The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In this last lecture, I shall try as far as possible to complete what I have already said, and to bring forward certain practical considerations. In the ensuing discussion, I shall make such additions as may prove necessary.

The practical hints I propose to deal with to-day are not such as can be embodied in general formulae, but need to be greatly modified according to the particular situation and the persons applying them. For this very reason, it is necessary that we should gain Spiritual-Scientific insight into this sphere, which will enable you intelligently to adapt to the individual case the various steps to be taken. I would ask you to consider how little insight there is into that most important matter, the feeding of our farm animals. Merely to indicate new methods of feeding is not sufficient.

How, then, ought our farm animals to be fed? In my opinion, improvement will certainly come if, in the teaching of agriculture, an insight is gained into the essential meaning of feeding as such. This is what I shall try to do today. Completely wrong ideas prevail as to what nutrition signifies both for man and beast. It is not merely the crude process of taking in foodstuffs and after certain changes, of storing these up in the organism, excreting what is not needed. This view carries with it the idea, for instance, that the animal should not be overfed, that its food should be as nourishing as possible and thus the bulk of it be utilised. And if we are of a materialistic turn of mind, we like to distinguish between actual food-stuffs and such substances as promote what is called combustion in the organism. We then build up all sorts of theories and put them into practice, finding, as always, that some work and some do not_? or that they only work for a time, having to be modified in one way or another.

What else indeed could we expect? We speak of processes of combustion in the organism. But no such thing takes place there. The combination of any substance whatever with oxygen in the organism means something quite different from a process of combustion. Combustion is a process which takes place in mineral, inanimate nature, and gust as a living organism is something different from a quartz crystal, so what is called “combustion” in a living organism is not the same as the “dead” process of burning, but something which is living and even sentient. The mere fact of using words in this way has directed our thoughts along certain channels and has done great mischief. To speak of “combustion” in the organism is to speak in a slipshod way. This does not matter if, by instinct or tradition, we still retain a right view of the facts. But if these slip-shod expressions are subjected to an attack of “psychopathia Professoralis,” then clever theories begin to be built upon them. If we depend upon these theories, what we do will be hopelessly wide of the mark, for such theories no longer cover the facts of the case. This is characteristic of our times. We are always doing something which does not fit in with what is going on in Nature. In this matter of nourishment, therefore, it is important to learn with what we are really dealing.

Let us recall what I said yesterday about the plant as having a physical and etheric body and being more or less surrounded from above by the astral element. The plant does not reach the astral element but is surrounded by it. If the plant enters into a special relation with the astral element, as in the case or the formation of edible fruits, a kind of food is produced which will strengthen the astral element in the animal and human organism. If one can look into this process, the very “habitus” of a plant and so on reveals whether or not it is capable of promoting some process in the animal organism. But we must also consider the opposite pole. Here something of great importance takes place. I have touched on this before, but now that the general principles of nutrition are being established, I must emphasise it still more definitely.

Since we are dealing with feeding, let us start from the animal. In the animal, the threefold organism is not so sharply defined as it is in man. The animal has a system of nerve and senses and a metabolic and limb system. These are clearly divided, the one from the other. But in many animals the limits of intermediate rhythmic system are indefinite; both nerves and senses system and metabolic system trespass upon the limits of the rhythmic system. We should therefore choose other terms when we speak of animals. In man one is quite right in speaking of a three-fold organism: but in the case of animals one ought to speak of the nerve and senses system as being localised primarily in the head, and of the metabolic and limb system as being in the hind quarters and limbs but at the same time diffused throughout the whole body. In the middle of the body the metabolism becomes more rhythmical as does also the nervous system, and there both flow into one another. The rhythmic system has a less independent existence in the animal. Rather the opposite poles become indistinct as they merge into one another. (Drawing 15.) We should therefore speak of the animal organism as being twofold, the extremes interpenetrating at the middle. In this way, the animal organization arises.

Mow all the substances contained in the head system—I am speaking of animals, but the same is true of man—are of earthly matter. Even in the embryo, earthly matter is led into the head system. The embryo must be so organised that its head receives its matter from the earth. In the head, therefore, we have earthly matter. But the substances which we bear in the metabolic and limb, organisation, those which permeate our intestines, our limbs, our muscles and bones, etc., these substances do not come from the earth, but from what has been absorbed from the air and warmth above the earth. It is cosmic substantiality. This is important. “When you see an animal's claw, you must not think of it as having been formed by the food which the animal has eaten and which has gone to the claw and been deposited there. This is not the case. It is cosmic matter taken up through the senses and the breathing. What the animal eats serves only to stimulate its powers of movement so that the cosmic matter can be driven into the metabolic and limb organisation, can be driven into the claw and similarly distributed, throughout the whole organism.

With forces (as opposed to substances) it is the other way around. Because the senses are centred in the head and take in impressions from the cosmos, the forces in the head are cosmic in nature. To understand what happens in the metabolic and limb organisation, you need only think of walking, which means that the limbs are permeated with earthly gravity: the forces are earthly ones. Thus, the limb system contains cosmic substances permeated by earthly forces.

It is extremely important that the cow or the ox, if used for working, should be fed so as to absorb the greatest possible amount of cosmic substance and that the rood which enters its stomach should produce the necessary strength to lead this cosmic substance into its limbs, muscles and “bones. It is equally important to realise that the (earthly) substances in the head have to be drawn from the food which has been worked upon in the stomach and is led into the head. In this sense, the head relies upon the stomach in a way in which the big toe does not, and we must realise quite clearly that the head can only work upon this nourishment which comes to it from the metabolism, if it can at the same time draw in sufficient cosmic forces. If, therefore, animals instead of being left in stuffy stables where no cosmic forces can reach them, are led into meadows and given every opportunity of entering into relation with their environment through the perceptions of their senses, then we may see results such as appear in the following examples.

Imagine an animal standing in a dark and stuffy stable before its manger, the contents of which have been measured out by human “wisdom”„ Unless its diet is varied, as it only can be out-of-doors, this animal will show a very great contrast to one which seeks out its food with its sense of smell, guided by this organ in its search for cosmic forces, seeking and finding its nourishment by itself and developing its whole activity in doing so. An animal that is red from a manger will not show immediately how devoid it is of cosmic forces, for it has inherited a certain amount of them. But it will breed descendants to whom these cosmic forces are no longer transmitted. Such an animal will become weak, beginning from the head, i.e. it will not be able to nourish its body because it cannot take in the necessary cosmic substances which should come in. This will show you that it is not enough simply to say: “This kind of fodder for one case, that for another.” Bather one must have a clear idea of the value for the animal's whole organisation that such and such methods of feeding have.

But we must go a step further. What is actually contained in the head? Earthly substance. If you take out the brain, the noblest part of an animal, you will have before you a piece of earthly substance. The human brain also contains earthly substance. But in both the forces are cosmic. What is the human brain for? It serves as a support for the ego. The animal, let it be remembered, has as yet no ego; its brain is only on the way to ego-formation. In man, it goes on and on to the complete forming of the ego. How then did the animal's brain come into existence? Let us look at the whole organic process. All that which eventually manifests in the brain as earthly matter has simply been “excreted,” (deposited), from tne organic process. Earthly matter has been excreted in order to serve as a base for the ego. Now the process of the working-up of the food in the digestive tract and metabolic and limb system produces a certain quantity of earthly matter which is able to enter into the head and to be finally deposited as earthly-matter in the brain. But a portion of the food stuff is eliminated in the intestine before it reaches the brain. This part cannot be further transformed and is deposited in the intestine for ultimate excretion.

We come here upon a parallel which will strike you as being very paradoxical but which must not be overlooked if we wish to understand the animal and human organisations. What is brain matter? It is simply the contents of the intestines brought to the last stage of completion. Incomplete (premature) brain-excretion passes out through the intestines. The contents of the intestines are in their processes closely akin to the contents of the brain. One could put it somewhat grotesquely by saying that that which spreads itself out in the brain is a highly-advanced dung-heap. And yet the statement is essentially correct. By a peculiar organic process, dung is transformed into the noble matter of the brain, there to become the foundation for the development of the ego. in man the greatest possible quantity of intestinal dung is transformed into cerebral excrement because man bears his ego on the earth. In animals, the quantity is less. Hence there remain more forces in the intestinal excrement of an animal which we can use for manuring. In animal manure, there is therefore more of the potential ego element, since the animal itself does not reach ego-hood. For this reason, animal dung and human dung are completely different. Animal dung still contains ego-potentiality. In manuring a plant, we bring this ego-potentiality into contact with the plant's root. Let us draw the plant in its entirety (Diagram 16). Down here you have the root? up there the unfolding leaves and blossoms. And just as above, in the leaves and blossoms, the astral element is acquired from contact with the air, so the ego-potentiality develops below in the root through contact with the manure.

The farm is truly an organism. The astral element is developed above, and the presence of orchard and forest assists in collecting it. If animals feed in the right way on the things that grow above the earth, then they will develop the right ego-potentiality in the manure they produce, and this ego-potentiality, working on the plant from the root, will cause it to grow upwards from the root in the right way according to the forces of gravity. It is a wonderful interplay, but in order to understand it one must proceed step by step.

From this you can see that a farm is a kind of individuality, and that both animals and plants should be retained within this mutual interplay. If, therefore, instead of using the manure supplied by the animals belonging to the farm, we sell off these animals and obtain manure from Chili, we are in a sense doing harm to Nature. In doing this we trespass the bounds of that which is a closed circuit, of that which should be self-sufficient. Of course, things must be ordered in such a way that the circuit really is self-contained. One need only have on the farm as many animals and of such kinds as will supply sufficient and appropriate manures. And one must also see to it that the animals have such plants to eat as they like and seek instinctively.

At this point experiments tend to become complicated because every case is different. But the main thing is to know the directions which the experiments should take. Practical rules will be found, but they should all proceed from the principle that a farm should be, as far as possible, self-contained. I say as far as possible because Spiritual Science takes a practical not a fanatical view of things. Under our present economic order this cannot be fully attained; but the ideal is one which we should make every effort to reach.

On this basis, then, we can find concrete instances of the relation between the organism formed by the livestock and the plant or “fodder organism.” Let us first consider this relation on broad general lines.

To begin with the root. The root generally develops in the soil and through the manure it becomes permeated with ego-potentiality which it absorbs. This absorption is determined and aided if the root can find in the right quantities salts in the soil around it. Let us assume that we are considering the nature of these roots merely from the point of view of the foregoing reflections. Then we shall suggest that roots are the food which, when it is absorbed into the human organism, will find its way most easily to the head by way of the digestive process. We shall therefore provide a diet of roots where we require to give the head material substances to enable the cosmic forces which work through the head to exercise their plastic activity. Mow imagine someone saying to himself: “I must give roots to this animal which requires earthly substance in its head in order to stimulate its sense-connections with its environment, i.e. with the cosmic environment.” Does not this immediately suggest the calf and the carrot? A calf eating carrots portrays this whole process. The moment something like this is put forward and you know how things really are and their true connections, you will know immediately what is to be done. It is simply a matter of realising how this mutual process arises.

But let us proceed to the next stage. Once the calf has eaten the carrot, once the substance really has been introduced into the head, the converse process must be able to begin, i.e. the head, on its part_? must begin to work with forces of volition, thus begetting within the organism forces which can be worked into it. It is not enough for the “carrot dung” to be deposited in the head; from what is deposited and in the course of disintegration, streams of force must come which will enter the rest of the organism. In short, there must be a second food substance which will enable one part of the body which has already been fed (in this case the head) to work in the right way on the rest of the organism.

Well, I have given the animal the carrot fodder. And now I want the animal's body to be permeated with the forces which are developed from the head. For this, as a second fodder, we need a plant with a spindly structure, the seed of which will have gathered into itself these “spindly” forces. We immediately think of flaxseed (linseed) or something similar. If you feed young cattle on carrots and linseed—or carrots and fresh hay (which is equally suitable)—this will bring into full operation the forces already latent in the animals. We should therefore try to give young cattle food which promotes, on the one hand, the forces of ego-potentiality, and, on the other, the complementary streams of astral force working from above downwards. For the latter purpose, those plants are especially suitable which have long, spindly stems and as such have been turned into hay. (Diagram 17.) Just as we have looked into this concrete case_? so we must approach Agriculture as a whole: of every single thing, we must know what happens to it when it passes either from the animal into the soil, or from the plant into the animal.

Let us pursue the subject yet further. Let us take the case of an animal' which should become particularly strong in the middle region (where the head or nervous organisation tends to develop in the direction of breathing and the metabolic organisation tends to have a rhythmic character). Which animals have to be strong in this particular region? They are the milch animals. The secretion of milk shows that the animal in question is strong in this region. The point to observe here is that the right co-operation should take place between the current going from the head backwards (mainly a streaming of forces) and the current going from the animal's hindquarters forward (mainly a streaming of substance). If these two currents co-operate and intermingle in the right way, the result will be an abundant supply of rich milk. For good milk contains substances prepared in the metabolic system and which, without having entered into the sexual system, have become akin to it. It.is a sexual process within the metabolic system. Milk is simply a sexual secretion on another level. It is a substance, which, on its way to becoming sexual secretion, is penetrated and transformed by the forces working from the head. The whole process can be seen quite clearly.

Now for processes which should arise in this way, we must choose a diet which will work less powerfully towards the head than do roots which contain ego-potentiality; neither may the diet, since it is to be connected with the sexual system, contain too much of the astral element, i.e. of that which goes towards the blossom and fruit of the plant. In short, if we wish to find a diet that will produce milk, we must choose the part of the plant which lies between blossom and root, i.e. the green and leafy part. (Diagram 18.) If we wish to bring about an increase in the milk supply of. an animal whose milk production we have reason to believe could be increased we shall certainly reach the desired end if we proceed as follows:

Suppose I have a cow and feed it with green fodder. I take plants in which the process of fruit-formation has been developed within the process of leaf-formation. Such, for example, are the pod-bearing or leguminous plants and especially the clovers. In clover, the would-be fruit develops as leaf and foliage. A cow that is fed in this way will perhaps not show much result of it; but when the cow comes to calve, the calf will grow into a cow that yields good milk. The effects of reformed foddering usually need a generation in which to show themselves.

There is however one point to be borne in mind. As we know, modern doctors go on using certain traditional remedies without knowing why they do so, except that the remedies have continued to prove effectual. The same thing happens in farming. People go on using traditional methods without knowing why they do so, and m addition to this they make experiments and tests, try to ascertain exactly the quantity of food that should be given for fattening cattle, milch cows, etc. But here again we have what always arises in haphazard experimenting. You know what happens when you have a sore throat and go and see your friends. They will all offer you some cure or other and in half-an-hour you will have collected a whole chemist's shop. If you were to take all these remedies, they would cancel each other out, and certainly ruin your stomach, and your sore throat would not be any better. Because of the circumstances, something which ought to be quite simple has been made extremely complicated. Something similar to this happens when one experiments with fodder for cattle. For it means, does it not, that one is using a food which suits the case 'in one particular but is ineffective in another direction. Then a second food is added to the first and finally one has a mixture of foods, each of which has a special significance for young cattle perhaps or for fattening stock. But the whole thing has become so complicated that one loses one's grasp of it all, because one loses sight of the interplay of forces involved. Or perhaps the different ingredients cancel each other in their effects. This is what often happens and especially with the modern college-trained student-farmer. Such a person looks things up in a book or tries to remember what he may have learned somewhere; “Young cattle must be fed in this way, and cattle for fattening in that.” But this does not help, because the fodder recommended by the book may well conflict with the fodder one i-s already giving.

The proper way to proceed is to start from the basis of thought which I have mentioned and which simplifies cattle-feeding so that it may be taken in at a glance. I really mean at a glance, as we saw in the case of the carrots and linseed. We can easily survey this. Think how one can then stand livingly in the midst of the farm, acting consciously and with deliberation. This knowledge leads not to a complication but to a simplification of methods of feeding. Much that has been discovered by experiment is right, but it is unsystematic and inexact. Or rather it has the sort of exactness which is really inexact because things are muddled up and cannot be seen through. Whereas what I have recommended is simple and its effects can be followed up into the animal organism.

Suppose now that we wish to consider the flowering and fruiting part of the plant. And we must go further, and observe what is fruit-like in the rest of the plant. This recalls a feature of plant-life that always delighted Goethe, namely the fact that the plant has throughout its whole body the tendency towards what is normally specialised at certain parts. With most plants, we take the seed which has formed from the blossom and place it in the earth in order to produce more plants. But we do not do this in the case of the potato. Here we use the eyes of the tubers. This is the fruiting part of the potato plant, but like many processes in Nature, it is not carried out to the end. We can, however, heighten its activity by a procedure which bears an external resemblance to combustion. For instance, if you “cossette” (chop up into thin straws) roots or tubers and dry the “cossettes” for fodder, the stuff will be enormously strengthened in its activity and brought a stage nearer to the fruit stage if you spread it out in the sun and allow it to steam a little.

Practices like this are based upon a deep and wonderful instinct. We can ask: how did men first come to cook their food? Men began to cook their food because they gradually discovered that what develops during fruit formation is mainly due to processes akin to cooking, viz. burning, warming, drying and evaporating. All these processes tend to make the fruit and seed and indirectly the other parts of the plant, especially the higher parts, more fitted to develop the forces that are necessary to the metabolic and limb system in the animal. Even uncooked the blossom and fruit of a plant work on the animal's metabolic and digestive system and primarily through the forces they develop, not through their substance«, For it is the forces of the earth which are needed by the metabolic and limb system, and in the measure in which it needs them, it must receive them. Take the case of the animals which pasture on steep mountain sides. Unlike those in the plains, they climb about under difficult conditions owing to the fact that the ground is not level. There is all the difference for those animals between level and slanting ground. They require food that will develop those forces in limb and muscle which are energised by the will. Otherwise they would not be good for either labour, milking or fattening. It is therefore important that they should eat plenty of those aromatic mountain plants in which blossom and fruit have undergone an additional treatment by the sun, resembling a process of natural cooking.

But similar results can be achieved and strength given to muscle and limb by artificial methods—roasting and boiling, etc. Flower and fruit are most suitable for this, especially of those plants which from the beginning develop towards fruiting and do not waste their time, as it were, in growing foliage. People should take careful note of these things, especially those who are on the dangerous slope that leads to laziness and inertia. An instance of this is the man who wants to be a mystic-. “But how,” he asks, “can I become a mystic if I am working with my hands all day? I ought to be completely at rest and not be constantly stirred to activity by something outside or inside me. If I no longer waste my forces by fussing about all day, I shall become a real mystic. I must therefore order my diet in such a way as to become a mystic.” And he goes in for a diet of raw food and ceases to cook for himself. But the matter is not so easy as all this. For a man of weak physical constitution who takes to a diet of raw food when he is already on the downward path that leads to mysticism, will naturally accelerate the process; he will become more and more “mystical”—that is more and more inert', (and what happens here to a man can be applied to the animal and can teach us how to stir it to greater) activity). But the opposite may also occur. We may have the case of a man of strong constitution who nevertheless has developed the queer idea of becoming a mystic. In this case his own inherent forces and those absorbed through the raw food will continue to develop and to work in him, and the diet may not do him much harm. And if, by this means, he stirs up the forces which generally remain below and produce gout and rheumatism if; he stirs these up, and transforms them, then his raw diet will make mm stronger. There are two sides to every question. No general rule can be laid down, but we must know how these principles work in individual cases. The advantage of vegetarianism is that it calls forth out of the organism forces which were lying fallow and which produce gout, rheumatism, diabetes, etc. where only vegetable food is taken, these forces serve to make it ripe for human assimilation* But where animal food is consumed, these same forces are deposited in the organism and remain unused, or rather they begin to work from out of, themselves, depositing the products of metabolism in various parts of the body, or, as in diabetes, they lay claim for their own use to substances which should remain spread out over all the organs. We only understand these matters when we look more deeply.

This brings us to the question of the fattening of animals. Here we must say we should regard the animal as a kind of sack to be filled as full as possible with cosmic substance. A fat pig is really a most heavenly animal'. Its fat body, apart from its system of nerves-and-senses, is made up entirely of cosmic, not of earthly substance. The pig needs the food which it enjoys so much in order to fill itself with cosmic substance, which it absorbs on all sides and then distributes throughout its body. It must take in this substance which has to be drawn from the cosmos, and distribute it. And the same is true of all fattened animals. lou will find that animals will fatten best on the part of the plant which tends towards fruit-formation, and has been heightened in its activity by cooking or steaming. Or, if you give them something which has in it an enhanced fruit-process, for instance turnip, which belongs to a species in which this process has been enhanced and which has become larger through long cultivation. In general, the best kind of food for fattening cattle is that which will at least help to distribute the cosmic substance, i.e. the part of the plant which tends to fruit-formation—and which has in addition received the proper treatment. These conditions are in the main fulfilled by certain kinds of oil cakes and the like. But we must also see to it that the animal's head is not entirely neglected and that in this fattening treatment a certain amount of earthly substance is introduced there. The fodder just mentioned needs to be complemented by something for the head, though a smaller quantity, as the head does not require so much. In fattening an animal, we should therefore add a small quantity of roots.

Now there is a substance which as substance has no particular function in the organism. In general, one can say that roots have a function in connection with the head, blossoms in connection with the metabolic and limb system, and leaf and stem in connection with the rhythmic system within the human organism. There is, now, a substance that can aid the whole animal organism, because it is related to all its members. This substance is salt. And as of all the ingredients in the food of both man and animals, salt is the least in quantity, we can see it is not how much we take which matters, but what we take. Even small quantities of substance will fulfil their purpose if they are of the right kind.

This brings us to a very important point and one on which I should like to see very accurate experiments made. These could be extended to the observation of human beings who use the article of food I am now going to deal with. As you know, the introduction of the tomato as a food is of comparatively recent date. It is very popular as a food and also extremely valuable as an object of study. One can learn a very great deal both from growing tomatoes and from eating them. Those who give the matter some thought—and there are some such nowadays—are of the opinion and rightly so, that the consumption of the tomato by man is of great significance. And it can well be extended to the animal; it would be quite possible to accustom animals to tomatoes. It is, in fact, of great significance for all that in the body which—while in the organism.—tends to fall out of the organism and to form an organisation of its own« We have the statement made by an American that in some circumstances the use of tomatoes can act as a dietetic means of correcting an unhealthy tendency of the liver. The liver is the most independent organ in the human organism, and diseases of the liver (and especially those of the animal liver) can in general be combated by a diet of tomatoes. Once again, we are gaining insight into the connection between plant and animal. Anyone suffering from cancer, I say this in parenthesis, i.e. from a disease which tends to make one organ in the body independent from the rest, ought at once to be forbidden tomatoes.

Why does the tomato have a special effect upon the parts of the organism which tend to be independent and specialised in their function? This is connected with the conditions which the tomato requires for its own growth. During its growth, the tomato feels happiest in the vicinity of manure which retains the form it had when it separated from the animal. Manure composed of a haphazard collection of all kinds of refuse, not worked upon in any way, will ensure the growing of very fine tomatoes. And if compost heaps could be made of tomato stalks and leaves i.e. of the tomato's own refuse, the result would be quite brilliant. The tomato does not wish to go beyond its own boundaries. It would rather remain within its own strong vitality, it is the most unsocial being in the plant kingdom. It does not wish to admit anything strange to its own nature and especially anything which has already been through the rotting process. And this is connected with the fact that this plant has a special effect on any independent organisation within the animal and human bodies.

In this respect, the tomato bears a certain resemblance to the potato, also a very independent plant in its effects—so much so indeed that after passing very easily through the digestive system, it penetrates into the brain and makes that organ independent even of the workings of the rest of the organs'. And among the factors which have led men and animals to become more materialistic in Europe, we must certainly reckon the excessive consumption of potatoes. The consumption of potatoes should serve only to stimulate the brain and head-system. But it should not go beyond this. These are the things that show in an objective way the intimate connection between agriculture and social life. It is infinitely important that agriculture should be so related to the social life.

I have only indicated these matters on general lines and, for some time to come, these should serve as the foundation for the most varied experiments, such as should lead to most striking results. From this you will be able to understand how the contents of these lectures should be treated. I am thoroughly in agreement with the decision which has been come to by the agriculturalists who have attended this course, namely, that what has been said at these lectures should for the present remain within this circle and be developed by actual experiment and research. This same circle should decide when in their opinion these experiments have been carried sufficiently far for the matter to be made public. A number of persons not directly connected with farming, but whose presence has been permitted through the organisers' tolerance because of their interest in the subject, nave also attended this course. They will, like the character in the well-known opera, be required to put a padlock on their mouths and not; fall into the common Anthroposophical mistake of spreading things as far and wide as possible. For what has so often done us harm is the talk of the individual, dictated not by a desire to convey real information but simply by a desire to repeat what has been heard. It makes all the difference whether these things are said by a farmer or by a layman. Suppose these things are repeated by laymen as an interesting new chapter of Anthroposophical teaching. What will happen? Exactly the same as has happened in the case of other Lecture Cycles. People on all sides, including farmers, will hear it ... But there are different ways of hearing. A farmer hearing these things from another farmer will think at first: “What a pity. The poor fellow has gone crazy.” He will say this the first and even the second time. But when finally a farmer sees something with his own eyes, then it is hardly wise for him to dismiss it as nonsense. But if he has only heard of a new method from people who are not professionally concerned with it but only interested in the subject, then naturally it all comes to nothing and the whole thing will lose its effect: it will be discredited from the start. Therefore, those friends who have been present and are not members of the Agricultural Circle must exercise restraint and not repeat what' they have heard wherever they go, as is so often done in Anthroposophy. This course has been decided on by the Agricultural Circle and the decision announced by our esteemed Count Keyserlingk, and I entirely agree with it.

And now that we have come to the end of this Course, I should like to express my pleasure at your having come to hear what was said, and at the prospect of your taking part in all the developments which will take place in the future. I think you will agree with me when I say that what we have been doing is useful work, and as such possesses a deep inner value.

There are, however, two things to which I would draw your attention. The first is the trouble that has been taken by Count and Countess Keyserlingk and all their household to make this course the success it has been.

This required energy, self-sacrifice, consciousness of the end in view, a sense of Anthroposophical values, a real identification with the cause of Anthroposophy. And this is why the work we have all been engaged upon, a work which will undoubtedly be of service to the whole of humanity, has seemed to take the form of a wonderful festival, for which we give our heartfelt thanks to Count and Countess Keyserlingk.

Discussion

QUESTION: Has liquid manure the same force of ego-organisation as dung?

ANSWER: Of course, liquid manure and dung should be used in union with each other and both should contribute to the same force of organisation of the soil. The connection with the Ego to which I referred holds good particularly for the dung, but does not hold good xn general for the liquid manure. For every Ego, even in the rudimentary form in which it appears in manure, must work in conjunction with some astral element, and the dung would have no astrality unless the liquid manure were there. The liquid is strong is astrality, the dung in ego-force. The manure may be regarded as “grey matter,” while the liquid is the cerebral fluid.

QUESTION: Could we be given the correct astronomical data for those preparations which must be burnt?

ANSWER: (by Dr. Vreede): The exact data cannot be supplied at present. There are calculations still required which cannot be made at the moment. In general, the period for burning the insects is from the beginning of February on into August. With regard to the destruction of field-mice, the period this year (1924)—it shifts from year to year—would be from the second half of November to the first half of December.

DR. STEINER: The principles laid down (in 1912) for the Anthroposophical Calendar ought to be worked out more precisely. Then one could go by it exactly.

QUESTION: In speaking of Full Moon and New Moon do you mean the one day on which the moon is full or new, or does it include the period shortly before and after it?

ANSWER: One reckons the new moon from the moment when the thin sickle (Diagram 22) of the old moon is still there and disappears. Full moon is reckoned from the moment when this other picture appears (again Diagram 22). Both phases cover from twelve to fourteen days.

ANSWER: We shall give the times for making the preparations, but the insects can be kept until then.

QUESTION: Has the burning of the weed seeds to take place in summer, or at any time?

ANSWER: Not too long after they have been gathered

QUESTION: How can this insect-pepper which has “been scattered over the soil' affect the living insects which never come into contact with the soil?

ANSWER: What matters here is not the physical contact but a certain quality coming from this homoeopathic dose. The insect has its own kind of sensitiveness, and it will flee from what has been scattered over the ground without having to come in contact with it. That the insect does not come into direct contact with the earth makes no difference at all.

QUESTION: What is the nature of the harm done by frost in agriculture and in the case of tomatoes in particular? In what sense is frost connected with cosmic forces?

. ANSWER: To have fine and large tomatoes you must keep them warm. They suffer from frost. With regard to frost in general, you must realise what it is t-hat is active in the effects of frost. Frost means that the cosmic influence which is active in the earth has been essentially strengthened. Now this cosmic influence has a normal mean between certain degrees of temperature. When the temperature is at a certain point, this cosmic influence is exactly what the plant requires. If, however, the frost is intense, lasts too long and strikes too deeply, the influence of the heavens upon the earth is too strong and the plant tends to become stalkified and thin throughout and in this attenuated state it falls an easy prey to the frost and is destroyed. Frost which is too intense is therefore extremely harmful to the growth of plants because it is a sign that too much of the heavens has entered into the earth.

QUESTION: Should the burnt remains of Horse-fly be used to treat the bodies of animals, or be scattered over the meadows and pastures?

ANSWER: Scatter it where the animals feed. It is to be regarded as additional to the manure.

QUESTION: What is the best way of combating couch-grass? Is it not very difficult to obtain the seeds?

ANSWER: This difficulty really solves itself. When it grows underground and rampant one can fight it. You need very little seed and you will be able to get this. Why, one can even find four-leaved clover!

QUESTION: Is it permissible to preserve bales of fodder by means of an electric current?

ANSWER: What would be your object in doing this? It is necessary at this point to consider the part played by electricity in Nature. Now it is comforting to note that in America, where people are more observant than they are over here, voices are heard to say that man cannot go on developing in the same way in an atmosphere which is continuously “being pierced “by electrical currents and waves; it has an influence on the whole development of man. Man's inner life will become different if these things are carried further and further. It makes a difference to a district whether it is provided with steam trains or electric trains. The action of steam is more conscious: the action of electricity is extremely unconscious, so that people simply do not know how certain things happen. .

No doubt there is a development going on which must be reckoned with because electricity is being used above the surface of the soil as radiant electricity (wireless) and also as conducted electricity (cables) for transmitting news as quickly as possible from one place to another. The result of this will be that men and women living in the field especially of the radiant electricity can no longer “take in” the news they obtain. The electric radiations used to ensure quick transmissions tend to blot out the capacity for understanding. This can already be observed. People have far more difficulty in taking in what comes to them than they had several decades ago. It is a comfort to find that a glimpse of the truth of this matter is beginning to dawn at least from America.

Whenever anything new appears, it is usually regarded at first as “a remedy.” Then the prophets come in and use the thing. It is strange how, when something new appears, clairvoyant perception is so often brought down to the human level. For instance, a man who had never before thought about it, begins to prophesy wildly regarding the healing power of electricity, and the idea is taken up not merely because electricity is there, but because it is in the fashion. Electricity in the form of radiations is no more a remedy than pricking with small thin needles can be a remedy. It is not the electricity which heals but the shock it produces.

It must not be forgotten, however, that, electricity has a particularly powerful effect upon the higher organisation in living beings, i.e. upon the head in men and animals and upon the root in plants. An animal that eats food that has been preserved through electrification will therefore gradually tend to grow sclerotic. The process will be slow and will not be noticed at first. All that will be noticed, is that in one way or another these animals die too soon. No one will attribute this to the electricity: all sorts of other reasons will be found. I cannot help it, but electricity is the last thing in the world which ought to be introduced into a living being to promote its life! It cannot promote life. Electricity is at one level lower than life, and the higher the level reached “by life, the more it tends to rid itself of electricity; and if you induce the living organism to take repulsive measures when there is nothing to be repelled, the organism becomes nervous and fidgety and gradually sclerotic.

QUESTION: What does Spiritual Science say on the subject of preserving food-stuffs by acidification in general?

ANSWER: If we use salt-like materials at all in this process it does not make much difference whether the salt is added at the moment of eating, or whether it is used in the preparation of the fodder. In the case of fodder that contains too little salt to carry the food stuffs to those parts of the organism where they should work, souring is the right procedure to adopt. Take the case of turnips. These, as we saw, are particularly fitted to work upon the head-organisation. They are, therefore, an excellent food for certain animals, especially for young cattle. If, however, it be noticed that the young animals shed their hair too soon and too much, their fodder should be salted because this means that the food is not being deposited in sufficient quantities in those parts of the organism where it is needed. Salt is tremendously effective in carrying food to the part of the organism where it is needed and will work.

QUESTION: What view does Spiritual Science take on the subject of souring of the leaves of sugar-beet and other green plants?

ANSWER: The great thing here is to find a certain optimum and not go beyond it by adding too much salt, because salt is the part of food which more than any other remains what it is once it is inside the organism. The organism in general, in the case of animals- and even more so of human beings, is so constructed as to submit everything it absorbs to the most varied changes. It is an error to think that the albumen which goes into our stomachs remains the same as it was before we ate it. It must first be changed into a completely lifeless substance and then changed back again by means of the etheric body into specifically human (or in the case of animals specifically animal) albumen.

Everything that enters into an organism must be changed. This applies even to warmth. Suppose that this (see Diagram 23, Part I) is a living organism and this the warmth in the environment. Now assume you have a piece of dead wood (Diagram 23, Part II) which, it is true, comes from a living organism but is already dead. It is likewise surrounded by warmth. Now when the warmth enters into the living organism, it does not simply go a little way in and remain what it is; the organism immediately transforms it into a warmth of its own, and it could not do otherwise. Whereas when the warmth penetrates into the dead wood it remains exactly the same kind of warmth as exists outside in the mineral earth. The moment warmth penetrates into us unchanged as it does into the piece of wood, we catch cold. Nothing that comes into the living organism from outside may remain what it is; it must immediately he changed into something else. This process takes place to the least extent m salt. No great harm, therefore, will he done by using salt for the preserving of food-stuffs so long as you do it carefully and do not put in too much. The mere sense of taste will reject it. If it is necessary for the preservation of food-stuffs this shows that up to a point it is the right process to adopt.

QUESTION: Do you recommend souring fodder without salt?

ANSWER: That is too advanced a process. It is a super-organic process (self-fermentation) and can in certain circumstances be extremely harmful.

QUESTION: Is Spanish Chalk, sometimes used to mitigate the effects of souring, bad for the animals?

ANSWER: Some animals cannot stand it at all; they become ill. Some can. I cannot say at the moment which are those that can stand it. On the whole, it does not do the animals much good and is apt to make them ill.

QUESTION: I suppose that the gastric juice will be dulled by the Spanish chalk?

ANSWER: Yes. The gastric juice becomes useless.

QUESTION: I would like to ask whether the inner attitude with which one sets to work is not of great importance in these matters? There is surely a great difference between sowing seed and scattering what is destined to work destruction. The attitude of mind must count. Does it not have an immensely greater karmic effect to work against insects in this way than to kill them in single instances by mechanical means?

ANSWER: The main thing about an inner attitude is whether it is a good or a bad attitude. What do you mean by “destruction?” Now consider how one must think about these things. In my lecture to-day I pointed out that we can know something and then actually see it before us. We can look at a linseed plant or a carrot and actually see (because we know) the course it takes and the process it undergoes when it enters the body of an animal. If we can really attain to this objective vision and make it a reality, then it is inconceivable

that we should not at the same time be penetrated by certain feelings of piety. And we shall gain the impulse to do this in the service of mankind, in the service of the Universe. The only way in which our state of mind could bring harm would be if we did our work from bad motives. I do not see, therefore, since these methods work on the whole for good, that they can in any way do harm. You seem to think that it would not be so bad just to run after the animal and kill it?

QUESTION: I wanted to know if there was a difference between the two ways of destruction—mechanical and cosmic?

ANSWER: This question raises very complicated issues which can only be understood if we have gained insight -into the wider connections that exist between things. Suppose you draw a fish out of the sea and kill it. Then you have killed something. You have carried out a process on a definite level. But suppose that for some reason or other you take a whole pail full of water containing quantities of fish-spawn, thus destroying a vast amount of life. This is something quite different from killing one fish. The process has been carried out on quite a different level. If something in Nature passes on towards a full-grown fish, it has travelled along a certain path. If you cut the fish off at this point, you cause a certain disorder in Nature. But it is quite a different matter to arrest a process which has not been completed or which has not ended in the blind alley of a fully-grown organism. Your question, therefore, boils down to this: What wrong am I doing in making this pepper? What I destroy with the pepper does not really come into consideration as it moves on another level of existence. All we need ask is: What must I have in order to make this pepper? And in most cases, it turns out that in making it I shall destroy far fewer animals than if I have to collect them in some other way and then kill them. I think that if you look at the question in a practical way and less from an abstract point of view you will find that it is not so very appalling.

QUESTION: Can human faeces be used for manuring, and how should they be treated before use?

ANSWER: They should be used as little as possible. For they achieve very little in the way of manuring and they can do more harm than any other kind of manure. If, however, you want to use them the normal amount that is to be had on a farm or estate will be amply sufficient. If one knows that a given number of human beings are working on an estate, then if the human manure be added to what already comes from the animals on the estate and from other sources, clearly this will make up the maximum that can he used without doing harm. It is the greatest mistake to use human manure in the neighbourhood of large towns, because the amount supplied by a large town would suffice for an estate of gigantic size. No one would have such a crazy notion as to use on a small piece of land the human manure supplied, say by the whole of Berlin. You need only try eating some of the plants that grow in the neighbourhood of big cities. Take asparagus or any other plant which still manages to grow fairly true to its nature and upright, and you will see what happens.

Again, if you use human manure for plants that are eaten by animals, you will have the most harmful results., For then much of what is eaten and goes through the animal's organism remains at the same stage as that at which the asparagus is arrested when it goes through the human organism. In this connection, it is the grossest ignorance which has caused the greatest mischief in this field.

QUESTION: Is there any remedy for red murrain (Erysipelas) in swine?

ANSWER: This is really a veterinary question. I have never gone into the matter, as I have never been asked for advice about it, but I rather think the best thing to do is to rub in a certain dose of antimony. This is a therapeutic question as it deals with a real disease.

QUESTION: Can one combat Wild Radish, which is a bastard species, with these peppers?

ANSWER: The peppers of which I have told you only affect the plants from which they were made. Plants which arise from symbiosis or the crossing of one plant with another cannot therefore be affected by pepper made from one of them.

QUESTION: What are your views on green manuring?

ANSWER: It has its uses, especially in connection with fruit-growing. One cannot generalise on such matters. It should be used if a powerful development of the leafy part of the plant is required. For such a purpose, it can well supplement other manures.

Dear attendees! When you look at all the circumstances of the present, at the hardship, misery, and hopelessness, and when you look at the causes from which all this has emerged, then, in my opinion, an unbiased view of life suggests itself that the first riddle of our present time is, so to speak, the most urgent riddle: How can humanity unite the paths of the soul with the paths of life so as to work together constructively on building our social and other relationships in the future?

Since I intend to provide an addition to some of the things that I have said from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science here in Stuttgart for years, you will forgive me if I take up one or the other in a historical way today and thus perhaps give the impression that these links are sometimes more personal than what I have presented here over the course of many years. But that will only appear to be the case.

The starting point of my talk today is that I would like to point out how this very question: How can present-day humanity harmonize the paths of the soul with the paths of life? – how this question was in my mind when, at the end of the 1880s and beginning of the 1890s, I was working on my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1894, as the basis of the world view that emerged for me over many years. For basically, the way it was presented by me at the time, this “Philosophy of Freedom” should already answer the fateful question of humanity posed at the beginning of our deliberations today. I do not intend to talk about the content of this “Philosophy of Freedom” today, but I would like to touch on the intentions underlying this writing with a few introductory words.

The underlying intention was to answer the question: How can a person, placed in the present, come to terms with the most important feeling, the most important longing of modern times, with the feeling of freedom, the longing for freedom, in the face of the great social demands of the present? And it is indeed essential, especially in this consideration of the nature of freedom, that we break with the whole way in which we have always asked about the justification of the idea of freedom, of the impulse for freedom. We have asked: Is man a free being by nature, or is he not? — This way of asking the question seems to me to have been superseded by the whole development of modern humanity for our time. Today, after what humanity has been through in the last three to four centuries, we can really only ask: Is man capable of founding a social order such that, as he develops from childhood to adulthood, he can find in it that which he is justified to call the freedom of his being? The question in the Philosophy of Freedom is not whether man is born free, but rather, in this writing, the question is whether it is possible for man to find something in the depths of his being that he can bring up from subconscious or unconscious depths into full, clear, bright consciousness, and whether he can cultivate a free being within himself through this bringing up. And this consideration led me to the conclusion that this most essential element in the development of humanity in modern times could only be based on two things: firstly, on what I then called intuitive thinking, and secondly, on what I then called social trust. And since I did not use these two words to describe something abstract or theoretical, but rather things of reality, things of life, what was meant in my writing was understood very, very slowly, because we live in a time of abstractions, as I have often stated here. We live in the age of theorizing. And when someone asserts something that comes only from a sense of reality and this assertion is then formulated as an idea, people confuse what has been taken from reality and clearly appears in the form of an idea with what lives in them as abstract ideas that have nothing to do with reality. And then they look at what can actually work in people as a real impulse, as something utopian or the like - especially those people who themselves only have utopian ideas in their heads, they see something like this as utopian.

What was the idea behind this striving for a universal education of humanity in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom”? It was this: that man can never become free if he only takes into his consciousness those ideas that have come to him for three to four centuries from the scientific world view, if he only fills himself with what can be learned from nature. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have often said here that the objection is raised: But how many people today absorb into their consciousness those ideas that are borrowed from the observation of nature? People think that only a few individuals study natural science and that perhaps those who learn something from natural science recruit others who establish a monistic – or as it is otherwise called – world view, but that this still has no decisive influence on the broad masses of humanity today.

It is not so, my dear attendees, it is different. It is the case that, gradually, over the course of the last three to four centuries, we have entered into a spiritual life, into a life in general, which is essentially fed — even now, even in the outermost regions of the country, not only among city dwellers or among the so-called educated — by what flows through our journalistic, newspaper, and book literature: Without being aware of it, people absorb into their imagination what follows from fiction, popular science, and journal and newspaper literature. They fill their souls with it. They may go to church on Sundays and think they are good Catholics or good Protestants, they may indulge in the idea that they honestly believe everything that is proclaimed to them. But in what they are, so to speak, in their everyday lives, the form of their thoughts, the whole configuration of their imaginative life is shaped by what unconsciously flows in from all the sources I have just mentioned. We can determine this by a kind of crucible test:

I believe that a large number of you are of the opinion that a certain community wants to instill ancient religious ideas with very intense forces into the life of the present - ancient religious ideas. Who doubts, for example, that the members of Jesuitism are striving to instill ancient religious ideas into the life of the present? That is certainly the case when the Jesuits write about what they believe should be said on the basis of the confession, when they speak about what people should believe, when they speak about what expresses the relationship of people to the church, and so on. But when today the Jesuits write about natural objects, about objects of human nature as well, and believe they should take science into account, then what are these Jesuits? They are the most pronounced materialists. Anyone who follows what a Jesuit presents to the world as secular literature in addition to his theological and religious writing will find that the sole aim of this secular literature is to establish materialism in the broadest sense. One can even form very clear ideas about the why. From this side, efforts are made to remove everything that concerns the soul, everything that concerns spiritual life, from human research and direct human thought. People should not research these questions of the soul and these questions of life, but should devote themselves to what is traditionally available. Everything that concerns the questions of the soul and the questions of spiritual life is thereby set apart from what research is to cover. One must not look at nature, at the real, true environment of life, from the standpoint of the spirit, from the standpoint of the soul, because such research is unchristian from its point of view, is irreligious. But if one is not allowed to research life from a spiritual point of view, then research becomes materialism, because if one is not allowed to bring the spirit into research about matter, then the spirit remains outside of research about matter, and one has only the most blatant materialism at hand. Therefore, in addition to the assertion of all traditional ideas on religious or theological ground, you see the most blatant materialism when [besides theological literature] secular literature comes out of precisely this circle. Today it is of no use to indulge in delusions about these things, only an unbiased examination of them can help.

And so it can be said that even those who, so to speak, officially represent piety – how could one not believe that Jesuitism officially represents piety, of course – even those are, as a result of what has taken place in modern times, crass materialists. And so we can naturally always see that people go to church on Sundays and cling to what they do not understand, and during the week only understand that which comes from the basis of the materialistic world view. It is this state of affairs, as I have often emphasized here, that has led us into the distress of the most recent times. For it is easy to see that from such circumstances man cannot find those paths of the soul that lead him to the paths of life. From that which, on the one hand, is an uncomprehended spirit, handed down only traditionally and, to make matters worse, traditionally incorrectly, and from that which is mere materialism, the soul cannot build for itself those paths that lead it into a strong, secure movement along the ways of life.

That is why I tried in my “Philosophy of Freedom” to point out, on the one hand, how man must come to not only fill his consciousness with what he overhears from nature, what the newer natural science hands down to him in ideas and images, but it was pointed out that a source of inner life can develop in man himself. And when he grasps this source of the inner soul life, when he grasps that in the soul which does not come from outside through the observation of the senses, but what comes from the soul itself, then he educates himself through this grasping of the intuitive soul content to make free decisions, to will freely, to do freely. And in my Philosophy of Freedom I have endeavored to show that if we follow only what are called the natural impulses, we are always dependent; I have endeavored to show that we can become free only when we are able to follow what develops in the human soul itself as intuitive thinking, as intuitive, pure thinking. This reference to that which man must first conquer in his soul through self-education in order to truly partake of freedom, this reference then led me to the necessity of giving a continuation of what was indicated in The Philosophy of Freedom. I have tried to do this over the past decades through what I call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For if one has pointed out that man must draw the impulse of this freedom, intuitive thinking, out of the depths of his soul, then it must also be pointed out what comes out when man turns to this inner source of his soul life. And basically, the explanations in the anthroposophically written works of the following years are only a summary of everything that was pointed out in my Philosophy of Freedom. I have pointed out that there are paths to be followed in the soul to a thinking that does not merely intellectually combine the environment, but that rises from inner vision to the experience of the spirit. And I was compelled to show what one sees when one looks into the spiritual world.

However, this must be emphasized today: the nebulous mysticism that many people mean when they speak of this inner source of the soul, that unclear hovering and rambling that surrenders to inner dreams, was not meant. Therefore, however, two things emerged. One is that those people who did not want to turn to the subject of pursuing clear thinking, which is perceived as uncomfortable today, felt little attracted by precisely what lay in the direction of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” That is one thing that has emerged. The other thing that has happened is that, admittedly, a sufficiently large number of wishy-washers and windbags, who want to find everything through unclear, nebulous paths, have latched onto what should be striven for with clarity through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It has turned out that this attaching of themselves has brought about malicious spirits enough who today fight against that which people say with whom I have nothing to do and who, by fighting, attach to me everything that the Schwafler and Schwätzer, the nebulous mystics, pull out as their own making from what was meant as most intensely necessary for the culture of the present.

For that is what we particularly need on the one hand: clarity of inner striving – that clarity of inner striving that distinguishes the true natural scientist today in his outer striving, but a clarity of inner striving. That is what we demand on the one hand. Not darkness and twilight, not dim mysticism, but bright, clear clarity in all that thinking has to do with. That is one thing. The other thing that should be based on and what I wanted to express through my “Philosophy of Freedom” is social trust. We live in an age in which every individual must strive within his or her own consciousness for the direction of his or her own thinking, feeling and will. We no longer live in a time when people will endure being led only by authority; nor do we live in a time when people truly endure having their whole life organized. Organizing has only emerged as a kind of counterpoint.

In 1908, I tried to point out the underlying facts in the following way. I said: On the one hand, there has been a general human force for three to four centuries that people want to be more and more focused on their own individuality, that they want to find within themselves the impulses for all that they actually strive for in life.

But while this is deeply rooted in the unconsciousness of many people, something that they do not want to realize because, at heart, they are still afraid of their own innermost being, something has emerged – I would say like a shadow in a strong light – that is opposed to this striving for freedom, this striving for for the individual to live their life as they see fit, something emerged that actually worked against everything that had developed in human nature over long periods of time; something emerged in the last three to four centuries that worked against all urges of human nature, and it grew ever stronger towards the present. I said: While it is actually natural for people today to strive for individual fulfillment, one can see how, because they do not understand themselves in this most modern of pursuits, they actually set the polar opposite goal externally. I characterized it somewhat grotesquely in 1908, but I am sure that even today people will understand me as many did at the time. I said: It seems as if people were not striving for the development of individuality at all, but for such a state, social, social organization that makes nothing else possible for people than that they move in all ways and means of life in such a way that the doctor is on their left and the police - the doctor, so that he is constantly taking care of health, without the person having the slightest need to trust his own judgment about his health; the police officer, so that he ensures that the person finds the direction of life, without the person giving himself this direction of life.

Just follow what, despite all enlightenment, despite all the alleged sense of freedom, has been done in this direction in recent times, more or less unconsciously. It had to be said: If we continue in this direction, we will descend into a terrible decline. We can only ascend if we strive to cultivate in humanity that which gradually makes possible a social life together that is filled with complete mutual trust. We must regain faith in people; we must regain faith in the fact that, through appropriate education in the truly human sense, through the development of our humanity, it can become possible for us to get along with each other in the affairs of life that demand something more than just being able to pass each other on the street, and to do so in the same way that we get along with each other when we meet on the street. For when people meet on the street, one goes left and the other goes right; they pass each other without jostling. That is a matter of course. If the source in humanity that I speak of as the true intuition in my “Philosophy of Freedom” is opened, then one can found a social community in the higher matters of life on trust, just as one must ultimately found everyday life must be based on trust, because it is not acceptable for a policeman to approach two people who meet on the street and say, “You have to walk this way so that you don't bump into others.” This matter of course of everyday life can also be brought into the higher life, where the seriousness of life is present and cultivated.

Admittedly, two demands were made in that “Philosophy of Freedom” regarding the paths of the soul. One was that we should not be satisfied with the thinking that is popular today, that is popular in everyday life, that is popular in science, but that we should rise to the level of educating that in man which the new time wants: to a thinking that flows from its own source in the soul of man, to a thinking that is full of light and clarity in itself. And here I must again draw attention to the fact that traditional education leads to the opposite of what I have described as a necessary future requirement in my last lecture here.

If a person today is educated only by what comes to him from the traditions of the confessions and from the more recent world of ideas in the natural sciences, if he bases his thought forms of everyday life on nothing but on what he has absorbed from the popularized versions of the natural-scientific world view, from popular literature, from literature in general, from journalism and newspapers, then, ladies and gentlemen, then the human being becomes a materialist. Why does he become a materialist? He becomes a materialist because he does not free his thinking from the body, because he does not strive to find that source in his soul that frees the soul from the body; but by doing so, man falls into the dependency of the body in life.

Why are we materialists today? Not because we interpret life wrongly, but because we live wrongly. We live and educate our children in such a way that they do not think with their soul, but only with their brain, because the brain can become an imprint of thinking. We switch off the soul and think with the brain. No wonder that we then also speak about this thinking as if it were dependent on the brain; for the greater part of people today it is dependent on the brain. People are materialistic because they have become material with their whole life, because they do not strive to gain freedom through a thinking that breaks away from the body, that becomes free of the body - if I may use this expression today, which I have often justified. The one who wants to develop himself in the sense of today's demands must free his thinking from corporeality. He must transform his thinking into a free mobility of the soul that exists in itself. He must know what it means to think in the mere thought within, not to think in such a way that what is thought is only the result of the brain.

The question today is absurd: is thinking only a result of the brain or not? It is a result of the brain if we do not first detach it from that brain. Here I would draw attention to a whole tangle of errors in which present-day humanity is entangled, for we are now in a position, through what humanity has achieved in the course of historical development, to detach our thinking from the body with full, clear clarity. How do you detach it? Not by becoming a spiritual researcher oneself, although everyone can become one to a certain extent if they pay attention to what is written in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in my “Occult Science” and other similar books. But it is not even necessary to do this. One need only accept from the spiritual researcher what he has to say to the world, just as one accepts from the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist what the astronomer, the chemist, the physicist has to say. One need only approach what is to be received with one's common sense. But then one will make a certain discovery. One will make the discovery: No matter how long you follow what the spiritual scientist says with your thinking, which has been trained only on natural science, on today's life, with your material thinking, then it seems to you to be fantasy, enthusiasm, something you have to reject. You only understand what the spiritual researcher says when you realize that thinking can be detached from the body, that you can immerse yourself in the thinking that is drawn in from spiritual worlds at birth or conception, that will be drawn into spiritual worlds when you pass through the gate of death. Detachment of thinking from the body is the first great goal on those paths that must be followed by the soul in today's life.

And another great goal is still necessary: when we train the will as spiritual science methodically describes it - it is presented in the books just mentioned - then this will take the opposite path to thinking. Thinking frees itself from the body, it breaks away from the body. But the will, precisely through the training described in these books, will take hold of the body all the more. For this is the peculiar characteristic of modern man, that he indulges in abstractions through the will, devotes himself to abstract ideals through the will, hears abstract commandments from the pulpits, but that these abstract commandments do not enter into his arm, not into his body, not into his actions. The second link in the chain of the education and development of humanity that is meant here leads to the human becoming one in what he experiences as the impulses of the will in his body itself. The spiritualization of the body with the will, the introduction of the will into everything sensual, everything physical and everything social, is what this spiritual science imparts as a second step.

And what becomes of ideals when they are, as it were, inoculated into the body in this way, according to the method of spiritual scientific thinking? They are seized by that which would otherwise be directed out of this body only towards the ordinary world of the senses. What gradually awakens in our body during childhood, sensual love, becomes, when a person is seized by spiritual science, so that all ideals too do not remain mere abstraction, that they do not remain mere thoughts, but that they are loved, loved with the whole human being. It becomes so that one loves the spiritual that underlies our morality, our ethics, our morals, our religious impulses, as one loves a loved one, so that what would otherwise remain abstract becomes completely concrete like a being of flesh and blood.

Therefore, Kant's categorical imperative, which already disturbed Schiller, had to be overcome by the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Because this categorical imperative intrudes into human life like something to which one submits. And what Kant says, proceeding from a consciousness that must be overcome today if we want to make progress: “Duty! thou exalted, great name, thou that dost not connote anything complaisant, anything that implies ingratiation , but demands submission,” you who ‘lay down a law... before which all inclinations are silent, even if they secretly work against it’ - that must be replaced by the other: Freedom, you wonderful spiritual construct that encompasses everything, to which my humanity would like to surrender in love! Schiller was disturbed by the inhuman categorical imperative of Kant, and he said: “I am happy to serve my friends, but unfortunately I do it with inclination. And so it often bothers me that I am not virtuous.” — “There is no other advice, you must try to despise it, and then, with disgust, do as duty bids you.” Schiller sensitively saw all that was philistine and inhuman in this categorical imperative. He did not yet live in the time when it had to be pointed out — as it has in the present — that what is to be sought in spiritual science combined with the human being, and what makes what is to live spiritually in us an impulse of love, must be sought beyond all natural foundations in spiritual foundations. When such an impulse of love becomes the social driving force among people, then the social community is based on trust. Then the relationship between people is such that what happens between them happens through the experience of each individual person, not because people live like a herd of animals and everything that should be the direction, the path of their lives, is ordered and arranged for them from above by some kind of organization.

And so we can say: In the early nineties, I strongly wanted to raise the call for something with my “Philosophy of Freedom” that today is being counteracted by the terrible, murderous opposite in Eastern Europe, and from there contagiously in many other places, and across a large part of Asia.

We have just entered into social conditions in modern times that — out of perverse human instincts — sought the complete opposite of what should have been striven for out of the knowledge of the true, deeper goal of modern humanity — that is the terrible 'tragedy of the latest times. But it is also the absolute necessity of the latest times for a striving towards the future that we recognize: the social order must be built in such a way that it can only be built on free thinking, on trust, on what Goethe meant when he wanted to define duty and said: “Duty is when I love what I command myself.

Dear attendees, when an education works for the paths of life and the paths of people's souls in such a way that these people, out of a keen interest in their environment, know how they should relate to other people, in that their whole existence is imbued with human dignity, only then can the ideal of modern times be fulfilled. Not through any organization, because it takes away so much of what people today must strive for if they follow their nature, and that must lead not to freedom but to bondage and decline.

And I have never made a secret of the fact that, in advocating the 'Philosophy of Freedom' and then the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science built on it, I never made a secret of the fact that I did not care about this or that content, about this or that detail. I have always spoken with a certain irony of those for whom the main thing is to hear: How many parts does human nature consist of? What can be found in this or that region of the spiritual world? — I have always spoken with a certain irony about such endeavors. On the other hand, it was always important to me to answer the question: What happens to the whole human being, to the human attitude, soul, body and spirit, when this person strives not to think as mere science gives it today, not to will as the organizations inoculate it, but to think and will as it is in the sense of the “Philosophy of Freedom” and anthroposophically oriented spiritual science? I always pointed out that thinking, simply by absorbing this spiritual science, becomes agile, that it opens up interest widely to the affairs of the present, that it provides a free and unbiased view of what is necessary and of what is holding back our progress in human development.

That there is much that holds back our necessary progress in human development - I may say that it came to me early on, a good forty years ago, when I got to know, through a student of Gervinus, such people who, within German intellectual life, and who, under the impressions made on him by the revolutionary years around 1848, wrote his History of German Literature and his History of the German People in the 19th Century. When delving into Gervinus' history of German literature, one still says today: He actually set the guidelines that all later literary historians followed. He set the broad lines according to which German antiquity, the German Middle Ages, Minnesang and Meistersang, the early days of the German classical period are to be judged. But he also set the guidelines for a healthy assessment of the Goethe-Schiller period. Some of his views may be considered pedantic today – but those who followed him are even more pedantic. And some people today who believe themselves to be at the height of a particularly modern, expressionist era really show through their snobbery a pedanticity that is much greater than that of the old traditions, but I do not want to defend their pedanticity. But there was something strange about Gervinus, this Gervinus, who became quite bitter in the 1770s, so that – despite the fact that he was owed so much – he caused much offence to those who under the auspices of these Siebziger Jahre believed they were sailing into the golden age of Germanness and who, in any case, had no inkling of what was to come from the seeds that were already present in that age.

What did Gervinus proclaim as his own well-intentioned conclusion in his history of German literature? He proclaimed the remarkable fact that German poetry ended with Goethe's death. — Just think, my dear audience, the one who first described this German literature with such deep love, he stated at the end of his description that the German people should no longer listen to what comes from all sorts of lyricists and the like, but that they should become aware of what has emerged from the deepest essence of Germanness to the surface until 1832. Beyond that, Gervinus believes, the German people must no longer devote themselves to lyric poetry and drama, to fiction, but to politics, to practical action. The time for practical action has come. In a strange way, the first seed of this came to me; I felt it more than forty years ago, when I received the whole of Gervinus's teachings in this way from Karl Julius Schröer, my dear old friend Schröer, at the Technical University. At that time, I felt something that was a seed of another, which, I would say, is now fully developed.

There were a good number of people like Gervinus who, based on a largely justified insight, said that the time of inward contemplation, the time when one withdrew from practical life and strove for spiritual heights, was over. It was now a matter of devoting oneself to practical life. But by observing this germ one could already feel something: that all these people who spoke in this way pointed to practical life in a very abstract, unrealistic way, that they regarded the old ideals as fulfilled, so to speak, and pointed to a new, practical life, but for this practical life they had no impulsive ideas, no impulsive forces. For if one asked Gervinus, for example: What is the spiritual content of what you described so beautifully until 1832? One was given a vast, grand tableau in the presentation. If one asked: What should live in the hearts, in the souls of those people who are now to move out into practical life, who are to lead this practical life, who are to find the ways of life from the ways of the soul? There was nothing, no new ideals were there! And the thought had to arise in the soul: First of all, the world, the spiritual world, must be found, from which the new ideals for a new practice of life can be found; this spiritual world must first be scientifically fathomed, just as the natural world has been scientifically fathomed for three to four centuries.

And basically, the time has shown that the world has remained without drawing from these spiritual sources, that it wanted to establish practice, but practice without spirituality - and this desire to establish practice without spirituality has led us into today's time of decline, into a time of need, misery and hopelessness. And many a thing has been said that repeatedly points to where we are actually heading. Yes, many things have permeated the lectures that I have been privileged to give here in Stuttgart for two decades, many things that seemed necessary to me to bring to people's consciousness from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, if there is to be an upward development – an upward development not through cannons and guns, but through a practice of life that is supported by spirituality, but by a spirituality that must first be created anew. And here today I may point out something that I have said from the most diverse points of view as belonging to our spiritual science.

I have said: if someone applies the same approach, which has come to us from natural science and which fills our thought forms with natural scientific formations, if someone applies this to history, then they see only that which leads to decline in history. For in history there are always forces that bring about decline. And if you follow history only with the methods that are common in science, as for example the English cultural historian Buckle did and those who followed him, then you see in history only that which leads to the downfall, then you see only the evening glow of history. In order to see what has brought about the ascents in history, it is necessary to look into the spiritual world. That which brings about the ascents in history are impulses that arise from the spiritual world. I have already pointed out here that, for example, through Gibbon we have an excellent history of the decadence of Romanism written in the age of natural science. But what we still lack today is a historical account of what was the impulse of Christianity in the declining Roman world. One can describe what perished in Romanism with a scientific way of thinking; but one cannot describe what arose in Christianity with a scientific way of thinking. I have pointed this out. And what follows from what I have pointed out? It may seem to follow only in ideas, only in thoughts, but in reality in terms of the ways of life? What follows from this?

This follows: If someone were to appear in our age, in which natural science has taken hold of all circles and minds, right down to the circles of the Jesuits, as I have indicated, if someone were to appear and give a life-historical account from this natural scientific spirit, what would he have to say? He can only see phenomena of decline, because he regards our Western culture from the perspective of natural science. What would such a person write if he were to write about the present from a scientific point of view? He writes: “The Decline of the West”. And have we not - in contrast to all healthy thinking in spiritual science - now also received this terrible literary product: “The Decline of the West” - a morphological historical view by Oswald Spengler. My dear audience, the only way to understand how this could be possible is to realize that those who are saturated with a purely scientific way of thinking can only see the signs of decline, so that they must prophetically predict: the whole culture must perish.

But must it not go under if all people think as this Spengler thinks? Just as one must become a materialist if one does not detach thinking from corporeality, so one must think about Western culture as Oswald Spengler thinks if one looks at this culture of the West only from a natural scientific point of view. But if everyone looks at it that way, if everyone believes that we must perish, then we will perish. That is why I call this book a terrible book. For those who are infected by these ideas, by these impulses, and who take them up in an honest way, must become bearers of decline from the deepest depths of their soul; they must enter soul paths that lead to the life paths into the abyss. From time to time we must look at such phenomena, because only they show us the depths of human life in which the phenomena of decline are present today, and the depths to which the paths of the soul are prepared that rush down into the abysses of the paths of life.

Now, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science faces such things. It keeps its gaze fixed on that which is rooted in the spiritual world by the human being. Of course, this is most attacked in itself, that it asserts that the human being can, if he only develops the powers of the soul present in him, come to the contemplation of a spiritual world. Today this is brusquely rejected from almost all sides as enthusiasm, although one could easily follow that those paths to the spiritual world - which I tried to open in my book “How to Obtain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?” and in my attempt at meditations on self-knowledge and so on - that these paths are just as safe as those that lead into the fields of mathematics with absolutely clear, sharply defined thinking. Only in this spiritual research one does not only think, but also other, more real powers of the soul than in mathematics come into consideration in this research.

There this spiritual research must indeed speak about the spiritual world; it cannot place itself on the foundation on which many traditional creeds are based today. What do these traditional creeds proclaim? One thing they proclaim, for example, is something that has been fully established by spiritual science: the indestructibility of the human soul when the body is returned to the earth, the transition of the human being into the spiritual world when the human being passes through the gate of death. But it is not enough just to come to such conclusions; it is also important how these conclusions are cultivated in the human being. And how is the idea of immortality cultivated today? By appealing to the selfish instincts of the human soul's journey. Read the countless sermons, read the countless reflections on this subject – you will find everywhere speculation that man has an egoistic interest of the most intense kind, that he does not perish with death. Basically, all talk about immortality is a concession to this egoism of the soul. The way in which the idea is presented is characterized by this. And what is sharply denied in the face of this half-immortality is the other half, the part that Origen still had expressed, although he was considered a heretic by the church: the pre-existence of the soul, to which the unbiased spiritual researcher returns. What do today's confessions have to give? The conviction that two people come together in the world, produce a child and that the soul is then newly created from the spiritual world, that every time a sensual process takes place here, a spiritual process is added from the spiritual worlds.

Dear attendees, this idea is not a Christian one. This idea is an Aristotelian one. It was Aristotle who, out of the decadence of Greek thought and out of an uncomprehended Platonism, taught this coming into being of the soul with the body and thus the one-sided immortality only after death. And so the Christian denominations, by denying pre-existence, do not represent something Christian, but rather something Aristotelian, something that in its depths has absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. And when spiritual science, as it is meant here, comes along and reveals the whole state of affairs, then the “Trauben” like the pastor, the professor Traub, come along and declare that spiritual science is merely copying. No, it is not like that. In truth, with regard to certain elementary things, one agrees with old truths just as one agrees today with the old Euclid in geometry. But people like Traub are only too willing to throw mud at anything that existed in older times, because if one studies impartially, one would recognize where their own wisdom comes from. Their wisdom is borrowed from all the things they want to bury so that no one will find out about it. That is why they make people think that anthroposophy draws from gnosticism and the like, so that people think of gnosticism as something dangerous and do not look for themselves how this gnosticism has flowed not into anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but into the modern content of creeds, by bringing into decadence what lived in gnosticism.

This spiritual science must point out precisely how man descends from the spiritual world, how it is not a whim of the physical world that causes the divine-spiritual world to create a soul for what human beings procreate on earth, but how the soul descends from the spiritual world with experiences that it has had there; it must point out precisely how physical life is a continuation of spiritual life. Spiritual science adds full, complete immortality to half immortality. If one walks this path, one recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds into the individual human being. One also recognizes how the spiritual flows from spiritual worlds – but through the human being – into cultural advances, and how these cultural advances have very specific, distinct epochs and periods. Today we are in the period that, in terms of our conception of culture and civilization, must lead to something entirely new. That is how it is.

When you read a book like Oswald Spengler's, which is quite a thick volume, you can see how he looks at individual cultures from his scientific point of view. He says: Cultures are always developing; they have had a childhood, an adolescence, a maturity, a death. This was the case with oriental cultures. They emerged, grew, matured, and died. It was the same with Greek culture. And it is the same with our culture; and our culture is now in the process of dying. Because, he says, we are compelled to look at cultures in the same way that we look at an oak or a pine tree. An oak tree emerges, grows, matures, and dies. We look at cultures in the same way. Yes, we look at them in the same way when we are completely imbued with a purely scientific way of thinking. If we get to know the spiritual world and learn to cultivate it in the right way, then we also know how to look at cultures differently.

Then what I gave here during my last stay in Stuttgart as an outline of the historical life of mankind will come into our souls, in which I pointed out that once upon a time, in primeval times, people had an instinctive knowledge, an instinctive spiritual life, but something higher than we can achieve today with our intellectuality. Compared with what was there at the beginning from the human instincts of wisdom, we are today, however, in an epoch of decline. But if we understand, as spiritual science means, to open the source in our souls for free, enlightened thinking, for freedom, which is love at the same time, for social trust, for spiritual insight at all, then what lives in us, what penetrates through our soul, into this earthly culture, into this earthly civilization, brings about an ascent. But if we were to be satisfied with what contemplation of nature and the scientific world view can give us, if we could only believe in what is there today through this view, then there would be an inevitable decline. There will be no decline if we become aware that within us is the source of a thinking that can detach itself from the body, that within us is the source of a willing that can love the ascent into the spiritual world as much as only sexual love can love something. If we raise in freedom the wisdom that ancient humanity received in instincts and that can only be raised today because physicality no longer gives us anything, if we raise in freedom that, then we insert the impulses of ascent into what wants to descend. So the question that is put to humanity today is: Is the world not in decline? Yes, it is in decline if man wants to follow only what is given to him from outside, if he will only be harnessed in a natural or social organization given from the outside.

Decline will not occur if people build and found a new world from within themselves. The Lenins and Trotskys, who want to build a new world in every respect and only on the basis of natural science, lead most quickly and most intensely to decline. Those who want to build a new world out of the spirit lead to social advancement – but only they. For all those who still believe that the world can be cured by external institutions, by all kinds of external means, by Marxism or the like, Oswald Spengler has spoken the truth. If only these people work on the world with their powers, if only they direct world development, then Spengler's prophecy must be fulfilled. For he only drew the consequences from that, from which they must draw one, who today is only filled with a scientific world view. Today the ways of life are serious, and it is necessary that the greatest seriousness should take hold of the ways of the soul. But one must also take such great matters seriously. And one must be able to judge from symptoms.

I told you that more than forty years ago, when I, as a young man, got to know Gervinus' way of thinking through Schröer and then approached Gervinus myself, it had a profound effect on me how Gervinus demands practice but has no ideas for practice, how he wants the world in which there were still those ideas, of which he alone knows how to speak, to have ended in 1832, to have ended with the death of Goethe. It made a deep impression on me how he called on people to stop writing poetry and drama, to stop writing fiction, but to devote themselves to the practical tasks of life, how he pointed people in the direction of practicality, but had no ideas for these practical tasks of life. And so people behaved accordingly. The lyricists were only there for the school, at most for the concert hall; there they were declaimed. But what flowed from the spiritual life could not intervene in the ways of life. There was a discordance between the ways of the soul and the ways of life. And so we developed. Now people like Oswald Spengler are saying: All that Western culture and civilization have brought is finished, it is doomed! So what do we do? This is now particularly interesting, and let us consider with Spengler's own words why he actually wrote his book, for which minds he actually intended it. He says himself: “If, under the influence of this book, people of the newer generation turn to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of epistemology, then they are doing what I want, and one cannot wish them anything better.

Now, my dear audience, I think that in the age in which one believes that one has made such splendid progress in practice, people have turned to technology instead of poetry, to the navy instead of painting, to politics instead of the critique of knowledge, before Spengler wrote his book – all that was truly already there; there have truly never been too few politicians. Now to prophesy the decline of Western civilization, now to have to admit that one wants to call on people to turn away from spirituality, to turn to a practice for which one does not have any ideas, indeed, does not want to have any ideas, in principle, to now prophesy the downfall of the ideas of the West because one believes them to be dying - that is speaking from the heart of the time of decline. And perhaps I may, without being immodest – for I only want to characterize a desire, an attempt, a beginning – perhaps I may point out that what has been presented here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and what now, out of this spirituality, wants to take on a practical form here in Stuttgart, the center of the movement, stands on the opposite point of view. We do not say to people: Turn away from all spirituality, because that is in decline, and turn to the coming day. We say to people: New spirituality must be created; we need to delve into new sources of spiritual life. We need to enter into the soul paths of a spiritual vision so that we can find precisely that practical life that is supported by realistic ideas. Without ideas we have ridden ourselves into decline; but with ideas, which cannot now be the traditional, old ones, but must be newly created, with these new ideas alone will we be able to enter the dawn. Admittedly, it seems as if it could not happen so quickly, because what can be seen on a large scale is also evident on a small scale. But I only want to speak of this symptomatically.

The way in which such a desire, as it emanates from here, is judged – it had to be characterized in issue no. 50 of our newspaper “Threefolding of the Social Organism” by Eugen Kolisko under the title “Theologians' Criticism and Conscience”. It had to be characterized once again on the basis of the book by a university professor, Dr. Philipp Bachmann, professor of theology at the University of Erlangen. This book, “Life or Death?” was published here in Stuttgart. Read the article written by Dr. Kolisko and you will see that he rightly summarizes his review at the end with the following sentences, which are a perfect description of a science that today is effective only through diplomas and external positions, but which is inwardly hollow and which always develops precisely those forces that, from the alleged spirit, must only lead into decline. Today we must have the courage to characterize the phenomena of decline not only in general and abstract terms, but to shine a bright light on how we have an alleged intellectual life today, which even in the simplest things works with an unscrupulousness that only parallels its thoughtlessness, its ignorance. This, ladies and gentlemen, must not be ignored if one wants to speak today of the harmonies between the ways of the soul and the ways of life.

Thus Dr. Kolisko had to characterize what is identified with such an insignificant little book:

It would not be necessary to concern oneself so thoroughly with this book if it had not been written by a university professor. Such a person must know what the task of an objective critic is. But the present critique is careless.

In particular, the way the train of thought of my “Secret Science” is reproduced in this book is careless.

One can only proceed in this way without prejudice in the field of theosophy. For here one is not checked when one asserts the most absurd. Anthroposophy, theosophy, spiritualism are all considered equal by many, and according to the saying that at night all cows are gray, one can with impunity combine everything and write derogatory reviews. If a critique were to be written in such a careless manner in any other scientific field, without sufficient knowledge of the criticized field, if only in one case, instead of in many places, the thoughts of a writer, ignoring the relevant literature and mixing up the opinions of different writers, would be held accountable in scientific circles and would lose his reputation and perhaps even his position. Anyone who presents to their readers the content of what is said in the book “The Occult Science” about the human constitutional elements with the words: “The physical body dies, the etheric body sleeps, the astral body forgets, the I (the sentient soul) is the memory.” He is either incapable of reproducing someone else's train of thought, or he does it to maliciously distort it. Either way, he is condemned as a critic. It is an indictment of today's education system that a university professor can produce such a work unhindered. What is to be thought of the Christianity of a theology professor who writes such criticisms is left to those who can still muster some outrage at such a frivolous and unscrupulous procedure.

That is what that Bachmann, in his “Bachmann-like manner,” discovered as the content of what is in my book “Die Geheimwissenschaft.” This is how university professors read today.

Now, my dear attendees, this is what is opposed from all corners to the will for ascent; these are the ones who do not want to let anything approach that could somehow lead to ascent. These people are present in large numbers, they educate our youth. And there are the “Spenglers” and write that we must necessarily fall into decline. Why do the “Spenglers” write like that? Because they are incapable of focusing on anything but the “Bachmanns” with their ignorance and carelessness. These things must be faced in all seriousness today. And I may, after having three lectures preceding, say at the end today: After I in my first two lectures last week tried to show something of the paths that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to take in an epistemological way, in a social way — wants to go scientifically, not as the “Bachmen” and “Trauben” [a play by Max Frisch about the perversion of art for the sake of money] — after I have also spoken of what is to be artistically developed in Dornach, I may say today that those who strive for science and art in such a way can truly be reminded of a beautiful saying that extends from Goethe and will remain eternally true: ‘He who possesses science and art also has religion’. Spiritual science and its art have religion, but a religion that is not built on blind faith, but on a clear, bright, truly spirit-knowing science, on an artistic will striving for spiritual deepening. And after Goethe said, “He who possesses science and art has religion,” he continues, “He who does not possess those two, let him have religion!”

In our time, however, it may perhaps be said of spiritual science, of the representative of the idea of threefold social order, as a special, deepest matter of the heart: Yes, whoever possesses science and art also has religion. But today, religion can only lead to ascent if it draws from a living science in a living way, not from a science of the dead. It can only lead to ascent if it arises out of an artistic volition that is connected with a knowledge of the spirit such that one can say: Whoever today possesses a science rooted in spiritual insight, whoever today attempts, even if only in the weakest beginning, an art that is completely connected with this spiritual insight in its most intense will, should not be reproached for opposing the religious element in the way of life in the present. For he who seeks the spirit, who seeks to embody the spirit artistically, certainly also has the will to introduce into social life that which, connected with human worth and human dignity, truly exercises in the social community the look up to the divine guidance of the world, to the divine primal forces of life - a true look up that does not merely speculate on human egoism, but on the connection of human beings with the great eternal laws of existence. Only a religion that does not want to speculate on egoism, but points to the deepest harmony of the individual human being with the whole world, can lead to ascent.

And to the same extent that such a religion permeates the human soul through the impulse of such science and art, we will advance socially. To the same extent, despite adversity and misery — but perhaps, if the opposing forces are all too strong, through much adversity and much misery — we will not face the decline of Western culture, but the ascent of true human life: a life in which ways of the soul and the ways of life can and will be worked on religiously, scientifically, and artistically, in which the spirit, the spirit-filled art, and the spirit-filled religion will be worked out for the human present and into the human future.

Dear attendees,In one of my last lectures here, I already referred to a significant contemporary literary publication, a literary publication that even someone who otherwise doesn't like to have much to do with what is commonly referred to as “literature” can point out, as is the case with the person speaking here. He wants to be concerned with the roots of practical life, with the forces that shape this practical life; he wants to be concerned with everything that shapes this practical life out of the spiritual, with everything that approaches man's mind and heart and soul directly, elementarily, and strengthens man for life. He wants as little as possible to do with what is regarded as “literature” today. But about the book – you can guess from the formulation of the title of today's Contemporary Speech – about the book by Oswald Spengler “The Decline of the West”, even those who do not particularly love literature as such may speak. For one can say: Precisely about that which today every person who is not actually asleep in his soul must feel, about the forces of decline, the forces of decline that are working powerfully, the forces of decline that are working terribly in our cultural and civilizational life must feel, precisely about this decline, about these phenomena of decline, Oswald Spengler in his book has used a language that, firstly, sounds so characteristically of the whole spirit of our time, but, secondly, and in particular, sounds of the Central European, of the German spirit. In this book by Oswald Spengler, nothing less is attempted than to prove the necessity of this decline of Western civilization, to prove it by all means, one might almost say with all the sophistication of today's science—yes, a science that is distilled from today's by a man of genius like a new science so that Oswald Spengler's book is, I would say, not a theoretical book, not a literary book, but a book that speaks of facts, of facts emerging directly from the human spiritual life of the present, but also speaks in such a way that the very thoughts of this book influence the actions of the people who take them up. And the fact that many people are taking up these ideas from Oswald Spengler's book is clear from the simple fact that, despite its 615 pages, well over 20,000 copies of the book have already been sold. What the sale of 20,000 copies of a book means for the number of readers concerned is known to anyone who has ever dealt with such questions. It can be said that among the things in the spiritual realm that one must deal with today if one wants to delve a little into the undercurrents of contemporary cultural and civilizational life, two books are among the most important for us Central Europeans books are among the most important: firstly, this book by Oswald Spengler, 'The Decline of the West'; and secondly, a work that has perhaps not yet received much attention in the literary world, the book 'The Economic Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship'. This book has just been published by the Viennese cooperative publishing house “Neue Erde” and was written by the man who, as the highest economic commissar, that is, as the minister for economic affairs, summarized his principles and experiences in this book after the establishment of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, following his escape and internment in Austria. One would like to say: These two books cast a terrible light on what is present in the undercurrents of intellectual and even working life in the present.

Oswald Spengler is a man who in his “Decline of the West” tried to - the seeds for his book, he states, lie in 1911, so already before the beginning of the world war catastrophe - tried to show how our Western culture contains within itself forces of decline, how it necessarily shows itself to be a culture of decline through its characteristic manifestations. For Oswald Spengler, this culture is so obviously a culture of decline that he predicts that with the beginning of the third millennium, it will have reached its end as the ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, ancient Greek, and ancient Roman cultures once reached their end. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is not proved by a man who is acting on a superstitious prophecy, it is not said by a man who indulges in some random fantasy, it is said by a man who has mastered the scientific spirit of the present in an outstanding way. Precisely because of the genius of the author's personality, because of his universal mastery, one might say of twelve to fifteen sciences of the present day, because of his courageous penetration of all the consequences of these sciences for practical and historical life, this book must be seen as a wealth of deeds, not just as a single deed. All that I have just said must be said about this book on the one hand. But on the other hand, it is a terrible book. Is it not a terrible book that, with the full weight of the scientific armamentarium that can only be mustered today, ingeniously proves that the symptoms of decline in this Western culture must lead to the downfall of this Western culture, right from the beginning of the third millennium thousand years – these symptoms of decline, within which we live, which were played out with a blaze in the world catastrophe of war and which now continue, even if they are not noticed by sleepy souls?

One must concern oneself a little, and we want to do that in the introduction, with the whole way in which Oswald Spengler comes to his conviction of the necessity of the decline of the West, if one wants to answer the question that should actually be the topic of my reflection today: Who may now speak against the decline of the West? – for one should not speak lightly against Spengler's book. To speak against it carelessly would mean to carelessly ignore the serious scientific armament of the author, and would mean that one does not want to consider at all what he conscientiously brings out of the phenomena of contemporary life. And I believe that many people have already spoken out against Oswald Spengler's book who should not really have done so. Oswald Spengler appears in his book first of all as a historian. He says himself that he noticed the symptoms of decline before the world war catastrophe, as I said. He wanted to understand the actual causes, the essence of these symptoms of decline. He was one of those personalities on whose soul the symptoms of decline weighed heavily, while the great mass of the population, especially the so-called intelligent population, still talked about how we had come so far and how we we have achieved and how we want to carry it everywhere, into all corners of the world - it has become clear to us what power we actually had to carry out what we believed we had to carry out into all corners of the world. Oswald Spengler describes for us how he came to the conclusion, from observing the phenomena of decline in the present day, that one cannot really speak properly about these phenomena of decline without speaking about the whole history of the West, namely about what thoughts live in Western culture and how we are able today, precisely from a historical perspective, to bring these thoughts to life in us and to make them active. And so Oswald Spengler's reflection expanded into a comprehensive historical book that aims to explore the entire foundations of Western thought and feeling. Oswald Spengler comes to the conclusion that the scientific view that has become common in recent centuries has indeed been gradually applied to history, that this scientific view – we have often emphasized this here from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science – that this scientific view has been incorporated into all the thinking, feeling and willing of those parts of humanity that are relevant to progress in general. But it is precisely in history, in what the [scientific view of] history does not provide, in the way it does not elucidate the actual causes of historical events, that Oswald Spengler realizes how misguided the entire historical approach has become in the last few centuries up to the present. This, ladies and gentlemen, is truly not without significance for the present day in a practical sense, for we will see later how, in the broadest circles, it is precisely historical prejudices that are to be made reality. We shall show, by means of a typical example, the Hungarian Council of Economic Commissioners, Eugen Varga, how the ideas which Oswald Spengler describes as historical thinking are actually being put into practice. If Oswald Spengler's thesis is only applicable to forces of decline, then the way of thinking and looking at things, which only uses thoughts and ideas that come from this view of decline, must also create only phenomena of decline in the field of social organism.

In a person like Professor Eugen Varga, the way of thinking that Oswald Spengler finds only touches on, and which, with the beginning of the third millennium, must lead to the decline of the entire Western world, has been incarnated, has become flesh.

Now Oswald Spengler became acquainted with what I have often called Goetheanism here; he became acquainted with the Goethean method of observing nature, in contrast to the natural science that is practiced everywhere as the official one at the universities and radiates from there to the lower teaching institutions and which [through application to historiography] has turned history into a caricature. And what does he find himself compelled to do when he becomes acquainted with Goethe's method of observing nature? He finds himself compelled to apply this Goethean method to history, to apply it, to be sure, in the way he believes it must be applied to historical phenomena. Goethe's method is far different from what is today officially the scientific approach. Goethe does not look at nature in a philistine, mechanical, pedantic way, as a mere cause and effect relationship; he looks at how the living being lives out its emergence, its birth, its growing young, its maturing, its growing old, its dying, by ascending into the realm of living beings. And one need only read his essay from 1790, his attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants, to see how Goethe observes the development of the plant from the root, from leaf to leaf, in its ascent to blossom and fruit , to see how he contemplates nature in its living becoming, how each leaf is the symbol of what is formed differently, how the primordial organ is only metamorphosed in the petal, in the stamen, and even in the germ. Inspired by this Goethean morphology, by this theory of the development of living beings, Oswald Spengler sets out to consider the historical development of mankind itself according to the pattern of Goethe's ideas of organic nature. He then comes to look at [the cultures] in the same way that one looks at the development and growth of an organic living being, a plant, an animal or even a physical human being, at the birth, growth, maturation, aging and death of cultures; and he looks at the birth , the growth, the maturing, the aging, the dying of Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, and Roman culture. He observes this by looking at the individual phenomena of these cultures in the same way that Goethe looked at the individual organs of a living being. And now he focuses on what Western culture has produced so far; he compares - just as someone who studies living beings compares one living being with another - he compares what Western culture has produced so far with what Greek, Roman, and so on, culture has produced in ancient times up to a certain point in its development. And then he can calculate where the present culture of the Occident stands, because one can compare this point of view with the corresponding point of view of Persia, Egypt, Greece, and so on; one can calculate when the present culture of the Occident will perish, because one knows how long the ancient cultures took to perish.

All this becomes fruitful because Oswald Spengler breaks with the philistine method of looking at history, and he has the courage to break with it, he has the courage to say what history has become in its connection to mere scientific ideas; he has the courage to say, for example: The previous form of historical approach has kept the formal consideration of history at a level that one would have been ashamed of in other sciences. Why does he think this? Because he thinks it is necessary not to apply the dead method to history, which is suitable for the mineral kingdom and other inanimate things, but to apply a living method to history, by comparing one cultural form with another. Of course, to do that you have to be as knowledgeable as Oswald Spengler; you have to be able to compare the achievements of the most diverse fields of science and art and technology in the most diverse times and cultures; you have to be able, for example, to compare the style in the architecture of any cultural period with the methods of optics, chemistry, and so on – that is, one must have a comprehensive view of what has really happened, and Oswald Spengler has that view, and he has it in the way that someone has it who has completely mastered the scientific spirit of the present. He can compare as the eye compares one plant with another, one animal with another; he can compare what the mathematician accomplishes in a cultural period with what the musician accomplishes; he can compare what the physicist accomplishes at the experimental table with what the socialist agitator designates as a cultural form in the same time; he can compare what the chemist says with what the painter conjures up on the canvas. That is to say, he can really apply a morphological approach: He can compare, he can shape the comparison, the analogy, as he believes, into a scientific method, and from this application of comparison, of analogy – which the others only apply as if on a string of fantasy – he finds strict methods to deduce the underlying causes from the superficial events of history, which are usually considered alone. He does this in his own way, and it is interesting to see what conclusions Oswald Spengler, with his genius, knowledge and courage, comes to. He truly manages to penetrate to what history has actually become today in the hands of those who treat it mostly from the point of view of some party or other and do not even realize it. How today's historians themselves mock the fact that in the time of Herder and Goethe, people described a Brutus, a Caesar, an Antony, an Alexander, a Pericles in the way they needed them for their ideals, in the way they needed any ideal personality, in order to present them either in their excellent, angelic or even nefarious nature. Today's historians believe that they have gone beyond the personal and human aspects that were introduced into the historical approach at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. Oswald Spengler rightly reproaches them: “They sneer at the historians of Goethe's time when they express their political ideals by writing a history of antiquity and using the names Lykurg, Brutus , Cato, Cicero, Augustus, and by whose rescue or condemnation they cover their own program or a personal infatuation; but they themselves cannot write a chapter without betraying which party their morning newspaper belongs to.” One must often characterize that which lives in the consciousness of people of the present day, especially of intellectuals, even of those who appear to be at the pinnacle of science, one must often characterize it as Oswald Spengler has characterized it here.

And Spengler also notes many other things. For example, he notes how little some of what has been perceived in recent times as, I might say, absolute truth about some phenomenon has been drawn from the depths of events. Oswald Spengler, for example, draws attention to the whole fuss that was kicked up about Ibsen's “Nora” at the time. Those good bourgeois people who belonged to this milieu and knew only this milieu, from which something like Ibsen's “Nora” emerged, believed that they could draw the whole problem of femininity into their sphere. Oswald Spengler says: How comical Ibsen's women's problems appear when, instead of the famous Nora, you put, for example, Caesar's wife. Don't they know that they are basically only considering something modest: the lady who does not go beyond the bourgeois boundaries between 1850 and 1950 – because then they will have disappeared? It is quite a feat when a contemporary person who has to be taken seriously, like Oswald Spengler, hurls these things at people who, I would like to say, so gladly and often - unspoken or spoken in a strange with self-praise and self-satisfaction, they demonstrate, tacitly or explicitly, their self-praise and self-satisfaction at knowing so much about the deepest secrets of the world, and they have no idea that these secrets are nothing more than European superficialities between 1850 and 1950.

It would be terrible if the present could not muster anything to effectively counter the serious armament of Oswald Spengler. And there, my dear attendees, much must be pointed out that has been put forward for a number of years - actually, I may say, for decades - here in Stuttgart from the point of view of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. You see, reference has often been made here to a significant fact, to the fact that the way in which science has affected the Western cultural process over the last three to four hundred years is actually quite wrongly regarded. It is believed that natural science has come about through Kepler, Copernicus, Galilei and so on – all this is a prevailing belief in the broadest circles, especially in scholarly circles – that one must learn from it how to penetrate reality. It is believed that one has to train one's thinking in science, because in science one can see how to think correctly, how to think exactly, and therefore one must look at everything else that occurs in life according to the pattern of this way of looking at things.

Spiritual scientific considerations lead to a different realization. These spiritual scientific considerations, they do what, I would like to say, Oswald Spengler falls back on in a scanty way from his also only superficial considerations of Goetheanism, they do it in a deeper way. Long before the name of Oswald Spengler could be mentioned in any way, something else was pointed out here in the most essential foundations of the whole development of Western culture. It was pointed out that what has happened in the development of this Western culture in the last three to four centuries can only be understood if one gains a real overview of the course of the whole history of mankind from the foundations of spiritual science. Here too, in public lectures, it has been repeatedly pointed out how quite different an ancient Indian culture was, and one must go back to the 7th or 8th millennium to find it. This is what I have called in my book Occult Science. I have pointed out how different the nature of such an ancient Indian culture was, and how different the nature of an ancient Persian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Babylonian, and Greek-Latin culture, and how, after these cultures had been born , matured and died, and how our present-day culture emerged from it, the fifth cultural epoch after the great Atlantic catastrophe – our present-day culture, which people talk about in the most diverse ways. And again it was shown how within our present culture, since the middle of the 15th century, the intellectual element has been emerging and how, in the development of humanity, the emergence of this intellect – for before that time the intellect did not mean the most excellent cognitive power of man – how the emergence of this intellect has meant something special for the whole education of humanity, especially in the West.

My dear audience, if we take a spiritual scientific look at the entire configuration – precisely what Oswald Spengler strives for but does not achieve – the morphology of earlier cultural epochs, we know that these ancient cultures produced something great, powerful and awe-inspiring as they were born, grew young, matured, aged and died. But that to which our culture is called, what it has to bring from the deepest depths of the human soul to the surface of the outer cultural life, is the maturing of the true power of freedom in the human being. That is why I tried to present that which must well up from the depths of the human soul in the early 1890s in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. After this experience of freedom, after the experience of freedom in the pure intellect, for freedom can be experienced in nothing else – although other things in the human being are also valuable – freedom can only be experienced in pure thinking and can then radiate out to the whole of the human being's remaining nature. Mankind had to discard everything that it had previously brought to the surface out of instinct, like knowledge, in the form of mysticism, occultism, and theosophy. Today it is impossible to awaken again what humanity has acquired in the way of ancient astrology, mysticism, theosophy, gnosticism, and what was quite useful for an old knowledge, or to want to warm it up again. What is incumbent on us today, is to bring out from the present point of development of humanity just that which leads to the consciousness of freedom: the grasping of the human being in pure thinking. But when we grasp this human essence in pure thinking, then a completely new spiritual world must be born out of this thinking. Never in ancient cultures was that which we have handed down in terms of spiritual treasures and insights born out of pure thinking. Only in our time can a true realization of the spirit be born out of pure thinking, because this realization of the spirit must be born out of pure thinking, because only in this way can man, at the same time in the whole process of human development, mature to freedom, to the real consciousness of freedom, which from now on is his due in his development on earth. And everything we are experiencing today in the way of terrible present-day events and symptoms of decline comes from this: because humanity is to grasp from the very depths of its soul life the crystal-clear clarity of thought to conquer freedom, and because humanity is to mature to the strength necessary for this, the old realities are no longer relevant to it; they are no longer relevant to it at first, they are in decline, and the way must be sought to rise from the crumbling ruins of the old cultural life, permeated with pure thinking and thus growing into freedom.

In order to conquer freedom, to find ourselves completely within, we must give birth to human greatness from within, out of the chaos, out of the ruins of external life. Therefore, at first, humanity lost sight of what could really essentially control the external life, and just at the time when the urge was to awaken the consciousness of freedom, only a dead natural science came about. And what natural science did achieve was not something from which one could learn the actually progressive thinking, but it was something that afflicted humanity as a weakness. The fact that it must achieve freedom appears as a weakness in natural science. Natural science has become weak because the power must be turned to another side. Science itself has taken shape out of the educational forces within the human being. How science has become what it is is connected with the forces in the development of humanity. It is not the case that these forces have to learn from what science has become.

Now Oswald Spengler comes to this: one cannot penetrate into historical becoming with the ideas that science has produced. It really does matter that one needs comparison in order to get from the exterior of historical events to the deeper, interior happening. But — and we must be clear about this: Oswald Spengler does indeed recognize what is missing from today's historical perspective, from the perspective of humanity as a whole. He recognizes this clearly and sharply, and he even sees that only the perspective that has emerged in Goetheanism could help us to escape from the limitations of the scientific perspective. But Oswald Spengler is a mind that, although he has a universal command of the present-day sciences, is deeply stuck, not in the way of thinking that is produced by science, but in the way of thinking that has produced science since the middle of the 15th century; and he cannot develop himself out of it to what, from the depths of the human soul, could now overcome this scientific way of looking at things. Thus Oswald Spengler came to the negative realization in a brilliant way: Yes, we only bring about decline when we let natural science become our way of life. He comes to claim: What does today's natural science give us? It gives us the proof that the Occident, at the beginning of the third millennium, must end with its present culture. But now he cannot overcome in himself what has led to natural science. One has to give him the right: with those ideas that live in scientific knowledge, one can only come to the unproductive in the social ideas of the present. One must ascend to comparison, to the image, to the allegory, in order to recognize from it the deeper historical forces. But if the comparison, the allegory, is not to be merely a fantasy image and the image not merely a product of the imagination, if image and comparison, allegory and symbol in Spengler's sense are not to be merely something created by the imagination, then a real power must arise from the soul, which does not arise in Oswald Spengler. The real forces—the methods of attaining knowledge of the higher worlds have been described here—these forces must be developed if one seriously wants to use image, allegory, symbol, symptom, as Oswald Spengler uses them, for the consideration of world events. In other words, Oswald Spengler is a person who strives to go beyond this way of looking at things because he feels that the present way of looking at things is insufficient for the development of humanity; he knows that other forms of ideas must be applied, especially to history, but he does not want to apply these forms of ideas by inwardly invoking the power that alone can apply these forms of ideas. For it must be said: If someone applies images, allegories, imaginations, symbols to the historical approach, then he remains, if he remains at the point of view with which we are born, if he does not develop within himself the spiritual powers of knowledge that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks of, then he remains a player with mere allegories, remains a fantasist in the historical field. That means: What Oswald Spengler demands as his method must not be applied from his spiritual point of view, but it may only be applied when one ascends to that which has already been described here as imaginative, inspirative and intuitive knowledge.

Oswald Spengler wants to apply methods to the historical perspective that are still permeated by the old scientific thinking, even if not by the scientific spirit. And Oswald Spengler is one of those who blush when one speaks of what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must speak of as the only way out of the decline of the West. To Oswald Spengler, the social orientation that is created from this anthroposophically oriented underground seems like salon communism and the like. That is to say, Oswald Spengler displays genius in terms of his personal intellectual power, displays universal thinking and insight in the most diverse fields of science, but at the same time he also displays the utmost narrow-mindedness when it comes to developing such intellectual powers that can apply his method in a fruitful way.

My dear audience, only when you understand this, only then can you speak out against Oswald Spengler's arguments about the decline of the Occident. Only then can one say: Yes, you are right, it is the cultures that have emerged in the course of historical development that are to be regarded in such a way that one looks at their birth, their youth, their maturity, their aging, their dying. Yes, if we look at them in this way, our culture also shows that we must ascribe to it the downfall meant by Oswald Spengler. But then we see only one culture next to the other, like one plant next to the other, like one animal organism next to the other. We then have none of what we get when we look at them in a spiritual scientific way.

If we look at cultures from a spiritual scientific point of view, we see the first culture, the ancient Indian culture – I have dealt with it in my lecture on the historical development of humanity – and we find that what man brings forth from his own consciousness at that time is primitive, very elementary, simple. But at the same time we find that what man can bring forth out of his own powers of consciousness is imbued with an awe-inspiring primeval world wisdom. We go back and find the first cultures at an elementary stage of development; but when we understand what primeval world wisdom lives in these cultures, we literally kneel down in awe before that which has permeated these primeval cultures. And if we go further, we find that these first cultures have been replaced by other cultures. We find less and less primeval world wisdom, more and more that which man consciously brings forth, and so more and more until we find a complete drying up of primeval world wisdom in our culture, especially since the middle of the 15th century. This is even expressed externally. It is nonsense for people to believe that they can understand scientific thought from the 10th or 11th century. No, they cannot understand it, because a completely different language was spoken then than is spoken today. One must first become familiar with the way of thinking of that time, which has changed fundamentally. Therefore, what these earlier cultures instinctively mastered of primeval world wisdom has died out, so that one culture could emerge from another, that the primeval Indian culture could send the germ of primeval world wisdom to the primeval Persian culture, which in turn could send it to the primeval Egyptian culture, which in turn could send it to the Greek-Latin culture, and so on. We have advanced — because of our sense of freedom — to a development of pure intellect, of pure thinking, but we have lost the ancient instinctive primeval wisdom.

If we, like Oswald Spengler, look at nature only from the outside, then we must speak as Oswald Spengler spoke about the decline of the West. And we may only speak out against this decline of the West if we have the courage to say to ourselves: the old, instinctive spiritual wisdom has dried up, but a new spark is already glowing in our hearts; we will give birth to a new spiritual life from what we have acquired as intellect, which can permeate our inner being with new cultural achievements. We not only believe, but we know: In our inner being is the germ of futures, not just of one future, and there we learn to understand how very differently we must view what has taken place in history than Oswald Spengler saw it. We see, for example, how the old Greco-Latin culture, which came up from the south, is drawing to its close; it brought Christianity over from the East, initially preserving the secret of Golgotha, and then — what happened to this secret of Golgotha? In those days it was still understood because a remnant of primeval world wisdom still existed; it understood the origin of Christianity. Then the Germanic peoples came from the north and took up what the aged peoples had developed, who had come to maturity and to die; they took it into their young blood and transformed it. These Germanic peoples were the last who could still absorb primeval world wisdom. Then, in their bosom, humanity developed, in which this primeval world wisdom dried up and which will bring forth a new spiritual life from the power that must be generated within itself. If this new spiritual life is not brought forth, then Western culture will descend into barbarism.

Today it is not a matter of looking at the outside world and saying: I believe there will still be enough forces to rekindle the declining life. —- It is not a matter of standing there with a sleeping soul and waiting for this or that to appear here and there that lives in the outside world; it leads to decline. And Oswald Spengler is right about the proof, no matter how many mistakes the historians he laughs at prove in his favor; but he ceases to be right in the eyes of those who are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West from a new spiritual life. He ceases to be right in the eyes of those who say: Yes, everything in the external world may and will collapse. But we can find something that was not there before: we can build a new world out of our will, if we illuminate it with pure thoughts, a world that is not seen today, but that must be willed. And one has strength for such volition only when one wants to permeate and interpenetrate this volition with what can be won through spiritual knowledge, as a permeation and impelling of this volition — in ways that have often been described here. And so today one does not appeal to the vague belief that there were always forces at work that brought forth new cultures. No, today one has to agree with Oswald Spengler: Yes, the facts prove the decline, and Oswald Spengler only summarizes the facts as proof. One has to agree with him if one does not have the certainty that The will that is kindled by the spirit, of which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science speaks, will not refute theories, not views, not concepts and ideas that are false, but will fight the facts of decline through its own sense of fact. Today we do not have to refute theories, we do not have to refute false views, today we have to overcome the facts based on the truth. That is the only thing that justifies speaking about the decline of the West. And at the same time it shows us how one has to understand an idea like Oswald Spengler's: that the Western, the Central European peoples, with everything they have produced, are already at the end, and that the Russian population – I have long before Oswald Spengler, I have said time and again that the Russian population contains the core, the true germ of the future Europe; that is true. But how does Oswald Spengler imagine the process of the future? He thinks that Western culture will disappear and that what is emerging in Russia will then take the place of what is in Central Europe. No, once one has grasped the core of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, one says something else, one says: Just as the Germanic peoples received the essence of Christianity in their own way, and could not have developed anything out of their young blood if the mystery of Golgotha had not appeared from the south, so too must the culture that comes from the east shine out of this Central Europe, which we ourselves develop from a new spiritual life. It is not a matter of a Russism alien to Oswald Spengler's sense flooding Western and Central Europe with something that is young in comparison to what has died. No, it is a matter of this Russism having to find something that we ourselves create as a new spiritual life, something that this Russism has to receive in the same way that the Germanic peoples received the Mystery of Golgotha with their young blood. The future of those who are rumored to have a future also depends on us not dying from the decline of the West, but on us developing the immortal part in us through a new spiritual life; only those who speak of such a thing may speak against the decline of the West.

Therefore, wherever the old ideas live on today, especially when they become socialist theories, it shows that people not only observe the decline and allow it to happen, but that they actually foster it. And in this respect it is extremely interesting to see how the Minister for Economic Affairs in Räterepublik Hungary, Professor Eugen Varga, has gained his experiences, which he describes in his book “The Economic and Political Problems of the Proletarian Dictatorship”, which has just been published by the Wiener Genossenschaftsverlag der “Neuen Erde”. He describes how, in terms of his principles, he is a Marxist similar to Lenin and Trotsky in an even more radical form, and he wants to establish an order, an economic order in Hungary with these forces that are shaping themselves to the point of bullishness. I will only emphasize in a few brief strokes how, on the one hand, he is a true Marxist. He believes that if you make the world Marxist, it will become real, so he is making Hungary Marxist, and real, in the first instance. He knows that it was the urban industrial proletariat that carried the Marxist ideas, and he knows that what he wants to establish can only be born out of the ideas that the urban industrial proletariat swears by. But he has to state one thing right away: yes, the entire belief of this urban proletariat is that the future depends on the practical realization of Marxist ideas. But when such institutions are set up, the urban population and thus the urban industrial proletariat will be left without bread and become unhappy. The only ones who will benefit are the peasants outside; if things are set up as we want them to be, they can do a little better; the proletarians in the cities are initially faced with nothing but impoverishment, enormous price increases, and ultimately only ruin. —So how does Professor Eugen Varga, as a true Marxist, console himself? He says to himself: The greatness of an ideal is shown by the fact that you can starve for it. — But if the ideal has promised the people that, if it is fulfilled, they will not have to starve, then it is questionable whether they will really be so willing to starve if it is not fulfilled. And Varga should have waited to see if his Hungary of councils did not collapse for internal reasons. He has the excuse, however, that it did not come to that because he can point to the Romanian incursions and other external reasons; and so he finds all sorts of other things that he cites as his experiences.

And it is particularly interesting to point out these phenomena because one is dealing with someone who was allowed to become a practitioner, who was able to show how the stubborn theories that one thinks are just practical turn out to be reprehensible and corrupting when one wants to transfer them into reality. And so Professor Eugen Varga also has many a nice story to tell about his Marxism. But he also describes how he appoints his works councils, how everything is chosen from the workforce, how the positions in the factories that are foremen are filled, and so on. He says: You have to avoid the old bureaucracy. But what he describes is bureaucracy. But he says: What is currently rife will all be beautifully resolved in the future. He says: Yes, in the present, one does indeed have bad experiences; because those who have been elected to supervise the companies are just hanging around, arguing, and the others, who are still supposed to work, think that they should all be elected to the supervisory bodies themselves, because this loitering and arguing seems to them to be a very special ideal. This is the picture painted by Professor Eugen Varga, the creator of the Soviet dictatorship in Hungary. He does not realize that in a single sentence, on page 47 of his book, he expresses a significant truth. I will be quite frank with you: his book is an extremely interesting contemporary phenomenon for me, because in Professor Eugen Varga, what Oswald Spengler regards as the symptoms of decline are transformed into socialist ideas. There is a power of decline in his ideas, so that through people like Professor Eugen Varga, the power of decline is instilled in people. If you leave culture to its own devices, if you try to use such ideas to meddle in such areas, as Lenin and Trotsky and others do in the East and in Asia, then you are pushing for destruction in a concentrated way, so that history then rushes headlong into complete destruction. So, in terms of cultural history, a book by a man like Eugen Varga, who wants to be a practitioner and in doing so brings the theory of the decline of the West into his practice, is interesting to me, because this book is not just literature, it is something that expresses real life.

But what is actually interesting about it? I have to say that as interesting as the book is, what actually interests me the most is just a single sentence, which can be found on page 47 of Professor Eugen Varga's book. The sentence even surprised me. He describes how he formed his works councils, how the production commissar is at the top and how the individual commissars are, as the true Marxist envisions them. These production commissars mediate between the works councils and the supreme economic office. Now, on page 47 of his book, there is a strange confession about these commissars. You see, he says: This system – he means his system of councils – meets all four of the above-mentioned requirements, if the person of the production commissioner is the right one. Well, my dear audience, if you put the right people in all the positions, then you don't need to implement socialist ideas in reality, because then all the requirements will be met by these personalities. Thus, from the considerations of this practical abstract theorist, what he consciously certainly did not want to admit jumps out. His four demands are: 1. the councils must be elected from the working class, 2. the establishment of economic commissariats, 3. that the whole thing is not bureaucratic, and 4. that all individuals, including teachers, must be politically reliable. These demands are being met – when? When the commissioner is a suitable person. – The economic system of Professor Eugen Varga will, of course, only find the commissioner reliable who is just as much a Marxist and Leninist as Varga himself. This shows how these people deal with reality. They do not merely describe – as historians describe the old heroes, an Alexander, a Pericles – according to the political concepts contained in their morning newspaper – no, they want to shape people according to what their morning newspaper contains. Here we have what Oswald Spengler finds to be the main cause of decline, transferred into the most direct practice, and the most important thing in practice is simply not seen. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what leads to an answer to the question: Who is allowed to speak out against the decline of the West?

We live in a time in which only those who feel in their souls that there is a spiritually oriented science that can ignite the will so that forces arise that were not there before are allowed to speak out against the decline of the West. Those who consider only the forces that existed before, like Oswald Spengler, or those who work outside, like Professor Eugen Varga, can either see only the decline or must bring it about themselves. Who may speak against the decline of the West? The one who demands the human deed that comes from the newborn spiritual life may speak out against the downfall of the West. — This is how the question must be answered clearly and unambiguously today, and this is how anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been trying to do so for years.

When I observed the results of the teaching in the individual classes towards the end of the school year at the Waldorf School, I could see – I have already mentioned some of it – how, for example, Dr. Stein introduced the 7th and 8th grades to history from the perspective of the rising spiritual life, a will that is contrasted with the dwindling forces. I have mentioned other things that shine into the Waldorf School as good fruits of our spiritual science. Today I would just like to mention that people outside scoff, especially when the soul and spirit of the human being, alongside the body, are spoken about — as they have to be from a spiritual science. But one should just have seen, for example, how in Class 5, under the direction of Miss von Heydebrand, what anthroposophy makes of anthropology is brought to the children - albeit in a form appropriate to the children - and what awakens in the children an idea of the real concrete form of the soul and spirit of the human being. There is a pulsating life in man, there is nothing of the dullness of today's anthropological concepts that are otherwise brought to children; because the insights are drawn from real life, real life is also stimulated in the young. It is only a matter of the teacher being able to transform what emerges from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for the corresponding age.

And so it may also be said: At the time when it struck the development of the earth, one had the Mystery of Golgotha; one understood it with the remnants of the old instinctive spiritual science - I have presented this several times in my lectures -; one must understand it today with the rising, new spiritual science. Then Christianity itself will experience a new birth, then Christianity will be understood again for the first time, because under the hand of theologians, Christianity has degenerated into materialism. But instead of seriously addressing the issue of how Christianity itself must be rediscovered from a renewed spiritual life, today theologians are emerging - forgive me for also bringing this up - theologians who [turn against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science]. If one wanted to read all the literature against anthroposophically oriented spiritual science today, one would come to nothing else, but it is sometimes interesting to keep an eye on the titles of the writings that appear there. For example, there is a publication called “The New Church”, edited by Pastor Franz Tügel and Dr. Peter Petersen on behalf of the Hamburg Volkskirche. In the 15th issue of 1920, there is an article titled “Theological Direction, Dr. Steiner and the Devil”. And on page 232 we find the following sentence: “At best, it can still be imagined that a Catholic becomes a disciple of Steiner...” — something like this is born out of today's culture; people should just consider what the Catholic clergy hurls at anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but here a Protestant is speaking, and so the author thinks that this spiritual science could, well, be acceptable to Catholicism – “[...] there are relationships that one can understand; but how a Protestant, at least a conscious one, one who has been influenced by the spirit of the Reformation, can follow it, is completely beyond comprehension. In Steiner's school, all belief is an assumption of truth! And Schaeder rightly points out that all the exercises recommended by Steiner result in legalism and moralism. For me, there is no doubt: Luther would have handed over the Steiner doctrine to the devil in his language, and he would also have emphasized the thoroughly un-German aspect of it. He would have warned his Protestant Church against the false prophet.” Now I would like to ask: Do the exercises I recommend lead to lawlessness and immorality? Because that is emphasized here as something particularly bad, that the exercises I recommend lead to legalism and moralism. Well, a lot is written in this tone today.

However, there is also another tone in which, one cannot say, is written. For example, the anatomy professor Fuchs in Göttingen, who has already been mentioned here, managed to use a sophisticated distortion in newspaper articles to claim that anthroposophy is not scientific. He proved nothing other than that as a scientist of today he can only regard that as science which just happens to fit into his head, and what does not, he does not regard as science. That means, he does it the way those did it who, when Copernicus appeared, considered Copernicus to be unscientific because he did not teach what they taught the faithful in the church. In medieval times, the grand inquisitors came from the ranks of the church; today they can come from the ranks of university professors and be called Fuchs; and their followers are prepared to pull out all possible means of fighting from their pockets, such as children's trumpets and ratchets, house keys that are whistled with when a Dr. Stein and a Dr. Kolisko talk about anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. It cannot be said that these people had not heard the speeches that had been delivered, because otherwise they would have had to conjure up the children's trumpets and ratchets and whatever else they had, after hearing the “bad” reasons of Dr. Kolisko and Dr. Stein. But it was not in their power to hear the reasons of Dr. Stein and Dr. Kolisko; it was in their power to shout something down, as in medieval times, with other means, they would have crushed what these people today venerate as progress. One must have the courage to look at such an attitude without reservation. And yet one needs to look no further than the numerous sleeping souls of people who do not want to look at the phenomena of spiritual life, who would like to sleep in the face of these phenomena. Then one must say - also about the supernatural - what a Viennese writes about his Vienna, what he writes about what he loves there - even if it is not particularly well written, it is still something like self-knowledge. After this young Viennese draws attention to his own youth and brings it together with what he says has developed into a healthier spirituality, he writes in the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung no. 29 of July 19, 1920:

The intellectual situation of the German Danube countries seems to me to be even less encouraging than the economic and political situation. We have more or less the cheapest and shallowest kind of socialism, the oldest and long-since-overcome variety of philosophy in free-spirited debauchery and banal historical concepts; alongside it, the most unedifying method of playing off knowledge and belief against each other; alongside it, religiously embellished blanket intolerance; alongside it, the most uncritical desire to pounce on all noisily embellished artifice , an admirable loquacity and sentimental preference for the self-evident; alongside it, traits of genius, muffled by tacitly agreed lack of talent among intellectuals, which regards half as whole and the whole as half, and finally, on top of that, a considerable variety of vanity that, puffing itself up, says: “Don't tell me! I am bad and educated myself!” It is hardly surprising that, embedded in such a kind of spirituality, even the softest and most unprofiled brand of occultism is the most popular here. A broad, murky stream of nonsense flows through this city and all kinds of truisms flourish on its banks.

Now, my dear attendees, it is fair to say that a kind of spirituality prevails here that allows the most stupid brand of occultism, the most stupid spiritualistic stream of nonsense, to flow around freely – that, my dear attendees, is a matter of course! I do not want to point out now – because it is already too late – that there might be other places besides Vienna where this stream of frivolous shallowness has its audience and where people are asleep to what is most necessary: the reawakening of those forces that must awaken in the human breast if we want the dawning of the dawn to take the place of decline. But if we can recognize error, just as, on the one hand, people of genius like Oswald Spengler can prove the downfall of what exists, and, on the other hand, people like Professor Eugen Varga can show the currents of decline through their deeds, then we – if we have the ability to awaken in the soul, then we will be able to look at the spiritual current that, as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, wants to put into the will of people that which can be born out of the light of supersensible knowledge. And then, then we will gain a new version of the Christ's words: Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will not pass away. - We will then say: Yes, everything that is accessible to the eyes of Oswald Spengler and everything in which social reforms such as those of Professor Eugen Varga would like to move, that will pass away. But that which is born of a truly new spirit will dominate the future, because it not only believes in some indeterminate forces somewhere that will help to bring about a new culture, as has been helped in the past, but it wants to ignite the own will, the deepest inner will of man himself, which one has in freedom in one's hands, to new powers. We speak out against the downfall of the West not only because we have faith in the future, but because we want to bring about a future that we can already see. Just as we see the future plant in the germ of the old one, so we want a future that we already see as a germ in us. The future will be, if only we want it, against all forces of doom. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is directed at the will, not at the idle point of view, and from this it wants to take the right to speak out against the downfall of the West.

Not only everyone notices that civilized humanity is going through severe crises in the present, but everyone actually experiences them. I would like to say that two of these crises have recently emerged quite clearly, so to speak explosively.

The first, more insidious crisis, is already being noticed and mentioned by a great many people in the present, but its nature is understood by very few. For this crisis, which has brought such severe misery and hardship to humanity in the first instance and which we can describe as the state crisis of the present, we can probably set 1914 as the year of explosion. We know, of course, how the most terrible struggles took place in the European state system at that time, and how humanity is still suffering from the terrible after-effects of those struggles today. It may be said that it became apparent during the course of these struggles, but especially after these struggles came to an apparent end in 1918, that it became apparent how little is understood as to where the source, the actual cause of this state-legal crisis of humanity is to be found.

From two sides, one could hear something like a motto that would indicate the direction in which the terrible crisis would develop. Some thought – I do not want to go into the characteristics of the individual parties now, that does not belong here, but I just want to mention it – they thought that a different structure of the state system of civilized humanity must emerge from the chaos of war; at least, many thought, the existing states would have to change their borders, set up safeguards here or there. The others, no less numerous, wanted to make the motto from the most diverse points of view: Neither winners nor losers! - That would mean that the system of states of civilized humanity must emerge from the chaos of war in the same form as it was before.

It must be said that both those who thought of conquests, of changing state borders, and those who spoke the slogan “neither victor nor vanquished” actually realized that this terrible confusion in the second decade of the 20th 0th century had arisen from the fact that the states, in their mutual relationship, with their borders as they were, simply could not remain, but that they also did not have the strength within themselves to reorganize themselves in such a way that a tolerable relationship could emerge between them. That it could not come to the conclusion 'neither victor nor vanquished' is shown by the outcome of the war. But that the conclusion 'victory' is not enough either is shown by what has developed since then, because if you look at what has arisen from the way of thinking, from the outlook of those who are among the victors , then one must say: in Versailles, in Saint-Germain, in Spa and so on, everywhere those who thought with the same thoughts were together, with which one set up the states that had come into confusion and chaos. They wanted to continue with the same way of thinking, the same way of looking at things. They wanted to set up some new state territories, which we also saw emerging – at first only on the surface – but what was hoped for did not come of it. Anyone who takes an unbiased look at the conditions of civilized humanity today will have to admit that what has been established, especially in Europe, already clearly shows that it cannot have an inner foundation. From the disorder in which everything that emerged from the peace agreements finds itself, the unbiased must recognize that one simply cannot continue the old way of thinking, the state way of thinking, which has emerged through modern history. It has asserted itself in the peace agreements; it has proved its impossibility through the facts.

The second crisis – or perhaps it would be better to say the explosion of the second crisis, since it had been in preparation for a long time – occurred around 1918 and in the following years. It can be called the economic crisis. Out of the chaos of war arose in the yearning of humanity what could be called the aspiration to arrive at economic conditions such as are present in the instincts and needs of numerous members of today's civilized humanity. What have we seen emerging from this economic crisis so far? If we look to the West, we see absolute helplessness; we also see the continuation of economic activity as it has emerged in modern history; we see continuous experimentation without guiding ideas; we see those who are concerned about this economic activity, so far in great apprehension about the outcome of this experimentation. And if we look to the East, we see how purely economic thinking, insofar as it has asserted itself in the minds of the proletariat, has taken on a strange form. We see in the European East – and we see the same thing continuing deep into Asia – the endeavour to create, one might say, a militarized economic state structure. We see the purely militaristic principle applied in the East, which has suffered such shipwreck from the old constitutional states. I would like to say: we see the purely militaristic principle applied to an economic organism that is to be created. And today the facts speak clearly enough for these efforts. Who would claim today that anything else could be achieved by this militarization of economic life in the east of Europe than merely the plundering of the old economy and the destruction of the old economic structure? One has illusions about anything that is to be created for humanity, but which crumbles more with each day, with each week. On the other hand, we see how the ideas and views of people, how they have developed, particularly in the second half of the 19th century, as so-called thought-based economic reforms, social reforms, how these ideas, where they are to be applied radically, cannot in the least produce anything fruitful.

And so it may be said that two crises, the state crisis and the economic crisis, now face civilized humanity with no prospect of a way out. One does not need to develop extensive spiritual abilities to recognize this, as I mentioned in the introduction; one need only devote oneself impartially to observing what is happening. From these observations, which could already be made over decades, if one directed the attention of the soul to the way in which these two crises were clearly preparing, arose that which has been undertaken in recent times in Dornach as anthroposophical college courses. Of course, the anthroposophical college courses held in September and October of this year in Dornach by three lecturers from the most diverse branches of science need not be overestimated in their present significance; they are a very first and perhaps very weak beginning, but the beginning of a very definite, purposeful will. The thirty lecturers in Dornach were intended to show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that I have been presenting for almost two decades now, also in Stuttgart, has the inner strength and the inner scientific methodology to fertilize the most diverse human scientific branches, so that they can take on a form corresponding to the demands of contemporary and future life.

But what is necessary in order for something like this to be undertaken in a purposeful way? It is necessary to understand what the most important, the third crisis is, of which the other two crises mentioned are basically only the outward expression. But this third crisis is not yet being properly understood by almost all of humanity today: it is the crisis of our entire spiritual life. I know, my dear audience, that what I am saying is something that is met with the gravest doubt in the broadest circles today. I also know that what I am saying is something that people actually find uncomfortable to hear. This is shown, for example, by the fact that many people admit the state crisis and many people admit the economic crisis, that they demand fundamental changes in the conception and organization of state and economic life as a result of this admission, but that very few people are convinced that intellectual life, including the individual sciences, must also undergo a transformation. In many circles today, it is thought that intellectual life must provide the sources for further fruitful progress for humanity, for emerging from hardship and misery and social confusion. But people think of the contribution of intellectual life in such a way that they simply take only those 'intellectual goods' that have been produced so far as so-called 'safe science' and want to introduce them into the widest circles through the most diverse channels, through adult education centres, popular education associations and so on. But - as I have mentioned here before - people are not unbiased enough to thoroughly consider the following fact: When one recognizes that it was precisely those circles that have so far participated in the intellectual life as it has developed in modern human development, and that it was precisely these educated circles that have essentially become the bearers of the confusion, when one recognizes this, one must admit that the same confusion cannot be removed by popularizing the thoughts that have led to disaster and that have been brought about by this intellectual movement, because then the same confusion would arise from the widest circles that has already emerged from the narrow circle of the representatives of this intellectual life.

Therefore, the aim that has emerged from Dornach, where these Anthroposophical college courses have taken place, is not to simply popularize in a conservative way what we already have in terms of so-called certain science or other spiritual goods within which the confusions have asserted themselves, but to fertilize this spiritual material anew, to give it an impetus through which it can become the bearer of a different social and economic life. The aim of the spiritual movement inspired by anthroposophy is to renew spiritual life, not to broaden the old spiritual life. It should be recognized within the spiritual movement inspired by anthroposophy that the impulses, thoughts and views that have led to the confusion of states and the confusion of the economy were already present in the old school of thought. But few people today still take the trouble to really look at the origins of our distress and our lives, at the crisis in our intellectual life. That is just inconvenient. After all, something should be “certain”, one should be able to stand on some firm ground. One believes that everything would be shaken if one were to have a reforming effect on this intellectual life itself. That is why it is so difficult for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to speak to people of the present day, because basically the interest that it must assert out of its inner sense of duty in world history is not active at all among the people in the broadest circles. One would like to look everywhere, in the economic and the state, for the sources of the crises, but one shrinks from looking for them in the spiritual life.

But until we look for it in the intellectual life, nothing, absolutely nothing, will improve – not in economic life, nor in the life of the state. For what is external reality in the life of the state and in economic life is, even if people do not want to see it today, only the expression of what people think, what they have learned to think through the spiritual life that has emerged in the last three to four centuries, particularly in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century in the developmental history of humanity. The state and economic crises are too noticeable to be denied, and it has become necessary to recognize that new impulses must be supplied to both state and economic development. Many people admit that something must happen in the spiritual life as well. But that something must happen that is oriented towards anthroposophical spiritual science is something that people of the present day, who also admit the former, very often resist. We can already give enough examples of this today - examples that can be taken from the present, both from the world regions suffering from terrible cultural pressure that belong to the defeated, and from those cultural regions that belong to the victors.

We see, now that the war turmoil has come to a temporary, but only apparent, end, that after the revolutionary spirit had emerged, the call to separate the ecclesiastical and religious element from the state element has been asserted within Germany. Taken in the abstract, I would say that this is the first call for a part of what the threefold social organism wants: it wants to separate the entire spiritual life from the state and economic life and place it in its own self-government, built only on its own principles. Today, only this innermost part of spiritual life is understood, so that one has demanded, but only in an abstract sense, its separation from state life.

Now, however, other phenomena have emerged in this very area within Germany: from a certain quarter, a decidedly anti-religious, anti-Christian sentiment has asserted itself, and that which has asserted itself there has combined with the war cry: separation of the Church from the State. In particular, it became difficult for Protestantism to come to terms with what emerged as a result of the war, the revolution. On the one hand, one had to realize that the Catholic Church, with its ancient constitution, would not lose much by separating from the state, because it has so many political and administrative and also popular impulses within itself that it could indeed only gain from this separation from the state, especially if it still circumvents the separation from the state in a scheming way. On the other hand, the connection of the Protestant churches with the state authorities was so close – the Protestant churches were designed to see the ecclesiastical authority exercised by state powers – that they had to feel, as it were, abandoned by the separation from the state. This was felt to a certain extent, leading to a kind of rallying call for a gathering of all that could still, from a religious point of view, direct the gaze towards the spiritual. The various denominations were to be organized so that they could achieve together what they could not achieve separately, through a kind of self-government.

Yes, something else emerged that is highly characteristic: those who were the bearers of this “consolidation” idea of the various church denominations openly stated that it was good that the separation of church and state affairs was still taking place as trustingly as possible with regard to the state authorities, that the separation - as it was put - was happening in a “benevolent” manner, so to speak. They openly stated that at least religious education would still be provided by the state and so on, that the church would not simply be released from state authority, but would be compensated in a certain way - well, and what more such things are -: “benevolent detachment from the state”. From this it can be seen that religious denominations are accustomed to being run by the state; they cannot imagine a certain state independence. This is not only due to economic circumstances, but also to the way people think. And so we see that the churches that are to gain their independence still look, so to speak, if only halfheartedly, to the state leadership they have become accustomed to over the centuries. This is more or less the case in Central Europe.

Let us now look at the rest of the world. It is extremely interesting that in Switzerland, for example, speakers from America are now being heard who are church representatives of religious denominations. What do they say in their speeches? They say something like the following in their speeches – I can only summarize what is explained in detail in a few sentences – they say something like the following, from the American point of view, of course: Humanity is striving, they say, for the League of Nations. The League of Nations is supposed to lead humanity out of the old, militaristic conditions; it is supposed to bring the longed-for peace and a new human culture and human civilization. But, they say, the achievements of the statesmen to date, what they have accomplished so far, cannot bring about a viable League of Nations. In saying this, they are attacking Woodrow Wilson, whom they describe as a well-meaning but somewhat foolish idealist. For such a League of Nations would be forged together by external, state conditions that have actually outlived themselves, that no longer have the strength to support human civilization. The true League of Nations, so say these American pastors, must be rooted in the hearts of men. But it can take root in the hearts of men only when Christian feeling and religious confession are found throughout the earth. And so these American speakers would actually like to come to the constitution of the League of Nations with the Europeans from the religious point of view; they would like to win the hearts of humanity religiously.

What I am relating to you, ladies and gentlemen, is something that comes from the spiritual life. But anyone who hears the speeches of such American pastors, and who is able to see without prejudice what is now raging economically in Europe, will say: however beautiful the words may be – they are sometimes very beautiful, these words that are spoken there - however beautiful the words may be, they do not find the way to the hearts of men; they are powerless to found an inner league of nations. For those people, whose instincts and desires give rise to the social battle cries of today, no longer have an ear for these beautifully spoken words; they demand something else; hearts do not open to these words. Here it is shown, as well as on the ground, where the call sounds to break away benevolently from the state, to gather together what is scattered, everywhere it is shown that one already notices the creeping mental crisis of the present. But one must really be quite biased if one can believe that, on the one hand, the beautiful words of American pastors can found the world federation in the hearts of men or that, on the other hand, by collecting the various denominations that exist in Central Europe can be brought about by the collection of what exists in terms of denominations in Central Europe – a spiritual renewal that is truly powerful enough to bring about strength for social human progress, to bring about strength that can reform in the state and economic spheres. Only if one is biased can one believe such things.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science studies what is actually taking place from its insights and its perspective, and it notes: Yes, the will is there to make a spiritual life powerful among people again, so that the state and economic life can emerge from thoughts rooted in a fruitful spiritual life. Otherwise, economic and political life cannot be reformed. The will is there, but something is missing: the creative power. Today it is not enough for American pastors to repeat old-fashioned words, however beautifully they are forged, but which have lost their value for human hearts. Today it is not a matter of collecting the confessions of the past; today it is a matter of bringing a new spiritual life to people through a new creation. Only those who do not merely want to repeat the old, do not merely want to collect the old, but who develop the will to create spiritually anew understand the spiritual crisis.

We must ask ourselves: Why do the most beautiful words prove powerless? Why does the collection [of religious creeds] lead to nothing? We see that in the course of the last three to four centuries, what is called state life and what is called economic life has become powerful throughout civilized humanity. These two have taken the spiritual life so completely in tow that those in Central Europe who, in terms of their religious confession, are to be separated from the state, nevertheless crave the state and its leadership. So completely has the spiritual life been dragged in tow that today the most beautiful words that can be spoken from this old spiritual life no longer find their way to the hearts in which the instincts for today's reforms arise. This proves, from the external historical facts, that we do not merely need a new fertilization of the old, a stimulus for the old, but that we need a complete new creation. From this point of view, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science stands. It wants to fertilize the individual sciences, which are supposed to provide the thoughts for the state and economic life of humanity. But spiritual science as anthroposophically oriented should also inspire state life itself and economic life in such a way that both are supplied with new impulses that are created in spiritual life itself. We have succeeded in doing this for a large part of the sciences, at least for a start – we can emphasize this after our successes, after our results during the Dornach college courses. Historical, physical, chemical, biological, legal, yes, even mathematical, philosophical, psychological research – all these fields have already taken shape through our college courses, showing what these branches of science will become if they are methodically and rigorously permeated by what spiritual scientific research intends, as it has been presented here in Stuttgart for more than a decade and a half. It is precisely this crisis of the spirit, which makes necessary new spiritual creations, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to point out. Why, I said, have the most beautiful words proved powerless? Why do we long for guidance from the state again? Because, basically, we have gradually attained a spiritual life that was entirely an appendage of state or economic life, that was entirely established in relation to educational and teaching institutions out of state will, that was entirely maintained by the aging economic forms. What state and economic life have hammered together with spiritual life over the past few centuries, what they have made out of the old creeds, has now become something that proves powerless when it wants to assert itself, as is the case with the American pastors for the founding of a League of Nations. Yes, my dear ladies and gentlemen, spiritual life has been reduced to this impotence by the state's supreme supervision and economic supremacy. The spiritual life towards which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science aims must, as I have often discussed here, arise from the innermost soul life of the human being himself. This soul life, however, cannot be subject to any kind of supervision or control, but can only arise in full freedom, through the completely free development of human individuality, in the free self-administration of this spiritual life itself. If this spiritual life is in free self-management, if it can produce precisely the kind of science that has emerged in Dornach and that the Waldorf School demonstrates for the art of education every day, if this spiritual life in free self-management can truly bring forth the human individual abilities that are sent into the physical world with every human being through birth or conception from spiritual worlds, then the fruits that flourish from such a free spiritual life can be fed to state life and economic life. The crises in the life of the state and in economic life are due to the fact that they lack the fertilizing ideas which should be supplied to them from a free spiritual life. When the state and economic life took it upon themselves to direct the spiritual life, it resulted in the suppression of the fertilizing influence which can only come to them if the spiritual life is left free, so that from this freedom the spiritual life can have an effect on the state and economic life. What I am hinting at here can also be fully substantiated by an unbiased observation of the course of civilization history. I will just point out some of this evidence. We see how, since the 15th, 16th, 17th centuries, especially since the 18th century, economic life has become more and more complicated. We see how the necessity has developed to lead this economic life, which used to be guided more instinctively, even into city culture, even into the guild system, out of unconscious thinking. But one need only look at the people who are to be named among the spiritual founders of the newer economic sciences, at minds like those of the Frenchman Frangois Quesnay and the Englishman Adam Smith, and one will find that, in the period of world history in which it has become necessary to grasp the economy from the spirit, scientific thinking itself has become powerless to cast any kind of light on economic life. Both Quesnay, the Frenchman who wanted to establish a political economy more from a natural science background, and Smith, the Englishman who founded a similar political economy, basically wanted to construct the whole political economy from a few axiomatic-looking principles such as “the validity of private property” and “the economic freedom of the human individual”.

If we look in particular at the founder of modern political economy, Adam Smith – and his thinking is, of course, only an expression of the thinking of his entire age, the 17th and 18th centuries – we find that this economic thinking of Adam Smith is basically a true reflection of the thinking that was established as scientific thinking in the West of civilization in particular at that time. It is very interesting to follow how, for example, what entered into physical-astronomical thinking as a method, as a way of looking at things, through Newton, and then entered into science as a way of dealing with problems, is encountered again in Smith in the treatment of economic tasks. Just as mathematical physics seeks to derive everything from a few principles that can be grasped by the intellect in the abstract, so a man like Adam Smith seeks to derive the whole of political economy from a few principles that can be grasped by the intellect in the abstract. It is interesting to observe how unprejudiced minds, even Bulwer in a novel, set about mocking what has now become established as thinking in political economy. We find the mocking thought in Bulwer: “In the past it was believed that anyone who wanted to get involved in political economy had to have extensive knowledge of what people do when they do business with each other. Today, all you need are a few abstract principles, and you can derive the entire national economy from them. - And even earlier, an unbiased thinker, Young, said: Until now, he had thought that someone who wanted to talk about the national economy had to know the virtues and vices of people, the way people communicate in economic life, what they do there - in short: that such a person had to have extensive knowledge. But Adam Smith showed him, said Young, that you only need a few ideas and that with a few strokes of the pen you can compress all the extensive, empirical economic knowledge into a few abstract ideas.

As economic life has become more complicated, what has happened to economic thinking? Well, my dear audience, something has come over this economic thinking, which first asserted itself in the West, which originates from the newer economic life, which is modeled on the newer economic life and which, in its final consequences, whether one admits it or not, now appears in the East of Europe in the few abstract thoughts of Lenin and Trotsky as the final consequence. That is what we have to face. But you only understand what is at stake here if you not only acquire a few abstract thoughts - which today's humanity loves very much - but if you get a thorough overview of the course of human development for many centuries, as I have often hinted at and as I will now hint at from a different point of view.

My dear attendees, just as a view such as that begun by Newton, which then came into the human psychology through other thinkers and mechanized the human psychology , just as Newton mechanized astronomy, just as this mechanical-mathematical scientific approach came into political economy through Adam Smith, so, basically, it has taken hold of even the popular views of the modern civilized world. And today, in the age of newspapers and the popularization of science, there are basically few people alive who have not been touched in some way, even if they are unaware of it, by the spirit of this scientific discipline. This type of science lives on the one hand in mathematics; in mathematics it has the only thing that springs from within the human being, for all of mathematics is not something that is gained through observation, but it is something that springs from within the human being. This branch of science, which has mathematical thinking, which can be clearly seen, for example, in Smith, and also in Ricardo, the later editor of the national economy, - this mathematical thinking is one side of modern science. The other side is the sensory observation of the external world and the formation of all kinds of abstract theories, of atomistic or other materialistic theories about this sensory external world. These two currents actually stand there: sensory observation of the external world, mathematizing thinking. We must be fair to what appears on the one hand as mathematizing thinking, right into economics, and on the other hand as conscientious observation and conscientious experimentation in the external world. We must be fair to this, for it has brought about the great triumphs of modern Western science. And I have emphasized it many times: these triumphs of modern science are by no means opposed by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but fully recognized. But it must be realized that there was a time in the development of humanity when this kind of scientific attitude was not present at all. Today, of what was present in humanity in this field, only the last decadent remnants are left.

Again I point to the Orient. But if one wants to see the essential things in their true form, one must not look to the present-day Orient, where everything is already in decline and destruction, which was once an ancient wisdom of humanity, which was even greater than it later became — you can read about it in my book “Occult Science”. It was even greater in the time before the Vedas, before the Vedanta philosophy came into being; what still shines out artistically from the Vedas, and only in the last echoes from the Vedanta philosophy, can still be seen by the unbiased knower in the whole of oriental development. There is much that is magnificent and powerful in the wisdom. There is nothing in it of the special way in which Western science of more recent times works. The way of thinking, the way of looking at the world, was quite different. The scientific methods that we so admire today, and rightly so, that we must emulate, were not found in ancient oriental thought. Instead, ancient Oriental wisdom had what I would call a world view, in contrast to science: a world view without science. That was basically the characteristic essence of the ancient East in its wisdom.

This world view is significant in that it encompasses the whole person; it is significant in that through this world view, the human being grasps himself as spirit, soul and body. Admittedly, this world view in the ancient Orient occurred in such a way that little attention was paid to the body and to that which belonged to the external, physical world. This life was more of an understanding between soul and spirit, in which man knew himself rooted, but it was a world view. That is to say, through what man thought and felt, he firmly established his position, his relationship to the world of the senses and to the world of the spirit. He did this not in a scientific way, but through soul perception. What was gained through spiritual contemplation certainly lived in its original form in the ancient times of the Orient. But the legacy of it lived on, and basically, the legacy of this oriental world view can be felt right up to the present day. This life of world-conception gave that through which, for example, the first Christianity - in which this ancient oriental wisdom and world-conception was still alive - grasped the mystery of Golgotha that gives meaning to the earth. But in the place of the view that the ancient Orient had, the intellectual element became more and more established as this view remained. Before the appearance in more recent times of the Western world's science, which is also without a worldview and which has also given shape to the teaching of the soul and to economics, as I have mentioned, what I would like to call an inner struggle arose in the middle, beginning with ancient Greece, clearly developing in ancient Rome, and then establishing itself throughout Central Europe. He grasped an event that can only be grasped by the spirit, the Christ event, still through the inherited echoes of ancient, oriental wisdom. Alongside this, through the special talents of Western humanity, there shimmered more and more, even into this Central Europe, that which is mere human intellectuality, which basically wants to understand the entire cosmos, above all our earthly surroundings and human beings themselves, only through mathematics and through observation of the external world.

And so, in Central Europe, on the one hand, there was precisely that which one might call a leaning towards the ancient oriental heritage. Everything that lived and still lives today through the Middle Ages and more recent times in the content of Christian teaching, everything that lives in it as a world view - even if it has almost gone out, even if pure rationalism has taken hold of modern theology - is for the most part old oriental heritage, because only a few attempts at a new creation exist. And connected with this is what man now finds out of himself through mathematics and observation of nature, but which does not lead to a world view. And so we see in the Middle Ages, in the time when Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were working, this conflict between what human reason can achieve through observation and mathematics, what should be limited to the sensory world, and that which is supposed to be revelation, world-view revelation – the Mystery of Golgotha, which was not called by that name at the time, but which, in terms of its content, not of fact, was ancient oriental heritage. And basically, this dichotomy lives on to this day in all public life in Central Europe, including in state and economic life, emerging from the Middle Ages - this dichotomy between scientific thinking without a worldview and an old, inherited worldview without science. Man in Central Europe has been called upon to wage this inner battle since the time of the ancient Greeks. And it was precisely this inner struggle that produced the greatest spiritual achievements during the period of German culture at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. For that which lived in Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the philosophers of German idealism, in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, only lived in all these minds because these minds, in their inmost depths, concentrated the struggle that exists between science without world-view and the inherited world-view without science. In Goethe's works, one can follow this conflict in his individual utterances, as he tried to reconcile what science gives on the one hand, and what lived in him as an intuitive feeling, in accordance with the imagination, as an ancient heritage of the Orient. Indeed, with Goethe it goes even further; he experienced this inner conflict until the eighties of the 18th century. Then he was drawn to the south, so that he could at least still feel in the south the echoes that remained in southern Europe of the ancient oriental, unscientific world view, which, however, was very, very much dying out in Greece. From this unscientific world view, nothing but mathematics, dry mathematics, came through the Arabs from the European south to the west. It is basically Europe's last remnant, albeit a lasting remnant, of what arose from the unscientific world view of the Orient as a comprehensively universal concept. For there, all wisdom was so intrinsic to the human being, whereas in our civilization, only mathematics is still intrinsic. Novalis, in particular, felt this about mathematics and stammered out.

And what the Western civilization has gained is what I would call the system of observation and experimentation, from which the actual science of the West has emerged, from which everything that man does not initially gain from his inner being emerges, but which he gains by allowing the world of the senses to have an effect on the senses. And what has become of the scientific spirit in the process, what has been transferred from the scientific spirit to all the things through which our leading people gain their education, their scientific knowledge, that, my dear audience, has revealed its powerlessness in the face of economic and state life, in the face of the spirits I have mentioned, to whom many other names could be added.

And so we see our modern life looming. I would like to express it symbolically, what has actually become established in the last three to four centuries as our looming modern life. Outwardly, it is characterized as follows: On the one hand, we see the essential spirit of science developing and dominating schools and universities. But we see that what is done in schools and universities leads to an unworldly existence. We see how the universities stand as lonely islands of education. But we also see something else happening: that what is done in the way of newer science, of science without world view, stops at nothing. A characteristic example of this is the Darwinian doctrine, which, with such scientific conscientiousness, traces the development of living beings from the simplest creature to the most perfect one. However, it places man at the top of this animal organization, so to speak, and only comes to explain man insofar as he is an animal. From this and many other examples, one could show how the insights of mathematizing and purely externally observing science stop at the human being. Thus we have a scientific system of education, without a world view, that lives in abstractions, that does not give the human being what the world view of the Orient, without science, still gave - a sense of his place in the world - that only satisfies the head, only the intellect, that does not take hold of the whole person. On the one hand.

On the other hand, something arises that I would like to describe symbolically by showing you the factory with the modern practitioner. What is the relationship between the factory and the university? Yes, there is a relationship, but this relationship has become very one-sided. The one thing that shines from the modern universities into the factory is mechanical science. And this shining of mechanical science has brought about the great development of technology for the factory and for everything that goes with it, which has founded modern civilization. This science, which stops at the human being with its knowledge, was able to contribute to the development of technology in the highest sense. But even in the factory, the practitioner stops at the human being. He extends his routine — for it is nothing other than routine — only into the technical and into that which is connected with the technical. He cannot establish any relationship, any human relationship, between himself as an entrepreneur and leader and those who work on modern civilization from out of the broad mass of humanity. In knowledge, science stops short of the human being; in practice, in social activity, it stops short of the human being. This halting of the advance is indicated by a boundary. Everything that could come from modern mathematical science into technology, everything that could fertilize trade and commerce, and so on, has been taken into the area that has this boundary. But from science, which stops at human knowledge, no social life could be gained from this science that could have satisfied the great demands of modern times on this purely human side. And so, beyond the boundary, stood all of humanity, which in the most recent time now demanded its human dignity; so stood that humanity to which one had not found the path in practice, just as one had not found the path to the human being himself and his essence in the modern world-view-less scientific knowledge. This is the tragedy that has led to the modern crises, because what is written about modern practical life in the books, what is written in the ledger and the cash book, has nothing to do with what lives in the souls of those who stand beyond the boundary, beyond which humanity one stopped. But these came forward with their soul demands, and from these soul demands arose the counter-image of the spiritual crisis of the present.

Thus we have seen the rise of those universities, those colleges, those educational institutions that only opened the way to the technical, to the commercial, to the inhuman, I might say, into the factory, into industry, into the modern money economy, but which did not penetrate to the human being itself. And so, on the other hand, we have seen the imperfect sense of observation, which was first found in cognitive science without a world view, develop into the experimental sense of modern practitioners, who want nothing to do with guiding ideas, who limit themselves to experimenting with the mathematical-mechanical-technical, who summon people and make them work without concerning themselves with the social structure of humanity. We have seen the rise of the practitioner, who today has a formal hatred of all guiding ideas, who has a formal hatred of everything scientific, of everything cognitive, but who is right on the one hand in that this modern, world-view-less science has nothing of what can illuminate practice, insofar as the human heart is involved in practice. But this practitioner is wrong in that he attributes to this branch of science what he attributes to every spiritual life. And so he wants to remain a routine practitioner, he wants to continue what I would call a spiritless, mere experimental approach. This makes it so difficult to really build the bridge that could be built from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science to the most practical life. The only thing to blame for this is the aversion of practitioners, who want to remain routiniers, to what, for example, the impulse for the threefold social organism comes from spiritual science. More and more we have seen this hatred of practice against everything that is spiritual life. And so today in the West we see a confused hustle and bustle of experimental economic activity, of experimental state activity. And we see in the East this economic activity, this state activity, leading to a militarized economic state that must paralyze everything human.

Thus we see how the crisis of the state and the economic crisis have actually arisen from the crisis of the spirit. Based on this clear insight, what has been represented here for more than a decade and a half as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science would like to develop the forces for human progress. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science seeks to develop living knowledge out of the same scientific spirit that developed in the West without a worldview, out of the innermost human soul experience. This knowledge in turn becomes a worldview, not just a repetition of old words that no longer find their way to the hearts of men, but which seeks to shed light on the old creeds and to open up the view to that mighty event in the evolution of the earth, the Mystery of Golgotha. There is resistance to such a renewal of spiritual life, which, from the spirit of modern humanity, seeks to view the fundamental fact of Christianity, which can only be properly grasped and contemplated in spirit. We can no longer return to the ancient Orient. We can no longer aspire to a worldview that is not scientific. We have moved beyond the times when a worldview lacking in science could suffice for humanity. Today we are faced with the great task of developing a worldview from science through the inner development of the human being. We will be able to do this if we truly understand the nature of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. However, as long as there are still people who claim that what is gained through the spiritual-scientific method of knowledge - an inward but strictly scientific method modeled on the strictest mathematical methods - could be just as much a vision as any other vision or hallucination, as long as there are there are people who claim such things, because, for example, they cannot in reality read what is written in my books “Occult Science” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”; as long as there are such people and as long as such people find credence, spiritual science will indeed have a difficult road to travel. I will have more to say about this. For such people do not realize that what is grasped with spiritual insight, what is grasped by man inwardly awakening himself to a spiritual insight, teaches him to distinguish fantasy from reality just as one learns to distinguish fantasy from reality in ordinary consciousness. The logic of facts on which this distinction is based is basically very simple, a logic of facts that only our opponents cannot grasp.

How do I know, for example, that when I lift a kilogram weight, I am not hallucinating, but that it is external reality? How do I recognize that? I recognize this by the fact that I simply have to strengthen my sense of self when I lift the weight. I have to make myself stronger inwardly. If I have a mere vision or hallucination, my sense of self remains with the same intensity. I am absorbed in the vision because I do not have the experience of intensifying my sense of self. I notice the resistance by the fact that I have to apply strength that is within me when lifting the kilogram weight; I am not absorbed in the vision. Likewise, when I have spiritual experiences, I do not lose myself in hallucinations or fantasies in which my sense of self does not increase. They are described everywhere in the spiritual scientific writings that those experiences through which one penetrates into the world in which man is before birth or conception, in which he will be after death, in which his eternal is rooted , that these experiences through which one penetrates into the supersensible world presuppose that one must awaken the soul more than in ordinary life, that is, one must make it experience more intensely, more strongly inwardly. But this expresses precisely what guarantees the scientific nature of what is asserted as spiritual insight. And if one asserts what I have only hinted at here, what I have often discussed in lectures here in Stuttgart over many years, if one asserts this, then, yes, then one acquires accurate views about what has seized modern humanity like a crisis in intellectual life.

For example, one sees how mathematics came to the West as an ancient inheritance via a detour through Arabia, but how it was powerless to conquer the complicated economic and political life of the West, as can be seen, for example, in Adam Smith. One observes that this mathematical thinking, this mathematical view, is gained entirely from within the human being, and by inwardly awakening the soul, one develops precisely that which adheres to this mathematical thinking. It is precisely that which lives in mathematical thinking that one develops into a higher perfection through inner, spiritual methods. In this way one acquires a very specific spiritual view. By inwardly enlivening the mathematization, which is limited only to the world between birth and death, through spiritual-scientific methods, one learns to recognize that which comes into the soul through inspiration. It comes in such a way that the intuition opens up for us to what the human being has experienced supersensibly in spiritual worlds before birth or conception. Mathematics is the one field of science that has preserved for us a final starting point for arriving at a view of prenatal human life.

What Western science, without a worldview, acquires in its external observation, if it is developed here [in spiritual science], initially provides something that does not remain an abstract view - for worldview For science without world-view it remains abstract contemplation – but it rises to become moral, as I have shown in my Philosophy of Freedom, rising to become moral imagination and thus the foundation of the moral life of the human being. Everything we gain in thoughts from the outside world leads to images, to imaginations, which ultimately connect with inspiration. We experience this. And however imperfect what we can observe of the external world between birth and death may be, when we process it inwardly, when we also experience what we have observed outwardly in our soul through the spiritual-scientific method, then from our imaginations we also gain a view of the life into which we enter after our death. When applied to science, spiritual science will in turn lead to a world view that is based on mathematics, observation and experimentation. However, this world view can give modern civilization the strength to advance humanity. For the world view has the property - as it already showed as an oriental, science-less world view - that it affects the mind and will of man, that it works in such a way that man founds a legal life according to these particular views, through which he brings about an understanding from person to person in the human community, in other words, that he builds himself a state life. A worldview stimulates the will through which economic life is determined. Science without a worldview speaks only to the head, to the intellect; it leaves the emotions and the will unaffected.

And so we see that while intellectual science has reached its highest flowering at the beginning of the twentieth century, the feeling that should permeate the state and the will that should shape economic life have remained uninfluenced. We would be heading towards this barbarization if head and intellect increasingly develop the life of instinct and leave mind and will uncared for, as it is already so terribly evident in the East of today's civilization. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, on the other hand, can take hold of feeling and will and thus generate a new force for human progress. This is something that science, without a worldview, cannot do. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in turn penetrates into feeling, that is, into state life; it penetrates into the will, that is, into economic life. It is by this crisis and the healing of it that one must recognize what the other two crises are. Non-ideological science, ladies and gentlemen, only seizes the intellect. It leaves unaffected the emotional life, which should lead to that proper understanding between man and man, which is the decisive thing in the state, and it leaves equally unaffected the will, which should have a formative effect in economic life.

And so we see what has emerged as the threefold crisis in modern times. We see how people long for a renewal of intellectual life, but how they do not want to admit that this renewal of intellectual life can only come from a new creation. And so we see the powerlessness of the old intellectual life in the “collection” idea, in the fine words of the American speakers who address the Swiss and the Europeans in general. But attention must be drawn to the necessity of a new creation of intellectual life. Only from this new creation of spiritual life will something new be able to emerge that was not there, that has not proved its impossibility, like the modern state system, which in 1914 entered into its catastrophe, not merely into its crisis because it had no free spiritual life alongside it, which had not proved its impossibility like the economic life, which entered into its catastrophe in the present because it did not have the fertilization of the free spiritual life.

In modern times, we see the emergence of an intellectualized science that cannot produce the human being who is equal to political and economic life, who can find fruitful ideas for political and economic life. We see the emergence of the type of person who, in the institutions of the state, seeks only the satisfaction of his or her egoism through human sentiment, instead of communication from person to person, and thus gradually undermines the structure of these state institutions. We see through mere intellectual science, which seizes the head alone, the will degenerating into mere instinctive life, and thus also flowing into acts of egoism. We see the rise of a lack of brotherhood, which aims only at enhancing the existence of one's own being, from mere science without a worldview. However, we will find the new forces for human progress precisely through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and thus find a worldview from modern science. It will produce a thinking human being whose thinking is not merely intellectual, whose thinking shines into feeling, whose thinking penetrates into will. We will see the man of action springing from the thinker, the man who, instead of merely satisfying his egoism, seeks human understanding in a state community.

We will see the emergence of the human being who, in the associations that bring together people with the most diverse economic needs and with different economic abilities, we will see the sense of brotherhood emerging from the will, which is fertilized by a real spiritual thinking, which works in associative community in such a way that the human being works together with the other people with understanding for all and thus also for himself. We shall see emerging from a truly spiritual world-knowledge the thinking man of action, the feeling man of right, the fraternally minded economic will-man, and thus we shall gain out of such an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science a new power for human progress out of the spiritual crisis.

It has frequently been emphasized that man's greatest riddle is himself. Both natural and spiritual science ultimately try to solve this riddle—the former by understanding the natural laws that govern our outer being, the latter by seeking the essence and purpose inherent in our existence. Now as correct as it may be that man's greatest riddle is himself, it must also be emphasized that each individual human being is a riddle, often even to himself. Every one of us experiences this in encounters with other people.

Today we shall be dealing not with general riddles, but rather with those posed to us by every human being in every encounter, and these are just as important. For how endlessly varied people are! We need only consider temperament, the subject of today's lecture, in order to realize that there are as many riddles as there are people. Even within the basic types known as the temperaments, such variety exists among people that the very mystery of existence seems to express itself within these types. Temperament, that fundamental coloring of the human personality, plays a role in all manifestations of individuality that are of concern to practical life. We sense something of this basic mood whenever we encounter another human being. Thus we can only hope that spiritual science will tell us what we need to know about the temperaments.

Our first impression of the temperaments is that they are external, for although they can be said to flow from within, they manifest themselves in everything we can observe from without. However, this does not mean that the human riddle can be solved by means of natural science and observation. Only when we hear what spiritual science has to say can we come closer to understanding these peculiar colorations of the human personality.

Spiritual science tells us first of all that the human being is part of a line of heredity. He displays the characteristics he has inherited from father, mother, grandparents, and so on. These characteristics he then passes on to his progeny. The human being thus possesses certain traits by virtue of being part of a succession of generations.

However, this inheritance gives us only one side of his nature. Joined to that is the individuality he brings with him out of the spiritual world. This he adds to what his father and mother, his ancestors, are able to give him. Something that proceeds from life to life, from existence to existence, connects itself with the generational stream. Certain characteristics we can attribute to heredity; on the other hand, as a person develops from childhood on, we can see unfolding out of the center of his being something that must be the fruit of preceding lives, something he could never have inherited from his ancestors. We come to know the law of reincarnation, of the succession of earthly lives and this is but a special case of an all-encompassing cosmic law.

An illustration will make this seem less paradoxical. Consider a lifeless mineral, say, a rock crystal. Should the crystal be destroyed, it leaves nothing of its form that could be passed on to other crystals.¹ A new crystal receives nothing of the old one's particular form. When we move on to the world of plants, we notice that a plant cannot develop according to the same laws as does the crystal. It can only originate from another, earlier plant. Form is here preserved and passed on.

Moving on to the animal kingdom, we find an evolution of the species taking place. We begin to appreciate why the nineteenth century held the discovery of evolution to be its greatest achievement. In animals, not only does one being proceed from another, but each young animal during the embryo phase recapitulates the earlier phases of its species' evolutionary development. The species itself undergoes an enhancement.

In human beings not only does the species evolve, but so does the individual. What a human being acquires in a lifetime through education and experience is preserved, just as surely as are the evolutionary achievements of an animal's ancestral line. It will someday be commonplace to trace a person's inner core to a previous existence. The human being will come to be known as the product of an earlier life. The views that stand in the way of this doctrine will be overcome, just as was the scholarly opinion of an earlier century, which held that living organisms could arise from nonliving substances. As recently as three hundred years ago, scholars believed that animals could evolve from river mud, that is, from nonliving matter. Francesco Redi, an Italian scientist, was the first to assert that living things could develop only from other living things.² For this he was attacked and came close to suffering the fate of Giordano Bruno.³ Today, burning people at the stake is no longer fashionable. When someone attempts to teach a new truth, for example, that psycho-spiritual entities must be traced back to earlier psycho-spiritual entities, he won't exactly be burned at the stake, but he will be dismissed as a fool. But the time will come when the real foolishness will be to believe that the human being lives only once, that there is no enduring entity that unites itself with a person's inherited traits.

Now the important question arises: How can something originating in a completely different world, that must seek a father and a mother, unite itself with physical corporeality? How can it clothe itself in the bodily features that link human beings to a hereditary chain? How does the spiritual-psychic stream, of which man forms a part through reincarnation, unite itself with the physical stream of heredity? The answer is that a synthesis must be achieved. When the two streams combine, each imparts something of its own quality to the other. In much the same way that blue and yellow combine to give green, the two streams in the human being combine to yield what is commonly known as temperament. Our inner self and our inherited traits both appear in it. Temperament stands between the things that connect a human being to an ancestral line, and those the human being brings with him out of earlier incarnations. Temperament strikes a balance between the eternal and the ephemeral. And it does so in such a way that the essential members of the human being, which we have come to know in other contexts, enter into a very specific relationship with one another.

Human beings as we know them in this life are beings of four members. The first, the physical body, they have in common with the mineral world. The first super-sensible member, the etheric body, is integrated into the physical and separates from it only at death. There follows as third member the astral body, the bearer of instincts, drives, passions, desires, and of the ever-changing content of sensation and thought. Our highest member, which places us above all other earthly beings, is the bearer of the human ego, which endows us in such a curious and yet undeniable fashion with the power of self-awareness. These four members we have come to know as the essential constituents of a human being.

The way the four members combine is determined by the flowing together of the two streams upon a person's entry into the physical world. In every case, one of the four members achieves predominance over the others, and gives them its own peculiar stamp. Where the bearer of the ego predominates, a choleric temperament results. Where the astral body predominates, we find a sanguine temperament. Where the etheric or life-body predominates, we speak of a phlegmatic temperament. And where the physical body predominates, we have to deal with a melancholic temperament. The specific way in which the eternal and the ephemeral combine determines what relationship the four members will enter into with one another.

The way the four members find their expression in the physical body has also frequently been mentioned. The ego expresses itself in the circulation of the blood. For this reason, in the choleric the predominant system is that of the blood. The astral body expresses itself physically in the nervous system; thus in the sanguine, the nervous system holds sway. The etheric body expresses itself in the glandular system; hence the phlegmatic is dominated physically by his glands. The physical body as such expresses itself only in itself; thus the outwardly most important feature in the melancholic is his physical body. This can be observed in all phenomena connected with these temperaments.

In the choleric, the ego and the blood system predominate. The choleric thus comes across as someone who must always have his way. His aggressiveness, everything connected with his forcefulness of will, derives from his blood circulation.

In the nervous system and astral body, sensations and feelings constantly fluctuate. Any harmony or order results solely from the restraining influence of the ego. People who do not exercise that influence appear to have no control over their thoughts and sensations. They are totally absorbed by the sensations, pictures, and ideas that ebb and flow within them. Something like this occurs whenever the astral body predominates, as, for example, in the sanguine. Sanguines surrender themselves in a certain sense to the constant and varied flow of images, sensations, and ideas since in them the astral body and nervous system predominate.

The nervous system's activity is restrained only by the circulation of the blood. That this is so becomes clear when we consider what happens when a person lacks blood or is anaemic, in other words, when the blood's restraining influence is absent. Mental images fluctuate wildly, often leading to illusions and hallucinations.

A touch of this is present in sanguines. Sanguines are incapable of lingering over an impression. They cannot fix their attention on a particular image nor sustain their interest in an impression. Instead, they rush from experience to experience, from percept to percept. This is especially noticeable in sanguine children, where it can be a source of concern. The sanguine child's interest is easily kindled, a picture will easily impress, but the impression quickly vanishes.

We proceed now to the phlegmatic temperament. We observed that this temperament develops when the etheric or life-body, as we call it, which regulates growth and metabolism, is predominant. The result is a sense of inner well-being. The more a human being lives in his etheric body, the more is he preoccupied with his internal processes. He lets external events run their course while his attention is directed inward.

In the melancholic we have seen that the physical body, the coarsest member of the human organization, becomes master over the others. As a result, the melancholic feels he is not master over his body, that he cannot bend it to his will. His physical body, which is intended to be an instrument of the higher members, is itself in control, and frustrates the others. This the melancholic experiences as pain, as a feeling of despondency. Pain continually wells up within him. This is because his physical body resists his etheric body's inner sense of well-being, his astral body's liveliness, and his ego's purposeful striving.

The varying combinations of the four members also manifest themselves quite clearly in external appearance. People in whom the ego predominates seek to triumph over all obstacles, to make their presence known. Accordingly their ego stunts the growth of the other members; it withholds from the astral and etheric bodies their due portion. This reveals itself outwardly in a very clear fashion. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, that famous German choleric, was recognizable as such purely externally.⁴ His build revealed clearly that the lower essential members had been held back in their growth. Napoleon, another classic example of the choleric, was so short because his ego had held the other members back.⁵ Of course, one cannot generalize that all cholerics are short and all sanguines tall. It is a question of proportion. What matters is the relation of size to overall form.

In the sanguine the nervous system and astral body predominate. The astral body's inner liveliness animates the other members, and makes the external form as mobile as possible. Whereas the choleric has sharply chiseled facial features, the sanguine's are mobile, expressive, changeable. We see the astral body's inner liveliness manifested in every outer detail, for example, in a slender form, a delicate bone structure, or lean muscles. The same thing can be observed in details of behavior. Even a non-clairvoyant can tell from behind whether someone is a choleric or a sanguine; one does not need to be a spiritual scientist for that. If you observe the gait of a choleric, you will notice that he plants each foot so solidly that he would seem to want to bore down into the ground. By contrast, the sanguine has a light, springy step. Even subtler external traits can be found. The inwardness of the ego, the choleric's self-contained inwardness, express themselves in eyes that are dark and smoldering. The sanguine, whose ego has not taken such deep root, who is filled with the liveliness of his astral body, tends by contrast to have blue eyes. Many more such distinctive traits of these temperaments could be cited.

The phlegmatic temperament manifests itself in a static, indifferent physiognomy, as well as in plumpness, for fat is due largely to the activity of the etheric body. In all this the phlegmatic's inner sense of comfort is expressed. His gait is loose-jointed and shambling, and his manner timid. He seems somehow to be not entirely in touch with his surroundings.

The melancholic is distinguished by a hanging head, as if he lacked the strength necessary to straighten his neck. His eyes are dull, not shining like the choleric's; his gait is firm, but in a leaden rather than a resolute sort of way.

Thus you see how significantly spiritual science can contribute to the solution of this riddle. Only when one seeks to encompass reality in its entirety, which includes the spiritual, can knowledge bear practical fruit. Accordingly, only spiritual science can give us knowledge that will benefit the individual and all mankind. In education, very close attention must be paid to the individual temperaments, for it is especially important to be able to guide and direct them as they develop in the child. But the temperaments are also important to our efforts to improve ourselves later in life. We do well to attend to what expresses itself through them if we wish to further our personal development.

The four fundamental types I have outlined here for you naturally never manifest themselves in such pure form. Every human being has one basic temperament, with varying degrees of the other three mixed in. Napoleon, for example, although a choleric, had much of the phlegmatic in him. To truly master life, it is important that we open our souls to what manifests itself as typical. When we consider that the temperaments, each of which represents a mild imbalance, can degenerate into unhealthy extremes, we realize just how important this is.

Yet, without the temperaments the world would be an exceedingly dull place, not only ethically, but also in a higher sense. The temperaments alone make all multiplicity, beauty, and fullness of life possible. Thus in education it would be senseless to want to homogenize or eliminate them, but an effort should be made to direct each into the proper track, for in every temperament there lie two dangers of aberration, one great, one small. One danger for the young choleric is that he will never learn to control his temper as he develops into maturity. That is the small danger. The greater is that he will become foolishly single-minded. For the sanguine the lesser danger is flightiness; the greater is mania, induced by a constant stream of sensations. The small danger for the phlegmatic is apathy; the greater is stupidity, dullness. For the melancholic, insensitivity to anything other than his own personal pain is the small danger; the greater is insanity.

In light of all this it is clear that to guide and direct the temperaments is one of life's significant tasks. If this task is to be properly carried out, however, one basic principle must be observed, which is always to reckon with what is given, and not with what is not there. For example, if a child has a sanguine temperament, he will not be helped if his elders try to flog interest into him. His temperament simply will not allow it. Instead of asking what the child lacks, in order that we might beat it into him, we must focus on what he has, and base ourselves on that. And as a rule, there is one thing we can always stimulate the sanguine child's interest in. However flighty the child might be, we can always stimulate his interest in a particular personality. If we ourselves are that personality, or if we bring the child together with someone who is, the child cannot but develop an interest. Only through the medium of love for a personality can the interest of the sanguine child be awakened. More than children of any other temperament, the sanguine needs someone to admire. Admiration is here a kind of magic word, and we must do everything we can to awaken it.

We must reckon with what we have. We should see to it that the sanguine child is exposed to a variety of things in which he has shown a deeper interest. These things should be allowed to speak to him, to have an effect upon him. They should then be withdrawn, so that the child's interest in them will intensify; then they may be restored. In other words, we must fashion the sanguine's environment so that it is in keeping with his temperament.

The choleric child is also susceptible of being led in a special way. The key to his education is respect and esteem for a natural authority. Instead of winning affection by means of personal qualities, as one does with the sanguine child, one should see to it that the child's belief in his teacher's ability remains unshaken. The teacher must demonstrate an understanding of what goes on around the child. Any showing of incompetence should be avoided. The child must persist in the belief that his teacher is competent, or all authority will be lost. The magic potion for the choleric child is respect and esteem for a person's worth, just as for the sanguine child it was love for a personality. Outwardly, the choleric child must be confronted with challenging situations. He must encounter resistance and difficulty, lest his life become too easy.

The melancholic child is not easy to lead. With him, however, a different magic formula may be applied. For the sanguine child this formula was love for a personality; for the choleric, it was respect and esteem for a teacher's worth. By contrast, the important thing for the melancholic is for his teachers to be people who have in a certain sense been tried by life, who act and speak on the basis of past trials. The child must feel that the teacher has known real pain. Let your treatment of all of life's little details be an occasion for the child to appreciate what you have suffered. Sympathy with the fates of those around him furthers the melancholic's development. Here too one must reckon with what the child has. The melancholic has a capacity for suffering, for discomfort, which is firmly rooted in his being; it cannot be disciplined out of him. However, it can be redirected. We should expose the child to legitimate external pain and suffering, so that he learns there are things other than himself that can engage his capacity for experiencing pain. This is the essential thing. We should not try to divert or amuse the melancholic, for to do so only intensifies his despondency and inner suffering; instead, he must be made to see that objective occasions for suffering exist in life. Although we mustn't carry it too far, redirecting the child's suffering to outside objects is what is called for.

The phlegmatic child should not be allowed to grow up alone. Although naturally all children should have play-mates, for phlegmatics it is especially important that they have them. Their playmates should have the most varied interests. Phlegmatic children learn by sharing in the interests, the more numerous the better, of others. Their playmates' enthusiasms will overcome their native indifference towards the world. Whereas the important thing for the melancholic is to experience another person's fate, for the phlegmatic child it is to experience the whole range of his playmates' interests. The phlegmatic is not moved by things as such, but an interest arises when he sees things reflected in others, and these interests are then reflected in the soul of the phlegmatic child. We should bring into the phlegmatic's environment objects and events toward which “phlegm” is an appropriate reaction. Impassivity must be directed toward the right objects, objects toward which one may be phlegmatic.

From the examples of these pedagogical principles, we see how spiritual science can address practical problems. These principles can also be applied to oneself, for purposes of self-improvement. For example, a sanguine gains little by reproaching himself for his temperament. Our minds are in such questions frequently an obstacle. When pitted directly against stronger forces such as the temperaments, they can accomplish little. Indirectly, however, they can accomplish much. The sanguine, for example, can take his sanguinity into account, abandoning self-exhortation as fruitless. The important thing is to display sanguinity under the right circumstances. Experiences suited to his short attention span can be brought about through thoughtful planning. Using thought in this way, even on the smallest scale, will produce the requisite effect.

Persons of a choleric temperament should purposely put themselves in situations where rage is of no use, but rather only makes them look ridiculous. Melancholics should not close their eyes to life's pain, but rather seek it out; through compassion they redirect their suffering outward toward appropriate objects and events. If we are phlegmatics, having no particular interests, then we should occupy ourselves as much as possible with uninteresting things, surround ourselves with numerous sources of tedium, so that we become thoroughly bored. We will then be thoroughly cured of our “phlegm;” we will have gotten it out of our system. Thus does one reckon with what one has, and not with what one does not have.

By filling ourselves with practical wisdom such as this, we learn to solve that basic riddle of life, the other person. It is solved not by postulating abstract ideas and concepts, but by means of pictures. Instead of arbitrarily theorizing, we should seek an immediate understanding of every individual human being. We can do this, however, only by knowing what lies in the depths of the soul. Slowly and gradually, spiritual science illuminates our minds, making us receptive not only to the big picture, but also to subtle details. Spiritual science makes it possible that when two souls meet and one demands love, the other offers it. If something else is demanded, that other thing is given. Through such true, living wisdom do we create the basis for society. This is what we mean when we say we must solve a riddle every moment.

Anthroposophy acts not by means of sermons, exhortations, or catechisms, but by creating a social groundwork, upon which human beings can come to know each other. Spiritual science is the ground of life, and love is the blossom and fruit of a life enhanced by it. Thus spiritual science may claim to lay the foundation for humankind's most beautiful goal—a true, genuine love for man.

• 1. Translator's note: The reader may conclude from this remark—for it was, after all, a remark, not a published claim—that Steiner was ignorant of the concept of seed crystals. However, a likelier explanation is that Steiner, whose audience was very likely not a scientifically knowledgeable one, was simply indulging in a bit of rhetorical hyperbole. He doubtless knew that a seed crystal will hasten the crystallization process in a saturated salt solution, but this fact is not really relevant to his point, which comes out only gradually in this paragraph. His point is not that a newly-forming crystal cannot receive some contribution from a previously existing one, only that it need not; this is in contrast to living things, which require a progenitor.
• 2. Francesco Redi, 1626-1697. Refuted spontaneous generation of living beings out of mud.
• 3. Giordano Bruno, 1548-1600. Italian philosopher, Dominican monk, burned at the stake as heretic. Taught that the world is infinite in space and time and filled with innumerable suns.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814. German Idealist philosopher.
• 5. Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821. French ruler and emperor 1804-1814 and 1815.

[ 1 ] The decision to give public expression to the esoteric from my own inner experience impelled me to write for the Magazine for August 28, 1899, on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Goethe's birth, an article on Goethe's fairy-tale of The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, under the title Goethes Geheime Offenbarung.¹ This article was, of course, only slightly esoteric. But I could not expect more of my public than I there gave. In my own mind the content of the fairy-tale lived as something wholly esoteric, and it was out of an esoteric mood that the article was written.

[ 2 ] Since the 'eighties I had been occupied with imaginations which were associated in my thought with this fairy-tale. I saw set forth in the fairy-tale Goethe's way from the observation of external nature into the interior of the human mind as he placed this before himself, not in concepts, but in pictures of the spirit. Concepts seemed to Goethe far too poor, too dead, to be capable of representing the living and working forces of the mind.

[ 3 ] Now in Schiller's letters concerning education in aesthetics, Goethe saw an endeavour to grasp this living and working by means of concepts. Schiller sought to show how the life of man is under subjection to natural necessity by reason of his corporeal aspect and to mental necessity through his reason. And he thought the soul must establish an inner equilibrium between the two. Then in this equilibrium man lives in freedom a life really worthy of humanity.

This is clever, but for the real life of the soul it is far too simple. The soul causes its forces, which are rooted in the depths, to shine into consciousness, but to disappear again in the very act of shining forth after they have influenced other forces just as fleeting. These are occurrences which even in arising also pass away; but abstract concepts can be linked only to that which continues for a longer or shorter time.

[ 4 ] All this Goethe knew through experience; he placed his picture-knowledge in a fairy-tale over against Schiller's conceptual knowledge.

[ 5 ] In experiencing this creation of Goethe's, one had entered the outer court of the esoteric.

[ 6] This was the time when I was invited by Count and Countess Brockdorff to deliver a lecture at one of their weekly gatherings. At these meetings there came together seekers from all sorts of circles. The lectures there delivered had to do with all aspects of life and knowledge. I knew nothing of all this until I was invited to deliver a lecture; nor did I know the Brockdorffs, but heard of them then for the first time. The theme proposed was an article about Nietzsche. This lecture I gave. Then I observed that among the hearers there were persons with a great interest in the spiritual world. Therefore, when I was invited to give a second lecture, I proposed the subject “Goethe's Secret Revelation,” and in this lecture I became entirely esoteric in relation to the fairy-tale. It was an important experience for me to be able to speak in words coined from the world of spirit after having been forced by circumstances throughout my Berlin period up to that time only to let the spiritual shine through my presentation.

[ 7 ] The Brockdorffs were leaders of a branch of the Theosophical Society founded by Blavatsky. What I had said in connection with Goethe's fairy-tale led to my being invited by the Brockdorffs to deliver lectures regularly before those members of the Theosophical Society who were associated with them. I explained, however, that I could speak only about that which I vitally experienced within me as spiritual knowledge.

[ 8 ] In truth, I could speak of nothing else. For very little of the literature issued by the Theosophical Society was known to me. I had known theosophists while living in Vienna, and I later became acquainted with others. These acquaintance ships led me to write in the Magazine the adverse review dealing with the theosophists in connection with the appearance of a publication of Franz Hartmann. What I knew otherwise of the literature was for the most part entirely uncongenial to me in method and approach; I could not by any possibility have linked my discussions with this literature.

[ 9 ] So I then gave the lectures in which I established a connection with the mysticism of the Middle Ages. By means of the ideas of the mystics from Master Eckhard to Jakob Böhme, I found expression for the spiritual conceptions which in reality I had determined beforehand to set forth. I published the series of lectures in the book Die Mystik im Aufgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens.²

[ 10 ] At these lectures there appeared one day in the audience Marie von Sievers, who was chosen by destiny at that time to take into strong hands the German section of the Theosophical Society, founded soon after the beginning of my lecturing. Within this section I was then able to develop my anthroposophic activity before a constantly increasing audience.

[ 11 ] No one was left in uncertainty of the fact that I would bring forward in the Theosophical Society only the results of my own research through perception. For I stated this on all appropriate occasions. When, in the presence of Annie Besant, the German section of the Theosophical Society was founded in Berlin and I was chosen its General Secretary, I had to leave the foundation sessions because I had to give before a non-theosophical audience one of the lectures in which I dealt with the spiritual evolution of humanity, and to the title of which I expressly united the phrase “Eine Anthroposophie.”³ Annie Besant also knew that I was then giving out in lectures under this title what I had to say about the spiritual world.

[ 12 ] When I went to London to attend a theosophical congress, one of the leading personalities said to me that true theosophy was to be found in my book Mysticism ..., I had reason to be satisfied. For I had given only the results of my spiritual vision, and this was accepted in the Theosophical Society.

There was now no longer any reason why I should not bring forward this spiritual knowledge in my own way before the theosophical public, which was at first the only audience that entered without restriction into a knowledge of the spirit. I subscribed to no sectarian dogmatics; I remained a man who uttered what he believed he was able to utter entirely according to what he himself experienced in the spiritual world.

[ 13 ] Prior to the founding of the section belongs a series of lectures – which I gave before Die Kommenden, entitled Von Buddha zu Christus.⁴ In these discussions I sought to show what a mighty stride the mystery of Golgotha signifies in comparison with the Buddha event, and how the evolution of humanity, as it strives toward the Christ event, approaches its culmination. [ 14 ] In this circle I spoke also of the nature of the mysteries.

[ 15 ] All this was accepted by my hearers. It was not felt to be contradictory to lectures which I had given earlier. Only after the section was founded – and I then appeared to be stamped as a “theosophist” – did any objection arise. It was really not the thing itself; it was the name and the association with the Society that no one wished to have.

[ 16 ] On the other hand, my non-theosophical hearers would have been inclined to permit themselves merely to be “stimulated” by my discussions, to accept these only in a “literary” way. What lay upon my heart was to introduce into life the impulse from the spiritual world; for this there was no understanding. This understanding, however, I could gradually find among men interested theosophically.

[ 17 ] Before the Brockdorff circle, where I had spoken on Nietzsche and the on Goethe's secret revelation, I gave at this time a lecture on Goethe's Faust, from an esoteric point of view.⁵

[ 18 ] The lectures on mysticism led to an invitation during the winter from the same theosophical circle to speak there again on this subject. I then gave the series of lectures which I later collected into the volume Christianity as Mystical Fact.

[ 19 ] From the very beginning I have let it be known that the choice of the expression “as Mystical Fact” is important. For I did not wish to set forth merely the mystical bearing of Christianity. My object was to set forth the evolution from the ancient mysteries to the mystery of Golgotha in such a way that in this evolution there should be seen to be active, not merely earthly historic forces, but spiritual supramundane influences. And I wished to show that in the ancient mysteries cult-pictures were given of cosmic events, which were then fulfilled in the mystery of Golgotha as facts transferred from the cosmos to the earth of the historic plane.

[ 20 ] This was by no means taught in the Theosophical Society. In this view I was in direct opposition to the theosophical dogmatics of the time, before I was invited to work in the Theosophical Society. For this invitation followed immediately after the cycle of lectures on Christ here described.

[ 21 ] Between the two cycles of lectures that I gave before the Theosophical Society, Marie von Sievers was in Italy, at Bologna, working on behalf of the Theosophical Society in the branch established there.

[ 22 ] Thus the thing evolved up to the time of my first attendance at a theosophical congress, in London, in the year 1902. At this congress, in which Marie von Sievers also took part, it was already a foregone conclusion that a German section of the Society would be founded with myself – shortly before invited to become a member – as the general secretary.

[ 23 ] The visit to London was of great interest to me. I there became acquainted with important leaders of the Theosophical Society. I had the privilege of staying at the home of Mr. Bertram Keightley, one of these leaders. We became great friends. I became acquainted with Mr. Mead, the very diligent secretary of the Theosophical Movement. The most interesting conversations imaginable took place at the home of Mr. Keightley in regard to the forms of spiritual knowledge alive within the Theosophical Society.

[ 24 ] Especially intimate were these conversations with Bertram Keightley himself. H. P. Blavatsky seemed to live again in these conversations. Her whole personality, with its wealth of spiritual content, was described with the utmost vividness before me and Marie von Sievers by my dear host, who had been so long associated with her.

[ 25 ] I became slightly acquainted with Annie Besant and also Sinnett, author of Esoteric Buddhism. Mr. Leadbeater I did not meet, but only heard him speak from the platform. He made no special impression on me.

[ 26 ] All that was interesting in what I heard stirred me deeply, but it had no influence upon the content of my own views.

[ 27 ] The intervals left over between sessions of the congress I sought to employ in hurried visits to the natural-scientific and artistic collections of London. I dare say that many an idea concerning the evolution of nature and of man came to me from the natural-scientific and the historical collections.

[ 28 ] Thus I went through an event very important for me in this visit to London. I went away with the most manifold impressions, which stirred my mind profoundly.

[ 29 ] In the first number of the Magazine for 1899 there appears an article by me entitled Neujahrsbetractung eines Ketzers.⁶ The meaning there is a scepticism, not in reference to religious knowledge, but in reference to the orientation of culture which the time had taken on.

[ 30 ] Men were standing before the portals of a new century. The closing century had brought forth great attainments in the realm of external life and knowledge.

[ 31 ] In reference to this the thought forced itself upon me: “In spite of all this and many other attainments – for example, in the sphere of art – no one with any depth of vision can rejoice greatly over the cultural content of the time. Our highest spiritual needs strive for something which the time affords only in meagre measure.” And reflecting upon the emptiness of contemporary culture, I glanced back to the time of scholasticism in which, at least in concepts, men's minds lived with the spirit. “One need not be surprised if, in the presence of such phenomena, men with deeper intellectual needs find the proud structure of thought of the scholastics more satisfying than the ideal content of our own time. Otto Willmann has written a noteworthy book, his Geschichte des Idealismus⁷ in which he appears as the eulogist of the world-conception of past centuries. It must be admitted that the human mind craves those proud comprehensive illuminations through thought which human knowledge experienced in the philosophical systems of the scholastics ... Discouragement is a characteristic of the intellectual life at the turn of the century. It disturbs our joy in the attainments of the youngest of the ages now past.”

[ 32 ] And in contrast to those persons who insisted that it was just “true knowledge” itself which showed the impossibility of a philosophy comprising under a single conception the totality of existence, I had to say: “If matters were as they appear to the persons who give currency to such voices, then it would suffice one to measure, weigh, and compare things and phenomena and investigate them by means of the available apparatus, but never would the question be raised as to the higher meaning of things and phenomena.”

[ 33 ] This is the temper of my mind which must furnish an explanation of those facts that brought about my anthroposophic activity within the Theosophical Society. When I had entered into the culture of the time in order to find a spiritual background for the editing of the Magazine, I felt after this a great need to recover my mind in such reading as Willmann's History of Idealism. Even though there was an abyss between my perception of spirit and the form of Willmann's ideas, yet I felt that these ideas were near to the spirit.

[ 34 ] At the end of September 1900, I was able to leave the Magazine in other hands.

[ 35 ] The facts narrated above show that the purpose of imparting the content of the spiritual world had become a necessity growing out of my temper of mind before I gave up the Magazine; that it has no connection with the impossibility of continuing further with the Magazine.

[ 36 ] As into the very element suited to my mind, I entered upon an activity having its impulse in spiritual knowledge.

[ 37 ] But I still have to-day the feeling that, even apart from the hindrance here described, my endeavour to lead through natural-scientific knowledge to the world of spirit would have succeeded in finding an outlet. I look back upon what I expressed from 1897 to 1900 as upon something which at one time or another had to be uttered in opposition to the way of thinking of the time; and on the other hand I look back upon this as upon something in which I passed through my most intense spiritual test. I learned fundamentally to know where lay the forces of the time striving away from the spirit, disintegrating and destructive of culture. And from this knowledge came a great access of the force that I later needed in order to work outward from the spirit.

[ 38 ] It was still before the time of my activity within the Theosophical Society, and before I ceased to edit the Magazine, that I composed my two-volume book Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century, which from the second edition on was extended to include a survey of the evolution of world-conceptions from the Greek period to the nineteenth century, and then appeared under the title Rätsel der Philosophie.⁸

[ 39 ] The external occasion for the production of this book is to be considered wholly secondary. It grew out of the fact that Cronbach, the publisher of the Magazine, planned a collection of writings which were to deal with the various realms of knowledge and life in their evolution during the nineteenth century. He wished to include in this collection an exposition of the conceptions of the world and of life, and this he entrusted to me.

[ 40 ] I had for a long time held all the substance of this book in my mind. My consideration of the world-conceptions had a personal point of departure in that of Goethe. The opposition which I had to set up between Goethe's way of thinking and that of Kant, the new philosophical beginning at the turning-point between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel – all this was to me the beginning of an epoch in the evolution of world-conceptions. The brilliant books of Richard Wahle, which show the dissolution of all endeavour after a world-conception at the end of the nineteenth century, closed this epoch. Thus the attempt of the nineteenth century after a world-conception rounded itself into a whole which was vitally alive in my view, and I gladly seized the opportunity to set this forth.

[ 41] When I look back to this book the course of my life seems to me symptomatically expressed in it. I did not concern myself, as many suppose, with anticipating contradictions. If this were the case, I should gladly admit it. Only it was not the reality in my spiritual course. I concerned myself in anticipation to find new spheres for what was alive in my mind. And an especially stimulating discovery in the spiritual sphere occurred soon after the composition of the Conceptions of the World and of Life.

[ 42 ] Besides, I never by any means penetrated into the spiritual sphere in a mystical, emotional way, but desired always to go by way of crystal-clear concepts. Experiencing of concepts, of ideas, led me out of the ideal into the spiritual-real.

[ 43 ] The real evolution of the organic from primeval times to the present stood out before my imagination for the first time after the composition of Conceptions of the World and of Life.

[ 44 ] During the writing of this book I had before my eyes only the natural-scientific view which had been derived from the Darwinian mode of thought. But this I considered only as a succession of sensible facts present in nature. Within this succession of facts there were active for me spiritual impulses, as these hovered before Goethe in his idea of metamorphosis.

[ 45 ] Thus the natural-scientific evolutionary succession, as represented by Haeckel, never constituted for me something wherein mechanical or merely organic laws controlled, but as something wherein the spirit led the living being from the simple through the complex up to man. I saw in Darwinism a mode of thinking which is on the way to that of Goethe, but which remains behind this.

[ 46 ] All this was still thought by me in ideal content ; only later did I work through to imaginative perception. This perception first brought me the knowledge that in reality quite other beings than the most simple organisms were present in primeval times. That man as a spiritual being is older than all other living beings, and that in order to assume his present physical form he had to cease to be a member of a world-being which comprised him and the other organisms. These latter are rejected elements in human evolution; not something out of which man has come, but something which he has left behind, from which he severed himself, in order to take on his physical form as the image of one that was spiritual. Man is a microcosmic being who bore within him all the rest of the terrestrial world and who has become a microcosm by separating from all the rest – this for me was a knowledge to which I first attained in the earliest years of the new century.

[ 47 ] And so this knowledge could not be in any way an active impulse in Conceptions of the World and of Life. Indeed, I so conceived the second volume of this book that a point of departure for a deepening knowledge of the world mystery might be found in a spiritualized form of Darwinism and Haeckelism viewed in the light of Goethe's world-conception.

[ 48 ] When I prepared later the second edition of the book, there was already present in my mind a knowledge of the true evolution. All through I held fast to the point of view I had assumed in the first edition as being that which is derived from thinking without spiritual perception, yet I found it necessary to make slight changes in the form of expression. These were necessary, first because the book by undertaking a general survey of the totality of philosophy had become an entirely different composition, and secondly because this second edition appeared after my discussions of the true evolution were already before the world.

[ 49 ] In all this the form taken by my Riddles of Philosophy had not only a subjective justification, as the point of view firmly held from the time of a certain phase in my mental evolution, but also a justification entirely objective. This consists in the fact that a thought, when spiritually experienced as thought, can conceive the evolution of living beings only as this is set forth in my book; and that the further step must be made by means of spiritual perception.

[ 50 ] Thus my book represents quite objectively the pre-anthroposophic point of view into which one must submerge oneself, and which one must experience in this submersion, in order to rise to the higher point of view. This point of view, as a stage in the way of knowledge, meets those learners who seek the spiritual world, not in a mystical blurred form, but in a form intellectually clear. In setting forth that which results from this point of view there is also present something which the learner uses as a preliminary stage leading to the higher.

[ 51 ] Then for the first time I saw in Haeckel the person who placed himself courageously at the thinker's point of view in natural science, while all other researchers excluded thought and admitted only the results of sense-observation. The fact that Haeckel placed value upon creative thought in laying the foundation for reality drew me again and again to him. And so I dedicated my book to him, in spite of the fact that its content – even in that form – was not conceived in his sense. But Haeckel was not in the least a philosophical nature. His relation to philosophy was wholly that of a layman. For this very reason I considered the attack of the philosophers that was just then raging around Haeckel as quite undeserved. In opposition to them, I dedicated my book to Haeckel, as I had already written in opposition to them my essay Haeckel und seine Gegner.⁹ Haeckel, in all simplicity as regards philosophy, had employed thought as the means for setting forth biological reality; a philosophical attack was directed against him which rested upon an intellectual sphere quite foreign to him. I believe he never knew what the philosophers wished from him. This was my impression from a conversation I had with him in Leipzig after the appearance of his Riddle of the Universe, on the occasion of a presentation of Borngräber's play Giordano Bruno. He then said: “People say I deny the spirit. I wish they could see how materials shape themselves through their forces; then they would perceive ‘spirit’ in everything that happens in a retort. Everywhere there is spirit.” Haeckel, in fact, knew nothing whatever of the real Spirit. The very forces of nature were for him the “spirit,” and he could rest content with this.

[ 52 ] One must not critically attack such blindness to the spirit with philosophically dead concepts, but must see how far the age is removed from the experience of the spirit, and must seek, on the foundation which the age affords – the natural biological explanation – to strike the spiritual sparks.

[ 53 ] Such was then my opinion. On that basis I wrote my Conceptions of the World and of Life in the Nineteenth Century.

• 1. Goethe's Secret Revelation.
• 2. Mysticism at the Beginning of the Modern Spiritual Life.
• 3. “An anthroposophy.”
• 4. From Buddha to Christ.
• 5. This was the lecture which was later published, together with my discussions of Goethe's fairy-tale, by the Philosophische-Anthroposophische Verlag.
• 6. New Year Reflections of a Sceptic.
• 7. History of Idealism.
• 8. Riddles of Philosophy.
• 9. Haeckel and His Opponents.

When the candles are lit on the Christmas Tree, the human soul feels as though the symbol of an eternal reality were standing there, and that this must always have been the symbol of the Christmas Festival, even in a far distant past. For in the autumn, when outer Nature fades, when the sun's creations fall as it were into slumber and man's organs of outer perception must turn away from the phenomena of the physical world, the soul has the opportunity—nay not only the opportunity but the urge—to withdraw into its innermost depths, in order to feel and to experience: Now, when the light of the outer sun is faintest and its warmth feeblest, now is the time when the soul withdraws into the darkness but can find within itself the inner, spiritual Light. The lights on the Christmas Tree stand there before us as a symbol of the inner, spiritual Light that is kindled in the outer darkness. And because what we feel to be the spirit-light of the soul shining into the darkness of Nature seems to be an eternal reality, we imagine that the lighted fir-tree shining out to us on Christmas Night must have been shining ever since our earthly incarnations began.

And yet it is not so. It is only one or at most two centuries ago that the Christmas Tree became a symbol of the thoughts and feelings which arise in man at the Christmas season. The Christmas Tree is a recent symbol but each year anew it reveals to man a great, eternal truth. That is why we imagine that it must always have existed, even in the remote past. It is as if from the Christmas Tree itself there resounded the proclamation of the Divine in the cosmic expanse, in the heavenly heights. The human being can feel this to be the unfailing source of those forces of peace in his soul which spring from good-will. And thus, according to the Christmas Legend, did the proclamation also resound when the shepherds visited the birthplace of the Child whose festival we celebrate on Christmas Day. To the shepherds there rang forth from the clouds: From the cosmic expanse, from the heavenly heights, the Divine Powers are revealing themselves, bringing peace to the human soul that is filled with good-will.

For centuries and centuries men could not bring themselves to believe that the symbol presented to the world in the Christmas Festival ever had a beginning. They felt in it the hallmark of eternity. Christian ritual has for this reason clothed the intimation of eternity in what takes place symbolically on Christmas Night, in the words: ‘To us Christ is born anew!’ It is as though every year the soul is called upon to feel anew a reality of which it is thought that it could happen once and once only. The eternity of this symbolic happening is brought home to us with infinite power if we have the true conception of the symbol itself. Yet as late as 353 A.D., 353 years after Christ Jesus had appeared on earth, the birth of Jesus was not celebrated, even in Rome. The Festival of Jesus' birth was celebrated for the first time in Rome in the year A.D. 354. Before then this Festival was not celebrated between the 24th and 25th December; the day of supreme commemoration for those who understood something of the deep wisdom relating to the Mystery of Golgotha, was the 6th of January. The Epiphany was celebrated as a kind of Birth-Festival of the Christ during the first three centuries of our era. It was the Festival which was meant to revive in human souls the remembrance of the descent of the Christ Spirit into the body of Jesus of Nazareth at the Baptism by John in the Jordan. Until the year A.D. 353 the happening which men conceived to have taken place at the Baptism was commemorated on the 6th of January as the Festival of Christ's birth. For during the first centuries of Christendom an inkling still survived of the mystery that is of all mysteries the most difficult for mankind to grasp, namely, the descent of the Christ Being into the body of Jesus of Nazareth.

What were the feelings of men who had some inkling of the secrets of Christianity during those early centuries? They said to themselves: The Christ Spirit weaves through the world that is revealed through the senses and through the human spirit. In the far distant past this Christ Spirit revealed Himself to Moses. The secret of the human ‘ I ’ resounded to Moses as it resounds to us from the symbol on the Christmas Tree from the sounds I A O—the Alpha and the Omega, preceded by the I. This was what resounded in the soul of Moses when the Christ Spirit appeared to him in the burning bush. And this same Christ Spirit led Moses to the place where He was to recognise Him in His true being. This is described in the Old Testament where it is said that the Lord led Moses to Mount Nebo ‘over against Jericho’ and showed him what must still come to pass before the Christ Spirit could incarnate in the body of a man. To Moses on Mount Nebo, this Spirit said: But thou to whom I revealed myself in advance, mayest not bear what thou hast in thy soul into the evolution of thy people; for they have first to prepare what is to come to pass when the time is fulfilled.

And when, through many centuries, the evolutionary preparation had been completed, the same Spirit by Whom Moses had been held back, did indeed reveal Himself—by becoming Flesh, by taking on a human body, the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Therewith mankind as a whole was led from the stage of Initiation signified by the word ‘Jericho’ to that indicated by the crossing of the Jordan.

The hearts and minds of those who in the early centuries of our era understood the true import of Christianity turned to the Baptism in the Jordan of Jesus of Nazareth into whom Christ descended, Christ the Sun-Earth-Spirit. It was this—the birth of Christ—that was celebrated as a Mystery in the early Christian centuries. The insight for which we prepare ourselves to-day through Anthroposophy, through the wisdom belonging to the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of civilisation, flashed up in the form of vision from the vestiges of ancient clairvoyance still surviving during the age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place; it flashed up in the Gnostics, those remarkable, enlightened men who lived at the turning-point of the old and the new eras, whose conception of the Christ Mystery differed in respect of form but not in respect of content, from our own. What the Gnostics were able to teach trickled through into the world and although what had actually come to pass in the event indicated symbolically by the Baptism in the Jordan was not widely understood, there was nevertheless an inkling that the Sun Spirit had been born at that time as the Spirit of the Earth, that a cosmic Power had dwelt in the body of a man of earth. And so in the early centuries of Christendom the festival of the birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the festival of Christ's Epiphany, was celebrated on the 6th of January.

But insight, even dim, uncertain insight into this deep Mystery faded away more and more as time went by. The age came when men could no longer comprehend that the Being called Christ had been present in a physical human body for three years only. More and more it will be realised that what was accomplished for the whole of earth-evolution during those three years in the physical body of a man is one of the very deepest and most difficult Mysteries to understand. From the fourth century onwards, with the approach of the materialistic age, the powers of the human soul—then still at the stage of preparation—were not strong enough to grasp the deep Mystery which from our time on will be understood in ever greater measure. And so it came about that to the same extent to which the outer power of Christianity increased, inner understanding of the Christ Mystery decreased and the festival of the 6th of January ceased to have any essential meaning. The birth of Christ was placed thirteen days earlier and envisaged as coincident with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. But in this very fact we are confronted by something that must always be a source of inspiration and thanksgiving. Actually, the 24th/25th of December was fixed as the day of Christ's Nativity because a great truth had been lost, as we have heard. And yet ... although the error would seem to point to the loss of a great truth, such profound meaning lay behind it that—although the men responsible knew nothing of it—we cannot but marvel at the subconscious wisdom with which the festival of Christmas Day was instituted.

Verily, the working of Divine wisdom can be seen in the fixing of this festival. Just as Divine wisdom can be perceived in outer nature if we know how to decipher what reveals itself there, so we can perceive Divine wisdom working in the unconscious soul of man when the following is borne in mind. In the Calendar, the 24th of December is the day dedicated to Adam and Eve, the following day being the Festival of Christ's Nativity. Thus the loss of an ancient truth caused the date of Christ's birth to be placed thirteen days earlier and to be identified with the birth of Jesus of Nazareth—but in a most wonderful way the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was linked with the thought of man's origin in earth-evolution, his origin in Adam and Eve. All the dim feelings and experiences connected with this festival of Jesus' birth which were alive in the human soul—although in their upper consciousness, men had no knowledge of what lay behind—all these feelings that were astir in the depths of the soul speak a wondrous language.

When understanding was lost of what had streamed from cosmic worlds in the event which would rightly have been celebrated on the 6th of January, forces working in hidden depths of the soul caused the picture to be presented of man as a being of soul-and-spirit before physical embodiment, at the starting-point of evolution as a physical human being. The picture is of the new-born child whose soul is as yet untouched by the effects of contact with the physical body, of the child at the beginning of physical evolution on earth. But this is not a human child in the ordinary sense; it is the child who was there before human beings had reached the point of the first physical embodiment in earth-evolution. This is the being known in the Kabbala as Adam Kadmon—Man who descended from divine-spiritual heights, with all that he had acquired during the periods of Saturn, Sun and Moon. The human being in his spiritual state at the very beginning of earth-evolution, born in the Jesus Child—this was presented to mankind by a Divine wisdom in the festival of Jesus' birth. At a time when it was no longer possible to understand what had descended from cosmic worlds, from heavenly spheres, to the earth, remembrance of their origin, of their state before the advent of the Luciferic forces in earth-evolution was engraved into the souls of men. And when it was no longer realised that in the highest and truest sense it could be said of the Baptism by John in the Jordan: From cosmic worlds there has come into human souls the power of the self-revealed Godhead, in order that peace may reign among men who are of goodwill—when understanding of how this picture could be presented as a sacred festival was lost, another affirmation was presented in its place, the affirmation that at the beginning of earth revolution, before the Luciferic forces began their work, man had a nature, an entelechy that can inspire him with undying hope.

The Jesus of the Gospel of St. Luke—not the Jesus described in the Gospel of St. Matthew—is the Child before whom the shepherds worship. To them the proclamation rang forth: Now is the Divine revealed from the heavenly heights, bringing peace to the souls of men who are of good-will. And so for the centuries when the higher reality was beyond man's grasp, the festival was instituted which every year brings to his remembrance: Although you cannot gaze into the heavenly heights and there recognise the great Sun-Spirit, you bear within you, from the time of your earthly beginning, the Child-Soul in its state of purity, unsullied by the effects of physical incarnation; and the forces of this Child-Soul can give you the firm confidence that you can be victorious over the lower nature which clings to you as the result of Lucifer's temptation. The linking of the festival of Jesus' birth with remembrance of Adam and Eve gave emphasis to the thought that at the place visited by the shepherds a human soul had been born in the state of innocence in which the soul existed before the first incarnation on earth.

At this time of festival, therefore, since the birth of the God was no longer understood, the birth of a human being was commemorated. For however greatly man's forces threaten to decline and his sufferings to take the upper hand, there are two unfailing sources of peace, harmony and strength. We are led to the first source when we look out into cosmic space, knowing it to be pervaded by the weaving lift, movement and warmth of the Divine Spirit. And if we hold fast to the conviction that this Divine-Spiritual Power weaving through the universe can permeate our being provided only that our forces do not flag—there we have the Easter thought, equally a source of hope and confidence flowing from the cosmic spheres. And the second source can spring from the dim inkling that as a being of soul-and-spirit, before he became the prey of the Luciferic forces at the beginning of his earthly evolution, man was still part of the same Spirit now awaited from cosmic worlds as in the Easter thought. Turning to the source to be found in man's own, original being, before the onset of the Luciferic influence, we can say to ourselves: Whatever may befall you, whatever may torment you and draw you down from the shining spheres of the spirit, your divine origin is an eternal reality, hidden though it be in the depths of the soul. Recognition of this innermost power of the soul will give birth to the firm assurance that the heights are within your reach. And if you conjure before your soul all that is innocent, childlike, free from life's temptations, free from all that has already befallen human souls through the many incarnations since the beginning of earthly evolution, then you will have a picture of the human soul as it was before these earthly incarnations began.

But one soul—one soul only—remained in this condition, namely the soul of the Jesus Child described in the Gospel of St. Luke. This soul was kept back in the spiritual life when the other human souls began to pass through their incarnations on the earth. This soul remained in the guardianship of the holiest Mysteries through the Atlantean and Post-Atlantean epochs until the time of the events in Palestine. Then it was sent forth into the body predestined to receive it and became one of the two Jesus children—the Child described in the Gospel of St. Luke.

Thus did the festival of Christ's Nativity become the festival of the Birth of Jesus.

If we rightly understand this festival we must say: That which we believe to be born anew symbolically every Christmas Night, is the human soul in its original nature, the childhood-spirit of man as it was at the beginning of earth-evolution; then it descended as a revelation from the heavenly heights. And when the human heart can become conscious of this reality, the soul is filled with the unshakable peace that can bear us to our lofty goals, if we are of goodwill. Mighty indeed is the word that can resound to us on Christmas Night, do we but understand its import.

Why was it that the festival of Christ's birth was set back thirteen days and became the festival of the birth of Jesus? To understand this we must penetrate into deep mysteries of human existence. Of outer nature, man believes, because he sees it with his eyes, that what the rays of the sun charm forth from the depths of the earth, unfolding into beauty through the spring and summer, withdraws into those same depths at the time when the outer sun-sphere is darkest, and that what will spring forth again the following year is being prepared in the seeds within the depths of the earth. Because his eyes bear witness, man believes that the seed of the plant passes through a yearly cycle, that it must go down into the earth's depths in order to unfold again under the warmth and light of the sun in spring. But to begin with, man has no notion that the human soul too passes through such a cycle. Nor is this revealed until he is initiated into the great mysteries of existence. Just as the force contained in the seed of every plant is bound up with the physical forces of the earth, so is the inmost being of the human soul bound up with the spiritual forces of the earth. And just as the seed of the plant sinks into the depths of the earth at the time we know as Christmas, so does the soul of man descend at that time into deep, deep spirit-realms, drawing strength from these depths as does the seed of the plant for its blossoming in spring. What the soul undergoes in these spirit-depths of the earth is entirely hidden from the ordinary consciousness. But for one whose eyes of spirit are opened the Thirteen Days and Thirteen Nights between the 24th of December and the 6th of January are a time of deep spiritual experience.

Parallel with the experience of the plant-seed in the depths of the natural earth, there is a spiritual experience in the earth's spirit-depths—verily a parallel experience. And the seer for whom this experience is possible either as the result of training or through inherited clairvoyant faculties, can feel himself penetrating into these spiritual depths. During this period of the Thirteen Days and Nights, the seer can behold what must come upon man because he has passed through incarnations which have been under the influence of the forces of Lucifer since the beginning of earthly evolution. The sufferings in Kamaloca that man must endure in the spiritual world because Lucifer has been at his side since he began to incarnate on the earth—the dearest vision of all this is presented in the mighty Imaginations which can come before the soul during the Thirteen Days and Nights between the Christmas Festival and the Festival of the 6th of January, the Epiphany. At the time when the seed of the plant is passing through its most crucial period in the depths below, the human soul is passing through its deepest experiences. The soul gazes at a vista of all that man must experience in the spiritual worlds because, under Lucifer's influence, he alienated himself from the Powers by whom the world was created. This vision is clearest to the soul during these Thirteen Days and Nights. Hence there is no better preparation for the revelation of that Imagination which may be called the Christ Imagination and which makes us aware that by gaining the victory over Lucifer, Christ Himself becomes the Judge of the deeds of men during the incarnations affected by Lucifer's influence. The soul of the seer lives on from the festival of Jesus' birth to that of the Epiphany in such a way that the Christ Mystery is revealed. It is during these Thirteen Holy Days and Nights that the soul can grasp most deeply of all, the import and meaning of the Baptism by John in the Jordan.

It is remarkable that during the centuries of Christendom, wherever powers of spiritual sight developed in the right way, it was known to seers that vision penetrated most deeply during the period of the Thirteen Holy Nights at the time of the winter solstice. Many a seer—either schooled in the mysteries of the modern age or possessing inherited powers of clairvoyance—makes it evident to us that at the darkest point of the winter solstice the soul can have vision of all that man must undergo because of his alienation from the Christ Spirit, how adjustment and catharsis were made possible through the Mystery enacted in the Baptism by John in the Jordan and then through the Mystery of Golgotha, and how the visions during the Thirteen Nights are crowned on the 6th of January by the Christ Imagination. Thus it is correct to name the 6th of January as the day of Christ's birth and these Thirteen Nights as the time during which the powers of seership in the human soul discern and perceive what man must undergo through his life in the incarnations from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha.

During my visit to Christiania last year¹ it was interesting to me to find the thought which in rather different words has been expressed in so many lectures on the Christ Mystery, embodied in a beautiful saga known as ‘The Dream Legend.’ Strange to say, it has come to the fore in Norway during the last ten to fifteen years and has become familiar to the people, although its origin is, of course, very much earlier. It is the legend which in a wonderfully beautiful way relates how Olaf Åsteson is initiated, as it were by natural forces, in that he falls asleep on Christmas Eve, sleeps through the Thirteen Days and Nights until the 6th of January, and lives through all the terrors which the human being must experience through the incarnations from the earth's beginning until the Mystery of Golgotha. And it relates how when the 6th of January has come, Olaf Åsteson has the vision of the intervention of the Christ Spirit in humanity, the Michael-Spirit being His forerunner. I hope that on some other occasion we shall be able to present this poem in its entirety, for then you will realise that consciousness of vision during the Thirteen Days and Nights survives even to-day, and is in fact, being revivified. A few characteristic lines only will now be quoted. The poem begins:

Come listen to me and hear my song
The song of a wonderful youth,
I'll sing you of Olaf Åsteson
Who slept many days—'tis the truth.

'Twas Christmas Eve when down he lay
And slept so long all unknowing,
He never woke till the thirteenth day
When to Church the people were going.
Yes, it was Olaf Åsteson
Who lay so long a-sleeping.

(Translated from a German version
of The Dream Legend, by E.C.M.)

And so the poem goes on, relating how in his dream during the Thirteen Days and Nights, Olaf Åsteson is led through all that man must experience on account of Lucifer's temptation. A vivid picture is given of Olaf Åsteson's journey through the spheres where human beings have the experiences so often described in connection with Kamaloca, and of how the Christ Spirit, preceded by Michael, streams into this vision.

Thus with the coming of Christ in the Spirit, it will become more and more possible for men to know how the spiritual forces weave and hold sway and that the festivals have not been instituted by arbitrary opinions but by the cosmic wisdom which so often lies beyond the reach of men's consciousness yet works and reigns throughout history. This cosmic wisdom has placed the festival of the birth of Jesus at the beginning of the Thirteen Days. While the Easter Festival can always be a reminder that contemplation of the cosmic worlds will help us to find within ourselves the strength to conquer all that is lower, the Christmas thought—if we understand the festival which commemorates man's divine origin and the symbol before us on Christmas Day in the form of the Jesus Child—says to us ever and again that the powers which bring peace to the soul can be found within ourselves. True peace of soul is present only when that peace has sure foundations, that is to say, when it is a force enabling man to know: In thee lives something which, if truly brought to birth, can, nay must, lead thee to divine Heights, to divine Powers.—The lights on this tree are symbols of the light which shines in our own souls when we grasp the reality of what is proclaimed to us symbolically on Christmas Night by the Jesus Child in its state of innocence: the inmost being of the human soul itself, strong, innocent, tranquil, leading us along our life's path to the highest goals of existence. May these lights on the Christmas Tree say to us: If ever thy soul is weak, if ever thou believest that the goals of earth-existence are beyond thy reach, think of man's divine origin and become aware of those forces within thee which are also the forces of supreme Love. Become inwardly conscious of the forces which give thee confidence and certainty in all thy works, through all thy life, now and in all ages of time to come.

• 1. 7th-17th June, 1910, when the Lecture Course on The Mission of the Folk-Souls was given.

1.

In the history of recent Western philosophy, Rudolf Steiner appears as a unique personality because his whole philosophical work is not the result of a thinking effort, but is based on spiritual experiences. In the world of the East it goes without saying that a great thinker is at the same time a great initiate; in the West, however, it never before occurred that a whole philosophical system was based on immediate spiritual experience. For this reason Steiner had to face the greatest mistrust from the world of the “official” philosophers.

It was Eduard von Hartmann whose works Steiner carefully studied, who influenced his early writings, and to whom he dedicated his doctoral thesis, Truth and Knowledge, published in 1892; and that despite the wide difference in their views. Following Kant, Hartmann believed that true reality can never be grasped by means of our consciousness, and that the experiences of our consciousness are nothing but an unreal reflection of reality. In contrast, there was no doubt for Steiner that “the experiences of our consciousness can enter the true realities by means of strengthening of our soul forces, and that the divine spiritual principle manifests itself in man if he makes this manifestation possible by his soul life.” (See Steiner's autobiography, The Course of My Life.) The unconscious realities of the world which, according to Hartmann, are veiled forever from our knowledge, “can be brought to our consciousness again and again, by means of the efforts of our soul lives,” as Steiner expressed it in the book quoted above. We are by no means separated from the realities of the world forever, but only so long as we are perceiving by means of the senses exclusively. Actually, the world of the senses is spiritual. If by enhancing our soul life, we succeed in experiencing the ideas working in the world of the senses, then we are able to experience the world in its reality. Steiner calls his philosophical system, “concrete” or “objective idealism.”

From his early youth on, Steiner felt the kinship between this kind of idealism and Goethe's world conception. In contrast to almost all philosophers, his education was not a classical, but a technical one-as if this were a kind of presentiment of the world in which, and into which, Steiner wanted to work later. He graduated from the Institute of Technology in Vienna where he was strongly influenced by his personal connection with the famous Goethe researcher, Karl Julius Schröer. Upon Schröer's warm recommendation, Steiner was invited to edit, in 1884, the natural scientific writings of Goethe in the great Goethe edition of Kürschner's Nationalliteratur. Four years later he was invited to join the work at the Goethe Archives in Weimar. Here Steiner lived from 1889 to 1897.

As a fruit of this research work, his book, A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception, Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller, was published already as early as 1886. (Further editions appeared in 1924, 1936, 1949 and 1960 respectively.) Up to then, Goethe's scientific endeavors had been considered as mere poetic presentiments of the truth. It was Steiner who proved that all of Goethe's various individual discoveries and presentiments had their origin in a total view, and that this is what matters.

2.

Goethe's understanding of nature brought him in opposition to Kant. The problem here is the limitation of our knowledge. In this difference of views, Steiner in his interpretation of Goethe took the side of the latter, in opposition to Kant, and thus put himself in opposition to the Neo-Kantians, whose views were taught in all German universities at that time. Otto Liebmann who renewed Kantianism in the second half of the nineteenth century, had proclaimed that the human consciousness cannot be enhanced. The same line of thought was the foundation upon which Johannes Volkelt had based his thesis that the world known to man has to be separated sharply from the other world, that of the “things in themselves” which, as such, is unknown to man. Thus, the follower of Kant believed that man's knowledge is limited, and that man can never cross this limit; however, in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Steiner makes the statement that with his thinking, man lives in the reality of the world as a spiritual world, and that the world of the senses is, in truth, a manifestation of the spiritual principle.

In this, Steiner was in full agreement with Goethe. Goethe had conceived the great idea of metamorphosis. According to the latter, the world is a manifestation of ideal forces in the world of the senses. All plants, for example, are nothing but materializations of the one, ideal archetypal plant. The archetypal plant is the fundamental design of all plants: the knot and the leaf. We have to think of this fundamental design as a living, working idea which cannot be seen by means of our sense organs but which manifests itself in the world of the senses. Whenever this fundamental design materializes physically, it varies in a manifold manner, and in accordance with any of these variations, the different plants are formed, following the living archetypal pattern. The archetypal plant is the Proteus who hides himself and manifests himself in all these various forms and whoever is able truly to imagine this archetypal plant, can somehow invent new plants which do not, or do not yet, exist in the world of the senses.

Time and again, Steiner pointed to a conversation between Goethe and Schiller which took place in the summer of 1794 during which Goethe claimed to look at nature in such a way that nature is to be thought of as “working and living, and having the tendency from the whole into the single parts.” In the course of this conversation, Goethe drew a sketch of the “archetypal plant” as a physical super-physical form according to which all existing plants are shaped. Schiller, the follower of Kant, answered that this “archetypal plant” is nothing more than an idea which man builds up in order to understand the particulars. Goethe did not agree with this. He said that in the spirit, he saw the whole in the same way as physically he saw the particulars; there was no fundamental difference between the spiritual and the physical view. To him both were parts of the reality. Whereupon Schiller answered, “This is not an experience; this is an idea.” To this Goethe replied, “I am very happy about this, that I do have ideas without my knowledge, and that I even see them with my very eyes.”

This conversation reveals two typical approaches to the problem of the relationship between a spiritual and a sense experience. Schiller, on the one hand, emphasizes the contrast: the two experiences can never be united. In Goethe's view, on the other hand, the idea and the sense perception complete each other, forming two means of knowledge by working together. Man has to let things speak to him in a twofold way: one part of their reality is given him without his cooperation, if only he opens his senses; the other part, however, can be grasped by him by means of his thinking only, and if he is blessed as was Goethe, he is able to see it with his very eyes. However, together the two parts form the complete whole of the object itself.

Schiller considers the ideal part as a subjective addition on the part of man. Though Kant had realized that we have to use the concept of the inner functionality if we really want to understand the various products of nature, and that we cannot grasp the reality without this concept, he still allotted it to the “reflective power of judgment” of man only; or, in other words, he considered this concept to be nothing but an invention of man, though an indispensable one. In contrast to this, the young Schelling in 1797, exclaimed, entirely following Goethe's ideas, “No longer is there any reason to be afraid of statements!” And consistently, he wanted nature explained from the side of the idea. And here are Goethe's words: “By looking at ever-creative nature, we become worthy of spiritually participating in her productions. Didn't I, first unconsciously, and only following an inner urge, time and again insist upon that archetypal, typical principle? I even succeeded in building up a description which follows the formative forces of nature; and nothing was able any longer to prevent me from courageously undergoing the adventure of the reason, as the Old Man from Konigsberg himself calls it.” But for Kant, the “Old Man from Konigsberg,” the postulation of an objectively existent idea still remained an “adventure of the reason.”

But how is man able to grasp this idea which, of its own nature is non-physical, yet working in the physical world of the senses? Goethe considered himself as possessing a power of judgment by looking at an object (an “anschauende Urteilskraft”); he says that the thinking itself must be metamorphosed, must be enhanced, in order to experience the idea of metamorphosis; a spiritual activity is needed, a dynamic thinking.

3.

By adopting Goethe's theory of knowledge, Steiner also answers the question as to what meaning man's activity of knowledge has in the cosmos. The positivistic thinkers consider knowledge nothing but a mere comprising of individual objects into groups; and these groups are for us, then, abstract concepts or names. Thinking as such serves economic purposes exclusively, but it will never create anything new, although the latter might be of great importance for man. In contrast to this, Steiner states that Science is by no means a mere repetition of what is presented to us by our senses, in some abbreviated form, but rather it adds to it something fundamentally new, something which can never be found in the mere perception, or in the experience. This fundamentally new principle, however, is by no means something of a subjective nature which, according to Kant, man projects on the given perception, or on nature, but rather the true essence of the world of the senses itself. The physical phenomena are riddles which the thinking solves; but what this thinking thus brings about, is the objective world itself. For the world is presented to us by two means: by sense perception and by spiritual knowledge. Both are parts of the objective world. According to Kant, the unity of the objects as it is expressed in concepts, is merely loaned to them by man's I; every connection, he says, originates in our “transcendental apperception.” Steiner, on the other hand, says that just the opposite is true: that objects have their ideal content within themselves. The objects, however, are not presented to our senses in their completeness. By thinking about the objects, we develop the ideas which are working in the specific objects, thus adding to the perception what has been missing from it. This missing, however, is not an objective fact but only the consequence of the fact that by means of our senses we perceive the world in a fragmentary manner only.

Consequentially, the idea is, and works objectively; however it is not presented to our sense organs but appears, in our own thinking, on the subjective stage of our consciousness. This is the reason why it seems to us to be subjective only. Man, by means of his thinking, reveals the ideal nucleus of the world. If it were supposed that man's spirit did not exist, the ideas as expressed in natural laws would be working, but they would not be expressed, not grasped as such. Thus, our intellect does not create order in the objective outer world, but restores the order and the unity of this objective world, which has been interfered with by its own means of understanding, subject to two ways of knowledge. This, however, entitles him to grasp the concept as such, thus adding to the already existing form of existence, a completely new form. (Here the question arises as to whether or not Peter Wust was influenced by Steiner when in the former's Dialektik des Geistes, Dialectic of the Spirit, page 293 in the original German edition, he expresses almost the same lines of thought.)

Human thinking frees the ideal pure form as such; thus, man becomes a creator. Without him, thinking would not exist.

4.

Steiner's Anthroposophy—with which we are not dealing here—differs from the “mystical” schools in the extremely high value it accords to thinking. This high evaluation of thinking originates here, in Steiner's philosophy: man has his right place in the cosmos as a thinking being.

Thinking, on the one hand, and perception, on the other, belong together; however, we experience them as separated. Perceptions are presented to us; facing them, we are merely passive; thoughts, again, have to be brought about by the effort of our soul forces. The world insofar as it is perceived, cannot solve any riddles; there, dreams and hallucinations are presented to us in exactly the same way as is the world of the senses. Thoughts, however, are completely familiar to us, and—fundamentally, at least—are transparent. If we wish to find relationships within the world of sense perception, we have to use our thinking forces.

However, what is added to the perception by our thinking is by no means of a merely subjective nature. For it is not we who “have” the thinking, but rather it is the thinking which “has” us. We cannot combine contents of thoughts arbitrarily, but we have to follow their laws. The thinking does not produce the thoughts; it merely receives them, as does the eye the light, and the ear the sound. The only difference is that the senses work automatically while we remain passive, while, insofar as thinking is concerned, we have to activate it ourselves. Perceptions are given to us; concepts we ourselves have to work out.

Let us imagine a spirit to whom the concept is given together with the perception; such a spirit would never achieve the idea that the concept is not an integral part of the subject, but something of a “subjective” nature. Steiner suggests that in earlier times, as a matter of fact, all mankind experienced things in this way.

Therefore it is not the fault of the objects that we first confront them without the corresponding concepts, but of our own spiritual-physical organization. The abyss between perception and concept opens only at the moment when I, the perceiving subject, confront the objects. To explain the object by means of thinking means nothing other than to restore the connection which man's organization has broken up. It is up to man to gain knowledge. The objects themselves require no explanation. We are the ones who ask questions because we face the cleavage between perception and concept.

In this way Steiner has succeeded in building up a truly objective idealism, from Kant back to Plato, or forward to Schelling. What is new in Kant's philosophy—his idealism in contrast to dogmatism—remains in Steiner's world conception. Steiner, however, refuses to accept the subjective nature of this idealism, and with it, the disastrous division of the world into that of human experience and that of the objects in themselves. For Steiner, thinking is neither a mere subjective activity nor a shadowy imitation of the perception, but an independent spiritual reality.

5.

By considering from the outset the nature of the transcendental principle to be conceptual-spiritual, Steiner rejects the dogma of the modern theory of knowledge since Kant: that man is never able to grasp reality. In the thinking process, he himself participates in the transcendental order of laws of the objects. What here leads us constantly in the wrong direction is the fact that we think our I to be somewhere within our physical organization, and that impressions are given to it by the “outside.” The truth however is that our I is living within the order of laws of the objects themselves; but this life of the I in the region of the transcendental principle is not consciously experienced by man. It is rather his physical organization by which he experiences himself.

Steiner frequently uses the example of a mirror which reflects outer events; and this “mirror” is our physical body. The activity of the body represents the living mirror which reflects the life of the I, which in turn is of a transcendental nature. Thus the human I is able to enter the transcendental principle without “forgetting” itself. But the content of our ordinary, empiric, every-day consciousness is to what our I experiences in reality, as the reflection of the mirror is to the original.

This difference between our true life and that which is only “mirrored,” enables Steiner to settle the conflict between natural science tending toward materialism, and spiritual research presupposing the spiritual principle. Natural science studies nothing but the “mirrored reflection” of the reality which is bound to the brain; this “reflection,” of course, depends on the “mirror,” or in other words, on our nervous system. Man's illusion—though necessary for his every-day life—of thinking of his I as an entity living within his physical organization, is relatively justified here. However, the true innermost being of man will never be found within this physical organization, but rather in the transcendental field.

Thus man has to be considered as a being who, on the one hand is living in the spiritual world itself, and on the other, is receiving its experiences “mirrored” by its physical organization. The world of the senses is, in reality, a spiritual world, but it does not appear to us as such.

The training indicated by Steiner in his various anthroposophical books seeks to stimulate man's soul development to the point where he is able to experience this spiritual world consciously; and this training consists of laborious spiritual exercises which require, above all, a great deal of patience and perseverance.

For those of us who are not—or are not yet—in the position to come to spiritual experiences, Rudolf Steiner's philosophy will still be a highly important contribution toward man's understanding of himself and of the world in which he lives—even though this philosophy can be used only to guide the student on his own right way. However, this whole philosophy is by no means meant to be a mere theoretical line of thought; rather does it find its true completion in the realms of its practical effects. Steiner had good reasons for giving his book—in the original German at least—the title, Die Philosophie der Freiheit, that is, literally, The Philosophy of Freedom, and he poses the question: When is an action free? And he answers this question by stating that it is free when it has its origin in pure thinking. At first glance, Steiner's philosophy of ethics may appear intellectualistic. As in the theory of cognition we have to differentiate between subjective perception on the one hand and the objective concept on the other, in the same way, in the realm of ethics we have to differentiate between motives which originate in the perception and those having their origin in pure thinking. In the first instance we cannot call the deed a free one, since this kind of action is prompted by our surroundings, by our feelings and our will, as well as by our personal nature. None of these is truly free. Only the action motivated by our thinking is truly free. For this kind of action is objective; it is not in the least connected with our I; the world of thinking is common to all of us.

Spinoza, the great Dutch philosopher of the 17th century, objected to the doctrine that man's actions are free by saying that if a stone thrown by someone were endowed with consciousness, it would also make the statement that it flies “freely.” To this Steiner replied that it is not the consciousness as such that builds up in people's minds the belief that they are free; rather it is the fact that man is capable of comprehending the rationality of his motives—provided they are rational. Only that action can be called free which has been determined by the rationality of its ideas.

But how does man materialize his rational motives? The answer is, By means of his moral imagination, which enables him to obtain his motives from the world of ideas. The unfree man is determined passively by the motives of his surroundings which also include his innate nature. The free man, on the other hand, acts according to his moral intuition which, though his own, nevertheless lifts him from the level of his limited I to the objective world of thinking.

Now the problem arises, How can objective morality be united with personal initiative? Steiner strongly rejects Kant's ethics which claim his “categorical imperative” to be a general law which extinguishes the personality. He claims just the opposite, namely a purely individual ethic, expressing it thus: “I do not ask anybody, no man and no law; I perform my action according to the idea which guides me. In so doing, my action is my own, and not the execution of the will of an authority. The urging of my desires means nothing to me, nor does that of moral laws; I want simply to do what seems right to me.” In strict opposition to Kant, any action dictated by a general law appears to him as unfree, heteronomous, while only those actions are autonomous which originate in a law given by man's own self. In a letter dated December 5, 1893, addressed to John Henry Mackay, the follower of Max Stirner, Steiner expressly laid stress on the full agreement of his own philosophy of ethics with that of Stirner, presented in the latter's book, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, The Individual and His Property.

The moral imagination must, out of necessity, be individual. This is the point which counts. However, here we find no opposition between individuality and the general law; we all share in the world of thinking, we all live in one spiritual world. Thus, despite the fact that every single human being draws from his own personal world of ideas, there cannot be any conflict. People are living together, not there is one spiritual cosmos, common to all. This is one of the most important aspects of the picture of Man. For the idea of man is that of a free being. However, we are still rather far from this goal, which belongs to the future. Man's evolution toward this highest goal is far from completed; Man has not yet become a reality. There is something very special in relation to the idea of Man: while all other ideas have materialized, have become one with their perception, as we have seen above, that of Man is still waiting for its materialization, its incorporation. It is Man alone who is able to complete this. While nature performs the task of completion in the case of the plant and animal, so far as Man is concerned nature can do no more than pave the way toward this completion. But it is only and exclusively Man himself who is able to take the last and the decisive step. Books have been written on the question whether or not Man is free, but the manner of asking the question is wrong, for it can never be answered objectively-theoretically. The answer is given by a process of self-liberation.

Rudolf Steiner enthusiastically follows the theory of evolution as it was developed by Darwin and Haeckel. However, he goes far beyond its mere biological aspect. The moral life of man is the continuation of his biological development. Creating new moral ideas out of our “moral imagination”—as, for instance, Gandhi's “non-violence,” or Albert Schweitzer's “reverence for life”—is a “jump” in evolution comparable to the “jump” which creates a new species in the plant or animal kingdom. In a letter dated August 26, 1902, addressed to Wilhelm Hübbe-Schleiden, Steiner wrote, “Nature achieves the most important moments in evolution every time she makes her typical jumps.”

The evolution of mankind as a whole within the hierarchy of the Spiritual Beings is a process of cosmic importance.

HUGO S. BERGMAN
The Hebrew University,
Jerusalem, 1961

Translated by Stephen Michael Engel

Dear attendees! When a person, after a day's work and toils, takes a little time to reflect and tries to find his way in the life of the soul, the question arises as to how the individual facts of life, how the individual experiences are connected with the whole human destiny, with the great goal of human life in general. One of the questions that then arises for the soul is undoubtedly that of the meaning of human knowledge.

When we talk about knowledge, we can initially mean that knowledge which relates to the direct services of practical life, to everything that enables us to get to know the outside world in such a way that we can put it at the service of our practical interests. The question becomes somewhat different when we consider knowledge that attempts to penetrate the deeper foundations of life, the riddles of existence – knowledge that does not lead us to an immediately practical work and activity. It is said that man has an immediate urge to know and that knowledge is valuable in itself. Those who look deeper will hardly be satisfied with such an answer. What value would knowledge have if it were only an inner image, only a repetition of what is outside in the world? Why should that which is weaving in the world be effective in the outer world and be repeated in one's own soul only as in a mirror? Is it really only the satisfaction of a soul urge that pushes for knowledge that reaches beyond the everyday? This question will occupy us today: the goal and destiny, essence and significance of human knowledge.

If we mean the concept of knowledge that many people have today, which consists in saying that knowledge should provide us with a true reflection of what the world is experiencing, then it will not be easy to relate knowledge to the great goals and tasks of human existence. We will have to ask ourselves: Is knowledge really only the repetition of something external? Or is it one of the forces that must work in our soul in order to advance it on the paths it must traverse in its existence in the world?

This question cannot be answered by external science; it can only be answered if we consider the whole human being. External science only provides us with information about what our senses perceive and our minds grasp. But beyond this ordinary science, there is something that is trying to become part of our entire spiritual life today, which can be called spiritual science or anthroposophy.

What does theosophical spiritual science seek to comprehend? It seeks to comprehend the whole human being. Let us first agree on what that means, the whole human being. When we look at a person, we see two strictly separate states within the normal human existence of today. These two states, which life presents to us, are so familiar to the human being that he does not even notice that the greatest riddles of existence are hidden in them. We express these states in the words “waking and sleeping”. We recall that from time immemorial many philosophies have called sleep the little brother of death. We can combine these words with two others, namely with the words “life and death”. In these words we have a large part of what we can count among the riddles of existence.

Let us try, starting from what presents itself to us in the most ordinary way, to understand the changing states of waking and sleeping. In the waking state, we try to comprehend all the impressions that constantly flow into our soul - impressions that our senses transmit to us, everything that fills us with joy, desire and pain, in short, what constitutes what we call our mental life. We see this ebb and flow of drives, desires, passions, and so on, plunging into an indeterminate darkness in the evening. During sleep, it transitions into another state, that of unconsciousness. It would be absurd to say that the human being as a being of soul disappears in the evening and is reborn anew in the morning. We must ask ourselves: where is that which works in us throughout the day, where is it when we let our soul life sink into an indeterminate darkness in the evening? We are immediately pointed to answers that cannot be given from an ordinary, sensory perspective, because that perspective escapes precisely that which hides behind the nocturnal state in the evening. The question of where the soul is at night can only be answered by theosophical spiritual science, because it rises from the knowledge of the sensual to the knowledge of the supersensible, from the visible to the invisible.

We need to come to an understanding about how theosophical spiritual science can arrive at such supersensible insights by once again taking a brief look at what really fulfills our entire life during the day. We can say that we live with our soul during the day through external stimulation, through external impressions. In the evening, the external stimuli fade away, creating the emptiness of the sleeping state. But because a person in the normal life of today's existence can lead a soul life only when external perceptions evoke from his soul that which we are currently experiencing, we can imagine that the inner work of the soul dies, withers away when the external stimuli are not there. Must it be so?

That it need not be so can be seen if one accepts the experiences of clairvoyant consciousness. What knowledge of the sensory world is comes about through the stimulus of the sensory world. Supersensible knowledge can only come about through the soul's willingness to unfold work within itself, in order to develop powers and abilities even when there are no stimuli from the external sensory world. The possibility of developing such inner powers is given to us by the method of spiritual schooling. This method is there for those who want to penetrate into the knowledge of the supersensible world. This method can only be briefly hinted at here. Those who want to get to know it thoroughly can find it in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. We shall only briefly indicate here how man can find within himself the abilities to ascend to knowledge of the higher worlds.

The first thing is that man learns to artificially evoke, through a strong willpower, what otherwise only comes in the state of unconsciousness, namely, what man experiences when the sensory impressions cease. He must be able to command all outer impressions to stop; all outer impressions around him must fall silent, just as they do in the evening when we fall asleep. But this moment must take place through his will, in full consciousness. He would be like a sleeper if he could awaken nothing in his own soul. But although all outer impressions fall silent, he learns to unfold strong powers; he draws out of the deep recesses of his soul what slumbers there. No outer efforts are needed; they are intimate soul processes. There is a sinking into strong, vigorous thoughts, which are not given from without, but which the soul forms for itself.

This is meditation or concentration, as it is called – a drawing together of thoughts. Without external impressions we must feel joy and sorrow. The spiritual researcher lets powerful, strong thoughts arise in his own soul, thoughts that have nothing to do with the external world, and these are ideals as well as impulses of the will. These must have a stronger effect than external impressions; the soul must be seized by them intensely and powerfully. If a third element were not added, these perceptions would have the effect of volcanoes. This is that through a strong effort of will an inner calm and quiet can be brought about despite these impulses. Then the spiritual researcher experiences - even if only after a long time - the great moment that can be compared to the moment when a blind person suddenly regains his sight after an operation. Just as the impressions of the external world flood into the soul of the blind man after an operation, so too does everything that was previously unavailable to him.

This fact makes it clear to us that there can only be a supersensible world for us if the organ of perception for it is present. When this organ is awakened, a new world opens up. We must not decide about what we do not know, but only about what we know. These organs, which are necessary for recognizing the supersensible world, are developed through meditation or concentration in the calm of our soul. Then “spiritual eyes” and “spiritual ears” arise - to use an expression of Goethe. It could now be objected: Yes, it may be that the spiritual researcher experiences a higher world, but what do the spiritual worlds have to do with the others who cannot ascend to them? — That is not correct. The spiritual eye is necessary for recognition [of the supersensible worlds], but to understand what the spiritual researcher has to say, unbiased reason is sufficient, and therefore it concerns all people.

Someone in whom the higher organs are awakened can observe such a phenomenon as sleep. It is a very different state from that of waking. Only part of the human being remains in the physical world during sleep, the other part, the soul-spiritual, withdraws from the physical body when falling asleep and returns to its home, the spiritual world. The spiritual world need not be imagined as a different place; it is all around us. We have human nature, divided into two parts; during waking these are together, but during sleeping they are separated. But human nature is not yet fully explained. We can get a rough idea of the two parts that go out at night by comparing man with the animals that are closest to him of all visible creatures. We also find instincts, desires, and feelings in animals. Even if they are not present in the same perfection, they are still more or less present in animals, and only those who cannot rise to a higher [contemplation] will consider them to be the same as in humans. We need only think of something that is usually not emphasized in external science; we need only remember that, for example, in the German language there is a word that cannot be called to anyone from the outside, [the word “I”]. This name cannot sound [from the outside] to our ear when it means our own self; it must arise from one's own soul life. All true religions have recognized this. This is an announcement of what is essentially the same in man as in the divine. Correctly understood, “I” means the ineffable name of God, because Yahweh, correctly translated, means “I am,” no matter what philology may otherwise interpret. This does not mean that man is to be made a god. Just as a drop of water is not the sea, so man is not God.

That which withdraws itself in the evening divides again into two parts: that which is the carrier of desires, passions, etc., and that which lets all these perceptions flow together in us and works through them - the I. Through the I, man becomes the crown of all creatures on this earth. But that which goes out at night is composed of the I and the astral body. What does a human being leave behind? The physical body, and we have that in common with every mineral. It consists of the same forces. The inanimate mineral, the crystal, takes its form from the forces within it; this is not the case with a living being. In the case of humans, we see that their physical body is subject to chemical laws only in one instance, and only at death. In death, we see what the forces imprinted on the mineral do to the body. In life, it never follows these forces. What remains in bed at night is imbued and permeated by another body, and we call this the etheric or life body. This prevents the body from following the chemical and physical laws; it is a faithful fighter against them.

Now we can ask ourselves: Why does this happen every evening, that a person must return to their spiritual home, so to speak? Why must they withdraw into a spiritual world every evening? In the evening, external impressions fade; we are overcome by fatigue. When the astral body and the ego withdraw into the spiritual world, the person falls into unconsciousness. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and pain, urges, passions and so on. Why does all this disappear from our soul life? How can it be that all this dies away at night? We shall soon understand why this is so. The astral body and the I are the bearers of pleasure and pain, of perceptions and concepts. But in order for this to become conscious to the human being, it is necessary that they are mirrored by the physical body and the etheric body. We perceive nothing but what lives in ourselves. It is like a kind of echo that is produced in us by the physical and etheric bodies. Man does not perceive directly what he feels, but what he experiences is mirrored to him through the astral body and the I, through the etheric and physical bodies. But the work of the astral body involves conjuring up what we call the soul life. The real work is done by the astral body and not by the mirror – just as it is necessary for a person to be active at a mirror in order to create this or that image. The astral body has to work from morning till evening to extract from the physical what we can call the content of our soul. The forces that the astral body needs to work during the day, it must draw from the spiritual world. When these forces are exhausted, fatigue sets in, and it must draw new forces again.

Sleep has a profound significance. In the spiritual world is the source of everything we conjure up during our daily lives. If we look at our daily life in this way, we ask: What is the significance of our daily life if the soul has to draw its strength from the spiritual world? The soul and the ego do not enter the astral world empty, but take something with them from our outer world every evening. Life during the day is not without fruit for the soul's life. We need only look at what is characteristic of our soul in its deepest meaning and what is taken from our daytime life into our nighttime life. This can be seen indirectly when we look at our soul during our youth and in old age. This gives us an idea of development. In youth, we see germinal tendencies, but undeveloped, and later we see our soul transformed, with richer content. How can we transform ourselves? By the soul forming a kind of essence every evening from the external impressions we have received. We carry our daytime experiences into the night, and in the morning that which was the soul's spiritual experience has entered the soul; it joins what is already there, and in this way the soul develops.

You only have to look at people who cannot sleep, and if you are an attentive observer, you will notice how the soul's progress suffers when it cannot get the right amount of sleep. We can only imprint something on our memory if we have had a proper amount of sleep. Only in this way can we develop the forces that lead us ever higher. We imprint in our soul what the world reveals to us during our waking life, and in this way our soul becomes wiser. Knowledge is an important means of developing our soul between birth and death. But let us now ask ourselves how much transformation we can actually achieve. How narrow are the limits within which we find ourselves? We can increase our soul development. We can see this in individual abilities, for example in learning to write. Writing encompasses a whole group of abilities. When we look back, we see what a wide range of abilities were involved, how much work and effort and so on went into learning the art of writing. Or think of the first attempt we made to draw the first letter, of everything that then flowed together into the one skill of writing. From what we experienced then, we extracted an essence, and through such weaving together a soul skill arises.

Whatever has a deeper impact on our lives can only develop within very narrow limits in the time between birth and death. If someone pursues the riddles of the world or has gone through this or that life experience in deep pain, you can even see that reflected in their physiognomy and in their movements. From decade to decade, this is expressed more and more, even in the body. But we can develop in this direction only to a limited extent. Why? Because we have our souls before us like a malleable material, but we cannot work with what our inclinations have created between birth and death into the body, no matter how many experiences we have gathered. Let us take the example of music. If we do not have a finer ear, if we are not musical, we are unable to develop the ability during our lifetime that could change our physicality in this respect between birth and death. We are powerful in the face of the soul, but powerless in the face of the facts of our physicality. But we know that when we face the external world and conjure up all these images, they are born out of our soul - not only, but through its activity, because it could never conjure up such reflections if something were not given from outside. And this outside includes the same forces that make up our physical body. It seems so mysterious to us because we cannot penetrate there. We would have to conjure up a fine musical ear and so on from the same world. It is something like a veil, like a shell. But behind it is something that, if we could master it, would give us the ability to transform our physical body just as much as the astral.

We can gain knowledge, but we cannot utilize it; we cannot transform our body with the knowledge. But there is a possibility to transform our physical body in the same way as the astral one. Even if we recognize the forces, we could not apply them directly, because our physical and etheric bodies are given to us as dense material. Here we want to refer to a law that will be incorporated into modern spiritual life through Theosophy.

In the 17th century, not only laymen but also naturalists believed that worms and fish could arise from mud. If we go back to the 17th century, we find scholarly works that describe how wild animals grew out of other animals – for example, hornets out of a dead ox that had been beaten until it was brittle, bees out of a horse carcass, and wasps out of a donkey carcass. It was [the naturalist] Francesco Redi who first uttered the sentence: Living things can only arise from living things. There must be a germ of something living in order for something living to arise. Redi was almost burned [as a heretic] for saying this. Today, anyone who claims otherwise would be considered backward. Spiritual science says: Spiritual-soul things can only arise from spiritual-soul things. Just as an earthworm does not come from mud, so the spiritual does not come from the inheritance of the father and mother.

We have to distinguish between the environment of the spiritual and the spiritual itself. In spiritual science, this leads us to the law of reincarnation [of what lives spiritually in man]. Today those who have recognized this law are perhaps not exactly called heretics – fashions change. Today the [true] enlightened are declared to be fantasists, dreamers. But in the not too distant future, people will no longer be able to understand how anyone could have believed otherwise. Thus, we see in what comes into existence through birth the repetition of an earlier earthly existence. And what lies between death and birth is a purely spiritual existence. When we look at a child with undeveloped features, we see what it has brought with it from previous lives on earth, and we can understand something that is very important.

Why can we only develop mental abilities during our lifetime? When we wake up, we find the same body with the same organs. But when a person passes through the gate of death, the great moment arrives when he discards his physical body and only what is spiritual and mental remains. Now he is no longer bound to the body. The conditions are quite different than during sleep. In the morning, when we wake up, we find the same physical body; we cannot destroy it and rebuild it. But when the physical falls away at death, what we have taken in knowledge during our life is united with our soul. In accordance with the knowledge and experiences we have had, we can now reshape them and incorporate them into a new body.

Thus, in each life, we build our body according to what we have gained in the last life; we make it the product of our experiences in the last life. Life experience in the present life is our existence in a next life. This is how knowledge works in us; it is one of the most important forces of existence, shaping itself. We are grateful for the knowledge of the last life; it has produced a body in the present life and preserves that with which we have enriched ourselves in the present life, and that will bring us higher in the next life. Now we also understand why there can be a huge difference between different people when we consider the strength and weakness of their cognitive abilities.

Now you will ask: why does man not remember his previous lives? That is also a matter of development. A four-year-old child cannot count. But it would be a false conclusion to say that this is not a human being, because humans can count. Wait until he is ten years old. There comes a time for every person when he begins to remember. One can only remember that which is present. Fichte was right to say that most people would rather consider themselves a piece of lava on the moon than a self. The realization of what the self is is still missing. Just as the flowers can only be recognized through sensory impressions, so can the spiritual only be recognized through spiritual research. From the intimate study of the self, it follows that the self must be there as a conscious idea before one can remember. Only when we have generated the idea of self can we reflect back on ourselves. Thus, knowledge as self-knowledge leads us to build up our memory in such a way that we consciously expand life beyond the life that is enclosed between birth and death. If we can continue to work from life to life, if through knowledge we succeed in shaping ourselves and thus awaken the eternal in us, then the knowledge of development helps us in the shaping of all that is eternal in us. Now we give the work of knowledge and its meaning for our whole life. It brings us immortality and gives us knowledge of our immortality.

Immortality and knowledge belong together. In a particular life, our body appears to be something that has been worked into it from the previous life. We often cannot use the knowledge in this life, but we need it to build a new body. This certainty gives spiritual science a practical meaning in life. It must not remain mere theory, but we must permeate ourselves with it completely. We then see death in a new light. Knowledge has built up our present body. Through the disintegration of our body, we become free from it and gain the opportunity to build a new one. Thus, even if we look at death in pain when it touches others, or with fear when it approaches us, it appears to us in a completely different form. If we can rise to a higher point of view, we can say that we are grateful for death, because it gives us the opportunity to build a new body for ourselves - for a higher life. The old spiritual researchers have always recognized this and also said so. Goethe puts it so beautifully in front of our soul, how we bring in from fresh life what we have worked for in the previous life:

As on the day when you were given to the world
The sun stood in greeting of the planets,
You immediately thrived and thrived
According to the law by which you entered.
So you must be, you cannot escape yourself,
So the Sibyls said, so the prophets said;
And no time and no power can dismember the form that has been stamped, which develops itself alive.

The first of the topics chosen for this short lecture cycle is “Nature and Spirit in the Light of Spiritual Science”. Nature and Spirit! — It seems to express a contradiction, and the human soul immediately has many opposing views and opinions that have confronted each other in the world. We know, of course, that in recent centuries a kind of science has emerged that only wants to accept nature and that, from its point of view, can hardly do anything other than also consider the spirit to be nature. On the other hand, we see how defenders of the spirit and of intellectual life assert themselves in all fields, even in our time. And we need only look on one side to the extreme, where it was said in the 19th century: the brain secretes thoughts, like the liver secretes bile. That is, what we perceive as spiritual in the human being is a purely natural process, and we do not believe in another spirit. We need only place this alongside the many current efforts to establish a spiritual science, and we have extremes.

But one can also think differently about the words “nature and spirit”, namely, point to Goethe's words: “Nature is sin, spirit is devil, they harbor doubt between them, their deformed hybrid child.” And so we can point out many things that set nature and spirit in opposition to each other, and we can find many things in them that have brought disharmony into human hearts, that have caused storms of struggle and conflict in the world.

On the other hand, we are still confronted with a word from more recent times, also from Goethe, which says that the spirit could never be and be effective without matter and that matter could never be and be effective without spirit. This word can be refuted very easily. One need only point out that when I cut a piece of granite out of a rock, I then have matter without spirit! It is very easy to find refutations of profound words in the world, and it must be clearly understood, especially in a spiritual-scientific movement, that nothing is easier for the foolish in the world than to refute the words of the wise with a great semblance of right. An anthroposophical view must go deeper into these things.

What is spirit, what is nature? — There is no doubt in our ordinary perception that we encounter nature when we see plants sprouting from the earth in spring and watching them unfold. There we see the weaving and living of nature. Nor is there any doubt that we speak of nature with a certain right when the snowflakes cover the earth in winter. These are both effects of nature. But does this mean that we are fully entitled to participate in what is unfolding around us? Imagine that: Entities could think that are much smaller than we are, so small that for them our nails or our hair would be as big as for us the trees, so these entities would describe the hair of our head in the same way that we describe the plants that come out of the earth. We humans, however, do not describe the individual hairs or the head of the human being as a ground on which the individual hairs rise, because we know that we cannot find a hair as an individual being in nature; they are only possible on another being. Only someone who, due to their smallness, cannot see the hairs in their entirety could describe a hair on its own. Such an entity could perhaps very well distinguish between the different hairs. Depending on the place on the head where they grow, they could be organized into classes and orders: one class of left temporal hair, one class of right temporal hair; one class of left frontal hair, one class of right frontal hair; later, names could be given to further distinguish them. Thus, there could be a hair science for such small entities. For other beings there is, with some justification, such a science: it is botany. While in fact the earth as a whole produces individual plants just as our head produces hair, while the individual plants belong to the earth and do not exist as a special genus, in botany the plants are classified and described without taking into account that this plant world forms a unity belonging to the earth, just as our hair forms a unity with our organism. To nature or the world, it is of no consequence that man has created a botany for himself, just as a hair science would be of no consequence to a thinking little being for man.

Spiritual science, however, leads us even further. It shows us that just as little as one can think of a being like man, with hair on his head, without a soul, just as little can the earth be considered other than as a whole, which has all material, purely natural things as organs of the earth spirit or the earth soul. When we study this earth spirit or this earth soul further, it differs from the human soul at first. What is peculiar about the human soul is that it presents itself to us as a kind of unity. With the earth spirit, this is not the case at first. In the end, however, as you know, there is a directing earth spirit, but the next thing we find in the spiritual observation of the earth is a large number, an abundance of elemental beings, which form the next stage of the earth spirit as a multitude, a diversity.

We can deal with this earth spirit for the time being. Then it turns out that, for example, on the half of the earth where it is summer at a certain time, these entities of the earth spirit go through a kind of sleep, and where it is winter, they wake. For spiritual realization, in fact, to the same extent that the plants sprout out of the earth, the elemental beings and spirits begin to fall asleep. In winter, they begin to stir. Then these elemental beings and spirits form their ideas, sensations and feelings in their own way. What night is for humans is summer for the half of the earth that is currently in summer, and what day is for humans is winter for the earth. The Earth as a whole sleeps and wakes like man, but in such a way that one half is always more awake and the other more asleep, whereas man is organized in such a way that when he sleeps, he sleeps all at the same time. That is actually not correct either, but it is quite the same with man as with the Earth. When man sleeps, only his head is asleep, while the other organs are all the more alert. But man is just not equipped to perceive that. It is actually the same with the earth, although not quite. One hemisphere of the earth has more water than the other, so the earth's sleeping and waking is not unlike man's sleeping and waking.

Just as we regard human beings as animate and ensouled beings, so must we also regard the Earth. Just because we walk the Earth as such small creatures, we do not see that it has both body and soul at the same time. But that also stems from the materialistic age. Kepler, for example, who also knew how to think, still says that he regards the Earth as a great organism. He just had no occult conception of the earth, so he did not know that winter means waking and summer sleeping for the earth, and he imagined the earth to be a great whale instead of thinking of it as a souled being higher than man. He somewhat belittled the conditions, saw the He saw the earth as a whale and in the movement of the air he saw the inhaling and exhaling of the animal. This was also the view of Giordano Bruno. For him, the earth was a great, ensouled organism that breathes with the tides. Goethe was of the same opinion: “The Earth is a great, living individual that manifests its process of inhaling and exhaling in the tides, in the currents of air and in the seas.” Yes, the spirits of the older, more spiritual times still knew that one cannot look at the earth in such abstract, theoretical terms as one does today, as if one could describe a hair or a nail in itself, whereas one should know that these cannot exist without the whole organism, that they are grounded in the whole organism. The naturalistic view does not know what is important. When observing the world, it is important that one can ask oneself about everything in the world: Is it a part of a whole or is it a whole in itself? — If someone finds a human tooth, they should not look at it as an individual thing, but the tooth is only understood when it is seen as a part of the human being. It is also absurd to describe a single plant, because it is only conceivable as a part of the whole earth being. So it is only conceivable that the outer body of the earth has a soul and a spirit. And if one knows nothing of the spirit of the earth, if one does not know that this earth is the body of a spirit, as our own body is, then one regards the earth as mineralogy, geology, botany regard it. These have no consciousness of the fact that behind everything they describe is the directing earth spirit. If I cut a piece out of a rock, it is easy to say: There is no spirit in it! — There is no spirit in a piece of tooth either, but the piece of tooth is inconceivable without the whole human being and the soul-spiritual to which it belongs.

We must keep this in mind when we speak of nature and spirit. When we speak of the earth as a natural planet, without speaking of its soul and spirit, this description stems only from the fact that we disregard the spirit, we do not want to know anything about it. Where does the earth exist as a mere natural planet? Botany, geology, astronomy would say: It moves in space! —- If that were true, it would soon stop moving, then it would collapse, like the human body after death, when the spirit has left it.

This way of looking at the world has rubbed off. Even the limbs of the human being and the human being as a whole are described today as if they were only nature, that is, one looks at the corpse. For if man were as the physiologist, anatomist and so on describe him, he would have to die immediately. Physiology describes only its own fantasy, as do astronomy and geology with their description of the earth. This is a pure fantasy product. There is no such thing as the mere natural earth. The fact that the earth is as it is is based, down to the smallest piece of rock, on the earth being permeated by the spirit of the earth.

There we see what is important. When observing human beings, it is important to find the starting point from which the part can be seen as part of the whole, and not to crumble the part away from the whole. Man as such is a whole. But when it comes to the earth, the whole earth is to be regarded as a whole. If we separate nature and its effects from the earth, what then is this nature? Then it is our product of the imagination, which does not really exist, which only appears to us because we cut a part out of a whole. Therefore, it can be seen that it is not at all important that someone describes something accurately, but that he knows how a part is integrated into the whole, or rather grows out of the whole. The earth must be seen as a whole, not as a physical whole, but as a living being that belongs to its spirit.

But we could also talk about nature and spirit in another way. We only need to look at the human being itself. In the human being, something comes to us that seems to justify the concepts of “nature and spirit” as opposites. A child is born, and all the expressions of life in the child in the early days appear to be something that has emerged from the physical, from the whole of physical nature. That is why it is often said that a child still acts entirely according to its nature. Only later is the spiritual, the soul, born out of the body. In the beginning of his life, man is more nature, later he develops more of the spirit. But that, in turn, is nothing more than a careless way of looking at things. For in the early days of our life there is much spirit in us, it is just more hidden in us than later. Everything that gives our body its forms is active spirit, it is just that we do not work inwardly in spirit and illuminate it with the faculty of memory. We truly have no less spirit in us in the early years of childhood than in later years. One could even be more radical in one's speech. Someone recently asked: What does it mean when a child only lives for a few days and then dies? Occult science shows us that such a short life still has a purpose. Often, the being in the womb has been able to develop many things, but sometimes it has not been able to develop one thing, for example, healthy vision. Let us assume that someone was an excellent person in one incarnation, but had poor eyesight. Then it will happen that such a person later lives only a few days in an incarnation, just to make up for what was lacking in the previous life because of his poor eyesight. In this case, this incarnation must be counted as part of the previous one. In general, the importance of the child's ability to learn in the first few days is greatly underestimated. When the child learns to see into the light, more capacity is needed than for anything learned in the first academic semester.

One can object to such things, but just think about the content of such a thing, and you will see that it is correct. We only consider childhood in the right way when we know that the spirit is not less in the body when we build our brain, work out our physiognomy and so on, than later, when we can do something more astute. At a later age, the spirit has withdrawn itself a little more from the body and works as the more abstract spirit, but it can no longer organize the brain. This has already become fixed again. The spirit, which one so readily calls “spirit” later in life, was already present in the first part of life, but had something else to do then, was more linked to the natural processes. We just don't see that, that's why we call what happens there just nature, and what happens later consciously, just mind. Therefore, man assumes an opposition between the “natural” processes of early childhood and the spirituality of thinking, feeling and willing in later life. But the contrast is quite different.

In early childhood, there is an intimate connection between nature and spirit; they permeate each other and are still on friendly terms. Later, they separate, and the spirit and natural processes take place more separately. In return, the natural processes become more spiritless, in that the spirit has differentiated itself from them and become the special soul of which the human being is so proud. Man pays for this with his body becoming more spiritless. Man has first drawn spirit out of his body so that he can use it more separately for himself. There is something similar in the whole evolution of the earth. In very early times of the earth, spirit was intimately connected with the nature of the earth everywhere, and so there was then an intimate interaction between earth spirit and earth nature. Today, in a certain way, the nature of the earth is as separate from its spirit as the nature of the human being is from the soul. And just as it is the spirit in the human being that directs thinking, feeling and willing, so too, in the evolution of the earth, the earth spirit runs alongside the natural process as the course of history. In the Lemurian period these were still more interwoven with each other, just as the spiritual and natural processes are more closely related in the child than in later man. What is the point here? Does it matter whether we say: the spirit develops in the later age of life or the earth age? — No, it was already there, but in those days it directed its activity to that which was then separated. And that hardens, lignifies, dies.

For this reason, we must also consider the whole, which is to be considered as a whole, not in time, only according to its parts. Man as a child is not a physical whole on earth. A human being in youth, middle age, old age and so on is only a whole, and we cannot say: 'The human being undergoes a development from the natural to the spiritual', but we must say: 'In his first childhood, nature and spirit were intimately connected. Later they separate more and more. Thus, the natural becomes somewhat dead, somewhat less inwardly alive, and the spirit becomes more independent. So a differentiation has occurred in the whole human being. That is the right impression. But the spiritual does not develop out of the natural without further ado. There is differentiation. If we speak of nature without spirit, then we speak of a mere fantasy product. Under the present physical conditions of the earth, a human being could never later become a thinking, feeling and willing creature that is so proud of its spirituality if it had not first detached its spirit from its natural existence. One must learn to completely rethink about nature and spirit.

This goes even further. Let us consider the external nature of man and woman. If you look at it very superficially, you will come to the conclusion that woman is closer to nature, judges more directly from the standpoint of nature. Man has distanced himself more from nature; independent thinking, the independent spirit, lives more in him. — The materialistic age, which thinks of the spirit in materialistic terms, has taught other reasons for this difference, such as the weight of the brain. But when the brain was weighed by the man who thought up this theory, it turned out that he had a particularly small man's brain! So if we look at nature and spirit in this way, even a superficial glance shows how little this is true. Anyone who goes into the depths here will in turn come to a completely different way of looking at things. In a certain respect, however, the woman's outer being is more natural, but in turn more spiritual than the man's outer being. Womanhood on today's earth is more natural because the spiritual activity in her has not yet separated from her physicality as it has in man. Therefore, man cannot be conceived of as having a greater spirituality than woman, but in man only that which is distilled spirit, leaving matter beside it, is more prominent. On the other hand, for certain parts, the male body is more abandoned to spirit. The feminine body is more permeated by spirit, as for example is the case with the child; the masculine body is more abandoned to matter at a later age than it is in youth. But we must not speak of more naturalness or spirituality in being a man or a woman.

The approach must therefore be completely different. It is true that, in a sense, what has to do with the essence of man and woman affects us throughout our lives. It is not always pleasant to point this out. Why, for example, are there more women than men in the Anthroposophical Society? Does this not actually speak against the presence of intellect in anthroposophy? — one might ask. The answer to that question is entirely objective, but it is easy to be misunderstood when one gives it. The fact that women are more attracted to the Anthroposophical Society, that is, more readily embrace spiritual truths, is because they preserve the spirituality of the nervous system and the brain longer in later life. In the case of man, these separate from the physical earlier, so he does not have the opportunity to so easily take in what speaks to what is neither man nor woman, but what stands above: the being itself.

In an incarnation, a person is either man or woman. In the case of man, the lignified parts are more developed, and somewhat more distilled out of his overall nature is the spirit, the temporal, transient spirit. In women, nature and spirit remain more connected throughout life, which is why their nature remains more flexible. But spiritual truths speak to something in people that has nothing to do with the difference between men and women. Because the being that goes from incarnation to incarnation can alternately be man and woman, even if that is a truth that often makes men angry.

Thus, our deepest nature has nothing to do with man or woman. Just as it has nothing to do with man and woman, so the deepest nature of world phenomena and facts has nothing to do with nature and spirit, but one time it is more spiritual, the other time more natural. These are both phases of an existence, as life continues. Just as in human life, there is a daily alternation between more spiritual activity during the day and more natural activity for the physical human being at night, so in the universe there is an alternation between times when beings become more spiritualized and times when they become more “naturalized”. That is a rhythm in the universe. For example, if you look at the nature of man, when he is a man in an incarnation, when he is thus karmically condemned to distill the spirit out of the natural, then he can say to himself: 'Now I am indeed karmically destined to distill the spirit out of nature, but that must alternate rhythmically, cyclically with a woman's existence, where I am allowed to be more in the natural with my spirit, so that I may have a pendulum swing in the direction of natural existence.

This is the case with all planets, with all wholes, totalities, with all worlds. Where we find a natural, there is a spiritual belonging to it, and where we find a spirit, it tends to separate something out of itself, which is a natural. Nature and spirit are not opposites, but alternating states of the higher being that stands behind them.

Thus we must see that through our spiritual world view, many old concepts with which much mischief has been done must be corrected. When we stop describing only parts of a being that is actually a whole, we will also come to clarity about the concepts of spirit and nature and will no longer limit ourselves to one-sidedness. Then one will realize that the spirit would be very weak if nature were hostile to it, then one will realize that nature is something that the spirit occasionally releases from itself, like the snail releases its shell. But the spirit can also absorb nature again and dissolve it within itself. Then it makes it invisible, but then it has it within itself, then it has become one with it. If a complete unity of spirit and nature were to exist somewhere, it would mean that for the realm of facts, the spirit has dissolved all nature that belongs to it.

Let us assume that a person is forty years old. He has his nature and he has his soul, his spirit, of which he is so proud. If we go back to his childhood, it is more of a unity, but it appears more in its natural basis. If we go back even further, before his birth, then he is entirely spiritual, he still had all spirituality without a natural basis, without matter in him.

It is a pendulum swing in the world: the being creates its image in the natural aspect and reveals itself through it. The spirit bears nature in its bosom in order to make an image of itself with what it itself gives birth to in its bosom as nature. But the spiritual essence also has the power to absorb everything that is out there in nature into the spirit. And so the spirit can triumph over all images of itself in order to appear ever anew in new transformations and new forms. This testifies to the fact that an infinite number of formations rest in the bosom of the being, and that the meaning of the world is actually fulfilled in ever new and ever new becoming. If one can see the belonging together, the inseparability of spirit and nature, one comes to the being in the world.