The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Rudolf Steiner, in all that he created and gave to the world, took his start from real needs,—never from theoretical programmes. Time and again, what he gave took its inception from the spiritual questions and interests of individuals or groups among his friends and pupils. Yet as the faculty to apprehend the spiritual aspect of the World first had to be rekindled and awakened in our time—a slow and gradual process—it must have signified a very great sacrifice and a severe hindrance for this universal spirit to bring the spiritual truths from infinite horizons into the narrower range of outlook of his contemporaries. This sacrifice he did not shun. Even into the anxiously constraining walls of earth 20th-century scientific thinking he brought the light of spiritual knowledge, and we who have received this cannot find adequate words in which to thank him. Our truest thanks must be the will to widen out our own horizon, thus making easier the teacher's task.

The Anthroposophical Movement within this 20th century is seeking to bring about a return from materialism to a spiritual understanding of the World. It is a good thing for mankind that in this Movement some individualities have also chosen the very hardest task, namely to lead again to spiritual sources that realm of human knowledge which has plunged most deeply into agnostic materialism—Natural Science. Future generations will surely be very grateful to the scientists—teachers of the Waldorf School at Stuttgart above all—who had the inner courage to put their questions to the great spiritual teacher.

We take this opportunity to thank those who have hitherto administered this spiritual treasure—who first revised and duplicated the notes of the lectures, thereby preserving them for posterity. We refer especially to the Waldorf School teachers E. A. K. Stockmeyer, Alexander Strakosch, and above all Dr. Eugen Kolisko and Dr. Walter Johannes Stein. My thanks are also due to Ehrenfried Pfeiffer of Dornach for his assistance in preparing the present edition.¹

It will be well for us to refer at this point to the following passages from Rudolf Steiner's Autobiography:—

“The anthroposophical period of my life-work began at a time when many people were feeling dissatisfied with the ways of knowledge of the immediate past. They looked for ways to get beyond that realm of existence to which the scientific era was restricted inasmuch as nothing was held valid as “secure knowledge” unless it could be grasped in mechanistic forms of thought. The strivings of many of our contemporaries towards some form of spiritual knowledge touched me deeply. There were biologists for instance such as Oskar Hertwig. Having begun his career as a disciple of Haeckel, he afterwards took leave of Darwinism, for he now felt that the driving forces recognized by the Darwinian school were inadequate to explain the facts of organic evolution. The longing of our time for knowledge seemed to me to find expression in such men as these. And yet it seemed to me this longing was oppressed by a heavy load—a burden due to the belief that only those things which we can investigate by means of the outer senses and then express in terms of measure, number and weight, constitute genuine knowledge. Men did not venture to unfold that inner activity of thought by means of which reality is experienced more intimately than by the physical senses. The most they did was to declare that with the kind of scientific explanation hitherto applied also to higher forms of reality—those of organic life for example—no fundamental progress was possible. If a more positive contribution was looked for,—if they were now to say what it is that works in the realm of life—they could bring forward only the vaguest notions.

“Those who were striving to transcend the mechanical explanation of the World generally lacked the courage to admit that if we want to overcome the mechanistic system we must also overcome the habits of thought which have led to it. The time was calling, yet called in vain, for a clear recognition of this kind. The orientation of our faculties of knowledge towards the outer senses enables us to penetrate what is mechanical in Nature. This mental tendency has become habitual throughout the second half of the 19th century. If the mechanical aspect of the world no longer satisfied us now, we ought not to expect to reach into higher regions in the identical frame of mind. The outer senses develop and awaken in the human being, so to speak, of their own accord; but on this basis we can only gain insight into the mechanical domain. If we desire to know more than this, we must by dint of our own efforts give to our deeper, latent faculties of knowledge the same development which Nature gives the powers of the senses. The faculties with which we apprehend what is mechanical are awake of their own accord; those that apply to higher realms of reality first need to be awakened.

“The time required, so it seemed to me, that in our striving after knowledge we should arrive at this clear recognition of our state, and I was happy when I saw any beginnings or indications that seemed to tend in this direction. . . .”

“There now exists a twofold outcome of the anthroposophical period of my life-work. There are my published books upon the one hand, while on the other hand there are a larger number of lecture-courses, printed at first for private circulation and available, to begin with, only to members of the Anthroposophical Society. These printed versions of my lectures are reports, more or less accurately made, which I was quite unable to correct for want of time. It would have pleased me best to let the spoken word remain as spoken word; but members wanted the lectures made available in printed form; so it was done. . . .

“To gain a picture of my own inner work, my unceasing effort to present the spiritual science of Anthroposophia to the prevailing consciousness of our time, one must have recourse to my published writings. In these I tried to come to terms with the modern striving after knowledge in its many aspects. Here I set forth, what in the realm of spiritual perception grew for me ever more fully and clearly into the edifice of “Anthroposophia”, admittedly imperfect as it still is in many ways. Herein I saw my essential task, in the fulfilment of which I only had to bear in mind what is required when communications from the spiritual world are imparted to the prevailing culture of our time. Yet side by side with this requirement I had to do full justice to another one, namely to meet the inner needs and spiritual longings that became manifest among the members of the Society.

“To this end the many lecture-courses were given in the Society; and this involved another circumstance. The lectures were attended by members only. Acquainted as they were already with the initial teachings of Anthroposophia, one could speak to them as to more advanced students. Thus the whole tenor of these member's lectures came to be different from what was possible in written books intended for the world at large. In these more intimate circles I might speak of many things in a form which I should certainly have had to change had I intended it for publication from the outset.

“Competent judgment on the content of these privately printed lectures will of course only be possible for those who are acquainted with the premisses of thought, taken for granted in those who heard them. For the great majority of these reprints, this implies at the very least some knowledge of the anthroposophical science of Man and of the essence of the great Universe as described in Anthroposophia; also a knowledge of ‘anthroposophical History’, for this too is an essential part of the communications from the spiritual world.”

Whoever reads the lectures here reproduced should bear the foregoing words in mind. If those who work with this lecture-course approach it with the will “to awaken in themselves the faculties of knowledge for higher forms of reality”, the time will surely come when the dead mechanistic picture of the world which the last century produced will be transcended—transcended above all by the most up-to-day, the most gifted and conscientious of our scientists, who will then see through the inherent impossibility and untruth of this world-picture. Then will the far more living and spiritual form of Science which Rudolf Steiner had in mind reveal its truth and beauty, also its ethical inspiring power. The Section calls to all its fellow-workers: Help the Goetheanum bring about the beginning of this new epoch even within the present century. For generations due to come at the end of the 20th century, let there be in existence a Science of Nature permeated with the living Spirit, permeated with the Christ-Impulse!

For the Natural Science Section at the Goetheanum
Guenther Wachsmuth.
Dornach, January 1925.

• 1. TRANSLATOR: The English version (1948) has been based on this edition, and on a number of corrections and improvements, issued a few years ago by Paul Eugen Schiller of Dornach.

Having talked about various outer circumstances as well as the more intimate aspects of modern spiritual movements, I will attempt today and tomorrow to provide an interpretation of the conditions which govern the existence of the Anthroposophical Society in particular. And I will do so by means of various events which have occurred during the third phase of the movement.

We have to understand clearly our position at the time when the second phase of the anthroposophical movement was coming to an end, around 1913 and 1914, and our position today. Let us look back at the progress which was achieved in the first and second phases by adhering essentially to the principle that progress should be made in line with actual circumstances, that the movement should move forward at the same speed as the inner life of anthroposophy expands.

I said that in the first phase—approximately up to 1907, 1908, 1909—we gradually worked out the inner spiritual content of the movement. The foundations were laid for a truly modern science of the spirit with the consequences which that entailed in various directions. The journal Luzifer-Gnosis was produced until the end of the period. It regularly carried material by me and others which built up the content of anthroposophy in stages. When the second phase began, the science of the spirit came to grips, in lectures and lecture cycles, with those texts which are particularly significant for the spiritual development of the West, the Gospels and Genesis, a development which included the broader public in certain ways. Once again real progress was made.

We started with the Gospel of St. John, and moved from there to the other Gospels. They were used to demonstrate certain wisdom and truths. The spiritual content was built up with each step. The expansion of the Society was essentially linked with this inner development of its spiritual content.

Of course programmes and similar things had to be organized to take care of everyday business. But that was not the priority. The main thing was that positive spiritual work was undertaken at each stage and that these spiritual achievements could then be deepened esoterically in the appropriate way.

In this context it was particularly at the end of the second phase that anthroposophy spread more widely into general culture and civilization, as with the Munich performances of the mystery dramas. We reached the stage at the end of the second phase when we could begin to think about the construction of the building which has suffered such a misfortune here. This was an exceedingly important stage in the development of the Anthroposophical Society. The construction of such a building assumed that a considerable number of people had an interest in creating a home for the real substance of anthroposophy. But it also meant that the first significant step was being taken beyond the measured progress which had kept pace with the overall development of the Anthroposophical Society. Because it is obvious that a building like the Goetheanum, in contrast to everything that had gone before, would focus the attention of the world at large in quite a different way on what the Society had become.

We had our opponents in various camps before this point. They even went so far as to publish what they said about us. But they failed to draw people's attention. It was the construction of the building which first created the opportunity for our opponents to find an audience.

The opportunity to construct the building assumed that something existed which made it worthwhile to do that. It did exist. A larger number of people experienced its presence as something with a certain inner vitality. Indeed, we had gathered, valuable experience over a considerable period of time. Since a society existed, this experience could have been put to good use, could be put to good use today. Everything I have spoken about in the last few days was meant to point to certain events which can be taken as valuable experience.

Now this period has come to an end. The burning of the Goetheanum represents the shattering event which demonstrated that this period has run out. Remember that these lectures are also intended to allow for self-reflection among anthroposophists. That self-reflection should lead us to remember today how at that time we also had to anticipate, anticipate actively, that when anthroposophy stepped into the limelight the opposition would inevitably grow.

Now we are talking in the first instance about the start and the finish. The start is represented in the courage to begin the construction of the Goetheanum. Let us examine in what form the effect achieved by the Goetheanum, in that it exposed anthroposophy to the judgement of an unlimited number of people, is evident today.

The latest evidence is contained in a pamphlet which has just appeared and which is entitled The Secret Machinery of Revolution.¹ On page 13 of this pamphlet you will find the following exposition:

At this stage of my inquiry I may refer briefly to the existence of an offshoot of the Theosophical Society, known as the Anthroposophical Society. This was formed as the result of a schism in the ranks of the Theosophists, by a man of Jewish birth who was connected with one of the modern branches of the Carbonari. Not only so, but in association with another Theosophist he is engaged in organizing certain singular commercial undertakings not unconnected with Communist propaganda; almost precisely in the manner in which Count St. Germain² organized his dyeworks and other commercial ventures with a like purpose. And this queer business group has its connections with the Irish Republican movement, with the German groups already mentioned, and also with another mysterious group which was founded by Jewish intellectuals in France about four years ago, and which includes in its membership many well-known politicians, scientists, university professors, and literary men in France, Germany, America, and England. It is a secret society, but some idea of its real aims may be gathered from the fact that it sponsored the Ligue des Anciens Combattants, whose aim appears to be to undermine the discipline of the armies in the Allied countries. Although nominally a Right Wing society, it is in direct touch with members of the Soviet Government of Russia; in Britain it is also connected with certain Fabians and with the Union of Democratic Control, which opposes secret diplomacy.

The only thing I need add is that my trip to London is planned for August, and you can see from this that our opponents are very well organized and know very well what they are doing. As you know, I have said for some time that one should never believe there is not always a worse surprise in store.

As you can see, we have our opponents today and that is the other point which marks the end of the third phase who are not afraid to make use of any lie and who know very well how to utilize it to best advantage. It is wrong to believe that it is somehow appropriate to pass over these things lightly with the argument that not only are they devoid of truth, but the lies are so crude no one will believe them. People who say that simply show that they are deeply unaware of the nature of contemporary western civilization, and do not recognize the powerful impulses to untruth which are accepted as true, I have to say, even by the best people, because it is convenient and they are only half awake.

For us it is particularly important to look at what lies between these two points. In 1914 the anthroposophical movement had undoubtedly reached the point at which it could have survived in the world on the strength of its own spiritual resources, its spiritual content. But conditions dictated that we should continue to work with vitality after 1914. The work since then consisted essentially of a spiritual deepening, and in that respect we took the direct path once again. We sought that spiritual deepening stage by stage, without concern for the external events of the world, because it was and still is the case that the spiritual content which needs to be revealed for mankind to progress has to be incorporated into our civilization initially in any form available. We can never do anything in speaking about or working on this material other than base our actions on these very spiritual resources.

In this respect anthroposophy was broadened in its third phase through the introduction of eurythmy. No one can ever claim that eurythmy is based on anything other than the sources of anthroposophy. Everything is taken from the sources of anthroposophy. After all, there are at present all kinds of dance forms which attempt in one way or another to achieve something which might superficially resemble eurythmy to a certain extent. But look at events from the point when Marie Steiner took charge of eurythmy.³ During the war it was cultivated in what I might describe as internal circles, but then it became public and met with ever increasing interest. Look at everything which has contributed to eurythmy. Believe me, there were many people who insinuated that here or there something very similar existed which had to be taken into account or incorporated into eurythmy? The only way in which fruitful progress could be made was to look neither left nor right but simply work directly from the sources themselves. If there had been any compromise about eurythmy it would not have turned into what it has become. That is one of the conditions which govern the existence of such a movement; there must be an absolute certainty that the material required can be gathered directly from the sources in a continuous process of expansion.

Working from the centre like this, which was, of course, relatively easy until 1914 because it was self-evident, is the only way to make proper progress with anthroposophy.

This third period, from 1914 onwards, witnessed an all-encompassing phenomenon which naturally affected the anthroposophical movement as it affected everything else. Now it must be strongly emphasized that during the war, when countries were tearing each other apart, members of sixteen or seventeen nations were present here and working together; it must be emphasized that the Anthroposophical Society passed through this period without in any way forfeiting its essential nature. But neither must it be forgotten that all the feelings which passed through people's minds during this period, and thus also through the minds of anthroposophists, had a splintering effect on the Anthroposophical Society in many respects. This cannot be denied.

In talking about these things in an objective manner, I do not want to criticize or invalidate in any way the good characteristics which anthroposophists possess. We should take them for granted. It is true that within the Anthroposophical Society we managed to overcome to a certain extent the things which so divided people between 1914 and 1918. But anyone watching these things will have noticed that the Society could not avoid the ripple effect, even if it appeared in a somewhat different form from usual, and that in this context something came strongly to the surface which I have described before by saying that in this third phase we saw the beginnings of what I might call a certain inner opposition to the tasks I had to fulfil in the Anthroposophical Society.

Of course most people are surprised when I talk of this inner opposition, because many of them are unaware of it. But I have to say that this does not make it any better, because these feelings of inner opposition grew particularly strongly in the third phase. That was also evident in outer symptoms. When a movement like ours has passed through two phases in the way I have described, there is certainly no need for blind trust when certain actions are taken in the third phase given that the precedents already exist whose full ramifications are not immediately clear to everyone. But remember that these actions were undertaken in a context in which, while most certainly not everyone understood their full implications, many things had to be held together and it was of paramount importance that the anthroposophical movement itself should be defined in the right way. That is when we observed what might be described as such inner opposition.

I am aware, of course, that when I speak about these things, many people will say: But shouldn't we have our own opinions? One should certainly have one's own opinions about what one does, but when someone else does something with which one is connected it is also true that trust must play some role, particularly when such precedents exist as I have described.

Now at a certain point of the third phase during the war, I wrote the booklet Thoughts in Time of War.⁴ This particular work elicited inner opposition which was especially noticeable. People told me that they thought anthroposophy never intervened in politics, as if that booklet involved itself with politics! And there was more of the same. Something had affected them which should not grow on the ground of anthroposophy although it sprouts in quite different soil. There were quite a few such objections to Thoughts in Time of War, but I am about to say something terribly arrogant, but true nevertheless; no one ever acknowledged that the whole thing was not really comprehensible to them at the time but if they waited until 1935 they might perhaps understand why that booklet was written.

And this is only one example among many which demonstrates clearly the strong intervention of something whose almost exclusive purpose was to undermine the freedom and self-determination within the Anthroposophical Society which we take for granted. It should have been self-evident that the writing of this publication was my business alone. Instead, an opinion began to form: If he wants to be the one with whom we build the Anthroposophical Society, then he is allowed to write only the things we approve of.

These things have to be stated in a direct manner, otherwise they will not be understood. They are symptomatic of a mood which arose in the Society and which ran counter to the conditions governing the existence of the anthroposophical movement!

But what has to play a particularly significant role in this third phase is the awareness of having created a Society which has taken the first steps along a road which a large part of mankind will later follow. Consider carefully that a relatively small society is set up which has taken upon itself the task of doing something which a large part of mankind is eventually supposed to follow.

Anthroposophists today must not think that they have only the same commitments which future anthroposophists will have when they exist by the million rather than the thousand. When limited numbers are active in the vanguard of a movement they have to show commitment of a much higher order. It means that they are obliged to show greater courage, greater energy, greater patience, greater tolerance and, above all, greater truthfulness in every respect. And in our present third stage a situation arose which specifically tested our truthfulness and seriousness. It related in a certain sense to the subject matter discussed at one point in the lectures to theologians.⁵ Irrespective of the fact that individual anthroposophists exist, a feeling should have developed, and must develop, among them that Anthroposophia exists as a separate being, who moves about among us, as it were, towards whom we carry a responsibility in every moment of our lives. Anthroposophia is actually an invisible person who walks among visible people and towards whom we must show the greatest responsibility for as long as we are a small group. Anthroposophia is someone who must be understood as an invisible person, as someone with a real existence, who should be consulted in the individual actions of our lives.

Thus, if connections form between people—friendships, cliques and so on—at a time when the group of anthroposophists is still small, it is all the more necessary to consult and to be able to justify all one's actions before this invisible person.

This will, of course, apply less and less as anthroposophy spreads. But as long as it remains the property of a small group of people, it is necessary for every action to follow from consultation with the person Anthroposophia. That Anthroposophia should be seen as a living being is an essential condition of its existence. It will only be allowed to die when its group of supporters has expanded immeasurably. What we require, then, is a deeply serious commitment to the invisible person I have just spoken about. That commitment has to grow with every passing day. If it does so, there can be no doubt that everything we do will begin and proceed in the right way.

Let me emphasize the fact. While the second phase from 1907, 1908, 1909 to 1914 was essentially a period in which the feeling side, the religious knowledge of anthroposophy, was developed, something recurred in the third phase which was already present in the first, as I described yesterday. The relationship between anthroposophy and the sciences was again brought to the forefront.

It was already evident during the war that a number of scientists were beginning to lean towards anthroposophy. That meant that the Anthroposophical Society gained collaborators in the scientific field. At first they remained rather in the background. Until 1919 or 1920 the scientific work of the Society remained a hope rather than a reality, with the exception of the fruitful results which Dr. Unger⁶ achieved on the basis of The Philosophy of Freedom and other writings from the pre-anthroposophical period. Otherwise, if we disregard the constructive epistemological work done in this respect, which provided an important and substantive basis for the future content of the movement, we have to say that at the start of the third phase the scientific aspect remained a hope. For scientific work became effective at this stage in a way exactly opposite to what had happened in the first phase. In the latter period people were concerned, as I explained yesterday, to justify anthroposophy to science; anthroposophy was to have its credentials checked by science. Since it did not achieve that, its scientific work slowly dried up. In the second phase it did not exist at all, and towards the end everything concentrated on the artistic side. General human interests took the upper hand.

Scientific aspirations emerged again in the third phase, but this time in the opposite way. Now they were not concerned, at least not primarily, with justifying anthroposophy to science, but rather sought to use anthroposophy to fertilize it. All kinds of people began to arrive who had reached the limits of their scientific work and were looking for something to fertilize their endeavours. Researchers were no longer looking for atomic structures, as they had done when physics and astronomy had led them to look for atomic theories to apply to the etheric and astral bodies. Now, when enough progress had been made to make a contribution to science, the exact opposite occurred.

This tendency, and I wish to discuss only its positive aspects today, will only be effective for the benefit of the anthroposophical movement if it can find a way of working purely from anthroposophical sources, rather in the way that eurythmy has done in the artistic field, and if it is accompanied by the commitment which I have mentioned. As long as so much of the present scientific mode of thinking is carried unconsciously into the anthroposophical movement it will not be able to make progress productively.

In particular, there will be a lack of progress as long as people believe that the current scientific establishment can be persuaded about anything without their first adopting a more positive attitude towards anthroposophy. Once they have done that, a dialogue can begin. Our task with regard to those who are fighting against anthroposophy today can only be to demonstrate clearly where they are not telling the truth. That is something which can be discussed. But of course there can be no dialogue about matters of substance, matters of content, with people who not only do not want to be convinced, but who cannot be convinced because they lack the necessary basic knowledge.

That, above all, is where the work needs to be done: to undertake basic research for ourselves in the various fields, but to do that from the core of anthroposophy.

When an attempt was made after the war to tackle practical issues in people's lives and the problems facing the world, that again had to be done on the basis of anthroposophy, and with the recognition that with these practical tasks in particular it was hardly possible to count on any sort of understanding. The only proper course we can pursue is to tell the world what we have found through anthroposophy itself, and then wait and see how many people are able to understand it. We certainly cannot approach the world with the core material of anthroposophy in the hope that there might be a party or a person who can be won over. That is impossible. That is contrary to the fundamental circumstances governing the existence of the anthroposophical movement. Take a women's movement or a social movement, for instance, where it is possible to take the view that we should join and compromise our position because its members' views may incline towards anthroposophy in one way or another; that is absolutely impossible. What matters is to have enough inner security regarding anthroposophy to be able to advocate it under any circumstances.

Let me give you an amusing example of this. Whenever people are angry with me for having used the Theosophical Society for my work, I always reply that I will advocate anthroposophy wherever there is a demand. I have done it in places where it was only possible once, for the simple reason that people did not want to hear anything further from me a second time. But I never spoke in a way that, given their inner constitution, they could have been persuaded by superficial charm to listen to me a second time. That is something which has to be avoided. When people demand to hear something we have to present them with anthroposophy, pure anthroposophy, which is drawn with courage from its innermost core.

Let me say that these things have all happened before in the anthroposophical movement, as if to illustrate the point. For instance, we were invited to a spiritualist society in Berlin,⁷ where I was to talk about anthroposophy. It did not occur to me to say no. Why should those people not have the right to hear something like that? I delivered my lecture and saw immediately afterwards that they were quite unsuited, that in reality this was not what they were seeking. For something happened which turned out to be quite funny. I was elected immediately and unanimously as the president of this society. Marie Steiner and her sister, who had accompanied me, were shocked. What should we do now, they asked? I had become president of this society: What should we do? I simply said: Stay away! That was perfectly obvious. By electing as their president someone they had heard speak on only one occasion, those people showed that they wanted something quite different from anthroposophy. They wanted to infuse anthroposophy with spiritualism and thought that they could achieve it by this means. We come across that kind of thing all the time.

We need not hold back from advocating anthroposophy before anyone. I was invited once to speak about anthroposophy to the Gottsched Society⁸ in Berlin. Why should I not have done that? The important thing was not to compromise over the anthroposophical content.

That was particularly difficult after I had written the “Appeal to the German People and the Civilized World”, and after Towards Social Renewal: Basic Issues of the Social Question had been published.⁹ The essential thing at that time was to advocate only what could be done on the basis of the sources underpinning these books, and then to wait and see who wanted to participate.

I am convinced that if we had done that, if we had simply adopted the positive position which was contained in the “Appeal” and in the book, without seeking links with any particular party—something which I was always against—we would not be stumbling today over obstacles which have been put in our way from this quarter, and would probably have been able to achieve one or two successes. Whereas now we have achieved no successes at all in this field.

It is part of the conditions governing the existence of a society like ours that opportunities must always be found to work out of the spirit itself. That should not, of course, lead to the stupid conclusion that we have to barge in everywhere like bulls in china shops or that we do not have to adjust to the conditions dictated by life, that we should become impractical people. Quite the contrary. It is necessary to inject some real practical life experience into the so-called practical life of today. Anyone who has some understanding of the conditions governing life itself will find it hard not to draw parallels between contemporary life and the life of really practical people,¹⁰ who have such a practical attitude to life that they immediately fall over as soon as they try to stand on both feet at once. That is what many people today describe as practical life. If these people and their real life experience manage to penetrate a spiritual movement, things really begin to look bad for the latter.

As I said, today I would rather dwell on the positive side of the matter. We should not pursue a course so rigid that we run headlong into any obstacle in the way; of course we need to take avoiding action, make use of the things which will achieve practical progress. The important factor is that everything should contain the impulse which comes from the core.

If we could progress in this way the Anthroposophical Society would quickly shed the image—not in any superficial or conventional way, but justifiably—which still makes it appear sectarian to other people.

What is the use of telling people repeatedly that the Society is not a sect and then behave as if it were one? The one thing which needs to be understood by the members of the Anthroposophical Society is that of the general conditions which govern the existence of a society in our modern age. A society cannot be sectarian. That is why, if the Anthroposophical Society were standing on its proper ground, the we should never play a role. One repeatedly hears anthroposophists saying we, the Society, have this or that view in relation to the outside world: Something or other is happening to us. We want one thing or another. In ancient times it was possible for societies to face the world with such conformity. Now it is no longer possible. In our time each person who is a member of a society like this one has to be a really free human being. Views, thoughts, opinions are held only by individuals. The Society does not have an opinion. And that should be expressed in the way that individuals speak about the Society. The we should actually disappear.

There is something else connected with this. If this we disappears, people in the Society will not feel as if they are in a pool which supports them and which they can call on for support when it matters. But if a person has expressed his own views in the Society and has to represent himself, he will also feel fully responsible for what he says as an individual.

This feeling of responsibility is something which has to grow as long as the Society remains a small group of people. The way in which that has been put into practice so far has not succeeded in making the world at large understand the Anthroposophical Society as an eminently modern society, because this practice has repeatedly led to a situation in which the image which has been set before the public is we believe, we are of the opinion, it is our conception of the world. So today the world outside holds the view that the Society is a compacted mass which holds certain collective opinions to which one has to subscribe as a member. Of course this will deter any independently minded person.

Since this is the case, we have to consider a measure today which need not have been thought about, perhaps a year ago, because things had not progressed to a stage in which we are tarred with the same brush—with certain ulterior motives, of course—as the Carbonari,¹¹ the Soviet government and Irish republicanism. So now it seems necessary to think seriously about how the three objects¹² which are always being quoted as an issue might be put in context: fraternity without racial distinctions and so on, the comparative study of religions, and the study of the spiritual worlds and spiritual methodology. By concentrating on these three objects, the impression is given that one has to swear by them. A completely different form has to be found for them, above all a form which allows anyone who does not want to subscribe to a particular opinion, but who has an interest in the cultivation of the spiritual life, to feel that he need not commit himself body and soul to certain points of view. That is what we have to think about today, because it belongs to the conditions governing the existence of the Society in the particular circumstances of the third phase.

I have often been asked by people whether they would be able to join the Anthroposophical Society as they could not yet profess to the prescriptions of anthroposophy. I respond that it would be a sad state of affairs if a society in today's context recruited its members only from among those who profess what is prescribed there. That would be terrible. I always say that honest membership should involve only one thing: an interest in a society which in general terms seeks the path to the spiritual world. How that is done in specific terms is then the business of those who are members of the society, with individual contributions from all of them.

I can understand very well why someone would not want to be member of a society in which he had to subscribe to certain articles of faith. But if one says that anyone can be a member of this Society who has an interest in the cultivation of the spiritual life, then those who have such an interest will come. And the others, well, they will remain outside, but they will be led increasingly into the absurdities of life.

No account is taken of the circumstances of the Anthroposophical Society until one starts to think about conditions such as these which govern its life, until one stops shuffling along in the same old rut. Only when the Society achieves the ability to deal with these issues in a completely free way, without pettiness and with generosity, will it be possible for it to become what it should become through the fact that it contains the anthroposophical movement. For the anthroposophical movement connects in a positive way without compromise, but in a positive way to what exists in the present and what can act productively into the future.

It is necessary to develop a certain sensitivity to these points. And it is necessary for anthroposophists to develop this sensitivity in a matter of weeks. If that happens, the way forward will be found as a practical consequence.

But people will only be able to think in this direction if they radically discard the petty aspects of their character and truly begin to understand the need to recognize Anthroposophia as an independent, invisible being.

I have had to consider the third phase in a different way, of course, to the two preceding ones. The latter are already history. The third, although we are nearing its end, is the present and everyone should be aware of its circumstances. We have to work our way towards guidelines concerning the smallest details. Such guidelines are not dogma, they are simply a natural consequence.

• 1. “The Secret Machinery of Revolution”, by G. G. London, 1923. (Reprinted from The Patriot. The relevant passage, with the sub-heading A Mystery League, appeared in No. 37, Vol. III, 19 October 1922, p.169. It is contained in Part VI of a series of articles entitled “The Anatomy of Revolution”.)
• 2. Died 27 February 1784. cf also the lecture by Rudolf Steiner of 4 November 1904 in Berlin in The Temple Legend. Translated by J. M. Wood. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1985.
• 3. Marie Steiner had been involved with eurythmy from its beginnings in 1912 and took over the practice and development of Rudolf Steiner's indications from 1914 onwards. See Aus dem Leben von Marie Steiner-von Sivers, pp.74ff.
• 4. Reprinted in GA 24.
• 5. The courses for theologians (Stuttgart, 12–16 June 1921; Dornach, 26 September—10 October 1921; Dornach 6–22 September 1922) have not been published.
• 6. Carl Unger, 1878–1929. Engineer. One of the most effective advocates of anthroposophy in Germany. Member of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society from 1912 to 1923. A few moments before he was due to deliver his public lecture “What is anthroposophy?” in Nuremberg, he was fatally shot by a mentally deranged person. See his book Die Grundlehren der Geisteswissenschaft. Dornach, 1929.
• 7. It has not been possible to establish when this incident took place.
• 8. On 17 October 1904. There is no transcript.
• 9. The Appeal was printed in Stuttgart in 1919 and distributed as a leaflet with the signatures of many well-known personalities from German-speaking culture. Rudolf Steiner further included it in his book Towards Social Renewal: Basic Issues of the Social Question (1919). Translated by F. T. Smith. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1977. See also GA 189.
• 10. Title of a poem from the Gallows Songs by Christian Morgenstern, which is often presented in eurythmy.
• 11. Literally: charcoal burners. Name of a secret political society in Italy which was connected with Freemasonry and which also established a strong presence in France in the nineteenth century.
• 12. The reference is to the three objects of the Theosophical Society: 1. To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or colour. 2. To encourage the study of comparative religion, philosophy and science. 3. To investigate unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man.

My dear friends,

Allow me in the first place to express my deep satisfaction that this Experimental Circle has been created as suggested by Count Keyserlingk, and extended to include all those concerned with agriculture who are now present for the first time at such a meeting. In point of time, the foundation has come about as follows. To begin with, Herr Stegemann, in response to several requests, communicated some of the things which he and I had discussed together in recent years concerning the various guiding lines in agriculture, which he himself has tested in one way or another in his very praiseworthy endeavours on his own farm. Thence there arose a discussion between him and our good friend Count Keyserlingk, leading in the first place to a consultation during which the resolution which has to-day been read out was drafted.

As a result of this we have come together here to-day. It is deeply satisfying that a number of persons have now found themselves together who will be the bearers, so to speak, of the experiments which will follow the guiding lines (for to begin with they can only be guiding lines) which I have given you in these lectures. These persons will now make experiments in confirmation of these guiding lines, and demonstrate how well they can be used in practice.

At such a moment, however, when so good a beginning has been made, we should also be careful to turn to good account the experiences we have had in the past with our attempts in other domains in the Anthroposophical Movement. Above all, we should avoid the mistakes which only became evident during the years when from the central anthroposophical work—if I may so describe it—we went on to other work which lay more at the periphery. I mean when we began to introduce what Anthroposophical Science must and can be for the several domains of life.

For the work which this Agricultural Circle has before it, it will not be without interest to hear the kind of experiences we have had in introducing Anthroposophical Science, for example, into the scientific life in general. As a general rule, when it came to this point, those who had hitherto administered the central anthroposophical life with real inner faithfulness and devotion in their own way, and those who stood more at the periphery and wanted to apply it to a particular domain of life, did not as a rule confront one another with full mutual understanding.

We experienced it only too well, especially in working with our scientific Research Institutes. There on the one side are the anthroposophists who find their full life in the heart of Anthroposophia itself—in Anthroposophical Science as a world-conception, a content of life which they may even have carried through the world with strong and deep feeling, every moment of their lives. There are the anthroposophists who live Anthroposophia and love it, making it the content of their lives. Generally, though not always, they have the idea that something important has been done when one has gained, here or there, one more adherent, or perhaps several more adherents, for the anthroposophical movement. When they work outwardly at all, their idea seems to be—you will forgive the expression—that people must somehow be able to be won over “by the scruff of the neck.” Imagine, for example, a University professor in some branch of Natural Science. Placed as he is in the very centre of the scientific work on which he is engaged, he ought none the less to be able to be won over there and then—so they imagine.

Such anthroposophists, with all their love and good-will, naturally imagine that we should also be able to get hold of the farmer there and then—to get him too “by the scruff of the neck,” so to speak, from one day to another, into the anthroposophical life—to get him in “lock, stock and barrel” with the land and all that is comprised with it, with all the products which his farm sends out into the world. So do the “central anthroposophists” imagine. They are of course in error. And although many of them say that they are faithful followers of mine, often, alas! though it is true enough that they are faithful in their inner feeling, they none the less turn a deaf ear to what I have to say in decisive moments. They do not hear it when I say, for instance, that it is utterly naive to imagine that you can win over to Anthroposophical Science some professor or scientist or scholar from one day to the next and without more ado. Of course you cannot. Such a man would have to break with twenty or thirty years of his past life and work, and to do so, he would have to leave an abyss behind him. These things must be faced as they exist in real life. Anthroposophists often imagine that life consists merely in thought. It does not consist in mere thought. I am obliged to say these things, hoping that they may fall upon the right soil.

On the other hand, there are those who out of good and faithful hearts want to unite some special sphere of life with Anthroposophia—some branch of science, for example. They also did not make things quite clear to themselves when they became workers in Spiritual Science. Again and again they set out with the mistaken opinion that we must do these things as they have hitherto been done in Science; that we must proceed precisely in the same way. For instance, there are a number of very good and devoted anthroposophists working with us in Medicine (with regard to what I shall now say, Dr. Wegman is an absolute exception; she always saw quite clearly the necessity prevailing in our Society). But a number of them always seemed to believe that the doctor must now apply what proceeds from anthroposophical therapy in the same medical style and manner to which he has hitherto been accustomed.

What do we then experience? Here it is not so much a question of spreading the central teachings of Spiritual Science; here it is more a question of spreading the anthroposophical life into the world. What did we experience? The other people said “Well, we have done that kind of thing before; we are the experts in that line. That is a thing we can thoroughly grasp with our own methods; we can judge of it without any doubt or difficulty. And yet, what these anthroposophists are bringing forward is quite contrary to what we have hitherto found by our methods.” Then they declared that the things we say and do are wrong.

We had this experience: If our friends tried to imitate the outer scientists, the latter replied that they could do far better. And in such cases it was undeniable; they can in fact apply their methods better, if only for the reason that in the science of the last few years the methods have been swallowing up the science! The sciences of to-day seem to have nothing left but methods. They no longer set out on the objective problems; they have been eaten up by their own methods. To-day therefore, you can have scientific researches without any substance to them whatever.

And we have had this experience: Scientists who had the most excellent command of their own methods became violently angry when anthroposophists came forward and did nothing else but make use of these methods. What does this prove? In spite of all the pretty things that we could do in this way, in spite of the splendid researches that are being done in the Biological Institute, the one thing that emerged was that the other scientists grew wild with anger when our scientists spoke in their lectures on the basis of the very same methods. They were wild with anger, because they only heard again the things they were accustomed to in their own grooves of thought.

But we also had another important experience, namely this: A few of our scientists at last bestirred themselves, and departed to some extent from their old custom of imitating the others. But they only did it half and half. They did it in this way: In the first part of their lectures they would be thoroughly scientific; in the first part of their explanations they would apply all the methods of science, “comme il faut.” Then the audience grew very angry. “Why do they come, clumsily meddling in our affairs? Impertinent fellows, these anthroposophists, meddling in their dilettante way with our science!”

Then, in the second part of their lectures, our speakers would pass on to the essential life—no longer elaborated in the old way, but derived as anthroposophical content from realms beyond the Earth. And the same people who had previously been angry became exceedingly attentive, hungry to hear more. Then they began to catch fire! They liked the Spiritual Science well enough, but they could not abide (and what is more, as I myself admitted, rightly not), what had been patched together as a confused “mixtum compositum” of Spiritual Science and Science. We cannot make progress on such lines.

I therefore welcome with joy what has now arisen out of Count Keyserlingk's initiative, namely that the professional circle of farmers will now unite on the basis of what we have founded in Dornach—the Natural Science Section. This Section, like all the other things that are now coming before us, is a result of the Christmas Foundation Meeting. From Dornach, in good time, will go out what is intended. There we shall find, out of the heart of Anthroposophia itself, scientific researches and methods of the greatest exactitude.

Only, of course, I cannot agree with Count Keyserlingk's remark that the professional farmers' circle should only be an executive organ. From Dornach, you will soon be convinced, guiding lines and indications will go out which will call for everyone at his post to be a fully independent fellow-worker, provided only that he wishes to work with us. Nay more, as will emerge at the end of my lectures (for I shall have to give the first guiding lines for this work at the close of the present lectures) the foundation for the beginning of our work at Dornach will in the first place have to come from you. The guiding lines we shall have to give will be such that we can only begin on the basis of the answers we receive from you.

From the beginning, therefore, we shall need most active fellow-workers—no mere executive organs. To mention only one thing, which has been a subject of frequent discussions in these days between Count Keyserlingk and myself—an agricultural estate is always an individuality, in the sense that it is never the same as any other. The climate, the conditions of the soil, provide the very first basis for the individuality of a farm. A farming estate in Silesia is not like one in Thuringia, or in South Germany. They are real individualities.

Now, above all in Spiritual Science, vague generalities and abstractions are of no value, least of all when we wish to take a hand in practical life. What is the value of speaking only in vague and general terms of such a practical matter as a farm is? We must always bear in mind the concrete things; then we can understand what has to be applied. Just as the most varied expressions are composed of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, so you will have to deal with what has been given in these lectures. What you are seeking will first have to be composed from the indications given in these lectures—as words are composed from the letters of the alphabet. If on the basis of our sixty members we wish to speak of practical questions, our task, after all, will be to find the practical indications and foundations of work for those sixty individual farmers.

The first thing will be to gather up what we already know. Then our first series of experiments will follow, and we shall work in a really practical way. We therefore need the most active members. That is what we need in the Anthroposophical Society as a whole—good, practical people who will not depart from the principle that practical life, after all, calls forth something that cannot be made real from one day to the next. If those whom I have called the “central anthroposophists” believe that a professor, farmer or doctor—who has been immersed for decades past in a certain milieu and atmosphere—can accept anthroposophical convictions from one day to the next, they are greatly mistaken.

The fact will emerge quickly enough in agriculture! The farming anthroposophist no doubt, if he is idealistic enough, can go over entirely to the anthrospophical way of working—say, between his twenty-ninth and his thirtieth year—even with the work on his farm. But will his fields do likewise? Will the whole Organisation of the farm do likewise? Will those who have to mediate between him and the consumer do likewise—and so on and so on? You cannot make them all anthroposophists at once—from your twenty-ninth to your thirtieth year. And when you begin to see that you cannot do so, it is then that you lose heart. That is the point, my dear friends—do not lose heart; know that it is not the momentary success that matters; it is the working on and on with iron perseverance.

One man can do more, another less. In the last resort, paradoxical as it may sound, you will be able to do more, the more you restrict yourself in regard to the area of land which you begin to cultivate in our ways. After all, if you go wrong on a small area of land, you will not be spoiling so much as you would on a larger area. Moreover, such improvements as result from our anthroposophical methods will then be able to appear very rapidly, for you will not have much to alter. The inherent efficiency of the methods will be proved more easily than on a large estate. In so practical a sphere as farming these things must come about by mutual agreement if our Circle is to be successful. Indeed, it is very strange—with all good humour and without irony, for one enjoyed it—there has been much talk in these days as to the differences that arose in the first meeting between the Count and Herr Stegemann. Such things bring with them a certain colouring; indeed, I almost thought I should have to consider whether the anthroposophical “Vorstand,” or some one else, should not be asked to be present every evening to bring the warring elements together.

By and by however, I came to quite a different conclusion; namely, that what is here making itself felt is the foundation of a rather intimate mutual tolerance among farmers—an intimate “live and let live” among fellow-farmers. They only have a rough exterior. As a matter of fact the farmer, more than many other people, needs
to protect his own skin. It can easily happen that people start interfering with things which he alone understands. And at rock bottom you will discover in him a certain sweet tolerance. All these things must be truly felt, and I only make these observations now because I think it necessary to begin on a right basis from the outset.

Therefore I think I may once again express my deep satisfaction at what has been done by you here. I believe we have truly taken into account the experiences of the Anthroposophical Society. What has now been begun will be a thing of great blessing, and Dornach will not fail to work vigorously with those who wish to be with us as active fellow-workers in this cause.

We can only be glad, that what is now being done in Koberwitz has been thus introduced. And if Count Keyserlingk so frequently refers to the burden I took upon myself in coming here, I for my part would answer—though not in order to call up any more discussion:– What trouble have I had? I had only to travel here, and am here under the best and most beautiful conditions. All the unpleasant talks are undertaken by others; I only have to speak every day, though I confess I stood before these lectures with a certain awe—for they enter into a new domain. My trouble after all, was not so great. But when I see all the trouble to which Count Keyserlingk and his whole household have been put—when I see those who have come here—then I must say, for so it seems to me, that all the countless things that had to be done by those who have helped to enable us to be together here, tower above what I have had to do, who have simply sat down in the middle of it all when all was ready.

In this, then, I cannot agree with the Count. Whatever appreciation or gratitude you feel for the fact that this Agricultural Course has been achieved, I must ask you to direct your gratitude to him, remembering above all that if he had not thought and pondered with such iron strength, and sent his representative to Dornach, never relinquishing his purpose—then, considering the many things that have to be done from Dornach, it is scarcely likely that this Course in the farthest Eastern corner of the country could have been given.

Hence I do not at all agree that your feelings of gratitude should be expended on me, for they belong in the fullest sense to Count Keyserlingk and to his House.

That is what I wished to interpolate in the discussion.

For the Moment, there is not much more to be said—only this. We in Dornach shall need, from everyone who wishes to work with us in the Circle, a description of what he has beneath his soil, and what he has above it, and how the two are working together. If our indications are to be of use to you, we must know exactly what the things are like, to which these indications refer. You from your practical work will know far better than we can know in Dornach, what is the nature of your soil, what kind of woodland there is and how much, and so on; what has been grown on the farm in the last few years, and what the yield has been. We must know all these things, which, after all, every farmer must know for himself if he wants to run his farm in an intelligent way—with “peasant wit.”

These are the first indications we shall need: what is there on your farm, and what your experiences have been. That is quickly told. As to how these things are to be put together, that will emerge during the further course of the conference. Fresh points of view will be given which may help some of you to grasp the real connections between what the soil yields and what the soil itself is, with all that surrounds it. With these words I think I have adequately characterised the form which Count Keyserlingk wished the members of the Circle to fill in. As to the kind and friendly words which the Count has once again spoken to us all, with his fine-feeling distinction between “farmers” and “scientists,” as though all the farmers were in the Circle and all the scientists at Dornach—this also cannot and must not remain so. We shall have to grow far more together; in Dornach itself, as much as possible of the peasant-farmer must prevail, in spite of our being “scientific.” Moreover, the science that shall come from Dornach must be such as will seem good and evident to the most conservative, “thick-headed” farmer.

I hope it was only a kind of friendliness when Count Keyserlingk said that he did not understand me—a special kind of friendliness. For I am sure we shall soon grow together like twins—Dornach and the Circle. In the end he called me a “Grossbauer,” that is, a yeoman farmer—thereby already showing that he too has a feeling that we can grow together. All the same, I cannot be addressed as such merely on the strength of the little initial attempt I made in stirring the manure—a tack to which I had to give myself just before I came here. (Indeed it had to be continued, for I could not go on stirring long enough. You have to stir for a long time; I could only begin to stir, then someone else had to continue).

These are small matters, but it was not out of this that I originally came. I grew up entirely out of the peasant folk, and in my spirit I have always remained there—I indicated this in my autobiography. Though it was not on a large farming estate such as you have here; in a smaller domain I myself planted potatoes, and though I did not breed horses, at any rate I helped to breed pigs. And in the farmyard of our immediate neighbourhood I lent a hand with the cattle. These things were absolutely near my life for a long time; I took part in them most actively. Thus I am at any rate lovingly devoted to farming, for I grew up in the midst of it myself, and there is far more of that in me than the little bit of “stirring the manure“” just now.

Perhaps I may also declare myself not quite in agreement with another matter at this point. As I look back on my own life, I must say that the most valuable farmer is not the large farmer, but the small peasant farmer who himself as a little boy worked on the farm. And if this is to be realised on a larger scale—translated into scientific terms—then it will truly have to grow “out of the skull of a peasant,” as they say in Lower Austria. In my life this will serve me far more than anything I have subsequently undertaken.

Therefore, I beg you to regard me as the small peasant farmer who has conceived a real love for farming; one who remembers his small peasant farm and who thereby, perhaps, can understand what lives in the peasantry, in the farmers and yeomen of our agricultural life. They will be well understood at Dornach; of that you may rest assured. For I have always had the opinion (this was not meant ironically, though it seems to have been misunderstood) I have always had the opinion that their alleged stupidity or foolishness is “wisdom before God,” that is to say, before the Spirit. I have always considered what the peasants and farmers thought about their things far wiser than what the scientists were thinking. I have invariably found it wiser, and I do so to-day. Far rather would I listen to what is said of his own experiences in a chance conversation, by one who works directly on the soil, than to all the Ahrimanic statistics that issue from our learned science. I have always been glad when I could listen to such things, for I have always found them extremely wise, while, as to science—in its practical effects and conduct I have found it very stupid. This is what we at Dornach are striving for, and this will make our science wise—will make it wise precisely through the so-called “peasant stupidity.” We shall take pains at Dornach to carry a little of this peasant stupidity into our science. Then this stupidity will become—“wisdom before God.”

Let us then work together in this way; it will be a genuinely conservative, yet at the same time a most radical and progressive beginning. And it will always be a beautiful memory to me if this Course becomes the starting point for carrying some of the real and genuine “peasant wit” into the methods of science. I must not say that these methods have become stupid, for that would not be courteous, but they have certainly become dead.

Dr. Wachsmuth has also set aside this deadened science, and has called for a living science which must first be fertilised by true “peasant wisdom.” Let us then grow together thus like good Siamese Twins—Dornach and the Circle. It is said of twins that they have a common feeling and a common thinking. Let us then have this common feeling and thinking; then we shall go forward in the best way in our domain.

My dear friends,

With profound thanks I look back on the words which Count Keyserlingk has just spoken. For the feeling of thanks is not only justified on the part of those who are able to receive from Anthroposophical Science. One can also feel deeply what I may call the thanks of Anthroposophia itself—thanks which in these hard times are due to all who share in anthrosposophical interests.

Out of the spirit of Anthroposophia, therefore, I would thank you most heartily for the words you have just spoken. Indeed, it is deeply gratifying that we are able to hold this Agriculture Course here in the house of Count and Countess Keyserlingk. I know from my former visits what a beautiful atmosphere there is in Koberwitz—I mean also the spiritual atmosphere. I know that the atmosphere of soul and spirit which is living here is the best possible premiss for what must be said during this Course.

Count Keyserlingk has told us that there may be some discomforts for one or another among us. He was speaking especially of the eurhythmists; though it may be the “discomforts” are shared by some of our other visitors from a distance. Yet on the other hand, considering the purpose of our present gathering, it seems to me we could scarcely be accommodated better for this Lecture Course than here, in a farm so excellent and so exemplary.

Whatever comes to light in the realms of Anthroposophia, we also need to live in it with our feelings—in the necessary atmosphere. And for our Course on Farming this condition will most certainly be fulfilled at Koberwitz. All this impels me to express our deeply felt thanks to Count Keyserlingk and to his house. In this I am sure Frau Doctor Steiner will join me. We are thankful that we may spend these festive days—I trust they will also be days of real good work—here in this house.

I cannot but believe: inasmuch as we are gathered here in Koberwitz, there will prevail throughout these days an agricultural spirit which is already deeply united with the Anthroposophical Movement. Was it not Count Keyserlingk who helped us from the very outset with his advice and his devoted work, in the farming activities we undertook at Stuttgart under the Kommende Tag Company? His spirit, trained by his deep and intimate Union with Agriculture, was prevalent in all that we were able to do in this direction. And I would say, forces were there prevailing which came from the innermost heart of our Movement and which drew us hither, quite as a matter of course, the moment the Count desired us to come to Koberwitz.

Hence I can well believe that every single one of us has come here gladly for this Agriculture Course. We who have come here can express our thanks just as deeply and sincerely, that your House has been ready to receive us with our intentions for these days. For my part, these thanks are felt most deeply, and I beg Count Keyserlingk and his whole house to receive them especially from me. I know what it means to give hospitality to so many visitors and for so many days, in the way in which I feel it will be done here. Therefore I think I can also give the right colouring to these words of thanks, and I beg you to receive them, understanding that I am well aware of the many difficulties which such a gathering may involve in a house remote from the City. Whatever may be the inconveniences of which the Count has spoken—representing, needless to say, not the “Home Office” but the “Foreign Office”—whatever they may be, I am quite sure that every single one of us will go away fully satisfied with your kind hospitality.

Whether you will go away equally satisfied with the Lecture-Course itself, is doubtless a more open question, though we will do our utmost, in the discussions during the succeeding days, to come to a right understanding on all that is here said. You must not forget: though the desire for it has been cherished in many quarters for a long time past, this is the first time I have been able to undertake such a Course out of the heart of our anthroposophical striving. It pre-supposes many things.

The Course itself will show us how intimately the interests of Agriculture are bound up, in all directions, with the widest spheres of life. Indeed there is scarcely a realm of human life which lies outside our subject. From one aspect or another, all interests of human life belong to Agriculture. Here, needless to say, we can only touch upon the central domain of Agriculture itself, albeit this of its own accord will lead us along many different side tracks—necessarily so, for the very reason that what is here said will grow out of the soil of Anthroposophia itself.

In particular, you must forgive me if my introductory words to-day appear—inevitably—a little far remote. Not everyone, perhaps, will see at once what the connection is between this introduction and our special subject. Nevertheless, we shall have to build upon what is said to-day, however remote it may seem at first sight. For Agriculture especially is sadly hit by the whole trend of modern spiritual life. You see, this modern spiritual life has taken on a very destructive form especially as regards the economic realm, though its destructiveness is scarcely yet divined by many.

Our real underlying intentions, in the economic undertakings which grew out of the Anthroposophical Movement, were meant to counteract these things. These undertakings were created by industrialists, business men, but they were unable to realise in all directions what lay in their original intentions, if only for the reason that the opposing forces in our time are all too numerous, preventing one from calling forth a proper understanding for such efforts. Over against the “powers that be,” the individual is often powerless. Hitherto, not even the most original and fundamental aspects of these industrial and economic efforts, which grew out of the heart of the Anthroposophical Movement, have been realised. Nay, they have not even reached the plane of discussion. What was the real, practical point? I will explain it in the case of Agriculture, so that we may not be speaking in vague and general, but in concrete terms.

We have all manner of books and lecture courses on Economics, containing, among other things, chapters on the economic aspects of Agriculture. Economists consider, how Agriculture should be carried on in the light of social-economic principles. There are many books and pamphlets on this subject: how Agriculture should be shaped, in the light of social and economic ideas. Yet the whole of this—the giving of economic lectures an the subject and the writing of such books—is manifest nonsense. Palpable nonsense, I say, albeit that is practised nowadays in the widest circles. For it should go without saying, and every man should recognise the fact: One cannot speak of Agriculture, not even of the social forms it should assume, unless one first possesses as a foundation a practical acquaintance with the farming job itself. That is to say, unless one really knows what it means to grow mangolds, potatoes and corn! Without this foundation one cannot even speak of the general economic principles which are involved. Such things must be determined out of the thing itself, not by all manner of theoretic considerations.

Nowadays, such a statement seems absurd to those who have heard University lectures on the economics of Agriculture. The whole thing seems to them so well established. But it is not so. No one can judge of Agriculture who does not derive his judgment from field and forest and the breeding of cattle. All talk of Economics which is not derived from the job itself should really cease. So long as people do not recognise that all talk of Economics—hovering airily over the realities—is mere empty talk, we shall not reach a hopeful prospect, neither in Agriculture nor in any other sphere.

Why is it that people think they can talk of a thing from theoretic points of view, when they do not understand it? The reason is, that even within their several domains they are no longer able to go back to the real foundations. They look at a beetroot as a beetroot. No doubt it has this or that appearance; it can be cut more or less easily, it has such and such a colour, such and such constituents. All these things can no doubt be said. Yet therewithal you are still far from understanding the beetroot. Above all, you do not yet understand the living-together of the beetroot with the soil, with the field, the season of the year in which it ripens, and so forth.

You must be clear as to the following (I have often used this comparison for other spheres of life): You see a magnetic needle. You discern that it always points with one end approximately to the North, and with the other to the South. You think, why is it so? You look for the cause, not in the magnetic needle, but in the whole Earth, inasmuch as you assign to the one end of the Earth the magnetic North Pole, and to the other the magnetic South.

Anyone who looked in the magnet-needle itself for the cause of the peculiar position it takes up, would be talking nonsense. You can only understand the direction of the magnet-needle if you know how it is related to the whole Earth. Yet the same nonsense (as applied to the magnetic needle) is considered good sense by the men of to-day when applied to other things.

There, for example, is the beetroot growing in the earth. To take it just for what it is within its narrow limits, is nonsense if in reality its growth depends on countless conditions, not even only of the Earth as a whole, but of the cosmic environment. The men of to-day say and do many things in life and practice as though they were dealing only with narrow, limited objects, not with effects and influences from the whole Universe. The several spheres of modern life have suffered terribly from this, and the effects would be even more evident were it not for the fact that in spite of all the modern science a certain instinct still remains over from the times when men were used to work by instinct and not by scientific theory.

To take another sphere of life: I am always glad to think that those whose doctors have prescribed how many ounces of meat they are to eat, and how much cabbage (some of them even have a balance beside them at the table and carefully weigh out everything that comes on to their plate)—it is all very nice; needless to say, one ought to know such things—but I am always glad to think how good it is that the poor fellow still feels hungry, if, after all, he has not had enough to eat! At least there is still this instinct to tell him so.

Such instincts really underlay all that men had to do before a “science” of these things existed. And the instincts frequently worked with great certainty. Even to-day one is astonished again and again to read the rules in the old “Peasants' Calendars.” How infinitely wise and intelligent is that which they express! Moreover, the man of pure instincts is well able to avoid superstition in these matters: and in these Calendars, beside the proverbs full of deep meaning for the sowing and the reaping, we find all manner of quips, intended to set aside nonsensical pretentions. This for example:—

“Kräht der Hahn auf dem Mist,
So regnet es, oder es bleibt wie es ist.

If the cock crows on the dunghill,
It'll rain—or it'll stay still.”

So the needful dose of humour is mingled with the instinctive wisdom in order to ward off mere superstition.

We, however, speaking from the point of view of Anthroposophical Science, do not desire to return to the old instincts. We want to find, out of a deeper spiritual insight, what the old instincts—as they are growing insecure—are less and less able to provide. To this end we must include a far wider horizon in our studies of the life of plant and animal, and of the Earth itself. We must extend our view to the whole Cosmos.

From one aspect, no doubt, it is quite right that we should not superficially connect the rain with the phases of the Moon. Yet on the other hand there is a true foundation to the story I have often told in other circles. In Leipzig there were two professors. One of them, Gustav Theodor Fechner, often evinced a keen and sure insight into spiritual matters. Not altogether superstitiously, from pure external observations he could see that certain periods of rain or of no rain were connected, after all, with the Moon and with its coursing round the earth.

He drew this as a necessary conclusion from the statistical results. That however was a time when orthodox science already wanted to overlook such matters, and his colleague, the famous Professor Schleiden, poured scorn on the idea “for scientific reasons.” Now these two professors of the University of Leipzig also had wives. Gustav Theodor Fechner, who was a man not without humour, said: “Well, let our wives decide.”

In Leipzig at that time the water they needed for washing clothes was not easy to obtain, and a certain custom still prevailed. You had to fetch your water from a long distance. Hence they were wont to put out pails and barrels to catch the rain water.

This was Frau Prof. Schleiden's custom as well as Frau Prof. Fechner's. But they had not room enough to put out their barrels in the yard at the same time. So Prof. Fechner said: “If my honoured colleague is right, if it makes no difference, then let Frau Prof. Schleiden put out her barrel when by my indications, according to the phases of the Moon, there will be less rain. If it is all nonsense, Frau Prof. Schleiden will surely be glad to do so.”

But, lo and behold, Frau Prof. Schleiden rebelled. She preferred the indications of Prof. Fechner to those of her own husband. And so indeed it is. Science may be perfectly correct. Real life, however, often cannot afford to take its cue from the “correctness” of science!

But we do not wish to speak only in this way. We are in real earnest about it. I only wanted to point out the need to look a little farther afield than is customary nowadays. We must do so in studying that which alone makes possible the physical life of man on Earth—and that, after all, is Agriculture. I do not know whether the things which can be said at this stage out of Anthroposophical Science will satisfy you in all directions, but I will do my best to explain what Anthroposophical Science can give for Agriculture.

To-day, by way of introduction, I will indicate what is most important for Agriculture in the life of the Earth. Nowadays we are wont to attach the greatest importance to the physical and chemical constituents. To-day, however, we will not take our Start from these; we will take our start from something which lies behind the physical and chemical constituents and is nevertheless of great importance for the life of plant and animal.

Studying the life of man (and to a certain extent it applies to animal life also), we observe a high degree of emancipation of human and animal life from the outer Universe. The nearer we come to man, the greater this emancipation grows. In human and animal life we find phenomena appearing—to begin with—quite independent not only of the influences from beyond the Earth, but also of the atmospheric and other influences of the Earth's immediate environment. Moreover, this not only appears so; it is to a high degree correct for many things in human life.

True, it is well-known that the pains of certain illnesses are intensified by atmospheric influences. There is, however, another fact of which the people of to-day are not so well aware. Certain illnesses and other phenomena of human life take their course in such a way that in their time-relationships they copy the external processes of Nature. Yet in their beginning and end they do not coincide with these Nature-processes. We need only call to mind one of the most important phenomena of all, that of female menstruation. The periods, in their temporal course, imitate the course of the lunar phases, but they do not coincide with the latter in their beginning and ending. And there are many other, less evident phenomena, both in the male and in the female organism, representing imitations of rhythms in outer Nature.

If these things were studied more intimately, we should for example have a better understanding of many things that happen in the social life by observing the periodicity of the Sun-spots. People only fail to observe these things because that in human life which corresponds to the periodicity of the Sun-spots does not begin when they begin, nor does it cease when they cease. It has emancipated itself. It shows the same periodicity, the identical rhythm, but its phases do not coincide in time. While inwardly maintaining the rhythm and periodicity, it makes them independent—it emancipates itself.

Anyone, of course, to whom we say that human life is a microcosm and imitates the macrocosm, is at liberty to reply. That is all nonsense! If we declare that certain illnesses show a seven day's fever period, one may object: Why then, when certain outer phenomena appear, does not the fever too make its appearance and run parallel, and cease with the external phenomena? It is true that the fever does not; but, though its temporal beginning and ending do not coincide with the outer phenomena, it still maintains their inner rhythm. This emancipation in the Cosmos is almost complete for human life; for animal life it is less so; plant life, an the other hand, is still to a high degree immersed in the general life of Nature, including the outer earthly world.

Hence we shall never understand plant life unless we bear in mind that everything which happens on the Earth is but a reflection of what is taking place in the Cosmos. For man this fact is only masked because he has emancipated himself; he only bears the inner rhythms in himself. To the plant world, however, it applies in the highest degree. That is what I should like to point out in this introductory lecture.

The Earth is surrounded in the heavenly spaces, first by the Moon and then by the other planets of our planetary system. In an old instinctive science wherein the Sun was reckoned among the planets, they had this sequence: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Without astronomical explanations I will now speak of this planetary life, and of that in the planetary life which is connected with the earthly world.

Turning our attention to the earthly life on a large scale, the first fact for us to take into account is this. The greatest imaginable part is played in this earthly life (considered once more on a Large scale, and as a whole) by all that which we may call the life of the silicious substance in the world. You will find silicious substance for example, in the beautiful mineral quartz, enclosed in the form of a prism and pyramid; you will find the silicious substance, combined with oxygen, in the crystals of quartz.

Imagine the oxygen removed (which in the quartz is combined with silicious substance) and you have so-called silicon. This substance is included by modern chemistry among the “elements,” oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, sulphur, etc. Silicon therefore, which is here combined with oxygen, is a “chemical element.”

Now we must not forget that the silicon which lives thus in the mineral quartz is spread over the Earth so as to constitute 27-28% of our Earth's crust. All other substances are present in lesser quantities, save oxygen, which constitutes 47-48%. Thus an enormous quantity of silicon is present. Now, it is true this silicon, occurring as it does in rocks like quartz, appears in such a form that it does not seem very important when we are considering the outer, material aspect of the Earth with its plant-growth. (The plant-growth is frequently forgotten).

Quartz is insoluble in water—the water trickles through it. It therefore seems—at first sight—to have very little to do with the ordinary, obvious conditions of life. But once again, you need only remember the horse-tail—equisetum—which contains 90% of silica—the same substance that is in quartz—very finely distributed.

From all this you can see what an immense significance silicon must have. Well-nigh half of what we meet on the Earth consists of silica. But the peculiar thing is how very little notice is taken of it. It is practically excluded to-day even from those domains of life where it could work most beneficially.

In the Medicine that proceeds from Anthroposophical Science, silicious substances are an essential constituent of numerous medicaments. A large class of illnesses are treated with silicic acid taken internally, or outwardly as baths. In effect, practically everything that shows itself in abnormal conditions of the senses is influenced in a peculiar way by silicon. (I do not say what lies in the senses themselves, but that which shows itself in the senses, including the inner senses—calling forth pains here or there in the organs of the body).

Not only so; throughout the “household of Nature,” as we have grown accustomed to call it, silicon plays the greatest imaginable part, for it not only exists where we discover it in quartz or other rocks, but in an extremely fine state of distribution it is present in the atmosphere. Indeed, it is everywhere. Half of the Earth that is at our disposal is of silica.

Now what does this silicon do? In a hypothetical form, let us ask ourselves this question. Let us assume that we only had half as much silicon in our earthly environment. In that case our plants would all have more or less pyramidal forms. The flowers would all be stunted. Practically all plants would have the form of the cactus, which strikes us as abnormal. The cereals would look very queer indeed. Their stems would grow thick, even fleshy, as you went downward; the ears would be quite stunted—they would have no full ears at all.

That on the one hand. On the other hand we find another kind of substance, which must occur everywhere throughout the Earth, albeit it is not so widespread as the silicious element. I mean the chalk or limestone substances and all that is akin to these—limestone, potash, sodium substances. Once more, if these were present to a less extent, we should have plants with very thin stems—plants, to a large extent, with twining stems; they would all become like creepers. The flowers would expand, it is true, but they would be useless: they would provide practically no nourishment. Plant-life in the form in which we see it to-day can only thrive in the equilibrium and co-operation of the two forces—or, to choose two typical substances, in the co-operation of the limestone and silicious substances respectively.

Now we can go still farther. Everything that lives in the silicious nature contains forces which comes not from the Earth but from the so-called distant planets, the planets beyond the Sun—Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. That which proceeds from these distant planets influences the life of plants via the silicious and kindred substances into the plant and also into the animal life of the Earth. On the other hand, from all that is represented by the planets near the Earth—Moon, Mercury and Venus—forces work via the limestone and kindred substances. Thus we may say, for every tilled field: Therein are working the silicious and the limestone natures; in the former, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars; and in the latter, Moon, Venus and Mercury.

In this connection let us now look at the plants themselves. Two things we must observe in the plant life. The first thing is that the entire plant-world, and every single species, is able to maintain itself—that is to say, it evolves the power of reproduction. The plant is able to bring forth its kind, and so on. That is the one thing. The other is, that as a creature of a comparatively lower kingdom of Nature, the plant can serve as nourishment for those of the higher kingdoms.

At first sight, these two currents in the life and evolution of the plant have little to do with one another. For the process of development from the mother plant to the daughter plant, the granddaughter plant and so on, it may well seem a matter of complete indifference to the formative forces of Nature, whether or no we eat the plant and nourish ourselves thereby. Two very different sets of interests are manifested here. Yet in the whole nexus of Nature's forces, it works in this way:—

Everything connected with the inner force of reproduction and growth—everything that contributes to the sequence of generation after generation in the plants—works through those forces which come down from the Cosmos to the Earth: from Moon, Venus and Mercury, via the limestone nature. Suppose we were merely considering what emerges in plants such as we do not eat—plants that simply renew themselves again and again. We look at them as though the cosmic influences from the forces of Venus, Mercury and Moon did not interest us. For these are the forces involved in all that reproduces itself in the plant-nature of the Earth.

On the other hand, when plants become foodstuffs to a large extent—when they evolve in such a way that the substances in them become foodstuffs for animal and man, then Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, working via the silicious nature, are concerned in the process. The silicious nature opens the plant-being to the wide spaces of the Universe and awakens the senses of the plant-being in such a way as to receive from all quarters of the Universe the forces which are moulded by these distant planets. Whenever this occurs, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are playing their part. From the sphere of the Moon, Venus and Mercury, on the other hand, is received all that which makes the plant capable of reproduction.

To begin with, no doubt this appears as a simple piece of information. But truths like this, derived from a somewhat wider horizon, lead of their own accord from knowledge into practice. For we must ask ourselves: If forces come into the Earth from Moon, Venus and Mercury and become effective in the life of plants, by what means can the process be more or lese quickened or restrained? By what means can the influences of Moon or Saturn on the life of plants be hindered, and by what means assisted?

Observe the course of the year. It takes its course in such a way that there are days of rain and days without rain. As to the rain, the modern physicist investigates practically no more than the mere fact that when it rains, more water falls upon the Earth than when it does not rain. For him, the water is an abstract substance composed of hydrogen and oxygen. True, if you decompose water by electrolysis, it will fall into two substances, of which the one behaves in such and such a way, and the other in another way. But that does not yet tell us anything complete about water itself. Water contains far, far more than what emerges from it chemically, in this process, as oxygen and hydrogen.

Water, in effect, is eminently suited to prepare the ways within the earthly domain for those forces which come, for instance, from the Moon. Water brings about the distribution of the lunar forces in the earthly realm. There is a definite connection between the Moon and the water in the Earth. Let us therefore assume that there have just been rainy days and that these are followed by a full Moon. In deed and in truth, with the forces that come from the Moon on days of the full Moon, something colossal is taking place on Earth. These forces spring up and shoot into all the growth of plants, but they are unable to do so unless rainy days have gone before.

We shall therefore have to consider the question: Is it not of some significance, whether we sow the seed in a certain relation to the rainfall and the subsequent light of the full Moon, or whether we sow it thoughtlessly at any time? Something, no doubt, will come of it even then. Nevertheless, we have to raise this question: How should we best consider the rainfall and the full Moon in choosing the time to sow the seed? For in certain plants, what the full Moon has to do will thrive intensely after rainy days and will take place but feebly and sparingly after days of sunshine. Such things lay hidden in the old farmers' rules; they quoted a certain verse or proverb and knew what they must do. The proverbs to-day are outworn superstitions, and a science of these things does not yet exist; people are not yet willing enough to set to work and find it.

Furthermore, around our Earth is the atmosphere. Now the atmosphere above all—beside the obvious fact that it is airy—has the peculiarity that it is sometimes warmer, sometimes cooler. At certain times it shows a considerable accumulation of warmth, which, when the tension grows too strong, may even find relief in thunderstorms. How is it then with the warmth? Spiritual observation shows that whereas the water has no relation to silica, this warmth has an exceedingly strong relation to it.

The warmth brings out and makes effective precisely those forces which can work through the silicious nature, namely, the forces that proceed from Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. These forces must be regarded in quite a different way than the forces from the Moon. For we must not forget that Saturn takes thirty years to revolve round the Sun, whereas the Moon with its phases takes only thirty or twenty-eight days. Saturn is only visible for fifteen years. It must therefore be connected with the growth of plants in quite a different way, albeit, I need hardly say, it is not only working when it shines down upon the Earth; it is also effective when its rays have to pass upward through the Earth.

Saturn goes slowly round, in thirty years. Let us draw it thus (Diagram 1): here is the course of Saturn. Sometimes it shines directly on to a given spot of the Earth. But it can also work through the Earth upon this portion of the Earth's surface. In either case the intensity with which the Saturn-forces are able to approach the plant life of the Earth is dependent on the warmth-conditions of the air. When the air is cold, they cannot approach; when the air is warm, they can.

And where do we see the working of these forces in the plant's life? We see it, not so much where annual plants arise, coming and going in a season and only leaving seeds behind. We see what Saturn does with the help of the warmth-forces of our Earth, whenever the perennial plants arise. The effects of these forces, which pass into the plant-nature via the warmth, are visible to us in the rind and bark of trees, and in all that makes the plants, perennial. This is due to the simple fact that the annual life of the plant—its limitation to a short length of life—is connected with those planets whose period of revolution is short. That, on the other hand, which frees itself from the transitory nature—that which surrounds the trees with bark and rind, and makes them permanent—is connected with the planetary forces which work via the forces of warmth and cold and have a long period of revolution, as in the case of Saturn: thirty years; or Jupiter: twelve years.

If someone wishes to plant an oak, it is of no little importance whether or no he has a good knowledge of the periods of Mars; for an oak, rightly planted in the proper Mars-period, will thrive differently from one that is planted in the Earth thoughtlessly, just when it happens to suit.

Or, if you wish to plant coniferous forests, where the Saturn-forces play so great a part, the result will be different if you plant the forest in a so-called ascending period of Saturn, or in some other Saturn period. One who understands can tell precisely, from the things that will grow or will not grow, whether or no they have been planted with an understanding of the connections of these forces. That which does not appear obvious to the external eye, appears very clearly, none the less, in the more intimate relationships of life.

Assume for instance that we take, as firewood, wood that is derived from trees which were planted in the Earth without understanding of the cosmic rhythms. It will not provide the same health-giving warmth as firewood from trees that were planted intelligently. These things enter especially into the more intimate relationships of daily life, and here they show their great significance. Alas! the life of people has become almost entirely thoughtless nowadays. They are only too glad if they do not need to think of such things. They think it must all go on just like any machine. You have all the necessary contrivances; turn on the switch, and it goes. So do they conceive, materialistically, the working of all Nature.

Along these lines we are eventually led to the most alarming results in practical life. Then the great riddles arise. Why, for example, is it impossible to-day to eat such potatoes as I ate in my youth? It is so; I have tried it everywhere. Not even in the country districts where I ate them then, can one now eat such potatoes. Many things have declined in their inherent food-values, notably during the last decades.

The more intimate influences which are at work in the whole Universe are no longer understood. These must be looked for again along such lines as I have hinted at to-day. I have only introduced the subject; I have only tried to show where the questions arise—questions which go far beyond the customary points of view. We shall continue and go deeper in this way, and then apply, what we have found, in practice.

DR STEINER greets those present with the words:

My dear friends!

Let the first words to resound through this room today be those which sum up the essence of what may stand before your souls as the most important findings of recent years.^A

Later there will be more to be said about these words which are, as they stand, a summary. But first let our ears be touched by them, so that out of the signs of the present time we may renew, in keeping with our way of thinking, the ancient word of the Mysteries: ‘Know thyself.’

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

Soul of Man !
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

My dear friends! Today when I look back specifically to what it was possible to bring from the spiritual worlds while the terrible storms of war were surging across the earth, I find it all expressed as though in a paradigm in the trio of verses your ears have just heard.^B

For decades it has been possible to perceive this threefoldness of man which enables him in the wholeness of his being of spirit, soul and body to revive for himself once more in a new form the call ‘Know thyself’. For decades it has been possible to perceive this threefoldness. But only in the last decade have I myself been able to bring it to full maturity while the storms of war were raging.³⁸ I sought to indicate how man lives in the physical realm in his system of metabolism and limbs, in his system of heart and rhythm, in his system of thinking and perceiving with his head. Yesterday I indicated how this threefoldness can be rightly taken up when our hearts are enlivened through and through by Anthroposophia.

We may be sure that if man learns to know in his feeling and in his will what he is actually doing when, as the spirits of the universe enliven him, he lets his limbs place him in the world of space, that then—not in a suffering, passive grasping of the universe but in an active grasping of the world in which he fulfils his duties, his tasks, his mission on the earth—that then in this active grasping of the world he will know the being of all-wielding love of man and universe which is one member of the all-world-being.

We may be sure that if man understands the miraculous mystery holding sway between lung and heart—expressing inwardly the beat of universal rhythms working across millennia, across the aeons of time to ensoul him with the universe through the rhythms of pulse and blood—we may hope that, grasping this in wisdom with a heart that has become a sense organ, man can experience the divinely given universal images as out of themselves they actively reveal the cosmos. Just as in active movement we grasp the all-wielding love of worlds, so shall we grasp the archetypal images of world existence when we sense in ourselves the mysterious interplay between universal rhythm and heart rhythm, and through this the human rhythm that takes place mysteriously in soul and spirit realms in the interplay between lung and heart.

And when, in feeling, the human being rightly perceives what is revealed in the system of his head, which is at rest on his shoulders even when he walks along, then, feeling himself within the system of his head and pouring warmth of heart into this system of his head, he will experience the ruling, working, weaving thoughts of the universe within his own being.

Thus he becomes the threefoldness of all existence: universal love reigning in human love; universal Imagination reigning in the forms of the human organism; universal thoughts reigning mysteriously below the surface in human thoughts. He will grasp this threefoldness and he will recognize himself as an individually free human being within the reigning work of the gods in the cosmos, as a cosmic human being, an individual human being within the cosmic human being, working for the future of the universe as an individual human being within the cosmic human being. Out of the signs of the present time he will re-enliven the ancient words: ‘Know thou thyself!’

The Greeks were still permitted to omit the final word, since for them the human self was not yet as abstract as it is for us now that it has become concentrated in the abstract ego-point or at most in thinking, feeling and willing. For them human nature comprised the totality of spirit, soul and body. Thus the ancient Greeks were permitted to believe that they spoke of the total human being, spirit, soul and body, when they let resound the ancient word of the Sun, the word of Apollo: ‘Know thou thyself!’

Today, re-enlivening these words in the right way out of the signs of our times, we have to say: Soul of man, know thou thyself in the weaving existence of spirit, soul and body. When we say this, we have understood what lies at the foundation of all aspects of the being of man. In the substance of the universe there works and is and lives the spirit which streams from the heights and reveals itself in the human head; the force of Christ working in the circumference, weaving in the air, encircling the earth, works and lives in the system of our breath; and from the inmost depths of the earth rise up the forces which work in our limbs. When now, at this moment, we unite these three forces, the forces of the heights, the forces of the circumference, the forces of the depths, in a substance that gives form, then in the understanding of our soul we can bring face to face the universal dodecahedron with the human dodecahedron. Out of these three forces: out of the spirit of the heights, out of the force of Christ in the circumference, out of the working of the Father, the creative activity of the Father that streams out of the depths, let us at this moment give form in our souls to the dodecahedral Foundation Stone which we lower into the soil of our souls so that it may remain there a powerful sign in the strong foundations of our soul existence and so that in the future working of the Anthroposophical Society we may stand on this firm Foundation Stone.

Let us ever remain aware of this Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, formed today. In all that we shall do, in the outer world and here, to further, to develop and to fully unfold the Anthroposophical Society, let us preserve the remembrance of the Foundation Stone which we have today lowered into the soil of our hearts. Let us seek in the threefold being of man, which teaches us love, which teaches us the universal Imagination, which teaches us the universal thoughts; let us seek, in this threefold being, the substance of universal love which we lay as the foundation, let us seek in this threefold being the archetype of the Imagination according to which we shape the universal love within our hearts, let us seek the power of thoughts from the heights which enable us to let shine forth in fitting manner this dodecahedral Imagination which has received its form through love! Then shall we carry away with us from here what we need. Then shall the Foundation Stone shine forth before the eyes of our soul, that Foundation Stone which has received its substance from universal love and human love, its picture image, its form, from universal Imagination and human Imagination, and its brilliant radiance from universal thoughts and human thoughts, its brilliant radiance which whenever we recollect this moment can shine towards us with warm light, with light that spurs on our deeds, our thinking, our feeling and our willing.

The proper soil into which we must lower the Foundation Stone of today, the proper soil consists of our hearts in their harmonious collaboration, in their good, love-filled desire to bear together the will of Anthroposophy through the world. This will cast its light on us like a reminder of the light of thought that can ever shine towards us from the dodecahedral Stone of love which today we will lower into our hearts.

Dear friends, let us take this deeply into our souls. With it let us warm our souls, and with it let us enlighten our souls. Let us cherish this warmth of soul and this light of soul which out of good will we have planted in our hearts today.

We plant it, my dear friends, at a moment when human memory that truly understands the universe looks back to the point in human evolution, at the turning point of time, when out of the darkness of night and out of the darkness of human moral feeling, shooting like light from heaven, was born the divine being who had become the Christ, the spirit being who had entered into humankind.

We can best bring strength to that warmth of soul and that light of soul which we need, if we enliven them with the warmth and the light that shone forth at the turning point of time as the Light of Christ in the darkness of the universe. In our hearts, in our thoughts and in our will let us bring to life that original consecrated night of Christmas which took place two thousand years ago, so that it may help us when we carry forth into the world what shines towards us through the light of thought of that dodecahedral Foundation Stone of love which is shaped in accordance with the universe and has been laid into the human realm.

So let the feelings of our heart be turned back towards the original consecrated night of Christmas in ancient Palestine.

At the turning of the time
The Spirit-Light of the world
Entered the stream of earthly being.
Darkness of night
Had held its sway,
Day-radiant light
Streamed into souls of men.
Light that gives warmth
To simple shepherds' hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise heads of kings.

Light Divine Christ-Sun !
Warm thou our hearts,
Enlighten thou our heads,
That good may become
What we from our hearts would found
What we from our heads would direct
In conscious
Willing.

This turning of our feelings back to the original consecrated night of Christmas can give us the strength for the warming of our hearts and the enlightening of our heads which we need if we are to practise rightly, working anthroposophically, what can arise from the knowledge of the threefold human being coming to harmony in unity.

So let us once more gather before our souls all that follows from a true understanding of the words ‘Know thou thyself in spirit, soul and body’. Let us gather it as it works in the cosmos so that to our Stone, which we have now laid in the soil of our hearts, there may speak from everywhere into human existence and into human life and into human work everything that the universe has to say to this human existence and to this human life and to this human work.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway
In depths of worlds begetting being:
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones!
Let there ring out from the heights
What in the depths is echoed
And in the echo of the depths
The secret of the heights, resounding
Speaks:
Ex Deo nascimur.
The spirits of the elements hear it
In East, West, North, South:
May human beings hear it.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

For the Christ-Will in the encircling round holds sway
In the rhythms of the worlds, bestowing grace on the soul:
Through the spirits: Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai,
Let there be fired, ye spirits, from the East
What through the West is formed,
And the fire of the East,
As it receives form from the West
Speaks:
In Christo morimur.
The spirits of the elements hear it
In East, West, North, South:
May human beings hear it.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

For the world-thoughts of the Spirit hold sway
In the being of worlds, craving for light:
Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi !
Let there be prayed from the depths
What in the heights will be granted,
And when it is rightly understood
How it rings forth from Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi,
When from the depths is prayed
What in the heights can be answered,
Then speaks it through the world:
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.
The spirits of the elements hear it
In East, West, North, South:
May human beings hear it.

My dear friends, hear it as it resounds in your own hearts! Then will you found here a true community of human beings for Anthroposophia; and then will you carry the spirit that rules in the shining light of thoughts around the dodecahedral Stone of love out into the world wherever it should give of its light and of its warmth for the progress of human souls, for the progress of the universe.

• A. In the 1985 German edition, from which this translation is made, the verses spoken here and in the subsequent sessions are given as shown in the shorthand report. See the Note on the Verses.
• B. At this point, and again in the final words of this meeting at which the Foundation Stone was laid in members' hearts, Rudolf Steiner changed for a moment from the formal mode of address to the more intimate ‘Du’. (Tr.)
• 38. For the first time in the public lecture in Berlin on 15 March 1917 in Rudolf Steiner Geist und Stoff, Leben und Tod (Spirit and Matter, Life and Death). GA 66, and in the chapter ‘Die physischen und die geistigen Abhängigkeiten der Menschenwesenheit’ ‘Physical and Spiritual Dependencies of the Being of Man’ in Rudolf Steiner Von Seelenrätseln (Of the Riddles of the Soul) GA 21.

by Marie Steiner

The content of the lectures which are published here can be taken as complementing the material which Rudolf Steiner included in his autobiography The Course of my Life. They were delivered in a lively, informal and conversational tone, and as such were not conceived of in book form. But because of their exceedingly important content and historical context, their significance should not be underestimated. This is true not only insofar as it applies to anthroposophists, who will find illuminated the background of the movement to which they belong and who will thus acquire a firm standpoint through their insight into the necessity of events which need no justification. It also applies to those who have only come across superficial descriptions by others, or in dictionaries. They might well be thankful for the opportunity to gain real insight into the facts. After all, there will be increasing numbers of souls who will want to grasp the opportunities which allow them to see that there are answers to the questions which they inwardly perceive as riddles, and that they can be shown the ways to find these answers ... This book will provide the relevant information to those who are interested in the historical development of the movement; it also provides the necessary and simple explanation for a situation which arose as a natural consequence of the given circumstances: namely, the original co-operation with the Theosophical Society, which was looking for an initiated teacher.

If a person is summoned, and the conditions he lays down are accepted, why should he not respond and help? A request went to Rudolf Steiner and at no time did he hesitate to point out what the consequences of his work with the Theosophical Society would be: the re-learning process, the need to awaken to the requirements of the time, the sensitivity to progressing events and to the tasks of the West. In such a situation why should he, who was certain of his path, not seek to help those who were searching without a guide and show them how to find their divine helper and their individual freedom? ...

Although Rudolf Steiner says in the present lectures that the legacy of the Theosophical Society had been overcome by the end of the second phase of the anthroposophical movement, it is nevertheless true that certain less happy symptoms keep reappearing in our Society because of the influx of new generations and many theosophical members; symptoms which it was his great concern that they should not be allowed to fester.... It is our duty to reflect on what we are doing. Let us not make ourselves out to be better than we are. We do not need to be coy about our mistakes, but we must allow the light of self-reflection to arise powerfully out of their darkness. Communal awareness is difficult. We can only develop a strong communal I to the extent that we can rouse ourselves, are willing to work for knowledge, and have the courage to face the truth. That cannot be won in secrecy; it has to be fought for communally. Honest struggle will do us no harm and will earn us the respect of everyone with good will. Those who are ill-disposed towards us should think back to what the Church has suffered as a community despite the strong outer discipline which it imposes, the extent to which its ideals had to suffer from flaws and contradictions. They will then see that the leader who gives a movement its impulse cannot be held responsible for the mistakes of those who follow his teachings, but that it is human beings as a species who cannot avoid the many detours, the climbing and back-sliding, the renewed scrambling upwards before they reach their goal.

Anthroposophy is a path of schooling. The Anthroposophical Society is certainly no paragon of how to live anthroposophical ideals. It might even be true to say that in certain respects it is an infirmary which is not surprising in a time of human sickness. All those in need of help, all those who have been crushed by the need of our time flock towards it. But why should there only be infirmaries for the physically ill? Is there not a duty to have places where people can recover their spiritual equilibrium? That is what has happened here in the widest sense. There have been a great many letters and words of gratitude in which people testified that it was only anthroposophy and its teacher who made life worth living for them once again. But in order for them to find anthroposophy there had to be a society in which such work was done.

Thus the Anthroposophical Society was a workshop in which an immense amount of work took place. Anthroposophy had a fertilizing influence in all areas of life, in the arts, the sciences, and also in practical endeavours. At the time of severe economic crisis, anthroposophists were frequently unable to realize the ideals which stood before them, but they were struggling against twice the odds. The people, however, who flocked to the Society and began to represent it to the outside when it was already established in the world in a representative way, were people moulded by our time rather than by corresponding to any ideal of anthroposophy, and thus many of them fell prey to the temptations and habits of the age. The young people, who were disappointed by what they experienced and failed to find in the organized youth movements, here discovered the answers to the questions which were puzzling them, and sought to realize their endeavours in the new community of Anthroposophia; but they also brought their habits into the Society, including some things which should have been overcome by them if they wanted to make a new start in anthroposophy. Thus the Anthroposophical Society cannot yet be a model institution; it remains a place of education. Do we not, however, need such places of schooling, in the wider context of mankind also, if we are to make progress towards a better future?

Whichever way we look at it, the Society is a necessity. It has to school itself and it has to provide the opportunity to be a place of education for mankind. The vital forces with which it has been imbued can achieve that if strong, capable and devoted people gather together within it who know that it is necessary to join together in order communally to serve mankind in the wider sense; that one must not isolate oneself for the sake of self-indulgence; who know that it would be ingratitude simply to accept passively the lifeline which has been thrown; who know that with it comes the obligation to pass it on to those others whose ship of life is in danger.

Much is said today about the difference between belief and knowledge. In particular, it is often asserted that anthroposophy, in view of what it has to say, must be regarded not as a science but as a matter of faith, as a religious belief. But basically, all the differences that are made in this way stem from the fact that people have very little insight into what has emerged as belief in the course of human development, and that they actually do not have much insight into what knowledge is.

All belief, everything that is connected with the word belief, actually goes back to very early times in human development. It goes back to those times when the breathing process played a much greater role in the life of man himself than is the case now. Man, with his present state of soul, does not really pay attention to his breathing process. He breathes in and breathes out, but he does not perceive any special experience in doing so.

The beliefs of older times have always pointed to the importance of breathing. One need only remember – as I pointed out a few days ago – that in the Old Testament the creation of man is associated with the breathing of breath, and one need only recall what I said about the striving that existed in ancient India, for example, to gain higher knowledge by regulating the breathing process in a certain way. This striving had meaning in that time when man paid more attention to his breathing. I have said that this striving took place in the time when man perceived around him not only the dead nature that we perceive today, but when man saw spiritual and soul activity in all things and facts of nature, when he perceived spiritual and soul activity in every spring, in every cloud, in the river and in the wind. During this time, the aim was to become more and more aware of one's breathing: to regulate inhaling, holding one's breath, and exhaling. And through this regulation of the breathing process, what one might call self-awareness was generated, the experience of the ego, of “I am”. But this was a time when the perception, the experience of breathing in general played a certain role in human life. From his ordinary consciousness, the person of the present cannot imagine much of what it was like. I would like to give you such an idea.

The breathing process is divided into inhaling, holding the breath and exhaling. This breathing process is initially regulated by human nature. The yoga scholars I have spoken of regulated it differently. Just as today, when someone studies, they develop a way of thinking that is not the thinking of everyday life, so in the times when breathing played a special role in life, a different breathing was developed than in ordinary life. But let us now consider not yoga breathing, the developed breathing, but the ordinary. I can best show you this schematically.

Let us assume that this is the human chest organism, then we can say: we distinguish the inhalation process, the breath-holding process – I will not draw that separately – and the exhalation process. When people in ancient times inhaled, they experienced it as if, with the inhalation, that is, with the inhaled air from the outside world, what was spiritual in the beings and facts of the outside world came in. So in what I have here color-coded red as the inhalation current, the person, let's say gnomes, nymphs, experienced everything that was spiritual and soulful in the surrounding nature. And as he exhaled (blue), as he sent the inhaled air outwards, these beings became invisible again in the exhalation. They were lost, so to speak, in the surrounding nature. You inhaled and knew: there is something spiritual-soul in nature outside, because you felt the effect of this spiritual-soul in the inhalation. You felt connected to the spiritual-soul of the outer nature. That had a certain intoxicating effect on people in those ancient times - but it is only comparatively speaking - in a certain way. He intoxicated himself with the spiritual soul of his surroundings. And by breathing out again, he sobered up. So that he lived in a state of intoxication and a state of sobering up. And in this intoxication and sobering up there was an interaction with the spiritual soul of the outside world. But there was something else as well. Man felt, by breathing in, by intoxicating himself, as it were, with the spiritual-soul, how the spiritual-soul beings quietly drew up into his head from the breathing current, how they filled him inwardly, how they united with his own physical being. So that what man felt there can be expressed something like this: I breathe in the spiritual and soul life of the environment. It fills my head. I feel it, I perceive it. Then the breath is held. And as he breathes out, the person would say: I give back my perception of the spiritual and soul life.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

But this had an intimate connection with life. Take just one very simple thing: here is chalk. If you take this chalk today, you look at it, you reach out, take it up. The people of the ancient epoch did not do that. We have the thought of looking at the chalk and then picking it up. This was not the case with ancient man, who looked at it and inhaled what was spiritually radiating from the chalk, exhaled, and only in the exhalation did he grasp the chalk, so that for him inhaling meant observing, exhaling meant being active. This was at a time when man actually always lived in a kind of rhythmic interaction with the environment. This rhythmic interaction has been preserved for later times, but without the living, observing consciousness of ancient times. Just imagine how, in our youth, threshing was still done by hand in the countryside: looking, beating, looking, beating, in rhythmic activity. This rhythmic activity corresponded to a certain breathing process.

Inhaling = observing

Exhaling = doing

As far as the later development of humanity is concerned, we can say that this experience of inhalation ceased to be perceived by the human being, and the human being perceived or perceives only that which goes up from breathing into his head. So in ancient times, the human being perceived how what was inhaled, which was intoxicating for him, continued into the head and connected there with the sense impressions. Later on, this was no longer the case. Later on, man loses consciousness of what is going on in his chest organism. He no longer perceives this upwelling of breathing because the sensory impressions become stronger. They extinguish what arises in the breath. When you see or hear today, the breathing process is included in the process of seeing and also in the process of hearing. In the ancient person breathing lived strongly in hearing and seeing, in the modern person seeing and hearing live so strongly that breathing is completely subdued. So that we can say, what was perceived by the ancient one in the breathing process in his inner being, no longer lives in the intoxicating, head-filling way that he said: Ah, the nymphs! Ah, the gnomes! Nymphs that whirl in the head, gnomes that hammer in the head, undines that surge in the head! Today, this hammering, surging, and whirling is drowned out by what comes from seeing and hearing and what fills the head today.

There was once a time when man perceived more strongly this upwelling of breathing into his head. This passed over into the time when man still perceived confusedly, when he still perceived something of the after-effects of the gnome-like hammering, the Undine-like surging, the nymph-like tumbling, when he still perceived something of the connection of these after-effects with the perceptions of sound, light and color. But then all that he still perceived of the breathing process was lost. And of those people who still had a trace of consciousness that breathing once introduced the spiritual-soul of the world into man, what now remained, what was established from sensory perception in connection with breathing, was called “Sophia”. But breathing was no longer perceived. So the spiritual content of breathing was killed, or rather, paralyzed by sensory perception.

This was particularly felt by the Greeks. The Greeks did not have the idea of such a science as we do today. If one had told the Greeks about a science as it is taught today at our universities, it would have seemed to them as if someone had continually pierced their brains with small pins. They would not have understood that it could give a person satisfaction. If they had had to take in science as we have it today, they would have said: That makes the brain sore, that wounds the brain, that stings. --- Because they still wanted to perceive something of that pleasant spreading of the intoxicating breath, into which, flowing in, the heard and the seen pours. So the Greeks did perceive an inner life in the head, an inner life such as I am describing to you now. And they called this inner life Sophia. And those who loved to develop this Sophia within themselves, who had a special inclination to devote themselves to this Sophia, called themselves philosophers. The word philosophy definitely points to an inner experience. The hideous, pedantic assimilation of philosophy, whereby one simply 'ochst' (as they say in student life) at philosophy, that familiarization with this science, was not known in Greece. But the inner experience of 'I love Sophia' is what is expressed in the word philosophy.

But just as the process of breathing that enters the body is taken up in the head by the sense perceptions, so what emanates as exhaled air is taken up by the rest of the body. In the limb-metabolism organism, just as sensory perceptions flow into the head through what is heard, just as what is seen flows into the head through what intoxicates the inhaled air, so too do physical feelings and experiences flow together with the exhaled air. The sobering effect of the exhaled air, the extinguishing of perception, flowed together with the physical feelings that were aroused while walking and working. Being active, doing, was linked to exhaling. And as man was active, as he was doing something, he felt, as it were, how the spiritual-soul left him. So that he felt when he did something, when he worked at something, as if he allowed the spiritual-soul to flow into the things. I take in the spiritual-soul: it intoxicates my head, it connects with what I have seen, with what I have heard. I do something, I breathe out. The spiritual-soul aspect goes away. It goes into what I hammer, it goes into what I grasp, it goes into everything I work. I release the spiritual-soul aspect from me. I transfer it, for example, by fizzling the milk, by doing something externally, I let the spiritual-soul aspect flow into things. That was the feeling, that was the sensation. So it was in the old days.

But this perception of the exhalation process, this perception of the sobering up, just stopped, and there was only a trace left in Greek times. In Greek times, people still felt something, as if, by being active, they were still giving something spiritual to things. But then everything that was there in the breathing process was dulled by the physical sensation, by the feeling of exertion, of fatigue in working. Just as the inhalation process was dulled in the head, so the exhalation process was dulled in the rest of the organism. This mental process of exhalation was paralyzed by the bodily sensation, that is, by the sensation of exertion, of becoming heated, and so on, by what lived in man so that he felt his own strength, which he applied by exerting himself, by doing something. He did not feel the breathing out process as fatigue in himself now, he felt a power effect in himself, he felt the body permeated with energy, with power.

This power that lived inside the human being was Pistis, faith, the feeling of the divine, the divine power that makes one work: Pistis, faith.

Sophia = the spiritual content of breathing, paralyzed by sensory perception

Pistis (faith) = the spiritual process of exhalation, paralyzed by the bodily sensation.

Thus wisdom and faith merged in man. Wisdom flowed to the head, faith lived in the whole of man. Wisdom was only the content of ideas. And faith was the power of this content of ideas. Both belonged together. Hence the only Gnostic writing that has survived from ancient times is the Pistis Sophia. So that in Sophia one had a rarefaction of inhalation, in faith a condensation of exhalation. Then wisdom became more rarefied still. And in the further rarefaction, wisdom became science. And then the inner power became more condensed. Man felt only his body: he lost consciousness of what faith, pistis, actually is. And so it came about that people, because they could no longer feel the connection, separated what was to arise subjectively from within as mere content of faith, so to speak, and what connects with external sense perception. First there was Sophia, then Scientia, which is a diluted Sophia. One could also say: originally Sophia was a real spiritual being that man felt as an inhabitant of his head. Today, all that is left of this spiritual being is the ghost. For science is the ghost of wisdom. This is something that should actually haunt the soul of today's human being like a kind of meditation, that science is the spectre of wisdom. And in the same way, on the other hand, faith — which is what it is usually called today; here one has not really grasped a particular difference in the words — faith as it is lived today is not the inwardly experienced faith of antiquity, pistis, but it is the subjective closely connected with egoism. It is the condensed faith of ancient times. In the faith that had not yet been condensed, people still sensed the objective divine within them. Today, faith only arises subjectively, as it were, rising like smoke from the body. So that one could say, just as science is the spectre of wisdom, so today's faith is the heavy residue of former faith, the lump of former faith.

These things must be held together, then one will no longer judge as superficially as many people do today, who say that anthroposophy is only a matter of faith. Such people do not know what they are talking about because they have never brought themselves to consciously perceive the whole connection between faith and wisdom, this inner experience of faith and wisdom, from the real history of mankind. Where today do we speak of history as we have to here? Where do we talk today about what the breathing process once was for man, how it represented a completely different experience than it is today? Where do we realize how abstract on the one hand and robustly material on the other that has become what was once a real spiritual-soul-like on the one hand and a real soul-bodily on the other?

When the development of faith had reached a certain point, it became necessary for humanity to include something very specific in this belief. In ancient times, man had the divine within the belief. He experienced the divine in the process of exhalation. But the process of exhalation was lost to his consciousness. He no longer had the consciousness that the divine passes out into things. Man needed a revival of the divine for his consciousness, and he received this revival through the fact that he now received an idea within himself that has no external reality on earth. It has no external reality on earth that the dead rise from the graves. But the Mystery of Golgotha has no real content for a person if he describes the course of Jesus' life until Jesus dies. After all, that is nothing special. That is why Jesus is no longer anything special for modern theology either. Because a person goes through some experiences and then dies, as modern theology presents the life of Jesus, that is nothing special. The mystery only begins with the resurrection, with the living life of the Christ being after the physical body has gone through death. And - that is also according to Paul's words - whoever does not take up this idea of the resurrection into his consciousness has not taken up anything of Christianity at all, which is why modern theology is actually only a Jesusology, actually no Christianity at all. Christianity needs such a concept that refers to a reality that does not take place on this earth as a direct perception of the senses, but that as a concept already lifts man up into the supersensible.

Through an inner experience, the old human being was lifted up into the supersensible. I have shown you in these days how the yoga student was led to the inner experience of being a baby. They experienced the first impressions of being a baby, that which shapes the human being in a plastic way. What one otherwise knows nothing about became conscious through the yoga exercises I have spoken to you about, but with it, at the same time, the whole prenatal life, or the life that lies before conception, when the human being's soul was in the spiritual world above before descending and taking on a physical body. Only a notion of this remained. This notion is also contained in the Gospels: Unless you become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. This saying refers to it, but in those days it no longer had any direct effect on life. This saying was, so to speak, a reminder that one could once place oneself back into the time of childhood and experience the Kingdoms of Heaven from which one descended through birth into physical existence. It is hardly the case that a person today, when he hears about the Kingdoms of Heaven from the Gospels or from some other ancient language, imagines something significant by it. He may think: Well, I have seen that here on earth – France, England and so on, they are divided into kingdoms. Whatever there is of kingdoms on earth is also there above, the kingdoms of heaven are there too. – Otherwise, people cannot really get a concrete idea of the kingdoms of heaven if they cannot imagine what is down there as being up there. I believe that in English, if I am not mistaken, they even say: the kingdoms of heaven. Yes, you don't get the idea of what is meant by the term “the kingdoms of heaven”, which has been modernized today. The gospel even usually says it in such a way that you can't even see what it actually means, it even says: the kingdom of God. In doing so, people hardly think of anything, but simply let a word resound. But in ancient times the heavens were exactly that which, when the earth is here (center), spread out as the sphere of the world (white, blue). And “kingdom” — what was that? Let us disregard all philology and take the observation to help here, which can be given by anthroposophical method itself. “Reich” = that which reaches out, encompasses, surrounds, that is the reaching, the sounding, the speaking, so that one must soar to the imagination: Through these heavens, for the one who learns to perceive, the spiritual-soul sounds through. He perceives not only the heavens, but the world-word that resonates and reaches through the heavens.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Those who cannot become like little children cannot perceive the word of the heavens, the word that speaks from the heavens everywhere. If earthly realms are called “realms” and earthly rulers “rulers of these realms,” then one would have to have the secret idea that these rulers could speak or sing so loudly that their voice would resound throughout their entire realm. In older, legendary conceptions, there is also something like a resounding of the realm. And this was symbolically expressed by the fact that laws were given which were proclaimed with trumpets to the quarters of heaven, whereby the kingdom became a reality. The kingdom was not the plane on which men dwelt, but the kingdom was that which the trumpet-angels carried out into the wide spaces as the content of the laws.

But it was a memory. Another concept had to come that was more related to the will – what preceded related to the idea, to the thought – to that which accompanies a person when he passes through the gate of death. The will remains as his energy development. This goes with him through the gate of death with the world thought content. The human will, filled with world thoughts, enters with him into the spiritual worlds when the human being dies. And it was to this will that the new idea of the resurrected Christ turned, of the one who lives even if he has died in an earthly way. This was the strong, powerful idea that did not merely recall childhood, that pointed to death, and that appealed to what passes through the portal of death with man. Thus we find the irruption of the Christ idea, the whole Christ impulse, thoroughly grounded in the evolution of mankind itself.

Now, of course, one can say: Even today there are still many people on earth who know nothing of the Christ. Those people who know about him today usually know it badly, but they learn something about the Christ, even if, according to the sense of today's materialism, they do not have the correct idea of the Christ, the feeling for the Christ that they have within them. But there are many people on earth who live in other, older forms of religion. And that is where the big question arises, which I already hinted at yesterday. I said that the Mystery of Golgotha is a fact. The Christ died for all people. The Christ Impulse has become a power for the whole earth. In this objective sense, apart from consciousness, the Christ is there for Jews, pagans, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on. He is there. Since the Mystery of Golgotha, He has been alive in the forces of the evolution of humanity on Earth. But there is a difference between whether people live within a Christian sphere or a non-Christian one. The only way to study the difference that exists between the life that a person develops between death and a new birth and life on earth is to see the connection. If a person has passed through death and was a Buddhist or Hindu in life, say, if he has not absorbed any idea, any feeling of Christ, then he takes with him for the universe behind death what a person can experience here on earth from the external environment, from nature. One would know nothing of nature in the heavens if man did not take with him the knowledge of the earth when he enters the realms of the heavens through death. Man carries what he takes in here on earth over into the realm of the supersensible by passing through death, for it is only through this that the supersensible worlds have any knowledge at all of the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal on earth. But the one who knows something of Christ, who can have the idea that Christ lives in him, who experiences the Pauline word, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” now carries into the supersensible worlds not only the knowledge of the earth, but the knowledge of the earthly human being. Thus both are carried into them by the modern human being as well. Christians carry into the supersensible world the knowledge of the earthly human being, of the bodily earthly form of the human being. The Hindus, the Buddhists, and so on, carry into the heavens the knowledge of what is around the human being. Even today, human beings complement each other in what they contribute to the supersensible worlds by passing through death. Naturally it becomes more and more necessary that all secrets which man can experience in himself, through himself, are carried into the heavens, so that man is more and more permeated by Christianity. But above all it is important that what man experiences here on earth only as a human being with other human beings is carried through death by means of Christianity.

Consider that this is actually an extraordinarily important truth, a very essential truth. Take, for example, the Hindu or the Buddhist. What he experiences in looking at the world, in feeling the world, in sensing the world, what he experiences in thoughts about minerals, in feelings about plants, in feelings about animals, he carries all this through the gate of death and enriches the knowledge of the gods in the supersensible world with what he experiences. What the Christian experiences by entering into a social relationship with his fellow human beings, by developing social connections, that is, what one can only experience as a human being among other human beings, what is experienced in human brotherhood on earth, that is what the Christian carries with him through the gate of death. One would like to say: The Buddhist carries the beauty of the world through the gate of death, the Christian carries kindness through the gate of death. They complement each other. But the progress of Christianity consists in the fact that precisely the social earthly conditions acquire a significance for the heavenly worlds.

The Oriental tyrants might decapitate as many people as they liked, but it had little effect on the worlds beyond. It only affected them to the extent that the person received external impressions as a result: the external impressions of horror and so on were carried through the gate of death. The unkindness between people that is developing today as a result of miserable social conditions, and which is spreading across the earth as a false socialism due to a misunderstanding of social interrelationships, also has a great significance for the supersensible worlds that people enter through the gateway of death. And when today, under the flag of the realization of socialism in the east of Europe, a terrible, destructive force is being developed, then what is experienced there is also carried into the beyond as a terrible result. And when unloving conditions develop among people in the age of materialism, this is carried into the transcendental worlds through the portal of death, to the disgust of the divine spiritual worlds.

Through Christianity, man should come to bear the results of the evolution of the earth, which arise through him, into the supersensible worlds as well. What man himself develops on earth, he becomes capable of carrying into the spiritual worlds through the thought of the Risen Christ, of a living being who has gone through death and yet lives.

This is why even those people who do not want their social deeds to be carried by death today have such a horror of recognizing the Risen Christ.

The ancients were allowed to become intoxicated by the breath. The moderns are not allowed to become intoxicated by words. Words must not be intoxicating for them, but must be held in the sense of Sophia, penetrating man with wisdom.

These are the things through which anthroposophy also points to what is important in social relationships today. And it wants to express something of this in its name, this anthroposophy, anthroposophia, which is also a wisdom. During the Greek period, the human being was taken for granted. Sophia was already a human wisdom because the human being was still full of light and wisdom. Today, when one says Sophia, people only think of the ghost of Sophia, of science. Therefore, one must appeal to the human being one is calling upon, to the Anthropos: Anthroposophia. One must point out that this is something that comes from the human being, that shines out of the human being, that blossoms out of the best forces of the human being. One must point this out. But it also makes anthroposophy something that enlivens human existence on earth. For it is something that is experienced by man in a more spiritual, but no less concrete way than the ancient Sophia was experienced, and which at the same time is meant to bring about that which was then in the whole human being, the content of faith, pistis. Anthroposophy is not a belief, but a real body of knowledge, but one that gives people a strength that in earlier times was contained only in faith.

On the first anniversary of Rudolf Steiner's death, on 30 March 1926, Marie Steiner-von Sivers, who had not only taken a special position as co-founder and co-leader of the Erkenntniskultischer Arbeitskreis (a working group within the General Anthroposophical Society), but also through her inner competence in the same, had written¹ a memorial service with a symbolic-cultic character was held in the context of the first class of the School of Spiritual Science. On the stage of the carpentry hall at the Goetheanum, where all events in Dornach were held at the time, she had three altars set up, at the eastern altar of which she had always served at the side of Rudolf Steiner. The following drafts of her address express what Rudolf Steiner's life's work meant to her, namely, to have experienced the legend of the temple.

Marie Steiner

We have gathered here in memory of the one who left this earth a year ago, who worked for us here in this place, among us, who gave us guidelines for our work, the service at the altars of wisdom, beauty and strength, as a sign of which we have placed these altars, which symbolize his work for us. We have placed these tools on the altars as a symbol of his creative work. With them he shaped the new forms in the wood. They are his compass and his straightedge, his trowel and his hammer. They are still imbued with the fire of his hands, they speak to us and demand action.

In his memory and in memory of what we have to do, we light these candles:

1. The light that he has kindled in our hearts, may it shine brightly and become wisdom.

2. It may rise in purity to him, as pure as he has sunk it into our souls.

3. It strengthens us in our active work, so that our actions serve his spirit, our spirit grows stronger in its self-transcendence through Christ.

We stand in this room of mourning, remembering the great man who has left us. The three altars stand before us as a sign and seal of his work. The leader who stood at the helm of this turning point for humanity served at these altars continually. He was allowed to bring them out of the depths of the temple, where they had stood since the beginning of mystery religions, and hand them over to humanity. He gave them to us in images and in art, by incorporating them into his mystery dramas, at the stages of the spiritual student's progress. He gave them to us in His Word by placing at the center of His activity the ideals of wisdom, beauty and strength, constantly presenting them to our minds in their individual expression and in their interaction. He allowed the two most important poetical personalities among His disciples to present the legend to the world in words and pictures. You know them from their works.² We can only remember them insofar as they have been given to humanity artistically. And with the hammer blow with which Rudolf Steiner established the connection to eternal spiritual service at the laying of the foundation stone, he is now commemorated here.³ We take up the thread of his work and place ourselves under his protection to serve the powers to which he led us in his service.

Why was Rudolf Steiner allowed to do this, which signifies a turning point for humanity, even within esotericism, a new phase and a new path?

When the great is very close to us, we do not see it, the mountain wall towers above us, it crushes one, it hinders the view of the other. We do not see beyond it, we only feel: this is great.

It takes a long time before we reach the summit of the mountain and take in the full extent of the view; but now and then, during the arduous ascent, a glimpse of the big picture presents itself, and we grasp parts of the enormous context.

Our vision was made easy; we were able to experience it, but perhaps the light was too dazzling for us to see clearly.

We experienced the construction, we saw Rudolf Steiner raise his hammer to work and how his students flocked to serve the work; the temple had risen, noble and radiant, from the power of its spirit and the skill of its hands, and we were allowed to learn and work. But we too, in addition to our weaknesses and imperfections, had among us the three evil companions, who went as far as betrayal and a will to destroy. The seed of hatred bore its fruit. The building was in flames, just as the Sea of Steel was once in flames. Rudolf Steiner embodied the legend; he realized it in physical action; he became the legend. He proclaimed it to humanity through his life.

And Rudolf Steiner threw himself into the searing fire of the center. We were this searing fire for him, we, the children of Cain. He took our karma upon himself so that we would be freer to serve. But our karma was too hard and too heavy and broke his physical strength almost immediately after he had entered into the covenant. His last year of life was a mighty expiration of his spirit...

We are gathered here today because we are aware that we have experienced a moment in world history that was a turning point, not just a turning point. The spirit descended in currents never before imagined through a person who had made himself capable of receiving the spirit in mind, soul, and body. Today we want to do nothing else but let this spirit prevail among us in the words he left us, as a source of life and strength, the words and the music inspired by him in the space surrounded by black, which is the physical color of the spirit, at the three altars whose significance is known to you through the mystery plays, by the light of the three candles that are the chandeliers of these altars.

Our thoughts turn to the one who left us a year ago today, who poured his wisdom into our hearts with inexhaustible, never-ending gentleness and kindness, whose love embraced and carried the souls of us all, whose strength lifted our earth out of its Ahrimanic material snares, in which it threatened to suffocate, and carried it towards the spirit, on the wings of the ego-transcendence he lived and taught. “Christ in me” - that was his life, his work and his word.

In his words he created a structure of indestructible strength, clarity and beauty. May our thoughts, feelings and will strive to keep this word alive among us!

We have laid down on the altars of wisdom, beauty and strength, before which he has served, the tools with which he has worked, which are still imbued with the warming fire of his hands, which have grasped the future. With them he worked into the material until it became a spiritual revelation, thus opening up to us the most hidden laws of nature, which push towards revelation through the beautiful appearance. These are his compass, his measuring rod, his trowel, his hammer, his mallet, with which he created the forms of his sculpture: (3 hammer blows: long short short; long short short; long short short).

In his spirit we gather today, asking that he cover our weaknesses and our inadequacies with the splendor of his being. In his name we call upon the archangel, whose service he has consecrated to us, seeking to recognize the guardian who stands before the gate of the temple to the other realm: (3 hammer blows: long short short; long short short; long short short). We try to approach this Guardian in the sign of his love, which, emanating full of wisdom, became for us the bestowing virtue of his word, which, being transformed into action, became for us the pointing, active sword of Michael, his emanating life, which, in creating knowledge, led us back to our original state, and, overcoming space and time, became for us the future. We call upon them, the existing, active, ruling powers: He who created them anew: Anthroposophia, Him whom He bids us follow: Michael The all-embracing source that bears the future within itself: Jahveh-Adonai

Life – Love – Logos
Christ in me

Ex deo nascimur / In Christo morimur / Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus

(3 hammer blows: long short short; long short short; long short short).

• 1. A participant reported a related statement by Rudolf Steiner in the context of the work of the Knowledge Cult as follows: “At the top, as head of the school and as mediator of spiritual realities, was Rudolf Steiner; at his side as comrade and colleague was Marie von Sivers. ... During a higher-level activity, at which only a small number of participants were allowed to be present, we were informed by Rudolf Steiner himself that Marie von Sivers' collaboration was to be taken in a fully legitimate sense - not symbolically as with the rest of us. And in such a way that reference was made to a reality that goes beyond birth and death.” Adolf Arenson in a circular letter to the members of the Anthroposophical Society, October 1926.
• 2. Albert Steffen's drama “Hieram and Solomon” and the poetry of Kurt Piper, see “Further Reading” on page 498.
• 3. What is meant is the laying of the foundation stone for the education of the General Anthroposophical Society at Christmas 1923. Adolf Arenson reports: “Rudolf Steiner opened the Christmas Conference not with words but with symbolic blows, and in so doing he brought the law of continuity into effect. For everyone who belonged to the institution that Rudolf Steiner describes in the 36th chapter of his 'Life Course' said these blows: “The new that I want to give you, I hereby tie to the existing earlier, true to the law of esotericism. ... It hardly needs to be emphasized that this tying to the earlier includes the possibility of bringing a completely new, even a leaping new, as indeed the flower ties to the formation of leaves in the plant and yet is a completely new one.” Letter from Adolf Arenson to Albert Steffen, December 24, 1926.

A lecture given during the first general meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in Berlin

My dear theosophical friends! When in the year 1902, we were founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, there were present, as most of our theosophical friends now assembled know, Annie Besant and other members of the Theosophical Society at that date – members who had been so for some time. Whilst the work of organization and the lectures were going on, I was obliged to be absent for a short time for a particular lecture of a course which I was at that time – more than ten years ago – delivering to an audience in no way belonging to the theosophical movement, and the members of which have, for the most part, not joined it. Side by side, so to say with the founding of the theosophical movement in Germany, I had during these days to deliver a particular lecture to a circle outside it; and because the course was a kind of beginning, I had used, in order to describe what I wished to say in it, a word which seemed to express this still better than the word ‘Theosophy’ – to be more in keeping with the whole circumstances and culture of our time. Thus, whilst we were founding the German Section, I said in my private lecture that what I had to impart could best be designated by the word ‘Anthroposophy’. This comes into my memory at the present moment, when all of us here assembled are going apart, and alongside of that which – justly of course – calls itself Theosophy are obliged to choose another name for our work, in the first place as an outer designation, but which at the same time may significantly express our aims, for we choose the name ‘Anthroposophy’.

If through spiritual contemplation we have gained a little insight into the inner spiritual connection of things – a connection in which necessity is often present, even if to outer observation it appears to be a matter of mere ‘chance’ – feeling may perhaps be allowed to wander back to the transition I was then obliged to make from the business of founding the German Section to my anthroposophical lecture. This may be specially permissible today when we have before us the Anthroposophical Society as a movement going apart from the Theosophical Society. In spite of the new name no change will take place with regard to what has constituted the spirit of our work, ever since that time. Our work will go on in the same spirit, for we have not to do with a change of cause, but only with a change of name, which has become a necessity for us. But perhaps the name is for all that rather suitable to our cause, and the mention of feeling with regard to the fact of ten years ago, may remind us that the new name may really suit us very well. The spirit of our work – will remain the same. It is really that which at bottom we must call the essence of our cause. This spirit of our work is also that which claims our best powers as human beings, so far as we feel ourselves urged to belong to this spiritual movement of ours. I say, “ours best power as human beings” because people at the present time are not yet very easily inclined to accept that which – be it as Theosophy or Anthroposophy – has to be introduced into the spiritual and mental life of progressive humanity.

We may say “has to be introduced” for the reason that one who knows the conditions of the progressive spiritual life of humanity, gains from the perception of them, the knowledge that this theosophical or anthroposophical spirit is necessary to healthy spiritual and mental life. But it is difficult to bring into men’s minds, in let us say a plain dry way, what the important point is. It is difficult and we can understand why. For people who come straight from the life of the present time, in which all their habits of thought are deeply connected with a more materialistic view of things, will at first naturally find it very difficult to feel themselves at home with the way in which the problems of the universe are grappled with by what may be called the theosophical or anthroposophical spirit. But it has always been the case that the majority of people have in a certain sense followed individuals who make themselves, in a very special way, vehicles of spiritual life. It is true the most various gradations are to be found within the conception of the world that now prevails; but one fact certainly stands out as the result of observing these ideas – that a large proportion of contemporary humanity follows – even when it does so unconsciously – on the one hand certain ideas engendered by the development of natural science in the last few centuries, or on the other hand a residuum of certain philosophical ideas. And on both sides – it may be called pride or may appear as something else – people think that there is something ‘certain’, something that seems to be built on good solid foundations, contained in what natural science has offered, or, if another kind of belief has been chosen, in what this or that philosophical school has imparted.

In what flows from the anthroposophical or theosophical spirit, people are apt to find something more or less uncertain, wavering – something which cannot be proved. In this connection the most various experiences may be made. For instance, it is quite a common experience that a theosophical or anthroposophical lecture may be held somewhere on a given subject. Let us suppose the very propitious case (which is comparatively rare) of a scientific or philosophical professor listening to the lecture. It might very easily happen that after listening to it he formed an opinion. In by far the greatest number of cases he would certainly believe that it was a well founded, solid opinion, indeed to a certain degree an opinion which was a matter of course. Now in other fields of mental life it is certainly not possible, after hearing a lecture of one hour on a subject, to be able to form an opinion about that subject. But in relation to what theosophy or anthroposophy has to offer, people are very apt to arrive at such a swift judgment, which deviates from all the ordinary usages of life. That is to say, they will feel they are entitled to such an opinion after a monologue addressed to themselves, perhaps unconsciously, of this kind, “You are really a very able fellow. All your life you have been striving to assimilate philosophical – or scientific – conceptions; therefore you are qualified to form an opinion about questions in general, and you have now heard what the man who was standing there, knows.” And then this listener (it is a psychological fact, and one who can observe life knows it to be so) makes a comparison and arrives at the conclusion, “It is really fine, the amount you know, and the little he knows.”

He actually forms an opinion, after a lecture of an hour’s length, not about what the lecturer knows, but very frequently about what the listener thinks he does not know, because it was not mentioned in the hour’s lecture. Innumerable objections would come to nothing, if this unconscious opinion were not formed. In the abstract, theoretically, it might seem quite absurd to say anything as foolish as I have just said – foolish not as an opinion, but as a fact. Yet although people do not know it, the fact is a very widely spread one with regard to what proceeds from theosophy or anthroposophy. In our time there is as yet little desire really to find out that what comes before the public as theosophy or anthroposophy, at least as far as it is described here, has nothing to fear from accurate, conscientious examination by all the learning of the age; but has everything to fear from science which is really only one-third science – I will not even say one-third – one-eighth, one-tenth, one-twelfth, and perhaps not even that. But it will take time before mankind is induced to judge that which is as wide as the world itself, by the knowledge which has been gained outwardly on the physical plane. In the course of time, it will be seen that the more it is tested with all the scientific means possible and by every individual science, the more fully will true theosophy, true anthroposophy be corroborated. And the fact will also be corroborated that anthroposophy comes into the world, not in any arbitrary way, but from the necessity of the historical consciousness.

One who really wishes to serve the progressive evolution of humanity, must draw what he has to give from the sources from which the progressive life of mankind itself flows. He may not follow an ideal arbitrarily set up, and steer for it just because he likes it; but in any given period, he must follow the ideal of which he can say, “It belongs especially to this time.” The essence of Anthroposophy is intimately bound up with the nature of our time; of course not with that of our immediate little present, but with the whole age in which we live. The next four lectures,¹ and all the lectures which I have to deliver in the next few days, will really deal with the ‘essence of Anthroposophy’. Everything which I shall have to say about the nature of the Eastern and Western Mysteries, will be an amplification of ‘essence of Anthroposophy’. At the present time I will point out the character of this ‘essence’, by speaking of the necessity through which Anthroposophy has to be established in our time. But once again I do not wish to start from definitions or abstractions, but from facts, and first of all from a very particular fact. I wish to start from the fact of a poem, once – at first I will only say ‘once’ – written by a poet. I will read this poem to you, at first only a few passages, so that I may lay stress on the point I wish to make.

The god of love speaks softly to my inmost heart
In deep words of yearning,
He speaks of marvellous things,
Which throw my thoughts into a whirl;
So flattering is everything he says.
And as I hearken and delude myself,
I strive to repeat what I hear;
It is but lost labour.
It is beyond my power.

After the poet has enlarged further on the difficulty of expressing what the god of love says to him, he describes the being he loves in the following words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

It appears to be quite obvious that the poet was writing a love-poem. And it is quite certain that if this poem were to be published somewhere anonymously now—it might easily be a modern poem by one of the better poets—people would say. “What a pearl he must have found, to describe his beloved in such wonderful verses”. For the beloved one might well congratulate herself on being addressed in the words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

The poem was not written in our time. If it had been and a critic came upon it, he would say: “How deeply felt is this direct, concrete living relation. How can a man, who writes poems as only the most modern poets can when they sing from the depths of their souls, how can such a man be able to say something in which no mere abstraction, but a direct, concrete presentment of the beloved being speaks to us, till she becomes almost a palpable reality.”

A modern critic would perhaps say this. But the poem did not originate in our time, it was written by Dante.²

Now a modern critic who takes it up will perhaps say: “The poem must have been written by Dante when he was passionately in love with Beatrice (or someone else), and here we have another example of the way in which a great personality enters into the life of actuality urged by direct feeling, far removed from all intellectual conceptions and ideas.”

Perhaps there might even be a modern critic who would say: “People should learn from Dante how it is possible to rise to the highest celestial spheres, as in the Divine Comedy, and nevertheless be able to feel such a direct living connection between one human being and another.” It seems a pity that Dante has himself given the explanation of this poem, and expressly says who the woman is of whom he writes the beautiful words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

Dante has told us – and I think no modern critic will deny that he knew what he wanted to say – that the ‘beloved one’, with whom he was in such direct personal relations, was none other than Philosophy.

And Dante himself says that when he speaks of her eyes, that what they say is no untruth, he means by them the evidence for truth; and by the ‘smile’, he means the art of expressing what truth communicates to the soul; and by ‘love’ or ‘amor’, he means scientific study, the love of truth. And he expressly says that when the beloved personality, Beatrice, was taken away from him and he was obliged to forego a personal relation, the woman Philosophy drew near his soul, full of compassion, and more human than anything else that is human. And of this woman Philosophy he could use these words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

—feeling in the depths of his soul that the eyes represent the evidence for truth, the smile is that which imparts truth to the soul, and love is scientific study.

One thing is obviously impossible in the present day. It is not possible that a modern poet should quite honestly and truly address philosophy in such directly human language. For if he did so, a critic would soon seize him by the collar and say. “You are giving us pedantic allegories.” Even Goethe had to endure having his allegories in the second part of Faust taken in very bad part in many quarters. People who do not know how times change, and that our souls grow into them with ever fresh vitality have no idea that Dante was just one of those who were able to feel as concrete, passionate, personal a relation, directly of a soul-nature, towards the lady Philosophy as a modern man can only feel towards a lady of flesh and blood. In this respect, Dante’s times are over, for the woman Philosophy no longer approaches the modern soul as a being of like nature with itself, as a being of flesh and blood, as Dante approached the lady Philosophy. Or would the whole honest truth be expressed (exceptions are of course out of the reckoning), if it were said today, deliberately that philosophy was something going about like a being of flesh and blood, to which such a relation was possible that its expression could really not be distinguished from ardent words of love addressed to a being of flesh and blood? One who enters into the whole relation in which Dante stood to philosophy, will know that that relation was a concrete one, such an one is only imagined nowadays as existing between man and woman.

Philosophy in the age of Dante appears as a being whom Dante says he loves. If we look round a little, we certainly find the word ‘philosophy’ coming to the surface of the mental and spiritual life of the Greeks, but we do not find there what we now call definitions or representations of philosophy. When the Greeks represent something, it is Sophia not Philosophia. And they represent her in such a way, that we feel her to be literally a living being. We feel the Sophia to be as literally a living being as Dante feels philosophy to be. But we feel her everywhere in such a way – and I ask you to go through the descriptions which are still existing – that we, so to say, feel her as an elemental force, as a being who acts, a being who interposes in existence through action. Then from about the fifth century after the foundation of Christianity onwards, we find that Philosophia begins to be represented, at first described by poets in the most various guises, as a nurse, as a benefactress, as a guide, and so on. Then somewhat later painters etc. begin to represent her, and then we may go on to the time called, the age of scholasticism in which many a philosopher of the Middle Ages, really felt it to be a directly human relation when he was aware of the fair and lofty lady Philosophia actually approaching him from the clouds; and many a philosopher of the Middle Ages would have been able to send just the same kind of deep and ardent feelings to the lady Philosophia floating towards him on clouds, as the feelings of which we have just heard from Dante. And one who is able to feel such things even finds a direct connection between the Sistine Madonna, floating on the clouds, and the exalted lady, Philosophia.

I have often described how in very ancient periods of human development, the spiritual conditions of the universe were still perceptible to the normal human faculty of cognition. I have tried to describe how there was a primeval clairvoyance, how in primeval times all normally developed people were able, owing to natural conditions, to look into the spiritual world. Slowly and gradually that primitive clairvoyance became lost to human evolution, and our present conditions of knowledge took their place. This happened by slow degrees, and the conditions in which we are now living – which as it were represent a temporary very deep entanglement in the material kind of perception – also come by slow degrees. For such a spirit as Dante, as we gather from the description he gives in the Divine Comedy, it was still possible to experience the last remnants of a direct relation of spiritual worlds – to experience them as it were in a natural way. To a man of the present day it is mere foolish nonsense to except him to believe that he might first, like Dante, be in love with a Beatrice, and might afterwards be involved in a second love-affair with Philosophy, and that these two were beings of quite similar nature, the Beatrice of flesh and blood, and Philosophy.

It is true I have heard that it was said that Kant was once in love, and someone became jealous because he loved Metaphysics, and asked “Meta what?” – but it is certainly difficult to introduce into the modern life of the spirit enough understanding to enable people to feel Dante’s Beatrice and Philosophy as equally real and actual. Why is this? Just because the direct connection of the human soul with the spiritual world has gradually passed over into our present condition. Those who have often heard me speak, know how highly I estimate the philosophy of the nineteenth century; but I will not even mention it as possible, that anyone could pour forth his feelings about Hegel’s Logic in the words:

At the sight of her,
Breezes from Paradise seem gently to fan me.
Love itself gives her that smile,
And what her eyes say is no lie.

I think it would be difficult to say this about Hegel’s Logic. It would even be difficult, although more possible, with regard to the intellectual manner in which Schopenhauer contemplates the world. It would certainly be easier in this case, but even then it would still be difficult to gain any concrete idea or feeling that philosophy approaches man as a concrete being in the way in which Dante here speaks of it. Times have changed. For Dante, life within the philosophic element, within the spiritual world, was a direct personal relation – as personal as any other which has to do with what is today the actual or material. And strange though it seems, because Dante’s time is not very far removed from our own, it is nevertheless true, that for one who is able to observe the spiritual life of humanity, it follows quite as a matter of course for him to say: “People are trying nowadays to know the world; but when they assume that all that man is, has remained the same throughout the ages, their outlook does not really extend much further than the end of their noses.” For even as late as Dante’s time, life in general, the whole relation of the human soul to spiritual world, was different. And if any philosopher is of opinion that the relation which he may have with the spiritual world through Hegel’s or Schopenhauer’s philosophy, is the only possible one, it means nothing more than that a man may still be really very ignorant.

Now let us consider what we have been describing – namely, that on the transition from the Graeco-Roman civilisation to our fifth period, that part of the collective being of man which we call the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, which was specially developed during the Graeco-Roman period, was evolved on into the self-conscious soul, during the development which has been going on up to the present. How then in this concrete case of philosophy does the transition from the Graeco-Roman to our modern period come before us – i.e., the transition from the period of the intellectual soul to that of the self-conscious soul? It appears in such a form that we clearly understand that during the development of the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, man obviously still stands in such a relation to the spiritual worlds connected with his origin, that a certain line of separation is still drawn between him and those spiritual worlds. Thus the Greek confronted his Sophia, i.e. pure wisdom, as if she were a being so to say standing in a particular place and he facing her. Two beings, Sophia and the Greek, facing each other, just as if she were quite an objective entity which he can look at, with all the objectivity of the Greek way of seeing things. But because he was still living in the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, he has to bring into expression the directly personal relation of his consciousness to that objective entity. This has to take place in order to prepare the way gradually for a new epoch, that of the self-conscious soul.

How will the self-conscious soul confront Sophia? In such a way that it brings the ego into a direct relation with Sophia, and expresses, not so much the objective being of Sophia, as the position of the ego in relation to the self-conscious soul, to this Sophia. “I love Sophia” was the natural feeling of an age which still had to confront the concrete being designated as Philosophy; but yet was the age which was preparing the way for the self-conscious soul, and which, out of the relation of the ego to the self-conscious soul, on which the greatest value had to be placed, was working towards representing Sophia as simply as everything else was represented. It was so natural that the age which represented the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, and which was preparing the self-conscious soul, should bring into expression the relation to philosophy. And because things are expressed only by slow degrees, they were prepared during the Graeco-Roman period. But we also see this relation of man to Philosophia developed externally up to a certain point, when we have before us pictorial representations of philosophy floating down on clouds, and later, in Philosophia’s expression (even if she bears another name), a look showing kindly feeling, once again expressing the relation to the self-conscious soul.

It is the plain truth that it was from a quite human personal relation, like that of a man to a woman, that the relation of man to philosophy started in the age when philosophy directly laid hold of the whole spiritual life of progressive human evolution. The relation has cooled: I must ask you not to take the words superficially, but to seek for the meaning behind what I am going to say. The relation has indeed cooled – sometimes it has grown icy cold. For if we take up many a book on philosophy at the present day, we can really say that the relation which was so ardent [passionate] in the days when people looked upon philosophy as a personal being, has grown quite cool, even in the case of those who are able to struggle through to the finest possible relation to philosophy. Philosophy is no longer the woman, as she was to Dante and other who lived in his times. Philosophy nowadays comes before us in a shape that we may say: “The very form in which it confronts us in the nineteenth century in its highest development, as a philosophy of ideas, conceptions, objects, shows us that part in the spiritual development of humanity has been played out.”

In reality it is deeply symbolic when we take up Hegel’s philosophy, especially the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and find as the last thing in this nineteenth-century book, a statement of the way in which philosophy interprets itself. It has understood everything else; finally, it grasps itself. What is there left for it to understand now? It is the symptomatic expression of the fact that philosophy has come to an end, even if there are still many questions to be answered since Hegel’s days. A thorough-going thinker, Richard Wahle,³ has brought this forward in his book, The Sum-Total of Philosophy and Its Ends, and has very ably worked out the thesis that everything achieved by philosophy may be divided up amongst the various separate departments of physiology, biology, aesthetics, etc., and that when this is done, there is nothing left of philosophy. It is true that such books overshoot the mark but they contain a deep truth, i.e., that certain spiritual movements, have their day and period, and that, just as a day has its morning and evening, they have their morning and evening in the history of human evolution.

We know that we are living in an age when the Spirit-Self is being prepared, that although we are still deeply involved in the development of the self-conscious soul, the evolution of the Spirit-Self is preparing. We are living in the period of the self-conscious soul, and looking towards the preparation of the age of the Spirit-Self, in much the same way as the Greek lived in the epoch of the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, and looked towards the dawning of the self-conscious soul. And just as the Greek founded philosophy, which in spite of Paul Deussen⁴ and others first existed in Greeks, just as the Greek founded it during the unfolding of the intellectual soul, or soul of the higher feelings, when man was still directly experiencing the lingering influence of the objective Sophia, just as philosophy then arose and developed in such a way that Dante could look upon it as a real concrete, actual being, who brought him consolation after Beatrice had been torn from him by death, so we are living now in the midst of the age of the self-conscious soul, are looking for the dawn of the age of the Spirit-Self, and know that something is once more becoming objective to man, which however is carrying forward through the coming times that which man has won while passing through the epoch of the self-conscious soul.

What is it that has to be evolved? What has to come to development is the presence of a new Sophia. But man has learnt to relate this Sophia to his self-conscious soul, and to experience her as directly related to man’s being. This is taking place during the age of the self-conscious soul. Thereby this Sophia has become the being who directly enlightens human beings. After she has entered into man, she must go outside him taking with her his being, and representing it to him objectively once more. In this way did Sophia once enter the human soul and arrive at the point of being so intimately bound up with it that a beautiful love-poem, like that of Dante’s could be made about her; Sophia will again become objective, but she will take with her that which man is, and represent herself objectively in this form – now not merely as Sophia, but as Anthroposophia – as the Sophia who, after passing through the human soul, through the being of man, henceforth bears that being within her, and thus stands before enlightened man as once the objective being Sophia stood before the Greeks. This is the progress of the history of human evolution in relation to the spiritual facts under consideration.

And now I leave it to all those, who wish to examine the matter very minutely, to see how it may also be shown in detail from the destiny of Sophia, Philosophia and Anthroposophia, how humanity evolves progressively through the soul principles which we designate the intellectual soul (the soul of the higher feelings), the self-conscious soul and the Spirit-Self. People will learn how deeply established in the collective being of man is that which we have in view through our Anthroposophy. What we receive through anthroposophy is the essence of ourselves, which first floated towards man in the form of a celestial goddess with whom he was able to come into relation which lived on as Sophia and Philosophia, and which man will again bring forth out of himself, putting it before him as the fruit of true self-knowledge in Anthroposophy. We can wait patiently till the world is willing to prove how deeply founded down to the smallest details is what we have to say.

For it is the essence of Theosophy or Anthroposophy that its own being consists of what is man’s being, and the nature of its efficacy is that man receives and discovers from Theosophy or Anthroposophy what he himself is, and has to put it before himself because he must exercise self-knowledge.

• 1. The Mysteries of the East and of Christianity, Berlin, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th February 1913 [PC]
• 2. Poem number 61 in Dante’s Rime {note from the book Isis Mary Sophia}
• 3. Richard Wahle (1857-1935) was professor of philosophy at the Universities of Czernowitz (in Western Ukraine) and Vienna.
• 4. Paul Jakob Deussen (1845-1919) was a German professor of philosophy at University of Kiel and academic researcher of the history and cultures, languages, and literature of the Indian subcontinent.

Today we will have to reach some kind of conclusion in our deliberations. Clearly that will have to include drawing the consequences which arise for the future action of the Anthroposophical Society. In order to gain a better understanding of what this action might be, let us take another look at the way anthroposophy emerged in modern civilization.

From the reflections of the last eight days, you will have realized how an interest in anthroposophy was at first to be found in those circles where the impulse for a deeper spiritual understanding was already present. This impulse came from all kinds of directions. In our context, however, it was only necessary to look at the way homeless souls were motivated by the material which Blavatsky presented to the present age in the form of what might be called a riddle.

But if the Anthroposophical Society can be traced back to this impulse, it should, on the other hand, also have become clear that this material was not central to anthroposophy itself. For anthroposophy as such relies on quite different sources. If you go back to my early writings, Christianity As Mystical Fact and Eleven European Mystics, you will see that they are not based in any way on material which came from Blavatsky or from that direction in general, save for the forms of expression which were chosen to ensure that they were understood.

Anthroposophy goes back directly to the subject matter which is dealt with in philosophical terms in my The Philosophy of Freedom, as well as in my writings on Goethe of the 1880s.¹ If you examine that material, you will see that its essential point is that human beings are connected with a spiritual world in the most profound part of their psyche. If they therefore penetrate deeply enough, they will encounter something to which the natural sciences in their present form have no access, something which can only be seen as belonging directly to a spiritual world order.

Indeed, it should be recognized that it is almost inevitable that turns of phrase sometimes have to be used which might sound paradoxical, given the immense spiritual confusion of language which our modern civilization has produced. Thus it can be seen from my writings on Goethe² that it is necessary to modify our concept of love, if we are to progress from observation of the world to observation of the divine-spiritual. I indicated that the Godhead has to be thought of as having permeated all existence with eternal love and thus has to be sought in every single being, something quite different from any sort of vague pantheism. But there was no philosophical tradition in that period on which I could build. That is why it was necessary to seek this connection through someone who possessed a richer, more intense life, an inner life which was saturated with spiritual substance.

That was precisely the case with Goethe. When it came to putting my ideas in book form, I was therefore unable to build a theory of knowledge on what existed in contemporary culture, but had to link it with a Goethean world conception,³ and on that basis the first steps into the spiritual world were possible.

Goethe provides two openings which give a certain degree of access into the spiritual world. The first one is through his scientific writings. For the scientific view he developed overcomes an obstacle in relation to the plant world which is still unresolved in modern science. In his observation of the vegetable realm, he was able to substitute living, flexible ideas for dead concepts. Although he failed to translate his theory of metamorphosis into the animal world, it was nevertheless possible to draw the conclusion that similar ideas on a higher level could be applied. I tried to show in my Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World Conception how Goethe's revitalizing ideas made it possible to advance to the level of history, historical existence. That was the one point of entry.

There is, however, no direct continuation into the spiritual world, as such, from this particular starting-point in Goethe. But in working with these ideas it becomes evident that they take hold of the physical world in a spiritual way. By making use of Goethe's methodology, we are moving in a spiritual environment which enables us to understand the spiritual element active in the plant or the animal.

But Goethe also approached the spiritual world from another angle, from a perspective which he was able to indicate only through images, one might almost say symbolically. In his Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,⁴ he wished to show how a spiritual element is active in the development of the world, how the individual spheres of truth, beauty and goodness act together, and how real spiritual beings, not mere abstract concepts, have to be grasped if we want to observe the real life of the spirit.

It was thus possible to build on this element of Goethe's world view. But that made something else all the more necessary. For the first thing we have to think about when we talk about a conception of the world which will satisfy homeless souls is morality and ethics. In those ancient times in which human beings had access to the divine through their natural clairvoyance, it was taken for granted that moral impulses also came from this divine spiritual principle. Natural phenomena, the action of the wind and the weather, of the earth and of mechanical processes, represented to these ancient human beings an extension of what they perceived as the divine spiritual principle. But at the same time they also received the impulses for their own actions from that source. That is the distinguishing feature of this ancient view of the world. In ancient Egyptian times, for example, people looked up to the stars in order to learn what would happen on earth, even to the extent of gaining insight into the conditions which governed the flooding of the Nile to support their needs. But by the same means they calculated, if I may use that term, what came to expression as moral impulses. Those, too, were derived from their observation of the stars.

If we look now to the modern situation, observation of the stars has become purely a business in which physical mathematics is simply transferred into the starry sky. And on earth so-called laws of nature are discovered and investigated. These laws of nature, which Goethe transformed into living ideas, are remarkable in that the human being as such is excluded from the world.

If we think in diagrammatic form of the content of the old metaphysical conceptions, we have the divine spiritual principle here on the one hand (red). The divine spirit penetrated natural phenomena. Laws were found for these natural phenomena, but they were recognized as something akin to a reflection of divine action in nature (yellow). Then there was the human being (light colouring). The same divine spirit penetrated human beings, who received their substance, as it were, from the same divine spirit which also gave nature its substance.

What happened next, however, had serious consequences. Through natural science the link between nature and the divine was severed. The divine was removed from nature, and the reflection of the divine in nature began to be interpreted as the laws of nature.

For the ancients these laws of nature were divine thoughts. For modern people they are still thoughts, because they have to be grasped by the intellect, but they are explained on the basis of the natural phenomena which are governed by these laws of nature. We talk about the law of gravity, the law of the refraction of light, and lots of other fine things. But they have no real foundation, or rather they are not elevating, for the only way to give real meaning to these laws is to refer to them as a reflection of divine action in nature.

That is what the more profound part of the human being, the homeless soul, feels when we talk about nature today. It feels that those who talk about nature in such a superficial way deserve the Goethean—or, actually, the Mephistophelean—epithet: and mock themselves unwittingly.⁵ People talk about the laws of nature, but the latter are remnants from ancient knowledge, a knowledge which still contained that additional element which underlies the natural laws.

Imagine a rose bush. It will flower repeatedly. When the old roses wither away, new ones grow. But if you pick the roses and allow the bush to die the process stops. That is what has happened to the natural sciences. There was a rose bush with its roots in the divine. The laws which were discovered in nature were the individual roses. These laws, the roses, were picked. The rose bush was left to wither. Thus our laws of nature are rather like roses without the rose bush: not a great deal of use to human beings. People simply fail to understand this in those clever heads of theirs, by which so much store is set in our modern times. But homeless souls do have an inkling of this in their hearts, because the laws of nature wither away when they want to relate to them as human beings.

Modern mankind therefore unconsciously experiences the feeling, in so far as it still has the capacity to feel, that it is being told something about nature which withers the human being. A terrible belief in authority forces people to accept this as pure truth. While they feel in their hearts that the roses are withering away, they are forced into a belief that these roses represent eternal truths. They are referred to as the eternal laws which underlie the world. Phenomena may pass, but the laws are immutable. In the sense that anthroposophy represents what human beings want to develop from within themselves as their self-awareness, natural science represents anti-anthroposophy.

We need still to consider the other side, the ethical and moral. Ethical and moral impulses came from the same divine source. But just as the laws of nature were turned into withering roses, so moral impulses met the same fate. Their roots disappeared and they were left free-floating in civilization as moral imperatives of unknown origin. People could not help but feel that the divine origin of moral commandments had been lost. And that raised the essential question of what would happen if they were no longer obeyed? Chaos and anarchy would reign in human society.

This was juxtaposed with another question: How do these commandments work? Where do we find their roots? Yet again, the sense of something withering away was inescapable. Goethe raised these questions, but was unable to answer them. He presented two starting-points which, although they moved in a convergent direction, never actually came together. The Philosophy of Freedom was required for that.

It had to be shown where the divine is located in human beings, the divine which enables them to discover the spiritual basis of nature as well as of moral laws. That led to the concept of Intuition presented in The Philosophy of Freedom, to what was called ethical individualism. Ethical individualism, because the source of the moral impulses in each individual had to be shown to reside in that divine element with which human beings are connected in their innermost being.

The time had arrived in which a living understanding of the laws of nature on the one hand and the moral commandments on the other had been lost; because the divine could no longer be perceived in the external world it could not be otherwise in the age of freedom. But that being so, it was necessary to find this divine spiritual principle within human beings in their capacity as individuals. That produced a conception of the world which you will see, if you only consider it clearly, leads directly to anthroposophy.

Let us assume that we have human beings here. It is rather a primitive sketch but it will do. Human beings are connected with the divine spirit in their innermost selves (red). This divine spiritual principle develops into a divine spiritual world order (yellow). By observing the inner selves of all human beings in combination, we are able to penetrate the divine spiritual sphere in the same way as the latter was achieved in ancient times by looking outward and seeing the divine spirit in physical phenomena, through primitive clairvoyance.

Our purpose must be to gain access to the spirit, not in an outer materialistic way, but through the real recognition of the essential human self.

In fact The Philosophy of Freedom also represents the point when anthroposophy came into being, if our observations are guided by life rather than by theoretical considerations. Anyone who argues that this book is not yet anthroposophical in nature is being rather too clever. It is as if we were to say that there was a person called Goethe who wrote a variety of works, and this were then to be challenged by someone claiming that it was hardly a consistent view, on the grounds that a child was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1749 who was blue at birth and not expected to live, and that Goethe's works had no logical connection with that child. That is not a particularly clever standpoint, is it? It is just as silly to say that it is inconsistent to argue that anthroposophy developed from The Philosophy of Freedom. The Philosophy of Freedom continued to live, like the blue baby in Frankfurt did, and anthroposophy developed from it.

Those who are involved in the contemporary development of so-called logic and philosophy have lost the capacity to include real life in their considerations, to incorporate what is springing up and sprouting all around them, what goes beyond the pedantic practice of logic.

The task, then, was to make a critical assessment of those representatives of contemporary life who were endeavouring to bring progress to human civilization.

As you are aware, I concentrated on two important phenomena. The first was Nietzsche, who, in contrast to everyone else, was honest in his response to the direction in which modern thinking was developing.

What was the general verdict in the 1890s? It was that natural science was, of course, right. We stand on the terra firma of science and look up at the stars. There was the instance of the conversation between Napoleon and the great astronomer Laplace.⁶ Napoleon could not understand how God was to be found by looking at the stars through a telescope. The astronomer responded that this conjecture was irrelevant. And it was, of course, irrelevant when Laplace observed the stars with a telescope. But it was not irrelevant from the moment that he wanted to be a human being. Microscopes allowed the investigation of micro-organisms and the smallest components of living things. You could look through a microscope for as long as you wished, but there was not the slightest trace of soul or spirit. The soul or the spirit could be found neither in the stars nor under the microscope. And so it went on. This is what Nietzsche came up against.

Others responded by accepting that we look through a telescope at the stars and see physical worlds but nothing else. At the same time they said we also have a religious life, a religion which tells us that the spirit exists. We cannot find the spirit anywhere, but we have faith in its existence all the same. The science which we are committed to believe in is unable to find the spirit anywhere. Science is the way it is because it seeks reality; if it were to take any other form it would be divorced from reality. In other words, anybody who undertakes a different type of research will not find reality! Therefore we know about reality, and at the same time believe in something which cannot be established as a reality. Nevertheless, our forefathers tell us it should be reality.

Such an attitude led to tremendous dilemmas for a soul like Nietzsche's, which had maintained its integrity. One day he realized he would have to draw the line somewhere. How did he do that? He did it by arguing that reality is what is investigated by natural science. Everything else is invalid. Christianity teaches that Christ should not be sought in the reality which is investigated with the telescope and the microscope. But there is no other reality. As a consequence there is no justification for Christianity. Therefore, Nietzsche said, I will write The Anti-Christ.

People accept the ethical commandments which are floating around or which authority tells us must be obeyed, but they cannot be discovered through scientific research. Under his Revaluation of Values Nietzsche therefore wished to write a second book, in which he showed that all ideals should be abandoned because they cannot be found in reality.

Furthermore, he argued that moral principles certainly cannot be deduced from the telescope or the microscope, and on that basis he decided to develop a philosophy of amorality. Thus the first three books of Revaluation of Values should have been called: first book, Anti-Christ; second book, Nihilism or the Abolition of Ideals; third book, Amorality or the Abolition of the Universal Moral Order.

It was a terrible stance to adopt, of course, but his standpoint took to its final and honest conclusion what had been started by others. We will not understand the nerve centres of modern civilization if we do not observe these things. It was something which had to be confronted. The enormous error of Nietzsche's thinking had to be demonstrated and corrected by returning to his premises, and then showing that they had to be understood as leading not into the void but into the spirit. The confrontation with Nietzsche⁷ was thus a necessity.

Haeckel, too, had to be confronted in the same way.⁸ Haeckel's thinking had pursued the approach of natural science to the evolution of physical beings with a certain consistency. That had to be utilized in my first anthroposophical lectures with the help of Topinard's book.⁹ This kind of procedure made it possible to enter the real spiritual world. The details could then be worked on through further research, through continuing to live with the spiritual world.

I have said all this in order to make the following point. If we want to trace anthroposophy back to its roots, it has to be done against a background of illustrations from modern civilization. When we look at the development of the Anthroposophical Society we need to keep in mind the question: Where were the people who were open enough to understand matters of the spirit? They were the people who, because of the special nature of their homeless souls, were prompted by Blavatsky and theosophy to search for the spirit.

The Theosophical Society and anthroposophy went alongside one another at the beginning of the twentieth century simply because of existing circumstances. That development had been fully outgrown in the third stage, which began approximately in 1914. No traces were left, even in the forms of expression. Right from the beginning the thrust of anthroposophical spiritual work included the aim of penetrating the Mystery of Golgotha and Christianity. The other direction of its work, however, had to be to understand natural science by spiritual means. The acquisition of those spiritual means which would once again enable the presentation of true Christianity in our age began in the first phase and was worked on particularly in the second one.

The work which was to be done in a scientific direction really only emerged in the third stage, when people working in the scientific field found their way into the anthroposophical movement. They should take particular care, if we are to avoid the repeated introduction of new misunderstandings into the anthroposophical movement, to take full cognizance of the fact that we have to work from the central sources of anthroposophy. It is absolutely necessary to be clear about this.

I believe it was in 1908 that I made the following remarks¹⁰ in Nuremberg, in order to describe a very specific state of affairs. Modern scientific experimentation has led to substantial scientific progress. That can only be a good thing, for spiritual beings are at work in such experimentation. The scientist goes to the laboratory and pursues his work according to the routines and methods he has learnt. But a whole group of spiritual beings are working alongside him, and it is they who actually bring about results; for the person standing at the laboratory bench only creates the conditions which allow such results to emerge gradually. If that were not the case, things would not have developed as they have in modern times.

Whenever discoveries are made they are clothed in exceedingly abstract formulae which others find incomprehensible. There is a yawning gap today between what people understand and what is produced by research, because people do not have access to the underlying spiritual impulses.

That is how things are. Let us return once more to that excellent person, Julius Robert Mayer.¹¹ Today he is acknowledged as an eminent scientist, but as a student at Tubingen University he came close to being advised to leave before graduating. He scraped through his medical exams, was recruited as a ship's doctor and took part in a voyage to India. It was a rough passage; many people on board became ill and he had to bleed them on arrival.

Now doctors know, of course, that arterial blood is more red than venous blood which has a bluer tinge. If one bleeds someone from the vein, bluish blood should therefore spurt out. Julius Robert Mayer had to bleed many people, but something peculiar happened when he made his incisions. He must have cursed inwardly, because he thought he had hit the wrong place, an artery, since red blood appeared to be spurting out of the vein. The same thing happened in every case and he became quite confused. Finally he reached the conclusion that he had made his incisions in the right place after all but, as people had become sick at sea, something had happened to make the venous blood more red than blue, nearer the colour of arterial blood.

Thus a modern person made a tremendous discovery without in any way seeking the spiritual connections. The modern scientist says: Energy is transformed into heat and heat into energy, as in the steam engine. The same thing happens in the human body. Since the ship had sailed into a warmer, tropical climate, the body needed to burn less oxygen to produce heat, resulting in less of a transformation into blue blood. The blood remained redder in the veins. The law governing the transformation of matter and energy, which we recognize today, is deduced from this observation.

Let us imagine that something similar was experienced by a doctor not in the nineteenth, but in the eleventh or twelfth century. It would never have occurred to him to deduce the mechanical concept of heat equivalence from such observations. Paracelsus,¹² for instance, would never have thought of it, not even in his sleep, although Paracelsus was a much more clever, even in sleep, than some others when they are awake. So what would a hypothetical doctor in the tenth, eleventh or twelfth centuries have said? Or someone like Paracelsus in the sixteenth century?

Van Helmont¹³ speaks about the archeus, what today we would call the joint function of the etheric and astral bodies. We have to rediscover these things through anthroposophy, since such terms have been forgotten. In a hotter climate the difference between the venous and the arterial blood is no longer so pronounced and the blue blood of the veins becomes redder and the red blood of the arteries bluer. The eleventh or twelfth century doctor would have explained this by saying—and he would have used the term archeus, or something similar, for what we describe as astral body today—that the archeus enters less deeply into the body in hot climates than in temperate zones. In temperate climates human beings are permeated more thoroughly by their astral bodies. The differentiation in the blood which is caused by the astral body occurs more strongly in human beings in temperate zones. People in hotter climates have freer astral bodies, which we can see in the lesser thickening of the blood. They live more instinctively in their astral bodies because they are freer. In consequence they do not become mechanistically thinking Europeans, but spiritually thinking Indians, who at the height of their civilization created a spiritual civilization, a Vedic civilization, while Europeans created the civilization of Comte, John Stuart Mill and Darwin.¹⁴

Such is the view of the anthropos which the eleventh or twelfth-century doctor would have concluded from bleeding his patient. He would have had no problem with anthroposophy. He would have found access to the spirit, the living spirit. Julius Robert Mayer, the Paracelsus of the nineteenth century if you like, was left to discover laws: nothing can arise from nothing, so energy must be transformed; an abstract formula.

The spiritual element of the human being, which can be rediscovered through anthroposophy, also leads to morality. We return full circle to the investigation of moral principles in The Philosophy of Freedom. Human beings are given entry to a spiritual world in which they are no longer faced with a division between nature and spirit, between nature and morality, but where the two form a union.

As you can see, the leading authorities in modern science arrive at abstract formulae as a result of their work. Such formulae inhabit the brains of those who have had a modern scientific training. Those who teach them regard as pure madness the claim that it is possible to investigate the qualities of red and blue blood and progress from there to the spiritual element in human beings.

You can see what it takes for real scientists who want to make their way into anthroposophy. Something more than mere good intentions is needed. They must have a real commitment to deepening their knowledge to a degree to which we are not accustomed nowadays, least of all if we have had a scientific training. That makes a great deal of courage essential. The latter is the quality we need above all when we take into account the conditions governing the existence of the Anthroposophical Society. In certain respects the Society stands diametrically opposed to what is popularly acceptable. It therefore has no future if it wants to make itself popular. Thus it would be wrong to court popularity, particularly in relation to our endeavours to introduce anthroposophical working methods into all areas of society, as we have attempted to do since 1919.¹⁵ Instead, we have to pursue the path which is based on the spirit itself, as I discussed this morning in relation to the Goetheanum.¹⁶

We must learn to adopt such an attitude in all circumstances, otherwise we begin to stray in a way which justifiably makes people confuse us with other movements and judge us by external criteria. If we are determined to provide our own framework we are on the right path to fulfilling the conditions which govern the existence of the anthroposophical movement. But we have to acquire the commitment which will then provide us with the necessary courage.

And we must not ignore those circumstances which arise from the fact that, as anthroposophists, we are a small group. As such we hope that what is spreading among us today will begin to spread among a growing number of people. Then knowledge and ethics, artistic and religious development will move in a new direction.

But all these things which will be present one day through the impulse of anthroposophy, and which will then be regarded as quite ordinary, must be cultivated to a much higher degree by those who make up the small group today. They must feel that they bear the greatest possible responsibility towards the spiritual world. It has to be understood that such an attitude will automatically be reflected in the verdict of the world at large.

As far as those who are not involved with anthroposophy are concerned, nothing can do more profound harm to the Anthroposophical Society than the failure of its members to adopt a form which sets out in the strictest terms what they are trying to achieve, so that they can be distinguished from all sectarian and other movements.

As long as this does not happen, it is not surprising that people around us judge us as they do. It is hard to know what the Anthroposophical Society stands for, and when they meet anthroposophists they see nothing of anthroposophy. For instance, if anthroposophists were recognizable by their pronounced sensitivity to truth and reality, by the display of a sensitive understanding to go no further in their claims than accords with reality, that would make an impression! But I do not want to criticize today but to emphasize the positive side. Will it be achieved? That is the question we have to bear in mind.

Or one might recognize anthroposophists by their avoidance of any display of bad taste and, to the contrary, a certain artistic sense—a sign that the Goetheanum in Dornach must have had some effect. Once again people would know that anthroposophy provides its members with a certain modicum of taste which distinguishes them from others.

Such attitudes, above and beyond what can be laid down in sharply defined concepts, must be among the things which are developed in the Anthroposophical Society if it is to fulfil the conditions governing its existence.

Such matters have been discussed a great deal! But the question which must always be in the forefront is how the Anthroposophical Society can be given that special character which will make people aware that here they have something which distinguishes it from others in a way which rules out any possibility of confusion. That is something anthroposophists should discuss at great length.

These things are a matter of conveying a certain attitude. Life cannot be constrained by programmes. But ask yourselves whether we have fully overcome the attitude within the Anthroposophical Society which dictates that something must be done in a specific way, which lays down rules, and whether there is a strong enough impulse to seek guidance from anthroposophy itself whatever the situation. That does not mean having to read everything in lectures, but that the content of the lectures enters the heart, and that has certain consequences.

Until anthroposophy is taken as a living being who moves invisibly among us, my dear friends, towards whom we feel a certain responsibility, this small group of anthroposophists I must say this too will not serve as a model. And that is what they should be doing.

If you had gone into any of the Theosophical Societies, and there were many of them, you would have encountered the three famous objects. The first was to build universal fraternity among mankind without reference to race, nationality and so on. I pointed out yesterday that we should be reflecting on the appropriateness of setting this down as dogma.

It is, of course, important that such a object should exist, but it has to be lived. It must gradually become a reality. That will happen if anthroposophy itself is seen as a living, supersensory, invisible being who moves among anthroposophists. Then there might be less talk about fraternity and universal human love, but these objects might be more active in human hearts. And then it will be evident in the tone in which people talk about their relation to anthroposophy, in how they talk to one another, that it is important to them that they too are followers of the invisible being of Anthroposophia.

After all, we could just as well choose another way. We could form lots of cliques and exclusive groups and behave like the rest of the world, meeting for tea parties or whatever, to make conversation and possibly assemble for the occasional lecture. But an anthroposophical movement could not exist in such a society. An anthroposophical movement can only live in an Anthroposophical Society which has become reality. But that requires a truly serious approach. It requires a sense of alliance in every living moment with the invisible being of Anthroposophia.

If that became a reality in people's attitude, not necessarily overnight but over a longer time-span, the required impulse would certainly develop over a period of perhaps twenty-one years. Whenever anthroposophists encountered the kind of material from our opponents which I read out yesterday, for example, the appropriate response would come alive in their hearts. I am not saying that this would have to be transformed immediately into concrete action, but the required impulse would live in the heart. Then the action, too, would follow.

If such action does not develop, if it is only our opponents who are active and organized, then the right impulse is clearly absent. People clearly prefer to continue their lives in a leisurely fashion and listen to the occasional lecture on anthroposophy. But that is not enough if the Anthroposophical Society is to thrive. If it is to thrive, anthroposophy has to be alive in the Anthroposophical Society. And if that happens then something significant can develop over twenty-one years. By my calculations, the Society has already existed for twenty-one years.

However, since I do not want to criticize, I will only call on you to reflect on this issue to the extent of asking whether each individual, whatever their situation, has acted in a spirit which is derived from the nucleus of anthroposophy?

If one or another among you should feel that this has not been the case so far, then I appeal to you: start tomorrow, start tonight for it would not be a good thing if the Anthroposophical Society were to collapse. And it will most certainly collapse, now that the Goetheanum is being rebuilt in addition to all the other institutions which the Society has established, if that awareness of which I have spoken in these lectures does not develop, if such self-reflection is absent. And once the process of collapse has started, it will proceed very quickly. Whether or not it happens is completely dependent on the will of those who are members of the Anthroposophical Society.

Anthroposophy will certainly not disappear from the world. But it might very well sink back into what I might call a latent state for decades or even longer before it is taken up again. That, however, would imply an immense loss for the development of mankind. It is something which has to be taken into account if we are serious about engaging in the kind of self-reflection which I have essentially been talking about in these lectures. What I certainly do not mean is that we should once again make ringing declarations, set up programmes, and generally state our willingness to be absolutely available when something needs to be done. We have always done that. What is at stake here is that we should find the nucleus of our being within ourselves. If we engage in that search in the spirit of wisdom transmitted by anthroposophy then we will also find the anthroposophical impulse which the Anthroposophical Society needs for its existence.

My intention has been to stimulate some thought about the right way to act by means of a reflection on anthroposophical matters and a historical survey of one or two questions; were I to deal with everything I would run out of time. And I believe these lectures in particular are a good basis on which to engage in such reflection. There is always time for that, because it can be done between the lines of the life which we lead in the everyday world.

That is what I wanted you to carry away in your hearts, rather like a kind of self-reflection for the Anthroposophical Society. We certainly need such self-reflection today. We should not forget that we can achieve a great deal by making use of the sources of anthroposophy. If we fail to do so then we abandon the path by which we can achieve effective action.

We are faced with major tasks, such as the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. In that context our inner thoughts should truly be based on really great impulses.

• 1. Goethe the Scientist. Translated by O. D. Wannamaker. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1950. See also Rudolf Steiner. A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World Conception (1886). Translated by O. D. Wannamaker. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1940.
• 2. See, for example, Goethean Science. Translated by W. Lindemann, Mercury Press, New York, 1988. Chapter XI: Relationship of the Goethean Way of Thinking to Other Views.
• 3. Note 1 above.
• 4. See Lecture One, Note 6. See also Goethes Marchen von der grunen Schlange und der schnen Lilie with nine drawings by Assia Turgenieff, drawn according to a chiaroscuro technique set out by Rudolf Steiner. Dornach, 1929.
• 5. Faust I, in the scene of Faust's Study. In the Penguin Classics edition of Faust/Part One, Philip Wayne translates the relevant passage as follows:
  
  To docket living things past any doubt
  You cancel first the living spirit out:
  The parts lie in the hollow of your hand,
  You only lack the living link you banned.
  This sweet self-irony, in learned thesis,
  The chemists call naturae encheiresis.
• 6. Could not be traced.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner. Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom. Translated by M. Ingram de Ris. Rudolf Steiner Publications, New Jersey, 1960.
• 8. See Rudolf Steiner's essay and lecture of 5 October 1905 in Two Essays on Haeckel. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co. and Anthroposophic Press (undated), GA 54 and GA 30.
• 9. See also Lecture 2, Note 10.
• 10. In 1907 and 1908 Rudolf Steiner delivered public lectures in various cities on the subject “Natural science at the crossroads”. The one in Nuremberg took place on 1 December 1907. The reference could not be traced more precisely.
• 11. See Lecture 3, Note 5. cf. Kleinere Schriften und Briefe von Robert Mayer nebst Mitteilungen aus seinem Leben. Ed. Weyrauch. Stuttgart, 1893. Also Weyrauch. Robert Mayer. Stuttgart, 1890.
• 12. Theophrastus Bombastus Paracelsus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541. cf. Rudolf Steiner's lecture in Berlin on 26 April 1906, “Paracelsus”, in GA 54; typescript (NSL 154) in Rudolf Steiner House library, London. Also Eleven European Mystics, pp. 100ff.
• 13. Johann Baptist van Helmont, 1577–1644. Great Dutch doctor and philosopher. His works appeared under the title Ortus medicinae, Amsterdam 1648, and Opuscula medica inaudita, Cologne 1644.
• 14. Auguste Comte, 1798–1857. Positivist philosopher. John Stewart Mill, 1806–1873. Philosopher who attempted to provide the logical justification for the positivist method. Charles Darwin, 1809–1882.
• 15. A detailed list of the institutions in the fields of science, education, curative education, medicine, publishing, the economy, and theology which were established on the basis of anthroposophy can be found in GA 37/260a, pp.712–724. cf also the lecture in Dornach on 2 March 1923 in Awakening to Community.
• 16. At the tenth general meeting of the Goetheanum Association on 17 June 1923 in Dornach. Reproduced in Aufbaugedanken und Gesinnungsbildung. Dornach, 1942.