The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I want during the next few evenings to talk to you about various things in connection with our present civilisation, things which are necessary to right understanding and action in the world to-day. It is not very difficult—in view of the many facts that meet one almost at every turn—to perceive signs of decline within our civilisation, and that it contains forces that make for its downfall. Recognising these forces of decline and fall within our civilisation, we have then to seek out the quarters from which it may draw fresh sources of new strength. If we survey our present civilisation we shall see that there are present in it three main downward forces,—three forces which gradually and inevitably must bring about its overthrow. All the distressing phenomena which we have hitherto experienced in the course of man's evolution, and all those that we have still to go through,—for in many respects we are only just at the beginning,—are all only so many symptoms of a vast process going on in our age, which, taken as a whole, presents a phenomenon of decline and fall.

If we look beyond our own immediate civilisation, beyond what has taken place in our own times merely, or during the last three or four hundred years,—if we take a wide survey of the whole course of man's evolution we may observe that earlier ages had a groundwork for their civilisation, a foundation for the habits and thoughts of everyday life, such as we to-day only believe ourselves to have. These old civilisations, especially the heathen civilisations, had something of a scientific character about them, a scientific character of a sort which made men realise that what lived within their own souls was part of the life of the whole universe. Just think what a vivid conception the Greeks still possessed of worlds extending beyond the bounds of everyday existence, of a world of gods and spirits behind the world of sense. One has but to recall how great a part was played in everyday life by whatever could form any sort of link between the people of those older civilisations and a spiritual world to which they were no strangers. In all their daily transactions, these men of the old civilisations were conscious of forming part of a creation that was not exhausted within the limits of the everyday world, but where spiritual beings made their activities felt. The commonest everyday affairs were carried on under the guidance of spiritual forces. Thus, in the heathen civilisations especially, we find when we look back on them, a dominant scientific character, which is best described by saying: in those days people—we can put it in that way—people had a COSMOGONY; that is, they recognised themselves to be members of the whole universe. They knew that they were not merely beings that had gone astray and were wandering about over the face of the green earth like lost sheep, but that they were part and parcel of the whole wide universe, and had their own functions in the universe as a whole. The men of old days possessed a COSMOGONY.

Our civilisation possesses no instinct for the creation of a cosmogony in real life. Our mode of conception is not, in the strict sense of the term, a genuinely scientific one. We have tabulated isolated facts and have constructed a logical system of concepts, but we have not got a real science, forming a practical link between us and the spiritual world. How paltry is the part played by the science of our day in common life, compared with what a man of old felt pulsing through him from forces of the spiritual world! In all his actions, he had a cosmogony; he knew himself a member of the whole vast universe. When he looked up at the sun and the moon and the stars, they were not to him strange worlds; for he knew himself, in his own deepest nature, akin to the sun and moon and world of stars. Thus, the old civilisation possessed a Cosmogony; but for our civilisation this cosmogony is lost. Without a cosmogony in life, man cannot be strong.—That is one thing,—what I might call the scientific element,—that is bringing about the downfall of our civilisation.

Another, the second element that is bringing about its downfall, is that there is no true impulse for FREEDOM. Our civilisation lacks the power to ground life upon a broad basis of general freedom. Only very few people in our day arrive at any real conception of freedom. There are plenty who talk about it; but very few to-day arrive at any real conception of what freedom really is, and fewer still have any real impulse for it. And so, it comes, that our civilisation is gradually sinking into something where it can find neither strength nor support—into fatalism. Either we have religious fatalism, in which men yield themselves up to religious forces of some sort or another, make these religious forces their master, and ask nothing better than to be pulled about by strings, like puppets at a show; or else we have the fatalism of natural science. And the effects of such scientific fatalism are seen in the way people have come to regard everything that happens as happening by natural necessity, or by economic necessity, and as leaving no scope for free action on the part of man. When men feel themselves fettered to the world of economics or the world of nature, that is, to all intents and purposes, fatalism. Or else, again, we have that fatalism which has come in with the more modern forms of religious faith,—a fatalism that deliberately precludes freedom. Just ask yourselves how many hearts and souls there are to-day that consciously yearn to yield themselves up, for Christ, or a spiritual power of some kind, to do what he pleases with them. Why, it is even an accusation that one frequently hears made against Anthroposophy, that it lays too little stress on men being redeemed by Christ and not by themselves. People prefer to be led; they prefer to be guided; they would really prefer fatalism to be true. How often lately, in these troublous [troubled?] years, has one not heard that kind of talk from one person or another. They would say: “Why doesn't God, why doesn't Christ, come to the help of this or that set of people? There must, after all, be a divine justice somewhere!” People would like this divine Justice ... They would like to have it suspended aloft as a fate. They do not want to get to that ingrained innate strength which comes from the impulse of Freedom and permeates the whole being. A civilisation that does not know how to foster the impulse of Freedom weakens men and dooms itself to downfall.

That is the second thing. Of the forces that are bringing about the decline of our civilisation, the first is the lack of a COSMOGONY, and the second is the lack of a genuine impulse for FREEDOM.

The third is that our civilisation is incapable of evolving anything that can give fresh fire to religious feeling and purpose. Our civilisation, in truth, aims at nothing more than nursing the old religions and fanning their cold ashes. But to bring new religious impulses into life,—for that our civilisation lacks the strength. And lacking this, it lacks also the strength for true altruistic action in life. That is why all the processes of our civilisation are so egoistic, because it has within itself no real, no strong, altruistic motive-power. There is nothing, friends, that can supply altruistic motive-power, but a spiritual view of life. Only when a man comes to recognise himself as a member of the spiritual world, does he cease to be so tremendously interested in himself that the whole world revolves round him. When he does,—then, indeed, egoistic motives cease and altruistic ones set in. Our age, however, is little given to cultivating so great an interest in the spiritual world. The interest in the spiritual world has got to be a good deal further developed before people really feel themselves members of it.

And so, one might say that it was like impulses given from on high that REINCARNATION and KARMA came amongst us and into our civilisation. But how were these impulses interpreted? At bottom it was in a very egoistic way that these ideas of Reincarnation and Karma were understood, even by those who took them up. For instance, they would say: “Oh, well! In some life or other everyone has deserved what he gets.” Even otherwise quite intelligent people have been known to say that the ideas of Reincarnation and Karma of themselves sufficiently warranted the existence of human suffering. There was at bottom no justification for the social question,—so said many otherwise intelligent people,—for, if a man was poor, it was what he had earned in his previous incarnation, and he has to work off in this incarnation only what he deserved from a previous one. Even the ideas of reincarnation and karma are unable to permeate our civilisation in any way except one which gives no stimulus to the altruistic sense. It is not enough for us merely to introduce ideas such as those of reincarnation and Karma,—the question is, in what way we introduce them. If they become merely an incentive to egoism, then they do not raise up our civilised life, they only serve to sink it lower.

There is another way, again, in which reincarnation and karma become unethical, anti-ethical, ideas; many people say: “I must be good, so that I may have a good incarnation next time.” To act from such a motive, to be virtuous in order that one may have as pleasant a time as possible in one's next incarnation,—this is not mere simple egoism, it is double egoism; yet this double egoism is what many people did actually get out of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. So that one may say that our civilisation possesses so little of any altruistic religious impulse that it is incapable of conceiving even such ideas as those of reincarnation and karma in the sense that would make them a stimulus to altruistic, not to egoistic actions and sentiments.

Those are the three things which are acting within our civilisation as forces of decline and fall:—lack of a COSMOGONY, lack of a sound foundation of FREEDOM, lack of an ALTRUISTIC SENSE. But without a cosmogony there is no real science or system of knowledge, there is no real knowledge; then all knowledge ultimately becomes a mere game, in which all the worlds and the civilisation of man are toys. And this is what knowledge has, in many respects, become in our age,—in so far as it is not merely a utilitarian incident of external culture, of external technical culture. Freedom has become in many respects in our age an empty phrase, because the force of our civilisation is not that which lays a large foundation of freedom nor spreads abroad the impulse of freedom. Neither have we in the economic field the possibility of progressing further in the social direction, because our civilisation contains no altruistic motive-force, but only egoistic, that means anti-social motive-forces,—and one cannot socialise with antisocial forces. For socialising means creating a social framework such that each man lives and works for the rest. But just imagine in our present civilisation each man trying to live and work for the rest! Why, the whole order of society is so instituted that each one can only live and work for himself. All our institutions are like that.

The question then arises:—How are we going to surmount these signs of our civilisation's decline and fall? To plaster over such signs of decline in our civilisation, my dear friends, is quite impossible. There is nothing for it but to recognise the facts as they have just been stated, to regard them dispassionately and without reservations, and to harbour no illusions. One must say to oneself: There they are, these forces of decline and fall, and one must not imagine that one can in any way turn them in another direction, or anything of that sort. No, they are very powerful forces of decline, and it is necessary to give them their proper name, and to speak of them as we are doing now. This being so, what we have got to do is to turn to where forces can be found for the re-ascent. That is not to be done by theorising, People in the present day may invent the most beautiful theories, may have the most beautiful principles, but with theories one can do nothing. To do anything in life, it must be by means of the forces that are actually present in the world; and one must summon them up. If our civilisation were through and through as I have been describing it,—I mean, if it were like that through and through,—then there would be nothing for it but to say to ourselves: “There is nothing for it, but just to let our civilisation go to pieces, and ourselves go to pieces along with it.” For to attempt in any way to redress the signs of the times by mere theories or conceptions would be an utter absurdity.

One can but ask:—Does not the root of the matter perhaps lie really deeper? It does lie deeper; and in this way:—People to-day—and I have here often pointed out the same thing from different aspects,—people to-day are too much bent upon the absolute. When they ask: “What is true?” they mean, “What Is true absolutely?”—not what is true of a particular age. When they ask, “What is good?” they are asking, “What is good absolutely?” They are not asking, “What is good for Europe? What is good for Asia? What is good for the 20th century? What is good for the 25th century?” They are asking about absolute Goodness and Truth. They are not asking about what actually exists in the concrete evolution of mankind. We must put the question to ourselves in a different way, for we must look at the actuality of things, and from the point of view of actuality; questions must be differently put, very often so put that the answers seem paradoxical compared with what one is inclined to assume from a surface view of things. We must ask ourselves: Is there no possibility of arriving once more at a mode of conception which is cosmogonical, which takes in the universe as a whole? Is there no possibility of arriving at an impulse of freedom which shall be an actual influence in social life? Is there no possibility for an impulse which shall be religious and at the same time an impulse of brotherhood, and therefore the real basis for an economic social order? Is there no possibility^ of arriving at such an impulse? And if we put these questions before us from a real aspect, then we get real answers. For the point, we have here to remember is this: that the various types of people on the earth to-day are not all adapted to the whole all-comprehensive universal truth, but that the various types of men are only adapted to particular fields of the true activity. We must ask ourselves; Where in the life of earth to-day may there, perhaps, exist the possibility for a cosmogony to evolve? Where does the possibility exist for a sweeping impulse of freedom to evolve? And where does the impulse exist for a communal life among men, which is religious and also, in a social sense, brotherly?

We will take the last question first; and if we contemplate the state of affairs on our earth impartially, we shall come to the conclusion that the temperament, the mode of thought for an actual brotherly impulse upon our earth is to be sought amongst the Asiatic peoples, the peoples of Asia, especially in the civilisations of Japan and India. Despite the fact that these civilisations are already fallen into decadence, and despite the fact that external, superficial appearances are against it, we find there enshrined in men's hearts those impulses of generous love towards all living things, which alone can supply foundations for religious altruism in the first place, and, in the second, for an actual, altruistic, industrial form of civilisation.

But here we are met by a peculiar fact: that the Asiatics have, it is true, the temperament for altruism, but that they have not got the kind of human existence which would enable them to carry their altruism into practice; they have merely got the temperament but they have no possibility, no gift, for creating social conditions in which altruism could begin to be externally realised. For thousands of years the Asiatics have managed to nurse the instincts of altruism in human nature. And yet they brought this to a state in which China and India were devastated by monster famines. That is the peculiar thing about the Asiatic civilisation, that the temperament is there, and that this temperament is inwardly perfectly sincere, but that there exists no gift for realising this temperament in outward life. That is just the peculiar thing about this Asiatic civilisation, that it contains a tremendously strong instinct for altruism in men's inward nature, yet no possibility for the moment of realising 4t externally. On the contrary, if Asia were left to herself alone, this very fact, that she has this capacity for paying the inward basis of altruism, without any gift for realising it outwardly, would turn Asia into an appalling desert of civilisation.

We may say, then, that of these three things: the impulse for COSMOGONY, the impulse for FREEDOM, the impulse for ALTRUISM, Asia possesses more especially the inward temperament for the third. It is, however, but one third of -what is necessary to bring our civilisation into the ascendant, which Asia possesses,—the inward temperament for altruism.

What has Europe got? Well, Europe has got the utmost necessity for solving the social question; but she has not got the temperament for the social question. To solve the social question, she would need to have the Asiatic temperament. The social necessities of Europe are such as to supply all the conditions requisite for a solution of the social question; but the Europeans would first need to become permeated through and through with the way of thought which is natural to the Asiatic, only the Asiatic has no gift for actually perceiving social needs as they exist externally. Often, indeed, he even acquiesces in them. In Europe, there is every external incentive to do something about the social question, but the temperament is lacking. On the other hand, there is in Europe, in the very strongest degree, the talent, the ability which would provide the soil for Freedom,—for the impulse of freedom. The strong point of European talents, specifically European talents, lies in developing in the very highest degree the inner sentiment, the inner feeling for freedom. One might say that the gift for getting to a real idea of Freedom is specifically European; but among these Europeans there are no people who act freely, who could make freedom a reality. Of Freedom as an idea, the Europeans can form the loftiest conception. But just as the Asiatic would be able to set about doing something, if he possessed the clear thought of the Europeans without their other failings, if he could only get the clear-out European idea of Freedom, so the European can evolve the most beautiful conception of Freedom, but there is no possibility, politically, of realising this idea of freedom through the direct agency of the European peoples, for, of the three essentials to civilisation,—the impulse for altruism, the impulse for freedom, the impulse for cosmogony,—the European possesses only one-third, the impulse for Freedom. The other two he has not got.

So, the European also has only got one-third of what is necessary in order really to bring forth a new age. It is very important that people should at last recognise these things as being the secrets of our civilisation. In Europe we can, at least, say that we have all the conditions of thought and feeling requisite for knowing what freedom is, but, without something more, there is no possibility for us to actualise this freedom. I can assure you, for instance, that in Germany the most beautiful things were written by various individuals about freedom, at the time when all Germany was groaning under the tyranny of Ludendorff and Co. Most beautiful things were written about freedom at the time. Here in Europe, a talent undoubtedly exists for conceiving the impulse of freedom. That is one-third, so far, towards the actual upraising of our civilisation,—one-third, not the whole.

Leaving Europe and going westwards—and I take Great Britain and America together in this connection,—passing, then, to the Anglo-American world, we find there again, one-third of the impulses, just one out of the three impulses necessary to the upraising of our civilisation, and that is, the impulse towards a cosmogony. Anyone acquainted with the spiritual life of the Anglo-American world knows that, formalistic as Anglo-American spiritual life is in the first instance, that, materialistic as it is in the first instance, and though, indeed, it even tries to get what is spiritual in a materialistic fashion, yet it has got in it the makings of a cosmogony. Although this cosmogony is to-day being sought along altogether erroneous paths, yet it lies in Anglo-American nature to seek for it. Again, a third, the search for a cosmogony. But there the possibility of bringing this cosmogony into connection with free altruistic man does not exist. There is the talent for treating this cosmogony as an ornamental appendage, for working it out and giving it shape; but no talent for incorporating the human being in this cosmogony as a member of it. Even the spiritualist movement, in its early beginnings in the middle of the 19th century, of which it still preserves some traces, had, one may say, something of a cosmogony about it, although it led into the wilderness. What they were trying to get at were the forces that lay behind the sense-forces; only they took a materialistic road, a materialistic method, to find them. But they were not endeavouring through these means to arrive at a science of the formalist kind that you get, for instance, among the Europeans; they were trying to become acquainted with the real actual super-sensual forces. Only, as I said, they took a wrong road, what is still known as the “American” way. So here, again, we have one-third of what will have to be there before our civilisation can really rise again.

One cannot to-day arrive at the secrets of our civilisation, my dear friends, unless one can distinguish how these three impulses needed for its rise are distributed among the different parts of our earth's surface; unless one knows that the tendency towards Cosmogony is an endowment of the Anglo-American world, that the tendency towards Freedom lies in the European world, whilst the tendency towards Altruism and towards that temperament which, properly realised, leads to socialism is, strictly speaking, peculiar to Asiatic culture. America, Europe, Asia, each has one- third of what must be attained for any true regeneration, any real reconstruction of our civilisation.

These are the fundamental ideas which must inspire thought and feeling to-day for anyone who is in earnest and sincere about working for a reconstruction of our civilisation. One cannot to-day shut oneself up in one's study and ponder over which is the best programme for the coming times. One has got to-day to go out into the world and search out the impulses already existing there. As I said, if one looks at our civilisation and at all that is hurrying it to its fall, one cannot avoid an impression that it is impossible to save it. And it cannot be saved unless people come to see that one thing is to he found amongst one people, and the second amongst another, the third amongst a third,—unless people all over the earth come together and set to work on big lines to give practical recognition to what none of them, singly, can of himself achieve, in the absolute sense, but which must be achieved by that one who is marked out, so to speak, by destiny for that particular work. If the American to-day, besides a cosmogony, wants also to evolve freedom and socialism, he cannot do it. If to-day the European, besides founding the impulse for freedom, wants to supply cosmogony and altruism, he cannot do it. No more can the Asiatic realise anything save his long- engrained altruism. Let this altruism be once taken over by the other groups of the earth's inhabitants, and saturated with that for which each has a special talent, then, and then only, we shall really get on.

We have got once for all to admit to ourselves that our civilisation has grown feeble, and must again find strength. I have expressed this in a rather abstract way, and to make it more concrete will put it as follows:—The old pre-Christian civilisations of the East produced, as you know, great cities. Great cities existed in them. We can look back over a wide spread range of civilisations in the East, which all produced great cities. But the great cities they produced had, as well, a certain character about them. All the civilisations of the East had this speciality for creating, along with the life of great cities, the conception that, after all, man's life is a void, a nothing, unless he penetrates beyond the merely physical into the super-physical. And so, great cities such as Babylon, Nineveh, and the rest, were able to develop a real growth, because men were not led by these cities to regard what the cities themselves brought forth as being itself the actual reality, but, rather, what is behind it all. It was in Rome that people came to make the civilisation of cities a gauge of what was to be regarded as real. The Greek cities are inconceivable without the country round them. If history, as we have it, were not such a conventional fiction,—a “fable convenue,”—and would only revive past times in their time aspect, it would show us the Greek cities rooted in the country. But Rome no longer had her roots in the country. Indeed, the whole history of Rome consists in the conversion of an imaginary world into a real world, the conversion of a world which is unreal into one which is real. It was in Rome that the Citizen was first invented,—that ghastly mock-figure alongside the living being, Man. For man is a human being; and if he is a citizen besides, that is a fiction. His being a citizen is something that is entered in the church register, or the town register, or somewhere of the sort. That besides being a human being, endowed with particular faculties, he is also the owner of assessed property, duly entered in the land register,—that is a fiction alongside the reality. That is thoroughly Roman thought. But Rome achieved a great deal more than that. Rome managed to take all that results from the separation of the town from the country,—the real, actual country,—and to give it a fictitious reality. Rome, for instance, took the old religious concepts and introduced into them the Roman legal concepts. If we go back to the old religious concepts with an open mind, we do not find the Roman legal concepts contained in the old religious ones. Roman jurisprudence simply invaded religious ethics. All through religious ethics, thanks to what Rome has made of them, there is, at bottom, a notion of the supersensible world as of a place with judges sitting, passing judgment on human actions, just as they do on the Benches of our law-courts, that are modelled on the Roman pattern.

Yes, so persistent is the influence of these Roman legal concepts, that when there is any talk of Karma, one actually finds that the majority of people to-day who accept the doctrine of Karma picture it working, as though Justice were sitting over there beyond, meting out rewards and punishments according to our earthly notions, a reward for a good deed, and a punishment for a bad one,—exactly the Roman conception of law. All the saints and supernatural beings exist after the fashion of these Roman legal concepts which have crept into the supernatural world.

Who to-day, for instance, comprehends the grand idea of the Greek “Fate”? The concepts of Roman jurisprudence do not help us much to-day, do they, towards the understanding of the “Oedipus.” Indeed, men seem altogether to have lost the capacity for comprehending tragic grandeur, owing to the influence of Roman legal concepts. And these Roman legal concepts have crept into our modern civilisation; they live in every part of it; they have become in their very essence a fictitious reality, something imaginary,—not something one imagines, but something that is imaginary. It is absolutely necessary for us clearly to see that, in our whole way of conceiving things, we have lost touch with reality, and that what we need is to impregnate our conceptions afresh with reality. It is because men's concepts are, at bottom, hollow, that our civilisation still remains unconscious of the need for the common co-operation of men all over the round earth. We are never really willing to go to the root of what is taking place under our eyes; we are always more or less anxious to keep on the surface of things. Just to give you another example of this. You know how in the various parliaments throughout the world in former days,—say, the first half of the 16th century, or a little later,—party tendencies took shape in two definite directions, the one Conservative the other Liberal,—which for a long time enjoyed considerable respect. The various other parties that have come up since were later accessions to these two main original ones. There was the party of a conservative tendency, and the party of a liberal tendency. But, my dear friends, it is so very necessary that one should nowadays get beyond the words to the real thing behind, and there are many matters about which one must ask, not what people, who stand for a certain thing, say about it, but what is going on subconsciously within the people themselves. If you do so, you will find that the people who attach themselves to one or other of the parties of a conservative tone are people who in some way are chiefly connected with agrarian interests, with the care of land and cultivation of the soil; that is to say, with the primal element of human civilisation. In some way or other this will be the ease. Of course, on the surface, there may be all sorts of other circumstances entering in as well. I do not say that every conservative is necessarily directly connected with agriculture. Of course there is here, as everywhere else, a fringe of people who adhere to the catchwords of a cause. It is the main feature that one has to consider; and the main feature is that that part of the population which has an interest in preserving certain forms of social structure and in keeping things from moving too fast, is agrarian.

On the other hand, the more industrial element, drawn from labour that has been detached from the soil, is liberal, progressive. So that these two-party tendencies have their source in something that lies deeper; and one must, in every case, try to lift such things out of the mere phrases into which they have fallen,—to get through the words to the real thing behind them.

But ultimately, it all tells the same tale,—that the form of civilisation in which we have been living is one whose strength lies in words. We must push forward to a civilisation built upon real things, to a civilisation of real things. We must cease to be imposed upon by phrases, by programmes, by verbal ideals, and must get to the clear perception of realities. Above all, we must get to a clear perception of realities of a kind that lie deeper than forms of civilisation in city or country, agricultural or industrial. And much deeper than these are those impulses which to-day are at work in the various members of the body human distributed over the globe,—of which the American is making towards Cosmogony, the European towards Freedom, and the Asiatic towards Socialism.

At present, this certainly comes out, has and does come out, in a curious way. Anglo-American civilisation is conquering the world, But, in conquering the world, it will need to absorb what the conquered parts of the world have to give; the impulse to Freedom and the impulse to Altruism; for in itself it has only the impulse to Cosmogony. Indeed, Anglo-American civilisation owes its success to a cosmogonic impulse. It owes it to the circumstance that people are able to think in world-thoughts. We have often and often talked about this during the war, and how the successes of that side proceeded from supersensible impulses of a particular kind, which the others refused to recognise. The cosmogonic element cannot and must not be left thus isolated; it must be permeated from the domain of freedom.

Yes, my dear friends, but then, to see the full meaning of this, it is, I need hardly say, necessary to get right, right away from phrases, and pierce to the realities. For anyone who is tied to phrases would naturally think; Well, but who of late has stood out as the representatives of Freedom, if not the Anglo- American world?—Why, of course, in words, yes, to any extent, but what matters about a thing is not how it is represented in words, but what it is in reality. We have had over and over again, as you know, occasion to refer to -the language of “Wilsonism.” Phraseology of the Wilson type has been gaining ground in Western countries for a long-time past. In October 1918, it even for a time laid hold of Central Europe. And over and over again here,—I remember there was always quite a little commotion here when, over and over again, as the years went on, one had to point out the futility of all that Woodrow Wilson's name stood for, how utterly hollow and abstract it all was, for which Woodrow Wilson's name stood. But now, you see, people even in America are apparently beginning to see through Wilsonism, and hour hollow and abstract it all is. Here, there was no question of any national feeling of hostility towards Wilson, there was no question of antagonism proceeding from Europe. It was an antagonism arising from the whole conception of our civilisation and its forces. It was a question of showing Wilsonism for what it is,—the type of all that is abstract, all that is most unreal in human thought. It is the Wilson type of thought which has had such one-sided results, because it has absorbed the American impulse without really possessing the impulse of freedom (for talking about freedom is by no means a proof that the impulse of freedom itself is really there), and because it had not the impulse for really practical Altruism.

The life of Central Europe, with all that it was, lies in the dust. What lived in Central Europe is, to a great extent, sunk in a fearful sleep. At the present moment, the German is, one might say, forced to think of freedom, not as they talked of it in all manner of fine phrases at the time when they were groaning under the yoke of Ludendorff,—when constraint of itself engendered an understanding of the idea of freedom. Mow they think of it, but with crippled powers of soul and body, in total inability to summon up the energy for real intense thought. We have in Germany all sorts of attempts at democratic forms, but no democracy. We have a republic, but no republicans. And this is in every way a symptom that has especially manifested itself in Central Europe, but it is characteristic of the European world in general.

And Eastern Europe?—For years and years, the proletariat of the whole world have been boasting of all that Marxianism was going to do. Lenin and Trotsky were in a position to put Marxianism into practice; and it is turning into the wholesale plunder of civilisation, which is identical with the ruin of civilisation. And these things are only just beginning. Yet for all that, there does exist in Europe the capacity for founding freedom, ideally, spiritually. Only, Europe must supplement this in an actual practical sense, through the co-operation of the other people on the earth.

In Asia, we can see the old Asiatic spirit lighting up again in recent years. Those people who are spiritual leaders in Asia (take, for example, the one I have already alluded to, Rabindranath Tagore),--the leading spirits of Asia show by their very way of speaking that the altruistic spirit is anything but dead. But there is still less possibility now than there was even in old days, of achieving a civilisation through this one third only of the impulses that go to the making of a civilisation.

All this is the reason why to-day there is so much talk about things which are peculiar to the civilisation that is dying, but which people talk about as though they stood for something that could be effective as an ideal. For years, we have had it proclaimed that “Every nation must have the possibility of ...” well, I don't quite know of what, living its own life in its own way, or something of that sort. Now, I ask you: For the man of to-day, if he is frank and honest about it, what is a “nation”?—Practically just a form of words, certainly nothing real. If one talks about the Spirit of a Nation, in the sense in which we speak of it in Anthroposophy, then one can talk about a Nation, for then there is a reality at the back of it; but not when it merely signifies an abstraction. And it is an abstraction that people have in mind today when they talk of the “freedom” of nationalities, and so forth. For they certainly don't believe in the reality of any sort of national Being. And herein lies the profound inward falsity to which men to-day do homage. They don't believe in the reality of the national Being, yet they talk of the “Freedom of the Nation,” as if to the materialist man of our day, the “nation” meant anything at all. What is the German nation? Just ninety millions of persons, who can be added together and summed up, A plus A plus A. That is not a National Being—a self-contained entity—for men to believe in. And it is just the same with the other nations. Yet people talk about these things and believe that they are talking about realities, and all the while are lying to themselves in the depths of their souls.

But it is with Realities we are dealing when we say; The Anglo- American Being—a striving towards cosmogony; the European Being—a striving towards freedom; the Asiatic Being—a striving towards altruism. When we then try to comprehend these three divided forces in a consciousness that embraces the universe as a whole,—when, from out of this consciousness of the universal whole, we say to ourselves: “The old civilisation is bursting through its partitions, it is doomed,” to try to save it -would be to work against one's age, not with it. We need a new civilisation upon the ruins of the old one. The ruins of the old civilisation will get ever smaller and smaller; and that man alone understands the present times who has will and courage for one that shall be really new. But the new must be grounded, neither in a sense of country as among the Greeks and Romans, nor in a sense of the Earth, as with men of modern times. It must proceed from a sense of the Universe, the world-consciousness of future man, that world-consciousness which once more turns its eyes away from the earth here, and looks up to the Cosmos. Only, we must arrive at a view of this Cosmos which shall carry us in practice beyond the Schools of Copernicus and Galileo.

My dear friends, the Europeans have known how to express the earth's environment in terms of mathematics; but they have not known how, from the earth's environment, to extract a real science. For the times in which he lived, Giordano Bruno was a remarkable figure, a great personality; but to-day we need to realise that where he could only perceive a mathematical order, there a spiritual order reigns, reality reigns. The American does not really believe in this purely mathematical world, in the purely mathematical cosmos. His particular civilisation leads him to reach out to a knowledge of the supersensible forces beyond, even though he is, as yet, on the wrong road. In Europe, there was no sort of knowledge that they did not pursue; and yet when Goethe, in his own way, really put the question: “What is scientific knowledge?” there was no getting any further; for Europe had not got the power to take what can be learnt from the study, say, of Man, and widen it into a cosmogony, a science of the universe. Goethe discovered metamorphosis, the metamorphosis of plants, the metamorphosis of animals, the metamorphosis of man. The head, in respect of its system of bones, is a vertebral column and spinal marrow, transformed. So far, so good; but you need to follow it up and develop it, until you realise that this head is the transformed man of the previous incarnation, and that the trunk and limbs are the man in the initial stage of the coming incarnation. Real science must be cosmic, otherwise it is not science. It must be cosmic, must be a cosmogony, otherwise this science is not something that can. give inward human impulses which will carry man on through life. The man of modern times cannot live instinctively; he must live consciously. He needs a cosmogony; and he needs a freedom that is real. He needs more than a lot of vague talk about freedom; he needs more than the mere verbiage of freedom; he needs that freedom should actually grow into his immediate life and surroundings. This is only possible along paths that lead to ethical individualism.

There is a characteristic incident in connection with this. At the time when my Philosophy of Freedom appeared, Edouard von Hartmann was one of the first to receive a copy of the book, and he wrote me: “The book ought not to be called The Philosophy of Freedom,” but “A Study in Phenomena connected with the Theory of Cognition, and in Ethical Individualism.” Well, for a title that would have been rather long-winded; but it would no# have been bad to have called it “Ethical Individualism,” for ethical individualism is nothing but the personal realisation of freedom. The best people were totally unable to perceive how the actual impulses of the age were calling for the thing that is discussed in that book, The Philosophy of Freedom.

Turning now to Asia,—indeed, my dear friends, Asia and Europe must learn to understand each other. But if things go on as they have in the past, then they will never understand each other, especially as Asia and America have to understand each other as well The Asiatics look at America and see that what they have there is really nothing more than the machinery of external life, of the State, of Politics, etc, The Asiatic has no taste for all this machinery; his understanding is all for the things that arise from the inmost impulses of the human soul. The Europeans have, it is true, dabbled in this same Asiatic spirit, the spiritual life of Asia; but it must be confessed that they have not, so far, given proof of. any very great understanding of it. Nor have they been in very perfect agreement, and the kind of disagreement that arose plainly showed that they had very little understanding of how to introduce into European culture what are the real actuating impulses of Asiatic culture. Just think of Mme. Blavatsky; she wanted to introduce into the civilisation of Europe every kind of thing out of the civilisation of India, of Thibet. Much of it was very dubious, that she tried to introduce. Max Müller tried another way of bringing Asiatic civilisation into Europe. One finds a good deal in Blavatsky that is not in Max Müller; and there is a good deal in Max Müller that is not in Blavatsky. But from the criticism Max Müller passed on Blavatsky it is plain how little insight there was into the subject. In Max Müller's opinion, it was not the real substance of the Indian spirit that Blavatsky had brought over to England, but a spurious imitation, and he expressed his opinion in a simile, by saying: That if people met a pig that was grunting, they would not be astonished; but if they met a pig talking like a man, then they would be astonished. Well, in the way Max Müller used the simile he can only have meant that he, with his Asiatic culture, was the pig that grunted, and that Blavatsky was as if a pig should start talking like a man! To me it certainly seems that there is nothing remarkably interesting about a pig grunting; but one would begin to feel rather interested if a pig were suddenly to start running about and talking like a man Here the simile of itself shows that the analogy they found was a very thin one and lies chiefly in the words. But people do not notice that nowadays; and if one does make bold to point out the absurd side of the matter, then people think one ought not to treat “recognised authorities” like Max Müller in that kind of way, it is not at all proper!

That is just where it is, my dear friends, the time is at hand when one must speak out honestly and straightforwardly. And if one ie to be honest and straightforward, one must speak out quite plainly about the occult facts of our civilisation in the present day,—such facts as these: That the Anglo-American world has the gift for Cosmogony, that Europe has the gift for Freedom, Asia the gift for Altruism, for religion, for a social-economic order.

These three temperaments must be fused together for a complete humanity. We must become men of all the worlds, and act from that standpoint, as inhabitants of the universe. Then, and then only, can that come about which the age really demands.

We will talk more about this tomorrow. To-morrow we meet at 7 o'clock. First there will be the Eurhythmic performance, then a break, and after that the lecture.

I do not propose today to link up with what I was saying here last Sunday in the manner usually intended when people speak of continuing a subject. On that occasion I tried , as far as this was possible in a mere outline, to show in a general pedagogical and introductory way how we are to conceive the organisation of a life of spirit, a life instruction, independent of either the economic life of that of the State. I tried, too, to show how, once this independence is established, the various branches of instruction have to be applied in a new way, in order to give what must reveal itself to teacher and educa tor some kind of anthropological and pedagogical form or, perhaps it is better to say, a kind of anthropologically pedagogical activity. On the same occasion I remarked that one essential in the future will be the training and particularly the examining of a prospective teacher or educator to discover whether his personality is fitted for the task.

I will reserve the direct continuation of these matters for a later occasion and try to pursue my main subject in quite another way. I shall try to put before you clearly how it is necessary for me to think out of the evolutionary forces of the age—and how today we should have to speak at teachers' conferences, for example, or at somethigg of the sort, where people really desire to serve their times. At present it is a fact that, if we want to emerge from utter confusion and chaos, many things will have to be spoken of quite differently from how the present thinking habits prompt us to do.

Today even at teachers' conferences people talk—as can be proved by striking examples—on the old hackneyed lines, whereas it would be possible to introduce a really liberal education for the future, only if educators and teachers were able to rise to the level from which they could survey the very great task s at present facing us, insof ar as, out of the very nature of education and instruction, these tasks lend themselves to logical development. True, the manner in which I shall speak to you today will not be what I should like to hold up as a standard or even a pattern. But what I want to do is to indicate the angle from which we should speak to teachers so that they may themselves receive the impulse to get to work on an education having free play. It is just those who do the teaching who must rise to the level of the great and all-embracirg tasks of the age; they must be first to gain insight into the nature of the forces concealed behind present world events; they must see which forces have to be recognised as coming from the past and therefore needing to be superseded, which forces need to be specially cherished as having their roots in our present existence. These matters must be looked at today culturally and politically, in the best and most ideal sense, if we are to create a foundation for the impulses which will have to exist in those who are teachers. Above all, people must become aware that at every stage of instruction and guidance our education has suffered impoverishment and the reasons for this must be understood. The principal reason is that education has lost its direct connection with life. The educationalist today talks of many things which have to do with method, above all of the tremendous benefits that education is to derive from State control. Apparently, in his almost automatic way, he will still be speaking of these benefits when in theory he will in part have accepted the concept of the necessary threefold social organism. There has never been an age when thinking has been so automatic as it is now, and this is particularly evident where ideas on education are in question. These ideas on education have suffered under something that up to now we have been unable to escape; we must, however, escape from it. There are indeed questions today that cannot find so easy a solution as the following: Judging from past experience this or that will be possible. Then doubt will immediately take possession of the hearts and minds of men. Today there are innumerable questions which will have to be answered by: Is it not imperative that something should happen if we are to extricate ourselves from confusion and chaos? Here we have to do with questions of will, where the often apparently justified intellectual doubt regarding the validity of experience can settle nothing. For experience has value only when worked upon in a suitable way by the will. Today, though very little worked upon thus by the will, there is much in the way of experience. In the educational sphere itself a great deal is said against which, from the purely intellectual and scientific point of view, not much objection is to be made, and which from its own point of view is quite clever. But today it is important to understand the real issue—above all to understand how alien from real life our education has become.

I should here like again to refer to a personal incident. In Berlin about twenty-three years ago a society was formed concerned with college education. Its President was the astronomer Wilhelm Forster. I too belonged to this society. We had to hold a course of lectures most of which were given on the assumption that all it was necessary to know were certain stereotyped things about dealing with the various branches of science, about grouping these into faculties, and so on. I tried—though at the time I was little understood—to draw attention to the fact that a college should be a department of life in general, that whoever wants to speak about college education ought to start with the question: From the standpoint of world history, in what situations are we in life at present in all its different spheres, and what impulses have we to observe in these various spheres of life in order to let these impulsesstream into the college, thus linking it with the common life? When we work out such things, not in the abstract but concretely, countless points of view are revealed which, for example, help to reduce the time to be expended on any particular subject, and new ways of dealing with the various subjects are discovered. The moment any proposal is made for this reduction simply out of the ideas with which education works today, everything falls to the ground; the educational centres in question become mere institution s for training people who have no real connection with the world.

Now what are the intrinsic reasons, the deep lying reasons, for all this? Whereas in recent times thinking on the lines of natural science has made such wonderful progress, this fine method of thinking, which on the one hand has come to look upon man as purely a being of nature, has—to speak truly—cut off all knowledge of the real man. We have spoken quite recently of the tremendous importance of this knowledge of man's being for the right kind of teacher—the knowledge that recognises the real nature of the living human being, not in the formal way in which he is so often represented today, but in accordance with his inner being, particularly in accordance with the evolution of that being. There is a symptom, to which I have often referred here, showing how dreadfully foreign man's real being is to the modern educational movement. When a thing of this kind is said it may perhaps be considered paradoxical; it must be said today, however, for it is of the utmost importance. The loss of any real knowledge of man has produced that dreary, barren effort that is a branch of what is called experimental psychology against which, as such, I have no complaint. The so-called intelligence tests are a horrible travesty of what is really beneficial in the sphere of education. I have perhaps often described how, by certain physical contrivances, experiments are made with the avowed object of testing the memory, the understanding, of a human being, in order to register whether the particular person's memory and understanding are good or bad. In a purely mechanical manner, by giving part of a sentence and demanding its completion, or by some other device, it is sought to form an idea of the abilities of a growing human being. This is a symptom of how the direct relation between people—which alone is profitable—is a forgotten factor in our culture. It is a symptom of something cheerless which has been allowed to develop; but today it is admired as being remarkable progress—this testing of intelligence, this offspring of what are called in modern universities psychological laboratories. Until people see how necessary it is to return to a direct intuitive knowledge of man by studying the human being himself, particularly the growing human being, until we get rid of the unhappy gulf in this sphere between man and man, we shall never be able to understand how to lay the foundations for an education that is really alive and for a life of the spirit that is free. We shall have to purge all our educational establishments of this desire to experiment on the human being in order to satisfy the pedagogues. As groundwork for a reasonable psychology, I consider experimental psychology of value; in the form in which it has crept into education and even into the courts, however, it is a pervesion of the sound development of the evolving human being, between whom and his equally evolving fellow there is no yawning chasm. We have brought matters to such a pa ss that from what we strive after culturally we have excluded everything human; we must retrace our steps and once again unfold what belongs to man. We have also to find the courage to make an energetic stand against much of what in recent times has aroused growing admiration as a great achievement; otherwise we shall never make any advance. This explains how those today, who leave college with the intention of teaching, and proceed to educate human beings, have the most misguided conceptions about the real nature of man, and do not acquire the true conceptions because, in place of them, the kind of superficiality has arisen which we see in these intelligence tests. This will have to be recognised as a symptom of decline. We must seek within ourselves the capacity for judging the abilities of a human being, since he is a man and we ourselves are men. It must be understood that, because of this, every other method is unsound, for it destroys the fulness of what is immediately and vitally human—so necessary a factor in beneficial progress.

Now today these things are not seen at all. It is of primary importance that they should be seen if we are to progress. How often these things have been spoken of here; sometimes they have provoked a smile. But people have no notion that the reason for speaking of these things so frequently today is that they are an essential part of our life of spirit. There is nothing to be gained today by listening to what is said here as if it were a novelette; the important thing is to learn to distinguish between what is merely perceived, observed, and what may contain within it the seed to action. The culminating point of all the anthroposophical endeavors here is the building up of the idea of man, the passing on of the knowledge of man. It is this that we need. We need it because, from the very nature of the times, we have to overcome three forms of compulsion, the survivals of earlier days. First, the most ancient compulsion which masquerades today in various forms—the compulsion of the priesthood. We should make more progress in our study of the present situation were we today to recognise these disguises of certain obsolete facts and of the ideas and impulses unfortunately still living on in the thinking of the peoples of Europe, America and even in Asia—the modern disguises of the old priestly compulsion.

As our second compulsion we have something that develops later in man's historical evolution, also disguised in various ways today—the political compulsion.

And thirdly, coming comparatively late, there is the economic compulsion.

Out of these three compelling impulses men have to work their way; this is their task for the immediate present. They can get free today only if, to begin with, they clearly perceive the masks which in various ways disguise what is living in our midst, the masks which conceal the three compelling impulses among us.

Above all today the teacher must look to the level on which these things can be discussed, where, by means of the light gained from these things, we can illuminate contemporary evolution and thus become aware how one or other of these compulsions is lurking in some contemporary fact. Only when we find the courage to say: It is because teachers have isolated themselves, withdrawn into their schools, that such ill-judged ideas have been thought out as this testing of human efficiency by experiment—which is merely a symptom of much else... But everywhere today, where either general or special educational methods are spoken of, we see the result of this withdrawal behind the school walls where teachers have been banished by the State; we see this remoteness from real life. None of the principal branches of life, namely, the spiritual, the rights or political, and the economic, can develop fully at the present time—I say expressly at the present time, and particularly in this part of Europe—if these three branches do not stand each on its own ground. For the extreme west, America, and for the extreme east, it is rather different but, just because this is so, we ourselves must be aware of this. We shall have to think ultimately in concrete terms and not in abstract ones; otherwise, where space is concerned, we shall arrive at some theoretical Utopia for mankind throughout the entire earth, which is nonsense, or a kind of millennium in historical evolution—also nonsense. Thinking concretely in this sphere means thinking for a definite place and a definite time. We shall have something more to say about this today.

The attention of the teacher must be directed towards the great world phenomena; he must be able to survey what is there in our present spiritual life, and what changes have to be made in this present life by bringing out of the growing human being something different from what has been cultivated in him of late years. What has been cultivated of late years has, among those in educational circles who should have been active as teachers, led to terrible specialisation. On occasions such as speech-days, gatherings of scientists and other meetings of experts, we have often heard the praises of this specialisation vociferously sung. Naturally it would be foolish on my part were I unable to see the necessity for this specialisation in scientific spheres; but it needs to be balanced or we just create a gulf between man and man, no longer meeting our fellow men with understanding, but as a specialist confronting him helplessly as another kind of specialist. This gives us nothing on which to bare our belief in a specialist but the fact that he bears the stamp of some existing body of knowledge. We have been very near bringing this specialisation from the school into life. Whether the present vicissitudes will preserve us from the unhappy fate of having psychologists brought into the courts in addition to all the other experts, as many people wish, so that experiments can be made on criminals in the same way as they are made on our young people—this remains to be seen. I have less to say against the matter itself than against the way in which up to now it has been dealt with.

This is how things are under State control in the sphere of education, of school instruction.

Now after the short time in which people were talking of the inherent rights of manor, as they were then called, natural rights—no matter whether these were contestable or not—after this comparatively short time, came the age when people began to be shy of discussing these natural rights. It was taken for granted that whoever did so was a dilettante; in other words anyone was a dilettante who assumed the existence of something that established rights for man as an individual human being; the only professional way was to speak of historical rights, that is, of those rights which had developed in the course of history. People had not the courage to go into the question of the actual rights and on that account confined themselves to a study of the so-called historical ones. This especially is something that a teacher must know. Teachers must have their attention drawn, particularly during their conferences, to how in the course of the nineteenth century the concept of natural rights has been lost, or lives on in rights today in disguise, and how a certain wavering, a certain inner doubt, has persisted in face of what is merely historical. Whoever is acquainted with the conditions knows that the principal impulse today goes in the direction of historical rights, that people are at pains—to use Goethe's words—not to speak of inherent rights. In my lectures here I have frequently focus sed attention on how we must openly and honestly come to a final settlement in this matter. Hence we should not shrink from giving a true account of what has to be abolished, for nothing new can ever be set up unless there is a clear concept of what has impaired man's habits of thinking and perceiving.

It may well be said that our mid-European culture is a particularly forcible example of how a really positive idea of the State has broken down. There was an attempt to build it up again in the nineteenth century. It foundered, under the influence of the idea of purely historical rights, which made their impulses felt without this being noticed by those concerned. Whereas these people believed they were pursuing science in a way that was free from all prejudice, it really amounted to their pursuing it in the interest of the State or for some economic purpose. Not only into the carrying on of science but also into its content, and especially into all that has became practical science, there has flowed what has come from the influence of the State. Hence today we have practically no national economy because a free thinking, established on its own basis, has been unable to develop. Hence, too just where the most important laws of the economic life are concerned, there is today an utter lack of understanding given laws relating to genuine political economy are mentioned. We can see especially clearly into what confusion education has been thrown—education on a grand scale—for it has no connection with life, it has withdrawn from life into the schoolroom. A really living study of anything can never arise if we show merely what is to be experienced outwardly, without showing the way in which it should be experienced. The one thing cultivated today, namely, the worship of merely outward experience, leads simply to confusion, especially when it is a conscientious worship. We need the capacity to cultivate the inner impulses which lead us to the right experiences.

You will remember that last Friday I called your attention, in the necessarily brief way for lectures such as these, to how, by studying the conditions of European economy at the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, we were able to gain a clear idea of the forming of associations in future from impulses arising out of production and consumption. But to this point of observation, which underlies the whole of European life and proceeds from what is so clearly to be learnt in the general change-over to our modern age at the end of the fourteenth century, we come with the right point of view only by studying anthroposophy in its deepest aspects. The essential facts are not falsified by this, but we are directed to that point in evolution where is revealed in clear symptoms what lies rather beneath the superficial stream of evolution, and what is to be looked upon as the actual driving element. For this reason, what is inherent in the scientific method has been hidden from modern pedagogy and scientific didactics; pedagogy and didactics were thrown back upon chance and chance dictated in what sphere they were to be found. What we need is inner guiding lines to direct us to important truths; the directing lines which can be found by studying Goethe's world conception, through which such an infinite amount may be learnt. This is not just to be built up nor looked for intellectually, it must be sought in an inter-weaving of man with the world. This is something lost to us, as may indeed be seen in our present wish to fathom the individual being of man in the superficial way this is done in the educational side-line we call experimental psychology.

What is pre-eminently necessary today is for a light to be kindled in those who are responsible for the education of children concerning the very root of our modern development. If we now stand at a point where the main direction of life has to be changed, it is absolutely necessary to see into what has happened in the course of evolution up to now. The first thing to go under was the elementary impulse towards a free economic life of the state; then in the last third of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth,—particularly in Central Europe, we trampled on our life of spirit, made it into something of secondary importance. How much, for instance, of the great impulse of Goetheanism has flowed into the kind of life of spirit we want today? Nothing, or practically nothing! People talk in a superficial way of Goethe; of the immensities concealed in the very way Goethe perceived the world, nothing has sunk into the general consciousness. As I have frequently told you the Goethe Society at Weimar showed themselves lacking in all sense of responsibility by placing at their head not a man who had understanding of Goethe, but a superannuated Prussian Minister of Finance!

Thus have we let ourselves sink into utter forgetfulness of our spiritual past. Nowhere in present day consciousness do we find what, through Goethe, gave the German life of spirit its characteristic stamp. It is all effaced, reduced to the level of a parasite. Editions of Goethe have followed one upon another, but nowhere do we meet with Goethe's spirit. Whoever sees through all this must say: In the realm of economy this is bad, in that of politics it is bad, but it is worst of all in the spiritual realm. In this way we have begun by ruining our political consciousness; after that we have ruined all connection with our own life of spirit. I do not say this from pessimism, I say it because, out of insight into what has happened in the past, there must arise what is to happen in the future.

Then—well, then came what is called the world war. After the collapse of the political life, which in its collapsed condition was nevertheless kept going, after the collapse of the life of spirit comes the economic collapse, the magnitude and intensity of which is even today not realised, because it is believed that we are at the end or at any rate in the middle of it, whereas we are merely at the beginning. This economic collapse—it can be studied in everything that played a part in producing the world catastrophe. If we would go into the pertinent details of the question of the Baghdad railway before the world war, for example, you would see there the most unhappy consequences of linking the political with the economic life. If you follow the single stages of the Baghdad transactions, with which the unfortunate Helfferich is specially connected, you see economic capitalism on the one hand forming combination on combination, on the other hand the interference of the national-political machinations of chauvinists, machinations which differ according to whether they work in from the east or from the west. In Germany, my dear friends, we observe the loss of all sense of action as the lifo of the spirit has been lost; the sense of action has disappeared with the real life of the State, and what remains is merely the economic life. Everywhere from the West we see economical-political aspirations playing in, wearing the mask of chauvinism or nationalism, the mask of the economical-political; whereas from the East we have the spiritual-political masquerading in various forms. All this is united in a confusion of threads which then lose themselves in the absurdity, in the impossible situation, of the Baghdad question. This question of the Baghdad railway, this whole procedure shows clearly the impossibility of any further development of the old imperialism, of any further development of the old political system.

Now what in the will to build this railway we see here as a great political problem of world importance, is seen again in incidents during the war. Things, however, have never been observed so that, guided on the right lines, people have come to the point where outer events can betray their inner connections. So Kapp squealed, Bethmann Hollweg raised an outcry while there was silence on the part of the spiritual leaders of Germany. That was indeed the situation. Kapp who represented agriculture squealed, not knowing which way to turn between war economy and the problems of the land. Bethmann Hollweg, who had no head for politics, raised an outcry, no longer having anything reasonable to say on the matter; and those Germans who were at the head of the spiritual life were silent because they had withdrawn into the schoolrooms of Germany and were no longer in touch with real life, having no notion of how in real life things should be managed.

I don't know how many of you remember all this. What I am giving you is no highly painted version but the situation in its actual colors. Kapp did squeal, Bethmann Hollweg really raised an outcry against the terrible way in which he, poor man, was attacked in the Reichstag; and those who were supposed to know something of the matter in question said either nothing or what, because it had no connection with life, amounted to nothing. The lines on which economy was developing could be shown up in all their absurdity only by a great, conspicuous world affair. Indeed, many people have never noticed the pass to which we have come also in what concerns the State. They had their Hohenzollerns, their Hahsburgs, their Romanoff Czars. That because of their impracticability, already in a most decided form the elements of disintegration were present within the empires of Hohenzollems, Habsburgs and Romanoffs, could be ignored, for it was possible for these empires to be held together in an umatural frame, already in process of disintegration because, within the State, there was no longer any real impulse.—On the part of the socialists today we frequently hear it emphasised that the State must cease. No one has done more to prevent a judicious administration of the State than those who represented the European dynasties in the nineteenth century. By deluding ourselves, and refusing to be conscious in various ways, it is possible to ignore the fact that we have trodden the life of spirit underfoot, as far as its achievements in the nineteenth century are concerned. This cannot be done to the economic life. When the State is starved people are offered the consolation of public holiday and royalty is feted with paper flowers. For example, it is no fabrication but an ascertainable fact that on the Hamburg bridges well-dressed women, souvenir mad, violently precipitated themselves on the cigarette ends William II had thrown away. Neither is it an idle tale that this same William II was not averse to such flattery but that it tickled his vanity; he delighted in such displays.

Thus, in the sphere of the economic life we have ultimately experienced the remarkable phenomenon which can be characterised only by saying that agriculture squealed, that there was an outcry on the part of the political life, and industry preened itself with satisfaction, workers included—to the extent to which they formed part of industry—until they arrived at the front, where they learned another tune and spread abroad other views on returning to their homes. It is obviously untrue when today it is said that collapse started in the home. Collapse started at the front because the men there could no longer endure the conditions. Such things must be known, especially by those who want to educate others. Henceforward they dare not sit in a comer without any understanding of life; they have to know what must happen. Far more important than keeping to any school time-table today would it be for the instructors of youth to hear discussions about this cultural and historical phenomenon, and to have revealed to them what shows itself so clearly in the sphere of the economic life under capitalism.

You know the saying ascribed to a certain society—a saying approved on one side, disputed on the other—“The end justifies the means.” In the economic life under capitalism another impulse has shown itself during the world catastrophe, and that is: The end has desecrated the means. For everywhere among the declared ends and aims—this is revealed also in that very question of the Baghdad railway—the means were desecrated, or, again the means desecrated the ends.

These matters must be known today and must be studied unreservedly. My present observations have an educational purpose insofar as I believe that from the aspect from which I am speaking today—not perhaps in accordance with the way in which I speak—teachers must, above all, have each stage elucidated. We have to outgrow what previously has prevented teachers hearing of these great world events. Because of this we are experiencing today the comfortless fact of how entirely ignorant a great part of the population were politically. Today we meet people—in this instance I cannot politely say “present company excepted”, at least not in all cases—who do not know what has been going on for decades in the most external affairs, for instance in the workers' movement; these people have no notion what form the struggles of the proletariat have taken during these decades. Now an educational system that turns out into the world men who pass one another by, and know nothing of each other, must surely be a factor leading to collapse. Are there not in the middle class today those who scarcely know more about the workers than the fact that they wear different clothes, and details of that description; who know nothing of the struggles going on in trades unions, in associations, in political parties, and have never taken the trouble to look into what is taking place all around them? Now why is this? It is because people have never learnt to take lessons from life, because they always learn some particular thing. They think: Ah, I know that, I am a specialist in that sphere; you know something else and are a specialist in some other sphere.—People have become accustomed to this without ever getting beyond what they have absorbed as knowledge at school, considering this as an end in itself, whereas the important thing is learning to learn,—Learning to learn, so that, however old one is, one can remain, up to the very year of one's death, a student of life. Today even when people have taken their degree, as a rule they have exhausted their powers of learning by the time they are out of their twenties. They are unable to learn anything more from life; parrot­wise they reel off what they have absorbed up to then. At most they have, now and again, an inkling of what is going on. Those who are different are exceptional. It is important that we should discover an educational method where people learn to learn, and go on learning from life their whole life long. There is nothing in life from which we cannot learn. We should have different ground beneath our feet today if people had learnt how to learn. Why nowadays are we socially so helpless? It is because facts are confronting us on a level to which men have not grown. They are unable to learn from these facts because they have always to confine themselves to externals. In future there will be no education that bears fruit if people will not trouble to rise to the great points of view in human culture.

Now whoever views the world today out of a certain anthroposophical back ground frequently discussed here, knows how to think concretely about all that is in it. He looks to the West, he looks to the East, and out of this concrete observation he can set himself problems. He looks towards the West into the Anglo-American world in which for many decades, perhaps even longer, there have played the great political impulses so damaging at present to central Europeans. Nevertheless these impulses are on a grand scale; and all the great impulses in the political life of the present time have originated from the Anglo-American peoples, for they have always known how to reckon with the historical forces. When during the war I tried to bring this to the notice of certain people sayinq: The forces coming from there can be withstood only by forces arising in the same way from historical impulses,—I was ridiculed because there is no belief, among us here, in great historical impulses. Whoever knows how to study the West rightly, insofar as it is Anglo-American, finds there a number of human instincts and impulses coming from the historical life. All these are of a political-economic nature. There are important impulses in an elementary form within Anglo-Americanism, which all have a political economic coloring; ever one there thinks so politically that this political thinking is extended into economics. But in all this there is one peculiar feature. You know that when we talk of economy we are demanding that, in the economy of the future, fraternity should hold sway; it was driven out of the imperialist-political economic strivings of the West. Fraternity was left out, eliminated; hence what lived there assumed its strongly capitalist trend.

Fraternity was developed in the East. Whoever studies the East in accordance with its nature, so entirely of soul and spirit, knows that out of the people there really springs a sense of brotherliness. Whereas what was characteristic of the West was a boom of the economic life destitute of brotherliness and tending therefore to capitalism, in the East there was brotherliness without economy, these two being held apart by us in Central Europe. We have the task—a thing the teacher must know—the task of synthesising the brotherliness of the East with the non-brotherly but economic way of thinking belonging to the West. We shall be socialists in a world-embracing sense if we bring this about. Let us now bring the East into a right line of vision. You find there, from very ancient times, a highly spiritual life. That it should have died out can be maintained only by those who have no understanding for Rabindranath Tagore. Men there, in the East, live a spiritual political life; and what of the opposite pole? It is to be found in the West. For this spiritual-political life of the East lacks something—it lacks freedom. It is a subjection that leads to the renunciation of the human self in Brahma or Nirvana. It is the reverse of all freedom. On the other hand, the West has made a conquest of freedom. Standing between East and West it is we who have to unite these in a synthesis, which is possible only by keeping freedom and fraternity quite distinct in life, but at the same time preserving balance between them. We must not understand our task, however, in such a way that what is suitable for one is suitable for everyone; for abstract thinking of that kind is the ruin of all striving after reality. All thinking in accordance with reality comes to grief when people believe that one kind of abstract ideal can be set up over the whole earth, or that an ordering of society holding good today will do so to all eternity. This is not only nonsense, it is a sin against reality, for each part of space, each section of time, has its own task, and this must be realised. But then we must not refuse through laziness to gain knowledge of the true, concrete human relations; and we must recognise our task by learning to study facts in accordance with their meaning. The primary and secondary education of recent days has led us very far from this kind of study; it has no wish to know anything of this concrete approach to phenomena, for at this point the region begins where men today feel uncertain of themselves. Instead of describing they would rather define. They would like today to take up images of the facts instead of accepting images of the facts as mere symptoms of what is expressed in the deeper lying impulses.

I am speaking today in such a way that the content of all I say is meant to be drawn from the region out of which anything about education must issue. Those who can best enter into what is said from this region make the best educators and teachers; not those who are asked what they know of any particular subject—knowledge of that kind can be found in a textbook and read up before a lesson. The important thing in future examinations must be to discover what those who aspire to be teachers are as men. A life of spirit of this kind applied to education, out of its very nature, creates the necessity of not being trained for cultural life one-sidedly but as spiritual workers standing fully within the three branches of the nature of man. I am not saying that anyone who has never worked with his hands is unable to see the truth rightly and never ta ke s a right stand in the life of the spirit. The following should be the aim—for man to go in and out of the three spheres of the threefold social organism, that he should form real relations with all three, that he should work, actually work, in all three. We need have no fear that the possibilities for this will remain hidden. A feeling for this, however, must arise particularly in the heads of those who in future will be teachers of the young. Then another feeling will come to life, a tendency to go beyond specialisation to what we try here to bring about through anthroposophy. We must come to the point of never breaking the thread of our study of the universally human, of our insight into what man actually is; we must never be submerged in specialisation in spite of having our specialists. This, it is true, demands a much more active life than most people today find pleasant.

I have often experienced an extraordinarily discordant note at conferences of specialists or technical conferences. People foregather there with the express purpose of furthering their special subject. Now this frequently is done for hours, with great diligence and keenness. But I have repeatedly heard a very strange expression—the expression "talking shop". Time is requested when shop is no longer to be talked, when no one is to speak any longer on his special subject. Then, for the most part, the silliest rubbish is talked, the most boring rubbish, but no shop. There is a certain amount of malicious gossip; many subjects are discussed, sometimes very interesting subjects—though that is looked at askance—in short, everyone is relieved when the talking of shop is over. Doesn't it show how little connection people really have with what they actually do, and what they are supposed to do, for mankind, if they are so pleased to get away from it? Now, I ask you: Will leaders of men who want to esca pe their particular profession as soon as possible ever be able to face up to a population of manual workers who enjoy their work? When today in their complacent way, they talk about the wrongs existing among the manual workers, you must not question the manual workers, you must question the bourgeoisie who have created the wrongs—these are the real sinners. Those who as manual workers are tied to the desolation of capitalism cannot attain joy in their work, when above them stands a class who perpetually have the wish to escape from what should make for their happiness. These are the ethical by-products of recent educational methods. It is something which must above all be realised and above all undergo change. There is much here that will have to become different in the customary thinking of those who teach.

What am I wanting to tell you in these remarks? I want to make clear to you how thorough-going today we have to be in our indications of what is to come about; how thoroughly necessary it is to leave the realm of the trivial, the terribly trivial content to which we have confined our thinking, and not only our thinking but also our life of feeling and will. How should the will prosper—and we need our will for the future—if it has to remain in the light of this petty habit of thinking, this petty quality of our ordinary thinking and feeling?

How much is entirely lacking that we must have for the future? For one thing we must have a real people's psychology. We must know what there is in the growing human being. We have blotted out this knowledge and in its stead have acquired tests that experiment with human beings because of the inability to apprehend their characteristics intuitively. All kinds of apparatus are supposed to reveal what the human being has in the way of abilities. We do not trust in ourselves to discover these things. And why? Because we do not approach them with interest; because we go through the world with our soul asleep. Our soul must wake up and we must look into these things. Then we shall see that much of what today is looked upon as great progress is really absurd. This poor pedagogue of the primary and secondary school is sent out like a human tame rabbit unable to see what is really going on in the world. The rabbit then proceeds to educate human beings, who because of this very education pass by their fellow men without any feeling for what lives in their souls. Thus, it is today, irrespective of the fact that among many of the middle class there is obviously no will to enter into the great contemporary questions and impulses, and that those today who have any will are not of much use because they know absolutely nothing about what is necessary, having slept through the time during which the proletariat day by day, for decades, have been schooling themselves politically. It is indeed very seldom that, when it is a matter of discussing the great questions of the day, we find proletarians making the excuse of not being able to afford the time to look into them; they make the time. But if you inquire of any bourgeois group, they have so much to do that they cannot afford the time to study contemporary matters—they all have far too much to do. That, however, is not the real reason; as a matter of fact they have no notion at all what it is they are supposed to study. They do not know how to go to work beca use this was never included in their education.

Now these are not just so many pessimistic remarks, nor are they intended as a sermon; they are a pure statement of fact. What is more, we have experienced that, when men have been forced to it by life, they have educated themselves in this matter. In cases where people should have been able to educate themselves out of their own impulse, it has all come to nothing, nothing at all has happened. It is on this account that we find ourselves in our present wretched condition, on this account that we hear about anything tried-out today not only expressions of ill-will, which are frequent enough, but all the unintelligent nonsense arising from ignorance of life, because no school has ever thought of teaching its pupils how to learn. Knowledge in individual cases always trickles to people through the protecting walls of comfort, but this does not have the same result as when the human being has free access to the phenomena of life with unimpeded senses.

The sad events of the present time might show us an infinite amount in that very sphere where people go on talking in the old way, and where it appears as if the clockwork of the brain had been wound up and was obliged to go on ticking. Conferences on external matters proceed today still in the same way as they proceeded before the war catastrophe. A great proportion of the people have learnt practically nothing from these terrible events, because they have never learnt how to learn. Now they will have to learn from dire necessity what fear has not taught them. In the past I have referred here to an utterance, quoted in what I wrote on the social question, of a most unassuming but cultured observer of life, Herman Grimm. “In the nineties of last century this man said: When we contemplate the life around us today and consider whither it is heading, whither it is rushing headlong, particularly in these ceaseless preparations for war, it is as if the chief desire was to fix the day for general suicide—so utterly hopeless does this life appear.” People are wanting, rather, to live in dreams, in illusion, those above all who think themselves practical. But today necessity is calling us to wake up; and those who do not wake will not be able to take part in what is essential, essential for every single man. Many do not even know how to put their hand to the plough in this matter.

This is what I wanted to say as a kind of exposition of what should be discussed today at teachers' meetings. It is what should be developed particularly by those who have the task of educating youth, those who should be looking towards what the future is to bring. When we continue these studies we shall go more into the details of education, details of primary and secondary education.

I felt the need to speak to you about an anthroposophical topic this evening, despite the fact that my stay in Stuttgart should be devoted to other things. Today I would like to share with you something about the relationship between the human being and the world around that person, insofar as this world environment plays a role in the nature of the human being. I would like to shape this theme in such a way that its content can be particularly relevant to many things that need to be considered in the face of the decline of civilization in our time.

If we take together what we have learned over the years from anthroposophical spiritual science about the human being, then much can be summarized for us in that threefold nature of the human being, which has indeed already often appeared before our souls, in the threefold nature of spirit, soul and body. If we look at our present education from the spiritual-scientific point of view, at that which is penetrating more and more into our education today, then we must say that the development of humanity has gradually come to subject only the physical part of the human being to observation. In relation to this consideration of the bodily, we certainly have comprehensive knowledge today and even more endeavor to get to know the bodily in its relationship to the other phenomena of the world. But we live at a time when more and more attention must be paid to the soul and the spirit. Precisely when one looks at the physical so carefully, as is the case with today's usual knowledge, one must actually be led by this consideration of the physical to the consideration of the soul and the spiritual.

I would like to start from phenomena that cannot really be understood today because only the physical is considered, and which nevertheless, I would like to say, are there as great questions before man. When we consider the human body, it fits into the whole order of nature, and knowledge has gradually endeavored to piece this order of nature together from necessarily interrelated causes and effects. The human body is also thought of as being integrated into this chain of causes and effects and is explained from it. This is the materialistic character of our present-day knowledge in the broader and actual sense, that one only looks at natural causes and effects and the way in which the human body is derived from these causes and effects with a kind of mechanical necessity.

But then certain phenomena immediately present themselves to man, which are indeed abnormal phenomena in a certain sense, but which stand there like great riddles, like question marks, if one merely stops at the purely natural explanation according to cause and effect. We see how human corporeality unfolds. The natural scientist comes and seeks the same laws in the human body that he seeks in the rest of nature. He may say that they are only more complicated in the human body, but they are the same laws that are also found in nature. And lo and behold, we see individual laws from which certain phenomena arise, albeit in an abnormal way, which cannot possibly be incorporated into the course of natural events. The materialistic thinker endeavors – he has not yet achieved it, but he regards it as an ideal – to explain ordinary human volition, ordinary human feeling, human thinking or imagining as effects of bodily processes, in the same way that we explain a flame through the combustion of fuel. And it can certainly be said, even if, of course, such explanations have not yet been achieved today, that in a certain way the natural scientist may say that the time will come when thinking, feeling and willing will also be explained from the human body, just as the flame is explained from the burning of fuel. But how should we relate to human imagination, for example, if this view were completely correct? We distinguish between ideas in life that we accept because we can describe them as correct and ideas that we reject because we describe them as incorrect, because we say they are an error. But in the natural order, everything can only follow from the causes and be the proper effect of the causes. Thus, in accordance with the natural order, we can say that error and deception arise from necessary causes in the same way as the correct and justified conception. But here we are confronted with a riddle: why do the phenomena of nature, which are supposed to be all necessary, give rise in man to the true in one instance and the false in another?

But we are even more mystified when we see what we call deceptive visions and false hallucinations arising in individual human beings, which we know to be something that vividly suggests reality without being rooted in it. How can we possibly claim that something is an unjustified hallucination when everything that takes place in a human being necessarily arises from the natural order that is also in him? We would have to ascribe just as much justification to hallucinations as to what we call true impressions and true perceptions. And yet, we are – and we can feel and sense this – justifiably convinced that hallucinations must be rejected as such. Why must they be rejected? Why may they not be recognized as legitimate content of human consciousness? And how can we recognize them as hallucinations at all?

We will only be able to shed light on these mysteries if we look at something else that may initially remind us of hallucinations, but which, according to our perception, cannot be recognized by us in the same sense as hallucinations, and that is the products of human imagination. These products of human imagination arise first from the unfathomable depths of the human soul; they express themselves in images that magically present themselves to the human soul, and they are the source of many things that beautify and uplift life. All art would be inconceivable without the products of the imagination. Nevertheless, we are aware that these products of the imagination are not rooted in a solid reality, that we have to look at them as something that deceives us if we ascribe reality to them in the usual sense of the word. But then we come to something else.

We know the first stage of supersensible knowledge from our spiritual science. There we speak of imagination, there we speak of imaginative knowledge, there we describe how the soul, through certain exercises, comes to have a pictorial content in its contemplation, but which, although it appears as a pictorial content, is not seen by the spiritual researcher as a dream, but is seen as something that refers to a reality, that depicts a reality.

We have, so to speak, three stages of the soul's life before us: the hallucination, which we recognize as a complete deception; the fantasy, which we know that we have somehow brought out of reality, but which nevertheless does not, as it arises in us as a figment of the imagination, have anything directly to do with reality. Thirdly, we have the imagination, which also arises in our soul life as an image or as a collection of images and which we relate to a reality. The spiritual researcher knows how to relate this imagination to a reality through life, just as he relates the secure perception of color or sound to a reality. And to those who say that imagination, real imagination, cannot be proved in its reality, that it could also be an illusion, one must reply: He who has immersed himself in the things of the soul says: You also cannot know whether a hot piece of steel is a real hot piece of steel or merely a thought, a mere mental image. You cannot prove it through thoughts, but you can through life. Everyone knows how to distinguish in life, through the way he comes into contact with external physical reality, the merely imagined hot iron that does not burn you from the real hot iron. And so, in life, the spiritual researcher knows how to distinguish between what is merely imagined in this spiritual world and what points to a reality of this spiritual world through imagination, precisely because of the contact he comes into with the spiritual world through imagination.

Now, one does not understand the relationship of this threefold system, hallucination, fantasy, imagination, if one is not able to penetrate the essence of man in relation to his entire world environment in a spiritual scientific way. The human being is, after all, a being that is divided into spirit, soul and body. If we first consider the human being as he presents himself to us between birth, or let's say conception, and death, then, in terms of our immediate experiences, we have him before us in his corporeality. This corporeality of the human being is only understood to a very small extent, even by today's science. This corporeality is a very, very complicated one. The more one is able to follow it down to its details, the more it becomes a wonderful structure. But the answer to the question: How do we understand this corporeality? - it must come from another side and it only comes to us from the side that spiritual science offers us when it points to the spirit.

But if you take many of the things that have been said in the various lectures of the past years together, you will actually be able to say to yourself: Just as we have the human being's corporeality before us between birth and death, so we have his spirituality, his spirit, before us in the life that the human being accomplishes between death and a new birth. And if we consider the life of a human being between death and a new birth, as I did in the lecture series I gave in Vienna in the spring of 1914, we observe the growth and development of the human spirit in the same way as we observe the growth and development of the human body when we follow the human being from birth to death. It is really so: when we look at the newly born child and then follow the development of the human being, how he develops out of childhood, how he becomes more and more mature, how then decay comes, how then death occurs: we follow the human body in its becoming with our outer senses and combine our outer sense impressions with the intellect. In the same way, we can follow the human spirit in its development if we observe the growth and maturing of the spirit, if we arrive at what I have called in Occult Science the midnight hour of existence between death and a new birth, when we then see its approach to physical life; we then contemplate the spirit, and we must then look at the relationship of this spirit, which actually appears to us in its original form between death and a new birth, to what appears to us here in the physical world as its body in its becoming.

Now, through spiritual research, we are confronted with the significant and important fact that what we experience here as the body, what reveals itself to us as the body, is in a certain respect an image, an external image, a true image of what we observe as spirit between death and a new birth, and what we see as spirit in the way just now indicated is the model for what we see here in the physical life as a body. This is how we must imagine the relationship between the spiritual and the physical. Someone who knows nothing of the life between death and a new birth knows basically nothing of the human spirit.

But when we stand before a human being, as he presents himself to us in the corporeality that reveals itself to us between birth and death, and we then equip ourselves with the awareness that this is an image of the prenatal spiritual, then we ask ourselves: What mediates between the model and the image? What makes the model, which of course precedes the image in time, what makes this model develop in the image? We could perhaps do without such mediation if the human being were to appear completely perfect, if he were to be born in such a way that his spiritual model would immediately transform into the perfect human being and he would no longer have to grow and develop, but would stand before us in perfection. Then we could say: In a spiritual world beyond lies the spirit of man, here in the physical world is the physical image. We relate the physical image to the spiritual model. But it is not like that, as we know, but through birth, the human being first enters into sensual existence as an imperfect being and only gradually, slowly does the human being become similar to his model. Since the spirit only has an effect up to the moment of conception or even a little further into the embryonic life, that is, up to birth, and since the spirit then, so to speak, releases the human being, there must be a mediator, something must be there that, for example, in the twentieth year, takes what had not yet fully corresponded to its spiritual model and shapes it so that it corresponds more and more to its spiritual model. And that which reproduces the spiritual model in the physical is the soul.

And so we find man placed in his entire world environment. We then follow his spiritual existence between death and a new birth, his physical existence between birth and death, and we look at his soul existence as that which the model gradually develops in the physical body, in the bodily image. Then, so to speak, the midpoint of a person's development on earth comes around the age of thirty-five. Then decline sets in. Then, so to speak, the person becomes more and more hardened in terms of his physicality. But that which develops in him is already preparing itself to be absorbed again in its spiritual, purely spiritual, form at death, so that the human being can then live out again in the spiritual form between death and the next birth. What is it, again, that prepares the physical more and more so that it can become spiritual again in death? It is again the soul. This soul-life thus prepares us to be an image of our spirit in the first half of our life. It prepares us to become spirit again in the second half of our life. And so we get the human trinity of spirit, soul and body. This gives us a concrete idea of the relationship between spirit, soul and body. But we also get an idea of the physical, which is clear in itself, which is without contradiction in the sense that it must be. Because if the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual, then all spiritual activities must also be reflected in the physical; then what is spiritual must be traceable in the body in material form. And we need not be surprised that materialism has emerged in the newer knowledge and said that the bodily is the origin of the spiritual. If one takes only that which develops in man between birth and death, namely as imagination, then one finds everything that lives in the life of imagination in the images of the human body. One can follow the human being in the body up to his thinking, and one can come to the delusion of the materialistic view, because one must indeed find those fine ramifications of the bodily organization that come to light in thinking, in imagining.

So one can become a materialist in this way. One can become a materialist because the physical is a true reflection of the spiritual. And when one knows nothing of the spiritual, then one can be satisfied with the bodily, limit oneself to the bodily, then one can believe that the whole human being is contained in the bodily. But this bodily comes into being with the life of the embryo, dissolves after death. This bodily is transient, and all that we also develop as the life of imagination, bound to this bodily, is transient. And yet, it is a true reflection of the spiritual. This corporeality is a particularly true reflection of the spiritual when we look at the activity of this corporeality. We carry out an activity in the fine organizations of our nervous and sensory systems, and this fine activity is absolutely a reflection of a spiritual activity that has taken place between death and a new birth.

And when we now look at this physical activity, when we realize how it is - as I have indicated - mediated by the soul, we have to say: This physicality is an image, a reflection, and we only find the spiritual in the associated spiritual world. Here in this physical world, man, insofar as he is in this physical world, is quite a material being, and in the organization of his materiality, the true image of the spiritual is expressed at the same time. The soul certainly lives in him, which imparts the spiritual, but what belongs to the whole human being is that which lives right up to the embryonic life, which then transforms into that into which the human being in turn transforms after death: the spiritual. The spiritual, the soul and the physical are thus connected.

But if we look at this correctly – just try to see clearly what I have put before you – you will say to yourself: what the human being develops as the power of thinking must, even if only in reverberation, mediate through the soul what has gone before, from the embryo life. In other words, when I have ideas now, a certain power lives in my imaginative life, but this power is not only developed from the body; in the body there is only its afterimage. This power resonates, so to speak, it is a resonance of the life that I spent between death and a new birth before my embryonic life. This life must play a part in my present life. When the ordinary man of today imagines, it is indeed the case that in his imagining lives the echo, the reverberation of his prenatal life.

And how does a person come to ascribe a being to himself? He comes to ascribe a being to himself through the fact that he unconsciously has a realization of it: By imagining, my prenatal being lives on in me, resonates in me, and my body is an afterimage of this prenatal being. If he now begins to develop such an activity himself, which should actually only be developed through the resonance of prenatal existence, what then? Then, in this physical existence, the body, because it is an afterimage, develops something out of itself that is similar to the imaginative activity, but is not justified to do so. And that can indeed occur. When we live and think and imagine in our normal lives, our prenatal life resonates within us. And because the human being is tripartite, the nerve-sense life can be eliminated and each of the other parts can begin to imitate the activity from the purely physical realm that should actually resonate from our prenatal existence. When the rhythmic person or the metabolic-limb person develops such an activity out of themselves without justification, which is similar to the justified imagination that resonates from prenatal life, then hallucination arises. And you can, with absolute precision, if you look at the matter spiritually, distinguish the justified perception, which at the same time, by recognizing it as a justified perception, is living proof of the pre-existent life. You can distinguish it from the hallucination, which, by virtue of the fact that it can be there, that it is the imitation is a living proof that the original it apes also exists, but that it is cooked up entirely by the body and therefore stands there as something unauthorized. For in physical life the body has no right to ape out of itself the way of thinking that should be born out of the spiritual life of prenatal man.

Such considerations must indeed be made if one wants to get beyond those foolish ideas that are now considered definitions of hallucinations and the like. One must look into the structure of the whole human being if one wants to distinguish the hallucinatory life from the real life of imagination. And when the real life of imagination is further developed, when it is consciously taken up and when this consciousness is added to it, so that one not only experiences the echo in the imagination of prenatal life, but when one now quite consciously makes this echo into an image and thereby looks back from the echo to reality, then one comes to imagination. Thus the true spiritual scientist differentiates between hallucination, which is a boiled-out of the physical body, and imagination, which points to the spiritual, which projects itself back into the spiritual, so that one can say: In the hallucinating person the body combines, in the imagining person, who transports himself back from the echo into the prenatal world, the spirit combines; he extends his life beyond the physical existence and lets the spirit combine. In him the spirit combines. Those people who out of prejudice or, as is already happening today, out of ill will, repeat over and over again that the imagination of spiritual science could also be hallucination, they deliberately overlook the fact that the spiritual researcher knows how to strictly differentiate between hallucination and imagination, that it is he who, in the strictest sense of the word, can firmly distinguish one from the other, whereas what is said today in conventional science about hallucinations is everywhere without foundation and ground, everywhere arbitrary definitions. And it is actually only proof that present-day science does not know what hallucinations are, that it cannot distinguish what it encounters as imagination from the hallucinatory life.

Given the character of the insinuations made in this field, one must today already speak of conscious slander. It is only due to the fact that our scientists are lazy about what spiritual-scientific research is that they even bring such things into the world. If they would not be too lazy to go into spiritual science, they would see how strict distinctions are made between hallucinatory and imaginative life in spiritual science.

But one must take this into one's consciousness if one honestly wants to profess our movement, that in our contemporaneity there is the malevolence that comes from laziness, and one must pursue the laziness, which then leads to mendacity, in our contemporary culture to its hiding places; there is no other way for spiritual science today. So that we can say: In the hallucinatory life the body combines, in the imaginative life the spirit combines, and the human being feels completely removed from the world between birth and death when they feel fully immersed in the imaginative life.

The soul stands between the two. The soul is the mediator, so to speak, the spiritual fluid that mediates from the spirit, the model, to the body, the afterimage. This must not be sharply contoured on either side, it must have fluid contours, blurred contours; in contrast to this, one cannot say in a definite way that it is rooted in reality or that it is not rooted in reality. In the case of hallucinations, because they are only cooked up by the body, which however cannot cook up anything real unless it is living in the echoes of prenatal life, in the case of the body and its hallucinations one can say that they are not rooted in reality. In the case of the imaginations and their abstract images, the thoughts, one can say that they are rooted in reality.

With the images that arise from the combination of the soul, with the fantasy images, we now have something blurry; they are real-unreal. They are taken from reality, the sharp contours of reality are toned down, made to fade, made to blur. We feel ourselves to be lifted out of reality, but at the same time we feel that it is something that means something for our inner life, for our whole life in the world. We feel the intermediate state between hallucination, between deceptive hallucination and real imagination in the mediating fantasy, and we may say: in hallucination the body combines, in fantasies in the case of imagination, of which abstract thoughts are the ordinary-life reflection, the soul combines, in the case of inspiration, the mind combines. Here we have the threefold nature of man in his activity and in his relation to his environment. We may say: When we are in the spirit, whether in the shadowy image of thoughts or in imagination, through which we then rise to the higher levels of knowledge, we combine reality;

When we are within the soul and its figments of the imagination, we combine something that floats back and forth between reality and unreality; when the body combines, the hallucinations suggest to us something that may actually correspond to an unreality.

If you take what I have developed now, then you will say to yourself: Yes, an unbiased consideration of the human being provides us with this trinity of spirit, soul and body. And even with regard to what is activated by the human being, we can distinguish in three ways: hallucination, fantasy and imagination, and we are referred to body, soul and spirit. You see, with Anthroposophy you have to penetrate deeper and deeper into its essence to see how it covers the details from its wholeness.

We see how one must first present the division of the human being into body, soul and spirit in a more abstract way, and then how it is filled more and more with concrete content. If you look for the relationships between something that you have presented in this way and the other, you get more and more evidence. But that is necessary in anthroposophical life, that you keep pushing forward and forward. But that is what today's man, who feels so terribly clever, does not love. Modern man does not like to say to himself: I have now read an anthroposophical essay, I have heard an anthroposophical lecture, yes, it is not yet clear to me, but I will wait, I will see what else comes. If he would wait, he would see that progress is constantly being made on other things, and that in the end everything is certain to be true, that one thing will become proof of the other. And to the one who says: If one thing proves the other, then the whole universe is without reason and ground, then one thing always holds the other – to the one who makes this objection, you just say that he cannot accept the description that astronomy gives him of the earth. He is also told that one part of the earth supports the whole and that the whole stands without ground or base. The one who wants other proofs than this support of the one by the other does not take into account that in the case where one comes to totalities, this is precisely the characteristic, that one part supports the other.

What is necessary in order to present anything like what we have developed today before our soul is that people not only talk about the spirit – of course, one can easily talk about the spirit and actually mean blue smoke), but that one speaks spiritually of the spirit, that one is actually grasped by the spirit and that one arranges the one in the world in such a way that the work of the spirit comes to the fore. Someone who only thinks materially cannot distinguish hallucination from imagination and from figments of the imagination when he juxtaposes them. But the one who sees the living spirit in the mediation of the three pulls the threads from one to the other, is filled with living soul content in his way of looking at things, and speaks in such a way that the spirit lives in his words. One should not only speak of the spirit in science, one should let the spirit speak in spiritual science. Please reflect on this sentence, which is indeed very important if the essence of spiritual science is to be understood: One should not only speak about the spirit or of the spirit, one should let the spirit speak in a spiritual way. In this way one becomes free, for the spirit receives one freely and one expresses the nature of the spirit through one's own spirit. One must speak about the spirit in a spiritual way, that is, with fluid thinking, not with hardened thoughts, which correspond to a materialistically thinking science.

But if we take this, then it is, I would say, the very point that leads to the innermost task of our time, and which alone can save us from the decay that is such a strong impulse in our entire present-day civilization. We can say: If we feel completely at ease today with genuine, real devotion to knowing in the world within, then we are led, as if by a world grace pouring over us, to think in such a way that we think spiritually about the world. This is the one that, as a property of world evolution, only came about at the end of the 19th century. Anyone who follows the development of humanity with an open mind will see that the evolution of the world was different before the last third of the 19th century, but that, one might say, the gates of the spiritual have opened and that today, after the materialistic view of nature has celebrated great triumphs, we are faced with the task of looking at the world spiritually again. For rhythmic movement is also the human becoming, through which the individual human being passes in the rhythm of repeated earthly lives. This life is rhythmic. In rhythmic recurrence, man goes through that which once lived out in such spiritual striving of mankind, as it had its peak, for example, in the middle of the 19th century, when man only directed his mind to the material and wanted to explain everything materially , and our present time, when we must return to spiritual contemplation, because if we allow the world to fill our souls without reservation, that soul will be filled with the urge for spiritual contemplation of the world.

That is the secret of our time, I would say. Those who live with the spirit today must realize that the gates between the supersensible and the sensory world are open for earthly existence. Just as the things of the material external world speak to us through colors and sounds, so today a spiritual world speaks clearly to people. But people are still accustomed to letting the old, merely representative material world speak to them, and so they have opened the battle in all forms against the influx of the spiritual way of looking at things. This conflict manifests itself in the materialistic scientific point of view; it manifests itself in the terrible materialistic struggles that convulsed the beginning of the twentieth century. But just as in an earlier period of human development people once aspired too strongly to the spiritual and therefore fell into illusions and enthusiasms that wanted to express the spiritual in their bodies , so he who fights against the spiritual, as basically the majority of civilized people still do, falls into the clutches of the power that today resists the descent of the spiritual into the physical world. And so we have seen looming that which must come to those souls who resist the influx of the spiritual: we come to that which is the appearance of falsehood, which we have seen streaming in so terribly during the time of the world war. It was, however, already prepared beforehand, and we live today in a time when not only does the world resist knowledge, but the world is developing an inclination to tell untruths in a truly dreadful way. And basically, most of what is being said today by opponents of anthroposophy and everything associated with it is untrue. What profound dishonesty is evident in those who today virtually present themselves as the bearers of truth, who call themselves the proclaimers of truth!

Let me give you an example – I always have to use examples that are close at hand, I'm sorry to say: A paper called Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt (Stuttgart Protestant Sunday Paper) is published in Stuttgart. In issue 19, page 149, the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt published a few sentences that included the following, among other things. Someone, a retired pastor named Jehle, had presented something about the anti-church currents of the present day. Much valuable information had been said about monism and freethinking, and then the retired pastor Jehle explained the deeper reasons for the bitterly fought battle against the historicity of Jesus, as waged by A. Drews. He then shed light on Christian Science, which, in the sharpest contrast to the materialistic world view, declares everything material to be unreal, and further: “Steiner's Theosophy, which, in gratitude for his allegiance to the returned Bernhard of Clairvaux, declares Pastor Rittelmeyer to be so.”

Now, my dear friends, a friend of ours has tried to get this matter rectified. The matter was also brought to Pastor Rittelmeyer, and Pastor Rittelmeyer then wrote the following letter to those who had made such a claim:

Well, you see, the Stuttgarter Evangelische Sonntagsblatt did not print the last words at all, about the low mentality and so on, but only the first words, and added:

So it is not admitted that one has spread a lie, but regrets that readers have understood it as if one had counted on the vanity. And now it continues: “As much as we regret, for factual reasons, the promotion of Rudolf Steiner's cause by a representative of the church, the thought of personal disparagement was far from our minds. We also have no doubt that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised by the thought of such an appointment by Rudolf Steiner.

So they create the impression that Pastor Rittelmeyer was unpleasantly surprised when he heard that I had appointed him, whereas he explicitly states that he was unpleasantly surprised that such a lie was spread by the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt.

“Besides, I think our regular readers know us too well to suspect us of intending to personally disparage or even defame them. They also know that we have plenty to do with better and more beautiful work.” – I leave it to the readers of the Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt to judge this.

You see, this is how those who call themselves representatives, the official representatives of the truth, and those whom numerous people consider obliged to represent the truth, work today. One only has to point this out to draw attention to where the tendency towards untruthfulness is today. But there is not yet enough widespread revulsion, not enough widespread disgust for such immorality, for such an anti-religion, which calls itself Christian Sunday worship.

One need only point to a single such symptom, of which hundreds could be demonstrated today, to show where today - and this will get much worse, because we are living in our time - the starting points are that then accumulate into those rabble-rousing performances like the ones that took place at our last eurythmy performances in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden. The same eurythmy performance that was seen here with full sympathy last Sunday was jeered at and whistled at in Frankfurt and Baden-Baden with all kinds of keys and similar instruments, not, of course, out of objective judgment, but out of the coincidence of two things. Firstly, the battle that is being waged on a large scale for reasons that you have probably heard me speak of on many occasions. This battle is being waged against the assertion of the influx of spiritual life into our physical world and is being waged out of the tendency towards untruthfulness. People do not have much time for it, but it must be pursued to its very last hiding place. And the other is the inability that is in league with laziness, with discomfort. When a well-known local newspaper, as I have already mentioned here, wants to pass judgment for its readers, it turns to one of the current authorities, for example Professor Traub in Tübingen; and in one of these articles, as I have already mentioned here, one found very strange words. This university professor, who still has the right today to prepare as many young souls, as they say, for their profession, writes: In Rudolf Steiner's world view, spiritual things and spiritual beings move in the spiritual world like tables and chairs in the physical world! Well, has anyone ever seen tables and chairs moving in the physical world with a sober mind? Professor Traub in Tübingen has the style of writing now that I talk about in my writings that in the spiritual world the entities move like tables and chairs in the physical world. Since he probably does not admit to being a spiritualist, Professor Traub, I at least will not be so rude as to impute to him the other state while he wrote this article, in which one usually sees the tables and chairs moved.

But these are the authorities to whom one turns when one demands a judgment about what presents itself as spiritual science today. These things are just not always stated with sufficient sharpness, and above all they are not thought about and felt with sufficient sharpness by many of our friends either. And again and again we experience it happening that when someone says something against us and we describe him in his whole character, one does not take it badly that he is a liar, but one takes it badly that we say he is a liar. We have experienced this in the last few weeks, one might say, from day to day, here and elsewhere.

One may well speak of an inability when such nonsense is written, as Professor Traub wrote in Tübingen, who also wrote in the same essay: Secret science cannot be a science, simply because the terms “secret” and “science” are mutually exclusive; what is secret is not a science. Now I ask you, if someone writes a scientific book and someone else has the quirk of keeping it secret for a hundred years, is it any less scientific because it was kept secret? It is certainly not scientific because it is kept secret or public, but because of its scientific character! One must really be abandoned by all the spirits of healthy thinking if one can just write such a sentence.

And another thing: here, among ourselves, it is permissible to say that there are some things I must say because, unfortunately, they are not being said enough from other quarters. For many years now, we have been striving to develop an art of recitation and declamation in eurythmy, which in turn goes back to the old good principles of art, again reminding us of what poetry actually is, the art of rhythm, beat, sound, imagery, while in our unartistic time poetry is actually only recited in a prosaic way. They recite the prosaic, the literal, they do not go back to the rhythmic, the metrical basis; and because in our eurythmy we seek what Goethe meant when he rehearsed his iambic dramas with his actors with a baton like a conductor, pointing to the truly artistic in poetry, because we go back from an return from the unartistic to the artistic, that is why the protectors or the people themselves, who today, while pretending to recite poetry, croak and bleat all sorts of prosaic things, they rise croaking and bleating out of their inability and insult those who devote themselves to reciting, who in turn want to bring out the real art of reciting.

I regret that I have to say this myself, but what use is it; if things are not formulated by others, then they must be formulated by me. And I can't help but see in this struggle another form of the struggle of inability, as can be seen, for example, in Traub's thoughtlessness, a struggle of inability of the bleaters against what attempts to be a real recitation. It is understandable that what works out of inability bleats itself or makes its protectors bleat, but we have the obligation to protect spiritual knowledge, and we must, even if it is resented, point out in strong words what is the fundamental damage of our time. Today I have spoken to you about a topic that corresponds to spiritual science, and I had to – well, it was already past our hour, so it was an encore – let my reflections end with something that, in terms of contemporary history, is very much connected to the purely spiritual-scientific main topic. I regret that I have to let my reflections run into such arguments, but we do not live in a cloud-cuckoo-land, we live in the world within, and if we have the necessary enthusiasm, if we feel the sacred obligation to stand up today for the cause of anthroposophical knowledge and its effects, then we must see clearly where the opposition lies, and then, by communicating with each other about these things, we must develop within ourselves the strong will to shine a light into this opposition. For only in this way will we join that which, in the face of decline, leads to a new dawn, which are the impulses that, in the face of the struggle against spirit and soul, want to bring about the assertion of spirit and soul in earthly life. In order to be able to feel together in the right sense in the strong assertion of the power that wants to bring spirit and soul into play, can bring them into play, we must come to an understanding about everything that is against spirit and soul.

I did not want to complain or grumble about the opponents, but I wanted to speak to you to make clear what is necessary for our souls to resonate in the work for mind and soul. I will say more about this when we meet again.

Because circumstances will probably arise in the next few weeks that will mean no lectures here in the branch, I will have to give something summarizing today. Something comprehensive that will point to certain time relationships, the observation of which makes it possible to gain a more precise insight into the tasks of the present time. And such an insight into the tasks of the present time is, as can be seen from various things that I have just discussed here, most urgently needed today.

The human being, especially in Central Europe, is actually so attuned today that he either fears or despises knowledge of the spiritual world. Both are, of course, inwardly related. But it is precisely this fear of the spiritual world and this contempt for the knowledge of the spiritual world that are connected with the extraordinarily difficult situation in which Central Europe has come to be, and in which it will continue to be.

Over the years and in recent weeks, I have already hinted at many things that I would like to summarize today. You will have gathered from the observations made here that in the West, among the peoples of the Latin and Anglo-American races, extrasensory knowledge plays a role in everything these peoples undertake in the broadest political sense. Anyone who believes that, for example, Anglo-American politics is not dependent on certain supersensible insights into the development of humanity is under a great illusion. And in the same way, supersensible insights play a part in everything that is striven for in the East, among the peoples of Asia and as far as Russia. In this connection, however, everything that concerns the present Russian regime must be excepted from what is being striven for in Russia. That is certainly foreign and far removed from all supersensible knowledge. These conditions show that we in Central Europe are, as it were, wedged in between world formations that are definitely determined by supersensible knowledge, which is often not of an impeccable nature for the present time. We have spoken of these things. And it has also been pointed out that this must not be the case, that in Central Europe, in a certain stubborn way, people close themselves off from real supersensible insights. For this closing off from supersensible insights would drive this poor Central Europe more and more into hardship and misery, into confusion and chaos.

It may correspond to a present-day note in all parties on the left and right to regard everything supernatural as something childish in the development of humanity. The peoples of Central Europe would suffer greatly if they continued to close their minds to supersensible knowledge, for they would simply be strangled by what is saturated with supersensible knowledge in the West and in the East. It is important to point out that in the broadest circles today, trust in those who have extrasensory knowledge has vanished, that this trust is to be eradicated through the mere worship of what can be mustered as knowledge without extrasensory vision. On the other hand, it is also true that no time is more in need of the most intensive cultivation of trust in those who can communicate something of such supersensible knowledge than our own. Thus we find ourselves in Central Europe in a situation in which we have the most urgent need of something that we also most intensely want to reject. This fact must be faced without bias. For example, we must ask: Where did the Anglo-American world get these insights into the course of human development that have become so pernicious to us in Central Europe? And what are the sources from which the eastern peoples, namely the eastern peoples of Asia, will be able to gain in the future that will be suitable to choke our throats in Europe? Only a clear insight into these things can really bring salvation.

If we follow what is spread as world ideas even among so-called completely enlightened historians and politicians in England and America, we will find that even in these enlightened people, their ideas are influenced by supersensible knowledge about the course of the world. In the Anglo-American world, this knowledge has been gained in a kind of mediumistic way since the middle of the nineteenth century in particular. The path suggested in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', for example, which is the direct path from the development of the human soul forces, is not popular in the Western world. In the Western world, one proceeds as follows: one seeks out certain people who are considered particularly suitable for making inquiries about the spiritual world, people who have more or less mediumistic abilities. Those who do not believe what I am about to explain, or rather the following generations, will have to pay heavily for this unbelief. Mediumistic personalities are sought out. These mediumistic personalities are brought into other states of consciousness, into trance-like states of consciousness, and when one knows the corresponding machinations by which, after the external mind has been shut down, what they carry within themselves in their subconscious is revealed through such mediumistic personalities, then one finds out precisely what was resting in the subconscious of these personalities. And it was particularly in the course of the nineteenth century in the Anglo-American world that the principles were discovered through which the successes could be achieved politically against Europe and Asia. They simply brought personalities who were suited for this into a certain trance, and then they developed the tasks for the Anglo-American world out of this trance. The people of the Anglo-American world are much too clever to do it the way the Central Europeans do, who simply do not believe what is revealed in this way from the depths of existence. With this disbelief, they close themselves off to all those impulses that could help them to advance in the real movement of humanity.

Now the path I have indicated here, which consists of experiencing supersensible developmental impulses of humanity through mediums, is an extremely precarious one. For it is self-evident that the instincts of the Anglo-American race prevail in the bodies of all those who are selected from the Anglo-American population. And the cultural-political impulses that are obtained in this way come out so that they are colored, mixed with what the egoism of the Anglo-American race is. And so these impulses are then effective in the egoistic service of the Anglo-American race. And anyone who can see through what can be seen through in this area knows that the successes of the Anglo-American race against Central Europe have been achieved with the help of what the occultism of the Western world has brought up from spiritual sources in the way I have just indicated. The method that is followed in this is easy to see through. You only need to remember what was said here eight days ago. You only need to remember that the ordinary logical mind, as it is used by us in external sensory observation and to create external sensory science, that this mind extinguishes real supersensible knowledge. For this ordinary logical mind is, after all, bound, bound in the most eminent sense, to the tool of physical corporeality. As soon as you develop up to those powers of cognition that are mentioned in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, you are no longer dependent on the tool of the physical body with these powers of cognition of yours. As soon as you make use of the logic to which one is accustomed in today's everyday life, that logic to which one has become accustomed as a result of today's external natural science, you are placed in the impossibility of getting to know that which actually prevails socially and spiritually in the development of mankind. Therefore, the people of the Anglo-American world, who are well aware of this fact, seek to gain their political principles by excluding the ordinary logical mind. By putting suitable personalities into a trance, the ordinary logical mind is eliminated. The medium speaks from the depths of his soul, without the use of reason. And if what is gained in this way is then clothed in the thought forms of common sense, it can be easily understood and can also be used in practical life. In the Western world, this is done by spiritualistic means for everything observed in the treatment of political and cultural facts, excluding the ordinary mind. Important impulses for the cultural policy of the Western world have been gained in this way and have been effective in recent years.

The opposite approach is taken in the Orient, by the people inhabiting Asia and also by certain elements of the Russian population in the European East. You see, I do not believe that the ideas of the threefold social organism would have been properly received if I had not first explored the human organism itself, the exploration of the human organism of which I have spoken, at least in outline, in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (The Riddle of the Soul). There I showed how the ordinary human natural organism is a threefold one, how this human natural organism is divided into three parts: a nervous and sensory organism, a rhythmic organism and a metabolic organism. Recognizing these three parts of the natural human organism is of immense importance for the current thinking of humanity. And through the recognition that one exercises in this view of the threefold natural human organism, one also comes to recognize the social organism correctly in its threefoldness. Just as we can investigate today that the natural human organism consists of these three parts: the nervous or sensory organism, the rhythmic organism, which is linked to the rhythmic activity of the respiratory and cardiac organization, and the metabolic organism, just as we can investigate it today, it was not investigated in ancient times. But in ancient times there was a certain instinctive, atavistic knowledge of these things. And the Orient, which had come particularly far in terms of the ancient way of looking into the supersensible world and gaining supersensible knowledge, has retained to this day the instincts to apply in life what can be gained from such supersensible knowledge. Therefore, the Oriental still seeks supersensible impulses today, just as the Occidental does; but he seeks supersensible impulses in a different way. The Oriental does not try to eliminate the intellect through mediumistic machinations, as the inhabitant of the Anglo-American world does, but on the contrary, he tries to fertilize the intellect. That is to say, he tries to stimulate the nerve-sense human being from the rhythmic human being. Therefore, in the Orient you will find that those who want to recognize something supersensible are recommended, above all, to train their human respiratory activity, to train the whole rhythmic human being. The Oriental yoga exercises, which are supposed to give these people of the Orient real knowledge, these Oriental yoga exercises are based on training the rhythmic human being in such a way that, through a certain type of breathing, through a certain technique of heart movement, influence is exerted on the human mind, which is otherwise only bound to the physical tool. By devoting himself to certain yoga exercises, the Oriental takes ordinary rhythmic breathing and ordinary heart activity out of their natural course and puts them into such a course that they gain influence over the mind, which would otherwise be directed only to the sense world, and which, through this influence, gains insights into the supersensible world. Thus the Oriental, by the opposite path from the Occidental, also has real knowledge of the supersensible world. These two paths of knowledge also lead to real knowledge. But just as the American and the Englishman, as occultists, for the reasons I have given you, gain knowledge that lies in the sense of the national ego, so the Oriental, by approaching directly the body, which is glowing with racial impulses, through his yoga exercises, gains impulses that are egoistic to the race. We are stuck between the national egoistic impulses of the West and the race egoistic impulses of the East. But insights can be gained in this way. And those who gain insights in the West and in the East in this way simply laugh at the Europeans who believe that they can gain real insights through their sciences or their social considerations. What the Europeans prattle out of their natural science, out of their so-called causal knowledge, and what they then prattle into their social science and social agitation out of their way of thinking, is regarded by Western and Eastern people as just a prattle, which it basically is compared to real knowledge. Because what is contained in our European sciences and in our European impulses for agitation is, compared to the real forces that guide the development of humanity, a mere rambling. And because we live in mere hot air, because we reject everything that is taken from reality, we bring misfortune upon ourselves. As soon as people unconsciously notice that something has been taken from reality, such as the idea of threefolding, they quickly vilify it as something that must not exist. But as long as we want to eliminate everything that is real from the world through ramblings - be it the ramblings of science or the ramblings of political parties - we will not emerge from chaos and confusion, but only drift deeper into chaos and confusion. But we must also be completely clear about the fact that neither the path of the West nor that of the East can be ours. For here in Central Europe it is necessary that the path be followed that is truly modern in the most eminent sense. And that can be no other than the one described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. What is the basis for what is described in this book, in contrast to the West and the East? To understand this, one must, however, gain some insight into the development of humanity. Above all, one must have assimilated a great truth about time, which consists in the fact — as I have often mentioned here — that a turning point for modern humanity occurred in the middle of the fifteenth century. According to our spiritual-scientific historical classification, this is where the fifth post-Atlantic cultural development begins, which differs significantly from everything that has gone before and which lasted from the eighth century BC to the fifteenth century AD. That is when humanity's endeavor to gain all knowledge through a new state of consciousness begins. This struggle of humanity to place itself at the apex of the personality, to fully develop the consciousness soul, goes hand in hand with other facts that I have already mentioned. And there is no other way for us to strive for supersensible knowledge than by taking this fact fully into account.

External science must remain mere idle chatter because it cannot see into the course of earthly evolution as it is connected with the development of humanity. What external natural science talks about are only the ripples that drift to the surface of life. This outer natural science speaks of what is investigated in the physics laboratory, what is observed through the telescope and microscope; it speaks of what is observed in the corpse; it speaks of everything that is dead in evolution. Nowhere does it speak of what is alive in evolution. For there is no test tube for any laboratory, there is no chemical reaction by which one could determine that which can only be determined through the supersensible experience of the human being himself. It is only the human being, the living human being, through whom the great events can be investigated. The great events of earthly existence must not be investigated by turning to the retort in the chemical laboratory. The great events of earthly existence must be investigated by turning to the being where the strong reactions occur, to the human being himself. But if we just present the development of humanity as it is today, we will not get to the most important things; we have to look at them through the millennia, and that is really only possible through supersensible knowledge. And when we look at it through this supersensible knowledge, we find that in everything we call food today, for example, in all the external material substances we can absorb to satisfy our physical needs, what lived in them before the fifteenth century no longer lives in them today. However paradoxical and absurd and insane this may appear to people of the present day, who are so scientific in their own opinion, and who are so full of nonsense in ours, however paradoxical and unreasonable it may appear to people of the present day, it is nevertheless the case that certain forces of almost all foodstuffs and almost everything we take from the physical world to satisfy our bodily needs have changed since the fifteenth century. Before the fifteenth century, in all material things, whether taken directly from nature or cooked, there were forces present that still had an effect on the soul. By eating, man still received certain soul forces from what he consumed. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, the ability to supply people with soul forces through simple eating has been completely lost. Since then, we have truly entered a stage of earthly development in which we can no longer obtain anything from the earth itself and from what it gives physically to satisfy our physical needs. Since that time, only physical processes take place in our metabolism, whereas before, when we digested, our metabolism was still soul-based, just as it is today — forgive the harsh word — in a cow or a snake, for example. It will surprise you that I say just that. But with regard to the external metabolism, the cow, when it digests, is a more material being than man, and so is the snake. When you see a cow lying or standing after it has eaten, or when you watch a snake digesting its food, something is alive in the astral organism of that cow or snake that was also alive in humans in the past, when they were more attuned to the animal, but is no longer alive in humans today. We have been so released by nature on this side that it no longer works in the same way as it used to. You may find it surprising that food has lost its soul-effect for us, but not for the cow; but that is the way it is. Expressions always mean different things to different beings. Precisely for man, because he is organized differently, food means something different than for the cow or for the snake, which of course the materialists do not believe. Precisely for man, because he is organized differently than the cow, the matter is as I have just explained. Therefore, today we have to take into account this more physical way of our metabolism compared to the past. But we also have to learn to take into account all the things that have changed on the other side.

You see, if we were to remain awake throughout our lives, we would be the most foolish beings imaginable in relation to the supersensible world, for we would only ever use our intellect through the instrument of the ordinary physical body. That means that all supersensible insight would have to fade away for us. It is our good fortune that every time we fall asleep, we withdraw our mind from the physical brain and then have that of the supersensible world. Today, however, we do not yet want to develop our consciousness to bring this knowledge of the supersensible world, which we unconsciously gain in our sleep, into the physical organization. But we have to, then we will become different people than we are now. It is indeed the case that while we are becoming more and more physical in our processes during our daily digestive activity, we are already becoming more and more spiritual during our sleep. And it is only a matter of bringing in what we accumulate in spiritual experiences from falling asleep to waking up. We bring this in by not doing it like the Oriental, that is, by not infiltrating our mind from the breathing process, so to speak, but by treating ourselves purely spiritually and mentally as described in 'How to Know Higher Worlds Higher Worlds?” is described, that in this changed outer life – which occurs for us because we treat ourselves in this way – everything that the mind accumulates in the supersensible world from falling asleep to waking up can enter.

I have already mentioned that the influence of the supersensible world cannot be gained in the way that many people do today: they drink so much beer in the evening that they have the necessary heaviness in bed. Yes, it is certainly not possible to dwell in the supersensible world from falling asleep to waking up in such a way that what has been supersensibly experienced can actually enter. Rather, we have to treat this body, which has been different from what it used to be since the mid-fifteenth century, as it were, from the soul, as it is in the sense of the book “How to Know Higher Worlds?” is. Then we first get supersensory attitudes, and then also supersensory knowledge.

What is recommended here as a Central European path to the supersensible world differs quite significantly from the path of Westerners and Orientals. What is recommended here is a training that has simply been demanded by human development since the fifteenth century. What is being done in the West is based only on what has been observed through the experiences that were made with the Native Americans. These Native Americans, who were wiped out during the conquest of America, were, in the opinion of the Europeans, quite uncultured people. Yes, outwardly they were quite uncultured people. But the strange thing was that these American Indians, who were wiped out, had very intense supersensible knowledge, and that they gained this supersensible knowledge through methods that the Anglo-Americans then learned from these Indians and cultivated in a somewhat more cultivated, but thereby also more decadent, way. This is based on a very significant process in the evolution of the earth.

You know that history tells a one-sided story of how things have progressed in the development of culture. History tells of all kinds of cultural migrations from Asia to Europe via Greece, Rome and so on. But it does not tell us that another cultural migration took place, not from Asia to Europe, but from Asia across the Pacific to what is now the West, to America, along the routes that were perfectly possible in ancient times. What was achieved in the way of spirituality in the East was brought to America. And you know – at least those of you who were here when I spoke about it here a year ago – that the whole external history of the so-called discovery of America and of the great human developmental principles is wishy-washy. Because I said at the time: Until the twelfth century, people in Europe were well aware that there was an America in the West. It has only been forgotten. The knowledge was covered up, and the discovery of America is only a belated discovery, a rediscovery of what was once well known. First, the connection between the European and American nature was broken, then it was rediscovered. But it was discovered in such a way that the Americans of the time, the American Indians, were massacred. This kind of cultural expansion was the first step on the path we then continued to follow step by step. Yes, it is indeed the case that when the Europeans came to America, they found an external culture of dirt in the material world among the Indians, but they also found a high spiritual life among these so-called wild people, whom they wiped out. And these wild people spoke at every opportunity of the great spirit that lived with them in all the details of their lives. It was sometimes a great experience for those Europeans who could understand it, to get to know the way these American Indians spoke of the great spirit. How was it that in the course of the evolution of the earth these Indians, who were so degraded in appearance, had preserved the possibility of looking up to this great spirit that permeates and interweaves the world? It was through this that they had preserved the possibility, in spite of their outward physical degradation. They were outwardly and physically ossified. Thus they had retained, like a mighty memory, the knowledge of the great spirit that had come to them from the East, from our East, but by the opposite route across the Pacific Ocean. They had preserved that. They had separated the spiritual knowledge from the knowledge of the soul and the knowledge of the body. They lived, so to speak, completely absorbed in the spirit.

The Europeans had an awful fear of what emerged as knowledge of the spirit from the North American Indians. The Europeans had indeed already ensured that this fear of the spirit would not be dispelled. I have often mentioned to you the memorable Council of Constantinople in the year 869, at which the Catholic Church abolished belief in the spirit, at which the Catholic Church decreed that in future one should not believe in body, soul and spirit, but that one should only believe in body and soul. And this abolition of the knowledge of the spirit has brought about all the chaos in science and knowledge that has befallen Europe. It was therefore no wonder that this European humanity, grown in fear of everything spiritual, was seized with even more terrible fear when it now came face to face with the American Indians and their knowledge of the great spirit. But as I said, that was only the beginning of the road we have continued to follow. We have gradually lost our belief in the soul as a result of the great European Enlightenment, and in today's materialism we believe only in the effectiveness of the body. But from this belief, from this superstition in the effectiveness of the body, there must come forth that which in turn leads to the knowledge of the spiritual, of the supersensible, by the path of which I have just spoken, and which must be neither the path of the Occidentals nor the path of the Orientals, but the specifically Central European one. And from this Central European path, we will also find that which alone can lead out of social hardship and social chaos. No other path can lead us out.

But you also see that this path requires some effort. You have to do something with yourself. You have to have the patience to develop your soul and spirit. For since the middle of the fifteenth century, these soul and spirit forces have no longer developed in such a way that one merely needs to eat and then, from the digestion of the food, inhales that which can infiltrate us with spiritual views. We have to take our development into our own hands, so to speak, if we do not want to remain foolish. But that is the great ideal of materialistic humanity in Europe: to remain foolish, not to become wise, to recognize only that which arises from the digestion of the body. This is basically the true cause of the social damage that has occurred in Europe since the middle of the fifteenth century: the ideals of European materialistic humanity not to take their own soul and spiritual development into their own hands, but to remain as they were born and to develop with the greatest possible exclusion of any spiritual and soul development.

And in doing so, people do not even notice what the historical connections actually are. They do not even notice, for example, how the same impulses that carried the Eighth Ecumenical Council in 869, which abolished the spirit, carry our university science and our social theories of today. People believe themselves enlightened because they see only what is in their consciousness. They do not realize that there would have been no Marx, no Engels, no Lassalle, with their peculiar thinking, if Marx and Engels and Lassalle had not been the disciples of those who were prepared for their views by the Ecumenical Council of 869. Social democracy, in its various parties today, is the faithful discipleship of what prevailed in the Catholic Church. The people just do not realize that. They do not realize that they are often the latecomers of Catholic-Christian impulses. They only believe themselves to be in the impulses of the very latest times. It will be a mighty coming to themselves when one day the parties, especially the left-wing ones of today, realize how Catholic they are in the bad sense. When people's eyes are opened to this, when they wake up to it, oh, it will be a strange realization. That is why they are so careful to ensure that people's eyes do not open to these connections. It is already the case today that anyone who sees through things only has to say what, after all, makes all people of today, from left and right, feel quite uncomfortable. If you understand the context of things, you cannot agree with the left and the right today. Therefore, today more than at any other time, one would like to exclude from public activity all people who understand something of the matter, and one would prefer to have as leaders those who, in their bullishness, are not clouded by any knowledge of the subject. But unbiased thinking about these things must enter into human minds and hearts; otherwise things will not progress. Therefore, it must be admonished again and again to such an unbiased view of the present situation. Above all, this connection must be recognized, which exists between correct social principles and what is known of the supersensible world.

There are three important concepts in the social field. You will find them in my book The Essentials of the Social Question: the concept of the commodity, the concept of human labor, and the concept of capital. In recent times, much has been said about these three concepts by academics and non-academics, by parties and non-partisan people. But hardly anything has been as inadequately based and as pompously proclaimed as the three concepts of commodity, human labor, capital. I do not want to say that sometimes quite accurate feelings about these things have been put into the world. Because the feeling that I have often characterized in my lectures, that has been triggered in the great proletarian mass by considering labor power as a commodity, this feeling is quite justified. Important social impulses must also come from this feeling. But that does not at all prevent the concept, the idea, the real impulse from which the feeling originates, from being fundamentally wrong. For one cannot recognize the concept of the commodity without having at least taken in the first step of supersensible knowledge. However paradoxical it may appear to people today, it is nevertheless true. A commodity is something to which human labor is attached, in which, as it were, the human being has invested himself. The definition of a commodity as you find it in Marx is quite incorrect. This is because Marx only uses the concepts that can be derived from ordinary sensory science. A commodity cannot be understood by anyone who does not have a concept of imaginative knowledge. Therefore, there will be no definition of the commodity until imaginative knowledge is recognized. And I have taken these things into account in my book “The Crux of the Social Question.” No wonder people say they don't understand these things. They have to find their way into the way of thinking that prevails in this book, not into the one that prevails outside of this book in the literature that separates from all reality.

No one can talk about human labor without knowing something about inspired insight. Because today, simply to say: a commodity is stored-up labor power – or: capital is stored-up labor power – is, of course, pure nonsense. I have already mentioned here that labor, the use of labor as such, is not decisive for any economic concept. Someone who plays tennis all day or does something else that has no economic effect at all applies the same labor as someone who chops wood, which has an important economic effect. What matters is not how much labor is put into the human development process, but how what emerges from work as a product is incorporated into the economic life of the nation. No thing derives its value from labor. The moment you make the value of a commodity dependent on labor, you would end up with nothing but absurdities. Therefore, it is important how labor is placed in the national economic process; otherwise, labor is something that is completely independent of all economics, something that is bound to human nature itself. Therefore, one cannot decide on labor from within the economic process itself, but one must decide on labor on the basis of something that is independent of the economic process, on the basis of pure law. You will also find this discussed in the book 'The Core of the Social Question'. In order to know something about these things, it is necessary to look into reality in a completely different way than the scientific drivel of the present day can. These things must be spoken about in all seriousness, because everything that appears in today's world is nothing more than scientific drivel, with tremendous arrogance and self-importance. And scientific drivel, in the face of the demands of the present, is everything that does not want to rise from mere sensual knowledge to supersensible knowledge. The function that labor has in the process of human development can only be found if one has an inkling of inspired knowledge.

And as strange as it sounds, no one can truly understand the function of capital without an idea of intuition, of the highest form of knowledge. The Bible already sensed this when it said that Christianity was to be fought with mammonism. However, this knowledge must, so to speak, be one that works in the opposite direction. One must educate oneself about what is to take the place of ahrimanic capital through supersensible knowledge, not through knowledge bound to sensuality. Thus, the development of a healthy national economy depends on people engaging in healthy supersensible knowledge, otherwise national economic matters will continue to be rambled on about in the future as they are now. In order to recognize something socio-economic, it is necessary today to know the science of initiation. But this science of initiation, of which we are speaking here, is rejected and despised by those who want to work publicly today. Therefore, what can be heard today from the mere sensory view in the form of party opinions sounds to him who sees through things - and this must be said - like the clanging of the sayings of a company of fools. Now you can imagine that since the truth is not pleasant, it is even less pleasant to tell this truth to today's humanity. But this truth must be told to today's humanity. The fact is that today's humanity does not want to hear the truth, but it is absolutely necessary that this truth be told to today's humanity without reservation. For today's humanity, according to its feelings and emotions, definitely wants what this truth implies. But today's humanity is lulled into all that could be called the illusions of life, and it does not want to let go of these illusions of life.

Some time ago, I quoted a man who came from the Latin culture, mentioning that a flare-up of particularly strong truth can often come from declining cultures. Beredetto Croce says in his “Outlines of Aesthetics” – I quoted it to you a fortnight ago – that art cannot possibly be based on the external physical world. Why not? According to Benedetto Croce, because the external physical world is not real and art strives for reality. Such things seem quite incredible to today's humanity. And yet they are true, absolutely true. That which lives in real art is a completely different reality than that which lives in the sensual external appearance. In artistic creation, one strives out of the unreality of physical nature towards the reality that is first sensed in the spirit and can then be found in the spirit through supersensible knowledge. Therefore, it is precisely in supersensible forms, in supersensible artistic creations, that present humanity must be helped, because it wants to find the way back into the supersensible world. But it is only possible to make progress in these matters by developing an inner sense of what is truly true. The instructions in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' also point to this. We also need to develop an appreciation of how little the ordinary cultural means of our time actually develop this sense of truth. Just think how we have come to a point in the last five to six years where the voice of truth is hardly heard in world affairs. Think of how much untruthful stuff has been spoken in world affairs in the last five to six years and to this day. All this bears witness to the present world's tendency towards untruth. It must be mentioned again and again, right here in the bosom of this society, that acquiring a sense of real truth is eminently necessary. When work began here in the spirit of the anthroposophical movement, there were many people in the bosom of this movement who, from old circumstances, had always liked to retouch the truth. It is precisely in such movements as the anthroposophical one that old faults are cultivated rather than new virtues. Such a glossing over of the truth was something that had developed into a particular inclination. And it was often difficult, especially within this society, to introduce something that simply consists of calling a lie a lie. Whenever people in this Society have said something that is not true, there has always been a tendency to excuse it, to present it in such a way that good intentions might lie behind the untruth, and so on. No, it is essential that we call untruthfulness untruthfulness. You know that it was the turning to the truth that caused this Anthroposophical Society to separate from the old Theosophical Society, which, as you also know, continues to live in the world. Now, with regard to everything that is at work in this Anthroposophical Society, they continue to lie in the Theosophical Society. And it is necessary, because I am also taking into account other contemporary phenomena, that I draw your attention today to the fact that, in the course of time, the Theosophical Society has been lying in a very sophisticated way about the anthroposophical movement, even lying in a book whose preface contains the sentence: “I hope I have reported the truth.” But within this book, for which the authoress hopes to have reported the truth, it says under many another: “It is certain that Steiner's separation was a blessing.” — The separation of the Anthroposophical Society from the Theosophical Society. — “The Occultist” — now you hear the blatant lie — “The Occultist” — that was meant for me — “was also a convinced Pan-German. If we assume for a moment that he had become president of the Theosophical Society, he would have found there much more substantial means and influence in almost all countries of the world. He could have pursued his Pan-German policy more freely and with more authority. And in all likelihood he would have done so."

And what is this lie formed from? From the fact that I not only gave my lectures on anthroposophy in Germany, among Germans, but also went to other countries. I have given lectures from Bergen to Palermo, and I still regard it today as a most beautiful sign of the impulse that could come from this movement for world peace, that as late as May 1914 I was able to give a speech on anthroposophy in Paris, in German, to a public audience, so that each sentence had to be translated. They were not Germans from Paris in this lecture, but all Frenchmen. We had already come so far that in May 1914 our world view could be spoken about throughout Europe. Then the event occurred that took peace and the possibility of life from the world. It is a fact that just before the outbreak of this terrible world catastrophe, in May 1914, in Paris, the Anthroposophical Society was working on something that could have contributed to world peace. And where did all these speeches come from? Not a single one was initiated by us, but was requested by friends in Bergen, Paris, London, the Netherlands, Palermo and so on. They were always requested by the others. The lie is fabricated from this, that they were held to propagate Germanness throughout the world. It is necessary to call a lie a lie. This book, which promises in its preface to report the truth, brings, at least about everything that relates to the Anthroposophical Society and to me, nothing but lies. Now, one might say that I am turning against the others, while here, you see, the following unctuous sentences follow. I ask those who know the facts to compare these sentences with the facts: “What was the attitude of our president towards this colleague, who first sought to reduce her influence in inner circles and then wanted to oust her? Her behavior was always one of great tolerance and perfect courtesy. She saw great intellectual value in him, a rare philosophical development; she appreciated everything that was beautiful and sublime in him, and... did not speak of the rest. She constantly recommended tolerance and patience to her students, which “plus royalistes que le roi” were annoyed by the behavior of the German section. In doing so, she was simply following her principles. “

Please compare this with the truth of what has happened, and you will see the extent to which one can lie. Perhaps it will be said, when people hear what I have said today, that I am attacking. But I would like to point out that I never said anything critical before I was attacked.

These things must also be considered as a cultural-historical phenomenon, which expresses itself in the fact that in a movement that wants to work towards the spirit, lies can also be cultivated to a high degree. It is indeed necessary that we strive for the sense of truth in the most tremendous way today. The whole matter has only been translated into German and even published in German in Basel in order to somehow destroy the anthroposophical movement that will emerge from the Goetheanum in the future. You see, these people are accustomed to introducing nationalistic impulses even into that which they disseminate as spiritual science. Therefore, they cannot imagine anything else but that the other person also has such impulses. Today, it is of no use but to call a lie a lie, even when this lie appears on such ground, where one says in abstracto and theoretically that the search for truth is taking place. Whether the lie appears on confessional or ideological ground today, those lies that can be confronted with facts must be branded as lies, otherwise we will not move forward. For the spirit of lies, the spirit of deception, is the greatest enemy of real spiritual progress. And I hope that I have shown you, especially today, that spiritual progress is the only thing that can truly move the world forward by providing some points of view that I consider to be particularly valuable for the present time.

And so I would like all of you to consider the things that have happened here in context, in such a way that on the one hand there is the social, on the other the spiritual, but that the two belong together intimately. It is precisely the failure to see things in this context that is causing the present disaster.

Eight days ago I said here: Three demands permeate the social life of the present age.

1. The conquest of world power by the Anglo-American powers.
2. The efforts, which today are still quite abstract, that are moving towards a League of Nations.
3. The efforts we call social.

These three currents are the three decisive currents in today's cultural world: the world domination of the Anglo-American powers; the alliance of nations; the striving for a social organization of world affairs. There are three formidable obstacles to these three endeavors: The spirituality of the ancient Indians, the Indian spirituality, stands against that which the Anglo-American world, radiating from England, strives for as a world power. This will be the great contrast: the search for world principles by medial means – the search for world principles by the yoga path in India. This battle will be the greatest spiritual battle that has to be fought out in world history. To see clearly what is present as two poles in the movement of the times is the first task of anyone who wants to be a true spiritual scientist.

In the field of striving for the League of Nations, it must be clearly seen that two impossibilities are involved in this striving today. The one that confronts the modern striving for human unity, for that humanity of which Ferder, Lessing, and Goethe had spoken, the one that confronts this striving of modern humanity for human unity, is precisely national egoism, national chauvinism, in all fields. And now the League of Nations is supposed to become a unity of peoples closed in on themselves. The building of the Tower of Babel shows that the very thing that was done to prevent the League of Nations was to separate nations into their nationalities. And that is supposed to be the means to unite the nations. Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, his utopia, wants to solve the task of uniting the nations by preserving what is implied in the building of the Tower of Babel. It will only promote that which further divides the nations. It will only increase the confusion of the Tower of Babel. Thus, the second movement is full of contradictions; there are two impossibilities in the politics of the League of Nations.

And in the third, the social movement, there is a rejection of the spiritual. Only the economic and the material are taken into account, and it is believed that a spiritual will spring from the material itself. The aim is to establish a paradise on earth, excluding everything that can bring order to paradise, excluding the spirit. There you have the full contradiction in the third striving as well.

There is no other way to overcome these contradictions than to follow the path of the spirit, which works in the sense of human development and not against it. And the anthroposophical movement, in so far as its limited strength permits, should champion these paths. It will not be understood if it does not understand that it champions what is realistic and possible in contrast to what is unrealistic and utopian.

Notes from a lecture given in Prague^*

Given the large amount of literature available, it is always possible to learn about the findings of spiritual science, particularly when anthroposophical groups work together. Since we are together now, I would like to discuss some guiding ideas out of spiritual impulses, ideas that continue in a more esoteric way what we spoke about more generally in yesterday's public lecture.¹

Many people today still believe in the contrast between faith and knowledge, faith and cognition. They say science can tell us about the world outside us, the only one we can know of with certainty. However, concerning the spiritual world, we must have faith. This attitude appears to contradict spiritual science, which strives to give us real knowledge of and insight into the spiritual world. In fact, it has to enter souls in our time in just this form, as insight and knowledge. In earlier incarnations our souls were in a completely different condition than now. They were more primitive, but in those times there were great individuals and many people connected with them. Those individuals conveyed ideas of the spiritual world, which we can still find in certain tribes and peoples and trace to individuals such as Hermes, Zarathustra, Moses, Buddha, and Krishna.² Spiritual ideas had to be poured into people's souls.

In the physical world life is not just toil and work, but slaving and drudgery. Most of this toil and work is not in the sense of “it's been a hard day's work,” but in the sense of unconscious occurrences caused by our thinking—in fact, our whole soul life as it takes its course.

We are all much more alike when we are born than we think. We do not resemble each other in our appearance, but in our structure. The forces at work in a child are active at an unconscious level. The spirit takes hold of the body and structures it. Only then does the sculpting and elaborating of the nerves begin. This happens independently of our mind, at a time when we are not yet able to use it. Then we become aware of ourselves as an I. That is when the wisdom we have brought with us from the gods, from the spiritual world, ceases.

In the first period after birth, we have only life forces, so to speak; our life then is nothing but a continuation of the spiritual world. Death in infancy is due to external bodily causes, and the child's soul plays no part in it.

Then we begin to deplete our physical bodies with every thought, every feeling. We must sleep to make up for what we have depleted during the day. If we did not thus eat away at our physical organization, we would have a budding and burgeoning life. Our etheric body always wants to bud and to sprout, but the astral body needs to consume what the etheric body builds up, and thus suppresses it. When we are sleeping, compensation for what has been eaten away and killed off flows into us from the spiritual world to reestablish the balance. The normal amount of sleep replaces exactly as much as has been depleted. If we decided to sleep more, as some retired people do, we would sleep too much. Of course, that is no objection to sleeping a lot. Since intellectual work takes a lot out of our physical organization, people doing that kind of work need much sleep. But if we sleep too much, we have too many new life forces and these then begin to proliferate; the human being then abounds with life forces. This surplus of life forces leads to illness. So if we want to do more than merely make up for what we depleted through our daily work and advance spiritually, we have to consciously take what we need from the spiritual world.

The founders of our religions believed it was their task to lead their people, to use up life forces, which will then be compensated for. However, what has to develop within us for the progress of humanity must be consciously drawn from the spiritual world so that it will not die in our physical existence.

That is why the founders of our religions provided ideas they had received from the spiritual world. These truly spiritual thoughts nourish our soul and maintain it. It would be the death of our soul if it always had to live in thoughts taken only from the physical world. In earlier times, religious beliefs were such spiritual thoughts human souls need. That phase of our development has been completed, and we live now in a time when we on earth will gradually lose the ability to take in what speaks only to our emotions, our faith. We can still preserve this faith for a time, galvanizing it, so to speak, but we cannot keep it for the future. The principle “I believe” has to be replaced with “I believe what I know.” People will begin to feel that this new principle must be applied. Otherwise we deny ourselves any possibility of knowing something about the life between death and a new birth. Then we would return to pitiful conditions in our next incarnation. Enthusiasm for other ideals, all clearly justified, is certainly a good thing and has to exist. However, in comparison with the foundations of spiritual science, these ideals cannot be put into practice directly. Lacking its knowledge, they can only be precursors of spiritual science.

As we progress in our spiritual research, we will feel the need to remain silent rather than to speak. If we speak nevertheless, it is out of insight into the conditions necessary for our time. Knowledge alone will make us free, and it is the task of the future to win the freedom of the human soul.

Thoughts of great spiritual power came from the founders of our religions. They were thoughts of faith that could wonderfully illuminate the region beyond death. These ideas were transformed into a true, spiritual light that revealed the environment beyond death to human beings. But the time will come when we will have to live in freedom. And even if new religious leaders were still to proclaim the old teachings of faith with the voice and the power of the gods, we would no longer understand them. We are experiencing this now. The sciences concerned with the outer world have arrived, as they had to. A great contemporary scientist, Max Müller, said that if an angel were to come down and proclaim news of the spiritual world, people would not understand or believe him.³

That is the development of humanity. It seems to lead inevitably to the loss of our ability to imbue ourselves with thoughts related to the spiritual worlds. That would mean we would have less light after death to illuminate our spiritual environment by ourselves. After all, no sun will shine from the outside on the world around us then, the light has to come from us. We then take the place of the sun and illuminate our surroundings after death. People unable to do this will have to return and repeat life on earth to assimilate thoughts and ideas that are fruitful for their existence after death. When we understand this, more than the usual enthusiasm for spreading spiritual science will loosen our tongue and prompt us to speak. Believing in what we know—that will be the need of humanity in the future.

In ancient times, religious ideas, myths, and fairy tales gave souls light for the spiritual world. It is easy to say that myths and fairy tales developed in the childhood stages of the human race. Of course, people did not physically meet the angels that myths and fairy tales speak about. But thinking based on philosophy will be of little use in the spiritual world where such knowledge has no meaning. It is easy to say fairy tales are not based on truth. Spiritual researchers are not so naive, and know that fiery dragons do not really fly through the air. However, they always knew it was necessary to form the Imagination of the fiery dragon, for when it lives in the soul, it casts light on the spiritual world. These are powerful Imaginations. That is the principle behind all myths; they are not intended to reflect external reality accurately, but to enable us to live in the spiritual world.

Materialists say myths and fairy tales originated in the childhood stage of the human race. But in its childhood, humanity was taught by the gods. In the process of our evolution, myths and fairy tales are gradually lost, but children should not grow up without them. It makes a tremendous difference whether or not children are allowed to grow up with fairy tales. The power of the fairy tale images, which give wings to the soul, becomes apparent only at a later age. Growing up without fairy tales leads later to boredom, to world-weariness. Indeed, it can even cause physical symptoms—fairy tales can help to prevent illnesses. The qualities that seep into our soul from fairy tales later emerge as a zest for life, enthusiasm for being alive, and an ability to cope with life, all of which can be seen even in old age. Children have to experience the power of the content of fairy tales while they are young and can still do so. People who cannot live with ideas that have no reality on the physical plane will be dead to the spiritual world. Philosophies based only on the material world are the death of our soul. Physical evolution leads to the death of the spiritual world. We must reach a view of the world based not on appearances, but resting solidly on its own inherent structure. We have to move toward the principle: I believe what I know.

We have to learn to pay attention to the symptoms of our cultural life. For example, I once gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany, and afterward two Catholic priests came up to me and said that I was only speaking to educated people, while they spoke so everyone could understand them. In reality, the opposite is the case. Anthroposophy can reach everyone provided we find the way to the simple, ordinary people. The farmer would understand it much better than the so-called educated person if only the way were not blocked by social conventions. In these matters, we must be able to leave ourselves completely out of the picture and not ask what we think best. Instead, we must ask what human souls require in a given era. So I replied to the priests that while their feeling tells them they speak to everyone, the facts will tell them they do not, because not everyone comes to hear them. And it is to those who do not come to them that I speak.

On earth we gain knowledge and insight through our physical and etheric bodies. Let us examine carefully how much of what is in our soul comes from the physical world. Light, for example, reaches us through the eyes. The process of seeing is one of deterioration right from its start in the eyes. The deterioration starts directly at the retina. The process detaches itself from life. In the morning, after sleep, our eyes have been restored and are filled with pure life. However, as we perceive, something forms in the living tissue that is no longer alive but only mineral. And we perceive the outer world, which is mirrored in us, because this process continues in the nerve tissue. Thus, insofar as the physical body is the bearer of these processes, it is not alive.

The etheric body is the bearer of thoughts that are also mirror images. People could easily discover that our thoughts reflect the super-sensible. Thoughts will never lend themselves to inspection under the microscope because in reality they live in the etheric body. They are formed by our thinking, which is mirrored in the physical body. We can see from this that understanding and knowledge are dependent on the physical and etheric bodies, which are affected only by the impressions of the physical world. Completely different thoughts have to take hold in our soul, in our astral body, and all our feeling, willing, and thinking not limited to the physical plane. Otherwise we will remain inwardly dead. All thoughts that represent objects are meaningful only on the physical plane. This is implied in the very question, “Are thoughts that do not represent objects justified?” Only with the thoughts living freely in the spirit, living freely in the astral body and the I can we gain insight, only with those thoughts can we live. These thoughts not only represent things, but are also inwardly active and alive; they create something out of themselves and out of us.

In modern art, naturalism predominates these days. In ancient times the soul was filled with images that brought activity into the thoughts of the astral body. Everything depicting only outer things is meaningless in the spiritual world. We must imbue ourselves with new images that can once again meaningfully permeate our soul. Often we take hold of something we believe to exist only in our imagination, to be only fantasy. This is frequently only a memory of something originating on the physical plane. We can revitalize what would otherwise die in our soul only by enlivening our images with thoughts that do not originate on the physical level and are not created by that kind of imagination.

People increasingly misuse the phrase: A beautiful soul in a beautiful body, a healthy soul in a healthy body. This phrase was appropriate for the understanding of earlier times. Unfortunately, today it is seen as a statement of cause; if someone has a healthy body, people conclude that a healthy soul lives in it. Whatever makes the body healthy will do the same for the soul.

If people do not develop thoughts that keep the astral body inwardly agile, they will suffer from mineral deposits even in childhood and as a result become ill later in life. And the world they enter after death will remain dark, because they do not radiate any light themselves. The rays of the sun strike a surface and that is how we see things. But in the spiritual world we are the source of light; we illuminate the surroundings we are supposed to see. Souls feeling the need to pursue spiritual science may not be aware of these circumstances, but they live in the depths of the soul. Just as in the physical world sunlight comes from the outside, so we must make ourselves sunlike in the spiritual world. We have to light in ourselves the spiritual fuel, the inner flame, to illuminate the realm of the spirit.

Physicists imagine the red of a rose can be traced to oscillation, to variations in wavelength. People say there is really no sound, only vibrations of air. They claim what we hear as sound exists only in our ears. Well, a simple experiment can teach us otherwise, namely, if we have someone wake us up by knocking on the door. We will notice that we were not conscious during the night when we were asleep, but that on waking up we were already living in the knocking. We ourselves have to enter into the knocking sound. We use the other person to do the knocking because our soul itself cannot do it. If we resolved firmly to wake up, we could do so, but this way we are only using the other person as a tool.

If materialist views continue to persist for several generations more, the red of roses will really disappear. People will actually see little gray atoms vibrating as an atomic whirl, not because they have to see them or because they exist, but because they will have trained themselves to see them. That is why it is necessary to spread spiritual science, to prevent having to live in a future filled with nothing other than physical atoms swirling around.

We are not talking about the physical ether but the one that is living thought. We must realize first of all that a rose is not a mass of whirling atoms, but that behind it there are real living and interweaving elemental beings. The theory of the spiritual world is secondary; the main thing is to concentrate our feeling, to feel ourselves living and weaving in our new perception of the reality of the spiritual world. This is the resurrection of the spiritual world in our souls, the truly ecumenical Easter event.

Our ancestors required a different event that was connected to the time when the sun reaches its zenith. When everything in nature was budding and blossoming, they experienced an ecstasy that reaffirmed for them the existence of the spiritual world. What they experienced then at St. John's Tide we now have to experience in the spring, at Easter. We have to be able to celebrate the awakening of the soul, the resurrection of the soul, when spiritual science speaks to us not merely as a theory, but as living knowledge.

• *. The following two lectures differ in character and content from the preceding five. In both, Rudolf Steiner approaches the central theme from a much wider perspective. In addition, “Faith and Knowledge” is not a complete, word for word, record of a lecture but notes summarizing what Steiner said. Therefore, the two lectures have been placed in the appendix.
• 1. Lecture of April 16, 1914, entitled “Wie findet die Menschenseele ihre wahre Wesenheit?” (“How Can the Human Soul Find Its True Essence?”).
• 2. Hermes, the ancient Greek herald and messenger of the gods. See also Lecture Three, note 5.
• 3. Max Müller, 1823–1900, German orientalist, linguist, and religious scholar, professor of philology at Oxford. Literally: “A change is to take place, a transformation of such magnitude that even if angels came down and announce it, we would understand it as little as an infant would understand what we told it about the world in our language,” in Leben und Religion (“Life and Religion”), Stuttgart, n.y.

Dr. Steiner: I have tried to picture the way our friends in Austria appear to themselves. Everyone has something in a corner of their soul that reveals itself as pre-Maria Theresa. There, people have become educated by becoming “monks.” What we need is that we also become “monks.” Kolisko would have been a Dominican somewhere, Stein a Cistercian, and our dear friend Schubert, a Piarist.

I would like to hear about the things weighing upon your souls. There is, however, one thing I want to say. In teaching religion, you need to bring in all the things we have developed so far. When you teach, you must bring the children into a prayerful attitude, beginning with the lowest grades. You need to slowly develop a strongly prayerful attitude in the children. Children need to find the mood of prayer. We need to carry out “Not my will, but thine be done.” We must raise the children into divine experience. Religious instruction should not appeal simply to pictures, it must be completely oriented toward elevating attitude. You need to teach the children an attitude connected with the Sunday services, and allow them to feel a prayerful mood.

I mentioned to the Protestant teacher that I would like to visit his class. He said that he would need some time to think about it. I will also tell the Catholic teacher the same.

We also make an error here. I noticed it today in the way that the students answered your question about what their religion is. The answers arose out of the feeling that we are still not united within the school. We should be aware that we should take seriously that the Catholic children go to the Catholic priest, and we need to feel among ourselves that this only relates to religious confession and has nothing to do with the remaining instruction. We must certainly maintain that, otherwise an unpedagogical principle will creep into this school. It seems to me necessary that we not teach the Catholic children that they are not welcome here. That was seen in the way that the other children made faces, something that was quite characteristic. That brings disharmony into the school, and we must overcome it. We must seriously undertake allowing each religious confession to exist in its own right. It is much less important to me that the religion teachers perceive themselves as a foreign body here in the school. I don’t think that you trouble yourselves much about the religious instruction of the Catholic and Protestant children. You do not seem to care much about that.

A teacher: The child says, “He doesn’t teach us anything about Jesus.”

Dr. Steiner: All the more reason. For some children that is of still more value. That is really too bad. It is terrible that they need to keep a stiff upper lip. That is often the case, but we have to accept that. It would help if you were to exchange a few words with the Protestant religion teacher. As we were standing in the hallway today, I was wondering when Mr. S. would introduce me to the vicar. He did not do it. This is something intangible and really should not continue.

I do not find that it hurts children to go to Catholic mass. We do nothing wrong when we encourage them. I am not against having the Protestant children develop a desire to attend mass, either. The mass is certainly nothing terrible. It is impersonal and has an effect through its content. You can quite ignore the priest. The mass has a grand effect, but it is more to see the mass than participate in it as a high sacrament. The way the Church does the Missa Solemnis, the mass itself disappears behind all the pomp. The mass has only four parts: the gospel, the offertory, the transubstantiation, and the communion. It is most effective when the priest does it with two servers. We cannot make the Protestant children go to mass, but they would get something from it.

I regret I was unable to visit more classes.

A question is asked about whether W.E. and M.G. should go into the remedial class.

Dr. Steiner: The way the situation is now, he is not moving forward and his attitude is damaging the other children. We might be able to carry the girl along. She is simply a burden, but he is difficult. He is always disturbing the other children. Today, he started up again. It would be good for him to go into the remedial class. Everything indicates he needs special attention. He is very nervous and is not moving forward when he is with the other children.

There are some questions about other children.

Dr. Steiner: That is the problem. If you have to do something different with every child in the class, you cannot teach even a class of ten. It is obvious that we will not reach our goals, and that we have not now reached them. That is clear. We cannot even artificially achieve the goals we have set. On the whole, it does not matter whether we achieve the learning goals set in other schools. We must keep to what we decided earlier. In general, it does not matter whether we heed the goals set outside. We must, however, take our own learning goals into account in a special way, much more than we have done.

A teacher questions whether a child should be held back.

Dr. Steiner: We have decided against that.

A teacher: In my class, there was a boy who was absent all the time.

Dr. Steiner: If he was hardly there during the year, it would be good for him. Keeping children back is something we have decided against, and, whenever possible, we should not do it.

We don’t want to bring the Dutchman here, otherwise people will say that our methods are the same as those used for learningdisabled children.

A teacher asks a question about the Sunday service.

Dr. Steiner: We need five services. It is a difficult question about who will do it and where.

A teacher: We need long drapes.

Dr. Steiner: You can do things as they are now. We cannot achieve perfection, so we can do it as it is.

We need more women for the services.

I cannot write the gospel text here. I will try to write a text as quickly as possible.

A question is asked about astronomy in the eighth-grade class.

Dr. Steiner: If the question concerns how to create the proper feeling, that can be achieved through a true picture of the heavens. However, try to do what you did in the lower grades—bring forth a memory of that picture. The children develop a certain respect if you occasionally take them out to see the stars and say what is necessary. It is more difficult to achieve that respect if you place a map before them instead of the stars. Maps deaden respect.

With the Latin course, things are not so bad. There are major differences between the individual children. The disruptive children play a role, but you should avoid them. On the other hand, there are some gaps in what the children can do. The answers they give are appropriate for approximately the eighth or ninth grade. I don’t think you would have gotten such mature answers from the seventh grade. You could expect some of the answers from the ninth grade. The only problem is that there are such tremendous gaps, but they answered with understanding. To go into further detail would take freedom from your teaching. I don’t think we should be so confining.

A teacher asks whether foreign language grammar should be discussed in dialogue. One of the teachers is against that.

Dr. Steiner: You could do it that way. You would not teach the way they do in France. I do not know why using a French phrase would present a difficulty. I think that might even be good, since they would learn more vocabulary. If you do not teach grammar pedantically, but see it as a way of learning to feel the language, then I do not understand how you could complain about it. In speaking of German grammar, we use very little German. We use Latin when we teach grammar. That certainly happens, and it is quite useful. The terminology is such that it cannot be understood if it is translated. I do not want to push the point. What I mean is not that you should teach grammar in French. You should separate out the material taught in class, the conversation. If you find it technically necessary to explain things in German, that is not undesirable. You can do things in the way you think is right.

If you bring the analytical perspective into a picture, that is good. You should always work toward developing a picture, and analysis is part of that picture. A high-school graduate is too oriented toward thinking of “man” as “homo.” That is actually nonsense, since the picture is missing. “Man” derives from the soul of the stream of the generations. “Homo” arises from the physical form of the human being, so that we can say that “man” is incarnated in “homo.” It is just the same as with Adam. If people do not understand the pictures, the soul loses everything. I think that is the sort of thing you should strive for in Latin.

That is what Mrs. X. wanted to do in the days when she had such great plans for the future of Magyar, something quite good for primitive languages. There is a living fact behind the fact that the Englishman says “Mr. Smith” and the Hungarian says, “Tanito Ur.” Namely, “ur”—“the master.” In other words, “the master” speaks this primitive language. There is an entirely different life in it. “Kávéház” is a borrowed word. You arrive at quite different pictures depending upon whether you look at a man from the front or the back. No hour should pass without the child experiencing something pictorially.

A teacher presents a draft reader.

A teacher: We thought it would contain some legends.

Dr. Steiner: You could do that. Why don’t you include them? We need to write a good Jesus legend. This will be a very exciting reading book, and we should discuss these pictures a lot with the children. If you were to print it, I do not think it could be done for less than 20,000 marks. It would have to be very expensive. It is a reading book and would have to cost at least 100 marks.

A teacher: Is it possible to have a period for teaching shop?

Dr. Steiner: We could think about having a period for that, but it would not be possible to include it in the morning. We would have to see if we could leave out some of the foreign language periods and thus gain a period there. That would be a certain relief for the faculty without hurting the instruction. Leaving out a foreign language period would hurt nothing. We could certainly interrupt the foreign languages occasionally. The teaching of foreign languages does not depend upon having every period.

A teacher: How long should such a period be? What grade could we begin with?

Dr. Steiner: We could begin with the ninth grade and do it for two weeks during the language period. It would also be possible to do it every six weeks perhaps and divide it throughout the year.

The teachers asked Dr. Steiner to give a speech at a parent evening.

Dr. Steiner: I could do that if I have enough time. It’s been a terribly long time since the last one. Three or four per year would be best. To have none is really not enough.

A teacher: There will be a pedagogical course in Jena from Sunday to Sunday, October 8-15. We want to ask you to give a cycle of lectures in the evening.

Dr. Steiner: I could give the same themes I presented in Oxford and do it in the mornings. Two lectures in the morning and a discussion in the afternoon.

A teacher: We would also like to ask Mrs. Steiner if she could include two or three eurythmy performances.

Dr. Steiner: Actually, it would be better to include the holidays. We could begin one week earlier and then have the fall holidays. When school is in session, we could not send all the children to Jena. If there were no school, then we could speak with the parents to see if they would agree.

Marie Steiner: If we took the Ariel scenes, we could do twelve performances. However, the children would have to do some show pieces. They could do exercises with the rods and also rhythm. Several things in the same performance.

Dr. Steiner: We certainly cannot send them there simply because of the Ariel scenes. The children could prepare something else. We cannot send them when school is in session and we can send them only if the parents agree.

Marie Steiner: It would have to be something people know. We could do something like a scene with gnomes and fairies, or Olaf Åsteson.

Dr. Steiner: It might be good if we spoke more about the experiences the teachers have had both in their own teaching and as a whole. Perhaps you could extend your Vienna presentation about your own experiences. We would also have to try to overcome the opinion some people have that they already have everything. That is something we need to overcome. It would also be good for someone to speak to the question of how poorly anthroposophy is treated by our contemporaries. It would be very good to speak about that. The Waldorf teachers should speak.

I also believe it would be good if some students spoke about their understanding of the youth movement. They should not be fanatics. They should be reasonable people. Some one-sided people have said things at various anthroposophical meetings. Other people would not get much from them, but on the other hand, we have also experienced some quite good things. The main thing would be to allow some of the younger people to speak.

A teacher: We thought we would all go.

Dr. Steiner: Then we will have to plan a school holiday at that time. Is it possible to shorten some of the other holidays? That would be nice if it is possible. We would then begin school on August 29. Quite a number of children would have to go so that the rod exercises are not too sparse. It should be half boys and half girls. Maybe we could also include two or three from Leipzig.

That would be a relief. Right now we always have to use the same people for everything. Something I noticed often was that it was very detrimental that the Waldorf School was overburdened with rushing from one project to another during the past year. If you add up all of the different activities in which some of the Waldorf School teachers participated, then you would see it is quite a bad thing. We cannot even say that it was relieved by the Vienna conference occurring during the school holiday, since a large number of you returned half dead at the beginning of the school year. That is certainly not acceptable, and now we have this course in Jena in the fall.

We need to gradually awaken a feeling here that our relationship to the world should be more open, so that we do not always tend to be defensive, but to draw people in. For example, all the suggestions I made in Vienna to use the conference were pushed aside. In general, the conference in Vienna was a great success from beginning to end. It was the largest we have had and was done in such a way that it could have quite decidedly resulted in major damage had it not been properly followed up. It was undertaken publicly, and we should have no illusions that it has resulted in considerable opposition. The damage that could result if we do not know how to follow it up could be greater than the success.

That is something we cannot do if we encapsulate ourselves, if we do not get new blood. Among the actively working people, we have a strong inbreeding of related souls that will lead to an impossible situation in the long run. We need to expand our circle, but each time someone is mentioned who we have met, and who is something, we reject that person. We must bring in new blood. In general, our movement requires that we not feel that we need to defend ourselves against everyone, but that we welcome people.

I would like to tell you about something. I was told you had invited someone to create a connection to medicine, and that you had begun to speak. In the third sentence, you said to him, “Professor, you are an immoral human being”! That is something I cannot understand. You simply offend them. I think this comes from too much zeal, but we need to find a way to work with people. You cannot work with people if you tell them straight off that they are immoral.

I was in the same situation myself when I wanted to explain the art in Dornach to a famous chemist. He then told me that there are colors of light that really shine. I could have said, “You are an idiot,” but I did not. We offend people too easily. That was his scientific conviction.

We cannot make such announcements in the Threefold News as one I saw there. We need to formulate the announcements that appear there so that people think we are only dilettantes.

It is natural in the anthroposophical realm to have a cooperative working between the Waldorf School and an association of physicians. Teachers from the Waldorf School would have much to say, and such interactions within the anthroposophical movement would result in an all-round improvement. I did not say that the groups should completely fuse together so that people could argue and fight. What I meant was that it is natural that such a symbiosis occurs.

A teacher: We have formed a group of that sort. We meet on Saturdays and give lectures.

Dr. Steiner: Has that significant neighborliness of the Gänsheide and the Kanonenweg been fruitful?6 I haven’t noticed anything. What I said before was meant esoterically and was directed toward every human heart. It must arise naturally. I cannot say that I believe some bureaucratic institution is necessarily positive. Something will result only through a living interaction, not through bureaucracy.

To-day we will continue to develop such forms as we spoke about yesterday. In this connection I should like to speak about those forms which may help to establish a certain relationship between a statement and its answering statement (Rede und Gegenrede). Yesterday I mentioned the spiral form and we saw how the evolving spiral gives the feeling of an outgoing of the human being into the world, and how the involving spiral gives the feeling of coming back into oneself. Now, however, let us bring these two forms into a relationship with each other. Move the forms to a clear Anapest rhythm; do it in the first place so that one form follows after the other. You can try it in this way: Fri. S. . . . will you take the spiral which goes from within outwards, and you, Fri. V. . . . the line which goes from without inwards; now reverse it, taking about six Anapests . . . it can be practised in this way.

In the case of dialogue,—a conversation from some play for instance in the form of question and answer,—it is good to move the spiral which winds from within outwards and which corresponds to the answer, in such a way that, when one reaches the last two Anapests, one simply takes two long, emphasized steps; it is as if one wished simply to have the long, emphasized beats. Do the exercise thus: Four Anapests, two long beats. In this way you get a form, the feeling of which corresponds to the nature of dialogue in a play, for example,—or indeed any dialogue which is to be expressed in eurythmy.

This form can also have a certain significance in curative education. I said yesterday that the one spiral form can be made use of in the handling of wild, unruly children, who are always fighting; while the other spiral may be used in handling children who are phlegmatic and who hardly come to the point of raising their own hands.

If you get individual children of such types to practise these forms you will have a certain amount of success. But if you form two groups—the one group of choleric, the other of phlegmatic children—and make both these groups run the spiral forms, and in such a way that the children must constantly look into each other’s eyes, then they will mutually correct each other. If you employ this corrective action of the one type of child upon the other, these forms will prove to have a remarkably powerful effect.

Now we have in the course of the past years made use of a number of eurythmic exercises and forms, based on such things as these. Frau. K. . . . will you do the form which we have for Hallelujah. One can, in the first place, do this to the pentagram form. You stand at the back point of the pentagram and use one line to do the ‘Hallelujah’. Begin with the H, pass over into a, do the l seven times; pass on to the e; make the second l three times; then u, i, a. You must, however, continue to move the form. The second line of the form must be done in the same way. Thus, when carried out by one person alone, this exercise is repeated five times.

Now let us take five people; when each one does this same exercise we again have a complete ‘Hallelujah’. Frau K . . . . you move the first line; Frl. S . . . . has the next, Frl. Sch . . . . the third, Frau Sch . . . . the following line and Frl. V . . . . has the last line.

You must all begin at the same time. And you must be careful to space out the line in such a way that, when the exercise is completed, you have all arrived on your own places.

In this way, out of the lines of the pentagram, you get a complicated and ever changing form. When this exercise is carefully practised the effect is very impressive and does actually convey the whole character of the word ‘Hallelujah’.

It is, however, possible to find another variation of this exercise. Let one person stand here, the second there (see diagram) and there the third, fourth and fifth . . . now we must add a sixth and a seventh. Each one must move in this direction (see arrow).

A different impression is thus created. The form should be divided up as before. Those in the front must always stand in such a way that the back ones come into the intermediate spaces, and are, therefore, also visible. Let us try it: 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4, 4 to 5, 5 to 6, 6 to 7 and 7 (in a curve backwards) to 1. (All at the same time.)

You will see that this produces a form of ‘Hallelujah’ which, on account of its measured tempo gives an impression of high exaltation.

Yet another variation can be brought about if each of you, on reaching your place (see following diagram), adds this line (the curve) to the form. (Here again all must move simultaneously.) The two lines of the form must now be accompanied by the same gestures as before. This way of doing the ‘Hallelujah’ necessarily entails a certain quickening of the pace. Such a form lends itself to many further variations.

Let us for instance do it in this way: Frau S. . . and Frl. Sch. . . will you stand here, one on each side, while the others fonn the pentagram? Now, you Fri. Sch. . . . must make the movement for the Sun as we did it yesterday, continuing this while the others move the pentagram. At the same time, Frau S.... you must make the quiescent gesture for the Moon. Here we have a form for ‘Hallelujah’ which again has its special colour.

Let us pass over from this form to our second form,—without the curved lines,—then we shall have a very exalted ‘Hallelujah’. And in making this transition, let the Sun and Moon take their places as before.

At this point we can pass over to the last form of all, which again demands a somewhat quicker tempo. Thus the ‘Hallelujah’ may be carried out in the most varied manner. In this way you get a form which will really have a profound effect upon the onlookers. Let us try it: Hallelujah.

This shows the possibility of making use of forms in such a way that they actually correspond to the most individual characteristics inherent in the matter in question.

Now let us vary the form of Evoe in a somewhat similar fashion. Frau P. . . . will you do it alone? With E take a step; with v stretch out one arm and with the other make a movement as though you were going to take hold of something; with o hold the arms to the sides and raise yourself up to a very erect position; with e step backwards. When you carry out these movements the form comes of itself.

Now let us see how this works out when done by three people. Here, when three take part, you can approach so closely together that each one lightly takes the hand of the other (with the v). The greater the number taking part in this exercise the more beautiful is the effect.

These are examples of definite forms which may be developed when, by entering into their inherent mood and feeling, and at the same time retaining throughout the true character of eurythmy, one is able to conjure up a certain mood of soul from out of the movements for the sounds.

It is also possible, by means of a single gesture arising directly out of a certain mood of soul,—as do the sounds in eurythmy, to give adequate expression to some special feeling. Fri. S. . . . will you do the following: Dr. W. . . . will kindly stand here on the stage, while Frl. S. . . . looks at him; she must stand with the toe of the left foot touching the ground, and, while still looking at him, must make the movement for s; I think no one could mistake the fact that her dealings with him are ironical: the mood of irony is expressed absolutely naturally when this eurythmic movement is carried out in the right way.

And now, Fri. S. . . . will you make the following movements: first express an ironical perception of something, and then, with an inner effort of will make this mood of irony still more active. Thus we have the previous movement as the first stage; and now, putting the foot flat on the ground and still retaining the S-gesture, hold the chin awry and slant the eyes. Pass over from the first movement to the second: first Irony, then delight in being a minx.

There can be no doubt that we have here an adequate means of expression, one which is actually drawn out from the gestures themselves. You have seen how satisfying it is. I wanted to show by means of this example how these things must be felt and experienced.

In eurythmy the possibility of becoming truly artistic first arises when one has reached the point of finding each movement,—whether vowel, consonant, or any of the other movements we have had,—as inevitable as this most characteristic gesture for irony. From this very gesture you can learn how one can find one’s way into all these things.

I want to show you another example of the metamorphosis of form. Those who took part on the stage yesterday in the interwoven Peace Dance and I and You exercise will remember how the four groups of three people were arranged; and 1 shall now ask those who were on the stage yesterday to come up again and take these same places. Let us do the following: instead of merely moving the form silently as yesterday, you will do the first form, the triangle, three times, accompanied by lines built up according to this pattern: Es keimen der Seele Wunsche,—then a second line to the second part of the form, and a third line to the third part of the form. We have now reached the point where yesterday we began the ‘I and you’; but here again we shall have words which may be built up according to the pattern of ‘I and you’. Thus we shall have a number of lines fashioned in this way. Then again, as an ending, we have another three lines, so that we once more come back to the Peace Dance:

Es keimen der Seele Wünsche,
Es wachsen des Willens Taten,
Es reifen des Lebens Fruchte.
Ich fable mein Schicksal, (approaching each other)
Mein Schicksal findet mich, (going back)
Ich fuhle meinen Stern, (approaching)
Mein Stern findet mich. (going back)
Ich fuhle meine Zeile, (approaching)
Meine Ziele finden mich. (going back)
Meine Seele und die Welt Sind eines nur.

Now come the last three lines corresponding to the Peace Dance:

Das Leben, es wird heller urn mich,
Das Leben, es wird schwerer fur mich.
Das Leben, es wird reicher in mir.

(The wishes of the soul are quickened,
The deeds of the will wax and grow,
The fruits of life are ripening.

I feel my fate,
My fate finds me.
I feel my star,
My star finds me.
I feel my aims,
My aims find me.
My soul and the world
Are one.

Life will be clearer round me,
Life will be heavier for me,
Life will be richer in me.)

In this way we have a relationship with the ‘I and You’, etc. which is not merely schematic, not merely an abstract form, but which, even if not perfect, is still absolutely dependent upon the structure of the lines of the poem. It is an example of how these forms may be developed. Do it once more. Now you will understand it better; you will see that there really is a perfect adjustment between the lines of the form and what is contained in the lines of the poem.

Here, at the same time, I have given you an example of the intimate relationship existing between the language of eurythmy and the language which we ordinarily use.

I have attempted, it is naturally only a slight attempt and intended merely as an illustration, to answer the question: How did poems arise in certain Mystery Centres where an art of movement existed such as we are endeavouring to renew in eurythmy?—In these Centres it was not the language, the structure and form of language in a poem which was considered in the first place, for a man of those early times had something within him which caused him first to experience the movement, the gesture with its accompanying form. And it was out of the form, out of the gesture, that the structure of the poem was sought. The eurythmic forms and gestures preceded the fashioning of the poem.

These things actually show the intimate relationship existing between eurhythmy and the earthly language. As eurythmists we must acquire a feeling for the fact that not every poem can be expressed in eurythmy. You see, at least 99 per cent of the poems which have gradually accumulated are far from artistic; at the outside we have the remaining 1 per cent. The history of literature could certainly not assume vast proportions if true poetry only were taken into consideration. For true poetry always contains eurythmy within it; it gives the impression that the poet who wrote it first carried out in his etheric body the eurythmic movements and gestures; it is as if he only possessed his physical body in order to translate the eurythmic gestures and movements into the language of sound. In no other way can a true poem arise.

Naturally this need not penetrate into the intellectual consciousness. Even in our present age there are true poets who dance, as it were, with their etheric bodies before they produce a poem; and in earlier times too such poets existed, as for instance Schiller in his really beautiful poems. I do not mean those poems of Schiller’s which should also be set on one side, but those which are a real poetic achievement. With Goethe, too, in the case of most of his poems, one really feels the eurythmic gestures lying behind the words. Indeed quite a number of poets may be said to possess this quality, albeit unconsciously. It is present in them unconsciously.

Now the eurythmist must naturally be able to feel, from the way in which a poem works on his organism, whether it is suited to eurythmic expression; whether, that is to say, he can answer the question: Was the poet himself a eurythmist? Had he in himself that something which I wish to express in form and movement?—It is when one feels this to be the case that one can enter into a certain inner relationship with the poem which is to be expressed in eurythmy.

Of course all this must not be exaggerated, for in the realm of Anthroposophy we must never become fanatics; it is possible to carry such ideas too far. We need not, for instance, advocate that only such poems as arose out of the Mysteries should be done in eurythmy, or such poems as are fashioned, as it were, after the manner of the Mysteries. On the other hand one would not, I imagine, choose a poem by Wildenbruch. It is such things as these which must be felt by eurythmists, otherwise they will not be able to enter into the true nature of eurythmy.

From this you will perhaps have gained some understanding of the intimate relationship existing between eurythmy and language.—And now I will ask Fri. S. . . . to do the following in eurythmy:

Mein Freund, kannst du es nicht lassen,
Mir das Traurige immer wieder
In die Seele zu rufen?

(My friend, canst thou not refrain from ceaselessly calling up sorrow in my soul?)

Do it as follows. Take, for instance, a simple wave-like line as your form, and, when you come to the words: ‘Mein Freund, kannst du es nicht lassen’ . . . begin definitely to accelerate the tempo, letting this acceleration be really visible; move the second half: ‘Mir das Traurige immer wieder in die Seele zu rufen,’—at a quite definitely quicker tempo. Do this once more. Now let us reverse the process in the following sentence:

Was seh’ ich: es ist der Morgensonne Glanz!
(What do I see: it is the glow of the morning sun!)

After ‘ich’ you must try to retard the quick tempo with which you began. You have here (first example) the transition in tempo from slow to quick, and here (second example) the transition from quick to slow.

When it is a question of will or striving, as in the first sentence, in which there is the impulse to check something, where there is a certain element of will: ‘I do not wish him to call this up incessantly before my soul’—then we have a transition from a slow to a quick tempo.

And when it is a question of the effect of an external happening, thus when,—as in the second sentence,—we are incited to observe something, when we have to do with perception, then we must pass over from a quick to a retarded tempo.

Mein Freund, kannst du es nicht lassen,
Mir das Traurige immer wieder = Will
In die Seele zu rufen?

Was seh’ ich: es ist der Morgensonne Glanz! = Perception.

You will feel that these tempi really give the possibility of expressing in movement on the one hand, will and on the other hand perception or feeling. And you will have to analyse poems in order to discover whether it is more a question of expressing will, of resistance in the movement, warding off something, or whether it is a question of expressing a yielding up of oneself, something in the nature of reverence or devotion.

In addition to this one can, of course, make use of the gesture for devotion. The effect will then be intensified. For there are always more ways than one of expressing such things.

We will give you yet another special example of how one can immerse oneself in the profundity of religious documents and gain an ever greater understanding of what they contain.

If we study our sense organs as they are usually studied, we see that we have the possibility through the sense of smell of perceiving matter itself. Unless this fine substance were given off, man would be unable to smell. What takes place here is a connection with matter itself. The organ of taste is not connected with matter itself, but acts through a process of dissolving and perceiving its effect. Thus we can call taste a chemical sense, because it penetrates into the constitution of matter. The third sense that of sight, has nothing more to do with matter, for it only perceives pictures that are produced by matter. The fourth, the sense of touch, has still less to do with matter as such, for it only perceives attributes of the surroundings in connection with objects, such as warmth and cold; this is a state of matter which is no longer dependent on matter itself, but on what conditions surround it. Hearing is in no way dependent on the air, for we perceive only the oscillations, the vibrations of the air, something which stands in a quite external relationship to what is material. Matter, the air, is only the vehicle for the sound waves.

The lowest perception of matter is smell, then comes taste, then sight, then touch and hearing. We can now ask: What is warmth and cold? It is what is contained in the warmth ether. So the sense of touch perceives the warmth ether, sight perceives the light ether, taste perceives the chemical ether, smell perceives the atomistic or life ether, hearing perceives the air. A sixth and a seventh sense⁷⁴ which will only develop in the future, would perceive water and earth.

We have therefore in our senses a sequence of stages in connection with what we call matter. We will first follow the development of our three lower senses.

The sense of sight perceives by means of the light ether the objects around us. There was however a time when everything was dark. Let us go back to the moment of time when sight came into existence and the outer world as such became perceptible to us. Previously the eye was not yet opened to the outer world. We must imagine the same force which the eye receives from outside in the light ether, pouring outwards from within, streaming out through the eye in the opposite direction. If this were the case the being would illuminate the others around him. This was so at a certain time when human beings possessed eyes like the Cyclops. Illumination was brought about through the out streaming light; this light streamed from within outwards. Then man illuminated, as many sea creatures still do today, the objects around him and his own body. At that time he had no consciousness of his own, but he was solely an instrument for the corresponding divine being, in order to illuminate the world for him. The divine being had no means of seeing the surrounding objects other than human eyes.

When as yet man had no intellect it was possible for the active light of the Godhead to pass through him and illuminate objects. The human being was the mediator for the Godhead. The latter wished by means of light to make the solid objects visible. Because the light passed through him, man himself was formed. Before the light had passed through the human being the Godhead had no need of light, because the objects were not yet solid, but fluid, so that no use could be made of light. That is the condition described in the Bible: ‘And darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God brooded on the face of the waters.’ At that time the world was simply water, even gold and silver and the other metals ran, were fluid. When within the water, like blocks of ice, solid objects arose, man separated his membered form and light became necessary. God said: ‘Let there be light and there was light.’ Then it was that man too first received his form. That is the moment when the Light Ether was introduced and the solid element separated off. God said: ‘Let the dry land appear.’ Before that everything was of a watery nature. In the same way as the Light Ether was incorporated into the solid element, so was the Chemical Ether incorporated into the water. Chemical relationships were worked into man when he was still fluid. The chemical relationships according to which today the different substances are combined, were imprinted into the individual. Then we come back into a condition when man and also the whole Earth was still aeriform; the life, or the atomistic ether flowed into him. The life ether was at that time introduced into the world through man.

Now let us once more turn our attention to the condition which existed when God said: ‘Let there be Light.’ The Earth began to densify. Light shone upon it. This was also the time when man began to densify. The earlier forces however had to be retained. Now we have reached the condition when man let the light pass through himself. Then a complete reversal took place. Man began to perceive the light as something outside.

Originally through him there had been introduced into this world:

1. The atomistic or life ether.
2. The chemical ether.
3. The light ether.

Reversal:

3. Perception of the life ether.
4. Perception of the chemical ether.
5. Perception of the light ether.

Now man receives back the light from the world. (Reversal of the spiral.) Formerly he was a source of light, now the light streamed into him. He had become self-enclosed; thereby he acquired consciousness. The light shone into him; man began to let the surrounding world reflect itself in him. The next stage is that he learns to recognise objects with regard to their chemical constitution. He developed sympathy or antipathy for substances, a relationship to the world outside him. Then finally he also gained an inner perception of the atomistic or life-ether.

Through the introduction of light into the world man acquired his solid form. Through the introduction of the chemical ether he acquired a relationship to the world. Through the introduction of the atomistic ether he acquired life. Thus through the eyes he acquired form; through the sense of taste, relationship to the world; through the sense of smell, the nose, life. Jehovah breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

When we approach religious writings with such ideas we find that the most profound truths have been placed into them. We shall see whether originally these truths were placed into the religious writings as we now have them.

Let us take for example the builder of the Gotthard Tunnel and then a man who describes it. The builder, who actually constructed the Gotthard Tunnel did not need perhaps to possess such a high degree of engineering science in his conscious self, but he actually brought a thought into reality. Such is the relationship between the wise men of ancient times and those of today. At that time they possessed a creative wisdom. Now we have a wisdom based on observation. The creative wisdom is that wisdom which once made man, building up one after another those parts which today the anatomist takes out and describes. The creative wisdom is exactly the same as the wisdom which can be discovered today; it has been placed into the world. In the primeval wisdom man was concerned with the plan of the world. Now you can understand why the mystic has to withdraw into himself. The true mystic must be an investigator of the inner. He attempts to seek out those stages of evolution through which he has been created.

If we were able completely to shut off all light from the eyes and then to create light within us, until the world appeared illumined from within outwards, then we should be able to immerse ourselves inwardly in the creative wisdom and penetrate into everything with inner vision. This has a practical value, for one can remember how in actual fact man has been built up by having passed through the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms: all this is also within him. What is outside in the world is the remains of what man himself once was.

The human heart as it came into being was akin to what had taken place outside. The moment one sinks oneself into the heart, one creates for oneself the surroundings as they were when in the Lemurian Age the heart came into existence. If one concentrates on the activity of the heart, one can conjure up the entire environment of the Lemurian Age when the heart was formed. The Lemurian landscape rises up within us. Whoever concentrates on the heart sees the genesis of the human species.

Through concentration on the interior of the brain, which developed gradually during the Atlantean Age, one sees the Atlantean landscape appear. If one concentrates on the solar plexus one is led to the Hyperboreans. So one travels back into the worlds as they once were. This is no brooding in oneself, but an actual perception of the various organs in their relationships with the world. This is the way in which Paracelsus found his remedies and achieved his cures. He knew that digitalis purpurea came into being at the same time as the human heart. Through concentration on a particular organ, corresponding remedies reveal themselves. Thus do the members of the macrocosm and the microcosmic nature of man stand in relationship to each other.

Now the following is easy to understand. The human being receives warm red blood as do also the higher animals. That is to say, from then on man can separate himself from his surroundings, becoming independent, a whole enclosed within itself. This the fish is not. The fish has the same temperature as what surrounds it. With the warm red blood it became possible for man to develop warmth within himself. Then he was able to separate himself from his environment. Previously he was of the same temperature as his surroundings. What is it that actually occurred?

Let us consider the undifferentiated human organism before the Lemurian Age. There was a uniform temperature over the whole Earth. The state of warmth within man was the same as the state of warmth outside.

Then the inner warmth condition was heightened. This warmth condition signified individual warmth, warmth which was made use of in individualisation; and in the world outside the opposite came about: warmth, fire was distributed. Previously there was as yet no outer fire. To kindle fire in Nature first became possible when fire appeared within man. Since that time there was the beneficent fire distributed outside, and within man the egoistic fire.

And now we have the point of time when fire was withdrawn from spiritual beings for the benefit of man. Human beings drew their warmth from a particular kind of spiritual being—the Agni. Because of this, what was previously there as Fire-Spirit in the world had to withdraw and from then on could only appear from time to time in the form of fire. The Promethean-Saga is based on this fact. The god had lost his previous body and created for himself a new one in the external fire. Here we have an outstanding example of how in a certain way man works destructively on the elemental forces of Nature. Man himself had called forth the element of fire in that he had become an individualised being. This underlies the occult saying that, fundamentally speaking, man works destructively where elemental beings are concerned. This is very far-reaching and makes clear to us how man still today continually creates new conditions, new forces of Nature in his world around him, while he himself progresses in his development. He shapes the structure of the Earth. Fire arose in the Lemurian Age; because of this Lemuria could meet its destruction through fire which man himself had created.

The Atlantean Continent perished through water. The downfall of the Fifth Continent will be brought about through evil. We can observe a kind of retrogression in the following way:

The next stage—during the Atlantean Age—was the creative work of the human being on his own etheric body. There he had drawn air from his environment into himself. In this way he had so changed his ether body that the conditions of Atlantis had become quite different. During Atlantis the surface of the Earth was at one time only mist, an atmosphere of such a kind that a rainbow would have been impossible. At that time man worked upon the water. In the Lemurian Age he worked upon solid earth, this brought forth fire; in the Atlantean Age he worked upon the water; this brought about light. (it corresponded to the light of our intellect.) Then he worked upon the air.

The Fifth Root-Race will bring man to his downfall through what must be called evil. Then comes the Sixth Root-Race. The Fifth Root-Race is that in which Manas develops on the physical plane.

In the Old Indian civilisation man lived in a condition corresponding to Manas in a kind of deep trance-like state. There the primeval wisdom was revealed to the ancient Indians by the Rishis. The second revelation took place with the Persians in a condition similar to our deep sleep. In this condition man heard the Word. It was the condition of the Ancient Persian Sleep-trance. ‘Honover’ was the word used by the Persians.

Third revelation: The peoples of the near East, Babylonians and Egyptians, perceived through Manas in picture-consciousness; they had visions or dream-sight.

Fourth revelation: Clear waking-day consciousness was developed by the Semites, the Greeks and Romans. At that time Manas was perceived in clear day-consciousness, as incarnated man, Christ Jesus.

So with the ancient Indians we find the trance of the physical body. With the ancient Persians we find the deep sleep of the etheric body. With the peoples of the Near East we find the picture consciousness of the astral body, with the Semites, Greek and Roman peoples the waking consciousness of the ego.

Now in the Fifth Sub-Race man does not perceive the changing stages of Manas, but this Race sees as the highest stage the psychic experience of concepts as such. Our Sub-Race has developed the psychic Manas, the usual scientific knowledge.

The Sixth Sub-Race will develop a Super-psychic Manas. What with human beings today is merely a kind of knowledge will become actual reality, a social force. The Sixth Sub-Race has the task of permeating society in a social way with everything which has been produced by the preceding stages of evolution. Then for the first time Christianity will come forth as shaper of the social order. The Sixth Sub-Race will be the one which is the germinal foundation for the Sixth Root-Race. The Fifth Root-Race is descended from the original Semites, from the Fifth Sub-Race of the Fourth Root-Race. This people developed the individual ego which produces egoism. Man owes his independence to the original Semites. Man must first find himself, but then again must also surrender himself He must surrender himself to what makes thought a reality. The Sixth Sub-Race is destined to replace blood relationship with Manas relationship, relationship in the spirit. Thinking which is altruistic will develop the predisposition to the overcoming of egoism.

The Seventh Sub-Race will be a premature birth. It will make outwardly real too soon and too strongly what has come forth from Manas.

In the Sixth Sub-Race the predisposition will be given for the overcoming of egoism, but in such a way that the balance is held between selfhood and selflessness. The man of the Sixth Sub-Race, will neither lose himself in what is outside, nor shut himself up in what is within. With the Seventh Sub-Race a kind of hypertrophy will come about. Man will then pour out what he now has within him: his egoism. On the other hand the members of the Sixth Sub-Race will hold the balance. The Seventh Sub-Race will harden egoism. Later the English-American people will be projected as something rigidified into the Sixth Root-Race, just as today the Chinese are a rigidified residue of the Atlantean Age, the Fourth Root-Race.

World-egoism proceeds from the Anglo-American Race. From that direction the whole Earth will be overlaid with egoism. It is from England and America that all the discoveries come that will cover the Earth like a network of egoism. So it is from there that the whole Earth will be covered by a network of egotistic evil. But from a small colony in the East [The Slavonic peoples.] there will be developed, as though from a seed, new life for the future.

The English-American civilisation consumes European culture. The sects in England and America represent nothing other than the most incredible conservation of what is old. But such Societies as the Salvation Army, the Theosophical Society and so on, come into existence just there, in order to rescue souls from decadence, for race evolution does not run parallel with soul evolution. But the race itself is going towards its destruction. Within it is the seed of the evil race.

In the Fourth Sub-Race work was performed as tribute (Slave Labour).
In the Fifth Sub-Race work is performed as a commodity (sold).
In the Sixth Sub-Race work will be performed as an offering (free work).⁷⁵

The economic needs of existence will then be separated from work: there will be no more personal possession, everything will be owned in common. One will no longer work for one's personal existence, but will do everything as absolute offering for humanity.

• 74. Compare with lecture 9 and the development of the pineal and pituitary glands.
• 75. See Anthroposophy and the Social Question which appeared at about the same time in the periodical Luzifer-Gnosis.

I want to begin these lectures for Members by speaking of how Anthroposophy lifts human consciousness above the earthly and material domain simply through the light it sheds upon the nature and being of man.

It is hardly possible for anyone immersed in modern civilisation to think otherwise than that during his life from birth to death he belongs to the Earth. Membership of a spiritual world is in most cases a mere belief or a dim inkling. Insight into the fact that man belongs to any world other than the Earth is scarcely within the power of human beings whose education and whole upbringing are the outcome of modern civilisation. Nevertheless, to believe that when man is being spoken of earthly conditions alone have to be considered is the great fallacy of all contemporary spiritual life in the West and in Middle Europe. The East alone has preserved a certain consciousness—although in a decadent form—of man's connection with the super-sensible, cosmic powers and forces around the Earth. In olden times man felt himself dependent on the stars as well as on the plants and the animals around him on the Earth; he knew, too, that the Moon is not simply a physical orb revolving in space. Interest in the Moon to-day does not really go much further than attempts to discover whether there are or are not mountains or water there; hypotheses are advanced, but little thought is given to any other aspect of this neighbouring planet. As for the other heavenly bodies, investigation is entirely concerned with their physical conditions. In ancient times it was altogether different. Man was aware of his dependence on the heavenly bodies just as to-day he is aware of his dependence on the Earth.

I will start with something that has a certain scientific importance; it is an example that may perhaps not be to the liking of some people, but it is easy to follow. I have often emphasised in Anthroposophical lectures that the formation of the human embryo in earthly life, even when investigated from the purely scientific point of view, provides the proof in itself that something extra-earthly is at work in the process. Natural science believes the ovum to be the most complex structure that can possibly exist on Earth. Much thought is given to this complex structure of the ovum and recently we have been hearing about the wonders of the atom and the molecule! The structure of a cell is said to be indescribably complex. But this is a fallacy, for the ovum is, in reality, chaos; it is not a complex structure. The chemical physical structure goes to pieces, and before a living being can arise the ovum must have been in a state of chaos. The very purpose of fertilisation is to produce this state of chaos in the ovum, so that within the mother's organism there is matter which has been completely broken down. The processes in the mother's body produce this state of chaos. And now think of a crystal. The Cosmos cannot work in a crystal with its hard, firm edges; neither can the Cosmos work in the substance of a plant, which also has solid form; nor in that of an animal. Fertilisation means that the ovum becomes a chaos. Only then does the whole surrounding Cosmos work in upon this germinating entity and build up the living human form in such a way that the being of soul and spirit coming from earlier earthly lives can enter into it.

According to modern views this is so much nonsense—but it happens to be the truth! What is so deplorable in our time is that when one speaks the truth it is almost inevitably pooh-poohed by contemporary scholarship. Some people may say: “This statement of yours may be based upon occult vision; but is it also capable of proof?” It is indeed—and in more ways than one might imagine. At our Institute for Biological Research in Stuttgart remarkable confirmation of this fact has come to light. Investigations have been made into the function of the spleen. You know, perhaps, that the spleen has always been considered a very enigmatical organ. The story goes that in a viva voce examination the candidate was asked by the professor: “Can you tell me anything about the spleen?” The candidate puzzled his brains and at last blurted out in desperation: “I have forgotten it.” “What a pity!” said the professor. “Nobody has ever known anything about the spleen; you apparently were the only one, and you have forgotten it!”

I indicated a certain method, based on the principles of Spiritual Science, according to which Frau Dr. Kolisko has investigated the function of the spleen. The validity of her results is still being questioned but they will eventually win through, because the investigations were genuinely exact. During the investigations something else came to light. Because of the methods in general use to-day, one is sometimes obliged to adopt procedures that go much against the grain, but we finally decided to excise the spleens of rabbits. It was nothing in the least like vivisection but a quite simple operation; and we did everything that could possibly be done to avoid causing suffering. Unfortunately one of the rabbits died from a chill after the operation because by an oversight it was not taken immediately into the heated room. What result was to be expected from this operation? After the removal of the spleen something developed in the rabbit's body at the same place, something to which the Cosmos could have access. As long as the spleen itself was there the Cosmos could do nothing; but if the spleen is removed, the etheric spleen alone remains, and the etheric spleen adapts itself to the working forces of the Cosmos. It was to be expected, then, that at the place where the spleen had been, something would develop in the form that is a copy of the Cosmos, namely, the spherical form. And this is what we actually found! When we opened the rabbit we found a tiny organic body, spherical in shape; it had been produced by the in-working cosmic forces—when the condition in which the Earth alone works had been removed. This is entirely in line with the contention that the fertilised ovum is a body in which a state of chaos has been induced. And so karma led us to an external proof of something that holds good in another sphere altogether.

In many respects it is the case that if a man's thoughts and feelings are the outcome of contemporary civilisation, his outlook is bound to be limited to the Earth; he is incapable of directing his gaze in any real sense to the Cosmos. Let me remind you of what is said in the book Occult Science, namely that the Moon and the Earth were originally one body, but that the Moon subsequently separated from the Earth. This fact is revealed to seership but it is also to some extent recognised by modern natural science. Particularly in the last few years a certain literary and scientific movement has been speaking—although in an erroneous way—of this relationship of the Moon to the Earth. The Moon in the heavens was once united with the Earth, was then ejected—if I may so express it—and since then has been circling around the Earth.

I must now speak of a second fact, connected with man's spiritual development in earthly existence. Even a purely external survey of what men have achieved on the Earth indicates the existence of a primordial, archetypal wisdom. It was not, of course, imparted in the abstract, intellectual forms demanded to-day, nor was it so closely bound up with the senses. It was imparted in a more pictorial, poetic form. Of this primordial wisdom itself, which existed on the Earth in times long before writing was known, nothing has remained. Echoes have been preserved in sagas and myths, in the wonderful Vedic literature, in the Vedanta and other Eastern texts. Anyone who steeps himself in this literature—not in the style of Deussen who sees only the outermost surface but for all that is an interpreter of great renown—anyone who can get to the depths of what this literature contains will have a profound reverence for the infinite wisdom there expressed in a pictorial, poetic form. He will feel that behind it all there was something unuttered and unwritten, perhaps even greater and more significant a primordial, archetypal wisdom. How was this wisdom attained? Men did not study as we do to-day, imbibing the contents of book after book and so gradually amassing a certain amount of information. Every human being who had developed a certain insight in those ancient times knew what Inspiration is, knew how to read in the world itself—not in books—when he induced in himself the right attitude of soul. He knew the reality of inner illumination; it was as real to him as the reading of books is real to us to-day. The priests in the Mysteries brought him to the stage where he was able to experience this inner illumination and become aware of spiritual reality in the Universe. This indeed was the purpose of the instruction he received in the Mysteries. He did not feel that the illumination came to him from the clouds. If we to-day were listening to someone talking from behind a screen, we should not attribute the voice to some undefined source but to an actual person. Similarly, a man who attained illumination knew: there are Beings on the Earth who, although they are not in physical incarnation, are the great Teachers of humanity. Man knew that he moved among Beings who were not, like himself, incarnate in flesh and blood but who were etheric Beings, imparting the illumination and the content of the primordial wisdom. He knew that the Earth was peopled not only by human beings of flesh and blood but by other Beings too, working and living in etheric bodies.

In studying these things we must get rid of the preconceived notion that humanity has lived on the Earth since the time of which records exist and that this was preceded by undefined conditions leading back to the man ape or the ape man. This is a really ludicrous idea! What the historians say holds good for a few centuries only, namely, that human beings have not changed fundamentally, except that they are supposed to have become cleverer. It is said that the Egyptians were a superstitious people, that they had mummies and other such customs, but apart from cleverness they are thought to have been just like modern men. Nothing is known with any certainty of the long period of previous history, but the view is that it leads back finally to the man ape.

That is a view of evolution which must be abandoned! Man peopled the Earth before the animals, only in a different form; man is the older being, as you can read in Occult Science. The ancient Teachers of the primeval wisdom did not incarnate in physical bodies but lived in spirit bodies, and the men who communed with them, having experienced—as we ourselves experienced—the event of the separation of the Moon, knew that these Beings who had been among them as great Teachers had gone forth into the Cosmos, that they were no longer on the Earth but on the Moon. So that in truth not only the physical substance of the Moon but these spiritual Beings too, separated from the Earth. Once upon a time these Beings—who do not pass through birth and death in the same way as man—withdrew from the Earth and took up their abode on the Moon, although the actual substance of the Moon has been involved for long ages in a constant process of change.

This applies equally to man. In a period of seven to eight years the physical substances in the human body have completely changed. If anyone imagines that the bodies sitting here are the same as they were a few years ago, he is mistaken. The physical substance is entirely different; the soul and spirit has remained. Natural science is aware of this fact but pays no attention to it. The following question was once put to me after a lecture: “It is said that bees, as a hive, have a real link with the beekeeper, that if he has been very devoted to his bees and then dies, the hive is aware of his death and often dies too. How can this possibly happen? The bees as single entities have no faculties for knowing a human being, and the hive is only the sum total of the single bees!”—But this is by no means correct. I answered by using the following analogy. “Twenty years ago, two men were together. One of them goes to America, the other stays behind; after fifteen years the former returns from America and recognises his friend again. Yet not a single particle of the same physical substance has remained!”—And so it is not a question of each individual bee but of the intelligence of the beehive as a unit and that is not really so very different from human intelligence. As men, we are distinct from the cells in our bodies, from our various organs. And just as no single particle of the bodies of those who attended my lectures ten years ago has remained, but only the soul and spirit, so, although the Moon substance which once left the Earth has long since passed away, has been exchanged in the Cosmos, the Beings have remained. How these Beings have continued to participate in the life of earthly humanity is clearly revealed to the vision of Initiation, and to deeper observation of what we call karma. I will begin to speak about this to-day and continue in the following lectures.

When we make the acquaintance of a human being we do not as a rule give sufficient thought to the fact that we have really steered our whole earthly life towards this meeting. Acquaintance with another human being may take two forms. If we pay close attention we shall find more or less the following.—We get to know some person and feel aware of an intimate bond with him, no matter what he is like outwardly—good looking or ugly, intelligent or stupid. We pay no attention to his outer appearance; we feel an inner bond with him. That is the one alternative, in its extreme form. The other alternative is this.—We make the acquaintance of someone without feeling any inner bond, but he makes an intellectual or a moral impression upon us. We can describe him in great detail. Our relationship with the first acquaintance is such that if, after our meeting, we are among other people who also know him, it goes against the grain to talk about him; we feel a kind of embarrassment; there is something essentially inward in our relationship with him. But to talk about the second acquaintance is quite easy. We say that he is intelligent, or that he is a fool; we can describe the very shape of his nose, but we have no inner affinity with him. In the case of some people, no sooner have we made their acquaintance than we are always dreaming about them. We may get to know another person extremely well; we may be with him every day but we never by any chance dream about him because we have not been stirred inwardly. Very rarely indeed will there by anyone like Garibaldi,¹ who felt the inner bond even before there was any direct, personal relationship. Such cases are rare, but they do occur. The circumstances in which Garibaldi met his first wife are very interesting. External life affected him so little that he had no interest whatever in women. On a voyage to the coast of Brazil he happened to look at the land through his telescope and saw a girl standing on the shore. At that very moment he knew that she must become his wife. He hurried his ship to the land where a man greeted him in a friendly way and invited him to a meal at his house. Garibaldi accepted, and this man turned out to be the father of the girl he had seen through the telescope! Even before the meal was served he said to her—he spoke only Italian and she only Portuguese—that she must be his for life. She understood, and a very beautiful relationship was established between them. There you have a telling example of a karmic relationship. There was something heroic in the way the woman behaved. She accompanied Garibaldi on his campaigns in South America and when the news came that he had fallen on the battlefield, she went to search for him there. These were the circumstances in which she gave birth to her child, and in order to keep it warm she was obliged to strap it round her neck. Such experiences helped Garibaldi to find a firmer foothold in life. His wife eventually died and he married another woman whose acquaintance he made in an entirely conventional way; but this marriage lasted only for a day!

These are matters where karma stares us in the face, indicating two ways in which karma comes to expression between one human being and another. The karmic relationships differ entirely according to whether a man feels an inner bond or whether he can describe only the external characteristics of the other person.

When we study karmic experiences like that of an acquaintanceship where beauty or ugliness counts for nothing but where the feeling of kinship wells up entirely from within, we are led to discern the influence of those Beings of whom I have said that they were the original, primeval Teachers of mankind; they have remained active to this day, but now they work from outside, from the Cosmos. Such relationships are of special interest to these Moon Beings and through them they participate in the most intimate way in the evolution of earthly humanity.

Just as there are Beings who belong to the Moon, so there are Beings who belong to the Sun. We have spoken of relationships where we find it easy to describe the other person in a more external way. In these cases it is the Sun Beings who interest themselves in the threads that are woven between soul and soul.

In studying human relationships we are led away from the Earth, first of all to the Sun and the Moon. There are human relationships in which we discern the working of the Moon; others in which we discern the working of the Sun. And so stage by stage we are led from the Earth to the Cosmos.

All that has been possible to-day is to make a beginning and we will continue in the lectures that are to follow.

• 1. Garibaldi, 1807–1882. The maiden name of his Brazilian wife was Anita Riveira de Silva.

Rudolf Steiner stated that the primary function of education is to exercise the students' faculties of thinking, feeling and willing. These basic human qualities manifest in civilization as the “eternal verities” of truth, beauty and goodness, and these in turn in science, art and religion.

True, the Beautiful, the Good—through all the ages of man's conscious evolution these words have expressed three great ideals: ideals which have instinctively been recognized as representing the sublime nature and lofty goal of all human endeavour. In epochs earlier than our own there was a deeper knowledge of man's being and his connection with the universe, when Truth, Beauty and Goodness had more concrete reality than they have in our age of abstraction. Anthroposophy, or Spiritual Science, is able once again to indicate the concrete reality of such ideals, although in so doing it does not always meet with the approval of the times. For in our age men love to be vague and nebulous whenever it is a question of getting beyond the facts of everyday life.

Let us try to understand how Truth, Beauty and Goodness are related, as concrete realities, to the being of man.

As the human being stands before us we see, in the first place, his physical body—nowadays the object of purely external observation. How the single organs, the form and functions of the body have been built up in pre-earthly existence—of this people are wholly unaware. In his pre-earthly existence man lives in a world of pure Spirit, where, in communion with higher Beings, he is engaged in building up the spiritual prototype, the spirit-form of his physical body. The physical body here on earth is but an after-copy of the spirit-germ that is elaborated, in a certain sense, by man himself in pre-earthly existence.

In earthly life the human being is conscious of his physical body, but does not know what this implies. We speak of Truth, little realizing that a feeling for truth is connected with our consciousness of the physical body. When man is confronted by a simple fact, he may either form an idea that harmonizes strictly with it and thus is true, or, from inaccuracy, laziness or positive aversion to truth, he may evolve an idea that does not coincide with the fact. When he thinks the truth, he is in harmony with the feeling he has of his physical body, nay also with his sense of the connection between this physical body and pre-earthly existence. If out of laziness or untruthfulness he forms an idea that is not in accordance with the fact, it is as if he cut the thread that binds him to pre-earthly existence. Untruth severs this thread. In pre-earthly existence a delicate spiritual wool is spun, and this is concentrated into an after-copy—the physical body. Many threads connect this physical body with pre-earthly existence, and they are severed by untruthfulness. The purely intellectual consciousness that is a characteristic quality in the early stages of the epoch of the Spiritual Soul (see Note 1) does not realize that such a severance takes place. And that is why man is subject to so many illusions as to his connection with cosmic existence.

For the most part to-day, man regards his bodily health from a purely physical point of view. But when, through untruthfulness, he severs the threads that bind him with pre-earthly existence, this works right down into his physical body, and especially into the constitution of the nervous system. The feeling he has of his physical body gives him his “spiritual sense of being” in the universe. And this spiritual sense of being depends upon maintenance of the threads proceeding from the physical body to pre-earthly existence. If they break, man must create a substitute for his healthy sense of being—and he does so, unconsciously. He is then led, unconsciously, to ascribe to himself a sense of being “out of the common.” But even here he has fallen into an inner uncertainty that makes itself felt even in the physical body. For this purely spiritual sense of being that we find existing with greater and greater intensity the farther we go back in history—is it strongly present in man to-day?

How often it is the case that a man would like to be a person of note not by virtue of his own spiritual life, but by virtue of some profession or title. He likes to have some such title as “Secretary” or “Notary,” and then imagines he is of importance when convention thus describes him. The essential thing, however, is that he shall be able to realize his existence inwardly, apart from all externalities.

What is it that can strengthen man in this sense of being? In earthly existence we live in a world that is but a copy of true reality. Indeed, we only understand this physical world aright when we realize it to be this copy of reality. It behooves us, however, to feel the true reality within us; we must be aware of our connection with the spiritual world. And this is only possible if the bond that links us with pre-earthly existence remains intact.

This bond is strengthened by a love of truth and Integrity. Nothing establishes man's true and original sense of existence so firmly as a feeling for truth and truthfulness. To feel himself in duty bound first to “prove all things” he utters, to set due restraint on all his words—this helps to consolidate the sense of existence that is worthy of his being. To be aware of the spirit within the physical body—with this, indeed, the sense of being is connected. There is, in effect, an intimate kinship between the physical body and this ideal of Truth.

We acquire the etheric body (or body of “formative forces”) only a short time before the descent from pre-earthly to earthly existence. We draw the forces of the etheric world together, as it were, to build up our own etheric body. Now in earlier epochs of evolution man had a better understanding of the etheric body than he has to-day. Indeed, instead of feeling the reality of the etheric body, he is nowadays apt to scoff at the very idea.

The sense of the reality of the etheric body is strengthened by the experience of Beauty. When truth and truthfulness enter the realm of real experience, we are, in a sense, living rightly in the physical body. A highly developed sense of beauty gives us a right relation to the etheric body of formative forces. Whereas Truth is connected with the physical body, Beauty is connected with the etheric body.

This will become clear if we think of the significance of beauty as manifested in art. If we have before us a human being of flesh and blood, we know that he is one among many. Yet the one has no meaning without the many who live around him. Slender indeed are the roots that bind man to physical existence, without the others around him.

If we try either through sculpture, painting, or drama—indeed, through any art—to portray a human being, we endeavour to create a figure that is sufficient and complete in itself—one that contains a whole world, just as man contains the whole universe within himself in his etheric body. For he draws together the etheric forces from the whole universe to mould his etheric body within earthly existence.

An intense feeling for beauty—as it was then conceived—existed in earlier ages. Nothing of the same kind is present in modern civilization, Man cannot be truly man if he has no sense of beauty. It is so, indeed; for to possess a sense of beauty is to acknowledge the reality of the etheric body. To have no sense of beauty is to disregard, to disown, the etheric body.

Of this modern man is all unconscious. When the Greek approached his temple, or beheld within the temple the statue of the god, he was conscious of an inner, glowing warmth, of a kind of inner sunlight. It was as though forces streamed into his being and into his different organs. Gazing at the statue of the god, his whole heart cried out: “Never do I feel the peripheral structure of my hands and fingers so vividly as when this statue stands there before me! Never have I such an inner sense of the arch of my brow as in the temple!” Inwardly warmed and irradiated—god-inspired—thus did the Greek feel in the presence of beauty. And this was nothing else but an experience in the etheric body.

In the presence of ugliness the Greek's feeling was quite different from that of modern man. The latter at most expresses his very abstract feelings in regard to ugliness by his features-he makes a grimace! Ugliness cast a chill through the whole body of the Greek, affecting even the very pores of his skin. In ancient times men were vividly aware of the reality of the etheric body, and in the course of evolution a part of human nature has, indeed, been lost. All these things of which I have been speaking—and which were actual experiences in earlier times—remain unconscious in man to-day, for with his rationalistic intellect and love of abstraction he tends to view everything from the head—the organ belonging to these qualities.

Enthusiasm for truth and truthfulness can kindle in man—in the unconscious depths of his soul at any rate—a feeling for pre-earthly existence. An epoch of civilization in which this feeling is absent can possess no real sense of truth and truthfulness. But when this sense is highly developed, it binds man strongly to the pre-earthly past, and his more immediate experience of the earthly present must needs cause a certain sadness to arise within him. It is a sadness that can only find consolation if the sense of beauty is awakened in the soul. Beauty gives us joy once more, even in the presence of a sadness that must always accompany great enthusiasm for truth. In a delicate, subtle way this enthusiasm tells us: Truth, alas, is only really present in pre-earthly existence. Here in this earthly world we have but her echo. Having left the pre-earthly life, we no longer stand within the essential substance of truth. Only enthusiasm for truth can help us to maintain intact our relationship with pre-earthly existence.

A genuine feeling for beauty forges a link that binds us here, in earthly life itself, once again with pre-earthly existence. We ought never to undervalue the significance of beauty in education and in outer culture. A civilization that is filled with ugly machines, with chimneys and smoke, and dispenses with beauty, is a world that makes no efforts to forge a link between man and pre-earthly existence; indeed, it tears him asunder. Not by way of analogy, but in very truth we may say: A purely industrial city is a fitting abode for the demonic beings who would like to make man forget his pre-earthly existence in the realm of spirit.

Yet delight in beauty must be paid for at the cost of realizing that the beautiful, in its essence, is not rooted in earthly reality. The more perfectly we represent the human form, say, in sculpture or painting, the more must we admit that this does not correspond to an outer reality in earthly existence. It is but a consolation afforded by beautiful semblance, and hence lasts only until the moment we pass through the gate of death.

The world of spirit in which we live during our pre-earthly existence is always present. We have but to stretch out our arms, as it were, to this pre-earthly world of spirit. Although it is always there, a link can only be forged in the depths of unconscious life when man glows with enthusiasm for truth and truthfulness. And when his heart thrills with love for the beautiful, this too forms a bond with pre-earthly existence.

If man is to be true in a higher, this means spiritual, sense, he must not forget that he has lived in the spirit in pre-earthly existence. To glow in response to beauty means that in his soul man must create in a picture, at least, a new link with pre-earthly spirituality.

How can man develop an actual power that will lead him directly into the world he left because he has descended to the earth from pre-earthly existence? The answer is, when he is filled with Goodness—the goodness that flows to other men and is not confined to self-interest, conscious only of what is living within his own being. Such goodness can lead the soul into the qualities, nature and experiences of others. It embraces innumerable forces of soul; and these forces are of such a nature that they actually instill into the human being elements with which he was wholly permeated only in pre-earthly existence. Through his sense of Beauty he links himself, by means of a picture, to the spirit he has left because of his descent to earthly existence. If he is truly good, he links this earthly life itself to pre-earthly existence. A good man is one who can bear his own soul over into the soul of another. Upon this all true morality depends, and without morality no true social order among earthly humanity can be maintained.

When this true morality develops into momentous impulses of will which then pass to reality in moral acts, it begins to be a quickening, all-pervading impulse in the soul, inasmuch as a man can then be moved to real sympathy at the sight of care on the face of another—his own astral body feels pain at the sight of suffering in others. For just as the sense of Truth manifests in man's right relation to the physical body; just as a warm enthusiasm for Beauty expresses itself in the etheric body—so does Goodness live in the astral body. And the astral body cannot be healthy, or maintain its true position in the world, if man is not able to pour through it the forces proceeding from Goodness.

Truth, then, is related to the physical body, Beauty to the etheric body, Goodness to the astral body. Here we have the concrete reality of the three abstractions of Truth, Beauty, Goodness. In short, we can relate to the actual being of man all that is expressed instinctively in these three ideals.

These ideals show us how far man is able to fulfill his whole human nature, when, to begin with, as he lives in his physical body, he is filled with a real sense of truth instead of conventional opinions. Again, full “humanity” is only afforded a worthy existence when a man can quicken his etheric body into life through his feeling for beauty. Indeed, he who is incapable of being moved at the sight of beauty to somewhat the same degree as the Greek, does not possess a true sense of beauty. One can merely gaze at beauty or one can experience it. To-day it is the case that most people only gaze, and this does not necessarily energize anything in the etheric body. To gaze at beauty is not to experience it. The moment we experience beauty, however, the etheric body is quickened.

A man may do good because of some convention, or because punishment is in store for serious wrong-doing—or, again, because other people will respect him less if he does wrong. He can, however, also do good from sheer love of goodness. I spoke of this years ago in my book, The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. Such an experience of goodness will always lead to a recognition of the reality of the astral body. Indeed, only this recognition will teach man anything about the essence of goodness. There can only be abstract knowledge of and inconsequent chatter about goodness, if loving enthusiasm for goodness in its essence does not lead to actual experience of the astral body.

Now to realize the good is not, as in the experience of beauty, merely to create a link with pre-earthly existence that ceases when man passes through the gate of death. To experience goodness is, indeed, to unite oneself with the world of which I said, it is ever present. We have but to stretch out towards it. Yet man is separated from this world in material existence. Experience of goodness is a link, leading directly to the world he enters after death.

Forces that endure beyond the gate of death are present in men's actions here on earth, if he lives a life of goodness. The sense of truth is a heritage from pre-earthly existence. The sense of beauty will create an image, at least, of pre-earthly connection with spirit. And the impulse exists within us not to cut ourselves off from spirit, but rather to maintain the bond intact by the goodness we develop as inner power.

To be true is to be rightly united with our spiritual past. To sense beauty means that in the physical world we do not disown our connection with spirit. To be good is to build a living seed for a spiritual world in the future.

Past, present, future—these three concepts, as they play their part in human life, assume far-reaching significance when we understand the concrete reality of the other three concepts—Truth, Beauty, Goodness.

The man who is untruthful denies his spiritual past; the liar severs the threads between himself and his spiritual past. He who disregards beauty is building himself an abode on earth where the sun of spirit never shines, where he wanders in spiritless shadow. The man who belies the good renounces his spiritual future; and yet he would like this future to be bestowed on him, may be by means of some outer remedy.

It was, indeed, out of a profound instinct that Truth, Beauty and Goodness were held to be the greatest ideals of human striving. Yet they have faded away into shadowy words, and it is only our present age that can bestow concrete reality upon them.