The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel appear in their full significance quite especially to someone who considers the far-reaching impetus they gave to personalities possessed of far less spiritual vigor than they. Something is moving and working in the souls of this trio of thinkers that could not come fully to expression within themselves. And what is working as the basic undertone in the souls of these thinkers works on in a living way in their successors and brings them to world views—in accordance with the spirit—that even the three great original thinkers themselves could not achieve because they had to exhaust their soul vigor, so to speak in making the first beginnings.

[ 2 ] Thus, in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, there appears a thinker who tries to penetrate more deeply into the spiritual than his father, Schelling, or Hegel. Whoever dares to make such an attempt will not only hear from outside the opposition of all those who are fearful about questions of world views; if he is a careful thinker, he will clearly perceive this opposition coming also from his own soul. Is there then actually a possibility of delivering the human soul of cognitive powers that lead into regions of which the senses give no view? What can guarantee the reality of such regions; what can determine the difference between such reality and the creations of fantasy and daydreaming? Whoever does not always have the spirit of this opposition at his side, so to speak, as the true companion of his prudence will easily blunder in his spiritual-scientific attempts; whoever has this spirit will recognize in it something extremely valuable for life.

Whoever enters into the arguments of Immanuel Hermann Fichte will find that a certain spiritual demeanor has passed over to him from his great predecessors that both strengthens his steps into the spiritual region and endows him with prudence in the sense just indicated.

[ 3 ] The standpoint of the Hegelian world view, which takes as its basic conviction the spiritual nature of the world of ideas, was also able to be the point of departure for Immanuel Hermann Fichte in the development of his thoughts. Nevertheless, he felt it to be a weakness in Hegel's world view that, from its supersensible vantage point, it still looks only at what is revealed in the sense world. Whoever lives into Immanuel Hermann Fichte's views can feel something like the following as its basic undertone. The soul experiences itself in a supersensible way when it lifts itself above sense perception to a weaving in the realm of ideas. Through this, the soul has not only enabled itself to see the sense world differently than the senses see it—which would correspond to the Hegelian world view—; but also, the soul has an experience of itself through this that it cannot have through anything to be found within the sense world. From now on the soul knows of something that itself is supersensible about the soul. This “something” cannot be merely the idea of the soul's sense-perceptible body. Rather, this something must be a living, essential beingness that underlies the sense-perceptible body in such a way that this body is formed according to the idea of this something. Thus Immanuel Hermann Fichte is led up above and beyond the sense-perceptible body to a supersensible body, which, out of its life, forms the first body. Hegel advances from sense observation to thinking about sense observation. Fichte seeks in man the being that can experience thinking as something supersensible, Hegel, if he wants to see in thinking something supersensible, would have to ascribe to this thinking itself the ability to think. Fichte cannot go along with this. He has to say to himself: If one is not to regard the sense-perceptible body itself as the creator of thoughts, then one is compelled to assume that there is something supersensible above and beyond this body. Moved by this kind of a view, Fichte regards the human sense-perceptible body in a natural-scientific way (physiologically), and finds that such a study, if only it is unbiased enough, is compelled to take a supersensible body as the basis of the sense-perceptible one. In paragraphs 118 and 119 of his Anthropology (second edition 1860), he says about this: “Within the material elements, therefore, one cannot find what is truly enduring, that unifying form principle of the body which proves to be operative our whole life long.” “Thus we are directed toward a second, essentially different cause within the body.” “Insofar as this [unifying form principle] contains what is actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner body-invisible, yet present in all visible materiality. That other entity, the outer manifestation of this form principle, shaped by continuous metabolism: let us call it ‘corporality’ from now on; it is truly not enduring and not whole; it is the mere effect or copy of that inner bodily nature that throws it into the changing world of matter in somewhat the same way a magnetic force puts together, out of metal filing dust, a seemingly dense body that is then blown away in all directions when the uniting force is withdrawn.” This opens for Fichte the perspective of getting outside the sense world, in which man works between birth and death, into a supersensible world with which he is connected through Ws invisible body in the same way he is connected with the sense world through his visible body, For, his knowledge of this invisible body brings him to the view he expresses in these words: “For one hardly need ask here how the human being, in and for himself, conducts himself in this process of death. Man, in and for himself—even after the last, to us invisible, act of his life processes—remains, in his essential being, completely the same one he was before with respect to his spirit and power of organization. His integrity is preserved; for he has lost absolutely nothing of what was his and belonged to his substance during his visible life, He only returns in death into the invisible world; or rather, since he has never left the invisible world, since the invisible world is what actually endures within everything visible, he has only stripped off a particular form of visibility. ‘To be dead’ simply means to remain no longer perceptible to ordinary sense apprehension, in exactly the same way that what is actually real, the ultimate foundations of bodily phenomena, are also imperceptible to the senses.” And with such a thought Fichte feels himself to be standing so surely in the supersensible world that he can say: “With this concept of the continued existence of the soul, therefore, we not only transcend outer experience and reach into an unknown region of merely illusory existences; we also find ourselves, with this concept, right in the midst of the graspable reality accessible to thinking. To assert the opposite, that the soul ceases to exist, would be against nature, would contradict all analogy to outer experience. The soul that has ‘died,’ i.e., has become invisible to the senses, continues to exist no less than before, and is unremoved from its original life conditions. ... Another means of incarnation need only present itself to the soul's power of organization for the soul to stand there again in new bodily activity ...” (Paragraphs 133 Anthropology)

[ 4 ] Starting from such views there opens up for Immanuel Hermann Fichte the possibility of a self-knowledge that man attains when he observes himself from the point of view he gains through his experiences in his own supersensible entity. Man's sense-perceptible entity brings him to the point of thinking. But in thinking, after all, he grasps himself as a supersensible being, If he lifts mere thinking up into an inner experiencing—through which it is no longer mere thinking but rather a supersensible beholding,—he then gains a way of knowing through which he no longer looks only upon what is sense-perceptible, but also upon what is supersensible. If anthropology is the science of the human being by which he studies the part of himself to be found in the sense world, then, through his view of the supersensible, another science makes it appearance, about which Immanuel Hermann Fichte expresses himself in this way (paragraph 270): to “... anthropology ends up with the conclusion, established from the most varied sides, that man, in accordance with the true nature of his being, as though in the actual source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. Man's sense consciousness, on the other hand, and the phenomenal world (world of appearances) arising at the point of his eye, along with the whole life of the senses, including human senses: all this has no significance other than merely being the place in which that supersensible life of the human spirit occurs through the fact that the human spirit, by its own, free, conscious activity, leads the spiritual content of ideas from the beyond into the sense world ...” This fundamental apprehension of man's being now lifts “anthropology” in its final conclusions up to “anthroposophy.”

[ 5 ] Through Immanuel Hermann Fichte the cognitive impulse manifesting in the idealism of German world views is brought to the point of undertaking the first of those steps which can lead human insight to a science of the spiritual world. Many other thinkers strove like Immanuel Hermann Fichte to carry further the ideas of their predecessors: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. For, this German idealism points to the germinal power for a real development of those cognitive powers of man that behold the supersensible spiritual the way our senses behold the sense-perceptible material. Let us just look at several of these thinkers. One can see how fruitful the spiritual stream of German idealism proves to be in this direction if one does not refer merely to those thinkers who are discussed in the usual textbooks on the history of philosophy, but also to those whose spiritual work was enclosed within narrower boundaries. For example, there are the Little Writings (published 1869 in Leipzig) of Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in Bromberg on August 16, 1867 as headmaster of a secondary school. His book contains essays on “the antithesis between pantheism and deism in pre-Christian religions,” on the “concept of religion,” on “Kepler, his life and character,” etc. The basic undertone of these treatises is altogether of a sort to show how the thought-life of their author is rooted in the idealism of German world views. One of these essays speaks about the “reasonable grounds for believing in the immortality of the human soul.” This essay defends immortality at first only with reasons that spring from our ordinary thinking. But at the end, the following significant note is added by the publisher: “According to a letter of August 14, 1866 to his publishers, the author intended to expand this essay for the complete edition of his collected ‘Little Writings’ with an observation about the new body that the soul is working to develop for itself already in this life. The author's death the following year prevented the carrying out of this plan.” How a remark like this spotlights the effect upon thinkers of the idealism of German world views, stimulating them to penetrate in a scientific way into the spiritual realm! How many such attempts a person would discover today, even by investigating only those thinkers still to be found in literature! How many there must be that bore no fruit in literature but a great deal in life! One is looking there really, in the scientific consciousness ruling in our day, at a more or less forgotten stream in German spiritual life.

[ 6 ] One of those thinkers, hardly ever heard of today, is Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler. Let us mention only one of his numerous books, Lectures on Philosophy, published in 1835. A personality is expressing himself in this book who is absolutely conscious of how a person using merely his senses and the intellect that deals with the observations of his senses can know only a part of the world. Like Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Troxler also feels himself in his thinking to be standing within a supersensible world. But he also senses how the human being, when he removes himself from the power that binds him to the senses, can do more than place himself before a world that in the Hegelian sense is thought by him; through this removal he can experience within his inner being the blossoming of a purely spiritual means of knowledge through which he spiritually beholds a spiritual world, like the senses behold the sense world in sense perception. Troxler speaks of a “supra-spiritual sense:” And one can form a picture of what he means by this in the following way. The human being observes the things of the world through his senses. He thereby receives sense-perceptible pictures of these things. He then thinks about these pictures. Thoughts reveal themselves to him thereby that no longer bear the sensible pictorial element in themselves. Through the power of his spirit, therefore, man adds supersensible thoughts to the sense-perceptible pictures. If he now experiences himself in the entity that is thinking in him, in such a way that he ascends above mere thinking to spiritual experiencing, then, from out of this experiencing, an inner, purely spiritual power of picture making takes hold of him. He then beholds a world in pictures that can serve as a form of revelation for a supersensibly experienced reality. These pictures are not received by the senses; but they are full of life, just as sense-perceptible pictures are; they are not dreamed up; they are experiences in the supersensible world held fast by the soul in picture form. In ordinary cognitive activity, the sense-perceptible picture is present first and then, in the process of knowledge, the thought comes to join it—the thought, which is not a picture for the senses. In the spiritual process of knowledge, the supersensible experience is present; this experience as such could not be beheld if it did not, through a power in accordance with the nature of the spirit, pour itself into the picture that brings this power to spiritually perceptible embodiment. For Troxler, the cognitive activity of the “supra-spiritual sense” is of just such a kind. And the pictures of this supra-spiritual sense are grasped by the “supersensible spirit” of man in the same way that sense-perceptible pictures are grasped by human reason in knowledge of the sense world. In the working together of the supersensible spirit with the supra-spiritual sense, there evolved, in Troxler's view, our knowing of the spirit (see the sixth of his Lectures on Philosophy).

Taking his start from such presuppositions, Troxler has an inkling of a “higher man” within the man that experiences himself in the sense world; this “higher man” underlies the sense-perceptible man and belongs to the supersensible world; and in this view Troxler feels himself to be in harmony with what Friedrich Schlegel expressed. And thus, as was already the case earlier with Friedrich Schlegel, the highest qualities and activities manifested by the human being in the sense world become for Troxler the expression of what the supersensible human being can do. Through the fact that man stands within the sense world, his soul is possessed of the power of belief. But this power after all is only the manifestation, through the sense-perceptible body, of the supersensible soul. In the supersensible realm a certain faculty of the soul underlies our power of belief; if one wants to express it in a supersensibly pictorial way, one must call this a faculty of the supersensible man to hear. And it is the same with our power of hope. A faculty of the supersensible man to see underlies this power; corresponding with our activity of love, there is the faculty of the “higher man” to feel, to “touch,” in spirit, just as the sense of touch in the sense-perceptible world is the faculty to feel something. Troxler expresses himself on this subject (page 107 of his Lectures on Philosophy, Bern, 1835) in the following way: “Our departed friend Friedrich Schlegel has brought to light in a very beautiful and true way the relationship of the sense-perceptible to the spiritual man. In his lectures on the philosophy of language and the word, Schlegel says: ‘If one wants—in that alphabet of consciousness which provides the individual elements for the individual syllables and whole words—to refind the first beginnings of our higher consciousness, after God Himself constitutes the keystone of highest consciousness, then the feeling for the spirit must be accepted as the living center of our whole consciousness and as the point of union with the higher consciousness ... One is often used to calling these fundamental feelings for the eternal: ‘belief, hope, and love.’ If one is to regard these three fundamental feelings or characteristics or states of consciousness as just so many organs of knowledge and perception of the divine—or, if you will, at least organs that give inklings of the divine,—then one can very well compare them to the outer senses and instruments of sense perception, both in the above respect and in the characteristic form of apprehension that each of them has, Then love corresponds in a striking way—in the first stimulating soul touch, in the continuous attraction, and in the final perfect union—to the outer sense of touch; belief is the inner hearing of the spirit, uniting the given word to its higher message, grasping it, and inwardly preserving it; and hope is the eye, whose light can glimpse already in the distance the objects it craves deeply and longingly.’” That Troxler himself now goes above and beyond the meaning Schlegel gave these words and thinks them absolutely in the sense indicated above is shown by the words Troxler now adds: “Far loftier than intellect and will, and their interaction, far loftier than reason and spiritual activity (Freiheit), and their unity, are these ideas of our deeper heart (Gerrütsideen) that unite in a consciousness of spirit and of heart; and just as intellect and will, reason and spiritual activity—and all the soul capacities and abilities of a lower sort than they—represent an earthward directed reflection, so these three are a heavenward directed consciousness that is illuminated by a truly divine light.” The same thing is shown by the fact that Troxler also expresses himself about the supersensible soul body in exactly the same way one encounters in Immanuel Hermann Fichte: “Earlier philosophers have already distinguished a fine and noble soul body from the coarser body ... a soul that had about itself a picture of the body that they called a schema and that was for them the inner, higher man. ... In modern times even Kant, in The Dreams of a Spirit Seer, dreams up seriously as a joke a completely inward soul man that bears all the members of its outer man upon his spiritual body; Lavater also writes and thinks in this way; and even when Jean Paul jokes about Bonet's slip and Platner's soul girdle, which are supposed to be hidden inside the coarser outside skirt and martyr's smock, we also hear him asking again, after all: ‘to what end and from where were these extraordinary potentials and wishes laid in us, which, bare as swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthly covering to pieces? ... Within the stony members (of man) there grow and mature his living members according to a way of living unknown to us.’ We could,” Troxler continues, “present innumerable further examples of similar ways of thinking and writing that ultimately are only various views and pictures in which ... the one true teaching is contained of the individuality and immortality of man.”

[ 7 ] Troxler too speaks of the fact that upon the path of knowledge sought by him a science of man is possible through which—to use his own expressions—the “supra-spiritual sense” together with the “supersensible spirit” apprehend the supersensible being of man in an “anthroposophy,” On page 101 of his Lectures there is the sentence: “While it is now highly encouraging that modern philosophy, which ... must reveal itself ... in any anthroposophy, is winding its way upward, still one must not overlook the fact that this idea cannot be the fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what philosophy sets up as subjective spirit or as finite ‘I,’ nor with what philosophy lets this ‘I’ be confronted by as absolute spirit or absolute personality.”

[ 8 ] There is no doubt that Troxler sought the way out of and beyond Hegel's thought-world more in dim feeling than in clear perception. One can nevertheless observe in his cognitive life how the stimulus of the idealism in the German world views of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel works in a personality who cannot make the views of this trio of thinkers into his own, but who finds his own way through the fact that he receives this stimulus.

[ 9 ] Karl Christian Planck belongs to those personalities in the evolution of German spiritual life who are forgotten now and were disregarded even during their own lifetimes. He was born in 1819 in Stuttgart and died in 1880; he was a professor in a secondary school in Ulm and later in a college in Blaubeuren. In 1877 he still hoped to be given the professorship in philosophy that became free then in Tübingen. This did not happen. In a series of writings he seeks to draw near to the world view that seems to him to express the spiritual approach of the German people. In his book Outline of a Science of Nature (1864) he states how he wants, in his own thoughts. to present the thoughts of the questing German folk soul: “The author is fully aware of the power of the deep-rooted preconceptions from past views that confront his book; nevertheless, just as the work itself has fought through to completion and into public view—in spite of all the adverse conditions confronting a work of this kind as a result of the whole situation and professional position of its author—so he is also certain that what must now fight for recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most obvious truth, and that through this, not merely its concerns but also the truly German view of things will triumph over any still unworthily external and un-German grasp of nature and spirit.—What, in unconscious profound inklings, has already been prefigured in our medieval literature will finally be fulfilled by our nation in the fullness of time. Impractical, afflicted by injury and scorn, the inwardness of the German spirit (as Wolfram von Eschenbach portrayed this inwardness in his Parzival), in the power of its ceaseless striving, finally attains the highest; this inwardness beholds the ultimate simple laws of the things of this world and of human existence itself, in their very foundations; and what literature has allegorized in a fanciful medieval way as the wonders of the grail, whose rulership its hero attains, receives, on the other hand, its purely natural fulfillment and reality in a lasting knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

In the last period of his life Karl Christian Planck drew his thought-world together in a book published by the philosopher Karl Köstlin in 1881 under the title Testament of a German.

[ 10 ] One can absolutely perceive in Planck's soul a similar kind of feeling for the riddle of knowledge as that revealed in the other thinker personalities characterized in this book. This riddle in its original form becomes for Planck the point of departure for his investigations. Within the circumference of the human thought-world can the strength be found by which man can apprehend true reality, the reality that gives his existence sense and meaning within world existence? Man sees himself placed into and over against nature. He can certainly form thoughts about what rules in nature's depths as powers of true being; but where is his guarantee that his thoughts have any significance at all other than that they are creations of his own soul, without kinship to those depths? If his thoughts were like this, then it would in fact remain unknown to man what he himself is and how he is rooted in the true world. Planck was just as far as Hegel from wanting to approach the world depths through any soul force other than thinking. He could hold no other view than that genuine reality must yield itself somehow to thinking. But no matter how far one reaches out with thinking, no matter how one seeks to strengthen its inner power: one still remains always only in thinking; in all the widths and depths of thinking one does not encounter being (Sein). By virtue of its own nature, thinking seems to exclude itself from any communion with being. Nevertheless, this insight into thinking's alienation from being now becomes for Planck precisely the ray of light that falls upon the world riddle and solves it. If thinking makes absolutely no claim of bearing within itself anything at all in the way of reality, if it actually is true that thinking reveals itself to be something unreal, then precisely through this fact it proves itself to be an instrument for expressing reality. If it were itself something real, then the soul could weave only in its reality, and could not leave it again; if thinking itself is unreal, then it will not disturb the soul through any reality of its own; by thinking, man is absolutely not within any thought-reality; he is within a thought-unreality that precisely therefore does not force itself upon him with its own reality but rather expresses that reality of which it speaks. Whoever sees in thinking itself something real must, in Planck's view, give up hope of arriving at reality; since, for him, thinking must place itself between the soul and reality. If thinking itself is nothing, it can therefore also not conceal reality from our activity of knowing; then reality must be able to reveal itself in thinking.

[ 11 ] With this view Planck has, to begin with, attained only the starting point for his world view. For, in the thought-weaving immediately present in the soul during life, that thinking is by no means operative which is pure, self-renouncing, and even self-denying, There play into this ordinary thought weaving what lives in the mental picturing, feeling, willing, and wanting of the soul. Because this is so, the clouding of world views occurs. And Planck's striving is to attain a kind of world view in which everything it contains is the result of thinking, yet nothing stems from thinking itself, In everything that is made into a thought about the real world, one must look at what lives in thinking but without itself being thought by us, Planck paints his picture of the world with a thinking that gives itself up in order to allow the world to shine from it.

[ 12 ] As an example of the way Planck wants to arrive at a picture of the world through such striving, let us characterize with a few strokes how he thinks about the being of the earth.

If someone pictures the earth in the way advocated by purely physical geology, then, for Planck's world view, there is no truth in this picture. To picture the earth in this way would be the same as speaking of a tree and fixing one's gaze only upon the trunk, without its leaves, blossoms, and fruit. To the sight of our physical eyes, such a tree trunk can be called reality. But in a higher sense it is no reality. For, as a mere trunk, it cannot occur as such anywhere in our world. It can be what it is only in so far as those growth forces arise in it at the same time which unfold the leaves, blossoms, and fruits. In the reality of the trunk one must think these forces in addition and must be aware that the bare trunk gives a picture of reality deceiving to the beholder, The fact that something or other is present to the senses is not yet proof that in this form it is also a reality, The earth, pictured as the totality of what it manifests in mineral configurations and in the facts occurring within these configurations, is no reality, Whoever wants to picture something real about the earth must picture it in such a way that its mineral realm already contains within itself the plant realm, Just as the trunk configuration of the tree includes its leaves and blossoms; yes, that within the “true earth” the animal realm and man are already present along with it. But do not say that all this is obvious and that Planck, basically, is only deceiving himself in thinking that not everyone sees it this way. Planck would have to reply to this: Where is the person who sees it this way? Certainly, everyone pictures the earth as a planetary body with plants, animals, and man. But they in fact picture the mineral earth, constituted of geological layers, with plants growing out of its surface, and with animals and human beings moving around on it. But this earth as a sum, added up out of minerals, plants. animals, and human beings, does not exist at all. It is only a delusion of the senses. On the other hand there is a true earth; it is a completely supersensible configuration, an invisible being, which provides the mineral foundation from out of itself; but it is not limited to this, for it manifests itself further in the plant realm, then in the animal realm, then in the human realm. Only that person has the right eye for the mineral, plant, animal, and human realm who beholds the entirety of the earth in its supersensible nature, and who feels, for example, how the picture of the material mineral realm by itself, without the picture of the soul evolution of mankind, is a delusion. Certainly, one can picture a material mineral realm to oneself; but one is living in a world-lie and not in the world-truth if, in doing so, one does not have the feeling that with a mental picture like this, one is caught in the same madness as a person who wanted to think that a man whose head has been struck off would calmly go on with his life.

It might be said: If true knowledge necessitates what is indicated here, then such knowledge, after all, could never be achieved; for, whoever asserts that the mineral earth is no reality because it must be viewed within the entirety of the earth should say too that the entirety of the earth must be viewed in the plant system and so on. Whoever raises this objection, however, has not grasped the significance of what underlies a world view that is in accordance with the spirit. In all human activity of knowing, in fact, the issue is not merely that one think correctly, but also that one think in accordance with reality. In speaking of a painting one can certainly say that one is not thinking in accordance with reality if one looks only at one person when there are three in the painting; but this assertion, within its rightful scope, cannot be refuted by the statement: No one understands this painting who also does not know all the preceding paintings of the same artist. A thinking both correct and in accordance with reality is in fact necessary for knowing reality. To consider, on their own, a mineral as a mineral, a plant as a plant, etc., can be in accordance with reality; the mineral earth is not a real configuration, however; it is a configuration of our imagination, even when one is aware of the fact that the mineral earth is only a part of everything earthly.

That is what is significant about a personality like Planck: he attains an inner state in which he does not reflect upon but rather experiences the truth of a thought; he unfolds a special power in his own soul by which to experience when not to think a particular thought because, through its own nature, it kills itself. To grasp the existence of a reality that bears within itself its own life and its own death, this belongs to the kind of soul attitude that does not depend upon the sense world to tell it: this is or this is not.

[ 13 ] From this point of view Planck sought in thinking to grasp what lives in natural phenomena and in human existence in historical, artistic, and judicial life. In a brilliant book, he wrote on the Truth and Banality of Darwinism. He calls this work a “monument to the history of modern (1872) German science.” There are people who experience a personality like Planck as hovering in unworldly conceptual heights and lacking a sense for practical life. Practical life requires people who develop healthy judgment based on “real” life, as they call it. Now, with respect to this way of experiencing Planck, one can also hold the opinion: Many things would be different in real life if this easy-going view of life and of living life were less widespread in reality, and if on the other hand the opinion could grow somewhat that thinkers like Planck—because they acquire for themselves an attitude of soul through which they unite themselves with true reality—also have a truer judgment about the relationships of life than the people who call them “dreamers in concepts” (Begriffsschwärmer) and impractical philosophers. The opinion is also possible that those dullards who are averse to such supposed “dreaming in concepts” and who think themselves so very practical in life are losing their sense for the true relationships of life, whereas the impractical philosophers are developing it to the point that it can lead them right to their goal. One can arrive at such an opinion when one considers Planck and sees in him, combined with the acme of philosophical development of ideas, a far-sighted accurate judgment about the needs of a genuine conduct of life and about the events of outer life. Even if one holds a different view about much of what Planck has developed in the way of ideas about shaping outer life—which is also the case with the present writer,—still one can acknowledge that his views can provide, precisely in this area, a sound starting point in life for solving practical problems; even if in proceeding from there one arrives at something entirely different from one's starting point. And one should assert: People who are “dreamers in concepts” in this way and who, precisely because of this, can see what powers are at work in real life are more competent to meet the needs of this real life than many a person who believes himself to be imbued with practical skill precisely through the fact that, in his view, he has not let contact with any world of ideas “make him stupid.” (In his book, Nineteenth Century Views of the World and of Life, published in 1900, the present author has written about Karl Christian Planck's place in the evolution of modern world views. This book was published in a new edition in 1914 under the title Riddles of Philosophy.)

Someone might maintain that it is unjustified to regard Planck's thoughts as significant for the motive forces of the German people since these thoughts have not become widespread. Such an opinion misses the point when speaking about the influence of the being of a people upon the views of a thinker from that people. What is working there are the impersonal (of ten unconscious) powers of a people, living in their activities in the most varied realms of existence and shaping the ideas of a thinker like Planck. These powers were there before he appeared and will work on afterward; they live, even if they are not spoken of; they live, even if they are not recognized. And it can be the case that they work in a particularly strong way in an indigenous thinker like this, who is not spoken of, because less of what these powers contain streams into the opinions held about him than into his thoughts. A thinker like this can of ten stand there alone, and not only during his lifetime; even his thoughts can stand there alone in the opinion of posterity. But if one has apprehended the particular nature of his thoughts, then one has recognized an essential trait of the folk soul, a trait that has become a thought in him and will remain imperishably in his people, ready to reveal itself in ever new impulses. Independent of the question: What effectiveness was granted to his work? is the other question: What worked in him and will lead again and again to accomplishments in the same direction? The Testament of a German by Karl Christian Planck was republished in a second edition in 1912. It is a pity that many of those who were philosophically minded and fond of writing at that time mustered up more enthusiasm for the thoughts in Henri Bergson's world view—lightly woven and therefore more easily comprehensible to undemanding souls—than for the rigorously interrelated and far-reaching ideas of Planck. How much has indeed been written about the “new configurating” of world views by Bergson: written, particularly, by those who discover the newness of a world view so easily because they lack understanding, and of ten even knowledge, of what has already been there for a long time. Relative to the “newness” of one of Bergson's main ideas the present author has pointed in his book Riddles of Philosophy to the following significant situation. (And it should be mentioned, by the way, that this indication was written before the present war. See the foreword to the second volume of the above book.)

Bergson is led by his thoughts to a transformation of the widespread idea of the evolution of organic entities. He does not set at the beginning of this evolution the simplest organism and then think that, due to outer forces, more complicated organisms emerge from it all the way up to man; he pictures that, at the starting point of evolution, there stands a being that in some form or other already contains the impulse to become man. This being, however, can bring this impulse to realization only by first expelling from itself other impulses that also lie within it. By expelling the lower organisms, this being gains the strength to realize the higher ones. Thus man, in his actual being, is not what arose last, but rather what was at work first, before everything else. He first expels the other entities from his formative powers in order to gain by this preliminary work the strength to come forth himself into outer sense-perceptible reality. Of course many will object: But numbers of people have already thought that an inner evolutionary drive was working in the evolution of organisms. And one can refer to the long-present thought of purposefulness, or to views held by natural scientists like Nageli and others. But such objections do not pertain in a case like this one. For, with Bergson's thought it is not a matter of starting from the general idea of an inner evolutionary force, but rather from a specific mental picture of what man is in his full scope; and of seeing from this picture that this man, thought of as supersensible, has impulses within him to first set the other beings of nature into sense-perceptible reality and then also to place himself into this reality.

[ 14 ] Now this is the point. What can be read in Bergson in a scintillating lightly draped configuration of ideas had already been expressed before that by the German thinker Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss in a powerful and strongly thought-through way. Preuss is also one of those personalities belonging to the presentation here of a more or less forgotten stream in the development of German world views that are in accordance with the spirit. With a powerful sense for reality, Preuss brings together natural-scientific views and world views—in his book Spirit and Matter (1882), for example. One finds the Bergsonian thought we cited expressed by Preuss in the following way: “It should ... be time ... to present a teaching about the origins of organic species that is founded not only upon principles set up in a one-sided way by descriptive natural science, but that is also in full harmony with the rest of natural laws (which are also the laws of human thinking). This teaching should also be free of any hypothesizing and should rest only upon rigorous conclusions drawn from scientific observation in the broadest sense. This teaching should rescue the concept of species as much as Is factually possible, but at the same time should take Darwin's concept of evolution into its domain and seek to make It fruitful.—The center of this new teaching is man, the species that recurs only once on our planet: homo sapiens. Strange that older observers started with objects of nature and then erred to such an extent that they did not find the path to man, in which effort even Darwin Indeed succeeded only in a most pitiful and utterly unsatisfying way by seeking the ancestor of the lord of creation among the animals. Actually, the natural scientist would have to start with himself as a human being and then, continuing on through the whole realm of existence and of thinking return to mankind ... It was not by chance that human nature arose out of earthly nature; It was by necessity. Man is the goal of tellurian processes, and every other form arising besides him has borrowed its traits from his. Man is the first-born being of the whole cosmos. ... When the germs of his being had arisen, the remaining organic element no longer had the necessary strength to engender further human germs. What arose then was animal or plant. ...”

[ 15 ] The idea, as it lives in the philosophy of German idealism's picture of the being of man, also shines forth from the mental pictures of this little-known thinker of Elsfleth, Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss. Out of this view he knows how to make Darwinism—insofar as Darwinism looks only at the evolution occurring in the sense world—into a part of a world view that Is in accordance with the spirit and that wishes to know the being of man In Its development out of the depths of the world-all. As to how Bergson arrived at his thoughts—so glittering in his depletion, but so powerfully shining in Preuss's—let us emphasize that less here than the fact that in the writings of the little-known Preuss the most fruitful seeds can be found, able to give many a person a stronger impetus than that to be found in Bergson's glittering version of these same thoughts. To be sure, one must also meet Preuss with more ability to deepen one's thinking than was shown by those who waxed so enthusiastic about the “new life” instilled in our world view by Bergson. What is being said here about Bergson and Preuss has absolutely nothing to do with national sympathies and antipathies.

Recently, H. Bönke has investigated Bergson's “original new philosophical creation,” because Bergson has found it necessary in these fateful times to speak such hate-filled words and to shower such contempt upon German spiritual life (see Bönke's writing: Plagiarizer Bergson, Membre de l'Institut. Answer to the Disparagements of German Science by Edmond Perrier, President de l'Academie des Sciences. Charlottenburg, Huth, 1915). When one considers all that Bönke presents about the way Bergson reproduces what he has gotten from German thought-life, the statements will not seem exaggerated that the philosopher Wundt makes in the “Central Literary Paper of Germany,” number 46, of November 13, 1915: “... Bönke shows no lack ... of incriminating material. The greater part of his book consists of passages, taken from Bergson's and Schopenhauer's works, in which the younger author repeats the thoughts of the older, either verbatim or with slight variation. Even so, this alone is not the decisive point. Therefore, let us be a little bit clearer and more critical in ordering the examples advanced by Bönke. They then fall definitely into three categories. The first contains sentences from both authors that, except for minor differences, coincide exactly. ...” In the other categories the coincidence lies more in the way their thoughts are formed.

Now it is perhaps really not so important to show how much Bergson, who condemns German spiritual life so furiously, reveals himself to be a right willing proponent of this German spiritual life; more important is the fact that Bergson propounds this spiritual life in lightly woven, easily attainable reflections, and that many a critic would have done better to wait with his enthusiastic proclaiming of this “new enlivener” of world views until, through better understanding of those thinkers to whom Bergson owes his stimulus, the critic might have refrained from his proclamation.

That a person be stimulated by his predecessors is a natural thing in the evolution of mankind; what matters, however, is whether the stimulus leads to a process of further development or—and Bönke's presentation also makes this quite clear—leads to a process of regression as in Bergson's case.

A Side Glance

[ 16 ] In 1912 The Lofty Goal of Knowledge by Omar al Raschid Bey was published in Munich. (Please note: The author is not Turkish; he is German; and the view he advocates has nothing to do with Mohammedanism, but is an ancient Indian world view appearing in modern dress.) The book appeared after the author's death. If the author had had the wish to produce in his soul the requirements needed for understanding the series of thinkers depicted in this present book, a book like his would not have appeared in our age, and its author would not have believed he should show to himself and others, by what he said in his book, a path of knowledge appropriate to the present day. But because of the way things appear to him, the author of The Lofty Goal could have only a pitying smile for the assertion just made here. He would not see that everything he presents to our soul experience in his final chapter “Awakening out of Appearances” on the basis of what preceded this chapter and with this chapter, was, in fact, a correct path of knowledge for the ancient Indian. One can understand this path completely as one belonging to the past. The author would not see that this path of knowledge, however, leads into another path if one does not stop prematurely on the first, but rather travels on upon the path of reality in accordance with the spirit as modern idealism has done.

[ 17 ] The author would have to have recognized that his “Awakening out of Appearances” is only an apparent awakening; actually it is a drawing back of oneself—effected by one's own soul experiences—from the appearances, a kind of quaking when faced by the appearances, and therefore not an “awakening out of appearances,” but rather a falling asleep into delusion—a self-delusion that considers its world of delusion to be reality because it cannot get to the point of taking the path into a reality in accordance with the spirit. Planck's self-denying thinking is a soul experience into which al Raschid's deluded thinking cannot penetrate. In The Lofty Goal there is the statement: “Whoever seeks his salvation in this world has fallen prey to this world and remains so; for him there is no escape from unstilled desire; for him there is no escape from vain play; for him there is no escape from the tight fetters of the ‘I’. Whoever does not lift himself out of this world lives and dies with his world.” Before these sentences stand these: “Whoever seeks his salvation in the ‘I,’ for him egoism (Selbstsucht) is a commandment, for him egoism is God.” But whoever recognizes in a living way the motive soul forces that hold sway in the series of thinkers from Fichte up to Planck will see through the deception manifesting in these statements from The Lofty Goal. For he recognizes how the obsession (Sucht) with oneself—egoism—lies before the experience of the “I” in Fichte's sense, and how a fleeing from an acknowledgment of the “I”—in an ancient Indian sense—seemingly leads arrogant cognitive striving farther into the spiritual world, but actually throws one back into obsession with one's “I.” For only the finding of the “I” lets the “I” escape the fetters of obsession with the “I,” the fetters of egoism. The point, in fact, really is whether, in “awakening out of appearances,” one has experiences of The Lofty Goal that are produced by a falling back into an obsession with one's “I,” or whether one has the kind of experiences to which the following words can point. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing from the “I” falls prey to obsession with the “I”; whoever finds the “I” frees himself from obsession with the “I”; for, obsession with the “I” makes the “I” into its own idol; finding the “I” gives the “I” to the world. Whoever seeks his salvation in fleeing from the world will be thrown back from the world into his own delusions; he is deluded by an arrogant illusion of knowledge, which lets a vain playing with ideas appear to him as world truth; he looses the fetters of the “I” in front and does not notice how, from behind, the enemy of knowledge binds them all the faster. Whoever, scorning the phenomena of the world, wants to lift himself above the world leads himself into a delusion that holds him all the more securely because it reveals itself to him as wisdom; he leads himself into a delusion by which he holds himself and others back from the difficult awakening in the idealism of modern world views, and dreams into an “awakening out of appearances,” A supposed awakening, like that which The Lofty Goal wishes to indicate, is indeed a source of that experience which ever and again makes the “awakened person” speak of the sublimity of his knowledge; but it is also a hindrance for the experiencing of this idealism in world views. Please do not take these remarks as a wish on the author's part to disparage in any way al Raschid's kind of cognitive striving; what the present author is saying here is an objection that seems necessary for him to raise against a world view that seems to him to live in the worst possible self-delusion. Such an objection can certainly also be raised when one values, from a certain point of view, a manifestation of the spirit; it can seem most necessary precisely there, because that seriousness moves him to do so which must hold sway in dealing with questions of knowledge.

Today I would like to speak to you again about something that has been spoken about here often enough, but which can only be fully grasped if one looks at it from many different angles. Anyone who consciously lives today's spiritual and ultimately also material life and has truly settled inwardly and emotionally into what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, must feel a heavy cultural concern for our events. This heavy cultural concern can be described something like this: On the one hand, we see the necessity that what we call initiation science, spiritual science, which can only be fathomed through the method of initiation, that this science must spread as far as possible among all thinking people, at least in terms of the main points, if we are to avoid further decline. People simply need to take this up into their intuitive life and allow themselves to be stimulated by this initiatory science for their mutual intercourse and reciprocal action among themselves. On the other hand, the vast majority of people – we only need to look at the few adherents of spiritual science – feel that they reject this initiatory wisdom, that they should continue to live in the same way as they have lived so far, without being influenced in any way by what this initiatory wisdom can give them. One would like to say, therefore, that on the one hand there is the most urgent necessity for the revelation of the spiritual worlds, and on the other hand, the radical rejection of this knowledge.

We must not be under any illusions about the fact that basically the way in which people have been taught by the traditional religions to think about the spiritual is largely to blame for this radical rejection of a wisdom from the spiritual worlds. Let us realize that, above all, the traditional creeds may only introduce people to one side, let us say, of the eternal in man, to that side that lies beyond death, and that there is a decided refusal on the part of the traditional creeds to point people today to that which is present of the eternal soul in man before birth, or let us say before conception. Much is said about the existence of the soul after death, albeit in a highly vague manner and always without pointing to knowledge, only to belief. On the other hand, all talk about the existence of the soul before birth or before conception is rejected. This is significant not only within the theoretical, as we have just mentioned it, within the pure cognitive judgments that say: We want to look at the time after death; we do not want to look at the time before birth – but this is significant for the whole nature of the human being. For the way in which one speaks about the immortal in man depends on this rejection of the prenatal. Just imagine how people usually speak of the soul's immortality. Appeals are made to people's finer egoistic instincts. These finer instincts of people tend to desire existence after death. The desire for this existence after death is present in people in the most diverse forms, and by speaking of this existence after death in the usual way, one must always appeal to these selfish instincts of people, to this desire for an existence after death. So one must appeal in a certain sense to human desire for immortality. And by appealing to it, one finds access to people's belief in this immortality after death. One would not easily find the same belief for the same kind of language if one were to speak of the eternal nature of the human soul as it exists before birth or before conception. Just consider one thing: one speaks of immortality. We are not talking about something that goes beyond birth in the same sense, because we do not have a word for it in the ordinary sense. We have the word 'immortality', but we do not have 'unborness', 'unborn-ness' – we would have to develop that first so that it would become familiar to people. From this you can see how one-sided the traditional religions' discussions of immortality are. And why is that so? Yes, it is quite different when one is to speak to people about the fact that they should regard their present life, which they have led from birth and continue to lead until death, as the continuation of a spiritual life, just as they want to regard the spiritual life after death as a continuation of this earthly life. For people it is like this: to learn about the afterlife is in a sense a pleasure for them; to learn about the prenatal life is not in the same sense a pleasure, because what we have become through birth, we have, we possess; so we do not desire that. Thus, inciting desire for the eternal before birth is out of the question. If one wishes to speak of this eternal before birth, one must first awaken in man the urge to look in that direction at all, to declare one's willingness to recognize such things.

This is connected with the fact that spiritual science must indeed presuppose a certain willingness to recognize before it can be recognized. What I mentioned in yesterday's public lecture as “intellectual modesty”: to feel towards the great insights of nature as a child would feel if it could feel, to feel five years old when faced with a book of Goethean poetry, with which it also cannot do anything, before it is educated to understand it — that is how man should feel when faced with nature unfolding. He can do nothing with it until he has prepared himself to penetrate it. Therefore, this preparation must be undertaken with intellectual modesty. And we must find ourselves inwardly ready to make something else out of ourselves than we are, if we have not yet taken our inner being in hand to advance it in soul and spiritual life. But for this it is necessary to look at certain things, which one does not really want to look at in the general slumber of the world to which one is devoted.

We as human beings have the ability to educate ourselves through our perceptions, through our thinking about the world. But we do not think much about the special peculiarity of this thinking. This thinking does have a special peculiarity, because it is actually unnecessary in relation to the outer life. We do not usually realize this. Apart from the fact that animals can also live, can find their food, can reproduce themselves between birth and death, without thinking in the human way, apart from that, we can see from this that we can also perform certain lower tasks of we can also perform certain lower tasks of life if we do not think in a human way. We only have to devote ourselves to a somewhat more thorough consideration of life and we will immediately see how thinking is actually unnecessary for the external physical life. We cannot rely on thinking at all when it comes to certain things. Right, we do science. Take any science, for example physiology, through which we learn about the way in which human organs function. In physiology, we learn, as well as it is possible in the materialistic or spiritual realm, to recognize what the digestive process is. But we can never wait for the thinking recognition of the digestive process; we have to digest properly first. We would get nowhere in life if we had to wait until we had thought about digestion, until we had realized it. We have to carry out the digestive activity without thinking, and so too the other activities of our organism. It is precisely with regard to what we do as human beings that thinking always comes afterwards. So for life in the sense world, we could basically do without thinking.

This is where the big question arises for the humanities scholar: what is the actual significance of this thinking, which cannot serve us at all in our ordinary physical-sensory body? Of course, one important thing must be pointed out. What is presented to us in outer technique would not be presented to us if we did not first think about it. But basically, thinking with its positive meaning only begins with outer technique and everything that outer technique demands. In everything that does not demand outer technique, thinking is something that actually comes afterwards and proves to be superfluous to our sensual existence. We therefore carry an element within us that makes no contribution to our sensory existence. This is what the humanities scholar says to himself, and then he comes to examine what this thinking actually is. Then he finds, as I have often explained to you, that this thinking is actually an inheritance from our prenatal existence, that thinking is precisely what we have developed most intensively between the last death and this birth, that we bring the ability to think into this sensual existence, that this thinking was actually developed for the supersensible world. We do not understand the significance of this thinking at all if we do not know that it is our inheritance from the supersensible world.

Thus the spiritual scientist gradually comes to see in thinking the inheritance of the life he has spent between the last death and this birth. What has actually been stripped away since the last life? The relationship of desire to the environment has been completely stripped away, because when we grasp the world with our thinking, we are without desire. That is the peculiarity of cognition, that desire does not permeate this cognition. Therefore, man must be educated to cognition. He must first be led to use cognition. For basically, he does not initially desire the things that become his through cognition. But spiritual science shows us something different in this area. It shows us, by means of our thinking, our thinking that we have a completely useless limb for the sensual world, that this thinking in us humans must be there for something other than for mere sensual life, and that we abuse this thinking when we leave it unapplied, when we do not apply it to penetrate not only into the sensual but into the supersensible. We have thinking as a gift, as an inheritance from the supersensible, and we must recognize that we must also apply it to acquire the supersensible.

What I have told you is expressed in life in the most diverse ways. If we look at life correctly, we can come across such things as those just mentioned. How do we actually enter into this life? By the ability to think gradually detaching itself more and more from the dark depths of our inner being, and by developing more and more the power to survey the world by thinking. How do we enter this world and how do we become more and more a part of it? Ask yourself very thoroughly, self-knowingly, ask yourself what kind of consciousness you connect with becoming more and more thoughtful. You directly link the need to communicate with this becoming of thought. When you think, you cannot help but want your thoughts to go into the souls of other people, so that you are able to communicate your thoughts to other people. As we think, this desire to communicate our thoughts to others grows in a certain way.

One need only hypothetically imagine what it would mean to have to keep one's thoughts to oneself, to find no one to share them with! But for most people, this is most certainly a need that applies only to the world of thoughts. With other possessions, it does not apply to most people, and even if you do find people who are happy to share their thoughts, perhaps even happier to share their thoughts than to share their other possessions (although the word “even” is really too much), they are not always so happy to share their other possessions. But there are people who really like to share. But then one must also analyze this willingness to give a little, and then one realizes that this willingness to give is connected with thinking. The thought: What will the other person think of you, what community will develop when you give him —, that is something that very strongly influences the giving of other goods, so that the need to share also lives very strongly in giving or working for another. The striving for community of thought is what plays a role here.

If you think about a question that a number of our anthroposophists have had to learn a lot about recently, about the pedagogical-didactic question, which had to be discussed a lot when founding or continuing the Waldorf school, which will soon have passed its first year of existence, then one comes to the conclusion that actually the one who has the greatest need to communicate has the best teaching profession. If someone likes being a teacher, it is because their need to communicate, to live in joint thinking with others, is particularly well developed in them, something they bring with them from the world we come from when we enter this sensual existence through birth. And since it is easier to communicate thoughts to children and to find understanding in children than in adults, the teaching profession is the one that arises precisely from an intense desire for success in the desire to communicate.

But once you recognize this, once you recognize, I would say, the soul teaching of teaching, then the other question arises, the question that has played the greatest role in the development of a pedagogy for the Waldorf school. It still sounds paradoxical to today's people, this other side of teaching pedagogy, and yet, in the training of the pedagogy of the Waldorf School, this other side has played the greatest role, and that is that we bring it to realization at the same time that the children who grow into the world are each a mystery in themselves and that we can really learn from the children. By being teachers, we not only satisfy our need to communicate, but at the same time our need to know, by saying to ourselves: You have grown older, but those who are coming in now bring you news from the spiritual world from a later time, they reveal to you that which has taken place in the spiritual world since your own birth, for they have remained in the spiritual world longer. The teachers at the Waldorf School have been taught in the most diverse ways to receive messages from the spiritual world in the growing child, to really think about it in every moment, and to feel it in particular: in the child that is given to you, what is sent to you from the spiritual world is revealed to you.

In this way, giving and taking are combined, and in this way one practically grows into living together with the spiritual world. The pedagogy of the Waldorf school is based on such an actual absorption of things of the spiritual world. Not just that one wants to theoretically explain some pedagogy that starts from the abstract principles of anthroposophy. That is not the point, but the teaching practice, which is expressed directly in the treatment of children. It is one thing to assume that the child brings you messages from the spiritual world into this world, and you have to solve the riddle that is brought to you from the spiritual world, and quite another to regard the child as a random plastic substance that you just have to educate. Solving this riddle leads to the practice of life that follows from what is observed and absorbed in anthroposophical spiritual science. And this anthroposophical spiritual science is not just there to represent principles or theories, but to be truly absorbed into the individual branches of life. That is what it is about.

In this way, we have pointed out how this work in education, in the sharing of one's thoughts – and ultimately it is a sharing of thoughts, whether I tell someone something, or whether I write a novel, or, if we think of the thought in the broader sense, whether I produce another work of art — how this whole life in thought is a living together with the spiritual world, a carrying in of that which we have experienced before birth, into this world here. This special feature of what is called spiritual experience, what is called spiritual civilization, must first be considered by anthroposophists. For it is through this that our spiritual life takes on its special character, that we, by being in this spiritual life, become aware that We are connected through it with everything that lies before our birth and everything that lies after our birth, in that children bring it to us from the supersensible worlds. But it is this that gives this spiritual life its special character. On the one hand, there is what should be, namely that the anthroposophist views the world much more realistically than other people today, that the anthroposophist learns to look at the subtleties of life. He should recognize how the outer life of civilization in the workings of the spiritual is connected with the prenatal, and how something actually unfolds there in the spiritual that is richer than the individual human being, that reaches beyond the individual human being. It is true that when we are dependent on communicating our thoughts to others, and thus also finding them in the hearts and feelings of others, spiritual life points us to a commonality, to something that we can only experience together with other people. It equips us with something that we do not want to have alone.

We know more, if I may express it paradoxically, than we are allowed to keep to ourselves, and our needs intersect in this respect. Whoever shares something with another should in turn receive something from another. It can't be any other way. So we shower each other with spiritual life, we pour out our riches on each other. That too is a peculiarity of this spiritual life. We have too much. We bring with us too much for this material world, because the spiritual life that we bring with us as thinking beings is at the same time destined for the supersensible. Because the supersensible lives itself out in it, it floods this physical world, as it were, like a flood. It is quite different when we turn our attention to economic life. There it is not the case that we so easily communicate our thoughts to others. First of all, we often do not want to do so. If we wanted to communicate thoughts of economic life to others as easily as we do with thoughts of pure teaching life, no one would patent anything, no one would keep a trade secret. The desire to communicate is not as great as in the field of spiritual culture. And you only have to imagine what the situation is in economic life to immediately see that there is no such flood of ideas passing from one person to another, but that things are quite different there.

Recently, I have often been able to point to an example that makes it easy to see what I actually mean. In the middle of the nineteenth century, people who had something to say about such matters began to express the urge to talk about free world trade and to make free trade, that is, no tariff barriers, the general way of people in the field of economic life across the world. At the same time as this thinking about free trade, another tendency arose: to replace bimetallism, the gold and silver currency, with the gold currency. This striving for the unified gold currency emanated from England, in particular; but it also took hold in other countries, as you know. And you can see in the parliamentary reports, or elsewhere, where such things were discussed, how people, in a very practical way, expressed themselves about the effect of the gold standard at a certain time in the 19th century. They said: Free trade will develop under the effect of the gold standard; the gold standard will bring about free trade by itself! And after the most respected parliamentarians and practitioners had championed this theory until the 1870s, what actually happened? Customs barriers were erected everywhere under the influence of the gold standard! The exact opposite of what the greatest theorists and practitioners had predicted!

This is a very interesting example of thinking in the economic field. Anyone who looks into economic matters at all today – the people, the practitioners do not notice – notices that it is the same in all fields. As a rule, the opposite of what people predict occurs in business transactions. One need only study the concrete cases, need only not take into account what one wants to declaim as a so-called practitioner of life, who looks down on everything idealistic, but really look at what is going on, then one already finds that this is the case.

So what I want to say – as you will assume – is that all those fools who predicted in parliaments and in debates that the gold standard would lead to free trade, while in reality the erection of customs barriers has occurred. No, that's not what I want to say. I don't want to say that they were fools at all. They were very, very clever people – some of them, of course; there were extremely clever people among them. And anyone who goes through the arguments they put forward and doesn't look deeper into the whole fabric of human coexistence can't help but be amazed at the cleverness with which such people were dominated when they declaimed a completely false prophecy.

Where does this come from? Precisely from the fact that in more recent times we have grown into individualism of thinking, that everyone wanted to think for themselves in such matters. Just as we have what we bring with us as actual spiritual thinking for everyone else, and how we can shower the others with it, so we have the thinking that we are to extract from life in the first place, not at all to pour out. We can only acquire it in life by having it very partially, by always distorting it to the point of caricature when we want to apply it generally. The judgment with which we are born, we have not only so that we can judge the world, but we have it so that it is also enough to give something to the other, so that he too can judge according to our judgment. Our economic judgment and that which is similar to economic judgment is more briefly summarized. This is not enough to communicate to the other, but to make it effective, it is necessary that associations be formed, that groups of people with the same interests, consumer interests or interests of a particular type of business, and so on, come together; because only groups of people together can bring about the living experience of what the other can contribute to them, what he can know and what the other must believe, on trust, when he is with him in the association.

This in turn raises a big question for those who, I would say, now look at the world with a clear eye of the soul. They say to themselves: We bring with us a certain amount of judgment that we can pour out on other people. These connect us with life before birth. But then we only acquire useful judgments in the realm of external, namely economic life, when we join with others in a lasting way, when we form associations with them, when we judge together with them, when we, so to speak, piece our judgment and their judgments together. We cannot communicate with them, but in order for our judgment to exist at all, we have to piece our judgment together with theirs. Where does this come from? That is the big question. It comes from the fact that we as human beings are really at least a dual being. We are actually a threefold being, but I will not take that into consideration today. You can read more about it in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'; but I will first take the dual nature into consideration by summarizing the second and third more. What we bring from the spiritual world into this world, what we can pour out over man, that forms our head, the head that is now really more than a mere expression, a mere tool, that really is an image of what we were before birth, that also expresses our soul , and thus does more than the rest of the organism, which, when we are not moving, does not truly visualize our soul directly in activity, and does not truly express our soul directly as the face and head express our soul.

On the one hand, we are truly human beings, and through our heads we carry the external image of what we have become before birth into the world. And the rest of the human organism is joined to this. It is only with the help of the head that the rest of the human organism has to judge something like economic life. We do not use our heads to judge economic life at all, because the head is not particularly interested in economic life. It does want to be nourished as well, but it only makes this demand of its own organism, not of the outside world. The head itself only corresponds to the rest of the organism in terms of its nutritional needs. It is actually placed on this rest of the organism in such a way that it is, so to speak, really carried by this rest of the organism. Just as a person sits in a cab, our head sits on the rest of the organism and does not participate in the movements. Just as we do not need to exert ourselves in the cab when we are riding in it, for example, to work with our arms and legs on the forward movement of the cab, our head does not participate in the movement of the legs and feet. Our head is something that rests on the rest of the organism. It is an organization of a completely different kind than the rest of the organism, and it judges in such a way that it brings the power of this judgment with it into physical existence through birth. The rest of the organism is built out of this world. This can also be demonstrated with the help of embryology, if only one really does embryology, not the caricature of embryology that is done by today's science. The way in which embryology is developed proves immediately what I am saying here. This remaining organism is what now enters into a relationship with the rest of the world, including the social world, and is dependent on the structures into which we enter into the outer world.

We can say that the human being confronts the world with two very different organizations. He counters spiritual life with his head, and economic life with the rest of his organism. But the rest of the organism already shows its dependence on the human outer world through its purely natural constitution. Consider: in relation to the rest of the organism, the human race is divided into men and women, and the fact that the world endures as the human race stems from the interaction of men and women. So here you already have the archetype of social interaction. What is the main organization, is not somehow dependent on interacting with others in such a way that the activities are joined together, but rather we give what the head produces to the other people, shower the other people, as it were. This forming of associations, this living together with other people in associations, is only, I would say, a further form of living together, which the human being enters through the rest of his organization, apart from the head. Something quite different from what appears through our head organization comes into the world. What we must say about it is that we only get it in the eminent sense by integrating ourselves into this physical world. — At first, this other part of the human organization is actually only born in its astral form: desire without wisdom. While the head does not develop desire, must first be educated to desire the world cognitively, the human being develops desire through the rest of his organism, but it is not permeated by wisdom, and must first seek its wisdom in living together with the head.

On the one hand, you have the spiritual world with very different qualities than the world we have on the other hand, the world of economic life: I have characterized the world of spirituality by showing you how it is carried in from our prenatal life; the world of economic life is formed, but cannot be fully developed by the individual human being, but only in living together with other people, in association, which actually mainly extends to desire, in which wisdom does not at all encompass what is desired in a person. We want to relate this completely different world to the other world in the threefold organism in the right way. But we can look at these two worlds, and something will become clear to us that we mentioned at the beginning of our reflections. What is present in economic life, in the outer life in general, speaks to the desire. But the traditional religions also appeal to this; they appeal to desire. They appeal to that which is subject to human egoism. They incite egoism in order to make people receptive to the idea of immortality. Our spiritual science wants something different. It does not want to incite people's egoism in order to arrive at the idea of immortality, but it wants to develop in man that which man brings with him through birth out of his unborn self. It wants to speak to that in man which refrains from desire, which does not succumb to human egoism. It wants to speak to human knowledge, not to human desire, about the immortal or unborn human soul. It wants to speak to the purest part of the human being, to the light-filled knowledge, and wants people to rise through this path of light-filled knowledge to grasp the eternal in human nature. But this brings a new element into life in general. As a result, this earthly life appears to us as a continuation of our prenatal life. But then an element of responsibility runs through earthly life, which it would not otherwise have. One becomes aware that one is sent into this earthly life from higher worlds, and that one has a mission to fulfill in this earthly life.

It can also be expressed differently: other beings count on this human life on earth, and we actually address these beings as our gods, as the spiritual beings that stand above us. They live with us between death and a new birth. In a sense, we are in lively contact with them. Then the moment comes for every human being when, in a sense, these spiritual beings, these divine beings of the world, say to themselves: Here in this world of the spirit, we can only bring the person to a certain degree of perfection; we can no longer let him into our world. We would not achieve through man that which is to be achieved through man if we let man into our world. We have to send him out. There he will also conquer for us, the gods, what he cannot conquer for us here, what we gods cannot conquer for ourselves if we do not send people out into the other world. So we are sent out here by the gods to develop within the earthly body that which could not be developed in the spiritual world.

Thus, immortality after death, which is certainly all too justified – we know this and we describe it, after all – appears as something that man wants to enjoy. He wants to enjoy at least the thought of it throughout his life. Not giving birth is connected with a certain responsibility and obligation towards life, with a mission to the effect that we should try to understand life in such a way that we truly give back to the gods that which they expect from us at death. Through spiritual science, our life takes on a meaning. Our life has a significance for the spiritual world. We do not live in vain on this earth. We do not just experience things on earth for ourselves, but also for the gods, so that they too have them. It is precisely through this that life acquires meaning, and without such meaning one cannot live.

If one has become accustomed to the scientific questioning of the present, one can certainly say that it is not at all necessary to ask about the meaning of life. You just live and don't ask about the meaning of life. But of course you don't need to ask about the meaning of life if you put it so simply that you only ask about the meaning of life out of arbitrariness. You don't ask about the meaning of life out of arbitrariness at all, but when you realize, or should realize, that you cannot find a meaning to life, then life becomes meaningless. Not asking about the meaning of life means at the same time recognizing the nonsense of life. That is the important thing. It makes a difference whether one asks about the meaning of life merely out of human arbitrariness or whether one is clear about the fact that not asking about the meaning of life means recognizing life as nonsense. But that means denying the spirit as such, and anyone who does not ask about the meaning of life denies the spirit. Only from this point of view does the real meaning of life then also become apparent, and we can then say to ourselves: This life has a meaning because the supersensible needs this sensual life to complete it. From this, however, you will see how infinitely wrong the world is thinking at present, since, from the education of civilized humanity that has taken place in the last three to four centuries, it wants to base a social existence in which people between birth and death would actually all like to be completely happy, would like to experience everything that can be experienced.

Where does it come from that one even asks the question about the meaning of life in this way? It comes only from the fact that one no longer grasps the meaning of the sensual life in the supersensible, that the last three to four centuries have brought forth such materialism that one seeks the meaning only between birth and death, or finds no meaning of life there, but would actually like to develop it only out of desire. This leads to the formulation of socialist ideals such as those evident in Leninism and Trotskyism. They are only the result of the materialistic mode of perception and cannot be eliminated from the world in any other way than by returning to a spiritual mode of perception.

It is necessary to repeatedly and repeatedly point out the peculiar fact – it cannot be pointed out sharply enough – that is expressed by answering the question: What is the actual state philosophy of the current Russian Soviet government, of Bolshevism? If you want to answer this question, you don't have to go to Russia, because the state philosophy of Bolshevism is a philosophy that was truly founded by a very worthy bourgeois, by Avenarius, and by the students of Mach, the student of Avenarius, who did not live in Switzerland, but many of Mach's students did live in Switzerland. One of them is... the most important is Friedrich Adler, who shot the Austrian Count Stürgkh; he lectured in Zurich. At that time they were - no longer Adler, but Mach and Avenarius - certainly respectable bourgeois who were not out of touch with the world around them. But they developed a philosophy out of materialism, a very consistent, sharply defined one. This philosophy makes sense to people who think in a Leninist, a Trotskyist sense in the practical, political realm. It is not only because many Bolsheviks studied in Switzerland that Avenarius's philosophy, as it was cultivated here in Switzerland, in Zurich in the 1970s, is now the state philosophy of Bolshevism, but rather it is the case that for for those who see things not only in terms of their abstract logic, but in terms of their reality context, for those, after a few decades, when the second generation comes, the lecturing that takes place in the manner of Avenarius becomes Bolshevism. From the materialistic teachings on the chairs, Bolshevism arises in the second generation. That is the actual context. And anyone who wants to continue to cultivate materialism in their knowledge must be aware, from the study of spiritual science, that after two generations it will be much worse and will bring about something much worse than what is there now, because in Russia there are about six hundred thousand people (in 1920) – there are no more Leninists there – who rule over millions. At present, the others have to obey them much more than the Catholics have ever obeyed their bishops.

These things all develop with an inner necessity, and materialism, as it has been cultivated in the second half of the 19th century, is intimately connected with what is now emerging as social chaos. The cure lies only in the direction of returning to the spirit in thinking, in feeling, in the impulses of the will, to permeating oneself with the spirit in feeling, to letting impulses come from the spirit in the will. The appeal to the spiritual life is expressed in such considerations, and that is the concern of culture. This appeal is all too justified, for on the other side stands the rejection of precisely the spiritual life in the broadest circles.

When we have often considered the development of our present culture together, we have had to say: materialism gradually emerges in the middle of the 15th century, takes hold of the minds and reaches its culmination in the present. Before that, other soul feelings were at the basis of culture, of that cultural period that began in the 8th century before the emergence of Christianity and ended around the middle of the 15th century, and which we call the Greco-Latin cultural period. Then we go further back into the Egyptian-Chaldean, into the pre-Persian, pre-Indian time, until we come to the Atlantic catastrophe. If we visualize these cultural currents, we can say that we have an ancient Indian culture, an ancient Persian, an Egyptian-Chaldean, a Greek-Latin, and then our own, which begins in the middle of the 15th century. It is not that we can get by with such a schematic equation of the individual successive cultures, but when we look back to the older cultures – actually, written documents are only available from the third post-Atlantean culture , we can only look back at the earlier ones with the help of the Akasha Chronicle. When today the external scholars in archaeology, anthropology and so on collect the records of older cultures, there is little understanding associated with what is brought up as a result. These records are treated in an external way. But if one gradually works one's way into the spiritual world through spiritual scientific methods, one can learn to recognize something of the secrets of the spiritual world again, and then look back at the earlier cultures. Then they appear in a different light; then one says to oneself: these older peoples did have an atavistic way of seeing, a more instinctive way of seeing. We have to struggle to get to the spiritual world at all, to an awareness of the spiritual world. The ancient peoples did not have such a clear awareness of it, but they did have a mythicizing way of living their lives. But when one sees the results of this atavistic, instinctive penetration into the spiritual world, the results in the Vedas, in Vedanta philosophy, in Persian and even Chinese documents, then one is filled with great reverence, even if one does not yet go into the mystery culture, great reverence for what was once given to humanity as primeval wisdom and which has actually declined more and more. The further back we go, the more human cultures prove to be imbued with spirituality, even if it was a sensed spirituality, an instinctive spirituality. Then spirituality fades, gradually dries up, and it has dried up the most in our fifth post-Atlantic age, which began in the mid-15th century.

Now imagine someone who knows nothing about this spiritual science, who also seriously does not want to know about this spiritual science, approaches the present culture of the West, looks at it, but looks at it impartially, without rhetorical empty phrases and phrasemongering declamations. He looks at it as a connoisseur, but he does not see that what was there once, the original wisdom of the divine spiritual beings, has gradually dried up, but he only sees what is there now. He looks at them in the way one has become accustomed to looking at things; he looks at them in a sense with the gaze of the natural scientist, and thus also looks at culture with the gaze of the natural scientist. There you have this Western civilization, but something that has emerged like the earlier civilizations and is passing away like the earlier civilizations. He notices the analogy with the birth of the outer physical human being, with the maturing of the outer physical human being, with the dying of the outer physical human being. He will say this, while we say: Not only was there this original culture once upon a time, but there was also an original wisdom, only it descended ever deeper, and now in the last cultural period it has more or less dried up. But if we want to make progress, we must appeal to the inner being of human beings. Then a new impulse of spirituality must be brought forth, so that what has disappeared in our culture can be rekindled: the spiritual wisdom of the human being. A new impulse must come, a new ascent. But this can only come about by descending into our own inner being, by bringing the spirit there again. Those who know nothing of this, how do they view Western culture? Those who have not acquired this spiritual-scientific perspective, but only the natural-scientific perspective, will believe that cultures come and go in the same way that an organic being is born, matures, grows old, and perishes. He will see our Western culture, compare it with others, and be able to calculate how long it will last before its complete death. But because he does not see that something must arise again in man himself that has been lost, he has no hope. He sees no elements of rebirth in culture; he speaks only of dying.

Today, such a person is no longer a hypothesis, for he is already present in the most significant way in Oswald Spengler, who wrote a book about the “Decline of the West,” of Western civilization. There you have a person who, one might say, has a complete command of twelve to fifteen contemporary sciences, who looks at present-day civilization with the eye of a naturalist, and who knows nothing of the fact that once there was a primeval wisdom and has dried up, that now the source of ascent must be sought from within man, who therefore sees only the decline and predicts for the 3rd millennium with great genius. The book is written with great genius. One can say about what we are experiencing that we see decline everywhere, and now the scholar has emerged who proves that this decline must come, that this Western culture must die a bleak death. I brought with me the bitter impression of that when I came back from Germany, because there, among the youth, Oswald Spengler's book has made the most significant impression. And those who still think think under the impression of the proof that barbarism must spread and must be present within the Occident and its American appendage until the beginning of the third millennium; for that has been proved, rigorously proved by the same means that scientific facts are rigorously proved, by a man who masters twelve to fifteen contemporary sciences.

This already points to the seriousness of the situation in which we currently find ourselves, but it also points to the fact that just as Spengler is imbued with the seriousness of life and knows nothing and wants nothing of what alone can be the salvation: spiritual science, spiritual insight, that one can talk about nothing else, if one talks honestly and sincerely, than precisely the decline of our civilization. Any insistence on some vague hope — “it will come” — is not the point today; only building on human will, appealing to human will to take up the impulses of spiritual science. Western culture and the development of humanity will come to an early end if people do not decide to save it. Today it depends on people, and the proof is that what has come from ancient times, if one wants to rely on it, only leads to decline, that a new one must be found from the depths of human nature if the earth is to reach its goal. All mere belief that there will already be powers that will carry civilization forward does not apply today. Only what people do by saving the declining civilization out of themselves applies. This must be said again and again.

That is how serious things are today. I must say that if you take things seriously today, then you have to look at them carefully. I had to give a lecture on our spiritual science to the student body of the Technical University in Stuttgart, and I know with what feelings I went to this lecture, thoroughly imbued with everything that can weigh on the soul as a feeling for today's youth as a result of the impact of Spengler's book. But all this points to one fact: the wisdom of initiation must make its way into external intellectual culture. Without this, we will not make progress. On the other hand, there are difficulties standing in the way. Today, when speaking of the things that are necessary, one is not always able to find the right words easily. I am probably saying something paradoxical with this sentence as well. When have words been easier to find than today! You only have to look through the popular feuilleton literature, that which most people quote from the newspaper today. Where there is literary care, it is truly easy to find the words, it is not difficult to find the words. Let me give you an example, truly not out of any silliness, but precisely to characterize the present.

Recently, in Stuttgart, in a public lecture to a large audience, I tried to characterize the connections that lead to Leninism and Trotskyism, and I searched for words to express what prevailed in people's minds when the transition was sought between the old bourgeois life and Leninism, Trotskyism. I tried to point out these instincts, to which I have pointed you today in a more spiritual scientific way. And truly, from a struggle for an expression, the expression emerged: Leninism, Trotskyism flows from “perverse” instincts. I couldn't find another expression. After the lecture, a doctor who obviously thought communistically approached me and was deeply hurt by this expression. Of course, the doctor, who takes such expressions with a completely different weightiness than the rest of the world today, who is too accustomed to feature articles and fiction, the doctor feels the full weight of the expression “perverse instincts” in political life. He felt offended and said how one could use such an expression. He knew what pathological abnormalities such an expression was used for. But after a while I had persuaded the gentleman to say: “So I see you didn't mean what you said in a literary or journalistic sense; then it's a different matter.” — That is necessary today, in order to understand at all that someone is learning to feel: there is a struggle for expression, there is a necessity to first search for the right word, while in public life words flow easily , but these words are then such that, in view of the way they are used today, using such strong words as “perverse” in such a context seems like frivolity.

I wanted to give you such an example so that you can see how today's general thinking is light-minded and how we need to delve into the seriousness of life. This can be seen in the details of life. Today we need talent to look at the one-sidedness of the traditional creeds, which speak only of immortality but not of birthlessness, and which therefore speak only to people's selfish instincts and are unable to appeal to their selflessness when eternity is mentioned. Spiritual science must be able to speak of eternity by not merely reflecting on the egoistic instinct of carrying existence beyond death, but by reflecting on the continuation that spiritual and prenatal life experiences here in this life, where we have a mission, where we have to give this life meaning by becoming aware that we bring something spiritual into this world.

But we will not be able to properly understand the pre-birth if we do not know how to connect the pre-birth and the after-death in the right way. And we only do that in spiritual science. For when we understand in the right sense how we spend the time between the last death and a new birth, and again between this death and a later birth, then the prenatal and the after-death join together to form the realization of repeated earthly lives, then this conviction of repeated earthly lives becomes a self-evident developmental truth. Repeated earthly lives carry within them the secret of pre-existence, the secret of pre-existence that the creeds are so eager to eliminate, that they do not want to talk about. The ancient wisdom of man has spoken of this pre-existence. It was only during the Middle Ages, with the adoption of Aristotelianism, that the doctrine of pre-existence was lost. But today the Christian confessions regard the rejection of prenatal life as a dogma connected with Christianity. This rejection has nothing to do with Christianity, it has only to do with the philosophy of Aristotle. The idea of immortality, as we are speaking of it here in the field of spiritual science, is entirely compatible with Christianity itself.

It will not improve in relation to the general culture of humanity until people in their social lives also perform acts that are dominated by this idea of pre-existence. In today's culture, one is only honest when one speaks, as Oswald Spengler does, of the decline of the West, insofar as one knows nothing about spiritual science or does not want to know about it. For only he who ascribes the power of this ascent and the strength of this ascent to the spirit active in human will, only he who now truly says out of the inmost conviction: “Not I, but the Christ in me!” But then one must also include this Christ in the idea of immortality; then one must actually appeal to the transformation of human nature, to the Christification of human nature, not merely to the pagan inclusion of the idea of God in the creed without the person having changed. The fact that it has been accepted in the broadest circles of the Protestant confession that the theologian Harnack could say: Only the Father-God belongs in the Gospel of Jesus, not the Christ, for Jesus taught only about the Father-God, and it was only later that Christianity adopted the view that Christ Himself is a divine being. — That is today's most modern theology: to exclude the Christ from Christianity. We spiritual scientists must reinclude Him. We must recognize how he fits into human history; we must permeate the cultural epochs with the Christ. Then they will not merely be what they are in Spengler's spirit, but will become something for our time that teaches us: we need a Naissance, not just a Renaissance, we need the rebirth of the spirit. This awareness is what really makes an anthroposophist, not the assimilation of individual teachings, but this awareness that we are called upon to enter not just into a rebirth, but into the birth of a spiritual element in our time. The more we become aware of this, the better we will become as adherents of the anthroposophically oriented worldview. But in order to become aware of this, it is necessary to familiarize oneself with the anthroposophical way of thinking by reading what has been offered and by inwardly contemplating what has been given and suggested. At the same time, becoming familiar with the anthroposophical way of thinking means everything else that is to arise from the depths of our consciousness. Threefolding is nothing other than a branch on the tree of Anthroposophy.

This is what I wanted to bring to your hearts today, as we have been brought together again through these reflections. I hope that through such reflections we will continue to progress in being imbued with the consciousness that constitutes our true connection with Anthroposophy.

What I have said during these evenings has been directed to showing, from the most various points of view, that that aspect of events which is generally accepted as the history of mankind is, in many respects, a superficial one. How, for an understanding of the present condition of affairs, it is peculiarly necessary that we should not be led into any illusions as to this superficial way of regarding mankind's historic evolution in these latter days. We must not on any account assume that what holds good, and what I am about to say, of the more or less final phase of the historic evolution covered by the Fifth post-Atlantean age,—that that holds good for the whole course of human history. We must have no such ideas. For this final phase, however, what I am about to say holds good

From the socialist side, it is always being pointed out that the whole course of human history is, in actual reality, to be traced in economic processes alone,—in the processes of industrial life, in the class-warfare that has resulted from the processes of economic life. And on the foundation of this economic matter-of-fact world, as a sort of superstructure upon it, are supposed to have grown up all those developments that we see in the way of Law, Moral Conventions, and especially spiritual life, including, of course, Art, Religion, Science, etc. As applied to the whole course of human history that is, of course, nonsense. One cannot but ask oneself: What has led to this nonsensical idea? V/hat has led to such a nonsensical idea is that, as a matter of fact, and in respect of this particular last phase of human evolution in our own modern times, the thing has a basis of truth in it. Amongst the events which ushered in this modern age we have to note those changes in our earthly evolution that I mentioned yesterday, which were brought about by the discovery of America, by the discovery of the sea-route to the East Indies. But, besides this, the latest phase of mankind's evolution must be marked by us as that of the great spiritual upheaval which was accomplished at the beginning of the modern age, and which we call The Reformation.

The time has come, my dear friends, when this Reformation, too, must be recognised for what it really was. And when one goes further into all that we were leading up to yesterday, and acquires a deeper view of history, not a merely superficial one, then, indeed, one finds that what is in appearance a spiritual transition at the beginning of the modern age—the Reformation—really rests, rests solidly, upon something that Is, after all, at bottom, economic in character. And it is just from a perception of this economic basis lying at the root of the Reformation, and from seeing nothing else, that the socialist view arose, that all historic evolution has been simply the outcome of class-warfare and of economic conditions.

If we examine, not by the light of illusion, but by the light of truth, what took place and the things that underwent a metamorphosis through the Reformation at the beginning of the modern period of historical development, we can but say: A tremendous shifting of status undoubtedly took place with considerable rapidity at this time, when the modern age was beginning. The way in which the shifting of the population took place was this; that the land and soil in Western Europe, particularly, were, before the Reformation set in, possessed by different peoples from those who possessed it afterwards. For those people who before the Reformation were the leaders, and on whom the social structure more or less depended, lost their position through the Reformation. All landed property before the Reformation was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, dependent on the lordship of the priesthood, and in all manner of ways. Before the Reformation, the lordship of the priests was remarkably powerful in determining the character, for instance, of economic conditions. Those who possessed landed estates possessed them to a very large extent as a sort of agents and under an obligation of some sort or another in connection with the offices of the Church.

Now, if one examines the actual course of history from a perhaps not very idealistic but therefore all the more truthful point of view, one finds that, with the Reformation, the old estates of the Church and Spiritual Orders were torn from those who held them, and transferred to the temporal lords. This was very largely the case in England. It was also very largely the case in Germany,—in what later on was Germany. In what later was Germany, many of the territorial Princes went over to the Reformation. But this was not Invariably,—not to put it too aggressively,—this was by no means invariably out of zeal for Luther or the other Reformers; it was a hungering for the estates of the Church, a craving to secularise the estates of the Church. Any number of estates that belonged to the spiritual power in the Middle Ages passed actually over to the temporal, the territorial princes. In England, it happened that a large number of those who had possessed land and holdings were dispossessed, evicted, and they emigrated to America. A large number of the American settlers—the point was alluded to yesterday in a different connection—were the evicted holders of landed property.

Economic conditions, then, played a leading part in the metamorphosis which went on under modern historic evolution, and which is commonly called the Reformation. On the face of it, the thing was like this:—Openly, people say that a new spirit must find Its way into men's hearts, that under the old church administration the temporal and spiritual have become too closely combined, that a more spiritual road to Christ must be sought, etc, etc. Whilst deeper down, less obviously on the surface, a shifting of economic strata is taking place through the transference of estates from spiritual to worldly owners.

Now this is connected with a fact whose roots stretch wide into the history of general evolution; and we can only understand these particular isolated facts of modern history when we glance back over a somewhat wider range of human evolution. We have only to glance back at that phase of human evolution which we term the Egypto-Chaldean age, which, as you know, ended in the middle of the 8th century before Christ, from which point the Graeco-Latin age began, lasting down to about the middle of the 15th century.

If we go back to the ancient Egyptian, the ancient Chaldean civilisation,—well there, we have as ruling powers quite a different type from what became the ruling powers later on. People nowadays take little account of the great upheavals that have come about in the course of historic growth. The powers that were peculiarly the ruling ones in that early age—the age that ended about the middle of the 8th century before Christ—were the sort of people who, in the traditional language of Spiritual Science, one would call “Initiates.” The Egyptian Pharaohs were, down to a certain date, invariably persons who were initiated. They were initiated into the secrets of cosmology, and regarded what they had to do on earth in the light of this cosmology When one says a thing of this sort to the modern man, he finds a certain difficulty in understanding it, for the simple reason that the modern man, from his own special mode of consciousness, thinks to himself: “It is all very well, but, after all, those Pharaohs, and the Chaldean initiates, too,—or so-called initiates—did a great many things that were highly reprehensible.” Well, one might, of course, argue that modern rulers, who are not initiates, also do a great many things that are hardly in accordance with the highest moral standards,—but that, here, would be obviously away from the point. One must, however, point out that in the world that lies beyond the senses the gods are not all good ones, but that there are also gods whose action is in every way contrary to men's interests, as commonly understood. So, one is by no means entitled to believe that anyone who is a real initiate must necessarily act from virtuous motives. And in speaking, as I am doing now, of the Pharaohs as Initiates, all that it must be understood to mean is that they acted on impulses inspired from the spiritual world. That these impulse's might often be very bad ones will be contested by nobody who has become in our sense acquainted with all the many divine, spiritual powers that lie behind the world of sense,—powers of a supersensible nature. But the true initiate,—he who could receive into his will, not merely receive into his consciousness, but into his will, what divine spiritual powers bestowed upon him,—he was in truth the ruler, down to the middle of the 8th century before Christ. Then began the age when, if one actually divests it of all the various illusions that pervade popular history,—when one may say that the real ruler was the Priest. The temporal ruler,—even when he was a Charlemagne—was always more or less dependent on the priesthood. Priest-rule was, to a much greater extent than is commonly supposed, even in the middle-ages of European civilisation, the really determining element. It entered into everything, it made itself felt everywhere, and was for the social structure also the element which, above all others, was the determining one. And the people who possessed land and estates held them to a very large extent of the Priesthood. Such regular soldiers as there were in old days, before the middle of the 8th century B.C., were troops in the service of the Initiates. Such regular soldiers as there were in the 4th post-Atlantean age, in the Graeco-Latin age down to the middle of the 15th century, were, taken as a whole, mercenaries of the priest-lords. And all enterprises, too, such as the Crusades, were, as a whole essentially military expeditions undertaken, if I may so express it, on behalf of the ruling priesthood. In one way and another, everything that was done had some connection with the rule of the priesthood.

We may say, then, that in the Egypto-Chaldean age, the Rulers were of the Initiate type; from the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century down to the middle of the 15th century the rulers were of the Priest type. From this time on, the type that was really the ruling one for actual historic developments was the Economic man. The economic man was the one who ruled. It does not really matter by what name he was called. The farther on one goes in the history of mankind, the less do names matter. The thing that gave a man a sort of basis for domination was that he was in a position to play a part in the world of finance and industry. Just as the essential feature about the Priest and the Initiate of old days was that these respective types of ruler could intervene in economic affairs,—only they did so from higher motives,—so now the man of the economic type of modern times was able to intervene in practically every detail of the social fabric.

Yes, but along with that, there goes something else besides, something that I have already indicated in connection with the Initiate type of ruler. The Initiate type of ruler works through his will, receiving into his will the motive-forces of the higher worlds. With the Priest type, this is no longer the case. It was not, at bottom, the spiritual life that was realised in the priest type, but the intellectual life. And accordingly, in that civilisation where the priest type were markedly predominant, the markedly predominant, the essential element is the intellectual one.

In Asia, in the East, it is not the intellectual which is the essential thing, but the spiritual life. For even what we still have as civilisation there to-day, fallen as it is very greatly into decay, yet it is still the relics of what once was the civilisation of Initiate of what was a spiritual civilisation. When the religious impulse of the East was transplanted to Europe, it became merged in the intellectualist conception of the priesthood. From the initiation into the real facts, into the spiritual world, they produced—Theology, an intellectual extract of the facts of the spiritual world. But this priest type, which intellectually boiled down the facts of the spiritual world and made them known in an intellectual form, so all that the people really got was an intellectualised religious element, they were in their turn again replaced in the strict meaning of that term, at the beginning of the modern age, by the economic type of man. One can show in detail in many cases exactly how this economic type of man came to be top. I shall come to that presently. Now the question naturally arises: How does it come about that the course of historic evolution undergoes such considerable changes? How does it really happen? Well, at the bottom of that, again, there is something which makes it necessary for one not to rest content with a surface view of historic life, but to go deeper down. If one studies history at all,—what passes as history,—one sees at once that the historians are writing on the assumption, as I said before, that the psychic evolution of man has undergone no very great fundamental change whatever in the course of history. In the view of the materialist thinkers, there was once a time when the ape, or a creature like an ape, wandered about the earth; and then, through all sorts of accidents, though of course very slowly,—science relies a great deal on length of time nowadays,—this ape-like creature developed into—Man. But, once there, man has remained practically unaltered, according to them, in all that relates to his state of consciousness, to the condition of his soul. A modern man thinks of the ancient Egyptian as being perhaps rather more of a child, because he was not yet so “clever,” he did not know so much as the man of to-day; but in the general constitution of his soul, the modern man pictures the ancient Egyptian as being pretty much the same as himself. And yet, if we go back to the time before the 8th century B.C., the constitution of man's soul then was quite, quite different from what it was later on, after the middle of the 8th century B.C. If one takes the soul of the man of to-day, in its present conformation, and knows no other, one can really form no picture to oneself of what went on in the soul of the sort of man who lived actually before the 8th century B.C.

The people of that time were of such a kind as still to be in living connection with their previous incarnation. These people were so constituted,—unless, indeed, they belonged to one of the Hebraic tongues, when it was different,—but if they belonged to any of the wide-spread heathen nations, so-called “heathen nations,” then, for them, everything that went on in their souls was the outcome of previous incarnations, of previous lives upon earth. And they were distinctly conscious that what was going on in their souls was the spiritual fruits of the spiritual worlds. For people such as this, no doubt whatever existed that what was the principal part of themselves was not inherited from their father and mother, but had come down out of spiritual worlds and united itself with the part which came to them from their father and mother. The constitution of these peoples souls was one which rested entirely on a spiritual form of civilisation. Hence it was possible for social life, as it existed amongst them, to be guided and directed by their Initiates, by those who were to a certain degree initiated into spiritual things in a real, actual way, not intellectually through their thoughts. In those days, when one talked to anyone and spoke of spiritual facts, one was speaking of things with which he was quite familiar. Everybody, in fact, pictured himself as a centaur. His physical body he looked upon as having undoubtedly come about through transmission in the flesh; but, on top of all that, was what had come down out of the spiritual world. Everybody knew that. Everybody looked on himself as a sort of centaur.

Then came the age that began with the 8th century before Christ,—roughly speaking, with the foundation of Rome. In that age,—it Is a fact that we have already considered from other points of view,—in that age the spiritual contact of the real actual kind was lost. People, however, still retained through their Intelligence a kind of spiritual touch with the world of spirit. Man, indeed, no longer pictured himself actually as a centaur, as though a higher spiritual being came down from above and settled upon something else that was inherited through the blood; still, he was clearly conscious that his intelligence, his world of thought, was not dependent on his blood, not dependent on his physical body, but that it had a spiritual origin.

One cannot, for instance, properly understand that great philosopher, Aristotle, unless one knows that Aristotle, in calling the highest part of the human soul “Diagnosticon,” was clearly conscious that this, the highest part of the human soul, which is an intellectual part, has been rained down from the worlds of soul and spirit. Aristotle knew that quite well; indeed, everybody, even down into the early times of Christianity, knew this quite well. This consciousness, that the human intelligence is of a divine spiritual origin, this consciousness was not lost until the 4th century after Christ. It was in the 4th century after Christ that men first really ceased to believe that the power of thought they bear within them comes from above, and is rained down upon them at their birth out of the worlds of soul and spirit. It was a great change, that, in men's souls. If we look back at the first, second and third Christian centuries, we find the men of that time able to say to themselves: Of course, I was born of father and mother, but I know,—not merely, I have puzzled it out, but I know, just as I know that my eye sees the light, so I know that my intelligence comes from the gods. It was an immediate consciousness that people then possessed, just like the consciousness aroused by a direct perception.

It was only after the fourth century that the feeling entered more and more into men's souls that up here, in this bony empty cavity,—for an empty cavity it is, as I have often had occasion to explain to you,—here, up here are seated the organs of intelligence, and this intelligence Is somehow connected with heredity, with blood-relation- ship. It was only during this period, when the transition was finally effected from a belief in the divine nature of the intelligence to a belief in its transmission along physical paths,—it was only then that what I may call the intellectualising of the religious impulse through the rule of the priesthood could be finally effected. And when the intellectualising process was very far advanced, and people had come to regard the intelligence as bound up solely with a man's bodily constitution, then it was all up with the rule of the priest, too. Priest-rule could only hold its ground so long as people could be made to understand the old traditions of the divinity of the intelligence. The economic type of man emerged at the moment, the epoch-making moment, when the belief in the divinity of the intelligence had vanished, and when man's feelings were leading him ever more and more to the belief that it was the physical man which is the actual vehicle, the organ for the evolution of thought. You should only know what a fight, priest-rule fought, and how it is still fighting even to-day. Anyone, for instance, who is acquainted with catholic theological literature, knows how priest- rule is still fighting—fighting with every conceivable philosophic argument—to maintain that the intelligence which has its seat in man is something additional that comes to him from without. Read any sort of catholic theological literature that you happen to come across, and you will find them no longer denying what, indeed, for the present- day man no longer admits of denial, that all the rest of his attributes are bound up with his bodily frame, but they cling fast to the intelligence as an exception, as something that is of a divine spiritual nature and has nothing to do with man's bodily frame. And yet, in the general consciousness of mankind it is not so. In respect of the general consciousness of mankind, a feeling has grown up ever more and more among men, a sense that it is our body, too, which enables us to think, which Is the basis of the intelligence as of other things. And so ever more and more man has arrived at a consciousness that he is really only a physical being. And it was only under the sort of spirituality which proceeds from regarding oneself as a merely physical being that it was possible for the economic type of man to make his way to the top.

And so there exist, you see, spiritual reasons deeper down for the economic type of man having come to the top. He has, however, come to the top, and in socialistic theories this fact has been handled and exploited to the disregard of all others. The business-man has been the ruling type ever since the Reformation; and from this you can see, too, what kind of spirit really is the ruling one in the various religious denominations that have come up since the Reformation Recognise quite clearly, without any illusions, what that spirit is, my dear friends: Temporal science is to permeate with its technique the whole of our external everyday life, and we do not mean to have the complete chain of this external science interrupted by all sorts of religious matter. Faith is to be kept very nicely in a special little box all to itself, and as far away from the external affairs of life as possible. Science, one thing,—a separate banking- account; Faith, another thing,—a separate banking-account, and they must never on any account be amalgamated. We want our faith; indeed, we want to be religious people, says the business type of man,—the more religious, the better, according to many of them; and one sees them going off very ostentatiously to church with their prayer-book under their arm. Oh, certainly! But then, that banking book,—religion must not intrude there, with that religion has nothing to do, except, perhaps, on the first page, where one always sees written in banking-books, “By the Grace of God,” but then that is only a little bit of blasphemy, of course. The complete chain must not be broken. Otherside [Otherwise?] people might perhaps find out that the Reformation was, in many respects, only a roundabout way of arriving at the secularisation and confiscation of Church estates and of claiming them for the temporal lord. Of course, if one were a German princeling, for instance, or an English lord, one could very well say: We are going to create a new historic epoch by taking away the land and estates from those who have hitherto held them. That is what the modern socialist says: We are going to expropriate the owners of landed property. But naturally people did not say that at the beginning of the new modern age; they did it, and threw a haze over it all with: We are founding a new religious faith. So people do not know their real reason for being religious; but it makes them feel comfortable to spread this illusion over the real grounds for their being so religious. That is how the economic type of man came up.

The consciousness that one is living out a spiritual life within one has gradually disappeared. That is the deeper-seated, spiritual root of the matter. If we go further hack still, before the third post-Atlantean age, which ended about the middle of the 8th pre-Christian century,—beginning in the 3rd to the 4th millennium B.C., we come again to a quite different conformation. Paradoxical as it may seem to the men of to-day, in the 4th or, 5th millennium B.C. there was not a man on earth who believed that what was transmitted from his father and mother was the essential part of him. At that time men were absolutely convinced that they were wholly, in respect of all essentials, descended from heaven, If I may so express it. That was men's rooted belief. They did not look on themselves as being of earthly origin; they looked on themselves as spiritual beings, sprung from a spiritual origin. And the period when men first began to feel themselves to be physical human beings in the body was designated by the Jews, “The Fall,” at the beginning of things, when Original Sin first overtook man. As a matter of fact, however, Original Sin has overtaken man more than once. It overtook him first at the beginning of the 3rd post-Atlantean age, when he ascribed one part of himself to his father and mother, to his blood, and merely believed that a spiritual something had come down on top of that. It overtook him for the second time when he began to regard his Intellectual part as more or less hereditary. That second “Fall” came about in the 4th century after Christ; for from that time on, intellectual capacity was regarded as something hereditary, as something bound up with the bodily nature. And there will be other “Falls” in the time to come.

Our task to-day is to return to spirituality by a different route. And, to do this, we must have the possibility, before anything else, of getting back to a spiritual form of intellectual life. We must have the possibility of attaching a sense to this existence on earth such that this sense itself is once more the revelation of a spiritual reality. Take, for instance, the things in my “Occult Science.” It cannot be said that the kind of intellectuality with which these are apprehended has a bodily origin; for it is not with the physical understanding that one arrives at what is there said about the universe and about man. It is a re-education of man back to that conception of his intellectual nature which is a spiritual one. And for this, modern mankind must first of all be willing to regain the faculty of looking on their Intellectual nature as something divinely spiritual. Then, Indeed, will it be possible to start on the road back to spiritualisation. It is a task upon which mankind must enter with full consciousness,—to return again to spiritualisation, and, first of all, to a thorough spiritualising of the intelligence. People must learn once more to think in such a way that their thought is permeated with spirituality. The best way to begin is by considering ethical concepts, and bringing them back to the moral imagination, to the moral intuitions, as I did in my “Philosophy of Freedom.” If in the moral sense one sees something which, as I expressed it in the “Philosophy of Freedom,” derives its impulses directly from the spiritual world, then that is a first beginning towards the spiritualisation of the intellect. I did this in my “Philosophy of Freedom” very cautiously and gently, for in the 19th century there was truly not much to be looked for as regards the spiritualising of anything. But this Is the road that will have to be taken.

The Economic type of man, who came up at the Reformation, regarded it as his special mission to make all intellectuality a matter merely of the body. What this business type of man really did during the Reformation period was to tear himself violently loose from the spiritual foundation of man's life on earth. One can see it illustrated in individual cases. At the beginning and during the first half of the 15th century, there was a man in England, Thomas Cromwell,—not Oliver Cromwell, but Thomas Cromwell, quite a different person,—who played a very important part in introducing the principles of the Reformation into England. There was one person, James I, who still made an effort to save the old dominion of the priesthood; and one best understands James I if one looks on him as a Conservator,—a man who was trying to conserve the rule of the priesthood. Only, his plans were thwarted by others. And amongst the people who came to the top at that time, and who were, so to speak, the earliest type of economic man, was Thomas Cromwell. It is impossible to understand Thomas Cromwell unless one recognises that he was one of those people who have a very short life between death and rebirth, before taking on a body here on earth again. And it is just those people who are unusually numerous among the ruling types coming to the top in modern times, who have had but a short life in the spiritual world before their present life here on earth.

As you know, I have often said here that one of the most significant phenomena in latter-day history is that for the ruling types it is the selection of the worst that takes place. You know that for years past I have taken occasion to tell you so repeatedly. Those who are, in reality, the rulers, the governors, are a selection of not the best. It has come about with the times that those who are really the best in this modern age have remained below, and those who have been selected for the top, for the leading positions, that is, are not infrequently anything but the best. Very often it has been a selection of the least fitted. And this selection of the least fitted has been founded, in so far as relates to their human nature, in the fact that they were fulfilling an earth-life which had only a very short space of time between the last life on earth and this one. It is a fact which one finds stamped upon many of the leading personages of modern times, that they have had a quick return to earth after a brief life in the spirit. In their preceding life between death and new birth they have received into them but little of spiritual impulse; but they are all the more impregnated with that which this earth alone can give. The Economic type, especially, have been men whose preceding spiritual life was a short one, who were permeated through and through with what the earth, as such, alone can give. I do not mean to say that there have not also In modern times been people who have passed a fairly long stage of time between death and birth and who are notable in modern times; but they have been thrust into the background. So the course of man's historic evolution fated it to be; such was the common karma of mankind.

And man's modern life was played out under these conditions. It is really pitiful, how frequently a phenomenon it is in modern times to see men who in their inward natures are far superior, looking up to men who are far, far worse than themselves, as special authorities. It is a common phenomenon. And these revered authorities are truly not people who in any way represent picked men of the best type. The time has indeed come when people must stop so naively chanting the praises of modern civilisation, and examine the plain, unadorned facts. Men must acquire the habit of considering life not in its more superficial aspect, but of considering it according to the inner configuration of men's souls. And this is just one of the facts that has to be considered, that one has to distinguish between the kind of men whose life in the spirit, between birth and deaths is a comparatively long one, and those whose life in the spirit has been comparatively short. One must consider people from their spiritual aspect. It is only by thus considering people from their spiritual aspect, that it becomes possible with clear consciousness to bring order into the social structure. Any really deep understanding of what is socially requisite to-day will only be acquired when such an understanding is sought for in a groundwork of spiritual knowledge.

In the last three days, I have made it my task to show you in what way the civilisation of our times must be regarded in respect of the possibility for mankind's further evolution. Our earth, as an earth with all that is upon It, has already entered on its downward stage, on the stage of its decline. I have often told you that keen-sighted geologists themselves have already noted this fact. It is even now possible to demonstrate by purely external physical science, and according to the most exact geology, that the earth has already begun to crumble away, that the ascending phase of its evolution is at an end, and that the solid ground we tread on is actually breaking up beneath us. But it is not only the mineral kingdom of the earth that Is breaking up; all organic life that moves upon the earth is more or less in a state of decomposition, of falling away. The bodies of plants, of animals, of men, these, too, are no longer in their ascending stage of evolution, but are going downhill. Our physical organisation is not now what it was, for instance, before the fourth century after Christ, or what it was in the times of ancient Greece. Our organisation is a perishable one, and along with us the earth is in its decadence. V/hat Is physical about the earth is in its decadence. I called attention to this phenomenon for the first time some years ago in a lecture at Bonn; but as a rule, not sufficient importance is attached to these things. The bodies we live in are crumbling away. But, as a set-off against this, we must reflect:

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Our bodies are crumbling away; but it is just out of these crumbling bodies of ours that what is spiritual can best develop, if only we give ourselves up to it. In the old bodies, you see, it was like this, supposing I make a diagram: Here is the body (Diagram I black) and, all through, the body is permeated with its spiritual element; here is the spiritual element, all over It like this (red).

Now to-day it is like this (diagram II): our body, if we draw it diagrammatically, Is crumbling away in many places. It is crumbling, it is falling away; and everywhere the spiritual element is spurting out of it, escaping from the body. If we only set ourselves to do so, we can inwardly within our souls lay hold everywhere of the spiritual element, because of this crumbling away of our bodies. But it is absolutely necessary that we should not rely upon the physical. It is, on the contrary, absolutely necessary for us, because of this, our crumbling condition, to turn to the spiritual. Everything physical is breaking up; everything physical on earth has begun to go to ruin, and one dare not rely any longer on the physical nature. The only thing we have to look to Is just what, to use a homely phrase, is spurting out from the spiritual soul-element,—spurting out because the physical element is in ruin.

There is one thing to be learnt from this, my dear friends. We are connected through our bodies with the physical conditions of the earth; and the earth's conditions express themselves socially in economic conditions. Now, as everything is crumbling away, as everything is in decadence, so also, in a certain respect, economic conditions are in a state of decadence; and only a fool could believe that It Is possible to-day to regenerate economic conditions simply by means o economic conditions alone. Anyone to-day who dreams of bringing about an economic paradise on earth by purely economic measures, is much the same as someone who has a corpse in front of him and believes that he can galvanise it back into life, wake it up again. So you can take all the theories that are based on pure economics to-day, listen to people telling you how the economic life can be adjusted so as to work by itself according to its own laws, listen to them telling you about the conditions under which production Is to be carried on, how the transition is to be effected from private ownership to communal ownership, etc.,—it is all founded on the false belief that one can, regenerate the economic life out of the resources of the economic life itself. Whereas the truth is that in the economic life, as elsewhere, everything physical is of itself going to ruin.

When anything is going to ruin of itself, then all one can do is to keep putting it right from time to time. That means that we want a remedy from this economic life, which of Itself is in a constant state of break-down, if the economic life were left to itself; if one did what Lenin and Trotsky want to do with it, it would be continually breaking down, continually falling sick. And therefore, one must have the remedy constantly at hand, too, as a counteractant to the economic life. That is, one must have, beside it, the independent spiritual life. If you have a sick man, or someone who is continually liable to fall sick, then, alongside, you must continually have the doctor. If you have an economic life which, owing to the earth's evolution, is constantly ripe for its fall, when left to itself, then you need to counteract it with the continually healing power of the spiritual life. That is the inward connection. It is part of a sound cosmogony that we should acquire an independent spiritual life. Without this independent spiritual life, to act as a perpetual source of healing wisdom, alongside an economic life that is constantly liable to break down,—without this, mankind will never get further. To attempt to regenerate the economic life out of its own resources is sheer folly. We must establish a healing source in the form of an independent spiritual life beside this economic life, and bridge them both over with the neutral Life of Rights. We shall never arrive at any adequate understanding of what is necessary in the present day, unless we have learnt to perceive that the earth's physical life is already sinking to ruin. It is because this is not perceived that there are so many people to-day who believe that the economic life can be regenerated by all sorts of remedies conjured up out of the life of economics itself. They do not exist. The only possibility that does exist is continuously and unceasingly to keep the economic life going by means of the independent spiritual life established alongside it. And only those can trace all the mysterious interweaving of these threads in our life who have learnt to read it by the light of a really modern cosmogony.

Just reflect how serious the whole situation is, how one must look on and see men rushing to destruction, if they still persist in believing that the economic life can be regenerated out of itself,—if they will not acknowledge and turn to that which is spurting forth from the crumbling physical world, which is able to stand alone and to be a continual source of healing. People ask: What is the remedy for revolutions? Well, when the downward forces have accumulated in cries in quantity sufficient to make a revolution, then the revolution comes. The only way to counteract revolution is continuously and unceasingly to apply the counteracting force. And unless a spiritual life is established as a continual healing force to withstand the economic life, then the economic life comes to a head and breaks out in revolutions.

It is high time, indeed, my dear friends, that the things we are here dealing with should be taken In all their gravity, in their full weight, and that people should not have the idea that Spiritual Science is a thing to play with. It will not be played with. You cannot dish up real Spiritual Science as a Sunday afternoon sermon. What people are used to making out of the old religious creeds,—taking all sorts of teachings about reincarnation and karma to regale themselves with in the privacy of their own souls,—that cannot be got out of this teaching, not if it is taken seriously. This teaching means to lay hold upon actual life. This teaching is bent upon becoming deeds, by the very force of what it is. And so it is not in accordance with some private personal whim that what is living within our Spiritual Science must now find expression in all manner of social ideas as well. It is really a matter of course. It is all part of the same thing. Naturally, anyone who talks of development and evolution in the modern natural-science sense, and has not a glimmering notion that Evolution is first an ascent and then a descent, will not be ready either to understand that we are living in a downward stage with respect to the earth's evolution; and such a person will take what is on its downward path, and try to wring from it forces for a regeneration,—That is no longer possible.

What I have, above all, had at heart in the course of these three lectures, my dear friends, is that you might see in all its extent and reality the deep seriousness of Spiritual Science and all that is connected with it. With the things of Spiritual Science there can be no playing. it can only be played with when it is watered down to all sorts of mystical, eclectic stuff,—then you can play with the things of Spiritual Science. Those people do very wrong who go and think that they can play with it, for all that. The things of Spiritual Science cannot be played with,

There is a great deal of opposition from various quarters to whit this Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy stands for. it will meet with opposition from almost all those people who want to play, to “mysticise,” I should like to call it,—who want to mysticise with the life of Spiritual Science,—“mysticism,” “mysticise”. Those people who want to mysticise will not, in the long run, get on very well with Spiritual Science, because they do not like to be reminded of the seriousness of life. That is why Spiritual Science has so many opponents. To-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents; and to-day, especially, there are numbers of opponents, turning out to oppose it from every sort of mysticising hole and corner. There is now to be a renewed attack made on this Spiritual Science on the ground that it is scientific in character, and that all genuine experiences of the spirit-worlds must come through direct spiritual communication,—that nothing of a scientific nature, no sort of scientific concept, must enter into it, and so forth; there is a fresh attack on foot from the corner where we have done a good bit of work, but which still keeps on pouring out a succession of slimy stuff,—mysticising stuff, in this very direction. Another book has appeared from the Munich quarter,—though possibly from different publishers,—which is at bottom intended as an attack of this sort,—mystical book, called “The Living God.”

When one sees these things in the present day, in an age when the social situation is so critical, it shows how spiritual frivolity and cynicism of a spiritual kind have taken possession of men's lives. All that must be got rid of.

This is, indeed, the time when we must set ourselves in all seriousness to examine the most important question in life, and ask ourselves: What can we do, what can we do with all our might and main, to lay hold of those forces which are actually in accordance with the age?

My dear friends, here stands this Building of ours, here it stands, waiting for the world to take it seriously, with such seriousness as really to perceive that it has been built in the consciousness of a perishing age, and in order to receive and take up the spiritual essence out of this age as it falls. Here we must be swayed by no belief that it is possible to preserve what is old what is ripe to perish and fall away. The faith that must inspire us here is that out of the on-rushing ruin it is possible to save and bring forth the spiritual essence,—one which must be quite unlike the old. A little transformation of our civilisation cannot do it. We have to recognise, and boldly face the recognition, that it is only with the great impulses of civilisation that we can accomplish what will take mankind the necessary step forward towards the future. And we must take counsel with our own selves, how to find strength really to take up these new impulses. We must have courage to make plain to people, as well as we can, what is meant by the earth being in decadence, and that what has lasted on down into our days as civilisation, and which we have grown up with and become used to,—that this, too, is passing away in the ruin; but that out of this ruin we must rescue and bring forth a new spirituality, a spirituality that can be carried on with us into other worlds, when this earth has finally sunk and passed away.

To work with clear consciousness towards a regeneration of Art, of Science, of Freedom, that is a work that should centre round this Building. In erecting this Building an attempt has been made to bid in a sort of way, defiance to the Past, in the shapes and lines of it, and so forth. And in the same way, practically, we must have the courage to grasp all that can be got from the fact that the Building actually stands here. We shall never get right, my dear friends, if we go on clinging to little remedies. We shall only get right by resolutely and consciously keeping before men's eyes the necessity for a new form of spiritual civilisation, for that alone can be the true starting-point for a new form of social civilisation. For the social order cannot any longer be evolved out of the economic order, but only out of a spiritual element that shall have sunk into the economic one. And we must clearly realise that the Economic type of man is played out, and that another type must come to the top,—the type of man who is a World-man, one who is conscious that there lives within him not only what he has inherited through earthly descent, but who is conscious that there live within him, also, forces of the sun and the heaven of stars, forces of the world above the senses. In such forms as people can understand, we must bring this to their consciousness; and then alone shall we be doing something towards the real progress of mankind. By merely transmitting all sorts of mystical teachings we can do no good whatever. Our mysticism must be actual spiritual life—active spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to make you realise to-day. This Building at Dornach ought to be regarded as being, without undue pretensions, the actual starting-point for a great world—movement, a world-movement which Is altogether international, a world-movement which embraces every kind of branch of spiritual life. This Building at Dornach should be the starting-point from which -to cast off all fondness for what is perishing and to receive the impulse of that force which is making for an actual renewal of man's consciousness. If we could establish something of this sort in the world, which should form a starting-point from whence to take up the spiritual essence out of the ruin of the physical earth,—if we could say: We put up the Building at Dornach to be the monument of this starting-point, to attract people's eyes to our purpose there,—if only we could create something of this kind, then we should be fulfilling what lies in the very impulse of the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy. But we need to summon up our energies and create what shall speak to mankind in actual facts,—speak by facts in such a way as to make them see: “Look! We are aiming here at something that lies in the direction of actual progressive evolution in human consciousness, in science and art as well as in religion.” If we are in a position to speak from positive facts in this way, then we shall accomplish far more than by trying to throw ourselves into all sorts of things at which other people are aiming. We should realise that what we have to aim at is a new thing. If we are able to do this, then we shall be accomplishing a worthy task. But there we must commune with our souls, my dear friends, and try to set our hands in this way to the task of Anthroposophy.

More on this subject, then, next Friday at 7 o'clock.

Yesterday I made two observations drawn from the science that we must call the science of Initiation, and I should like to remind you of them, for we shall need them as a connecting link. First, I said that the truths, the deepest truths, relating to the Mystery of Golgotha must by their nature be of the kind that cannot be substantiated through external historical evidence perceptible to the senses. Anyone who sets out by an external historical route to find a proof of the facts concerned with the Mystery of Golgotha, in the same way as historical evidence is sought for other facts, will be unable to discover it, for the Mystery of Golgotha is meant to relate itself to mankind in such a way that access to its truths is finally possible only by a supersensible path. If I may put it rather briefly—where the most important event in earthly existence is concerned, men are intended to accustom themselves to approaching it by supersensible means, not through the senses.

The second thing I said yesterday is that man, with the understanding he possesses according to his development as an earthly being, is never able, right up to his death, to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha through his own understanding developed within the sense-world. I went on to say: It is only after his death, during the time he spends in the supersensible world, that there develops in man the understanding, and the forces for that understanding, which can fully make clear the Mystery of Golgotha. Hence I stated yesterday something which will quite naturally be held up by the external world as an absurdity, a paradox. I said that even the contemporaries of Christ were unable to reach such an understanding until the second or third century after the Mystery of Golgotha, during their life beyond the threshold; and that what has been written about the Mystery of Golgotha in those centuries was inspired by men who had been contemporaries of it and, from the spiritual world, from the supersensible world, had an inspiring influence on the writers of that period.

Now there is an apparent contradiction to this in the fact that the Gospels are inspired writings (as you may gather from my book, Christianity as Mystical Fact; they are inspired writings of Christianity. The inspired Gospels, therefore, could give expression to the truth about Christianity only because—as I have often emphasised—they were not written out of the primal nature and being of man, but with the remnants of atavistically clairvoyant wisdom.

What I have said here about the relation of mankind to the Mystery of Golgotha is drawn from the science of Initiation. If in this way something has been given out of supersensible knowledge, the question may well be asked: How does it appear when compared with the facts of external historical life? Hence at the beginning of this lecture to-day I want to put forward, as a particularly characteristic case—at first only as a question which should receive an answer by the end of our studies to-day—a typical ecclesiastical author of the second century. I might just as well—but then naturally I should have to give the whole treatment a different form—choose some other writer of the Church, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, or any other. But I am choosing one who is often mentioned—Tertullian. With regard to the personality of Tertullian I should like to ask how the external course of Christian life is related to the supersensible facts of which I was speaking yesterday, and have repeated in essence to-day.

Tertullian is a very remarkable personality. Anyone who hears the ordinary things said about Tertullian—well, he will hardly get beyond the knowledge of Tertullian that is generally current. He is said to have been the man who justified belief in the being of Christ, in the sacrificial death and the resurrection, by saying, Credo quia absurdum est—“I believe because it is absurd,” because no light is thrown upon all this by human reason. The words, Credo quia absurdum est, are not to be found in any of the other Fathers of the Church; they are pure invention, but they are the source of the later opinion about Tertullian that has been held, often dogmatically, right up to the present day.

When, on the other hand, we come to the real Tertullian—there is no need to be an actual follower of his—then the more exactly we get to know his personality, the more we respect this remarkable man. Above all we learn to respect Tertullian's use of the Latin language, the language which expresses the most abstract way of human thinking, and had come in other writers of his time to exemplify the thoroughly prosaic character of the Romans—Tertullian makes use of it with a true fieriness of spirit. Into his style of treatment he brings temperament, brings movement; he brings feeling and holy passion. Although he is a typical Roman who expresses himself as abstractly as any other Roman about what is often called reality—and although in the opinion of people versed in the Greek culture of that time he was not a particularly well educated man—he writes with impressiveness, with inner force, and in such a way that while using the abstract, Roman language, he became the creator of a Christian style. And the way in which Tertullian himself speaks is impressive enough. In a kind of apologia for the Christians he writes in such a way that one seems to be listening directly to the speech of a man in the grip of a holy passion.

There are certain passages where Tertullian is defending the Christians who, when they are accused under a procedure very like torture, do not deny but testify that they are Christians—testify to what they believe. And Tertullian says of them: In all other cases those who are tortured are accused of denying the truth; in the case of the Christians it is the reverse; they are declared infamous when they testify to what is in their souls. The aim of torturing is not to force them to speak the truth, which would be the only sense in torture; the aim is to force them to say what is untrue, while they continue to speak the truth. And when out of their souls they testify to the truth, they are looked upon as malefactors.

In short, Tertullian was a man with a fine sense of the absurd in life. He was a subtle observer who had already identified himself with what had developed as Christian consciousness and Christian wisdom. So it is really significant when he makes such a statement as: You have familiar sayings; very often you say out of immediate feeling in your soul: “God be with you,” “It is God's will,” and so on. But that is the belief of the Christians: the soul—if only unconsciously—is confessing itself to be Christian.

Tertullian is also a man of independent spirit. He says to the Romans, to whom he himself belongs: Consider the Christians' God and then reflect upon what you are able to feel about true piety. I ask you whether what you as Romans have introduced into the world is in keeping with true piety, or whether true piety is what the Christians desire? Into the world you have brought war, murder, killing (said Tertullian to his fellow-Romans); that is precisely what the Christians do not want. Your sanctuaries are blasphemies (so said Tertullian to the Romans) because they are trophies of victory, and trophies of victory are signs of the desecration of sanctuaries. ... Thus spoke Tertullian to the Romans. He was a man of independent feeling. And turning to the ways of Rome he said: Do men pray when they instinctively look up to the sky, or when they look up to the Capitol? Thus Tertullian was in no way a man entirely merged in the abstractions of Rome, for he was permeated with a lively sense of the presence in the world of the supersensible.

Anyone who speaks on the one hand with the independence and freedom of Tertullian, and at the same time out of the supersensible—such a man is very rare, even in those days when the supersensible was nearer than it later came to be. And Tertullian was more than merely rational. To declare that “when the Christians say what is true, you claim them to be malefactors, whereas men should be claimed as malefactors only if when tortured they say what is untrue ...” certainly that was rational, but it was also courageous. And Tertullian said other things, too, for instance: When you Romans look up to your Gods, who are demonic beings, and really put questions to them, you will receive the truth. But you do not want to receive the truth from these demonic beings. If an accused Christian is confronted by someone who is possessed by a demon, and out of whom the demon speaks, and if the Christian is allowed to question it in the right way, the demon will admit that it is a demon. And of the God whom the Christian acknowledges the demon will say—though with fear: “That is the God who now belongs to the world!” Tertullian does not call on the evidence of Christians alone, but also on that of demonic beings, saying that they will confess themselves to be demons if they are simply questioned, questioned fearlessly; and that, just as it is described in the Gospels, they will acknowledge Christ-Jesus to be the true Christ-Jesus.

At all events we have here a remarkable personality who, as a Roman, confronts his fellow-Romans in the second century. This personality strikes us especially when we consider his relation to the Mystery of Golgotha. The words spoken by Tertullian concerning the Mystery of Golgotha are approximately these: The Son of God is crucified. Because this is shameful, we are not ashamed. The Son of God has died; this is easy to believe because it is foolish. Tertullian's words are: Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. It is credible, perfectly credible, because it is foolish. Thus: God's Son has died; this is perfectly credible because it is foolish. And He has been buried, He has risen again; this is certain, because it is impossible. From the words, Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est, the other untrue words have originated: Credo quia absurdum est.

Let us rightly understand what Tertullian says here about the Mystery of Golgotha. He says: The Son of God is crucified. If we men contemplate this crucifixion, because it is shameful we are not ashamed. What does he mean? He means that the best that can happen on earth is bound to be shameful, because it is the way of man to do what is shameful and not what is excellent. Were anything declared to be a most splendid deed, says Tertullian, a most splendid deed brought about by man, it could not be the most excellent event for the earth. For the earth the most excellent deed will indeed be one that brings shame to men, not fame—this is Tertullian's meaning.

To continue: “The Son of God has died. This is perfectly credible because it is foolish.” The Son of God has died; it is quite credible because human reason finds it foolish. Were human reason to pronounce it sensible it would not be credible, for what is found sensible by human reason cannot be the highest; it can never be the highest thing possible on earth. For human reason with its cleverness is not so high that it can arrive at what is highest; it arrives at the highest when it is foolish.

“He has been buried and has risen again. It is certain because it is impossible.” As a natural phenomenon it is impossible that the dead should rise again; but according to Tertullian the Mystery of Golgotha has nothing to do with natural phenomena. Were anything to be counted as a natural phenomenon, it would not be the most valuable thing on earth. What has most value for the earth can be no natural phenomenon and must, therefore, be impossible in the kingdom of nature. It is just on this account that He has been buried and has risen again, and it is therefore certain because it is impossible.

I should like to put Tertullian before you, with these words of his just quoted from his book, De Carne Christi, as a question. I have tried to describe him, first as a free, independent spirit, secondly as one who in man's immediate surroundings perceives the demonically supersensible. But at the same time I quoted three propositions of Tertullian's on account of which all clever people must look upon him really as a simpleton.

In matters of this kind it is certainly remarkable how one-sidedly people judge. When they put forward a proposition as false as Credo quia absurdum est, they are pronouncing judgment on the whole man in accordance with it. It is, however, necessary to take the three propositions—which certainly are not at first glance intelligible, for Tertullian is not to be easily understood—to take them first together with his complete awareness of the inter-working of the supersensible world into the human environment.

And now we want to bring before our souls something which in some measure is suited to spread light over the Mystery of Golgotha from another point of view. I have in mind two phenomena about which I said a few words during our studies of the day before yesterday. These two phenomena in the life of mankind are, first, the phenomenon of death, and secondly the phenomenon of heredity—death which is connected with the end of life, and heredity with birth. Where these are concerned it is important to have a clear insight into human life and the being of man. From all that I have been describing to you for some weeks you will be able to gather the following.

When man looks around with his senses at his environment and wishes to grasp the world of the senses with his understanding, then among the phenomena of the senses he encounter? also the phenomena of inheritance, for to a certain extent the characteristics of forefathers can be traced in their descendants, who are subject to the unconscious working of these inherited forces. Things connected with the mystery of birth, all the various inherited characteristics, are often studied without our knowing it. When, for example, we are learning about folklore, we are always speaking about inherited characteristics without noticing it. We cannot study a people without seeing all that we are studying in the light of inherited characteristics. When you speak of a particular people—of Russians, for example, of Englishmen, of Germans—you are speaking of qualities belonging to the realm of heredity, qualities the son acquires from the father, the father from the grandfather, and so on. The realm of heredity, connected as it is with the mysteries of birth, is indeed a wide realm, and when talking about external life we are often speaking of the facts and forces of heredity without being aware of it.

The fact that the mystery of death plays into the life of the senses is indeed constantly before us at the present time; it needs no reiteration. But if we look back over the human faculty for knowledge, something different becomes apparent. We see that this facility is adapted for grasping a great deal in the natural order, but it regards itself as sovereign and wants to grasp in terms of the natural order everything found therein.

Now this human faculty for knowledge is never adapted for grasping either the fact of heredity, which is connected with birth, or the fact of death. And so it turns out that the whole of man's outlook is permeated by false concepts, because it assigns to the sense-world phenomena which indeed are manifest in the sense-world but in their whole being are of a spiritual nature.

We count human death—it is different with animals and plants, as I have shown—we count human death among the phenomena taking place in the sense-world, because that is what it appears to be. But with this we get nowhere in learning about human death. It would never be possible for a natural science to say anything about the death of human beings; for on those lines we arrive merely at exchanging our whole human outlook for a delusion, with the facts of death mixed into it everywhere. We learn something about the truth of nature only when we omit death, and omit also inherited characteristics. A typical feature of human knowledge lies in its becoming corrupted, becoming mere appearance, because it claims to be able to deal with the entire world of the senses, including death and birth. And because it mixes death and birth into its whole outlook, its outlook concerning the world of the senses is falsified. We shall never perceive what man is as a sense-being if we ascribe to the sense-world the inherited qualities, which are indeed connected with death. We corrupt the whole picture of man developing along his normal straight line—I have told you of three streams, the normal straight line and the Luciferic and Ahrimanic side-streams—we corrupt the whole picture of mans development if we ascribe birth and death to his essential being in so far as he belongs to the world of the senses.

That is the strange situation in which we find the human faculty for knowledge! Under the guidance of nature itself this faculty is driven to thinking falsely because, were it able to think in accordance with truth, it would have to separate off from nature a picture of human life in which there was no heredity and no death. We should have to rule out death and heredity, paying no attention to death and birth, making our picture without them—then we should have a picture of nature. Inherited characteristics and death have no place in Goethe's world-outlook. They do not come into it and are not in keeping there. It is indeed the special characteristic of Goethe's world-outlook that you are unable to fit death and heredity into it. It is so good just because death and heredity have no place there, and that is why we can accept it as a true picture of the reality of nature.

Now up to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha people still thought about death and heredity out of certain spiritual depths, and more in conformity with nature. The Semitic peoples looked upon inherited characteristics as a direct continuance of the working of the God Jahve. They eliminated everything connected with heredity from nature, seeing it as the direct working of Jahve—for as long, at least, as the Jahve-outlook was properly understood. The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, signified the continued working of inherited characteristics.

On the other hand, the Greek outlook—though in its decadence it had little success—sought to grasp something in the nature of man that lived in him between birth and death but had nothing to do with death. The Greeks sought to raise out of the sum-total of phenomena something with which death had no power to interfere. They had a certain horror of the very idea of death. Just because they concentrated on the realm of the senses, they had no wish to understand death; for they instinctively felt that when the human gaze is directed purely to the world of the senses—as it was with Goethe—death becomes a stranger. It is not in keeping with the sense-world; it is foreign to it.

But now there arose other outlooks, and the alteration in certain ancient outlooks appeared most typically among the leading peoples and individuals at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching. Men increasingly lost all ability to look into the spiritual world in the atavistic way; and so they came more and more to believe that birth and death, or heredity and death, belong to the world of the senses. Heredity and death—they do indeed play their part, very palpably, in the world of the senses, and men came more and more to the view that heredity and death belong there. This view wormed its way into the whole of man's outlook. For centuries prior to the Mystery of Golgotha the whole human outlook was permeated by the belief that heredity and death have to do with the world of the senses. Thereby something very, very remarkable came into being. You will understand it only if you allow the spirit of what I have been telling you in the last few days to work upon you in the right way.

Now the fact of heredity was easily seen by observing how it figured among the phenomena of nature, and it was thought to be a natural phenomenon. Increasingly the belief gained ground that heredity is a natural phenomenon. Every fact of this kind, however, evokes its polar opposite: in human life you can never cultivate a fact without that fact evoking its opposite. Man's life runs its course in the balancing of opposites. A basic condition of all knowledge is the recognition that life runs its course in opposites, and a state of balance between opposites is all we can strive for. What, therefore, was the consequence of this belief that heredity has its place among natural phenomena and belongs to them? The consequence was the bringing of the human will into terrible discredit; and this took the form—because its opposite developed—of bringing into the human will a fact belonging to the past, a fact we know in Spiritual Science as the influence of Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits. And the effect on the soul of looking for heredity among the phenomena of nature was so potent that it led irresistibly to a moralistic world-outlook. For out of this misunderstanding of heredity its opposite came into being—the belief that once through the human will something had happened which went on to permeate the world as “original sin.” It was precisely through the introduction of heredity into the phenomena of nature that this great evil originated—the placing of “original sin” into the moral realm.

In this way human thinking wasted astray; it was unable to see that the way original sin is generally represented is blasphemy, terrible blasphemy. A God as conceived by the majority of people, a God who permits out of pure ambition, one might say, what happens in Paradise—according to the usual telling of the story—a God who does not do this with intentions of the kind described in the book Occult Science, but in the way usually described, would be no God of the heights. And to attribute this ambition to God is blasphemy. Only when we come to the point of not setting inherited characteristics in a moral light, but seeing them as a physically perceptible fact in a supersensible light; only when we relate them to the supersensible without any of this moral interpretation; when in the supersensible light we decline to fit them into a moral world-picture in the manner of rabbinical theology—only then do we come properly to terms with this matter.

Rabbinical theology will always give an elaborate intellectual interpretation of what are manifest in the world of the senses as the forces of heredity; but we should school ourselves through a spiritual outlook to discern the spirit in the inherited characteristics found in the sense-world. That is what it really comes to. And the essential thing is for you to see that, but for the Mystery of Golgotha, mankind would by then have reacted to the point of denying the spirit because people would have ceased to recognise the spirit in the inherited characteristics within the sense-world; for men have increasingly replaced the conception of the spirit by rabbinical and socialistic interpretations.

A tremendous amount is involved when a man is constrained to say: You understand nothing about the sense-world if you are not prepared for those phenomena which, because of their spiritual connections, do not really belong there. We must point to the connections of heredity with spiritual perception, supersensible perception. When the intellect takes hold of the realm of the senses, which is itself permeated with a spiritual, supersensible element, and turns it into a realm of morality, intellectually measurable—that is the spirit to which the spirit of Christ, the spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, stands opposed. I mean this with reference to heredity and to death.

Certainly the Church Fathers were able to verify that even among the heathen there were many who were convinced of immortality. But what was involved in this? Only in ancient times had it been truly recognised that in the world of the senses death is indeed a supersensible phenomenon. By the time of the Mystery of Golgotha the prevailing outlook had been corrupted by an acceptance of death as an experience of the sense-world; and thereby the forces of death were extended over the rest of that world. Death has to be looked upon as a stranger in the sense-world. Only then can a genuine science of the natural order arise.

A further element came in with the reflections of various ancient philosophers on immortality. They turned to the immortal in man. They were right in doing so, for they said: Death is there in the world of the senses. But they said it out of a corrupted world-outlook; for otherwise they would have been impelled to say: Death is not there in the world of the senses; only in appearance does it enter there. Out of their corrupted world-outlook they said that death is in the sense-world. ... And they gradually pictured the sense-world in such a way that death had a place there. In consequence, all other things are corrupted ... it goes without saying that everything else goes wrong when death is given a place in the sense-world. When this was said out of a corrupted world-outlook, other things too had to be said, for instance: We must turn to something in opposition to death, to something of a supersensible nature that opposes death. And indeed, because in the last days of antiquity and out of a corrupted world-outlook people turned to an impersonal spirituality, this world of spiritual immortality—even when called by some other name—was the Luciferic world. What people call something is unimportant; what matters is the active reality behind the picture in their minds. And in this case the reality was the Luciferic world. Even if the words sounded different, these philosophers of late antiquity had in all their interpretations said nothing but: “As souls approaching death we want to take flight to Lucifer, who will receive us, so that immortality will be ours. We die into the kingdom of Lucifer.” That was the true meaning of their words.

I have told you about the forces that prevail in human knowledge, as a result of all the conditions I have described—well, these forces have remnants which can be seen still active to-day. For what must you admit if you take in earnest the words I have spoken to-day out of Initiation-wisdom? You will have to say: Man has his origin and his end. Neither may be understood with the human intellect that serves to understand nature; for by introducing birth and death into the sense-world, where they do not belong because they are strangers, we arrive at a false outlook about both the supersensible and the sensible. Both are corrupted—the comprehension of the spirit and the comprehension of nature. And what is the consequence? One consequence for example, is this: there is an anthropology which traces the origin of man to very primitive ancestors, and it does so quite scientifically and very cleverly. Go through these anthropological writings which trace men back to primitive ancestors, who are portrayed as though the characteristics which still belong to savage peoples were the starting-point of the human race. Scientifically, this opinion is quite in order, but the conclusion which should be drawn from it is the following: Just because it is scientifically in order to believe that birth and death belong to the world of the senses—on that very account it is false; on that account the real origin of man was different. When Kant and Laplace thought out their theory, they built it up from natural science. On the surface there is nothing to be said against it—but things were different for the very reason that the Kant-Laplace theory is correct from the standpoint of natural science. You arrive at the truth if, both for man's beginning and his end and for the origin and end of the earth, you acknowledge the opposite of what holds good for natural science in its present-day form. What Anthroposophy has to say about the origin of the earth will be all the more in accordance with the truth, the more it contradicts what can be said by a natural science that is correct in the sense of to-day.

Hence Anthroposophy does not contradict the natural science of to-day. It allows validity to natural science, but, instead of extending it beyond its boundaries, it shows the points where supersensible perception must come in. The more logical Anthroposophy is, the more correct will it be in respect of the present natural order, which is necessary for man and inherent in him, and all the more will it refrain from saying what is not true concerning the origins of man's existence and of the earth. And the less natural science divines what death really is, the more will it indulge in fantasy where death is concerned. But without the Mystery of Golgotha it would have been human destiny to think unavoidably out of a corrupted world-outlook about the most important things. For this did not depend at all on human will or human guilt; it depended entirely on human evolution.

In the course of his evolution man simply came to regard as his real being the combination of flesh, blood and bones in which he found himself. An Egyptian of ancient days, in the older and better period of Egypt, would have thought it terribly comic had anyone maintained that what walked around on two legs, and consisted of blood, flesh and bones, was really man. These things, however, do not depend upon theoretical considerations; they cannot be spun out of rumination. Gradually it came to seem natural for a man to accept as himself a form consisting of flesh, blood and bones—a form which in truth is a reflection of all the Hierarchies. So much error was spread abroad on these matters that, curiously enough, those very individuals who were led to see the error blundered into a still greater one.

Certainly there were some who arrived at the idea—but in an Ahrimanic-Luciferic way—that man is not just flesh and blood and bones. They now said: “Well, if we are something better than this combination of flesh, blood and bones, we will despise the flesh; we will look upon the human being as something higher and rise above this man of the senses.” But this image of flesh, blood and bones, together with the etheric and astral bodies, as seen by man is an illusion; in reality it is the purest likeness of the Godhead. As I have explained, the error we have been talking about is not an error because we ought to be seeing the devil in the world; but it is an error to identify ourselves with physical nature because in our own world we

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should be seeing God in us. It is also false to say: I am a quite high being, a tremendously high being, a tremendously lofty soul ... and everything around me is inferior and ugly (see blue in diagram, I). It is not like that. This is how the matter really is: There are the kingdoms of the higher Hierarchies, all divine Beings (diagram, II); they have considered it to be their divinely-appointed aim to give shape to a form that is in their image (blue circle). This form presents itself outwardly as the visible human body. And into this form, which is a copy of the Godhead and is shamefully belittled when looked upon as something inferior, the Spirits of Form have planted the human ego, the present soul—the youngest of man's members, as I have often said (the point in the blue circle.)

If the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, man would have been able to gain only false conceptions about heredity and about death. And these false conceptions would have become ever more exaggerated. At present they appear at times in an atavistic way (as in many socialistic groups to-day an atavistic world-outlook prevails), so that death and birth are reckoned as phenomena of the senses. It would have been a necessity in man's further evolution for the door of the supersensible to be altogether closed to him. And what he could find of the supersensible within the sense-world—heredity and death—would have betrayed him, coming in a treacherous way to say: “We are of the senses” ... whereas they are not. Only by refusing to believe in a nature that shows us death and birth in a false light shall we reach the truth—such is the paradoxical way in which man is placed into the world.

There had to be planted into man something to bring equilibrium into his evolution—something able to lead him away from the belief that heredity and death are phenomena of the senses. Something had to be put before him to show clearly that death and heredity are not phenomena of the senses, but are supersensible. For this reason the event that gives man the truth about these things must not be accessible to his ordinary forces, for these are on the road to corruption and have to be set right by a powerful counter-shock. This counter-shock was the Mystery of Golgotha, for it entered human evolution as something supersensible, and so it gave men the choice—either to believe in this supersensible event, approaching it in a supersensible way but now consciously, or to succumb to those views which must result from regarding death and inherited characteristics as belonging to the world of the senses.

Hence two facts that are inseparable from a true view of the Mystery of Golgotha are those which form, as it were, its boundaries: namely, the Resurrection, which cannot be understood independently of the Virgin Birth—born not in the way that makes birth a delusive fact few mankind, but born in a supersensible way and going through death in a supersensible way. These are the two basic facts that have to act as boundaries to the life of Christ Jesus. No-one understands the Resurrection, which is meant to stand in opposition to the false idea that death belongs to the world of the senses—no-one understands this truth who does not accept its correlate, the Virgin Birth, the birth that is a supersensible fact.

Men wish to understand these truths, and modern Protestant theologians want to understand them in terms of theology, with the ordinary human intellect. But the ordinary human intellect is but a pupil of the sense-world, and, moreover, of a corrupted view of the sense-world which has arisen since the Mystery of Golgotha. And when they cannot understand these truths they become followers of Harnack, or something of the sort; they deny the Resurrection, while talking round and about it in all sorts of ways. And as for the Virgin Birth—well, they look upon that as something no reasonable being can even discuss.

Nevertheless, with the Mystery of Golgotha is intimately connected the metamorphosis of death—in other words, the metamorphosis of death from a fact of the sense-world into a supersensible fact; and the metamorphosis of heredity means that what the sense-world reflects in an illusory way as heredity, connected with the mystery of birth, is changed in the supersensible into the Virgin Birth.

However much that is erroneous and inadequate may be said about these things, man's task is not to accept them without understanding them. His task is to acquire supersensible knowledge, so that through the supersensible he can learn to grasp these things, which cannot be understood in the sense-world. If you think of the various lecture-courses in which these things have been spoken of, if you think particularly of the content of what I have given as the Fifth Gospel, [ Seven lectures given in Christiania (Oslo) from October 1st to 6th, 1913.] you will discover a whole series of ways by which these things may be understood, but understood supersensibly only. For it is right that, as long as the intellect of the student keeps to the realm of the senses, in accordance with the outlook of to-day, these facts cannot be understood. It is just when the most sublime facts of earthly life are such that they are unintelligible to the intellect of the student of the sense-world—it is just then that they are true. Hence it is not surprising that the science of Initiation is opposed by ordinary science, for it speaks of things which—just because they do not contradict true natural science—must contradict a natural order derived from a corrupted view of nature. Theology, too, has largely fallen a victim to this corrupted view of nature, though in a different direction.

When you take the other matter of which I was speaking yesterday, that only after death is man able to come to a right conception of the Mystery of Golgotha, then, if you reflect a little, you will no longer find it inconceivable that through the gate of death man enters a world where he cannot be tricked into thinking that death belongs to the world of the senses, for he sees death from the other side—I have often described this—and from this other side he learns increasingly to study death. And by this means he becomes ever more fitted to contemplate the Mystery of Golgotha in its true form. Thus we have to admit that had the Mystery of Golgotha not come about (but what is said in this connection can be understood only through supersensible knowledge), death would have taken possession of man. Evil also would be in the world, and wisdom also. But since men through their evolution had to fall into a corrupted view of nature, they were bound to have a false view of death. In wishing for immortality they turn to Lucifer, and in wishing to turn to the spirit they fall victim to Lucifer. If they do not turn to the spirit they become like dumb animals, and if they do turn to the spirit, they fall into Lucifer's grip. Looking to the future implies a wish to be immortal in Lucifer; looking towards the past means interpreting the world in such a way that inherited characteristics, which are supersensible, are viewed in terms of morality, thereby inventing the medieval blasphemy of original sin.

A real devotion to the Mystery of Golgotha is a protection against all these things. It brings into the world a true conception of birth and death, gained on a supersensible path. By a true conception of this kind men should be healed from the effects of the corrupted conception. Thus Christ Jesus is the Healer, the Saviour. And therefore—because men have not chosen to follow a corrupted conception of the world because they are good for nothing, but have come to it through their evolution, through their nature—therefore the Christ works healingly; therefore He is not only the Teacher but the Physician of mankind.

These things must be pondered—as I have said and must always repeat, they can be discerned only through supersensible knowledge—but if we are to ask ourselves: What kinds of knowledge could be reached by the souls who inspired such a spirit as Tertullian in the second century?—we must look to the dead who were perhaps contemporaries of Christ Jesus and have thus inspired Tertullian. Certainly, since there was much corrupted knowledge in the world, many things came through in distorted, clouded colourings. If, however, through the words of a Tertullian we hear the inspiring voices of the contemporaries of Christ, we shall understand how Tertullian was able to say such words as: “God's Son has been crucified. Because it is shameful, we are not ashamed of it.” Through a corrupted outlook men were bound to fall into shame; that which gives greatest meaning to the earth is manifest in human life as a shameful deed. “God's Son has gone through death. It is perfectly credible because it is foolish”—Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Precisely because it is foolishness by any criterion that man can reach with his ordinary intelligence up to the end of his physical life—for that very reason it is true in the sense of what I have been telling you to-day. “He is laid in the grave and has risen again; this is certain because it is impossible”—because within the corrupted phenomena of nature it does not happen.

When in the supersensible sense you take Tertullian's words as being inspired by Christ's contemporaries, who by that time had long been dead, you may say: Certainly Tertullian has absorbed all this, just in the way he could do in accordance with the constitution of his soul! ... But you will be able to divine how he came to be so inspired. Indeed, such a source was accessible only to a man who with his inner knowledge was so firmly grounded in the supersensible that he referred to demons being witness to the Divine, just as he spoke of human witnesses. For Tertullian spoke of how the demons themselves say they are demons and recognise the Christ. That was the preliminary condition for Tertullian being able to lay hold of what was given him through inspiration.

For those who incline to be Christians in a false way, there is something very disconcerting, thoroughly disconcerting, here. For just think, if even demons tell the truth and point to the true Christ, the demons might ultimately be questioned by a Jesuit—someone or other whom the Jesuit maintained was possessed by demons might be impelled by these demons to speak about the real origin of the Jesuits' Christ, and the demon might then say to the Jesuit: “Yours is not the Christ; the Christ of that other is the true one.”—You can understand the Jesuitical fear of the spiritual world! You can see how alarming it is to be exposed to the possible danger of being disowned in some corner of the spiritual world! Then someone might call Tertullian as witness for the Crown and might say: “Now see here, my dear Jesuit, the demon says himself that your God is a false God—and Tertullian, whom you have to recognise as a bona fide Church Father, says that demons tell the truth about themselves and about the Christ, just as the Bible states.” In short, the matter becomes very ticklish as soon as it is admitted by the supersensible world—even though in an unorthodox form—that demons witness to the truth. For even were we to cite Lucifer, he would not say what is untrue about the Christ! But it might leak out that something else is untrue about the Christ.

Now the truths of Initiation often sound different from what human beings find it convenient to acknowledge. Certainly this leads to things going rather criss-cross when to-day an endeavour is made to introduce Initiation truths to the external world—especially when they have to be introduced into the midst of immediate reality. Yes, as soon as the field is open for statements coming from the supersensible, some very remarkable conflicts may arise—when these statements are opposed by others which owe nothing to the supersensible!

This can often be applied to ordinary life. It has brought me a certain satisfaction that a suggestion I made really to myself during my lectures—and things I say during lectures I give out as my own conviction, with no intention of compelling others to accept them—this suggestion has been followed up, and our Building, out of all the conditions experienced at the present time, has been called the “Goetheanum.” And even if this has been with the assistance of certain supersensible impulses, it seems to me to be both right and good. But if I am asked by anyone for the reasons from an intellectual standpoint—as though I ought to count them all up on my fingers—if I am asked to give all the reasons for this, I should appear to myself a prodigious Philistine if I were to count up all the reasons for what has been felt out of a deep necessity—all the reasons for and against would seem to me like sheer hair-splitting.

One is often in this situation precisely when ascribing supersensible impulses to the will. People often say: “I don't understand this, I can't grasp what it means.” But is it terribly important whether you or anyone else grasps what a thing means? For what does this grasping (begreifen) mean? It really means putting a matter in the light where repose the thoughts which for decades a person has found comfortably suitable for himself. Otherwise its meaning is no different from what people call “understanding.” What people themselves call understanding often signifies very little where truths revealed from the spiritual world are concerned. Just in the most supersensible spheres—where truths are not mere theory but are meant to seize upon the will, to strike into the world of deeds—just here there is always something rather questionable when people ask intellectually: Why, why, why is this so? Or: How is this or that to be understood? In this connection we ought to accustom ourselves to finding for certain things belonging to the supersensible world an analogy—but only an analogy—with recognised facts of nature. If you leave here and a dog bites you and you have never before had a dog bite you, I don't know whether you will ask, Why has it bitten me? Or, How am I to understand it?—For what sort of connection has it with the intellect! You will simply relate the facts. So it is with certain supersensible things—we simply relate the facts. And there are many such things, as you can gather from what I have told you to-day—that in the sense-world there are two apparent events which conceal their real meaning: human death and human birth, which bring the supersensible into the world of the senses and are strangers in that world. They disguise themselves as sense-phenomena and in that way they extend their disguise over the rest of nature, so that the rest of nature also is bound to be seen in a false light by human beings to-day.

Thoroughly to understand these things, to absorb them thoroughly into our own approach to knowledge, is one of the future demands that will be made on human life. The Time Spirits will make this demand especially on those who are seeking knowledge for the future and wish to bring active will-impulses into some particular sphere. Particularly must the spiritual branches of culture be taken in hand—theology, medicine, jurisprudence, philosophy, natural science, even technics and social life, even politics—yes, truly, politics, even that strange creature! Into all this, those who understand the times ought to introduce the fruits of Spiritual Science.

You will have gathered from the remarks I have made during the last two days that there is a fundamental change in the inner constitution of the human being at every single stage of his life. Today, certainly, modern psychologists and physiologists also take this into account. They too reckon with these changes which take place in the course of life, firstly up to the change of teeth, then up to puberty, and again from puberty into the twenties. But these differences are more profound than can be discovered by means of the methods of observation customary today, which do not reach far enough, however excellent they may be. We must take a further step and examine these differences from aspects demanded by spiritual science. You will hear many things that are already familiar to you, but you must now enter more deeply into them. Even when the child enters this world from the embryo condition, that is, to take an external characteristic, when he adapts himself to the outer process of breathing, even then, physiologically speaking, he is not yet received directly by the outer world, for he takes the natural nourishment of the mother's milk. He is not nourished as yet by what comes from the outer world, but by what comes from the same source as the child himself. Now today people study the substances they meet with in the world more or less according to their external, chemical, physical properties only and do not consider the finer attributes which they possess through their spiritual content. Nowadays everything is considered in this way. Such methods are not to be condemned; on the contrary they should be recognised as justified. Nevertheless because the time came when man was concerned only with the outer aspects of things, aspects which could not be so regarded in earlier civilisations, he has now reached a point of extreme externalisation. If I may make a comparison, things are observed today in some such way as this. We say: I look upon death, upon dying; plants die, animals die, human beings die. But surely the question arises as to whether dying, the passing away of the various forms of life with which we come in contact, is in all three kinds of living beings the same process, or whether this only appears outwardly to be so. We can make use of the following comparisons: If I have a knife there is a real difference whether I cut my food with it, or whether I use it for shaving. In each case it is a knife, but the properties of “knife” must be further differentiated. Such differentiation is in many cases not made today. No differentiation is made between the dying of a plant, an animal or a man.

We meet the same thing in other domains too. There are people who in a certain way want to be philosophers of nature, and because they aim at being idealistic, even spiritual, they assert that plants may well have a soul; and they try to discover in an external way those characteristics of plants which seem to indicate that they have certain soul qualities. They make a study of those plants which, when they are approached by insects, tend to open their petals. The insect is caught, for it is attracted by the scent of what is in the plant. Such a plant is the Venus Flytrap. It closes its petals with a snap and the insect is trapped. This is considered to be a sort of soul quality in the plant. Well, but I know something else which works in the same way. It is to be found in all sorts of places. The mouse, when it comes near, feels attracted by the smell of a dainty morsel; it begins to nibble, and—hey presto! snap goes the mousetrap. If one were to make use of the same thought process as in the case of a plant, one might say: the mousetrap has a soul.

This kind of thinking, however, although quite legitimate under certain conditions never leads to conclusions of any depth, but remains more or less on the surface. If we wish to gain a true knowledge of man we must penetrate into the very depths of human nature. It must be possible for us to look in a completely unprejudiced way at things which appear paradoxical vis-à-vis external methods of observation. Moreover it is very necessary to take into consideration everything which, taken together, makes up the entire human organisation.

In man we have, to begin with, the actual physical organism which he has in common with all earthly beings and particularly with the mineral kingdom. In man, however, we have clearly to distinguish between his physical organism and his etheric organism. The latter he has in common only with the plant world, not with the minerals. But a being endowed only with an etheric organism could never experience feeling, never attain to an inner consciousness. For this again man has his astral organism, which he has in common with the animal world. It might appear that this is an external organisation, but in the course of these lectures we shall see how inward it can be. In addition to this man still has his ego-organisation, which is not to be found in the animal world and which he alone possesses among earthly beings. What we are here considering is in no sense merely an external, intellectual pattern; moreover, in speaking, for instance, of an etheric or life-body, this has no connection whatever with what an outmoded natural science once called “life-force,” “vital-force” and so on. On the contrary, it is the result of observation. If, for instance, we study the child up to the age of the change of teeth, we see that his development is primarily dependent on his physical organism. The physical organism must gradually adapt itself to the outer world, but this cannot take place all at once, not even if considered in the crudest physical sense. This physical body, just because it contains what the human being has brought with him out of the spiritual world in which he lived in pre-earthly existence, cannot forthwith assimilate the substances of the outer world, but must receive them specially prepared in the mother's milk. The child must, so to say, remain closely connected with what is of like nature with himself. He must only gradually grow into the outer world. And the conclusion of this process of the physical organism growing into the outer world is indicated by the appearance of the second teeth at about the seventh year. At approximately this age the child's physical organism completes the process of growing into the world.

During this time, however, in which the organisation is chiefly concerned with the shaping and fashioning of the bony system, the child is only interested in certain things in the outer world, not in everything. He is only interested in what we might call gesture, everything that is related to movement. Now you must take into account that at first the child's consciousness is dream-like, shadowy; to begin with his perceptions are quite undefined, and only gradually do they light up and gain clarity. But fundamentally speaking the fact remains that during the time between birth and the change of teeth the child's perception adheres to everything in the nature of gesture and movement and does so to such an extent, that in the very moment when he perceives a movement he feels an inner urge to imitate it. There exists a quite definite law of development in the nature of the human being which I should like to characterise in the following way.

While the human being is growing into the physical, earthly world, his inner nature is developing in such a way that this development proceeds in the first place out of gesture, out of differentiation of movement. In the inner nature of the organism speech develops out of movement in all its aspects, and thought develops out of speech. This deeply significant law underlies all human development. Everything which makes its appearance in sound, in speech, is the result of gesture, mediated through the inner nature of the human organism.

If you turn your attention to the way in which a child not only learns to speak, but also learns to walk, to place one foot after the other, you can observe how one child treads more strongly on the back part of the foot, on the heel, and another walks more on the toes. You can observe children who in learning to walk tend to bring their legs well forward; with others you will see that they are more inclined to hold back, as it were, between two steps. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch a child learning to walk. You must learn to observe this. But it is more interesting still, although much less attention is paid to it, to see how a child learns to grasp something, how he learns to move his hands. There are children who, when they want something, move their hands in such a way that even the fingers are brought into movement. Others keep their fingers still, and stretch out their hands to take hold without moving the fingers. There are children who stretch out their hand and arm, while keeping the upper part of the body motionless; there are others who immediately let the upper part of the body follow the movement of arm and hand. I once knew a child who, when he was very small and his high-chair was placed at a little distance from the table on which stood some dish he wished to get at, proceeded to “row” himself towards it; his whole body was then in movement. He could make no movements at all without moving his whole body.

This is the first thing to look out for in a child; for how a child moves reveals the most inward urge of life, the primal life impulse. At the same time there appears in the child's movement the tendency to adapt himself to others, to carry out some movement in the same way as his father, mother or other member of the family. The principle of imitation comes to light in gesture, in movement. For gesture is what appears first of all in human evolution, and in the special constitution of the physical, soul and spiritual organism of man gesture is inwardly transformed; it is transformed into speech. Those who are able to observe this know without any doubt that a child who speaks as though the sentences were hacked out of him is one who sets his heels down first; while a child who speaks in such a way that the sentences run one into the other tends to trip on his toes. A child who takes hold of things more lightly with his fingers has the tendency to emphasise the vowel element, while a child who is inclined to stress the consonants will bring his whole arm to his aid when grasping something. We receive a very definite impression of a child's potentialities from his manner of speaking. And to understand the world, to understand the world through the medium of the senses, through the medium of thought, this too is developed out of speech. Thought does not produce speech, but speech thought. So it is in the cultural development of humanity as a whole; human beings have first spoken, then thought. So it is also with the child; first out of movement he learns to speak, to articulate only then does thinking come forth from speech. We must therefore look upon this sequence as being something of importance: gesture, speech, thought, or the process of thinking.

All this is especially characteristic in the first epoch of the child's life, up to the change of teeth. When little by little the child grows into the world during the first, second, third and fourth years of life, he does so through gesture; everything is dependent on gesture. Indeed, I would say that speaking and thinking take place for the most part unconsciously; both develop naturally out of gesture, even the first gesture. Therefore speaking approximately we can say: From the first to the seventh year gesture predominates in the life of the child, but gesture in the widest sense of the word, gesture which in the child lives in imitation. As educators we must keep this firmly in mind for actually up to the change of teeth the child only takes in what comes to him as gesture, he shuts himself off from everything else. If we say to the child: Do it like this, do it like that, he really does not hear, he does not take any notice. It is only when we stand in front of him and show him how to do it that he is able to copy us. For the child works according to the way I myself am moving my fingers, or he looks at something just as I am looking at it, not according to what I tell him. He imitates everything. This is the secret of the development of the child up to the change of teeth. He lives entirely in imitation, entirely in the imitation of what in the widest possible sense comes to meet him from outside as gesture. This accounts for the surprises we get when faced with the education of very young children. A father came to me once and said, “What shall I do? Something really dreadful has happened. My boy has been stealing.” I said, “Let us first find out whether he really steals. What has he done?” The father told me that the boy had taken money out of the cupboard, had bought sweets with it and shared them with the other boys. I said “Presumably that is the cupboard out of which the boy has often seen his mother taking money, before going shopping; he is quite naturally imitating her.” And this proved to be the case. So I said further, “But that is not stealing; that lies as a natural principle of development in the boy up to the change of teeth. He imitates what he sees; he must do so.” In the presence of a child therefore we should avoid doing anything which he should not imitate. This is how we educate him. If we say: You should not do this or that, it does not influence the child in the slightest degree up to the change of teeth. It could at most have some effect if one were to clothe the words in a gesture, by saying: Now look, you have just done something that I would never do!—for this is in a way a disguised gesture.

It comes to this: with our whole manhood we should fully understand how up to the change of teeth the child is an imitating being. During this time there is actually an inner connection between the child and his environment, between all that is going on around him. Later on this is lost. For however strange and paradoxical it may sound to people today, who are quite unable to think correctly about the spirit, but think always in abstractions, it is nevertheless true that the whole relationship of the child to gesture and movement in his surroundings has an innate religious character. Through his physical body the child is given over to everything in the nature of gesture; he cannot do otherwise than yield himself up to it. What we do later with our soul, and still later with our spirit, in that we yield ourselves up to the divine, even to the external world, as again spiritualised, this the child does with his physical body when he brings it into movement. He is completely immersed in religion, both with his good and his bad qualities. What remains with us as soul and spirit in later life, this the child has also in his physical organism. If therefore the child lives in close proximity with a surly, “bearish” father, liable to fall into rages, someone who is often irritable and angry, expressing uncontrolled emotions in the presence of the child, while the inner causes of such emotions are not as yet understood by the child, nevertheless what he sees, he experiences as something not moral. The child perceives simultaneously, albeit unconsciously, the moral aspects of these outbreaks, so that he has not only the outer picture of the gesture, but also absorbs its moral significance. If I make an angry gesture, this passes over into the blood organisation of the child, and if these gestures recur frequently they find expression in his blood circulation. The child's physical body is organised according to the way in which I behave in his presence, according to the kind of gestures I make. Moreover if I fail in loving understanding when the child is present, if, without considering him I do something which is only suitable at a later age, and am not constantly on the watch when he is near me, then it can happen that the child enters lovingly into something which is unfitted for his tender years, but belongs to another age, and his physical body will in that case be organised accordingly. Whoever studies the whole course of a man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and who imitates these things will in his later years, from the age of about 50, suffer from sclerosis. One must be able to examine such phenomena in all their ramifications. Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood.

This is why an education which is really based on a knowledge of man must study the human being as a whole from birth until death. To be able to look at man as a whole is the very essence of anthroposophical knowledge. Then too one discovers how very strong the connection is between the child and his environment. I would go as far as to say that the soul of the child goes right out into his surroundings, experiences these surroundings intimately, and indeed has a much stronger relationship to them than at a later period of life. In this respect the child is still very close to the animal, only he experiences things in a more spiritual way, in a way more permeated with soul. The animal's experiences are coarser and cruder, but the animal too is related to its environment. The reason why many phenomena of recent times remain unexplained is because people are not able to enter into all the details involved. There is, for instance, the case of the “calculating horses” which has made such a stir recently, where horses have carried out simple arithmetical operations through stamping with their hooves. I have not seen the famous Elberfelder horses, but I have seen the horse belonging to Herr von Osten. This horse did quite nice little sums. For instance Herr von Osten asked: How much is 5 + 7? And he began to count, beginning with 1, and when he got to 12 the horse stamped with its foot. It could add up, subtract and so on. Now there was a young professor who studied this problem and wrote a book about it which is extremely interesting. In this book he expounds the view that the horse sees certain little gestures made by Herr von Osten, who always stands close to the horse. His opinion is that when Herr von Osten counts 7 + 5 up to 12 and the horse stamps when the number 12 is reached, this is because Herr von Osten makes a very slight gesture when he comes to 12 and the horse, noticing this, duly stamps his foot. He believes that it can all be traced back to something visible. But now he puts a question to himself: “Why,” he says, “can you not see this gesture which Herr von Osten makes so skilfully that the horse sees it and stamps at the number 12?” The young professor goes on to say that these gestures are so slight that he as a human being cannot see them. From this the conclusion might be drawn that a horse sees more than a professor! But this did not convince me at all, for I saw this wonder of an intelligent horse, the clever Hans, standing by Herr von Osten in his long coat. And I saw too that in his right-hand pocket he had lumps of sugar, and while he was carrying out his experiments with the horse he always handed it one lump after another, so that feeling was aroused in the horse associating sweet things with Herr von Osten. In this way a sort of love was established between Herr von Osten and the horse. And only when this is present, only when the inner being of the horse is, as it were, merged into the inner being of Herr von Osten through the stream of sweetness that flows between them, only then can the horse “calculate,” for it really receives something—not through gesture, but through what Herr von Osten is thinking. He thinks: 5 + 7 = 12, and by means of suggestion the horse takes up this thought and even has a distinct impression of it. One can actually see this. The horse and his master are in a certain way merged in feeling one into the other: they impart something to one another reciprocally when they are united through the medium of sweetness. So the animal still has this finer relationship to its environment, and this can be stimulated from outside, as, in this case, by means of sugar.

In a delicate way a similar relationship to the outer world is still present in children also. It lives in the child and should be reckoned with. Education in the kindergarten should therefore never depend on anything other than the principle of imitation. The teacher must sit down with the children and just do what she wishes them to do, so that the child has only to copy. All education and instruction before the change of teeth must be based on this principle.

After the change of teeth all this becomes quite different. The soul life of the child is now completely changed. No longer does he perceive merely the single gestures, but now he sees the way in which these gestures accord with one another. For instance, whereas previously he only had a feeling for a definite line, now he has a feeling for co-ordination, for symmetry. The feeling is awakened for what is co-ordinated or uncoordinated, and in his soul the child acquires the possibility of perceiving what is formative. As soon as this perception is awakened there appears simultaneously an interest in speech. During the first seven years of life there is an interest in gesture, in everything connected with movement; in the years between seven and fourteen there is an interest in everything connected with the pictorial form, and speech is pre-eminently pictorial and formative. After the change of teeth the child's interest passes over from gesture to speech, and in the lower school years from seven to fourteen we can work most advantageously through everything that lies in speech, above all through the moral element underlying speech. For just as the child before this age has a religious attitude towards the gesture which meets him in the surrounding world, so now he relates himself in a moral sense—his religious feeling being gradually refined into a soul experience—to everything which approaches him through speech.

So now, in this period of his life, one must work upon the child through speech. But whatever is to work upon him in this way must do so by means of an unquestioned authority. When I want to convey to the child some picture expressed through speech, I must do so with the assurance of authority. I must be the unquestioned authority for the child when through speech I want to conjure up before him some picture. Just as we must actually show the little child what we want him to do, so we must be the human pattern for the child between the change of teeth and puberty. In other words, there is no point whatever in giving reasons to a child of this age, in trying to make him see why we should do something or not do it, just because there are well-founded reasons for or against it. This passes over the child's head. It is important to understand this. In exactly the same way as in the earliest years of life the child only observes the gesture, so between the change of teeth and puberty he only observes what I, as a human being, am in relation to himself. At this age the child must, for instance, learn about what is moral in such a way that he regards as good what the naturally accepted authority of the teacher, by means of speech, designates as good; he must regard as bad what this authority designates as bad. The child must learn: What my teacher, as my authority, does is good, what he does not do is bad. Relatively speaking then, the child feels: When my teacher says something is good, then it is good; and if he says something is bad, then it is bad. You will not attribute to me, seeing that 30 years ago I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom a point of view which upholds the principle of authority as the one and only means of salvation. But through the very fact of knowing the true nature of freedom one also knows that between the change of teeth and puberty the child needs to be faced with an unquestioned authority. This lies in the nature of man. Everything is doomed to failure in education which disregards this relationship of the child to the unquestioned authority of the personality of the teacher and educator. The child must be guided in everything which he should do or not do, think or not think, feel or not feel, by what flows to him, by way of speech, from his teacher and educator. At this age therefore there is no sense in wanting to approach him through the intellect. During this time everything must be directed towards the life of feeling, for feeling is receptive to anything in the nature of pictures and the child of this age is so constituted that he lives in the world of pictures, of images, and has the feeling of welding separate details into a harmonious whole. This is why, for instance, what is moral cannot be brought to the child by way of precept, by saying: You should do this, you should not do that. It simply doesn't work. What does work is when the child, through the way in which one speaks to him, can feel inwardly in his soul a liking for what is good, a dislike of what is bad. Between the change of teeth and puberty the child is an aesthete and we must therefore take care that he experiences pleasure in the good and displeasure in what is bad. This is the best way for him to develop a sense of morality.

We must also be sincere, inwardly sincere in the imagery we use in our work with the child. This entails being permeated to the depths of our being by everything we do. This is not the case if, when standing before the child we immediately experience a slight sense of superiority: I am so clever—the child is so stupid. Such an attitude ruins all education; it also destroys in the child the feeling for authority. Well then, how shall I transform into a pictorial image something that I want to impart to the child? In order to make this clear I have chosen the following example as an illustration.

We cannot speak to the child about the immortality of the soul in the same way as to a grown-up person; but we must nevertheless convey to him some understanding of it. We must however do so in a pictorial way. We must build up the following picture and to do this may well take the whole lesson.

We can explain to the child what a butterfly's chrysalis is, and then speak in some such words as these: “Well, later on the finished butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. It was inside all the time only it was not yet visible, it was not yet ready to fly away, but it was already there inside.” Now we can go further and tell him that in a similar way the human body contains the soul, only it is not visible. At death the soul flies out of the body; the only difference between man and butterfly is that the butterfly is visible and the human soul is invisible. In this way we can speak to the child about the immortality of the soul so that he receives a true picture of immortality and one suited to his age. But in the presence of the child we must on no account have the feeling: I am clever, I am a philosopher and by no means of thought can I convince myself of the truth of immortality; the child is naive, is stupid, and so for him I will build up the picture of the butterfly creeping out of the chrysalis. If one thinks in this way one establishes no contact with the child, and then he gets nothing whatever from what he is told. There is only one possibility. We must ourselves believe in the picture, we must not want to be cleverer than the child; we must stand in the presence of the child as full of belief as he is. How can this be done? An anthroposophist, a student of spiritual science knows that the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis is actually a picture of the immortality of the human soul placed into the world by the gods. He can never think otherwise than that the gods inscribed into the world this picture of the emerging butterfly as an image of the immortality of the human soul. In all the lower stages of the process he sees the higher processes which have become abstract. If I do not get the idea that the child is stupid and I am clever, but if I stand before the child conscious that this actually is so in the world and that I am leading him to believe in something which I too believe with all my heart, then there arises an imponderable relationship between us, and the child makes real progress in his education. Then moral imponderabilia continually enters into our educational relationship. And this is the crux of the matter.

When we are quite clear about this we shall, out of the whole nexus of our studies, come to see how we can find the right approach to an instruction which is truly educational, an education which really instructs. Let us take an example. How must the child learn to read and write? There is actually a great deal more misery connected with this than one usually imagines, though human intellectualism is far too crude to perceive it. One recognises that learning to read and write is a necessity, so it follows that the child must at all costs be drilled into learning reading and writing. But just consider what this means for a child! When they are grown-up, people have no inclination to put themselves in the child's place, to imagine what he undergoes when he learns to read and write. In our civilisation today we have letters, a, b, c and so on; they are there before us in certain definite forms. Now the child has the sound a (ah, as in father). When does he use it? This sound is for him the expression of an inner soul experience. He uses this sound when he is faced with something which calls up in him a feeling of wonder, of astonishment. This sound he understands. It is bound up with human nature. Or he has the sound e (eh, as in they). When does he use this? He uses it when he wants to show he has the feeling: “Something has come up against me; I have experienced something which encroaches on my own nature.” If somebody gives me a blow, I say e (eh).¹ It is the same with the consonants. Every sound corresponds to some expression of life; the consonants imitate an outer, external world, the vowels express what is experienced inwardly in the soul. The study of language, philology, is today only approaching the first elements of such things.

Learned scholars, who devote themselves to research into language, have given much thought to what, in the course of human evolution, may have been the origin of speech. There are two theories. The one represents the view that speech may have arisen out of soul experiences in much the same way as this takes place in the animal, albeit in its most primitive form—“moo-moo” being the expression of what the cow feels inwardly, and “bow-wow” what is experienced by the dog. And so, in a more complicated way, what in man becomes articulated speech arises out of this urge to give expression to inner feelings and experiences. In somewhat humorous vein this is called the “bow-wow theory.” The other point of view proceeds from the supposition that in the sounds of speech man imitates what takes place in the outer world. It is possible to imitate the sound of a bell, what is taking place inside the bell: “ding-dong—ding-dong.” Here there is the attempt to imitate what takes place in the outer world. This is the basis for the theory that in speech everything may be traced back to external sounds, external event. It is the “ding-dong theory.” So we have these two theories in opposition to one another. It is not in any way my intention to make fun of this, for as a matter of fact, both are correct: the “bow-wow” theory is right for the vowel element in speech, the “ding-dong” theory for the consonantal element. In transposing gestures into sounds we learn by means of the consonants to imitate inwardly outer processes; and in the vowels we give form to inner experiences of the soul. In speech the inner and the outer unite. Human nature, itself homogeneous, understands how to bring this about.

We receive the child into the primary school. Through his inner organisation he has become a being able to speak. Now, suddenly he is expected to experience—I say experience deliberately weighing my words, not recognise, experience—a connection between astonishment, wonder, (ah) and the demonic sign a. This is something completely foreign to him. He is supposed to learn something which he feels to be utterly remote, and to relate this to the sound “ah.” This is something outside the sphere of a young child's comprehension. He feels it as a veritable torture if at the very outset we confront him with the forms of the letters in use today.

We can, however, remember something else. The letters which we have today were not always there. Let us look back to those ancient peoples who had a picture writing. They used pictures to give tangible form to what was uttered, and these pictures certainly had something to do with what they were intended to express. They did not have letters such as we use, but pictures which were related to their meaning. Up to a certain point the same could be said of cuneiform writing. These were times when people still had a human relationship to things, even when these were fixed into a definite form. Today we no longer have this, but with the child we must go back to it again. We must of course not do so in such a way that we study the cultural history of ancient peoples and fall back on the forms which were once used in picture writing; but we must bring all our educational fantasy into play as teachers in order to create the kind of pictures we need. Fantasy, imagination [The German phantasie is often more equivalent to the English imagination than to fantasy. In this lecture the latter is probably more appropriate.] we must certainly have, for without it we cannot be teachers or educators. And so it is always necessary to refer to the importance of enthusiasm, of inspiration, when dealing with some characteristic feature of anthroposophy. It never gives me any pleasure, for instance, when I go into a class in our Waldorf School and notice that a teacher is tired and is teaching out of a certain mood of weariness. That is something one must never do. One simply cannot be tired, one can only be filled with enthusiasm. When teaching, one must be absolutely on the spot with one's whole being. It is quite wrong to be tired when teaching; tiredness must be kept for some other occasion. The essential thing for a teacher is that he learns to give full play to his fantasy. What does this mean? To begin with I call up in the child's mind something that he has seen at the market, or some other place, a fish for example. I next get him to draw a fish, and for this I even allow him to use colours, so that he paints as he draws and draws as he paints. This being achieved I then let him say the word “Fish,” not speaking the word quickly, but separating the sounds, “f-i-ssh.” Then I lead him on so that he says only the beginning of the word fish (f...) and gradually I transfer the shape of the fish into a sign that is somewhat fish like, while at the same time getting the child to say f ... And there we have it, the letter “f!”

Or I let the child say Wave (W-a-v-e) showing him at the same time what a wave is (see sketch). Once again I let him paint this and get him to say the beginning of the word—w—and then I change the picture of a wave into the letter w.

Continuing to work in the same way I allow the written characters gradually to emerge from the painting-drawing and drawing-painting, as indeed they actually arose in the first place. I do not bring the child into a stage of civilisation with which as yet he has nothing in common, but I guide him in such a way that he is never torn away from his relationship to the outer world. In order to do this there is no necessity to study the history of culture—albeit the writing in use today has arisen out of picture-writing—one must only give free play to one's fantasy, for then one brings the child to the point at which he is able to form writing out of this drawing and painting.

Now we must not think of this only as an ingenious and clever new method. We must value the fact that the child unites himself inwardly with something that is new to him when his soul activity is constantly stimulated. He does not “grow into it” when he is pushed, so that he is always coming into an unfamiliar relationship with his environment. The whole point is that we are working on the inner being of the child.

What is usually done today? It is perhaps already somewhat out-of-date, but not so long ago people gave little girls “beautiful” dolls, with real hair, dolls that could shut their eyes when one laid them down, dolls with pretty faces and so on. Civilisation calls them beautiful, but they are nevertheless hideous, because they are inartistic. What sort of dolls are these? They are the sort which cannot activate the child's fantasy. Now let us do something different. Tie a handkerchief so that you have a figure with arms and legs; then make eyes with blobs of ink and perhaps a mouth with red ink as well; now the child must develop his fantasy if he is to imagine this as having the human shape. Such a thing works with tremendous living force on the child, because it offers him the possibility of using his fantasy. Naturally one must do this first oneself. But the possibility must be provided for the child, and this must be done at the age when everything is play. It is for this reason that all those things which do not stimulate fantasy in the child are so damaging when given as toys. As I said, today these beautiful dolls are somewhat out-dated, for now we give children monkeys or bears. To be sure, neither do these toys give any opportunity for the unfolding of a fantasy having any relationship to the human being. Let us suppose that a child runs up to us and we give him a bear to cuddle. Things like this show clearly how far our civilisation is from being able to penetrate into the depths of human nature. But it is quite remarkable how children in a perfectly natural, artistic way are able to form imaginatively a picture of this inner side of human nature.

In the Waldorf School we have made a transition from the ordinary methods of teaching to what may be termed a teaching through art, and this quite apart from the fact that in no circumstances do we begin by teaching the children to write, but we let them paint as they draw, and draw as they paint. Perhaps we might even say that we let them splash about, which involves the possibly tiresome job of cleaning up the classroom afterwards. I shall also speak tomorrow about how to lead over from writing to reading, but, quite apart from this painting and drawing, we guide the child as far as possible into the realm of the artistic by letting him practise modelling in his own little way, but without suggesting that he should make anything beyond what he himself wants to fashion out of his own inner being. The results are quite remarkable. I will mention one example which shows how something very wonderful takes place in the case of rather older children.

At a comparatively early age, that is to say, for children between ten and eleven years old, we take as a subject in our curriculum the “Study of Man.” At this age the children learn to know how the bones are formed and built up, how they support each other, and so on. They learn this in an artistic way, not intellectually. After a few such lessons the child has acquired some perception of the structure of the human bones, the dynamic of the bones and their interdependence. Then we go over to the craft-room, where the children model plastic forms and we observe what they are making. We see that they have learned something from these lessons about the bones. Not that the child imitates the forms of the bones, but from the way in which he now models his forms we perceive the outer expression of an inner mobility of soul. Before this he has already got so far as to be able to make little receptacles of various kinds; children discover how to make bowls and similar things quite by themselves, but what they make out of the spontaneity of childhood before they have received such lessons is quite different from what they model afterwards, provided they have really experienced what was intended. In order to achieve this result, however, these lessons on the “Knowledge of Man” must be given in such a way that their content enters right into the whole human being. Today this is difficult.

Anyone who has paid as many visits to studios as I have and seen how people paint and model and carve, knows very well that today hardly any sculptor works without a model; he must have a human form in front of him if he wishes to model it.

This would have had no sense for a Greek artist. He had of course learned to know the human form in the public games, but he really experienced it inwardly. He knew out of his own inner feeling—and this feeling he embodied without the aid of a model—he knew the difference between an arm when it is stretched out or when, in addition, the forefinger is also extended, and this feeling he embodied in his sculpture. Today, however, when physiology is taught in the usual way, models or drawings of the bones are placed side by side, the muscles are described one after another and no impression is given of their reciprocal relationship. With us, when the children see a vertebra belonging to the spinal column, they know how similar it is to the skull-bone, and they get a feeling for the metamorphosis of the bones. In this way they enter livingly right into the different human forms and so feel the urge to express it artistically. Such an experience enters right into life; it does not remain external.

My earnest wish, and also my duty as leader of the Waldorf School, is to make sure that wherever possible everything of a fixed nature in the way of science, everything set down in books in a rigid scientific form should be excluded from class teaching. Not that I do not value science; no one could value science more highly. Such studies can be indulged in outside the school, if so desired; but I should be really furious if I were to see a teacher standing in front of a class with a book in his or her hand. In teaching everything must come from within. This must be self-understood. How is botany taught today for instance? We have botany books; these are based on a scientific outlook, but they do not belong to the classroom where there are children between the change of teeth and puberty. The perception of what a teacher needs in the way of literature must be allowed to grow gradually out of the living educational principles I shall be speaking about here.

So we are really concerned with the teacher's attitude of mind, whether in soul, spirit and body he is able to relate himself to the world. If he has this living relationship he can do much with the children between the change of teeth and puberty, for he is then their natural and accepted authority. The main thing is that one should enter into and experience things in a living way and carry over into life all that one has thus experienced. This is the great and fundamental principle which must form the basis of education today. Then the connection with the class will be there of itself, together with the imponderable mood and feeling that must necessarily go with it.

Answers to a Question

Question: There are grown-up people who seem to have remained at the imitative stage of childhood. Why is this?

Dr. Steiner: It is possible at every stage of human development for someone to remain in a stationary condition. If we describe the different stages of development, adding to today's survey the embryonic stage, and continuing to the change of teeth, and on to puberty, we cover those epochs in which a fully developed human life can be formed. Now quite a short time ago the general trend of anthroposophical development brought it about that lectures could be held on curative education, with special reference to definite cases of children who had either remained backward or whose development was in some respect abnormal. We then took the further step of allowing certain cases to be seen which were being treated at Dr. Wegmann's Clinical-Therapeutic Institute. Among these cases there was one of a child of nearly a year old, about the normal size for a child of this age, but who in the formation of his physical body had remained approximately at the stage of seven or eight months embryo. If you were to draw the child in outline with only an indication of the limbs, which are somewhat more developed, but showing exactly the form of the head, as it actually is in the case of this little boy, then, looking cursorily at the drawing, you would not have the faintest idea that it is a boy of nearly a year old. You would think it an embryo, because this boy has in many respects kept after his birth the embryonic structure.

Every stage of life, including the embryonic, can be carried over into a later stage; for the different phases of development as they follow one after the other, are such that each new phase is a metamorphosis of the old, with something new added. If you will only take quite exactly what I have already said in regard to the natural religious devotion of the child to his surroundings up to the change of teeth, you will see that this changes later into the life of soul, and you have, as a second attribute the aesthetic, artistic stage. Now it happens with very many children that the first stage is carried into the second, and the latter then remains poorly developed. But this can go still further: the first stage of physical embodiment can be carried over into each of the others, so that what was present as the original stage appears in all the later stages. And, for a superficial observation of life, it need not be so very obvious that an earlier stage has remained on into a later one, unless such a condition shows itself particularly late in life. Certain it is however that earlier stages are carried over into later ones.

Let us take the same thing in a lower kingdom of nature. The fully grown, fully developed plant usually has root, stalk, with it cotyledon leaves, followed by the later green leaves. These are then concentrated in the calyx, the petals, the stamen, the pistil and so on. There are however plants which do not develop as far as the blossom, but remain behind at the stage of herbs and other plants where the green leaves remain stationary, and the fruit is merely rudimentary. How far, for instance, the fern has remained behind the buttercup! With the plant this does not lead to abnormality. Man however is a species for himself. He is a complete natural order. And it can happen that someone remains his whole life long an imitative being, or one who stands in need of authority. For in life we have not only to do with people who remain at the imitative stage, but also with those who in regard to their essential characteristics remain at the stage that is fully developed between the change of teeth and puberty. As a matter of fact there are very many such people, and with them this stage continues into later life. They cannot progress much farther, and what should be developed in later years can only do so to a limited extent. They remain always at the stage where they look for the support of authority. If there were no such people, neither would there be the tendency, so rife today, to form sects and such things, for sectarian associations are based on the fact that their adherents are not required to think; they leave the thinking to others and follow their leaders. In certain spheres of life, however, most people remain at the stage of authority. For instance, when it is a question of forming a judgment about something of a scientific nature people do not take the trouble to look into it themselves, but they ask: Where is the expert who must know about this, the specialist who is a lecturer at one of the universities? There you have the principle of authority. Again in the case of people who are ill the principle of authority is carried to extremes, even though here it may be justifiable. And in legal matters, for instance, nobody today will think of forming an independent judgment, but will seek the advice of a solicitor because he has the requisite knowledge. Here the standpoint is that of an eight or nine year old child. And it may well be that this solicitor himself is not much older. When a question is put to him he takes down a lawbook or portfolio and there again you have an authority. So it is actually the case that each stage of life can enter into a later one.

The Anthroposophical Society should really only consist of people who are outgrowing authority, who do not recognise any such principle but only true insight. This is so little understood by people outside the Society that they are continually saying: “Anthroposophy is based on authority.” In reality the precise opposite is the case; the principle of authority must be outgrown through the kind of understanding and discernment which is fostered in anthroposophy. The important thing is that one should grasp every scrap of insight one can lay hold of in order to pass through the different stages of life.

• 1. In English we tend to prefix an aspirate to the vowel, saying “Ha” when something astonishes us, or “Heh” when something impinges on us, e.g. “Heh, stop it!”

In these serious times, we can look at what people who have considered the gravity of the situation think is necessary. We can see what new institutions they imagine are needed, what changes in our untenable conditions are necessary. If we do this, we will see people with the goodwill to dedicate themselves to new institutions, to cooperate in changing what seems to need change in one way or another. If we accept the responsibility for our all-too-obvious social circumstances, then we cannot get around the fact that, although there is so much goodwill and there are so many wonderful ideas, they collapse immediately or, in any event, are not carried out to the extent so necessary today.

Spiritual science seeks, through anthroposophical understanding, to open the path to supersensible knowledge for modern humanity. It has tried for decades to address the conspicuous problems of modern civilization, namely the flagging goodwill and the loss of the wonderful ideas that live in this goodwill. The spiritual science I have presented here for years has attempted to point out exactly what is so necessary in the present, and what so many modern people welcome with such great sympathy or reject with such great antipathy. It tries to point out, on the one hand, what has made conventional science so great, and, on the other hand, as we will discuss today, what this science lacks the means to understand, namely, human will and human feeling.

We live in a time when it is no longer possible for people simply to yield to their instinctive will impulses. The necessity to increasingly transform the old instinctive life into a fully conscious life is especially characteristic of our time, yet so many prejudices arise today when it comes to admitting this. That people must increasingly change the old instinctive motives of human nature into conscious motives is a historical fact, the most important historical fact. It is this fact that has led to the present crisis.

To this end, scientific advances over the last three or four centuries have done much for modern civilization. But today, anyone who contemplates the institutions that arise out of the most vital contemporary needs must come to feel the insufficiencies of modern times that come from the modern scientific orientation and way of thinking. Just now in this city a limited attempt is being made to solve a social problem, a social problem that is more important than most people want to believe. Perhaps this evening we can point out the difficulties of solving such a specific problem.

Through the insight into anthroposophical spiritual science that he has often demonstrated throughout the years, our friend Emil Molt has succeeded in founding the Free Waldorf School upon social thinking appropriate to our times. This school is intended for children of the workers at the WaldorfAstoria factory and for a few others who will shortly be included. The imprint of modern society is visible in the manner of the school’s creation and in its connection with an industrial firm. This school must take into account the most practical needs of the people who entrust it with the education of their children. We could say that it is symbolic that this school was created in connection, in direct connection, with the industrialism that gives rise to the most important social questions of our time.

In founding the school, the faculty (for whom I held an introductory seminar lasting several weeks) considered the social pedagogical tasks relevant to modern culture. More than we are aware, our picture of modern civilization (as I already mentioned) results from the way our imagination has developed out of our understanding of physical nature. As I have emphasized for decades, spiritual science fully recognizes the value and meaning of the modern scientific way of thinking; in fact, spiritual science values conventional science more highly than that science values itself. Nevertheless, because conventional science so colors our picture of modern civilization, spiritual science must go beyond it. I have also emphasized that the means used by spiritual science to come to its understanding of the world differ from those of conventional science. I have repeatedly explained how we can really enter into the supersensible world through the path of spiritual science, how, through the development of inner capacities that otherwise only sleep in human nature, the way opens for us to see into the spiritual world in which we live. We can see into the spiritual world just as we can recognize the laws of the physical world through our senses, through reason, through associated events. I have explained how we, by awakening dormant capabilities, can look into the spiritual world that always surrounds us, but is unknown to us because the necessary sense organs remain undeveloped in ordinary life.

Today I want to discuss the capacities that spiritual science uses to see into the supersensible world—healthy, quite normal capacities of human nature. Those who want a deeper insight into how spiritual science works need not concern themselves with the accusations of our critics that it is based upon the use of unwholesome powers. It is quite simple to show the source of Anthroposophy and its path to the supersensible world.

If you look at my book How 7o Know Higher Worlds, you will see that I describe those stages of supersensible knowledge that people can attain through the development of certain capacities sleeping within them: 1) the Imaginative stage of knowledge, 2) the stage of Inspiration and 3) the stage of true Intuition. Now, where does spiritual science find the forces involved in such things as Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition? We can show that certain capacities forming the basis of human nature are at work during childhood. Later in life, when people have reached their normal size, when growth is complete, in a sense these forces lie unused. This spring I discussed the various stages of child development.¹ I remarked that during the first period of life, people are primarily imitative beings. They instinctively learn everything that people around them do, and they imitate this in their movements, sounds, speech, even in their thoughts. This imitative behavior continues until approximately the change of teeth, until approximately seven years of age. Then those who can more exactly observe human nature begin to see another activity. They can observe the need in human nature, beginning at six or seven years of age and continuing until sexual maturity, to rely upon people with experience, upon those adults in whom children can devotedly believe. During this period, children need to act under the influence of honored authorities. The self-reliance that is based in people’s confidence in their power of judgment, the self-reliance that enables them to involve themselves in all sorts of things in life, first appears with sexual maturity at the age of fourteen and continues to develop until the age of twenty or twenty-one.

These are three quite distinct periods of human youth. Only people who have lost healthy judgment due to all kinds of prejudices can overlook what develops in the child, what causes physical development until the age of seven when bodily development is relatively complete—the form continues to grow but the general structure is complete. Only such people can overlook how those forces that act formatively until seven years of age subsequently work more inwardly, particularly as inner growth. They act as living forces, making children stronger until fourteen years of age. They work between the ages of fourteen and twenty to strengthen those organs directed toward the environment, those organs that are capable of immersing themselves in their surroundings. In this time those inner spiritual forces act upon the human physical body. Inner spiritual forces act in quite differing ways upon the human body until seven, then fourteen, then twenty-one years of age. Forces that for an unprejudiced observer are quite clearly inner spiritual forces work on human organs to master them and develop them further.

These forces really exist. The forces that in a certain sense cause the crystallization of the second set of teeth out of human nature, a meaningful conclusion to the stage of human development ending at age seven, really exist. The forces that work mysteriously on that part of human beings that is connected with growth and the unfolding of human nature until age fourteen really exist. These forces are real; they are active. But after the completion of physical development (around the age of twenty), where are these inner spiritual forces that have acted upon our physical form? They still exist; they are still there. These inner forces fall asleep, just as the forces we use in our everyday life, our everyday work from waking to sleeping, fall asleep and become dormant while we sleep. The forces of human nature that blazed during childhood and youth, the forces that fired the developmental changes that transform children into adults, and everything connected with these changes, fall asleep around the age of twenty. Those who look at the whole human being know that at the very moment when human beings reach this point, the forces that acted in the child, in the youth, step back into the innermost part of human nature. These forces go to sleep.

We can awaken the forces that have brought forth the processes normally observed between the ages of fourteen and twenty, through which we slowly gain an understanding of our surroundings, through which those organs develop that can form only after puberty. These organs are not one-sidedly oriented toward sexual love, but are formed such that we can deepen our love of all humanity. This loving absorption in all humanity gives us true understanding of the world. The forces we use until the age of twenty-one for growing and forming the inner organs become inflexible, just critical intellect. A certain inner spiritual force stops working formatively. It becomes an imaginary inner force, a power of the soul, no longer so strong as it was earlier when it had to guide human formation. If we can find it sleeping in human nature, this power that once was a formative force but after the age of twenty no longer is, if we develop it so it exists with the same strength as before, then, acting now through love, it becomes Imaginative power. People attain a capacity to see the world not only through abstract concepts, but in pictures that are alive, just as dreams are alive, and that represent reality just as our abstract concepts do. The same force that previously acted upon the healthy developing human to form the capacity to love, can enable us to see such pictures of the world and to reach the first stage of supersensible knowledge. We can awaken this human capacity and plunge it deeper into our surroundings than normal thinking and normal sensing can go.

Then we can go further, since the forces that cause the important formative changes from approximately seven years of age, from the change of teeth, until sexual maturity, are also sleeping in us. These forces sleep deeper under the surface of normal soul life than the forces I just characterized as Imaginative. When we reawaken these idle formative capacities, when we call these spiritual powers out of their sleep, they become the forces of Inspiration. These teach us that Imaginative pictures are filled with spiritual content, that these pictures, which appear to be dreams but really are not, reflect a spiritual reality that exists in our surroundings, outside ourselves.

We can go even deeper, into the strongest forces sleeping in human nature, those that have worked upon human formation from birth until the change of teeth. These formative forces that were active in the first years of life have withdrawn themselves most deeply from external life. If we bring them forth again in later life and imbue them with Imagination and Inspiration, we will then have the Intuitive powers of supersensible knowledge. These are the powers that enable us to delve into the reality of the spiritual world in the same way that we can delve into the physical world through the senses and the will usually associated with the body.

In three stages, through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, we gain access to the supersensible world. These powers do not employ anything abnormal, but actually are the most normal of all things, namely the forces of healthy human development from birth until the early twenties. These forces then lie fallow, but we can bring them forth again. When they are no longer occupied with forming us, we can use them to open up the spiritual world.

I have now given you some idea of the source of those forces that open the way for spiritual science to enter the supersensible world. Those who seriously wish to follow this path will know how to differentiate what it can properly give from what simple conventional science, simple scientific understanding, can offer.

Why do I continually emphasize modern scientific understanding? It would not be so necessary to emphasize this scientific understanding and the attitude that derives from it, if modern popular thinking, including social thinking and social policies, were not so completely patterned after it. To be sure, we have here something that many people seldom consider. However, we must consider it if we wish to find something that will really lead to healing our ailing social conditions. We must be clear that scientific thinking so completely permeates all human thinking that when people begin to consider something else, they automatically revert to the modern scientific attitude and manner of thinking.

What is, in fact, the social political thinking of the second half of the nineteenth century right up to the present? What is it that fundamentally, even now, is presented to us as socialist theory? It is a social thinking patterned after mechanistic scientific thinking. Why does this social thinking appear to be so unfruitful, as I have often described it in these lectures? Because this social thinking, take for example the Marxist English Socialist thinking, is infested through and through with a conventional scientific attitude, an attitude that when used in this area simply cannot accomplish anything.

Now look at the most important characteristic of what I have referred to today as supersensible understanding in the sense of spiritual science. The most important characteristic is that this supersensible understanding uses those forces closely connected with what is human. What forces more closely connected with human nature could we possibly use than those that form human nature itself? How could we possibly use anything more human to achieve an ideal, to achieve anything we want to accomplish? How could we use forces for cognition more human than those that we can bring out of hiding the moment they are no longer needed to form human nature? There is a way of understanding in contrast to the modern scientific attitude and socio-political way of thinking, a life of abstract concepts connected only with the structure and function of the human head. This way of understanding is through those forces that people still retain after their formation is complete at the age of twenty or so. This way of understanding uses forces allowed to sleep, but which are more real because they work on human formation. What we can obtain from scientific concepts and happily use in the social sciences, and wish to use in social pedagogical tasks—these concepts and ideas, in fact, everything that we can obtain in this way for our souls, are only a reflection of reality in comparison to the content of supersensible knowledge. Every concept we can gain when our reason combines sense impressions and observations, everything that we know from our will impulses—all this is actually only a shadow, a reflection, in contrast to what is so tightly enmeshed with human growth and activity and existence as the forces that form us. Thus, the abstract character (the character of being “independent of human nature”) arises out of the scientific way of thinking that does not require people to use their will. We are proud of obtaining such knowledge that we can refer to as scientific and can call “objective.”

Concerning knowledge, spiritual science does not attempt to throw what is human out, but rather to draw it into the world. It attempts to come to its knowledge through just those forces that form people. We can observe that scientific concepts, and socio-political concepts patterned after the same methods, satisfy human intellectual curiosity. They satisfy the intellect, but clearly do not have the power to enliven, to infuse, to ignite human will. Were this scientific viewpoint and its onesidedness to become increasingly stronger and continually more dominant, in the end human willpower would completely atrophy. Nowadays we must motivate human willpower, atrophying under the influence of the scientific mentality, with something that can ignite it. This ability to stimulate willpower arises from people themselves because it can be drawn out of human nature as spiritual scientific knowledge.

This is what spiritual science wants to do, and what spiritual science, as we mean it here, can do. It wants to effect an understanding that is not simply there for the intellect alone, but flows into the feeling and the will.

Today, particularly in education, people repeatedly insist that we should not teach children knowledge simply for the sake of knowledge, that we should also teach them to be capable, to be able to work; we should develop the will. Here we have one of those points where the goodwill of our contemporaries becomes evident. Certainly much goodwill exists when people today say that we should not simply have “knowledge schools,” but schools that develop a capacity to work, schools that develop capabilities. But goodwill alone does not suffice. We need the capacity to illuminate this goodwill, to brighten it with true insight. We do not achieve this insight, however, by simply saying that we should create “schools of capabilities” instead of “schools of knowledge.” The core of this insight is that now we must move more and more from the instinctive to the conscious. It is necessary not only to affect the will instinctively, not only that the teacher instinctively affect the pupil. The important thing is that concepts, ideas and imagination be allowed to flow from the teacher to the child. However, these must be concepts that are not simply concepts in thought, but concepts that can stimulate the will, that can satisfy the whole person. We are not concerned that people often stress that only the will should be developed, or only the feeling. No, what we are concerned with is that we gain the possibility of working to obtain such an insight, such concepts that have the power in themselves to go into the will, to develop the inner fire of the will. This is what we need today to heal the present mentality, to properly use the will in the second social pedagogical area.

The first social pedagogical area is what the recently founded Waldorf School is intended to serve, namely that area encompassing the elementary grades.² Elementary education should prepare people for true social thinking today and in the near future. We shall see how much this is a question of spiritual science, a question of the path into supersensible worlds.

The other aspect of the social pedagogical question is to prepare people to learn from life. We do not fare well in life if we view it as a rigid and foreign object. We can place ourselves correctly in life only when every moment, every day, every week, every year becomes a source of learning for our further development. Regardless of how far we go in our schooling, we will have accomplished the most if, through this schooling, we have learned how to learn from life. If we find the proper way to place ourselves in relationship to everyone we meet, then they will become for us a source of further development through everything they are and through everything they consciously and unconsciously give us. In everything that we do, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, we experience ourselves such that everything we experience in our surroundings becomes a source of continuing further development. Life is a school for every healthy person.

However, neither of these social pedagogical realms, learning in school or learning from life, can meet the needs of society now and in the near future if they are not strengthened by what spiritual science can provide.

Today, people think we should educate children as “individuals.” We also find other fundamental thoughts represented in modern education. With one exception, I do not wish to go into the details of modern pedagogy. However, I do wish to mention that this pedagogy contains certain standards that are made clear to those who teach. The teachers are to educate according to these standards. Much goodwill lives in these standards also. People have done an exceptional amount of well-meant thinking in forming this pedagogy. However, what is necessary now and in the near future is a /iving pedagogy. What we need is a living pedagogy, derived from supersensible human understanding, that replaces an abstract pedagogy that sets up standards for teaching children.

This supersensible perception of human beings does not at all ignore sense-perceptible understanding—it takes it fully into account. The sense-perceptible view of human beings, with all its understanding of anatomy, physiology, and so forth, treats people as an abstraction. Supersensible perception adds the spirit-soul element, while at the same time taking sense-perceptible knowledge fully into account. It observes the whole person, with emphasis upon the development of the whole person. It can, therefore, concentrate upon the developing whole person at the time when the parents entrust him or her to the elementary school at about the age of seven. What developed in the child as a result of imitation requires the support of authority during this life-forming period. Only when we are able to look at people in such a way, can we see what truly lives in them. In that we observe such a change, we can see what is unfolding in people. If you notice in the right way, with sensitivity, what wants to develop in people at six or seven years of age, and if you have not become a teacher, but are a teacher, then an awareness for this most wonderful riddle awakens through the innermost living forces without the necessity of pedagogical standards—the developing person continuously offers him- or herself to your soul’s eye.

Here lies something that a true social pedagogical reformation, which must be the basis of a modern unified elementary school, must really take into account. Here we must say that it is essentially unimportant whether new teachers have really learned what is often taught as pedagogy, as special methods. What is important for future teachers is that, through their training, they have become capable of looking into the developing person. What is important is that they have acquired the skills that they can acquire through a thorough, real understanding of human beings. What is important is that they have become capable in the presence of each child and in each moment to newly form and re-form the educational task.

For the true teacher, pedagogy must be something living, something new at each moment. Everything that teachers carry in their souls as memories robs them of their originality. New insights into the nature of developing humans that allow the pedagogy to change and be alive in those people who teach must replace pedagogical norms. We could even say that the best pedagogy (stated radically) is one that the teacher continually forgets and that is continually reignited each time the teacher is in the presence of the children and sees in them the living powers of developing human nature. When an allencompassing interest in the secrets of the world, in the enigma of the world and in world views accompanies such an attitude, then within the teachers will live what enables them to give that part of themselves that should enter the being of the children.

How can the teacher’s inner nature become so alive in the way I have just described it? Certainly no longer through a way of thinking derived from science, but only when the teacher’s will is ignited through a science drawn from forces connected with human nature. The teachers who have absorbed what spiritual science knows about the supersensible nature of human beings, who have inwardly enlivened this, who in a living fashion carry within themselves a science founded upon those forces through which the child is to be educated—such teachers can make this knowledge into a living inner fire for teaching. The basis of such a pedagogical art is supersensible knowledge, that is, the same forces that from day to day, from week to week, from year to year bring about the growth and development of the child.

Think about it for a moment. Consider how close the sources of pedagogical art are to what grows in the child when supersensible knowledge controls and directs what the teacher brings to the child! We should not search for new abstract ideas nor clever new rules in what we refer to as social pedagogical effectiveness. What we should search for is that the living should replace the dead, the concrete should replace the abstract.

To demand such things today is much more necessary than people often imagine. It is remarkable that people cannot imagine that there is supersensible knowledge that acts upon sensible knowledge, that acts upon life and teaching, upon know-how and capabilities. Already people have begun to misunderstand the core of the Waldorf School, and thus they slander, often unconsciously, what we intend with the Waldorf School. People think the Waldorf School must be some kind of parochial school because those who stand at its cradle begin with spiritual science. They think that it is a school that teaches Anthroposophy to the children. They do not have any idea how deeply stuck they are in old ideas when they assume this, whether it be with a positive or negative attitude. We have absolutely no need to assert Anthroposophy, to assert it as a point of view by developing anthroposophical concepts and seeing to it that children learn these as they previously learned religion. That is not at all our task. We will continue with what we have already stated, namely that the Protestant and Catholic religion teachers shall teach the Protestant and Catholic religions. We will not set any obstacles in the way of the desire to give this religious instruction. We will keep our promises in this regard. We do not seek in any way to bring any new philosophical opinions into the school. We seek something else. Our viewpoint will result from spiritual science because it comes from human nature. We will pay attention to the way it develops human know-how, human capabilities, the way it directly flows into the human will. Our task lies in our pedagogical activities: how we act in a school, how we teach, how we plan the lesson and its goals, which teaching methods to use, how knowledge and philosophy affect the skill and capability of the teacher. These are our tasks.

For this reason, we will have to correct much that (out of goodwill, but without the necessary insight) people consider to be the goals and content of modern educational activity. For instance, people often say that we should emphasize visual aids.³ Yes, certainly, within boundaries, it is good to use illustrative material, that is, to teach children about things that we show them directly. But, we must not allow these materials to lead to a slide into the banality and triviality of superficial consideration. People always want to stoop to the level of the child, and then all kinds of trivialities result, like those we find when we read visual aid guides. We concerned ourselves with such things while forming the Waldorf School. There we could see how trivial the so-called visual aids are that are derived completely out of the materialistic attitude of our time. We could see how forced instruction is when the teacher stoops to the child’s level of understanding, when the teacher is not to teach the child anything other than what the child can easily comprehend.

Now, if you only teach children what they can understand, then you neglect what can be the most beautiful thing in human life. If you always want to stoop to the level of what the children can already comprehend, then you do not know what it means later in life, perhaps at the age of thirty or thirty-five, to look back upon what you were taught in school. You do not understand what it means to have been taught something that you did not fully comprehend because you were not yet mature enough. But it comes up again. Now you notice that you are more mature, because you now understand it. Such a re-living of what has been taught forms the real connection between the time in school and the whole rest of life. It is immensely valuable to hear much in school that we cannot fully comprehend until we re-experience it later in life. We rob the children of this possibility when, with banal instruction, we stoop to the level of the child’s understanding.

What then is the task of the teacher who wants to bring the children something they can absorb, but perhaps will understand only after many decades? Teachers must have the necessary inner life forces so that through their personality, through what they put into the teaching, they can give the children something they cannot yet fully understand. A relationship exists between the teacher and the children through which the teacher can bring things to the children. Things can be brought to the children through the way in which they live in the teacher, because the children feel the desire to experience the world that is aglow within the teacher. That is why the children can grasp them. It is tremendously important that the teachers become leaders in this way, that through the fire that lives in them, they become a wellspring for what the children will carry in their own lives. Compare this with how the banal instruction children receive dims with time.

There are many other examples to show that pedagogy must be something living, something stirred up in the teachers out of an understanding of human beings obtained through human capacities. More than anyone else, the teacher needs an understanding of humanity based upon a supersensible view of human beings. If, in teaching, we would use what comes from a supersensible world view and understanding of humanity, we could immediately remove all abstractions so that the teaching would come from the practical.

There are people today who think that they are practical, who think that they stand in practical life, but it is their “practicality,” which is really only routine, that caused the terrible misery and misfortune that resulted in the war, and in which we still find ourselves today. Instead of obtaining an insight into what supersensible knowledge could achieve for education, these people say supersensible knowledge has nothing to do with the true practicalities of life. They have conjured up these miserable times because they have always said this, because, in reproachable carelessness, they have thrown out the true supersensible content of practical life. We have scarcely caught our breath, and now these people want to continue this stupid practice by kicking to death every truly earnest desire for improvement. If those people who absolutely do not want to see what is necessary for our time are again victorious, then in a short time we will again have the same misery that started in 1914. Those people who wish to crush everything supersensible in the activities they so slander, which are in reality so practical, are exactly those people who have led us into this misery. That is what we need to see clearly today.

I would not have spoken these serious words had not the terrible croakings of doom again arisen where we want to create something quite practical, like the Waldorf School. We should have learned something from the terrible events of the last four to five years, and we should progress. We must keep a sharp eye on those who do not want to progress, who want to begin again where they left off in 1914. We need not worry that they will keep a sharp eye on us—that they will do for sure. But, we must also keep a sharp eye on them. All people must unite who have a sense that something must happen today that, on the one hand, really originates out of the true spirit, and, on the other hand, is capable of affecting serious practical life.

For such very practical reasons, what is often an empty slogan, particularly concerning pedagogical questions, must for once be handled with objective seriousness. We must take into account, for instance (we paid particular attention to such things in the seminar for the Waldorf School faculty), that around nine years of age something important ends and something new begins with children. Until the age of nine, children are strongly entwined with their surroundings. The imitative principle is still enmeshed in the authoritative principle. The possibility of developing the feeling of self first begins at the age of nine, so that, for instance, scientific facts, nature studies of the plant and animal world, can be brought to the child. At the same time, the stage between seven and nine years of age is such that we do well not to bring the children anything that is taught out of convention, that is not basic and does not obviously flow out of human nature.

We must gradually lead children into reading and writing. Anyone can see that the letters we have today are something conventional. (With Egyptian hieroglyphics, it was different.) That means we must teach writing starting from drawing. At first we do not pay any attention to the shapes of the letters, but draw forms. We must begin basic drawing and painting, along with music, in the lowest grades. We must derive the whole education from the child’s artistic capabilities. The children’s artistic capabilities touch their entire being. They touch the child’s will and feeling, and then, through will and feeling, the intellect. We then go on. We continue with drawing and painting to motivate the will through artistic instruction. We go on to writing and develop letters out of the drawn forms. Only then comes reading—it is even more intellectual than writing. We develop reading out of writing. I am giving these details so you can see that spiritual science is not off in the clouds but enters into all details of practical instruction. A living understanding of humanity, which must replace an abstract pedagogy, leads into all the details, into the ways in which we teach mathematics, writing, and languages.

So much for the special area of instructional pedagogy.

The social aspect of pedagogy encompasses all of practical living. After we have finished school, we go out into “real life,” but our conventional education creates a gulf between us and life. Thus we see that there is something instinctive in the great questions of humanity. Although these questions address the needs of life, there is no insight for solving them.

I would like to take note of another question that has concerned modern civilization for some time, the so-called feminist question, namely, what forms the gulf between men and women. People are correct in trying to close this gap, but they cannot close it when they do not really understand what is common between men and women. If they only pay attention to what they can learn about human beings in the physical world and from the modern scientific way of thinking, the difference between men and women remains extreme. We will first bridge the abyss between men and women when we bring the differences in perception and ways of working in the world into balance. We will attain this balance through what we can arrive at through the knowledge, will and feeling that exist in the forces that form the basis of human nature. What men do not have, but women do, gives men a certain inclination; and what women do not have, but men do, gives women a certain inclination. During the time when people are physically female, they are spiritually male, and during the time they are physically male, they are spiritually female. If what can come into our society from spiritual science would permeate our culture, then the ground would be prepared for such things as the so-called feminist question. We can apply this to numerous questions, but I only want to remark about one other.

People cry out for organization. It is obvious that they cry out for it since the complicated relationships of modern social life require organization. I have said much in my lectures about the nature of such structure. However, people think that we need only to organize things according to current scientific principles, according to modern socio-political thinking, without spiritual science. Lenin and Trotsky organize, Lunatscharsky organizes according to these principles. They have placed economic life into a mechanistic form, and they want to do the same with spiritual life. Neither the stories of various people who judge out of their impressions, nor what journalists and other people who have recently been in Russia tell, is important. What we can use are Lenin’s writings. They show anyone with insight what to expect: the organizational death of everything that is a true source of humanity, of what lies in the individual human being and in human nature. No greater foe of true human progress exists than what is now happening in the East.

Why is this? Because they absolutely ignore what can come from spiritual development, namely true social pedagogical life forces. We must organize, but we must be conscious that although we want to organize, people must live in this organization. People must live in this organization and have the opportunity to teach what the inner source of human nature is, what is hidden after people have grown, what we can again bring out of the sleeping powers of their human nature. Not everyone needs to be a clairvoyant and experience what can be experienced through the awakened powers of human nature, but everyone can be interested in what humanity can achieve through these living human forces.

When people take interest in such things, then a new capability awakens in them. This is a capability we can best characterize when we bring to mind an area where people already have somewhat weakened sensibilities. This capability can be likened to what a language is to all the people connected by it. To discover the spirit living in the language, those who speak one language must first understand the genius, the wonderful artistic structure of the language, even though they already speak it. They need to understand the spirit emanating from the language that permeates the people and forms the language into a unified whole. In that we learn to speak, we absorb, not consciously, but instinctively and unconsciously, with every word and with every connotation, something that reveals to us the genius of the language in a mysterious way. Social life is something that lives in many instincts. Language has always been one of the most wonderful social instruments. Only, in modern times, as we go from East to West, language has become increasingly abstract. People feel less and less what the sounds of the language say to the heart and to the head, and particularly the connections that the language forms to speak to the heart and to the head. People feel less and less the mysterious way in which the genius of the language makes impressions upon them.

Many other things that touch people as does the genius of language will become effective if a general human development becomes more widespread through the activity of the elementary school—acting not as a parochial school, but through rationally formed instruction. Then when people meet one another, they can unite through speech. Every conversation, every relationship to another person, becomes a source for the further development of our soul. What we do in the world that affects other people becomes a source of our own further development. We can first develop the elements of communication between people if we meet other people with those feelings aroused in us. We can develop this communication if we do not follow abstract modern science, but take up the living fire within us. This living fire can come to us from a science that is connected to what in human nature allows people to grow until twenty years of age, and from then on can lead to a development of supersensible knowledge.

Even though I have described the three forms of the social organism since spring, the spiritual sphere, the rights-political sphere and the economic sphere, I must emphasize that these are three external forms. Inside these three external forms will live the intimate inner connections forged from one human soul to another. People will recognize each other more clearly than they do today. If, in place of antisocial desires, those social motives that are the basis of true social life are present, then the modern scientific way of thinking can at last become fully useful for humanity. Through this scientific way of thinking we will be able to properly master the external lifeless nature that appears as technology and other things. The ethical, moral forces that can be kindled by the spiritual will derived from spiritual science will take care that the results of technology are useful to human beings. An inner structure that carries people and forms human life will come into the external forms of the social organism. Without this inner structure we cannot develop a fruitful external social form.

That is what I wanted to mention to you today, that spiritual science as we think of it here is not in any way abstract, is not something floating in the clouds, is not, as some people claim, metaphysical. It is something that streams directly into human will and makes people more adept and more capable of living. This remains unrecognized by those who refuse to see the present need for our spiritual science. They will also refuse to see that something like the Waldorf School has been formed, not arbitrarily, but out of truly practical life.

Can we expect much from those people setting the tone today? This spring and summer I repeatedly mentioned in my social lectures (I only mention this as characteristic of much of the modern intellectual attitude) that among the issues of the working class is that, in the future, work must not be a commodity. In a neighboring city I spoke about the “commodity character” of work. I think that people need only the tiniest bit of common sense to understand the general intent in the words “commodity character.” This morning I received a newspaper published in that neighboring city. The lead editorial closes with the sentence, “I am confused by the sentence that ‘work must be freed from its true character’”⁴ Yes, that's possible today. Today it is possible for people who are unable to understand something so clearly related to modern culture as “commodity character” to make judgments about such things. Someone like this could not in an entire life have possibly heard of the “commodity character of human work.” How do such people live in the present time? When it is possible to become so out of touch with reality, it is no wonder that we cannot get together in modern social life.

This is not only possible for people such as the writer of this editorial, it is also possible for those people who think they know everything about practical life. It is possible for people who, at every opportunity, look down upon what appears to them to be idealistic. They do not speak about real life any differently than people who see a U-shaped piece of iron and are told it is a magnet. “No,” they answer, “this is used to shoe horses.” These modern people who wish to shut supersensible knowledge out of practical life are like the person who sees a horseshoe-shaped magnet only as a horseshoe. They do not think anything can be true that does not directly meet their limited powers of understanding.

Today there are many more people than we think who hinder social progress. There are many people who do not want to understand that we cannot simply say that the last four or five years have brought something terrible to the people of Europe—something more terrible than ever before existed in historical times. To this we must add that now things must occur out of a depth of thought that people have never before reached in the course of what we call history. We have come to a time in which people think completely abstractly. Most abstract are the political opinions and programs that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century and that grew out of a modern scientific education. People do not want to understand how abstract, how foreign are the means they wish to use to come to grips with life. People think that they are practical. For example, people see today that in world trade money runs through their fingers, that the German mark is worth less day by day. And from day to day we do exactly those things that, of course, cause the value of the mark to fall. “Practical” people have again taken the helm. So long as people do not see that truly practical life does not lie where they, in 1914, looked for it, but in the understanding of the ideals of life, so long will nothing get better. People today are not modest enough to admit that things will get better only if they come to a deepening in their insight. Goodwill will not do it alone, that is the cancer of our times. It will be necessary that people see more and more what the true basis of spiritual cognition is. Spiritual cognition, because it is based upon the development of the same powers that work in the formation of healthy human beings, can place them in social pedagogical life. What we need today is spirituality—not a naive spirituality, not a spirituality lost in the clouds, not a metaphysical spirituality, but true spirituality that affects practical life, true spirituality that can master the problems of life. We also need practical insight into life; we need to be in life, but in such a way that our view of life kindles a desire to bring this spirituality into life.

From a spiritual-scientific point of view, people must understand one thing, otherwise no progress will be possible in our unfortunate times. The axiom must be:

Seek the truly practical material life, but seek it such that it does not numb you to the Spirit working in it.

Seek the Spirit, but seek it not in supersensible lust, out of supersensible egotism; seek it because you want to become selfless in practical life, selfless in the material world.

Turn to the old maxim: Never Spirit without matter, never matter without Spirit!

Do this so that you can say, “We want to perform all material deeds in the light of the Spirit, and we want to seek the light of the Spirit in such a way that it develops warmth within us for our practical deeds.”

Spirit brought by us to matter,
Matter wrought by us to its revelation
Driving the Spirit out;
Matter receiving from us Spirit revealed,
Spirit forged by us back into matter—
These create that Living Being,
Bringing humanity to true progress,
Progress only longed-for
By the best desires in the depths of human souls.

• 1. Translators’ note: Lectures of 5/11/19, 5/18/19, 6/1/19, contained in A Social Basis for Primary and Secondary Education (GA 192), Waldorf Institute, Adelphi University, New York, 1975.
• 2. Translators’ note: In the Germany of 1919, many children finished formal schooling with the eighth grade and then entered an apprenticeship.
• 3. Translators’ note: The reader should be aware that the “visual aids” and “illustrative materials” meant here are to be understood as actual materials in the classroom, as distinct from a verbal or written description of the object of discussion. Prior to this time illustrative material was rarely used in the classroom, and it was a somewhat controversial innovation in 1919.
• 4. Translator’s note: Steiner used the German word Warencharakter (commodity character); the editor understood him to say wahren Charakter (true character). Their pronunciation is nearly identical.

In my first lecture, which I gave here in Amsterdam on the 19th of this month, I tried to explain how spiritual science oriented towards anthroposophy fits into present-day civilization. This anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, which today already has an artistically executed outer place of care in the Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel in Switzerland, wants to add supersensible knowledge through exact spiritual scientific methods to the tremendous, great results of natural scientific knowledge, which it fully recognizes. And in my last lecture here on February 19, I took the liberty of pointing out that in the present time, numerous souls long for knowledge that is just as securely based as the knowledge that is considered scientific today, but precisely knowledge that extends to the realms of the world with which the eternal in the human soul is connected.

I pointed out that these supersensible insights can only be attained by developing certain abilities that are present in the human soul. These abilities are, however, still unknown to broad sections of our educated society today. Yet it is precisely this ignorance of these abilities that is the cause of the catastrophic developments of our time, which are apparent to everyone.

If we want to approach what is meant here by spiritual science, we must first start from what I called 'intellectual modesty' in my lecture on February 19. This intellectual modesty will be regarded as a paradox in our own time, which is particularly proud of its intellectuality. But anyone who wants to penetrate into the supersensible worlds — to which the human soul with its essential being does, after all, belong — needs this starting point of intellectual modesty. And I would like to repeat the parable, which I already used the other day to point out this intellectual modesty, because I have to assume that, due to the change of venue, a large number of the audience gathered here today were not present at my first lecture.

If we have a five-year-old child in front of us and we give him a volume of Shakespeare, he will play with it, perhaps tear it up, but in any case not do what is appropriate for the volume of Shakespeare. But if the child has lived for another ten or fifteen years, then those abilities that were previously latent in the child's soul will have been developed through education and instruction; he will now read the volume of Shakespeare. The child has ascended to a higher level of human existence, has become a different being after fifteen to twenty years.

If you really want to penetrate into the supersensible world, you have to be able to say to yourself: Perhaps as an adult you are in the same position as the five-year-old child in relation to the volume of Shakespeare, with regard to nature with its secrets and its deeper laws, and perhaps there are forces within the soul that first have to be brought out. If we seriously approach these slumbering powers and abilities in our soul with this intellectual modesty as adults, we will develop higher insights than the ordinary ones of everyday life and ordinary science.

First of all, the faculty in the human soul must be developed, which in ordinary life we know as the ability to remember. Through this ability to remember, we bring coherence into our lives. Through this ability to remember, our soul conjures up images of what we have experienced up to a very early age in childhood. This ability to remember makes permanent what would otherwise flash by as a mere idea. If we could only surrender ourselves to the outside world, if we would only surrender ourselves to ideas of the events and experiences that flash by, our whole soul life would be different. If one now further develops what is present in memory as lasting images, then one attains a quite different capacity for knowledge. And one can develop this through methods that I have described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, in my “Occult Science” and in other of my writings. One can develop this through certain processes of meditation and concentration, through a devoted resting on certain easily comprehensible ideas, which must not be reminiscences, must not be based on any kind of auto-suggestion; therefore they must be easily comprehensible.

One must rest with the whole structure of one's soul on such ideas. And these studies, which the true spiritual researcher must make regarding the knowledge of the supersensible worlds, are no easier than the studies one does in the clinic, in the physics or chemistry laboratory, or in the observatory, and they by no means take less time. This meditation, this concentrating with the whole power of the soul on certain ideas, which one does continually and on which one rests, must be continued for years. The powers of knowledge that lie dormant deep within the soul, of which the human being has no other idea, must be brought up. When they are brought up, one is able to perceive, through these higher powers of knowledge, that which surrounds us just as the physical-sensory world surrounds us. At first one perceives one's own experiences, but not as the vague stream of consciousness that goes back to just before birth, where the memory fragments emerge. Rather, one perceives the whole panorama of what one has gone through in this life since birth, like a unified, all-at-once present life panorama. And when one gets to know this, one experiences what it means to live in one's soul outside of the body. Materialism usually claims – and at first glance it seems justified – that all ordinary thinking, all ordinary remembering, all ordinary feeling and willing is bound to the physical body. But in ordinary life, this feeling, this willing, this thinking is interrupted. Every day, through sleep, that which is the ordinary soul life bound to the body is interrupted. People do not feel deeply enough the significance of the riddle associated with falling asleep, sleeping and waking up again. After all, the human being must be present in sleep, otherwise he would have to arise anew each time he woke up. But one only learns to recognize the form in which the human being is present in sleep by doing the exercises, some of which I have mentioned here.

When you are actually able to imagine mentally in such a way that you do not use your external eyes, do not use other senses, and do not use the ordinary mind that is connected to the brain, but only the purely spiritual-soul - and you achieve this when you develop the ability to remember in the way I have described it - then one comes to know that from the moment of falling asleep until the moment of waking up, the human being does indeed exist as a spiritual-soul entity outside of his body and that only the desire to return to his body then asserts itself. And this desire, which obscures consciousness.

Anyone who develops their powers of recollection as I have described will be able to behave exactly like the sleeping person – that is, not to perceive with the senses, not to combine the sensory perceptions with the mind – only to be fully conscious. He knows the spiritual soul independently of the body. This also enables him to recognize this spiritual soul before birth or conception and after death in its true essence and in connection with the rest of the supersensible world.

And if, in addition, he further develops a second soul power that is also present in ordinary life, namely the power of love, if he makes the power of love a power of knowledge, then the human being gets to know the images, which he otherwise experiences as a supersensible panorama, in their direct reality as well.

Today I would like to draw attention to something that is, in the most eminent sense, a link in a life practice that must interest all people. I would like to draw attention to the way in which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, as I am referring to here, can enrich the art of education and teaching.

What do you actually gain from such a spiritual science, the methods of which I have now very briefly outlined? Above all, one acquires a real knowledge of the human being. Without being able to see into the supersensible, it is indeed impossible to have knowledge of the human being. After all, the human being is not only the outer physical organization, about which the outer scientific world view gives us such great, powerful, and insufficiently appreciated insights. Man is also soul and spirit. Man harbors within himself the eternal core of his being, which passes through births and deaths, which has a consciousness after death, because then he has no desire for the body, which lies in bed during sleep and after which he has desire during sleep, which his consciousness in ordinary sleep extinguishes.

When this physical body is discarded at death, the human being attains an all the more clear consciousness because it is not extinguished by any desire for a body. Through all this and much more, which I do not wish to describe now but which you can read about in my writings, the human being attains true knowledge of the human being. And only out of real knowledge of the human being can true teaching and true educational art arise.

We have tried to address this area of practical life in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which I run and whose pedagogy and didactics flow entirely from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Firstly, the attitude of the teaching staff is such that something is brought into the classroom with every lesson, with every new morning, which turns teaching and educating into a kind of spiritual service. Does it not mean something special when we know through anthroposophical spiritual science that this human being, who reveals himself to us so wonderfully in the growing child, has descended from the spiritual worlds through conception or birth? If this is a true realization, if it is conveyed through anthroposophical spiritual science, then we face the developing human being, the child, in such a way that we have a task entrusted to us from the spiritual worlds. Then we see how the eternal, which has descended from spiritual worlds, works its way out of the initially indeterminate physiognomic features and the indeterminate movements of the child from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, with ever greater certainty. We see the spiritual soul at work on the physical development of the human being.

This is not the place for a careless criticism of what pedagogical geniuses have produced over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries. Certainly, some beautiful principles have been expressed with regard to pedagogy. For example, it is rightly emphasized that pedagogy has such principles as “one should not graft anything from the outside into children; one should draw everything one wants to introduce to children from their own abilities and capacities”. Quite right, an excellent principle – but abstract and theoretical. And so, by far the greatest part of our life practice confronts us in abstractions, in theoretical programs. For what is needed to carry out something like this, to extract from individuality what the child should develop within itself, requires real knowledge of the human being. Knowledge of the human being that goes into all the depths of the human being. But the science that has existed in modern civilization so far, despite its great triumphs, cannot have such knowledge of the human being.

I would now like to show you very specific things that will help you to see how this spiritual science, as it is meant here, can achieve real knowledge of the human being. There is a cheap saying that is thoughtlessly repeated over and over again: “Nature does not make leaps!” In fact, nature is constantly making leaps, and this expression is only thoughtless, as I said. Think of a plant: it develops green leaves, then it makes the leap to the calyx, then the leap to the colored petals, the stamens, and so on. And so it is with all life. It is just a phrase to say that nature does not make leaps. And so it is especially in human life. We have in human life, when we can observe it uninhibitedly through the impulses that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science provides, clearly distinct life epochs. The first life epoch goes from birth to the change of teeth, around the age of seven. It ends, then, with the year in which we start sending children to primary school. If one has the necessary insight and impartiality of observation, if one gets into the habit of observing life only at a higher level in the same way that one would otherwise observe at the lowest level in the natural sciences, one can sharply characterize the major differences between the first and second phases of human life. The first phase of life ends with the change of teeth, the second with sexual maturity. Both phases of life are quite distinct from one another. The first phase shows us the child as an imitative being. Even in play, the child is an imitative being. Of course, some believe that a certain imaginative being is formed during play. This is also the case, but if you study play in its deepest essence, you will perceive the moments of imitation everywhere, especially in children's play. And in connection with this play, I would like to remark right away how tremendously important knowledge of the human being, knowledge of the human being in relation to his totality, is for an education and pedagogical art that is full of life and truly engages with the world.

You see, every child plays differently. Anyone with an unbiased sense of observation can tell exactly how one child plays and how another child plays. Even if the difference is not a big one – you have to be a psychologist to be able to observe something like this if you want to become an educator at all. But if you can do that, then you have to relate the different ways of playing to a completely different epoch of a person's life. In terms of observing human beings, the natural sciences are such that they only rank what is nearest to what is nearest. But you won't get very far with that. What can be observed in children's play does not remain in the next phase of life. The child is turned to other things, that is, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. Even if it continues to play, the actual play age is no longer as characteristic as it used to be. What the play passions are withdraws into the depths of the soul and only comes to light again at a much later age: in the second half of the twenties, when the human being is supposed to enter into practical life. Some adapt themselves with great skill to the tasks of fate, while others become dreamers far removed from the world. The way in which a person can adapt to practical life in these years can be fully explained if one knows how the person played at the age of four, five, six, or seven.

Therefore, it is of the utmost importance for the pedagogue and educator to guide the child's play; to observe what the child wants to express and to guide what should not be expressed, because it would make the child awkward in later life. For when we guide play in the right way at the earliest age, we give the child something for life practice, as it develops in the twenties. The whole life of a human being is interrelated, and what we plant in the child's soul in youth only comes to light much later in life in the most diverse metamorphoses. Only a total knowledge of the human being, as provided by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, can truly see through the connections that lie as far apart as the twenties and childhood, as well as the finding of one's way into practical life and the play instincts; only such spiritual science can see so deeply into life. This will give you an idea of the scope of human knowledge that this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to work with in order to develop a pedagogical art.

I said that the child is an imitative being until about the age of seven. And I do not say the number seven out of some mystical inclination, but because the change of teeth is actually an important event in the child's overall development. The child learns the particular nature of his movements, and also his speech, through imitation; he even develops the form of his thoughts in this way. Because the connection between the child's environment and the child itself depends not only on external factors but also on imponderables, parents or educators who live in the child's environment must be clear about how the child adapts to what the adults around him do, not only externally – not only what they speak – but also what they feel, what they sense, what they think. It is usually not believed in our materialistic age that there is also a difference in terms of the child's education, whether we indulge in noble or ignoble thoughts in the presence of the child, because we see the connections in life only in terms of external material entities, and not in terms of how things are connected internally by imponderables. This can be seen if one really observes life according to its internal structures.

I would like to give an example of what is actually important in such matters: a father once came to me and complained bitterly – and I could give many similar examples – that his five-year-old boy had stolen something. He was very unhappy about it. I said: Let's see if the five-year-old boy really has stolen. – I had the case described to me. What had actually happened? The boy had taken some money out of the drawer where his mother kept her pennies, which she always needed for her daily needs. He had not even done it out of selfishness, but had distributed the money among other children. I said to the father: The child did not steal, but what the mother always does, the child also considers right to do, because at the age of five she is still very much an imitative being. We must be aware of this: we do not influence children through admonitions, through commandments, but only through what we do in their environment.

And we can only arrive at a sound judgment of the child's entire soul configuration if we know that this soul configuration of the child will change significantly with the change of teeth. The mere imitation is replaced by the mental behavior towards the environment as a self-evident authority. And we are dealing with this desire of the child for the self-evident authority of the teacher, the educator or whoever else is around the child throughout the entire school period. One only has to know what it means for the whole of life if, in this childhood from the seventh to the fifteenth year, one has looked up with a real, great inner awe to those who, as adults, were around with educational authority were around, that what we thought was true and false emerged from the way these educators saw true and false; from what was the standard of true and false for the educators. We enter into the human, not into some abstraction, when we want to distinguish true and false, good and evil in this childhood age.

You will not believe that I advocate this necessity – that all teaching and education between the ages of seven and fifteen should also be based on unquestioning authority – out of some kind of preference for conservative or reactionary ideas when I tell you that as early as 1892 I wrote a small pamphlet in which I firmly presented the individual freedom of the human being as a basic social requirement. But no one can become a truly free human being, no one can find the right social relationship with their fellow human beings in freedom if they have not recognized an authority beside them between the ages of seven and fifteen, and from this authority learned to shape the standard for right and wrong, good and evil, in order to only later arrive at their own standard of intellectual or other purely internal, autonomous judgment.

And then the soul of the child at this age is still so constituted that it is still completely merged with its surroundings. Only when we come to the end of this phase of life, which falls in the twelfth or thirteenth year, do we see that the child is clearly different from its surroundings, that it knows that the I is within and nature is without. Of course, self-awareness is present in the very earliest childhood, but it is more of a feeling. If you want to educate properly, you need to know that an extraordinarily important point in a child's development lies between the ages of nine and ten and a half. It is the point where the child becomes so absorbed inwardly that it learns to distinguish itself from nature and the rest of the external world. Before this point, which is a strong turning point in human life, the child basically sees his surroundings in images, because they are still connected to his own inner life, in images that are often symbolic. He thinks about his surroundings in a symbolic way. Later, a different era begins. The child differentiates between nature and the external environment. It is of immense importance that the educator is able to assess this point in life, which occurs a little later for one child and a little earlier for another, in the right way. For how the teacher and educator behaves in the right way between the ninth and tenth year – fatherly, friendly, lovingly guiding the child over this Rubicon – that means an incursion into human life that is lasting for the whole of the following existence until physical death. Whether a person has a zest for life in the decisive moments or carries inner soul barrenness through life depends in many respects - though not in every respect - on how the teacher and educator has behaved towards the child between the ages of nine and ten and a half. Sometimes it is a matter of simply finding the right word at the right moment when a boy or girl meets you in the corridor and asks a question, or of making the right expression when you answer. The art of education is not something that can be learned or taught in the abstract – any more than painting or sculpting or any other art can. Rather, it is something that is based on an infinite number of details that arise from the rhythm of the soul. This sense of rhythm is derived from anthroposophical spiritual science.

It is also important to distinguish between what we need to teach children before and after this important point in their lives between nine and a half and ten and a half years of age. Above all, we must bear in mind that in our present, advanced civilization, we have something that has become external, abstract and symbolic. Go back to ancient civilizations, take any pictographic writing, and what was grasped by the senses was fixed. This was made into an image with which the human being was connected, with which the human being lived through feeling and emotion. Today, however, all this has become a symbol. We must not introduce reading and writing to the child as something alien, because it wants to grow together with its environment before the age of nine; we must not teach it from that abstract level, as is the case today. In Waldorf schools, we begin teaching in an artistic way by letting the child draw, even paint, the forms that arise out of the fullness of humanity. We let the child do this at first, and then, when we guide the child further in this drawing-painting way, we develop the letter forms, the writing, from this drawing. We proceed from the artistic, and from the artistic we first bring out writing and then reading. In this way we really correspond to what lies within the child.

It is not a matter of saying in some abstract way in education that one should only bring out what is in the child. One must know how to do it practically, how to really meet human nature. Anthroposophical spiritual science is never theory, but always real practice. That is what enables it to develop such an art of education.

What I have said about authority can also make us aware of something else that may perhaps seem paradoxical to you. In today's materialistic age, an enormous amount of emphasis is placed on so-called illustrative instruction. To anyone who understands the true nature of the child, it is a terrible thing to see the abstract calculating machines and all the things that children are often subjected to today. Today, children are expected to understand everything immediately. The aim is to organize teaching in such a way that nothing goes beyond the usual eight- or nine-year-old understanding. It seems extraordinarily scientific. But believe me, ladies and gentlemen, even a person with thorough anthroposophical knowledge can grasp the obviousness of such a principle just as well as those who defend such principles today as something that should be taken for granted. But what is self-evident is that, above all, between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child must have its memory and sense of authority developed in a healthy way, as I have just described.

Those who only want vividness and vividness that is adapted to the child's understanding do not know the following: they do not know what it means for the whole of life if, let us say in the eighth or ninth year or in the tenth to fifteenth year, one has taken something on the authority of the teacher; because the revered authoritative personality tells one, one considers it to be true. It is still beyond the horizon, but it is absorbed into the soul. Perhaps it is only in the thirty-fifth or fortieth year that it is taken out again. What one has already had in one's memory is now understood through the power that has matured. This awareness of having matured, this awareness of being able to bring something up, refreshes and invigorates the soul's strength in a way that is not appreciated in ordinary life, whereas it deserts the soul if one wants to tailor everything to the understanding of the child in the eighth, ninth, twelfth year. This is something that must be said today, because people, out of their materialistic cleverness, are no longer able to see what is natural, right and essential in such matters.

And from the foundations of human nature, from what seeks to develop from week to week, from year to year, the curriculum of such a school is derived, as it is the Waldorf School. This curriculum arises entirely from the knowledge of the essence of man. It is not an abstract curriculum, but something that underlies the pedagogy of this school, just as painting can do for the painter, sculpting for the sculptor.

Here, I have described to you how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science enters into practical life from the fields of education and teaching. But just think about what kind of spiritual life would be needed if such educational and teaching practices were to really take hold! We are accustomed to seeing this spiritual life only as an appendix to the state, perhaps as an appendix to economic life. We are accustomed today to having the most important part of intellectual life, namely the teaching and education system, prescribed by the state. What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must now assert for modern civilization, based on a truly penetrating knowledge of teaching and educational methods that are based on true human knowledge, is that intellectual life, teaching and education must be placed in its own free administration. I would like to be quite specific: teachers and educators should not only teach and educate, but they should also have the entire administration of teaching and education in their hands, freely and independently of the state and economic life. From the lowest elementary school up to the highest teaching institutions, every teacher and educator should be so busy teaching that there is still enough time left for them to also be administrators of the teaching and education system. And only those who are still actively involved in teaching and education, the real teachers and educators in any field, not those who have become civil servants and are no longer involved in education, should also be the administrators of the education system. Nothing should be spoken into the teaching and education system except what also speaks into knowledge and art and religious world view. People do not want to recognize that what was necessary for one period of historical development, and perhaps extraordinarily good, does not apply to every period of history. When the modern era dawned, with its centralized state, it was a good and self-evident thing that the old confessional administrations should be relieved of the schools. At that time, it was a blessing for the development of humanity. But now we have arrived at a point in human development where this cannot continue; where what the state could do for the school system has been exhausted and where the free spiritual life, the spiritual life that draws from real spiritual sources, wants the independent administration of the school system.

Here the school question, the question of education, touches directly on the great social question, on everything that is the very essence of the social question. You see, regarding the social question, many people think that the essence of it lies in external institutions, that one only has to look at these external institutions to recognize the social question, that one has to work on these external institutions to do something for the social question. Those who have really come to know life cannot think this way. I have come to know proletarian thinking. I had the opportunity to do so not only in my own youth, but also because I worked for many years as a teacher of various subjects at a workers' education school and saw what actually lives in the broadest strata of the proletariat, which basically only emerged as a class, as a social stratum, through modern technology.

There it is not the external institutions, not even the bread-and-butter questions, from which the actual social question arises; there it is the state of mind, which is connected with the fact that the kind of intellectual life that has developed among the leading classes over the last three to four centuries has passed over to the broad masses of the proletariat like a kind of religion. I have seen this world view arise from materialistic principles in serious people, in deeply-rooted souls who were part of the bourgeoisie, who belonged to the leading classes, and I have learned the following: They said to themselves: Take the external scientific world view seriously; look at how it shows how the Earth developed from some kind of nebulous state through purely natural necessities to its present stage and how the various living beings have gradually developed along with it up to the point of humans. And a time will come again when either glaciation or heat death will occur to the earth – one may imagine it either way – but then the great churchyard will be there. What will have become of that which man must surely see as the noblest in human nature, which arises within him as moral ideals, as religious impulses, as art, as science? I have known people who seriously asked themselves this question, while the majority of modern people thoughtlessly juxtapose these two worlds, the world of external natural necessity and the world of what is actually humanly valuable, of moral ideals, of religious convictions, of knowledge, of artistic creation. Then serious souls say to themselves: Yes, man becomes aware of that which wells up from the soul; but that is an illusion, it is like smoke rising from the material basis. But one day the great churchyard will be there, and what we call the great ideals will have disappeared and faded away. - I have come to know the tragedy and pessimism that deeply inclined people have come to. But I also witnessed how this world view then penetrated into the proletarian soul and how a word was encountered that has a tremendous impact but denotes many things. If one understands how it lives in the proletarian soul, then one knows a lot about the foundations of contemporary civilization and its social issues. The word “ideology” lives in the souls of proletarians. What these proletarian souls know as intellectual life, as custom, law, science, art and religion, they call a superstructure above the production processes, which are historically the only real thing for them. This is the legacy of the world view that I have just described as tragic and that the proletarian souls, the millions of souls, have desolate.

One may appear an idealist today if one seeks the actual proletarian question in what the terrible word ideology expresses. But these idealists will be right. And those who believe that they have a monopoly on human wisdom and the routine of life will see history marching over them. This 'ideology' means that the souls of these masses remain desolate, have no connection with the living spirit – just as the leading classes do not either, who prevent this science from reaching the proletarians.

And here I may say something that should make clear to you the essential task and mission of Dornach, of the Goetheanum in Dornach, in the present age of civilization. Many people today realize that enlightenment and science must be brought to the broad masses. People's libraries and people's colleges are being founded, and all kinds of other things, in order to bring the science that is in our universities and our secondary schools to the people. Dornach cannot go along with this. Dornach wants to do what was the purpose of that autumn course that we held in the fall of 1920 and which we will repeat at Easter on a smaller scale, in keeping with our modest circumstances. The aim was to fertilize the individual sciences from the perspective of spiritual science. Thirty lecturers from all branches of science, including industrialists, merchants and artists, presented at this autumn course to show how all branches of science, art and life can be fertilized by this spiritual science. The aim is to renew science. The aim is to bring the spiritual into the sciences, to bring in a spirit that does not arise from a culture of the head but from the fullness of the human being.

That, then, is the purpose of the Goetheanum in Dornach: that a new spirit be brought into the colleges, only then will it be able to become popular. - One wants to bring the spirit of our college into the people - can one not see in modern civilization what use this spirit has been to those who have it? This spirit must be renewed. It is not that the schools must spread education among the people, but that a spiritual education must first be brought into the schools. That is the point in which Dornach differs from all other efforts along these lines today. For in this field people are thoroughly convinced that they are very free-thinking, but that they have a terrible belief in authority when it comes to conventional science. I say this not out of disdain for modern scientific thinking, but out of decades of engagement with all branches of this thinking. We need to work towards the liberation of spiritual life and thus the liberation of the school and education system, just as the state was once forced to take on teaching and education and wrest them from the old denominations.

I know what objections can be raised to developing a free spiritual life as the first link in the tripartite social organism. But when people express their fear that people would then not send their children to these free schools, it means looking at the matter wrongly. The question is not whether people voluntarily send their children to school or not, but rather that a free system of teaching and education is a necessity for humanity today and that one must then ensure that children go to school despite this. This should not be seen as an objection to a free spiritual life, but should merely lead to a consideration of how to get the children of negligent or unscrupulous parents into school despite a free spiritual life. This is the first link in the impulse of the threefold social organism, as formulated by the anthroposophical world view, to move towards possible solutions to social issues: a free spiritual life, administered by spiritual workers alone.

One can find logically slighted terms that teach all sorts of things in defense of this necessary freedom of spiritual life, as well as to attack it and condemn it. But that is not the issue. Anthroposophy proceeds everywhere from life practice and life observation. Those who know what a real spiritual science will mean to humanity also know how necessary the liberation of spiritual life is. People speak of ideology because spiritual life consists of abstractions, because they have no concept that an idea, that which lives in the soul, is something other than the image of something, because they no longer know that the old religions have given to man, that living spirit lives in every human being, that man with his eternal belongs to the living spirit and not only in his soul live abstract images. A living spiritual world that fills us inwardly and connects us with the eternal is not an ideology. It is the rise of ideology that has led to the catastrophes of our time. But a school and education system that aims to bring the living spirit into humanity must be a school system that is as free as the one I have described. This free school system appears to me as something that must be understood in the most eminent sense as a necessity of modern humanity - provided that it is sincere about human salvation and human progress.

Therefore, I consider it – I say this without wanting to agitate – as absolutely necessary to eliminate many of the forces of decline in our modern civilization by means of forces of ascent, that something be created on the broadest international basis, such as what I would call a world school association. This world school association would have to include all nations and the broadest circles of people. These people must be aware that a free spiritual life is to be created. It is of no use at all if people think that our Waldorf School in Stuttgart is something practical that one must see for a few hours or for a few weeks. To want to see something that arises out of a whole spiritual life is like cutting out a piece of the Sistine Madonna to get an idea of the whole picture. You cannot learn anything about the spirit of the Waldorf School by sitting in on lessons, but by getting to know anthroposophy, the anthroposophical spiritual science that lives in every teacher, in every lesson, in the children, and that also lives in the school reports. I would like to briefly describe how we at the Waldorf School gradually get to know each child, despite the fact that we also have large classes. We do not give them grades, certificates that say “almost satisfactory”, “hardly sufficient” - that is all nonsense. You cannot grade like that. Rather, we give the children a true description of their character, which holds up a mirror to them for the whole of the following year, and a saying that has been chosen from the depths of our souls. We have also seen the value that these reports have for Waldorf school children. So we have experienced what the anthroposophical spirit has brought to this Waldorf school.

But we do not want as many Winkel schools as possible to be established along the lines of the Waldorf School. Rather, we want the widest possible international recognition that the old idea of basing the school system only on the state must be fought. We must strive to force the state to allow the free spiritual life to create its own free schools. We do not want to establish isolated schools by the grace of the state; we will not lend a hand to this, but what is necessary is an understanding of the kind of alliance of peoples that would lie spiritually in a world school association. This would bring people together across the wide expanse of the earth in a great, a gigantic task.

This is what I want to say first about the first link of the threefold social organism. I can only touch on the other links, because they belong to life in other areas. Over the last four to five centuries, we have developed the unified state in today's civilized world. On the one hand, it has absorbed intellectual life with the school and education system; it has also absorbed economic life, at least to a large extent. And social democracy, of course, strives to use the entire state, the state framework, to basically set up a kind of barracked economy, whereby all economic freedom and individuality is destroyed, as we see in Trotskyism, in Leninism, precisely in what has become there, what is happening there in such a terrible way in Eastern Europe and as far as Asia, causing humanity to convulse. The point is that people learn how certain things are necessary for humanity today.

Economic life has its own conditions, just as intellectual life has its own. Anyone who, like me, has spent thirty years, half of his life, in Austria, which was precisely the experimental country for the work of the socially destructive forces – which is why Austria became the first victim of this world catastrophe – anyone who has lived in Austria with open eyes could see as early as the 1970s how it was rushing towards its end. I can refer to an example of how this country worked its way into decline on a large scale. In the 1970s, they also wanted to democratize parliament. How did they do that? They set up four constituencies: the constituency of the large landowners, the constituency of the chambers of commerce, the constituency of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and the constituency of the rural communities. All economic interests were drawn into parliament. The representatives of mere economic interests in four curiae were to make the decisions for everything concerning the state. They made them, of course, according to economic interests. As a result, neither the legitimate state interests nor the economic interests were given their due.

I could give you hundreds and hundreds of reasons that would show you that just as intellectual life must be separated from actual state life on the one hand, economic life must also be separated on the other. Just as intellectual life must be organized for the completely free human being and the administration of free human beings, economic life must be organized according to the associative principle.

What does that mean, an associative principle? Well, today we already have a striving for the formation of consumer associations. People who consume join together. And we have a movement in which people from the most diverse circles who produce join together. But ultimately we actually only have a surrogate, composed of consumers and producers. Only when production is organized according to need, not the barometer of profit, when the interrelations between consumers and producers are guided by those people who are experts in the various branches of the economy, when we we strive for totality in relation to spiritual life, but never in economic life, where we are in contact with people in other sectors, as soon as we take this seriously, the associative principle will be introduced into economic life. Association will not be organization. Although I have spent some of my life in Germany, the word 'organization' has a terrible connotation for me, and it was in Germany that I first experienced what it means to want to organize everything possible. You achieve terrible things when you always want to organize from a central point. Association is not organization. There the individualities remain in full effect, join together, so that through the union a collective judgment comes about. You can read more about this in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” and in the book “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung” (In the Execution of the Threefold Order), which summarizes a number of articles that I have published in the Stuttgart journal “Die Dreigliederung”, which is published by the Bund für Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus.

In it, I showed how these associations can be formed out of real practical economic life; how these associations will lead to fair pricing, to tolerable pricing. Whereas today we only have random pricing, it will be a matter of pricing that really arises from associative cooperation between consumers and producers. For in economic life, the price question is the central question of the whole economic existence. Those who do not realize that prices must be regulated above all by associations and not by statistics or the like, but by the living interaction in associations, do not know what is important. There is no need to be afraid of bureaucracy; it will certainly not be greater than it is today. But the fact that the same people who are involved in practical business life will also be the leaders will simplify the whole process. And everyone will receive enough when they produce something for themselves and their families, for the other things they have to provide for, until they have produced the same product again. Roughly speaking: if I make a pair of boots, I must receive enough for it to make another pair of boots. This is not to be laid down in some utopian way, but will be the final result when the associations are in existence as I have described them in my book, The Core of the Social Question. The essential thing about this impulse of the threefold social organism is that it contains nothing utopian, but is born entirely out of practical life and the demands of the time. Knowledge of the subject and expertise must guide spiritual life; knowledge of the subject and professional ability must guide economic life in associations that combine to form a large world economic association independent of national borders.

With regard to the spiritual and economic life, majority decisions are an absurdity; everything must develop out of expertise and professional competence. Majority decisions, real democracy, is only possible for those matters in which every person is competent. There is a wide range of political and legal matters that then remain between a free spiritual life and an economic life based on the principle of association. These are all those matters in which every mature person faces the other as an equal in parliamentary life, where all the questions are decided that then remain by themselves from economic life and spiritual life.

Strangely enough, the experts have objected that they understand that in the tripartite social organism there must be free spiritual life and associative economic life, but then there is nothing left for state life. — This is very characteristic. Modern state life has absorbed so much of the economic and intellectual life, even in terms of ideas, that it has not developed the most important things, so that experts have no idea what tasks state life can perform.

What I have presented to you today is only a sketch. It is further developed in the books mentioned. But it is basically linked to the most intense historical necessities.

We see the great human ideals of freedom, equality and fraternity radiating from the 18th century into our own. How could we not feel what lies in these three great human impulses! And yet, there were clever people in the course of the 19th century who showed irrefutably that freedom, equality and fraternity cannot coexist in a unified state. Thus, on the one hand, we have the strange phenomenon that our hearts beat faster when we hear about these three great human ideals, when we feel them inwardly, but on the other hand, the clever statesman - and I say this quite without irony - can prove that these three ideals are incompatible in the unified state. What is the reason for this? The reason is that in the eighteenth century people felt that liberty, equality and fraternity were incontrovertible ideals and impulses of humanity. But they were still under the illusion that everything had to be done by the unified state. Today we must mature to the threefold social organism. Only in it will liberty, equality and fraternity be truly realized. In a free spiritual life, which I hope can really be brought to light by a world school association, real freedom for people will prevail. In the state life, which stands between the free spiritual life and economic life, everything will be built on equality; in its administration there will only be those things in which every mature person is competent and can face another mature person as an equal. In economic life, consumer and producer interests will join together in associations, find a balance and ultimately culminate in a pricing structure that respects people.

We will have an opportunity to incorporate the three great ideals of human development if we free ourselves from the suggestion of the unitary state by striving for: freedom in the spiritual life, equality in the state life or political or legal life - the second link in the social organism - and fraternity in the associatively organized economic life, which results from the objectivity of production and consumption.

Freedom in spiritual life, equality in state life, fraternity in economic life: only this gives the three greatest social ideals of humanity – freedom, equality, fraternity – their proper meaning.

When a person who has concerned himself for some time with the world conception of spiritual science permits the various thoughts, ideas, and knowledge he has thereby acquired to work upon him, this knowledge suggests to him the most manifold questions. Indeed, one develops oneself as a spiritual scientist through associating such questions—which are in reality questions of sensation, feeling (Gemuet), and character, in short, questions of life—with the ideas of spiritual science.

These ideas do not serve merely to satisfy our theoretical or scientific curiosity. Rather, they elucidate the riddles of life, the mysteries of existence. Indeed, these thoughts and ideas become truly fruitful for us only when we no longer merely think, feel, and sense their content and significance but when, under their influence, we learn to look differently at the world about us. These ideas should permeate us with warmth; they should become impulses in us, forces of feeling (Gemuet) and mind. This they do increasingly when the answers that we have obtained to certain questions present us in turn with new questions, when we are led from question to answer, and the answer gives rise to further questions, and so on. In this way we advance in spiritual knowledge and in spiritual life.

It will be some time yet before it will be possible to reveal in public lectures the more intimate aspects of spiritual life to present-day humanity, but the time is approaching when the more intimate questions can be discussed within our own groups. In this connection it will continually happen that new members of the Anthroposophical Society may be taken by surprise by one thing or another and may be shocked. We would never progress in our work, however, if we were not to advance to discussion of the more intimate questions of life out of the depths of spiritual scientific research and knowledge. Today, therefore—though it may give rise to misconceptions on the part of those of you who have immersed yourselves in spiritual life for only a comparatively short time—we shall once more bring before our souls some of the more intimate facts of spiritual knowledge.

Without doubt, a significant question arises before us when we do not merely consider abstractly the idea of reincarnation, of repeated earthly lives, but when instead we allow ourselves to become thoughtfully absorbed in contemplation of this fact of spiritual life. Then, with the answer given to us in reincarnation, which provides such valuable fruit for our lives, there will in turn arise fresh questions. We may, for example, raise the following query: if a person lives on earth more than once, if he returns again and again in new embodiments, what can be the deeper meaning of this repeated passing through life? As a rule, this is answered by saying that we undoubtedly keep ascending higher in this way, and, through experiencing in later earthly lives the fruits of previous lives, we finally perfect ourselves. This, however, still represents a rather general, abstract opinion. It is only through more exact knowledge of the whole meaning of earthly life that we penetrate the significance of repeated lives on earth. If, for example, our earth were not to change, if man were to keep returning to an earth that remained essentially the same, then indeed there would be little to learn through successive embodiments or incarnations. On the contrary, their real meaning for us lies in the fact that each of these incarnations on earth presents us with fresh fields of learning and experience. This is not so apparent over short periods, but if we survey long stretches of time, as we are able to do through spiritual science, it becomes obvious at once that the epochs of our earth assume quite different forms and that we continually face new experiences.

Here we must realize something else, however. We must bear in mind these changes in the life of the earth itself, for if we neglect something that should be learned, something that should be experienced during a certain epoch of our earthly evolution, then, although we will come again into a new incarnation, we will have missed something entirely; we will have failed to allow something to stream into us that we should have allowed during the preceding epoch. As a result we will be unable in the succeeding period to employ our forces and faculties in the right way.

Speaking still quite generally, one can say that during our time something is possible on earth, almost anywhere on the globe, that was not possible, for example, during the previous incarnations of the people who are living now. It seems strange, but this fact is nonetheless of definite, indeed, of great significance. In the present incarnation it is possible for a certain number of persons to come to spiritual science, that is, to take up such conclusions of spiritual research as can be taken up today in the field of spiritual science. Of course, it may be regarded to be of trifling significance that a few people should come together who allow the discoveries of spiritual research to stream into them. Those who find this of little import, however, do not understand at all the significance of reincarnation and of the fact that one can take something up only during a particular incarnation. If one fails to take it up, one has missed something entirely and will lack it then in the following incarnations.

We must above all impress it upon our minds that what we learn today through spiritual science unites with our souls and that we bring it with us again when we descend into the next incarnation.

We will endeavor today to gain an understanding of what this means for our souls. Toward this end we must link together many facts of spiritual life, which are more or less new or even entirely unknown to you, with much that you already know from other lectures and from your reading. To begin with, we must go back to earlier periods in the evolution of humanity. We have often looked back to earlier periods of our earthly evolution. We have remarked that we are now living in the fifth period after the great Atlantean catastrophe. This fifth period was preceded by the fourth or Greco-Latin period, in which the Greek and Latin peoples indicated the principle ideas and feelings for the earth-will. This, in turn, was preceded by the third or Egyptian-Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian period, and this by the ancient Persian, which followed the ancient Indian. If we delve even further into antiquity, we come upon the great Atlantean catastrophe that destroyed an ancient continent, an ancient mainland, Atlantis, which once extended into the place where today lies the Atlantic Ocean. This cataclysm gradually engulfed the continent and thereby gave our solid earth its present countenance. Then, going further back, we come upon still earlier periods that existed before the Atlantean catastrophe; we arrive at those civilizations and conditions of life that developed on this Atlantean continent, the civilizations of the Atlantean races. Even earlier conditions preceded these.

If one considers what history tells us—and it does not, indeed, reach very far back—one can fall quite easily into the belief (although this is, even in relation to shorter periods of time, an entirely unfounded belief) that things on earth have always appeared as they do now. This, however, is not the case. On the contrary, conditions on our earth have altered fundamentally, and the soul conditions of human beings have also changed to a tremendous extent. The souls of the persons sitting here were incarnated during each of these ancient periods in bodies that were in keeping with the various epochs, and they absorbed what was to be absorbed in these periods of earthly evolution. With each succeeding incarnation, then, the soul developed new faculties. Our souls were entirely different from what they are today—perhaps not so noticeably different during the Greco-Latin era, but in the old Persian period they differed greatly from those of today, and still more in the ancient Indian period. In those ancient periods, our souls were endowed with quite different faculties, and they lived under quite different conditions.

Today, therefore, in order that we may clearly understand each other with reference to what follows, we shall call before our mind's eye as distinctly as possible the nature of our souls in the age, let us say—so as to be dealing with something full of significance—after the Atlantean catastrophe, when they were incarnated in the bodies that were possible on earth only during the first Indian civilization. We must not understand this first Indian civilization as having been of value only in India. The Indian people were at that time merely the most advanced, the most important, but the civilization of the whole earth derived its characteristic qualities from what the leaders indicated to the ancient Indians.

If we consider our souls as they were at that time, we must first say that the kind of knowledge human beings have today was as yet utterly impossible. At that time there was no such clearly defined consciousness of self, no such clearly defined I-consciousness. It had hardly occurred to human beings that they were I's. To be sure, the I already existed as a force in human beings, but knowledge of the I is something different from the force of the I, from its effectiveness. Human beings were not yet endowed with such an intimate inner life as they now have. They possessed instead entirely different faculties, for example, what we have often called an ancient, shadowy clairvoyance.

When we consider the human soul as it was during the daytime in that period, we find that it did not actually feel itself to be an I; instead, man felt himself to be a member of his tribe, of his people. Just as the hand is a member of the body, so the separate I represented, as a member, the whole community formed by the tribe, the people. Man did not yet perceive himself as an individual I, as he does today; it was the tribal-I, the folk-I, on which he fixed his attention. One thus lived during the day not knowing clearly that one was a human being. When evening came, however, and one passed into sleep, consciousness did not become totally darkened as it does today, but instead the soul during sleep was able to perceive spiritual facts. One thus perceived in one’s environment, for example, facts of which the modern dream is only a shadow—spiritual events, spiritual facts, of which the dreams of the present day are as a rule no longer true representations. Such were the perceptions of the human beings of that time, so that they knew that a spiritual world existed. To them the spiritual world was a reality, not through any kind of logic, through anything that required proof, but simply because each night they found themselves within the spiritual world, though only with a dull and dreamlike consciousness.

That, however, was not the essential thing. Besides the conditions of sleeping and waking, there were also in between states during which the human being was neither wholly asleep nor wholly awake. At such times the I-consciousness abated even more than by day, but at the same time the perception of spiritual events, that dreamlike clairvoyance, was substantially stronger than during the night. There were thus intermediate states in which human beings lacked consciousness of self, to be sure, but in which they were endowed with clairvoyance. In such states the human being was as though entranced, so that he knew nothing of himself. He was not able to know, “I am a man,” but he clearly knew “I am a member of a spiritual world in which I am able to perceive; I know that there is a spiritual world.” These were the experiences of the human souls of that time, and this consciousness, this life in the spiritual world, was much clearer still in the Atlantean period—very much clearer. When we survey this, therefore, we look back to an ancient era of dim, dreamlike clairvoyance for our souls, which gradually diminished during human evolution.

If we had remained at the stage of this ancient, dreamlike clairvoyance, we could not have acquired the individual I-consciousness we have today. We could never have known that we are human beings. We had to lose that awareness of the spiritual world in order to exchange it for I-consciousness. In the future, we shall have both at the same time. While maintaining our I-consciousness, we shall all gain once more what amounts to full clairvoyance, as is possible today only to one who has traveled the path of initiation. In the future, every person will be able once more to look into the spiritual world and yet feel himself as a human being, as an I.

Picture to yourselves again what has taken place. The soul has passed from incarnation to incarnation. At first it was clairvoyant; later, the consciousness of becoming an I grew ever more distinct and with it the possibility of forming one's own judgments. As long as one still looks clairvoyantly into the spiritual world and does not feel oneself to be an I, it is impossible to form judgments, to combine thoughts. The ability to form judgments gradually emerged, but in exchange the old clairvoyance diminished with each succeeding incarnation. A person dwelt less and less in those states in which he could look into the spiritual world. Instead, he became acclimated to the physical plane, cultivated logical thinking, and felt himself as an I; clairvoyance thereby gradually receded. The human being now perceives the outer world and becomes ever more entangled in it, but his connection with the spiritual world becomes more tenuous. One can therefore say that in the distant past man was a kind of spiritual being, because he associated directly with other spiritual beings, was their companion, so to speak; he felt that he belonged with other spiritual beings to whom he can no longer look up with normal senses today. As we know, there are also today, beyond the world that immediately surrounds us, other spiritual worlds inhabited by other spiritual beings, but the person of today cannot look into those worlds with his ordinary consciousness. Earlier, however, he dwelt in them, both during the sleeping consciousness of the night and in that intermediate state of which we spoke. He lived in the spiritual world and had intercourse with these other beings. He can no longer do this normally. He has been, as it were, cast out of his home, the spiritual world, and with each new incarnation he becomes more and more firmly established in this world of the earth below.

In the sanctuaries of spiritual life and in those fields of knowledge and science in which such things were still known, it was always taken into consideration that our incarnations have passed through these different earthly periods. They looked back to an ancient period, even before the Atlantean catastrophe, when human beings dwelt in direct contact with the gods, or spirits, and when they naturally had entirely different feelings and sensations. You can imagine that the human soul must have had quite different sensations in an age when it knew certainly that it could look up to the higher beings and when it was aware of itself as a member of that higher world. It has thus learned to feel and to sense entirely differently.

When you consider these facts, you must picture to yourselves that we can learn to speak and to think today only if we grow up among humankind, because these faculties can be acquired only among human beings. If a child were to be cast upon some lonely island and were to grow up there, lacking association with human beings, he would be unable to acquire the faculties of thinking and speaking. We thus see that the way in which any being develops depends in part on the kind of beings among which it lives and matures. Evolution is affected by this fact. You can observe this among animals. It is known that dogs removed from association with human beings to some place where they never meet a human being actually forget how to bark. As a rule, the descendants of such dogs are unable to bark at all. Something depends upon whether a being grows up and lives among one kind of being or another kind. You can therefore imagine that it makes a difference whether you dwell on the physical plane among modern human beings or whether you—the same souls, as it were—lived earlier among spiritual beings in a spiritual world that can no longer be penetrated by the normal vision of today. At that time the soul developed differently; the human being had within him different impulses when he dwelt among the gods. The human being developed one kind of impulse among men and another kind when he dwelt with gods.

A higher knowledge has always known this; such a knowledge has always looked back to that time when human beings were in direct intercourse with divine-spiritual beings, on account of which the soul felt itself to belong to the divine-spiritual world. This, however, also engendered forces and impulses in the soul that were divine-spiritual in a totally different sense from the forces of today. At that time, when the soul still operated in such a way that it felt itself to be a part of the higher world, a will spoke out of this soul that also derived from the divine-spiritual world. One could say that this will was inspired, because the soul dwelt among the gods. This period when man was still united with the divine-spiritual beings is spoken of in the ancient wisdom as the Golden Age or Krita Yuga. We must look back to a time preceding the Atlantean catastrophe to find the greater part of this age.

Afterward, a time followed when human beings no longer felt their connection with the spiritual world so strongly as during Krita Yuga, when they felt their impulses to be less determined by their association with the gods, when even their vision began to grow dimmer regarding the spirit and the soul. They retained the memory, however, of having dwelt with the spirits and the gods. This was especially distinct in the ancient Indian world. There they spoke quite easily of spiritual matters; they could call attention to the outer world of physical perception and yet, as we say, recognize the maya or illusion in it, because human beings had had these physical perceptions for only a comparatively short time. That was the situation in ancient India. The souls in ancient India no longer saw the gods themselves, but they still saw spiritual realities and lower spiritual beings. The higher spiritual beings were still visible to a few people, but a living companionship with the gods was obscured even to these. Will impulses from the divine-spiritual world had already disappeared. It was still possible, however, to glimpse spiritual realities during particular states of consciousness: during sleep and during the intermediate state we have already mentioned. The most important realities of the spiritual world, however, which had previously been a matter of experience, had become merely a sort of knowledge of the truth, like something that the soul still knew distinctly but that had only the effect of knowledge, of truth. To be sure, human beings were still in the spiritual world, but their assurance of it was less strong in this later time than it had been before. This is known as the Silver Age or Treta Yuga.

Following this came the period of the incarnations in which human vision became more and more cut off from the spiritual world, became more and more adjusted to the immediate outer world of the senses and accordingly more firmly entrenched in this world of the senses. This period, during which emerged the inner I-consciousness, the consciousness of being human, is known as the Bronze Age or Dvapara Yuga. Although human beings no longer had the lofty, direct knowledge of the spiritual world belonging to earlier periods, at least something of the spiritual world still remained in humanity in general. One could perhaps describe this by comparing it to human beings of the present day who, when they grow older, retain something of the joy of youth. It has indeed fled, but once having experienced it, one knows it and can speak of it as something with which one is familiar. Similarly, the souls of that time were still somewhat familiar with what leads to the spiritual worlds. This is the essential feature of Dvapara Yuga.

A period followed when even this familiarity with the spiritual world ceased, when, as it were, the doors of the spiritual world were closed. Thereafter, human vision became so confined to the outer world of the senses and to the intellect that elaborated the sense impressions that they could now only reflect upon the spiritual world. This is the lowest means by which something about the spiritual world can be known. What human beings now actually knew from their own experience was the physical, sensible world. If human beings wished to know something of the spiritual world, they had to accomplish this through reflection. This is the period when human beings became the most unspiritual and accordingly the most attached to and rooted in the world of the senses. This was necessary in order that consciousness of self might gradually attain the peak of its evolution, since only through the sturdy opposition of the outer world could man learn to distinguish himself from the world and to sense himself as an individual being. This last period is called Kali Yuga or the Dark Age.

I should like to emphasize that these expressions can also be used to refer to more extensive epochs. The designation of Krita Yuga, for example, may be applied to a much broader period, since before the Golden Age even existed, the human being participated with his experience in still higher spheres; hence, all these still earlier periods might be included in the term “Golden Age.” If one is moderate, so to speak, in one's claims, however, if one is content with that measure of spiritual experience that has been described, it is possible to divide in this way what has occurred in the past. Definite periods of time can be assigned to all such eras. To be sure, evolution moves forward slowly, through gradual stages, but there are certain boundaries of which we may say that prior to this, such a thing was primarily true, and after this some other condition of life and consciousness prevailed. Accordingly, we must calculate that, in the sense in which we first used the term, Kali Yuga began approximately in the year 3101 BC. We thus see that our souls have appeared repeatedly on earth in new incarnations, during which human vision has become increasingly shut off from the spiritual world and at the same time ever more restricted to the outer world of the senses. We thus see that our souls actually come with each new incarnation into new conditions from which something new can always be learned. What we can gain from Kali Yuga is the possibility of becoming established in our I-consciousness. This was not possible previously, because the human being had first to absorb the I into himself.

When souls have neglected in a given incarnation what that particular epoch has to offer, it is very difficult to make up for the loss in another epoch. They must then wait a very long time before it becomes possible to make good the loss in a certain way, but we certainly must not depend on this chance. Let us, therefore, remember that something essential took place at the time when, as it were, the doors of the spiritual world were made fast. That was the period in which John the Baptist worked, as well as the Christ. It was essential for this time, which had already witnessed the passing of 3,100 years of the Dark Age, that the people living then had all incarnated several times, or at least once or twice, during this Dark Age. I-consciousness had become firmly established, memory of the spiritual world had already evaporated, and, if human beings did not wish to lose all connection with the spiritual world, they had to learn to experience the spiritual within the I. They had to develop the I in such a way that this I, within its inner being, could at least be sure that there is a spiritual world, that man belongs to this spiritual world, and that there are also higher spiritual beings. The I had to make itself capable of inwardly feeling, of believing in, the spiritual world.

If, in the time of Christ Jesus, someone were to have expressed what was indeed the truth in that period, he might have said, “Once upon a time human beings were able to experience the kingdom of heaven outside of their own I's, in those spiritual distances they reached when they emerged from their lower selves. The human being had to experience the kingdom of heaven, the spiritual world, at a distance from the I. Now this kingdom of heaven cannot be so experienced; now the human being has changed so much that the I must experience this kingdom within itself. The kingdom of heaven has approached man to such an extent that it now works into the I.” John the Baptist proclaimed this to humanity, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” that is, approaches the I. Previously, it was to be found outside of man, but now man must embrace in the very core of his being, in the I, a kingdom of heaven now come near at hand.

Precisely because in this Dark Age, in Kali Yuga, man was no longer able to go forth from the world of the senses into the spiritual world, the divine being, the Christ, had to come down into the physical, sensible world. This is the reason that Christ had to descend into a man of flesh, into Jesus of Nazareth, in order that through beholding the life and deeds of Christ on the physical earth, human beings in physical bodies might gain a connection with the kingdom of heaven, with the spiritual world. The period when Christ walked upon earth thus fell in the midst of Kali Yuga, of the Dark Age, when human beings who comprehended their time and did not live in it in a dull and unenlightened way could say to themselves, “It is necessary that the God should descend among human beings in order that a connection with the spiritual world that has been lost can be won again.”

If there had been no human beings at that time capable of understanding this, capable of establishing an active soul connection with the Christ, all human connection with the spiritual world would gradually have been lost and human beings would not have accepted into their I's the connection with the kingdom of heaven. If all the human beings living at such a crucial time had persisted in remaining in darkness, it might have happened that this significant event would have passed by them unnoticed. Then human souls would have become withered, desolate, and depraved. To be sure, they would have continued to incarnate for a time without the Christ, but they would not have been able to implant in their I's what was necessary for them to regain their connection with the kingdom of heaven. It might have happened that the event of the appearance of Christ on earth could have been overlooked by everyone, just as it passed unnoticed, for example, by the inhabitants of Rome. Among these it was said, “Somewhere in a dingy side street lives a strange sect of horrid people, and among them lives a detestable spirit who calls himself Jesus of Nazareth and who preaches to the people, inciting them to all kinds of heinous deeds.” That is how much they knew of Christ in Rome at a certain period! You are perhaps also aware that it was the great Roman historian, Tacitus, who described Him in some such way about a hundred years after the events in Palestine.

Indeed, it is true, not everyone realized that something of the utmost importance had taken place, an event which, striking into the unearthly darkness as divine light, was capable of carrying human beings over Kali Yuga! The possibility for further evolution was given to humanity through the fact that there were certain souls who comprehended that moment in time, who knew what it meant that Christ had walked upon the earth.

If you were to imagine yourselves for a moment in that period, you could then easily say, “Yes, it was quite possible to live at that time and yet know nothing of the appearance of Christ Jesus on the physical plane! It was possible to dwell on earth without taking this most significant event into one's consciousness.” Might it not then also be possible today that something of infinite importance is taking place and that human beings are not taking it into their consciousness? Could it not be that something tremendously important is taking place in the world, taking place right now, of which our own contemporaries have no presentiment? This is indeed so. Something highly important is taking place that is perceptible, however, only to spiritual vision. There is much talk about periods of transition. We are indeed living in one, and it is a momentous one. What is important is that we are living just at the time when the Dark Age has run its course and a new epoch is just beginning, in which human beings will slowly and gradually develop new faculties and in which human souls will gradually undergo a change.

It is hardly to be wondered at that most human beings are in no way aware of this, considering that most human beings also failed to notice the occurrence of the Christ event at the beginning of our era. Kali Yuga came to an end in the year 1899; now we must adapt ourselves to a new age. What is beginning at this time will slowly prepare humanity for new soul faculties.

The first signs of these new soul faculties will begin to appear relatively soon now in isolated souls. They will become more clear in the middle of the fourth decade of this century, sometime between 1930 and 1940. The years 1933, 1935, and 1937 will be especially significant. Faculties that now are quite unusual for human beings will then manifest themselves as natural abilities. At this time great changes will take place, and Biblical prophecies will be fulfilled. Everything will be transformed for the souls who are sojourning on earth and also for those who are no longer within the physical body. Regardless of where they are, souls are encountering entirely new faculties. Everything is changing, but the most significant event of our time is a deep, decisive transformation in the soul faculties of man.

Kali Yuga has run its course, and now human souls are beginning to develop new faculties, faculties that—because this is precisely the purpose of the age—will cause souls, seemingly out of themselves, to exhibit certain clairvoyant powers that were necessarily submerged in the unconscious during Kali Yuga. There will be a number of souls who will have the singular experience of having I-consciousness and at the same time the feeling of living in another world, essentially an entirely different world from the one of their ordinary consciousness. It will seem shadowy, a dim presentiment, as it were, as though one born blind were to have been operated on and had his sight restored. Through what we call esoteric training, these clairvoyant faculties will be acquired much more readily, but because humanity progresses they will appear, at least in rudimentary form, in the most elementary stages, in the natural course of human evolution.

It might easily happen in our epoch (indeed, more easily than has ever been the case before) that human beings would not be able to comprehend such an event that is of the utmost significance for humanity. It could be that they would fail to grasp that such a thing is an actual glimpse into the spiritual world, though still only shadowy and dim. There might, for example, be so much wickedness, such great materialism on earth that the majority of humanity would not show the slightest understanding but would consider those people who had this clairvoyance as fools and would clap them into insane asylums along with others whose souls develop in a muddled fashion. This epoch could pass by humanity without notice, as it were, although we are letting the call sound forth today, even as John the Baptist, as the forerunner of Christ, and Christ Himself once let it resound: A new age is at hand, in which the souls of human beings must take a step upward into the kingdom of heaven!

It could easily happen that this great event might pass by without the understanding of human beings. If, then, in the years between 1930 and 1940, the materialists were to triumph and say, “Yes, there have indeed been a number of fools but no sign of the great happenings that were anticipated,” it would not disprove what we have said. If they were to triumph, however, and if humanity overlooked these events, it would be a great misfortune. Even if they were unable to perceive the great occurrence that can take place, it will nonetheless occur.

The event to which we refer is that human beings can acquire the new faculty of perception in the etheric realm—a certain number of human beings to begin with, followed gradually by others, because humanity will have 2,500 years in which to evolve these faculties increasingly. Human beings must not miss the opportunity offered in this period. To let it pass unheeded would be a great misfortune, and humanity would then have to wait until later to make up the loss, in order ultimately to develop this faculty. This ability will enable human beings to see in their surroundings something of the etheric world, which up to now they have not normally been able to perceive. The human being now sees only man's physical body; then, however, he will be able to see the etheric body, at least as a shadowy image, and also to experience the relationship of all deeper events in the etheric. He will have pictures and premonitions of events in the spiritual world and will find that such events are carried out on the physical plane after three or four days. He will see certain things in etheric pictures and will know that tomorrow, or in a few days, this or that will take place.

Such transformations will come about in human soul faculties, resulting in what may be described as etheric vision. And Who is bound up with this fact? That being Whom we call the Christ, Who appeared on earth in the flesh at the beginning of our era. He will never come again in a physical body; that event was unique. The Christ will return, however, in an etheric form in the period of which we have been speaking. Then human beings will learn to perceive Christ, because through this etheric vision they will grow upward toward Him Who no longer descends as far as into a physical body but only into an etheric body. It will therefore be necessary for human beings to grow upward to a perception of Christ, for Christ spoke truly when He said, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the earth.” He is here; He is in our spiritual world and those who are especially blessed can perceive Him always in this spiritual-etheric world.

St. Paul was convinced through such perception in the event of Damascus. This same etheric vision will be cultivated as a natural faculty by individual persons. To experience an event of Damascus, a Paul event, will be an increasing possibility for human beings in the coming period.

We thus comprehend spiritual science in a completely different sense. We learn that it imposes a tremendous responsibility upon us, since it is a preparation for the concrete occurrence of the reappearance of Christ. Christ will reappear because human beings will be raising themselves toward Him in etheric vision. When we grasp this, spiritual science appears to us as the preparation of human beings for the return of Christ, so that they will not have the misfortune to overlook this great event but will be ripe to seize the great moment that we may describe as the second coming of Christ. Man will be capable of seeing etheric bodies, and among these etheric bodies he will also be able to see the etheric body of Christ; that is, he will grow into a world in which the Christ will be visible to his newly awakened faculties.

It will then no longer be necessary to prove the existence of Christ through all sorts of documents, because there will be eye-witnesses to the presence of the living Christ, those who will experience Him in His etheric body. Through this experience they will learn that this being is the same as the One Who consummated the Mystery of Golgotha at the beginning of our era and that this is the Christ. Just as Paul was convinced near Damascus that this was the Christ, so there will be human beings who will be convinced through experiences in the etheric realm that Christ truly lives.

The greatest mystery of our time is this one concerning the second coming of Christ, and it takes on its true form in the way I have described. The materialistic mind, however, will in a certain way usurp this event. What has just been said, namely, that all genuine spiritual knowledge points to this time, will often be proclaimed in the coming years. The materialistic mind today corrupts everything, however, and so it will come about that this sort of mind will be unable to imagine that the souls of human beings must advance to etheric vision and with it to Christ in the etheric body.

The materialistic mind will conceive of this event as another descent of Christ into the flesh, as another physical incarnation. There will be a number of persons who in their colossal conceit will turn this to their own advantage by letting it be known among human beings that they are the reincarnated Christ. Accordingly, the coming period may bring us false Christs. Anthroposophists, however, should be people who will be so ripe for spiritual life that they will not confuse the second coming of Christ in a spiritual body, perceptible only to a higher vision, with such a reappearance in a physical body. That will be one of the direst temptations that will beset humanity. To help humanity overcome this temptation will be the task of those who learn through spiritual science to raise themselves to a comprehension of the spirit—of those who do not wish to drag the spirit down into matter but to ascend into the spiritual world themselves. It is in this way, therefore, that we must speak of the second coming of Christ and of the fact that we raise ourselves up to Christ in the spiritual world by acquiring etheric vision.

Christ is always present, but He is in the spiritual world; we can reach Him if we raise ourselves into that world. All anthroposophical teaching should be transformed in us into the strong wish to prevent humanity from letting this event pass by unnoticed but rather, in the time remaining at our disposal, gradually to educate a humanity that may be ripe to cultivate these new faculties and thereby to unite anew with the Christ. Otherwise, humanity would have to wait a long time for such an opportunity to be repeated—indeed, until another incarnation of the earth. If humanity were to ignore this event of the return of Christ, the vision of Christ in the etheric body would be limited to those who, through esoteric training, prove themselves to be ready to rise to such an experience. But the momentous event—the possibility that these faculties might be acquired by humanity in general and that this great event might, by means of these naturally developed faculties, be understood by all human beings—would be impossible for a long time to come.

We thus see that there is indeed something in our epoch that justifies the existence and the activity of spiritual science in the world. Its aim is not merely to satisfy theoretical needs or scientific curiosity. Spiritual science prepares human beings for this event, prepares them to relate themselves in the right way to their period and to see with the full clarity of understanding and cognition what is actually there but that may pass human beings by without being brought to fruition. This is its aim!

It will be of utmost importance to grasp this event of Christ's appearance, because other events will follow upon this. Just as other events preceded the Christ event in Palestine, so, after the period when Christ Himself will have become visible again to humanity in the etheric body, will those who previously foretold Him now become His successors. All those who prepared the way for Him will become recognizable in a new form to those who will have experienced the new Christ event. Those who once dwelt on earth as Moses, Abraham, and the prophets will again become recognizable to human beings. We shall realize that, even as Abraham preceded Christ, preparing His way, he has also assumed the mission of helping later with the work of Christ. The human being who is awake, who does not sleep through the greatest event of the near future, gradually enters into association with all those who, as patriarchs, preceded the Christ event; he unites with them. Then appears once more the great host of those toward whom we shall be able to raise ourselves. He who led humanity's descent into the physical plane appears again after Christ and leads man upward to unite him once more with the spiritual worlds.

Looking far back into human evolution, we see that there is a certain moment after which humanity may be said to be descending even further from its fellowship with the spiritual world and entering more and more into the material world. Although the following image has its material side, we may nevertheless use it here: man was at one time a companion of spiritual beings, his spirit dwelt within the spiritual world and, by reason of the fact that he dwelt in the spiritual world, he was a son of the gods. What constituted this constantly reincarnating soul, however, participated increasingly in the outer world. The son of the gods was then within man, who took delight in the daughters of the earth, that is, in those souls who had sympathy for the physical world. This, in turn, means that the human spirit, who had previously been permeated by divine spirituality, sank down into the physical world of the senses. He became the mate of the intellect, which is bound to the brain and which entangled him in the sense world. Now this spirit must find the path by which he descended and, climbing upward again, become once more the son of the gods. The son of man, which he has become, would perish here below in the physical world if he were not to ascend once more as son of man to the divine beings, to the light of the spiritual world, if he were not in the future to find delight in the daughters of the gods. It was necessary for the evolution of humanity that the sons of gods should unite with the daughters of men, with the souls that were fettered to the physical world, in order that, as son of man, the human being would learn to master the physical plane. It is necessary for the human being of the future, however, that, as the son of man, he shall find delight in the daughters of the gods, in the divine-spiritual light of wisdom with which he must unite himself in order to rise once again into the world of the gods.

The will shall be enkindled by divine wisdom, and the mightiest impulse toward this will arise when, for him who has prepared himself for it, the sublime etheric figure of Christ Jesus becomes perceptible. The second coming of Christ will be, for human beings who have developed clairvoyance naturally, the same as when the etheric Christ appeared to Paul as a spiritual being. He will appear once more to human beings, if they come to understand that these faculties that will arise through the evolution of the human soul are to be used for this purpose.

Let us use spiritual science so that it may serve not merely to satisfy our curiosity but in such a way that it will prepare us for the great tasks, the great missions of the human race for which we must grow ever more mature.

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Rudolf Steiner's Answers to Questions in Connection with the Preceding Lecture

When things are spoken of such as those we have discussed today, when we attempt to shed light upon the more intimate mysteries, let us not regard them thoughtlessly as one is likely to listen to certain things today, but let us be quite clear that anthroposophy should become for us something totally different from mere theory. Of course, the teaching must be there; how would one be able to rise to such thoughts as have been uttered here today if it were not possible to absorb them in the form of teaching? What is essential, however, is that it should not remain teaching but rather be remolded in our souls into traits of feeling (Gemuet) and character, into an entirely different disposition, and that it should thus make totally different human beings of us. It should guide us in making the right use of our incarnations, so that we may be able during their course to develop into something entirely different.

In trying to say not a word too much nor a word too little, I have not made more than fleeting reference to important subjects. What was said, however, is significant not only for those souls who will be incarnated on the physical plane in the period between 1930 and 1940 but also for those who will then be in the spiritual world, between death and a new birth. We must realize that souls in the spiritual world have an influence on the world of the living, though the latter may be quite unaware of it. Through the new Christ event, however, this relationship between those who are embodied here on the physical plane and those who are already in the spiritual world will become increasingly conscious. Cooperation between physically embodied human beings and spiritual beings will then be possible. This should already have been implied in our having visualised the reappearance of the prophets to human beings on earth.

Therefore, you must picture to yourselves that, when these great moments arrive in the future of humanity, human beings will work together with one another more consciously in the physical and in the spiritual worlds. Today this is not possible because of the lack of a common language. People here in the physical world use in their speech words descriptive only of physical things and physical conditions. Human beings between death and a new birth, however, live in a world quite different from the one immediately surrounding us, and they speak a different language. Of all that is spoken in our world, the dead can receive only what is spoken in spiritual science. Thus, in anthroposophy, we are concerned with something that will be increasingly intelligible to the dead. What we say in this province also benefits those who are between death and a new birth.

Humanity is ripening toward a time when the influences of the spiritual world will be felt ever more widely. The tremendous occurrences of the coming period will be discernible in all worlds. Even the human beings between death and a new birth will have new experiences in the other world as a result of the new Christ event in the etheric world. Unless they have prepared themselves on earth to do so, however, they will no more be able to understand these events than will the human beings now incarnated on earth; they must have prepared themselves rightly to receive the events of this important moment. It is essential for all the souls now incarnated (regardless of whether or not they will still be embodied then) that they shall have prepared themselves for these significant coming events by taking up anthroposophical truths. Should they fail to do this, they will have to wait. If they have not received with their earthly consciousness what anthroposophy or spiritual science has to give, they will have to wait until they are again incarnated to have the possibility of receiving corresponding teachings here on earth. There are things that can be learned or experienced only on earth. One could say, for example, that in the spiritual world it is impossible to gain any knowledge of death, and a God had to descend to the physical world to be able to die. One cannot in any other world learn what the Mystery of Golgotha actually is in the same way as here in the physical world. We have been led down into the physical world to acquire what can only be acquired here. Christ descended among human beings because only here in the physical world could He give evidence to them, by causing them to experience something in the Mystery of Golgotha, of what was to bear far-reaching fruit in the spiritual world. The seeds, however, must be sown here in the physical world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the General Meeting last year you heard a course of lectures on Anthroposophy. This year I shall deliver a series entitled, Psychosophy, from a similar point of view, and later on it will be necessary to give a third course on Pneumatosophy. In this way the three cycles will combine and form a bridge connecting the three worlds in which we live. This will close the circle that takes us in a roundabout way back to our starting point.¹

Psychosophy is intended as a study of the human soul starting with what it can itself experience here in the physical world, but then ascending to higher realms in order to show that the life we encounter and can observe in the physical world leads up to glimpses of a higher soul life, from which the light of theosophy will come to meet us, as it were. A variety of considerations will occupy us during these lectures. Beginning with apparently simple matters, we will ascend to a contemplation of those phenomena of the soul life that we call attention, memory, passions, emotions. We will consider the realms of the true, the good and. the beautiful. Then we will examine the phenomena that affect human life beneficially or harmfully, out of which arise actual causes of sickness that at the present time intervene and influence our soul lives. This will bring us to the point where the psychic element enters our physical life, our daily work. We shall have to study the interaction of bodily weal and woe, and the forms of the soul life. Our observations will lead us up to the high ideals of human society, and we will consider phenomena of our daily life, such as the origin of means for passing the time and how these, in turn, affect the soul life and reveal themselves in manifold concatenations. Then the curious effects of boredom and much else will be presented, as well as remedies for poor memory, lack of forceful thinking, and the like.

You will readily understand that a detailed exposition of the soul life calls for consideration of the adjacent realms. Theosophy, of course, has provided you with ready mental images for relating the soul life of man to other realms. You are familiar with the organization of the nature of man as body, soul, and spirit, from which it is natural to infer that the soul life comes in contact on the one side with the bodily life and on the other with the spiritual life. This is the step that leads up from anthroposophy to psychosophy, and at some future time we must ascend from psychosophy to pneumatosophy.

If we would study this soul life by itself, within its two boundaries, we must ask what it is. Well, all that we are accustomed to call the outer world, all that we see before and about us—animals, plants, minerals, clouds, rivers—whatever we encounter on the physical plane, we do not include in our soul life, no matter what mental pictures we may add to our perceptions.

A rose, when encountered on the physical plane, is not a part of our soul life, but when the rose gives us pleasure, when it stimulates something like gratification in our soul, this fact then pertains to our soul life. To meet a person and to form a conception of his hair, his expression, etc., is not a function of the soul life, but to take an interest in him, to feel love or antipathy for him, that is an experience of the soul. That is the way in which matters pertaining to the soul must be characterized.

Now let us turn to something different. Suppose we are watching a man carrying out some action that induces the feeling in us of a good deed, morally laudable. A psychic experience of that sort comprises something more. Here it is not a question of how the action arose, nor even of whether we were moved by love or hate in estimating it; we find something beyond what has thus far been characterized. As soon as we judge an act to be good or bad, higher interests play a part. When we call an act good, we know that it would be wrong for this quality to depend upon our verdict. We must dissociate our personality from the question of whether an act is good or bad. True, the verdict must arise in us, but independent of ourselves. Nothing in the outer world can tell us that the act is a good one; the verdict must come about within ourselves, but uninfluenced by love or hate. In all such inner experiences that nevertheless have a significance independent of our inner frame of mind, so that it is immaterial whether we pass judgment or not—in all such experiences the spirit plays a part in the human soul. Thus we have characterized the relation of the soul to the outer world by reviewing these three cases precisely from the outer world.

Summing up, first, we observe something as pertaining to the outer world: the rose. Second, we experience something in connection with it: pleasure. Third, something arises in us, but something that must be independent of us: judgment (good or evil). The outer world must reveal itself to the soul by way of the body. Soul experiences take place wholly within us, and the spirit declares itself within the soul. The point is to keep firmly in mind that the soul flows and ebbs in inner facts.

It now remains to find something through which the character of our soul life is brought to our consciousness from within as well. Thus far we have considered the soul life as it is bounded from without. Now we shall see how it can be characterized from within, disregarding what is adjacent, and clearly expressing in a conception what we mean by the pure soul principle. We must acquire a mental picture of the nature of the soul as it has its being on the physical plane.

The basic character of pure soul, of pure psychic experience, can be described in two ways. Speaking accurately in regard to earthly conditions, and indicating the inner phenomena of the soul life exactly as far as its boundaries, there are in the first instance two conceptions that we can apply to man's pure soul experiences and to nothing else. The inner phenomena of the soul life—its inner fluctuation—clearly indicate its boundaries, and the attributes of these boundaries must be mentioned. My next task will therefore be to characterize these inner phenomena of the soul life, and this, as I said, can be done in two ways. We will devote today's lecture to gathering conceptions, but never mind; it will greatly help us to understand phenomena that concern us intimately. It is a matter of gleaning hints that are extraordinarily important in connection with the soul life, whether healthy or diseased.

One conception by which the pure soul principle can be characterized is reasoning. Reasoning is one activity of the soul, and all remaining psychic experiences can be summed up in what we may call the inner experiences of love and hate.

Rightly understood, these two conceptions—reasoning, and love and hate—comprise the entire inner soul life. Everything else denotes something that derives from without through the body or from within through the spirit. We shall see how fruitful a careful study of the two psychic activities can become. Everything pertaining to the soul, then, is either reasoning or living in love and hate; at bottom these two conceptions are the only pure soul activities. Reasoning on the one hand, loving and hating on the other—these are the forces of the soul life exclusively pertaining to it.

If we are to understand each other aright with regard to these two basic forces of the soul, it behooves us to visualize clearly first, the significance of reasoning within the soul life, and then, the role played in the soul life by love and hate. I refer to reasoning not from the standpoint of logic, but of the activity comprising the inner soul process of reasoning; not judgment, but the activity, reasoning.

If you are led to concede that the rose is red, you have reasoned; the activity of reasoning is involved. If you are inwardly constrained to say that the rose is red, that man is good, the Sis-tine Madonna is beautiful, that steeple is high, you are dealing with activities of the inner soul life that we designate as reasoning.

Now, how about love and hate? A little introspection will show you that we do not pass by the outer world in such a way that our soul remains untouched by the majority of external phenomena. Passing through a landscape you see cloud-capped mountain peaks, and you experience joy in your soul. What underlies this is that you love what you experience through this landscape. Whatever exists of joy or horror in an experience, that is love or hate. If love or hate hides in many kinds of soul experiences, that is merely because these accompany us incessantly from morning to night. If you see someone committing an evil deed and are repelled by it, you have a hidden experience of hate, exactly as you have when you turn from a malodorous flower. Love and hate accompany the soul life continually and so does reasoning.

If we now observe an important concomitant of reasoning, we can learn to know the phenomena of the inner soul life better still. It is this, that all reasoning has an effect in the soul life, and this fact is the key to the soul life. By forming the judgment, “the rose is red,” “that man is good,” you retain a result in the soul. It can be characterized this way: When you have given the verdict, the inference is the conception, “the red rose,” “the good man.” The verdict “the rose is red” has been transformed into the conception “the red rose.” As a being endowed with soul, you then continue to live with this conception. Every judgment is a confluence of conceptions. Here we have, on the one hand the rose, on the other, red. These flow toward each other and combine in the conception “the red rose,” which you carry with you in your further soul life.

This may sound dry, but it is indispensable for an understanding of the soul life. Neither the soul life nor its relation to the higher planes could be accurately comprehended without the knowledge that judgments converge into visualizations.

Experiences of love and hate, on the other hand, do not give rise to the question of how do they converge, but rather as to where they arise. In the case of reasoning, the question is, Whither? and the answer is. Toward the conception. But with regard to love and hate the question is. Whence? We will always find one impulse in soul experiences themselves that gives rise to love and hate, an impulse that breaks into the soul life from another quarter, as it were. All love and hate can finally be traced back to what within the soul life we call desire. Entering from another direction and underlying love and hate, as these manifest themselves in the soul, desire can always be found streaming into our soul lives. Into one side of it flows desire, manifesting itself in love and hate. On the other side the activity of reasoning leads to visualization.

Desire is something you can easily recognize as arising naturally out of the inner soul life. The external cause of it may not at all be known to you, but you do know that it appears in your inner soul life, and that invariably love and hate result. In like manner you realize that your verdict “the rose is red” arises in the soul, but when this verdict has culminated in a visualization, the latter must have external validity. Reasoning takes place in the soul; it arises out of the inner life. We can put it this way: primarily, desire—for reasons not known to us today—manifests itself in the soul and expresses itself in love and hate. But in the same way—also for unknown reasons—the soul is impelled to permit judgment to enter from the wellspring of its own being, and provided the verdict has been arrived at in a certain way, the visualization must be valid for the outer world.

It will seem strange to you that I should be so prolix in expounding the elementary concepts of the soul life. You may think that these matters could be skipped over more rapidly, and indeed, they could, but just because these relationships remain largely unnoticed in scientific circles, error after error is committed. I will mention one prime error common today. By drawing far-reaching conclusions, those guilty of this error become entangled in misconceptions; they start from entirely false premises. In many books on physiology you can find the statement that the raising of a hand or leg is brought about by the fact that we have two kinds of nerves. Those that run from the sense organs to the brain or the spinal cord and that transmit messages to the brain, so to speak, are supposed to be contrasted with another set, called motor nerves, as against the sensory or perceptive nerves. According to this theory, when an object is seen, the message of the sense organ is first carried to the brain, where the stimulus thus exerted is supposed to stream out into a nerve that leads to a muscle, and only then does the impulse arise that entails motion. According to spiritual science, however, that is not the case. What is called the motor nerve does, in fact, exist as a physical unit, but it does not serve to instigate the motion. It serves only to enable us to perceive the motion ourselves, to check up on it, to bring our own movement to consciousness. Just as the optic nerve, through which we perceive an external event, is a sensory nerve, so the muscle nerve leading to the hand is also a sensory nerve, whose function is to keep track of the movement of our hand. This example of faulty scientific thinking is a prime error that has poisoned all physiology and psychology.

Our task is clearly to understand the role played by these two elements of the soul, reasoning, and love and hate. They play an enormous role, for the entire soul life runs its course in manifold combinations of these two elements. We should misconstrue this soul life, however, if we failed to allow for extraneous forces, not properly psychic, that constantly enter in across the border. The first example that occurs to us, to be met with everywhere in daily life, around which, indeed, our everyday soul life is built, is that of sense experiences. These are the various experiences brought about by the ear, the eye, the tongue, the nose, etc. What we experience through our sense organs we take into our soul, in a way, and there it lives on. With this in mind we can actually speak of our soul reaching as far as a certain boundary, which is the boundary of the sense organs. We have posted sentinels, as it were, at the boundaries of our soul life, and what these sentinels report of the outer world we take into our soul life and carry further.

We can now ask about those impressions in the soul that we experience through our sense organs. What is represented within the soul life by what we experience through the ear as tone, through the eye as color, through the nose as smell? Well, the study of these sense experiences is as a rule pursued in a lopsided manner. Science fails to face the fact that the processes taking place at the boundaries of the soul life are composed of two factors, two elements. One element is perception, our immediate experience of the outer world. You hold the tone, the color, the smell, and so forth—that is, the impression of these—only as long as you are in contact with the external stimulus. The impression, the interaction of inner and outer factors, ceases at once when you turn away, close your eyes, or the like.

What does that prove? If you consider the immediate perception in conjunction with the fact that later you know something (you know the tone, the color, etc.), it proves that you have retained something of your experience of the outer world, even though the experience has ceased. What does this imply? That something has completely entered your soul life. Something that has become part of your soul life must inevitably run its course there because you carry it with you. If it were part of the outer world you could not carry it with you. You can continue to hold the impression of color, the perception of the color impression, only if it has remained within your soul.

It is necessary to distinguish between a sense perception proper and what you continue to carry in the soul, what you detach from the outer world. The experience you thus derive from objects we will call perception, and what you continue to carry in the soul, sensation. As a foundation, then, for subsequent expositions, keep in mind the sharp distinction between sense perceptions and what we retain as sensation (sentience). The perception of color ceases when you turn away; the sensation of it remains. Ordinarily such fine distinctions are unnecessary, but for these four lectures they are apposite.

So we continue on our way, carrying these sensations about with us in our soul. We now ask if it could be that these sensations, derived from external objects, constitute a new element of the soul life, as opposed to reasoning and the phenomena of love and hate, which we termed the exclusive elements? If that were the case I should have been guilty of omitting to name something that also constitutes an inner experience, namely, sentience. But that is not the way matters stand; sentience is not a separate element of the soul life.

If you have sensed the color red, the color red is not an inner soul experience, for it is the object that is red. If “red” were an inner soul experience your whole color-perception of red would avail you nothing. The quality “red” did not originate in your soul life. What did arise there was the activity in which you engaged for the purpose of carrying away with you something of the red. What you did while confronting the rose, that is inner soul life. This activity of your inner soul is in reality nothing more than a fusion of what I have described to you as the two basic elements of the soul life.

But then we must consider the following. If what I have told you of the two elements is true—if love and hate, deriving from desire, and reasoning lead to visualization—then what was characterized as sentience would have to be related to those two elements in the case of a sense experience as well. A sense experience must be accompanied by love and hate, and reasoning. Imagine you have a sense experience of color, and observe closely what happens:

Desire and reasoning flow to the boundary of the outer world and become visualization of the material object.

Above the heavy line is the outer world, below it the world of the soul. The line is the boundary. When at this boundary an object makes an impression upon the sense organs and induces an experience—for instance, of color, this experience must be met by the result of love and hate and of reasoning, emanating from the soul as visualization. Nothing else can flow out of the soul.

Note, however, an important distinction that can exist between different kinds of desire, different kinds of reasoning. As an example, let us assume that while you are waiting for a train, day-dreaming, the visualization of a disagreeable past experience appears in your soul life, and side by side with this appears another, namely, everything unpleasant that has happened to you since then as a result of that experience. Then you can sense how these two visualizations combine into a more intensive visualization of that distressing event. During this process nothing related to it has occurred in the outer world. A judgment has been reached that remains wholly within psychic experience. Nevertheless, love and hate appeared in the soul life; they amalgamated with the visualization, as it were. As you sit there dreaming, your environment need show nothing of all this; your surroundings are of no consequence; yet something occurs. A visualization comes about through love and hate, and reasoning, without any stimulus from without.

That is quite a different thing from confronting a sense experience. When we perform such an inner act—let judgments arise, provoke love and hate—we remain within the sea of our soul life. But when a sense experience arises we must advance to the boundary of the outer world, and there it is as though the currents of the soul life were directly stopped by the outer world.

Whenever a sense experience is involved we are stopped by the outer world. Desire, love and hate, flash to the boundary; the capacity for judgment flows there too, and both are obstructed at that boundary. The result is that reasoning and desire are checked. They are there, but the soul does not perceive them, and the sense sensation is brought about by this flowing to the boundary and there being stopped. The sense sensation is nothing but a phenomenon of love, hate and reasoning that remains unconscious, though these are obstructed and held fast from without (cf. previous diagram).

We can put it this way. Ebbing and flowing in the sea of our soul life, psychically substantial, is what can be designated love and hate, and reasoning. This manifests itself in various ways.

When a judgment is reached within the soul itself, the soul is aware of the activity of reasoning as visualization.

When the soul directs the activity toward the outer world, it must stop at the boundary and it perceives the outer world: perception.

When, however, the soul directs the activity toward the outer world but stops before it is reached, sensation arises. Sensation is the confluence of desire and reasoning within the soul life.

If we consider what the soul life ordinarily comprises, we find that our inner experiences really consist, as a rule, of what we have carried away with us from sense experiences. A little introspection will convince you of this. If you want to create higher visualizations for yourself, you will notice how helpful it is for your inner soul life to try to substantialize what is not of the senses, to imagine it pictorially, to clothe it in a garb that is faintly a sensation of color or tone. Speech itself could teach us how extensive is the soul's need to express higher things in such a way as to symbolize them in sense sensations. As a rule, the symbol is a necessity, though people usually have no inkling of the fact, because in symbols the likeness is shadowy, nebulous.

Try, for a moment, to imagine something without the aid of a symbol—a triangle, for example; a triangle without color or any link with any sense sensation. Just try it, and you will see how difficult it is to visualize a triangle un-symbolized, that is, a visualization not associated with any sense picture. Most people are quite incapable of accomplishing this. Symbols alone provide the possibility of rising to higher visualizations. Even language is aided by symbolization. Observe how we are forced at every turn to symbolize speech. I said that a symbol must be verknüpft (linked) with the visualization of a triangle: what a crude conception, knüpfen!¹ Even words themselves disclose the prevalence of symbols, and we see to how great an extent the soul life consists of products of sensations.

We have just one conception that cannot be directly classed as an outer sense experience, although it keeps recurring as an inner soul experience and we must continually relate it to the outer sense experiences: the conception of the ego. If we face the purely psychic state of affairs, we must concede that man lives largely in a world of sense sensations. In this world the conception of the ego keeps bobbing up and crowding forward, but this ego is not always present as a conception. It would be foolish to assume that the ego conception could be present continually or for a prolonged period. Fancy what it would be like to keep saying to yourself, to keep visualizing incessantly, I, I, I ...! No, that is not what you do. You have other conceptions, such as red, blue, tone, large, small. Nevertheless you know that your visualizing occurs in your ego, that your ego must participate whenever a sense experience takes place. What we call soul experience is in a sense at the same time ego experience. You know that soul experiences—desire, reasoning, etc.—must always be opposed by the ego, but no matter how insistently visualizations are stimulated by the outer world, the conception of the ego can never possibly be created merely through the outer world. It does not enter from without. True, the ego sensation, the ego conception, invariably accompanies these sense conceptions that originate in the outer world, but it does not itself arise there. It emerges from the sea of the soul life and, as a visualization, joins the other visualizations, as it were.

Out of the sea of soul experience the other sense experiences emerge as well, but only when outer causes are in question. In this fact is to be seen primarily the sole difference between the ego sensation and sensations consequent upon sense perception. A significant phenomenon thus confronts us. In the midst of our soul life there appears a conception that joins the others coming from without. How is this to be explained?

Among present-day philosophers and psychologists, even outside the anthroposophical movement, there are some who point out the importance of the ego conception, but strangely enough these psychologists, no matter how well-meaning, invariably overshoot the mark. The French philosopher, Bergson, was one who emphasized the significance, the distinctive character, of the ego conception. From this the philosophers infer a permanence of this ego conception, or at least, that it points to something permanent, and they substantiate this view as follows. The ego differs from all other experiences of the senses and the soul by participating, as it were, in the other experiences and conceptions in such a way as to lend them their true form; ergo, it must be of a permanent nature.

Here, however, a grave error appears, and a certain objection that must be raised against Bergson's argument proves quite fatal for his inference. Let us assume that the ego conception yielded something that constitutes the soul within itself. The question would then necessarily arise as to what happens to this during sleep at night. The ego conception ceases entirely, of course, during sleep.

All these concepts concerning the participation of the ego in visualizations apply only to our waking life. They merely appear anew every morning. If the ego conception were to prove anything concerning the permanence of the ego, it would have to remain present during sleep. From the absence of the ego conception during the night it follows that after death it need not necessarily be present either. Thus there is no testimony available for the permanence and the immortality of the ego. It might be lacking, for it disappears every day.

Hence we must keep in mind that, on the one hand, the presence of the ego conception without external stimulus is significant, but that, on the other, this presence in no way proves the permanence of the ego, as the latter is away during sleep. In this way we have today reached an inference upon which we shall build further.

We have seen that two elements emerge from the surging sea of the soul life: reasoning, leading to visualization, and love and hate, deriving from desire. At the boundary of our soul life is the confluence, of which we are not aware, of desire and reasoning. An ego conception appears without external stimulus, but it shares its destiny with the other visualizations of the soul life; just as tone, color, and so forth, come and go, so does the ego conception emerge and disappear.

In the following lectures we will examine the connection of this ego conception, this soul center, with the other conceptions of the soul life—sensation, desire, reasoning, love and hate.

• 1. A transcription by Dr. Steiner of Goethe's youthful poem. The Wandering Jew, referred to by Frau Marie Steiner toward the end of her Preface, was recited at the beginning of this lecture, following a few explanatory remarks. The original is little known in Germany and entirely unfamiliar to American or English readers, and it is unthinkable that Dr. Steiner's transcription of it could have any meaning for those unacquainted with the original. The extraordinary experiment, however, is so fully explained in the course of the lecture that both the object and the method are wholly clear, even without a knowledge of the poem in either version. Since Frau Marie Steiner was herself in doubt about the advisability of having it appear in the published version of the cycle, she would surely approve of omitting it in the translation.
• 1. Knüpfen means literally to knot together.