The Rudolf Steiner Archive

So far a number of different approaches have been used to consider the effective forces in human evolution which we must know about if we want to arrive at a proper understanding of current events. We must above all understand where the root causes lie that have led to the disastrous situation we are facing today. Only then can we find the right way of taking effective action ourselves, and work for the real progress of humankind. Unfortunately far too little attention is paid to the changes which those forces effective in human evolution have undergone in very recent times, compared to times that relatively speaking were not that long ago.

Perhaps I may again be permitted to take the great disaster that has happened in recent years as my starting point. This will lead us to the event I referred to in just a few words at the end of my last talk, to the specific Christ event that belongs to the first half of the 20th century, as I have mentioned a number of times.

Taking a genuinely unbiased view of the disastrous events and of their consequences that continue into the present and will still make themselves felt for a long time, we cannot fail to notice how much the whole fabric of the destiny of civilized humanity differs from earlier times. Let me point out immediately that large numbers of people, including those in authority, have not yet become fully aware of what has come upon us. They have been, and still are, acting in accord with the demands of earlier times and their actions are not at all in accord with the needs of the present age.

Again let me give an example, just by way of introduction as it were. We have a—well, they call it a ‘war’ behind us; a much greater war than any we know of in historical times. We have seen that at the time when the war started, something like a spectre from prehistoric times lived in the thoughts that were in people's minds, and that this spectre is still there in the minds of people today. We have seen that this spectre of ideas which has continued into the present from prehistoric times has given rise to opinions, all kinds of measures were taken, and people had no idea that really and fundamentallY something quite different was going on to what they imagined the events of the time to be.

Like earlier wars, the last one was a conflict between human beings; human beings were fighting each other. Unlike earlier wars, however, this war involved energies and forces coming from quite different sources than the form of energies used in earlier wars—energies deriving from the particular nature of human beings. We have seen a tremendous development of technology in recent times and the coming of this powerful technology has changed the whole situation, where the destiny fabric of human beings is concerned. This change determined the course of events in recent years. Yet there has been no corresponding change in people's ideas.

Let me present the major aspects of this. During the period preceding this disastrous war the human technology which had evolved in most recent times had reached a significant stage. Although people had no real awareness of this, human work—labour—had taken on quite a different form to what had gone before. You can get an idea of the different forms it took if you consider one of the fundamental aspects of modern technology, let us say coal-mining, in different countries in the civilized world. The amount of coal produced in the mines relates to the amount of energy gained by processing it; energies merely channelled and controlled by human beings that will then work more or less independently. I would say, therefore, that in recent times human work has come to consist more in stepping back and directing the actual work done by machines.

Considering the facts one will find, for instance, that during the period preceding the outbreak of war, 79 million 'horse power years' of that kind of energy were produced in Germany. These were energies controlled by humans, but in fact derived from coal-mining. They did not arise from something that human beings let spontaneously come forth from within them, but from completely external actions and processes. The energies expended in work are measured in units based on the work a horse does in a year. During the time immediately preceding the outbreak of war, Germany was producing '79 million horse power years of coal-derived energy per year.

What does this really mean? A very superficial comparison with the population figure for Germany shows that on average every single individual in Germany had a horse by his side. This means that the inhabitants of Germany did so much work in the field of technology that is was equivalent to every individual having a horse work for him all year long. The population figure was approximately 79 million, and the energy used was 79 million horse power years. The work done by machines, all kinds of machines, therefore had the same effect as if every individual had a horse to work for him. When war broke out, the potential was there for that much work to be done. A large proportion of this work was then used for the purposes of war, with the result that the purely technological effect of 79 million horse power Years was brought into action at the front.

Now let us take some other figures. For a start I will just add the fact that in 1870, a year when another great event⁶⁸ took place the way people see it—and rightly so, as people see it—no 79 million horse Power years were produced. Energy production was then six whole millions and seven-tenths of a million, a very low figure compared to human energy output. Six and a half million in 1870, 79 million in 1912. Clearly this means a complete change in the human situation.

Let me give you some more figures. During the time preceding the disastrous war, France, Russia and Belgium together had 35 million horse power years available. Great Britain on the other hand had 98 million. Due to the geographical position of Great Britain those 98 million horse power years could not immediately be fully brought to bear in the war zone; it took some years until this was achieved. When war broke out, therefore, not only were human beings opposing each other, but 79 million horse power years had been pushed into the front lines by the Germans, or a total of more than 90 million by the Central Powers [Germany and Austria]. A large part of those energies were of course used in the war industries and therefore reached the front lines indirectly. Those energies were opposed by Great Britain's 98 million horse power years that could only be brought to bear gradually, and a to of 35 million available in Belguim, Russia and France. You can see now that it would be quite correct to say that, basically, the contribution made by human beings only gave a preliminary result in the initial stages. The army's general staff could order the troops to march; that could be planned and projected by trained minds. But when the front lines had been established for some years, the actual confrontation was between the horse power Years that technology had produced—and these were quite independent of human beings. Thus the relative size of something that had really been taken out of the sphere of human activity determined the fate of this [part of] human evolution. If you now take the following and add it to what has been already said you will see that forces independent of humanity, particularly the most recent achievements of technology, have been responsible for the events that occurred.

The efforts of human beings were of course limited to a channelling function, or at best to stopping some things from happening. But their directions, or else their failure to stop things from happening' caused forces to enter the field of battle that objectively speaking were not under their control. Some of these were able to overcome the others, as it were, on the basis of objective laws that had nothing to do with human beings. Add to this the fact that the United States intervened in the process. At the time when the other countries were able to field the number of horse power years I have mentioned, the Americans were in a position to mobilize 179 million horse power years. This gives you the relative figures for energies mobilized through technology; energies completely independent of anything human beings are capable of producing. Indirectly they are of course connected with ideas thought up by human individuals and so on. The things people have thought up have however been channelled in this direction, and in the war the situation then was that objective force met objective force and in the final instance this had to decide the issue. In very recent times human beings directed their destinies to such effect that when something occurred that in the past would have taken quite a different course, human actions had caused the forces of destiny to be surrendered to the powers that were active in the objects they themselves had produced. Humans are dependent on the earth's productivity where these forces are concerned. They are dependent on many factors that do not lie within their own skins.

This reveals one of the characteristic features of the present age. I have merely given the most striking example of it. Examples like this can be used to illustrate a point. Yet the things that happened there on a gigantic scale—we cannot merely say on a large scale, because it was gigantic—happen on a smaller scale in every day of the life we are given, for we have been delivered up to the products of technology. In 1912 a point had been reached in Germany where fertile human brains had created something outside themselves that did the same amount of work for every individual as a horse would have done. That is the characteristic feature of modern civilization, and we must take a good look at it.

What is alive in those forces with their own objective activity that human beings have created outside themselves in modern civilization; forces that work for them day by day and determine their destinies? Looking at these forces and the way they influence human destiny we perceive the power that we have come to call the power of Ahriman. Ahrimanic powers are alive in these things. Looking at it like this, you will have to admit that the power of these ahrimainc forces has increased at a tremendous rate. Just consider those two figures I have given: in 1870, six and a half million horse power years were available in Germany; that is not very much per human being. In 1912, 79 million horse power years were produced in Germany. That is the sum total of these things influencing not only economic life but the rest of our life as well. So you see what goes on in a world constructed by human beings, that is quite independent of what really lies in human nature. These forces are completely at odds with everything that came into effect when people faced each other as human beings, in the battles fought in the ancient Orient, for instance. Only luciferic forces were involved in those, and this still held true when the Tartar hordes invaded Europe, for example. We often do not realize how different the world has become for modern humanity and how quickly this has come about, relatively speaking.

Spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy is, moreover, called upon to consider the full implications of such a fact. So far I have merely described the outer aspect. We begin to see the inner aspect when we consider the powers which are active in this. In the past they were luciferic powers and now they are ahrimanic. Human beings find themselves in the middle between the two. First of all, however, we must get a definite idea as to what we mean by ‘ahrimanic’ and ‘luciferic’.

Consider what went on in human soul life in those past times when the great struggles in which human beings were involved were largelY determined by luciferic elements. At that time people looked at the phenomena in the world and, as you know, they looked at them in such a way that they perceived a certain number of elemental beings—let us say demonic spirits. Materialistic scientists call this the ‘age of vitalism’, saying that people introduced all kinds of water sprites, gnomes and so on into the phenomenal world. We know that spirits are indeed active in the phenomena of nature. Today, people see only dry-as-dust, prosaic natural phenomena. In the past, people perceived the spiritual entities, the essential spirit of natural phenomena. This is called superstition, nowadays. That is the view taken by the present age. We know, however, that the people of the past used those names to describe something real, which their minds perceived when they looked at the phenomena of nature. They saw elemental in everything nature presented to them. Thus we may say that however instinctive, dim and dreamlike their conscious awareness may have been, some illumination was received as to the nature of those elemental spirits. spirits

During the times that followed, perception of the spiritual essence of natural phenomena no longer came clearly to awareness when people looked at the natural world around them, that did not depend on them for its existence. The modern intellectual approach that we call a scientific attitude came into being. This only concerns itself with forces that can be abstracted from nature and made comprehensible through abstract ideas, in short, the things that may form the content of the human intellect.

I would say, however, that without people being aware of it a completely new world developed in a relatively short time—just take the time from 1870, when six and seven-tenths million horse power years were used in Germany, to 1912, when 79 million were used. This is a world that did not exist before. These forces are present in the human environment, and in major events like those we have seen in recent years. Human destiny actually depended on them, just as formerly it had depended on natural phenomena. These forces and energies also exist and take effect independent of human beings, just as the forces of nature are independent of human beings. Demons elemental powers—are active in them, but their effects on human beings differ from those of the elemental powers that human beings Perceived in the phenomena of nature in the past. Then, people would look at the phenomena of nature and say: ‘Elemental spirits are at Work in there.’ That had an effect on their conscious awareness; the soul came to an understanding with the phenomena Of nature, and the conscious mind could relate to those phenomena. Today's enlightened' minds consider it superstitious to look for spiritual Powers in natural phenomena. They have not the least idea that demonic spirits are active in the whole world of technology created by the human race. Nor will they find it easy to see this, because those powers are acting on the will—and I have often told you that the will is alseep. They work at an unconscious level, taking hold of the unconscious human mind. The consequence is as follows. In the past human beings had at least some awareness of demonic powers. Today demonic powers are restively stirring in all products of technology;⁶⁹ their activities extend into the sphere of the human will, but human beings are not yet inclined to accept this. In the first place these things are at an unconscious level and in the second place people feel it would be superstitious to say that demonic spirits are active in the machines they have produced. They are active nevertheless. The spirits perceived in the phenomena of nature in older times were luciferic by nature; the spirits active in machines, in all products of technology, are ahrimanic by nature. Human beings are thus surrounding themselves with an ahrimanic world that is growing completely independent of them.

You will perceive the trend in human evolution. From a luciferic world that still influences their conscious minds and there determines their destinies, human beings are drifting into an ahrimanic world. And at present this is happening at quite a fast pace. This ahrimanic world acts on the human will, and the intellectualism of modern science does not enable people to gain immediate conscious awareness of the will. The great danger is that the ahrimanic world will take hold of the human will and human beings will completely lose their bearings among the demonic powers that are present in the products of technology.

In Eastern Europe present-day thinking has led to a desire to militarize the economy and make it into a vast machine. Even human beings are trained to be like machines, with human labour made into something quite separate from the human being. Behind it lies the will to call forth will demons, for it is their sphere into which people are sliding in Eastern Europe.

The road from the luciferic to the ahrimanic sphere—yes, it has to be said that the course of human evolution is going in that direction. Fundamentally speaking we are right in the middle of leaving the luciferic and sliding into the ahrimanic sphere. Luciferic elements are of course still present in many ways. The ahrimanic element is taking hold of people. The luciferic is more alive in feelings. The ahrimanic takes effect through the human intellect and comes to realization as it takes form in the products of technology.

And now the Christ event, which we may expect during the first half of the 20th century, enters into the situation to give human beings their bearings. The nature of this Christ event will be such that more people will be having objective experiences and will then know that the etheric Christ is walking on earth, the Christ who will represent the power that once walked on earth in the physical form of Christ Jesus, but now at the etheric level. If people come to know this Christ power, if they let it enter into them, they will find the right way of dealing with the forces influencing them that come from the ahrimanic powers which are now in the ascendant. The great problem of our time is that people slide into the ahrimanic sphere without having the support of the Christ force.

We are speaking of something very concrete and positive when we refer to this event that is entering into human evolution in the 20th century. In my first mystery [play] I referred to this as the reappearance of the Christ. I would also say that it is possible to perceive what will happen in human souls when they meet this Christ event in a living way.

The other day I was able to indicate in a public lecture⁷⁰ that the scientific thinking of the West, which is totally lacking in cohesive vision, reaches its limits when it comes to perceiving the nature of the human being. Science mostly grasps the non-living world. This is categorized and so on. Theories are developed concerning both the non-living and the living world. Darwinism does not go beyond the evolution of animals, however. The human being is then placed at the top of the tree, but this theory really does not include the human being. It is unable to perceive the nature of the human being.

The same applies to the comprehension of social concepts. I have shown that people really 'run on rails' when working in this field; their approach is ahrimanic, technical, and they do not go beyond this. They have got it all down in their books, where credits and liabilities are recorded. They fail, however, to consider the people involved. Those people want their dignity as human beings to be recognized, but no bridges are built between management and workers. Practical life fails to take account of the nature of the human being.

On one side all this is still more or less theoretical today—though perhaps we should not call it theory but rather the impotence of theory, of perception. On the other side we have something that is much to the fore in the social sphere today. The things that are not written down in the books are today making themselves felt in strikes and revolutionary movements. They show themselves in life and they arise out of the work done in industry, in commerce and so on, just as much as all kinds of goods result from industrial production. It is merely that this element, which is now causing unrest among the people, had not been included in the textbooks. It is therefore making itself felt in real life.

I believe it is true to say that very few people really think about these things—which I also discussed at that recent public lecture. The 19th century has really been clouding the issue where these matters are concerned. During the 18th century some people, certainly the more radical thinkers, did begin to get an idea as to what was coming. The 19th century brought events which caused grand-scale confusion. Pierre Bayle⁷¹ made a very peculiar statement in the 18th century. He was one of the 18th-century materialists who were the forerunners of 19th-century materialism. His statement went as follows: ‘States will know honour and dishonour, ambition, egotism and so forth, but there cannot be a state in which Christian attitudes play an effective role; it is possible to have a state system in which the old heathen virtues and vices play a role, but there can be no such a thing as a Christian state.’ Those were the words of Pierre Bayle, a radical materialist, and there was more truth to his words than to those of the 19th-century idealists. Those idealistic thinkers pretended to themselves that states were Christian. The truth is that they were not. Consider the Christian beliefs of the Middle Ages, for those were foremost in Pierre Bayle's mind. Those beliefs were based on a denial of this earth. It was considered a virtue to rise to a life that was not of this world. The life that developed during the 18th century was largely concerned with earthly matters. ‘There can be no such thing as a Christian state’, Pierre Bayle said, and that in fact was the truth. People were lying when, in the 19th and early 20th century, they pretended to themselves and others that the modern states which had gradually evolved had the Christ spirit in them. They cannot be Christian. Something else emerged from this, however. Whether they stood in the pulpit, or heard the words that were spoken from the people felt utterly convinced that they were true Christians. In the same way people going to their work in government offices, putting on their medals or using the titles conferred on them by the state, imagined themselves to be Christian. They were not in fact Christians, for they held those very positions on account of the fact that they were not Christians. People got into the habit of living a lie; they got out of the habit of seeing the truth when it came to major aspects of life. The result was a nebulous atmosphere where it was not even possible to develop an unbiased view of the progressive ahrimanization of the world.

There has been a lot of talk about the campaign of lies we have had in recent years. Yet in all most important respects people have actually got used to such campaigns of lies. What reason is there to tell the truth now about the lies that were told during that disastrous war? After all, during the 19th century people got into a habit where their souls no longer wanted to know the truth, when it came to the things that are most important in their lives.

It is uncomfortable to face up to these things, and the problem is that people are not facing up to them. Apart from anything else, therefore, modern people are in the difficult position that has arisen because of their inner untruthfulness. This atmosphere will cause a particular mood to develop. Until now it has been mere theory in many respects, merely something we know, that human beings can no longer get through to each other; that the nature of the human being cannot be understood and that this failure to get through to others is also having an effect in the social sphere. All this will become deposited on the human soul. The influence of the external products of technology on the will is going to make the unconscious react with the conscious sphere. There will be no conscious awareness of this, of course, for the whole is at a subconscious level, but a mood will be created. This mood will emerge more and more over the next few decades, or rather years, taking hold of large numbers of people. You will be teaching children in your school and you will note that these children come up with feelings that their elders never had. Something like this has also existed in earlier ages, but it will happen to a much greater degree in the near future. Profound spiritual insight into the present age will be able to judge what is evolving from the depths of the souls of these young people. A great longing is going to come, a kind of longing for something that is lacking. Initially, theories could not be developed that embraced the true nature of the human being, and in the social sphere it proved impossible to include human gifts and talents in business ledgers. All this will condense into feelings and emotions. There will be people—we shall find them among the young in the next generations—who will feel like this: ‘Well, here I am. My form is different from that of other life forms around me. I do not look like an animal, an ox, a donkey, a weasel or an eagle. I look different, but I do not know what it is that looks different. I do not know what a human being is; I do not know what I am.’ Despondency and neurosis will invade the souls of the coming generation. This will be the mood of the age that teachers perceive when they give their lessons. It will be a mood that spreads far and wide. People are so superficial nowadays that is is difficult to talk to them about these things. To show what I mean let me remind you that during the 18th century people who had some perception of the soul of that age were speaking of a ‘Werther fever’. Goethe wrote his Werther⁷²out of the whole mood of that age. Then another novel called Siegwart⁷³ appeared. This had been written out of the Siegwart fever' of the second half of the 18th century. Those were the moods of the times, but they only affected a limited number of people. A mood will however arise in the souls of vast numbers of people that may be brought to expression as follows: ‘Well, what am I as a human being? What kind of life form am I as I walk around on two legs? I have a science that I have taken to great heights; have a life in the social sphere—yet both of them do not touch on the reality of what I am.' This mood will be the great question mark of the age, a question mark as to one's own nature as a human being’ It will prepare the eye of the soul so that it may perceive something that is difficult to describe but will nevertheless come to be the new Christ event. Out of that longing, the power will arise to see the Christ made evident. Outer want will become an inner want for the soul, and out of this inner want is to be born the vision of the Christ who will be walking unseen among human beings, and they will need to hold on to him to stop them from sliding from the luciferic into the ahrimanic sphere, in a way that is quite unthinkable.

What good is the whole of science to us if it cannot help us get a really concrete grasp of human life in its immediacy? It has to be clearly understood that human beings as they are today already have a whole number of earth lives behind them. We live through repeated earth lives. In earlier earth lives we ourselves have seen elemental powers at work in the phenomena of nature. We have brought the fruits of those earlier earth lives into our present life. Then, we knew that nature spirits around us determined our destines, and that we had those spirits within us. Today we consider nature entirely with the intellect, with the head, and the products of technology we ourselves have produced are considered in the same way. All we see are the contents of our intellect. But out of the many earth lives we have lived through—though we refuse to consider them nowadays—something is restlessly astir in us that I have called a great longing, a longing for something that is lacking. We have been human beings who looked at nature and saw the spirit; this enabled us to develop an inner feeling for the true nature of human beings. Now we have a science and a social awareness that do not get as far as the human being. Our past vision of the world around us has given us the potential capacity to feel ourselves to be human beings. Today we look into a nature empty of human beings, we do not penetrate as far as the human being. This will create a great need in the souls of people in the decades to come. This need in the souls of people is a positive power, and out of this positive power will be born the ability to see the Christ.

The old way of approaching the Christ has been destroyed by the theology of most recent times. Our modern theology has made the Christ into the ‘simple man of Nazareth’. Surely it will be impossible for human beings to relate to the Christ event today unless there is a renewal of life in the spirit.

The Catholic Church knew very well why it did not want the masses to have direct access to the Gospels. In theory, catholics are still not permitted to read the Gospels. The Albigenses, Waldenses and others who would not accept this were, of course, declared heretics because the church was only too well aware what would happen if the Gospels became accessible to the masses. In the first place there are four Gospels. The divine spirit reveals itself to humankind in those four forms. You cannot, however, use the intellect to present an event in four different ways the way it has been done in the Gospels, for then contradictions, will arise. The moment you deny the Gospels their reality, considering them to be the products of the human intellect, they inevitably become contradictory, full of contradictions. What has emerged, therefore, is the total destruction of any way in which the Mystery of Golgotha may be perceived.

Again people live with the lie that they are supposed to be Christians, and yet the source has been blocked and brought to nought because modern theology no longer has anything in it that is Christian. To regain Christianity we must acquire a new spiritual vision. Access has to be again gained to the treasure we have gathered in our souls, a treasure we have carried with us through many earth lives.

Our present life, the life we now find ourselves in, is also the starting point for future earth lives. The abstract thinking we use for mathematics, and the various moods of which the soul has concrete experience, are the inheritance of earlier earth lives. Everything we take in of the outside world in this earth life will provide the germ for faculties we shall have in future earth lives. In the past, people came to see elemental spirits active in the world of nature outside. When we were on earth before we looked at nature and gained an Impression of elemental spirits; this is now part of us. Today life is largely determined by what the ‘horse’ beside us is producing, by technical things. This enters into us. Unless we do something about it this will form the basis for future earth lives in us. New demons, the ahrimanic demons, are active in it. What a way of preparing oneself for future earth lives—to allow ahrimanic powers to take over! Machines create something in us that will be the economic life in future earth lives. The roar of cannon fire at the front is something we make part of ourselves, for it is something that was alive in those machines. And so it really is our intention to be quite unconscious when we rise again in our next earth life. But human beings are more than just intellect; they also have feelings and sensibilities. These have to cope with everything entering the soul from the products of technology, from machines.

There arises yet another feeling, one I have not yet described. I was speaking of the longing for something that is lacking. At the unconscious level the soul creates something out of the products of technology, out of the ahrimanic powers, and this acts into higher levels, entering our awareness in form of thoughts and ideas. Yet it arises in a form similar to fear. You will find that children you teach at school in the years and decades ahead will show this longing for something that is lacking, and also an indefinite but nevertheless tangible fear of life. This will show itself as a form of nervousness, in a nervy, fidgety character—you will find this very obvious. The first signs of it are already to be seen today.

The only way to counteract this is to fill your soul with the one thing that will give strength, a strength the earth itself cannot provide. This is the strength that has come to the earth from outside through the essential Christ who is about to appear again. It is a power we cannot gain from the earth. The earth provides technical power, the 79 million horses by our side. We must develop in our souls the strength that comes from the Christ. Otherwise we shall be filled with nothing but the power provided by the products of technology in our next life. The only cure for the nervousness that must show itself in the growing generation is to prepare ourselves for the Christ event that is to come in the first half of the 20th century.

Our age should not be described by the way it presents itself on the outside. We ought to base our description on the feelings that are paramount in human souls. It would be magnificent and important to say of our age that human beings developed an eye for what is alive in human beings. As a rule only external aspects are described. People like Paquet,⁷⁴ for example—a writer who has been travelling in Eastern Europe—are in no position to give a true picture of what goes on in the hearts and minds of people who are already experiencing a great deal of the future; all such writers can do is describe things from the outside.

If spiritual science is to come alive in us it must be able to provide us with insight into the sphere of feelings and sensibilities. You do not know what life really is if you use abstract terms to speak of the Christ event that is to come; you only know what life really is if you speak of human souls moving ahead to meet this Christ event, partly with longing in their heart and partly with fear.

Surely it must be impossible for people, as they are today, to grasp such things as the way the fate of that disastrous war was sealed by ahrimanic forces quite independent of anything human beings were able to do? It was entirely determined by elements thought up in human brains that then became objective forces. It is impossible for modern people to get the right picture and assess the real effects of these things—unless they take account of spiritual science. Just think what it means that there were 79 million horse power years produced in Germany, 98 million in Great Britain, 35 million in Belgium, France and Russia, and finally the 179 million produced in the United States were added to this! We are speaking of something that takes no account of human nature, and those are the factors that truly determine human destiny today. Human beings have totally given themselves over to something that is no longer human. The statement that human insight does not go as far as the human being, now appears in a new light. Human beings remain limited to the non-human realm, even in the social sphere they will be limited to non-human aspects, unless they find the bridge that leads to the nature of the human being. That is how they fulfil their destiny today. They make their destiny partly dependent on elements that are no longer human; they produce elements which will partly determine human destiny, and yet human beings themselves will no longer be able to influence these elements. We ought no longer to be speaking of courage, of the brilliance of the general staff and the like when we want to speak of the way destinies are determined, but of the ratio of horse power years produced in different countries. Human destiny has to be discussed without reference to human beings. People will need tremendous strength to rise and face this human destiny which is determined by non-human elements and to call out: ‘The destiny of the human race must be determined by human beings again!’ That can only happen' of course, if people let the power of Christ enter into them. This power of Christ is approaching and it will restore them to their human powers. We can only become sure of ourselves as human beings if we walk the road created by the whole of technology, but do not let our lives be governed by the products of technology, and grow able to behold the Christ power that can become part of us and overcome all those products of technology.

These are the lessons to be learned today. These are the words that tell us how we can prepare ourselves for the Christ event. All the mediocre stuff that makes up the bulk of modern literature, all the empty talk one hears nowadays, will not help humanity to progress; it will only mean regression. Progress can solely and only be achieved with the things we gain by going down to the spiritual bedrock. And we will make no progress at all unless we become fully aware again of the seriousness of these things. It is necessary for us to understand that humanity has created a completely new world around itself today; human beings themselves have developed the energies and forces that now determine their destinies. This certainly does not merely mean the events of war. Step outside and you will see the factories that determine our destiny, and the same principle is to be found in ordinaly life; it is not limited to the destinies of 1914. Ahrimanic forces are producing those smoking chimneys. The human being no longer counts there.

Walking on past the factory we come to the church. The church still has it traditional message but this has grown abstract. It no longer has relevance in ordinary life. The church concerns itself with things that have no application in practical life. All this is luciferic, just as the things that go on in factories are ahrimanic.

The dreadful thing connected with the destiny of modern humankind is that in the places where people speak of the things of the spirit all ability has been lost to relate to real life. In a public lecture I recently gave⁷⁵ I spoke of American preachers coming to Switzerland and other neutral countries and saying something like this: ‘The League of Nations must be created, for it will be a great blessing for humankind; but it cannot develop from the ideas of statesmen. It will be necessary to win people's hearts instead, so that they will believe in the League of Nations.’ Anyone with an unprejudiced mind will realize that these gentlemen make very fine speeches; yet if that is enough to please us, and we find it sufficient to praise the beauty of those speeches, we fail to understand the signs of the times. Those may be honeyed words, but their sweetness does not penetrate to the hearts of the people. Those hearts are full of worry about the economic situation, and no bridge exists to words that take their origin in old religious persuasions. You cannot use them to create a League of Nations, nor can you do so with the words uttered by Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau⁷⁶ and others. What matters today is that the two must be brought together, life must be imbued with spirit, and life must be taken forward to connect with the spirit. The Christ spirit from outside the earth entered into the flesh in Jesus, a human being, uniting itself with the physical world. The Christ who will be coming during the first half of the 20th century will not use the language of abstract religious confessions—oh no! He will use the language of everyday life. People who are all the time merely looking to unearthly mystical heights for moral uplift will not understand this language. The Christ will however be speaking of the spirit even when He is speaking about everyday life. The spirit will unite with everyday life in the same way as the Christ spirit came from spheres beyond this world, beyond the world of the senses, and united with the physical human being Jesus. Such is the new understanding we must gain for the Christ event; otherwise we shall not be able to appreciate its true value when it comes upon humankind.

A question we may ask even now is the following: ‘What will be the attitude of the people who are preaching official Christianity to the Christ event when it occurs during the first half of the 20th century?’ If we understand the Gospels rightly, they actually provide an example for us. The Gospels speak of ‘scribes and Pharisees’. Our judgement would be wrong if we were to place Adolf Harnack⁷⁷ among those who testify for the Christ; we only judge him rightly if we follow the example of the Gospels and place him among the scribes and Pharisees. And there are others of the same kind who must also be counted among them. It is essential to judge these things in the right way. We must get to the truth! The materialist Pierre Bayle said that a state could not be Christian, that states might know honour and dishonour, ambition and egotism, but that a Christian state was an impossibility. A social community in the name of Christ will however be possible, providing we do not insist on a political state but rather establish an independent life of the spirit. That can be Christian through and through. And this independent life of the spirit will be able to illumine the sphere of life where we have government and states, a sphere that simply cannot be Christian. The result will be that an economic life based on associations can develop; though this, too, cannot be Christian in itself. The people who are involved in it will be Christian, however. They will be filled with the Christ impulse. What we must do is to let people enter into an independent life of the spirit. Then it will be possible to make the whole of social life Christian.

First of all we must have truth, however. We shall not prosper with lies. These are the things we must come to accept today, inscribing them deeply in our hearts. If we fail to do so we will be siding with the people who follow Spengler and believe that we have to become barbarians. Yet it also will not help if we make the facile statement that Spengler is wrong. We would simply be lying to ourselves. We will only base ourselves on the truth if we say: 'The power has to be produced that will get us forward. This, however, can only be produced out of the living spirit, out of the spirit which spiritual science working towards Anthroposophy is seeking. Spiritual science has something that must enter into the impulses of the present age if we are to have a life of the spirit that is Christian again, a political life that once again is human and does not fail to encompass the human being, and an economic life that is controlled by human beings and not by horse power years. Those horse power years that human beings have at their side are an expression of the principle which governs destiny through the products of technology, through something that is outside human beings—something inhuman.

The events of recent years cannot be read as being due to human feelings and emotions. We must read the writing of the horse power years produced by technology, the terrible signs Ahriman is beginning to write into the evolution of humankind. A new understanding of the Christ must be found so that humanity may be led out of this situation.

• 68. TN. The Franco-Prussian War 1870–71.
• 69. TN. Throughout this lecture Rudolf Steiner used an invented word, Technizismen (technicisms) for ‘products of technology’.
• 70. Stuttgart 10 November 1920, ‘Die Geisteskrisis der Gegenwart und die Krafte zum Menschheitsforschritt’ (The spiritual and cultural crisis of the present time and the forces that mean progress for humanity). To be published in GA 335.
• 71. Bayle, Pierre, French philosopher. Statement has not been traced to date.
• 72. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The sorrows of Werther) 1775. Weimarer Ausgabe, 19. Bd.
• 73. Miller, Johann Martin. Siegwart, novel published in 1776 (2 y ears after Werther), very popular for a time.
• 74. Paquet, Alfons, writer. Im korrunzinistischen Ruffland In communist Russia, appeared in 1919.
• 75. See also public lecture referred to in note 69.
• 76. Clemenceau, Georges. French physician and politician.
• 77. Harnack, Adolf von. German theologian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Held in Dornach on 27 May 1923, 23 October 1923, 3 January 1924 for the “Wachsmuth-Lerchenfeld Group” ¹

Text by Maria Röschl-Lehrs, “written down immediately afterwards from memory”.

I

n the introduction, it was explained why such a group is possible again now. A clear consciousness is necessary. In the past, people approached the institutions of anthroposophy with too little awareness, too little spiritual awareness.

If what had been given in those old esoteric contexts had been published, it would have given rise to many cults in the world. But because it was not published, hatred and betrayal of the cause arose.

These people here have not been summoned by him, they have gathered together themselves. He has refused to continue forming such groups himself in the face of the spiritual world. Don't be proud! There are more people who would be suitable, including those who are further along! Here are only those who have found each other. Through meditation. It is not just a personal matter, but has world significance. The Cosmos is interested in whether we do it or not.

Oh man...²

Legend [Temple Legend] new appendix two directions - in John the center. Recognizing what comes from the two directions. Fire, because both unite against the center. Hatred against the continuation of this center.

Wake up! Wake up to these two directions, but also in general. Wake up through right meditation! Goethe was fully awake, Schiller only half awake, Herder and Lessing slept completely.

In the face of the mystery of Golgotha, the words of an initiate were: Salem. Now the reversal: Melas... the circle is complete.

Addendum: Before that, Mach ben ach - son of the earth of suffering, or the physical body has separated from the soul and spirit.

Vocal exercise – pilgrimage to the self ³
O A J A O: I in the midst of light and space
A J O J A: Space for me and light
J O A O J: Light through space and me
I am

Now only that of the two directions and the fire.⁴

The Temple Legend

The wording of the temple legend from the esoteric hour of May 27, 1923, was reconstructed afterwards by various participants from memory and from texts from the earlier Erkenntnis cultic work context. The designation “New version, given in spring 1923”, under which this wording was passed on, actually applies only to the last conclusion (in the notes of Maria Lehrs-Röschl designated as “New Appendix”). In the first part, the legend text corresponds word for word to that of Rudolf Steiner's 1906 transcript (p. 365). The subsequent description of the casting of the brazen sea and Hiram's death, on the other hand, shows some variants compared to the earlier descriptions. The description in the 1923 version, which begins after the sentence from Rudolf Steiner's transcript (p. 367): “Hiram is only in possession of a real-human ego,” reads as follows:

From this point on, King Solomon is seized by violent jealousy against his master builder Hiram Abiff. The latter had three journeymen working on the temple construction who demanded the master's degree from him. However, they had shown their incompetence by cutting a mighty beam, which was irreplaceable for the construction of the temple, too short. Hiram had remedied the accident by stretching the beam to the correct length with his special powers. They are now Hiram Abiff's opponents because they had to be rejected by him when they demanded the master's degree and the master's word from him, for which they were not yet ready. The three treacherous companions have no difficulty in finding the ear of the king for the deed by which they want to corrupt Hiram Abiff.

The completion of the temple construction was to be crowned by a work in which Hiram Abiff sought to reconcile the tension and enmity between the Cain and Abel sons. It was the brazen sea, whose casting was to be made from the seven basic metals (lead, tin, iron, gold, copper, mercury and silver) and water, the metal of the earth, in such a way that the finished casting would be completely transparent. The thing was finished except for one very last step, which was to be carried out in front of the assembled court, including the Queen of Sheba, and which was to transform the still cloudy substance into one that was completely clear.

Now the three treacherous companions who had the task of adding the last ingredient mixed the water in the wrong proportion, and instead of becoming transparent, the casting sprayed in devastating flames. Hiram Abiff tried to calm the fire, but failed. The flames burst out on all sides.

But Hiram Abiff heard a voice from the flames and from the glowing mass: Plunge into the sea of fire, you are invulnerable. He plunged into the flames and realized that his path led to the center of the earth. Halfway there he met Tubal Cain, his ancestor. He led him to the center of the earth, where the great ancestor Cain was in the state he was in before the sin of killing Abel. He gave him the golden triangle with the master word. Halfway up, Tubal Cain gave him a hammer and instructed him to touch the casting of the brazen sea with it. There Hiram Abiff receives from Cain the explanation that the vigorous development of human powers on earth ultimately leads to the height of initiation, and that the initiation attained in this way must take the place of the old vision in the course of the world, that the latter will disappear. With the hammer, Hiram returns to the earth's surface; he touches the brazen sea with it, the casting is successful, and he was able to make it completely transparent.

Hiram wanted to see his work, the temple, for the last time and went there at night. There the false companions waylayed him. The first struck him on the left temple at one of the gates, so that the blood flowed down to the shoulder. Hiram Abiff turned to the second gate to leave the temple. There the second companion struck him on the right temple, so that the blood flowed down to the shoulder. He turned to the third gate. There the third journeyman struck him on the forehead, so that he collapsed. He still dragged himself out to a well, into which he sank the golden triangle. The three journeymen buried his body. Before his death, Hiram was still able to sink the golden triangle with the master word into a deep well. On his grave grew a cassia tree, an acacia. It was known to the initiated that a cassia tree grows out of the grave of an initiate. When his body was found, the new master word resounded: “Mach ben ach”.⁵ This means: The spiritual soul has separated from the physical body or: the otherness of the body.⁶ They then searched for the golden triangle and found it in the well. A cubic stone with the Ten Commandments was placed on the triangle and thus it was hidden and walled up in the temple.

With this symbolism, that which in meditation elevated the inner essence of human development on earth to imagination was given. The brazen sea can be seen as a symbol of what man would have become if the three treacherous forces had not found a place in the soul. These three treacherous forces are: doubt, superstition, and the illusion of personal self.

Hiram Abiff was reborn as Lazarus and was thus the one who was first initiated by Christ. With him began the (reconciliation of the differences) that stood between the Cain and Abel currents.

According to another record, the “new appendix” reads as follows:

Hiram Abiff was reborn as Lazarus and thus became the first to be initiated by Christ. With him began the current of the center, which stood between the Cain and Abel currents. Over time, the Cain current found its main representatives in the F. (Masonry current), while the Abel current found its expression in the priestly current of the (Catholic?) Church. Both currents of humanity remained strictly hostile to each other. Only once did they unite in harmony: in their hatred of the current of the center. The result of this harmonious union of two otherwise hostile directions was the destruction of the Johannesbau (Goetheanum).

II

First, the Indian mantram was given for the first time, the translation for the first time. After this Indian mantram, the regular invocation was made: “Brothers of the...”

True esotericism is initially incomprehensible. As an example, imagine a living person who expresses absolutely no spiritual life on the outside. His spiritual life is directed entirely inwards. Nevertheless, it is an intense inner life.

About the vowels: hierarchies are involved.
I A O Seraphim, Cherubim and partly Thrones are involved.
U Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis
E _ Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi.

The whole together means the ancient-holy word of Jahve in place of the I-am. To create this word of Jahve out of the hierarchies means an act. The execution of this act on earth: the butterfly meditation:

Catch the butterfly
Send it to the icy heights
Where the world's secrets prevail.
It will become a bird for you
Then you have done half the work
. Dip the bird
Into the depths of the sea - - - - - JAOUE
Where the will of the world is at work.
If the bird drowns,
Then you still have to do,
Purifying the bird's corpse
By burning it in the fire.
Then consume the ashes
And you are
The light in the darkness of the world.

The visualization of this butterfly meditation has an ethereal effect. Only a simple interpretation. Searching in memory with the three and a half years following the butterfly meditation. Its ethereal effect is connected with the fact that it causes one to occupy oneself with one's own will, and in the retrospective examination of one's own will, one can find a point in one's life where this will has had a very specific impulse towards certain tasks. It is often the case that when searching for such moments of volition, the non-fulfillment of which has caused dissatisfaction, one comes to a point about three and a half years ago. (Prevention by external circumstances, for example, threefolding.)

Once this point has been reached, the task is to cultivate the content of this longing, not to try to carry out the deed, but to cultivate the content as much as possible, in the highest way. Then, three and a half years after this point in time, there will be another opportunity for realization. And then the task will be to perform a selfless act that has nothing to do with the starting point of seven years ago. This can also be a very inconspicuous act outwardly.

Description of the times, the situation. The present lectures and this hour are, in comparison to the prevailing fanaticism at the height of democracy outside, just the opposite; they signify the height of aristocracy and hierarchy. An enormous abyss that evolution must leap across in order to overcome these contradictions. Descriptions of this abyss, over which some courageously leap, others are dragged, others are torn. The whole thing is a heroic tragedy in the history of mankind.

Falter-Meditation
Invocation
Indian Mantram

III

Brothers of the... Indian Mantram

Indication that the new society was founded without mentioning the esoteric reason. (He had previously said that the reasoning had esoteric reasons.) Esotericism does not tolerate playing around, everything so far has been playful [taken]. Now esotericism must be brought openly and seriously into life, from Dornach, as the center. But now we really must not play with esotericism anymore. For that, modesty is needed, above all modesty before the ego.

Therefore, wake up! Become aware that we are asleep! With each waking we enter into a new sphere of the world, for we live completely surrounded by spheres of the world, only we sleep and know nothing of them. So far, everything in man only happens in dreams. The importance of the Falter meditation (he had said last time that everything he said about the effect of this meditation and its connection with the two times three and a half years only applies to people over 28). Reading it out loud – J A O U E.

Something should be added to enhance the effect of this meditation by Falter:

4 stages of falling asleep: in thinking, feeling, willing, in the I
4 stages of waking up: in thinking, feeling, willing, in the I

Thinking:

The head is like a fruit, the heart like a glowing chalice. We should experience our head as self-illuminating right down to our heart. We should experience our thinking as an etheric organ that feels its way towards everything it is meant to grasp. The difference between the occultist and the non-occultist is that the occultist is aware that this organ radiates out into the etheric. We should experience ourselves as a snail stretching out its feelers. Thinking must become a feeling process! Help for this:

Awaken in thinking: you are in the spiritual light of the world.

Experience yourself as radiant, feeling the radiance.

Through such thinking, all of nature becomes radiant. Stone and plant shine forth in the earthly... as animal and human being... in the moral. Through the experience of thinking as touching, we develop something like a sense of touch: we see a dandelion blossom and experience it as sand; we see chicory and experience it as silk, a sunflower as a spiky animal...

Feeling:

This is still a deep dream. We should experience our heart as glowing, but in such a way that it absorbs light from our entire environment and reflects it back outwards like the moon. Through our awakening feeling, we must experience the world quite differently; the earth as a sentient being that laughs and cries. In the withering of autumn there is a kind of weeping in nature, but joy of the Ahrimanic beings in winter, joy of the luciferic beings in spring. Natural processes as deeds of spiritual beings! Trees - in winter they are only their physical body, the etheric is outside. One can come to see how the trees solve tasks in the etheric.

When one awakens in thinking, one expands into infinity. When one awakens in feeling, one sets oneself in motion, one leaves oneself.

Awaken in feeling: you are in the spiritual deeds of the world.

Experience yourself, feeling the spiritual deeds.

Wanting:

In this respect, the human being of the present is still in a state of deep sleep. But in the realm of the will, the human being is completely on his own. He has his thinking only in this embodiment, taking nothing of it with him into the afterlife. The gods need our thinking, but they do not need our feeling and willing. A person may be ingenious, but only because the gods need it that way. Geniuses are the lamps that the gods need. Our thinking abilities return to the gods after death.

Our will, on the other hand, goes with us through our embodiments; it is a result of our embodiments, we work on it through our earthly lives. In our cooperation in shaping the world, our will is what is essentially characteristic. The will is man's property, while man's thinking belongs to the gods. Envy of the gods! In our volition, we have a life of our own. But people are still asleep in their volition. They love their volition because they always believe that what they want is already the right thing. But with our volition, we are helping to shape the world. We wake up in our volition by becoming aware that we are not alone, but are responsible for the actions of others. For example, Kully: What he does, especially what upsets us the most, is our fault, we are actually participating; Goesch affair = Maya.⁷When we no longer feel ourselves as separate individual beings, but so connected in the general activity, then we awaken in the will, then we come to the living will, then we think the spiritual beings: Awaken in the will: you are in the spiritual beings of the world. The spiritual beings experience you thinking.

Awakening in the I:

We sleep in the I. We use the word “I” only because the gods once spoke it for us - our angeloi - and now, imitating them, we speak it. But we must awaken in the I! Imagination for this: altar, above it the sun. We approach the altar and experience ourselves entirely as shadows, entirely as insubstantial. So far we have said: I am. Now we consciously say: I am not. – Then a deity rises out of the sun above the altar and animates the shadow. We are like a bowl that receives the light of the deity rising out of the sun. – By grace we receive this deity, it gives itself to us. – Fichte experienced this, but only in a shadowy way. Therefore, what he says about it is completely abstract.

In the I awaken: you are in your own spiritual being.

Experience yourself as receiving from and giving to the gods.⁸

Then it was said:
The stones are mute...
Brothers of the...
Indian saying

• 1. Named by Rudolf Steiner (see page 466) because the initiative came from the two Wachsmuth brothers, Count Lerchenfeld and Harriet von Vacano. The following participants are known by name: Marie Steiner, Dr. Ita Wegman, Dr. Elisabeth Vreede, Albert Steffen, Dr. Günther Wachsmuth, Wolfgang Wachsmuth and his wife, Dr. Kurt Piper, Dr. Otto Palmer, Dr. von Baravalle, Dr. Maria Röschl, Count Lerchenfeld, Harriet von Vacano, Jürgen von Grone, Margarita Woloschin.
• 2. This mantram was later incorporated into the mantras of the first class of the School of Spiritual Science.
• 3. See original recording on page 473.
• 4. Regarding this, Maria Röschl-Lehrs' note: “Only very sparse notes here. The order is not clear.”
• 5. Here, according to the usual traditions, the intermediate link is missing: Solomon gave the order to search for Hiram's body. Since it was believed that the murderers had extorted the master word from Hiram, it was agreed that they would remain silent during the search. The first word that one of the masters spoke unintentionally while digging up the body was to be considered the new master word. When the body was found after a long search, the word “Mach ben ach” escaped from one of them at that moment. This was accepted as a new master word.
• 6. Another record has here: “Earth son of suffering”.
• 7. Kully and Goesch: two opponents actively appearing at the time.
• 8. Cf. the manuscript on page 477.

We shall best understand how karma is anchored in the individual and in the evolution of humanity, and how the single facts of karma lend themselves to description, if we begin by considering how human consciousness has evolved since the time when, even in his ordinary life, man had a direct, elementary perception of his karma. To-day it is a fact that in his waking consciousness man knows nothing of his karma. The world in which he lives from awaking to falling asleep prevents him from having any direct knowledge of his karma. But humanity has not always lived in the state of consciousness that is considered normal to-day. In olden times, moreover during the earlier Post-Atlantean periods of evolution, quite different states of consciousness prevailed, even in the everyday life of man. There are three states or conditions of normal consciousness to-day—I have often described them to you. Firstly, there is waking consciousness; secondly, dream-consciousness into which scattered reminiscences of the day's experiences make their way but mingled, too, with influences from the spiritual world; and lastly, sleep-consciousness proper, in which dimness and darkness surround the human soul and consciousness sinks away, so to speak, into unconsciousness.

1. Waking consciousness.
2. Dream consciousness.
3. Sleep consciousness.

It was not always thus. There was a time in man's evolution when the experiences of his everyday consciousness took quite different forms. Let us look back some eight or ten thousand years to the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe whereby many widespread forms of civilisation and culture were wiped out of existence.

It was an epoch when land began to arise where formerly there had been sea, and sea to cover tracts that had once been land, a time moreover when the earth was destined to pass through a period of intense cold. We discover there a humanity which had survived the Atlantean catastrophe and was also endowed with three distinct kinds of consciousness but of an essentially different character from those of to-day. The prosaic, everyday consciousness of modern man in his waking hours, by which he sees other human beings and the creatures and happenings of nature in sharp outlines—this the men of those ancient times did not possess. They saw the human being without sharp contours, extending in all directions into the Spiritual, spreading out into the aura; and in this aura they saw his soul. Animals too were seen in great and mighty auras; in their case it was the inner processes—digestion, breathing and so forth—that became visible in the aura. Plants reached up with their blossoms into a sort of cloud which permanently surrounded the Earth. Everything was bathed in a dying astral light. The day-consciousness of men who lived directly after the Atlantean Flood was a gradually fading astral vision of the physical world. I say “fading,” for in its power of giving light it was gradually waning away; before the Atlantean catastrophe this power of vision in astral light had been much stronger and more intense.

The awakening to this condition of consciousness—for the entering into it may be compared to an awakening—was very different from the awakening of normal man to-day, where the soul is confronted with chaotic dreams before passing into the waking consciousness of day. When these people of antiquity awakened it was no mere world of dreams that invaded their consciousness; they were within a world of reality of which they knew also that therein they had been among spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies and elementary spirit-beings. “Waking up” was for them as it might be with a man of to-day who leaves a place in which he has had many experiences and goes somewhere else where in a sphere of new experiences he remembers the others. When in those ancient times a man entered waking life, he had the new experiences of day; but the remembrances remained with him of how he had been in another world, with other beings, not with the physical human beings who together with the plants and animals are generally around him, but with disembodied human souls living between death and a new birth, and with other beings, too, who never incarnate on the earth.

Man felt that he had departed from beings dwelling in the cosmos and was now placed into another world, into the world of physical experience between birth and death, Nevertheless he still preserved a memory of the spiritual world, the world through which human beings pass between death and a new birth. Vision of the spiritual world still streamed into his already fading astral vision. The condition of consciousness in which man to-day lives among purely physical beings did not then exist at all. In those times men had the following experience—it was not a dream but a picture that was graphic and real: when they passed into the day-consciousness and looked at trees, animals, mountains, rocks and clouds, they felt that this was the same world in which were living those spirit-beings and human souls who were not incarnate on the earth but living in the spiritual world that is man's habitation between death and a new birth. And then there came to these men a concretely real picture of how these beings pass into the trees and rocks while man is in his waking consciousness, how they disappear into the depths of the mountains or rise up to the heights of the clouds, steal away into all the created things of outer physical nature.

On going into a forest, a man would, for example, notice a tree and know that it was the hiding place of a being with whom he had been together in the night. Men then saw clearly, as an Initiate can still see to-day, how spirit-beings made their way into physical habitations as though into their homes. No wonder that all these things passed over into the myths and that men talked of tree-spirits, water-spirits, spirits of clouds and mountains, for they saw their companions of the night disappearing into the mountains, into the waves, into the clouds, into the plants and the trees.

Such was early dawn in the experience of the soul: men saw the spirit-world disappearing into the physical world of sense. They spoke reverently of the great and lofty Spirits as taking rest by day in these physical habitations; they spoke of the lesser, elementary beings who live among men and often among animals, as lurking in the things of nature. They expressed it even roguishly. But whether expressed in sublime and reverent language or in pleasantries, it was exactly what they felt about this condition of early dawn in the soul's experience.

Picture it to yourselves. A human being had been in a spiritual world during the last phase of his sleep; it was when he awoke, and only then, that he clearly remembered having been in this spiritual world. How was this? Why did he only see this spiritual, super-sensible world as he awoke, when the spirits were already disappearing? Why did he only then see this spiritual, super-sensible world in which he lived between death and birth? It was because in those days, when during the last phase of his sleep man was able to see the spirit-world, he experienced yet a third condition of consciousness which conjured up another, an entirely different world before his soul. For it was so that during the time he was “asleep” in his earthly existence and present with power of vision in the spiritual world, he looked back on the evolution of his own karma.

This third state of consciousness experienced by men during the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, consisted in a vision of karma. This vision of their own karma was an absolute reality to them.

1. Waking consciousness .... Fading astral vision.
2. Dream consciousness ..... Vision of the spiritual world.
3. Sleep consciousness ....... Vision of karma.

As the three states of consciousness alternate in the life of man to-day, so did ancient man experience successively the three conditions of a darkening astral vision, a vision of spiritual worlds and a vision of karma.

It is a fact that in olden times a vision of karma was a reality of consciousness for man; we can truly say that man once had a consciousness by means of which he beheld the reality of karma.

Evolution then took the following course. First of all this vision of karma ceased in the sleep that was of course no sleep as we understand it. The vision of karma began to grow dim. Of the facts of karma there only remained the knowledge possessed by the Initiates in the Mysteries. That which had once been vision and actual experience became a matter of learning and erudition. The ancient consciousness darkened and there only remained—so it was in the old Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian period—the power to look up into the spiritual world. Thus, in the centuries which preceded the Christian epoch, a vision of the super-sensible world still came about quite naturally, but the facts about karma were only taught, they were no longer seen. In the times immediately preceding the Christian era there was still an intense consciousness of the spiritual world, of the world in which man lives between death and a new birth, although the consciousness of karma had faded and was simply not there for humanity in general when the Christian era began. It is therefore understandable that special emphasis was laid upon man's connection with the spiritual world while he is in the disembodied state. Especially in the ancient Egyptian conception we can discern this intensely strong consciousness of the spiritual world, a purified, and clear-sighted consciousness of the world which man enters through the gate of death, when he becomes Osiris. But there is no consciousness any longer of repeated earthly lives.

Then came the gradual approach of the time which has now reached its apex and properly belongs to the humanity of our day. Astral vision has sunk into the prosaic, matter-of-fact consciousness we have in ordinary life between awaking and falling asleep, when we only perceive, for example, that insignificant part of man which is enclosed by his skin and consists in flesh and bones and different vessels; that is all we see in our day-consciousness. One can well understand that people want to array it in all kinds of so-called beautiful clothes in an attempt to give it some importance, since deep down in the sub-consciousness there is a feeling that in itself it is of no significance and belongs, rightly, in the radiant, glowing garment of the aura, of the astral and Ego nature. And when men became aware of the change from the vision that sees the human being in his aura to the vision that sees only the unimportant, bodily part of him, they endeavoured to imitate in the clothing what had once been seen as the aura; so that the fashions of old—if I may put it so—were in a certain sense copies of the aura. As for modern fashions, well, I can assure you they are no such thing!

The consciousness of the super-sensible world has taken on the form of chaotic dreaming. Man dreams it away! And in respect of the karma-consciousness, man is fast asleep. He would have the consciousness of karma if that part of his consciousness which is dreamless between falling asleep and awakening were suddenly to awake. Then he would have the consciousness of karma. Thus in the course of ten thousand years or thereabouts, the great change has taken place. Man “wakes” away—not only “sleeps” away—the spiritual reality in the physical world. He “wakes” away the Spiritual in nature, he “dreams” away the true spiritual world, he “sleeps” away his karma.

This development was necessary, as I have often told you, in order that the consciousness of freedom might arise. But humanity must now again emerge from its present condition of consciousness.

We have heard that what was a natural, albeit a dreamlike state of consciousness in olden times, namely knowledge of the super-sensible world and of karma, gradually grew dim and then became Mystery-teaching, while in the modern age of materialism it has been entirely lost. But in this age the possibility must again be found of building a bridge to consciousness both of the super-sensible world and of karma.

This means, in other words: When we picture to ourselves how in olden times at early dawn, the spirit-beings with whom man lived from falling asleep to awakening hid themselves in trees and clouds, in mountains and rocks, so that in the day man could say to himself when he saw a tree or a rock or a spring: “A spirit has been enchanted into it, a spirit with whom I was together during my sleep-consciousness”—so now, by accepting the new Initiation-Science, we must learn in our present day-consciousness to recognise the spirit and as we look at every rock or tree or cloud or star, or sun or moon, to recognise the spiritual beings in all their diversity.

We must set out on the path that leads to this. We must prepare for the time when it shall be even so. As truly as a man of olden time, on awakening, saw the spirit-beings with whom he had lived during the night steal into the trees and rocks, so truly for modern man shall the spirit-beings steal forth again from tree and rock and spring!

It can really happen, and in this way. A man can lay aside the standpoint of ordinary prejudice in which he has been living, into which even children in the kindergarten are led to-day; he can put aside the prejudices that make him imagine he cannot with healthy human understanding see into the spiritual world. And when the Initiate comes and tells of things of the spiritual world and of events that happen there, then, although he cannot yet himself see, nevertheless by making use of his unprejudiced human understanding, he can be enlightened by the communications that are given concerning the spiritual worlds. This is indeed, and under all circumstances, the right first step for each one to-day.

But difficulties are always cropping up ... Last year, after one of my lectures on how to attain knowledge of the spiritual worlds, a well-meaning paragraph appeared in a newspaper of some standing. We can really call it “well-meaning” and even “respectable” as compared with many vehement expressions of opposition to Anthroposophy to-day! In this lecture I had pointed out that there is no need to become clairvoyant in order to have knowledge of the spiritual world, but that when the seer imparts the knowledge it can be received and understood by the healthy human intellect. I had emphasised this very strongly. The man who wrote the paragraph said in all good faith: “Steiner wants to apply the healthy human intellect to knowledge of the super-sensible world. But so long as the human intellect remains healthy it can certainly know nothing of a super-sensible world; as soon as it does, it is no longer healthy.” I think I have never heard it put so honestly before! For it is after all what everyone is bound to say if he denies to the healthy human intellect a knowledge of the super-sensible world, and if he speaks in the usual way of the boundaries of knowledge. Either he must give up the present point of view, or he must agree with this assertion; no other way is really honest.

A modern Initiate can speak from clear and conscious knowledge of how from every star a spirit-being is released, of how other spirit-beings are released from plants. They come forward to meet us as soon as we pass beyond external sense-observation. Every time we go out into nature we may see all around where nature begins to be a little elemental, kobold-like elementary beings coming out of their stony shelters; if we become friendly with them, especially with the elementary beings of the mineral world, we can see behind them higher Beings who finally lead up to the First Hierarchy, to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

It is a fact that if the exercises given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are practised regularly with strong inner energy, selflessness and devotion, they will lead—provided we have the necessary courage—to a new power of perception. We become able to see, for instance, in certain strata of the mountains, whole worlds of elemental beings lying hidden in rock and stone. They come forth on every side, they steal out, they grow big—and we discover that they have only been as it were rolled up and packed tight into these fragments of the elementary world. Beings are present in the mineral kingdom of nature, especially where the earth begins to grow green, and feels so fresh that we can scent its aroma and the aroma of the plants that cover it. But when we enter this sphere of elemental beings, we find that they can indeed inspire us with fear. For the beings we thus encounter are incredibly clever. We must be humble enough to say to ourselves, when we see these little dwarf-like beings emerging from the objects of nature: “How stupid man is! and how clever is this elemental world!” And because many do not like to say this in earnest, do not like even to admit that judged by spiritual perception a little new-born child is much wiser than a learned scholar, therefore these elementary beings withdraw from man's vision. If however we can discern them, the horizon is widened and the foreground opened up to us by these clever, playful little sprites leads away into a background that reaches right up to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Thus by means of the exercises to which I referred, a man whose consciousness has been made clear and quick by the study of what humanity has learned through modern natural science, can enter this world of elemental beings, and thence a higher world. If by a loving surrender to nature we thus acquire a consciousness that is not “sicklied o'er” by the authority-ridden knowledge that holds the ground to-day, we may gradually rise through Initiation-knowledge to that knowledge which humanity has lost.

And he who eventually attains the faculty to see the tree-spirits come forth from the trees—the same that the ancients saw stealing away in the dawn, and darting out again in the evening twilight—he will also be able, as he approaches a human being, to see emerge from him the figures of his earlier lives together with the evolution of his karma. For this kind of vision leads on to a vision of karma.

In the mineral world, where at first we perceive the clever, mischievous little dwarfs, the vision leads us to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

In the plant world, the vision leads us to the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

In the animal world (when we see emerge from the animals their own spiritual beings) we are led to a vision of the Archai, Archangels and Angels.

And in the human kingdom the vision leads to karma.

Behind the manifestations of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, behind all the other Beings of the higher Hierarchies, behind all the elemental nature-spirits who startle us by their cleverness when they dart forth from the minerals, or who come to meet us with their gentle importunities from the plant world, behind all that comes from the animals—fierce, passionate and violent as that may be at times, and also icy cold—behind all that stands here so to speak as a foreground, we face the overwhelming, the sublime manifestations of karma. For behind all the mysteries of the world there lies, in truth, the great mystery of human karma.

Having thus prepared our hearts and minds in the right way, we shall pass on in the remaining lectures to speak of particular facts of karma.

We shall best understand how karma is anchored in the individual and in the evolution of humanity, and how the single facts of karma lend themselves to description, if we begin by considering how human consciousness has evolved since the time when, even in his ordinary life, man had a direct, elementary perception of his karma. To-day it is a fact that in his waking consciousness man knows nothing of his karma. The world in which he lives from awaking to falling asleep prevents him from having any direct knowledge of his karma. But humanity has not always lived in the state of consciousness that is considered normal to-day. In olden times, moreover during the earlier Post-Atlantean periods of evolution, quite different states of consciousness prevailed, even in the everyday life of man. There are three states or conditions of normal consciousness to-day—I have often described them to you. Firstly, there is waking consciousness; secondly, dream-consciousness into which scattered reminiscences of the day's experiences make their way but mingled, too, with influences from the spiritual world; and lastly, sleep-consciousness proper, in which dimness and darkness surround the human soul and consciousness sinks away, so to speak, into unconsciousness.

1. Waking consciousness.
2. Dream consciousness.
3. Sleep consciousness.

It was not always thus. There was a time in man's evolution when the experiences of his everyday consciousness took quite different forms. Let us look back some eight or ten thousand years to the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe whereby many widespread forms of civilisation and culture were wiped out of existence.

It was an epoch when land began to arise where formerly there had been sea, and sea to cover tracts that had once been land, a time moreover when the earth was destined to pass through a period of intense cold. We discover there a humanity which had survived the Atlantean catastrophe and was also endowed with three distinct kinds of consciousness but of an essentially different character from those of to-day. The prosaic, everyday consciousness of modern man in his waking hours, by which he sees other human beings and the creatures and happenings of nature in sharp outlines—this the men of those ancient times did not possess. They saw the human being without sharp contours, extending in all directions into the Spiritual, spreading out into the aura; and in this aura they saw his soul. Animals too were seen in great and mighty auras; in their case it was the inner processes—digestion, breathing and so forth—that became visible in the aura. Plants reached up with their blossoms into a sort of cloud which permanently surrounded the Earth. Everything was bathed in a dying astral light. The day-consciousness of men who lived directly after the Atlantean Flood was a gradually fading astral vision of the physical world. I say “fading,” for in its power of giving light it was gradually waning away; before the Atlantean catastrophe this power of vision in astral light had been much stronger and more intense.

The awakening to this condition of consciousness—for the entering into it may be compared to an awakening—was very different from the awakening of normal man to-day, where the soul is confronted with chaotic dreams before passing into the waking consciousness of day. When these people of antiquity awakened it was no mere world of dreams that invaded their consciousness; they were within a world of reality of which they knew also that therein they had been among spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies and elementary spirit-beings. “Waking up” was for them as it might be with a man of to-day who leaves a place in which he has had many experiences and goes somewhere else where in a sphere of new experiences he remembers the others. When in those ancient times a man entered waking life, he had the new experiences of day; but the remembrances remained with him of how he had been in another world, with other beings, not with the physical human beings who together with the plants and animals are generally around him, but with disembodied human souls living between death and a new birth, and with other beings, too, who never incarnate on the earth.

Man felt that he had departed from beings dwelling in the cosmos and was now placed into another world, into the world of physical experience between birth and death, Nevertheless he still preserved a memory of the spiritual world, the world through which human beings pass between death and a new birth. Vision of the spiritual world still streamed into his already fading astral vision. The condition of consciousness in which man to-day lives among purely physical beings did not then exist at all. In those times men had the following experience—it was not a dream but a picture that was graphic and real: when they passed into the day-consciousness and looked at trees, animals, mountains, rocks and clouds, they felt that this was the same world in which were living those spirit-beings and human souls who were not incarnate on the earth but living in the spiritual world that is man's habitation between death and a new birth. And then there came to these men a concretely real picture of how these beings pass into the trees and rocks while man is in his waking consciousness, how they disappear into the depths of the mountains or rise up to the heights of the clouds, steal away into all the created things of outer physical nature.

On going into a forest, a man would, for example, notice a tree and know that it was the hiding place of a being with whom he had been together in the night. Men then saw clearly, as an Initiate can still see to-day, how spirit-beings made their way into physical habitations as though into their homes. No wonder that all these things passed over into the myths and that men talked of tree-spirits, water-spirits, spirits of clouds and mountains, for they saw their companions of the night disappearing into the mountains, into the waves, into the clouds, into the plants and the trees.

Such was early dawn in the experience of the soul: men saw the spirit-world disappearing into the physical world of sense. They spoke reverently of the great and lofty Spirits as taking rest by day in these physical habitations; they spoke of the lesser, elementary beings who live among men and often among animals, as lurking in the things of nature. They expressed it even roguishly. But whether expressed in sublime and reverent language or in pleasantries, it was exactly what they felt about this condition of early dawn in the soul's experience.

Picture it to yourselves. A human being had been in a spiritual world during the last phase of his sleep; it was when he awoke, and only then, that he clearly remembered having been in this spiritual world. How was this? Why did he only see this spiritual, super-sensible world as he awoke, when the spirits were already disappearing? Why did he only then see this spiritual, super-sensible world in which he lived between death and birth? It was because in those days, when during the last phase of his sleep man was able to see the spirit-world, he experienced yet a third condition of consciousness which conjured up another, an entirely different world before his soul. For it was so that during the time he was “asleep” in his earthly existence and present with power of vision in the spiritual world, he looked back on the evolution of his own karma.

This third state of consciousness experienced by men during the epoch immediately following the Atlantean catastrophe, consisted in a vision of karma. This vision of their own karma was an absolute reality to them.

1. Waking consciousness .... Fading astral vision.
2. Dream consciousness ..... Vision of the spiritual world.
3. Sleep consciousness ....... Vision of karma.

As the three states of consciousness alternate in the life of man to-day, so did ancient man experience successively the three conditions of a darkening astral vision, a vision of spiritual worlds and a vision of karma.

It is a fact that in olden times a vision of karma was a reality of consciousness for man; we can truly say that man once had a consciousness by means of which he beheld the reality of karma.

Evolution then took the following course. First of all this vision of karma ceased in the sleep that was of course no sleep as we understand it. The vision of karma began to grow dim. Of the facts of karma there only remained the knowledge possessed by the Initiates in the Mysteries. That which had once been vision and actual experience became a matter of learning and erudition. The ancient consciousness darkened and there only remained—so it was in the old Chaldean-Babylonian-Egyptian period—the power to look up into the spiritual world. Thus, in the centuries which preceded the Christian epoch, a vision of the super-sensible world still came about quite naturally, but the facts about karma were only taught, they were no longer seen. In the times immediately preceding the Christian era there was still an intense consciousness of the spiritual world, of the world in which man lives between death and a new birth, although the consciousness of karma had faded and was simply not there for humanity in general when the Christian era began. It is therefore understandable that special emphasis was laid upon man's connection with the spiritual world while he is in the disembodied state. Especially in the ancient Egyptian conception we can discern this intensely strong consciousness of the spiritual world, a purified, and clear-sighted consciousness of the world which man enters through the gate of death, when he becomes Osiris. But there is no consciousness any longer of repeated earthly lives.

Then came the gradual approach of the time which has now reached its apex and properly belongs to the humanity of our day. Astral vision has sunk into the prosaic, matter-of-fact consciousness we have in ordinary life between awaking and falling asleep, when we only perceive, for example, that insignificant part of man which is enclosed by his skin and consists in flesh and bones and different vessels; that is all we see in our day-consciousness. One can well understand that people want to array it in all kinds of so-called beautiful clothes in an attempt to give it some importance, since deep down in the sub-consciousness there is a feeling that in itself it is of no significance and belongs, rightly, in the radiant, glowing garment of the aura, of the astral and Ego nature. And when men became aware of the change from the vision that sees the human being in his aura to the vision that sees only the unimportant, bodily part of him, they endeavoured to imitate in the clothing what had once been seen as the aura; so that the fashions of old—if I may put it so—were in a certain sense copies of the aura. As for modern fashions, well, I can assure you they are no such thing!

The consciousness of the super-sensible world has taken on the form of chaotic dreaming. Man dreams it away! And in respect of the karma-consciousness, man is fast asleep. He would have the consciousness of karma if that part of his consciousness which is dreamless between falling asleep and awakening were suddenly to awake. Then he would have the consciousness of karma. Thus in the course of ten thousand years or thereabouts, the great change has taken place. Man “wakes” away—not only “sleeps” away—the spiritual reality in the physical world. He “wakes” away the Spiritual in nature, he “dreams” away the true spiritual world, he “sleeps” away his karma.

This development was necessary, as I have often told you, in order that the consciousness of freedom might arise. But humanity must now again emerge from its present condition of consciousness.

We have heard that what was a natural, albeit a dreamlike state of consciousness in olden times, namely knowledge of the super-sensible world and of karma, gradually grew dim and then became Mystery-teaching, while in the modern age of materialism it has been entirely lost. But in this age the possibility must again be found of building a bridge to consciousness both of the super-sensible world and of karma.

This means, in other words: When we picture to ourselves how in olden times at early dawn, the spirit-beings with whom man lived from falling asleep to awakening hid themselves in trees and clouds, in mountains and rocks, so that in the day man could say to himself when he saw a tree or a rock or a spring: “A spirit has been enchanted into it, a spirit with whom I was together during my sleep-consciousness”—so now, by accepting the new Initiation-Science, we must learn in our present day-consciousness to recognise the spirit and as we look at every rock or tree or cloud or star, or sun or moon, to recognise the spiritual beings in all their diversity.

We must set out on the path that leads to this. We must prepare for the time when it shall be even so. As truly as a man of olden time, on awakening, saw the spirit-beings with whom he had lived during the night steal into the trees and rocks, so truly for modern man shall the spirit-beings steal forth again from tree and rock and spring!

It can really happen, and in this way. A man can lay aside the standpoint of ordinary prejudice in which he has been living, into which even children in the kindergarten are led to-day; he can put aside the prejudices that make him imagine he cannot with healthy human understanding see into the spiritual world. And when the Initiate comes and tells of things of the spiritual world and of events that happen there, then, although he cannot yet himself see, nevertheless by making use of his unprejudiced human understanding, he can be enlightened by the communications that are given concerning the spiritual worlds. This is indeed, and under all circumstances, the right first step for each one to-day.

But difficulties are always cropping up ... Last year, after one of my lectures on how to attain knowledge of the spiritual worlds, a well-meaning paragraph appeared in a newspaper of some standing. We can really call it “well-meaning” and even “respectable” as compared with many vehement expressions of opposition to Anthroposophy to-day! In this lecture I had pointed out that there is no need to become clairvoyant in order to have knowledge of the spiritual world, but that when the seer imparts the knowledge it can be received and understood by the healthy human intellect. I had emphasised this very strongly. The man who wrote the paragraph said in all good faith: “Steiner wants to apply the healthy human intellect to knowledge of the super-sensible world. But so long as the human intellect remains healthy it can certainly know nothing of a super-sensible world; as soon as it does, it is no longer healthy.” I think I have never heard it put so honestly before! For it is after all what everyone is bound to say if he denies to the healthy human intellect a knowledge of the super-sensible world, and if he speaks in the usual way of the boundaries of knowledge. Either he must give up the present point of view, or he must agree with this assertion; no other way is really honest.

A modern Initiate can speak from clear and conscious knowledge of how from every star a spirit-being is released, of how other spirit-beings are released from plants. They come forward to meet us as soon as we pass beyond external sense-observation. Every time we go out into nature we may see all around where nature begins to be a little elemental, kobold-like elementary beings coming out of their stony shelters; if we become friendly with them, especially with the elementary beings of the mineral world, we can see behind them higher Beings who finally lead up to the First Hierarchy, to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

It is a fact that if the exercises given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment are practised regularly with strong inner energy, selflessness and devotion, they will lead—provided we have the necessary courage—to a new power of perception. We become able to see, for instance, in certain strata of the mountains, whole worlds of elemental beings lying hidden in rock and stone. They come forth on every side, they steal out, they grow big—and we discover that they have only been as it were rolled up and packed tight into these fragments of the elementary world. Beings are present in the mineral kingdom of nature, especially where the earth begins to grow green, and feels so fresh that we can scent its aroma and the aroma of the plants that cover it. But when we enter this sphere of elemental beings, we find that they can indeed inspire us with fear. For the beings we thus encounter are incredibly clever. We must be humble enough to say to ourselves, when we see these little dwarf-like beings emerging from the objects of nature: “How stupid man is! and how clever is this elemental world!” And because many do not like to say this in earnest, do not like even to admit that judged by spiritual perception a little new-born child is much wiser than a learned scholar, therefore these elementary beings withdraw from man's vision. If however we can discern them, the horizon is widened and the foreground opened up to us by these clever, playful little sprites leads away into a background that reaches right up to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

Thus by means of the exercises to which I referred, a man whose consciousness has been made clear and quick by the study of what humanity has learned through modern natural science, can enter this world of elemental beings, and thence a higher world. If by a loving surrender to nature we thus acquire a consciousness that is not “sicklied o'er” by the authority-ridden knowledge that holds the ground to-day, we may gradually rise through Initiation-knowledge to that knowledge which humanity has lost.

And he who eventually attains the faculty to see the tree-spirits come forth from the trees—the same that the ancients saw stealing away in the dawn, and darting out again in the evening twilight—he will also be able, as he approaches a human being, to see emerge from him the figures of his earlier lives together with the evolution of his karma. For this kind of vision leads on to a vision of karma.

In the mineral world, where at first we perceive the clever, mischievous little dwarfs, the vision leads us to the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones.

In the plant world, the vision leads us to the Exusiai, Dynamis and Kyriotetes.

In the animal world (when we see emerge from the animals their own spiritual beings) we are led to a vision of the Archai, Archangels and Angels.

And in the human kingdom the vision leads to karma.

Behind the manifestations of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, behind all the other Beings of the higher Hierarchies, behind all the elemental nature-spirits who startle us by their cleverness when they dart forth from the minerals, or who come to meet us with their gentle importunities from the plant world, behind all that comes from the animals—fierce, passionate and violent as that may be at times, and also icy cold—behind all that stands here so to speak as a foreground, we face the overwhelming, the sublime manifestations of karma. For behind all the mysteries of the world there lies, in truth, the great mystery of human karma.

Having thus prepared our hearts and minds in the right way, we shall pass on in the remaining lectures to speak of particular facts of karma.

From within our work in the Anthroposophical movement we look forward into the future of humanity and we let our souls and hearts be permeated with that which we believe will embody itself in the streams of evolution and in the forces of evolution of the future of humanity. When we contemplate the great truths of existence, when we look up to the Forces, Powers and Beings who reveal themselves to us in the spiritual worlds as the cause and foundation of all that meets us in the sense-world, here also we rejoice to know that the truths which we bring down from the spiritual worlds will and must be gradually realised more and more in the souls and hearts of the men of the future. Thus for the greater part of the year our spiritual gaze is directed either to the immediate present or the future.

All the more do we feel ourselves impelled on the special days of the year—on the Festivals which come through to us from time and its changes as set reminders of that which earlier humanity imagined and devised—on these feast days we feel ourselves impelled to realise our union with this earlier humanity, to sink ourselves a little into that which led men of past time out of fulness of heart and soul to place these sign-marks in the course of time which come down to us as the ‘Festivals of the year.’ If the Easter Festival is such as to awaken in us, when we understand it, thoughts of human powers and of the power of overcoming all the lower through the higher, everything externally physical through the spiritual, if the Easter Festival is a festival of resurrection, of awaking, a festival of hope and confidence in the spiritual forces which can be awakened in the human soul; so, on the other hand, the Christmas Festival is a festival of the realisation of harmony with the whole cosmos, a festival of the realisation of Grace. It is a festival that can again and again bring home the thought: No matter how doubtful everything around us may appear, however much the bitterest doubts may enter into faith, however much the worst disappointments may mingle with the most aspiring hopes, however much all that is good around us in life may totter, there is something in human nature and essence—this the rightly understood thought of the Christmas Festival may say—that only needs to be brought vitally, spiritually, before the soul, which reveals to us perpetually that we are descended from the powers of good, from the forces of right, from the forces of the true. The Easter thought points us to our victorious forces in the future—the Christmas thought points us, in a certain sense, to the origin of man in the primeval past.

In such a case one can clearly see, how the unconscious or subconscious reason or spirituality of man stands far, far higher than man with his consciousness can wholly compass. We have often reason to admire that which men have established in the past out of the hidden depths of the soul more than that which they have established out of their intellectual thoughts and understanding. How infinitely wise it appears to us, when we open the calendar, and for the 25th December we find registered the Birth-Festival of Christ Jesus, and then we see registered in the calender for the 24th December ‘Adam and Eve.’ It may be said: How clearly reasonable and spiritual it appears that out of the dim subconscious work of the Middle Ages, when Christmas plays were performed here or there about Christmas time by people from different places, when the ‘singers’ as they were called gathered for their Christmas plays, that the Paradise Tree should be brought forward. As in the calender ‘Adam and Eve’ appeared before the Christ Birthday Festival, so in the Christmas plays of the Middle Ages, the Tree of Paradise was brought forward by the troupe which took part in the performance of the Christmas plays. In short, there was something in the deep hidden soul-depths of men which caused them to place directly together the earthly beginning of humanity and the Jesus Birth Festival. In the year 353, even in ecclesiastical Rome, the 25th December was not kept as the Festival of the Birthday of Jesus. Only in 354 the Jesus Birthday Festival was celebrated for the first time in ecclesiastical Rome. Previous to this, there was a festival which brought to men a consciousness similar to the Jesus Birth Festival, namely, the 6th January, the day of remembrance of the Baptism by John in Jordan, the day which was commemorative of the Descent of the Christ from the spiritual heights, and the Self-immersion of the Christ into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. That was originally the Birth of the Christ in Jesus, the remembrance of the great historical moment which is symbolically presented to us as the hovering dove over the head of Jesus of Nazareth. The 6th January was the commemorative day of the birth of the Christ in Jesus of Nazareth. In the fourth century, however, it had for a long time been impossible for the self-assertive materialistic philosophy of the West to understand the penetration of Jesus with the Christ. Like a powerful fight this thought with instantaneous illumination was present to the Gnostics, who were in a certain respect contemporaries or direct followers of the Event of Golgotha. They were in the position of finding it unnecessary to seek the depth of this wisdom of the ‘Christ’ in ‘Jesus’ as we have to seek this wisdom again through modern clairvoyance. The Gnostics were able, by means of the last flickering of those old, original human clairvoyant powers to see, as it were, in the light of grace that which we must acquire again for ourselves concerning the great secrets of Golgotha. Much was clear to the Gnostics which we have to acquire again, for example, in particular, the secret of the birth of Christ in Jesus at the Baptism by John in Jordan.

Just as the old clairvoyance faded away for humanity generally, so did also the peculiar kindling of the highest clairvoyant power, of the highest Christmas light of humanity, which the Gnostics possessed. In the fourth century Western Christianity was no longer able to understand this great thought. Hence in the fourth century the true meaning of the Festival of the appearing of the Christ in Jesus was lost to Western civilisation. Man had forgotten what this ‘Festival of the Appearing’ of the 6th January actually meant. They had for a time—yes, right into our time, buried under much materialistic intellectual rubbish what indeed would not allow itself to be destroyed, the feeling toward the Christ-Figure in human evolution. If man could not understand that One Most High, as compared with humanity, had manifested Himself in the Baptism by John in Jordan, yet he could understand,—for that did not contradict materialistic knowledge,—that that bodily organism which was selected for the reception of the Christ was something significant. Hence they put back the Spirit-birth, which indeed took place in the John-Baptism in Jordan, to the Child-birth of Jesus of Nazareth, and set the ‘Jesus-Birth-Festival’ in place of the ‘Festival of the Appearing.’ To represent quite rightly and in detail, that which became the Christmas Festival of humanity always aroused significant feelings, high exalted feelings. Something significant lived in the human soul at the approach of Christmas, which may be expressed as follows: If man contemplates the world in the right sense, he can, by belief in humanity, fortify himself against certain things, against all life’s dangers and blows of fate; in the feeling of love and peace man can fortify himself in his deepest soul against all disharmony and strife of life. This is something which becomes ever more clearly bound up with the Christmas Festival. For what was it actually of which man reminded himself? From our anthroposophical point of view let us look at what man remembered.

We know what significant, real and powerful preparations human evolution had to go through in order that the Mystery of Golgotha could enter this human evolution. The human being who was the reincarnated Zarathustra, had to be born as one of the two Jesus children. He also had to be born for whom the real Jesus-Birth-Festival was the commemorative festival; he had to be born whose soul-substance had remained in the spiritual worlds. So long as humanity went through all that was possible within heredity through the generations up to the Mystery of Golgotha—for all other human souls had gone through the generations—so long had man been taking up the destroying forces that crept right into the blood. One single soul substance had remained behind in the spiritual worlds, guarded by the purest Mysteries and Mystery-centres, and then it was poured out into humanity as the soul of the second Jesus-child, the child of the Luke Gospel, that Jesus-child to whose birth all the commemorations and representations of the Christ-Festival, of Christmas, belong. At Christmas-time men’s thoughts went back to the origin of humanity, to the human soul, which had not yet descended, not even into Adam’s nature. They would say: In Bethlehem, in Palestine was born that soul-substance which had not taken part in the descent of humanity, but had remained behind, and for the first time in fact entered into a human body, in incarnating in the Jesus described by Luke. The human soul, when its thought is directed to the fact, may feel: One can believe in humanity, one can have faith in humanity; however much conflict, however much disbelief, however much disharmony has entered into it—and they have entered into all that has flowed into humanity from the time of Adam to the present—when one looks back on that which in olden times was called ‘Adam Kadmon,’ which became later the ‘Christ’ conception, there was kindled in the human soul confidence in the soundness of human force, and there was kindled confidence in the primeval peace-and-love nature of humanity. Hence the subconscious soul of man drew together the Jesus-birth Festival and the Adam and Eve Festival because man saw in fact his own nature in the Christ Child that was born, but his own nature in its innocence, in its purity.

Why then was the Divine Child placed before humanity for hundreds and thousands of years as the highest there was for the human soul to revere? For the reason that when man looks at a child and sees the child not yet able to say ‘I’ to himself, he can know that the child is still working on the human body, the Temple of the Eternally Divine, and because the human child who cannot yet say ‘I’ nevertheless clearly shows the sign of his origin from the spiritual world. Through this contemplation of the child nature man learns to have full trust in human nature. Here, where he can most easily foregather, when the sun shines least and warms the earth least, when he is not busied with the ordering of his outer affairs, here, when the days are shortest and the nights longest, when the earth gives him the best opportunity to foregather and to enter into himself, when all outer brightness, all outer beauty withdraws for a while from the outward view—here, the Western civilisation places the Birth-Festival of the Divine Child, that is, of the Human Being who enters the world pure and unsullied—and through the innocent entrance into the world can give to man at the time of his closest assembling with others, the strongest, the highest confidence through the knowledge of his divine origin.

To the anthroposophist it is a confirmation of the great truth that one can learn most from the child, when one sees that a festival of a child’s birth is placed in the course of time as a great significant festival of confidence in human evolution. So we admire the subconscious, the spiritual reason of the men of the past, who have placed such sign posts in the path of time. We feel then like those who decipher wonderful hieroglyphs, produced by the men of old through the placing of such festivals in the writing of the times and we feel one with these men of old. Whilst at other times our look is directed towards the future, whilst at other times we are willing to place our best powers at the disposal of the future, to strengthen and increase all faith in the future, here, on such festival days, we seek just to live in remembrance, to draw towards us as though incarnated the old thoughts teaching us at the present time that we can think truly in our way of what lies in the spiritual at the foundation of the external world; but that in earlier times—in a different way, it is true, but not less right, not less magnificent and significant—the True and Sublime was thought and experienced through the realisation of the oneness of humanity and the high possibilities that then lay ahead of humanity. This is our anthroposophical ideal, to be able to feel one with that which the men of old produced—often from the most hidden depths of the soul. These festivals, particularly the great ones, encourage this, if we can only through the anthroposophical truths imprint in our souls the significance of the hieroglyphic signs written in the path of time.

A wonderful thought unites with a wonderful emotion in our souls when we see how, in those centuries which followed the fourth which first transferred the Jesus-Birth Festival to the 25th of December, how there here flows into the souls of those men the feeling of confidence awakened through the child-nature, so that in painting, in the Christmas plays, everywhere, is shown how all the creatures of the Earth-kingdom bow before the Jesus-Child, before the Divine Child, before the divine origin of man. There comes before us the wonderful picture of the manger, how the beasts bow before this primal man; to these may be added those wonderful stories, as for instance that when Mary had taken the Child Jesus on the way to Egypt, a tree bowed itself, a very ancient tree, as the border was crossed by Mary with the child. Traditionally the legends of almost the whole of Europe relate that the trees in a remarkable way, in the Holy Night, bow to this great event. We could go to Alsace, to Bavaria, everywhere we find legends, how certain trees bear fruit in the Holy Night. All wonderful symbols which proclaim in fact how the birth of the Jesus-Child reveals itself as something which is connected with the whole life of the earth. When we recollect what we have so often said—that the ancient spiritual streams were given by the Gods to mankind, and how in ancient times men had clairvoyant insight into the divine spiritual world, how this clairvoyance gradually vanished from humanity in order that men might be able to come to the gaining of the ego—if we picture how here, in the whole human organisation something like a drying-up, a withering, of the old divine forces is taking place, and how through the Christ-Impulse which came through the Mystery of Golgotha there is a flooding of the withering divine forces with new water of life; then there appears to us in a wonderful picture what the Christmas legends relate to us, how the dried up and withered roses of Jericho shoot up of themselves in the Holy Night. That is a legend which we find everywhere noted down in the Middle Ages, that the roses of Jericho blossom in the Christ-night and unfold, because they first unfolded under the footsteps of Mary, who, when she carried the Child Jesus on the journey to Egypt, stepped over a place where a rose tree was growing. A wonderful symbol of what happened to human divine powers, that even things so dry and lifeless as that which one usually finds on the wayside, as the roses which apparently are dead, can spring up again and shoot forth through the Christ-Impulse which entered into the time evolution.

That to man was first given in reality what was destined from the beginning is expressed in the Jesus-Birth Festival, in the festival of the Birth of the Jesus infant. Before Adam and Eve existed, that was destined for humanity—so the Christmas legend says—which yet lies in the quite unspoilt divine child-nature of man. In truth however—and really on account of the influence of Lucifer—man has only been able to attain it after the whole period of time from Adam and Eve to the Mystery of Golgotha.

A deep emotion awakens in our souls when we take for our meditation a feeling, compressed into the one night of the 24th and 25th December, of what mankind has become from Adam and Eve to the birth of Christ in Jesus, through the Luciferic powers. If we can realise that, we shall really grasp the significance of this Festival, and realise the goal before humanity. It is as though humanity, if it would use its opportunity and take these sign posts of time as material for meditation, could really become aware of its pure origin in the cosmic forces of the universe. Here, looking up into the cosmic forces of the universe and penetrating a little by means of Anthroposophy, through the true spiritual wisdom into the secrets of the universe, humanity can first become ripe to understand this, that what as the Christ-Birth Festival was once understood by the Gnostics, was in fact the festival celebrated on January 6th, the Festival of the Birth of Christ in the body of Jesus of Nazareth, as a higher stage of the Birth-Festival of Jesus. To enable us to plunge into the twelve great Forces of the universe, the twelve Holy Nights are set between the Christmas Festival and the festival which should be celebrated on the sixth of January, which now is the festival of the Three Holy Kings, and which in fact is the festival we have been speaking about.

Again, without man’s really knowing it in present knowledge, these twelve Holy Nights are established out of the hidden wise depths of the soul of mankind, as though they would say: ‘Realise the depths of the Christmas Festival, but sink during the twelve Holy Nights into the holiest secrets of the cosmos, that is, in the realms of the universe out of which Christ descended to the Earth.’ Only when mankind wills to be inspired through the thought of the holy childlike divine origin of man, to let himself be inspired by the wisdom that works through the twelve forces, through the twelve holy forces of the universe, symbolically presented in the twelve signs of the Zodiac, due in truth to spiritual wisdom—only when mankind sinks into true spiritual wisdom and learns to discern the course of time in the great cosmos and in the single human being, only then will the mankind of the future, fructified through Spiritual Science, find to its own salvation the inspiration which can come from the Jesus-Birth Festival so that thoughts for the future may be permeated with fullest confidence and richest hopes.

Thus we may as anthroposophists allow the Christmas Festival to work on our souls as an inspiration festival, as a festival that brings the thought of human origin in the holy divine primeval human child so wonderfully before our souls. That light which appears to us in the Holy Night as the symbol of the Light of humanity at its source, that Light which is symbolically presented to us later in the lights of the Christmas-tree, rightly understood, is the Light that can give to our striving souls the best and strongest forces for our true real world-peace, for the true blessedness and real hope for the world.

Let us feel ourselves strengthened for the needs of the-future by such thoughts on the facts of the past, on the establishing of the festivals in the past; Christmas thoughts, remembrance thoughts on the origin of humanity, thoughts well-rooted which will unfold themselves to real, to most mighty soul-plants for the true future of humanity.

When one hears a Madonna or a goddess speaking from the stage today, one can hardly believe one's ears. Not the slightest attempt is made to free language from the triviality of everyday life; nor is there the slightest attempt to use language to soar to a higher sphere. Every path to the spirit is barred to the stage of today; nowhere does access open to these strange, closed worlds; not even the most modest. One does not even strive to let something of the background from which unearthly figures emerge show through in the language. Real spirituality is a lost concept. A washerwoman at her trough could speak just as these Madonnas do, who are placed on pedestals in many miracle plays – devoid of all divine-spiritual content. Language is so uncultivated, so rough and prosaic, that it hurts, it offends. This is not meant to be disparaging in any way about the way the washerwoman speaks; it is justified in her case. Her difficult profession makes it necessary for her voice to become rough and hard, and her struggle with the material world must make her coarse if she does not have a counterweight in anthroposophy or religion. But the Madonna in the heavenly realms does not need to pursue such a hard physical occupation there. She should still have some atmosphere about her when she stands on the stage pedestal; some radiance, some transparency, some spirituality should resonate in her voice. The speakers should know how to make a voice sound detached and floating from afar. The figure that is presented to us is a symbol of something that reaches up to heaven and brings us its gifts from there, radiating light and spherical tones into us.

And then - the heavenly hosts! Have you ever heard them speak on stage or behind the scenes? Goethe's archangel, for example, and “the Lord”?.. Any couch potato could speak like that and any business traveler. Dry, sober, business-like, very matter-of-fact... But spiritual backgrounds, spheres of spheres, aeon steps... they are missing. “The sun sounds in the brotherly spheres of the ancient way of singing...” there is not much left of that.

But that is what must be sought, striven for, conquered today. Step by step one must feel, hear and sense one's way to it - constantly struggling and never being satisfied - until one breaks through intellectualistic boundaries, clears obstacles of matter out of the way, overcomes narrowness and finds oneself outside, liberated and redeemed. Those who are happy “to find earthworms” do not go beyond themselves, do not discover that they are also an “air man” who dominates the physical man and can use him without being chained to him. He does not find the healing power of the word, the momentum, the luminosity that allows him to grasp the core of his being and carry him over to where he came from. On the wings of the word, he can again seek out the paths that he senses when he places himself back in the word's original powers. I, living breath, center of divinity... that is where the word can lead him back.

And let us look around us in the realms of denser spirituality, which poetry wants to open up to us, in the world of the elements, for example. What keys are given to us today through art, this child of the gods, to open up those realms to us? None at all. Reason and temperament should suffice for everything. One blunders along without having an inkling of the wise mastery of the means of art through the knowledge of our human organization, of the laws that are revelations of divine-creative artistic power, of which man and the earth are the representatives for us. Should we not at last seek to trace the paths the gods have used to create works of art in their own image, and then breathe life into them? Let us enter these paths with our groping consciousness, softly at first and reverently, and let us begin to trace the living breath that gives us the reason for our existence, here as there. When we penetrate into the word - into its essence, we enter these paths. Could there be a more glorious task?

But one must begin with spelling, with the basic elements: the sounds. Not with the pressing forces of our one-sided personality. I saw Shakespeare's “Tempest” on a large stage in Germany. There was no sense of the spirituality of the elements. There was a lot of noise, temper and shouting. The Caliban scenes were extended and exaggerated in a realistic way, far beyond the limits that Shakespeare assigned to them. And Ariel? There was no airiness or lightness of being. A heavy, strong, robust voice, a stocky figure, lots of jumping and shouting. The heaviness of the squat little body was not alleviated by those jumps; the shaggy, disheveled head was the opposite of radiant. Ariel! Is there not a lightness in this word, a radiance, a flying, ringing, floating, airy bliss? Soon after, I saw the same actress as Salome in Hebbel's “Herod and Mariamne.” Then I realized that she had talent because her physique supported her in this role. The dark, heavy voice, the hard, lurking look, the stocky figure, heavily inclined towards the earth – she became the most interesting figure in Hebbel's colorfully heavy play, this ominous Salome-Herodias, while Mariamne was too consciously cool, powerfully intelligent and feminist. Maccabees? Oh no, she is very northern German in character.

When will the actors find the way out of their one-sided minds to the sources that open up the epochs, the races, the elements and the spiritual world to them? They will wither away if they do not find these ways. Nerves driven to the extreme snap, consumption is not interesting for long and in any case not productive; when it becomes fashionable and a mannerism, it is repulsive. There are already more and more voices saying that theater will have to abdicate before film.

I once saw a performance of Iphigenia. It was an event for me; it had something fateful about it, because it could not go on like this; this had been taken to the extreme and had to break. It had to break where the driving forces behind these excesses are and the counterforces are called upon. I do not want to talk so much about Iphigenia herself; she was just terribly boring and banal and expressed the blasé and dull emptiness of the hollowed-out salon lady, who has nothing else to do but walk up and down in her park and be bothered by the one boring suitor. I do not want to dwell on the boxer figure of this admirer either, although with his drooping, naked, muscular arms and his bare bull's neck, he wanted to say, as it were: “Now take my measurements, you won't find a more capable guy...” I also don't remember that anything else would have been said from his words, in any case nothing royal. But Orestes! This Orestes!

It was clear that only one thought had inspired him: to be different from all Orestes that had existed before – and to excel in the trivial. Because – isn't it true that when you're a tramp, you just happen to have copper-red skin, a wild, unkempt shock of hair that's an indefinable color of dust, and a hoarse and flat and tinny voice... Orest is also possessed, and you construct from the intellect what it's like to be possessed: the thoughts are tearing - aren't they - the nerves are aching, you are nervous, you don't want to be touched; everything is disgusting... Such a sophisticated realistic mental image is as true from the inside out as a billiard ball would be if it spoke; from the outside, it looks like a neglected tramp, the kind you might meet on some country road in Russia... But wait, such a thought could have an inspiring effect: Tauris Krim - Russia - obsessed tramps... that provides analogies. Today, one hardly takes a much broader view. In contrast, Tantalus, the Greek hero... that is outdated, has been done too often. And iambic pentameter, the metrical measure... the noble cadence of language... long outdated.

We were told how Maximilian Harden's journalistic cartographies had begun with the editor of the Monday edition of the “Berliner Tageblatt” having a number of young people as his employees, to whom he said: “You do nothing all week but sit in the coffee houses and read all the newspapers you can get hold of, and then you have to write me an article for Monday that is different from anything you have read on the same subject.” — It is said that this best describes Maximilian Harden.

If something similar was the driving motive for that Orest actor, then one would have an explanation for his bizarre and inartistic idea, otherwise not. Although his novelty consisted only in taking to the extreme what had already been achieved in naturalistic intellectualism and in applying a realistically nervous obsession with reduction to a pinnacle of German intellectual achievement. The noblest, most flawless, most perfect creation of German literary art: Goethe's “Iphigenia” in its Roman version, this work was trampled, quite ruthlessly and brutally; and anyone who felt sympathy for such a thing felt trampled along with it. One emerged from such a performance laden with responsibility; for here it was a matter of saving the highest spiritual values.

Around this time, our destiny shaper left us, and he also showed art the new paths to healing. He spanned the shimmering arc over the abyss of modern spiritlessness to the beyond; he built and formed and ignited and sprayed, leaving his work to us in a thousand and one precious stones. In full awareness of our responsibility, we now gather together these gems of his spiritual heritage.

They will continue to bless and ennoble people for thousands of years, and today they will serve us like the magic key that opens closed doors, revives the dead, heals the sick, atones for evil - if we are of good will. All these scattered gems can become a magic key – even if they are still as fragmented as they appear to our eyes in these highly inadequate transcripts of three magnificent lectures. For seven years they have been there, unexcavated for a larger public, because the shortcomings of the transcript were too obvious. And yet there is still so much of the richness left that a rebirth of the theater is possible on this soil.

Every spoken word must be taken in its full value and in its context, and a basis for understanding must be created through the will to gain an overall knowledge of the human and divine world. Rudolf Steiner calls the guidelines he has given us here. He has opened up worlds for us with them.

These lectures can be signposts to those subtler areas of art to which access has been lost today, buried by materialism. The intimacies of the soul life, secrets of the human organization in their connections with the secrets of the cosmos, form the basis for these reflections, which seek to be nothing more than starting points for further penetration through constant work and inner experience. They are only outlined here because of the limited space available; but they are intended to inspire and awaken and can call forth the artist's powers to independent life. They were given as part of a whole complex of lectures that had one goal: to lead out of the destructive forces of our time into new light and to recovery! This was Rudolf Steiner's deed, and even if hostile forces might think that with the paralysis of his public activity, with the burning of the Goetheanum, with his physical death, the work of his life has been stopped or even destroyed, they are mistaken, because the future-saving seeds are there and are working everywhere, even if the outer form breaks.

Preparing and building this future required tireless work, the strength of a superhuman and the sealing through sacrifice. In the midst of a restless working life, one of the highlights of Rudolf Steiner's work was the opening of the Goetheanum as a School of Spiritual Science. It was a time of upheaval and social turmoil, of economic collapse. Even though the artistic works were not all completed, the building could be handed over to its purpose, the work to its goals. For three years, the building served this work: the renewal of humanity in the spirit. Then it burnt down on New Year's Eve. The dignity of the celebration was given to the act of destruction; the greatness of the annual cycle to the historical event. Thus the building was sealed into the cosmos and the course of time when it was snatched from earthly activity.

These lectures form part of the university courses, which could not be absent from the opening ceremony, because they were more than an integral part. For Steiner, the word was the basis of all that is happening. The word was the starting point and center and goal of all becoming and all unsealing. But Rudolf Steiner did not use big words only veiled in mystery; he led to them through recognition and through grasping. What he opened up became perception, became conscious comprehension and action. One was allowed to climb the first rungs of the ladder under his guidance. Then he handed us over to freedom. His word in us was to become daring and deed.

Art was never absent from the events that originated with Rudolf Steiner. We were to approach it with insight, to bring it to fruition with reverence, and to remember its origin. It was an essential component of cosmic worship; it originated in the threefold logos; at the altars of truth, beauty and strength, it served and sacrificed. It has preserved its divine connection for the longest time, through the rationalist ages. In the age of triviality, its divine childhood sank into the physical; the victory of mechanics tore it away from its spiritual sources and chained it to the machine.

It must be redeemed again. The aim of the House of Language – as Rudolf Steiner called the Goetheanum – was to lead art, science and religion out of the separation into which they had fallen and back to their original unity. In the spiritual deepening and mutual fertilization of art, science and religion, Rudolf Steiner saw a remedy that could effectively intervene in the social life of humanity, so that barbarism could be avoided and, instead of the already scientifically proven twilight of European culture arising out of need, misery and error, a new dawn could arise.

The deeply moving words in which he expresses this aspiration clearly show the important role he ascribes to spiritualized art in the reconstruction of higher human culture, and should therefore appear in this book together with the lectures on the arts of oratory.

The house that served these purposes, offering a warm welcome to every guest in free openness, no longer stands. In its place rises a castle-like building made of the austere material of our time, concrete. His creator, who has since passed away, breathed life into it; this ennobles it and gives it its significance. The mystery plays, Rudolf Steiner's dramatic creations, are to be performed there. These place the human being back into his spiritual-cosmic context, make him a citizen of the world, and explain his present personality from his previous earthly lives. Through these dramas, humanity will be able to learn to recognize itself, to experience itself and to renew itself. There, above all, eurythmy is to be cultivated, that art which Rudolf Steiner placed as a new art in the series of the older arts that preceded it, the outer visible moving form of language, which imperatively and compellingly demands the renewal of the art of language, of the artistically spoken word. Rudolf Steiner called for an orchestral interaction between the spoken word and the eurythmic gesture, and this had to be achieved in practice. When what we were doing met his requirements, he gave us an understanding of what we were doing, shone a light into the secrets of the art of speech and poetry, and thus released us from the unbearable.

We are under no illusion that the world will yet show much understanding for this endeavor. We would even understand if some honest seekers were to throw this book aside in the first instance, in desperation and despair. A transformation of consciousness is necessary to tread this path, and one has indeed wanted to keep art away from the penetration of consciousness. Only a consciousness that sees, hears and wills leads us today to true artistic experience and snatches poetic language from the abstract intellectualization and mechanization to which it has already fallen.

If we have become accustomed to accepting what is offered in this direction from the stage, we have no idea what can be suffered when the noblest works of poetry are presented to us in such a mutilated, mistreated, and desecrated state, as happens all too often today.

It is as if the gods were turning away in anger from what we have done with their gifts. They have given us everything, withholding nothing; works have been created of incredible height and purity and formal perfection; the German language has become a tool of the subtlest power and suppleness, to grasp the vastness and depth of being and to unlock the inner being... It is still versatile and pliable and capable of growing beyond itself, thus carrying humanity forward... But those who lead it to this destiny, purposefully and unwaveringly, will be stoned.

Those who trivialize and sensationalize it, on the other hand, are considered masters.

The possibilities of the German language in the contouring and transcendence of its conceptual formulations are matched in another way by the plasticity and permeability of its phonetic elements. It is not musical in the usual sense, not on the surface – you you have to have an inner ear for it – but it has so many shades, lights, veils, brightenings and flashes that with its help you can repeatedly push through the boundaries of meaning: from the other side, from over there, it sounds through its umlauts, its diphthongs, whispers in the consonant connections, sounds in the flowing swings of its sentence structure. One has no inkling of the artistic experience that language can be until one has learned to listen from within, until the spiritual and intellectual resonance has been transformed into the formation of the 'sound, into the flight of movement.

Today's world is a realization of the intellectual; it does not go beyond the mechanical-mathematical; it does not find the way into the imaginative, into the formation of legends. One no longer manages to form images because one has become an intellectual abstraction. It is much easier to think cleverly than to create picturesquely, because the intellectual emanates from the personal, and artistic creation requires much more selflessness. It submerges into the object instead of imagining it, letting itself be carried away by it instead of holding on to it. We lose our real connection with the world, we deprive people of the immortal by living in intellectualism. Pictorial design not only works on the intellectual, but on the whole person; it goes into much deeper layers of the soul life than conceptual thinking. By trying to speak in pictures, what is atomized by studying the subject matter is synthesized again. It is moved up into the sphere of the imagination, where it is vividly dissolved and musically inspired. In this way it approaches what is eternal in the soul, what stands behind the intellectual. Through speech inspired by the imagination, we lead people to the substantial content of the word, to the supersensible, to the creative word that streams out of the supersensible. Immortal soul life is awakened when we speak from the image, from the artistic; immortal soul life is conquered when we work from the intellectual.