of journalism, which, it must be said with respect, dominates the world today and on which so much else depends.

I would have to continue speaking for a long time if I wanted to tell you more. But I have already taken up a great deal of your time today and hopefully we will be able to talk further about this in the next few days, although one cannot know now whether some necessity will arise overnight to leave here, or something like that. Today, when days mean decades, one can only say: the moment must be seized and the necessary must be done in the moment. — So that must also be reckoned with within our innermost circle. But I hope that we will be able to continue the discussion on Friday at the latest. If anything should happen, I will make sure that we can at least discuss some other things that we would like to say in this area here. Otherwise, we will continue our deliberations on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then achieve what I was unable to achieve today: to examine the fates of nations today and the social question on an even deeper, spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical basis.

You have recently seen a eurythmy performance of Fercher von Steinwand's “Choir of Archetypal Dreams” (Choir of Primordial Dreams). Fercher von Steinwand's next poem, which follows on from the “Choir of Archetypal Dreams”, is now being prepared for a eurythmic performance: the “Chor der Urtriebe” (Choir of Primordial Instincts). It is perhaps desirable for you to familiarize yourselves with the ideas of the poem first, because during the eurythmic performance, your attention will be very much taken up by the simultaneous absorption of the eurythmic and the poem. To make it possible for you to familiarize yourself with the text before the eurythmy performance, Dr. Steiner will recite the first and second paragraphs of the Chorus of Primordial Drives before the lecture today and then continue with it tomorrow.

In these reflections, I have tried to tie in a few episodes from the significant developmental events of the present, which should then offer the opportunity to provide further perspectives from our spiritual scientific point of view. Today, I would also like to present one or two more episodes to you with reference to our current events, so that within these three lectures today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, we may be able to arrive at some perspectives that must be important to everyone in the present. I would like to start today with a general observation. Among the many terrible and catastrophic events that have befallen humanity in recent years, two things in particular should be mentioned. One is that a kind of strengthening of humanity in relation to the feeling for actual truth should arise from the observation of what has been experienced. And the second should be: a certain ability to learn from world events, from the world as such, should arise from the tragedy that has taken place and will continue to take place.

These are the two things that should be gained from the observation of the past four and a half years. I said that humanity should develop a feeling for actual truth, for the truth within the world of facts. We have seen, if we wanted to see, if we were concerned to see, that over the years – by which I do not mean that it was not the case to some extent before, only it was not so noticeable – that over more than four years humanity throughout the civilized world has gradually become dulled to the observation of actual reality, of the truth that lives in events. How often is it necessary, within the circle of those who have joined together in our movement, to speak of the significance, the actual significance of truth! On the other hand, how difficult it is to awaken any understanding for the genuine image of truth, in so far as truth is not merely an abstraction but a reality. And how great are the temptations to withdraw from the vision of real truth. Mankind will also want to be informed about the last four years and about what preceded them, because at least out of the chaos something like the urge to get to know the events will develop. Today – I wanted to point this out in particular in the last reflections I made here – today few people really have a need to know the truth about the last few years. But that is not what I mean so much as devotion to reality. People love to live in illusions. Between illusions and untruths there is only a very narrow gulf, and it is very easy to cross over from illusions into the realm of downright falsehood. Whether this lie is conscious or unconscious is of little consequence when it comes to realities. The temptations are simply very great to introduce into one's world of ideas at the point where one should practice devotion to the truth, to switch on the illusion and then very soon just the untruth.

It should now be clear to the spiritual scientist that only a life lived in truth can educate, develop, build up and promote growth, whereas everything that is a life of untruth destroys and isolates. A life of untruth is always connected with selfishness. That which is so obstructive to the penetration of the truth prevailing in the facts is the spinning of one's own subjective comfort, namely, of the life of imagination, but also of the life of feeling. One does not want to rise above the illusions that everything, everything is so that one is relieved of thinking, of natural thinking.

The individual is placed in this mood, which very easily becomes the general mood, and if he has to make use of a certain form in a time that is not very favorable to the truth, he is then understood with great difficulty. Those who have been forced to have one or the other examined by the actual circumstances in the last four years, and who have been forced to take brutal realities into account, have naturally been poorly understood. But how difficult it is to develop this leaning towards the truth in the facts can be seen from the fact that it would have been truly quite uncomfortable for many people to adjust their thinking to something like what was, for example, put forward by me in that Vienna Cycle of lectures, to which I have recently referred here again; who spoke of what has been going on within humanity for decades, as of a carcinoma disease, a cancer disease that takes place in the social life of human beings. And I said at the time: Truly, only the obligation to say something like that can cause one to utter it. But at the same time I said: One would like to shout out to the world what lies within. But it is uncomfortable to hear, and it was uncomfortable for people to hear, before this catastrophe befell them, that it would happen. Of course, it was inconvenient for a large number of people to be made aware, let us say, two years ago, that events could take no other course than the one they have now taken. That this course of events is a very inconvenient one for the so-called Central Powers is already obvious today. That it will be quite unpleasant for the Entente, that will become apparent over the course of a few years, but it is not so obvious today; therefore it is still an inconvenient truth today. Of course, pretty much anywhere in the world today, something unpleasant could happen to the person who would say more clearly than has already been said here what it is all about, just as something unpleasant would have happened to someone in other areas if they had put the worship of Hindenburg and Ludendorff in the right light two years ago.

These are things that only play a role on a large scale. But there are things that occur in human life every day, they show themselves from person to person everywhere. And after all, what takes place on a large scale, what are known as the great events, are nothing more than the accumulation of what takes place on a small scale from person to person every day, in everyday life. For one thing, there is a certain tendency for people not to want to look at the truth. Of course, people talk a lot about truth. But I have never seen greater love for illusion than in those people who use the word truth all the time, just as I have never seen greater egoism than in those people who constantly say that they really only want this or that impersonal thing.

That is one thing: the necessity to develop a sense of truth, insofar as truth lies in facts. The other thing is to learn from world events. One's heart can bleed when one sees the necessity to learn precisely from the events of recent years, and when one sees how relatively little has been learned by people. When one considers things, it often seems as if centuries lie between the year 1914 and the present year, and one can still meet people today who judge exactly the same way today as they judged these or those things in 1914. Of course, a certain basic foundation of things remains untouched, but I am sure you will understand when I say that one must have learned to judge certain things differently. —- One can well understand that the same things are meant that have just come to light through such events as the last four years.

What many people could learn already is the necessity of leaning towards a spiritual view of the world. From all that is happening, especially in the field of social life, from the social complications that have finally emerged from this world catastrophe, and from the social chaos that will develop from this world catastrophe, the necessity for humanity to turn to spiritual, to spiritual world contemplation will arise above all. This is already making itself felt today in that those people who, for some time, will be at the top in this whirling dance that has now begun are the very ones who are most fiercely opposed to all spiritual life, to all spiritual contemplation of the world. But it is precisely in this terrible rejection that the real seed for the evocation of the longing for spiritual world contemplation lies. It will not be possible to achieve a social structure full of light in the future without turning one's gaze to what today's order, today's chaos, has produced. But insight into what has happened – and the present chaos is only the result of what has happened in the course of human development – can only be gained through spiritual science as a source of spiritual light.

In order to gain some control over the great proletarian questions that arise – I am not even talking about being able to solve them – one must ask oneself: What is the significance of the classes to which the proletariat, for example, looks back when it perceives itself as a class: the class of the old nobility, the bourgeoisie, and finally the class of the proletariat itself? — Definitions do not get to the bottom of things. Nor does observing how the aristocratic class behaved over the centuries, what became of it, how the bourgeoisie behaved, how the proletariat came into being. Nor does this alone lead to an understanding of what has flowed into the human social order by drawing its tributaries from other classes, especially from these three classes.

The nobility in its most diverse forms - yes, ultimately one understands what is connected with the nobility as a class only if one is able to shed light on it in a spiritual-scientific way. Only in this way is it possible to say: those people who have developed in the caste of the nobility are, of course, not only those human individuals who descend from certain ancestors according to the continuity of blood and have thereby secured certain privileges in the world on the basis of certain events, which are more or less known to you, but the members of this caste are also souls, at least for the most part souls, who have sought to embody themselves in precisely those bodies that were born into the caste. In the future, we will have to acquire the ability to look at the human being not only as a physical-bodily creature, but also in connection with the spiritual world behind him, in which he has the source of his soul. We will gradually have to develop the feeling that we do not know the human being if we do not grasp his connection with the spiritual world behind him.

One can now really make a spiritual effort to answer the question: Where does it actually come from, what has entered into humanity through the nobility? — Indeed, in the present time one has quite a few opportunities to deal with such questions in a spiritual way; at least one had the opportunity to do so. That will all come to an end now. The world has railed much against so-called Prussian-German militarism; now Prussian Germany itself rails against Prussian-German militarism. The railing may be justified from this or that point of view; the reasons that have been advanced by one side or the other, for and against, have mostly been very ugly and certainly very few true reasons, and still are not. And for the seeker of truth, it depends much more on the reasons than on the abstract vote or non-vote. But much more important than this pro and contra is the fact that eighty percent, actually more than eighty percent, of the commanding positions in the Prussian-German army are occupied by nobles, by good old nobles, leading positions, in the highest leading positions, eighty percent, over eighty percent; so that, without allowing sympathies and antipathies to prevail, one can answer the question of where, for example, what has come into humanity through the nobility comes from. Whether this is an opportunity for humanity to speak in favor or against, I will not go into that, as I said above, but what has happened can be reduced to the question: How does it actually relate to the whole process of evolution, to the whole development of humanity? — For one can, for example, raise the question precisely with regard to this militarism, what has happened through it in the course of the last decades and the last four and a half years, since it is led in its majority precisely by aristocrats. The question that I raised above can be answered: How do the impulses of the nobility relate to the overall development of humanity? And everywhere you look, even spiritually, even if you try to explore the connection between the human soul and the spiritual worlds, everywhere you look, you find that what humanity has experienced anywhere and anytime through its nobility is the effect of an old human karma, the effect of impulses that were once brought into human development by this or that. In order that certain things may befall people because of earlier collective human complications, nobility in this or that field was essentially there for that purpose, now seen spiritually; the effect of old debts, one might say. One must go back into the past everywhere if one wants to understand the impulses that work socially in nobility in terms of their significance for humanity.

Once one has begun a deeper consideration of things at the point where I have indicated it to you, then one is driven to also touch the other pole. And the other pole is the proletariat. Here the situation is reversed. All the difficulties for humanity that are caused by the proletariat, all the complications that are brought into humanity by the proletariat, all this points to the future, gives future karma, and will have to be dealt with by humanity in the future.

The former, that the nobility is, so to speak, the executive power with regard to old guilt, this realization can lead to a feeling of responsibility for what must happen today through the proletariat. After all, what happens through the proletariat is, to a large extent, caused by the bourgeoisie through the detour of the spiritual life. In order to understand the latter thoroughly, one must try to consider the bourgeoisie's middle position between the nobility and the proletariat.

You see, the nobility is usually averse to an actual scientific treatment of world events. They are not averse to knowing something about world events, but they do not want to come to an understanding of world events through scientific research and scientific thought. He would much rather enter the secrets of the world by authority, without the effort of thinking – I say all this without sympathy or antipathy, just to characterize – not through knowledge. There is no doubt that the comfortable way in which people try to enter the secrets of the world through spiritualism, for example, finds numerous followers in aristocratic circles. Well, you may say: of course not only the nobility are spiritualists. — That is really true, but in the other classes there are as many people opposed to the spiritualists who at least have a certain aspiration to enter the spiritual world by applying their own thinking, to do science. Within the nobility, people who are scientifically striving are not on the side of those who want to enter the spiritual world in a spiritualistic or mystical way – well, there are different ways, not all of which need to be characterized. On the other hand, whatever a nobility class somehow claims in the world must always be supported in some military way. A nobility class is inconceivable without military support. These are some examples – there are, of course, many other characteristic peculiarities of the nobility class – but these are the ones that are of radical importance.

As for the bourgeoisie, which stands between the nobility and the proletariat, it can be said that with the bourgeoisie there arises a certain striving to make knowledge scientific, to bring scientific form to the ideas that want to enter the spiritual world. The power of the bourgeoisie is based on the possession of the means of production, the tools and the like. I select individual things to say in order to establish certain prospects for tomorrow or the day after, but you will see that what I select has a certain significance.

What is particularly characteristic is what one class always takes over from the next one up. Thus, for example, the bourgeoisie takes over militarism from the nobility. But the interesting thing is that the bourgeoisie everywhere tends to democratize militarism. The nobleman needs an army at his disposal to keep him. How he achieves this is of no concern to him. The bourgeois, by the very nature of his relationship to his means of living and existence, is also dependent on the support of an army, but he must take this army from the same people that he puts to his means of production. Therefore, he becomes a fan of universal conscription. And, isn't it true, in the time when the bourgeoisie gradually emerged and developed, you were obviously a fool if you couldn't enthuse about universal conscription, because that was simply the greatest advance of the time, universal conscription, the so-called democratization of militarism and so on.

What the proletariat in turn took from the previous class is the science of the bourgeoisie, bourgeois science. The proletarian today – at least insofar as he is scientifically educated, and there are very many of them – he knows how to appreciate certain subconscious or unconscious things in man. He knows well how a certain thinking and a certain form of thinking comes from a person's class or caste. For example, the proletarian knows very well that if you are a member of the nobility, you think differently because you belong to the caste of the nobility than if you are a bourgeois or if you are a proletarian. The entire formation of thought is different, the instincts that flow into the thought forms and form these thought forms are different. Bourgeois science, it takes the standpoint that truth is truth, there can only be one truth, and believes in the absoluteness of its judgments. The proletarian does not do that, because he knows the dependence of what a person thinks on his caste, on his class.

Now, of course, there is also a certain basic foundation of truths that do not depend on caste, for me, certain elementary mathematical concepts and the like. Of course, even purely mathematical-mechanical astronomy is not dependent on caste. But everything that relates to social and historical life, and especially the formation and use of individual scientific ideas, depends on the caste. Proletarian science has seen through this. Proletarian science looks into many of the subconscious thoughts of people. But it takes over, this proletarian science takes over bourgeois thinking, takes over, so to speak, lock, stock, and barrel, what bourgeois education, bourgeois intelligence has conquered, and popularizes it. Exactly as the bourgeoisie has democratized the militarism of the nobility, so the proletariat popularizes bourgeois science, or rather, the bourgeois scientific method, in a completely blind faith.

From this you can already see that the proletariat, with regard to its entire thinking, is the heir to what the bourgeoisie has done with regard to human thought, with regard to human scientific achievements. This will prove to be an extremely important fact in the near future, and it would be extremely necessary to be able to learn to pay attention to such things. Otherwise, people will want to live in comfortable illusions, which are only separated from the lie by a narrow gap, about the most important things that are creeping up.

There is nothing, for example, that is more detrimental to the truth, in the sense in which I spoke of the truth earlier, than nationalism. But nationalism is precisely part of the program that will be seen as a particularly beneficial program in the near future. It belongs to the program of the near future. Therefore, when this nationalism wants to build – for in reality it can only destroy – it will have to be experienced that the illusions, which are separated from the lie by a narrow chasm, will continue to exist. For as much nationalism as arises in the world, so much untruth will there be in the world, especially towards the future. And so there will be many sources of new untruths. Untruth has ruled the world in many respects. But it will not be able to rule once humanity has taken in those impulses, those currents, which today emerge chaotically in the proletarian masses and which, as you have seen - I presented this to you recently from spiritual scientific documents - correspond to one of the three great currents in the development of humanity.

Actual events are essentially connected with these things. But people have been reluctant, especially in recent decades, to look into the world in such a way as to really see what is real. One could only look into the world without looking at the spirit if one did not want to miss what is real. You see, everything that has happened in recent years goes back, basically, to spiritually transparent power dynamics in the civilized world. There was actually nothing more dreadful in the course of these sad events than talking from this or that so-called national or other point of view. Most of the time, people were talking about things that had nothing at all to do with the course of events. The strange thing was that the leading statesmen also spoke in such a way that their speeches had little to do with the course of events. One should not treat so lightly the things that are touched upon here, that is to say, what might be called the fate of human beings, insofar as these human beings are crowded together in groups, in groups of nations, for example. For here one touches on circumstances that are fundamentally and deeply connected with the spiritual, and one should not speak of them as superficially as one often does.

Above all, it should not be overlooked that certain terms mean quite different things in different parts of the world. Just think that people everywhere, let us say, speak of the state. But it is not important to have a certain concept of the state, but rather to associate at least something with this concept of the different emotional nuances that are attached to this state here or there, and above all to get away from the unfortunate amalgamation of state and nation and the people, that unfortunate confusion which is a fundamental characteristic of Wilsonianism, which always confuses the state and the nation and the people, and even wants to found states on nations, thereby perpetuating the lie, at least in certain circles, at least if it were possible.

We must look at the specific, real issues everywhere. In the course of these reflections, I have shown you how a certain configuration of Central Europe is connected with those old suggestions, based on group instincts, that emanated from Roman Catholicism, from Rome. You see, what was the old imperial idea of Central Europe, which died in 1806, was closely connected with this specter of the old Roman Empire, as spiritual science says. Until then, there was more or less, really more or less nominally, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which only disappeared in 1806. It did not actually disappear, but was only abolished. For this Holy Roman Empire, which more or less favorably or unfavorably held together or divided the various German tribes over long periods of time, this imperial impulse of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation has actually gradually been transferred to the Habsburg power, and that is what has been blessed with the Austro-Hungarian state structure. But a state that existed in the shadow of Habsburg power means something different from a state that, let us say, has developed since the fifteenth or sixteenth century, as it has actually formed as a state more in connection with the people in England or France. Where the state has no real substance, in what was the Habsburg Empire, where different peoples were held together under the aspect of the Habsburg power and this Habsburg power had them like a mantle, like an old treasure, there was something deeply medieval, namely the emperorship from the old Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. What the Habsburgs were was the oldest Middle Ages, and unfortunately also thoroughly connected with the oldest Middle Ages in terms of Romanism, in terms of that Catholicism that had been revived or at least made lifelike by the Counter-Reformation and which has produced all those conditions of which I have already spoken to you here, which has contributed so much to the lulling to sleep, to the dimming, but also to other evil effects within the Central European world.

This Habsburg empire of the oldest medieval type was confronted by a most modern one, which had gradually become completely modern, something of the most modern character: the Prussian-Hohenzollerian empire, that Prussian-Hohenzollerian empire which represented Americanism within the German being, Wilsonianism before Wilson. That is the great, enormous difference: this most modern character of Prussian-Hohenzollern Americanism, masked as an empire, and the medieval Habsburg empire, which was forged together from the outside. It is necessary to study these things if one wants to understand what has happened and what will happen.

What emerged as Hohenzollern-Prussian Americanism had a very specific peculiarity: it developed exactly the same impulses that developed, for example, in the British Empire, but it developed all these impulses in the opposite way. You see, there are three currents, handed down from ancient times, arising in the present: the aristocratic, the bourgeois, and the proletarian. Nowhere else, I might say, have these three currents, the aristocratic, the bourgeois, and the proletarian, developed in such a pure form, side by side, yet separate, as in the British Empire and also within the so-called Germany – which is not an official name, there is no Germany under constitutional law, there never has been under constitutional law – that is, in the so-called German Reich. So in both areas, but in the exact opposite sense, these three currents developed. In the British Empire, it all developed in such a way that the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the proletariat came together, always striving towards a common tendency. There is good old nobility, but it knew how to balance with the demands of the bourgeoisie, namely with the demands of the material and financial bourgeoisie. You are not only a nobleman, you also become a wealthy nobleman, a rich person in the modern sense. You can have your income from industry and be a good, old, respected nobleman. But you manage everything so that the proletarian in his undertakings does not deviate too much from what the others want. It always comes together in some way.

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Within the new German state structure, everything diverged. There were also three currents, but they developed in such a way that they diverged in the following sense: you had industry forming large-scale industry, which had its own current; you had the old nobility in the Prussian landed gentry – the two may have pushed together, but it was also afterwards! the proletariat, which increasingly became the opponent of the bourgeoisie and set itself the task of taking up the class struggle against the bourgeoisie in the most eminent sense. All this developed apart. Anyone who has studied historical events in this respect will find this particularly interesting. And all this within a framework that was bound to burst. For what had been constructed as so-called Germany – as I said, which never existed under constitutional law – bore the stamp of Bismarck, the stamp of a man for whom modern big industry never became a reality, who never knew it, who never reckoned with it, who constructed the framework he constructed to exclude the development of big industry. Now the whole Americanism of big industry developed into it and burst the framework. It was already blown up in itself long before this war catastrophe occurred.

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To study these conditions with an unbiased eye, with scientific objectivity, in peace, humanity in the mad whirl in which it had fallen in all possible fields, truly had no peace. Because one is not very inclined to go into realities. One must actually seek to achieve realities. One must have a sense for realities, perhaps not only a sense, but also an instinct for realities; for the trend of the times is to deny realities, not to engage with realities at all. You see, the people who looked at where the Inn flows, the Moldau flows, the Danube flows, the Leitha flows, they did not distinguish much between two fundamentally different things: between the German-Austrian people and the Habsburg Empire. That merged. And again, when people visited Austria, where the German-Austrian people lived, who are now heading towards such a tragic fate – how did they get to know what lives within the actual people? As a traveler to Austria, you got to know – as a writer once stated – the “Aryan” attitude, which was very closely connected with sloppiness. When you arrived at a train station, well, you were instructed to go there because you had a connection. You went there, and if you were supposed to arrive at the right time, you certainly did not arrive at the right time. Not true, you were never sure if you relied on the trains that you would arrive at the right time, but you were, as the person said, safe everywhere you went, that you would get a good cup of coffee. But that is just a superficiality. What was there in this area of Central Europe and from which a certain brutality was to stop, was precisely the possibility of developing strong spiritual individuals from a certain background of nationality.

You see, little was printed by Fercher von Steinwand in the 1880s. I lived in Vienna with some friends, younger writers. Once, the conversation turned to Fercher von Steinwand, and I knew some of his poems. It was around the time when I was editing the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna. Hamerling had pointed out Fercher von Steinwand with great understanding and sincere goodwill. Then some friends said to me: Yes, we can find Fercher, Of course, I was quickly willing to find Fercher von Steinwand. You could only find him by going to a secluded restaurant on Singerstraße in Vienna. That is a street that goes from the opera house towards Stephansplatz. Yes, you see, among all kinds of brothers, who you could already call “brothers,” there was Fercher's fine, spiritualized face in the middle. This German from the Carinthian region, entirely descended in terms of the way he forms his thoughts, this German-Austrian area, and yet precisely that connection to the world of ideas, as it is a spiritual connection and as he actually only lives in this way in this way. Fercher von Steinwand also had great political ideas, but he was not suited to somehow put these political ideas into practice according to the practices that took place in such fields. He was not at all. There are such people everywhere, even if they are not as talented as Fercher von Steinwand, who, precisely in this area, are connected to the spiritual world, who have carried within themselves for a long time a certain feeling for impulses that live there. But it was uncomfortable to listen to such people.

I must say that I was often with Fercher von Steinwand. He always seemed to me to be like one of those gypsies who wander around the world, but the aristocrat among gypsies, like their leader, with great ideas in his head, and who spoke of great ideas as if he had been among them himself. One evening, as we were sitting together, I said to him, just as I had just edited the “Deutsche Wochenschrift”: “Tell me, Mr. Fercher, couldn't you give us something that has not yet been printed?” Surely you still have all sorts of poetry that has not yet been printed; I would be happy to publish it in the weekly magazine.” — ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I have all sorts of funny things lying around that I still have.’ And so he gave me this ‘Choir of Primal Instincts,’ which he had had in his desk for a long time and which I published at the time.

This Fercher von Steinwand is one of those individuals who have truly emerged from the folklore of Central Europe. I would like to give you a little insight into the way Fercher von Steinwand was connected to his folklore.

On April 4, 1859, Fercher von Steinwand gave a lecture at the Dresden Antiquarian Society, in the presence of the then Crown Prince Georg (this book still says: present King of Saxony), all ministers and many officers of the highest rank – I ask you to note the latter in particular – in front of all these people, Fercher von Steinwand, so please: in 1859, on April 4, gave a lecture, and on the Gypsies at that. This lecture on the Gypsies contains an extraordinary amount, not so much because of the subtle observations Fercher von Steinwand makes about the Gypsies, but because of the great psychological insights into the psychology of nations that he presents in connection with the Gypsy question. He believes that the gypsies are Indo-Europeans. And now his gaze wanders – as I said, he gave this speech, from which I will now read a piece to you, before Crown Prince Georg of Saxony, before all the ministers and before high military dignitaries – to the Germans, and he said in the course of this speech:

“We Germans, who for a long time did not believe that such a dark genius was possible on earth, had to pay for our bright trust in the world and world order one after the other on inglorious battlefields. We Germans have the unfortunate virtue of respecting a foreign people to the point of foolishly disregarding ourselves, even if they have little or nothing praiseworthy about them, as a striking peculiarity.”

Now I will skip what he says next.

"But our virtue suddenly turns to vice as soon as a great event comes crashing before our doorstep, without stirring up our suffering and troublesome nature and overcoming our ingrained unnatural fear of the divine hint of history, which has often led us to the guillotine of doom. The gods are more hostile to no one than to the Philistine, and nowhere under the sun are there small-time merchants who would not be bullied by a big-time merchant. Like every future, our German future may be a mystery to us. But this one is not as impenetrable as we usually think. We are already coming up with real solutions to this German puzzle, solutions that we can prophetically call prophetic with reference to our homeland.

All this in a speech about the Gypsies. He ties his observations to being a Gypsy, Fercher von Steinwand.

"Let us look a little over the Atlantic Ocean! Let us turn our gaze to São Jorge dos Ilheus or let us travel in our thoughts up the Rio Contas, where we encounter German settlements. “With quiet contempt – so Emperor Max, who is a man of feeling and creative spirit, so something far better than the Emperor of Mexico – ”with quiet contempt, the new shoots look at the old mainland. The gaunt children with the pale, sallow faces, the forget-me-not blue eyes and the straw-yellow, spiky hair particularly caught my eye and vividly reminded me of the descendants of our German villages. I approached two older boys and spoke to them in German; they looked up at me shyly and could not answer me, only uttering their own German names with difficulty. They were children of German immigrants, of whom there are many in Ilheus. Not without a feeling of indignation, I found that even they were complete Brazilians, unable to speak their mother tongue even with their own parents. And then the Germans wonder why they have no independent position anywhere, that they, instead of dominating, are a kind of halfway house between slaves and free people. What a disgrace for German parents to communicate with their children in foreign languages! How the family relationship must suffer when the weak mother must struggle with her own blood in foreign expressions! – This fact, which can be found everywhere, may be a major reason for the gloomy melancholy that weighs heavily and worryingly on the faces and natures of all German colonists. During my trip, I did not see a single cheerful German emigrant; they all bore a secret pain. Sometimes the children benefit from the broken existence of their parents, but their lack of character almost always leads them to abandon the foreign and closed nationalities. This is the pain that weighs on the minds of these strangers. — Two pale men with haggard features were walking along the path; a few German words proved their transatlantic origin. They answered in the language of their homeland, but the sound was no longer full and pure, the dull tone had something tired and sad about it; their figures were also without energy and elasticity, as if they were people who missed their calling, did not feel at home, for whom the French expression dépaysé applies in the fullest sense. Most German emigrants present such a picture of melancholy; the secret worm gnaws at all of them.”

Is that not the air of the gipsies wafting over from the banks of the Rio Contas? And that dreadful Melusine, what whispers she in our ears? A word from our German future, an icy greeting from her for a speedy reunion. Yes, this future is already approaching eerily on our horizon.

This was spoken in 1859!

"Yes, this future is already approaching eerily on our horizon, looking over the banks and mountains into the depths of our lands, gaunt enough, like the genius of death with the pallor of death on its face. We have no right to expect otherwise.

What we say has no marrow; what we do has no core; what we create artistically has neither the sound nor the nobility of the great outdoors. It seems as if we have set ourselves the task of teasing art with barren idiosyncrasy, with sober folksiness, with forced naturalism. What we think or contribute to history has enough room in the hollow cone of a sleepyhead."

Thus spoke that which really spoke out of this folklore. And that is present, that still lives today. It can only be brutalized. That has also been sufficiently brutalized in the course of recent years. It will also have to be conceded at some point what national self-awareness is in select individuals; perhaps it did not live best under the aegis of people like Clemenceau, but perhaps under a different aegis.

From time to time, one must also look at things apart from the phrases that dominate the world, and in world-historical moments this is perhaps also necessary. When Fercher von Steinwand speaks of his people in reference to gypsy characterizations, there is perhaps something melancholically pessimistic about it when it comes out exactly as it did in this speech, but that is not how it is meant, it is truly not meant that way. Something of these “gypsies” must go into world mission. This is rejected today, this is denied today. This denial is closely connected with Wilsonianism, but the facts will teach the world otherwise. And so that from some side there is already protest against what will certainly be connected with much worldly infallibility and much worldly belief in authority in the near future, so that there may be protest against this – perhaps the world will say: Gypsy -Protest is taking place here — I have expressed my wish and my thoughts that this building, as a protest against what will happen in the coming years to all of civilized humanity, so-called civilized humanity, should be called the Goetheanum. This is not just to connect with Goethe in some superficial, easy way, but it is out of the impulse of our time.

We will continue this discussion tomorrow.

Even when we reflect on current events, as we are doing now, reflections that we then want to expand into certain perspectives, perspectives that can only be achieved through spiritual science, even when we reflect in this way, we must always bear in mind that we have arrived at the age of the consciousness soul in the developmental stream of humanity, and that it is precisely the task of the human being in the present to follow things from the point of view of entering into the consciousness soul. The basic impulse of our time will be such that only those who want to seek out of the most recent and further past understanding for the forces that prevail in the present, only those who will have the good will for understanding, can grow to meet the demands that the difficult present and future will make of people. For even if many conditions are such that the forces are thrown into confusion, that chaotic conditions arise – oh, much more chaotic conditions could arise than there are – in the chaos live nevertheless the continuations of those forces that were already there. And only he will understand chaos who understands the forces that were already there and that continue, perhaps very masked, but that continue from earlier times. But also the demands that are made on humanity must be understood to a much greater extent than many people today imagine.

Yesterday I pointed out that an understanding will have to be acquired for the truth that reigns in things. It is quite certain that very many people today have no conception at all of the truth that reigns in things. That truth or untruth prevails in things themselves, in the events, and that one can devote oneself to one or the other, is still not believed by many people today, because they only have the abstraction in mind, that truth is the subjective agreement of what one imagines with something that is going on outside. But in events, especially as they affect human life, truth or untruth itself prevails, and it is quite unimportant whether a person knows or not about some untruths, because the worst untruths very often pulsate precisely in human life as subconscious forces, not reaching up into human consciousness at all. But especially in the present time one must get to know these subconscious forces, one must bring them up into consciousness. This is extremely difficult for many people, and to deal with the immediate future can make the task easier; to deal with the coming events in such a way that they can, as it were, teach something, that is important. But it is not so very easy, because it is not quite comfortable either way. In recent years, we have heard various judgments — I have already mentioned this — judgments from this or that point of view. From a certain superficial point of view, of course, neither the one nor the other point of view could be blamed. It was only regrettable that so little investigation was made into the deeper issues at work in these tremendous catastrophic events; and it is also regrettable that people have repeatedly fallen back into their old complacency, judging by appearances, or I would not say by catchwords, but by catchwords, by catchphrases. Even when events have called for quite different judgments, people have continued to judge according to the old ways of thinking, and even today, instead of really focusing on the big questions that arise every day, they still judge in many ways according to the old ways of thinking.

Particularly with regard to what I suggested at the beginning of yesterday's reflections, namely to immerse oneself in the truth of the facts, it is important to now set our sights on something. Regarding many things, there is only a beginning, but regarding some things, something decisive has occurred. What has happened is perhaps not exactly what the victorious powers of the present day had imagined, in a different way, would be the fate of the Central Powers after victory. At least not after four and a half years. But there is something connected with these decisions, which should be clear to the scholar, if he judges the situation quite objectively. There has not been a war for a long time, and what people still imagine, that peace could be made in the next few weeks, or, I don't know when, will of course look just like the curious peace of Brest-Litovsk and everything that is currently called peace. It is only an old habit to still believe that catastrophic events can end with an ordinary peace agreement, just as it is an old habit to believe that the war has remained a war, which it has not been for a long time; because what was ruling behind it can be seen in more abbreviated manifestations through minor details, I might say.

You see today that the so-called German Revolution, the revolution in the former German Reich, has taken on a strange form. Probably most people, in Germany and outside of Germany, did not imagine that things would take on such a form. They have taken on such a form because the historical symptoms – I have indeed spoken to you for a long time about historical symptoms – point only to something deeper, and ultimately a symptom could play out in one way or another. Finally, what is happening now is all just a consequence of the fact that a certain party within Germany wanted to play one last trump card, which wanted to maintain this Germany, one last gamble: the fleet, which had not yet been activated or at least only in minor ways, was to be induced to carry out one last attack, one last action. The sailors did not go along with this, and so it was precisely the sailors who staged the form – only the form, of course – of the revolution that then came.

I have not spoken to you about historical symptomatology for nothing, so that what should be the case with you at least can at least be the case with people of the present and the future: the assessment of what is happening from the symptoms, which are not to be taken as in ancient history, but precisely as symptoms, as revelations of realities that stand behind these symptoms, so that one must evaluate and weigh these symptoms. But the way these decisions, these provisional decisions, are now presented, they are the starting point of things that, after so much has been wrongly evaluated for so long, should now be more correctly evaluated by at least some people.

You see, everything that has been done wrong by the central powers, if I may use the term, everything that the various rulers in power have sinned against, and all the untruthfulness that has been at the root of the events, will come to light. Events have developed in such a way that the world will learn in the most minute details in the relatively not-so-distant future all the sins committed by the Central European rulers. And I myself will communicate what I know of the events – and I can only say that karma has also given me the opportunity to know quite a lot about the crucial things in this case – and, if my life is sufficient for that, I will do everything to ensure that truth takes the place of what has been presented to the world so far. But on the other hand, the events are such that this does not seem to lead to it. Of course, you should know from the very things that have been discussed here over the years that no less untruth has prevailed on the other side. Do you think that this will also be presented to the people in detail? Not even the documents for the judgment are there for that! Not even the intellectual documents for the judgment are there, but all the documents are there to ensure that the truth remains hidden.

If I compare the mood with which the events of August, September, October and November 1914 were judged in neutral and enemy countries with regard to the actions of the Central Powers, and compare it with the benevolence with which the outrageously cruel armistice conditions for the Central Powers, with the general, strange silence with which the fact that these armistice conditions, as they were and as they will remain even after they have been mitigated, are a veritable death sentence, is passed over in silence, then I notice a difference, a very enormous difference in the will to judge. For this difference in the will to judge is also based on the fact that there was no will to judge in August, September, October, November 1914 and so on. Perhaps I can only go into some of this hypothetically, which, as I said, will already be known to the world, whereas now, in order to come to a judgment, it is not at all necessary to do anything other than read paragraph by paragraph. I know that I am speaking to deaf ears even with this, speaking to deaf ears in many directions, but why should I not, when one has the obligation to speak the truth without sympathy or antipathy, purely in its objectivity, even at this moment when it may not be very welcome in this direction, why should the truth not be spoken, since I cannot know how much longer it will be permitted to speak even such truths. I speak these things truly not to express any sympathy or antipathy, but to express a bloodily won realization dutifully. In the age of the consciousness soul, it is necessary to approach things knowingly and to make knowledge the impulse of one's actions and especially the impulse of insight. And insight is necessary – I have emphasized this again and again in recent days – insight will be necessary for the people of the age of consciousness.

It will become clear to the world that all the talk that has prevailed for the past four and a half years with regard to the so-called question of guilt was, in fact, quite superficial talk. What has taken place is much more tragic in a higher sense than one can speak of guilt, because one cannot speak of guilt when, for example, inability plays a large part in a series of events. Of course, inability, as I have shown you, played an enormous role in the central powers, for example, in the decisive positions, but precisely the absolute intellectual inability, also the inability in the assessment of the circumstances, in the power of judgment and the like. It will be necessary to consider some realities. I will point out just one.

It is true that out of passion one can judge, condemn, misjudge and so on a great many things. Yes, the person who speaks on the basis of the facts, who knows the facts, must answer many questions, which are extremely important historical questions, in sharp contours. You see, of course things always look different from different points of view. There are various reasons that can be given for why in August 1914 a war also came about from Germany to France. I have already pointed out some of them. One can say: Only those who really have the will to speak accurately can express things correctly under these circumstances. It was a matter of a hair's breadth, one can say, so in August 1914 there would have been no war on two fronts at all, but the inevitable war against Russia. I am now speaking from the point of view of the Central Powers; the matter looks different from the other side, of course. It was a matter of a hair's breadth. What was it? What is this 'hair's breadth'? Well, you see, the gentleman who is now supposed to be in Holland and whom foreign countries in particular took so tremendously seriously, which was a great injustice done to the German people, he was, as you can see from my account a few days ago, an extraordinarily indiscreet man. Not true, when - as I told you - he was offered an alliance by Russia and France over the years, so that an alliance between Russia, France and Germany against England would have come about, In 1908, in the famous Daily Telegraph affair, he boasted that he had immediately informed his grandmother of the Russian and French request and that he had thereby rendered a great service to the British Empire. You could ask the relevant authorities what actually happened with the invasion of Belgium. After all, this gentleman, whom I am referring to, was the supreme commander and could decide. The gentleman in question - please do not object that many people in Europe already knew this - but the gentleman in question did not know that Belgium would be invaded until July 29, 1914. And why? Because it couldn't be told to him, because if it had been told to him today, the whole world would have known about it tomorrow, when all those people, like Sven Hedin and so on, who admired him so much, came to him. What kind of anomaly is it when a war plan has to be strategically worked out for certain reasons that are based on strategy, and the supreme commander must not know the most important point, the starting point at all! Is something supposed to come of it that can then be judged in the usual way?

Now the situation was such that, due to the European constellation, well, that is, due to the very, very innocent Entente Powers – they are, after all, in their opinion, quite innocent, aren't they, of the outbreak of this war – that due to these very innocent Entente Powers, the opinion has arisen in Germany for a long time, since the 1890s, perhaps even earlier: You have to fight a war on two fronts, a war on the left and on the right. I don't know what the situation is like in other countries, whether war plans are made there in a week! In Germany it was not so. Making such a war plan takes a very long time. You change it in individual, very subordinate parts, but it takes a very long time. This war plan had been worked on for decades, certainly the details had been changed, but in terms of its main point it had been worked on for decades and was ready in every detail. You must not forget that you have to look at the matter purely from a military point of view; now it will be possible to look at it a little more objectively, now that the military point of view seems to have been overcome in the world! If you judge the matter purely from a military point of view, you will judge it more objectively. Every single train and everything that has to be loaded must be specified; the departure of each individual train from there and there, the rush of each individual soldier is specified in such a war plan.

Now, events took a turn for the worse. I will not give a full account now, but just a sample; perhaps the opportunity will arise to present the full account in detail before the World Forum. The circumstances that led to this dreadful catastrophe became so urgent that within Germany in the last days of July the question actually arose from all sides: Should war be waged against France or not? Will it become necessary to wage war against France, will it not be necessary from a military, rather than a political point of view, to wage war against France?” The supreme commander, who was perhaps able to decide on something else every half hour, had repeatedly made the serious decision not to let the army march to the west at all, but only to the east. And it was hanging by a thread in the behavior of the British government, so something strange would have happened, but it would have been a matter of placing a certain judgment, I mean, on a curious basis. Among the contradictory things, it had already been ordered not to march to the west at all, but only to the east. There was a definite objection to that, and from what was against it, you can see, if you consider it properly, how strangely things are in the world. There was an objection to the fact that the German general staff had drawn up a war plan that envisaged a war on two fronts, but no war plan that envisaged a war on only one front, because such a thing could not be strategically foreseen from the European situation. And the supreme commander once replied: Yes, we can't do that at all, because if we are supposed to march only to the east, we have an unruly, wild, chaotic crowd. Our war plan is based on two fronts; we can't help but march to the west. Well, order must be maintained, but if you can give such an answer to a question, you really can't say that there was some mischievous thought of instigating this or that, but something quite different. And it is still not clear whether, if there had been time, a war plan could have been made in such a way that the move to the west would not have been the prerequisite for the entire war plan, and then all the events would have happened without the move to the west. I am not touching on the question of whether this would not have been a huge world-historical escalation, because I myself never believe that if the German army had marched east, the French would have remained calm. But I am telling facts and not conjectures and not hypotheses; facts that are likely to give the judgment an appropriate, realistic direction.

I would like to give an idea of how incredibly reckless it is to talk about the question of guilt one way or the other, especially after the confusing red and blue and yellow and flash blue books that have been scrapped and that can be scrapped in any direction, from which you can make anything. You may be inclined to suspect something deeper behind the whole sequence of facts, which you see more as symptoms, than what can be judged in such a superficial way, as has often happened in recent years. You must take this into account, as I have only hinted at it to you now on a trial basis. The things that underlie this catastrophic world event are, after all, incredible. They must be known as facts if one is to base a judgment on them. And it is no different in the so-called Entente countries.

But now, out of what mankind has called war and from which it has cherished the idea that it will be replaced by peace, something has developed that is only just beginning. I said here at a certain point: one should look at the things that are happening in Russia, and one has something much more important when considering future issues than what people in recent times have still very illusory spoken of as a war and a peace that should follow.

Much has been unleashed. But at least this should be understood: there is hardly anything in literary or writing history that has had such a tremendous impact as Karl Marx's work. In 1848, he published the so-called “Communist Manifesto,” which briefly summarized the main impulses of the Social Democratic view of life. It ended with the words: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” The book on “Political Economy” and the book “Das Kapital” were written by the same Karl Marx, with the support of his friend Engels. What underlies these books as principles has indeed become the knowledge and world view of the leading proletariat across the globe. The leading proletariat has dealt with what Marxism is in the most penetrating way.

Even on the surface – but this superficiality is perhaps the most important internal aspect – Karl Marx and his achievements are something that, I would say, was born out of the civilized world of Europe and in turn had a profound effect on the proletarian world, the proletarian part of the civilized world. Karl Marx's personality and work are not that simple. First of all, it has a very specific basic structure. This is an innate acumen, extraordinary acumen, which always has a certain effect. Isn't it true that this effect can be illustrated by something that seems far removed, but which can illustrate the matter? You see, the most bourgeois, the most philistine, the actual philosopher of the philistines, Kant, Immanuel Kant – he is the basic philosopher for the academic philistines – why is he actually considered to be so particularly witty? Well, I have never met a university professor who understood Hegel or Schelling, but I have met many—even university professors—who have at least come close to understanding Kant. Now, they think: I am a clever man – such a gentleman thinks, of course – and since it takes me such an effort to understand Kant and I have finally understood him after all, Kant is also a clever man, and since it has taken me, as a man of such exquisite taste, such an effort to understand him, Kant must be the most exquisite man. This is roughly the impression these people have. It is the impression of the philistine, which then passes over to the academic philistines and their followers, their journalistic and other followers. Something similar also worked on the proletariat in the understanding of Karl Marx, who was a very astute man. One has some difficulties in understanding. The proletarian tries harder than many an average philistine, I should say average bourgeois, is inclined to try, even when reading proletarian books. The proletarian tries harder to understand his Karl Marx; he also appreciates what takes effort. It truly takes more effort to absorb the impulses of the proletarian world in the books of Karl Marx than it may have taken the bourgeoisie to understand their economists. But very few people do that. Instead, a number of particularly well-fed bourgeois have also been content to get to know proletarian life from Hauptmann's “Webern”. So you can combine pleasure, you know, with learning, and the like. That's the first thing about Karl Marx: a certain innate perspicacity.

But then it cannot be denied that Karl Marx's dialectic is a great one. This dialectic, this ability to work with concepts, which most people today lack completely – our entire official science lacks this dialectic – this art of working with concepts as realities, Karl Marx had from Hegel, because in this respect he was a disciple of Hegel. So that one can say: Karl Marx had his dialectic, the art of working with concepts, from German folklore. He had the socialist impetus from his Frenchness, where Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc in particular had a great influence on him, so that he combined what the German Hegelian developed in finely crafted, plastic, sharply contoured concepts with the revolutionary impulse, the revolutionary impetus of a Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc. And this in turn, what was in him, could only express itself in the way it did, with Karl Marx going to London, to England, and there, through the study of economic conditions, he thoroughly studied this whole way of thinking and this way of feeling – the one from the Germans, the other from the French – in terms of English conditions, whereby he applied the whole thing only to material economic conditions. Thus, what is born as I have described it to you: the proletarian out of the industrial and machine age, out of the mechanism, which therefore could only be observed at its source in England, because it first came to expression only there until 1848, that was grasped by Karl Marx with Hegelian dialectic. And that which has been grasped with Hegelian dialectics, in that, I would say, the entire revolutionary impetus of a Louis Blanc or a Saint-Simon prevails. So you see: From components that are German, French, English, on the basis of the astute Semitism that was in the blood of Karl Marx, because he was Jewish – this is of course meant only very objectively – so from four ingredients together, what this Karl Marx has delivered to the proletariat as the most effective weapon – because it is a spiritual weapon – is composed of that spiritual-chemical. Hence the penetrating effect, the unlimited effect. Of course, this has been further disseminated in numerous popular writings. All circumstances have been judged from this point of view.

Yes, of course, what has been prepared in this way over the decades can only really be weighed by, for example, let us say, acquiring knowledge of how some professor in bourgeois circles spoke about Lessing and then how proletarian circles spoke about Lessing in a Marxist way. Both things are really quite different from each other.

You see, the impact of this Marxism is by no means exhausted. This Marxism contains very important things. Through this Marxism—which arose from the fact that a German, well educated in Hegel, came to London through the circumstances of France and there applied what lay in his thinking from Hegel's school and what lay in his feeling from Louis Blanc and Saint-Simon to the external, purely material conditions of the modern world – through him, what is most modern in the British state – not in the British people, but in the state, the state structure, the social order – has indeed found its way into the world. It is only the beginning of this introduction. The first phase of this introduction is already Marxism. You must not forget: over and above this there is the best English tradition in many fields. We must distinguish clearly between what is English tradition and what is the British Empire, that monster which has been formed not only on the basis of British nationality but also of the geographical and historical conditions of modern times. Marxism is the first emanation, as it were. These radiations will continue. Because all kinds of future perspectives will arise from what now lies there as a basis. Above all, the following must be considered today.

You see, the role of the German element in modern civilization is fundamentally quite different from that of other ethnic elements. You can see this in the details. The world has become accustomed to identifying the Germans with the Central Powers. But what do these Germans as Germans have to do with one or the other empire? What do the Germans of Austria have to do with the Habsburg monarchy? The Germans of Austria would never have been the most hated people in Italy if the Germans of Austria had not been treated exactly the same by the House of Habsburg as the small proportion of Italians who were under the House of Habsburg. The Germans have suffered just as much from the House of Habsburg as any Italian has suffered, only that the Germans now have the tragedy of being hated by those with whom they have suffered the same. And so it is throughout. There is a lack of understanding of the completely un-national character of the Germans, who were the leaven of Europe but never had any national character or anything aggressively national at all. This is not part of the basic German character; it has been grafted on from various sides. This German element had nothing special to do with either the House of Habsburg, by which it was subjugated, or with the other ruling house, and it is no reason to confuse the German essence with it. But that is what happens in the world, and it happens, one might say, with a certain delight. It also happens to peoples for whom there is truly no obstacle to feeling a unity, perhaps only with the exception of a few splinters that have been snatched from them. But one should not forget the main thing: what is German as a people has never really been predisposed to form any kind of unity. The very best qualities would be lost if the Germans wanted to live in such a way that they would form an abstract unity, a unity of peoples. Of course, under the influence of certain European impulses, certain aspirations towards unity, such as were to be found in Italy, have also been felt by the German people, although not in an unorganized way. They were strong from 1848 into the 1850s and 1860s. But this always went hand in hand with the German character's longing to merge with the world. And that has indeed been achieved to a very special extent. Consider that you will hardly find such understanding of other nations in literary works as can be found in German literature. There is, for example, a beautiful book that does real justice to the most beautiful and most significant impulses that have been at work in the French character from the Revolution to the second Napoleon. The author of this book is called Heinrich von Treitschke. The book was written between 1865 and 1871. It is a complete appreciation of Frenchness and Italian nature in this book by Heinrich von Treitschke: “The French State Form and Bonapartism”. I could give you all sorts of interesting details from which you would see all sorts of truths that people are not inclined to listen to in the world. There has certainly never been such an insightful discussion of English and American nature by a foreign people as that which Herman Grimm unfolds about the Americans and the English.

Of course, we must not forget that all sorts of other things that are not part of German folklore have also been incorporated. I will not go into the absurdity that confuses Germanness with something that is as un-German as possible, with Pan-Germanism, as it has been called. Well, it is just absurd to want to measure German character against Pan-Germanism. There is no other way to put it. But if, at some point, efforts were made to achieve something like German unity, which would not have lasted very long anyway – yes, just study the history from 1866 to 1870, what was said in France at the time about the desired German unity! They could not be tolerated, they were not wanted under any circumstances.

These are things that raise the question: Why is there so much grumbling about the German character? And there is a source of untruthfulness in the world that is quite terrible and will be the starting point for effective untruth. But what the German essence is and what has been structured in a certain inorganic way since 1871 will have its task in the world, even if today it is an abomination for many people to speak of the task of the German essence. It must have its task in the world. If you have asked a reasonable person so far – I will cite Heinrich Heine, for example, among these reasonable people who have spoken out particularly clearly on the matter – then two poles have been cited, from which two completely different basic directions of human thinking have emerged for a long time. We will have to go into this in more detail. I once told a lady who, when I was last here in 1917, had asked me what the mission of Judaism in the world was: “That will come too, that I have to talk about it.

Heinrich Heine indicated these two poles, from which, so to speak, all the impulses that exist in humanity from a certain point of view are nourished: Heinrich Heine indicated Judaism on the one hand and Greek culture on the other. Now, Judaism has always had to prove itself as the Great Seal-bearer for the human capacity for abstraction, for the human capacity to unify the way of thinking, the world view. Greekship has always had the task of bringing to the world that which lives in pictoriality, in imaginative elements. The world view, the outlook on life of the modern proletariat has absorbed everything from Judaism, but nothing yet from Greekship, because it completely lacks the imaginative element. It will still have to receive that. In the course of the future, the third will then come, because all things consist of a trinity, and to Judaism and Greekness will come Teutonism in the course of time - that will be the trinity - when that materialism will have eaten strongly at the modern world in the age of the consciousness soul, which has taken its beginning with that phase that radiated into the world with Marxism from the British Empire.

This materialism, which will radiate out from the British Empire and America and flood the world, has indeed laid its foundations; let us not forget, the foundations have been solidly laid. And such things must be taken into consideration, for example, that immediately before the war England, and at that time Russia as well – but that no longer comes into question – France, Belgium and Portugal together had 23% million English square miles of colonial possessions with 470 million people living on these colonial possessions. Germany and the United States together had only 1 million English square miles of colonial possessions with 23 million people; it will be different now, won't it, the English-speaking population is now united. So: England, France, Portugal, Belgium, and then, with something that comes into it only marginally, Russia: 23¾ million square miles with 470 million people; in contrast, Germany and the United States — who have now redeemed the world — with 1 million square miles of English colonial possessions and 23 million people. The ground is well prepared. For this reason, materialistic and ever more materialistic culture will develop, because it only goes into economic conditions. That culture, whose first emphasis, whose first nuance, has come about precisely because it is already rooted in the starting point. Just compare Lassalle with Karl Marx, Lassalle, who only has certain similarities with Karl Marx: natural acumen and Hegelianism, but he did not go through the French and English experience that Karl Marx did. Therefore, he has a certain dialectical and also a certain astute conception of the modern labor movement, but not the effective one that lay in the Marxist system. This Marxist system arose in such a way that the dialectic of the German character drew its content from the material culture, from the pure material culture of the British society, of the British context, not of nationality, but of the context of the empire, of the developing empire.

Well, things have an after-effect. What has happened will almost completely eliminate French culture from future currents; it will have little significance. French culture also belongs to the defeated. It is absolutely certain that in the future perspective – and I will talk to you in more detail about this tomorrow – French nationality will be eliminated by the constellation of events for future influence in the world. World domination passes to the English-speaking empires.

But if the first pole was created by Karl Marx using a certain dialectic that he had learned at the Hegelian school to place himself in the material circumstances of the British Empire, the future will bring something else into play. Today, it can be discarded as a matter of course in a variety of directions, and one can say that what I am saying is only the continuation – well, I don't know what other nonsense there is in the world – of German plans for world conquest or something like that. And yet it must be said, which is a truth that is just as firmly established in perspective as other truths: Just as the German Hegelian Marx went to England, to material England, in order to absorb from there the first phase of material culture, so when this material culture, which will of course have an ascending and a descending curve and will destroy a certain kind of spirituality, when this material will have produced the counter-movement in its own English people, when those of whom I have already spoken, who rebel, for example, against the most terrible principle of the doctrine of utility: “The greatest good of men consists in the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” which is already being remonstrated against today, precisely from the occultist side, will be heard, when the material culture of the British Empire, spreading over the earth as a world power in the age of the consciousness soul, scorches and exterminates the spiritual. When that has spread, then the opposition will arise from within the British people itself. They will feel the need to turn to what remains of Goetheanism, rooted in German national culture, in order to seek from it the impulse for how the world can be healed. They will turn to the third element. Just as people studied Jewish impulses long after Judaism had fallen as a political power, just as all of modern education is based on Greek culture after the Romans destroyed Greek culture, so the recovery of the world will one day be based on what is taken from German Goetheanism. A monument should be erected for this. Even if this monument itself experiences this or that fate, the important thing is the decision: that the decision has been made.

Before the lecture begins, Dr. Steiner will finish reciting the “Choir of Primordial Instincts”, the part that has not yet been recited by her. I would like to say a few words in advance, which I ask you, please, not to take suggestively; they are meant to be quite factual. We have organized things so that the lecture begins in such a way that our friends in Zurich can hopefully hear it to the end or at least to a point where they will not miss anything important. And I would like to make a comment in connection with the various requests, more or less justified requests, that have come in from here and there. This is that I would not consider it in the spirit of our movement if the opinion were to prevail that, considering the content of the lectures given here, the most important thing in our movement has already been done. Our movement should be in step with the times and take into account the things that arise from the demands of the time. And you can be quite sure that we will not achieve what you believe can be achieved by taking up the content of the lectures if we do not show ourselves to be accommodating and understanding, especially towards newer artistic endeavors that are taken up within our movement. This applies particularly to eurythmy, which is meant to be a new art in a certain sense and is meant to be felt as a new art, and to be felt as a new art in relation to all similar arts. But I myself would like it to be noted that it also applies to recitation. What one actually experiences in terms of recitation when one wants to develop artistic feeling in the world is something tremendously great, something terribly sorrowful that happens to one. We have, after all, developed a certain method that lies within the spirit of our spiritual-scientific movement, especially with regard to the art of recitation. And, no, I would not want it to be seen as if it were given, well, out of a hobby of this or that person, as an addition to our cause; no, it is one of the most important things for us to find our way into a new artistic way of feeling. As for recitation, most people have the most primitive ideas. Actually, one would think that anyone can recite and that reciting is not a special art. In a way, reciting is one of the most difficult arts, because you have to work on the material very slowly and gradually. And since we are striving to emphasize the artistically shaped word, and this is essential in the future social order of humanity for such things, that this interest is not lost, that the general bourgeois morass does not gradually take hold, which is particularly evident in as it is the recitative, which everyone thinks is just a reading, we strive for that, and I ask that this not be considered a minor matter, which, because the trains go one way or the other, can be moved to any random day or night hour.

As I said, what I said was not meant to be offensive; but I just wanted to express my opinion on our cause with regard to what is otherwise often seen only as a tendril.

Now the conclusion of “Choir of Primordial Drives” by Fercher von Steinwand is to be recited.

What I started out from in these reflections – the necessity of sensing the truth at work in the facts of the world – I could also say sensing the active reason or the active spirit – must apply particularly to the understanding that one must acquire in the age of the consciousness soul, to the understanding of this catastrophic event in which we are immersed. For basically this event originated, one would like to say, in an illusion in which people lived. I have hinted at it to you in many different ways; it could be further explained. But you have already seen that the people who were involved in the outbreak, in the last outbreak of this catastrophic event, actually moved in appearances, that they were full of phantasms and illusions, that they were far from being in reality. But it must be said that over the years, more and more of what was wrongly named, because people lived in illusions and appearances, and what was wrongly scolded, because people lived in illusions and appearances, gradually and slowly developed into that which contained the truth of the matter itself. This has already emerged to some extent and will emerge even more over the next few years. I have often pointed out that this was not a war in the old sense between one group of powers and another, which in the ordinary sense can also be ended by a peace treaty; that it was much more a matter of what will happen as a surge in the social struggles, which will take on the most diverse forms. What we have to bear in mind is that the social struggles, which will gradually emerge as the truth, have, I might say, seized the superficial appearance and are initially acting out entirely in the superficial appearance, in the illusions and phantasms that have become deeds. And we should consider what is actually alive in the final conflicts of the present, what is actually hidden in these conflicts of the present. One cannot do so without repeatedly pointing out how human thinking and imagining, even the whole conception of life, has distanced itself from what is necessary for human beings in terms of understanding the world, but which has been lost precisely under the influence of the newer development of humanity. Our spiritual science has, in the most eminent sense, the task of again accessing this lost knowledge in the modern sense and making it accessible to people for whom it is so necessary in the present and for the future.

I have often pointed out the threefold nature of man and the threefold world from different points of view, and that it is necessary to distinguish at least two other divisions in man, in addition to what is usually called man, and to distinguish other divisions in what is called the world. In all these things it is immaterial whether, as I have done for certain reasons, one calls one thing so or so out of the demands of spiritual science, or whether one calls it out of hunches, as Fercher von Steinwand does in his book Der Geisterzögling (The Spiritual Pupil). Where he speaks of what you find in my 'Theosophy' as the soul world, he speaks of 'Sinnheim'; for reasons that would lead us too far afield to discuss now, he speaks of what I have called the spirit world as 'Wahnheim', but he doesn't just mean a home where the madness is, but by speaking of 'Wahnheim' he actually means the spirit world. What matters is to really immerse oneself in these things in some way and take them seriously for one's life. One can say: With the gradual dying out of Greek culture, humanity in its development from the third to the fifth post-Atlantic period actually lost a great deal, which must be awakened again in a different form, from the point of view of the new spiritual science, if order is to be brought into the social chaos that will now develop. For it must be emphasized again and again: the most important thing today is that economic continuity is not disrupted, but that, as it were, an interim arrangement is created in the field of economic life and is also perceived as such. At the same time, however, general education must be tackled in all areas where it is so urgently needed by humanity. A new social order cannot be founded on the concepts that already exist today. It is best to try to come to terms with what is emerging as the most pressing demands, to create a provisional arrangement so that economic continuity is not lost, and to ensure that a start be made at the end where the beginning is so necessary: on the way of education, of teaching in the broadest sense, on the way of creating thoughts that start from an understanding of man and into the minds of men. Because you can only start something by creating thoughts in people's minds. If only these thoughts are already there in people's minds! You are not dealing with porcelain figures, which you can place here or there as you please and impose on them any order you like. You are dealing with human beings who must first acquire the ability to understand what is necessary in the development and evolution of mankind. The starting point of the human being must lead to a gradual enlightenment in people's minds about what people are together – call it a realm, call it a state, call it a democracy, call it what you will, all these things are much less important than the matter at hand. In the minds of men, the pure porridge has arisen in the ideas of this living together, of this form of living together, so that people can no longer form really concrete, plastic ideas of why one thing is there and why another thing is there.

Plato's tripartite division of the human being is based on the primal wisdom that has been acquired by humanity in an atavistic way, as I have often explained to you, but which must be regained in a fully conscious way by the age of the consciousness soul. Today, this is seen as something childish. But it is based on a very deep wisdom, a wisdom that is truly deeper than what is taught about man today at our universities, whether it be from the natural sciences, from economics or from other sciences.

Plato divided the human being into three parts. Today we structure things somewhat differently, but an awareness of this threefold nature was still present well into the eighteenth century. Only then did it disappear completely. And these nineteenth-century people, so clever and enlightened, only laughed at this threefold nature in its concrete form, and continue to laugh at it today. Plato first divided man, whom one must understand if one wants to understand the social structure, into the human being who unfolds wisdom, knowledge, the logical part of the soul, that which we attach to the head organism as its knowledge to its sense and nerve organism. Plato then distinguished the so-called active, irascible part of the soul, the courageous, brave part of the soul, everything that we associate with rhythmic life. You only need to read my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Soul Riddles). Then he distinguished the man of desire, the human being, insofar as he is the source of the capacity for desire, everything that we now know in a much more perfect form; Plato was able to link this physically to metabolism, spiritually to intuition, as we understand it in our threefold structure of the higher faculty of knowledge: imagination, inspiration, intuition. It is impossible to understand what is going on in the social structure of humanity and how social structures express themselves if we do not get to know the human being according to this threefold nature. For man is not so in the world, in which he is as a member of the physical plan, that he develops these three members equally in relation to their inner, intimate formations and qualities, but he develops them in different ways; one develops one part more, the other develops the other part more. And it is on the basis of the different ways in which the parts are developed that the classes are formed, as they have emerged in the course of the development of European humanity with its American appendix.

It can be said that the part that mainly considered the rhythmic life and organized education, living together, and social views in such a way that the rhythmic life was what was primarily felt as human, is the estate or class that developed as the old nobility. If you imagine a social structure that arose from the fact that people mainly felt themselves to be chest people, then you have what constitutes the group of the nobility, the nobility class. If you imagine those people who preferably develop the head, the wise part – now I am also saying something that may reconcile you with some of what I have said – those people who were united in the class , who mainly develop the brain, the wise part, the part of the senses and nerves, that is the group that gradually united in the bourgeoisie. Those human beings who today form by far the greatest number, who have preferably united in all this – but you know that intuition is spiritually connected with metabolism – that has its source in will, in metabolism, that is the proletariat. So that in fact human beings are socially structured in the same way as the human being is structured in detail.

Now, of course, one must recognize the special nature of the human association. And in this respect, everything still remains to be done for the consciousness, for the conceptualization of human beings, because in relation to what I mean now, modern humanity in particular has the most distorted ideas. This modern humanity has even gone so far as to imagine that the human being is less perfect as an individual than as a member of a state, that the human being gains something by becoming a member of a state, and it will be very difficult to get the idea into people's heads that the human being gains nothing by integrating himself into a state organism, but loses. He also loses by integrating himself into estates, into classes. That which the individual develops is not promoted by the fact that it lives in the social structure in the majority, but is instead paralyzed and suppressed.

Thus the traditions and ideas of the aristocratic caste suppress the highly individual powers of the chest man. Not that they promote them, but they suppress them, they paralyze them. That is the point. It is important to realize that, although the group of noble human beings includes those whose souls primarily long to embody themselves as chest people, the external association on the physical plane paralyzes what would come out of the chest person. It would take us too far afield to show you this in detail. But just suppose, for example, that what is honor is developed in a very individual way out of the chest man; but the external concept of honor is precisely there to create the exterior so that the interior can sleep. All aggregation is actually there to constitute something externally so that the internal, original, elementary can sleep. I need not remind you of Rosegger's saying, which I have often quoted: One is a human being, more are leaders and the many are animals. Man is indeed what he is, out of the elementary forces as an individuality. I tried to show this in a scientific way in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

All that the modern proletariat strives for is not suited to bring to perfection that which is elementary in it, but to suppress it, to push it into the background, to paralyze it. And today is the time to recognize this, when you can only get ahead if you see through things. Because the instinctive forces - I have often said this - no longer work. And the bourgeoisie - now comes the other side of the coin - its union has mainly existed to paralyze wisdom. People have already come together in the bourgeoisie whose souls have striven to educate the head people; but especially the so-called science of the social bourgeoisie has brought about a structure that has made the head person as headless as possible. And he proves himself more and more in the face of the onslaught of modern times as a truly headless creature.

Now, on the one hand, this human structure has developed in a pronounced and significant way. But the connection of understanding had been missed; one could no longer form ideas about the way one lives among people because one had lost the understanding of the threefold human being. It would be necessary, for example, and something like this would have to happen before one can set about founding a new social order somewhere or at some time: it will be necessary, for example, to study everything that is connected with the impulses of the chest-man. And only when we study this in a way that corresponds to reality, not in the way that theosophists think, only then will we have a true science of how labor, the fruits of labor, wages, rents, capital, means of production, and so on, must be arranged in the world to meet the instinctive demands of modern times. As far removed as possible from that which is officially called political economy, which is actually only a game with concepts and words and which will hopefully soon disappear from the scientific scene, as far removed as possible is that from what comes out when you really study the human being as a chest of drawers, where it comes out what must be demanded with regard to the distribution of labor, the means of production, the land and so on, as a requirement in the development of mankind. Likewise, we must study what is connected with the head, the sense and nerve man in the broadest sense, again not as abstractly as the theosophists imagine, but we must study in all concreteness what man is in the sense world as a spiritual creature with other people together in society, with other people together in any structure, be it state or other. It must be studied from the nature of the nervous and sensory human being. The study of the nervous and sensory human being gives a real social science. And finally, the study of the metabolic human being, which is connected with intuition, only this gives a real view of the development, of the becoming of the human being, only this gives a historical view of the development of humanity.

Now you can easily understand that it was impossible to have a historical conception of the development of humanity without really understanding the microcosmic human being, nor a real view of the distribution of economic values, because one does not study the chest human being; nor could one understand how the individual human being stands within human society, because the head human being, the human being of nerves and senses, is not studied in his reality, in his complete connection with the cosmos and his historical development; for all these things had actually been lost from view. For centuries no conception of these things has been formed, or if so, it has only been laughed at. Therefore, above all, chaos arose in people's imaginations and then in reality.

Now demands arose from that class of people who had been shaped by modern life, which was no longer based on outdated ideas but was moving forward. The modern proletariat has emerged from the modern machine, industrial system, from the mechanization of the world. Demands developed from this because this modern proletariat came into conflict with those who could provide the machines as means of production.

You see, the impulses for the world view of this proletariat came from the metabolic human being. But of course the human being is in contact with the other links. From this, views were formed that radiated from the other links impulses of the threefold human being; views were formed that were a necessity on the basis of the proletarian human caste. Views were formed with the help of what the bourgeoisie had established as science. For the proletarians had inherited only the science of the four or, what do I know, six faculties, to which they had now grown, that the bourgeoisie had created. With purely bourgeois science, the proletarians gradually tried to form ideas in the age of the consciousness soul about the social structure in which they lived. Of course, that could not suffice. Out of all the astute and other fundamentals, but again, because he was a child of his time and had no idea of the existence of a spiritual science as we think of it, the proletarians created a science precisely as an expression of what the instincts of the proletariat develop out of themselves in an elementary way, the Karl Marx mentioned yesterday.

The proletarians treated this Karl Marx differently than the so-called greats were treated by the bourgeoisie in the last centuries. He really penetrated the entire thinking of the proletariat throughout the civilized and industrialized world. He dominated the thoughts of the proletarians and developed these thoughts into a doctrine. Yes, for the first time thoughts have become facts, because the thoughts of the bourgeoisie are not facts, they have grown out of illusions, even if people believe that they are based on real positive science. But the thoughts of Karl Marx have become facts in the proletariat and live as facts and have an effect as facts, just as facts have an effect, with all the contradictions of life, with all the contradictions that arise in life, with all disharmony, with all that is fertilizing and destructive and paralyzing, with which life arises. In the instincts, in the subconscious of people, more is at work, especially in our age, than in their consciousness. The tripartite human being was not included in consciousness; but from instincts, and therefore insufficiently and, while fertilizing reality, converting thoughts into deeds, but insufficiently converting them into deeds, is how Karl Marx founded his doctrine of “political economy”. It was already expressed in 1848 in the “Communist Manifesto”, of which I spoke yesterday, and then in his book on “Political Economy”, which appeared in 1859, a year that was so endlessly fruitful for all kinds of achievements, at least at the end of the 1850s. Another of the many innovations of the late 1850s was Karl Marx's book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” To mention other things: it appeared at the same time – and there is an inner connection – Bunsen's spectral analysis. In the same year, more was also known about what is called Darwinism, as well as about what, on the one hand, had an endlessly stimulating effect but, on the other hand, also led to confusion in psychology: Gustav Theodor Fechner's Vorschule der Asthetik (Aesthetics: An Esthetic Primer), which then led to a psychophysics. This also belongs to this year; many other things could be mentioned. There are inner reasons that this occurred out of bourgeois science. For Hegel is also bourgeois science, profound bourgeois science. But out of bourgeois science, Karl Marx tried to understand the social structure of human beings. The way he understood it made sense to the proletariat. But they had forgotten the most important thing: the knowledge of the threefold human being. This must above all enter into people's heads before any kind of fruitful progress can be made, not theoretically, but by really living into the situation that the present has brought about. You see, one can say: the world also confronted Marx in three parts. This physical-sensual world also confronted Karl Marx in three parts, and so he sought to unravel it in three ways: firstly, through his theory of value, the theory of surplus value — I have already mentioned some of this to you — secondly, through his materialistic conception of history, and thirdly, through his view of the socialization of man. It is remarkable how, in the minds of millions of proletarians, the tripartite social structure is reflected in the mind of Karl Marx and in the minds of millions of people in the way I have explained it, , it is interesting to see how the three-part social structure is emerging, without people having any real, solid, fundamental ideas about what a human being lives as an entity and how he enters the world as a spiritual being.

Insufficiently, instinctively, the impulses of the human being at the heart of the human being, the rhythmic human being, in whom the actual reservoir of what then becomes work in social life is, insufficiently incorporated into the ideas of Karl Marx and thus into proletarian ideas, the so-called surplus value theory developed. Let us look at this surplus value theory from a different point of view than we have done recently. The main question for Karl Marx was: How is value, be it in the form of use-value or exchange-value, actually created in the modern economy? — It is, of course, not true — as Karl Marx pointed out — that in the modern economy what a person receives as remuneration, for example, is really related to what he achieves. Such illusions can only be entertained by those who do not understand economic life, who believe that a person acquires what corresponds to his work, his performance. That is not the case. What a person can acquire in modern economic life, as it has developed over the last four centuries, especially in the civilized world, is not tied to any relationship between acquisition and work, but to the circulation of goods. What a person can acquire depends to a large extent on how values are produced by bringing goods to market, selling them and receiving a certain amount in return. That is what creates economic value. Not labor as such directly creates value today, in economic terms, but what one gets for it on the goods market when it is completed and put into circulation by the most diverse factors. So that in the modern world, when it comes to the creation of economic value, the only question that can be asked is: What is the constellation on the goods market for one thing or another? – This must be thought of in the broadest possible terms; but if it is thought of in this way, it is like that.

Now Karl Marx came to express what was instinctively felt by those people who were pushed into the proletariat by their life circumstances, by their karma. If the market value of the commodity alone really produces the value ratio for everything that exists today and is the basis of every acquisition, it cannot be true that a worker is in any way actually remunerated for what he does as work. For what one does as work has no value in circulation in the national economy, but only what has become a commodity has value. And here Marx arrived at the formulation of what the proletarians felt out of their instincts: the formulation that what matters in the modern economy is not valued as a service, as an activity, as a creation, but that this too is valued as a commodity, as the commodity “labor power”. One buys, as Karl Marx put it, one buys cherries, one buys shirts, trousers and so on, but one also buys the commodity of labor power. The person who has the means of production, who owns the land, sells cherries, sells grain, sells trousers or skirts, sells machines; the person who does not have the means of production, who is without property in modern economic life, can only bring what his labor power is to the market. He must go there himself. But only that has a real economic value, which comes into consideration as the commodity value of his labor.

What does that mean? It means that one must think about how to pay for goods. You pay for goods first according to what is necessary for their production. What happens to the goods on the market afterwards is something completely different. You pay for goods first after they have been produced. Right, you go to the cherry tree owner, and he sells the goods to you; then you ship them and so on, and it is only in the circulation process that the value of the goods is determined. But the commodity labor power must, so to speak, be bought at its source. The person themselves must carry it to the person who wants to buy it. The person must always be present. So what can the compensation, the purchase price of the commodity labor power consist of? Yes, according to what the production costs are. One has to think about how many hours of daily labor are necessary to maintain a worker with regard to his labor power, that is, to maintain him so that he is nourished, clothed, and so on. Then one must consider how many different other people have to work, how much time they have to work; let us say, for example, that five or six hours have to be worked to procure so much food, so much clothing and other necessities to equip a worker with labor power so that it can be bought and put on the labor market. The bourgeois pays compensation for what is necessary to maintain the worker, to produce the commodity of labor power. He pays for what is necessary to enable the worker to eat, clothe himself, and so on, to meet his family needs and the like, if any. For example, five to six hours of work are necessary for this. However, the worker sells himself, and by selling himself, he enters into the necessity of working longer than, say, five to six hours, through the general process of circulation. There he works for the one who is the entrepreneur. That is where the surplus value is generated. Only because labor power is a commodity in the modern circulation process and because you pay for the commodity according to the production costs, then the worker is made to work longer than he would if he only worked to earn what he needs, only then is the surplus value generated in modern economic life.

This is something that Karl Marx used Hegelian dialectics to process in his books. This is something that made a lot of sense to the proletariat because it is a science that takes the human being as a whole, so to speak, because it not only takes the theoretical mind, it also takes the moral sensations, in that the worker knows that, politically speaking, he is being told: You are a free man – but because only commodities have value in the modern economy and only commodities are paid for, his labor power is made into a commodity in the modern circulation process. This makes him look at the surplus value that is generated not only through labor, but also through mere speculation, through entrepreneurial spirit, whatever.

But something else is emerging as a result. This leads

to the development of an awareness on the part of the worker, entirely in the sense of Marx: All the talk that something can be achieved through fraternity, through charity, through a sense of benevolence, these are always empty words, they must be social phrases. For he sees what has emerged: that labor, his labor, has become a commodity, he sees this as a necessity in modern development, and he says: Now, no matter how charitable, however fraternal, however philanthropic his attitude, he cannot help himself – historical development compels him to – but buy the commodity labor power at its production costs and then supply the other thing, in its own way, to the circulation process. Therefore, it is of no value for any social thinking to preach morality, to speculate on impulses of fraternity, of philanthropy, because none of that matters. The entrepreneur cannot do otherwise than to reap the added value.

These are the things that are extremely important: that the proletarian has been drilled, so to speak, that it does not depend on the morality or immorality of entrepreneurship that he is in a subhuman existence, but that this is an historical necessity, but that it must also lead to class struggle with historical necessity; that is to say, there is no other way than for those who belong to the proletarian caste to fight those who belong to the owner caste, because they are opponents by the historical process itself. Therefore, it cannot happen otherwise than that a different order will come about through the powerful social struggle of the proletariat than the one that the last four centuries or the previous historical development has brought to the fore. What the proletarian wants is so infinitely important, it is making history, making history out of ideas, by saying to himself: Since it has come to this in modern economic development that only commodities are paid for, and I as a proletarian must sell my labor power as a commodity, but the others have something that does not come from the labor power , but comes from the surplus value, so I want to participate in the surplus value myself, I do not want to abolish the entrepreneur – because the entrepreneur has been brought about by the necessary historical process – but I want to become an entrepreneur myself, I want to take possession of the means of production as a proletarian, as a partner, in a communist way; then I myself am an entrepreneur as a partner. Only in this way can the class struggle be eliminated, when I no longer have the entrepreneur next to me, but am an entrepreneur myself. Moving on to the next historical phase, that is what follows from Marxist doctrine for the proletarian, making history, even if it can be presented more or less Kautsky or more Lenin or Trotsky, which are different shades. But what I said about the one thing that is recognized in its correct basis is true: namely, to build everything on the human being, on the human being who is in rhythm, it is the basis of the consciousness of the modern proletariat. It is something that should be seen differently, seen with enormous power and become action. And there is no other remedy than to see through the matter; there is no other remedy, since the bourgeois education with all its university system has failed to shed light on these things, since it does not even have the scientific methods to shed light on them, there is no other possibility than to create a provisional arrangement so that economic continuity is not lost, and to work for enlightenment from below. That is the starting point. Education from below can only happen if the knowledge of the threefold human being is brought into the present-day human being.

But of course, if you speak to the modern proletarian today as I speak to you now after eighteen years of preparation, you will not be understood by him, but laughed at. You have to speak to him in his own language. To do that, you must, of course, first have a command of the subject matter and then have the good will to respond to the language that is understood there. You see, this theory of surplus value is constructed in such a way that it is truly, I would say, a closed Hegelian dialectic. The curious thing about it is that when Karl Marx died in 1883, in the 1880s, bourgeois economists, as they later called themselves, social scientists and so on, were very much inclined to say: Well, socialist agitator has no scientific value; scientific socialist! — They usually say it with a certain buttery mouth, with the buttery mouth of the expert who has mastered the subject. Well, that was the case back then. But this bourgeois science did not go into the subject in depth, at most people like Sombart and similar people, they took up some of it, they let themselves be infected. The actual bourgeois public was not interested in the feelings and thoughts of the proletariat; at most, they allowed it to be presented in plays, as I told you. But the university professors, who are barren themselves, accepted some of it and then took it over lock, stock, and barrel. And so you find in many books that come from university professors all kinds of Marxist ideas, sometimes criticized, but all unfruitful, because the things are not seen through, because above all, one did not have the will to evoke a real knowledge, a real understanding of the threefold human being. If one had this understanding, then one would come to the fundamentals, which are necessary to understand, and what I can only hint at to you, but of which an understanding must be evoked. For only when this fundamental understanding sets in with regard to two points will the greatness of Karl Marx's theory of surplus value and the proletarians appear, but only then will it also become clear where the correction has to be made, where that has to be made that is based on reality, not on Marxist illusion. But it is still difficult to find understanding for this.

There are, of course, the most diverse offshoots – even if they are sometimes opponents – of the modern proletarian ethos. One such offshoot, from a completely different background – forgive the expression – came up against me in the 1890s in Berlin in the person of Adolf Damaschke, in the land reform. This Adolf Damaschke had followers, and a number of them were also our members, members of the Theosophical Society. They wanted me to enter into some kind of discussion with this Damaschke in front of them. They were our followers who had formed a group of land reformers at the same time, and Damaschke was supposed to present his thoughts on one issue or another. I then said, after Damaschke had presented his views: “You see, the situation is as follows. What you have said will certainly appeal to people, because it is presented with a certain economic clarity – I didn't say crystal clear, but that was the idea – and it sometimes seems to point in the direction I indicated yesterday. You do not want the means of production, like the Social Democrats, but you do want the land, and specifically the land on which houses stand, and thus, to a certain extent, nationalize the entire land communally, creating a sense of community in land ownership, in order to bring about a solution to the social question. Some of what you have said is correct, but the whole thing suffers from a capital error, which of course must escape you if you proceed merely theoretically and not realistically. What you say is not right, but it would be right under certain conditions. For example, if you could expand the soil elastically where two houses adjoin in a city, and a third house was to be built, so that one house stands there and the other house there, and in between you would create space for the third house – if the soil were elastic, then everything would be right. But since the earth has a certain area and is not elastic, does not grow, the whole land reform theory is in fact wrong.

This is the most important objection from this point of view. I can only hint at it. Damaschke told me at the time that he had never noticed this before, but he promised me that he would think deeply about the matter. I have not heard anything further, and I do not know how deeply he has thought about it. In his subsequent writings, nothing of this could be seen. He continued in his old way and developed all his land reform ideas in this direction. There were always people who said: Yes, the Social Democratic idea does not work, but land reform is something that can certainly be realized.

On the one hand, it must be studied in its broader scope; for social democracy also regards land as a means of production. It would only be that if it were elastic. The means of production that can be regarded in an elastic way, which is not taken into account, can be regarded in the way that Marxism does, as means of production that can also be produced, or created, if necessary. If you need machines, you can make them to produce this or that, and if you want to make more machines, you can put more workers in place; there is elasticity there. The moment you apply the same way of thinking – and it is the way of thinking that matters – to land, it fails because of the inelasticity of the land.

That is one point where one must intervene. The other point where one must intervene is that social Marxist thinking must necessarily fail because it is formed entirely out of the economic process and only thinks of the means of production, which it thus wants to administer communally, in the economic process as they are as real means of production, as means of production for manual labor. This eliminates the infinitely important position that the spiritual has in the whole process of development, including the social process of humanity. For the spiritual has the peculiarity of having a minimum of means of production. For example, the only means of production for me is the pen. You can't even say that paper is a means of production, because that is an object of circulation. Only the pen is a means of production in the Marxist sense. But through this, the whole impulse that must come from the spiritual, and which would be paralyzed if the world were arranged in a social Marxist way, this spiritual process must be eliminated by Marxist thinking. That is the other pole.

The Marxist way of thinking fails at two poles. In the middle, it is firmly established. In the middle, it is dialectically extremely astutely developed; at two poles it fails. And it fails in the most radical sense: it fails radically at these two poles. First, the surplus value theory. It fails because of the inelasticity of the land. It fails because of the inelasticity of land, in a much stronger sense than one might think. Because the entire population statistics in a limited territory do not come into their own economically, because the land remains the same, even if, for example, there is a population increase. This causes changes in the scale of values that cannot be taken into account by mere Marxist thinking. Furthermore, what cannot be taken into account in mere Marxist thinking is that which, in turn, cannot be increased or decreased in the economic process itself. It is strange that the two things are at the extreme ends of the economic process: what is in your head, excuse me for saying so, and what is on the ground. What lies in between is actually subject to the thinking of the means of production, as it is in Marxist thinking. But the soil depends on the weather, on all sorts of other things, it depends on its extent – so, as I said, it is not elastic. That is at one pole.

I can only hint at it as a kind of result. If I were now to talk to you about it, to prove in all its details that Marxism must fail precisely because it must fail at these two poles, I would have to talk a lot first. That might be so, but it would lead too far for the moment. But it can be proved. And that is the most dangerous thing in the present social and economic experiment, that no account is taken of these two poles, that everything that arises from them corresponds merely to the industrially conceived Marxist-dialectical thought-images and only reckons with industrial concepts, with that which leaves out of account, on the left and on the right, land and that over which there can be just as little arbitrariness: talents and ideas. Consider what depends on them! The economic process comes to a standstill if you do not integrate the land into the right social structure and if you do not integrate human inventiveness, in the broadest sense, into the right social structure. Everything comes to a standstill. You can only overexploit what already exists for so long. You can exploit what is already there in terms of existing economic values. But one day there will be a standstill in what is already there if one does not really think realistically, does not develop what I always call realistic thinking, if one does not think realistically but only illusively, namely, again, only considers what is in the middle and does not consider the total, the full total again.

From this, however, you can see that it is necessary above all to provide clarification. And I can assure you: the function of land and the function of intellectual activity are more difficult to understand in the economic process than what Marxism has contributed in a beautiful and astute way to the economic process in terms of insight. But for the rest, everything still remains to be done. Go peddling, and see how many people you can interest in these things today! But there is no salvation in the future without an interest in these things. And they can only be properly studied if one has the principles of spiritual science. Just as today bridges can only be built if one is a mathematician and has studied mathematics, so social structures can only be understood if one forms the elementary concepts from spiritual science. That is what must be borne in mind. Do not forget that it is necessary, above all, to create schools and educational opportunities everywhere, so that what people need to understand in this area in order to live together can enter their minds. you create only illusionary structures with all the best will in the world, with all the possible Lenins and Trotskys and Scheidemanns and all the more obvious ones that perhaps are not allowed to be named here, structures that can be plundered, but which are not real structures. It is better to create with the awareness that it is a provisional arrangement, a continuity of economic life, to regard it as a provisional arrangement and, above all, to work towards the disappearance of the bourgeois education system with its lack of understanding.

You may consider this to be somewhat difficult and inconvenient, but it is a necessity. You can either want humanity to descend into chaos or you can want this to really happen – you cannot consider it inconvenient – and now we really have to start at the right end, namely first with the radical enlightenment of people. That is where the effort must be directed. Above all, it must be clearly understood that, since Karl Marx basically only took up bourgeois thinking and developed it very astutely dialectically, Karl Marx also evokes inadequate ideas about the other two areas. One can only gain an understanding of the way in which people come together with other people – coming together arises from interest, from feeling – and one can only gain an understanding of how the social structure must form in this sense by studying the nerve or head man. But the bourgeoisie, which is particularly organized around the nervous-mental type, has so paralyzed him that all real, enlightened spiritual concepts in this area have actually disappeared. Well, they have actually disappeared quite visibly, one can say, they have disappeared so vividly: you can still see pictures today from the eighteenth century – the attitude has carried over into the nineteenth century, albeit in a less obvious form – where people delight in how man is originally a social being, pictures: princesses, queens, in short, all sorts of people who hardly exist today, they dance in shepherd's costume, indulge in the warmth and fraternity that the original elementary human being develops in social life. You cannot imagine anything more false than all these things, which only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries then took on different forms. But the lie and illusion and fantasy dominated thinking to such an extent that what I discussed from this side, the theory of surplus value, asserted by Marxism as an expression of the proletarian mood, really strikes like a bolt of lightning: oh what, wishy-washy all the talk of brotherhood , of man's standing within society, of one person belonging to another; look at how, precisely in relation to industrial life, sociability has developed, which prevails between the mine owner and those who work in the coal mines in continuous labor and have to work so and so much. Consider the human and convivial relationship between the entrepreneurs and owners of sulfur mines in Sicily and the people who work in them in this life-destroying labor, and whose surplus value they possess. — In this peculiar way in which man works for man, in which man needs man in human life, Karl Marx has truly worked in a way that the proletariat can understand. And this was understood in turn: that the effect of person to person works above all in the differentiation into classes of the propertied and the propertyless. And programs emerged with the consequence: if this is to change, it can only change through the struggle of the proletarian class against the bourgeoisie, because that is a necessity.

Of course there will be many who are mine owners, and when the sufferings of the miners are presented to them in the 'I' theater, their hearts will be full of compassion, full of sympathy, perhaps even their eyes will fill with tears. But that's not worth anything, says the proletarian, because this compassion does not help these people; they can't help it, they are not personally, individually to blame for it. Man is not an individual being; man is, through historical necessity, placed in a certain socialization - not sociability, as the idealistic conceptions of the eighteenth century were, but in a socialization that cannot be other than through a struggle. It is a necessity to understand this. There is no question of personal responsibility, because it is a necessity to promote a historical process. This is what Karl Marx drummed into his proletarians and what was so little understood in the bourgeoisie.

And the third was the materialistic science of history. But before we consider this third point, we can ask: What is important if we want to understand socialization? — For Karl Marx did not grasp what man is as a nervous and sensory being: that he is an individuality, that he is more than any society can give him, as an individuality. This is what I had to counter in my Philosophy of Freedom, which touches on the fundamental nerve of the social question precisely on this point; and this is again what must be countered to Karl Marx's theory of socialization, where the individual disappears completely, just as the function of land and spiritual labor in socializing the means of production must be countered. For again, it can be shown that all social process must come to a standstill if it is not supplied with the sources that come from human individuality.

This is important, but it will only be possible if we know the source of human impulses, human sensory and nervous beings. Again, it is necessary to start with the social work. We can only deduce what is fact from the other thoughts. Karl Marx, with a beautiful instinct, coined the wonderful word: “The philosophers have so far only interpreted the facts differently; but we want to create facts, change the facts.” And he wanted to change the facts from his thoughts, wanted to create thoughts that could become facts, and he achieved it; but he only achieved that the proletariat itself, the way of thinking, the way of feeling of the proletariat is there. But what lives in it? The thought-offspring of the bourgeoisie live in the proletariat, the inheritance of the thoughts of the bourgeoisie. This is what the proletarian must understand above all, that he cannot make progress on his way with his demands without a real spiritual-scientific knowledge of man, and that this can never come to him if he retains bourgeois science. He will understand if he is enlightened in the right way and has the opportunity to be enlightened in the right way. This possibility must be created.

And finally, the third thing is to recognize the extent to which the human being is the being that he is from his metabolic process, which is precisely connected with his most spiritual being. This is where a real conception of history arises. But because Karl Marx had no idea about the threefold human being, because he was forgotten, the conception of history became a mere materialistic conception of history. He correctly recognized that what people carry within them as their instincts is more important than what they delude themselves about as their illusions. This comes from the classes. He said to people: Look at him, the bourgeois! Don't condemn him, he hasn't become that way because of anything he can be blamed for, but in the historical process the class of the bourgeoisie has simply been formed; as a result, he lives in his class in a very certain way. This life in his class determines the direction of his thoughts. Different thoughts are produced in you. You cannot help what you think; he cannot help what he thinks, because all these thoughts arise from the subconscious, namely from the class structure, from the social structure. Do not judge the matter morally, but recognize the necessity that he cannot help but oppress you, that he cannot help but be your opponent. Therefore become his opponent. Through class struggle, create for yourselves what is necessary.

All three points culminate in the class struggle, which was presented as the great demand of the new era. Karl Marx took up the dialectic in a truly Hegelian way. He said: “As proletarians, we do not want anything that we invent, but rather what development itself teaches us; we just want to get the wheel rolling a little, so that it rolls on consciously. All that we want would come by itself, as entrepreneurship increasingly comes together in societies, trusts and so on. By putting state impulses at its service, the business community is already ensuring that it increasingly sets itself apart as a class from the proletariat, that the haves and have-nots are increasingly sharply opposed to each other , but in such a way that all this becomes more and more uniformed, that there are fewer and fewer individual property owners, but larger and larger property-owning societies, which would necessarily be brought about in this way by the proletariat. Property is organizing itself. Above all, it was the spirit of struggle that dawned on the proletariat from Marxist dialectics, from Marxist science. And this fighting spirit had been alive for decades in the antagonism between the proletariat, which felt itself to be merely the proletariat across all national and other borders, and between the entrepreneurial class, which increasingly socialized and finally grew into imperialism. So that gradually modern life more and more lost the old political form and that, of which one still confusingly had the illusion that they were old state structures, became the new imperialisms, which are actually nothing more than the embodiment of that which confronts the proletariat as entrepreneurship. And in the most eminent sense, those imperialisms include the one that imagines itself to be an old political entity, but which has gradually become entirely an entrepreneurial organization: the British Empire; and the United States belongs to that. You can read about this in the older writings and lectures of Wilson, who proved all this to be true, because in this area, in terms of perception – I have already shown it from a different perspective – Woodrow Wilson is truly an insightful man.

So that is what, one could say, actually underlies this war, so-called war; that is what lurked and disguised itself in the so-called antagonism between the Central Powers and the Entente. This has been developing for decades. It had to come to expression in some way and will continue to do so. More and more the struggle will take on the form of expressing the antagonism that has emerged between the entrepreneurs and the proletariat of millions in some disguise. In the sense that the Western states want to remain states, one can only be called a state if one is used in some way as a framework for entrepreneurial endeavors, capitalist endeavors; and opponents and opposition will emerge where the consciousness of the proletariat prevails. This smoldered, glowed, glowed, glowed - what does not quite glow glows - glowed under what extended over the world as a great lie, as the lie of the so-called world war; it used all that now sounded like a catchphrase: “Freedom of nations, right of self-determination for every nation”. “Freedom of nations” sounds nicer than saying, ”We need a market in Eastern Europe, because where there is production, there must be consumption.” Perhaps it is only said if one belongs to a very secret lodge that rules the whole situation from the rear power realms. On the outside, the whole thing is embellished with beautiful-sounding phrases, dressed up by coining words that people can be outraged by, about all sorts of monstrous deeds and so on. But what is behind things as truth will show itself to people; it will show itself that what springs forth from the sum of untruthfulness is what is behind it and what can only be cured through such a deep understanding of reality as is possible only in spiritual science.

For that which has organized itself in the old way, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that which organizes itself in a new way out of the spiritual, participates in the process in a peculiar way. We live in the age of the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul is the primary agent in all that is being united in the British Empire community in the English-speaking population. You know that I have developed in detail at other times; so that is the main contemporary issue. But this contemporary issue must actually be clothed in entrepreneurship, in imperialism. It must become world domination in terms of external material. If this is now carried out by such means, as I have also discussed here in the Christmas lectures of 1916, then it must lead to the same results as before and as it will continue to do in the future. That is what is the real driving force behind the scenes of history, the other is something that is easy to talk about. But the spread of world domination, and specifically materialistic, material world domination, that is what is actually going on — it is being promoted by one side, while people are revolting against it on the other. Everything else is just a cover. For that which has formed itself in a different order, which is less in keeping with the times in the process of human development, must also find its development in a different way. Thus it comes about that the Romance element, the most excellent bearers of which, if we disregard Spanish, which is corrupt, we see Italian and French, the Romance element, which has come from quite different conditions, inherited from the earlier cultural period, from the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, into the fifth, will come to its decline, to its downfall, precisely through the victories it has now won. But you can also see this from certain things that can show you just how spiritual science is derived from reality.

You see, I have explained to you what French unity is in the form of a state. I am not talking, of course, about the individual Frenchman, but about the Frenchman who feels French insofar as he belongs to the state of France, that state of France that attaches importance to possessing Alsace-Lorraine and so on. There is a great difference here. Nothing that is said is directed against the individual person. It is not directed against anything at all, but only characterizes. But it is directed against the extent to which a person belongs to this or that group, which always makes one worse: “Oaner is a Mensch...” (a person is a person...) because there are usually many nations. Well! So keep in mind that we are in the midst of a threefold development. French is particularly there to develop, at the stage at which it is now possible, what we call the mind or emotional soul; we have already spoken about this. This mind or emotional soul, in its particular development, falls within the years of a human being from 28 to 35, as you know: astral body until the age of 21, sentient soul until the age of 28, mind soul until the age of 35, from the age of 35 to 42 consciousness soul, then comes the spiritual self.

But now developmental currents are running through each other. You know that the individual human being is today in the process of developing the consciousness soul, that is, he is only really introduced to the forces that his age can give him when he lives beyond the age of 35. Before that, he must learn, must be educated in it, but one can never learn even that which one's age then gives one unless one lives beyond the age of 35. This is unpleasant for those who want to postpone the voting age, but it is simply a developmental fact. So one can say: this development is particularly favorable for participation between the ages of 35 and 42. It is at this time that the forces that can really consolidate develop for that which is most in keeping with the times in the age of the consciousness soul. This could naturally lead to an understanding of how the consolidation of that which makes the British Empire great can come from English-speaking men and women between the ages of 35 and 42 – even if Lloyd George remained a twenty-seven-year-old, but Lloyd George is not a typical person for that, but a typical person for the humanity of the present, not for Britishness.

In contrast, the whole of humanity is developing in such a way that people, as they become younger and younger, are currently in the process of developing the period from 21 to 28 years, the sentient soul. These two currents now run into each other in the forward development of humanity. You see, the period from 28 to 35 years remains fallow, barren. But this is precisely the period allotted to the development of France: the years from 28 to 35. What you can investigate spiritually is so strongly expressed that even the infertility of the French population is expressed in it, the outer physical infertility. At the same time, this is a perspective indication of what could otherwise be shown in numerous occult researches: that the French people are no longer able to maintain what is the inheritance of Romanism out of the confusion. Only that which flows to Italianism from the fact that Italianism is currently in the process of developing the sentient soul, 21st to 28th year, that precisely through this renewal Italianism acquires the hegemony of the Romance peoples, insofar as they still have a task in the future. This is so important that we have to keep such big things in mind in the European process, so that we know, for example, that something that has emerged from impulses that are completely different from the present ones, such as the after-effects of Romanism in European culture, is indeed in a state of decadence, but that the Italian people are coming to hegemony.

Perhaps someone will not grant me the right to speak about this 'tragedy'. But that is also the one thing that can be said with a certain tragedy: that the French have not committed themselves to the French cause either way, but have done everything possible to promote that which will make the French essence disappear from the process of development of modern humanity.

In the East, Russian Slavdom awaits; it can wait because it is destined for the future, all that will emerge from the confused chaos of what is developing here and there. Such things are the other thing that must emerge from a spiritual-scientific penetration of the facts. What I would like to point out again and again through such considerations, which in the near future can again be increased if possibilities are still opened to us, is to decide to see things in their truth, to really go out a little, not to stop at the illusions and phantasms, but to see things in their truth. Spiritual science is something that not only gives abstract concepts, but can also familiarize us with reality. Then, when we become familiar with reality through spiritual science, we will not overestimate all the strange concepts with which the spiritual life, and also humanity, has nourished itself in recent times. These concepts have been formed in many cases, I might say, in a Luciferic-Ahrimanic way, in that people have nourished themselves in their thinking and imagining with feelings from the most ancient times, which they have carried forward in time. People cling so tenaciously to inherited concepts, and one can feel deep sorrow when one observes this clinging, this rigid clinging to inherited concepts in people. Even in this time people have spoken of “great generals”. In a certain field, a real idolatry has been nourished for people like Hindenburg and Ludendorff, a real idolatry, as if this old hero worship could still have any meaning in the whole context of the catastrophe that has taken place! All the abilities that won battles in the past, or the inabilities that led to battles being lost in the past, no longer had any significance in this war process. You either won or you didn't, depending on the material, material in the form of cannons, material in the form of ammunition, material in the form of people, that was available at a particular place and if you had it or the other side had it; depending on that you won; or depending on whether one or the other had a more or less effective or ineffective gas. Victory or defeat depended on these factors. To that extent, the personal skill of the strategist was no longer a consideration, as it had been in the past. And here, too, we come upon a terrible untruth in the judgment of one man or another. You cannot believe where it is necessary today to correct the concepts of truth and untruth. Our time is so deeply entangled in empty phrases and untruthfulness, in illusions and phantasms. Therefore, it must be emphasized again and again that we must escape from this entanglement in these ideas. And these ideas are present especially in the field of education. Starting at the top and going down to the lowest level of schooling, it is necessary everywhere: medicine and theology and jurisprudence and philosophy, and all the other subjects that have been added at these universities, then the intermediate school system and everything else, that is what was suitable to undermine the ground of truth and what has lulled people most of all with regard to this undermining of the ground for truth.

It is indeed extremely difficult to find understanding on this point, and there is no salvation if one does not find understanding on this point. Perhaps it is easier for me to have gained understanding on this point than for many others. For I do believe that it has done much, much harm in the present time, that that way of thinking has prevailed for so long and has really taken hold of broad masses of the human population, that way of thinking which consists in the parents already taking care of the young person – I will now leave out how they take care of their daughters , because that would be a chapter in itself. He just has to get a government job, where he, even if he gets it late – well, the old man has to help out there – then he rises from one five-year period to the next without having to do anything, rises from one five-year period to the next in his salary. He is provided for life because he is entitled to a pension. This lulls him into a certain carelessness. It is only a minor matter compared to the fact that you also know how to do a wide range of things: if you sit in one place long enough, you will receive the Red Eagle Order, 4th class, then 3rd class – that's in addition. That's what happens when you're at the first gate of life, the thing that can make you so carefree because it takes you out of the struggle for survival. Proletarian theory, Marxism would say: That is quite natural; anyone who subconsciously generates the ideas that arise from this sense of security of being entitled to a pension in a bourgeois way cannot understand the person who, no matter how much he destroys what is present, as a proletarian destroys nothing but his chains. — That is a constant saying in proletarian circles. But you can feel how ideas are really formed in their forms through the way you are involved in the social process. You stop taking an intense, interested part in the struggle for life, on which the only thing that depends is a prosperous, fruitful life, when you know that you will get a raise every five years and a pension of so and so much, and will be provided for for life. As I said, I don't want to talk about the daughters. But the way of thinking is by no means different in the social process with regard to the placing of daughters and women in social life.

But I believe that a great deal depends on it. The facts are now such that they are beginning, perhaps precisely by shaking up many things that were firm, that were firmly believed, to hammer other ideas into people's heads. Some who have been able to wait patiently for the changes that have been taking place year by year may look into the future with some uneasiness when the next quinquennium comes around. Perhaps the experience, as I said, that I have never consciously sought any professional or other connection with anything to do with government employment or even just in any way with the state, has helped me to gain understanding for these events. It always disgusted me to have anything to do with anything smacking of the state. I do not boast of it, for it is of course a great failing; one is then a Bohemian. Now, how did Harlan call me for the nineties in the feature pages of the Vossische Zeitung? “An unsalaried, free-thinking scholar of God.” Someone I was friends with back then and who described me in such a way that his description still fits in the present day; he described many things, and he meant that I didn't fit into the then society of bohemians any more than he did. He called me an unpaid freethinking scholar of God, which I already was at the time, and which did not really fit into the circle of that time. But the whole of society at that time – I am now putting this in parentheses, don't be offended, we know each other too well for you to misunderstand me – the whole of society called itself the “Verbrechertisch” (the “Crooks' Table”), and under this title a number of people were grouped together who set themselves the harmless program, if one can speak of a program, of annoying the philistines. Jokes are there to conceal seriousness, and yet they are often only the expression of seriousness in a self-educating way of dealing with life.

But the day before yesterday I spoke at the end about how, out of current events, Germanness must come to Judaism and Greekness in a certain way, that Germanness which will initially be eradicated, at least as a German essence, through brutalization, right? But it will play a role. Greece was also eradicated, Judaism was eradicated in a certain way. It will play its role. And it is just right for me that through the recitation of the “Choir of Primitive Instincts” one of the most pronounced minds of modern times, Fercher von Steinwand, who speaks so truly from German folk tradition, and also from that German folk tradition that thrives particularly in German-Austrian areas, has now has presented itself before your soul in those concrete, vivid ideas that will show you that a certain task has been given precisely for this Germanness, which never had a real talent for an external state structure; that this Germanness has certain possibilities of good self-knowledge precisely in such excellent individuals as Fercher von Steinwand was.

Today, one feels compelled to say so many different things to the Germans. Especially in the last four and a half years, one has always felt compelled to say this and that to the Germans from the outside. We have experienced it again in these days, haven't we? I believe it was Lloyd George, I mean his Excellency himself, of course, who, after so many other speeches, has once again spoken about all that is depraved and immoral about Germanism, as if there were no possibility that precisely within this nationality the things that this nationality needs in terms of self-knowledge could arise. In this respect, Fercher von Steinwand is an extremely good example. You see, I told you about the lecture that he, Fercher von Steinwand, gave in 1859 about the Gypsies to the future King of Saxony, then Crown Prince Georg, to ministers and many generals – remember that: to many generals, because that is militarism, isn't it –; to many generals he gave this lecture. He said various things about the gypsies, because the gypsies seemed to him to be somehow related to the role that the German people will play in the future. 1859, isn't it, it's a strong piece of self-knowledge how he imagines it on the one hand, I read it to you the day before yesterday, but I will characterize it for you from another side. And to do that, allow me to read you another small piece from this Gypsy lecture by Ferchers von Steinwand. So imagine that Fercher von Steinwand speaks, speaks about what is favorable and unfavorable for the further development of the German people, before a crown prince, before ministers and before generals, imagine that he speaks in the following way:

"In our mountainous country, there is a custom, which is otherwise praiseworthy, that immediately before bedtime, the head of the household kneels at the table and recites a prayer known as the rosary. This prayer is said aloud by the entire family, including the servants, in the present paragraphs, and its duration fills an hour, which is not to be doubted. Yes, it can be considerably extended by a pious housewife with the addition of Our Fathers. For this reason, it is not unnatural for the longed-for sleep, but postponed by continued holy “prayer for us”, to sometimes hastily take hold, interrupting the tired worker in the middle of the loud “Ave Maria” and repeatedly shakes the kneeling position of the same, and so on, until the eloquently begun piety has dragged on in a stammering manner to the end. This time, the master of the house himself was seized by the gentle hand of nature, and his “Lord, have mercy on us” had gradually lost all its usual emphasis. I myself knelt in a corner of the room, nodding more to the sleeping place than to God.

Outside the open door of the room stood silently the black-browed horde” – there were gypsy visitors, in fact – ”sometimes revealing crystal-white teeth. The prematurely-withered face of a young woman, who was quietly turned towards the entrance, was shimmeringly illuminated by the glow of the fireplace. The white in her eye seemed to fade away in increasing drowsiness. The pale yellow enamel at the glazed, circular edge of the eyeball stood out all the more clearly, a delicate pale yellow enamel that characterizes every gypsy eye and is sometimes only discoverable to the painter.

All our annoyance with the strangers had vanished, for tiredness dominated the house. Nobody except the gypsy mother we already knew, who had planted her knees in the middle of the floor, had followed the prayer with a brave voice, and piety was about to suffer a general defeat.

Suddenly, the old woman, twitching like a viper, rose up with terrible force from the floorboard, stormed with rapid-fire superiority on the flagging prayer leader and tore the beaded symbol of the rosary from his limp hand, spraying up in cherubic rage. All devout mumbling stopped as if before the blare of the Last Judgment, and the room seemed to tremble, struck by the holy earthquake. Then the pythically inspired woman leaped or sprang into the middle of the circle of worshippers; her face had taken on a Gorgon-like transfiguration, her voice intensified to a thunderclap. Stretching both arms towards the sky, she cried: “But Lord, you will spew out of your mouth those who are lukewarm.” The dim light fluttered on her coppery, black-ringed forehead, and from beneath it, like the lightning of the archangel Michael, a fiery blaze flared up. Never before had I been told with such fiery urgency that wavering and undecided people are the worst and most worthless of the Creator's creations.

What immense religious wealth this woman possessed, I thought, and how enviable!

Poor student that I was, I had not yet learned

what a difference there is between possessing spiritual content and expressing it. I did not yet know that it is enough to feel a few rudiments of content within oneself to possibly make an excellent interpreter of serious spiritual content.

I once sat under a maple tree that was growing. But it did not make that clear with any drumming. However, it cannot be denied that inner nobility is necessary to be a good drummer. If it were not so, then the greatest noisemakers and braggarts, the most skillful gesticulators, would have to be the greatest creative spirits among mortals, and boldly expansive actors would have to be the most profound playwrights and modern Germany would have no lack of excellent tragedies.

Where would such a reflection be more appropriate than in a history of the Gypsies?

That is the nature of such self-awareness, which does not need to be preached to by the world, which could judge for itself that what existed in 1870 has come into decadence. But if one understood the issues, one did it as I did in my book on Friedrich Nietzsche, where I quoted Nietzsche's words: “Exstirpation of the German spirit in favor of the ‘German Reich’.” I could not have the book on Friedrich Nietzsche reprinted during the war because of what it says. Fercher von Steinwand continues:

“The air is heavy and sulphurous from the oaths that have been sworn on constitutions for eight decades. How many states are there in which these oaths have not been broken many times over? Our minds are deaf from the blasts of the trumpets, the cries of jubilation with which we welcomed the heavenly benefactress, freedom.”

You would think that Fercher von Steinwand was talking about Wilsonianism and Entente views!

"But count the mortals who are man enough to be free! Where are there still four walls that do not resound with quotations from Schiller's writings? But where, in which hut, in which palace, under which star of the German zone, does something of the poet's energetic soul, of his fiery vein, of his stubborn urge for a great goal, still live? Who would have the courage and the gift to make his mistakes? The 'tribunes of all European empires totter under the burden of eloquence and science, through which order and happiness are to be introduced into human society.

That is why I said yesterday: At least in Central Europe it will have come to pass that some contribution will have been made to breaking through the lie. Where it has triumphed, it will continue to live.

"You of little heart! What is the thought that you have thought? Who among you is a Mirabeau? How ardent is your image of the happy state, if it is not already cold as a corpse before you announce it? Tell me, which of you is greater than the moment? How many scoundrels have you intimidated, how many noble-minded people have you encouraged? How many silent praises do you not hear in the complaints? Does misfortune not speak louder than ever? Is it really so terribly difficult to grasp the idea that every human being, without exception, must be educated from childhood for freedom, order and happiness, and even for the art of educating themselves, educated far less through reasoning than through love, patience, strictness and painful sacrifices? Is it really so terribly difficult, instead of paying for making a noise, to pay for a fruitful activity? Is it really so terribly difficult, instead of obeying the bayonets, to serve the mild, all-equalizing reason?“

”Imagine a state” — please, there are the generals! -, ”imagine a state of the first or second order. Imagine, in addition, an insightful minister” — the ministers are sitting there too — ”who does not count as his own glory what harms or dishonors a neighbor; in a word, a minister who uses two-thirds of his enormous military coffers for the education of the lowest classes of the people — what do you think? Would not such a minister, within a few years, bring about the most tremendous change in all conditions, for his own benefit, for the benefit of his people, for the benefit of his lord and king? Would such a minister not change the character of world history in less than half a generation? I would have the heart to say “Yes” again, for it matters little to me whether some polished war hero or corpulent model official calls me a foolish ideologue.

Meanwhile, take comfort, you Gypsies! You are not alone in your kind; you are not threatened with extinction: new reinforcements are flowing to you daily from all directions of life!

It is a view of life that has taken firm root in the impulses in which it is based on real nationality, which in a certain sense justifies one to make such assertions as I have done and as I do not want to make them out of some mere impulse, but as they can be proven piece by piece.

We will meet again next Friday at 7 p.m., and then we will continue our discussion.

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among other significant things that he has expressed and articulated, said a sentence that should actually become a hallowed word of life in the broadest sense. The sentence is: “Man can do what he should; and when he says, ‘I cannot,’ he will not.” Now, I say: this sentence should become a sacred word of life in the broadest sense, and it is precisely the task of spiritual scientific thinking and feeling to make this sentence fully alive in itself. For only out of this consciousness of personality, which can be sustained and strengthened by such an attitude: man can do what he should; and when he says: I cannot, he does not want to — only through such an attitude can the tasks that humanity will face from the present on towards the near future be solved to some extent.

Now the strange thing is – and this is connected with the course of human development – that precisely this sentence is completely contradicted by the prevailing attitude of the present, which is, after all, a result of the attitude of the last few centuries and its development, this sentence, or rather the strength, the content of this sentence. On the contrary, humanity has gradually developed an almost absolute disbelief in itself. This self-doubt asserts itself through the most diverse refinements of life. It asserts itself in such a way that sometimes people believe they have great self-confidence, but only persuade themselves of this out of all kinds of subconscious grounds, while they lack a right, true, active self-confidence the reason that they lack a right, true, active self-confidence is simply because, as a result of the entire education of the nineteenth century, people have become infinitely lazy with regard to their inner life, to the exposure and implementation of their spiritual powers. And if only the awareness could take root that for far too many things people say they cannot do, the truth is that they lack willpower. For the most important thing, the most important thing for the future, will not happen through institutions, will not happen through all kinds of organizations, however much one believes today in institutions and organizations as if they were the only true ones everywhere, but the most important thing for the future will happen through the efficiency of the individual human being. But this efficiency of the individual human being can only arise from a true, real trust in an inexhaustible source of divine power in the human soul. But present-day humanity is far, far removed from this belief in an inexhaustible source in the human soul.

That is why today's humanity is so at a loss in the face of the great tasks that, I would say, today, so to speak, are everywhere in the street of life. Mankind stands perplexed before the great tasks. And the catastrophic events of recent years have increased these tasks to such an extent that most people, who are asleep today, have no idea how great and how comprehensive these tasks are. They do not want to deal with the comprehensiveness and the magnitude of these tasks, which today basically encompasses everything around us. And when, as is happening right now in many parts of the world, people are called upon to make certain decisions based on their judgment, in short, based on their soul, then things get out of hand today, because people are simply not prepared to grasp the magnitude of the tasks at hand; for the tasks cannot be tackled on a small scale today, they can only be tackled on a large scale. And so we shall see that what people will do to replace the catastrophic conditions with what they think of as order will, at least for a long time, remain fruitless work, leading rather to chaos than to any kind of order. This will happen simply because people lack the self-confidence I have been describing. It is indeed more comfortable to say, when faced with the tasks of life, “I cannot accomplish them,” than to seek the means and ways to really gain the strength for these tasks from the soul. And these strengths are in the soul, for the human being is permeated by infinitely vast divine powers. And if he does not seek these powers, he leaves them fallow, he does not want to develop them.

You see, today man must appropriate this on both a small and large scale: to somehow tie everything to the great aspects of life, to make these great aspects of life truly alive. Anyone who observes life could, with regard to such things, observe the great phenomena of decadence in this very area in the current of development that has brought about today's catastrophe. I will tell a little story, because such little stories may teach more than theoretical discussion.

About eighteen or nineteen years ago in Berlin, I met a man who was already highly esteemed as a political economist and organizer. I knew him, I had met him once or twice, and I had also heard about his fame. Even back then in Berlin, people were saying that the man was so famous that now that a big newspaper had been founded, he had been hired by that newspaper with a large salary, and not for articles that he was supposed to write for that newspaper, but he was free to write an article once every few years if he wanted. But the only thing he had to do in return for the high salary was not to write for any other newspapers. The man was so famous that one of Berlin's biggest newspaper entrepreneurs simply gave him a high salary in return for not competing with this man's writing in other newspapers, while allowing him to write in his newspaper whenever he wanted. This man also had a plan to establish, on a small scale, a variety of social institutions over a certain area, so to speak, small social model societies or model states, one might say. He was considered to be extremely ingenious in how he had devised these social model communities. And if he did not actually gain many more followers and the followers he did gain remained only in the theoretical, it was not because people did not think he was very astute, but because people were too lazy to profess something they thought was very astute and very beneficial for humanity. Now he came up to me and said – I could already see him coming with a radiant countenance –: 'I have finally found the man with the money who will provide me with the sum of money that I need to found such a settlement cooperative. Now we want to found the community of the future. – I said nothing but: Go ahead and found it, it will fall apart in no time. – Because such things are only founded in the present time, so that they will fall apart, of course.

I am telling you this story because it is easy for belief to take hold in a non-energetic way of thinking, in a way of thinking that does not want to tie in with the big problems of life, that one should start in the present with all kinds of small foundations; with non-comprehensive foundations and especially with small foundations, it must be shown whether anything can also prove itself on a large scale. But this is completely absurd, because you are then founding something within a sick social order, which may perhaps be quite exemplary, but precisely because it is good and thus differs greatly from all that it is placed in, it is all the more certain to fail. They cannot possibly, given the way things have developed, where the world on the whole shows how it has led itself into absurdity, even remotely think of achieving anything with small particles or doing anything on a small scale. Only that which seizes the whole of today, which can send out its rays, I might say, to all that is human, can have any significance. It does no harm if such an attempt at grasping the whole fails, for the impulse will remain, and that is what matters. It is the impulse that matters.

But what is more and more necessary is the characterized trust in the source of immeasurable divine powers that lies within man. Nothing has sinned so much against this belief in the immeasurable source of divine powers in human nature in the course of the world as the bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. That is why this bourgeoisie has left the emerging proletariat a bad legacy, and this emerging proletariat will initially take on this bad legacy. And if it cannot grasp that it is not important, above all, to want to do new things with old ideas, but that it is important to turn to new ideas, then nothing will come of all the institutions, or rather, they will only come to fruition when these institutions come from real new ideas, from the impulse, from the power of new ideas.

This is where understanding must be applied to a variety of things that we have begun to consider, the consideration of which is extremely important and significant for the present, for an understanding of reality in the present. I have spoken to you about how the rising proletariat is imbued in its thoughts and feelings with the impulses of the teachings of Karl Marx, and I have given you some points of view from these teachings. These aspects, which millions and millions of people today have mastered, can already tell you that this whole Marxism is precisely the heritage of the bourgeois world view of the last century. For I have, I would say, shown you the currents from which Karl Marx himself drank his spiritual water. I have told you that the present-day Marxist doctrine of the proletariat is the product of three sources: the dialectical thinking that Karl Marx had learned at the school of the Hegelians; the socialist impetus of Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc, that is, the French; and the utilitarianism of the English. It was from these three currents that Karl Marx composed what he so effectively taught the proletariat.

Now that we have learned something about the points of view of Karl Marx himself, we can consider these three things in detail. German Hegelianism can be characterized from a variety of angles. In order to understand Karl Marx, one must characterize him from this perspective. Hegelianism is devotion to thought in man himself. Perhaps never has pure thought been so energetically and powerfully worked with as by Hegel himself. Hegel's entire system, if I may use the bourgeois expression, is thought-work, from beginning to end it is nothing but real thought. This also explains why Hegel is so difficult to understand. Since most people never have a single pure thought in their lives, a thinker whose entire system consists of pure thoughts is, of course, difficult, difficult, very difficult to understand. But understanding Hegel requires nothing more than overcoming the laziness of thinking. Diligence is required, diligence. Where there is diligence, then comes the fulfillment of the sentence: Man can do what he should; and when he says: I cannot, then he does not want to. Hegel is therefore an energetic thinker, a thinker who is able to control his power of thought in such a way that he really finds the thought in the individual phenomena of life.

But there is a certain dark side to this, which I would ask you to consider carefully. You have to make the greatest possible effort, but that is enough; hard work is enough. You have to make the greatest possible effort if you really want to work your way into something like the Hegelian system. You have to make an effort. But then, when you have made these efforts, when you have really worked through the Hegelian system from beginning to end – most philosophy professors stop very soon because they believe they have already understood Hegel in principle; that is why Hartmann, Eduard von Hartmann, was able to justifiably claim that of all the university professors in the world, there were only two people who had a proper education in Hegel, of all philosophy professors. Since then, one of the two has died and no one else has been added. Now, if you have appropriated Hegel in this way, ploughed through his system and appropriated it, if you are a normal person – I don't want to say a philistine, but if you are a normal person – well, then, you want to get something out of such a strenuous study, you want to hold something in your hand. But that is not the case at all, at least not in the ordinary sense of the word. In the sense that people want, you don't really get anything from Hegel, at least nothing that you can write in a notebook and confidently take home, nor something that you can summarize in a small compendium and carry home as an excerpt of worldly wisdom. You don't get any of that from Hegel. From Hegel, you only have the fact that you have exerted your thinking and that, if you have overcome yourself to plow through Hegel, you can then think. But you can do nothing else with your thinking but think. You can think, but with your thinking you stand outside of all of life. You can only think. You can think well, but with this thinking, which proceeds in the pure conceptual organism and is thus dialectical, you stand outside of life.

That was more or less what Marx was able to learn from Hegel: he was able to learn how to think, to really move with virtuosity in thought, he was able to learn that. But he was looking for something else. He was looking for a conception of life for the proletariat, for the vast majority of the propertyless newer humanity. He could not doubt the correctness of Hegelian thinking, if I may express it that way, but he could not begin with this mere Hegelian thinking in relation to his task. That gave, if I may say so, his karma the corresponding impetus, which led him beyond mere Hegelianism, in which his thinking had been sharpened, to the French utopians, to Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc. When Marx asked himself: How should we shape the social order? —, Hegelianism could not answer him, for Hegel himself could, I might say, only offer everyone the opportunity to think deeply and penetratingly. But when Hegel was asked in later years what the best social order would be, he had actually forgotten his youthful views. It is extraordinarily interesting. One of Hegel's most significant youthful views with regard to the social order is that the state destroys everything that is truly human; therefore it must cease. That is a Hegelian youthful dictum: the state must cease. This great thought was still fermenting in Hegel when he wrote this sentence. When he had developed it to the pure thought, with which one could only begin to think, he had, with regard to the best social order, only the answer that one can reproach him for today can, if one wants to judge everything one-sidedly. There he had only the answer from his astute thinking: the best social institution is the Prussian state, and the center of the world, of everything perfect, is Berlin. Berlin is the center of the world, and the University of Berlin is in turn the center of Berlin. So that we are here – as he said in an inaugural address – at the center of the center. Anyone who has no sense of greatness, which can often be grotesque precisely because it is great, will of course raise all those objections, which are fair, against such a sentence. But spiritual science could give them an inkling that behind all these things, from the point of view of reality, there is something infinitely significant. For Hegel did not say such things out of mere silliness. And the judgment about the great, unique thing that never existed in humanity before: the moving in pure thought, that never existed in the world except with Hegel, is not affected by the fact that under certain conditions Hegel himself drew such a conclusion. But it seems understandable that Karl Marx could not get much for the best social interests out of Hegel,

So, initially, his karma led him to the French utopians. I have already characterized some of them for you. For Saint-Simon, for example, it was mainly a matter of replacing the state he had found with a different institution, and in thinking of this different institution, what immediately presented itself to his mind was what is most characteristic and most influential for the modern era: the industrialization of life. Therefore, he demanded that the administration of the various branches of production be established in place of all the old political institutions, so that basically he sought the salvation of the social order in the best possible administration of the social structure according to the order of a factory context. In 1848, as is well known, Louis Blanc established the most diverse national workshops in which such Saint-Simonian ideas were to be realized. Well, they soon perished, as is natural for such things to perish. As the fundamental impulse that should underlie all such administration of branches of production, Saint-Simon conceived a kind of very, very simplified Christianity. Not the old dogma Christianity should go, he thought, but a practical Christianity should go, which should actually consist in the only sentence: Love your neighbor as yourself. - A very nice sentence, but if you preach it, just as ineffective as if you preach to the stove to be warm and do not heat it.

So now Karl Marx was thrown in with these utopians. With Hegel he could say to himself: Wonderful thinking, but it is not feasible if you are to enter into this real life. You don't touch it, this real life. It remains at the level of pure dialectical thinking, not abstract, but pure dialectical thinking. Here, with the utopians, he found, in a sense, a forceful feeling, because in the case of both Saint-Simon and Louis Blanc, the social impetus came from feeling - a forceful feeling. But Karl Marx, through his Hegelian training, was, first of all, too great a thinker not to have seen the dullness – I mean no harm by this, but in relation to life, as one has a blunt knife – the dullness of this utopian doctrine and view of life. And on the other hand, Karl Marx had to say to himself: In order to create such institutions as Saint-Simon demanded for the salvation of humanity, one needs, within the bourgeoisie, goodwill, practical Christianity. But where should that come from? – That becomes the main thing for him: Where should this practical Christianity come from?

You see, even in purely practical terms, there is no possibility of believing that the ordinary bourgeois outlook and bourgeois mentality are capable of solving what Karl Marx, Saint-Simon and all those others could call the social question. For the social issues on which the bourgeoisie based their work led to many things, I mean, as values for the bourgeoisie, but that was only enough for a small minority, for a really small minority. A small minority could live comfortably, could travel, could enjoy all kinds of art – I am only mentioning the nicest things. But the great majority could not get at all of that. And how should the bourgeoisie, which was only able to provide for a small minority, how should it do something out of mere compassion or sympathy for the whole proletarian mass? I think the simple idea suggests itself that nothing can be achieved in this way, apart from the idea that Karl Marx then asserted, and which I mentioned to you the other day: that, precisely because of the social structure of this bourgeoisie, it is not even remotely capable, even if it wanted to, of doing anything effective for the proletariat. Now, as we pointed out the other day, Karl Marx regarded Hegel's thought as appropriate to the new era, and Saint-Simon's feeling. But in his opinion he could not do anything with either of them.

So his karma led him further to English utilitarianism, to that social structure within which the modern industrial being, I would say, had progressed the furthest, even as Karl Marx was forming his worldview. Those within English thought who, like Karl Marx, pursued socialism, developed their socialism — I am thinking here of Robert Owen — primarily out of volition. Karl Marx was able to study how, when a certain will is restricted to a small area – you will remember what I said just now – nothing can be achieved. We know that Robert Owen introduced model economies that were really set up in practice. But in the modern world, all you can do with small model economies is fail. Of course, Robert Owen's attempts also failed in the end; that is only a matter of course. And so Karl Marx was led through all this, but was particularly attracted by the practical thinking that is purely absorbed in the mechanization of industrialism, and from this he formed his proletarian world view, this proletarian world view that is not based on thinking, although it uses thinking, that is not based on feeling although it uses feeling, nor is it based on the will, but rather is based on that which happens externally, purely externally in the sensory world, and specifically happens in the industrial world, in the world of modern production, under the hand of the proletarian. And here Karl Marx showed himself, who had gone through modern thinking, feeling and willing in such a magnificent way that he was attached, and in the classical sense now attached to, I would like to say, with a certain greatness this lack of trust that actually characterizes modern mental life. For example, in Hegel, Karl Marx had been able to hear that world history is the progress of humanity in the consciousness of freedom; thus, something ideal lies at the basis of the development of humanity in its history as an impulse. It is an abstract proposition, which is not very helpful. From Saint-Simon he had been able to learn that where practical Christianity prevails, and to the extent that practical Christianity prevails, the development of humanity must advance. But it has not progressed; it has led precisely to modern impoverishment, to modern proletarian misery, and so on. An idea took hold in Karl Marx, an intuitive impulse that was really capable of finding understanding in the broadest proletarian circles, and not in the bourgeois circles only because the bourgeois circles were lazy and did not take up such things, did not care about such things. Karl Marx became convinced of the idea that ultimately it is completely irrelevant what people think, what they feel, what they want, because what determines historical development depends only on the economic process, on how people live. Whether someone is an entrepreneur, a worker, or involved in the economy in this or that way, this leads to them having thoughts in a certain way, feeling in a certain way, and having certain volitional impulses. A child growing up in a family of civil servants has a different idea of what is right and what is wrong, feels and thinks differently simply because he grows up in the economic order of a civil servant's family, unlike the child of a proletarian who is left to his own devices while his father and mother go to the factory and so on. And so Karl Marx came to his relevant, proletarian-relevant sentence: The institutions that affect people are not based on the consciousness of the people, but the consciousness of the people is based on the institutions that arise by themselves, through a mere actual necessity. People believe that they think and feel and want out of their inner impulses. Oh no, they do not think and feel and want out of their inner impulses, but they feel and think and want according to the class into which they were born, without merit or demerit.

One can sense that if the basic impulse of a doctrine is this, this basic impulse must lead to a receptive understanding in the proletarian class, because through this doctrine one was above all trust in oneself. You don't need to have any self-confidence, because it doesn't help you at all whether you think energetically or not, whether you feel energetically or not, whether you will energetically or not; after all, all that is only the outflow, the superstructure, of the foundation that the social order, the economic position into which one is born, instructs you. Therefore, you can think up the most beautiful systems, as the true Marxist would say, for how people can best organize their social structures and how the best economic life can be shaped. You can think about how to make people happy and content, how to ensure that they have enough to eat and can lead a can lead a pleasant life, you may think as you like, but all that has no value, nothing depends on it, all that is only a mirror of economic life, how you think and feel and want, because what makes everything is economic life. That is why Karl Marx rejected all socialist theories as theories and said: “It is only important to understand economic life, to know how economic life works.” At most, you can give the locomotive a jolt here or there to make it go faster, but it goes by itself, things develop by themselves.

Of course, they will feel that all sorts of contradictions are stirring. We will come back to that. But now let us present the matter as it is reflected in the minds of the Marxist proletarians. So Karl Marx said, and so these say: the main forms of economic life have developed apart over time. In earlier oriental conditions, the coexistence of people was steeped in barbarism. Then came that economic system which divided men into masters and slaves, which was still regarded as a necessity in Greek, even by Aristotle: that men be divided into masters and slaves. Then came the more medieval order of serfdom, of feudalism, where people were not slaves, but serfs, bound to the lord who held the feudum, so that they belonged, so to speak, to the feudum, to the estate. Then came the more recent period, the wage system, in which the worker, in the way I characterized for you the other day, sells his labor power as a commodity to the entrepreneur and receives the price for the commodity in the form of wages. Barbarianism, slavery, serfdom, the wage system are the main forms in which economic life has developed. The thinking of people must be different where slavery prevails, different where serfdom prevails, different where the modern wage system is. For all that people think, by which they believe they can make the world happy, is the ideological superstructure. What people think about it can become consolidated; and what has thus become consolidated in views, opinions and thoughts can in turn have an effect, so that these human thoughts in their ideologized form actually have an effect on the economic order. But originally they come from the economic order. This modern wage system has developed most intensively in modern economic life under the influence of modern industrialism through the antagonism between entrepreneurs and workers. It has developed in such a way that, as I have already explained to you from a different point of view, the entrepreneur is the owner of the means of production. Because he is the owner of the means of production, work can only be done through him. The worker is forced to sell his labor power as a commodity to the entrepreneur and to be paid for it, which, as I have shown you, results in added value.

This modern economic life, Karl Marx assumes, tends to concentrate the ownership of the means of production more and more. This economic life brings with it the necessity that entrepreneurship must unite from the individual entrepreneur to the company, to the trust and so on. And as a result, as the entrepreneurs unite, the sum of means of production comes to a sum. But this prepares the way for the socialization of the means of production in general. The entrepreneurs are already working on it, and when a certain point has been reached, the means of production must be concentrated to such an extent that only one reorganization is needed. Then you nationalize, socialize the means of production, which have already converged in companies and trusts anyway, and you just rearrange things by having the one who was previously the worker, now, as a whole society, take possession of the means of production, by having them through a necessary process. What is being presented now must happen. The entrepreneurs are preparing the way for socialization; by increasingly taking care of socialization themselves, they bring it to a point where the proletariat can take it over. Hegel went in thought from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. Karl Marx implements this in the reality of the economic process: the entrepreneurial order turns into its opposite; the proletarian takes possession of the means of production all by himself. The economic process makes itself. One is merely the obstetrician of that which happens by itself, not believing that this ideological superstructure of thinking, feeling and willing can make anything special. The economic process, says Karl Marx, does everything; what you think are merely the foam waves at the top of the economic process. Depending on the economic order, this produces this or that thought in these or those human minds. Those are the foam waves up there. The economic process is the most important thing, but it necessarily leads from thesis to antithesis. What the proletariat has worked for was taken away from the actual owners, the proletarians, by the entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs became the expropriators. But this process of expropriating the proprietor is necessarily reversed in the economic development into its opposite. As cause and effect follow in nature, the expropriation of the expropriators arises.

You didn't need any faith in the powers of the soul. You could work with this proletarian theory, especially with the worst legacy of bourgeois education in modern times, with mistrust of the human soul. The proletarian saw himself helplessly at the mercy of the bourgeoisie. He had sympathy for a theory that does not claim that he should help himself, because the expropriation of the expropriators automatically brings about what the socialization of the means of production must result in. The modern mode of production necessarily turns into its opposite.

That things would make themselves, was something that seemed so tremendously obvious to the proletarian world. And if one wants to gain an understanding of the psychology of this proletarian sentiment, one must take into account that it was precisely this absolute mistrust of the powers of the soul that was an important driving force in the triumphal march that Marxist thinking made through the world. Marxism is not a dogma at all, but a method of observing the world - and for the proletarian, the only world accessible to him - the world of economic order, of economic development. I would like to say – I believe this really hits the nail on the head – the proletarian does not rely on any kind of power of thought, although Karl Marx says: “The philosophers have only ever interpreted the world through thought; one must create through thought in the world” – but actually he does not rely on thoughts and their power, on the effectiveness of thoughts for any kind of institution, but he relies only on the self-regulating process of the economic order. And that was essentially what one encountered when one familiarized oneself with the real life of the modern proletariat. One might say that one encountered the almost apocalyptic hope that the expropriation of the expropriators, the necessary socialization of the means of production, would have to come with a major crisis.

The bourgeoisie ridiculed this, repeating again and again that the modern proletariat was waiting for the great Kladderadatsch. This great Kladderadatsch was imagined as the shattering of the vessel, so to speak, that founded the entrepreneurial system, and its transformation through self-regulation into the joint administration of the means of production by the proletariat. That was, so to speak, the apocalyptic hope. It was in this hope that this modern proletariat worked with such firm belief. They were firmly convinced that it could not happen otherwise than that this socialization would have to occur.

You see, in Marxism every mere theoretical view is rejected. A mere theoretical view is ideology or superstructure, which can indeed react back, but which, even when it reacts back, originally arose out of the mere economic order. And yet the whole thing is a theory, after all. It cannot be denied that it is a theory. And as a theory it has had a tremendous impact; it has uplifted people, it has taught people a certain belief. And the strange thing was: as the faith of the bourgeoisie, which was not a new one, but only a traditionally old one, became more and more mired, rotten and corrupted, a purely materialistic faith arose, the faith in the apocalypse of the economic order, rock-solid in the proletariat. If you look only at the power of faith, only at the impetus of faith, you can say: It is quite certain that even within the first Christian communities there was never a stronger belief, a stronger belief than that of the modern proletariat in the apocalypse of economic development: expropriation of the expropriators. One could already get to know the power of faith there, even if, in the opinion of people – people other than the proletarians – it did not address anything very lofty. One could already learn what the power of a belief, of a confession, is; because for the proletariat this became a confession.

Now, the remarkable thing is that Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels drew this conclusion from their observations, primarily of life in the British Empire; but this doctrine has been most intensively adopted, so that it has become orthodoxy, within the German working class. The most genuine Marxists were to be found among the German workers. And for those who can study such things according to the fundamentals of reality, the matter is such that they realize that the Marxist doctrine could only arise within the British Empire from the observation of British conditions. Only a man who had gone through Hegelian dialectic thinking, a man steeped in the utopian sentiment of the Saint-Simon school and who had looked at Owen's and other socialist experiments, but who at the same time observed how entrepreneurship and the proletariat relate to one another in English industrialism , and how there is an absolute lack of understanding, a mere adjustment to a fight, only such a person, who has gone through all this, who has just landed with his observation where, so to speak, the economic, the purely economic process stood before him in pure culture, could think up something like that. When Marx thought this up, Germany, for example, was still far from being an industrialized country in which one could have thought up what Karl Marx thought. You needed German thoughts of Hegel's teachings to think through the industrial-economic system so astutely. But Germany itself was still far too much an agrarian and not at all an industrial country at the time to be able to observe what was necessary to arrive at this Marxist method of observing economic life.

There are, of course, older socialist teachings within Germany, for example Weitling's “Gospel of a Poor Sinner” or Marlo's socialist experiment. Marlo was a professor in Kassel, Winkelblech is his real name. Then there is Rodbertus; but Rodbertus relies mainly on agrarian conditions. All these things are really only small beginnings of social feeling compared to the forcefulness of the Marxist view. What Karl Marx did could only be gained through observation of the object, namely in the British Empire, where industrialism was already so advanced in the first half of the nineteenth century. But then, after it was gained, it was able to take root thoroughly in the burgeoning industrialism, to take root thoroughly among the proletariat of burgeoning industrialism within Germany.

It is quite understandable that it was able to take root there. For when a person like Hegel lives in such a region, he does not fall from the sky like a meteor, but rather he represents only the concentrated power, precisely with regard to such a quality, as it is with Hegel, the concentrated power of tendencies that are already present in the people. Karl Marx had, as it were, learned his dialectical thinking in Germany and carried it over from Germany to England. It is understandable that what he had developed there found the deepest understanding in Germany, that his thinking was now suitable for being applied in the transformation from the heights where one had only learned to think to comprehension, to the attempt to comprehend the economic process. If you only have Hegel – isn't it true, I have characterized this for you – well, you can think afterwards, but you have nothing in your hands. But now Marx, under the influence of the British Empire, of the industrialism of the British Empire, has changed thinking so much that he presented the proletariat with the following: When the crisis has come, you will have all that the people who are sucking you dry have. You just need to think like that, then you're doing enough. Just be understanding; the locomotive is running, just give it a push sometimes to make it go faster. That's the only thing you can do. Of course, what you think is also just an ideology, but what you think has an effect in turn. Your thoughts come from economic life, and healthy economic thinking cannot be acquired through study, but only by being a proletarian, because economic thinking comes only from this class. So you are a proletarian. Because you are a proletarian, you think correctly in the sense of modern times. That is where your ideology develops, with which you can in turn have an effect, by giving the locomotive a push. Now we have something of use! This is not just Hegelianism, nor Saint-Simonism, nor Owenism, because Hegelianism gives thoughts that do not intervene in reality, Saint-Simonism gives social feelings, but they are like saying: “Warm up, dear stove,” without putting wood in. Robert Owen and others have failed with individual socialist enterprises; but Karl Marx has pointed out a process that all of humanity is undergoing, the proletariat across all countries across the entire earth, which consists of the expropriation of the expropriation, that the means of production are socialized. There is therefore an intrinsic reason why what has been seized upon by German thought has, to a certain extent, also taken most hold in Germany, so that the most orthodox Marxism has arisen there.

The strange thing is that Marx could fabricate such a doctrine in England, but it is not applicable to England itself, because people there do not accept it for the very reason that the contrast between entrepreneur and worker does not exist to the same extent. I think I have mentioned this. There the entrepreneur and the worker are closer. I can also give you individual proofs for this. I will give you one such example. All these things, which are mentioned from a spiritual-scientific point of view, can also be fully proven by empirical facts. You see, Marx worked with astute Hegelian thinking, which is mainly German thinking. His Marxist system found sympathetic support precisely in the German proletariat. Eduard Bernstein, who then spent more time in England, studied not so much the industrial economic process as the views of the people, the proletarians, the social currents there. He was less schooled in Hegel — after all, Bernstein was still alive. He did not apply Hegel's astute dialectical thinking to the English situation, but rather adapted his thinking more to English proletarian thinking itself. When he returned to Germany, after he had long been banned from Germany and found asylum in London, his view of things became what is known as socialist revisionism, that is to say, a watered-down, no longer Marxist way of thinking that has actually been little understood and has only gained followers – not within the proletarian-socialist party, but within the various trade union circles – because it is somewhat more accommodating towards the powers that be than Marxism. You see, there you have living proof: someone who has adapted to English proletarian thinking has not come to Marxism, just as the German proletariat has directly embraced Marxism, because although this Marxism could be fabricated in England, it does not have the soil in England itself, it does not have the soil in the people. It found its soil in the German workers above all. From there it then spread in many directions, but in the same orthodox rigidity, firmness, with that tremendous power of faith, but not so easily elsewhere as within the German proletariat.

This is very important to note, because it characterizes the German essence, the German proletarian essence, its whole position in the world, especially at the present time when the social question plays its great role. And this must also be borne in mind if one wants to thoroughly understand the current world-historical position of the social questions, if one wants to understand them in the context of the catastrophic political events of the present.

You see, it is a theory, I said before – despite the fact that all theory is declared to be mere ideology – it is a theory that has penetrated hearts and minds and developed an enormous intensity of belief. But in becoming a fact, it has, as it were, developed the rigidity of theories. This led to the modern proletariat, especially the German proletariat, being firmly educated, filled with faith in Marxism in its majority, but having no real understanding of certain elementary things if they did not agree with the fact of Marxism. Anyone who has had many discussions with modern proletarians, as I was able to do when I was a teacher at a workers' educational school and spoke to a wide variety of trade union and political associations of social democracy, anyone who was able to study the actual conditions there – I also gave speech exercises because the people were practical, they wanted to participate in political life, wanted to learn to talk —, who held discussion exercises by name, that is, was familiar with the way people discussed with each other, of course knows what things people were open to. If you lead discussion exercises, you simply throw in something here or there as a technical aid to stimulate the discussion. Especially if you only lead discussion exercises, you know – everyone knows – that you don't throw in what you throw in as your opinion, but as a trial. You could also say: What would you answer if, for example, you wanted to say to the proletarian: Yes, you see, the strike is something that is a very useful weapon in the modern proletarian class struggle; why don't you go on strike against the cannon factories? You are committing the great contradiction that you know full well that cannons are your worst enemies, but you are making them. You would achieve infinitely more in terms of the real effect of your theory if you refused to make cannons. — You see, no proletarian understood this very elementary objection, because they did not go that far. For them, it was not a matter of somehow intervening in what was actually developing. It was all the same to them what was being produced. For him, it was only about the single point: the transfer of the means of production, regardless of what is produced, into the social order, socialization of the means of production, regardless of what these means of production produce.

If you take this, you will see that it actually came down to a specific goal. Of course, if you, like the modern proletarian, are not entirely belligerent in your soul – the proletarian is naturally not belligerent because he does not expect any benefit from war – then you can only hope that you are contributing to overcoming war by making cannons just as well as anything else, if you yourself come to power, because then you can, after overthrowing the old powers, abolish cannon-making! And that was more or less, or is more or less, the way of thinking. It is a matter of acquiring power.

There you have indicated the point where Marxism, as it were, turns, where it enters into a kind of contradiction, where the dialectical process, I might say, takes revenge on it. For it starts from the assumption that economic life is, as it were, subject to self-control, that therefore what is to happen happens of itself; one need only push the locomotive here and there once. And yet he must strive to overthrow the old governing powers and place himself in their stead, that is, to strive for power that emanates from man. He wants to make what should happen happen. He is therefore appealing to man, counting on the fact that he will come out on top and then have the power, whereas previously the others had the power.

This was already to some extent in the theory. In practice, I would like to say, as revenge of dialectics on Marxism, this modern terrible catastrophe of war, which now suddenly plays power more or less into the hands of the proletariat over large areas of the earth, not at all out of the economic order, but out of a completely different order, or rather disorder, plays power into the hands of the proletarian. This is a remarkable process, extraordinarily remarkable. And it becomes even more remarkable when you see it, this process, in its entirety, when you see it now, so to speak, spreading across the whole world. Because, as I told you recently, the truth has only emerged over the years from this so-called war. That the Central Powers and the Entente were opposed to each other was, of course, untrue; in reality, this terrible economic struggle, which is now beginning, emerged. — That is the truth that emerged from that untruth, which masked what actually underlies world history. And actually, the two camps are already beginning to stand out a little today. The two camps stand out economically, in that it is becoming more and more apparent that the English-speaking population geographically and historically represents a kind of entrepreneurship as the ruling element, which in one way or another defeats the other world, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, more or less the proletariat as the ruling world. Just as entrepreneurs and workers face each other in the modern factory, so in the world the old Entente entrepreneurship faces the proletariat in the defeated powers. This is the grand, oppressive, tragically grand effect. We cannot study what is happening today other than by understanding it in the context of the whole proletarian socialist question.

But on the world-historical stage, not only what I have just hinted at will unfold, but another element is disconcertingly mixed into what is actually only an economic struggle, a huge economic struggle. The economic struggle arises within humanity, and it will be an economic struggle that will be fought in a terrible way between one half of the world and the other half of the world. The economic struggle within humanity is based on the development of the senses and the nervous system. And in the fifth post-Atlantean period, in the age of the consciousness soul, the English-speaking world is particularly organized for the sense-nervous system, because in this period the nervous system develops only utilitarian, material thoughts, tending to turn the world into one big commercial enterprise. But the world of blood, the other pole in the life of man, the world of blood, has a disturbing effect on this world of the sensory nervous system. It will throw its wave into what the sensory-nervous life stirs up on the one hand as a purely economic struggle, the world of blood, initially represented by the united Slavic outposts: Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, Slovaks and so on, until the other wave with the purified blood, with the spiritualized blood in Eastern Europe, the Russian-Slavic, will then play into it. , Slovenes, Poles, Slovakians, and so on, until the other wave of purified blood, of spiritualized blood, in the east of Europe, the Russian-Slavic, will play into it. While from the West the East and Central Europe are to be made into a large area for the consumption of the products of the producing world of the West, not only the revolt of the consuming proletariat of the East will radiate towards the West, but above all the restless wave of blood. Blood and nerves could also be called that which comes into the world and wants to be understood, which wants to be mastered with understanding. It was already involved in this military catastrophe. Study the effects of German shipbuilding and the German fleet, navy, the German colonization system, study the things that the far-sighted but selfish Chamberlain negotiated with the simple-minded German government at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and what then did not come about, then you will have such approaches, but some of the many approaches to the great economic process that played into this so-called war. And if you study the so-called Oriental question with its last phase, the unfortunate Balkan war, then you have the other thing, the wave of blood that counteracted the economic war. This is already playing a role in the current catastrophe. These things need to be understood.

In the last few reflections, I have tried to introduce you to the ideas and impulses that have been moving proletarian circles for a long time, that are alive in proletarian circles, and that will contribute the most essential thing to what will be world-shaking events from the present into the near future. Today, in order to bring these considerations to some kind of conclusion tomorrow, I would like to point out some of the forces that are available for the present from the past, so to speak, that can be perceived by the observer, especially the observer of spiritual science, as forces that have been preparing themselves in the past, are now are there, but which are actually not as obvious as most people today believe, but which must be taken into account by anyone who, at any point in world development, and at one point everyone is indeed, wants to participate in the shaping of events - one can already speak of such a shaping of events - that will form from the present into the future.

What happens always happens out of certain forces that have their center here or there and then radiate in different directions. We have seen how, in the last four and a half catastrophic years, long-standing forces have been unleashed in many different directions, taking on the most diverse forms, so that what has happened in the last four and a half years has taken place shows clearly distinguishable epochs, even if they are short in time, and one cannot get by with simply referring to these events of the last four and a half years as the “war” of the last years. The events came to a warlike ignition at a certain point, I would say. But then quite different forces were added to the things that first, I might say, shone more illusively into human consciousness and were also interpreted in the most illusory way by the broadest circles. In a relatively short time, people's decisions and impulses of will became quite different from what they had been before.

All this must be carefully considered. In the future, one will see that here and there these or those impulses of will will emerge. In one place, in one center, people will want one thing, in another center they will want another. These impulses of will, which will emanate from groups of people, will interpenetrate and mutually oppose each other in the most diverse ways. There is no possibility of thinking of a harmony of the effective forces, but the only thing to be considered at first is that the individual really acquires understanding for what occurs here or there. Today very few people are at all prepared to assess this or that in the right way, because people have become too accustomed to judging things according to preconceived opinions, according to catchwords. In the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, people have gradually been educated in such a way that they have diverted their attention from what really matters. As a result, it is hardly possible today to easily assess the weight of the volitional impulses emanating from this or that group of people in the right way. The course of recent events has provided sufficient evidence of this. This evidence will one day be recorded by history. Perhaps sooner than people think, they will be recorded by history. But for those who want to form an opinion on events in any way, it is necessary that they develop the will today to assess the free events, to assess the events.

I say: there is plenty of evidence for what I have just said. One only needs to provide a striking example, a proof whose validity unfortunately still extends far into the present, in that in this respect, in places where the judgments should not be clouded, these judgments are often clouded. In the course of the past few years we have had the distressing experience that precisely people who were in positions of responsibility here or there in the most diverse fields, that people who had to direct or manage this or that or even just had to judge this or that – because a great deal depends on judgment, on so-called true public opinion, which is sometimes actually is the unexpressed thought of men and which has nevertheless a certain deep meaning -, we have made the experience and it still works in the present, that people in decisive places or also in non-decisive places, which however are still taken into consideration, have formed illusion judgments about everything, about which they should have had a healthy judgment. I have already mentioned the fact that the German people in particular have been given a bad reputation by foreigners, which has had more influence than one might think in the course of recent events: that is the reputation of the German Kaiser. This judgment of the German Emperor is now being somewhat corrected by the very latest events, but it is only just beginning to be corrected. The worst thing about these judgments was that it had an almost devastating effect, considering this man to be an important man. If he had not been considered an important man, but a highly insignificant one, not at all relevant to the events, as he was throughout the years since he came to power, then the terrible judgment of the foreign countries would not have come about, which – as history will show – has caused greater devastation than one can even imagine today.

Not true, it will certainly help to correct the situation if we look at the terrible fear that a few people in Germany had when this man, still reluctant to resign, fled to headquarters in the last few days, in order to find some information at headquarters that might help him to hold on, to somehow hold on to the old conditions. If one could correctly assess the voices of those who always advised him to return to Berlin, where he belongs, then one must say that this shows the weight of necessary judgments. Things must not only be thought, they must be weighed, they must be weighed. It is highly reckless when, for example, an article appeared in a Basel newspaper yesterday, effectively apologizing for the German Kaiser and accusing the German people. This German people has truly suffered enough over decades from all that has been achieved through the insignificance and theatrical exaggeration of all circumstances, through the tiresome bullying. And when, as happened in yesterday's Basler Zeitung, the German people are now being accused in the most foolish way, by making the foolish claim that this man was merely an exponent of the German people – which he was absolutely not – then this is an act of profound recklessness that must be condemned unconditionally. It is important today that such reckless judgments do not gain a foothold, especially in neighboring countries. People must look at such judgments, which are likely to poison the whole atmosphere into which we must enter.

These things must really be looked at today with a more penetrating eye. One must not sleep in the face of these things, one must be awake. One must really be able to take these things in with a non-emotional, but with a truly intellectual temperament, and one must feel an indignation, feel it intellectually, when such follies are brought into the world today that are likely to completely distort a proper judgment. And an objective judgment is necessary today above all. Try to take things really as they are to be taken today, by taking them in their weight, by not spreading opinions about things that stir up sentiment, with an indifferent humor, which is no humor, and let everything slide, since it is nevertheless about events that, each in itself, can have an enormous, far-reaching, world-historical significance. These things must be observed today against a more urgent background. And I would very much like to see something enter the hearts of those who want to profess anthroposophy that I would call a world-historical sense of judgment. I would like something to enter into your hearts that constitutes the importance of the moment, that you really get beyond the mood that has never been there since I tried to bring an anthroposophically oriented worldview into the world , that the mood would change from one that takes what is presented in Anthroposophy only as a Sunday afternoon sermon, as something intended only to warm the heart and to soothe, to temper the soul. No, everything based on an anthroposophically oriented worldview was intended to guide hearts and souls into that world current that has been gathering since the end of the nineteenth century, that pointed more and more to the significant, great events that have come to shake humanity and will continue to come more and more. Everything was geared towards directing hearts to the forces at work, not just to please people's ears with something that tempers souls and warms hearts a little, so that when they have absorbed what an anthroposophically oriented worldview offers, they can sleep with a certain more peaceful soul than they would otherwise be able to sleep with. Today, the individual is no longer able to look only to themselves, to simply receive a new religion to soothe their own heart. What is demanded of humanity calls upon the individual to participate in what surges and billows through human sociality.

To do this, it is necessary to look at things in a larger context. I admit that it was necessary in the course of the last few years, under the impulses that the anthroposophically oriented worldview was to bring to people's hearts, to bring a lot in quick succession because time was pressing, to let ideas quickly replace each other. If the material that had to be presented during the course of a week had sometimes been available a month or even longer, it could have been offered in small portions, which, due to the urgency of the times, necessarily had to be brought to the hearts quickly, it might have been absorbed more deeply into the souls. But that was not possible. Time was pressing, and events have shown that time was pressing. I admit that the speed with which the teachings of the anthroposophically oriented worldview were presented to the members of the anthroposophical movement sometimes led to the fact that the later erased the earlier. But one cannot be in such a serious matter without changing one's whole mind. And in a certain sense, the word that had to be spoken again and again at the time of the founding of Christianity is being repeated in the present: Change your mind. It is not enough that we accept this or that teaching in terms of content; what matters is that we change our whole way of thinking, that we strip away everything that was decisive for the direction of our judgment from the nineteenth century, which can truly be called, as I said earlier in reference to a saying, the century of indecent psychology, of indecent soul direction, where, because of that lack of trust in the divine spiritual powers of the soul of which I spoke yesterday, one can see only arbitrariness or only powerlessness or only inaction within the human soul, where one has never grasped anything like Fichte's saying: “Man can what he should; and when he says, ‘I cannot,’ he means, ‘I will not’.” This nineteenth century was a century of great scientific achievements. But these achievements were such that they paralyzed the will of men and awakened the belief that everything that comes out of the human breast comes out of it only as something purely accidental. That the Divine Eternal radiates out of every human breast and that every human being is responsible for representing the Divine Eternal through himself, that is what the nineteenth century completely suppressed, that is what the Goethean Age into the age of philistinism; that is what makes today's intelligentsia so unprepared for all that I have indicated to you and what runs through millions and millions of proletarian souls as an impulse.

Understanding is the first thing that matters in the present. Doing will only come when people have really tried to understand. None of the things that the bourgeoisie, for example, believes today could be good in the future, none of them will somehow attack the impulses that I have given you these days as the impulses of the proletariat striving from bottom to top. Some of the quackery emanating today from those who should have learned from the events of the past decades would be tragicomic if it were not so tragic.

So today, in order to prepare for something that is of immediate relevance and that I still have to present, I would like to say that we are creating a larger basic tableau, creating a background, so to speak. You see, everything that has an effect on modern society, everything that acts as forces that will discharge in the most diverse ways towards the future, comes from certain basic forces that interact in the most diverse ways. Yesterday I pointed out in conclusion that the struggle, which is a purely material struggle, will be staged more and more from the West and will plunge humanity into materialistic struggles. From the East, the blood will counteract what comes from the West as an economic struggle. We must interpret this word in more detail, for it will be extraordinarily important in the future in social terms and is important for anyone who wants to form a clear judgment. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to talk to a wide variety of people about the things that should be taken from the active forces in order to give the future this or that direction here or there. At every opportunity to discuss something effective, I was almost horrified, I would say, oppressed by the short-sightedness that has gradually taken over the judgment of modern humanity. Today, it is taken for granted that anyone who wants to have a say in what is developing should know the national conditions here or there. But people do not seek this knowledge in the ways in which it must necessarily be sought today, and that is why grotesque and grandiose errors arise. The one error I have mentioned is only a partial error. In order to visualize the full weight of what is involved, it must be pointed out that the time is now running out when whole masses were driven into the most nonsensical judgments.

Yesterday I showed you that the majority of people, because that is the proletariat, have a power of belief that extends only to purely material things. I had to tell you: if the power of belief, which, for example, has developed over decades in the proletariat through Marxist impulses, if this power of belief had existed to even the slightest degree in the bourgeoisie, things would be somewhat different than they unfortunately are today. But it would then have been necessary for precisely those people who, by virtue of their social position, would have had the opportunity to take advantage of this opportunity — since they did not do so, they must do so in the future — to enter the paths to judgment, on which alone real judgment can be gained; I do not mean judgment about this or that, but judgment in general. Just consider that not just one nation, but people over a wide area, were able for years to consider two generals to be important people, who were in fact highly insignificant people: Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Such a distortion of judgment for entire broad sections of the population is a characteristic of our time. This is mainly due to the fact that people do not feel the responsibility involved in forming a judgment. Of course I know that one could say: Yes, if someone had already formed a judgment, a correct judgment, for example, about Ludendorff, who must be seen as a pathological nature, who must be seen as a nature that, so to speak, since the beginning of the war can no longer be judged from any other than a psychiatric point of view. I know that one could say: What would such a judgment have helped at a time when a judgment was not allowed to be pronounced? Of course that is true, but that is not the point. The point is that people should at least form their own judgment in the first place. And now it must be said all the more, because the power of events has meant that individual judgments have to be corrected by the so-called central powers. This power of events has not yet arrived for the correction of the judgments of the Entente and the American powers. And that would bring a tremendous disaster upon humanity if the correction of the judgments were also to wait until the power of events speaks; if now, for example, there were an inclination to worship the rulers of the Entente; if the hearts did not mature the resolve to see clearly how things really are. If worship of success should arise now, if the destiny of judgments should be determined only by the outer course of events, then it would have tremendously devastating consequences for the development of humanity. That will not be a sign of how one or the other will be able to express themselves under the gagging of judgment, but at least in his or her own way, man should form an independent judgment about that which is. One forms this opinion when one feels within oneself that one is not a personality flung into the world by chance, who can think whatever he wants, but when one feels that one is a member of the divine world order and that the power which places a judgment in this heart, in this soul, is a power to which one is responsible even with one's most intimate thoughts. In the course of the events of the last four and a half years, many things have happened. This or that has happened here or there. It can be said that almost nothing has happened about which, for example, the German government or the German military leadership has formed a correct judgment in a responsible position. They have judged wrongly about everything and continued to act under false judgment. These are clear proofs of how little the present and the recent past have educated people to judge things.

I said that I have had occasion to talk to a wide variety of people. People do have the opinion, in abstract terms, that one should get to know what is going on in the various popular movements, for example. They are satisfied when one or another journalist is sent to this or that area and writes his newspaper article, and people do not know what to make of it when the same principle is applied to the field of spiritual life, as is necessary in mathematics, for example, where elementary basic maxims are taken as starting points and the furthest conclusions are reached. When bridges or railways have to be built, people admit that science is needed to build them, a science that starts from the simplest things in order to arrive at the most far-reaching conclusions. But people want to do history, to make history, without any principles, and they will not be able to do anything with it when you tell them: No one can judge European conditions without at least knowing the elementary fact that on the Italian peninsula the sentient soul is the soul of feeling, which is primarily effective in the folk, in France the soul of mind or feeling, in the British Empire the soul of consciousness, and so on, as we have come to know it. These things are the basis of what happens, just as the multiplication table is the basis of arithmetic. And unless you start from these things in relation to knowledge of the real conditions in the world, you are an incompetent person, no matter what your position in the structure of social or political life in today's world, just as you would be an incompetent person in bridge building if you did not know the simplest things in mathematics. People must come to realize this; they must learn to see through it. For the future of humanity depends on people being able to see through this. That is what matters.

Because only when you know these basic facts can you understand the various forces that radiate into what is happening. You cannot properly assess the path of a country peddler to the city if you are unable to place the peddler's journey from the countryside to the city within the fabric of social life. Humanity was allowed to live through social life in an atavistically drowsy state to a certain extent, and in the nineteenth century people preserved this state in order to sleep more deeply. In the future, humanity will not be allowed to continue living in this way. Rather, it will be obliged to think about what the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on think about the course of human evolution and what they radiate into what people do. The smallest must be linked to the greatest in everyday judgment. If today you see councils, workers' and soldiers' councils, emerging in this or that country, if you are in danger of seeing workers' and soldiers' councils emerging everywhere except in the Entente countries, then you must be able to appreciate the significance of such a fact in the right way. What is needed above all is to gain a judgment about these things. Do not ask first: What is to be done? What is to be done will come by itself, if only a real judgment is present, so that the smallest thing can be linked to the great lines of world events. The great world event, that is the peculiarity of our time, is becoming topical in these days; it will no longer be a mere theory, but will become topical.

For example, in the course of European events – American events are only a colonial appendix to European events – forces are at play that have been in preparation for a long, long time. The observer of European conditions – and we have been pointing this out from various points of view in recent days – should pay attention to the particular configuration of, say, the social conditions in the British Empire, and he should pay attention to the particular configuration of the social conditions in Eastern Europe, in Russia and in Central Europe, and he should pay attention to the forces that are at play there. For on the surface of events these events mask themselves in many ways, and he who observes only the surface of events will easily arrive at, as one says, catchwords, one can also say catch-ideas, catch-concepts, through which he wants to master events. In many cases, superficial stuff is going on in people's heads today. But in people's impulses, forces are at play that have been preparing themselves not just for centuries, but for millennia, and that are only now beginning to take on their very significant form.

You see, there is no possibility that that international entity, which I have characterized as the mood of the proletariat, which is mainly nourished by Marxist ideas, in the broadest sense, of course, Marxist ideas, really spreads across Europe. That is an illusion of the proletariat. And since the proletariat will one day wield a certain power, this is a very pernicious illusion of the proletariat. We must not overlook the fact that the worst would come to pass if this illusion of the proletariat were to gain world domination, for then one would be compelled to overcome this domination again. It would be better to see how things are preparing and how they can be counteracted. Even assuming that the impulses of the proletariat come to power in certain areas, what would happen as a result? Well, they would come to power externally; you can kill as many people here or there as Bolshevism killed in Russia. But all these ideas are only suitable for plundering, only suitable for consuming the old and not for establishing the new. When the ideas of the proletariat are realized socially, when they become established, then the existing values will be gradually consumed, consumed in rapid progression. Please take only such facts – I will show you a few, they could be greatly increased – take just one such fact: the treasury in Russia, for example, still had an income of 2,852 million rubles in the ill-fated year 1917. Bolshevism broke in. It practiced plundering. The state revenue of Russia in 1918: 539 million rubles! That is about one-fifth of the previous year's revenue. From such figures you can calculate for yourselves the progression that must occur when plundering is carried out. One must not look at these things from the point of view of the judgments that are formed from above, but one must look at them from the point of view of how the objective course of events in human history unfolds under the influence of this fact. If this social order were to spread, one would arrive at zero, at nothing. But before this nothing happens, the reactions from the subconscious of people emerge here and there, and into the spreading proletarianism, which is permeated by Marxism, everything that has been prepared over the centuries, sometimes over millennia, in the beliefs, impulses, illusions or even follies of human beings must again mix in the most diverse centers. It will not mix in the same form in which it was there, but it will mix in a transformed form. Therefore, one must know it and be able to assess it in the right way.

Now the powers that are now partly doomed but partly still rule the world have always made it their more or less conscious or unconscious task to deceive people. How much has not been deceived by means of so-called historical instruction! In all kinds of countries, history is nothing more than a legend; history is only there to train people's minds to take the direction that seems pleasant to those in power and seems like the right direction. But the time has come when people will have to form their own judgment. Over the years, much has been done in this regard, precisely in order to correct one judgment or another. But today something else must be asked. Today, among the—one does not know how many to say in terms of numbers—among the hundreds of questions that arise urgently, above all the question must be asked: How did the various power relations, the various social structures come about, for which people here or there are enthusiastic or have been enthusiastic or have quickly forgotten how to enthuse in recent weeks? For years, humanity has lived by catchwords, catchwords such as “Prussian militarism” or “German militarism,” “League of Nations,” “international law,” and so on, which were just catchwords. These have dominated and confused people's minds. As I said, a lot has been said here to correct these judgments. But the important thing is to realize that, of course, these things will not appear in the same form in the near future, but we must know them so that we will recognize them when they appear in a new form.

It is not to be assumed, for example, that the Hohenzollern dynasty will reappear as such. But the feelings of the people among whom the Hohenzollern dynasty was able to live will continue to live, masquerading in a different form. Or, it is not even very likely that, even with the will of the Entente, which to a certain extent certainly exists, the unfortunate Habsburg dynasty will somehow resurface. But that is not the point. The sentiments which were able to keep this Habsburg dynasty in the hearts of men will live on. They will not, of course, go so far as to restore the Habsburg dynasty, but they will contribute to that reaction against proletarianism of which I spoke; they will reappear in quite a different form. Therefore, it is necessary to see through what will arise from the most diverse centers with a truly healthy judgment. Then it is a matter of looking at the circumstances, but looking with a gaze that is directed by reality. The facts as such have no value. In my books—you can find this in the most diverse places—I have spoken of fact fanaticism, which has such a devastating effect. This fanaticism for facts is rooted in the belief that what is seen outside is already a fact. It becomes a fact only by being harnessed to right judgment. But right judgment must have behind it the impulse of the right directing power.

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Take an example. You know that I have often said that in Central Europe all folk impulses are primarily conditioned by the fact that in this Central Europe the folk spirit works through the I, in contrast to the most diverse regions of Western Europe. But the I has the peculiarity, I might say, of circling up and down among the other regions, which are fixed. So let us assume: in the south and west, the sentient soul, mind or emotional soul, consciousness soul, but in the center the I (it is drawn). The I can be in the consciousness soul, in the mind soul, in the sentient soul. It oscillates up and down, so to speak, it finds its way into everything. Hence the peculiarity: If you look to the west of Europe, you have, I would say, sharply defined national contours. There is sharply defined nationality, nationality that you can really, I would say, define, that is within a good framework. Look to Central Europe, preferably to the German people, and you have a nature that is defined on all sides. And now follow history, judging these basic maxims in the right way. Look wherever you want, in the west as far as America, in the east as far as Russia, and see how German nationality has worked as a ferment everywhere. It penetrates into these foreign regions, is within them today, and will have an effect in the future, even if it has denationalized itself, as they say; it penetrates into these regions because the I soars and descends. It loses itself in it. You can find this out quite precisely from the fundamental nature of the people. Just look at how this whole Russian culture is permeated with the German character, how hundreds of thousands of Germans have immigrated there over a relatively short period of time, how they have given the national character its stamp to infinite depths. Look at the whole of the East and you will find this influence everywhere. Go back centuries and ask the question today. Take Hungary, for example, which is supposedly a Magyar culture. This Magyar culture is based in many ways on the fact that all kinds of Germanic elements have been introduced there as a ferment. The whole northern edge of Hungary is inhabited by the so-called Zipser Germans, who have naturally been majoritized, tyrannized, denationalized, who have suffered unspeakably, but who have provided a cultural ferment. If we go further east, to Transylvania, we find the Transylvanian Saxons, who once lived on the Rhine. If we go further to the so-called Banat, there you have the Swabians, who immigrated from Württemberg and who have left behind a cultural legacy. And if I were to show you a map of Hungary, you would see here the broad border of German people who have become Magyars, here the Zipser Germans, in the southeast the Transylvanian Saxons, here in Banat the Swabians, not counting those who have become individualized. And the peculiarity of this German nationality is that, precisely because its national spirit works through the ego, it perishes outwardly as a nation, so to speak, but forms a cultural ferment. That is what can contribute to the assessment of the effective forces. That is such an effective force.

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Let Andrássy and Karolyi work away, let an old politician in the old feudal sense, as they say, work away; the only reason that what they are doing is not a slogan is that we must take into account what will be brought about in the future from the subconscious of the people through such historical events, as I have shown you one - and hundreds of others are involved -, in the future. And that radiates into the rest of what is happening in Europe, and basically one has to proceed quite thoroughly if one wants to get to know this complicated structure of Europe today. For example, one must not forget, when judging an important participant in the future shaping of Europe, namely the European East, that to a certain extent everyone who spoke the truth about Russia in a historical context was not only a heretic, but also in mortal danger. Russian history is, of course, not much more than the other histories, but it is also a historical legend. For example, those who learn Russian history in the usual sense are not even aware of what was developed here a few years ago: that at about the same time as the Normans were exerting their influence in western Europe, Norman-Germanic influence was also being exerted in the east. And today's Russian history has an interest in showing, going back further and further, how everything, absolutely everything, comes from Slavic people, from Slavic elements, and also an interest in denying that the decisive element, the one element from which what is in the East is still deeply influenced today, comes from impulses that are Norman-Germanic in origin. You don't get much further back in Russian history than telling people – well, that's the stereotypical sentence that is always said –: We have a great country, but we have no order, come and rule us. That is more or less how it begins, while in truth it should be pointed out that what had spread in Russia by the time of the Mongol invasion was of Germanic-Norman origin and had a Germanic-Norman social configuration. But that means that something spread in Russia at that time that was overgrown by later conditions, which, I might say, has been preserved and conserved in its purest form, for example, within the social fabric of the British Empire. There you have a straight line of development. If you take the social development of the British Empire, you have a current that naturally changes over the centuries, but which is the straight line continuation of the old Norman-Germanic social constitution. In the east, towards Russia, you have the same current spreading out, but under the Mongol yoke, under the Mongol influence, I would say, from a certain point onwards it breaks off. That is to say, if the same thing that was prepared under Norman-Germanic influence in the social structure of the British Empire at the time of William the Conqueror and developed until the nineteenth century to occupy its present position in the world had developed further in Russia, Russia would be similar to England.

Nowhere has anything that has worked more deeply in the hearts and souls of people than in Russia. Now, we must not forget: what is it that comes with the Norman-Germanic influence? This Norman-Germanic influence, in working itself out, has also had counter-effects in the West. I say: here it has developed in a straight line, it has developed in the straightest line, but it has also had counter-effects here. What it encountered here as a counter-effect, from which it emancipated itself to a certain extent and which modified its developmental current, is, on the one hand, the Western Roman Catholic Church and, on the other, Romanism in general, which contains an abstract legal element and an abstract political element. So that we see the national influence, from which all the stratifications of the estates, all the formation of classes and castes, as they are found within the British essence, originate, joined by what came from the church and what came from Romanism. All this is at work in it, but in such a way that, to a certain extent, the British character emancipated itself early on from the profound influence of the Church, which then continued to have an effect and flourish in Central Europe and still does so today; but that, comparatively speaking, this character emancipated itself less from the Romanesque-abstract element of legal-political thinking. The truth is that this Norman-Germanic element has also extended into the various Slavic areas, which have been present on the territory of present-day Russia since ancient times, as the dominant element, as the element that has shaped the social structure.

This Norman-Germanic nature is based on a certain view, which then finds expression in social facts. This Norman-Germanic nature is based on the view that what has blood relationship, closer blood relationship, should also have this blood relationship in an inherited or hereditary way in a social way, based on a certain social institution of the clan and the superclan, the nearest family clan and the clan standing above it, which then leads to the prince, who rules over the sub-clan, the clan that goes further. This is what a social constitution brings about according to a certain blood configuration.

This is in the sharpest possible contradiction to what, for example, the Romanesque-legal-political essence assumes. The Romanesque-legal-political essence brings abstract connections everywhere, sets up everything according to contracts and the like, not according to blood. This is something that brings the facts less to mind than to paper, something radical. Only one thing was thoroughly diverted by this Germanic-Norman nature. If it had worked alone – this is, of course, a hypothesis, it could not have worked alone – but if it had worked alone, there would never have been a monarchical state constitution in any European territory. For a monarchical state constitution does not lie in the development of those social impulses that emanate from the Norman-Germanic essence, but rather, this Norman-Germanic essence is based on the impulse of an organization according to clans, according to family configurations, which are relatively individual and independent of each other, and only from certain points of view do they unite under a prince, who then controls the overarching clan. And above all: apart from this, a monarch could never have taken hold of this Norman-Germanic essence, and pure monotheism could never have come from this essence, because it came from the south – I would actually say from the south-east – through the theocratic-Jewish element. If the Norman-Germanic element had remained purely isolated, it would be easier today to assert the rightful monotheism, which in turn does not accept the abstract single God, but rather the succession of hierarchies, angels, arch angeloi and so on, and not the nonsense that the one God, for example, protects two armies that are furiously facing each other, the Christian and the Turk at the same time, because he is the one God of the whole world. The nonsense that proliferates as abstract monotheism would never have been able to take hold, because within this element, abstract monotheism was not present. The people were pagans in the modern sense, that is, they recognized the most diverse spiritual beings that guide the forces of nature, and thus lived in a spiritual world, albeit in an atavistic way. What monotheism is, a nonsense, was only imposed from the southeast by the theocratic element. That is why it is so difficult today to get across what must necessarily be accepted: the diversity of spiritual beings that guide natural forces and natural events, the gods. But it was on Russian soil that the damping down of what came from the north took place to a certain extent. Some time ago I even talked about the name Russian here. You will remember that I pointed out that the name Russian indicated where these people came from in the north. They called themselves Vaeringjar.

But the actual idea of the state is a construct that should be carefully studied. This idea of the state comes, in a certain respect, from the same corner of the weather where many other significant things for Europe come from. Especially when discussing such things, one must remember that history can only be considered symptomatically. When we consider some phenomenon that is an external fact, we must recognize it as a symptom. In Russia, as long as this Norman-Germanic influence was present and shaping the social structure, there was no sign of any state idea. The Slavic areas were, so to speak, closed in on themselves, and what had spread was what I have called the clan idea. The clan idea has entwined this in a network-like way. The various closed Slavic areas had within them what modern man might call the democratic element, but at the same time linked to a certain longing for a lack of domination, with a certain insight that centralized ruling powers are not actually needed to bring order to the world, but only to create disorder. This lived in these closed Slavic areas. And in what extended from the Norman-Germanic element, the clan idea actually lived, the idea that was connected with blood.

Now came the Mongol invasion. These Mongols are indeed portrayed as being quite evil. But the worst thing they did was actually demanding high tributes and taxes, and they were more or less satisfied when people paid their taxes, of course in the form of natural produce. But what they brought – and please take this as symptomatic and don't think that I am saying that the idea of the state came from the Mongols – what they brought at that time, taken symptomatically, is the idea of the state. The monarchical idea of the state comes straight from this corner of the world from which the Mongols also came, only that it was brought to the further west of Europe earlier. It comes from that corner of the world that one finds when one follows the culture, or, for that matter, the barbarian wave that rolled over from Asia. What remained in Russia of the Mongols is essentially the idea that a single ruler with his paladins has to exercise a kind of state rule. This was essentially borne by the monarchical idea of the khans, and that was adopted there. In Western Europe it was only adopted earlier, but it came from the same weather angle. And essentially it was a Tartar-Mongolian idea that put together the so-called state structure in Russia. And so for a long time precisely that which characterized the culture of the West from many points of view proved to be without influence in Russia: feudalism, which was actually without influence in Russia because, by skipping monarchy spread, which was always disturbed in the West, initially by feudalism, by the feudal lords, who actually always fought the central monarchical power and who were an antithesis to the monarchical power.

The Roman Church is the second. This was ineffective in the East because the Eastern Church had already separated from the Western Church in the tenth century. The Greek-Roman, Roman-Greek education, as it has worked in the West and has contributed very much to the development of the modern bourgeoisie, has been ineffective in Russia. Therefore, the monarchical idea of the state, which has been brought in by the Mongolians, has taken its deepest roots there.

You see, you have a few of the impulses that one must know, because they will appear in the most diverse ways, masked, changed, in metamorphosis. Here or there you will see this or that flash up. You will only appreciate it correctly if you appreciate it from this point of view, which I have now stated. And above all, you will recognize the importance of the fact that within the establishment of world domination by the English-speaking population, which I have been talking about for many years now, the training of the consciousness soul is essentially effective, that this is precisely appropriate to our age, and that a healthy judgment should be applied in assessing the circumstances.

The social question will play a major role in the shaping of conditions in the future. The social thinking that already exists among the proletariat can only lead to overexploitation, to degradation, to destruction. It is a matter of really realizing that the shaping that the social question assumes, the shaping in particular that the proletarian movement will assume, makes it necessary that what today is furthest removed from spirituality as proletarian feeling must be brought closer to spirituality. What seems to be furthest apart on the outside is intimately related on the inside: proletarian will and spirituality. Of course, the proletarian today fights against spirituality with his hands and feet – one can say with his hands and feet, because he does not fight much with his head. But what he wants, without knowing it, cannot be achieved without spirituality. Spirituality must join forces with it. And it must join forces in all areas. And one must really acquire a feeling that one is at an important turning point in time. The mood that has prevailed in the most diverse areas in the nineteenth century must pass.

If you observe individual events and evaluate them correctly, you can already see, I might say, if I may express myself trivially, which way the wind is blowing. Through Mr. Englert's kindness I was recently given a letter written from Russia, which very vividly describes present-day Russian conditions. It also talks about art. The way in which people are introduced to art is very interesting; but what they paint, these people who are brought in directly from the factory, people who have lung diseases and can no longer work in the factory and are then placed in an artistic institution so that they learn to paint something there, so that they are driven from the proletariat into art, the painting – they don't paint quite like they do in our dome, but you can see it, they start painting in such a way that from this beginning, what is painted in our dome will ultimately result, even if it is still called Futurism today. That is on the march. Especially in those things where there is no programmatic approach, it becomes clear what impulses lie in the present. Those who look at programs – not to mention government programs – will always go astray. Those who look at the impulses that develop alongside and between the programs, namely from the unconscious, will see much that is radiating in the world today. You can be quite sure that the paths will be found, even if it is difficult. Once people begin to read something straight from the impulses that are emerging today in the proletariat in such a primitive, predatory way, I will not say the things themselves, which are imperfect and must be replaced by others, but things like my mysteries or the anthroposophical books, they will only be read with the right interest by the better elements that are streaming upwards from the proletariat, while what the bourgeoisie licked its fingers around in the nineteenth century: Gustav Freytag's 'Soll und Haben' or similar works, or Gottfried Keller, will interest no one. Today, for example, it is an insult to humanity to mention Gottfried Keller in the same breath as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. While Conrad Ferdinand Meyer represents an element of the future, an element that actually contains true spiritual life for the future, Gottfried Keller is the bourgeois poet of the sleeping humanity of Seldwyler Switzerland.

This must be seen everywhere and in all areas. There will be no interest in the future for this when people put models in studios and imitate what nature can do much better and then delight in it, whether it looks really natural or whether it is really like the model. After that, one will demand that something is there in the world that is not made by nature itself. Understanding for this will have to be prepared. Therefore, the model as such had to be fought against here as well. You remember how I once spoke about art from this point of view years ago. An understanding must be created that one follows the impulses that are there. For example, the stupidity that people want to learn about how the people live, say, by reading Berthold Auerbach's “Village Stories” or similar stuff, where a person who knows the people, well, as one who goes out into the countryside on Sunday afternoons and looks at the people from the outside, describes how one has so beautifully described the people, must end. That is not what matters. What matters is not observing the temporary, but the eternal that lives in man must be observed more and more. That is what matters.

We will talk more about these things tomorrow.

I think you have seen that the momentous challenge that arises from the flood of human events and that we call the social movement is treated externally according to the peculiar forces of the time, treated from the point of view as if there were actually only a physical, a sensual world, precisely where it is most intensively considered and felt. The social question has indeed become effective as a proletarian demand. It lives in the proletarian demands in a certain, one might say abstract-theoretical way, and the danger exists that the abstract-theoretical way, which should never become an external fact, can become an external fact, or at least that it is demanded that it become an external fact. But this proletarian consciousness, from which the social question asserts itself today, is thoroughly imbued with a belief only in the material world, with its ethical addition of mere ethical utilitarianism, of mere utilitarian morality.

This is a fact that anyone today can actually grasp: that the ideas for the social movement are drawn from a certain belief only in material existence and the usefulness of human life and the useful powers of human life. But for those who see through life, it is especially significant that the actual enlightenment about the social question, namely about the ideas that are necessary for this social question in the present and the near future, cannot be obtained from any, even the most scientific, consideration of the external, physical-material world.

This is something that the present must know, that people of the present must penetrate. They must penetrate that the social question can only be solved on a spiritual basis, and that today its solution is sought without any spiritual basis. This expresses something tremendously important for our time. You see, the ideas needed for the social movement cannot be formed in the whole field that can be surveyed with the mere faculty of sense and the mind that is bound to this faculty of sense. These ideas, if they are to be seen in their direct effectiveness, lie entirely beyond the threshold that leads from the physical-sensual world to the supersensible world. The most necessary thing for the present and the near future, in terms of the development of human destiny, is to bring in certain ideas from beyond the threshold. The most characteristic phenomenon in the present is that such a bringing in from beyond the threshold is downright rejected. And all work in this field must be imbued with the will to overcome this reluctance to bring in socially effective ideas from beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

Of course, there is an extraordinary difficulty in this undertaking, a difficulty that simply presents itself when one considers that, since we are living in the age of the consciousness soul, so everything should or must actually be striven for more or less consciously, that it is necessary, necessary for an important contemporary demand of the present time, to become acquainted with truths that lie beyond the threshold of physical consciousness.

Now, of course, one can say that very few people at the present time have a proper appreciation of what lies beyond the threshold of consciousness. Very few people today have a proper appreciation of initiation and the wisdom of initiation, as it must actually prevail or must become prevalent in the present day. Those abilities that lie in every human soul and that bring in certain ideas from the supersensible, people of the present time, out of the often characterized comfort, do not want to make use of them. And it is also the case that one must say: there is a definite objective difficulty in this field. You must not forget: I might say, in their original form, the things and entities that lie beyond the threshold can only be observed by the one who has crossed this threshold. But this crossing of the threshold is indeed one of the most important events in one's personal life. It is also an event in one's personal life that is thrown into a special light when, as I have just done, it is brought into such close relation to the social question. The social question, as its name already indicates, is a matter of groups of people, of human contexts; the secret of the threshold is a matter of individuality. One could say that no one is actually in a position to communicate the secret of the threshold directly to another person if they know it. One could even say that it signifies a certain crisis in the human soul when the secret of the threshold becomes clear to one inwardly, out of certain contexts in which one has otherwise received it.

You, or rather those of you who have been involved for years in spiritual scientific contemplation, insofar as it is anthroposophically oriented, have all had the opportunity to find your way to the secret of the threshold. When you approach the secret of the threshold, you will definitely receive the consciousness through the thing itself, that one can speak well about the paths that lead to the secret of the threshold, but that one cannot make a direct statement about the secret of the threshold. Thus, in a sense, the secret of the threshold is an individual matter for each person, and yet it is necessary to bring from beyond the threshold precisely the most important ideas for social development. Today, the secret of the threshold is a very special matter, because today there is little trust from person to person. That is something that has terribly diminished among people, the trust from person to person, and it would be quite different for our social life if there were just a little more trust from person to person. Thus it is that today, when anyone knows the secret of the Threshold, knows it through becoming acquainted with the Dweller of the Threshold, a trust is established that is much too weak, or one that is wrongly directed, wrongly oriented, wrongly adjusted.

As you can see, this would be a rather hopeless situation if something else were not to happen. For one could say: Thus, for example, the social question can only be solved by initiates. — But the initiates will simply not be believed due to the lack of trust that people today have in each other. People will not believe that they have an insight into life. This can only be perceived in a certain area, namely, beyond the threshold, which they cannot speak of directly from person to person, at least not at all times and under all conditions. If, for example, someone were to carelessly communicate his experiences with the Dweller of the Threshold to another person who absorbs them emotionally or, let us say, in such a way that he does not place himself in the region of his soul in which he has practised a certain degree of self-discipline, and might even become one who, having received the secret of the Threshold in this way, would divulge it further. This would indeed be a transition of the secret of the Threshold into social life, but it would have a very bad consequence. It would cause the same thing that sometimes results from merely communicating the way to the secret of the threshold: people would be divided more or less into two camps, and people would be set against each other. For while the ideas coming from beyond the threshold, when they work in their true power, in their purified spiritual power, are likely to bring about social harmony among people, if they are scattered among people unrefined, they are likely to cause quarrels and wars among people.

You see, then, that there is something very peculiar about the Mysteries of the Threshold. And if something else did not intervene, the hopelessness of which I have spoken would be justified. But since something else does intervene, it must be said that the path which the future must take can be clearly characterized. Today it is the case that socially fruitful ideas can only be found by a few people who can make use of certain spiritual abilities that the vast majority of people today do not want to use, even though they lie in every soul. They not only consciously do not want to use them, but mostly unconsciously do not want to use them. But these few will have to set themselves the task of communicating what they extract from the spiritual world with regard to social ideas. They will translate it into the language into which the spiritual truths, seen in a different form beyond the threshold, must be translated if they are to become popular. They can become popular, but must first be translated into a popular language.

In view of the general character of the times, people will naturally not believe those initiated into the mysteries of the Threshold who speak about social ideas, because the necessary trust among people is not there. In today's democracy-crazed times – I should say democracy-addicted times – any social idea that is actually not a reality, as you can see from the above, any social idea that is directed towards the sensory world with the ordinary mind, will of course be In our present-day democracy-crazed age, one would naturally consider such a purely intellectually-derived social idea, which is none, to be democratically equivalent to what the initiate brings out of the spiritual world and what can really be fruitful. But if this democracy-craving view or feeling were to prevail, we would, in a relatively short time, experience social chaos in the most dreadful sense. But the other is precisely what is present and applies to an outstanding degree to the social ideas that are brought from beyond the threshold by initiates. I have emphasized it again and again: anyone who really wants to make use of his sound understanding, not his scientifically tainted understanding but his sound understanding of human nature, can always, even if he cannot find what only the initiate can find, test it in life and understand it once he has found it. And this is the path that socially fruitful ideas will have to take in the near future. There is no other way to make progress. Socially fruitful ideas will have to take this path. They will emerge here and there. At first, of course, as long as one has not examined, as long as one has not applied one's common sense to it, one can confuse any kind of Marchist thought with a thought of initiation. But when one will compare, reflect, and really apply common sense to the things, then one will indeed come to the distinction, then one will indeed realize that it is something different in reality content, what is brought from beyond the threshold from the secrets of the threshold, than that which is taken entirely from the sense world, such as Marxism.

In this way I have not characterized just any program, for in the near future humanity will have very bad experiences with programs; I have characterized a positive process that must take place. Those who know something about social ideas from initiation will have the obligation to communicate these social ideas to humanity, and humanity will have to decide to think about the matter. And by thinking about it, just by thinking about it with the help of common sense, the right thing will come out. This is so extraordinarily important that what I have just said now should really be seen as a fundamental truth of life for the near future, starting right from the present! It is not the demand that one should believe that one can do this or that from any arbitrary idea, but the demand is that one should believe: people must work together. Direct personal collaboration between people is necessary so that those who have the relevant ideas from the other side of the threshold are also among those working together. So you see, what is important for the present is not something to be trifled with. It is an extremely serious matter that confronts people from the present. And one can say: in the wide circle of human consciousness there is still little sense for the tremendous seriousness that applies precisely to these things.

There is a further difficulty, which at least those who can start from certain spiritual-scientific considerations in these matters must know. The social problem of the present day is international in its effects. Herein lies a fatal error, which has recently found practical expression in the fact that a man like Lenin, who was entirely oriented towards the West, towards England and America, was driven in a sealed car under the protection of the German government, to Russia in a sealed car, in order to bring about a situation there with which the German government, namely in the person of Ludendorff, believed it could make peace and maintain itself. This is based on the fallacy that something truly international, applicable everywhere, can actually be achieved. And precisely Leninism in Russia shows how impossible it is to graft something that originated entirely in the West onto Russian national identity, something that the West does not want at all.

When social harmony is sought in the near future, it will not be a matter of abstractly coming back to the fact that all people are equal with regard to their fundamental nature, but rather it will be a matter of people having to learn to understand each other in their individuality, also in the great, eternal forces that pass through human individuality. Today, it is still something extraordinary and exciting for some people to hear the things that are meant to help people learn to understand each other better. Today, you can experience it when you tell someone: the German national character is such that the national spirit speaks through the ego, while the Italian national character is such that the national spirit speaks through the sentient soul. You can experience it today when someone is able to say: well, the Italian is less valued because the sentient soul is less than the ego, for example. That is what people say. It is, of course, complete nonsense, because these things are not about establishing values, but about providing something that allows people all over the world – and today, people's destinies cannot be ordered in any other way than across the globe – to really learn to understand each other. From a certain point of view, nothing of this kind is more valuable or less valuable, but each has its task in the development of humanity. And then, of course, there is something in every human being that is connected with the mystery of the threshold, whereby he stands out from such a group-like nature, which is characterized by the fact that one says: there the sentient soul is at work, there the I, there the spiritual self, and so on. But today we need to know these things, otherwise people will always miss each other and yet not know much more about each other than at most two things: firstly, that most people have their nose in the middle of their face, or that what journalists know when they travel the countries is correct. Both are truths of roughly equal importance.

That is what it is about: not an abstract, general humanity, but a real connection between people based on an interest in the particular individual design that a person acquires by being placed in a specific national character. The time has come when such things, which are not only perceived as uncomfortable but sometimes even as hurtful, must become popular. We cannot move forward without such things becoming popular. This must be properly considered. But all these things are such that they are truly accessible to common sense. And if only this self-confidence would arise in a large number of people, this self-confidence that does not always say: Yes, I cannot see into the spiritual world after all, I just have to believe the initiate – but which says: Now, this or that is being claimed; but I want to apply my apply my common sense to understand it. If this self-confidence, but effective, energetic, not just abstract or theoretical, were to enter into a larger number of people, then it would be good and then an enormous amount would be gained, especially for the path that must be taken with regard to the social problem. But that is precisely the harm, that through human education in the nineteenth century, people have lost this self-confidence in their common sense, more or less. The harmful characteristics through which this self-confidence and thereby the use of human judgment has been forfeited, these harmful characteristics were also present in earlier times, but they were not so harmful because man did not live in the age of natural science, which necessarily demands of him that he really applies a unified judgment, that he applies his common sense completely. But that is precisely what has been most lacking in recent times.

The examples that can be given for this are not taken seriously at all. But I will give you an example that I could not only multiply a hundredfold, but a thousandfold. I have a treatise here; this treatise is called: “On Death and Dying from a Purely Scientific Point of View.” This essay is a speech, the reproduction of a speech that was held in the auditorium of the University of Berlin on August 3, 1911 by Friedrich Kraus. He wants to talk scientifically about the problems of death and dying and says a lot on 26 pages. This speech, which was held in memory of the founder of the Berlin University, King Frederick William III, was always held, and such speeches also happen at other universities. This speech, of course, also has a beginning, and I will read this beginning to you. It was a treatise on death and dying, delivered in a strictly scientific sense, at least in the opinion of the lecturer, in the opinion of the deans and senators standing around the magnificence and the other illustrious gentlemen of science, and this speech begins: “Honorable Assembly! Dear colleagues! Fellow students! The University of Berlin celebrates today its founding and its royal benefactor. The speakers who take the floor at this hour each year, in remembering our origin, usually recall the difficult times, out of which adversity this university emerged, and the truly royal word of the replacement of lost physical by intellectual strength. Today, in a time of powerful prosperity, when the Emperor's strong arm protects our peace in honor, we can calmly consider that even the life of a nation with the strongest heartbeat runs in waves of ups and downs."

Well, today events provide the correction of these things; today events provide the correction of a sentence like: “Today, in a time of powerful prosperity, where the emperor's strong arm protects our peace with honor”! But what should common sense say in such a matter? Common sense should say: A person who is capable of saying this, which is nothing more than a great folly, must also be regarded as saying foolish things about everything else concerning death and dying. But who decides to use such common sense? So you see, the issue is not that common sense is incapable of making a decision, but that, for certain fundamental reasons of the present day, the use of common sense is out of the question. These things must be clearly understood.

The Berlin Academy of Sciences was founded by the great philosopher Leibniz. That is one example. One could cite other examples, which would have to be characterized similarly, from Munich, from Heidelberg, if you like. I will omit one country out of a certain courtesy – well, one does not say that today, so out of a certain feeling. I will say this: one could find similar things in Paris, in London, in Washington and so on, in Rome of course, in Bologna and so on. Leibniz undertook to found the Berlin Academy of Sciences under the Elector Frederick. Well, it was a good intention. But it could only be realized if Leibniz the great philosopher condescended to compare the elector – who was nothing like Leibniz said he was – to King Solomon and to call him the Prussian King Solomon. Yes, he even had to compare the electress with the Queen of Sheba. But this Berlin Academy of Sciences, which the great Du Bois-Reymond called “the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern,” did not fulfill its tragicomic destiny with this fate. Because one day Frederick William I found that Professor Gundling was getting too much salary, namely because he was too clever. So he was deprived of his livelihood, was chased away, and Professor Gundling was forced to perform something vaudevillian in all sorts of taverns, to use his special talents to fool people into a kind of vaudeville show. King Frederick William I heard about this, and Gundling, whom he had previously chased away, began to interest him. So he made him a court jester, and now he gave him a salary again. But he said: “The court jester can also do something else for us.” So he made him president of the Academy of Sciences. And so Professor Gundling indeed became president of the Academy of Sciences. But this is not just a single fact that arose from a single quirk, but Frederick the Great, who then wanted to appoint Voltaire to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, heard about the salary that Voltaire was demanding for his admission to the Academy of Sciences; he said: This salary is much too large for a court jester. So, the issue was to treat the entire Academy of Sciences in terms of the attitude that one is dealing with fools.

You have to be able to point out such things if you want to draw attention to the discrepancy in events, that from a certain royal house the scholars are put on the same level as the court jesters, in reality, and that the scholars then dismiss them as they did the one example I just told you about from the year 1911. The point is that you cannot arrive at a healthy understanding of people if you do not have the will to look at reality without embellishment, to pursue the things that are accessible to you. And pursuing things in one area or another is actually something that can train every person with regard to a sense of reality, with regard to everything that gives you a healthy understanding of people. If you have – of course you have, naturally, I would not be so rude as to deny anyone common sense, because I believe that every person has it – but if you have the ability, the will to use common sense, then you can only do so by approaching things in any field completely without prejudice and with an open mind. Just try to realize that this is a difficulty, but one that can be overcome. Try to think how much of national or other human prejudices there is in you that prevent you from approaching things impartially and without prejudice. You have to have the good will to engage in this self-reflection, otherwise you will never be able to say a rational word when it comes to deciding which ideas are socially fruitful for the present and the near future and which ideas are not socially fruitful.

Having established this, I would like to say, more as a characteristic of the attitude than as a characteristic of any theoretical basis. From this point of view, let us consider rhapsodically, aphoristically, some details that may be important to us for understanding and for our actions in the present and in the near future. I will start with one of the basic ideas that is truly and intensely rooted in the modern proletariat. From Marxism, this modern proletariat has absorbed the notion that in the real progress of humanity, the opinion of the individual human being, the opinion of the individual individuality, actually has no significance. The opinion of the individual has significance only for those things that are his private affairs – at least, that is what the modern proletarian world view believes. But everything that becomes historical happens out of necessary economic foundations, as I characterized them the day before yesterday. The very opposite was the impression I made on the modern proletariat through my Philosophy of Freedom, in that it demands that everything be built precisely on human individuality, on the content and energy of human individuality, to which these modern proletarian ideas attach no importance at all, but which only want to accept man as a social animal, as a social being. Society brings about everything that has any developmental character in history, that is in any way fruitful in history. Whatever a minister or a factory owner or anyone else does out of his individuality – so the proletarian thinks – has a meaning within the four walls of his house or at his card table or wherever he is a private person, it has a meaning for his amusement, it has a significance for the personal relationships that he forms with this or that person; but what comes from him as a member of humanity does not come from his individuality, but from the whole social class context, and so on, as I have characterized it to you.

This idea is firmly rooted in the modern proletariat. It is intimately connected with the modern proletariat's disbelief in the individual human being and his insight. It is of little help to the modern proletariat when the individual communicates some knowledge to this proletariat, because the proletariat then says: What the individual thinks is of private value only to him; only what he says as a member of a class, as a member of the proletariat, and what anyone can say has real external social value. In connection with the ideas of the modern proletariat, there is a terrible leveling with regard to human individuality, an absolute disbelief in this human individuality. From this you will see how tremendously difficult it is for him to penetrate to what comes from the most individual, namely to the truly fruitful social ideas. But in our time, the course of events itself is such that such great world-historical prejudices – for when millions profess them, one can speak of world-historical prejudices – are refuted by the facts, by reality. There could be no stronger refutation for proletarian theory, which wants to derive everything from the impoverishment of the masses, in short, from social phenomena, from the economic crises that necessarily occur from time to time and so on – from this, it says, the development of things arises, not from what people think or recognize – There could be no stronger refutation of this principle, this world-historical prejudice, than the fact, given by the latest events, that ultimately – I say ultimately, but this “ultimately” has a great significance for this world catastrophe – the decision of this world catastrophe depended on very few people. By a very few people. What has become of it ultimately depended on the thread of the fears, the suspicions, the aspirations of a very few people. And one can say: like flocks, millions of other people have been driven into this catastrophe by a very few people. — This is unfortunately the sad truth that presents itself to anyone who looks at the conditions of the present from a realistic point of view.

It is true that now people are beginning to realize a little what all depended on Ludendorff's will, which was extraordinarily narrow-minded in so many respects. Just think how easily something like this could remain hidden! It is conceivable, absolutely conceivable, that it would not have come to this terrible catastrophe of the present with all its terrible consequences, and that Ludendorff's strange way of acting would not have come to light. But it has come to light. Other statesmen, who do not belong to the Central Powers, may be voted out of office at the next election or may retire from public life. This event will be discussed, but no one will think of them as having done as much harm to humanity as Ludendorff. This is also a chapter that belongs to the education of common sense, because it is easy to ignore common sense out of adoration of success or for some other reason. Those who have common sense will not be persuaded to look upon Woodrow Wilson, no, I mean those people who today fawn over Woodrow Wilson – and after all, how few do not! – those people who today fawn over Woodrow Wilson, any differently than they would upon Professor Kraus, who in 1911 spoke the words that I have read to you. That is what one would like: to encourage people to use their common sense. Of course, this is closely related to the will to face facts. It is an enormous detriment to the present that the most impractical people today feel precisely that they are the strongest practitioners. How much the Central Powers have felt themselves to be practical, let us say in the field of militarism! They felt tremendously practical and were the greatest illusionists, were the greatest fantasists, and made not only incorrect but grotesquely incorrect judgments about almost all the things that have happened in the course of the last, well, I will say, two and a half years, and acted on the basis of these grotesquely incorrect judgments.

It is difficult when you see how people who are actually good people, often in the sense of what is commonly referred to as good people, cannot even be reached by common sense. In this respect, one could have the most terrible experiences over the last four years, when one saw, for example, what happened in Germany in recent years with officers who wanted to lead the people's education, who wanted to hammer into the people how they had to think so that everything would go right, so that the people behind the front would also “hold out”, as it was so beautifully called. It was terrible. When you then had a more precise insight into what was to be drummed into people, and what those who drummed it into them often presented with the very best of intentions – it was probably, in reality for my sake, the thing in its own way honest, but they did not want to make use of their common sense. And that is what matters. And that is of the greatest importance for the present, because this common sense must look at reality everywhere, and must not reject it because it finds something unpleasant out of prejudice. Is it not true that in our time we have witnessed the grotesque combination of the monarchical principle, which almost borders on absolutism, with Ludendorffism – with Leninism in Russia, with Bolshevism, because Bolshevism is actually a creature of Ludendorff. Bolshevism was created by Ludendorff in Russia because Ludendorff believed that he could make peace with no one in Russia except the Bolshevists. Thus not only did the German people, but also that the misfortunes of Russia are in many respects connected with the grotesque errors of this one man. These things show the colossal error of the proletariat, that the opinion of the individual has no significance in the social organization of conditions. These things must be seen quite objectively with common sense.

If we start from this attitude, we find in particular a sentence that I ask you to take to heart, because this one sentence can, among other things, have a guiding force for social thinking in the future. This one sentence is: It is enough to have no ideas in times of revolutions and wars, but it is not enough to have no ideas in times of peace; for when ideas become rare in times of peace, then times of revolutions and wars must come. — For wars and revolutions one needs no ideas. To maintain peace, one needs ideas, otherwise wars and revolutions will come. And that is an inner spiritual connection. And all declamations about peace are of no use if those who are called upon to guide the destinies of nations do not endeavor to have ideas, especially in times of peace. And if they are to be social ideas, then they must come from beyond the threshold. If an age becomes poor in ideas, then peace itself fades out of that age.

One can say such a thing; if people do not want to examine it, they will simply not believe it. But the terrible fate of the present depends on disbelief in such things. This is one of those principles that it is extremely important to take on board for the present and the near future. You will find another principle in the essay on “Theosophy and the Social Question”, which I published years ago in “Lucifer-Gnosis”. I am convinced that very few people take this principle fully to heart. I tried to draw attention to something that should work as a social axiom. I pointed out that if the relationship arises that a person is paid for his immediate work, nothing beneficial can come of it in any social structure. If a prosperous social structure is to emerge, it must not be the case that people are paid for their work. Work belongs to humanity, and the means of existence must be provided to people by other means than by paying for their labor. I would like to say, as I have already done in that essay: If the principle of militarism, but without the state, were transferred to a certain part — I will speak of this part in a moment — of the social order, then an enormous amount would be gained. But the underlying principle must be the realization that there is trouble on the social plane when people are in society in such a way that they are paid for their work, depending on how much or how little they do, that is, according to their work. Man must have his livelihood from a different social structure. The soldier receives his means of subsistence, then he has to work; but he is not paid directly for his work, but for being a human being in a certain position. That is what it is about. That is the most necessary social principle, that the proceeds of labor be completely separated from the means of subsistence, at least in a certain area of the social context. As long as these things are not clearly understood, we will achieve nothing socially. As long as this is the case, amateurs, who are sometimes professors, like Menger, will speak of “full labor income” and the like, which is all wishy-washy. For it is precisely the labor yield that must be completely separated from the procurement of the means of existence in a healthy social order. The civil servant, if he does not become a bureaucrat due to a lack of ideas, the soldier, if he does not become a militarist due to a lack of ideas, is in a certain respect – in a certain respect, do not misunderstand me – the ideal of social cohesion. And not an ideal of social cohesion, but the opposite of social cohesion, is when this social cohesion is such that man does not work for society, but for himself. That is the transference of the unegoistic principle to the social order. He who understands egoism and altruism only in a sentimental sense understands nothing of the matter. But the person who, practically, without sentimentality, with pure, healthy common sense, realizes that every society must necessarily perish because man only works for himself, that is, purely what is egoistically shaped in the social order—that person knows the right thing.

This is a law, as surely effective as the laws of nature work, and one must simply know this law. One must simply have the ability to apply common sense in such a way that such a law appears as an axiom of social science. Today we are still far from realizing this. But the recovery of conditions depends entirely on the fact that just as someone regards the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics as something fundamental, he takes this sentence as the basis of the social structure: all work in society must be such that the labor yield falls to the society and the means of existence are not created as labor yield, but through the social structure.

Of course, there are a number of such social axioms, because social life is naturally complicated. But today we are faced with the necessity of somehow considering how the social structure of human development can be put on a healthy footing. Above all, we must have a healthy eye for the parts, for the components of social life. One must be able to distinguish in a healthy way the different links of social life. You see, with all the things at stake today, it is not so much a matter of listening to the buzzwords that come from the Bolshevist or the Entente side , because today they are almost opposites, aren't they, but what is important is to realize what is needed by humanity, to acquire a sound judgment for the structure of social life. Of course, social life must be there. And precisely because social life must be there, that is why people are so attached to the Mongolian – well, excuse me, it is only meant to be symptomatic – to the Mongolian idea of the state, to the omnipotence of the state, because people imagine: what the state does not do cannot happen for the benefit of the people. – Incidentally, this view is not that old. For it was quite a while before the nineteenth century was over that an insightful man wrote the beautiful treatise: “Ideas for an Experiment to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State.” He was a Prussian minister, Wilbelm von Humboldt. This essay was particularly close to my heart because in the 1890s and even into the twentieth century, my Philosophy of Freedom was always categorized as a work of “individualist anarchism” – not by me, but by others. Wilhelm Humboldt's essay on the limits of state effectiveness was always categorized as the first work, while my Philosophy of Freedom was usually always categorized as the last, in chronological order. Well, you see, it was possible to be registered under “individualistic anarchism,” but at least together with a Prussian minister!

Social organization, social structure must be there, but it cannot be uniformed. It cannot be done in such a way that everything is, as it were, brought under one roof. What is needed today, what is important, could have been done in a certain way a long time ago, could have been done during this war catastrophe, and it can be done now, but it is always modified. For you must not forget that in the last few weeks the world has become a different one for Central Europe, and that one has an effect on the other. Now, for years I have endeavored to awaken understanding here and there for the form that is to be effective from Central Europe to Eastern Europe, for example — for the Entente is not teachable, of course, and should not be taught — I have endeavored to make that valid. The point is that if you want to assert something like that, you have to structure the lives that people have to lead together in the right way. When these ideas were presented to statesmen, let's say, I can only sketch these ideas out for you briefly; the point is that they have to be increasingly individualized. When these ideas were presented to a statesman some time ago, when it was already quite too late for the form I had given them at the time, but I told the gentleman that if he was thinking of approaching these ideas in any way, I would of course be willing to rework them in an appropriate way for the time that was then the present. Today, of course, they would have to be reworked again for the particular circumstances. In this context, it is important to really appeal to common sense when presenting such ideas. Then it is important that someone can see that social and other human coexistence is properly structured. The question arises as a main question: How must one differentiate in what people lead as a communal life? — And here it is important to distinguish between three aspects. Without this distinction it will not work, and no forward development from the present into the near future will come about without this threefold distinction being made. The first point is that, whatever the social group in question may be, small or large, it is essential that some social group should be so constituted that order prevails within it in terms of security of life and security towards the outside. The security service, conceived in the broadest sense – I must use such sweeping words – is one element. But this security service is also the only element that can be directed into the light of the idea of equality. This security service, everything military and police, if I may speak in the old sense, is also the only thing that can be treated in the sense of a democratic parliament, for example. Every person can have a say in this security service. So there must be a parliament, however the social group is constituted, in which deputies can be elected, for example, by universal, secret, direct suffrage, who have to form the laws and everything that is intended for this security service. Because this security service is a link in the chain of order, but it must be treated separately from the rest and then harmonized with the others only from a higher point of view.

A second aspect, however, must be kept entirely separate from all that concerns the security service, internal and external security. This aspect, which cannot be treated according to the idea of equality, is the actual economic organization of the social groups. This economic organization must not be directly related to what I have mentioned as the first link, but must be treated separately. It must have its own ministry, its own people's commissariat – today we say people's commissariat – which must be completely independent of the ministry, of the commissariat of the security service. It must have its own ministry, which is completely independent and which is chosen according to purely economic criteria, so that there are people in this economic ministry who understand something of the individual branches, both as producers and as consumers. This second link in the social order must be governed by completely different considerations, both in parliament and in the ministries. The first link can, let us say, be adjusted to democracy; if it suits us better, it could also be adjusted to conservatism. That depends entirely on the circumstances; if it is done properly, it will work, and the rest is a matter of taste. What is important is this trinity. For in the sphere of economic life there must prevail brotherhood. Just as everything in the sphere of security service must be subordinated to the principle of equality, so in the sphere of economic life the maxim of brotherhood must everywhere prevail.

Then there is a third area, which is the area of spiritual life. To this I count all religious activity, which must have nothing to do with the security service and economic life; to this I count all teaching, to this I count all other free spirituality, all scientific work, and to this I also count all jurisprudence. Without including jurisprudence, everything else is wrong. You will immediately arrive at a threefold structure that makes no sense if you do not structure it in the following way: security service according to the principle of equality, economic life according to the principle of brotherhood, and the areas that I have just enumerated: jurisprudence, education, free spiritual life, religious life, from the point of view of freedom, absolute freedom. And out of this absolute freedom must arise the necessary administration of this third link in the social order. And the necessary balance can only be sought through the free interaction of those who guide and determine these three links. In the sphere of intellectual life, to which jurisprudence also belongs, we shall not find anything like a ministry or a parliament, but something much freer. The structure will be quite different.

Of course, there must be transitional forms in addition to what is being striven for. But this should be clear to people. And we will not arrive at a healthy state until it becomes clear to people that this threefold order, of which I have spoken, must underlie everything, that we must think in such a way that we cannot maintain a uniformed state. For the idea of the state can be applied directly only to the first part, to the security and military service. Whatever is placed under state omnipotence, except for security and military service, stands on an unhealthy basis, because economic life must be built on a pure basis, whether it be corporative or associative, if it is to develop healthily. And the spiritual life, including jurisprudence, is only built on a healthy basis if the individual is completely free. He must be free in relation to everything else. He must also be able to appoint his judge, in my opinion from five to five, from ten to ten years, who is both his private and his criminal judge. Without that it does not work, without that you will not achieve an appropriate structure. These national questions could have been solved without territorial shifts! This is said by a man who has studied the difficult Austrian conditions, where there are thirteen different official languages or at least languages in official use, and who has been able to study these Austrian conditions, which is particularly necessary in the field of jurisprudence. Suppose two countries meet at some border, let them be divided by nationality or something else. Here is a court and here is a court, there is the border. The man here determines himself: I will be judged by this court in the next ten years – the other determines himself: I will be judged by this court. The matter is absolutely feasible if it is carried out in detail. But all the other things are ineffective unless there are things like this. For everything must indeed work together. But it only works together when the things are presented in such a way that they are made with a real understanding of what is there.

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I have had the opportunity to present these things to a wide variety of people in the past, because I was sure, and still am today, that the circumstances of the last few years would have taken a completely different turn if this program had been countered by the Wilson program. And this program would have been the only real program that would have been effective if it had been presented before Brest-Litovsk. Of course, Brest-Litovsk would never have happened if such a program had been understood. Things would have had to take a completely different course. For I had worked it out in those years as a guideline not only for an internal policy but also for an external policy; internal politics seemed superfluous to me when everyone was busy manufacturing ammunition. All the talk of three-class legislation and its amendment seemed wishy-washy to me, but it seemed necessary to me to have a real impetus – not a program – a real impetus that would have been able to give things a different turn. I can only give you a few points of view here, as I have done. But the matter can be worked out in such detail that it is absolutely effective precisely for solving the most important questions. One has indeed had painful experiences in the process. I gave the elaboration to a man - not just one, but many, but I will tell you about one case as an example - who wrote to me after months. That was a good sign, because he had really studied the matter, had put a great deal of honest effort into it, and had also discussed it with me. Both in his letters and in his conversations with me, two objections came up, for example, that are very characteristic. I have heard such objections over and over again in the most terrible way over the past few years, objections of that kind. One objection was this: Yes, it is well known that most of the wars to date are hidden, masked resource wars, that they are mostly states of war that arise from resource interests, from international, that is, mutual resource interests. But if you look at what you have done, then there could no longer be conflicting resource interests. “Yes,” I said, ”Privy Councillor, if you would tell me that to confirm what I have written to you, then I would understand; if you thought that what I have written would be good, because then the terrible masked wars for raw materials would finally be over in the world through the final solution of the tariff relationships, which in this second part of the economic program, if I may call it that, are thus solved. If you tell me something that corresponds to the reality of life, I would understand; but that you tell me this as a refutation, I cannot understand.

The second objection was this: he wrote to me after having studied the matter for months: Yes, I cannot imagine how, if you were lucky with something like that, a social-democratic policy could still be pursued, because your economic program would no longer make a social-democratic policy possible. — Yes, you laugh. I did not laugh, because I have learned from these things, which I could duplicate for you in great numbers, and which you can find everywhere today, how bad the selection is that is practiced today by the circumstances in determining those people who are to be the responsible leaders in this or that field. I spoke to you here a long time ago about the fact that today we suffer from the selection of the worst, who always come out on top. This is also something that belongs to a healthy sense of reality and thus also to a healthy human understanding: to see this selection of the worst.

In this way, I have given you, I would like to say, guidelines. The recovery of the situation for the future is based on this threefold nature. All the mischief is based on the confounding of these three links. What actually applies only to the first link, to security and military service, is applied to economic life, where it cannot possibly bring about any healthy conditions, but it is even applied to spiritual life, including jurisprudence, where it is quite impossible. Oh, if only people would want to get a little closer to what follows from the secrets from beyond the threshold, they would be able to see so very easily that just such truths as I have told you about the threefold nature of social life must be taken from the supersensible world, but can be grasped here by the senses. That is just it. I have given you guidelines, but they are not guidelines that represent some abstract program. Rather, they are guidelines of which I could say, for example, when I handed over the matter to a man who had a very important position (I will not say what an important position in the past and for whom it would have been an enormously significant act if he had made a manifesto in this direction. Yes, I told the man: you have the choice of either doing one thing or experiencing the other. What I have worked out here is not based on ideas that arise from, well, women's clubs or pacifist societies or the like, but from the study of the development of humanity in the next thirty to forty or fifty years. That is the content of what wants to and will develop in Central and Eastern Europe, and you have the choice of either promoting it through reason or expecting it to materialize through revolutions in a roundabout and extremely painful way. But you see, people have to believe such things, believe them by applying their common sense to verify them. People must have the insight to recognize that reality has to be examined. Because what develops in humanity develops according to certain impulses that one must study and of which one can say: they want to take shape. If you go against them, you govern badly, regardless of whether you are a socialist or a monarchist, a republican or a prince of Monaco or whatever.

But it is precisely the courage to do such things that people have been unable to muster in recent times, because they lacked precisely that trust of which I have spoken in these days, and that is based on the Fichte proposition, that is, on the attitude that comes from the Fichte proposition: Man can do what he should; and when he says, “I cannot,” he means “I will not.” People who had understood to some extent what I wanted came together; but those who had the courage – which only comes from the real use and handling of common sense – to implement something like this did not come together. And one can only hope that now that the forces of scrutiny have become even stronger, people will gradually come together. But one should not believe that what was formulated here years ago does not now need to be reformulated to fit the new conditions that have arisen. One must think so realistically that one knows: at every point in time, when things are to be thrown into reality, things must be thought of somewhat differently. — And so one could truly have very tragic experiences in the last years. For example, one of the monarchs who has now also passed away, when he saw what was coming, once again demanded these ideas and had his advisor come to hear them from him because he had forgotten the things and wanted to hear them again. He couldn't understand them quickly enough, so he said to the advisor in question, “So write these things down for me again briefly!” Yes, but I don't know how I am supposed to get the letter? How am I supposed to get this letter that you are supposed to write for me? It has to go through the ministry or the Cabinet Office, doesn't it? — This matter was never resolved because it went through the ministry, where everything was rewritten.

I am telling such things today – and I will tell many more in the future – because it is necessary that we learn a great deal from the recent past. Unless we learn from the past, we will not be able to move forward on a fruitful path. It is not enough to consider only the immediate situation; it is essential to have the will to look into the underlying causes that lie behind the mere symptoms. And one cannot look into them unless one develops a sound understanding of how symptoms arise and acquires the will to really assess them. Today, things are urgent. One would like to say again and again: If only they were not grasped drowsily, but if they were grasped with the full seriousness, which also includes having a sense of how much things have gone wrong due to the selection of the worst, and how inclined people are to let their judgment go astray, to be pulsed by false impulses! We must find a way to ensure that the continuity of economic life is not disrupted until ideas that can be used to further develop economic life have been introduced into people's minds in a certain way. We must gain the possibility of putting something realistic in the place of the economic nonsense that is produced by university economics professors in all countries today. We will not make any progress if we are not able to tackle education in the broadest sense first. Because we need understanding. Everything that the existing educational institutions provide about the necessary organization of social life or the social body is useless. But that is also what social democracy has inherited, and it is useless. Firstly, it is necessary to bring sensible ideas into people's heads. Therefore, it is necessary that anyone who wants to participate in social life at the present time should first find the possibility of such a transitional state that best satisfies what can best be satisfied. That is: security and public order. Why not give the people a parliament, which is something the democratic element, in particular, is now, well, yearning for. But the point is that the economic really acquires an independent position alongside the other things. This must first be carefully transformed into a complete set of provisional arrangements. Only the first link can be tackled radically today; the rest must be transformed into a series of provisional arrangements. And the spiritual life is the one that should be attacked immediately. The third link is the one to start with. And if someone were to come up with the idea that the universities, above all, would have to be cleaned out, and he does not want that, then, then there is simply no talking to him in this area. However, they must be cleaned out first!

I wanted to talk to you about this in the context of the important issues of the present.

In my last lecture dealing with present events, I called your attention to the necessities of a social order resulting from the impulses of the modern age. I must expressly emphasize the fact that I do not by any means wish to develop a program. You all know how little importance I attach to such things. They are mere abstractions. What I have discussed with you is not an abstraction, but a reality. I have expressed the matter in the following way to various persons with whom, in the course of the last few years, I have spoken of these impelling social forces as something inevitable. I have said that what we are seeking to set forth, which is something utterly different from an abstract program, will by its own connection with the impelling forces of history come to realization in the world within the next twenty or thirty years. “You have the choice”—I could express myself at that time in this way because people still had the choice, as they do not any longer possess it—“You have the choice between adopting a rational attitude and accepting such things, or realizing later that these things will come about in the most chaotic way through cataclysms and revolutions.” There is no other alternative in these things in the course of world history, and the demand simply faces us today to understand such things as proceed from the impulses actually at work in the world. As I have repeatedly declared, this is not a time when each person can say that believes this or that will happen or ought to happen, but it is a time when the only person who can speak effectively in regard to the necessities of the age is one who is able to perceive what bears within itself the impelling force for its realization in the course of the times.

Now, it is most important to understand that it was impossible for me to give you anything more than a sketch of what I am compelled to view as a necessity embodying the impulse to realization. In order to establish a connection with what has already been said, I shall repeat briefly today what I then spoke about, that is, that the confusion in the social structure that has gradually led to these catastrophic events of recent years over the whole world must be set aside, and it is imperative to replace it by that threefold organization of the social structure of which I spoke to you at our last meeting. You have seen that the outcome of this threefold organization will be to distribute into separate spheres what has hitherto constituted, in a confused fashion, the basis of the seemingly unitary organization of the state.

It will be distributed among three spheres, the first of which I designated as the political, or security, order; the second, as the sphere of the social organization, the economic organization; the third, as the sphere of free spiritual production. These three spheres will be integrated independently of each other, each in its own way. Indeed, this will become manifest within the net few decades even to those persons who are unwilling today to understand it. We shall escape the great perils toward which the world is still continuing to move only if we endeavor to understand these things, but we shall not understand them unless we really study them thoroughly. In order that what follows may not be misunderstood, I should like once more to emphasize that it is not our business either to create the social question or to discuss it in any merely theoretical way. In the light of our recent reflections, you will already have seen that the social question actually exists, that it must be accepted as a factor, as an actuality, and that it can be grasped and understood only in the same way in which an occurrence of nature must be understood.

You will already have seen that everything I set forth here last Sunday as constituting the necessary impulses leading to the future is of such a nature as to supersede, in a just and legitimate way, the elements left over from ancient times in our social structure, elements that permeate it destructively through and through. Especially if you reflect more deeply on the practical results of what I said to you last Sunday, will you see that these practical results of the social organization of which I spoke are of such a character as to supersede in a suitable way what those who call themselves socialists but who live in illusions rather than in realities, wish to overcome in an impractical way. What must be superseded—as will become clear to you upon deeper reflection over what was said last Sunday—is the membering of the social structure according to classes. What must be achieved in harmony with the period of consciousness in which we live, the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, is that the human being as such shall take the place of the ancient distinctions according to classes. For this reason it would be disastrous if what I developed before you here last Sunday should be confused with something that is perpetuated in our contemporary social organization out of past ages. Something extends into our social organization from the Greek period that must be superseded according to the principles holding sway in the course of world events. The differentiation of humanity according to the ancient Greek classification into husbandmen, soldiers, and teachers must be superseded by the very thing I brought to your attention last Sunday. It is the differentiation according to classes that brings chaos into our contemporary social structure. This differentiation will be superseded by the fact that human beings will not be divided in any way according to classes under the organization of society of which I spoke to you last Sunday. In the very nature of things, these classes will completely disappear. It is in this direction that historic necessity moves.

Man, as a living being and not as an abstraction, shall bring about the connections among the three spheres of society. We are by no means dealing with a differentiation according to classes, as husbandmen, soldiers and teachers, when we say that we must move forward toward political justice, economic organization, and free spiritual production. What this signifies is that relationships shall be integrated in this way, and that it will be impossible for human beings to belong to a single class when the relationships are really integrated in this way. The human being exists within the social structure and he himself forms the connecting link among the different elements integrated in these relationships. There will not be a separate economic class, a separate class of producers, but a structure of economic relationships. In the same way, there will not be a special class of ”teachers” but the relationships will be such that spiritual production will be free in its own nature. Likewise, there will not be a separate class of soldiers, but the effort will be made gradually to achieve for the first sphere of the social order in a liberal democratic manner that for which a confused struggle now proceeds on behalf of all three spheres.

The very essence of the matter is the truth that the passage from ancient times to modern times makes it imperative that the human being shall take his place in the world. There is no possibility of our reaching an understanding of the demands of our age otherwise than by acquiring the capacity to understand human beings. This can be achieved, of course, only on the basis of those perceptions that a science of the spirit
brings to light.

As I recently declared, what I have developed before you must be viewed against the broad background of world history. I have set before you certain things from the content of this historic tableau. In order that we may now continue further in describing such conditions as I began to explain to you last Sunday, I wish to lay a foundation today derived somewhat more from occult sources in order to make it clear to you that the manner of dealing with these things cannot be one in which each person thinks out something for himself in utter disregard of the facts of the case, but that the way to deal with these things is to view them in accordance with the actual movement of events. Here my point of departure must be the statement that the first necessity in developing the social structure is to base it upon social understanding. Indeed, this is the very thing that has been lacking for decades. The realm we here touch upon is one in which the greatest number of blunders have been made. A great majority of persons in positions of leadership have been utterly lacking in social understanding. It is not surprising, therefore, that such revolutionary movements as we now have in Central Europe seem to people like something springing out of the earth, something for which they have had no preparation. They do not appear as something unexpected to people who have a social understanding but I fear that people will continue still to be permeated by the mood that filled them before the year 1914. Just as the World War, obviously hanging over the heads of everyone at that time, came as a surprise, people will still behave in even more vital matters in just the same way. They will still continue to sleep while the social movement, which is spreading over the whole world, breaks in upon them. Because of the phlegmatic habits of thought now characterizing humanity, it may be just as impossible to prevent this as it was to prevent mankind from permitting the present catastrophe to overwhelm it unprepared.

What really matters most of all is to learn the truth that human beings must not conduct themselves in one way or another in the various parts of the world according to abstract notions, but that, the moment their conduct may have social consequences, they must choose their course according to how they are impelled to act by the impulses existent in the sequence of cosmic events into which man himself is integrated. An elementary fact is utterly ignored by people even today. I say this on the basis of experience, for I have been compelled in recent years to the discuss these matters with men belonging to varied professions and classes, and I know the response one meets when these things are discussed. I refer to the fact that people of the East and the West—and everyone will take part in the future shaping of things—are quite unlike one another in their impulses, and are different in what they will for themselves. Indeed, if we pay attention only to the social environment nearest to us, we shall reach no clear judgment as to what is proceeding as a matter of necessity in the world. We reach a clear judgment only when—and I must once more employ this expression—we form our judgment about things according to the impulses existing in the universal course of events. The people of the West, of Western European states and their appendage America, will have their say. The people of Eastern Europe, with its Asiatic hinterland, will have their say during the next two or three decades, but their manner of speaking will vary greatly among themselves, for human beings in various parts of the world necessarily have different conceptions regarding what man feels and must inevitably feel as a necessity of his human dignity and his nature as man.

We cannot discuss these things unless we see clearly that events must necessarily occur in the future that people would like best of all to avoid. I told you last Sunday that it is simply impossible for effectual, fruitful social ideas to be discovered in future by any other path than the one that leads in the search for truths beyond the threshold of ordinary physical consciousness. Within the limits of ordinary physical consciousness there are no effectual social ideas. For this reason, as I explained last Sunday, these social ideas, which are truly effectual, must come to people. But this statement implies at the same time that it will not do to shrink back in future from acquainting oneself, so far as this is possible for each person, with the real nature of the threshold of the spiritual world. Within the limits of everyday life and science, humanity may continue for a long time on its beaten path without becoming acquainted with the threshold of the spiritual world. In these fields we can get along as well as is absolutely necessary. But, as regards social life, it is not possible to get along without giving attention to what is here called the threshold of the spiritual world. There exists within people of the present age—still unconscious, of course, but thrusting ever more upward into consciousness—the impulse to bring about such a social structure as will permit every person to be, as his nature demands, a human being.

By no means clearly, and yet in an instinctive way, people in all regions of the earth feel the meaning of human dignity, of an existence worthy of the human being. The abstract social democrat of the present time believes that it is a simple matter to express in an international way the meaning of human dignity, human rights, etc. This cannot be done. If these things are to be expressed, it is imperative that we bear in mind the truth that the real conception of the human being belongs inherently beyond the threshold of the spiritual world, since man really belongs to the world of spirit and soul. In other words, a true and comprehensive conception of what the human being is can come to us only from beyond the threshold of the spiritual world.

In reality, the conception does come from this source. Even if the American, Briton, Frenchman, German, Chinese, Japanese or Russian speaks to you of the human being, expressing quite unsatisfactory conceptions and ideas, there yet dwells in his subconsciousness something far more comprehensive, but something that must be clearly grasped. This more comprehensive thing dwelling there struggles to rise into consciousness. In other words, we may say that historic evolution has progressed to the point where an image of the human being lives in the hearts of men. Without giving attention to this image of the human being, it is impossible to develop any social understanding. This image is alive but it lives only in the subconsciousness. The moment that it struggles upward into consciousness and really enters there, it can be grasped only by means of the capacities belonging to the form of consciousness that is in its nature super-sensible—at least, by means of these capacities in the conceptual field, as they have been taken up by sound common sense.

An image of the human being lives in those persons who are engaged at present in the social struggle that may remain unconscious and only instinctive so long as the impulse is lacking to see the matter clearly. If, however, there is a desire to arrive at clarity, it can be done only by irradiating the matter with the light that comes from the other side of the threshold. Then it becomes obvious to the objective spiritual observer that the image of the human being lurking instinctively in human souls varies greatly in people belonging to the West and those belonging to the East. This will become an enormously important question in the future. It plays a role in all actual conditions. It plays a role in the Russian chaos, in the revolution in Middle Europe, in the confusion that is in its early stages in the West, even all the way to America. In other words, what is in process of development must be viewed in the light of super-sensible consciousness if it is to be understood. It must be grasped by means of the capacities that are derived from super-sensible consciousness.

There is no approach from the side of sensory consciousness that will enable us to understand what dwells instinctively as an image of man both in the peoples of the West and of the East.

In order to achieve this understanding, however, it is necessary that you acquaint yourselves with two things. First, with the peculiar manner in which something that actually obsesses the subconsciousness of a person rises up into real super-sensible consciousness. A person learns in two different ways through the Guardian of the Threshold how something that is stirring chaotically in his instincts and does not belong to the person, for only what a person consciously grasps belongs to him, appears before him. Things that instinctively obsess a person appear in one case before the Guardian of the Threshold in such a way that they seem like external perceptions. It is an hallucination, an external perception, actually appearing before the person and presenting itself like something externally perceived. That is the specter character. When something that has lived instinctively and chaotically in an individual comes to be known clearly in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold, where all instincts cease and everything begins to be known consciously and to take its place in the free spiritual life, such an instinctive living element may appear as a specter. The person is then rid of it as an instinct. There is no need for fear because of the fact that such a thing appears as a specter. This is the sole way in which the person can get rid of it. He sees it in external objectivity and what has been chaotically stirring within him is really before him in the form of a specter. This is one of the forms.

The other form in which such an instinctive thing may appear is that of a nightmare. This is not an external perception but an oppressive feeling or the aftereffects in the form of a vision of something that oppresses one. It is an imaginative experience but it may at the same time be felt as a nightmare. What exists instinctively in the person must come to manifestation either as a nightmare or as a specter if it is to be brought up into consciousness.

Just as every instinct living in a person must gradually rise to a higher level either as a specter or as a nightmare, if the person is to become fully human, so must what lives unconsciously and instinctively as the feeling of human dignity, as the image of man in the West and the East appear to him in one form or the other and be understood by him but understood primarily through sound common sense. Thus, it may happen that the practicing spiritual scientist will be able to show that some things appear as nightmares, others as specters. What a spiritual scientist experiences on the basis of his observations will be expressed by him in words applicable to historical or other conceptions in order to render it possible for what he has experienced to be grasped by the sound common sense of those who do not yet possess the occult capacities necessary for seeing these things.

The fact that a person does not actually behold these things is not in the least a valid excuse for not accepting them, since everything perceived is presented in such concepts as can be grasped by sound common sense. Confidence in the person who does see these things should not go beyond believing that he can give suggestions. It is not necessary to believe him because, if a person employs his own powers diligently without preconception, everything that is declared to be true can always be grasped with sound common sense.

Now, the situation is such that those instincts living in the West, as constituting the image of the human being and striving toward a social structure, appear before the Guardian of the Threshold as specters. The image of the human being living in the people of Eastern Europe with its Asiatic hinterland, manifests itself as a nightmare. The occult fact is simply that, if you ask an American, and this is most marked in the case of America, to describe what he feels to be the image of true human dignity, and you work over this image in an occult way and carry it all the way to the Guardian of the Threshold, and then observe what you experience in his presence in connection with this image, it appears before you as a specter. If you prevail upon an Asiatic or an informed Russian to describe what they conceive as the image of man, it will work upon you, if it is carried all the way to the Guardian of the Threshold, as a nightmare.

What I am saying to you here is only a description of an occult experience that has its basis in historical impulses and events because what takes form instinctively in the hearts and souls of men grows also out of historical substrata. The peoples of the West—Britons, Frenchmen, Italians, Spaniards, Americans—because of certain historical stimuli in the course of their development from ancient times up to their present state, have permitted to take root in their hearts, not in full clear consciousness but in an instinctive way, such an image of the human being as can be described when we study historical stimuli adequately.

These images of Eastern and Western man must be replaced by what can actually be discovered by means of spiritual scientific research. This alone can become the basis for a true social order, not one that will be dominated by either specters or nightmares. If we investigate in the right way the question as to why the Western image of the human being is a specter, we shall discover, after taking into account all the historical substrata, that the specter of the ancient Roman Empire lies at the bottom of the instincts that have led to the image of the human being in the Western parts of the world. They are the instincts that have now led, for example, to the so-called Wilson program for the West, upon which so much praise is being lavished. Everything that has gradually developed in the course of history that possesses a thoroughly outmoded character, that is, a luciferic-ahrimanic character, and is not suitable for the immediate present but is a specter from earlier ages, constitutes the specter of Romanism. Of course, there is much in Western culture that does not belong at all to Romanism. In English-speaking regions you naturally find much that has no such connection. Even in the truly Latin countries there is much that has no connection with Romanism. That, however, is not the important matter. The important fact is the image of the human being insofar as he is supposed to enter into the social structure. In all these regions this is wholly determined instinctively by what has taken form within Roman culture. It continues to be altogether the product of the Latin way of thinking, belonging to the fourth post-Atlantean culture. This is nothing that really possesses life but is something that haunts the present like a ghost of the dead. It is this specter that appears to the objective occult observer when he undertakes to form an image of what is intended to be made dominant over the world under the influence of the West.

It serves no useful purpose to make assertions regarding these things without the necessary knowledge. That is no longer in keeping with the status of humanity in the present epoch. What must be taken into account is the necessity of acquiring a clear view of these things. The specter of Romanism is haunting the West. When I recently called your attention to the future destiny of various peoples of the West, especially the French, this is closely related to the fact that they have clung most firmly of all to the Roman specter. Their whole instinctive temperament and fundamental character would not permit them to get rid of this Roman specter. This, then, is one aspect of the matter, that pertaining to the West.

The other aspect is that a certain image of the human being, to the extent that he should take his place in the social structure, dominates also in the East. This image is of such character that there tends to come about even now through the very necessity of things something I have always spoken of. The sixth cultural epoch is in its preparatory stages in Eastern Europe. If we view the matter, however, from the standpoint of the present age, what is still alive in Eastern Europe, including its Asiatic hinterland, is not yet the image of the human being that will in future be developed in a natural way even though it is the duty of humanity even today to develop it through knowledge. On the contrary, it is an image that appears as a nightmare when we take it and approach the Guardian of the Threshold in order there to observe it.

This image, in turn, appears as a nightmare because the instincts that are nourished in the East and become effective in the determination of this image are nourished by, a force that is not yet perfect. This force will not reach its highest level of development until the future, until the sixth post-Atlantean cultural epoch. This force actually requires an impulse to support it. Before the consciousness awakes—and consciousness must, indeed, first awaken in the East—this force requires an instinctive basis. It is this instinctive basis, still living in the peoples of the East when they form their image of man, that works as a nightmare. Just as all the impulses left over from Romanism have their influence as ancient lingering impulses in the formation of man's image in the West, so does this instinctive foundation work as a nightmare but one that is to give a support, the effect of which ought to be precisely that of bringing the people of the East to the point of freeing themselves from the nightmare. It has this effect in a strange manner, working just as a nightmare does when it has been overcome after we have awakened and have seen clearly what actually has happened. This force that must work there in the East is not something from the past, but rather something that is working in our own epoch for the first time. It is made up of the forces proceeding from the British Empire. Just as the image of the human being in the West has been made into a specter through the stimuli of Romanism, so is the image of the human being so stamped upon the soul in the East that what will continue for a long time into the future as the undertakings of the British Empire becomes a nightmare.

These two things produce the result that what was conscious in the Roman Empire continues to live unconsciously in a ghostly way in the West. The British-American impulse toward world empire that is in process of preparation and is active in the present epoch, manifests itself as a nightmare, as the counter force of a nightmare in order that the peoples of the East may awaken to a conscious and adequate image of man.

It is not pleasant to state these things at the present time, to listen to them is equally unpleasant. The simple truth is, however, that we have arrived at an epoch in the evolution of world history when nothing can be achieved unless people take cognizance of the things in the world on the basis of their knowledge, their full consciousness, and really acquaint themselves objectively with what exists in the world. No progress can be made in any other way. What has been happening in our time is of such a nature as to compel men in a certain sense to reverse the direction of these events. Things must not continue longer in such a way that, just as men have permitted themselves for a
long time to be compelled to think in a certain way, they shall again permit themselves to be compelled to think entirely different thoughts for the simple reason that everything has been turned upside down in a certain region of the earth. It is possible to make the acquaintance today of people who, within a few weeks have suddenly evolved from gallant royalists into extreme republicans and all other imaginable sorts of things. Nothing helpful to humanity could previously be accomplished by those who were royalists out of compulsion, and nothing helpful can come now from those who are today socialists as a matter of compulsion, or who have even become bolshevists after having been true royalists. There are even such individuals as this.

What is necessary is neither the one nor the other of these things. What is necessary is that we shall come to see that only what proceeds from the free decision of the free human soul can be beneficial, that is, what the human being decides for himself through the use of his powers of reflection, through the use of his heart and most of all his insight. That is what really matters. Otherwise, we shall observe repeatedly that things will be viewed in one way or another under the force of circumstances. A person who considered Ludendorff a great field marshall six weeks ago and who calls him a criminal today, for instance, if he has no reason for either of these judgments and cannot form them through the free decision of a free heart, is of just as little use in the evolution of humanity in the one case as in the other. It is not sufficient that a statement is abstractly true, though generally one statement is as false as the other, but that we shall develop the capacity for forming real judgments. In this matter spiritual science may constitute a really excellent guidance
for you.

I am constantly being made aware that statements I make here or elsewhere in the field of spiritual science are considered difficult to understand. This is due simply to the fact that people do not really have the will to apply their sound common sense in full measure to these things. They are considered difficult to understand because people do not find it sufficiently comfortable to lay hold of them.

In the course of these reflections I have made various statements in regard to this so-called war catastrophe of recent years and its origin. I hope that what has happened in the last few weeks will be seen to be a complete confirmation of what I have said for many years to you and to others in regard to these matters. Nothing has come about that fails to harmonize with what has here been asserted. Indeed, you can see the map I drew on the blackboard here years ago coming to reality during these very days.

What is said here, however, must not be taken in the sense of a Sunday afternoon sermon, but in the sense intended; that is, as something asserted on the basis of the actual impelling forces that either have been realized or are driving toward realization. For this reason I shall not hesitate to call your attention repeatedly to certain matters of method, even if this involves repetition. These questions of method are most important of all in the field of spiritual-scientific knowledge, which is so necessary for our age. What this science of the spirit makes of our souls is far more important than the acquisition of a merely abstract acquaintance with one truth or another.

We can observe repeatedly that the sort of soul structure that comes about through spiritual science is serviceable precisely in the comprehension of the immediate events of the times. How often have I emphasized in the course of these years the fact that it is really terrible for people to repeat continually, as they have done, the easy questions, “Who is to blame for the world catastrophe of this war? Is it the Central Powers or the Entente? Or is it heaven knows who?” These questions as to who is to blame simply cannot be answered in any fundamental sense. What is really important is the correct and definite statement of the question. Only thus can we arrive at a sufficient, fundamental, actual insight, but it is utterly useless in the case of many persons of the present time to appeal to this insight. For example, much of what is now being reported from Paris reminds me of other things bearing upon this unhappy situation, things that happened earlier in Berlin or elsewhere. It is not a matter of any consequence to form one's judgment in accordance with what is permitted or not permitted—especially a judgment about questions of fact—but what matters is that this judgment should be formed on the basis of a free consideration, formed by the free mind itself. That is what really matters.

If you will recall various things I have said here in recent weeks, you will see that the events meanwhile have confirmed many of my statements. For instance, I explained to you that it is utterly wrong to discuss these things in such a way, so satisfying to many persons, as to discover on the side of the Central Powers what is called “guilt” in connection with the World War. But I have said to you that the governments of the Central Powers have contributed to the World War in an essential way through their idiotic methods. What I explained to you even in the most recent lectures has during this week been completely confirmed by the disclosures made by the government of Bavaria. They, that is, the publication of the letters exchanged between the government of Bavaria and the Bavarian Envoy in Berlin, Count Lerchenfeld-Koefering, are in complete agreement with my explanations. Through such events the picture I have given you for years, which I had to give in such a way that I was continually tracing things back to the right form of questions regarding them, will become clearer. It is a certain service—and even such things as these may now be openly mentioned—that has been undertaken by this Kurt Eisner in the publication of these things, a service by one who has come in a strange way out of prison to the post of premier. At a time when so much is said in regard to persons who have made themselves unworthy of their official positions, it is certainly permissible to speak also about such a person as the present Premier of Bavaria, though we )feed not lavish praise upon him for this reason.

Naturally, in accordance with the karma of each person and the manner in which he is stationed in the world by his karma, he will be able to pass one judgment or another in one place or another in the world, or ought to pass such a judgment. If we desire to achieve a social understanding, as I have said in various connections, the most important thing of all is that we shall acquire an understanding of the human being, interest in human beings, a differentiated interest in persons, that we should desire to know human beings. It is this that must constitute the task, the most important task of the future. But we must acquire a certain instinct, if you will permit me to use this expression, for forming judgments on the basis of symptoms. It is for this reason that I delivered the lecture on history as symptomatology. Such a person as this Premier of Bavaria, Kurt Eisner, is vividly present before our minds, for instance, when we consider the following facts. I say this to you now not for the purpose of bringing to your attention something actual, but to illustrate a bit of psychology, a bit of the science of the human
soul.

Before there had been any declaration of war, either from the left or from the right, in the last days of July 1914, Kurt Eisner said in Munich, “If a world war really comes about, not only will the nations tear each other to pieces, but every throne in Central Europe will fall. This will be the inevitable consequence!” He remained true to his convictions. Throughout these years he continued to assemble a little group of men in Munich, always pursued by the police, and to speak to them. When a strike occurred at a particularly serious moment in the developments of recent years in Germany, he was sentenced to prison, and he has now ascended from prison to the premiership of Bavaria. He is a human being molded in a single piece. I do not mean to praise him because conditions are now such that even such a person may make blunder after blunder. But I wish to describe an example of what must really be considered. What is needed is that we shall rightly estimate as symptoms the occurrences confronting us in the world, that from the symptoms we shall reach conclusions regarding what lies behind them—if we do not possess the capacity of seeing through the symptoms the spirit at work behind them. We must at least strive to reach through the symptoms a vision of the spiritual that lies behind them. Especially in the future will it be necessary that mutual understanding shall come about between human beings. The social question is not to be solved by cliches, programs or Leninisms, but by an understanding between man and man—such an understanding, however, as can be acquired only when we are able to recognize the human being as an external manifestation of the eternal.

If you consider what have said, that in the West the human being produces the effect of a specter in the presence of the Guardian of the Threshold and in the East that of a nightmare you will receive in a certain way the necessary stimulus for obtaining a true view of the conditions of the present time. In the West an image of the human being that is on a descending path and appears, therefore, as a specter; in the East an image that is ascending, but that must not be accepted in its present form since it is still merely an imagination of an oppressive nightmare and will appear in its true form only after this nightmare has been overcome. The conditions are such, therefore, that we must gain a deeper insight if we wish to participate at all in discussions of the social problem. The matters into which we must acquire a deeper insight are such as pertain to the character of our thinking, and the manner in which this thinking streams forth from the whole human being, differentiated in the case of individual personalities over the whole earth.

The reason why this ghost of Romanism could acquire so profound an influence is that the thinking characteristic of the Old Testament world view has not yet been surmounted in the essential nature of human thought. Christianity is really only at its beginning. Christianity has not yet progressed sufficiently to have really permeated human hearts and minds. What was necessary to prevent this has been brought about by the Roman Church, which in its theology is completely under the influence of the specter of ancient Romanism. As I have often indicated, the Roman Church has contributed more toward hindering the introduction of the image of Christ into human hearts and minds than it has helped because the conceptions that have been applied within the Roman Church for the purpose of comprehending the Christ are all taken from the social and political structure of the ancient Roman Empire. Even though human beings do not know this, it works within their instincts.

Now, the conceptions that were dominant in the Old Testament, that must be designated primarily as conceptions of Old Testament Judaism, and that took their worldly form in Romanism, which is in the worldly sphere the same thing as Judaism was in the spiritual sphere even though it is in opposition to Judaism, have come over into our own epoch by way of Romanism; they haunt our age in spectral forms. This Old Testament thinking, unpermeated by the Christ must be found in its true origin within the human being. We must ask ourselves the question, “Upon what forces does such thinking as that of the Old Testament depend?”

This thinking depends upon what can be inherited with the blood from generation to generation. The capacity to think in the manner characteristic of the Old Testament is inherited with the blood in the succession of human beings. What we inherit as capacities from our fathers through the simple fact that we are born as human beings, that we ere embryonic human beings before our birth—what we inherit as the power of thinking, what lives in our blood, is Old Testament thinking. Our thinking is made up of two members, two parts. One part of our thinking consists in what we possess by reason of our development up to our birth, what we inherit from our forefathers or from our maternal ancestors. We are able to think in the Old Testament way because we have been embryos. This was the essential characteristic also of the ancient Jewish people that, in the world in which we live between birth and death, they did not wish to learn anything in addition to what the human being brings with him as a capacity because of the fact that he was an embryo up to the time of his birth. The only way that you can conceive of Old Testament thinking with real understanding is to say to yourself, “This is the kind of thinking that we possess by reason of the fact that we have been embryos.”

The kind of thinking that is added to this is what we have to acquire for ourselves in the course of our development beyond the embryonic period. For the purposes of certain external needs man acquires a variety of experiences, but he does not carry this process all the way the transformation of his thinking. Thus, even today Old Testament thinking continues to exert its influence far more than is generally supposed. People do not permeate the experiences through which they pass here with the thinking that is actually the consequences of these experiences. This is done only in the most limited measure and for the most part instinctively. At least the experiences through which people pass are not pursued by them to the stage of the birth of a special kind of thinking. This is done only by the true occultist whose development has been in accordance with the present age. In his case the life lived is so ordered that he awakes again, just as a child awakes after it is born. One who conducts his life in accordance with my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, goes through this process a second time. He relates himself to his normal nature as the ordinary man relates himself to the embryo. In ordinary life people conduct themselves in such a way that, although they are compelled to go through experiences, they apply only the kind of thinking to them that they have acquired by reason of the fact that they have been embryos. It is thus that people go about having heir experiences but are not willing to proceed further. They apply to these experiences as a thinking content, especially as the character of their thinking, the form of their thinking, what the embryonic life has given them. In other words, they apply what is inherited in the blood from generation to generation.

One fact is of fundamental importance. The Mystery of Golgotha can never be grasped in its special nature by means of the kind of thinking that we possess because of our embryonic development. For that reason I have explained to you also in the lectures given during my present stay here that the Mystery of Golgotha is something that cannot be comprehended by means of ordinary physical thinking. This is something that will always be denied by honest individuals so long as they remain at the state of physical thinking. The Mystery of Golgotha and everything permeated by the Christ, must be grasped, not by means of what is derived from the moon but by what is derived from the sun; that is, from the standpoint that one attains after birth during the present life. This is the great distinction between what is permeated by the Christ and what is not so permeated. Whatever is not permeated by the Christ is mastered by a kind of thinking inherited in the blood stream. A comprehension of the world that is permeated by the Christ spirit is mastered by the kind of thinking that must be acquired by the individual human being as a personality in this world, through the experiences of life, by spiritualizing these experiences in the manner explained in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.

This is the essential fact. The kind of thinking we possess because of our embryonic development leads to the recognition of the Godhead only as the Father. The kind of thinking that is acquired in this world through the personal life after the embryonic stage leads to the recognition of the Godhead also as the Son.

Now, the influence of this tendency to make use only of the kind of thinking that belonged to Jehovah persisted even into the nineteenth century. But this thinking is suited to grasp only that element in the human being that belongs within the order of nature. This condition came about through the fact that the Jehovah divinity, who, as you know, was one of the Seven Elohim, gained the mastery of human consciousness and suppressed the other Elohim at an early period. The other Elohim were in this way thrust into the sphere of so-called illusion and were supposed to be fantastic beings. But this came about because the Jehovah divinity temporarily supplanted these spirits and permeated human consciousness with what alone can be developed as a power from the pre-embryonic time.

This continued into the nineteenth century. Human nature came under the influence of lower elemental spiritual entities who were working against the endeavors of the Elohim, through the fact that the Jehovah divinity dethroned the other Elohim in a certain sense. They, however, made themselves effective only through the personality of Christ, and they will continue to make them-elves effective one after another in the most varied ways.

Thus, the evolution of consciousness was such because the Jehovah divinity had placed himself as sole ruler and had dethroned the others. Through the fact that the others had been dethroned, human nature came under the influence of beings lower than the Elohim. Thus, not only does Jehovah continue his influence even into the nineteenth century, but so also do gods of a lower character instead of the Elohim. I have always told you that Christianity is really still in its beginning but even after it had become widely disseminated humanity did not yet understand it for the reason that men did not immediately accept the influence of the Elohim. They continued to be attached to the Jehovah thinking, to the kind of thinking awakened by the embryonic force, and also because they remained under the influence of the opponents of the Elohim.

During the nineteenth century—indeed, precisely during the fifth decade of that century, which I have often designated as an important turning point—the situation became such that Jehovah himself was gradually overpowered in his influence upon human consciousness through the dominance of those lower spirits he had evoked. The result was that, since only the element in the human being that is bound to the natural order of things, to the blood, can be comprehended by means of the forces of Jehovah, man's earlier seeking for the one God in nature was transmuted, because of the influence of the opposing elements, into mere atheistic natural science; that is, to mere atheistic scientific thinking and to merely utilitarian thinking in the field of practical life.

This must be grasped firmly as regards the fifth decade, the period mentioned. The fact that Jehovah could not free himself from the spirits he had evoked led to the transition of Old Testament thinking into the atheistic science of the modern age. This in the field of social thinking has become marx ism or something similar. Thus, a thinking under the influence of natural science holds sway in the field of the social life.

This is connected with much that is happening in the immediate present. Old Testament thinking in human beings today is transformed into naturalism. Against this kind of thinking neither what comes from the West as the image of man, nor what comes from the East, can provide an adequate defense because this thinking prevents man from acquiring actual and true insight.

It is perfectly obvious at present that people are opposed to the acquisition of insight. This sometimes takes on a pathological form. The so-called war history of the last two years, as I have recently said, will be a psychiatric account, socially psychiatric. The course of events, as these have occurred, is such that, when put together in the proper order, they provide for those who are familiar with them the best symptomatology for the social psychiatry of recent years and of the years to follow. Only it is necessary, of course, to deal with psychiatry also with more delicate hands and in a manner somewhat different from that of materialistic medicine. Otherwise we shall never bring to light in the right way the psychiatry to be studied, for example, in the person of Ludendorff. But it is precisely a considerable portion of the most recent history of our times that must be viewed in this light.

You will be able to recall that, from the beginning of the catastrophe, I have repeatedly and emphatically declared on the occasion of one or another irresponsible assertion that this particular war catastrophe will render it impossible to write history on the basis of mere documents and the results of archival research. The manner in which this catastrophe became possible will be understood only by one who comes to realize clearly that the most decisive occurrence that took place at the end of July and the beginning of August, 1914 occurred because of a dimmed condition in human consciousness. Men over the whole earth were in a state of dimmed consciousness, and occurrences were brought about through the influence of ahrimanic powers in these dimmed consciousnesses. In other words, things will have to be unveiled through a knowledge of spiritual-scientific facts. This is something that must simply be perceived. The time is past when events can be rightly explained on the basis of mere documents, in the manner in which Rancke wrote history, or someone else in some other field—Buckle, or others. This is important. Mere sympathies and antipathies determine nothing when the right guidance for one's judgment is needed. Judgments, however, have been formed in recent years, and are still being formed primarily according to sympathies and antipathies. Certainly, correct judgments are formed even under the influence of sympathy and antipathy, but these do not signify much as regards a person's grasp by means of his judgment of the factual world. The manner in which one sort of opinion or another becomes epidemic can be subjected to special studies if we trace the development of opinions among people during recent years. What have millions of persons believed in Central Europe, and what will they believe? What is believed in the rest of the world? This continued in Central Europe as long as possible; outside of Central Europe it will continue even longer. But what is really needed is that the habit shall be formed at last of learning from the events themselves. Events shall be observed for the purpose of forming judgments on the basis of these events.

It is to be desired that the weight of events shall have some determining, decisive influence upon people, and especially the way in which events have taken their course in the present period. This way is quite new; earlier events came about differently. Today, things diametrically opposed to one another come together.

I called your attention last time to the fact that the transplantation of bolshevism into Russia was an impulse derived essentially from Ludendorff. These things, which it was naturally not necessary to mention outside the region of the Central Powers, have been stated there often enough. People would not listen. I repeatedly had the following experience. It is highly significant and I once referred to it here, but I desire that it shall not be forgotten, for I shall gradually narrate all these things so that the world shall learn what has really been happening. The writing I have prepared consisted of two parts. The second part contained what I have sketched for you as the social relationships but arranged in a form suited for that time. The first part contained what I considered it necessary that I should discuss and disseminate in the manner indicated. I have met persons who have read what I wrote and who answered me by saying, “Yes, indeed, but to carry out the first point you make would lead inevitably to the abdication of the German Kaiser.” Of course, I could only reply, “If it leads to that, it will simply be necessary that it should lead to that.” World history has confirmed this. This abdication had to come. It should not have come, however, in the way in which it actually occurred, but ought to have come from a free inner decision. Most assuredly this would have resulted from my very first point. Naturally, the first point did not read, “The German Kaiser must abdicate,” but it made a definite demand. If this had been carried out, the abdication would have occurred long ago under entirely different circumstances from those that actually took place.

I could never bring people to understand that what had there been written down was an utterance derived from reality. Regarding that one point also no further progress was made. As I was stating the matter to a minister of foreign affairs, I said to him also, “Well, you have the choice either to be reasonable and employ reason in bringing things to pass, or to experience revolutions, which must occur in the course of the next decades, and will begin soon.”

Just as truly as this was necessary, which directs attention to a somewhat greater perspective, so was it true that the German Kaiser had to be induced to abdicate, and that a proposal was made looking in this direction. But, when this statement was made, which was based upon a more limited perspective than the other, it was simply something regarding which it was not permissible even to speak, and of which not even a serious discussion was allowed.

Thus it did not require these last events to render obvious the unsound mind of Ludendorff, but this could have been known long before. I was able long ago to point this out. But, as you know, in regard to spiritual science the situation is such that people shrink in terror from it, because they are afraid of it. Fear in heart and mind is something that plays a great and tremendous role in the minds of people at the present time. It appears under the most varied masks. Indeed, anxiety of soul, unwillingness to come into contact with a thing, whatever it may be, is what plays a special role at the present time. It is with this objective in mind that we must view events and we then recognize them as symptoms for things that lie much deeper. Just consider an event of the last few days.

That things would turn out as they have turned out now could have been known long ago by any thoughtful observer of conditions in Germany and of the German army. Only it was Ludendorff who came to realize for the first time on August 8th, 1918, that he could not win the victory. He was the “practical person.” Bear in mind all that I have said to you from time to time about “practical persons,” about the impracticality of practical persons! He was a practical person, who proved to be wrong under all circumstances, who came to realize at the very last, on August 8th, that he could not win the victory with the army available to him. Men of insight had known this since September 16, 1914; it was impossible to win the victory with this army. Now, what did Ludendorff do? He summoned Ballin to him in order that Ballin should go at last to the Kaiser and should tell him what the situation was, since Ballin was on terms of close friendship with him. You will ask whether there was no imperial chancellor at that time. Yes, there was an imperial chancellor, but has name was Hertling. Was there no minister of foreign affairs? There was one, but he was Herr von Hintze, who had come out of ,the most stupefying atmosphere of the court. There was also a Reichstag, and other things likewise—of such appendices of the life of the nation it is scarcely worthwhile in our time to speak. So Ludendorff summoned Ballin to him and proposed to him that he explain the situation to the Supreme War Lord. Ballin set out for the Kaiser's residence—of course, always at a distance from the actual events, except when Ludendorff himself found it opportune to announce that this or that action had been undertaken in the presence of His Majesty, the Supreme War Lord. Anyone who understood the situation knew what significance to attach to the word “presence.” So Ballin, who had long been a well-known and clever man, set out toward Wilhelmshohe, in order to enlighten the Kaiser. This would naturally have been possible only if he had been able to speak to the Kaiser alone, which he could have done at any time if the Kaiser had not once struck him on his cheek with a lady's fan, or something of the kind, when Ballin at an earlier time, at the beginning of the war, had wished to explain something to him. But he consented to go, in spite of the affectionate slap given him with the lady's fan. He consented to go because of the critical situation, in order to explain the situation to his old friend. But the latter summoned Herr von Berg to be present, and he knew how to change the subject of a conversation—as the Kaiser obviously wished, for he did not wish to hear the truth. So the conversation never touched upon what should have been discussed.

I relate this only as a matter of psychology. You have here a person who Stands in the midst of the most critical events and who is afraid of the truth, brought to him by another person, and will not permit it to reach him. Here you see the situation in a clear light. The same phenomenon is common at the present time. So Ballin was not able to convince the Supreme War Lord because he simply could not present the matter to him. Ludendorff summoned Herr von Hintze, and reached an agreement with him that an armistice should be asked of the Entente. This was immediately after August 8, 1918. Herr von Hintze promised to appeal to Wilson. But nothing happened until toward October 1918, in spite of the fact that it was clear that the very thing was a matter of necessity that actually occurred under the most unfortunate ministry of Prince Max von Baden many weeks later. Prince Max von Baden wished to go to Berlin and do something entirely different, but Ludendorff explained that an armistice must be proposed within twenty-four hours to avoid the greatest disaster. Prince Max von Baden did this against his earlier decision.

After five days, Ludendorff declared that he had really blundered, and that it would not have been necessary!

This is an example of the way in which practical persons, highly respected practical persons—to whom, however, there is not the least ground for showing respect—intervene in world events but from what points of view and with what forces of thought! This is also an opportunity for studying how opinions become epidemic. The opinion that Hindenburg and Ludendorff are “great men” has spread everywhere with epidemic violence, whereas they were in so sense really great men, not even from the standpoint of their limited profession. These catastrophic occurrences are especially characteristic in showing how false judgments are formed. Witticisms alone have often hit the mark. If you go to Berlin now—most of you have probably not been in Berlin in recent years—you will see in the vicinity of the Victory Column, near that great cuspidor (indeed, the Reichstag building really looks like a huge cuspidor), in that vicinity you will see a remarkable structure. There stands “Hindenburg,” a great, gigantic, most horrible statue of wood. Every “patriot” has driven a nail into this statue so that it has gradually had nails hammered into it everywhere. Only the wit of Berlin has correctly evaluated this. The saying is that, when he was finally entirely nailed up (Ganz vernagelt=absolutely stupid) he would be placed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

All these things ought to be considered especially from the viewpoint of which I have often spoken—from the standpoint of the symptomatology of history as well as the symptomatology of events that have any relationship to human beings. The external world gives only symptoms, and we arrive at the truth only when we learn to recognize these symptoms in their nature as such.