The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Speeches by Rudolf Steiner at the preliminary meeting of the fourth ordinary general assembly of “Futurum A.G.”

Emil Leinhas greets the members of the Anthroposophical Society who are present and who represent about 80% of the share capital of “The Coming Day”, and asks Dr. Steiner to take the chair.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! Today we will probably have to hold the most sober and uninspiring meeting possible within the Anthroposophical Society, and therefore we may well ask that pure reason alone prevail in today's meeting, otherwise we will hardly be able to cope.

The point is that today we have to talk to each other in a certain way about the fate of the “Coming Day”, which is connected with many ideals that members of the Anthroposophical Society have embraced in recent years. We have in the “Coming Day” an institution that emerged, so to speak, as the last major institution from the once emerging threefold social order movement, and it is only with a certain pain that we can turn our attention to the fact that this “Coming Day” is now in a truly serious crisis that absolutely must be resolved. Above all, it is important to see things as soberly as possible.

The hopes have not been fulfilled that the things connected with the “Coming Day” could proceed as one had wanted, that the Central European economic crisis, so to speak, would pass by the “Coming Day”, but the “Coming Day” is now just as any other business, fully participating in what the declining economic life offers. The “Coming Day” is not doing better today, but also not worse than any other Central European business.

The crisis has come about in the following way: if, [after the currency was converted to gold marks], the “Coming Day” had cash today, the possibility of continuing its economic and intellectual operations with cash, if it could count on being able to take out loans, then it would be able to continue working, just as other businesses are truly not working under better conditions today. However, the “Coming Day” does not have any cash, and so it cannot continue its economic and spiritual activities as they have existed up to now. The material value of the “Coming Day” is - and this must be emphasized again and again - such that if cash were available or could be raised, there would be no objection to simply letting the leadership go. Of course, there may be other reasons why “The Coming Day” is unable to find cash at the moment, but the main reason is that German economic life has taken on forms that make it impossible for the “Coming Day” to continue as other commercial enterprises do, because to do so it would have been necessary for the “Coming Day” to be treated with the same goodwill from outside as other commercial enterprises have been. That did not happen. A large part of the reasons why the “Coming Day” is in this crisis due to the lack of any cash funds - soberly this cannot be put differently than this: a large part of the blame lies in the way the “Coming Day” was vilified in the world. A project that is presented to the world in this way could only continue to function if it had a core of people who would take financial responsibility for it. But if only what has happened so far within the Anthroposophical Society is continued, the only thing that can be counted on, this is not the case either, and so today we can do no other than objectively present the situation of the “Coming Day” as it is. Therefore, I will take the liberty of organizing today's agenda in such a way that I will first ask Mr. Leinhas to present the situation of the “Coming Day” objectively to you, and as the second point on the agenda, I will make the proposals that need to be made in view of the serious situation. So I ask Mr. Leinhas to give an objective presentation of the situation of the “Coming Day” as a prerequisite for our further negotiations.

[Emil Leinhas describes the situation on the basis of the balance sheet. The situation is such that the economic enterprises can no longer support the spiritual ones.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! You have listened to the description of the situation of the “Coming Day”, and I will now take the liberty, with a heavy heart but purely rationally, as I ask you to take it, of discussing the only way we can get over this crisis of the “Coming Day” in my opinion.

The essential thing here is that, in view of the description of the situation that has just been given to us, we now have to divide the “Coming Day” into two parts: one comprising purely economic enterprises and the other comprising spiritual enterprises. If we draw the conclusion from what has just been said, it is actually the case that we, who, as anthroposophists, have to reflect on the situation, have to say that The “Coming Day” is no longer able to provide any cash for the spiritual activities, which essentially include the Waldorf School, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, the Research Institute and the publishing house. Therefore, the question is – since the prerequisite that I believed I had to make, that the purely economic operations had to be organized first, has failed due to the impossibility of somehow managing today with the sale of these operations or the like – how we manage to separate the spiritual operations of “Coming Day” in a certain way. But this can only be done through extremely difficult measures that require heavy sacrifices on the part of our anthroposophical friends. It is not possible in any other way. You must bear in mind that these spiritual enterprises are now in a situation in which they have no possibility of being continued in any way out of the situation of the “Coming Day”. They have, so to speak, been abandoned, not by any decision, but by the facts.

The question arises: how do we get out of this situation? We have to consider the following: the “Coming Day” has issued 109,000 shares. Let us do the math based on the number of shares. If we make an estimate, but probably a fairly accurate one, of the share capital underlying these 109,000 shares, and divide it between the purely economic and the spiritual enterprises, then 74,000 shares are accounted for by the economic and agricultural enterprises and 35,000 by the spiritual enterprises. So, we have possessions for the spiritual enterprises, which correspond to 35,000 shares of “Tomorrow”.

Now, my dear friends, how can these enterprises, these spiritual enterprises, be continued? That is the fundamental question. And however you may look at it, these spiritual enterprises cannot remain as they are in the face of the situation of the “Coming Day”. For what would then have to happen? Then the “Coming Day” would have to proceed in the same way as other enterprises have to proceed today. The holdings would have to be consolidated, and the total mass of shareholders of the “Coming Day” would be faced with exactly the same situation, only with a significantly reduced number of shares. Perhaps this would somewhat increase their creditworthiness, but it is something that cannot be done, given all the prospects that have to be considered.

But if this cannot be done, what can be done? There is nothing else to be done – and I am now saying what I have to say with the greatest reluctance, but it must be said because of the situation, and if I were to present the matter to you in a long-winded way, it would not be any better: the only thing that can be done is to get rid of the 35,000 shares that correspond to the ownership of the spiritual enterprises. But this is only possible if enough people of influence can be found within the Anthroposophical Society who are willing to simply renounce their shareholdings in favor of the most important spiritual enterprises, so that the spiritual enterprises receive the 35,000 shares as a gift. It is just as if spiritual enterprises were to be founded and if a number of self-sacrificing personalities could be found who would contribute the sum corresponding to these 35,000 shares.

So, my dear friends, is it possible that the owners of 35,000 “Kommenden-Tag” shares renounce ownership of their shares? Then the 35,000 shares of Coming Day stock that are being given away could be left to the German Goetheanum fund, which would then have to be at my free disposal. This would give me free rein to run the spiritual enterprises. I see no other possibility for any other solution to the problem we are facing now than for this measure to be taken. You will understand that it is extremely difficult for me, one year after I myself resigned from the supervisory board of “Kommender Tag”, to have to make this enormous demand on the shareholders of “Kommender Tag” today: Give me 35,000 shares so that the spiritual activities can be continued in the way I will explain in a moment.

So if today there are shareholders willing to make this donation, then the matter is such that the “Coming Day” as such will continue to exist as an association of purely economic enterprises. How this continuation is envisaged will be discussed later. This continuation would correspond to a shareholding of 74,000 shares. We can discuss the matter in this area later. At this moment, I consider it my task to explain what can happen to the spiritual enterprises if the 35,000 shares are donated to the German Goetheanum Fund. It would then be clear that this willingness to make a sacrifice would at least express an anthroposophical attitude. The donors would say to themselves: Of course we are making a sacrifice, but we are doing so out of the anthroposophical spirit. There are shareholders in the “Coming Day” who will be able to make such a donation. Since they can, of course, only be placed in a position to make such a gift voluntarily, one can only say: Those who will give will also be able to give. It will be a group of shareholders who can give. On the other hand, there are shareholders of the “Coming Day” who cannot renounce their shareholdings; they are referred to purely economic enterprises. They would be in no different a position than other shareholders. And in order to preserve the full ownership of the 74,000 shares, it would be necessary for the spiritual enterprises to have no influence whatsoever on the economic administration of the “Coming Day”. If this condition were to be fulfilled today, that 35,000 shares of stock be made available to the German Goetheanum fund, and the economic enterprises were to be thought of separately, then the following would emerge:

First of all, the Waldorf School has 300,000 German Marks booked in the “Coming Day”. What the Waldorf School needs cannot really be covered by any kind of equivalent value. As you all know, the Waldorf School is entirely dependent on school fees and voluntary donations for its cash resources. Therefore, if the situation is to be rectified, the Waldorf School cannot be provided with the equipment it needs unless it receives a gift of the full amount. What corresponds to the Waldorf School [in terms of land, buildings and facilities], which is therefore listed in the “Coming Day” with 300,000 marks, must be donated outright.

The following then remains: the Clinical Therapeutic Institute, which is currently linked to the sale of remedies, that is, to the pharmaceutical laboratory. I will discuss the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute later. Regarding the sale of remedies, the balance sheet shows that it can be said that there is every prospect of it no longer requiring any significant sacrifices from today onwards. It is self-financing. However, cash will still be needed in the near future. And because it is a solid economic asset, it will be taken into account as such, and it must also be possible to buy it. Now it occurs to me that the Internationale Laboratorien A.G. in Arlesheim also handles the sale of remedies for all those countries in the world that have not even been ceded to the Stuttgart laboratory in a treaty, that this Internationale Laboratorien A.G. Arlesheim handles the sale of these remedies for the world. It is a joint-stock company. And in view of the balance of the local sales of remedies and in view of the general circumstances relating to our sales of remedies, which are extremely favorable in ideal terms, the International Laboratories A.G. Arlesheim will be persuaded to take over the sale of remedies and carry out the purchase of the laboratory. But again, given the circumstances there in Arlesheim, I cannot imagine that the purchase price could exceed 50,000 francs. These 50,000 francs will of course have to be added to the Goetheanum fund, since if the spiritual enterprises are now independent, if they are given as a gift, but the donation does not receive any cash, so that there could actually be no question of this purchase having the consequence that compensation - which would in any case be quite minimal - could be paid to the donating shareholders.

Regarding the publishing house, I would like to say the following: I can only feel an obligation to the publishing house to save from it the anthroposophical books that I have written myself, the books that are the result of the extraordinary and meritorious research of Dr. and Mrs. Kolisko, the two brochures and another book by Dr. Wachsmuth, a member of the Executive Council at the Goetheanum, which is currently being published. That would make a total of books that could be worth between 25,000 and 30,000 francs. This is something that should be acquired and the income from it should go to the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press. The other mass of books is such that, speaking purely financially and from the point of view of the Coming Day, I not only cannot feel any obligation towards it, but must not feel any obligation towards it. In the case of this mass of books in particular, it occurs to me that despite all the objections I raised at the time when this book publishing house was founded, this publishing house has only behaved over time in such a way that it has essentially counted on the consumers of the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House within the Anthroposophical Society; that basically those who at the time created a competing company for the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag with the “Coming Day” publishing house with an alleged enthusiasm that was actually foolishness, could easily be taken to task for this. Therefore, I do not feel morally obliged in any way to take care of the remaining book stock of the “Coming Day” publishing house.

This remaining book stock brings me to another thought. In the future, I will have to work hard to ensure that no anthroposophical funds flow into economic enterprises that have nothing to do with the Anthroposophical Society as such. In this regard, there was a time when we gave in, but today it is imperative that no economic enterprises be fed anthroposophical funds in the future. Therefore, it was also necessary for me to ensure that in the future, the entire sale of remedies worldwide would not be based on capital that comes from anthroposophical pockets, but on capital from people who want to manage their own assets with these things, in other words, only by people who do not give the money for anthroposophical reasons, but only out of consideration for those who consider the sale of remedies profitable, without taking into account that this has anything to do with anthroposophy. In the future, these matters can only be dealt with from this point of view. The sale of remedies can be organized in such a way that, if it is also managed commercially in the future, it can become a profitable business in a purely commercial sense, given the great recognition that even those remedies find in the world that I myself have only, I would say, half-hoped for. But it can only be managed with funds that are given for the risk involved in selling the remedies. So I can also recommend to the Internationale Laboratorien A.G. Arlesheim, which will be based on the above principles in the future, the purchase of the sale of remedies here.

That leaves the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart, my dear friends. Although its finances are quite healthy at present, it cannot be thought of as needing any other kind of leadership than that provided by cash. In accordance with the intentions that emerged from the Christmas Conference in Dornach, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim can no longer be a member of the International Laboratories A.G. in Arlesheim, but only the local laboratory and the sale of remedies. In the future, a spiritual institute cannot be associated with purely economic enterprises. For this reason, the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim has also been separated from the International Laboratories A.G. in Arlesheim and has become an integral part of the Goetheanum. The same cannot be said for the ClinicalTherapeutic Institute in Stuttgart, because the Goetheanum could not guarantee or take on the risk of a penny subsidy. So the situation of the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart is such that it cannot be connected to the International Laboratories A.G. in Arlesheim, nor can it be connected to the Goetheanum for the simple reason that the Goetheanum cannot take on any risk. The only way to set up the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart is to make it a financially independent enterprise that can be taken over by a doctor or non-doctor who, if subsidies are needed, will take them on at their own risk. On the other hand, if subsidies are not needed, anyone with a little business sense can take them on at their own risk. But if subsidies are necessary, then the Goetheanum certainly cannot take them on. So there is no other option for the clinic than to make it an independent enterprise. As for Gmünd, I do not count it among the enterprises for which I am responsible; the “Coming Day” will have to continue to take care of it and find a way to make it profitable.

What remains, my dear friends, is the scientific research institute, which is almost heartbreaking when you have to talk about it in this situation. But as things stand, the fact is, on the one hand, that the “Coming Day” has no cash for this institute, that the Goetheanum in Dornach is in no position to take on any obligation for this scientific research institute, not even a single penny , so that there is no other possibility — not out of any wish or anything like that, but purely out of the economic situation — than, if no enthusiast can be found to take over and finance the scientific research institute, to dissolve it, to dissolve it completely. We may be burying the idea that we had in mind as one of the most sacred, I would say, to establish economic enterprises to serve the spiritual life. But the possibility of continuing this does not exist.

So the following situation would arise for the spiritual enterprises: the Waldorf School will be supported by donations. The Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Stuttgart will become independent and will be made into a separate enterprise; Gmünd will remain in the care of the “Coming Day”. The scientific research institute will have to be dissolved if no individual or consortium can be found to maintain it. My books and the others mentioned will be removed from the publishing house and it will be ensured that these books fall to the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House for further distribution. The rest of the book inventory must be sold on the open market to outside publishers. I would consider it inadmissible if any steps were taken within the Anthroposophical Society itself to sell the rest of this book stock and to found anything further on what lies within the Anthroposophical Society, because that would create competition for the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, and no one can demand that what the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag is doing should also be undermined by further competition.

That, my dear friends, is the stark and sober truth, which is the only thing that is necessary in the current situation. If we succeed in appealing to the willingness to make sacrifices of so many shareholders in the “Coming Day” today, so that 35,000 shares of stock for the spiritual enterprises are freely available and allocated to the Goetheanum fund, then we can undertake the reorganization of these spiritual enterprises in the way I have described. I would advocate for the order itself and then the remaining 74,000 shares would have to be dealt with for the further operation of the purely economic enterprises that are part of the “coming day”.

Do you believe, my dear friends, that what I have just presented to you briefly, soberly and dryly has really caused me the most serious concerns for weeks, has led to the most difficult struggles. But when Mr. Leinhas came to me at the Goetheanum in Dornach a few weeks ago and told me that the last of the economic enterprises with which the “Coming Day” still had to reckon, which, in a spirit of complete sacrifice, had actually raised the lion's share of the subsidies up to that point, it was clear that this enterprise would no longer be able to raise these subsidies either. Then it was clear: this would mean the end of the possibility of continuing the “Coming Day” in its old form. Then, despite its material assets, the “Coming Day” would be without the possibility of creating cash; then a reorganization would have to take place at all costs. Since that time, the whole matter has been a great concern to me. As long as there was hope that the economic enterprises could be sold first, and the spiritual enterprises would remain as a kind of rump of the “Coming Day”, one could think that what remains could be organized in some way. But now that things have progressed so far that we are standing before the General Assembly and have asked you to come together beforehand in confidence, it is not possible for me to put anything other than what I have just said before you as a proposal.

That is the point at which I would like to open the discussion. I therefore ask friends who want to participate to speak up. We can then, after the things that have been presented have been discussed, move on to discussing what possibilities can be considered for the continuation of the purely economic enterprises. I should also mention that one shareholder, who owns the corresponding number of shares, has made available to me the amount that the Waldorf School in “Kommender Tag” is currently worth. It can also be assumed that a number of others will definitely give it. So it will be possible for the shareholders who are willing to transfer their shares in the way described to add their number of shares to a list that is being passed around.

During the discussion, Emil Kühn asks whether it would not be possible for the shareholders who are donating today to participate in some way in the real values of the spiritual institutions.

Rudolf Steiner: As far as the economic enterprises are concerned, I myself would certainly be open to discussing the question that Dr. Kühn has just touched on. But as far as the spiritual enterprises are concerned, I would like to say the following: If the experiences that have been made in the economic management within the Anthroposophical Society in recent years are taken as a basis, then I can only say that I myself would not participate in the reorganization of the spiritual enterprises differently than if, in every respect, such conditions were created that would only make possible an administration in the spiritual sense for these enterprises.

As far as the Waldorf School is concerned, I would not be able to participate in a reorganization if, in any way, an economic administration were to be associated with this reorganization; and that would be the case if, in some way, the current shareholders of the Waldorf School were to participate. The Waldorf School can only obtain its operating funds from school fees and voluntary contributions, as I said before. And even if the property were there to begin with, it would always have to mean something quite imaginary for those who participate in it. The only healthy relationship is when the Waldorf School itself has this property, when it is given to it. On this condition alone, the spiritual enterprises of “Coming Day” can be detached from my proposal. I can say that I would only participate if a sufficient number of people were to give up their shares as a free gift - and this can only be done of their own free will - in order to find a solution. I myself would not participate in this solution if it were tied to the condition that gifts be made on condition that there should still be a participation. For that, financial administration would be necessary again, and I do not want to be associated with that. So I ask only those friends to sign up who are able to make their donations unconditionally, who want to place these spiritual enterprises on purely spiritual ground.

As you have seen, I have only made the proposals with a heavy heart. The proposal that has now been made is the most obvious one and has also been well considered. Otherwise it would be a matter of issuing bonds that would only represent an imaginary ownership. I want to keep away from anything imaginary. If the Waldorf School is not detached from an economic connection with the “Coming Day”, then I also don't know how the question can be solved, that I could remain the spiritual director of the Waldorf School. So I can't say what influence it would have on my own decisions if such a reorganization, as it has been suggested, were to take place. I have not appealed to a decision by you, but to the willingness of individual anthroposophical friends to make sacrifices. We do not have to bring about a decision if 35,000 shares are donated to the German Goetheanum fund as a gift – if Gmünd is dropped, it is only 29,000 shares – if 29,000 shares are donated to the German Goetheanum fund as a gift. I am not appealing to a decision, but only to the willingness to sacrifice in order to finance the spiritual enterprises in a certain way à fond perdu.

[Further discussion of the donation of shares to save the spiritual enterprises, which would also relieve the economic enterprises. These should become independent and, if possible, be taken over again by their former owners.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! The words contained in my proposal have, I am deeply moved to say, fallen on extraordinarily fertile ground. I do not wish to miss this opportunity to emphasize what seems to me to be important and significant, namely that despite the unfortunate circumstances that have arisen within the Anthroposophical Society as a result of various foundations - I have often spoken about this over the past few years - it has become apparent that the trust in the general anthroposophical movement is so great that we can only look on with the deepest satisfaction that this trust is so great that it has hardly been weakened at all in recent years, despite all the unfortunate measures that have been taken and that were intended to accommodate those who had the faith that such measures could do anything for the anthroposophical cause. I have already emphasized in various places how the reliance on purely anthroposophical ground since the Christmas Conference has been shown everywhere in the most energetic way, that trust in the actual anthroposophical cause has not diminished in recent months, but has become much greater. So that within Anthroposophy we can look with the deepest satisfaction at what is alive among us in this direction.

I must say that today, with an extraordinarily sad and worried heart, I set about making the proposal that I once had to make to you, my dear friends, after becoming aware of the situation of “Kommendes Tag”. And I could have well understood if this proposal had been rejected in the broadest sense. I must say that it is deeply touching and heart-warming that this did not happen, but that we can see that right from the outset, in the first hour, friends have agreed to donate 20,700 shares to the Goetheanum Fund. I cannot tell you how grateful I am for this very beautiful result, that we can look at this result, that the indicated number of 20,700 shares has been made available, so that in the very near future we will be able to achieve full financial recovery of the spiritual enterprises in this direction, as far as possible, and thus also be able to contribute indirectly to the recovery of the “Coming Day”.

This is an extraordinarily distressing result, and we can only look back on the proceedings of this meeting with the deepest emotion. I thank all those who were able to donate and did so, truly from the bottom of my heart for what you have done, which means an extraordinarily significant deed not only for the “Coming Day”, but especially for our anthroposophical movement. For if this willingness to make sacrifices is now being shown in spite of the failures of recent years within anthroposophical circles in such a way, we will nevertheless be able to achieve what needs to be achieved on our main path in the near future. And what needs to be achieved is what can be done through anthroposophy in spiritual terms for humanity and for modern civilization. Even if our material undertakings have not had the desired success, even if everything that has emerged from the threefold social order movement has basically fallen through today, we still have the opportunity – and this is solely due to the unlimited trust that our anthroposophists have in anthroposophy – to make further progress in the spiritual realm.

This, however, also imposes an obligation on me to continue in the way I have tried to make the Christmas Conference fruitful so far, by making the Anthroposophical Society ever more esoteric and esoteric, in an active way. It is precisely from what our friends have done today that I feel how strong the obligation is to continue in this direction in the most energetic way. If we stick together in this way, each doing what he can do, we will make progress on the appropriate path.

You see, my dear friends, there is still work to be done: the threefolding movement was founded here years ago. Individual enterprises have emerged from it. The part of the threefolding movement that should have been carried out in a purely practical way, for which practical collaboration would have been necessary, did not initially prove itself. On the other hand, far beyond the borders of Europe, especially in America, there is a great deal of interest in these impulses. Let me use this word, which has been so much maligned: These are realities of the threefold social order. It is becoming apparent that these impulses are nevertheless being taken up with a certain understanding more and more. And perhaps it will be good for these impulses in particular if we do not try to translate them into unsuitable practice in a hasty manner, but instead follow what I have often said at the beginning of our explanations of our magazine Anthroposophie: Threefolding can only take effect when it has entered as many minds as possible. We have seen the failure of applying threefolding to the outer practice of people's lives, but it will make its way into the world as something that is, after all, on anthroposophical ground. All indications show that our strength must be applied in the anthroposophical-spiritual field. And in this sense, I would like to tell you that I feel it is my duty and my gratitude to do everything in my power to further and advance the esoteric-spiritual character of our anthroposophical movement. If we succeed, and we must succeed, because the spiritual does not encounter obstacles in the same way as external material things, then the friends who have shown this willingness to make sacrifices will feel even more closely connected to our life in the Anthroposophical Movement in a renewed way.

Since it is already late, we may perhaps close today's meeting with this.

Excerpt from the memoirs of Emil Leinhas

The works council movement showed a tendency towards a certain one-sided, purely economically oriented radicalism. This danger became all the more apparent the more the employers retreated to their earlier entrepreneurial position with the strengthening of political reaction.

In this situation, we turned to a few professors at the University of Tübingen through the mediation of Professor von Blume. One Sunday we met with these gentlemen at the home of Professor Robert Wilbrandt in Tübingen. Rudolf Steiner described the development of the movement to form works councils and pointed out that such a one-sidedly economically oriented social movement could pose a great danger for spiritual and cultural life, precisely because it seemed to lead to a certain success among the working class. In contrast to this, he considered it necessary to also bring intellectual life to greater effectiveness through free corporations in all areas of cultural life. He therefore proposed the formation of a cultural council consisting of personalities from intellectual and cultural life, which would have the task of preparing the self-administration of the entire intellectual and cultural life, but above all of the education system and universities. Rudolf Steiner explained how he would envision the self-administration of a university, for example, without the involvement of a ministry of education, but rather through the teachers working at the university itself; a state of affairs that, incidentally, did not exist that long ago.

You can't exactly say that the professors didn't show any understanding for this; but their answers did paint the distressing picture that these gentlemen were truly worried about the difficulties that would arise from such self-government of the university within their own ranks. In view of the envy and jealousy that would show among colleagues, they believed that they still had to give preference to administration by a higher-level ministry of education. It was clear that a college of academics of this nature would be completely unsuitable for self-administration of its affairs.

As on previous occasions, for example on the occasion of a highly significant lecture that Rudolf Steiner had given in Tübingen to an audience consisting mainly of students, one had to make the sad experience again that of all sections of the population, the academic world was least able to muster understanding for new social ideas, regardless of age or rank. On the drive back from Tübingen, we decided to appeal to the general public of intellectual and cultural life as soon as possible, calling on them to establish a cultural council. At two meetings convened for this purpose at Landhausstraße 70 over the Pentecost weekend, various drafts of such an appeal were discussed in detail. On Sunday evening, a proposal I had put forward was accepted in its main features. During the night, this draft was reworked by Dr. Unger and several other friends, taking into account the suggestions that had arisen from the meeting, and submitted to a second meeting, which took place on Whit Monday, for a decision.

Fragment of an essay, 1920

The obvious objection is that a relatively small company like “Der Kommende Tag” is not only unable to do anything positive in the face of a general economic collapse, but must also collapse itself. But this objection is not valid. The economic system which is being aimed at here should show, on the one hand, how enterprises can maintain themselves through their inner life if they break with the practices of the present economic way of thinking, which has led to destruction.

In the exemplary way of cooperation between all employees striven for by the “Kommenden Tag”, it will be possible to guide the companies through severe crises. If the workers are kept in such a way that they feel bound to the entire company in terms of their interests, they will have justified goals to achieve not through disruption but precisely through the maintenance of operations.

On the other hand, this type of economy should enable the managed companies to produce goods that, in terms of quality and quantity, secure us the foreign market.

In our case, all of this guarantees that the investors will see their assets preserved even beyond the catastrophic period until the reconstruction, in which companies like ours must play a significant role.

It is necessary to found a bank-like institution that serves economic and spiritual enterprises in its financial activities, which are oriented towards the anthroposophically oriented world view, both in terms of their goals and their attitude. It should be distinguished from ordinary banking enterprises in that it not only serves the financial aspects, but also the real operations that are supported by the financial side. It will therefore be particularly important that loans, etc. are not granted in the way they are in ordinary banking, but rather from the factual point of view of the operation to be undertaken. The banker should therefore be less of a lender and more of a merchant who is familiar with the subject, who can realistically assess the scope of a transaction to be financed and make practical arrangements for its execution.

The main focus will be on financing such ventures that are likely to place economic life on a healthy associative footing and shape intellectual life in such a way that legitimate talents are placed in a position where they can express themselves in a socially fruitful way. What is particularly important is that, for example, enterprises are centered that currently yield well, in order to support other enterprises with their help, which can only bear economic fruit in the future and above all through the spiritual seed that is now poured into them, which can only come to fruition after some time. It is necessary for the bank's officers to have an insight into how the view of life that comes with anthroposophy can be translated into economically fruitful action. To do this, it is necessary to establish a strict associative relationship between the bank's administrators and those who, through their ideal work, can promote understanding for an enterprise to be brought into being.

For example: a person has an idea that promises economic fertility. The representatives of the ideational world view can create understanding for the social consequences. Their activities are financially supported by the amounts to be received, which are also intended to support the economic and technical realization of the idea.

The main focus must be on supporting the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement itself. The building in Dornach, for example, cannot support anything at first; nevertheless, it will bring a mighty economic return in the future. It must be made clear that everyone can support it materially, while respecting their financial conscience, if they only count on its material fertility over a longer period of time.

The undertaking must be based on the realization that technical, financial, etc. activity can develop branches that may temporarily produce favorable results for the individual entrepreneur, but that have a destructive effect in the context of the social order. Many recent undertakings were oriented in this way. They were capitalized, and it was precisely through their capitalization that the social order was undermined. Such endeavors must be confronted by those that arise from healthy thinking and feeling. They can be integrated into the social order in a truly fruitful way. However, they can only be supported by a social mindset inspired by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

It is true that an undertaking such as the one characterized here can initially only overcome the social-technical and financial possibilities of crisis, and that it will face social difficulties as long as these, as the actual workers' question, still take the form that comes from the old mode of production, which is doomed to crisis. The workers involved in the new ventures will, for example, behave in the same way towards wage differences as they do towards old-style ventures. However, one must not underestimate how quickly a company of the kind characterized here can also have socially beneficial consequences if it is managed properly. This will be seen. And the example will be convincing. If a project of this kind comes to a halt, then the workers involved will have their convictions with them when they get back on track. Only by aligning the interests of manual workers with the spiritual leaders of enterprises, through a way of thinking that affects all classes of people, can the forces of social destruction be counteracted.

The basic condition is that spiritual endeavors are intimately connected with all material ones. We cannot achieve such an orientation with the forces currently available in the anthroposophical movement because we do not have a practical enterprise in its bosom that has grown out of its own forces, except for the Berlin anthroposophical publishing house. But this alone is not enough to serve as a model, because its economic orientation is only the external expression of the power of spiritual science as such. Only those undertakings can be truly exemplary that do not have spiritual science as such as their content, but that have a content that is based on the spiritual scientific way of thinking. A school as such can only be considered exemplary in this respect when it is financially supported by only those undertakings whose entire institution has emerged from spiritual scientific circles. And the Dornach building will only be able to prove its social significance when the personalities associated with it have brought into being such enterprises that are self-supporting, provide the people who support them with the appropriate maintenance and then still leave so much that the deficit always demanded by a spiritual enterprise can be covered. This deficit is not really one at all. For it is precisely the fact that it arises that brings about the fructification of material enterprises.

You just have to take things really practically. That is not what the one who asks does: How, then, should one do a financial or economic enterprise in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? That is simply nonsense. Because you don't do anything practical with mere thoughts. It is essential that the powers organized in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement itself undertake the enterprises, that is, that bankers, factory owners, etc., join forces with this movement, that the Dornach building become the real center of a new entrepreneurial spirit. Therefore, no “social”, “technical” etc. “programs” are to be set up in Dornach either, but rather the building is to create the center of a way of working that is to become the way of working in the future.

Those who decide to give financial support to the Dornach enterprises must understand that we have now reached the point where supporting enterprises in the old sense means investing in the sterile, and that supporting one's money today means supporting future-oriented enterprises that alone are capable of withstanding the devastating forces. Short-sighted people who still believe that something like this has never borne financial fruit will certainly not join the Dornach endeavors. Those who do join must be far-sighted people who are truly capable of financial and economic judgment, who understand that wanting to continue muddling along in the old ways is digging a secure grave for themselves. These people alone will not follow the destructive course of the last four to five years. Working with companies in the same old style means nothing more than using up financial and economic reserves. Because even the reserves of raw material and agricultural production, which last the longest, are being used up. Their financial and economic fructification does not lie in the fact that they are there, but that the work is possible through which they are supplied to the social organism. But this work belongs entirely to the reserves. Everything for the future depends on a new spirit also being given the leading position in the individual enterprise.

Flyer, late May 1919

For centuries, our cultural life (schools, science, art and religion) served the state and the economy. Legal paragraphs and regulations turned us into uninspired, dependent beings. Tied into the one-sided economic life, there was high and low. A politically untrained people - that's how the world war catastrophe hit us. The result was collapse. The lack of social insight on the part of the ruling class overlooked the needs of the proletariat, which had no property of its own and only received the crumbs of cultural achievements, while otherwise wasting itself in the struggle for existence. The proletariat hoped that the revolution would liberate it from the soul-destroying effects of capitalism. Within the economic sphere, it sought its salvation only in economic betterment.

In reality, however, the urge for human dignity is striving to break through.

The great goal can only be achieved in the cultural sphere through schooling and education of the mind. There is a looming and frightening danger that cultural life will be enslaved again, with intellectual products being stamped as commodities.

This must not be allowed to happen if human culture is not to perish.

The entire spiritual life must become independent and self-governing. Only in this way can it beneficially stimulate economic and political life. Only in this way will it be possible to truly educate the truly capable.

Just as economic life is administered by the works council, so intellectual life must be administered by a cultural council. This council must bring together all those who are seriously willing, each in his own position, to renew intellectual life and to work towards it, free from the influences of the state and the interests of the economy, so that it can follow its own laws.

A spiritual worker is anyone who strives for true humanity.

Their workplace is in the cultural council. Whether they were active in the old order in the political, economic or cultural field, whether they were proletarians or non-proletarians, everyone should join immediately before it is too late! The time is serious!

The League for

Threefolding the Social Organism

Office: Champignystraße 17

Leaflet, second edition, June 1919

Printed matter

Last version, June 1920

The appeal “To the German People and to the Cultural World” written by Dr. Rudolf Steiner proposes the threefold social order. He calls for:

1. The complete independence of spiritual life, including the education and school system. He points out the spiritual inability of our time, insofar as it has its causes in the state's exploitation of spiritual culture. He demands the complete self-administration of this culture from a purely objective and general human point of view.

2. The restriction of state life to all those circumstances in which all people are equal before each other. On this basis, and with the strictest democracy, the current privately capitalist ownership and wage labor conditions can be transformed, especially to achieve such a general human right that the worker can stand as a completely free personality in relation to the labor manager, who is only a spiritual worker.

3. An economic life in which the worker confronts the labor manager in such a way that a free social relationship can come about between the two through a contract for services, so that the wage relationship ceases altogether. For this, the complete socialization of economic life is necessary. Only from the appropriate formation of corresponding cooperatives, which arise from the professions on the one hand and the needs of consumers and producers on the other, can a value regulation of goods emerge that ensures a dignified existence for all people.

Large sections of the German people, who have taken up the proposals of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, are imbued with the realization that at the present time of deepest need, the world-historical task of the German people is, by taking up this impulse, not only to save themselves from the fall into the abyss from which the leading circles, through their lack of understanding of the demands of modern times, have brought it to the brink, but that it can also lay the foundation for the liberation of all people from the oppression of the all-devouring economic policy and the imperialist states that serve it.

The broad masses of the working people have been plunged into physical and mental hardship as a result of being completely absorbed into the economic life of soul-destroying capitalism. They therefore expect a betterment of their situation from a purely economic revolution. They are raising the demand for the socialization of economic life. However, a one-sided socialization of economic life would only be a sham socialization. In it, the previous dictatorship of capitalism would be replaced by a bureaucracy that levels everything and inhibits all free human development, which would lead to a complete mechanization of all human activity and thus to a dehumanization of the human being. This danger can only be counteracted by simultaneously liberating intellectual life from state paternalism and economic dependence. An independent intellectual life, through the cultivation of all human talents and abilities, will be able to constantly supply new constructive forces to economic life, which would otherwise have to consume itself.

Until the outbreak of the world war catastrophe, the German people were proud of their intellectual life. And yet, despite all its much-vaunted achievements, this intellectual life was neither able to provide the ideas for a social order at home that could have met the newer demands of humanity, nor could it fulfill its task abroad. The fact that Germany has not been able to set herself a world-historical mission in the last five decades has driven her into the catastrophe of the World War; the lack of consciousness of such a mission during the World War was bound to result in her defeat in it. The Russian East could have received form and expression for its spiritual yearning from German intellectual life. Instead, it received the “peace” of Brest-Litovsk, which emerged from completely different than intellectual foundations. Germany could not counter the imperialist capitalism that was advancing from the West with its own political will - it capitulated to Wilson's abstract Fourteen Points.

Through the threefold social organism, the German people could have offered the West the example of a healthy socialization of economic life, and the East a strong spiritual life, independent and free from mystical obscurity.

In our time of deepest distress, the German people should finally awaken to the realization of their spiritual task. They should find their way to the pioneers of a free German intellectual life, to Herder, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, to the great creator of the plan of the ideal university, Fichte, to the glorifier of the true academic essence, Schelling, and to Hegel. It would have to show understanding for the demands of humanity in modern times and recognize that, even if the demands of the revolution are initially asserted in the consciousness of the broad masses in a one-sided way in the economic sphere, their driving forces in the depths of the soul are nevertheless aimed at recognition of human rights and human dignity. It would have to recognize that the soul impulse for freedom lives in them. Then it would realize that true human welfare can only arise when the spiritual life is based on individual human freedom in the most comprehensive sense, and that it is the task of the German spirit to realize the freedom of the spiritual life.^{1The philosophical basis for this demand is given in Rudolf Steiner's “Philosophy of Freedom», which appeared in a new edition in 1918, Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag, Berlin W, Motzstraße [note in the appeal]} Therefore, it must now be demanded that the state release spiritual culture and that the entire spiritual life create its free self-government from a purely objective and general human point of view. This applies first and foremost to the education and school system. One will only educate properly when the question, “How do you educate all people to become true, capable human beings?” is no longer open to anyone except those who, only from human nature itself, set their goals for education and teaching. Then schools will no longer see their task as training young people for specific, externally prescribed purposes, but rather as forming fully developed, free human beings. These will then naturally develop a lively relationship to their duties in the service of the community. In an independent intellectual life, all schools will be free institutions of the spiritual member of the social organism, whose members will be supported by the trust of the general public. The funds for education and teaching will no longer be raised indirectly through the state; rather, the spiritual organism will itself be a member of the economic system, as far as its economic circumstances are concerned, and will draw its means of existence directly from it, without the spiritual organism becoming dependent on economic interests as a result.

The first result in the field of education will be the emergence of a primary school that will be a unified school built from the same point of view for all people, a true psychological anthropology. In the sense of a pedagogical economy, this school will be built on a true understanding of the developing human being. It will educate the thinking, feeling and willing faculties in such a way that a strong personality develops, whose soul unfolds a sustaining power for the whole of life. In this free school, truly human arts and skills will also be cultivated that the state does not cultivate because it has no interest in them. All artistic exercises will have an outstanding effect on the development of the will. Such a primary school will provide a useful educational foundation for all physical and mental workers. The secondary modern school will build on the primary school, on the one hand, and the intermediate technical schools, on the other. These will develop a living relationship with the professions for which they prepare, through a constant back and forth of teachers between their work in the subject taught and the practice of a practical profession. Such a practice will also become established for the universities.

The liberation of intellectual life will have a decisive impact on the university system. The autonomy of the universities will be restored. The state system of qualifications and all state examinations will be discontinued. Instead, in future the certificates of the free schools and colleges will be statements of the abilities and knowledge that students have acquired by graduating from them. Independently of intellectual life, the state will be able to test those it wishes to employ within state political life on its own soil for their suitability for the positions it awards.

All state or economic influence on the teaching content of the individual sciences themselves will cease. Science and its teaching will be truly free.

The following basic requirements arise from what has been said, and their fulfillment is possible in the threefold social organism:

1. The liberation of teaching from all state supervision. The organization of primary education according to pedagogical and didactic principles, and its administration only by personalities who are part of the self-governing cultural community.

2. The abolition of state authorization for middle and vocational schools.

3. The autonomy of universities.

We hereby put these questions up for public discussion. We appeal to all those who care about culture in the broadest sense of the word, especially to the representatives of science and art, of education and teaching, and in particular to parents and, not least, to the academic youth. We also appeal to Germans living abroad, who, in their advanced positions, have always found the unhealthy mixing of cultural life with state and economic interests particularly painful. We call on all those who are willing to work towards the emancipation of intellectual life to join us in

formation of a community whose task it will be to restructure the entire teaching and education system in the sense of the above characterization. We are filled with the hope that through the joint work of such a free association of people, who are active in the most diverse

fields of intellectual life and who are imbued with the realization that the liberation of intellectual culture is the highest necessity of life, it will be possible to lay the foundation stone for the organization of a free, self-reliant spiritual life.

Stuttgart, Whitsun 1919
Champignystraße 17
The Working Committee of the Federation for
Threefolding of the Social Organism.

[179 signatures follow]

As in other places in Württemberg and Switzerland, I will take the liberty of speaking here about the most important and most pressing question of the present, the social question, and I will do so by referring to what has appeared in the appeal that went through the German lands some time ago, “To the German People and to the Cultural World”. The appeal, which advocates the threefold social order, may have come before most of you. The further explanations of what could only be briefly hinted at in such an appeal are given in my book 'The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Present and Future Life'. Allow me to outline some of the things that need to be said about this appeal this evening.

The social question – this is clear to every human soul that is alert to current events – is that which has emerged in a completely new form from the tremendous, harrowing events of the world war catastrophe. The so-called social question or social movement, as we speak of it today, is at least more than half a century old. But anyone who considers what is announced today as a mighty historical wave and compares these things with each other may nevertheless say: this social question has taken on a completely new form in our present time, a form that no one should pass by.

How often have we heard the words in the last four to five years: This terrible world war catastrophe is something that people have not experienced since the beginning of what we call history. But still little, truly very little, is said today, when this world war catastrophe has entered into a crisis, about the necessity that completely new impulses are now also needed to restore life; that a complete rethinking and relearning is necessary - although actually the necessity for this rethinking and relearning is already outwardly apparent. For the old thoughts have led us straight into that terrible human catastrophe. New thoughts and new impulses must lead us out again. And where these impulses are to be found can be seen from a truly penetrating observation of the social demands that are emerging from more and more people's minds, and which can only be ignored by those who sleep through the times and wait for events to unfold until the old structure, as it were, collapses without substance.

Today, social issues are often seen as something highly obvious, sometimes as something highly simple. Anyone who judges not from gray theories, nor from individual personal demands, but from a truly broadened experience of the necessities of life in the present and the future, must see in this social question something into which many forces flow that have developed in the course of human development and, one can already say, have in a certain way been led towards their own destruction. To anyone who has an overview of these living conditions, the social question appears in three forms. It appears to him as a question of spiritual life, secondly as a question of legal life, and thirdly as a question of economic life. Now the last few centuries, and in particular the 19th century, and also the past two decades of the 20th century, have led to the belief that almost everything that belongs to the social question has to be sought in the economic sphere. The reasons why people see so little clearly are precisely because they think that they only have to find their way in the economic sphere and then all the others will follow by themselves. It will be necessary for the first parts of my reflection today to be devoted to an area of life that people do not want to talk about as a socially important area, even now, from either the left or the right, namely the area of spiritual life.

The demands that are called social come from the broad masses of the proletariat, who have undergone the threefold ordeal to the conditions of the present, which we will discuss later. And this proletariat has been almost entirely pushed into the mere economic life by the emergence of new technology and soul-destroying capitalism, as well as by the other cultural conditions. The demands of the proletariat arose out of economic life. Therefore, the social question of the present takes on an economic form because it arises first of all from the proletariat. But it is not just an economic question. The mere observation that traditional ideas are inadequate in the face of today's loud facts can teach us that within the social movement we are dealing not only with an economic and legal question, but above all with a question of the mind.

We are faced with a loud social fact across a large part of the civilized world. We have had party opinions and party programs, we have produced them. All thoughts, all party opinions now prove inadequate when faced with the facts. Today it is not a matter of continuing old party opinions, but of facing the facts directly and with complete seriousness and a sense of reality.

Let us first see how human life has developed in recent times, and then ran into disaster. Above all, we have to look at the deep, seemingly unbridgeable gulf that exists between the proletariat and the non-proletariat. If we look at the cultural life of this non-proletariat, what do we encounter? Certainly, this cultural life has been abundantly praised as a tremendous advance in the course of modern times. Again and again we have heard how, in this modern age, means of transport have brought people together across vast areas of the earth, which in older times, if prophetically described, would have been decried as utopian. Thought, it was always preached and praised, flies like lightning across distant lands and seas and so on. No one has grown tired of praising progress over and over again. But today it is necessary to add a different consideration to all of this. Today it is necessary to ask: Under what conditions did this progress come about? It could only come about by building on a foundation of the broad masses of humanity who could not participate in all that this culture has been so praised for, built on the foundation of broad masses of people who had to do their work for this culture of a few, which, in the form in which it was “created”, could only exist because these masses had no part in it. Now these broad masses have grown up, have come into their own, and are rightly demanding their share. Their demands are at the same time the great historical demands of the present for everyone who really understands the times. And when today the call for socialization of economic life is heard, he who understands the times recognizes in this call not merely the demands of one class of people, but at the same time an historical demand of human life in the present.

One peculiarity of the leading classes, who were the participants in the much-praised culture, is that in recent times they have missed almost every opportunity to somehow bridge the gap between them and the masses of the proletariat, who are increasingly coming forward with their legitimate demands. What was needed to bridge this gap was ideas that should have been incorporated into human, social life. It is a peculiarity of this newer intellectual life, which has been so widely praised, that it has become increasingly alien to real, true life. Individuals pursue only that life that directly encompasses them. For the broad masses of the people, no comprehensive ideas from our intellectual life, from our school education, could be found. Here is an example that, from the most diverse points of view, could be multiplied not tenfold but a hundredfold or more.

At the beginning of the century, a certain government councilor by the name of Kolb took a remarkable turn in his destiny. I am happy to mention this government councilor Kolb because the way he took his destiny into his own hands is worthy of honor, and because I have no need to say anything detrimental about it, which I do not do willingly. At one point in his life, Kolb did something that not many other government officials do. Most of them retire when they no longer want to do their duty; but he left his office, went to America, and got a job as an ordinary worker, first in a brewery and then in a bicycle factory. Based on the experiences that this government official had, he then wrote a book: “Als Arbeiter in Amerika” (As a Worker in America).

The book contains a remarkable sentence. It reads, for example: “When I used to meet someone on the street who wasn't working, I would say, ‘Why isn't the bum working?’ Now I knew differently: And now I know something else about many things as well; now I know that even the most terrible affairs of life still look quite good in the study.” That is a confession that deeply characterizes the social conditions of the time. A man who has emerged from our intellectual life, who has been entrusted with human destiny for many years — for as many years as are necessary to bring it to the government act — knows nothing of human labor, that is, he knows nothing of human life. He must first create a destiny for himself in order to know something of the life he is to govern, in which he is to be active from the leading classes. He must first, in order to know something of this life, get himself hired as a laborer and then come to completely different views of life.

Does this example, which could truly be multiplied, not indicate how our intellectual life, from which the leading people emerge, has become alien to the lives of the broad masses? The broad masses have seen, in the necessities of their bodies and souls, how the leading classes conduct economic life. They have seen that something is wrong, that these leading classes do not have the necessary spirit to guide economic life. Today the question arises: what needs to be different?

And in many other respects, one can still see how alien the leading class has become over the last few centuries from what should have been done to avoid drifting into a catastrophe. In the most serious and dignified manner, the leading circles discussed all kinds of beautiful things, such as charity, brotherhood among men, the way man must be good in general, and the like. But they had no connection with real life. At most, they would bring up the subject for discussion. Such an enquiry from the mid-19th century is not so insignificant today. It was initiated by the English government at the time among mine managers. The people who talked about human existence in their well-heated rooms should have experienced the coal they were talking about. They should have realized that the coal they were discussing their advanced morality and advanced intellectual life with had been brought up through mine shafts into which children of nine, eleven, thirteen years of age were sent underground before day, before the rising of the sun, and only came up again at night, so that the poor children almost never saw the light of day. It was easy to talk about human goodness and neighborly love in the context of the coals that were mined in this way. And many similar stories could be told. And the question must be asked: Did such events inspire the leading circles of humanity to really intervene in social life? Some people will reply today: Yes, but many things have improved. But to that I would say: What has improved has improved not because of the initiative of the ruling class, but because of the hard struggle of those who have suffered under these conditions.

These are the things that need to be brought to our attention today. We need to focus on what the worker, who works from morning till evening, can see at most from the outside when he passes our universities, our secondary schools. He is only familiar with what goes on in primary schools, and even there only what he can experience. He does not know how the objectives of primary education are determined from above, he only sees that those who cannot lead today's economic life emerge from these institutions.

This is the first aspect of the social question. Despite all the praise of our intellectual life, we have no intellectual life that is up to the great tasks of the time.

Let us look at economic life. When the social movement arose, we often heard the leading circles dismiss this social movement with the words: They want to divide. But what comes out of the division? Then everyone gets very little. — Then this objection fell silent; because on the one hand it is very true, but on the other hand it is very stupid. Recently, however, it has been cropping up again and again. But these things are not the point. Anyone who looks into the particular structure of our economic life today knows that the physical and mental misery of the broad masses of the proletariat has arisen from completely different causes. He knows that the inadequate development of intellectual life has not been understood in terms of bringing an ever-increasing technical activity in economic life into such a form that every person can have a dignified existence in it.

Of course, it has often been rightly pointed out that the modern social movement has emerged through modern technology, through machines, through soul-destroying capitalism. But it has been forgotten that all that has emerged could not be mastered by the spiritual life as it developed.

Why is that so? With the advent of the machine, industrialism and capitalism, a certain tendency took hold of humanity, which expressed itself in the fact that it was considered progress to have the state absorb the spiritual life as far as possible. Nationalization of the spiritual life was seen as great progress. And today you still meet with the sharpest prejudices if you object to this nationalization of the spiritual life. Those who have their sympathies in today's intellectual life point out with a certain pride how much further one has come with the spirit than in the old, dark Middle Ages. Well, we certainly do not want the Middle Ages back. Not back, but forward we want to go. But another question must be raised. It is said that in the Middle Ages intellectual life, especially science, followed in the train of theology or the Church. Today we have to ask: Whose train does present-day intellectual life follow – or perhaps something else? Here is another example, which could be multiplied not only a hundredfold but a thousandfold. Again, I may speak of a person whom I hold in high esteem because I am convinced that he was an important naturalist. At the same time, he was the Secretary General of a learned society that is at the forefront of German intellectual life. In one of his well-delivered speeches, he wanted to express what these German scholars, who have the great honor of being members of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, consider their highest honor. When something like this is described, one would naturally like to point out an historical fact that is not insignificant. This Berlin Academy was always something that could, in a sense, intellectually express the impulses of the Hohenzollerns. A Hohenzollern of the 18th century was once faced with the necessity of appointing a president to his Academy of Sciences – I am not telling you a fairy tale, but an historical fact – and he believed he was honouring this Academy of Sciences most by giving it his court jester as president. But the great scholar of the late 19th century says that the learned gentlemen of the Berlin Academy consider it a great honor to be the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns.

We must look at such things as symptoms of the times. We must look at what intellectual life has become in its dependence on state power and the capitalist power associated with it. For if one can grasp inner impulses not out of some prejudice but out of the necessities of life, out of reality, then one will say, contrary to all the prejudices of the time, that intellectual life can only regain its strength if it is detached from state life, if it is left to its own devices. Everything that lives in spiritual life, especially the school system, must be handed over to its self-administration, from the highest level of the administration of spiritual life to the teacher of the lowest school level. In the administration of spiritual life, nothing but the forces of this spiritual life itself can be decisive. Those who are active in this spiritual life and experience it inwardly must form the body that administers this spiritual life and puts it completely on its own feet.

This is the first point of what is here called the threefold social organism. Such a spiritual life will be able to relate to life in a completely different way than the antisocial spiritual life in which we have gradually found ourselves, and from which it seems we have no desire to escape.

Someone who really has experience in this field is well placed to speak about it from that experience. For many years I taught at the Workers' Educational School in Berlin, founded by Liebknecht. So I know how to find the sources of a spiritual life that is not the preserve of a privileged class and represents a luxury spiritual life, but from which one can speak to all people who have the urge to achieve a dignified existence for soul and body. And I know something else from this practice of my life. I know how the workers understood me, always understood me better when I spoke to them from a free spiritual life that is there for all people, not for a privileged class. Because the workers believed that they had to go along with this or that, there were also times when I was led to guide the workers through museums or similar institutions, through sites where the evidence of a culture could be seen that existed only for a few, that did not represent a folk culture, a folk spiritual life. There I saw how the gulf also existed in the spiritual and mental life and how people basically could not really take in inwardly what had been created on the soil of a culture for a few. This is a misconception that many people still subscribe to today. They believe that they are promoting the education of the people when they throw chunks of what has been created at universities, secondary schools and other educational institutions from our culture, which is only born out of the social sentiments of a few. What has been done to promote such popular education! Public libraries, adult education colleges, public theaters, and so on. But we shall never get rid of the error which consists in believing that what is intellectually demanded by the emotional life of a secluding minority can be transplanted into the broad masses of the people. No, the time demands a spiritual life which embraces everybody in a social way. But this can only come into being when those who are to take part in it, with all their feelings, with all their social foundations, form a unity with those who create this spiritual life; when they are not thrown scraps, but when the whole mass of the people works uniformly in a spiritual way. But for this to happen, the spiritual life must be freed from state and capitalist constraints. Naturally, in a short lecture I cannot present all the arguments – not even all that is contained in my book on these key points of the social question – that could be adduced in favor of the necessity of detaching intellectual life, especially the school system, from the state and economic life and placing it on its own feet. But this is the first requirement for the threefold social order: a spiritual life that develops out of itself.

There is no need to fear such a spiritual life. There is no need to fear even if one has a low opinion of people, perhaps to the effect that they will fall back into the old illiterate state, or the like, if parents are free to send their children to school or leave them out without state coercion. No, the proletariat in particular will become more and more aware of what it owes to school education. And it will not leave its children out of school, even if it is not forced to send its children to school, but has to send them there of its own free will. And in particular, the advocate of the comprehensive school need not fear that a free spiritual life will be disturbed by the school. Nothing else can arise than the unified school if the free spiritual life is promoted.

That is what needs to be said first about the separation of spiritual life from state and economic life.

The second area of life that needs to be considered when studying today's social question is the legal life. People have developed the most diverse views about this legal life. But anyone who is able to observe and feel this legal life from reality says to himself: to give definitions or scholarly explanations of the law is just as absurd as trying to give scholarly instructions about what blue and red colors are. One can talk about blue and red colors with anyone who has a healthy eye. But about the sense of right, about the right that every human being has because he is a human being, one can talk to every awakened human soul. And with awakened human souls, with ever more awakened human souls, one is dealing with the modern proletariat.

With regard to this legal basis of life, however, modern humanity, insofar as it belongs to the ruling circles, has had a strange experience. These ruling circles could not help but spread a certain democracy over life. They needed a skillful proletariat to stage their capitalist interests, a proletariat that received certain soul forces. The old patriarchal life was of no use in the modern capitalist economy. But now something extremely unpleasant turned up for such a one-sided, capitalist democracy. You see, the human soul has the peculiarity that when you develop individual abilities and powers in it, then others will automatically come to the fore. Thus, the leading mankind wanted to develop only those soul powers that make workers able to work in factories. But it turned out that the souls awoke from the old patriarchal conditions, and that in them especially the awareness of human rights awoke. And then they looked into the modern state, which was supposed to embody the law. They asked themselves: Is this the soil in which the law really flourishes? And what did they find? Instead of human rights, class privileges and class disadvantages. And from this arose what is called the modern class struggle of the proletariat, which is nothing more or less than the great, justified demand for a dignified existence for all people.

This is the second aspect of the social question, the legal question. Its true significance cannot be recognized without also considering the third aspect, the economic question. Two things have seeped into economic life that simply do not belong there. These are capital and human labor, whereas economic life should only include what takes place on the goods market. I think that recent years, and especially the present, could teach people very clearly that the most important thing in the proletarian social movement is the proletarian himself. But today, as things are, the proletarian man cannot be judged by someone who, because the times suggest it, deigns to talk about the proletariat based on a variety of ideas. No, only someone whose destiny has led him to think with the proletariat and feel with the proletariat can judge these things. You have to have seen for yourself how, over decades, the proletarian world came together in the hours that could be wrested from the evening after hard work to educate itself about the economic movement of the new era, about the meaning of labor, of capital, about the meaning of commodity consumption and production; you have to have seen what an enormous need for education developed in the proletarian people, while, on the other side of the divide, within the higher classes, people visited their theaters and devoted themselves to many other activities, and at most managed to look down from the stage at the proletarian misery. Then the proletarian developed; he developed out of his spiritual life. And anyone who says today that the proletarian question is merely a question of bread and stomach must be given the answer: It is a shame that it has come to this, that the proletarian question has become a bread-and-butter question, that people did not look at something else earlier, namely, that the proletarian's entire striving has given rise to the demand for a dignified existence, for an existence in which he does not have to allow his body and soul to wither. For all proletarian demands have ultimately emerged from this, not from a mere bread-and-stomach issue. But while the proletarian was trying to come to his senses, while he was dealing with the economic systems of modern times, he developed an awareness of his own position as a human being in this human life. From his point of view, he was able to look at the way of life of the leading circles. He was told that history was a divine world order, or a moral world order, or the world order of the idea. He saw only that the ruling circles, within their world order, lived as the surplus value that he had to produce allowed them to live. That is why the words of the Communist Manifesto struck so deeply into the minds of the proletarians and made them aware of their situation. Despite all the progress of modern times, despite all the so-called newer freedoms, the proletarian is condemned to sell his labor power like a commodity on the labor market and to have it bought. This gave rise to the demand: The days are over when a person can sell or buy a part of himself. His feelings, which he perhaps could not always express clearly, led the proletarian back to ancient times, to the times of serfdom. And he saw how the purchase of his labor power has remained from those ancient times. For nothing else but this lies in the wage relationship. He said to himself: Goods belong on the market. You take the goods to the market, sell them and go back with the proceeds. I must sell my labor power to the employer, but I cannot go to him and say, “There is my labor power for so and so much money, and then I will go away.” I must deliver myself! — You see, as a human being, you must go with your labor power. That is what the proletarian perceives as an existence unworthy of a human being. |

The big question arises: What has to happen so that labor can no longer be a commodity? People today, insofar as they belong to the leading and guiding circles, basically give little thought to labor. These people open their wallets and pay with banknotes of a certain denomination. Whether they ever stop to consider that in the bills they give, or perhaps cut up into coupons, there is a decision to appropriate so many laborers from the proletariat, that is the big question. In any case, they do not give in to thoughts strong enough to intervene in social life.

The point is that human labor cannot be compared in price to any other commodity; that human labor is something quite different from a commodity. Human labor must be removed from the economic process. And it cannot be removed unless economic life is regarded as a part of the social organism, separate from the actual legal or state organism, from the political organism. Then what I would like to make clear to you by means of a comparison can occur. Economic life borders on the natural foundation on the one hand. You cannot manage a closed economic area in any way you like. You can use the soil by technical means or the like. But within certain limits you have to submit to the natural foundation. Imagine a number of large landowners, i.e. capitalists in their own right, who would say: If we are to achieve this balance, or even a better one, we need a hundred rainy days in summer, with sunny days in between, and so on. This is a complete plate, of course, but it does draw our attention to the fact that, on the one hand, we cannot change the natural foundations; we cannot demand, through our economic life, that the forces of nature in the ground prepare the wheat grain in a particular way. We must submit to the forces of nature; they stand beside economic life. On the other hand, economic life must be limited by the life of the law, that is to say, just as little as the forces of nature depend on the economic situation on the goods market, so little must human labor depend on the economic situation on the goods market. Human labor must be taken out of economic life like a force of nature and placed on the ground of the law. When it is placed on the legal ground, then everything in which one person is equal to another, in which only real human rights develop, in which labor law can also develop, can develop on this legal ground. The measure, type and time of work will be determined before the worker enters the economic process. Then he will face the one who, as we shall see in a moment, will not be the capitalist but the labor manager, the spiritual co-worker, as a free human being.

No matter how good the words may be about the so-called employment contract, as long as it is a wage contract, it can only lead to the dissatisfaction of the worker. Only when contracts can no longer be concluded for labor, but only for the joint production of the labor manager and the manual laborer, when a contract can only be concluded for the joint product, will a dignified existence for all parties arise from it. Then the worker will stand vis-à-vis the labor manager as a free partner. That is what the worker is basically striving for, even if he still cannot form a clear idea of it today. This is the real economic issue for the proletariat, the real economic demand: the liberation of labor power from the economic cycle, the establishment of the right of labor power within the second link of the three-part social organism, the legal basis.

And on this legal basis, another thing must be given a new form. This is precisely the thing that, when it comes to its reorganization, still makes today's people look very, very puzzled, namely the reorganization of capital. With regard to private property, people today think socially at least to a certain extent, and in fact in the area that seems to them to be the least difficult, in the spiritual area. For in the intellectual field, at least in principle, something social applies in relation to ownership. No matter how clever or talented a person is, he certainly brings his abilities with him through birth, but what we achieve that is socially valuable, intellectually as well, we achieve it by being within society, through society. In the intellectual field this is recognized by the fact that, at least in principle, nothing of what one produces intellectually, and from which one also receives the benefit, belongs to the heirs for thirty years after death. The time could be shorter, but at least it is recognized in principle that what is intellectual property must become the property of the general public at the moment when the individual with his individual abilities is no longer there to administer it. Intellectual property must not be transferred in an arbitrary manner to those who then have nothing more to do with its creation.

Now you say today that it is an historical requirement that it must become similar to material capital in the future! Tell that today to people who are within the capitalist education, then you will see what kind of perplexed faces they make! Nevertheless, one of the most important demands of the present is that capital should no longer be placed in the social process in the same way as it is today. The point is that in the future, everyone must be able to manage the means of production in a particular field based on their individual abilities. And the capital is actually the means of production. It is in the worker's own interest to have a good spiritual leader as a manager; because this is the best way to apply one's work. The capitalist is then just a fifth wheel on the car, he is not necessary at all. That is what must be realized. It is therefore necessary that in the future the means of production in a particular economic sector or for a cultural purpose are raised; but since the individual abilities of the person or group of people who have raised the means of production no longer justify personal ownership, these means of production , as I have shown in my book The Essential Points of the Social Question, must now pass to quite different people, not to the heirs, but to quite different people who now have the greatest ability to manage these means of production only in the service of the general public.

Just as blood circulates in the human body, so in the future the means of production, that is, capital, will circulate in the community of the social organism. Just as blood must not accumulate in a healthy organism, but must flow through the entire body, fertilizing everything, so in the future capital must not accumulate in any one place as private property. Rather, when it has served its purpose in one place, it must pass to whoever can manage it best. In this way, capital is divested of the function that has led to the greatest social damage today.

But the very clever people who speak from a capitalist point of view rightly say: All economic activity consists in giving up existing goods so that goods can be obtained in the future. That is quite right; but if we are to manage in this way – that is, by means of the past, the seeds are laid for the economy of the future, so that the economy does not die – then capital must participate in what the properties of goods are. Again, today there are extremely puzzled faces when one speaks of these demands of the future. Real goods, however, have the peculiarity that they are consumed. In consumption, they gradually follow the path of all living things. Our present economic order has brought capital to the point where it does not follow the path of living things. All one needs to do is to have capital, and then this capital is torn out of the fate of everything else that is involved in the economic process. Aristotle already said that capital should not have any young, but not only does it have young, but the young grow up until they are large; one can state the number of years until the capital doubles if it is only left to itself. Other goods, for which capital is only a representative example, have the peculiarity that they either wear out or can no longer be used if they are not put to use at the right time. Capital must be forced to share the fate of all other goods, insofar as it is monetary capital. While our current economic life aims to double capital in a certain period of time, a healthy economic life would make mere monetary capital disappear in the same period of time, so that it would no longer be there. Today it is still considered terrible to tell people that after a reasonable period of time, rather than doubling in fifteen years, monetary capital should no longer exist, because what is contained in this capital must participate in the process of wear and tear. Of course, some of what is involved in saving or the like can be taken into account.

So today we are not faced with small accounts, but with large accounts. And we must have the courage to admit to these large accounts. Otherwise the social order, or rather the social disorder, the social chaos, will descend on us. People today are little concerned about the fact that they are basically dancing on a volcano. It is more in their interest to continue with the old as lightly as possible, while time demands of us not only to change some institutions, but to rethink and relearn right down to our very habits of thought.

When labor and capital are removed from the economic process, with capital flowing to the community and labor being returned to the right of the free human being, then the economic process consists only of the consumption, circulation, and production of goods. Then the economic process has only to do with the value of goods. And then, within this economic process, which as a member of the healthy social organism is now left to its own devices, something may come into being of which one can then say: production is not merely for the sake of production, but for the sake of consumption. Then those cooperatives and associations will arise that are formed from the professional guilds, but that are formed in particular from the consumers, together with the producers. Out of these corporations will arise what is today entrusted to the chance of the goods market. Today, something decides on the goods market that is completely removed from human thought and judgment: supply and demand. In the future, the corporation must decide what conditions the formation of prices and the value of goods from the goods market. In this way alone will a person produce so much that what is produced has the value of all the goods he needs for his needs until he has produced an equal amount of goods again. That will be a just economic life. That will be an economic life in which the price of one type of goods does not disproportionately outweigh the prices of the other types of goods. Today, when wages are still included in the economic process and the worker is not the free partner of the spiritual leader, today the situation still exists that within the economic process the worker, on the one hand, must repeatedly fight for an increase in his wages; on the other hand, the fact that a hole is closed opens another: wages increase, food becomes more expensive, and so on. This only happens in an economic process that is polluted by capital and wage relationships. In an economic process in which corporations, cooperatives, determine the value of goods, and not according to supply and demand, which are subject to chance, but rather based on reason. In such an economic process alone can every human being find a dignified existence. The masses of proletarians basically long for such an economic process; that is their true demand in economic life.

In some areas, this demand is already being more clearly recognized. Take, for example, the question of works councils, which has now been so distorted by legislation. If the works councils are to become what the proletarian really demands, they must not be allowed to trail behind the state in every direction, just as intellectual life used to, but must be able to develop a truly beneficial social activity within economic life. For this, however, economic life must be placed on its own ground; for this, something other than these works councils must come into being; for this, transport councils and other councils must come into being; these must arise out of economic life, and they will create constitutions out of economic experience.

I know that many people today say: Education does not yet prevail in economic life to achieve what we want to achieve. Such are the words of people who always speak of ideals so that they do not have to implement what is possible in reality. That is the talk of people for whom ideals are something that should not be aspired to, so that they do not need to strive for what is most immediate. He who knows that the knowledge that comes from experience, from practice, is infinitely more valuable than anything that can be carried down from above, also knows that such a works council should not be set up only for individual companies, but must be inter-company. The works councils must connect the individual companies with the very different companies, mediate the connection, they must develop into a works council, a transport council and an economic council. If this grows out of the economic life, then one will come to the fact that these councils are not there for mere decoration, but that they become the human factor, the figures of economic life itself. But that is what is needed.

What I call the threefold social order did not arise out of some clever idea, out of a grey theory, but out of a real observation of the necessities of life in the present and the future. And it is truly a pity that today there are so few people who are able to turn their eyes to this vital necessity, to reality itself, out of the spiritual life that has developed up to now. People today slander what is most practical by saying: it is ideology, it is utopia. What is actually at the root of this? Some say: the socialization of the means of production is necessary. I agree. But I also say: it is necessary to know the way to get there. Today I have only sketched out what I mean. We need not only goals today, but also the paths and the courage to take them. Many people tell me that what I say is difficult to understand. Well, to understand what I am saying, more is needed than what people are usually willing to expend for understanding. It is necessary to look into real life, not to judge life from some subjective demands. It is necessary to also rise up, to summon the inner courage to think radically in certain things, as our time demands of every alert human being.

However, in the last four to five years, I have seen that people have understood things that I have not understood. They have even put things that they claimed to understand, when they came from certain places, into beautiful frames so that they could always look at them. Things that came from the great headquarters and the like, but understanding had to be commanded first. No one can be ordered to understand what should be understood out of an inner courage to live. Now the time has come when people should no longer allow themselves to be ordered to understand, but must be able to gain a real judgment from their life experiences, from their unprejudiced observation of life, about what is necessary before it is too late.

But today, strange things are happening. I do not like to talk about personal matters, but today it is these personal matters that dominate life. In April 1914, I was obliged to express my judgment on the social situation in a small gathering in Vienna (and intentionally in Vienna; as you know, the catastrophe of the world war originated in Austria). At that time, it was not only the social situation of the proletariat, but the social question of the whole of Europe. I pointed out that the social situation in Europe was tending towards a malignant growth, and indeed the world war then arose from it. — I was obliged to summarize my judgment about this in the words — in April 1914, note the date: anyone who looks into our social conditions, how they have gradually developed can only come to a great cultural concern, because he sees how a carcinoma is developing in social life, a kind of cancer disease that must break out in the most terrible way in the near future.

So at that time I had to point out what world capitalism was driving people into in the near future. Anyone who said this at the time was, of course, denounced as an impractical idealist, a utopian, an ideologue, because the practitioners spoke quite differently at the time. What did the practitioners say about the general world situation? They did not speak of a cancer disease. They spoke much as the German Foreign Minister did to the enlightened gentlemen of the German Reichstag in the spring of 1914 – they must have been enlightened, because they had been appointed, after all: We are heading for peaceful times, because the general relaxation is making gratifying progress. We have the best relationship with Russia; the St. Petersburg cabinet is not listening to the press pack. Promising negotiations have been initiated with England, which will probably be concluded in the near future in favor of world peace. The two governments are in such a state that relations will become ever closer and more intimate. – Thus spoke the practitioner, who was not scolded for being an idealist. And the general relaxation of tensions progressed to such an extent that what followed was something we have all experienced so painfully. It can be quite a shock to hear something like what was said recently at the League of Nations conference, where people talked about all sorts of things out of old habits of thinking. The only thing they did not talk about in a way that was somehow appropriate was the greatest movement of the present, the social movement, which is the only one capable of founding a real league of nations.

Then, sometimes, out of old habits of thinking, very clever people give very particular answers. Recently in Bern, a very clever gentleman answered me - I never want to underestimate people's cleverness -: I cannot imagine that something special comes out of a threefold structure, everything must be a unity. Law cannot arise only on the political plane, and so on. What is necessary is that the law develops on the basis of the law, then economic life also has the law, then spiritual life has the law. And if you say that the unity of the social organism is being cut, then I say: that is not the issue for me! The issue is not to cut the horse in two, but to put the horse on its four legs. The point is not to cut up the social organism, but to put it on its three healthy legs, on a healthy legal life, a healthy economic life and a healthy spiritual life. Then this unity, which is worshipped today as an idol as a unified state, but which must be abandoned if socialism is wanted.

For more than a century, people have repeatedly spoken of humanity's great social ideal, of the greatest social impulses: equality, freedom, fraternity. Of course, very clever people of the 19th century have repeatedly proved that these ideals cannot be realized because they were only seen under the hypnosis of the unitary state; hence the contradiction. But today is the time when these ideals must be realized, when these three impulses of social life must be grasped. And they can only be realized in the threefold social organism. In the spiritual life, which should stand on its own ground, individual abilities must be developed as they do on the ground of freedom. In the field of law, that which makes every human being equal to every other human being must prevail, and by means of this law every adult person can, through himself or through his representative, regulate his relationship with other people, including his working relationship. And in the field of economic life, that true brotherhood must prevail which can only flourish in cooperatives, whether they be consumer or producer cooperatives.

In the tripartite social organism, freedom, equality and fraternity will prevail because it has three parts: freedom in the realm of spiritual life, equality in the democratic realm of legal life, and fraternity in the realm of economic life.

Today I have only been able to hint to you from individual points of view what needs to be considered in today's very serious times; what is most necessary to consider if one seriously wants to help to get out of confusion and chaos, so as not to get deeper into confusion and chaos. What is necessary today is not to think only of small changes, but to have the courage to admit to ourselves that today great reckonings are due. Anyone who can truly look with an alert soul at what is only just beginning today must say to himself: We will not have long to deliberate. Therefore, we had better take a path that can be embarked upon every day. And what is given by the threefold social organism can be taken up every day. Only those who want to delve deeper into the practice that brought us the world catastrophe will want to call what is truly practical an impractical idealism.

If healing is to occur in social life, it will be necessary to thoroughly abandon the superstitious idolization of practice, which is nothing more than brutal human egoism. We must commit ourselves to an idealism that is not a one-sided idealism, but a true practice of life. Those who are sincere about our time will ask themselves today: how do I get on the path to a remedy for what we face as social damage? And it would be desirable for more and more people to come to this path before it is too late. And it could be too late very soon.

Closing words

After a discussion in which mainly party and trade union officials had spoken, Rudolf Steiner took the floor again:

I would have preferred it if the speakers had addressed the issues I had raised. Then we could have made the discussion fruitful. But that did not happen. So I will just point out a few things and draw attention to them.

Some speakers have said that nothing new has been presented in my considerations. Well, I know very well the development of the social movement. And anyone who claims that the essentials of what has been presented today from the experiences of the whole reorganization of the social situation through the world catastrophe is not something new should realize that they are saying something absolutely untrue. In reality, the situation is quite different: The speakers have not heard the new thing. They have limited themselves to hearing the few things that were taken for granted because they were correct when they were put forward as a critique of the usual social order. They have been accustomed for many years to hearing this and that as a slogan: that is what they heard. But what was said in between, about the threefold social order, about what can be achieved in every respect through this threefold social order, about that the speakers have heard absolutely nothing. And that is probably why they remained silent in their discussions about what they had not heard. I understand that. But I also understand that a fruitful discussion cannot actually come out of such a thing.

For example, we heard a speaker who, as if he had not experienced the last five to six years, talked at length about the old theories that have been discussed so many times before this catastrophe. He dutifully repeated all the theories about surplus value and so on, which are certainly correct but have been advanced countless times. He just forgot that we live in a completely, completely different time today. He forgot that, for example, only a few months before the German surrender, highly respected socialist leaders were still saying: When this world catastrophe is over, the German government will have to take a completely different position towards the proletariat than before. The German rulers will have to take the proletariat into account in all government actions and in all legislation in a completely different way than before. But the Socialists also said: the Socialist parties will have to be taken into account.

Well, things turned out differently. Those in power were plunged into the abyss, and the parties were there. Today they face a completely different world situation. In the face of this new world situation, however, one should not simply ignore new ideas and only listen to the parties that are naturally heard because they have always been considered as long as there has been a social movement. Instead, one should acquire the ability to respond to what is most urgently needed in the present day. Otherwise we face the great danger that basically has always existed in the old, customary world order: when something came along that looked at facts, that was taken from reality, it was declared to be ideology; it was declared to be philosophy, that it had nothing to do with reality, and that it paved the way for reaction. It would be the worst if the Socialist Party were to fall into a kind of reactionary paralysis, if it were unable to move forward with the facts speaking so loudly.

That is what matters today. Marx coined a nice phrase after he got to know the Marxists – it happens to many people who strive to bring something truly new into the world: As for me, I am not a Marxist. And Marx always showed – I am just reminding you of the events of 70/71 – how he learned from these events. He always showed that he was able to keep pace with the times. Today, when the time is ripe, he would certainly find the possibility of recognizing the real solution to the social question in the threefold social order. There is constant talk of new paths, and when a new path is shown, which admittedly takes real courage, it is said: No path is shown, only a goal is shown. One would like to ask: Has anyone already thought of this way, which makes it necessary for a kind of liquidation government to come into being? That is what is in fact very unusual for people, given their habits of thinking. The old governments, including the Socialist government, think of nothing but that they will be the beautiful, brave continuation of what the government used to be. What we need is for this government to keep only the initiative in the center, the supervision of the security service, hygiene and the like, and for it to become a liquidation government on the left and right: namely, by leaving intellectual life free, so that it passes into independent administration, and by putting economic life on its own feet.

This is not a theory, not a philosophy, this is a pointer to something that must be done. And for this to be done, it is first necessary to understand its necessity. This means gradually abandoning the old habit of only wanting to listen to what one likes and not wanting to listen to what is unknown.

When speakers appear who get tangled up in strange practical contradictions and don't even realize it, they show how actually impossible it is to find a practical way. One speaker managed to say today: Real political power still rests on economic foundations today. And then, after adding something – it is no longer so noticeable – he said: The first thing is that we gain political power in order to conquer economic power. So on the one hand, he declaimed: He who has economic power also has political power. And immediately afterwards, after a few sentences, they say: We must first have political power, then we will also get economic power. With such speakers, however, it will not be possible to take practical action. You can only take a practical path if you are able to think straight and not confuse the paths of thought.

You will not get anywhere by rigidly adhering to any objections, such as: The tendency towards laziness makes it necessary to force people into a unified school. All those who were in power in the past have put forward similar arguments. We have seen people in government who were truly no smarter than those they governed. But they still managed to put it this way: if we don't force people to do this or that, they won't do it voluntarily.

It is a strange phenomenon that such things are now also coming to light on socialist soil. What is really needed is the very thing that is at issue here: the opportunity to develop an understanding of what is necessary, not to stick to long-established theories and the like. That is what is always called for. When people say: the power must be seized!, they mean a gray 'theory'. Because once you have seized power, you also have to know what to do with that power. You can't get ahead any other way. Seize power – if you are in power and you don't know what to do, then all that power is for nothing. The point is that just before you come to power, you know clearly and distinctly what you are going to do with that power.

If, on the one hand, it has been said that the revolution of November 9 was a success, then it might just as well have been a failure. And if, on the other hand, it is said that foreign countries view the revolution as a fraud, this is precisely because power has been seized and those in power do not know what to do with it. But now it must finally be known what is to be done with power. But if everyone sticks to the old party opinions, then they may call for unity. There is one method of calling for unity, and that is to really see where the damage is. In this way, the threefolding impulse seeks to bring about unity. It is simply objectively defamatory to say that a new party or a new sect should be founded. It is nonsense. And if the resolution has been adopted by numerous assemblies, I am completely reassured that this resolution will never be complied with. If it were complied with, the result would be that the current rulers would very soon be shown the door. There is no need to fear that some kind of unity might be disturbed. But there is another way to destroy unity: to insist on one's principles and then to say: if you don't follow me, then we are not united. That is also a way of preaching unity when you actually mean: we can only be united if you follow me. Quite a few people actually think that today.

As I said, I am sorry that I cannot go into details, because actually not a single speaker in the discussion really touched on the issues that were raised in my lecture. It was even said at the end that I had philosophized. With such philosophizing, as this speaker did, one can indeed call everything a fruitless philosophy. But whether one can really arrive at something that can help with such philosophizing, as developed by the last speaker, is very much in question.

What is given in this threefold social organism was first given as an impulse during the terrible catastrophe of the war, when I believed that the right time had come. At that time, when we were still far from the monster of the Brest-Litovsk Peace, it seemed to me to be just the right thing to do, in contrast to what actually happened, to seek a balance in the East, starting from this impulse of threefolding. Nobody understood this. That is why what was subsequently triggered by the Brest-Litovsk Peace happened. Today it is really important that people are found who do not do it the way all those to whom this threefold social order was spoken about during the war, at that time of course with reference to foreign policy.

In the next few days, a brochure will be published about the guilt for the war. The world will learn what actually happened in Germany in the last days of July and the first days of August 1914. It will then be seen how the great misfortune befell us because we did not think for ourselves, because we let the authorities think for us, because we were satisfied to let the authorities do the thinking for us. That is what led to the fact that on July 26, instead of leading to a reasonable policy, politics had reached the zero point of its development. The world must learn about these things one day. It will learn about them in the next few days through the memoirs of the most important person who was active in those days, in July/August 1914. Then we will see what has been missed because only some people in authority thought in their own way, and that the others basically had their convictions dictated to them.

Now, we have heard the matter many times. The war profiteers were followed by the revolution profiteers. But there was also another consequence. The war talkers were followed by the revolution talkers. And the ratio of revolution talkers to war talkers is roughly the same as that of revolution profiteers to war profiteers.

We have to get beyond the chatter. And we have to get beyond the fact that we cannot be guided politically by any authority, whether they are socialist or other personalities. We have to become discerning people. We cannot become discerning people if we sweep aside everything that can really be based on the demands of the day.

I do not go into such things that have been brought up and that are nothing more than absolute distortions of what has permeated my considerations. The fact that I want to bridge the contradictions with goodwill is an objective slander. I certainly did not speak of bridging the contradictions with goodwill. I spoke of the institutions that are to be brought about. What does the independence of intellectual life, economic life, and legal life have to do with goodwill? It has to do with the objective description of what is to come.

I agree with anyone who says that first of all people want power, but I am also quite clear about the fact that whoever has the power must know how to use it. And if we just want to rush forward and leave the unenlightened masses behind, then we will not only end up in the same conditions, but in much worse conditions than those that already existed.

You can find something else philosophically and feel tremendously practical when you say: The French are exhausted, they can't give us bread, England is also emaciated by the war and can't give us bread, America is too expensive for us. But we can get bread from Russia! —- Well, for the time being the English have much more bread than the Russians themselves, despite all the false reports. The claim that we can expect bread from Russia is one that is not based on fact.

What is important is that we now truly understand the situation as it is. That we say to ourselves: we were unable to socialize with the old intellectual life, we need a new intellectual life. But that can only be the intellectual life detached from the constitutional state. We need a foundation on which labor is withdrawn from the struggles. That can only be the independent state under the rule of law. And we need a balancing of the value of goods, and that can only happen on the basis of an independent economic life. These are things that one can really want. These are things that are not just revolutionary phrases. These are things that, if one has the courage to bring them about, truly want to bring about a very different state of the world than it is now.

I believe that if you think about it long enough, you will come to understand what is contained in the threefold social order. And it can be introduced in a relatively short time. Now, when this healthy threefold organism is in place, our circumstances will be very much revolutionized. When the world moves towards the introduction of the threefold social organism, then we shall have no need to 'thunder' about world revolution, for it will then take place in an objective way. Thunder is not what it is about. What it is about is finding germinal thoughts that can develop into real social fruits.

Today, however, we do not need a lot of talk, but we do need to agree on what needs to be done. We are not dealing with ideologies, utopias or philosophies in the threefold social organism, but with something that can be done, that is a plan for real action, not a description of a future state, but a plan for work. We need a plan for every house, we need it for social reorganization. Those who are always cutting back, be they socialists or other people, will not lead to this, but only those who are inclined to really move forward. I fear that those who have heard “nothing new, only old” today will not lead us out of chaos, but into it.

We want to take a serious approach today to the acceptance of that which is so unusual, so new, that it is not even heard when it is said, but rather find its own phrases. Today, new habits of thought are necessary, a change in thinking is necessary. Humanity must appeal to new habits of thought, to new ways of thinking, before it is too late. And I say it again: if humanity does not have this inner courage, it could very easily soon be too late.

When people see the present distress and misery, they ask what has caused it, and usually they look for the causes in external circumstances. They will first look back at the painful years that have passed, four to five years. Perhaps he will also gradually become aware that what has been so painfully experienced in the last four to five years has been preparing itself over a long period of time, through decades, indeed through centuries of recent human development, just as a thunderstorm prepares itself through the sultriness of the whole day, without its formation being noticed, and then discharges itself. But even those people who look further back in this way to the causes and reasons for our present plight and our misery in this age, they will look more or less at external circumstances. They will also think of appearances when it comes to getting out of the confusion and chaos of this age, of external measures and institutions.

To a great extent, this view is correct. I myself have tried to express the extent to which this is the case, in accordance with my own convictions, in the lecture I was allowed to give here in Ulm a few weeks ago on social issues. But there is another side to this way of looking at things. We need only be attentive to what is a significant contemporary phenomenon in our present time with regard to the inner human life, the human soul life. In line with what I just mentioned, we are rightly striving for a more social organization of the external conditions of life than has been granted to humanity in the last three to four centuries. But is it not noticeable that we are striving towards this social organization from a very strange human state of mind? Do we not notice that basically human souls in the present are permeated with antisocial drives, with antisocial instincts, with little possibility of mutual understanding? And it is out of these antisocial states of mind, and all the more so because they are present, that we must strive for a more social organization of external life than that which the antisocial instincts of our present human life had developed during the last three to four centuries. If we consider the question from this point of view, we find that these antisocial tendencies of the present time are actually connected with the fact that we have lost the way to the innermost core of man's being, the way to that innermost core of being that every human being actually senses within himself, even if more or less brightly or only instinctively and obscurely: the supersensible human being. However strange it may sound, people today do not know exactly what their deeper, darker soul craves. It longs for a realization of the supersensible essence of the human being. And in the difficulties that our age in particular is experiencing in advancing to a satisfactory realization of this innermost human nature - in these difficulties lies much of what then expresses itself externally in confusion and chaos, as little as people want to admit this even today. Many people, however, think that the question I am talking about should be answered in a completely different way from the one I will give you tonight.

Since I have to discuss this question from the point of view of anthroposophical spiritual science, I will not be able to answer it in the convenient way that is sought by many people today, and which is popular in the broadest circles of humanity. When people today are told about the Mountains of the Moon and how one informs oneself about them through physical instruments and physical measures, they believe that acquiring knowledge about the Mountains of the Moon is a complicated matter. The human being overcomes himself and admits that one cannot penetrate to knowledge of, say, the Moon Mountains or the moons of Jupiter or the like in a completely comfortable way. But when it comes to the supersensible world, when it comes to the spiritual existence of the human being himself, the broadest circles today still behave quite differently. They find it too difficult to speak in the way I will have to speak to you today. Even today the widest circles say: Better than this apparent science is childlike confession or childlike belief in the Bible to enter the supersensible worlds. They insist on that which they find comfortable, on the childlike simplicity of the belief in confession or in the Bible, when it is a matter of the highest thing to which man can aspire on the path of the soul, and they reject that which does not lead man along this path in such a comfortable way. But even today people do not see certain inner connections that exist between this striving for comfortable spiritual paths and between our anti-social instincts and the difficulties of getting out of these anti-social instincts. If people realized the connection between what they have been told and believed from certain quarters: that you can seek the paths to the supersensible through childlike, simple creeds, and if they realized the connection between this assertion and this belief and between what is expressed today in terms of anti-social impulses, then one would certainly learn to think differently about what the widest circles today find to be a 'convenient way into the supersensible worlds'. 'But it is not out of some kind of intellectual quirk that spiritual science shows modern man other ways today, but it shows these ways because it feels it has an obligation to do so in view of the needs and tasks of present-day humanity. If present-day humanity were to recognize itself in its very depths, it would say to itself: With regard to supersensible striving, we can no longer be satisfied with the old ways. This lives today as a longing in many souls, and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to meet this longing.

As already mentioned, people today do ask more or less clearly or more or less unconsciously about the relationship between soul and body; if they have not already come so far as to deny everything of a soul nature, because doubt has always arisen in response to this question, doubt that has wearied them. But what does the modern person fundamentally know about soul and body? He observes the body in such a way that he applies his senses, his external physical mind, or, for that which he cannot directly learn through the senses and the mind, he resorts to natural science, which, through its investigations, is supposed to tell him what the laws are, what the inner nature of this human physical body is. On the other hand, man inwardly perceives that which he calls thinking, feeling and willing. This becomes an inner experience for him. To this thinking, feeling and willing he also attaches certain inner longings, desires and hopes, he attaches the belief that this inner life, living in thinking, feeling and willing, has not only the temporary significance for the world that the life of the physical body has. But then the question arises for the human being that gives rise to the great doubts: What is the relationship between what I perceive inwardly as soul in me, as thinking, feeling and willing, and what I see outwardly in myself and in others as the outer physical body, the laws and essence of which science seeks to explain to me? And if the human being cannot explain this relationship between the soul and the body to himself, then he may well turn to those who, based on certain scientific foundations, have the opportunity to investigate this relationship more deeply. And lo and behold, today's man, who is so eager to have everything explained to him by scientific authority, must then realize that in this question he can be helped little by the scientists he so seeks. If he takes anything at hand in which the researchers in this field have expressed themselves, he will usually find that they say about this question just as uncertainly as he carries within himself. All kinds of hypotheses and conjectures can be found. But something that seizes the human being in such a way that, if only they can truly take a position on it without prejudice, they might get a sense of the truth, is rarely found today. The task of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is to find this.

But we cannot advance along the same paths by which we arrive at external science to that which I must now speak of as a spiritual science, as a real spiritual science. Imagine someone telling you about the paths of research they have taken in the chemical or physical laboratory, in the clinic, to research external nature. You would usually hear from such a researcher, who can justifiably believe that he has become an expert in his field, that he has gone his research ways with a certain calm, with a certain inner equanimous soul mood. There is not much excitement to be found on today's research paths.

But anyone who wants to tell you about the path he took to his insights into the supersensible human being cannot speak of such calmness, of such an inner, equanimous mood of the soul. If he is to tell you about what he went through to arrive at these insights, he will have to speak of inner struggles, of inner soul-searching, of difficult efforts, of repeatedly standing at the precipice of doubt. He will have to tell you about what he had to overcome in abundance, what he had to go through to arrive at what provides information about the actual supersensible human core of being. For one only really enters upon the path to knowledge of the supersensible human being when one has familiarized oneself with everything I have already indicated: when doubts arise when considering the question of the relationship between body and soul, so that one that can only arise from a certain intellectual modesty – while most people today, in such matters, have not at all intellectual modesty, but on the contrary, terrible intellectual arrogance.

But if one really makes an effort with ordinary thinking, with all the ordinary powers of the soul that one otherwise has in life, to approach these questions about the nature of soul and body, then one gradually realizes that one must be modest, that one cannot approach these questions with ordinary human thinking. And gradually, through inner experience, through inner discovery, one comes to realize that with this ordinary human thinking and feeling, one's approach to the supersensible is comparable to the abilities of a five-year-old child when, for example, it is presented with a volume of lyric poetry. This child cannot do anything with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. We must first develop his abilities further, then he can do something with the volume of poetry that corresponds to the essence of this volume of poetry. So we must say to ourselves with regard to the thinking abilities that we have for our ordinary lives, with regard to the powers of knowledge that we have for our ordinary lives: you cannot use them to recognize the actual essence of the world and your own existence; you are initially confronted with this essence of the world and this essence of your own existence in such a way that you can do with it as little as a five-year-old child can with a book of poetry.

Only when one has developed this mood in one's soul, when one has conquered intellectual modesty so that one says to oneself: You must not remain with the way you can think now, feel and will now - only then does one stand at the starting point of the path into the supersensible worlds. For anyone who has something to say about the supersensible worlds must not only speak about something different from the ordinary external sense world, but must speak in a different way. This means, however, that one can only become a spiritual researcher if one first takes into one's own hands the faculties of thinking and cognition that one has for ordinary, everyday life and for ordinary science. Just as a child is educated by others, and its abilities developed by others, so must one take one's own inner soul abilities, first of all one's thinking ability, into one's own hands and develop them further, from the point of view at which thinking comes naturally in life.

In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have described in detail the systematic structure of the thinking process by which man can take his thinking ability into his own hands and develop it further than it has been developed by ordinary life and ordinary science.

This evening, due to the limited time, I will only be able to present the fundamentals of the matter. I will only be able to show you how to further develop this thinking, how to take it into your own hands and how to advance it further and further. The following is a prerequisite for this: If you want to educate yourself about the external physical being of a person, as I said earlier, you should turn to natural science. Now, this natural science is not to be disparaged. The spiritual researcher fully recognizes the great triumphs of natural science in modern times, just as the natural scientist can only recognize them himself. He recognizes this natural science as justified; he is all the better a spiritual researcher the better he is able to appreciate the value and significance of natural science. But precisely for this reason the other side must also be stated: if one asks this natural science, it initially presents one with the limits of knowledge. You are all well aware that it is precisely the level-headed natural scientists who speak of such limits of knowledge. Certain concepts, certain ideas are presented to the person who asks about the nature of things, about power, matter, etc. These concepts change from time to time, but certain limits always remain, beyond which the natural scientist says: You cannot go. The natural scientist is right in his field if he stops at these limits. The spiritual researcher cannot do this. But he must not want to go beyond these limits through mere speculation or mere fantasy.

When the spiritual researcher approaches that which science cannot recognize and where it has driven the boundary posts for knowledge, there the great inner soul struggles begin for him, for the spiritual researcher. The spiritual researcher must fight inwardly with what the natural scientist presents as fixed boundary concepts. And here this struggle becomes a first great experience. He overcomes these limitations in his inner experience by struggling, and by overcoming them, a realization dawns on him with the experiences, which is important, fundamentally important for everything that is to lead to the knowledge of supersensible human nature. By devoting himself to this struggle with the limitations of natural knowledge, he realizes how peculiarly the human being is adapted to life. For the spiritual researcher must ask himself, from his experience, what prevents him from looking into the inner nature of things in a purely scientific way? There he discovers something most remarkable, I might say, something most distressing. If nature were transparent, if it did not set limits for us, then we human beings would not possess a quality in our life between birth and death that we absolutely need for our social existence in this life. If man could see into the inner nature of nature, he would have to do without the soul power of love! Everything we call love from person to person, what we call love and brotherly feelings from person to person, what glows in the soul when we approach another person socially, we could not have if nature did not set limits for our knowledge of nature.

This is a truth that cannot be proven logically. Just as little as one can logically prove that there is a whale or that there is no whale – one can only be convinced by seeing it with one's own eyes – so one cannot prove that one would have to do without love if knowledge of nature had no limits. But as an experience it presents itself to him who really struggles into spiritual knowledge. There you see what secrets our human existence holds. It is such a secret that man must pay for limited knowledge of nature by developing love. And vice versa: he must pay for his ability to love by initially having no unlimited knowledge of nature.

But this also shows us what the one who really wants to penetrate into the spiritual world, to which man himself with his innermost core of being belongs, has to overcome. One of the basic principles for the paths up to the supersensible human being and to the supersensible world in general is that one's ability to love, one's devotion to all beings in the world, must be greater than it is in ordinary life between birth and death, so that one does not lose love when one now tries to shape one's thinking more and more so that it becomes different from the way one thinks in ordinary life. It must be a preparation for the spiritual path of knowledge, to make oneself much, much more capable of love than one has to be for the ordinary social life. One gradually realizes that one actually only gets to know the world in one's full human nature as long as one is in the physical body, through love, through no other method of research.

But if you want to penetrate into the spiritual world, you must at the same time develop your thinking higher than it develops naturally in human nature. This is achieved by systematically applying certain inner soul activities, which in life are otherwise only applied incidentally, by forcing yourself to do so. Today I can only give you a small excerpt of what you will find described in detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” But I can at least hint at what this higher development of human thinking is based on.

You know that when something from outside stimulates us in some way, we become aware of it. We hear a sound and we are interested in what is happening in the direction of that sound. So being interested in something and turning our attention to it are inner soul activities that are usually stimulated in people from the outside world. What is important when entering the spiritual path of knowledge is that we apply such forces as the forces that lead to attention and interest in us, for example, by meditating on an idea for a very, very long time, as they say, by putting our soul completely into this idea. In the ordinary, natural course of life, attention and interest in this idea are lost. But if you deliberately immerse yourself in such an idea with all your soul, and remain in it, so that you maintain from within the attention that is in danger of fading, that you maintain from within the interest when it is in danger of fading, through the length with which you devote yourself to the idea - and if you keep doing this, then you invigorate your thinking; your thinking becomes something quite different from what it used to be. Then one comes indeed to a thinking that is full of inner activity, but in which one must also exert oneself, as one must exert oneself in an external manual labor. One comes to a thinking that relates to ordinary thinking as ordinary thinking relates to the thinking of a five-year-old child, for example, in relation to lyrical poems. But one comes to a kind of thinking of which one says to oneself: if one has achieved it, then one had to exert an inner strength in order to achieve it, which really took the physical, which also cooperates, so that one feels it like a fatigue from hard external work, to which one has devoted oneself for years. If one learns to recognize that one can work at something in one's soul that costs as much effort as chopping wood costs for me, then one comes to grasp the living thinking in one's soul, while ordinary thinking only accompanies external phenomena, external experiences. Think about how you actually think in ordinary life: you do your work in ordinary life, and your thinking runs along dreamily alongside this outer life. Try to make this thinking more strenuous by reading a difficult book, and you will notice that just when thinking wants to be inwardly active, it must tire, like any other activity. But what is developed from within through this activity must be pushed further and further with the thinking. When it is pushed further and further, one notices that a great change is taking place in thinking. Then one learns to recognize something of which one had no idea before: one learns to recognize that one lives in a thinking of which ordinary thinking is only a reflection, an image: one learns to know a thinking that lives inwardly, a thinking that is completely independent of the tool of the brain, of the tool of the body. However grotesque, however paradoxical, however insane it may appear to present-day humanity, in this way, which you will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, the human being can come to know very precisely: by thinking, by developing the soul activity of thinking, you live outside the body with your thinking, while ordinary thinking is tied to the instrument of the body, to the nervous system. But one also learns to recognize exactly how little the inner soul being, which one grasps in one's thinking, is bound to the instrument of the brain. For one does not develop this inner soul being in the first place, but one only gets to know it. I am not talking to you about something that is being developed anew today, but about the knowledge of the supersensible human being. One learns to recognize the great error to which ordinary natural science and external popular opinion about thinking succumb, especially in our materialistic age.

Natural scientific thinking says: the brain is the instrument of thinking. But that is an error, just as it would be an error if you were to see wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps in a muddy country lane and then to reflect – let us assume for the moment – on the forces at work from below, from the earth, that have produced the wagon tracks or the marks of human footsteps. That would, of course, be foolish. You cannot see from the structure of the earth itself how the furrows were formed. You have to realize that a cart has driven there, that people have walked over it with their feet, that this has left an impression. In this way you come to see the error of science with regard to the human soul life when you really get to know thinking that is independent of the body. There you learn that what is in the brain as nerve furrows does not have the forces in the brain itself that produce the soul; rather, you learn that all these furrows are driven in — like furrows in soft earth driven in by carts and footsteps — that these furrows are dug in by soul activity independent of the body. And now you also understand the error that can arise in science. Such traces arise in the brain for everything that is engraved there; you can follow them all; but this did not arise from the body, it is engraved into the body.

But it is not always easy to grasp this active being. In order to get even a brief glimpse into this human thinking, which is independent of the body, one needs what could be called presence of mind, because it does not last long, such a glimpse of the spiritual into our ordinary perception. One can prepare oneself well – you will also find something about this in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' – by developing in everyday life what can be called presence of mind, rapid orientation in situations and the ability to act quickly in a situation. If we develop this quality more and more, we prepare ourselves to see what can appear out of the spiritual, the supersensible world, and what we otherwise do not see because we do not have time to muster the necessary presence of mind while it occurs; because we do not have time to look at it before it is over. But if you really learn to look into the spiritual world in this way, if you learn to recognize what lives in the human being and can be grasped in this way through developed thinking, then you see not only into the ordinary human life of everyday life, but then a completely different perspective arises.

There is one thing that this spiritual knowledge does not have: it is not memorable in the ordinary sense. The one who wants to tell you something from the spiritual world must always create the conditions to see it. He cannot just develop a memory for his earlier spiritual vision. But even if that spiritual insight, I would like to say, passes quickly like a fleeting dream that is soon forgotten, it contains within itself a meaningful memory. And at this point something must be said that will naturally strike the people of the present time as highly peculiar. But it certainly did strike people as peculiar when they were told that there are not just glowing points up there, but countless worlds spread throughout space! Just as men centuries ago were slow to believe it, but became so accustomed to it that today it is a matter of course for them, so what the spiritual researcher presents as his experience through his developed thinking will still seem unusual today, but it will have to be a matter of course for the coming centuries. And one of the tasks of our time will be to develop people's understanding for such an expansion of human knowledge and human perception. In the moment when man has an inwardly living thinking and knows that with this thinking he is independent of the body, he looks back - while he cannot have the ordinary memory in this moment - to the spiritual-soul that he has gone through in a purely spiritual world before he united with the physical human body through birth or conception and thereby descended from a spiritual world into the sensual world. The view expands beyond the life one has been living since birth; life expands into the contemplation of the spiritual world from which we have descended to our physical existence.

This also gives a new meaning to our entire social life. In our social life, we relate to this or that person. We quickly develop an affinity for one person, while with another we do not find ourselves so quickly united in sympathy. The most diverse relationships arise with other people here in this life between birth and death. If, as a spiritual researcher, you learn to recognize life as I have just indicated, then you will find that what attracts you to one person and what more or less alienates you to another person – in short, what arises in your relationships with others – is the result of what we have lived through with other souls in another world before we descended to this physical existence. Everything we experience in the physical world is a reflection of experiences in the spiritual world. In this way, human spiritual endeavor in our time will be able to give rise to insight into the spiritual world from this physical world.

There may still be many people today who cannot relate to such a view. But one can still think about such people. When the first railroad was built in Germany, a council of physicians and other scholars were called together to decide whether or not to build railroads. These learned gentlemen delivered the verdict that railways should not be built because traveling would be harmful to health and only fools would want to travel in them. In any case, a high board wall would have to be erected so that those along whom the railroad passes would not get concussions. Today there are people who, figuratively speaking, believe that one gets a concussion when the spiritual researcher speaks of the insights of the supersensible world. But the development of time will overcome these prejudices as it has overcome other prejudices.

What I have described to you is one way of crossing over from the physical world into the superphysical world. One must struggle with the limitations of knowledge of nature. But one must also come to terms with another limitation if one is to enter the spiritual world and gain insights into the supersensible nature of the human being. Just as one must come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of external nature, one must also come to terms with the limitations of knowledge of one's own being.

A great many people despair of finding satisfaction for their inner soul life in their old religious traditions and turn to so-called mysticism, believing that if they delve deeper and deeper into their souls, their inner soul life, their human nature, will become clear to them. Many people believe that what they truly are as human beings can arise mystically. The spiritual researcher must also learn this limit. He must be able to be a mystic, just as he must develop knowledge of nature. But he must not stop with mysticism, just as he must not stop with knowledge of nature. He must learn that mere mysticism leads to nothing but illusions about the supersensible human being, but not to a real knowledge of this supersensible human being. A true spiritual researcher is truly not an illusionist. He does not succumb to any illusions about what he has to recognize as reality. Therefore, unlike the ordinary mystic, he does not set out to conjure up all kinds of fantasies from within himself. No, there he knows one thing again: by struggling with his own inner being, by going through his own personal struggle, he knows that what mystics find is basically nothing other than what has made an impression on their souls since birth. They may have only grasped it dimly, it may not have come to their perception quite clearly, but it has remained in their memory.

Scientific research has already made some very interesting observations in this regard. I will briefly share one with you that is recorded in scientific literature, but which could be multiplied a hundredfold, a thousandfold. A natural scientist passes a bookstore window. His eye falls on a book. And as he looks at the title of the book, he has to laugh. Just imagine, a naturalist has to laugh when he sees a serious book title! He cannot explain to himself why he has to laugh. Now he closes his eyes because he thinks he will be able to figure it out more quickly if he is not distracted by the external impression. By closing his eyes, he hears in the distance what he had not heard before, as long as he was distracted: a barrel organ. And by continuing his investigation, he realizes that the organ is playing a melody to which he once danced. At the time, it made no strong impression on him; he was more interested in the dancer, or even in the dance steps. The impression of the melody itself was weak at the time, but still strong enough to resurface in later life when the researcher hears the same melody from the organ!

The spiritual researcher is very familiar with such things and their essence, for he has no illusions. He knows that when some mystic speaks of experiencing the divine human within himself, of experiencing something that brings him together with his eternal self, then it is the 'sounds of the barrel organ': he has once taken something in, that has transformed itself – for such things transform themselves – that rises as reminiscence. In the path of ordinary mysticism you find nothing but what you have once absorbed, and you can give yourself up to the most terrible illusions by wanting to be a mere mystic.

It is precisely this limitation that the spiritual researcher must overcome. Through experience one comes to know that what cannot be proved “logically” can be attained by the spiritual researcher through direct experience: one learns to recognize that one may not learn to know oneself by looking inwardly. For if one could see through oneself inwardly, one would in turn lack a human soul power that one must have for ordinary life if one could see through oneself inwardly. If one could see through oneself inwardly, one would not have the power of memory in ordinary life. And that this power of memory, the power of memory, is healthy, depends on whether we are healthy at all in our soul life. If our memory, our recollection, is disturbed, the ego is disturbed, a terrible mental illness occurs. So that we have to say: just as man, in order to have love, must have limits in his knowledge of nature, so too, in order to have memory, he must be placed in the impossibility of coming to the higher human being through mere inner contemplation.

But one can also ensure that this ability to remember is more firmly rooted in human nature than in ordinary life, which can also be done through exercises such as those I have described in the book mentioned.

In the same way that you can move towards consciously elevating your thinking, as I have described, you can also move towards conscious self-discipline by always noticing: You are doing this or that badly, you have to learn from life. In this way, you can take your will development into your own hands, just as you took your thought development into your own hands. When you take your will development into your own hands, something develops that, so to speak, illuminates the otherwise dark will in which you find yourself in ordinary life: you feel everything that you feel as will, interspersed with thoughts. In a sense, you are the spectator of your own will and action. When one comes to be the observer of one's own will and actions in such a tangible, spiritual and soul-like way, then what one receives as a higher willpower coincides with what developed earlier as thought activity. And now another faculty comes into play: one now beholds in one's own human nature something that appears so independent of all physical activity that one knows: What you carry within you, you carry out through death into the spiritual world. Through the culture of the will, one comes to know the spiritual life that a person lives after death, just as one comes to know, through the culture of thought, the spiritual life that a person has experienced before birth or conception. As you can see, spiritual research cannot speak in the usual way about the supersensible human being, but must relate how one experiences being able to look at the life of a person before and after death.

By penetrating into the world of one's own human existence in this way, one encounters social life in a new form. One observes how one experiences this or that together with other people, how one enters into relationships with other people, how one becomes friends with other people or is connected or disconnected again through other circumstances in the world. One learns to recognize that everything that takes place in the physical-sensual world is only the beginning of something that develops further as we pass through the gate of death. The relationships of the soul that are formed here between human and human find their continuation when the human being passes through the gate of death. The life that joins death becomes a very concrete reality in that we know that we are connected to those people here through our relationships in the sensual life, even beyond death.

These are things that still seem strange to people today, but they must be mastered by the tasks of our time. If they are, then something quite different will come to the fore. Then man will recognize in a completely different light what he today calls his own human development, what he today calls history. If one develops abilities such as those of which I have spoken, then one also looks differently into the historical of humanity than the fable convenue indicates, which is called history today and which must become something completely different in the future. I will give you an example at the end of my discussion to show you how the human being of the future must penetrate into the historical development of humanity itself.

We do not usually notice it, but at a certain historical point in recent times, a major turning point occurred in the development of humanity. That was in the middle of the 15th century. We usually say that nature does not make any leaps. It is a saying that is generally believed, although it is false. Nature is constantly making leaps. Consider the development of a plant, how a flower with stamens and pistils develops from a leaf, and finally the fruit! In the same way, historical life also makes leaps. And such a leap occurred in the middle of the 15th century, which we only fail to recognize because we look at history so superficially. The expanded human gaze, which overcomes, as it overcomes the experiences between birth and death, also that which is only presented in external history, in external facts, and it looks into the spirit of historical activity. And so this view shows that we have been living since the middle of the 15th century in the age that will last for a long time, which replaced another age that began in the 8th century BC and lasted until the middle of the 15th century. century. This era, from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, encompasses everything that was the magnificent Greek culture, what was Roman culture, and the after-effects of Greek and Roman civilization. And since the middle of the 15th century, we have, as I will characterize it in a moment, our modern culture with modern humanity.

How do these two cultures differ? They differ in something that people in the present time do not yet want to see and acknowledge. Before the 15th century, going back to the 8th century BC, man was capable of development in a completely different way than today. I can make this clear to you in the following way. Think about what the human being is like in the years before he changes his teeth around the seventh year, and how that marks a turning point in his life! You can read more about this in the small booklet on 'The Education of the Child from the Point of View of Spiritual Science'. You will see what it actually means for the more precise observer of human nature, what the child goes through with the change of teeth. There is a parallelism between the outer development of the body and the inner development of the soul. Then, in turn, there is a next point of development at the time of sexual maturity, in the fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then the parallelism between body and soul becomes less clear, but for present humanity it continues until about the twenty-seventh year. In the twenty-seventh year, one ceases to feel this connection between spiritual-soul development and bodily development strongly. This remarkable fact that the human being completes his physical development at the age of twenty-seven has only emerged since the middle of the 15th century. It was different in the previous period. What can be recognized here through spiritual research is an infinitely significant human developmental truth. In Greek and Roman times, human beings were at such a stage of development that until the age of thirty-three or thirty-five, there was a parallelism between their physical and spiritual-soul development. The Greeks developed qualities such as these, although not to the same extent, until well into their thirties, as evidenced by the change of teeth and sexual maturity. This is what constituted the remarkable harmony of soul and body in the Greeks. The progression that human history shows is that we have less and less of the years of youth, less and less of what emancipated us from the physical and bodily in our earlier years. But this also requires a completely different position of the soul-spiritual to the world being in the human being. In the long period from the 8th century BC to the 15th century AD, human beings developed more of an instinctive mind and an instinctive emotional life. Everything that lives in this period is permeated by this instinctive life of mind and soul. But since the middle of the 15th century, man has developed a more conscious mental and emotional life and with it the demand to place himself on the level of the free personality. This demand of human nature to place itself on the level of the free personality is only developing in history since the middle of the 15th century.

This also explains how the great events in human development fall differently depending on whether they occur in one or the other epoch. In the epoch that preceded our own, in which man remained capable of physical development well into his thirties, the greatest event in the development of the earth occurred in the first third of this epoch: the event that actually gives the development of the earth its true meaning, the event of the Mystery of Golgotha, the founding of Christianity. In the first third of the Greco-Latin era, what is like the central event of the whole human development on earth took place. The way it took place in the human race at that time, it could only be grasped naively by humanity in the age in which instinctive powers of mind and instinctive powers of the soul were present. It was only through these instinctive powers that people were able to relate to the great event in the right way during that period, because they did not yet behave consciously, but naively. They said to themselves: This is not just something that is done by human beings, something superhuman has broken into earthly development. The Christ, the superhuman being, has united with the body of Jesus of Nazareth. What happened at Golgotha is, in its physical facts, only the outer expression of something supersensible that has taken place in the development of the earth.

In those days, therefore, it could be grasped instinctively. This has changed since the middle of the 15th century. Since the middle of the 15th century, the instinctive mind, the instinctive power of mind, has been transformed into conscious mind, into conscious powers of mind. This made it possible to develop natural science to the high level it has reached, but also to develop industry, and to develop the materialism of the age, which had to be there as an adjunct to place the free personality at the top. But this materialism must be transcended by seeking the path to the spiritual world in a new way, as I have described it today. The age became materialistic in the epoch in which the consciousness soul of man developed from the earlier instinctive soul. Then, in addition to external materialism, the materialism of theology also emerged. Consider how, in wide circles, even theology, the religious view, has been grasped by materialism; how man of the age of consciousness became incapable of recognizing the supersensible in the event of Golgotha, how he came more and more to drag it down into the sensual; how he finally became proud of it, how even numerous theologians became proud of no longer seeing in the Christ the supersensible entity that descended to earth in the body of a human being, but only seeing the “simple man from Nazareth,” who is indeed somewhat greater than other people, but is nevertheless merely a human being. That in the Mystery of Golgotha, in the death and resurrection of Christ, the greatest fact in the evolution of the world and of humanity is presented to us, has not yet dawned upon the materialistic age. Religion itself has become materialized. Simple religious belief will not be able to stop this materialization of religion. It can only be stopped by the conscious knowledge of the spirit, of which I have spoken today. It will in turn arise from the realization that in Jesus of Nazareth there lived a supermundane, a supersensible being, which since that time has united itself with the evolution of mankind. The Mystery of Golgotha will be placed in the sphere of human contemplation through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science; but now it will be placed in such a way that it will be freed from the narrow-mindedness of the individual denominations.

What will develop as the spiritual outlook of the supersensible human being, as I have described it today, will make it possible for it to live in every human being across the whole earth, without distinction of race or nationality. From there, however, the path to the mystery of Golgotha will also be found, and all people across the whole earth will understand this Christ event, learn to comprehend it. In our time people enthuse about the so-called League of Nations; one enthuses about this League of Nations in the utopian way in which it originated in the abstract thinking of Woodrow Wilson. It will not be able to arise in this way. It needs a foundation of reality, and this must proceed from the innermost part of the human soul. That is the task of the present time. Only in this ability of the soul, which leads to the path of knowledge of the supersensible human being and unites people of the whole earth, only through such knowledge, which can look at the Christ event as a supersensible event, only in such an impulse, which works across nations, which works across all borders through nations, lies the real power for a future true League of Nations across the earth. In this way, Christianity must strike its new roots into human culture.

This shows you the other side to what I was allowed to say here in the previous lecture. This shows you the side that corresponds to the human inner soul life, which in turn will ignite social instincts in the human being when it fills him. To receive this spiritual science, one does not need to believe in authority as one does to receive the other scientific knowledge that is conveyed, say, from the observatory about astronomy, from medicine about the nature of the physical human being. That must be accepted on authority if one does not want to become an astronomer or a physiologist and so on oneself. But you do not have to believe what the spiritual researcher tells you on authority. You do not have to be a spiritual researcher yourself, just as you do not have to be a painter to find the beauty in a picture. You can absorb spiritual science through your common sense without being a spiritual researcher yourself, if you just sweep away the prejudices that have developed from today's materialism. Because everything in spiritual science is stored in the depths of the human soul, it can be understood without belief in authority. And this understanding, this trust in the revelations of spiritual science, is something that must be lived into the tasks of our age. Then this age will experience a renewal. Then this age will be given the ferment for what, as an external institution of a new structure, will have to play a corresponding role.

For what do we see when we really try to understand the nature of the present time? I would say: We see two paths, one on the left and one on the right. One of these offers us the possibility of stopping at the views that mere natural science has brought, and from this view, which natural science has brought, to now also proceed to social views; thus to start from the belief that one can understand social life with the same faculty of thought with which one understands nature. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels did that, and so do Lenin and Trotsky. That is why they arrive at their conclusions. People today do not yet realize that natural science stands on one side, and that its ultimate consequences find expression in social chaos and social decline. The terrible faith that now seeks to destroy all truly human culture in Eastern Europe, this terrible faith of Lenin and Trotsky, arises from the other faith, that the paths of scientific knowledge must also be followed in social life. What has happened under the influence of this newer materialistic-scientific faith? Our entire spiritual life has been mechanized. But because our spiritual life no longer rises to thoughts about the supersensible human being, because it mechanizes itself on the external mechanistic view of nature, at the same time the souls are vegetarianized, made plant-like, sleepy. Thus we see that in addition to the mechanized mind, we have a vegetarianized soul in modern cultural life. But if the soul is not warmed through by the spirit, if the spirit is not suffused with supersensible knowledge, then animal qualities develop in the body. Today these animal qualities live in anti-social instincts and want to become the executioners of culture in Eastern Europe. Then, under the guise of wanting to socialize, the most anti-social thing develops; then the bodily life becomes animalized alongside the mechanized spirit and the vegetated soul. The wildest instincts and drives arise as historical demands. That is the path that leads left.

The other way, the right way, is to enter into the view of the supersensible human being, the supersensible world, as presented in today's message. This view also sees the development of the human being in the supersensible light, and penetrates to the truly free spirit.

In my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”, I wanted to describe freedom as the basis for human progress, and to show how man can experience his true inner freedom by grasping the spiritual life. Only the spirit that permeates man can truly become free. The spirit that only permeates nature and seeks to shape all social life according to the pattern of modern natural science becomes mechanistically unfree. And the soul, permeated only by this spirit, sleeps like the plant. The soul that is warmed through by the true, pulsating will of spiritual knowledge of supersensible human nature steps forward in social life. It learns to recognize the supersensible human being in the other person. It learns to see the divine in the archetype in every person. It learns social feeling towards every person. It learns how, with regard to this innermost soul, all people here on earth are equal. And in this soul, warmed by the spirit, equality can develop in the other way on the right. And when the bodies are imbued and spiritualized by the supersensible consciousness, when they are warmed through, when they are ennobled by what the soul absorbs, by being awakened by the spirit, not remaining vegetated, then the bodies will not become animalized either; then the bodies become such that they develop what, in the broadest sense, can be called genuine love. Then, then the human being knows that he enters into his earthly body as a supersensible being, that he enters into this body to develop love in this body, to develop love towards the spirit. Then he knows that there must be brotherhood in the earthly body, otherwise the individual cannot be a whole, a full human being in unbrotherly humanity.

Thus the continuation of the old way leads us to the mechanization of the spirit, to the vegetarianization of the soul, to the animalization of the body. The path that is to be shown by spiritual science leads us to the true social virtues, but to the social virtues that are permeated by the spirit and warmed by the soul; that are carried out by the ennobled human body.

Thus spiritual knowledge of the supersensible human being leads us to found the future on a beautiful new building on earth: freedom in spiritual life. The spiritualized human being will be a free human being. Equality in the soul life warmed by the spirit: the soul that takes in the spirit will perceive and treat the other soul that it encounters in social life as truly equal, as if in a great secret. And the ennobled body, the body ennobled by spirit and soul, will become the vehicle of truest, most genuine human love, of true brotherhood. Thus the social order of man in freedom, equality and brotherhood will be able to take place through the correct understanding of body, soul and spirit.

A kind of nightmare-like oppression can weigh on the soul of anyone observing the current cultural life of humanity, a kind of contraction of the tortured heart, when one realizes that there are still relatively few people who want to see with an unbiased eye how we are on a slippery slope with regard to the most important branches of our cultural life. This downward slide has become sufficiently apparent through the events of recent years, through everything that has befallen people. But we still often find today that people are of the opinion that, unless drastic action is taken, things must remain at least as chaotic as they have become, and that we can continue to work from what is already there; the rest will take care of itself. Over the years, I have repeatedly had to speak out against these feelings of temporariness and point out the necessity of relearning and rethinking in order to find the inclination to think about a real renewal of our public affairs and public life from the deepest foundations of our intellectual and cultural life. And even though there are already a small number of people today who have become aware of this, and all signs indicate that without such decisive action the downward spiral will have to be continued and continued, even these few people will find little understanding for what is necessary for a new metamorphosis of the human spirit to emerge from the ice, in order to lead to a recovery, to a healing of many an ill, who are living out their lives on the slippery slope of our cultural life.

Three phenomena stand out, from which the most important for understanding our time and what is necessary in it can be seen. The first I would call the main defect of our time. For decades, the lectures on spiritual science have endeavored to point out this main defect and also to point out the many things that must follow from this main defect of insufficient knowledge and insight into spiritual life itself for the development of humanity in the present and the near future. The second thing that speaks loudly and clearly from the facts of the present, I would call the main demand. And this main demand has been sounding in many hearts for more than a century, since Schiller, in his “Don Carlos”, had the words spoken: “Give freedom of thought!” Those who look more deeply into the social and spiritual life of our time will be able to see how, behind many of today's consciously formulated social demands, the demand for free activity of the innermost human being, of human thought, is actually hidden. Many people sigh under the compulsion of their thought life, which comes either from old existing institutions or from the new economic conditions. They find themselves either officially existing beliefs or the constraints of economic life in their free development of thought inhibited. What actually lives in the soul, remains largely unconscious, but what rises to consciousness, comes in the fact that one can not be satisfied with anything, there is something that does not let people openly and freely confess before himself: I may lead a dignified human existence. And so the most diverse programs arise, which contain very beautiful things, but do not reach down to the bottom of the soul to see what is actually living there. If one searches for what is living there: it is the longing for the freest activity of the innermost human being, for what could be summarized with the expression of the time's demand for freedom of thought. And one need only utter the words “social forces” – and it can be felt how this indicates that modern intellectual, modern legal and political, and modern economic conditions have brought us to an age in which the productive forces of life operate in a complicated way, and how we are not able are unable, from what we have intellectually mastered, from what we want to process programmatically, to organize these social forces, in which human beings are interwoven, in such a way that within this organization the individual human being, who has come to the awareness of his humanity, can satisfactorily answer the question: Do I lead a dignified existence?

I may assume that the majority of the listeners gathered here today have been able to gather from the lectures and the writings, which further elaborate on the content of these lectures and which I have published, over the course of many years, what the inner meaning and spirit of the spiritual science referred to here is. This spiritual science believes that it must, out of a sense of the necessity of the times, place itself in the present-day cultural life. Today, since I can refer to the numerous lectures already given here, I will only need to touch on some fundamental points. Above all, however, I would like to touch on one introductory point again, which has already been discussed in the most diverse forms.

When spiritual science is mentioned, the outside world often associates it with all kinds of complicated mysticism, complicated theosophy, and so on. Although spiritual science does what it can to educate people about its true meaning, it is still spoken of in such a way in the broadest circles that it represents the exact opposite of what this spiritual science actually wants to be. First and foremost, the representatives of this spiritual science feel that for three to four centuries a way of thinking has emerged within humanity that dominates our entire lives and that has found its most significant expression in the way of thinking of modern natural science. Please do not misunderstand me on this point. I do not want to awaken the belief that I assume that only those people who have undergone some kind of scientific education are imbued with that school of thought. It is not like that. People from the widest circles, right down to those with a very primitive culture and education, who today want to be enlightened about the nature of man, about the nature of social life, and about the nature of the universe, think in such a way, they present in such a direction as it has been expressed mainly by natural science. And it is no wonder that this is so, because our whole life, which surrounds us and in which we are interwoven throughout the day, is basically a result of this scientific way of thinking.

Those who have heard me speak often know that I do not underestimate this scientific way of thinking, and that I recognize its great triumphs. But it has achieved these triumphs precisely because it has been able to take hold of part of our practical life in such a magnificent way, because over the last three to four centuries it has become magnificently one-sided. Everything that people think in this direction is based on an understanding of inanimate nature, of the physical and chemical, which then passes into technology, into everything that underlies our life institutions, and which, for example, is also incorporated into our healing methods, that is, into those insights that are intended to help human life from a certain point of view. But anyone who recognizes, without prejudice, the tremendous progress that has been made in the biological, physical and chemical aspects of the natural sciences, and who is able to appreciate the significance of what conscientious methodology has achieved in this respect, is precisely the person who, at the same time, is also able to fully grasp the limitations of this natural scientific way of thinking. I have explained this countless times here, and I would now like to summarize it in the words: Those who penetrate more deeply into what we today call genuine natural science will find that this natural science provides excellent insights into inanimate nature and into that in the living that, I might say, consists of inclusions in this inanimate nature. But there is one thing that we must stop at when we survey the scope of knowledge of the natural scientific way of thinking: We must stop before the actual essence of man. There is no way, if one does not want to indulge in self-deception, to believe that these views, which have led us so deeply into the inanimate, which have “brought us so gloriously far” in our technical achievements, that these views can provide any insight into the essence of man. This knowledge of the human being – that can be known by the one who does not cling to that fable convenue, which is not history but is called history – this knowledge of the human being was something instinctive for man up to three to four centuries ago. A certain knowledge of the human being lived out of an original, elementary instinct of humanity. However, just as the individual human being undergoes a development, so does all of humanity. And no matter how much we are deceived into claiming the opposite, humanity has now reached a point in its development where it can no longer judge the human essence from mere instinct. It is necessary for man to penetrate consciously into the essence of man himself, just as he must consciously penetrate into the phenomena of the outer life of nature, as Copernicus and Galileo did. When we come to the decisive point, where science and research must stop short before the insight into the human being, there is nothing left but to turn to what I have often mentioned: the intellectual modesty that is necessary for the human being, which can only provide the basis for the pursuit of true human development.

Those who cannot develop this intellectual modesty out of a genuine desire for knowledge will not be able to arrive at a true understanding of the human being. You have to be able to say to yourself: I see a five-year-old child, and I give him a volume of Goethe's lyrical poems. He looks at it and may well tear the book apart. He is going through the same process that an adult who has undergone development also goes through, so that he can really find what is meant to speak to him from this volume of poems. But just as one must admit that the child must first develop in order to relate to what is happening to him in the right way, so today one must also say: just as the human being is placed in existence by nature, he stands before human life itself like a five-year-old child before a volume of Goethe's poetry, if he does not have the will to guide his development beyond what is usually considered the only possible method today. One must take one's development into one's own hands. But then it becomes apparent that there are hidden forces in the human being that can be awakened and that give an equally rigorous scientific insight as only a natural science can give, but which go beyond the knowledge of the external world, the world of the senses, and lead into the supersensible, and only then lead to a true understanding of the human being. We must be able to admit: we cannot approach the human being with the ordinary powers that are sufficient for the knowledge of nature. We can only do so if we bring out the powers of knowledge that otherwise lie dormant in us, as the powers of understanding do in a five-year-old child, from the depths of the human soul.

And so the spiritual science referred to here represents the view that it is possible, from the standpoint that is sufficient to recognize external inanimate nature, to lead people to points of view of knowledge from which one can penetrate into the human being. This spiritual science does not want to be an idle brooding in inner mysticism; this spiritual science also does not want to handle any outer machinations to advance to the spirit, but wants to be something that builds so strictly on that for which the human being is really capable of developing, as, for example, the mathematician builds on the development of those abilities that are also brought forth entirely from within the human being. This spiritual science does not want to be as strictly logical as any other branch of science, but it does want to apply this logic only to what arises as a spiritual vision when what lies dormant within the human being is truly awakened in a natural way. In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” I have pointed out that it is entirely through inward, soul-spiritual methods that this development of inner, spiritual-soul forces is brought about in man, and how, through this, , to use Goethe's words, a spiritual eye, a soul ear, a spirit ear, so that he can see and hear the spiritual and soul realm, for which we basically only have words today. It is pointed out that it is important to cultivate a certain strengthening of our thinking life. I have emphasized the necessity of a certain self-discipline, of taking our development into our own hands, for otherwise we simply abandon ourselves to life, so that the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear are closed.

Most people today are still quite hostile to anything that comes from this side. And yet, one need only point out how, in our time, when social demands are springing up everywhere, the most anti-social instincts prevail. Where do these come from? They come from the fact that people actually pass each other by without understanding and that they do not comprehend one another. And why do they not understand one another? Because their knowledge, what they call knowledge, does not engage the whole person, because it remains in the head, because it is limited to the mere intellect. The peculiar thing about the spiritual science meant here is that the knowledge it provides through the developed forces engages the whole person, that it not only speaks to the intellect, not only to the intellect, but that they imbue feeling and will, that they infuse understanding of human nature, understanding of all that lives and moves beside and beyond us, that they pulsate with ethics, with morals, with a social attitude that simultaneously impacts directly on practical life.

This spiritual science does not know the unfortunate division that is discussed on every street corner today, the division into mental and manual labor. After all, what is our manual labor? It is nothing more than the use of the bodily tools at our disposal in the service of our will. But when we are clear about the fact - and I have often spoken of it - that this will, as a spiritual force, pulses through everything we do as a whole human being, and in turn radiates back to the intellect in our head, - when we really have the whole human being in mind, only then will we understand the innermost impulse of this spiritual science.

Please excuse me for mentioning something personal on this occasion. But in this case, the personal will serve to clarify the matter. The spiritual science that is being discussed here is to be served on the Dornach hill in northwestern Switzerland, a piece of Jura, the Goetheanum built there, which is intended as a university for spiritual science. When the time came to found this School of Spiritual Science and to dedicate the outer structure to it, it was not a matter of going to someone who, based on old architectural or artistic ideas, would have built a structure into which one would then have moved in order to pursue this spiritual science. No, it had to be something else. From the very beginning, this spiritual science was conceived in such a fruitful way that it can intervene in the whole of external cultural life, that it can truly infuse anew that which has become old in our art, in our architecture, in our life, in our work. So one could not simply give someone the commission: Build me a building in the Greek, Romanesque, Gothic or some other architectural style. Rather, out of this spiritual science itself, just as out of the other thoughts of life, just as out of the other impulses of life, so too did the architectural thoughts arise, which suggested: this is how this building must be in every line, in every single form. And so the building was undertaken that in every single form, even the smallest, it will indeed be the external crystallization of what underlies this spiritual science as a way of thinking, as an attitude.

And so perhaps I may say the following about myself: It was in the fall of 1913 and in the winter of 1914 that I myself worked out the model of this building, the whole building in miniature. Now that I have worked out the model, I ask about which even the architectural drawings are made: Was what I worked out in manual labor, was it manual labor or mental work? It was something where both came together and worked as one. I know this because I just did the thing. Then again, there is hardly anything about this building where I, like every single worker, did not lend a hand here and there. And for anyone who might be interested, I would like to say: we are working as the central figure of this building, a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group, which is supposed to represent the human enigma of our time, but in an artistic way. The task was to create a sculpted woodwork. Although the work is artistic, it is, if I may use the expression, a wood-chopping, and I could show the calluses on my fingers, which provide evidence that here mental work in direct manual labor from morning to evening itself is executed.

Recently, we had to decide on a certain financial matter; we needed to make the chairs. We got the cost estimate. The price was outrageous. So we made the model of a chair ourselves in our artistic studio, working together with a worker who is indeed extraordinarily skilled. When the model was finished – the chair will cost only two-fifths of what it would have cost according to the other proposal – again, one could not tell where the intellectual work ended and the manual labor began.

One may even say: in the way we work together in social life with our co-workers, who are made up of friends of our movement on the one hand and workers on the other, there is actually only one obstacle without which it would become apparent that mental work and manual work flow together everywhere. For example, we have a lady who is a certified medical assistant and who sharpens knives for our sculptors from morning till evening. And we can ask: What prevents what the wit, who are called spiritual workers, do, from simply flowing into what the workers do, to the complete satisfaction of both sides, to the most completely satisfying social collaboration? Yes, I do understand everything that has come about as social phenomena. Nevertheless, I must say that if I am to speak of the only obstacle that makes it impossible to hand over both manual labor and mental work to the manual laborer, it is the fact that the workers are organized and view everything that comes from the intellectual workers with mistrust, even though they are actually doing the same thing.

Why is it that today there is such a deep abyss between what lies in our art, in our science, in short, in our spiritual life and also in the spiritual direction of our social life, and in the external work that the proletarian movement in particular is dealing with today? This gulf has come about because what concerns the whole human being has fled from our way of thinking. A recovery for this lies only in spiritual science, not in a one-sided, complicated mysticism or theosophy, which idle people may pursue in their little rooms, without any momentum. The healing power of this spiritual science lies in the fact that it engages the whole human being. And I have said this now in order to make the following comment: I know that the insights that I am presenting to the world today with full responsibility would not have come to me if I had only worked with my head, if I had not had to devote my whole life to something that is usually called manual labor; because this also has a certain effect on a person. What is only the so-called brainwork, what only engages the intellect, does not reach to the spirit. And something that will seem highly paradoxical to many people today, I would like to mention here. Today, out there in practical life, we say: manual labor, practice; inside, from the intellect: intellectual work! Oh no, it is not at all as these words would lead us to believe. We have the separation between outer life practice and the so-called spiritual life because the spirit has fled from both, because today we are caught in the mechanical treadmill of technology, because the worker stands at the machine and merely performs mechanical tasks according to the instructions of the intellect, and because, on the other hand, those who are educated for an intellectual life are not sufficiently involved in real practical work. Our practical life is spiritless, and so is our intellectualized spiritual life. Only when the full activity of the human being in the world flows back into our heads, into our thinking, which can only arise from the harmonious activity of the whole human being, only when we do not only think with our heads, but think as one thinks when one has once formed something with one's hand and felt how it radiates back into the head, only then will the thought be so fully saturated with reality that there is spirit in it. That which is merely thought out is just as spiritless as that which is spiritlessly worked on a machine.

The spiritual science referred to here should not practise mysticism that is alien to life. It should arise from full engagement with life and should be much more saturated with reality than what is usually meant by intellectual life today. Or is what is meant today as spiritual life saturated with reality? Do we not see how powerless science is to really grasp the spirit? People who are generally immersed in our modern culture believe that they are doing unprejudiced natural science. But how did this unprejudiced natural science actually come about? Through the fact that for many centuries everything that people longed to know about soul and spirit, about that which extends beyond birth and death, was dependent on what the confessions monopolized, due to social circumstances. When the spirit of modern science arose, what did social life actually look like? Everything that people were allowed to know about soul and spirit was monopolized in the dogmas of the confessional societies. One was not allowed to think about soul and spirit, one was only allowed to think about the external world of the senses. And in this, people who have pursued natural science have found themselves. They got into the habit of thinking and researching only about the external world of the senses because research into spirit and soul had been forbidden for centuries. They translated this into certain ideas, they only pursued external sensory science. Then, through a grandiose self-deception, this has become the belief that exact science can only decide something about the external world of the senses, and that research into soul and spirit lies beyond the boundaries of knowledge. But this is also rooted in the soul life of modern man and permeates all life. One can gain fruitful thoughts about nature with such a view. But as soon as one wants to penetrate into social life, this way of thinking is not enough. There it is necessary, for the foundation of a real people's science, a real social science, that we imbue ourselves with a view of the whole human being. And that is lacking because the influences I have characterized prevented it.

So it has come about that people have said: Spirit and soul is something that has been established by dogmas for centuries. It cannot be researched. It is something that only through human will moves like smoke and fog over real life, and there, as the real thing, one forms nothing other than the economic forces themselves. Unbelief arose: the spiritual reigns in what the external economic forces are. And out of unbelief arose what has fatally taken hold in the hearts and minds of men. The belief arose that spiritual life could develop out of economic forces by itself, if only these were organized in a certain way. There is no realization that everything that has arisen economically is originally the result of intellectual life, but that our intellectual life has become unworldly, that there is an abyss between it and the outer life, and that for a recovery of our life we need a real spiritual science that penetrates into the essence of man, that penetrates man just as outer natural science penetrates the machine, but that must be built on the developed powers of human nature. In short, it is extraordinarily difficult to realize that spiritual science must become the basis for the understanding and mastering of social life. That is what the representative of spiritual science believes he recognizes: that the human intellect does not have enough impact, not even where it pulsates in today's social life, to immerse itself in real life, and that the latter must increasingly end in chaos if the impulses that reach into feeling and will, that can place human being next to human being in such a way that social forces can be organized, are not enlivened. No matter what natural scientific methods you take from the exact natural science that has reached its zenith in our time, you cannot establish a social science with them. The ideas that one gains without spiritual science behave in relation to social science in the same way as a color that one wants to paint on an oily surface. Just as the oily surface rejects the color, so life rejects what merely rules among us as intellectual science.

Thus external life cries out for the kind of depth that spiritual science provides. Spiritual science will have to provide the foundations for what people unconsciously express in their social demands today, what they cannot formulate clearly because the power of thought is not available. It is therefore necessary to understand this spiritual science not as something that one could devote a few thoughts to on the side, but as something that is among the most necessary conditions for the recovery of our lives. I know full well — for I truly do not believe I am an impractical person — that people say: We have our professions, we cannot devote ourselves to this spiritual science, which is quite extensive after all. Should not a little more thought also enter into the hearts and souls of people: Doesn't the present downward path on which we are walking show us — however much we are still in our profession — that we are only helping to shape the path into chaos? And shouldn't we consider it necessary to devote every hour that we can spare to such views, which now really and radically raise the question of recovery?

And what is meant here as spiritual science is intimately connected with that call in our time, which, as I have explained, is far older than a century, with that call, which I would like to describe as the call for freedom of thought. But this call is actually the call for social freedom. It is remarkable that when one tries to see through to what is rising to the surface in the waves of the so-called social demands in our present time, one repeatedly encounters the necessity to recognize how it actually relates to human freedom, to that impulse that expresses itself in one form or another as the impulse of human freedom. That this is an important point was recognized even by the man whom I consider the most unfortunate among the so-called outstanding people of our time who have gained influence over the shaping of conditions – even Woodrow Wilson recognized this. Since I never spoke differently about Woodrow Wilson even in neutral foreign countries during the war, while he was so adored by all sides, I may also speak about Woodrow Wilson today as I always have. There are numerous passages in his writings in which he points out that a recovery of the situation - he is primarily familiar with the American situation - can only come about if people's striving for freedom is truly taken into account.

But what is human freedom for Woodrow Wilson?

This brings us to a very, very interesting chapter in contemporary human thought - for Woodrow Wilson is, after all, a kind of representative thinker - where you will find the following view in his writing about freedom: You can form the concept of freedom by looking at a machine and how a gear wheel is attached. If it is attached in such a way that the mechanical device can move without hindrance, then one says that the gear wheel runs freely. When he looks at a ship, he says that the ship must be constructed in such a way that the machinery engages with the swell, so that it is not hindered, so that it moves with the swell, so to speak, is adapted to it, runs freely in the swell. Woodrow Wilson compares what the impulse of human freedom should really be to what a cogwheel in a machine or a ship in the waves of the sea is. He says: A person is free when he functions more or less like a wheel in a machine, when he functions freely in his external circumstances, so that he moves within them, so that he engages with his powers in what is going on around him, so that he is not hindered.

Now, I think it is very interesting that this peculiar view of human freedom can arise from the present-day scientific way of thinking and attitude. For is it not the opposite of freedom when one is so adapted to circumstances that one can only move in their sense? Does not freedom demand that one be able to stand up to external circumstances if necessary? Would not what lives as freedom have to be compared to what could, if necessary, behave in such a way that the ship turns against the waves and stops?

Where does this strange view come from, from which a healthy, statesmanlike insight can never arise, but at most the 14 abstract points of Wilson's pronouncements, which unfortunately were also admired here to some extent at a certain time? Hence it is that in our time it is not realized how one must go back to the human idea itself, to that idea which is conceived as an idea and which, if one really speaks of freedom, can provide the only real free impulse for human life. This is what I tried to present more than thirty years ago in my Philosophy of Freedom, a new edition of which has recently been published with corresponding additions. There, however, I tried to understand this impulse for freedom in a different way than it is currently being done. I tried to show how the question about human freedom has been wrongly formulated. The question is: Is man free or is he not free? Is man a free being who can make decisions out of his soul with real responsibility, or is he harnessed into a natural or spiritual necessity like a natural being? This question has been asked for thousands of years, and it is still being asked. This question alone is the great error.

One cannot ask the question in this way. Rather, the question of freedom is a question of human development, of a human development such that in the course of his youth or perhaps his later life, man develops powers within himself that he does not simply have by nature. One cannot ask: Is man free? By nature he is not, but he can make himself more and more free by awakening forces that lie dormant in him and that nature does not awaken. Man can become more and more free. One cannot ask: Is man free or unfree, but only: Is there a way for man to achieve freedom? And this way exists. As I said, thirty years ago I tried to show that when man develops an inner life within himself, so that he grasps the moral impulses for his actions in pure thoughts, he can really base his actions on thought impulses, not just instinctive emotions – thoughts that merge into external reality as the lover into the beloved. Then man approaches his freedom. Freedom is just as much a child of the thought, which is grasped in spiritual clairvoyance - not under an external compulsion - as it is a child of

of true devoted love, love for the object of our activity. What German spiritual life strove for in Schiller, when he confronted Kant and sensed something of such a concept of freedom, befits us to further develop in the present. But then it became clear to me that one can only speak of that which underlies moral actions – even if it remains unconscious in people, it is still there – and that one must call it intuition. And so in my “Philosophy of Freedom” I spoke of a moral intuition.

But this also provided the starting point for everything I later attempted to achieve in the field of spiritual science. Do not think that I now have an immodest opinion of these things. I know very well that this 'Philosophy of Freedom', which I conceived more than thirty years ago as a young man, has, to a certain extent, all the teething troubles of the intellectual life that emerged during the 19th century. But I also know that out of this intellectual life has sprung what is a leading up of the intellectual life into the truly spiritual. So that I can say to myself: When man rises to the moral impulses in moral intuition and represents a truly free being, then he is already, if I may use the frowned-upon word, “clairvoyant” with regard to his moral intuitions. In that which lies beyond all sensuality lie the impulses of all morality. Fundamentally, the truly moral commandments are the results of human clairvoyance. Therefore, there was a straight path from that “philosophy of freedom” to what I mean today by spiritual science. Freedom arises in man only when man develops. But he can develop further so that what is already the basis of freedom also drives him to become independent of all sensuality and to rise freely into the realms of the spirit.

Thus, freedom is connected with the development of human thinking. Freedom is basically always freedom of thought, and especially when we look at such representative people as Woodrow Wilson, we have to say: because such people have never grasped what the thought of something truly spiritual is, how it must be rooted in the spiritual if it is not to be abstract, that is why they can invent such paradoxical definitions as Woodrow Wilson has invented for freedom. From such things we see the inadequacy of the present spiritual life, the main defect of which is that it does not recognize the spiritual nature of man. We see what the main demand is: freedom of thought, and what the main need is: the mastering of social forces, if this life is to develop into the basis for these three great demands in the present for the near future. Thus, what is a truly original impulse in man does not depend on what can be achieved in man through scientific thinking, but on what can only be achieved through spiritual contemplation.

So much has been argued about freedom because people want to decide on it without entering the ground on which the knowledge of the immortality of the human soul arises. And no one who does not approach the question of the realization of human immortality, of the eternal in man, in an unbiased way is able to understand the essence of human freedom. If one does not seek the essence of this freedom in the flashing forth of the thought that is not merely given by nature, then one does not find this essence of freedom. But only when it has been found does it permeate and pulsate through the human being in such a way that he can become a truly social being, for it carries him alongside other human beings into the social order in such a way that social forces can be released from within. And we need this sense of social forces.

I mentioned earlier that in Dornach, where we are building, we are able to place people who have even reached certain heights in spiritual training and who do the most ordinary, dirty work, which in fact is in no way inferior to that of those who are usually called manual laborers. In social terms, however, the construction of Dornach is based on foundations that are not necessarily the same as those of an enterprise geared towards material gain. But if you take on board what I have set out in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and in the lectures on threefolding, you will find that it is possible to create similar foundations for the whole of life as those that have been created in Dornach for the building that is to represent our spiritual scientific movement. It is a pity that many people in other countries cannot visit this building today, because unfortunately we have come to a point where crossing national borders has become almost impossible.

But why is it possible, after all, to release social energies in such a way that the ideal of the proletarian movement is fulfilled, albeit differently than one dreams? Because everything that is done there is based on the conception of life, on this whole-hearted attack on life, which results from the impulses of spiritual science, because every single thing is done on the basis of spiritual science. What is done on a small scale on the basis of spiritual science can also be done on a large scale in social life on the basis of a spiritual-scientific understanding of life. Every factory, every bank, every external undertaking can be organized in a way that only someone who is able to think about practical life with a science that descends so deeply into the human being that it grasps not abstract thoughts and natural laws but living facts can organize. These living facts can be found if one only descends deeply enough into the human being through the indicated methods. It is not an abstract mysticism that is sought, but the facts of life through which the human being stands in reality. And by recognizing the human being, one finds at the same time through this spiritual science that which can bring the social forces into the corresponding organization, so that the people living in this organization can answer the question satisfactorily: Is human life worthy of a human being?

So the three things are connected: social forces, freedom of thought and spiritual science. Spiritual science is truly the opposite of what it is often portrayed as. A life of leisure, people think, the dream of idle people. No, spiritual science wants to be a way of life, precisely the way of life that our time lacks most. It wants to immerse itself in life, to master life in science and practice, because it wants to immerse itself in the reality of the human being, not just in the humanly conceived life. There are well-meaning people today who say: the mere mind, the mere intellect, which has developed over the past centuries and into our time, is no longer good for the recovery of our lives. But when asked what is useful, they give general answers: a re-fertilization of the soul through the 'spirit'. When it comes to true spiritual science, they reject it because they are still afraid of it, or use the strangest excuses. So you will always find people saying: Not everyone can become a spiritual researcher. Certainly, not everyone can do it, I have emphasized this again and again here. For although one can take those first steps into the spiritual worlds, into the supersensible existence, as I have described them in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Secret Science” , anyone can do them at any time, but the advance to those questions that deal with the beings of the supersensible worlds in a deeper sense is indeed tied to a variety of experiences that not everyone is ready for today. Those who want to look into the spiritual world, who want to become spiritual researchers in the truest sense, must undergo many struggles. You need only consider that at the moment when you really enter into a realization that does not make use of the senses, at the moment when you enter into a body-free cognition and the familiar outer world is no longer there, - that you are then in a world that presents all sorts of unfamiliar things: All the things that usually support you, the secure external experience, the ordinary intellect, have to give way to other, inner powers of judgment. You are like over an abyss and have to hold on by the center of gravity of your own being. Many people have an unconscious or subconscious fear of this, which they then express in logic when it comes to spiritual science. You may hear the most beautiful arguments; but in truth it is only the fear of the unknown.

But then you must also bear in mind that you, as you are as a human being, are not adapted to the spiritual world, that you are only adapted to the outer world of the senses. You enter into a completely different world for which you have not developed any habits of life. When one penetrates deeper, this causes those terribly painful experiences that must be overcome in real spiritual knowledge. Then, when they are overcome, insights follow from the innermost part of our being that provide information about what is eternal in human nature, what the spiritual is that underlies the world. Not all people can go through this path to such an extent. But I also had to assert time and again that it is not necessary to go through this path, but that all that is needed is common sense. For this common sense, if it is not misled by the prejudices of external views, can distinguish whether the one who presents himself as a spiritual researcher and speaks of initially unknown worlds speaks logically or like a spiritualist or otherwise. Logic is at hand, and one can judge whether the person in question is speaking logically and in such a way that the way he speaks indicates that the experiences he is talking about are being undergone in full mental health.

If one repeatedly objects: Yes, everyone can convince themselves of what external science says, that is correct. One need only discuss laboratory methods to be able to do so. But one can also say: Everyone can convince himself that what is described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Theosophy” is correct; one can deduce the inner value of the knowledge from the nature of the spiritual researcher. Then these insights are as valuable for life as they are in the soul of the spiritual researcher himself. The researcher is checked in external science by the external facts; the insights are checked by the way of speaking, the way they are clothed, the way the spiritual researcher has to say. He can be checked by common sense.

Consider what social forces will be unleashed when more and more people emerge as witnesses for the spiritual forces that can only be found in the supersensible, and which other people who cannot be spiritual researchers themselves – not everyone can be a chemist or a physicist – accept out of their common sense and trust, which is based on common sense. What kind of social life arises from this evaluation of the human being is precisely one of the most important points for awakening social forces of trust. They are undermined in our time, when everyone, without taking their development into their own hands, wants to judge everything as soon as they come of age. And that this spiritual science can really provide practical impulses in social life, we have tried to do so here with the establishment of the Waldorf school, which we owe to our dear Mr. Molt, in which the school system is to be built on true knowledge. We want to solve a social question in the right way; because we want a human being to grow in every child, who receives that guiding force for later life, so that social forces are developed in a fruitful way from the human being, not from a dull, inadequate knowledge, as it often dominates social thinking in our time. We really want to develop social thinking that is built on human trust, on the secure foundations of the human soul. And by seeing the developing human being in every child who attends this school, by trying to develop him or her through insights that can enliven the pedagogical foundations, we see something that is necessary, as in everything we try to bring out of this spiritual science.

Of course, I can only describe this spiritual science as a necessary requirement for present and future development from a few points of view. Thus it happens that antagonisms arise from such one-sided allusions because one does not see the whole picture. But now, at the end, I would like to come back to the beginning and point out how heavy the heart can become when one sees how few people there are who appreciate the downward slide; how one does not look for the foundations for a new structure of our spiritual, moral and other cultural life.

This can be seen from many things. Let me give you a few examples in conclusion. Even people who are thought to be firmly established in the external life, what view have they come to based on the facts? The words written by the Austrian statesman Czernin in his latest book deserve to be heeded:

"The war continues, albeit in a different form. I believe that future generations will not call the great drama that has dominated the world for five years the World War at all, but the World Revolution, and will know that this World Revolution only began with the World War. Neither the Peace of Versailles nor St-Germain will create a lasting work. In this peace lies the disintegrating seed of death. The struggles that are shaking Europe are not yet diminishing. Like a violent earthquake, the subterranean rumblings continue. Soon the earth will open here and there, hurling fire against the sky. Again and again, events of elemental force will sweep devastatingly across the lands until everything that reminds us of the madness of this war is swept away. Slowly, with unspeakable sacrifice, a new world will be born. Future generations will look back on our time as if it were a long, evil dream. But day always follows the darkest night. Generations have sunk into the grave, murdered, starved, succumbed to disease. Millions have died in the pursuit of annihilation and destruction, hatred and murder in their hearts. But other generations will arise, and with them a new spirit. They will build up what war and revolution have destroyed. Every winter is followed by spring. That, too, is an eternal law in the cycle of life, that resurrection follows death. Blessed are those who will be called upon to help build the new world as soldiers of labor.

Now, here too there is talk of the new spirit; I know that if one were to speak to this Czernin about the new spirit, he would shrink back, would consider it a fantasy. In abstracto people speak of the new spirit, they know that it must come. But they run for dear life when faced with the concrete spirit. But it is a serious matter to look at the concrete path of this new spirit. There are many today, for example, who attack spiritual science from the standpoint of their supposed Christianity, who do not want to recognize how this spiritual science provides the most vital foundations for a revival of Christianity; how Christianity will live into the future precisely because spiritual science will again teach the living Christ and the event of Golgotha as a historical fact from spiritual scientific research. A large number of theologians have come to the point of no longer teaching this Christ as the actual meaning of the earth, but rather to make him the “simple man of Nazareth”. Spiritual Christianity will be re-established through spiritual science. But those who are afraid today, precisely because of the Christian foundations, should be told: Christianity is built on such firm foundations that there is no need to fear it in the face of spiritual science, any more than there is need to fear the discovery of the air pump and other things — and thus also not the teaching of repeated earthly lives or the doctrine of fate, as spiritual science presents them. Christianity is so strong that it can absorb everything that comes from spiritual science. But whether all of today's 'bearers of the Christian faiths are so strong is another question, but also a serious one.

We have to think in global terms, that's what this so-called world war has drummed into us. Many people think similarly about our Europe and its culture as a Japanese diplomat, whose words I would like to share with you. This Japanese diplomat, who is an educated man, said:

One may think of this content as one wants: This is how one thinks in the world, and we have every reason to look at these thoughts as at facts. It is truly most unfortunate when, on the part of those who ought to be familiar with the conditions of spiritual life – allow me to characterize them – the objections that have been so often and repeatedly described keep coming up, for example, the objection: You can't check what the spiritual researcher says. For example, a booklet was recently published by a gentleman who lives not far from here: 'Rudolf Steiner as Philosopher and Theosophist'. I would just like to point out one aspect of the spirit and logic that prevails there. There is a nice sentence: 'I may have to become a historian, physicist or chemist in order to be able to check things independently. But I cannot verify the theosophical truths unless I am clairvoyant'. That is, he says, historians, physicists and chemists claim all sorts of things; if you want to check these, you just have to become a historian, physicist or chemist. I say: if you want to check spiritual-scientific things, you have to become a spiritual scientist. What does the gentleman say? “I just might have to become a historian, physicist or chemist in order to be able to check things independently. But I cannot verify the theosophical truths unless I am a seer.” Of course! I cannot verify the results of chemical research either unless I become a chemist. But one can become a chemist. But one does not want to become a spiritual scientist. So one says something very strange: I must be able to test, but to be able to test without somehow getting involved in the methods of testing. The question for this gentleman, as he himself says, as you will soon hear, is not whether one can decide when one has appropriated the reasons for the decision, but: “The question is whether they have been or can be verified by me, and that, apart from the formal logical criticism, I must deny.” Well, I readily admit that he must deny it. But just as I admit that one must become a chemist in order to be able to verify the results of chemical research, so everyone must set out on the path of spiritual research in order to verify spiritual scientific truths. But that man rejects that. His whole writing is actually characterized by this logic. And much of the distorting influence brought to bear on spiritual science is based on this logic. There really are better things to do than to concern oneself with such objections.

But it would be particularly fitting for this German nation, this sorely tried German nation, to think about how it should relate to the very foundations of intellectual life. I can point to a few sentences that P. Terman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, wrote in 1858 in his essay on Schiller and Goethe. He wrote more than 60 years ago: “The true history of Germany is the history of the intellectual movements in the nation. Only where enthusiasm for a great idea has stirred the nation and set the frozen forces in motion, are deeds done that are great and luminous.” Should we not be able to take such words to heart today? Or the words that Herman Grimm - certainly no revolutionary - wrote in 1858: ”The names of German emperors and kings are... not milestones for the progress of the people.” He meant that the milestones for the progress of the people are the deeds in the field of thought, of thought that goes into the spiritual.

Never has the German been more in need of adhering to this than in this time of hardship and trial. And that is why we can ask our contemporaries today to look to their great ancestors so that we can become their worthy descendants. Should the beliefs of the German people's ancestors, which they expressed in their spiritual life, not apply to the present day? Should we not continue to develop this spiritual striving instead of stopping at mere words and quoting them? Those who merely quote Goethe today do not understand him; only those who develop him further understand him. Those who merely quote Johann Gottlieb Fichte are doing something nonsensical if they do not develop him further in the spiritual life. You have heard how the world speaks about European intellectual life. In the world, one must learn to recognize that the German, in turn, has the will to look at the actual milestones of the progress of his people. In this world our ancestors, the great pillars of German intellectual life, were often called dreamers. They were misunderstood, just as today what speaks of the spirit is described as fantasy or something else. But there were still people who knew how what was striven for in the spirit was based in reality. And at an important moment, Johann Gottlieb Fichte said to the people: What the others say, that ideas cannot directly intervene in practical life, we idealists know that as well, perhaps better than the others; but that life must be oriented towards them, we know that in advance. - He pointed to the practice of life and said: Those who do not understand this belong to those who are not included in the plan of the world. So may these people be granted sunshine and rain in due course and a good digestion and, if possible, some good thoughts.

It depends on the spirit in which one looks up to the spiritual life of the great bearers of the German spirit. Reality, not abstract judgment, will decide this. If the descendants of these German ancestors have a sense of the true practice of the spirit, then the people who preceded us in this practice of the spirit will not have been dreamers. But if we fail to penetrate into the realities of the practice of the spirit, then they will not become dreamers through themselves, but through us or through our descendants, who want to know nothing of the true German spirit. Let the German people beware lest they make their great ancestors, of whom the world has so often said that they were dreamers, into dreamers through our fault, through our lack of appreciation for the spirit that has been invoked and conjured up in German intellectual life! May he gain followers! This is the last word I wish to speak to you in the context of my current disputes.