The Rudolf Steiner Archive

We describe the features of the earth in accordance with the principles of physical geography. In the same way, the spiritual impulses at work on earth (and already briefly characterized in these lectures) can be described by a kind of spiritual geography—especially the interplay of Eastern and Western impulses in human life, with all their various differences. What I have to say today in this direction is bound to remain rather sketchy; but it is more important to find a specific point of view for looking at much that I have already outlined than to give a detailed description.

The relationship of East and West is often expressed symbolically by saying that light comes from the East. Looking at the East, Western man—the man of recent civilization in general—receives the impression of a dream-like spiritual life. Modern spiritual life is used to sharply delineated concepts, closely linked to external observation; in contrast, the notions of the Orient—shifting, fluctuating, less closely and less sharply linked to externals—show up as dream-like. Admittedly, from this dream-like spiritual life, embodied in the most splendid poems, the Vedas, there did of course then develop the clear-cut concepts of a comprehensive philosophy—Vedanta, for example. These concepts were not gained by examining external data, that is analytically, but emerged from an inwardly experienced and apprehended spiritual life.

When this dream-like spiritual life works on us, however, and we lovingly submit to it without at first noticing how much it differs from our own, it has a curious effect. Once we allow its various configurations to affect our soul, we cannot stop there. We cannot merely take over its concepts and ideas. In absorbing them, whether from the literature or the philosophy (including such forms of these as have survived in the East down to the present), we feel a spiritual need to go beyond these images, ideas and concepts. When an Oriental idea, such as that of man's relation to the secrets and the mysterious workings of nature and the world, affects us, it is often accompanied in our mind by something that symbolizes it for the Orient too: the flower of the lotus, as it folds its petals about what must remain mysteriously hidden. We may immerse ourselves lovingly in shifting concepts that are more fitted gently to touch external phenomena and surround them with a mist, than to perceive them in sharp contours, and we may enter their intertwining branches; and if we do, there will inevitably appear to us all the intertwining, branching vegetation of the East and, with it, all that the human hand, the human spirit and civilization have produced from stone and other materials in line with these flowing, branching concepts. We may say: in immersing itself in these concepts, our soul inevitably sees before it a nature similar in its life, diversity and imaginative working to the soul's experience of the concepts themselves.

There appears to be no objective reason for man to abandon this Oriental spiritual activity in favour of a “faithful observation of nature;” indeed, it seems to me rather that there is in the Oriental concepts themselves an incentive not merely to accept them, but to apply them to the outside world. Europeans may feel that such things cannot be applied to the outside world, because of their vagueness, their (to them) fantastic character. If so, we may ask: How, then, can we track, with sharply delineated concepts, the shapes of clouds, fluctuating and rapidly changing as they are? Yet track them we must, if we wish to observe nature's workings in immediate revelation, as they appear to the human senses and the human soul.

Why is this so? It seems to me that there can be only one reason: that in what reaches us from this Eastern spiritual activity, there survives an element from which it was once directly created.

At the time when the Oriental was developing the finest part of his philosophy of life (which has since come down to his descendants in a partially decadent condition), the East created everything with devoted love. Love lives in each of its ideas, concepts and images and in them we perceive love. The love seeks to flow out into objects. And it flows out according to its nature, and conjures up before our soul the symbols that the Oriental established, with an inner understanding of much that functions supersensibly, in seeking to establish what he perceived as the spiritual dement in things. Of course, this is not to assert that this configuration of spirit, if extended over all the earth, would be an unmixed blessing for the development of the world. But once it has appeared on earth, and exerted its influence over other regions, it must be considered objectively, especially at a time when we need to foster understanding between men.

Against it, we may set the particular outlook that has developed, certainly with no less justification, but in a quite different form, further West—and in this respect we ourselves belong in many ways to the West. Here, we find, it is regarded as an ideal to stand back from what the senses observe directly, what extends in space and time, and to test what nature offers, and what should lead us to the world's secret, for position, motion, dimensions and weight. What presents itself directly to the eye is dissected and placed under a microscope, and gives rise to notions that could only emerge under a microscope.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are in the laboratory: how heavily equipped we are with these concepts, so remote from direct observation! Look how we regard the light flooding through the world! How we regard it by means of abstract concepts! We need them, if we are to reach understanding. But how remote are the observations we record on light and colour from what we encounter in wood and meadow, cloud-shape and sun! We may say: what we formulate in our sharply delineated concepts—with the balance, the measuring-rod, the most varied counting devices—takes us into some of nature's shallows and solves some riddles, but it does not take us to direct observation of nature. It is all very well to say: direct your attention to sensory observation and then try to derive your philosophy of life from it. But this is not what happens at all! The scientific view of life we establish is far removed from what the senses observe.

What we ought to say is this: if we establish our knowledge by using the equipment of learning with which we have harvested perhaps the finest fruits of present-day natural science, we shall have to retune our soul before we can approach nature again. If as botanists we have used the microscope extensively and learnt about cell-life, and formed concepts in the atomistic manner of today, we shall have to retune our soul before we can recapture a love of the immediate world of plants as it grows and flowers. If we have formed a scientific concept of the structure of animal and man, again we shall have to retune if we want to move on to direct observation of the animal's shape and actions, and to enjoy the way it plays in the meadow or turns its melancholy or unmoving gaze upon us or looks at us confidingly. Equally, we shall have to retune our soul to share in what the eye can see when it looks at the human shape, tracing its planes with an artistic eye. The Oriental has no retuning to do. Since what he called his science was shot through with love, it led him out to immediate observation. And this was a direct echo of what he experienced in his soul.

These are differences of temper in the attitude to life of East and West. And these different tempers multifariously combine in the man of the region between. In what we experience scientifically, artistically and religiously, there flows much of the temper I have just been characterizing as the one that comes to us from the Orient. In other respects again, we are moved by something of the way of experiencing the world kindled by that scientific attitude which the West has developed—by youthful science and knowledge, so to speak, as against the old-established ones of the East. And in every soul in the civilization that lies between, these two currents flow together. In the last analysis, the life that surrounds us in Europe is a fusion—and one whose component currents we really need to understand.

The contact between the tempers of East and West in our present spiritual life can be characterized in another way.

From what I have just said of the East, one thing is clear about the Oriental. In growing into his spiritual life, he experiences it as immediate reality; he bears it with him in his soul as the reality self-evident to him. External nature, and indeed the entire external world right up to the constellations, seems to him an echo which is, however, fundamentally the same as what he bears within him. Yet he cannot regard as reality what strikes him as an echo, what seems to him a reflection, as he can regard as reality what he experiences directly in his soul. He is closely linked with what he experiences in the spiritual sphere and can say “It is,” because he feels its existence as if it were his own, and in this way understands its mode of being. When he looks out at the reflection of this existence, he knows that it is not reality in the same sense. If he did not illuminate it with the light that streams from within him, it would be dumb and dark. And in becoming more and more aware of this, he arrives at a temper of soul that says: truth and reality reside in what the soul experiences directly. What is reflected to it from without is illusion, maya, incomplete reality, becoming reality only when it is touched by what must first reveal itself through the human soul.

Thus we see how the East developed the view that the spiritual world is reality, and the outside world, that of the senses, is semblance, the great illusion, maya. It would, however, be wrong to believe on this account that, in the pre-Buddhist period for example, the Oriental averted his glance completely from the outside world. He accepts) it, even if in a higher sense he must admit that in what extends in space and time he is dealing not with complete reality but with an illusion, the great non-being, maya. But this in turn gives a particular temper to the life of the soul in the East: the soul feels a close link with the spiritual world and sees, in all that exists in the external world of the senses, a replica of the original shape of the world as it exists in the spirit. And in the end this grows into the view that one's own human sensuous substance is a replica of a human being whose true existence is in the spiritual world. And here I would say: the Oriental, quite consistently, regards the world as made up of replicas of a spiritual world, just as he regards himself as a replica of what he was before he descended into the physical and sensuous world. From his standpoint, the view of man and the view of nature are in complete harmony.

This harmony is possible; though no longer consonant with our views, it does indeed express a truth, if somewhat one-sidedly, as we can see once again if, with the research methods of spiritual science, which I have been describing in the last few days, we ourselves take a look at this Oriental mode of knowledge.

As I have shown, by awakening powers dormant in the soul we can attain a view of the spiritual world that yet suits modern man; we can look once more into a spiritual world; and find this spiritual world unfolding before our “mind's eye” just as the physical and sensuous world unfolds before our physical eye. When we develop this vision, however, the spiritual world does not remain a mere pantheistic and nebulous embodiment of universal spirituality; it becomes just as concrete in its individual forms as the world of the senses in those of the realms of nature. There will then follow a view of man that I should now like to characterize.

Let us start with something familiar to us at every moment in our lives: an experience of the outside world. We have entered into this external experience through our sensory perception and perhaps also through setting our will in motion in some activity. We live in conjunction with the data of the outside world. For us, this is an immediate experience. In the last analysis, human existence on earth is composed of such experiences. From them, we retain thought-images, which become our memories. We can look back on our experiences through bearing within us faded, shadowy and, in fact, mental images of them.

Let us be quite honest with ourselves and consider whether, at any moment in life, our consciousness contains very much more than memories of external, factual, sensory experiences. Of course, many a nebulous mystic believes that he can summon up eternal things from the depths of his soul. If he looked more closely and could really test the structures he summons from his soul, he would discover that as a rule they are no more than transformed external perceptions. Within man, memories are not only faithfully preserved; they are also transformed in many ways, and man then fails to recognize them. He thinks that he is acting as a mystic and summoning something from the depths of his soul, when he has only called up from his memory a transformed external experience. Of course, we need only think of mathematical truths to realize that all kinds of mental structures do establish themselves in the life of the soul. But as a rule it is not these structures that the mystic seeks.

However, anyone who simply wishes to accept the everyday life of the soul, as it appears in ordinary consciousness, must say: This life is made up of images that are the remains of our experiences gained-through perceptions, and of other experiences within the external sensuous world. When we look at our soul and at the spiritual element that permeates it, as we have it in physical life on earth, we can therefore say: outside is the physical world extending in space, the world that unfolds its causes and effects in time, the world, that is, of facts. Here within is the world of shadows in the soul; we do indeed experience it in general as something spiritual and vital, but its content we experience only as a replica of the world of facts and of the senses. Now, paradoxical as the outlook of today may find it, for the attitude that I have been expounding in the last few days, the reverse comes about: in empty consciousness, as a result of meditation, the spiritual in the world, the spiritual within natural phenomena, is really experienced; it is observed also as the soul-spiritual element in man himself, as he is before he descends into his physical existence from a spiritual world; the spiritual is observed concretely by the spirit-organ we have developed; the world about us becomes spiritual, just as to our senses it is sensuous and physical. And when all this happens, we begin to perceive—as if in recollection of the times when we lived as spiritual beings in purely spiritual worlds—how in its particulars our physical organism is a replica of the spiritual world that surrounds us. With physiology and anatomy we can observe our lungs, heart and other organs only as outer objects; but when we can see the spiritual world about us, then the lungs and heart as they really are within us will become for us a replica in the physical sphere of what is spiritually prefigured. Just as in our ordinary consciousness the world outside is physical, and our soul creates replicas as its experiences; so now we learn that there is a spiritual world outside and that the replicas of this spiritual world exist in our own organs. We come to know man's structure only in coming to know the spiritual world. What is usually called matter then ceases to have the significance it has assumed in recent civilization, just as spirit ceases to have the significance of something abstract that it has had in recent civilization. We can thus see that in our organic functioning there is in fact a replica of what we were before we descended into our earthly existence.

At this stage, we need no longer be frightened even by materialism, in so far as there is justification for it—and even materialism has done some good and brought us countless discoveries. We look at the human brain and the human nervous system in its physical operation. Of course, we agree that ordinary, everyday thinking is a function of these physical organs. We are entirely in agreement with what exact science must hold about these matters today. But on the other hand we know that the material forms operating within us are themselves simply a transformed reflection of the spiritual sphere. For this reason, the material is acceptable, and because, in transforming itself into mortal man, the spiritual has sought out the capacity of brain and nerves to achieve in a material replica what is spiritually prefigured.

Modern man can see this in his “mind's eye” by developing the powers of cognition of which I have been speaking in the last few days. Yet there is a dream-like anticipation of it, I would say, in the Oriental philosophy of life I have outlined. This philosophy has become old and senile, but certain of its features still work effectively in our heart and soul. In its instinctive clairvoyance, the ancient Orient sensed that the spiritual world is a reality with which it felt closely linked, and that nature, and the natural element in man himself, is a replica of the spiritual; it provides an external garment for the revelation of what is inwardly spiritual.

Yet it would be wrong to say that the Oriental did not observe nature. His organs were finely attuned to its observation. For him, however, from everything that he faithfully observed and lovingly honoured as a replica, something of the spirit shone. Nature revealed spirit to him, shone spirit upon him at every turn. And this spirit was his reality. What lay before him outside was maya.

Even in Buddhism, which gained a far greater influence on Oriental life than we usually think—since it later assumed the most varied forms—we can see how the sense of inhabiting a spiritual world paled as man and world developed. The gaze was increasingly directed upon what was maya, and experience of the great illusion, the great non-being, maya, gradually became predominant. There thus arose an awareness of the need for redemption from what can be experienced within maya—experienced, that is, in the manner of Buddha, who regarded our direct experiences of this maya as a crowd of sorrows that flow in on man.

But it faded, this sense of inhabiting a spiritual world; and this is what justifies us in considering the early Oriental philosophy of life as something instinctive and even partial: if we do return to something like it, we must do so with complete self-possession and lucid consciousness. The impairment of human activity relative to the demands of the physical, external world must not occur a second time in the world's development. Man must never again escape into spiritual activity and so prevent himself from devoting his full strength to earthly tasks—which are what the Oriental perceives as maya, even if in deference to modern concepts he does not say so; whereas he perceives as reality what reveals itself within him. He has within him a light that is a direct reflection of the divine and spiritual elements in the world.

Against what I have thus described as the spiritual geography influencing our modern life, I should now like to set another illustration from the development of the human spirit and the world, but this time from the immediate present. Our civilization, which even in Europe is now of some antiquity, is subject to pressures from certain spheres, whence arise social longings and also social conflicts. Anyone who has moved in these spheres will have come across the phenomenon I am about to describe.

Although no one could properly accuse me of Socialist opinions, I was for some long time a teacher in Socialist circles. My intention was to do something for which in fact the time had not yet come (it is more than twenty years ago now): to propagate a spiritual life that could lead to theories that are in closer accord with reality than those derived from abstract or modified Marxism, which in many respects indeed are not realistic at all. There exists in these circles a basic attitude—something we can recognize as a first step, yet which is as deeply rooted in the soul as was the sense of maya at which the Oriental finally arrived. And in observing this attitude, we are profoundly struck by a word that expresses many unconscious feelings, unconscious ideas and concepts, unconscious longings too, a word that we hear again and again and must recognize as having characterized wide circles of humanity for centuries. Encompassing millions of people is a mood that this word expresses. The word is “ideology,” by which is meant “idealistic theorizing.” It derives from an attitude that the proletarian class in particular has absorbed into its education. The scientific method, with its increasing emphasis on matter, has given rise to the view that historical reality consists simply of economic struggles, economic patterns, class struggles, in short of the immediate material elements, externally sensuous and physical, in human life and history; and that therefore economic forces are the true reality.

This economic materialism, which is far more widespread than many upper-class people today believe, is a consequence of the general materialistic outlook. Nowadays, this is taken to be overcome even in science; yet it has a wide following particularly in the West.

And what is this “ideology?” It is law, morality, the realm of the beautiful, religious concepts, political theory, in short everything that makes up spiritual life. These things are not true reality, but bubbles and baubles arising from true reality, which resides in material struggles and patterns. “Ideology” is a way of indicating that what man experiences within himself—whether it is art or science or law or maxims of state or religious impulses—is maya, to use the Oriental term.

If we do not just take it at its face value, but can feel what millions of people are thinking, then the word “ideology” points to something that must inevitably assume the most formidable dimensions unless it can be set on the right course in good time. What the soul experiences and shapes within is not reality: true reality is only what exists externally in tangible facts.

Inside Western civilization, therefore, there has developed an outlook diametrically opposed to that which long ruled the Orient and still survives even today as a kind of antiquated trimming. There, true reality is what is experienced in the spirit, and maya what proceeds outside in physical actuality; here, maya or “ideology” (which is indeed a translation of the word “maya,” but applied to the spiritual sphere) is what is experienced in the spirit, and reality what is tangibly displayed, palpably there in the world.

In its development, the world aims at complete realization of its various potentialities. Just as the one extreme developed, in the Orient, so too the other was bound in its turn to take hold of humanity. To bring about a fruitful development of man and world, however, and to change the forces of decline into constructive ones, we must understand the significance of this mood, this “ideology.” It is recent and therefore a first step.

Let us look once more at what modern spiritual science can tell us. In the Orient, there was a dreamy, dark, instinctive knowledge that there exists a spiritual reality, with a sensory replica here in the physical realm. Because the soul's attention was devoted primarily to this spiritual reality, sensory reality came to be regarded as unreality, external appearance, maya. Yet this maya is important in more than one way. Although the world may be maya, our efforts, which are a reality for us, must still be applied to it in the first instance. But it is important also for the precept “Know thyself,” for a truly human attitude. Why? Well, it is true that we can now elevate ourselves to a life in the spiritual world, as I have described; that we can see by means of sharply delineated concepts and thus understand what appeared to the Orient like a dream. But the experience of such a world would never have created in human development the impulse to freedom.

When man feels closely linked to the spiritual world, he feels at the same time inwardly determined by and dependent on it. Therefore he and his consciousness had to move out of it and, for a passing phase of history (in which we now are), to turn to a world of mere fact. Confronted with this external actuality, the life of man's soul becomes an image of it. The spirit informing this life turns into abstract concepts and gradually becomes a mere image, to be recognized as a replica.

I have already suggested that, by having images within us, we can be free. Mirror-images do not determine our actions. If we wish to conform to mirror-images, which in themselves are powerless, the impulse to do so must come from us. The same is true of abstract concepts. And in making its appearance in pure thinking, our noblest feature, the moral and religious element, becomes for us an impulse of freedom. It is a most valuable component of human life. But in a period when man finds himself confronted with physical actuality, it makes its appearance in abstract thinking.

At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of moral intuition, makes its appearance in pure thinking, the task of the epoch is fulfilled. The epoch has developed from spirit-reality to the spirit as abstraction and (I would say, exaggerating a little) it now interprets everything spiritual as maya, as mere illusion, as “ideology.” We have a certain right to interpret as “ideology” everything that is a reflection of external natural existence. At the moment when the moral element, in the shape of intuition, enters this maya-thinking, this “ideology,” we reach the first stage at which we can recognize once more that we must awaken this “ideology,” which we experience as mere semblance, to inner life by energizing ourselves and allowing the life that is hidden within us to stream forth. The meaning of the world had to become “ideology” for humanity in order that man himself could infuse it with his own reality.

This was necessary for man's experience of freedom, which is something that has only been attained in the West and in recent civilization. It was necessary that man should first feel himself to be in a sphere of unreality when in contact with everything that is most valuable to him—his art, his science, his moral concepts, in short his entire spiritual life—and that everything transitory that shone on him should appear to be the only reality. For this reality, rightly contemplated, cannot in any way impair his freedom—the freedom that depends on his being himself a spiritual being who creates in physical and sensuous actuality only a replica of the spirit.

We see, therefore, that “ideology” represents in an extreme form an attitude that we really need in face of such concepts of nature as position, motion, dimensions and numbers. If nature were to provide us with anything other than concepts, it would never make us free. Only if we rise to concepts that will then appear as mere “ideology” to someone who is still stranded at the previous stage, can a new and spiritually real form of the higher world infuse these initially unreal concepts. This is the first step, from which must emerge for man a new form of the spiritual world. And when we encounter the exaggerated notion of “ideology,” those of us who are not bogged down in the immediate opinions of the day but can see beyond them to the world's development, must conclude: it was necessary for man to reach a stage of development at which, looking at only one side of the world and himself, he could speak of “ideology;” it is equally necessary now for him to attain the decision, conviction, power and courage to infuse into this “ideology” a spiritually perceived and experienced world. Otherwise, although perhaps it may be discussed philosophically, the “ideology” will remain merely “ideology.” And as we shall see in the second part of these lectures, which will be devoted to Anthroposophy and Sociology, in that case the forces of decline will quite definitely proliferate.

Before us, then, are two pictures: spiritual world as reality and world of the senses as maya—world of the senses as reality and spiritual world as maya. We need a philosophy of life that is capable of injecting the spiritual world, regarded as “ideology,” with spiritual intuition, spiritual imagination and inspiration, so that what today appears unutterably empty is filled once more with spiritual meaning. At the same time, it must be able to perceive that what the Orient regards as illusion and maya is a reality in the sense that it is a true and faithful replica, a transformation of the spiritual world, which was necessary for the development of humanity in freedom. If we are to reach an understanding of these two diametrically opposed world-pictures, we need a philosophy that can combine them and not just add them together mechanically, one that will develop through its own inner life, not from the one or the other, but in a spiritual progression from human substance itself.

And these world-pictures do ultimately affect everything that we experience spiritually. They certainly condition individual features of life and of human attitudes. As a Central European here in Central Europe, I would rather not give my own opinion on this particular point. I prefer to pass on the opinion expressed some years ago by an Englishman who compared Western and

Central Europe in relation to a certain aspect of spiritual life. This Englishman wanted to exemplify the way in which spiritual life has revealed itself in particular phenomena. He referred to the appearance, at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties of the last century, of Buckle's important work, The History of Civilization. Buckle, he noted, views history mainly—if not so exclusively as do the Marxists, for example—in terms of economic drives, so that ultimately spiritual life is taken to arise from the action and interaction of economic forces. We do not always have to condemn a view of this kind; we can take a positive attitude, and say: since man is in part an economic being, a historical consideration of human life from this standpoint also was needed at a certain stage in human development. The Englishman then refers to another book that was produced in Central Europe at the same time as Buckle wrote his History of Civilization—Jacob Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The Englishman himself observes that a quite different spirit prevails here; Burckhardt describes how men feel, what their attitude to one another is, and how through the opinions they have of each other they enter into certain relationships, which in turn determine other events occurring among them. And the Englishman finally sums up—I am simply quoting his opinion here—by saying that Buckle describes man as he eats and drinks, whilst Burckhardt describes man as he thinks and feels.

And if I may now add something myself: if, as we have heard, the West looks at eternal actuality and derives spiritual life from it, and the Central European looks at what inhabits the realm of the soul, but the soul in its earthly existence, then one would have to add, thirdly, that Eastern man (and in many respects even the East European) describes man as he preaches and sacrifices.

And so we might say, supplementing the Englishman's verdict: in the West, man is described as he eats and drinks (I say this in no pejorative sense); in the Middle region, as he thinks and feels; in the East, as he preaches and sacrifices. In this preaching and sacrificing is operative what I have described as the attitude of the East. Similarly, in the view of history that has become generally familiar today and that is also reflected in the notion of “ideology,” there operates what I have described as the attitude of the West. But we also need to see how in the mode attributed to the Centre, where man is presented as he thinks and feels, the two currents meet. We are called upon today to understand this confluence correctly, by taking a first step that will gradually lead us onward to spirituality.

I will try to sum up in a single image the two attitudes I have sought to represent, in order to show where understanding is really needed between East and West. To do so, I should like to recall that, at a time when the physical and sensuous world, and human existence also, was already felt as maya in the East, he who is called the Buddha encountered in his wanderings the most varied manifestations of human suffering on earth. Among these manifestations was a corpse; death confronted the Buddha, and through contemplation of death he reached his conclusion: Life is Suffering.

This was the tenor of Oriental civilization six hundred years before the establishment of Christianity. Six hundred years later, Christianity was founded, and henceforward we have a significant symbol: the crucifix, the raised cross with the Redeemer, the human body on it. In the West, countless men look at this body, at the image of it; just as countless men, who have become disciples of Buddha, have looked at the body from which Buddha drew his teaching. The East acknowledged: Life is suffering, we long for redemption. Western men, in looking at the image of the dead body, however, did not simply say: Life is suffering! For them, the sight of death became a symbol of resurrection, resurrection of the spirit through inner human power. It became a symbol of the fact that suffering can be redeemed by overcoming the physical; that it is overcome, not by turning away from it in asceticism, but by keeping it in full view, not regarding it as maya, and overcoming it through work, activity, and the vigour of the will. Out of the introspective life of the East arose a contemplation of the dead body, with the conclusion: Life is suffering, man must be redeemed from life. Out of the life of the West, attempting always activity, there arose, at the sight of the body, the view: Life must develop power within itself, so that even the forces of death can be overcome, and human work can do its task in the development of the world.

The one philosophy is old and jaded. Yet it contains things of such great value that, even though we may treat it as senile, we still approach it as something venerable. We honour an old man without expecting him to profess the views of youth. What we encounter in the West, however, has the character of a first step. We have shown what the “ideology” in its attitude must become. It is young, it must develop youthful power in itself so that it may attain spiritual meaning in its own way, just as the Orient did.

In honouring the Orient for its spirituality, there is something we still need to be clear about: we must build up our own spirituality from the first step we have taken here in the West. We must so shape it, however, that we can achieve an understanding with any view that may exist on earth, especially old and venerable ones. This will be possible if, as Central and Western men, we come to understand that, although our philosophy of life has faults, they are the faults of youth.

If we do understand this, it is a summons to have the courage to be strong. If for all our respect, love and admiration for its spirituality, we take what we need from the East, not with passive receptivity, but with a busy activity rooted in what, today, is still perhaps unspiritual in the West, yet contains the germ of spirituality—if we add strength to respect, then we shall do the right thing for human development.

Yesterday I tried to characterize the nature of the moment in human evolution at which we find ourselves. I tried to show you how, in the course of human evolution, humanity has now arrived at a point where it is absolutely dependent on what we call the science of initiation. This means that it is necessary, firstly, for the branches of knowledge of human cultural life to be permeated by this science of initiation, but secondly also for social thinking and social feeling to be permeated by those feelings and perceptions that result for the human soul from consciousness: there is a spiritual revelation, a supersensible revelation – one need only turn to it.

One can be convinced that many people come and say: Yes, but history has been conscientiously studied, and what is supposed to result from spiritual science about the character of the present period, and how it has developed from the preceding ones, is not spoken of in history.

Yes, it does not speak of it because, uninfluenced by real spiritual knowledge, it does not ask about its real impulses and forces. In order to know what speaks through history, one must first understand how to ask history in the right way.

Now, the three successive post-Atlantean periods, the primeval Indian, the primeval Persian, the Egyptian-Chaldean, are such that, in the sense sense, humanity has become younger and younger, that is to say, in the second period it did not remain capable of development into those years in which it was still capable of development in the first period, and so on. In the Graeco-Latin period, that is to say, in the period that began in the 8th century BC and ended in the 15th century, it was the case that human beings remained capable of development until the beginning of their thirties. When this period closed in the 15th century, human beings were clearly capable of development until well beyond the twenty-eighth year. Today, as we have emphasized, the ability to develop only extends to the twenty-seventh year and will descend more and more.

Now, simply due to their physical and bodily constitution, human beings can only come into contact with the spiritual world from their thirties onwards. Do not misunderstand me! Of course, if he turns to spiritual science, he can come into contact with the spiritual world earlier, even today; but if man, through his own development, which is bound to the physical body, is to receive spiritual forces from the universe, this can only happen if he remains capable of development well into his thirties. He does not. Therefore, from our point of view, there can be no question of human development progressing by natural means. It can only progress if humanity is fertilized by the science of initiation.

Now, as I have already indicated in one of the previous lectures, there are initiates in areas of Western civilization, especially in Anglo-American areas. But the peculiar thing about these initiates is that, from their point of view, they only intend to promote as a science of initiation that which British-American world domination can gradually bring about on earth. However strange it may sound, it is so. And it may be said that every single assertion that comes from this side bears a stamp that the knowledgeable person can recognize as being true. Above all, the various ways in which the science of initiation is handled in Western countries point to all these things.

You have seen that, within certain limits, certain truths of initiation are not withheld here. And if you look through what has been presented to you over the years, you will find in it, if you really follow things unsleeping, a whole series of important initiatory truths that are suitable for bringing not just a part of humanity, but all of humanity across the earth, beyond the current crisis and towards a real further development. But you will always find people, especially among Western initiates, who disapprove of and condemn the fact that so much of what has been communicated here is being made public today. This is due to a distorted conception of the science of initiation. In order to make you understand this distorted conception, I must first say the following.

The science of initiation always addresses the individual human being. Even if it speaks to a group of people, it is in reality addressing the individual human being. One cannot present the true science of initiation in the way it used to be presented to people in the past. The Catholic Church, for example, transplanted this kind of thing into the present day, and not only the Catholic Church, but certain political parties also still use the same method today. The way they worked was to use, if I may put it this way, the mass psyche, to appeal to what is instilled in a community of people in a certain, I would say hypnotic, way. You know that, as a rule, if you only use the appropriate means, you can teach a crowd things more easily than you can teach each individual to whom you wanted to speak. There is some truth to such mass hypnosis.

These methods, which are quite effective, cannot be used by a true wisdom of initiation. It must speak as though addressing each individual person and appeal to the powers of persuasion of each individual person. The way of speaking which the science of initiation, which today stands at the height of human development, must make use of, has not yet existed. Therefore, the way in which, for example, I speak here and in my books is still an abomination to some people today, because the way of speaking strictly adheres to the rule of appealing only to the power of persuasion of the individual individuality.

This also gives us an important social principle, which I have already mentioned in another context in recent days and which you will find systematically and in principle implemented in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom”. If you only want to appeal to the individual with ethical, moral impulses, then you cannot want to organize from general abstractions, then you cannot group people together like herd animals in order to give them some kind of common directive, but then one can only appeal to the individual and then wait for the right thing to happen in the whole, because each individual, in his standing in the whole, wants the right thing.

The social morality of the future cannot be based on any other principle than this principle of general human behavior. When I published my “Philosophy of Freedom”, for example, a review appeared in the “Athenaeum” in which it was said that such a view leads to a theoretical anarchism. But it only leads to anarchism if we do not succeed in making people into real people, that is, if people absolutely want to be subhuman, if they absolutely want to be kept together under such aspects as the members of a group of animals are kept together. Lions are held together as lions by their very shape, hyenas too, dogs too; but the development of humanity is such that in the future groups of people should not be organized either by blood ties or by ideological ties like flocks of sheep, but that what arises from the interaction of people should actually happen out of the power of individualities.

A few days ago I used a comparison here that may sound a little grotesque, but which I believe can shed light on the whole matter. I do not know whether there are not also people who would find it particularly liberating if they saw inscriptions everywhere: Decree of such and such an authority: The one who walks in this direction must give way to the other who walks in the other direction. Even in populous cities, people generally still get along with each other on the street, they pass each other; out of their reason, out of what they have as an impulse within them, they do not constantly push each other away. Humanity is moving towards this ideal. That it does not recognize this is its misfortune. It is important to have the directives of one's actions within oneself, even in important matters, so that the other can rely on them, without a common law that trains them to behave in such a way that the other can exist alongside them.

This work towards individuality is what is connected with the most important impulses of human development. Human individuality can never be brought to bear on something like this if it can only be conveyed through the current knowledge of nature or the current social science or the current social motives. Man only comes to such an individuality as I have just spoken of when a mass of thoughts is awakened in him that comes from the science of initiation. Only through his relation to the supersensible is man imbued with such thoughts as will make him a free individuality, but which can also function in the social order with the greatest possible freedom. Everything depends on humanity opening its heart and mind to what comes from the science of initiation.

Great trust must become the most important social motive of the future. People must be able to rely on each other. Otherwise things will not move forward. What I have told you now seems obvious to anyone who is serious about the whole of humanity, if they are sufficiently initiated into supersensible things, to the extent that they must say: either this happens or humanity goes into the abyss. There is no third way.

You can say that you cannot imagine that a social order is based on general trust. To that one can only answer: Fine, if you cannot imagine it, then you just have to imagine: Humanity must go into the swamp. – These things are serious, and they must be taken seriously as such.

To a certain degree of abstraction, the initiates of Western countries also know this. But they say the following: We have the science of initiation to a certain degree, we could publish it. They would, however, only publish a science of initiation that leads to the goals I have indicated; we are also now moving in an area that is just as applicable to the true science of initiation as it is to the one-sided one. The initiates of Western countries can therefore say: We have the science of initiation; we can publish it, but the fact is that it is only addressed to the individual. Now the great fear begins for these people, the terrible fear. They say, 'Yes, if we only speak to individuals in the future, then we will unleash a fight of everyone against everyone, because then people are not organized, then we rely on general trust, then people will enter into the fight of everyone against everyone. This fear stands before people. Therefore, they want to keep the most important truths of initiation, I would say, in the darkroom and let humanity walk towards the future in an apparent light, but asleep.

These things are indeed very topical, since the mid-19th century, when the peak of materialism in modern civilization was reached and since then people have had to ask themselves: How far do we go with the science of initiation? — They have not dared to communicate a real science of initiation to humanity beyond certain smaller circles until now.

Now, a certain education that humanity has undergone must not be allowed to break down, but it is already breaking down today thanks to a completely misguided theology. You can follow this education if you do not study that fable convenue which is usually called “history”, but if you study real history. Today, people do not really know how what is designated by certain words has changed over time. People talk about Catholicism, about emperorship, about aristocracy, about bourgeoisie, and believe that if they find the same words in the fourteenth century, they mean approximately the same thing, perhaps only a little nuance is different. As long as we do not realize that what Catholicism, emperorship, bourgeoisie and aristocracy meant in the 14th century has nothing at all in common with what we mean by these words today, we do not understand history. We must be quite clear about how the state of mind of human beings has really changed a great deal over the course of a few centuries.

What was it, then, that, until the 15th century, and in its after-effects even further, was the basis of what worked from general human education into the consciousness of the souls of the civilized world? All this was based on the fact that, during these centuries, human beings were able to assimilate supersensuous knowledge into their imaginative life, not in the way it is to be assimilated now through spiritual science, but in the way they were able to assimilate it at that time, according to their still atavistic states of consciousness. A fundamental fact filled human souls. It was the fundamental fact that is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. In the way people thought at that time, they knew that the Christ-Being had descended from supermundane heights, had been embodied in the man Jesus of Nazareth, and that something had happened in the Mystery of Golgotha that could not have happened according to ordinary laws discoverable by the knowledge of nature. The concepts and ideas that people had of the Mystery of Golgotha had such ideas and such conceptions that went beyond the earthly sphere.

Such conceptions create very different thought forms than the ideas that the average person has today. The thoughts that people have today do not extend into the supersensible life at all. Thoughts that people formed with such a connection to the mystery of Golgotha, as I have just characterized it, were suitable for evoking thought forms that had a reality in the supersensible. Therefore, one can also characterize the present moment in time by saying that humanity has gradually lost the ability to form such thought forms that have a meaning in the supersensible. Thus, one cannot create social orders on Earth that will advance it. Therefore, everything that has been introduced into humanity in the way of social ideas since about the sixteenth century bears the character that can be described as follows: We encounter social institutions according to the thought forms that are the thought forms of modern times. All such social institutions are destined to break down. They have no inner power of further development. That is even the secret of the newer development. No matter how willingly people may create social institutions on the basis of the external world-building that has taken place since the 16th century, all these social institutions carry the seed of death within them as they arise, because they are not connected to thought-forms that have a reality in the supersensible. As long as there are no people in the present who understand this, there is no point in talking about social progress at all. It is not a matter of deriving social ideas in an abstract way, perhaps out of some spiritual web of thought. That is not important at all. In my “Key Points of the Social Question”, for example, there is no long chapter about spiritual science from which social laws are then deduced, but reality itself draws attention to what has to happen. What matters is not that one deduces the social life from some spiritual web or other, but that one is oneself imbued with such thoughts, which are rooted in the supersensible. For it is this state of being imbued that makes it possible for everything one thinks to have a reality in the supersensible.

It is a paradox, but the following is quite true: Imagine a person, I will say a “statesman” - a word that is currently said in quotation marks - who says all sorts of clever things, that is, things that people today call clever, but has never established a connection with the supersensible world. What he says, if realized in reality, would bear the germ of death. Another speaks. If one does not know that he is engaged in spiritual science, one does not even need to notice it from his speech; he just talks about things in a slightly different way. From what he says about social issues, for example, one does not even need to notice that he is engaged in spiritual science, but the fact that he is engaged in spiritual science gives his ideas the real impulse.

So the point is that today it is not enough to have an abstract logic, but that one must speak reality. Because today we are already at a stage in the development of humanity that, let's say, a journalist can write the most beautiful things that people admire because they say: Yes, when I read this, it is pure spiritual science! That is not the point! Today it is no longer about the wording, but about the basis of the soul, from which something like this comes. It is about what the human being carries within himself as substance!

If I am to draw a comparison from a completely different field, then let it be the one I have often used before: there are poets today who write poetry with extraordinary ease, who make beautiful verses that one can admire. Nevertheless, the same also applies: today, ninety-nine percent of poetry is overdone. But there are others whose verses are like a stammer; but these verses, which sound like a stammer, can come from a genuine human, that is, spiritual, source, while those that one admires because the languages are so simple that any fool can create something admirable out of language can be worthless sound.

Today it is absolutely necessary to go beyond the mere wording to the motive, that is, not to remain in the abstract, not to read according to the wording, but to place oneself in full life and judge the phenomena from the standpoint of life. And so it is a matter of spiritual science, as it is meant here, above all, having to have a fertilizing effect on the various branches of life, otherwise what must happen will not happen.

When two people talk to each other, they communicate through language. But in relatively recent times, language was quite different from what it is today. Today, when we communicate through language, we actually become more or less a slave to language. In the past, people learned a great deal through the genius of language, and they did not actually think very much themselves; they let language do the thinking for them. This only worked until the period I described to you yesterday. Today, people only get ahead if they can emancipate themselves from language with their thinking and feeling. Language today runs, as it were, like a mechanism in which we stand, and instead of us, Ahriman actually lives more and more in the development of language. Ahriman actually speaks today when people speak. And little by little people have to get used to understanding each other from something quite different than from the mere wording of languages. One must go much deeper into life in order to understand another person today than in the age when the wings of language still contained what people had exchanged with each other. Today this is no longer contained in the wings of language. Today one can basically be a person completely empty of real knowledge. But the fact that language – every civilized language today – has gradually developed sentence forms, sentences, and even entire theories that already lie in the language, you just need to change what is in the language a little, then you have something seemingly created by itself, in reality you have basically just mixed up a little what was already there.

It would be very easy today, as grotesque as it may sound to you, to do the following experiment. Take the pronouncements of good bourgeois professors, philosophy professors, natural science professors and the like, who are only slightly inclined towards materialism, towards one side or the other, take what these people have said over the past few decades, in the second half of the 19th century, and with a little rethinking, the following can be easily achieved. Take, I mean, any concoction of a fairly brave philosopher, a brave dozen philosophers from the second half of the 19th century, who has expressed himself on this or that social thing, you can now take away certain adjectives and replace them with others that are in another sentence. You can turn things around a bit – and out of it comes the life philosophy of Mr. Trotsky! In order to be a Trotskyist with a Weltanschauung today, one does not need to be able to think for oneself at all, but only to let language think within oneself in the way I have just described. But because language has emancipated itself from them in a certain way, it is not people who are at work here, but Ahrimanic powers in human culture.

What I have told you now can be experienced. One only has to have the inner soul eyes open to such things. For those who work not with words but with thoughts, language today is a truly dreadful instrument. It is indeed not easy for those who work with thoughts to write today. Because if you want to write a sentence, it will not do so because so and so many people have written similar sentences. The sentence always wants to form itself out of the collective psyche, but you must first become its enemy in order to truly shape what is in your soul into a sentence. Anyone who works for the public today and cannot feel this hostility of language always runs the risk of abandoning themselves to the thinking of language and devising beautiful programs out of language.

The necessity of enforcing one's thoughts must begin today with the struggle against language. Nothing is more dangerous than for a person to allow themselves to be carried by language, in the sense of: This is how you express it, that is how you express it. — Because by having a stereotyped way of expressing things, by being able to say: you can only say it that way – you actually go with the usual flow of speech and do not work from the original thought.

Our schools are terrible in this respect. The schoolmasters, who actually correct every seemingly clumsy but at least original thought in terms of convention, commit great crimes in school. One should search for every awkward but substantially individual sentence that any boy or girl writes at school. One should use it to start discussions at school and not use the cursed red ink to replace what comes out of youthful individuality with convention. For today it is most important to look at what comes out of youthful individualities. Perhaps it will reveal itself in a way that we do not always find comfortable, that we easily see as flawed. If one wanted to correct Goethe's youthful letters with the eye of a high school teacher, then many things would have to be corrected! The Austrian poet Robert Hamerling received the worst grade in the “German essay” in his teaching examination! And there is still some truth to what Hebbel wrote in his diary, as I have often mentioned: he wanted to write a drama with the motif that a high school teacher of the higher grades in particular has a student who is the reincarnation of Plato, with whom he reads Plato in class; then the teacher finds that this “reincarnation of Plato” does not understand the slightest thing about Plato! The poet Friedrich Hebbel noted down this motif for a drama that was then not carried out. But there is some truth to it.

Now we must be clear about the fact that at all times, seduced by the remaining Luciferic and Ahrimanic powers, people have resisted the normal progress of humanity. Today we are faced with the necessity of having to seek something completely new from spiritual life in order to save humanity. It is no wonder that people are violently opposed to all kinds of logical absurdities and immorality. And so, for a long time now, I have always had to talk about my own situation as a kind of prologue to our reflections.

About a week ago I told you about the defamatory and mean way in which a large number of German newspapers are currently reporting things that are known to be their source, but which could turn against everything that comes from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and the related social issues. It is a very direct example, I might say, of what is happening “at the house” itself, how strongly the opposing forces are stirring. But there is a certain reason why I would like to characterize this matter for you in somewhat more detail today. To this end, I would like to draw attention once more to what has happened. It has come about that a defamatory report suddenly appeared in a number of German newspapers, which can be summarized in the following sentences. I have already read these sentences. However, we should bear them in mind once more, for they are actually worthy of being remembered as a characteristic example of certain cultural phenomena of the present day:

"Rudolf Steiner as political informer. The well-known Theosophical charlatan Dr. Rudolf Steiner, who influences millions of men and women, founded a league for the threefold social organism in Stuttgart in the spring of 1919, which was originally supposed to be only a religious-communist community, but then came into political contact with the Bolsheviks and communists and is now engaged in a very strange and repulsive political agitation. We learn the following about this from Dresden: “It is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – please note this sentence, “it is unequivocally clear from authentic reports” – “that the League for Threefold Order is determining the names of all officers allegedly active in a reactionary sense and collecting evidence against them of acts contrary to international law based on witness statements, which is then to be sent to the Entente for extradition. Mr. Steiner and his comrades are completely unconcerned about the accuracy of such accusations, and the fact that they do not even shrink from deliberately false statements is proved by the passage of a letter which says: “Accusations of theft are to be avoided because it is easier to prove that they are untrue. Similarly, one should not make incredible accusations such as the mutilation of children.”

Now, of course, this most slanderous and most mendacious story, sentence by sentence, is going through a series of German newspapers! One can be amazed at the most diverse things in it, but let us single out one fact. There is talk of letters that are said to have been written and that are referred to as authentic documents. In the issue of “Dreigliederung” that has not yet appeared, I expressly pointed out that I am well aware of the dubious sources from which such things originate. Now, however, I will read you a charming document from which you will see what the authentic foundations are for those people who spread such things into the world.

After this flood of meanness had subsided, and after I had received confirmation from various other sides of what I had known anyway about the murky sources, I received the following letter from a friend. This letter only reached me now, but it was written – I ask you to bear this in mind – before these newspaper articles appeared. So what this letter contains has been established before the newspaper articles appeared. I ask you to bear this fact in mind. This letter states:

So you see, there are factories for forging letters! These letters really do circulate. It continues:

"The second letter makes the following suggestion: Since there are still many officers in the army who are monarchists, it would be absolutely necessary to neutralize them by the following shameless means. The members of the troop to which the officer in question belonged during the campaign should be searched for people who, under oath, are to testify to as many of the person's crimes as possible. It is also stated in more detail that these would only have to be credible offenses, not rape, infanticide, and similar things. This record of sins should then be transmitted by a Mr. Grelling” - that is the only name mentioned in the letter - ‘to the Entente, and they would then demand the immediate extradition of the persons concerned.’

Both letters were read by the person concerned with his own eyes.

So this is the letter referred to in the newspaper article, the letter that is probably circulating in countless copies and that is addressed to this and that office in Berlin! So first the letters are forged, fabricated, then the newspaper articles are made up. This is the method of fighting!

I would like to know if other things are needed to make it clear that it is necessary to wake up today! — From what has happened in recent years, a moral ground for humanity has emerged, which was rooted in the impossibilities that had already preceded it, and which is producing such flowers.

It is no longer acceptable to continue sleeping when we know the depths of the swamp we are in. It could easily be, if these things were not talked about openly, that there would still be people in our ranks who would say, for example: Shouldn't we rather write to all the fine gentlemen who forge letters and then use the forged letters to fabricate newspaper articles in order to change their minds? Today it is really a matter of opening our eyes and seeing what kind of people are walking around among us, people whom we would soil ourselves if we got seriously involved with them. These things must not be overlooked; this must be said again and again. The connections must be pointed out. Do you think that it can be with impunity that, for example, in those Jesuit publications, in which the false statements that I have already mentioned to you are printed, the story has been circulated for years that I am a runaway priest, and then simply to take back such a thing with the words: This is something that one heard, “but which could not be substantiated”? Do you think that one has the right to say to such a Jesuit priest: You have taken back what you spread? No, one has to say to him: You have violated your duty in the most irresponsible way by spreading a thing unchecked, and your retraction means nothing at all. Today, morality must be taken seriously by those people who still understand something about morality. During the past five years, we have heard almost nothing but lies from all over the civilized world, and we are still living under the effects of the lie. It is necessary to face these things seriously.

Here you can clearly see an example of how things are. When things are not brought home to us through karma, so that the individual is at the same time completely decisive for the general, then there will always be people who want to vote for compromises, who, for example, treat a Ferriere still as a human being, with whom one engages on equal terms, while he belongs to the scum of the human race, by writing something unscrupulously, which he accepts without verification. These things are no longer acceptable today for a person who wants to stand on sound ground.

If I did not have this example of the origin of a matter at hand, it would not be so easy to believe me that there are now factories for forging letters, on the basis of which “they” then treat people in public as they did in this newspaper article.

But that happens today over and over again, and a large part of what you read consists of nothing other than the blossoms of this moral swamp. Today it is simply part of a healthy, serious and honest world view to know these things and to treat them accordingly. Today people are not allowed to make compromises with people who work with defamation in this way. For it cannot be justified by saying: One must be benevolent towards all people — love towards all people! — Love towards such people means extreme unkindness towards those who are slandered, who are distorted. It is a matter of knowing where to direct one's love. For loving the crime can never lead to the recovery of humanity. That such things would come could be foreseen. But it could be foreseen not only from the way certain quarters have been working. You only have to open the Jesuit literature that has been unleashed since the Church's condemnation of the anthroposophical writings in July 1919. You only have to look at the people who write and examine their approach to the truth, and you will naturally see everything that ultimately leads into such swamps. I do not want to talk today about the very murky sources, which I know very well and through whose acquaintance I also know how all these things are connected and how they are just the beginning.

I only wish that as few people as possible would be naive enough to believe that refutations could achieve anything. For these people, it is not about asserting this or that, but only about asserting something juicy, whereby they disparage others. These people could not care less about what they assert.

But not only that we have to take into account the fact that today we have numerous such people among us who work in this way, but also that we have to take into account the fact that for decades now, due to drowsiness, we have had a broad tolerance among the general public for this kind of thing, a reluctance to look at how public opinion is actually made today. But that is the most important part of what can lead to improvement. As long as people of the caliber of the Jesuit Zimmermann or the university professor Dessoir are not treated in the appropriate way, there can be no recovery. The people who stand opposite them and do not give them the right treatment are even more guilty than these individuals. For these individuals conduct their business in these matters, albeit in such a dirty way as Professor Dessoir. I characterized this to you some time ago. But it is a matter of finally waking up. Because a Dessoir book or a Zimmermann critique leads straight to these swamps, which I was able to characterize for you. I had to mention this not only with the intention of showing the symptoms of the forces that are effective in our time to suppress every legitimate spiritual aspiration, And so I would also like to mention the fact that I was recently given an article here that was supposedly intended for the Brockhaus Conversations Encyclopedia, for which the infamous Dessoir — infamous only with us! — was supposed to write articles about anthroposophy; at the same time that he had these articles of mine written by an intermediary, he was writing his book, this disgrace. But now consider the case that this article would lie here in our local archives! It would later be found there as an article that is said to come from me. So someone might say: Yes, Steiner copied the article in the archives from Dessoir's article in the encyclopedia and claimed it for himself! - Such blossoms can be driven when one is not awake! First one's things can be stolen by literary thieves, and then they can appear in such a way somewhere that not the one who made them but the one who stole them is considered the author and the one who is the author is considered the thief!

The moral question must be approached today from many sides; but it will not be approached profitably by anyone who does not stand on the ground of a sound spiritual science. That is what I wanted to share with you in the appendix to today's lecture, based on contemporary history.

The challenges presented by our age really have to be faced by every individual human being today. I have made it quite clear on a number of occasions that to understand the way individuals need to face those challenges we must be aware of how human evolution progresses all over the globe. The whole course of human evolution can only be clearly understood if we gain more profound insight into the powers that intervene in the course of earth evolution as a whole and also in human lives.

I have used a number of different approaches to show that as human beings we are part of an ongoing evolution that may be said to be taking its normal course. Spiritual science enables us to follow its progress over extended periods of time. I have also pointed out that there are certain powers that have different goals for mankind than the powers who desire to guide humankind in the normal course of evolution, a course during which the earth repeatedly comes to physical manifestation. Some of those powers we would call luciferic, others ahrimanic. I have spoken of this a number of times. It is necessary to take a very serious view of these things today, but our hearts and minds cannot really achieve this serious mood unless we pay proper attention to the way these luciferic and ahrimanic powers intervene directly in human lives.

As you know, a new era in human evolution started during the 15th century, very different from anything that went before. Thinking of this you will want to be aware of the many ways in which life is different in the present age, which had its beginning in the 15th century, if we compare it to the preceding age. We may say that one particular feature of the present age is that intellectual thinking has developed since the middle of the 15th century. Humankind has to undergo a major process of education in the course of Earth evolution. Part of it is this training of the intellect. Human beings had to find out, as it were, how human life can be lived when the emphasis is on intellectual thinking. They could never have been raised to be truly free individuals if the intellectual principle had not become part of them. We have no clear idea today of the extent to which people differed from us before the middle of the 15th century, particularly in this respect. We tend to take the things we are given for granted, without giving them much thought. We are now generally dealing with the peoples of civilized countries who are inclined to think with the intellect, and we have come to believe that people have always been thinking like this. That is not the case, however, Before the middle of the 15th century people were thinking in a different way. They simply did not think in the abstract terms in which we think today. Their thinking was very much more vivid and concrete, immediately bound up with the objects of the world around them. They were much more bound up with the feelings and will impulses that can be experienced in the human soul. We are living very much in our thoughts, though we are not sufficiently aware of this. We are not even aware of the source from which this way of thinking, the intellectual approach which we take so much for granted, has evolved. We shall have to go a long way back in human evolution to get a real understanding of the origins of this way of thinking, this intellectualism. Another question we must ask ourselves is whether anything still remains of the human activity out of which our thinking has evolved.

You know that older evolutionary forces persist into later ages and continue to be present side by side with those that are normal to the age in question. This also applies to our thinking. Reminders, echoes of thinking, of an activity similar to our thinking are experienced in our dreams, when a whole world of images emerges from our night time sleep. Experience teaches us to distinguish between the world of thoughts we evolve between waking up and going to sleep and the world of dream images which we experience in an entirely passive way. If we go back to earlier times in human evolution we find that the further back we go the more does the life of the soul during waking hours come to resemble the mental activity we know in our dreams today. Present-day thinking is the fruit of later stages of evolution. During earlier stages along this path the human soul developed activities more akin to dreaming. If we follow this dreamlike activity of the human soul a long way back we find ourselves going beyond Earth evolution as we know it. We come to a time when the earth had taken a physical form in the cosmos that preceded the present one. We have got used to calling it the Old Moon evolution. Human beings were part of this as well, but in an entirely different form. During that Moon evolution, i.e. the time when the earth materialized in a form that preceded the present one, the human being, the true ancestor of modern man, was still completely etheric. His soul became active in a way that was definitely dreamlike, consisting of dream images. The peculiar thing about this was that it related to the outer world in a way that is quite different from the soul activity we know as thinking. I would say that when our soul is active in thought we find ourselves rather isolated within the world. The world is outside us, it has its own processes. We reflect on those processes in our minds, but just when we think we are reflecting most profoundly on those external processes we actually feel ourselves entirely outside them. Indeed we often feel that we are best able to think about those external processes if we keep ourselves well isolated from them, withdrawing into ourselves. The human ancestor who was dreamy in his thinking, if I may put it like this, did not have that feeling. Developing in his way in his dreams what we develop in our way when we are thinking, he knew himself to be intimately bound up in everything he experienced with what went on in the world. We see the clouds, we think about them, but we do not feel that the powers alive in the clouds are also alive in our thinking. Our human ancestor did have the feeling that the powers alive in a cloud were also alive in his thinking. This ancestor said—and I must translate what he said into our language, for his language was a silent one compared to ours: The powers that are alive and active in the cloud out there produce images in my mind. He saw himself no more isolated from the great universe in which the cloud revealed its essential nature than my little finger is able to think itself isolated from the rest of me. If I were to cut it off it would wither; it would no longer be my finger. The human ancestor felt that he could not exist apart from the universe that belonged to him. My little finger might well say: The blood which pulses through the whole of the body also pulses within me; the whole of my organic life is governed by the same laws as the organic life of the rest of the body. The human ancestor said: I am part of the universe; the power that pulses within me as I evolve images is the same as the power that is alive and active in the forming of clouds. That is how the human ancestor felt himself to be closely related, intimately bound up, with the whole world.

We need to feel isolated from everything that goes on outside us in our thinking, as though the umbilical cord has been cut and we are separate from the essential origins and causes of the existing world. In ordinary life we are not aware of the pulses beating throughout the universe. Our thinking has grown abstract. Our thinking tells us nothing, as it were, of what is alive and active within it. This provides the actual potential for the freedom of human beings, a freedom where we do not feel that something is thinking in us but that we ourselves do the thinking.

The human ancestor was unable to form ideas independently of the universe as a whole. The human ancestor felt himself to be bound up with the existing world; he knew that this existing world contained more than just abstract forces of nature. He knew that power was also wielded by entities that differed from human beings, entities that did not have a physical body such as the human body, though human beings might feel that they had citizenry of the universe in common with them. The ancestor was not aware of ‘forces of nature’; he felt himself to be in communion with nature spirits. Today we may say that everything that happens in nature follows the laws of nature, and we are part of that nature. For the human ancestor who lived in a far distant past it was natural to say that everything that happened in nature outside himself happened out of will impulses of the spirits of nature. We say the earth attracts the bodies that are on it due to gravity, and according to the law of gravity the gravitational pull decreases at a rate that is proportional to the square of the distance between the two objects. We call this a special case of a law of nature. When we speak of nature we base ourselves on such abstract notions. The human ancestor knew that an essential spiritual element was present in the phenomenon we have made into an abstract gravitational force.

Certain spiritual powers who may be said to be involved in human evolution thus developed a relationship to human beings. This would normally cease the moment Earth evolution proper began for the human being. At that point human beings would be released from the tutelage of those spiritual powers, powers they had felt to be flowing and floating into them during the Old Moon stage. So we must ask ourselves what it was that made human beings grow independent of the guidance of spirits with whom they had felt at one, however dimly. It happened when the mineral kingdom became part of human nature. In those far distant times of which I have just spoken, human beings did not yet have the mineral kingdom within them. Their organization would not have been perceptible to our present-day sense organs, for it did not yet include mineral elements.

To grasp this without getting caught up in preconceived notions we need to consider what it truly means when an organism includes the mineral kingdom. People tend to be superficial in their thinking about such things. We look at a mineral, a stone, and quite rightly consider it to be the way it presents itself to our observation. Then, however, we look at a plant in exactly the same way we look at a stone. In reality it is not the actual plant we see. A plant is really something entirely beyond sensory perception. Consider a system of forces that in a sense has the qualities of an image. Its relationship to the mineral kingdom is that this otherwise invisible organization soaks up the mineral kingdom and the forces that are active between individual component elements in the kingdom. I have a plant before me. It is an invisible system of forces that absorbs mineral principles from the mineral kingdom. The result is that the mineral aspect occupies the space also occupied by the invisible system of forces. I see this mineral aspect, though it is merely something the plant, which is not perceptible to the senses, has absorbed. That is how it is even with a plant. When we talk about plants today we are really talking only of the minerals contained within them and not about the plants themselves. It is important that we clearly understand this in the case of a plant, for it also applies to animals and humans, only more so.

During the Old Moon stage, then, human beings did not have this mineral inclusion. Human beings living on the present earth have been made in such a way that they need the mineral kingdom, having absorbed the mineral kingdom and its forces into them, as it were. What significance does this have for human nature? In the first place human beings acquired a mineral body for thinking in images the way they did at the earlier stage. As evolution progressed the mineral human body provided the basis for intellectual thinking. This happened at a relatively late state, from the middle of the 15th century onwards, having been a long time in preparation.

Modern intellectual thinking is based on the fact that human beings have received a mineral body into them. As human beings we need a mineral body first and foremost to be able to think. The older form of thinking in images had been based on what we call the third elemental kingdom. The mineral kingdom had the function to transform this pre-earthly form of thinking into our earthly way of forming ideas on the basis of thought. Within the great scheme of things the spirits with whom human beings had to feel themselves connected, in forming those ideas that were images in the distant past, were then relieved of their function. We will have to picture those spirits rather differently from the way we are accustomed to picture non-human entities. People, even people of good will who may admit that there is more to life than is apparent to the senses, tend to stick too close to the human form. This anthropomorphism takes over whenever people try and create an image in their minds of anything that is above the human sphere. It is easy to accuse Feuerbach and Buechner¹ of being anthropomorphists. We have seen more than enough of this kind of thing. We have seen the legal way of thinking evolve in the Western world, with earthly misdeeds and crimes judged by earthly judges who impose penalties, and so on. The rewards and punishment meted out for sins, i.e. for something belonging to a sphere beyond this earth and seen more as imperfections in the Christian faith, have gradually come to look more like the proceedings in an earthly court of law. The religious ideas of the West have a great deal of human jurisprudence in them. We let the gods mete out punishments of the kind we know earthly courts of law impose. If we truly wish to get beyond the merely human we must firmly decide not to think in entirely human terms. We must think beyond anything anthropomorphic, and that indeed is what really matters in human life. That is the approach we must use if we want to see clearly that the spirits who influenced the thinking in images which human beings had at the time of the Old Moon lost that function in the normal progress of human evolution but are not prepared to accept this with good grace. We might ask why they do not submit to the will of the gods who guide normal progress. They simply do not. We have to accept that as a fact. The original intention was that they should only influence dreams within the human sphere and everything related to dreaming. In the context of today's lecture we refer to them as luciferic spirits. Their proper sphere would be everything that has to do with dreaming and anything related to this. They are not satisfied with this, however. They haunt the human way of thinking that has evolved out of their own sphere, human thinking now bound to the mineral sphere. When we allow anything that normally rules our dreams, the life of the imagination, to enter into our thinking we fall prey in our thinking to luciferic nature, to the influence of spirits that should only have influenced the old form of thinking in images that belonged to the human ancestors. They have retained their power and instead of limiting themselves to our dreaming, our life of the imagination, our creative artistic work, they are constantly trying to influence our thoughts and make them dependent on impulses similar to those that existed in pre-earthly times. Our thinking is still greatly influenced by elements coming from this source, by the luciferic principle.

It is justifiable to ask in all seriousness what powers are these that have such an influence on our thinking. These influences arise from the sphere where we human beings are still rightfully dreaming and rightfully asleep above all else. They come from the sphere of our feelings and emotions. We experience our feelings the way we normally experience dreams and we experience our will the way we experience sleep. There we are still rightly cocooned in a world which becomes a luciferic world as soon as it evolves in our thinking. We therefore will not manage our evolution as human beings properly unless we make the effort to evolve other thoughts as well, thoughts increasingly independent of mere feelings and emotions, of anything arising in us out of dreamlike inner experience even when we are fully awake. Theoretical principles will not help us achieve this, only life itself can do so. We find, however, that the mental habits humankind has acquired put up great resistance to the cultivation of mind and soul that is needed. We must be on the lookout for this resistance. We find that in the present time in particular people are not prepared to listen to anything that does not arise from their own inner prejudices, their feeling of how things should go, their personal preferences. They are not in the habit of listening to anything which in a way has been decided independently of human beings, requiring merely their consent. I should like to give you a brief example which I used on one occasion to explain to someone that there is an important difference with regard to what human beings are thinking.

Many years ago I gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany—today it is no longer in southern Germany—on the wisdom taught in the Christian faith.² —As you know, it is always necessary to limit the subject matter presented in a particular lecture and one can only speak within that context. When people hear just a single lecture, such a single lecture will impress one person in one way and another in a different way, particularly if one has been objective and dispassionate in presenting the subject. It certainly would not be possible for anyone to get an idea concerning the total philosophy that lies behind a single lecture if they just listened to that one lecture. If the wisdom taught within the Christian faith is the subject for example, it will of course be impossible to conclude from the contents of the lecture what the speaker thinks about the connection between light and electricity, say. It is therefore possible for something to happen the way it did on that occasion. I spoke about the wisdom taught within the Christian faith and two Roman Catholic priests were in the audience. They came up to me afterwards and said: ‘No objection can be raised to what you have been saying’—this by the way was many years ago now—‘but we have to say that whilst it is true that we say the same thing we do say it in such a way the everybody can understand it’. My reply was: ‘Reverend fathers, surely it is like this: You or I may have some kind of inner feeling that we are speaking for everybody, but that is not the point, for that is a subjective feeling. After all it is perfectly natural—if we go entirely by our feeling I, too, must believe that I am speaking for everybody, just as you think you do; that is self-evident; otherwise we would do it differently. But we are now living in an age when our belief that something is justifiable does not count. We need to let the facts speak for themselves. We must learn to look to the facts. Subjectively you believe you are speaking for everybody. But now let me ask you about the facts. Does everybody still come to your church? That would show that you are speaking for everybody. You see, I speak to those who do not come to your church to hear you speak. My words are for those who also have the right to hear of the wisdom taught in Christianity.’ That is how we must take our orientation from what the facts have to tell.

It is necessary for us to tear ourselves away from our subjective feelings. If we do not do so the luciferic element will enter into our thinking. We would not have gone through the truly dreadful campaign of untruthfulness that has gone around the world in the last five years, the final consequence of something that has long been in preparation, if people had learned to pay rightful attention to what the facts have to tell and not to their emotions, with nationalists the worst in stirring up such emotions.

On the one hand there is the absolute necessity today to do something about our thinking and to comply even if something goes against the grain. On the other hand people dislike having to be so true to reality that one looks to the facts for guidance.

We shall not be able to attain to the higher worlds and the knowledge to be gained there if we do no train ourselves in rigid adherence to the facts of the external world. Once you have got at least to some extent into the habit of liking to hear the facts you will often suffer tortures when people of the present age want to tell you something. Very often the kind of thing you hear people say is: ‘Oh, someone said something and that was frightful, quite terrible!’ Terrible in what way? You say is was terrible but that only tells me how you felt about it. I really want to hear exactly what it was. ‘Well, it really was terrible what was said there…’ And these people simply do not understand. All the time they want to describe their subjective feelings concerning the matter, whilst you want to hear an objective report of what they actually saw. It is especially when people tell you something someone else has told them, that it is quite impossible to tell if they are simply passing on what they have heard or if they have actually looked into the matter they are talking about. This is an area where one has to remind people again and again that truthfulness concerning the knowledge to be found in supersensible spheres can only be achieved if we train ourselves as far as possible to adhere closely to the facts in the sense-perceptible world. That is the only way in which human beings can overcome the luciferic elements that stream into their thoughts—by learning to base ourselves on the facts.

On the one hand mankind is open to luciferic influences, on the other to ahrimanic influences. It had to be said that thinking here on earth evolved from earlier stages of human soul life when human beings absorbed a mineral body, as it were. This mineral body is indeed the organ for the earthly way of thinking. It does however bring it predominantly into the sphere of the powers we call ahrimanic.

We can of course become aware of the need to base ourselves on the facts, on a real world that will get us out of the habit of being swayed by our subjective emotions. We must not, however, fall prey to the kind of thinking that is nothing but an inner activity arising from the mineral body. Here we come upon a truth that many people find highly unpalatable.

You know how some are idealists or spiritualists and others are materialists. There is plenty of discussion in the world as to which is the right approach, spiritualism or materialism. All these debates are of no value whatsoever for certain regions of the human organization. Human beings can develop in two ways. We can use the mineral body we have absorbed into ourselves as the instrument for our thinking, and indeed we have to use it, otherwise we would merely be dreaming. But we can also rise beyond this instrument in our thoughts; we can develop a spiritual point of view, spiritual vision. If we do this we will of course have been thinking with the aid of our material organization, but we will have used this to reach a further stage of human development, ascending to the world of the spirit as a result. On the other hand we can stop at the point where as earth beings we let our mineral body do the thinking. It is perfectly able to do so. That in fact is the danger, and materialism cannot be said to be wrong in its views, particularly where thinking is concerned. This mineral body is no mere photographic print. It is able to think for itself, though its thinking is subject to the limits of life on earth. We need to raise the experience our mineral body is able to give us into the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception.

It is therefore possible to say that it may indeed be true that human thoughts are merely something exuded by the human mineral organization. That may indeed be right, but human beings must first do it right.

Human beings have the freedom to develop on earth in such a way that they are merely the product of matter. Animals cannot do this; they do not get to the point where mineral inclusion leads to the development of thinking activity. Animals cannot choose to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view. Human beings are at liberty to prove the truth of the materialistic point of view; all it needs is the will to do so out of a materialistic attitude to life.

Human freedom is such that people are indeed free to make materialism come true for the human kingdom, that is, they can take a course that will lead to human beings on earth concerning themselves only with material things. Fundamentally speaking, therefore, it is a matter of choice if we become materialists. If we are strong enough to bring to realization what people are told is a materialistic attitude then this attitude will be made to come true by human beings.

This influence on human beings comes from ahrimanic powers. They want to keep everything connected with Earth evolution at the point which has been reached for human beings by that very Earth evolution—that is the point of having a mineral organization. They want to make human beings perfect, but only as far as their mineral organization is concerned. The luciferic powers want to keep human beings, who now have acquired a mineral organization, at the earlier stage that was right for them before they acquired a mineral organization. So we have two powers pulling at the traces, luciferic and ahrimanic powers. The luciferic spirits want to get human beings to a point where they finally cast off their mineralized bodies and go through an evolution that has no relevance in earth life and has merely been an episode in earth life. The luciferic spirits aim for the gradual elimination of everything relating to the earth from the whole evolution of mankind. The ahrimanic spirits aim to take firm hold of this earthly, mineral aspect of human beings, isolate it from progressive evolution and let it stand on its own. That is how luciferic and ahrimanic spirits are pulling in different directions.

It is absolutely vital that having presented the large outline we now come to apply this to ordinary everyday life. We do not consider a U-shaped bar of iron to be a horse-shoe when it is in fact a magnet. In the same way we really should not consider human life to be entirely the way it may appear on the outside. If you shoe a horse with magnets you fail to realize that a magnet has more to it than a horse-shoe. Yet it happens quite often nowadays that people speak of human life exactly like someone who shoes his horse with magnets rather than with horse-shoes. People have no hesitation in speaking of positive and negative electricity in the inorganic sphere, or of positive and negative magnetism, yet they hesitate to speak of luciferic and ahrimanic elements in human life. These are just as effective in human life as positive and negative magnetism are in the inorganic sphere. It is just that the idea of positive and negative magnetism is more easily understood. It does not take as much effort to grasp it as it does to grasp the idea that there are luciferic and ahrimanic elements. That is also the reason why we shall only learn to deal with the empty talk one hears today, empty talk that turns into lies, by knowing that it is luciferic by nature.

Similarly we shall only learn to deal with everything that shows itself here and there as the materialistic point of view by knowing that it is ahrimanic by nature. In future mere external characterization will not get us anywhere when we want to understand human life; all we would be doing is talk around the subject and commit the most stupid of errors when we try and apply such ideas to real life. One thing we would not be doing is to see human life in such a way that social impulses can be gained from our knowledge of human institutions. This has a very much to do with the utter seriousness required when looking at everything connected with evolutionary trends where humankind is concerned. We cannot gain understanding of the life we are now living unless we raise our vision from earthly concerns to spheres beyond this earth. There is a particular point to this.

Looking back into earlier stages of human evolution—though not as far back as those I have spoken of earlier—people generally base themselves on such historical documents as are available. There are historians—well-known names—who say that the history of humankind is made up of everything to be found in the written records. If you start from such a definition of history, like the historian Leopold von Ranke, you will obviously arrive at a particular kind of history. The art of writing is itself part of history, however, it has evolved from something else, and in real terms one cannot do anything with this kind of definition.

We need only go back as far as Chaldean-Babylonian times, to ancient Egyptian times, and we shall find that at that period of human evolution human beings still related to the cosmos in a very different way. People today have no real idea of what it meant to connect one's life to the course of the stars, the planets, and their position relative to the fixed stars of the zodiac. These things have become an empty abstraction nowadays. Do you think a modern astrologer delving into ancient astrological writings to compile his horoscopes—if at least he does search through the old writings, and does not produce new ones; the new ones are terrible!—has even the slightest idea of the living connection which the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans felt to exist between human beings and the movements and positions of the stars viewed from the earth? Everything is different today. It has to be said that an important part of human evolution since those times has been the narrowing down of human awareness to the physical world. What did those Egyptians know of the earth? It was the ground under their feet. They knew more about the heavens. They moved in the vertical in gaining their experience. The ancient Greeks did not yet go into the horizontal either; they, too, gained their experience by going vertically. The vertical came to be reduced as the horizontal started to spread. The maximum limitation human beings experienced in their knowledge of the heavens came with the great increase in knowledge of the earth that came when men sailed around the globe and found that having sailed away to the west they would return from the east. It was necessary for human understanding in the vertical direction to become obscured. Human beings had to be isolated from the universe so that they could find within themselves the only power that can lead to human freedom. Moral impulses will arise out of this human freedom in their turn.

Human beings therefore no longer relate to the spheres beyond the earth in the vertical fashion the ancient Greeks and Chaldeans did. We have had the training that only a horizontal surface can give and must now ascend again in moral, ethical terms. We must learn how human life is influenced by powers that do not show themselves in the course taken by the world that exists outside us. Those are the luciferic and ahrimanic powers.

People tend to put their minds to other things, however, and sometimes I also have to tell you something relating to our spiritual movement that takes its orientation in anthroposophy. This has accepted the task of working out of the full seriousness the time demands and listening to the language spoken from the cosmos beyond this earth, as it were, a language which tells us that we must once again come to see the way the human being is connected with the whole cosmos. Again and again, however, things make themselves heard in this work—please forgive the abrupt change of subject—which even today draw attention to some very peculiar points of view taken by people who oppose our aims of furthering the progress of mankind. Let me read you a passage from a letter that is really typical. As I said, please forgive the abrupt change of subject but we are obliged to inform you of all kinds of things that are going on at the present time with the purpose of undermining and destroying this movement which endeavours to take up the challenge of the present age.

There is someone in Norway³ who had made it his task to destroy our movement. To assure himself that he has a right to do so, this man is writing to leading figures—that is how one does these things nowadays. He wrote to a publication called Politisch-anthropologische Monatsschrift [Political Anthropological Monthly]. This journal sent him the following information: ‘Dr Steiner is a Jew of the purest water. He is connected with the Zionists, indeed associated with them, and works for the Entente.’ The editor added that they—i.e. people of this kind—'have had their eye on him for some time.’

I just wanted to tell you this in conclusion, as yet another case among the many one gets today, with a new one coming up almost daily. That is the attitude anthropologists are now taking to the efforts being made in the anthroposophical field.

• 1 . Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, German philosopher. Referring to Feuerbach's anthropomorphism, Rudolf Steiner repeatedly quoted from his book Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), e.g. in a lecture given in Dornach on 15 October 1921 (Anthroposophie als Kosmosophie, GA 207, English title Cosmosophy).
  
  Ludwig Buechner, German physician and materialist philosopher.
• 2 . ‘Die Weisheitslehren des Christentums in Lichte der Theosophie’ (The wisdom taught in the Christian faith in the light of Theosophy),Colmar, 21 November 1905 (no written record in existence).
• 3 . Details not known.

Quite a number of lectures have now been given by me on the changes that must necessarily take place in our whole civilization. First and foremost, what was said in this connection was expressed in such a way as to appeal to the will of men. We now live in a cycle of humanity's evolution in which people have to discover inner activity in order to contribute their share towards the necessary change. For human soul substance will have to stream into external life, into the objectivity of external life, and human beings themselves will have to bring about what should appear. In the present cycle of human development it is no longer possible to wait passively for divine powers, far removed from man, to step in and to do something for human evolution, without the participation of man himself.

The essential thing is to be in a position to understand such things by observing the individual phenomena of social life and the life of nature, but today, certain phenomena of social life shall be our topic. I would like to start with a quite definite fact. Let us suppose that someone announces himself; he may, for example, send his business card with the name “Edmund Miller” printed on it. Yet, on seeing this card with the name “Edmund Miller,” it would be foolish to assume that a miller was coming, a man who grinds corn. For the person announcing himself by this name may be a contractor, or a professor, or a court advisor, and so on. It would not be justified in such a case to deduce anything from the name “Miller.” Initially, it would perhaps be better to form no thoughts whatever, but just to wait and see what kind of a person conceals himself behind the name. Or, through certain other circumstances, we may already know something about the actual person, the real living entity concealed behind this name, “Miller.”

It is clear to us in this case that it would be quite wrong to infer from his name anything about the character of the approaching individual. If a person named “Smith” announces himself we would not think that he is a smith. This shows that in regard to those words we consider proper names, we feel the need to discover, by means of something that is not inferred from the name, what or whom we are dealing with.

Well, in this respect, even proper names have undergone a certain history. A person bearing the name Smith today no longer has anything to do with a real smith; a person called Miller has nothing to do with a miller. Yet these names originally arose at a time when name-giving such as is customary today did not exist, when people in a village would remark, “The smith said,—the miller said this or did that,”—or, “I saw the miller,”—and referred to the actual smith or miller. One who has lived in villages knows that people frequently do not refer to each other by proper names but say instead that they saw the smith, or the mason, or somebody else. Therefore, the name itself originally caused people to infer from the words what lay behind them.

All words, the whole language, will undergo the same development in the-course of evolution from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch that proper names have undergone, a development which in their case we can clearly survey. Nevertheless, human beings today are still almost completely caught up in the whole of language; we basically acquire all our knowledge out of language. In actual fact, the general attitude towards nearly the whole compass of language is to infer the things from their words. Now, it is convenient to do so, but human evolution follows a different course, and in regard to such things we must have the same attitude that we adopt in regard to natural phenomena. They contain objective necessity. Objective necessity also exists where the causality of nature holds sway in the sphere of life, something that is experienced by many people with abstract superficiality. It happens frequently—I have often pointed this out—that people will say, “I never intended to do or say this; I meant it quite differently; I had this or that intention with regard to this matter.” But regardless of how pronounced the child's intention is not to get burned, when it reaches into fire, it will burn itself. Concerning the things of life, intentions that do not delve into life are not decisive; at most, only those intentions that do delve into life, or, certainly, facts, and the relationships of these facts that follow natural laws, are decisive.

People must become used to this way of thinking; based on spiritual science, this is, above all, necessary in the most eminent sense. And one must also get used to the thought: “As pleasant as it might be if one could just take words as they are, it is nevertheless a fact that the objective course and laws of human evolution point in a different direction.” They indicate that man's whole conception, his whole soul life, is becoming emancipated from words. Words are gradually becoming mere gestures that simply indicate the being or thing in question, no longer designating and explaining anything fully. If spiritual-scientific descriptions are to be taken seriously, for example, then something must come about for which people are often annoyed with me, namely, that one can no longer use words in the manner that words and sentences are customarily used at present. For if one sets forth spiritual-scientific facts, one is above all presenting facts of the future; something is represented that in future time will have to become the possession of mankind. In a certain sense, one has to anticipate something that is supposed to occur in the future. What is to happen in the future must be received into one's will. Therefore, one is obliged to give spiritual-scientific descriptions in such a way that even the words point like gestures to the essential reality lying behind them. Since our ideal today concerning the reconstruction of the social order will have to be born out of spiritual science, as I explained yesterday, it is necessary that, particularly in matters of social reconstruction, we speak from the above-mentioned viewpoint. This is precisely what people did not at all wish to comprehend, for instance, in my book, Towards Social Renewal. They absolutely wanted matters presented to them in the old style, matters that cannot be described in the old style since they are part of the future. And basically, what one is being faced with here can best be made evident by the fact that almost all the questions that, up to now, have been connected by one side or another to the expositions in Towards Social Renewal always proceed totally out of the old manner of thinking. No attempt is made to find one's way into the transformed new way of thinking.

Thus we may say that, particularly in the descriptions of social relationships of the future, it must become evident that we have to develop an emancipated soul life that no longer clings merely to words. One who follows my descriptions in the various fields of spiritual science, including the recent ones into the field of social life, will find that I am always at pains to describe a matter from many different sides. As a rule, I use two sentences instead of one, because the first sentence indicates the matter from one side, the other one from the other side. This is then supposed to call forth a desire in the listener or reader to approach the matter by transcending the words and sentences, as it were. This is what must be mentioned in reference to human soul life as far as the transformation of the meaning of human language is concerned. This is an important matter. It is important for the reason that the greatest part of what occurs today in regard to confusion of one's manner of thinking and conceptions comes about for no other reason than the fact that the objective laws and impulses of human evolution already demand that we free ourselves from language. Because of their easy-going habits of thinking, however, human beings do not wish to give up clinging to language. When such a phenomenon is clearly understood, it leads to a deeper insight into the whole course of human development. Indeed, from this transformation of our language or languages, we can actually build a bridge to profound spiritual facts. Naturally, this is more the case in one language than in another. But this is then a matter of the specific treatment of a language, of the meaning of words in a language in the individualized differentiated regions of human civilization, as I have pointed out.

We now live in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch of human civilization and are approaching the sixth condition of development. These evolutionary conditions are not of such a nature that a clear line could be drawn between one and the other epochs; instead, one epoch, bearing its own peculiarities, passes over into the next; and long before it arises, the future one casts its shadows—one could also say its lights—into the present. One must take hold of these lights if one wishes to participate in the evolution of humanity with one's soul.

Let us try and connect what might be termed the “suprahistorical” fact, namely, that we are supposed to work our way towards the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, with another fact known to all of us. It is this: With his spirit-soul entity, the human being descends out of a spiritual world to earthly incarnation through birth or conception. On earth, he then experiences the life between birth and death; then, he passes through the gate of death, and in so doing bears his soul-spiritual being once again into that environment of life which is definitely of a spiritual and soul nature.

Now we must clearly understand—and the significance of this for the art of education, for example, has also been outlined here recently—that we bring down from the spiritual world, at least in the form of effects, what we have experienced in this spiritual world. When we move in ordinary life from one locality to another, we take with us not only our clothes but also our soul-spiritual belongings. In like manner, one brings along into this world through conception and birth the consequences and effects of what has been undergone in the spiritual world. In the period that mankind has presently lived through, concerning which we know that it began around the middle of the fifteenth century A.D., man, through his spirit-soul entity, brought along forces of the soul life devoid of images, forces containing no pictures. It is for this reason that, above all, the intellectual life has arisen and has flourished. During this period, prior to descending through conception and birth into physical existence, the human being was endowed in a sense with something lacking in capacities, lacking in images. This explains the slight inclination mankind had for developing original creations of fantasy since the middle of the fifteenth century. Human fantasy is, in truth, only a terrestrial reflection of super-earthly imagination. The Renaissance does not contradict this, for just the fact that one had to resort to a “renaissance,” not a “naissance,” clearly shows that original forces of imagination were not present, only a fantasy that required fructification from earlier periods. In short, the fact is that the human soul was permeated in a certain sense with forces that are devoid of images.

Now begins the age—and in many respects, this is the real reason for the stormy character of our times—in which the souls who descend through conception and birth into earthly life bring along for themselves images from the spiritual world. When pictures are brought along out of spiritual existence into physical life, and if salvation is to arise for the human being and his social life, they must under all circumstances be united with the astral body, whereas the element lacking images only unites with the ego. It is predominantly the unfolding of the ego which has blossomed in humanity since the fifteenth century.

Now, however, the time is beginning when man has to feel: Within me there live pictures from my prenatal existence; during my earthly life, I have to make them come alive. I cannot accomplish this merely with my ego; I must work deeper into myself, and this must reach as far as my astral body.

Now, it is generally true that humanity resists the images indwelling in the astral body, images experienced prior to conception. In a way, human beings repel what is supposed to find its way out of the depths of their being into the astral body. The dry, prosaic attitude of the present time is one of its fundamental characteristics, and there are many broadly based movements that oppose an education whose concern it would be that the forces arising from the soul and trying to make themselves felt in the astral body will actually assert themselves. There are insipid, dry people who would really like to exclude any education by means of fairy tales, legends and anything illuminated by imagination. In our Waldorf School system, we have made it our priority that the lessons and instruction of the children entering primary education will proceed from pictorial descriptions, from the life-filled presentation of images, from elements taken from legends and fairy tales. Even what the children are initially supposed to learn about the nature and processes of the animal kingdom, the plant and the mineral kingdoms, is not supposed to be expressed in a dry, matter-of-fact manner; it is supposed to be clothed in imaginative, legendary, fairy tale-like elements. For what is seated deep within the child's soul are the imaginations that have been received in the spiritual world. They seek to come to the surface. The teacher or the educator adopts the right attitude towards the child if he confronts the child with pictures. By placing images before the child's soul, there flash up from its soul those images, or, strictly speaking, those forces of pictorialized representation which have been received before birth or, let us say, prior to conception.

If these forces are suppressed, if the dry, prosaic person guides the education of the child today, he confronts the child from earliest childhood with something that is actually not at all related to the child, namely, the letters of the alphabet. For our present letters have nothing to do anymore with the letters of earlier pictorial scripts. They are really something that is alien to the child; a letter should first be drawn out of a picture, as we try to do it in the Waldorf School. The child is confronted today with something devoid of a pictorial element; the young person, on the other hand, possesses forces in his body—naturally, I am referring to the soul when I am now speaking of “body,” for after all, we also speak of the “astral body”—forces seated in his body that will burst out elsewhere if they are not brought to the surface in pictorial representation. What will be the result of modern mistaken education? These forces do not become lost; they spread out, gain existential ground, and invade the thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will after all. And what kind of people will come into being from that? They will be rebels, revolutionaries, dissatisfied people; people who do not know what they want, because they want something that one cannot know. This is because they want something that is incompatible with any possible social order; something that they only picture to themselves, that should have entered their fantasy but did not; instead, it entered into their agitated social activities.

Therefore, we can say that people who, in an occult sense, do not have honest intentions in regard to their fellowmen, do not have the courage to admit to themselves: “If the world is in a state of revolt today, it is really heaven that is revolting.” It means the heaven that is held back in the souls of men, which then comes to the fore, not in its own form, but in its opposite—in strife and bloodshed instead of imaginations. No wonder that the individuals who destroy the social fabric actually have the feeling that they are doing good. For what do they sense in themselves? They feel heaven within themselves; only it assumes the form of a caricature in their soul.

This is how serious the truths are that we must comprehend today! To acknowledge the truths that matter today should be no child's play; such acknowledgment should be pervaded by the greatest earnestness. In general, it is no light task today to describe such things, for, in the first place, people do not care for them; secondly, they cling to words. Indeed, one who states that heaven is revolting in human souls is naturally taken literally by his words; people do not notice how he is trying to show that additional facts must be known, whereby the word “heaven” is related to something more than they are in the habit of connecting with the term. This is the same as not thinking of a miller who grinds corn when a “Mr. Miller” announces himself. The emancipation from language is definitely required in individual concrete cases if, in the sense that the laws of human evolution demand it, we wish truly to make progress.

Here, we see how something that comes from the life before birth pushes into the social life. One who is familiar with these relationships knows that he has to recognize something that is actually heavenly in what appears on earth in a caricature. This is in regard to the social questions, but there is something else in addition.

During the age of intellectualism, which has developed predominantly since the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings have obtained very little from their life of sleep in the form of imaginations for their waking life. Even those who have somewhat more lively dreams tend to interpret them quite rationally and intellectually. In this direction, theosophists, for example, are rational and intellectual. I could not begin to describe in a small volume, only in a big one, how many people have come to me in the course of time and wished to have rational explanations for their dreams! What is important here is that even those imaginations that express themselves in dreams point to a deeper spiritual life. I have often said that the outward appearance of the dream does not matter at all; that has already emancipated itself from the actual content. The content which we receive and then interpret in words of a language, from which, in turn, we actually have to emancipate ourselves as well, is not the true course of the dream; it really has very little to do with the true course of the dream. The dream's content is represented in its dramatic sequence, in the way one image follows another, the way complications arise and are resolved; one can experience the same spiritual content in a number of different ways as a dream. One person comes and describes how he climbed a mountain; he ascended quite easily up to a certain point, then, he suddenly stood before an abyss and could not proceed. Another person relates that he was walking along a path; everything around him filled him with joy. Suddenly, when he reached a certain point in the road, a man with a #8224 came up 'to him and killed him. Here we have two completely different dream images. Yet the process concealed behind them may be exactly the same. It can express itself in one instance in the climb up the mountain and the feeling of confronting an abyss; in another instance, it can be expressed in a cheerful walk down a path until one confronts a person who intends to kill one. The content of the images is not important; it is the dramatic sequence of experiencing something that offers resistance. It is the dynamics behind the images that matters. The course taken by the forces can envelop itself in any number of images, indeed in hundreds of pictures!

We can only understand the spiritual world when we know that what appears in the physical world in the form of dreams, or what clothes itself in images from the spiritual world in such a manner that it resembles the physical world, is only an image. As long as one has the inclination, however, to interpret the images in a rationalistic, purely intellectual way, so long does one also occupy an intellectual standpoint in regard to the dream life of sleep. What matters here is that we understand this dream life of sleep as the expression of a deeper spiritual life. Then only do we comprehend it imaginatively; then we grasp the pictures as something that stands in place of the content.

Then we shall not turn against something that is beginning for the human being today, namely, making inner soul demands out of sleep in a manner similar to the demands made by the imaginations prior to birth or conception. For today we are beginning to sleep differently from the way sleep was experienced in the regular life of the intellectual age since the middle of the fifteenth century. Man brought along into the waking state little inclination for faculties that wish to experience, rather than interpret, the images.

We have now reached the point in human evolution where, out of sleep as well, we draw imaginations that seek to indwell not only our ego, where rationality reigns supreme, but also our astral body. If we work against this, we once more reject something that is trying to rise into consciousness out of the depths of the human soul; we also work against the whole course of mankind's evolution, and what matters here is that we do not oppose humanity's development but work in harmony with it. We do this in the first place by permeating our culture once again with as many elements as possible connected in some way with the spiritual world. Naturally, in regard to external life, it is important for us to imbue ourselves with what is grasped from the spiritual world; hence, that we also imbue ourselves with a true spiritual insight, to fill ourselves with something that in this physical world cannot be comprehended in terms of the physical world. The whole past epoch of human life was actually opposed to this. Consider a case that I have already mentioned a number of times.

It is true that Christianity confronts human beings in such a way that they can only grasp its essence, especially the nature of the Mystery of Golgotha, if they come round to a comprehension of something super-sensible. For one must envisage that Christ, a being Who formerly had not been connected with earth evolution, united with the human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and that super-sensible events took place. One must conceive of the fact that in regard to the event of Golgotha, even birth and conception differed from the way they take place in ordinary human circumstances. In short, the demand is made by Christology to understand the Mystery of Golgotha in a super-sensible sense.

There is an interesting passage in a book written by a modern naturalist⁹⁴ where fulminations are uttered against the Immaculate Conception, where it is said that it is an impertinent insult to human reason to claim that an immaculate conception can occur.

Well, a modern rationalist, a purely intellectual person, can't help feeling this way. In a certain sense, what is intended out of the spiritual life is indeed an impertinent mockery of human reason. But the point is that we now live in an age where we must gradually begin to bring into waking life what has been spiritually experienced between falling asleep and waking in such a manner that our astral body can be impregnated and permeated with a pictorial element—not merely our ego, which is the seat of rationality, of intellectualism.

It is interesting that even the theology of the nineteenth century developed in such a way that it opposed Christology with rationalism, with pure intellectualism. Increasingly, modern theology felt called upon altogether to deny Christ as such, and to describe the humble man from Nazareth, the mere Jesus, as a human personality somewhat more outstanding than other human beings. One did not wish to make the effort to comprehend something super-sensible. What is to confront the human being supersensibly, what is to awaken him to the super-sensible realm, this one tried to grasp with concepts gained here in the sensory world.

A Protestant theologian,⁹⁵ with whom I once discussed this matter, told me after we had talked about it for some time, “Yes, we modern theologians should really not call ourselves Christians any longer, for we no longer have Christ. If the name ‘Jesuit’ had not been appropriated already, we should really claim it for ourselves.” This is not something that I am saying; it is something that a Protestant theologian of the modern school said to me as a confession of his own soul.

One who has insight into the whole character of our time, however, will understand that we must advance to a comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. Just because it is the central manifestation of our human evolution, it will tear us away from the earthly manner of thinking, and will draw us with might and main to understand something that is incomprehensible based an the earthly sense domain. Whoever wishes in everything to remain caught in the earthly sensory sphere would say, “The Immaculate Conception is an impertinent insult against human reason.”

One who understands the task of present-day man will say: I must accustom myself to such ideas. In that case, I must emancipate myself from the customary use of words today. When somebody by the name of Smith or Miller announces himself, I must not assume that he is coming with a hammer in hand or overalls powdered with flour. I must expect something quite different from what I might deduce from the words. Thus, I have to become used to emancipating myself from what was ingrained into the words by the merely physical life of the senses.

Today, the Mystery of Golgotha is in fact the first test for us to see whether we are willing to go along with the comprehension of something that extends beyond the physical-sensory sphere. We, therefore, can no longer content ourselves with a merely traditional, historical description of Christianity, we need instead a creative understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Out of spiritual science, we need inner strength of soul which, in a new way, approaches the Mystery of Golgotha and is in a position to comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha as a supersensory fact. Then, having positioned the Mystery of Golgotha into the central point of human thinking and feeling, we must make a new beginning especially in regard to education, and prepare the child in such a way that it does not suppress, does not have to suppress, the imaginations that seek to arise from the depths of the soul. We must meet the imaginations halfway by making pictures of our conceptions.

This is the deeper reason why, in the last issue of Soziale Zukunft (Social Future),⁹⁶ which is a magazine dealing with education, I described education and instruction as an art in the most eminent sense. In the field of pedagogy, teachers and educators must actually proceed in the way an artist does—indeed, they must proceed in a style surpassing that of an artist. It does not do to impose abstract principles in an abstract pedagogical sense. What matters is that one penetrates the being of man, and, through this comprehension of man's nature, arrives at the point of reading from the inner human being what one has to do in each case. An artist who is creating something cannot go by abstract rules. The purpose of aesthetics is not that of establishing rules for the artists. An artist cannot even go by what he has created yesterday when he creates something today. At every moment he must endeavor to be creative and original. This is how the teacher must be, in a still higher sense. One must not say based on a certain attitude of mind: "Well, if we are looking for teachers like that, we have to wait another three to four hundred years." The only reason that we do not have such teachers as yet is because we say things like this. We can have them the very moment that we have the strong power of faith in it; but it is the strong, not the passive, power of faith that is needed here. Therefore, what is important here is that when we return from sleep, upon awakening, we truly experience in the astral body and imprint into the etheric body what the astral body experiences from the moment of falling asleep until waking up. It can only take place through pictorializing the whole cultural life.

This pictorialization of the whole life of culture, this pictorialization that is demanded by the laws of humanity's evolution, will come into being when the whole spiritual life is left to the decision of those who participate in the spiritual life; when no instructions, no school regulations are laid down by a government which by its very nature stands outside the spiritual life. It is important here that the state does not hand down pedagogical regulations, school curriculums, and such like in an abstract manner. What matters is that one has human beings in an emancipated spiritual life who act out of their own free personality, and that one accomplishes with them what one can or wishes to accomplish with them.

The fact that the human being is presently beginning to bring along through conception and birth something that differs from what he brought with him since the middle of the fifteenth century, and the fact that he also brings something different with him out of sleep, both these facts demand that careful attention be given such matters, and that one really permeates oneself with the knowledge of such decisive facts. But from where can this knowledge be gained, if not from spiritual science? The external culture, today's science, certainly does not deal in any way with these matters. It ignores them; indeed, its present methods compel it to do so. I feel obliged to say that the present situation becomes most poignant when one observes the frequent and strange discrepancy between the inner requirements of humanity's evolution and the way in which people meet them. In recent times, the need has arisen to reckon with what flows into the human being from the spiritual world. Those who were intellectual, who did not reckon with what flows out of the spiritual world, made hypotheses about atoms, molecules, and the like. It was thought that bodies possessing volume point back to an atomistic formation, and so on. Out of the root causes of mankind's evolution, the need arose to grasp spiritual facts. And this instinct to grasp the spiritual expressed itself also in something, for example, like the Theosophical Society. One of its heroes is a certain Mr. Leadbeater who wrote an occult chemistry. What did he do in this book? He did something quite horrible, for he pictures the spiritual world in an atomistic sense; meaning, the materialistic manner of thinking is carried into the spiritual world.

I have recently mentioned this whole grotesque thing. Something very clever came about in the Theosophical Society. Someone wished to prove that here is one life; there is the next one (see drawing below). Now, it is so, isn't it, that something has to pass from the preceding life to the later one. One sees the body fall into decay. A proper materialist says that the body disintegrates and it is all over with man. A theosophist, however, wants another earth life to come; so, something must pass from one life to the other! The proper materialist says that all atoms unite with the earth. The theosophist also does not think in any other way than materialistically, but at the same time he tries to think “theosophically.” He wants something to pass from the first to the next life. So he says: “Of course, the atoms become one with the earth; one atom, however, remains and it passes through the whole period of existence between death and a new birth. There it appears again. This is the permanent atom.” One atom! Oh, the theosophists were especially proud then, when they discovered this “permanent” atom! They had no inkling that in this way they were carrying materialism into the spiritual world conception! Materialism induced them to believe that something—they never said what it was—of the many atoms that sink down into the ground is saved; and this fortunate, saved, permanent atom then reappears in the next incarnation. Much has been written about this permanent atom. It is nothing more than an example of the fact that something was borne into spiritual science that people could not rise above, namely, materialism. It permeates, by the way, the whole description of man, in the way it is frequently presented in the literature of the Theosophical Society. As I have often pointed out, they present the physical body as dense, the etheric body as thinner, the astral body as still thinner. Then come degrees of thinness, where even thinking and conceptions become quite thin. Yet, one is still dealing with something substantial, like mist; hence, although Buddhi and Atma are mists, they are still tangible as mists. One does not have the will power truly to discard materialism even in one's conceptual life; to pass from concepts of matter to concepts of the spirit.

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All these things prove how closely human beings are tied to the old ways of thinking. Out of such considerations, anybody who honestly wishes to acknowledge spiritual science should take up the inner challenge to test himself as to how far he has freed himself from the old materialistic concepts; or, when he turns to something spiritual, to what extent he imagines this spiritual manner in materialistic pictures, not being aware of the fact that they are just pictures.

It is always a matter of being conscious of this. For if, say, I were to draw a picture of one of you on the blackboard, the picture could mean a lot to me, if the person in question were no longer present. But if I were then to imagine that the person in the picture would shake my hand, or would speak to me, in other words, that he would be the actual person, then I would be suffering from illusions! Therefore, one may naturally sensualize the spiritual in pictures, but one must always be aware of the fact that they are nothing but pictures.

In the case of words, too, people must realize more and more clearly that language is on the way to turning the word into a gesture, and that we should go no further than to allow the word to indicate something to us that no longer is contained in the word. All words will have to take the same direction that proper names have taken.

For philosophers, I have something even better to say. Philosophers of recent times have set up any number of theories. When I say, “The child is small,” they have a concept of “small;” they have a concept of “child.” The “is,” however, the copula of the two—what does it mean? Oh, much has been written about this copula even in the philosophical sense, not just from the grammatical or philological standpoint. Everything that has been written about it suffers from the fact that this verb, “is,” no longer has the meaning of which people speak. It has already emancipated itself from its meaning and the soul content has become a different one. Thus, people in fact philosophize about something that no longer lives in the soul in an alive sense.

This is just an incidental philosophical remark which perhaps doesn't have much significance, but it is supposed to draw your attention to the fact that something that is not noticed by the outer world is by no means noticed immediately by the philosophers. Nevertheless, it is often true that the philosophers are the last to notice the things that really occur in the world, and many of our philosophical systems lag considerably behind what exists outside of themselves!

By proceeding principally from the example of language, however, I have tried to show you quite concretely how present-day human development presents itself. What actually takes place in regard to human development can really only be seen by looking at super-sensible facts. Anthropology can no longer discover what actually takes place, only anthroposophy. This is the reason why anthroposophical cultural thinking must lie at the foundation of everything that constitutes work for the progress of mankind.

• 94 . Ernest Haeckel: Anthropogenie oder Entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen, Leipzig, 1891, p. 871.
• 95 . Max Christlieb: 1862–1916.
• 96 . In “Soziale Zukunft,” #5–7, Dornach, 1920.

Yesterday I set about to show how far from reality present-day thinking is, when in circles working on international questions it is already forgotten that the founding of a League of Nations was, in accordance with Wilson's ideas at the time, deemed possible only if peace were concluded without victory on either side. That you may see how exactly Wilson, on 22nd January, 1917, set out these conditions for the League, I should like today to read you the relevant passage from his speech. He said: “The chief thing in what has been said is that there must be peace without victory. It is not pleasant to have to say this. I may perhaps be allowed to state my own views about it and to emphasise that no other conception has entered my mind. I am trying merely to face the facts and to do this without shielding myself by hiding anything. A victory would mean that peace would be forced upon the vanquished, that the vanquished have to bow to the conditions of their conquerors. Such conditions could be accepted only with profound humility in circumstances of necessity and with insufferable sacrifice, and there would remain a smarting wound, a feeling of resentment, a bitter memory. A peace resting on such foundations could not be lasting, it would be like the house built on sand. The only lasting peace is a peace established between equals, a peace that in its whole essence rests on equality and the common benefit derived from a common act of good-will. The right attitude, the right mood of feeling, is as necessary between the different nations for enduring peace as for the just settlement of obstinate strife over questions of countries, races or peoples.” [ Note 1 ]

At that time this was held to be the condition for the founding of a League of Nations. And if we think clearly, it must be said that the moment this peace without victory is not forthcoming, all talk at present of founding a League ought to be abandoned, for it can no longer offer any prospect of success. But this has not happened. People do not think in accordance with reality, they think abstractly, letting their thoughts run on in the way they have begun, quite indifferent as to whether these thoughts have been based on suppositions likely to come true or not.

This is simply an outstanding example of the thinking that has brought the world so much misery. And unless we see that in place of this thinking estranged from reality there must be one that can penetrate reality, the situation will certainly not change in a way that is healing for mankind. This must be understood both in the great concerns of the world and also in the ordering of everyday life. For the measures affecting the daily life of individuals are closely connected with the most important affairs of mankind. The mention, therefore, must continually come before our souls: What then, today, could produce real change?

We know that what we call men's acceptance of Spiritual Science, is not merely a question of being convinced that there is a supersensible world. That is the what. But the important thing is that whoever in the true sense takes into his thinking what today can be told in the right way about the supersensible world, out of present spiritual revelation, should arrive at a certain how in his thinking. By this his thinking should gradually be transformed, in such a way that he really gets a sense for, an interest in, what truly and actually takes place in the world. It does not merely depend on what we acknowledge through Spiritual Science, but on how through it our thinking is transformed. The question therefore must touch us particularly closely why at present there is so strong an opposition to Spiritual Science.

Now yesterday I asked you to notice how everything that can be said about this opposition has to be related at the sane time to all that can arise under the influence of the threefold social organism. I said that once it has come about that the spiritual sphere has been placed on its own feet, so that it becomes independent of the economic sphere and of the life of the State, then in a comparatively short time Spiritual Science will become widespread. But one might go deeper into the question and ask: Why are people so little inclined to recognise necessity for the proper emancipation, of the life of the spirit and for its being placed on its own foundation? The reason is that this spiritual life has in recent times taken on a certain form that holds men back from directing their gaze to the supersensible world. One might say that the present sad experiences are in a certain way a kind of punishment for the necessary misunderstanding of spiritual life which has recently arisen. It must be realised that unless future human thought is led in a social direction, man will never get anywhere. We are taught this by facts against which it is foolish to contend. On the other hand it must be realised by penetrating deeply into things that any kind of socialism that is not at the same time spiritualised will prove the undoing rather than the salvation of mankind. The best groundwork for this penetration is a thorough understanding of the fact that socialistic thinking has proceeded out of modern thinking as a whole.

I have already given indications of this. Today we will gather up many of the things we have already heard. I have pointed out that there is something lurking in spirits like Fichte, when they direct their thoughts to the social sphere, that leads to an outlook quite similar to what is found today in Bolshevism. I tried to express this by saying that Johann Gottlieb Fichte would have actually been a genuine Bolshevist had he put his social theory into practice. He himself had so much spirituality that he could let his Bolshevist ideas appear in print (Der Geschlossene Handelsstaat) without becoming dangerous for mankind.

So little inclination exists today to penetrate into the real content of things that it is never noticed how in this book Fichte is a true Bolshevist.

Nevertheless it is in Hegel that modern thinking comes to expression with its particular characteristics. And Karl Marx isis again dependent upon Hegel though in a most remarkable way. Even if it leads us into the heights of abstraction I should like just to speak of what is characteristic in Hegel's mode of thinking. In the confusion of the last four-and-a-half years many inapt things have been said about Hegel. Why should we not for once be able to go objectively into the matter of his thinking?

Now let us consider how Hegel thought about the world, how he tried to direct his gaze to the revelations of the mysteries of the world. Hegel put what he had to say about his actual fundamental being of the world quite distinctly in various places—most distinctly of all in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Knowledge. Let us observe in a quite ordinary way what sort of world-outlook we here find expressed. Hegel's world-outlook falls into three parts. The first part he called Logic. Logic for him, however, is not the art of subjective human thinking but the sum of all ideas active in the world itself. Hegel sees indeed in these ideas not only what flits ghostlike through human heads. That for him is only the perception of the idea. Ideas for Hegel are in a way forces working in the things themselves. And for the being of things Hegel goes no farther back than to the ideas, so that he wishes in his logic as it were the sum of all ideas contained in things. The ideas not appearing creatively in nature, the ideas that do not come to reflection in man and are not recognised by man, are ideas in themselves which are working in the world as ideas. I know quite well that perhaps you may not become much wiser from what I am saying; but people have long been maintaining that they do not gain much wisdom from Hegel, for they are unable to imagine the existence of a pure tissue of ideas. In this pure tissue of ideas, however, Hegel sees God before the creation of the world. For Hegel, God is a sum, or better, an organism, of ideas in the form in which these ideas existed before nature arose and before man was evolved on the foundation of nature. Thus Hegel tried to represent ideas in pure logic—that is, God before the creation of the world. God before the creation of the world is therefore pure logic.

Now we might say that it would be very profitable for man's life were someone to set forth all the ideas there were, irrespective of whether they are ideas of a living God or ideas only hovering in the air like a spider's web—but at that time there was no such thing as a web—that this would be of great advantage to the human soul. If, however, you take this pure Hegelian logic, you again find nothing but a web of ideas; and this is the reason it is so seldom done. A beginning is made with the most meagre concept, that of pure being. Then it rises to the non-being, then to existence, and so on. You come therefore to the sum of all ideas man has had about the world, about which he does not usually reflect. He finds it tedious to place before his soul all that follows from pure being up to the appropriate building-up of the organism, apart from any external world. You then get a sum of ideas but only of abstract ideas. And man's living feeling will naturally take up a certain attitude towards this sum or this organism of abstract ideas. How anyone might protest that this is a pantheistic prejudice of Hegel's, this belief that ideas as such are there. I take up the standpoint that before the creation of the world a God would have been there who might have had these ideas and created the world in accordance with them. Try, however, for once to imagine the reason and the soul-life of a God who would have nothing in Him but these Hegelian ideas, and would have reflected only about what lived between being and suitable organisation, who would have had in Himself only ideas of the most external abstractions. What would you say on being expected thus to picture the soul-life of a God? You would never be able to understand how a God could be so poor in His divine reasoning as to think only in such abstractions! Nevertheless for Hegel the sum of these abstract ideas is God Himself, not merely God is understanding but God Himself before the creation of the world. The essential thing is that Hegel in reality never gets beyond abstract ideas, but looks upon these abstractions as divine.

Then he goes on to his second point—nature. Here too, I might give you certain opinions as a kind of definition of the way Hegel progresses from the idea, that is, God before the creation, to nature. Probably, however, you would not gain much here either, were you to keep to your ordinary way of thinking. According to Hegel, logic contains the idea in itself; nature contains the idea in its external form. What therefore you contemplate as nature is also idea, actually nothing but what is contained in logic, in the form, however, of being outside itself or having a different being. Then Hegel examines nature in its pure mechanism to the point where it displays its biological, plant, animal relations. He tries everywhere, as far as nature is an open book to man, to point to ideas in her, in the light, in warmth, and in other forces, that of gravity and so forth. Hegel makes up for the significance lost through his abstractions, by his own powers of perception and imagination. But this perception and imagination of Hegel's sometimes endanger the understanding of what he actually wanted. I once tried to vindicate Hegel to a university professor, a philosopher with whom I was an friendly terms. I defend Hegel, you know, because I count it fruitful to defend everything positive rather than always to swear by one's own opinion, roundly criticizing everything else. Anything at all good I always defend. That is the positivism of Spiritual Science. But that time, in the defence of Hegel, I went to work the wrong way. The friend in question said: “O leave me in peace about Hegel. One can't take a man seriously who has nothing to say about the comets except that they are an eruption in the sky!”—Naturally such a statement, that the comets are some sort of rash in the heavens rather like measles, must be taken in its whole context.

Now after Hegel has given a sort of catalogue of all the concepts and ideas incorporated in nature, he goes on to his third point, the spirit. In the spirit he sees the idea in its own being, that is, not only as it was before the creation of the world, not only in itself, but as it is apart from all else. The idea lives in the human soul, then objectively outside, and then for itself apart, for man. Since man is the idea because all is idea, this is the idea for itself alone. Hegel again tries to follow up the idea as it is present first in the souls of single human individuals, then—if I skip over something—in the State. In human souls the idea is inwardly active; in the State it is again objectified, living in laws and administration. In all this the idea lives, having become objective. It then goes on developing objectively in world-history, State, world-history. Thus in world-history everything is registered as ideas which brings about the further evolution of mankind on the physical plane. Nothing living as ideas in souls, in the State, in world-history, goes beyond the physical plane, nor does it make man aware of there being a spiritual world. For the spiritual world is for Hegel only the sum total of the ideas living in everything, first in the being in itself before the creation of the world., then apart in nature, and in the separateness of the human soul, in the State and in world-history.

After this the idea is developed to its greatest height, in the last moment of its development comes, as it were, to itself, in art, religion and philosophy.

I Logic: Idea in itself
II Nature: Idea in its external being
III Spirit: Idea in its separateness

Soul—State—World-history
Art—Religion—Philosophy

When the three, art, religion, and philosophy, arise in the life of man they stand above the State and world-history; nevertheless they are simply the embodiment of pure logic, the embodiment of abstract ideas. Those ideas existing before the creation of the world are represented in art in a physical image; in religion through a conception in accordance with feeling; and in philosophy the idea in its pure form appears finally in the human spirit. Man comes to fulfillment in philosophy, looks back on everything else that mankind and nature have produced in the way of ideas. He now feels himself filled with the God who is indeed the idea that looks back on the whole of its previous becoming. God sees Himself in men. Actually in man the idea is contemplating itself. Abstraction contemplates abstraction.

Nothing more ingenious can be imagined than these thoughts about human abstraction, if one bears in mind that this ingenuity is in the sphere of abstraction. And one can conceive nothing more inwardly daring than what holds good in the following—Ideas are what is highest, there is no God beyond ideas, ideas are God, and you, O soul of man, you are also an idea, only in you the idea is brought to its separateness, it contemplates itself.

Thus you see that we swim in ideas, we are ourselves ideas, everything is idea—the world in its extremest form of abstraction! It is of very great importance that just at the turn of the eighteenth century, and on into the nineteenth, there should have arisen a spirit who had the courage to say: It is only one who grasps the abstract idea who grasps reality; there is no higher reality than the abstract idea.

In the whole of Hegel's philosophy, from beginning to and, there is no path that leads into the supersensible world. For Hegel there is no such path; and if amen dies, because he is actually idea, in the sense of Hegelian philosophy he goes into the universal stream of world ideas. It is only about this stream of world ideas that anything can be said. There is no single concept that deals with the supersensible—this is just what is so great-minded about the Hegelian philosophy. Everything that meets us in Hegel's philosophy—in icy abstraction, it is true—is itself supersensible, even though abstractly supersensible. This proves itself entirely unsuited. to take up anything supersensible; it shows itself to be fitted only to enter into what is physical. The physical is spiritualised by the superphysical but only in a truly abstract form. At the same time everything supersensible is rejected because the sum of ideas given from beginning to end is related only to the physical world. Thus, I might say, the supersensible character of Hegel's ideas does not become very apparent, for this superphysical is not related to what is superphysical but only to what is physical.

I should particularly like to draw your attention to how the tendency of modern thinking is expressed. in its fundamental rejection of the supersensible; not, however, in superficial materialism but in the highest force of spiritual thinking. Hegel is therefore no materialist; he is an objective idealist. His objective idealism upholds the view that the objective idea is itself God, the founder of the world, the founder of everything.

Whoever thinks out a spiritual impulse of this kind, experiences in his thinking a certain inner satisfaction, which makes him overlook what is lacking. But what is lacking is felt all the more strongly by anyone who is not the original conceiver of the system but only reflects upon it. I have indicated this in my book Vom Menschenrätsel (The Riddle of Man).

Now imagine that a man—not like Hegel—spins thoughts in this way, with an inner supersensible impulse, but that this thinking is taken up by a different head having a sense only for the material—as was the case with Karl Marx. Then this idealistic philosophy of Hegel's becomes the motive for rejecting everything supersensible, and with it everything idealistic. And so it happened with Karl Marx. Karl Marx adopted the form of Hegel of thought. But he did not consider the idea in the reality; he considered the reality as it goes on shinning itself out as mere external material reality. He continued Hegel's impulse and materialised it. Thus the basic nerve of modern socialistic thought has its roots in the very pinnacle of modern idealistic thought. This personal contact that at the same time had to do with the history of the world, this contact of the most abstract thinker with the most material of all thinkers, was an inner necessity but also the tragedy of the nineteenth century; it has been in a certain way the change over of the spiritual life into its opposite.

Hegel continues in abstract concepts. Being is changed into non-being, cannot reconcile itself with non-being and therefore merges into becoming. Thus the concept progresses through thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to a certain inner triad, dealt with by Hegel in a grandiose way in the field of pure idea. Karl Marx carries over this inner triad, sought by Hegel for logic, nature and spirit in the inner flexibility of ideas, into outer material reality. He says, for example: Out of the modern economic and capitalistic form of human community, under private ownership, there has developed, as there developed with Hegel nothingness, non-being out of being, the formation of trusts, the capitalistic socialisation of the economy of private capital. With the increased amassing of industrial plant by the trusts, the private ownership of capital changes into its opposite. There arise associations that are the reverse of individual economy. This is a changing over into the opposite, the antithesis. Then comes synthesis. Once again the whole is changed as nothingness is changed into becoming; and the merging of private economy into the economy of trusts changes into something still greater—the trust economy ands in the communal ownership of the means of production. This purely external economic reality progresses in the triad. Here Karl Marx has been thinking exactly after Hegel's model, only Hegel in his thinking moved in an element of ideas while Marx lived in a weaving and living of external economic reality. So, side-by-side we find the extremes, one might say like being and non-being.

Now you can argue as long as you like about idealism and realism, spiritualism and materialism, but nothing comes of it, you get nowhere. What sustains man can be found only by thinking in the sense of the modern trinity, with man in the centre, the luciferic extreme on the one side, on the other the ahrimanic extreme. Ahrimanic materialism, luciferic spiritualism, as the two extremes, man keeping the balance. If you wish for the truth you can neither be idealist nor realist; you must be one just as much as the other. You must seek the spirit with such intensity that you find spirit even in the material; you must penetrate what is material so that through the material you find the spirit. That is the task of the modern age; no longer to wrangle about spiritualism and materialism but to find the balance between the two. For the two extremes of the luciferic in Hegel and the ahrimanic in Marx are outlived. They were there, they were manifested. Now there must be found what will bring agreement, and this can be done just by Spiritual Science. Here, it is true, we have to rise as did Hegel to the heights of pure thought, but this pure thought must be used for breaking through to the supersensible. We do not have to find logic, that is, an organism of ideas, which can be related only to the world of the senses; but at the point where logic has been found we must pierce through what belongs to the senses and reach the supersensible. Hegel was unable to succeed in thus breaking through, and because of this men was thrown back.

In a certain way it depends upon the heights and purity reached by modern thinking that socialism should have appeared without any reference to what is to any degree spiritual. And the present—day difficulty in adding spiritual thinking to socialistic thinking is bound up with the very ground of mankind's inner path of development. The whole connection must be seen into, however, for us to gain the strength to find the way out of the situation. The pursuit of science as it is now carried on in our universities has certainly not led to this.

Not physically, but where thinking is concerned, Hegel has squeezed out man as a lemon is squeezed till it is dry; and this squeezed out lemon of a man is then only another idea. You sit there in your chairs; in the sense of Hegel's philosophy you are pure ideas; there are not bodies sitting there, not souls, but ideas, for each of you bears en idea within him. And this was already there an abstract idea before the creation of the world. Then each one of you in yourself is body, nature—the idea outside itself is sitting there on those chairs. Then again within you is the idea in its separateness. You yourself grasp this idea that id you. Think what a shadow you are: Only think how squeezed out you are while you sit there as the idea in itself, outside itself, and apart from itself—but always just idea!

Now in the sense of Karl Marx you are quite different from ideas. Just because he has passed through Hegel's method of idealism you are for him an animal that has become two-legged, as you appear outwardly in the order of nature. The other extreme!

In face of what exists in man's evolution must we not make an attempt to give him back his manhood again even in our outward view of him? This means not taking man's nature to be merely universal idea nor animal-men, but really individual man in his own envelope, man who stands at the highest point in nature, who has within him a soul-being and is the goal of a spiritual world. The conception of man must be brought back to this real man. I have tried to do this in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. That is the actual historical statement of the problem which I had before me when I was constrained to write The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. The most highly developed animal enveloping man cannot be free, neither can there be freedom for the shadowy man—the idea in itself, outside itself, the idea in its separate being, for that is built up by the necessity of logic. Neither of these is free. Only the real man is free, the man who is the balance between the idea that breaks through to the actual spirit, and external materiel reality.

Therefore in the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity an attempt was even made to base moral life not upon any kind of abstract principle, but upon inner moral experience, which at the time I called moral imagination, that is, upon what, expressed figuratively, individual man draws from the well of intuition. Kant set up the categorical imperative that runs: Act in such a way that the maxim of your action can be a guiding line for all men: Put on a coat that will fit every man.—The maxim of the philosophy of freedom runs: Let your action be such that it flows to you in a precise concrete moment, in an individual concrete moment, out of your highest human forces, out of the spirit.

Through moral philosophy in this roundabout way we arrive at spirituality. And for modern mankind it might be a way of coming to an understanding of the spiritual world, were men first to see into something that, after all, is not hard to grasp, namely, that what is moral has no support if it is not conceived as part of the supersensible and spiritual. From beginning to end Hegel's logic is a sum of abstract ideas. But ultimately what harm is there in my looking upon the whole of nature, upon every visible thing, as simply a scheme of ideas? It becomes harmful, however, when what spurs us on as an impulse to the moral, does not come from the spiritual world. For if it does not come from the spiritual world it has no true reality and is more noise and smoke issuing from animal-man. When animal-man dies nothing is left. In Hegel's philosophy there is no single concept related to anything that would still be there for man when he has gone through the gate of death, or that could have been there before he came through the gate of birth. Hegel's philosophy is great, but great as a point of transition for the nineteenth century. To recognise Hegel in his greatness leads us to carry him further, to make a passage through what stands in our way when we come to pure thought, to pure logic, to the idea in the abstract—a passage through to the supersensible world. Being still a follower of Hegel, can only be represented as the personal enjoyment of a few twisted minds who, at the beginning of the twentieth century set out to prove their great spirituality by going as far as it was permissible to go in the first decade of the nineteenth century. For we have to learn not only to wish to live abstractly as men, but to live wholly with the times, to live in the evolution of the time. We come to what is really living by refusing, to be absolute, otherwise we cannot cooperate in the sense of human evolution. The important thing is that we should work together for human evolution.

Raphael was great. The Sistine Madonna is a very important artistic creation. Actually it could be estimated justifiably only by someone who, if a painter produced a Sistine Madonna today, would consider it a bad picture. For it is a question of not taking anything as absolute, but of understanding how to place oneself into the great association of all mankind. And the necessity lies before us today of not simply taking up an absolute attitude in the world, as might be done formerly, but of feeling ourselves consciously in the epoch into which we are placed in a certain incarnation. Strange as it may sound, a right estimation of the Sistine Madonna could be made only by someone who was able to condemn the picture out of the modern attitude of mind, had it been painted today. For nothing has an absolute value; things derive their value from the place where they stand in the world. Up to now people have been able to make do without this insight; but from now on it is essential. It is not so particularly profound. In his epoch the discoverer of the Pythagorean theorem was a great man. Today should anyone invent or discover this theorem it would be interesting but nothing more. It would also be interesting were anyone to paint the Sistine Madonna today. It is however not the time for this; it in not what must happen at the point of evolution in which we now stand.

You see what a new form thinking must take, what a socialising of thought there must be to experience jointly with other men is the important thing for today. To most people this will seem distinctly strange. Today however we find ourselves compelled to make a fundamental change in our thinking, to come to really new thoughts. We are no longer able to live with the old thoughts. If men go on spinning these old thoughts, the world will simply tumble about their ears. The salvation of mankind depends on men being able to free themselves from the old thinking and really wish for new thinking. Spiritual Science is a new thinking. The very reason it is so shunned is that fundamentally it is at variance with the old habits of thought. It is only those men who perceive the necessity for a new thinking who will be able to have a true feeling for Spiritual Science generally, and also for its revelations concerning individual spheres of the life of soul, for example, concerning the social question.

Something else is making the present age unhealthy, namely that men have come to think differently in their subconscious, but out of historic obstinacy they suppress this different thinking sitting in their subconscious, and for this they will have to suffer the consequences. Present historical evolution is in many respects the punishment for man's obstinacy in suppressing what lies in his subconscious and clinging in an artificial way to what for centuries he has maintained. We should not take those thinkers who are illogical and love the easy way, we should take the logical thinker of the epoch that is past and gone and learn from him where we have gone astray. It is not the thinker who makes concessions who is characteristic of this period that is past, but the thinker who clings fast to the standpoint of what is old. When, many years ago in the Austrian Upper Chamber, all the lovers of abstraction and the advanced Liberals were speaking of progress and liberalism, and of how religion was to be transformed to suit modern demands—when they used the cliches of all those who take up the cudgels, from Gladstone down to the valiant parliamentarians of the continent—the following rejoinder was made by Cardinal Rauscher, a Churchman keeping fast to the old, with nothing modern about him. He said: The Catholic Church knows no progress; what was once true is true for all time; nothing opposing it in the way of innovation that claims validity, has any right to it!—This was no modern spirit but a finished product of bygone times. And the same is true of Pobedonosceff (Russian Jurist and Statesmen) the only man who in an intelligent way partaking of genius has condemned the whole modern culture of the west, because in his opinion it really led to nothing. It was only possible to uphold the old order to which the bourgeoisie of today have become accustomed if people were willing to believe the world to be formed as Cardinal Rauscher, and Pobedonosceff himself, would have it. Had the world not been fed on the twaddle of Nicolas II but with the stark Principles of Pobedonosceff, it goes without saying that the present war would not have taken place. But on the other hand there is this to be said: One could no have built on Pobedonosceff's ideas, because the reality went in another direction. And now it is a question of following the reality, not by making concessions, not by behaving in the way most spirits have behaved during the second half of the nineteenth century or in the first two decades of the twentieth, but by resolving to think something as different from the earlier thought as the devastation of the world war, in its other negative side, is different from what went before. From this terrible calamity, of which it is constantly said that there has never been anything like it in the course of history, we should learn to grasp thoughts of which we can say that there has never been anything like these in the course of history.

Thus you see it is incumbent upon man to make a great resolution. What out of instinct will unconsciously bring this resolution to fruition makes itself felt as socialism. The world will never get out of chaos till a sufficient number of men combine material socialism with the socialism that is ideal and spiritual. This is the existing condition of things. Salvation cannot come to historical social evolution so long as man fails to reach the point of being able to see the immediate reality beneath his nose. This should become the inner practice, as it were, of the soul which can originate from the impulses of Spiritual Science. I should like to try to point you continually to this inner practice of the soul. The more strongly you feel the importance for our time of what I have been trying to put forward in these considerations, the more freely will you move in the spiritual stream which receives its life from the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy.

Notes:

1. Not Wilson's original English. Translated from the German.

I want to speak today OF something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to humankind by anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces of the human being: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of the human being we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

The human is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when people reach what is called the threshold of the spiritual world.

Our study today will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which humanity stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In the life between birth and death, human beings unfold the force of will as the impulse of their actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, the force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of human will bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while people are awake, they are in a condition resembling sleep wherever their will is involved. True, we have in our consciousness the ideas lying behind what we will, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that we know nothing. We do not know how the idea, “I move my arm,” is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconscious and it may truly be said that people are no more conscious of the real process of will than they are of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of human will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if scientists do not expressly say so, they have in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science today? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. People think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way people think and you will find evidence of it in any text book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that humanity inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were humans not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, humankind has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, humanity itself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution. I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa, and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then-Civilized world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of human beings were among the contributory causes. Yet so it is. In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of people on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses: Humanity itself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth existence. Nor does this apply only to an event of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within human beings and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms alone.

Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side. Here (X) is the center of the earth. When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following. In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapor if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapors begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapors lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapors inside the earth press upward. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapors arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapor do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram a, b, c, d, e, f—do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole. Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say, 1,500 million points¹ all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the center of gravity of your own physical structure. When people are awake, this center of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when they are asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centers of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within the human beings.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling today. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms lie within the human organism. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within humankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of the human being. Science tells us of physical, chemical, and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in our center of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologist in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that areconcentrated in our center of gravity, and the external, physical, and chemical forces? We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity. In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When people take into themselves the substances of the outer world, it is their will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between the human being and the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms of nature today is such that our will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings we had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through humankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space. So much for the one pole in the human constitution.

But the human is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in waking life, human intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while we are awake, although we are not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of the human being. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of human nature were not there—the pole of the up-building forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in our center of gravity, so the up-building forces lie in the sphere into which we pass during sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, we are in a condition figuratively described by saying that with our “I” and astral body we are outside the physical body. But then we are entirely beings of soul and spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time we are connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, up-building forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually up-built would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, up-building forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself. I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The up-building forces lie in humankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in our being but not in our waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously, during our sleep—that is what builds up the earth planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by human sense organs here on earth. But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inner activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If inhabitants of the moon—supposing in this sense there were such beings—were to look at the earth, they would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—they would detect what takes place around the centers of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which human beings live between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centers of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds us in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant, and mineral worlds are maya means nothing: What is of value is the realization that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of human evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain. Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, the human being too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in people is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in people. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of the human being to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth, if I may speak figuratively, hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as we believe that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as we cling to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed today lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking people cannot use the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as a human being I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all humankind—of every physical happening. The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text books of geology, botany, and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of Martian premises. I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean. Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology, and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth. This being would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink. That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by human beings themselves of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside the human being; they lie within humankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realize that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling people to sleep than to impress upon them that they have no share in the course taken by earth existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel themselves to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

Someone may say: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body. With equal conviction such a person should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure. The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of human beings. The range of our vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilized world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world consciousness, human responsibility widens into world responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions today. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis, do not imagine that what you read there today can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. People think today that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya. But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realized: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in humankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya,” becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in the human being a reality far greater than is usually perceived. And then the feeling of responsibility for earth existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realization that humankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As people of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of human beings.—What human beings? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the ones who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining today.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective inter-working of human beings on the earth. None of us should, for that reason, exclude ourselves as individuals, for each of us has a share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its on-flowing life.

I have been endeavoring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books. Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

And now suppose some creature who had never lived in our world were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge, were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second, and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second circle. This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quaternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when human beings are outside their physical bodies.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from our powers of cognition. The part played by humankind in shaping earth existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment speaks of the human being's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will Human beings know nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. We do not know what is really going on when by lifting our hand we set in operation a process of will; nor do we know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my mystery play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not fantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose fantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern people who like to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. They feel relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than fantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if poets are not themselves conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if their soul is linked with the cosmos, if they have not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, they give utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes.² The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying. Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the human world that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth existence the human world is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the human world. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from humanity. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper,” but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning. Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavors never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meager sense of reality prevailing in our present civilization expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without human beings, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose tree. These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thoughts: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality. Similarly, the human being has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without humankind. It is an unreal concept when modern scientific investigators think, according to their premises, that earth evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture today I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in human beings and their cosmic environment.

• 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.
• 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erlauterungen zu Goethe's Faust.

I want to speak to-day of something that will help to deepen our understanding of truths that must now be given to mankind by Anthroposophy. We have often spoken of the two poles of forces in man: the pole of will and the pole of intelligence. To understand the nature of man we must be constantly mindful of these two poles.

Man is a being of will and a being of intelligence. Between them—at any rate from birth until death—lies the element of feeling, constituting the bridge between the intelligence and the will. You know that these forces separate from each other in a certain sense when man reaches what is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World.

Our study to-day will be concerned more particularly with the relationship in which man stands to the surrounding world, on the one side as a being of intelligence and on the other as a being of will. We shall deal with the latter first.

In his life between birth and death, man unfolds the force of will as the impulse of his actions and activity. As it comes to expression through the human organism, this force of will is a very intricate, complicated matter. Nevertheless in one aspect, everything of the nature of will in man bears a great likeness, amounting almost to identity, with certain forces of nature. It is therefore quite correct to speak of an inner relation between the forces of will in the human being and the forces of nature.

You know from earlier studies that even while man is awake, he is in a condition resembling sleep wherever his will is involved. True, he has in his consciousness the ideas lying behind what he wills, but how a particular idea takes effect in the form of will—of that he knows nothing. He does not know how the idea, “I move my arm”, is connected with the process leading to the actual movement of the arm. This process lies entirely in the subconsciousness and it may truly be said that man is no more conscious of the real process of will than he is of what takes place during sleep. But when the question arises as to the connection of man's will with the surrounding world, we come to something that will strike the kind of consciousness that has developed in the course of the last three to five centuries as highly paradoxical. It is generally thought that the evolution of the earth would be the same even if human beings had no part in it at all. A typical natural scientist describes the evolution of the earth as a series, let us say, of geological, purely physical processes. And even if he does not expressly say so, he has in mind that from the earth's beginning until its hypothetical end, everything would go on just the same even if it were uninhabited by human beings. Why is this view held by natural science to-day? The reason is that when anything takes place, for example in the mineral kingdom, or the plant kingdom, let us say on November 9th, 1919, people believe that its cause lies in what has happened in the mineral kingdom prior to this particular point of time. Men think: the mineral kingdom takes its course and what happens at any point is the effect of what went before; the mineral effect is due to a mineral cause.

This is the way men think and you will find evidence of it in any text-book of geology. Conditions obtaining at the present time are said to be the effects of the Ice Age, or of some preceding epoch—but the causes are attributed entirely to what once took place in the mineral kingdom as such; the fact that man inhabits the earth is ignored. The belief is that even were man not present, everything would run a similar course, that the external reality would be the same—although, in fact, man has always been part of this external reality. The truth is that the earth is one whole, man himself being one of the active factors in the earth's evolution.—I will give you an example.

You know that our present epoch—thinking of it for the moment in the wider sense, as comprising the period since the great Atlantean catastrophe—was preceded by the Atlantean epoch itself, when the continents of Europe, Africa and America in their present form were not in existence. At that time there was one main continent on the earth—Atlantis as it is called—extending over the area that is now the Atlantic Ocean. You know too that at a certain period in this Atlantean evolution, immorality of a particular kind was rampant throughout the then civilised world. Human beings had far greater power over the forces of nature than they later possessed and employed these forces for evil purposes. Thus we can look back to an age of widespread immorality. And then came the great Atlantean catastrophe. The orthodox geologist will naturally trace this catastrophe to processes in the mineral kingdom; indeed it is a fact that one part of the earth subsided and another arose. But it will not occur to those who base their thinking on the principles of modern natural science to say to themselves that the deeds and activities of men were among the contributory causes.—Yet so it is.—In very truth the Atlantean catastrophe was the outcome of the deeds of men on the earth.

Outer, mineral causes are not alone responsible for these great catastrophic events that break in upon earth-existence. We must look for causes lying within the sphere of human actions and impulses. Man himself belongs to the chain of causative forces in earth-existence. Nor does this apply only to events of such magnitude but to what is happening all the time. Only the connection between what goes on within man and cosmic happenings which take effect in tellurian events, remains hidden, to begin with. In this respect the whole of our natural science amounts to a great, all-embracing illusion. For if you want to get at the real causes you will not discover them by studying the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms alone.

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Let me give you the following illustration of what comes into consideration here. We will approach it, so to speak, from the opposite side.—Here (X) is the centre of the earth.—When something takes place in the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom or the animal kingdom, it is a matter of seeking the causes. The causes lie at certain points which are to be found everywhere. You can picture what I mean by thinking of the following.—In the region around Naples in Italy, you will find that the earth over a wide area will emit vapour if you take a piece of paper and set it alight. Vapours begin to rise from the ground beneath you. You will say: the force which drives up the vapours lies in the physical process generated by the lighting of the paper. In this case, the physical process is that by lighting the paper you rarify the air and because of the rarification of the air the vapours inside the earth press upwards. They are kept down by the normal air-pressure and this is diminished by setting light to the paper. If I merely want to give an example of effects of a purely mineral nature—such as these vapours arising out of the earth—I could say for the sake of illustration that here, and here (points in the diagram), a piece of paper is set alight. This shows you that the causes of the rising of the vapour do not lie below the soil, but above it. Now these points in the diagram—a, b, c, d, e, f do not represent pieces of paper that have been set alight; in this instance they represent something different. Imagine, to begin with, that each point on its own has no significance but that the significance lies in the system of points as a whole.—Do not think now of the pieces of lighted paper, but of something else which at the moment I will not specify. Something else is there as an active cause, above the surface of the earth; and these different causes do not work singly, but together. And now imagine that there are not six points only, but, let us say 1,500 million points [Note 1] all working together, producing a combined effect. These 1,500 million points are actually there. Each of you has within you what may be called the centre of gravity of your own physical structure. When man is awake, this centre of gravity lies just below the diaphragm; when he is asleep it lies a little lower. There are therefore some 1,500 million of these centres of gravity spread over the earth, producing a combined effect. And what issues from this combined effect is the actual cause of a great deal of what takes place in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms on the earth. It is a scientific fallacy to trace back to mineral causes the forces manifesting in air and water and in the mineral realm; in reality the causes are to be found within man.

This is a truth of which there is scarcely an inkling to-day. It is known to very, very few that the causes of processes active in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms lie within the organism of man. (This does not apply to all the forces working in these kingdoms of nature, but to a large proportion of them.) Within mankind lie the causes for what happens on earth. Therefore mineralogy, botany, zoology, cannot be cultivated truly without anthropology—without the study of man. Science tells us of physical, chemical and mechanical forces. These forces are intimately connected with the human will, with the force of human will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity. If we speak of the earth with an eye to the truth of these matters, we must not follow the geologists in speaking of an earth in the abstract, but humanity must be accounted an integral part of the earth. These are the truths that reveal themselves on yonder side of the Threshold. Everything that can be known on this side of the Threshold belongs to the realm of the illusions of knowledge, not to the realm of truth.

At this point the question arises: What relation is there between the forces of will that are concentrated in man's centre of gravity, and the external, physical and chemical forces?—We are speaking, remember, of present-day humanity.—In normal life, this relation takes effect in the metabolic processes. When man takes into himself the substances of the outer world, it is his will that actually digests and works upon these substances. And if nothing else were in operation, then what is taken into the organism from outside would simply be destroyed. The human will has the power to dissolve and destroy all extraneous substances and forces; and the relation between man and the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of nature to-day is such that his will is connected with the forces of dissolution and destruction inherent in our planet.

We could not live were this destruction not to take place—but for all that it is destruction. This must never be forgotten. And what are often described as unlawful magical practices are based essentially on the fact that certain human beings learn to employ their will wrongfully, in such a way that they do not confine the destructive forces to their normal operations within the organism but extend them over other human beings, deliberately and consciously applying the forces of destruction that are anchored in their will. That, quite obviously, is a practice that is never, under any circumstances, permissible.

Through our will we are connected with the earth's forces of decline. And if as human beings had only our forces of will, the earth would be condemned through us, through mankind, to sheer destruction. The prospect of the future would then be far from inspiring; it would be a vista of the gradual dissolution of the earth and its ultimate dispersal in cosmic space.—So much for the one pole in man's constitution.

But man is a twofold being. One pole is, as we have seen, connected with the destructive forces of our planet; the other pole—that of intelligence—is connected with the will by the bridge of feeling. But in his waking life, man's intelligence is of little account as far as the planet earth is concerned. During waking life we cannot really establish a true relationship to earth-existence through our intelligence. What I have told you in regard to the will happens while man is awake, although he is not conscious of it. If you see a rock crumbling away and ask where the actual causes of the crumbling lie, then you must look into the inner, organic nature of man himself. Strange as this will seem to the modern mind, it is indeed so. But as I said, the earth would face a sorry future if the other pole of man's nature were not there—the pole of the upbuilding forces. Just as the causes of all destruction lie in the will that is concentrated in man's centre of gravity, so the upbuilding forces lie in the sphere into which men pass during their sleep. From the time of falling asleep until that of waking, man is in a condition figuratively described by saying that with his “I” and astral body he is outside the physical body. But then he is entirely a being of soul-and-spirit, unfolding the forces that are in operation between falling asleep and waking. During this time he is connected, through these forces, with everything that builds up the earth-planet, everything that adds to the forces of destruction the constructive, upbuilding forces. If you did not go about the earth, the destructive forces actually proceeding from your will would not be working in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. If you never went to sleep, the forces whereby the earth is continually upbuilt would not stream out of your intelligence. The constructive, upbuilding forces of the planet earth also lie in humanity itself: I do not say: in the individual human being—for I have expressly said that all these single causes form a collective whole. The upbuilding forces lie in mankind as a whole, actually in the pole of intelligence in man's being but not in his waking intelligence. Waking intelligence is really like a lifeless entity thrusting itself into earth-evolution. The intelligence that works, unconsciously to man, during his sleep—that is what builds up the earth-planet. By this I am only trying to explain that it is a fallacy to look outside the human being for the destructive and the constructive forces of our earth; you must look for them within the human being. Once you grasp this, what I am now going to say will not be unintelligible.

You look up to the stars, saying that something is streaming from them that can be perceived by man's sense-organs here on earth.—But what you behold when you gaze at the stars is not of the same nature as what you perceive on the earth in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms. In reality it proceeds from beings of intelligence and will whose life is bound up with those stars. The effects appear to be physical because the stars are at a distance. They are not in reality physical at all. What you actually see are the inter activities of beings of will and intelligence in the stars. I have already spoken to you of the ingenious description of the sun given by astrophysicists. But if it were possible to journey to the sun by some means of transport invented by a Jules Verne, it would be found with amazement that nothing of what was to be expected from these physical descriptions exists. The descriptions are merely a composite picture of solar phenomena. What we see is in reality the working of will and intelligence which at a distance appears as light. If an inhabitant of the Moon—supposing in this sense there were such a being—were to look at the earth, he would not detect its grassy or mineral surfaces but—also perceiving it as a light effect or something similar—he would detect what takes place around the centres of gravity of human bodies and also the effects of the conditions in which man lives between going to sleep and waking. That is what would actually be seen from the universe. Even the most perfect instrument would not enable the chairs, for instance, on which you are now sitting, to be seen; what would be seen is all that is taking place in the region of your centres of gravity and what would happen if you were suddenly to fall asleep—it is to be hoped that this would not happen in every case! But wherever it did happen, it would be perceived out in the universe.

So that to the outer universe, what takes place through human beings is the perceptible reality—not what surrounds man in earthly existence. A very common saying is that everything perceived with the senses is maya—the great illusion—no reality but simply appearance. Such an abstraction is of little account. It has meaning only when one enters into the concrete, as we have now been doing. To say glibly that the animal, plant and mineral worlds are maya means nothing. What is of value is the realisation that what you perceive outwardly depends fundamentally upon yourselves and that—not of course at each moment but in the course of mankind's evolution—you make yourselves an integral part of the chain of causes and effects.

Even when such a shattering truth is uttered—and I think it may well be shattering—it is not always seen in the aspect where it becomes of importance in life. Such a truth assumes importance only when we perceive its consequences. We are not physical beings only; we are moral—or maybe immoral—beings in earthly existence. What we do is determined by impulses of a moral nature.

Now just think with what bitter doubt modern thought is assailed in this domain.—Natural science provides a knowledge of the earthly that is confined to the connection between purely external causes and effects; and in this cycle of natural causes and effects, physical man too is involved. So it is alleged by external, abstract science which takes account of one aspect only of earthly existence.

The fact that moral impulses also light up in man is admitted but nothing is known about the connection between these moral impulses and what comes to pass in the round of external nature. Indeed the dilemma of modern philosophy is that the philosophers hear on the one hand from the scientists that everything is involved in a chain of natural causes and effects—and on the other hand have to admit that moral impulses light up in man. That is the reason why Kant wrote two “Critiques”: the Critique of Pure Reason, concerned with the relation of man to a purely natural course of things, and the Critique of Practical Reason where he puts forward his moral postulates—which in truth—if I may speak figuratively—hover in the air, come out of the blue and have no a priori relation with natural causes.

As long as man believes that what takes place in the external manifestations of nature can be traced only to similar manifestations, as long as he clings to this illusion, the intervention of moral impulses is something that remains separate and apart from the course of nature. Nearly everything that is discussed to-day lies under the shadow of this breach. In their thinking men cannot fuse the earthly round as such with the moral life of humanity. But as soon as you grasp something of what I have tried briefly to outline, you will be able to say: Yes, as man I am a unity, and moral impulses are alive within me. They live in what I am as a physical being. But as a physical human being I am fundamentally the cause—together with all mankind—of every physical happening.—The moral conduct and achievements of human beings on the earth are the real causes of what comes to pass in the course of earth-existence.

Natural history and natural science describe the earth in the way we find in text-books of geology, botany and so forth. What is said there seems entirely satisfactory according to the premises formed through modern education. But let us suppose that an inhabitant of Mars were to come down to the earth and observe it in the light of his premises.—I am not saying that such a thing could happen but merely trying to illustrate what I mean.—Suppose a being from Mars, having wandered dumbly about the earth were then to learn some human language, read some geology and thus discover what kind of ideas prevail concerning the processes and happenings on the earth.—He would say: But that is not all. By far the most important factor is ignored. For example, I have noticed crowds of students loitering about in their beer-houses, drinking and indulging their passions. Something is happening there: the human will is working in the metabolism. These are processes of which no mention is made in your books on physics and geology; they contain no reference to the fact that the course of earth-existence is also affected by whether the students drink or do not drink.—... That is what a being not entirely immersed in earthly ideas and prejudices would find lacking in the descriptions given by man himself of happenings on earth. For a being from Mars there would be no question but that moral impulses, pervading human deeds and the whole of human life, are part and parcel of the course of nature. According to modern preconceptions there is something inexorable in the play of nature, indeed pleasantly inexorable for materialistic thinkers. They imagine that the earth's course would be exactly the same were no human beings in existence; that whether they behave decently or not makes no fundamental difference or really alters anything. But that is not the case! The all-essential causes of what happens on the earth do not lie outside man; they lie within mankind. And if earthly consciousness is to expand to cosmic consciousness, humanity must realise that the earth—not over short but over long stretches of time—is made in its own likeness, in the likeness of humanity itself. There is no better means of lulling man to sleep than to impress upon him that he has no share in the course taken by earth-existence. This narrows down human responsibility to the single individual, the single personality.

The truth is that the responsibility for the course of earth-existence through ages of cosmic time, lies with humanity. Everyone must feel himself to be a member of humanity, the earth itself being the body for that humanity.

An individual may say to himself: For ten years I have given way to my passions, indulged my fancies and have thereby ruined my body.—With equal conviction he should be able to say: If earthly humanity follows impure moral impulses, then the body of the earth will be different from what it would be were the moral impulses pure.—The day-fly, because it lives for twenty-four hours only, has a view of the world differing entirely from that of man. The range of man's vision is not wide enough to perceive that what happens externally in the course of nature is not dependent upon purely natural causes. In regard to the present configuration of Europe, it is far more important to ask what manner of life prevailed among human beings in the civilised world two thousand years ago than to investigate the external mineral and plant structure of the earth. The destiny of our physical earth-planet in another two thousand years will not depend upon the present constitution of our mineral world, but upon what we do and allow to be done. With world-consciousness, human responsibility widens into world-responsibility. With such consciousness we feel as we look up to the starry heavens that we are responsible to this cosmic expanse, permeated and pervaded as it is by spirit—that we are responsible to this world for how we conduct the earth. We grow together with the cosmos in concrete reality when behind the phenomena we seek for the truth.

I so often tell you that we must learn to perceive the concrete realities of things for the most part taught as abstractions to-day. Nothing much is accomplished by adopting oriental traditions such as: the external world of the senses is maya. We must go much deeper if we are to arrive at the truth. Such abstractions do not carry us far, because in the form in which they have been handed down they are nothing but the sediment of a primeval wisdom that did not hover in abstractions but teemed with concrete realities which must be brought to light again through spiritual intuition and research. When you read in oriental literature of maya and of truth as its antithesis,do not imagine that what you read there to-day can be really intelligible to you. It is only a much later compilation of matters that were concrete realities to the ancient wisdom. We must get back to these concrete realities. Men think to-day that they have some understanding of cosmic processes when they assert that the external world of sense is maya.—But nothing can be understood unless one presses on to the underlying realities. The moment it is realised: we have not to ask how the present mineral world has developed out of the mineral processes of another age; we have rather to ask about what has been going on in mankind—at that moment the real meaning of the saying, “the outer world is maya”, becomes clear. Then we begin to perceive in man a reality far greater than is usually perceived.—And then the feeling of responsibility for earth-existence begins.

If you will try to get to the inner core of these things—and it must be by inward contemplation, not by means of the kind of intelligence employed in natural science—you will gradually find your way to the realisation that mankind is composed of free human beings. Nature does not, in truth, counteract our freedom, for as human beings we ourselves fashion the nature immediately surrounding us. It is only in its partial manifestations that nature counteracts our freedom. Nature counteracts our freedom to an extent no greater than if—to give an example—you are stretching out your hand and someone else takes hold of it and checks the movement. You will not deny freedom of will simply because someone else checks a movement. As men of the present day we are checked in many respects because of some action of our predecessors that is only now taking effect. But at all events it was an action of men.—What men? Not anyone against whom we can turn with reproach, for we ourselves were the men who, in earlier earthly lives, brought about the conditions obtaining to-day.

We must not confine ourselves to the mere mention of repeated earthly lives but think of the connection between them in such a way that even in external nature we perceive the effects of causes we ourselves laid down in earlier lives. Naturally, in reference to the single, individual human being, we must speak of contributory causes only, for in all these things, as I have said, it is a matter of the collective interworking of men on the earth. No one should, for that reason, exclude himself as an individual, for each of us has his share in what is brought about by humanity as a whole and then comes to expression in what constitutes the body for the whole of earthly humanity in its onflowing life.

I have been endeavouring to give you an idea of how a spiritual scientist must regard the statements made in ordinary scientific text-books.—Suppose I were to draw a series of figures:

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And now suppose some creature who had never lived in the world of men were to crawl out of the earth and, having some rudiments of arithmetical knowledge were to look at the figures and say: First figure, second figure, third figure. The third is the effect of the second and the second the effect of the first. Effect of the first figure—a triangle; effect of the second—a circle.—This creature would then be combining cause and effect. But it would be a fallacy, for I have drawn each figure separately. In reality the one is independent of the other. It only appears to be dependent to this creature who associates what comes first with what follows, as if the one were the outcome of the other. This, approximately, is how the geologist describes the process of the earth: Diluvial epoch, Tertiary epoch, Quarternary epoch, and so on. But this is no more true than the statement that the circle is the outcome, the effect of the triangle, or the triangle the effect of the rectangular figure. The configurations of the earth are brought about autonomously—through the deeds of earthly humanity, including the mysterious workings of the intelligence during the periods of sleep when man is outside his physical body.

This shows you that the descriptions given by external science are very largely illusion—maya. But merely to speak about maya is of little account. To the assertion that the external world is maya we must be able to reply by stating where the actual causes lie. These causes are hidden to a great extent from man's powers of cognition. The part played by mankind in shaping earth-existence cannot be fathomed by means of external science but only by an inner science. My book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment speaks of man's inner activity between the time of going to sleep and waking. This can be revealed by knowledge that reaches down to the sphere of the will. Man knows nothing of the connection between the will and the outer world for the processes of the will are hidden and concealed. He does not know what is really going on when by lifting his hand he sets in operation a process of will; nor does he know that this process continues and has an effect in the whole course of earth-existence.

This is indicated in the scene in my Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, where the actions of Capesius and Strader have their outcome in cosmic manifestations—in thunder and lightning. It is, of course, a pictorial representation, but the picture contains a deeper truth; it is not phantasy but actual truth. For a fairly long period in evolution, truths of this kind have been voiced only by true poets whose phantasy must always be perception of super-sensible processes.

This is very little understood by modern man who likes to relegate poetry, indeed all art, to a place separate and apart from external reality. He feels relieved not to be asked to see in poetry anything more than phantasy. True poetry, true art, is of course, no more than a reflection of super-sensible truth—but a reflection it is. Even if the poet is not himself conscious of the super-sensible happenings, if his soul is linked with the cosmos, if he has not been torn away from the cosmos by materialistic education, he gives utterances to super-sensible truths, in spite of having to express them in pictures drawn from the world of sense.

Many examples of this are contained in the second part of Goethe's Faust, where as I have shown in the case of particular passages, the imagery has a direct relation with super-sensible processes. [Note 2] The development of art in recent centuries affords evidence of what I have been saying.—Take any picture painted by no means very long ago, and you will find that as a rule, landscape is given very secondary importance. The painting of landscape has come into prominence only since the last three to five centuries. Earlier than that you will find that landscape takes second place; it is the world of man that is brought to the forefront because the consciousness still survived that in regard to objective processes of earth-existence the world of man is much more important than the landscape—which is but the effect of the world of man. In the very birth of preference for landscape there lies, in the sphere of art, the parallel phenomenon of the birth of the materialistic trend of mind—consisting in the belief that landscape and what it represents has an existence of its own, entirely apart from man. But the truth is quite the reverse. Were some inhabitant of Mars to come down to the earth he would certainly be able to see meaning in Leonardo da Vinci's “Last Supper”, but not in paintings of landscapes. He would see landscapes—including painted landscapes—and the whole configuration of the earth quite differently and with his particular organ of sense could not fathom their meaning.—Please remember that I am saying these things merely in order to illustrate hypothetically what I want to convey.

So you see, the saying: “the external world is maya” cannot be fully understood without entering into the concrete realities. But to do this we must relate ourselves intimately with earth-existence as a whole, know ourselves to be an integral part of it. And then we must grasp the thought that there can be external and apparent realities which are not the truth, not the true realities. If you have a rose in your room, it is an apparent reality only, for the rose as it is in front of you there, cannot be the reality. It can be true reality only while it is growing on the rose-tree, united with the roots which in turn are united with the earth. The earth as described by the geologists is as little a true reality as a plucked rose is a reality.

Spiritual science endeavours never to halt at the untrue reality, but always to seek what must be added, in order to have the whole, true reality. The meagre sense of reality prevailing in our present civilisation expresses itself in the very fact that every external manifestation is taken as reality. But there is reality only in what lies before one as an integrated whole. The earth by itself, without man, is no more a true reality than the rose plucked from the rose-tree.—These things must be pondered and worked upon; they must not remain theories but pass over into our feelings. We must feel ourselves members of the whole earth. It is of importance again and again to call up the thought: this finger on my hand has true reality only as long as it is part of my organism; if it is cut off it no longer has true reality.—Similarly, man has no true reality apart from the earth, nor has the earth without mankind. It is an unreal concept when the modern scientific investigator thinks, according to his premises, that earth-evolution would run the same course if humanity were not there. I recently showed you that it would not be so, by telling you that the bodies laid aside by human beings at death become a leaven in earth-evolution and that if no human bodies—either by burial or cremation—became part of the earth, the whole course of physical happenings would be other than it is in consequence of these bodies having been received into the earth.

In the lecture to-day I wanted to speak in greater detail of the connection between the two poles of will and intelligence in man and his cosmic environment.

Notes:

Note 1. Representing, approximately, the total population of the earth.

Note 2. Twenty-eight lectures given in the year 1915. Geisteswissenschaftliche Erläuterungen zu Goethe's Faust. [This is a reference to GA#'s 272 and 273: Spiritual Scientific Note on Goethe's Faust, Volumes I (15 lectures) and II (13 lectures), most of which are yet untranslated. – e.Ed.]

It is of outstanding importance today for us to recognise clearly the deep connections within the ordering of human society. In course of time people have become satisfied in many respects with what I would call superficial conceptions, conceptions based on what lies on the surface of existence. These conceptions lead them to consider one thing right, or let us say they lead to a certain thing being considered right by one man and wrong by another; but with these views of what is right and wrong we do not get anywhere. Nothing comes of them because, though thoughts may be formed about what lies on the surface, they do not produce any rational result when transformed into reality. Reality is not willing to put up so complacently as human heads with superficial opinions. These are a cancerous growth peculiar to the present age; and a further cancerous growth is men's refusal to gain sufficient self-knowledge to enable them, when the occasion arises, to say: All these things are done to further our personal interest and we should not make them masquerade: as a social aim; when we want to do something for ourselves we should not say that it is part of some social activity. We meet with a great deal of this kind. In diverse ways there has been an increase in what has existed for many years, namely, what people here have wished to do has continually been converted into the personal interest of some particular circle; it then being said that it is a consequence, an outcome, of what was wished from this quarter. I am just calling attention to the necessity for people nowadays to be willing to see more deeply into matters, thus ridding themselves of superficial conceptions.

Now nowhere is this necessity so urgent as in the sphere of education, and nowhere is the goodwill for it more lacking. For if we really think socially it is necessary in the educational sphere to focus our attention upon even the most elementary things; you may perhaps have gathered this from the two previous lectures of this series. But today especially I should like to know that this is realised as something meant to run through my whole lecture. Just look at what is experienced today by human beings, by small children, at all stages of school life. When a small child enters a school, in what goes on there everything is taken into account except the needs and the impulses of the developing human being; and with the advance from class to class this evil goes on increasing. Already at an age when such things should not be tolerated, the following, for example, may happen. The young pupil arrives at school for the first lesson of the morning. For this first lesson there is perhaps put down, for the convenience of the college of teachers, let us say mathematics, arithmetic, then Latin, then there may follow religious instruction. After that there perhaps come music or singing, perhaps not that but geography. You cannot do anything more destructive to the human heart and mind than arranging in this way for young people's powers of concentration to be so thoroughly undermined. What we must begin upon when reforming the sphere of education socially is pre-eminently the time-table, that arch-enemy of everything to do with genuine education; the time-table that continues throughout all stages in a school is what must be our first object of attack. If we think at all of restoring our education to health, we have to take care that in future the growing human being shall concentrate on one subject as long as it is necessary for his particular state of development. Thus, by careful study we must discover at what age it is necessary to give the growing pupil mathematical concepts, for example, and concepts of physics. Here we must not choose that worst of all methods—the giving of three or four weekly lessons on these subjects; we must on the contrary put aside a whole period for the pupil, which means that for a certain period of his life he has to concentrate on one thing without interruption. Out of a knowledge of man that is genuinely psychological, from the educational point of view, we must be clear, for example, at what age pupils should receive instruction in arithmetic. At that age arithmetic must be the first consideration, and the entire day devoted to focussing attention on the subject. Naturally I don't mean that the youngster should do nothing but mathematics from morning to evening; I mean it in the sense of what I found necessary when I was given a psychopathic child of eleven to educate. In this case I tried to set to work in an economic way; I arranged with all those responsible for the education of the child that I myself should have the say in respect of the time during which I wanted his soul to concentrate especially on a certain subject, and that I should be the one to draw up the plan for all the child did. Thus a definite time was to be given to the piano, a definite time to singing, and so on. It is not a question of filling the soul with teaching matter, but of so organising the whole development that the soul itself can concentrate upon one thing at a certain age, and that, before going on to any other subject, it is possible to reach a definite end in some individual branch of human culture. Let us say therefore: We have to consider how much arithmetic is to be given a human being at any definite period of life, so that at the end of that period the young developing child can have the feeling that it has made a step forward in the subject. Then only should a move on be made to another subject.

Thus, you see that what now constitutes the groundwork of our education, up to the highest stages of college life, bears within it the most harmful element of our whole education. There can hardly be anything more contrary to good sense than for the student on entering college to experience what I did in my day, that is, having to listen:

From 7 to 8 in the morning to philosophy
From 8 to 9 in the morning to history
From 9 to 10 in the morning to history of literature
From 10 to 11 in the morning to constitutional law.

Now in all this there is no intention, as there ought to be, of avoiding confusion in the mind of the developing human being; the only consideration is the convenience of the school authorities. This can be seen by the most unprejudiced of us.

Here we have a great and obvious task. It is a task, however, that, granted the present habits of thinking, wi11 not meet in general with much desire to set to work on it. This is what is meant when we say that now is the time for reorganisation on a big scale. Most people are prone to believe that this reorganisation is helped on by high-sounding words, but it is helped only when courage is forthcoming for big changes, and when we do not shrink from facing up to the opposition these changes arouse.

There is something else which today is very generally considered indispensable, something of particularly great significance for the lower classes in a school—the so-called government inspection of schools. There can be nothing more disastrous in a suitable development of the life of spirit than this official or semi-official inspection. What is needed in school affairs for the life of spirit—whoever look s deeply into things can see this—what is necessary for really thriving progress, calls for continuous watchfulness coming from the living nature of the instruction itself. This cannot and should never be gauged by any school inspection from outside. As long as he remains at his post, anyone to whom, with all necessary precautions, the administering of the life of spirit has been entrusted, should never have his methods, or anything of that kind, interfered with. This is something many people do not yet grasp, and lack of understanding for it is at the same time lack of understanding for one of the basic conditions of all life that can bring maturity to the human spirit. From this you see in what a thoroughgoing way we have to lay hands on what people today take as a matter of course—what they even ask to have in a more pronounced form. For there is scarcely one social party programme which does not dwell on the official or semi-official inspection of schools. This is not finding fault with any person or with any part, but simply pointing to what has resulted from the wrong direction gradually taken in the life of spirit.

We can make a special study, my dear friends, of this perverted life of spirit if we look at the higher classes in a school. How has our higher education actually developed? This indeed could be observed in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately all those within the German life of spirit who enabled it to come to any definite significance in the world, had already arrived at maturity before this more recent system had destroyed the foundations of real spiritual development. Goethe indeed sufficiently abused the impediments even he met with during his school career. We should just picture what a different account Goethe would have given in his Poetry and Truth of Professor Ludwig and others, if in his eighteenth or nineteenth year the restrictions of the present higher educational centres had been imposed upon him. We must reflect on such things today. What actually is it that has been gradually abolished? Now when the grammar school, which today in accordance with modern demands is looked upon as a bugbear, was the only centre of preparation for higher education, when it still bore the stamp of the old monastic school—for its time not at all to be despised—it retained what we might describe by saying: The student absorbed something which gave him a general world-outlook. In the syllabus of these schools there figured what is called philosophy. It is true that this was cultivated only during the last two years; for the most part what belonged to the second year was taken in the first and vice versa, but at least something was there—the last remnants of what flourished in the old colleges, namely, that the first years spent by a student at college afforded a possibility of gaining some kind of world-outlook and qualified him to enter upon study for a special calling. For in reality no one can be fitted for a special calling who has not, through preparatory instruction, become capable of an intelligent, perceptive opinion about human affairs in general. Today it is considered superfluous to give people in a true form concepts that are logical or psychological. No one, however, can profitably study any branch whatever of the higher life of spirit, who has not previously experienced these logical and psychological conceptions, and thus qualified for this study. The more recent cultural life of spirit has abolished all these things. It has no longer any wish to look at man at all; this new culture seeks to train the life of spirit out of impulses quite foreign fo that life.

Now this has led to all that is found in our common cultivation of the spirit, which no longer bears the stamp of a united culture. It has split us asunder and so far has been unable to master what must be mastered. Anyone having experience in this sphere knows what wide praise has been given to the specialisation of recent times. It ha s constantly been pointed out how our cultural life has been so much extended that a man can have a thorough and profitable grasp only of special branch of knowledge. Something has been indicated here which, from one aspect, might be called self-evident, but out of inner laziness people have accepted it with alacrity. Men need today just to confine themselves within the limits of some special subject to be hailed as qualified men of culture. Naturally, anyone having culture at heart cannot hope and cannot wish that specialisation should give place to a general dilettantism. The aim must be for all education, all school-life, to be so organised for the human being that at a lower level of his consciousness it is always possible for him to connect his specialty by thread s of intelligence with the general culture. This can happen in no other way than by giving every college a foundation of the general culture of mankind. The pedants today will here protest and ask what is to become of professional training. We should just prove how economically we can proceed with professional training, when dealing with specialities , if we can work upon human beings with an all­round culture—if we can work upon men who really have something human in them. Through the perverse conditions of our modern culture we have reached the point where a man in his special subject can be a most highly developed being and, at the same time, colosally stupid where the great problems of man kind are concerned, understanding absolutely nothing about them. We have in our midst nowadays this curious phenomenon—that someone who has only passed through the primary school, and perhaps has not done this very satisfactorily, and has been dragged rather than brought up, has more sensible things to say about general human conditions than the man who has passed through higher education and excels in his own sphere. Today we must fight this phenomenon if we have any idea of sending into the depths those impulses which alone can bring improvement, impulses which do not lead merely to the superficial measures sought by those unwilling to take the path demanded by reality if anything is to happen. Naturally today we have let the evil go so far that we no longer have the personalities fit to build the foundations for a college of the kind, and are in the terrible situation of possessing no teachers for general human culture. For, my dear friends, it has come to this, that our colleges lie half asleep on the outermost fringes of culture. The following can be experienced—that in our colleges, during the hour appointed for some particular science, a professor gives his lecture from a notebook and the student listens. He—the student—will then buy himself a copy of some kind in order to read it up for his exam. This is quite a usual procedure. But what is it in reality? In reality the young man when he sits there listening is completely wasting his time, for actually he gets the information needed by reading the copy he has bought. Merely by that he would have done everything in the matter that has any reality. This means that the professor taking his place at the reading-desk and reading from his notes is an entirely unnecessary factor, absolutely superfluous.—Now it will be easy to say: Here is a fellow longing for the suppression of all professors. But no, that is not the case. I most certainly do not long for the suppression of professors; I am only calling attention to how professors nowadays give their lectures with no regard to the fact that printing has been invented, and that what they give out in their lectures penetrates a student's brain-box better when read in a printed book. All the same, I point out that the best one can gain from a well written book is hardly worth a tenth part of what comes from the immediate personality of the teacher in such a way that a connection arises between the soul of the teacher and the soul of the one who is taught. This can happen, however, only in a life of spirit with a basis of its own and its own administration, in which the individuality can fully develop and traditions do not hold sway for hundreds of years—as in universities and other centres of higher education—and where the individual man is able to be himself in the most individual sense. Then from this instruction by word of mout h will come something of which we can say: We have broken with everything coming to men even through the arts of printing and illustration, but jus t by doing so we gain the possibility of developing quite new teaching capacities, which today are dormant in mankind. All this belongs, indeed pre-eminently belongs, to our present social questions. For only if we have the heart and mind for it shall we be able to enter into what is necessary for our present age.

Now let us look at what for the general social situation arises from the perverted nature of our higher education. Yesterday in a public lecture I had to draw attention to how, strictly speaking, neither in the national economy of the bourgeoisie nor in that of the proletariat have we any reflection of the real social conditions, because we simply have not had the ability to arrive at a true social science. What then has arisen under the bourgeoisie in place of social science? Something of which people are very proud and never tired of praising, namely, modern sociology. Now this modern sociology is the most nonsensical product of culture that could possibly have arisen; for it sins against all the most elementary requirement for a social science. This sociology seeks to be great by taking no account of anything that could lead to social will, social impulse, merely noting historically and statistically the so-called sociological facts, to prove, or so it appears, that the human being is a kind of social animal living within a community. It has furnished strong evidence of this, unconsciously it is true, furnished it by not advancing anything but the most insipid sociological views which are the common property of everyone—mere trivialities. Nowhere is there the will to discover social laws and how they must effect the social will of man. Hence in this sphere the force of all life of spirit is crippled. We must calmly admit that all levels of society today that are not proletarian lack anything in the way of social will. Social will is non-existent just because, where it is meant to be cultivated, namely in centres for higher education, sociology has replaced social science—an ineffective sociology in place of a social science which pulsates in the will and stimulates the human being. These matters have their roots deep in the cultural life; it is there that they have to be sought if they are ever to be found. Let us reflect how different our situation would be in life if what we have previously discussed here were to be carried out. Instead of our gaze being turned back to the most ancient epochs of culture, which took their shape from quite different communal conditions, from the age of fourteen or fifteen upwards, when the sentient soul with its delicate vibrations is coming to life, the human being must be led directly to all that touches us most vitally in the life of the time. He should have to learn what has to do with agriculture, what goes on in trade, and he should learn about the various business connections. All this ought to be absorbed by a human being. Imagine how differently he would then face life, what an indepedent being he would be, how he would refuse to have forced upon him what today is prized as the highest cultural achievement, but which is nothing but the most depressing phenomenon of decadence.

It is only on the soil of a self-governing life of spirit that, for example, art can flourish. Genuine art, my dear friends, is an affair of the people; genuine art is essentially social in character. Whoever studies buildings of the Greek, Roman or Gothic styles in the way this is often done today, knows little of what really comes into question. He alone realises what lies in the Greek, Roman and Gothic architectural styles who knows how, when these prevailed, the whole social structure was to be found in the architectural forms, the direction of the lines, in what they portrayed, and how this art went on vibrating in the human souls. What a man did day by day, down to the very movements of his fingers, was a continuation of what he saw when looking at these things, in which he was able to absorb the real, true nature of the architecture. We need today to bring about the marriage between life and art which, however, can flourish only in the soil of a free life of spirit. How it is to be deplored, my dear friends, that the schoolrooms for our children are veritably a barbaric environment for their young hearts and minds. Imagine every schoolroom, not decorated in the way often thought artistic today, but shaped by an artist in such a way that each single form is in harmony with what his eye should fall upon when the child is learning his tables. Thoughts that are to be socially effective cannot work socially unless, while they are being formed, there flows into the soul as a side-stream of the spiritual life what comes from a really living environment. For this, however, art needs to take a quite different course during children's growing years from what is now accorded it. Anyone today, especially anyone who feels within him the artistic impulse, has no possibility of really drawing near to life. If he feels the impulse to become a painter, for example, he is urged on by lif to produce as soon as possible a realistic picture, as of a ham, for he imagines it to be of importance to create something that satisfies himself. Obviously this is important; but the first question is whether the impulse towards inner satisfaction has found its way out into life in such a way that our greatest inner satisfaction comes from asking life: What is it that one has to create? and from the conscientious feeling that one is in duty bound to repay life for what one ha s taken from it. Today, art is not served by painters providing people with landscapes they do not understand; on the contrary, art is thrown to the dogs. In this way we have an unnecessary luxury-art, side-by-side in life with an environment showing traces of barbarism. Just imagine that conditions were such (I endeavored to deal with this in my book on the social question) that production costs were to accrue only until the article was complete, when this would go free of excess profit on the market. Think how by this every individual egoistic interest would be eliminated, how there would of itself spring up instinctively, intuitively, in all those who are creative, the tendency to create for men at large, how they would seek the possibility of creating for all mankind instead of creating, as is done today, what is unneeded, just for the benefit of the capitalist. The task is, above all, to socialise in such a way that the life of spirit is not trodden underfoot in the process.

On this point those with any authority have not yet the most elementary impulse to discover what is right. Nowadays they are scandalised by bolshevists and others. But the bolshevists are not responsible for their own existence. Who is? Those in authority! For they have felt no impulse to found a real people's culture. There would be no bolshevism had the authorities done their duty; apart from the fact that bolshevism is not what people in authoritative circles paint it, in order to make it into an object of horror and to justify their armaments. But this is merely a digression.

Today it would be necessary, particularly for those in leading circles, in all honesty to face oneself. But indeed there is very little inclination in this direction today.

That which is a necessary factor for the bettering of the soul has in truth not yet been torn from the soul through man's evolution; it might still be there; it could be even in the German people, indeed to a special degree. But the German people have long since left off developing the germinal forces of individual thoughts, individual feelings, individual impulses. In the lowest classes of a school impulses are inoculated which make of the naturally great-hearted German people a governmental automaton, a machine blindly following the dictates of their government. There is a connection between all that confronts us in such a terrible way today and this mistaken education, this education which does not make for the independence and freedom of man because in itself it is neither free nor independent. This education feels more at ease the closer it is bound to the State, and its we11-being increases when in innumerable conferences the resolution is adopted: We have every confidence in the Government—which now, in Versailles, is doing its best to destroy us. These resolutions are adopted at innumerable assemblies. We stand firmly behind our Government.—Whereas in truth in the Government there is hardly a man who has the right to be there—the first requirement being to admit openly and freely that everything happening there is merely the continuation of the harm done in the provinces of Germany in that unhappy year 1914. Into these things flow the faults of our education al system; and these faults haw deprived people of their ability rightly to estimate the events in life.

As I have already said, just as a reasonable school system, thinking more of concentration than of a wretched timetable, would give the human being an independent power of understanding and reason, so a real permeation by social art of our community through education would give us a true culture of the will. For no one can have will who has not had it drawn out by a genuinely artistic education. To realise this secret of the connection between art and life—especially with the will element in man—is one of the very first requirements of future psychological education; and in future all education must by psychological. To judge from how things are at present, when all psychology has been driven out of ordinary folk, the founders of our future psychology will have to be the artists, who still retain a little of it, whereas otherwise it has vanished from our culture. Even in scientific education no particle of it is left. But a psychological approach to life would be possible if the individual really worked for everyone and everyone worked for the individual; for then productive power would be so organised that time would be left for an education of this kind. Much of the humbug talked today would be unnecessary if we had the will to talk seriously and candidly, and if we achieved the only thing that can serve the life of spirit, namely, the mutual interplay of manual labor and work of the spirit, which must in future be our aim. Then, all over the earth, if everyone (it would not be possible for everyone but we can get some way towards the ideal would take a share in manual labor, no one would need to work at it daily for more than three or four hours. At least we get this result when reckoning approximately. Daily manual labor over and above three or four hours is not a necessity in human evolution—today this can be said dispassionately as a quite objective fact—it is a result of our having countless idlers in our midst and also people who live on private incomes. We must face these things as they really are. For the improvement of these conditions does not depend upon making some little change here or there, but upon organising our education, our primary and secondary education, so that through education, through the very nature of our schools, human beings learn how to use their judgment.

Affairs today are such that our system of education rears young human plants with no power at all to judge what is going on around them. Hence all the information, coming for example from Versailles, is so nonsensical, because no one can judge what is the relative importance of things, nor from what motives an opinion is formed by people about what is necessary for them on the grounds of their particular nature. When therefore these things are spoken of they meet with no understanding; were it possible for only a particle of what is inherent in the threefold social organism to enter human understanding, it would be seen how what threatens us from the West is a drowning of all political and spiritual life in the economic life, and how what presses upon us from the East, including Russia, is men's cry for the life of spirit to be freed from that of economics. Two poles confront each other, West and East, and we in the middle have the task of looking to the West and avoiding its errors, of looking to the East and ourselves cultivating what must otherwise be imposed upon us, not in the course of centuries but in a few decades, because if men will not impose tasks on themselves others will impose them. Ours is the task here in Central Europe of cultivating what can be cultivated only out of the threefold social organism. Today, were eastern culture to predominate, the earth would be inundated by a vague mysticism, inundated by a theosophy with no reality. Were predominance to arise in the West, we should be dominated, tyrannised over by a purely material life. Then the task should be ours to ward off from mankind two terrible sources of harm by a rational threefold State, giving independence to the economic life and to the lif e of the spirit, and making it impossible for the State to drive these things so far that we ourselves are crushed between East and West.

Now an objective picture of the West reveals today above all how alive we must be to all that comes from the Latin peoples. Nothing could be more dangerous for us than to delude ourselves about how profoundly it is rooted in the French to work for our destruction. If we prevent France from doing this then what threatens us from the side of the English can easily be overcome. For this, however, the powers of discrimination and judgment are needed. Above all, it is necessary to understand that with a few exceptions all those from Germany,—I don't know how this is to be expressed without wounding someone—who today in Versailles are negotiating the fate of Germany, are nothing more than instruments for these negotiations. These things today must indeed be faced as plain facts, faced by our inner judgment without the slightest concession.—If we understand this today we receive the first impulse particularly needed for primary and secondary education; we see what has been brought to the surface in man by his present education which now is forming man's destiny.

Naturally it is easier today to form the most trivial judgment about what is meant here than, aroused in this way, to look at the different human spheres for what is right.—When some time ago I spoke in our Dornach building of the threefold social organism, a short while afterwards a most strange plan emerged; perhaps I may quote it as a grotesque example of the way in which people today have been educated.—Well, we have our building, where a number of people are occupied, others are connected with it who have nothing to do but just live in the neighborhood. And in this building the threefold social organism was described. Now in certain heads there sprang up the idea, self-evident today, that a beginning would have to be made somewhere, and it was wished to begin with a social experiment, these people having in mind, in the most depressing sectarian way, a little area where depressing seedlings of egoism could be made to sprout so that they could then boast that socialisation had somewhere made a start. Thus, a beginning was to be made by those grouped around the Dornach building to form a social State when the threefold social organism could enter upon the scene. Plans were drawn up for this. The only thing to be done was to say to these good people: Whatever is this intended to be? If you are taking this seriously the first thing is to make your economic life independent. For that, you would naturally have to protect cows, milk them, and do all that obviously is imposed by an economic oasis. Then because men from outside must be connected with this economic oasis, it is quite possible for them to become fine parasites of yours, for any establishment shut off in this sectarian way breeds parasites. In such an economically shut-off domain it is only possible to create a social centre for egoism; who it is exclusive it lives at the cost of others. It is simply the direst form of capitalism. As for the life of rights—well, if you set up a Court of Justice and you sentence anyone who has been up to mischief, I should just like to know what the Swiss state would say to your Threefold Commonwealth. Then, for the life of spirit—since we have had an Anthroposophical Movement, it is precisely for the life of spirit that in face of resistance we have been striving on all sides toward s independence. We shall have this as long as we exist, but you do not see that this is already taken in hand. There is so little understanding for this that it may be thought not to have been attempted. It is not a question today of saying: A beginning must be made somewhere. A beginning of that sort is for the most part only a depressing capitalist individualisation. To found such a colony it is necessary to begin on a capitalist footing, and this is very far from what is meant from a really socialistic point of view. This is no criticism of any individual effort, for I am the last person to be unaware of the difficulties met with by the individual when embarking on the great tasks of the present time. There is something else, however, that I would impress upon your hearts: Don't bury your heads in the sand when you want to individualise anything on a capitalistic basis, but acknowledge that modern conditions still oblige you to individualise for your own advantage in a capitalistic way. Admit the truth, I beg, for truth will be the basis upon which all social life must be founded. Truth should not be forsworn in anything that is said. We should never, even in the forming of our sentences, confront mankind with what is untrue.

Throughout the land today you hear the cry for schooling free of charge. What does this really imply? But the cry throughout the land should be: How can we get a form of socialism in which everyone is enabled to contribute in the right way towards educational affairs? Free schooling is nothing less than a social lie, for behind this is hidden either the fact that surplus value finds it way into the pockets of a little set of people who then found a school and thus gain mastery over others; or sand is strewn in the eyes of the public so that they should not realise that among the coins they take from their purse there must be some that go to the upkeep of schools.—In all that we say, in the very shaping of our sentences, we must conscientiously strive after truth.

The task is great, but the greatness of the task must be vividly before us. What is set before anthroposophy as an ideal, what has been in this small movement for some decades, naturally, my dear friends, cannot be realised by everyone. One man has to consider his calling, another his wife, the wife her husband, while another has the education of his children to think of. This must be admitted unreservedly by each of us so that he may realise how far he is from what is really in question. For the anthroposophical ideal is of such a nature that it necessitates the absorption of the whole man. Today this is impossible for many. But they should not delude themselves with the nebulous idea that they have done enough; they should acknowledge the truth about themselves. On the other hand they should be permeated by the thought that the cultivation of our life of spirit is a matter today of the first importance. No one can form a right conception of what is necessary for the life of spirit, including the social life, who has not the courage to admit that radical change must go as far as reforming our obnoxious time tables; it must deal with many trifles; for it has been an accumulation of trifles which has brought about the terrible havoc existing in our present culture.

To-day I want to make various comments on matters that have been mentioned lately, and to fill in certain gaps. If you follow with attention current trends, you will have noticed a feeling that the thoughts and impressions and impulses which for a long time have led to such “splendid progress” are no longer capable of helping us to cope with the immediate future. Yesterday one of our members gave me a copy of the Frankfurter Zeitung for last Wednesday, November 21st. There speaks a very learned gentleman ... he must be very learned, for he is not only a Doctor of Philosophy but also a Doctor of Theology, and also a Professor, so naturally he is a very clever man. He has written an article which deals with all sorts of spiritual needs of the present time, and in the course of it he says:

“The experience of the form of being which lies behind things does not require pious dedication or a religious evaluation, for it is itself religion. We are concerned not with feeling and grasping a particular content, but with the great Irrational which lies hidden behind all existence ... Anyone who makes contact with this, so that the divine spark leaps across, goes through an experience which is of primal character and may be called the primordial experience. Anyone who experiences this one thing, together with all that is stirred by the same flow of life, is imbued with—to use a favourite modern phrase—a feeling of cosmic existence.”

Excuse me for reading this to you: I am quoting it not in order to arouse in you any magnificent ideas, but so as to bring before you a sign of the times:

“A cosmic religiosity is coming to birth among us, and how strong is the demand for it is shown by the evident spread of the theosophical movement, which undertakes to discover and unveil the phases of this life beyond the range of the senses.”

It is really difficult to stumble through all these wishy-washy ideas, but you will agree that the article is remarkable as a symptom of the times! He goes on: “In this cosmic piety there is no question of a mysticism which turns away from the world ...” and so on.

It would be hard to discover anything intelligent in all this, but since it is written by a man with all these degrees, one must suppose that some intelligence is there! Otherwise we should have to take it as the obscure stammering of a learned man who has reached a dead end on his own path and now feels impelled to call attention to something which certainly exists and evidently appears to him as not wholly unattainable.

There is no cause for satisfaction in such remarks; we must above all take care not to let them lull us into a comfortable slumber just because it has again been noticed, from some point of view or other, that something lies behind the spiritual-scientific movement. That would be really harmful. People who write in this way are often quite satisfied with having written it. With these misty thoughts they point to something which is trying to make its way into the world, but they are far too complacent to go in for the serious study that Spiritual Science requires. Nothing less than that must lay hold of men's minds if some reality is to be brought into the trends of the times, so that healing can come of it. Of course it is easier to talk of this “surge” of “cosmic feeling” than to give serious attention to those things that are demanded by the signs of the times and must be made known to mankind. For this reason it seems to me necessary to repeat here the remarks I have made in public lectures and shall make again, with particular emphasis now on the distinction between the worn-out ideas which have led into these catastrophic times and those which must take hold of human souls if any sort of progress is to be accomplished.

The old wisdom, through which mankind has been guided up to our time, may give rise to thousands of congresses, world-congresses, people's congresses and so on; thousands and thousands of societies may be founded; but we must be clear that all these congresses and societies will accomplish nothing unless the life-blood of Spiritual Science flows through them. What is lacking among people to-day is the courage to embark on real research into the spiritual world. Strange as it may sound, it must be said—as a first step nothing else would be needed than to spread the little booklet, Human Life in the light of Anthroposophy, in the widest circles. Something would thereby be done to evoke knowledge of a connection between man and the cosmic order. The booklet calls attention precisely to this knowledge by showing in concrete terms how throughout the year the earth undergoes changes in its state of consciousness—and so on. What is said in that booklet and in this lecture is said with full consideration for the needs of our time. Acceptance of it would signify more than all this wishy-washy talk on cosmic feeling and surges and I know not what. I have just read this to you and I can't bring myself to repeat it—it is all put in such a senseless way.

This should of course not prevent us from taking note of such things: they are important and real. What I want to bring home to you is that we must not befog ourselves: we must be absolutely clear as to what we wish to do on behalf of Spiritual Science.

Now I will turn again to the fact that in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch humanity will have to find ways of dealing with great life-problems which in a certain sense were veiled by the wisdom of the past. I have already called your attention to them. One of these great problems will be concerned with finding out how to place the spiritual etheric forces at the service of practical life. I have told you that in this epoch we have to solve the problem of how the radiations from human states of mind are carried over into machines; of how human beings are to be brought into relation with an environment which must become increasingly mechanised. A week ago I pointed out how superficially this mechanisation is treated in a certain part of the world. I gave you the example of how an American way of thinking tries to extend the realm of the machine over human life itself. I told you of the rest-pauses which were used in order to enable a given number of workmen to load up to 47½ tons, instead of a much lower figure; this involves simply the application of Darwinian natural selection to human life.

Where this kind of thing goes on, the wish to yoke up human strength with the strength of machines is always involved. It would be quite mistaken merely to oppose these things. They are not going to fade away; they are on the march. The only question is whether in the course of world-history they are going to be brought on to the scene by men who are unselfishly aware of the great aims of earth-evolution and wish to shape these developments for the healing of mankind, or by groups of men who want to use them for their own or the group's selfish ends. That is the issue. The point is not what is going to happen, for it certainly will happen, but how it happens—how these things are handled. The welding together of human beings with machines will be a great and important problem for the rest of the earth-evolution.

I have often pointed out, even in public lectures, that human consciousness depends on destructive forces. During public lectures in Basle I twice said that in our nerve-system we are always in process of dying. These forces of death will become stronger and stronger, and we shall find that they are related to the forces of electricity and magnetism, and to those at work in machines. A man will be able in a certain sense to guide his intentions and his thoughts into the forces of the machines. Forces in human nature that are still unknown will be discovered—forces which will act upon external electricity and magnetism.

That is one problem: the bringing together of human beings with machines, and this is something which will exert ever-increasing influence on the future.

The other problem is concerned with calling in spiritual relationships to our aid. This can be done only when the time is ripe, and when a sufficient number of people are rightly prepared for it. But we must come to the stage when spiritual forces are brought into action for the governance of life in relation to illness and death.

Medicine will be spiritualised—very highly spiritualised. These things will be caricatured from various standpoints, but the caricatures only show what has to come. Again, the question is whether or not this problem—like the other problem I have mentioned—is handled in an egotistic way by individuals or by groups.

The third great question concerns ways of thinking about human birth and upbringing. I have told you how congresses on this subject have already been held, and how a materialistic form of science will be brought to bear in the future on procreation and the union of man and woman. These things indicate the great significance that attaches to this process of becoming. It is easy enough to ask why those who have the right knowledge in these matters do not apply it. In the future it will be clear enough what the state of affairs is regarding this application, and what are the forces which are even now opposing, for example, a more generous provision for a spiritualised medicine or a spiritualised economic life. All that can be done at present is to speak of these things, until people—I mean those who are ready to accept them selflessly—understand them sufficiently. There are many who think they have already got as far as that, but many hindrances arise from the circumstances of life to-day. These will be overcome in the right way only if understanding goes deeper and deeper, and if we actually refrain, for a time at least, from attempting practical applications on any large scale.

Things have developed in such a way that one can say: Little is known of all that lay behind the old atavistic searchings which continued up to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. People talk a great deal about the old alchemy; sometimes they call to mind the creation of Homunculus and so on. But most of this talk misses the point. If people would come to understand what can be said about the Homunculus scene in Faust, for instance, they would be better informed: the essential thing is that a mist has been spread over these subjects since the sixteenth century. They have receded into the background of human consciousness.

The law which prevails here is the same law which governs the rhythmic alternation of waking and sleeping in man. Just as a person cannot do without sleep, so mankind could not dispense with the sleep regarding spiritual knowledge which has marked the whole period since the sixteenth century. Man had to fall asleep to the spiritual, so that it could reappear in a new form. These necessities must be clearly seen, but without letting them depress us. We must realise clearly that the time for awakening has now come, that we have to play our part in it, that events often run ahead of our knowledge and that we shall not understand the events going on around us unless we are willing to receive the knowledge and to act in accordance with it.

I have repeatedly told you that certain groups are working esoterically in the direction I have indicated. It was first of all necessary that certain forms of knowledge—called nowadays by such misunderstood words as alchemy, astrology, etc.—should fall into abeyance, so that men should no longer be able to discern the soul-element in outer Nature and should rather be thrown back on themselves. And in order that they should awaken their inward forces, certain things had to appear as abstractions. Now these things must again take on a concrete spiritual form.

During the last centuries three ideas have gradually emerged in abstract guise. They were incorrectly named by Kant, and correctly by Goethe. Kant called them God, Freedom and Immortality; Goethe called them God, Virtue and Immortality. If we look into what lies behind these three words, we find that the same words are taken abstractly by modern man and were taken more concretely—but also more materially in the old atavistic sense—up to the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Experiments in the old style were carried out: the alchemists sought to observe processes in which the working of God could be seen. And they tried to produce the Philosopher's Stone.

Something concrete lies behind all these things. The Philosopher's Stone was to enable men to become virtuous—but this was thought of in a more material sense. It was also to lead to an experience of immortality: to bring a man into such a relationship to the cosmic whole that he would experience in himself what lies beyond birth and death. All the nebulous ideas by which people nowadays try to grasp these things no longer correspond with what was really intended. It has all become abstract, and it is of abstract ideas that modern men speak. They want to understand God through an abstract theology, and virtue also as something abstract—the more abstract it is, the better people like it. And it is the same with immortality. Speculation turns on what in man could be immortal. In my first Basle lecture [23rd November, 1917. (Not translated into English.)] I said that the kind of learning which under the name of philosophy occupies itself with such questions as that of immortality is a starveling, under-nourished kind of learning. That is merely another way of describing the abstract terms in which such matters are pursued.

In certain Western brotherhoods, however, a connection with the old traditions has been retained, and endeavours are made to use it for the egotistic interests of the group. It is time to call attention to these things. Of course, if from this Western quarter anything is said about God, virtue or freedom, and immortality, the words are given an abstract sense, but in the circle of initiates it is well known that all this is not mere abstract speculation. For their own part, they look for something much more concrete behind these abstract formulae, and in their own schools these terms are accordingly translated. God is translated as gold, and an endeavour is made to arrive at what lies behind the secret of gold, as it may be called. For gold, the representative of the sun-like within the earth's crust, does in fact enshrine an important secret. Gold stands in the same material relationships to other substances as the thought of God does to other thoughts. The only question is what is made of this secret.

This is linked up with the egotistic use of the mystery of birth, and here, real cosmic understanding is sought. All such understanding has been replaced for modern men by a purely earthly understanding. If someone wants to investigate, for example, how the embryonic life-cell of animal or man develops, he studies it through a microscope and is concerned only with what lies there directly under his lens. But that is far from being the whole thing. It will be realised—and some groups are very near this already—that the forces at work are not contained in the cell but come from the cosmos and its constellations. When a seed of life arises, it does so because the living creature which harbours the seed is receiving forces, cosmic forces, from all sides of the cosmos. And when fertilisation occurs, the results depend on which cosmic forces enter actively into the process.

One thing, not yet seen, will be recognised. To-day the idea is that we have a living creature, a hen, let us say. When a new seed of life appears in the hen, the biologist investigates how the egg arises out of the hen; he looks within the hen itself for the forces which cause the seed to grow. That is nonsense. The egg does not grow out of the hen; the hen is merely the substratum for it. The growth-forces work from out of the cosmos on to the soil which has been prepared in the hen for engendering the egg. The biologist to-day believes that the relevant forces are all to be found within the field of his microscope. Actually, what he sees there depends on stellar forces which work together in a certain pattern at a given point. When we discover the cosmic at this point, then for the first time we shall have got at the reality and the truth: it is the cosmic whole which conjures up the egg in the hen.

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All this is connected especially with the secret of the sun, and in earthly terms with the secret of gold. To-day I can give you only a sort of schematic indication of it; these things will become much clearer in the course of time.

When “virtue” is discussed in these same schools, they call it simply “health,” and try to learn how the cosmic constellations are connected with health and sickness in men. By this means they come to know the particular earthly substances, the juices and so on, which are in their turn connected with sickness and health. We shall see develop increasingly from a certain direction a more material form of medical knowledge, but it will rest on a spiritual foundation.

From this side also will be spread the idea that man cannot be made good by learning all sorts of ethical principles, but by ingesting copper, for example, under a certain constellation, and arsenic under another. You can well imagine how ideas of this kind can be used by egotistic groups for enhancing their own power. They need only withhold this knowledge from others, and this will be the best means of dominating large numbers of men. They will not need to talk about such things; it will be enough to bring forward some new titbit. Then they will find openings for this titbit, having first flavoured it appropriately, and they will achieve their purpose when these novelties are accepted in a materialistic sense. We have only to remember that spiritual potencies are hidden in everything material. Only he who knows that in a true sense there really is nothing material, but only the spiritual—only he will penetrate behind the secrets of life.

Similar endeavours are made from the same quarter to transpose the problem of immortality into a materialistic frame, and this, too, can be done by making use of the cosmic constellations. This method certainly does not yield the immortality that is the subject of so many speculations, but immortality of another sort. Given a brotherhood lodge, then—at least so long as life cannot be lengthened by working on the physical body—preparations are made for subjecting a soul to such experiences as will enable it to remain within the lodge after death, so that it may contribute its forces to those at the disposal of the lodge. In these circles, accordingly, immortality is called simply “lengthening of life.”

External signs of all this can indeed be seen. I don't know if some of you may have noticed a book which also came from the West and caused a little stir for a while; it was called “On the Nonsense of Death.” These things all move in the same direction. They are still at their beginnings, for everything beyond that is kept as a closely guarded esoteric secret by the egotistic groups. But these things are really possible if they are given a materialistic colouring; if the abstract ideas of God, virtue and immortality are turned into the concrete ideas of gold, health and lengthening of life, and if what I have called the great problem of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch is utilised for the purpose of an egotistic group. You see, this “cosmic feeling,” which the learned Professor and Doctor of Theology talks about, is already being widely presented to people—and often, unfortunately, in an egotistic sense—as cosmic knowledge. For centuries science has kept its eyes fixed on earthly processes, and has ignored all the most significant influences that come from beyond the earth, but it is precisely in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch that extra-terrestrial forces from the cosmos will be put to use.

And so, just as it is essential for an orthodox professor of biology to have the most powerful microscope available and the most efficient laboratory methods, so, in the future, when science has been spiritualised, it will be of the utmost importance whether certain processes are carried through in the morning or in the evening, or at midday, and whether what has been done in the morning is allowed to be further influenced by an evening activity, or whether the cosmic influences are cut out, paralysed, from the morning until the evening. Processes of this kind will of necessity come to light and will run their course. Naturally, a great deal of water will have to flow under the bridges before the professional chairs and laboratories, at present organised on purely materialistic lines, are handed over to spiritual scientists, but this replacement must come about if humanity is not to sink into utter decadence. For example, if the question is one of doing good in the immediate future, existing laboratory methods must give way to methods whereby certain processes take place in the morning and are interrupted during the day, so that the cosmic stream passes through them again in the evening and is in turn rhythmically withheld again until morning. So the processes would take their course: certain cosmic workings would always be interrupted by day, and the cosmic morning and evening processes would be brought in. All sorts of arrangements would be necessary for this. You will realise that if one is not in a position to take any public action about these things, all one can do is to speak of them.

However, just as gold, health and the prolongation of life are put in the place of God, virtue and immortality, so from the same quarter efforts will be made to work not with the morning and evening processes, but with others. Last week I told you how an attempt will be made to set aside the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha, while for the West another impulse, a sort of Anti-Christ is introduced; and from the East an attempt will be made to paralyse the twentieth-century manifestation of the Christ Impulse by diverting attention from the coming etheric Christ.

Those concerned to present an Anti-Christ as the real Christ will try also to make use of something that works through the most material forces, but in this very way can work spiritually. Above all they will strive to make use of electricity and earth-magnetism in order to produce effects all over the world. I have shown you how earth-forces rise up into what I have called the human Double, the Doppelgänger. This secret will be opened up. An American secret will be to make use of earth-magnetism, with its north-south duality, and by this means to send over the earth guiding forces which will have spiritual effects. Look at the magnetic chart of the earth and compare it with what I am now saying. Observe where the magnetic needle deviates to East and West and where it does not deviate. I can give only hints about all this. From a certain direction in the heavens, spiritual beings are continually active, and they have only to be put into the service of the earth, and—because these beings working in from the cosmos can mediate the secret of the earth's magnetism—it will be possible for egotistic groups to get behind this secret and to accomplish a great deal in connection with gold, health and the prolongation of life. It will be necessary for them only to pluck up their faltering courage—and in certain circles that will be done readily enough!

From the East an endeavour will be made to strengthen what I have already explained: to place in the service of the earth the beings which work in from the opposite side of the cosmos. In the future there will be a great battle. Human science will stretch out to the cosmic, but will try to get there by different paths. It will be the task of good, healing science to find certain cosmic forces which can reach the earth through the co-operation of two cosmic streams, those of Pisces and Virgo. The great secret to be discovered will be how the influence which works from the direction of Pisces as a power of the sun unites itself with the influence working from the direction of Virgo. It will make for good when it is learnt how the morning and evening forces from the two sides of the cosmos can be brought into the service of humanity. (See diagram at end of lecture.)

These forces, however, will be left aside by those who try to achieve their whole purpose through the polaric duality of positive and negative forces. The forces which enable the spiritual to stream down to earth with the aid of positive and negative magnetism come from Gemini; they are the midday forces. In ancient times it was known that cosmic influences were involved in this, and to-day even exoteric scientists are aware that in some or other way positive and negative magnetism lie behind Gemini in the Zodiac. The aim will be to paralyse all that could be gained through a revelation of the true duality in the cosmos—to paralyse it in a materialistic, egotistic way by means of the forces which stream in particularly from Gemini and can be placed entirely at the service of the human “Double.”

Other brotherhoods, concerned above all to divert attention from the Mystery of Golgotha, will try to make use of the duality in human nature—the duality which in our epoch embraces man as a unity, but includes within him his lower animal nature. A human being is really a centaur in a certain sense: his humanity rests on his lower animal nature in its astral form. This working together of the duality in man gives rise to a duality of forces. This duality of forces will be utilised particularly by certain egotistic brotherhoods, chiefly from the side of India and the East, in order to mislead eastern Europe, whose task it is to prepare for the sixth post-Atlantean epoch. And this will be done with the aid of the forces which work in from Sagittarius.

Whether to conquer the cosmic for mankind in a wrong, twofold way, or rightly in a one-fold way—that is the question facing mankind. From this will come a true renewal of astrology, which in its old form is atavistic and cannot survive. The wise Beings of the cosmos will enter into the struggle; one side will use the morning and evening processes in the way I have indicated; the West will prefer the midday processes, shutting out the morning and evening ones; and the East will prefer the midnight ones. Men will no longer manufacture substances on the basis merely of chemical attraction and repulsion; they will know that different substances arise according to whether they are made with morning and evening processes, or with midday and midnight ones. It will be known that such substances act in a quite different way on the triad, God, virtue and immortality—gold, health and prolongation of life. When the forces of Pisces and Virgo act in co-operation, nothing wrongful can be brought into being. Men will achieve something through which the mechanism of life will be detached, in a certain sense, from man himself, but will not give any one group power and rulership over another. The cosmic forces drawn from this direction will create remarkable machines, but only those that will relieve man of work, because they will carry a certain power of intelligence within themselves. And a Spiritual Science which itself reaches out towards the cosmic will have to see to it that all the great temptations which come from these machine-animals, created by man himself, are not allowed to exercise any harmful influence upon him.

With regard to all this, the essential thing is that people should prepare themselves for it by not treating realities as illusions and by coming to a genuine spiritual conception and understanding of the world. To see things as they are—very much depends on that! But we can see them as they are only if we are in a position to bring the ideas of Spiritual Science to bear on reality. For the rest of the earth's existence the dead will be co-operating actively in the highest degree, and it is how they co-operate that will matter. Here, above all, a great distinction will arise. On one side the attitude of men on earth can rightly lead the co-operation of the dead in such a direction that the dead will be active out of their own impulse, an impulse coming from the spiritual world which the dead are themselves experiencing. But from the other side many endeavours will be made to introduce the dead into human existence by artificial means. Along the indirect path through Gemini the dead will be led into human life, with the result that human vibrations will pass over into the mechanism of machines and will continue to vibrate there in a quite definite way. The cosmos will impart motion to the machines by the indirect path I have indicated.

It will thus be essential, when these problems emerge, that no improper methods should be applied to them, but only those elemental forces which belong to nature on their own account, and great care will have to be taken not to introduce improper forces into the realm of machines. In this occult sphere the human element must not be related to machinery in such a way that the Darwinian natural selection theory is used to determine the working capacity of human beings, in the way of which I gave you an example last week.

I am making these remarks—obviously they cannot exhaust the subject in so short a time—in the belief that you will meditate on these things and will try to build a bridge between them and all those experiences of life which can be encountered, particularly in this difficult time. You will see how things become clear to you if you contemplate them in the light that can come from such ideas as those I have been placing before you. The real point is not that in our time powers and constellations of powers are standing opposed to each other, as we are always being told in external exoteric life. The real point is quite different. It is that a kind of veil is now meant to be spread over the true impulses at work. Certain human powers are intent on saving something for themselves—what is it? Their aim is that impulses which up to the time of the French Revolution were justified, and were represented also by certain occult schools, shall now be taken charge of in an Ahrimanic-Luciferic sense, so as to maintain a form of society which is generally thought to have been overcome since the end of the eighteenth century.

Two powers, especially, stand in opposition to each other: the power representing the principle that was overcome at the end of the eighteenth century and the power representing the new age. A great many people, of course, are instinctively supporters of the new age. Therefore the representatives of the old impulses, those of the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, must be yoked by artificial means to the forces which emanate from certain brotherhoods who are working for group-egotistic ends. The most effective principle for extending power over as many men as may be needed is to-day the principle of economic dependence. But that is only an instrument: the real thing is quite different. The real issue you can gather for yourselves from all the various hints I have given. The economic principle is connected with everything which seeks to enlist a great number of men all over the world as a kind of army in the service of these principles.

These are the powers which stand opposed to each other. And this indicates what it is that is really battling in the world to-day. In the West we have the principle which is really rooted in the eighteenth, seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, but which passes unnoticed because it clothes itself in the phrases of revolution and democracy. It wears them as a mask and by this means strives to gain all possible power for itself. These endeavours are favoured if as many people as possible do not exert themselves to see things as they are, and in this field allow themselves to be lulled to sleep again and again by the illusion that to-day there is a war between the Entente and the powers of Central Europe.

In reality there is no such war; only by going behind this illusion can one get at the real struggle, but light can be thrown on it if it is approached along the lines which, for certain reasons, I only hint at. At least we should endeavour not to take illusions for realities: then gradually the illusion will be dispelled as far as it need be. Above all we must strive to see these things objectively, as they really are.

If you bring together all that I have been saying, you will see that an apparently casual remark I made in the course of these lectures was not so at all. When I quoted something that Mephistopheles said to Faust, “I see you know the Devil” (he would certainly not have said this to Woodrow Wilson), it was by no means a casual remark: it can throw a great deal of light on the present situation. We must really look at these things objectively, without sympathy or antipathy; above all, we must be able to see how much in a particular case depends on the setting and how much on the capacity of an individual, for behind an individual's capacity there often lies something quite different from what lies behind the setting. Ask yourselves without prejudice—how much would Woodrow Wilson's brain be worth if it were not throned on the Presidency of the United States? Consider how it would be if this brain had a quite different setting: then its individual capacity would be revealed! The setting is what matters.

Let me now speak abstractly and radically, of course without discussing in detail the particular case I have mentioned—in a neutral country that would not be appropriate. If you take any individual brain, it can be revealing to ask whether it is worth something because it is illuminated and activated by a particular spiritual soul-force—whether it has the kind of spiritual significance I have been speaking of here—or whether it is worth no more than its weight, measured on a pair of scales.

In the eyes of people to-day, all this is grotesque; but what seems grotesque to them must come to seem obvious, if certain things are to be diverted from an unhealthy stream into a health-giving one. And what good is it to be always talking about them? You must come to see that there is no point in wishy-washy talk about “cosmic religiosity” or “how strong the striving for it is,” or of “the movement which aims at discovering and revealing the circulation of the life behind the senses,” and so on. All this does is to spread a mist over things which must be brought out clearly in the world, and should above all be carried as practical moral-ethical impulses into human life.

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I can give you only indications. I leave you to build on them in your own meditations. I have been speaking aphoristically in many respects. But you will have the possibility of drawing a great deal out of the relationships shown in this picture of the Zodiac, if you truly use it as a subject for meditation.

It is our aim in these lectures to speak of important questions of mankind's evolution, and you have already seen that all sorts of preparatory facts drawn from distant sources are necessary to our purpose. In order that we may have a foundation as broad as possible, I shall remind you today of various things that have been said from one or another standpoint during my present stay here, but which are essential for a right understanding of the two coming lectures.

I have pointed out to you that in that evolutionary course of mankind which can be regarded as first interesting us after the great Atlantean catastrophe, significant changes took place in humanity. I have already some months ago indicated how changes in humanity as a whole differ from changes taking place in a single individual. The individual as the years go on becomes older. In a certain respect one can say that for humanity as such, the reverse is the case. A man is first child, then grows up and attains the age known to us as the average age of life. In so doing the man's physical forces undergo manifold changes and transformations. Now we have already described in what sense I a reverse path is to be attributed to mankind. During the 2,160 years that followed the great Atlantean catastrophe mankind can be said to have been capable of development in a way quite different from what was possible later. This is that ancient time which followed immediately upon the great flooding of the earth—called in geology the Ice Age, in religious tradition, the Flood—from which there actually proceeded a kind of glacial state.

We know that at our present time we are capable of development up to a certain age independently of our own action; we are capable of development through our nature, our physical forces. We have stated that in the first epoch after the great Atlantean catastrophe man remained capable of development for a much longer time. He remained so into the fifth decade of his life, and he always knew that the process of growing older was connected with a transformation of the soul and spirit nature. If today we wish to have a development of the soul and spirit nature after our twenties, we must seek for this development by our power of will. We become physically different in our twenties and in this becoming different physically there lives at the same time something that determines our progress of soul and spirit. Then the physical ceases to let us be dependent on it; then, so to speak, our physical nature hands over nothing more, and through our own willpower we must make any further advance. This is how it seems, externally considered—we shall see immediately how matters stand inwardly.

There was in fact a great difference in the first 2,160 years after the great Atlantean catastrophe. Then indeed man was still dependent on his physical element far into old age, but he had also the joy of this dependence. He had the joy of not only progressing during his growth, and increasing, but of experiencing, even in the decline of life-forces, the fruit of these declining life-forces as a kind of blooming of soul qualities, which man can feel no longer. Yes, external physical cosmic conditions of human existence alter in relatively not such a very long time.

Then again came a time in which man no more remained capable of development to such a great age, into the fifties. In the second epoch after the great Atlantean catastrophe, which again lasted for approximately 2,160 years, and which we call the Old Persian, man remained still capable of development up to the end of his forties. Then in the next epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, he could develop up to the time of his forty-second year. We are now living—since the 15th Century—in the period where man carries his development only into his twenties. This is all something of which external history tells us nothing, which moreover is not believed by external historical science, but with which infinitely many secrets of mankind's evolution are connected. So that one can say: Mankind as a whole drew in, became younger and younger—if we call this change in development a becoming-younger! And we have seen what consequence must be drawn from it. This consequence was not so pressing in the Greco-Latin age; a man then remained capable of development up to his thirty-fifth year through his natural forces. It becomes more and more pressing, and from our time onward quite specially significant. For as regards humanity as a whole we are living, so to say, in the twenty-seventh year, are entering the twenty-sixth and so on. So that men are condemned to carry right through life the development they acquired in early youth through natural forces, if they do nothing of their own freewill to take their further development in hand. And the future of mankind will consist in their receding more and more, receding further, so that I, if no spiritual impulse grips mankind, times can come in which only the views and opinions of youth prevail.

This becoming younger of humanity is shown in external symptoms—and one who regards historical development with more sharpened senses can see it—it is shown by the fact that in Greece, let us say, a man had still to be of a definite age before he could take any part in public affairs. Today we see the claim made by great circles of mankind to reduce this age as much as possible, since people think that they already know in the twenties everything that is to be attained. More and more demands will be made in this direction, and unless an insight arises to paralyse them there will be demands that not only in the beginning of his twenties a man is clever enough to take part in any kind of parliamentary business in the world, but the nineteen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds will believe that they contain in themselves all that a man can compass.

This kind of growing younger is at the same time a challenge to mankind to draw for themselves from the spirit what is no longer given by nature. I called your attention last time to the immense incision in the evolutionary history of mankind which lies in the 15th Century. This is again something of which external history gives no tidings, for external history, as I have often said, is a fable convenue. There must come an entirely new knowledge of the being of man. For only when an entirely new knowledge of man's being is reached, will the impulse really be found which mankind needs if it is to take in hand of its own freewill what nature no longer provides. We dare not believe that, the future of humanity will come through with the thoughts and ideas which the modern age has brought and of which it is so proud. One cannot do enough to make oneself clear how necessary it is to seek for fresh and different impulses for the evolution of humanity. It is of course a triviality to say, as I have often remarked, that our time is a transition age—for in reality each age is a transition. But it is a different thing to know what is changing in a definite age. Every age is assuredly an age of transition, but in each age one should also look about and see what is passing over.

I will link this to a fact—I could take a hundred others—but I will link on to a definite fact and let it serve as an example—one could draw on hundreds from every part of Europe. In the first half of the 19th Century, in 1828 in Vienna, a number of lectures were held by Friedrich Schlegel, one of the two brothers Schlegel, who have deserved so well of Central European culture. Friedrich Schlegel sought in these lectures to show from a lofty historical standpoint what the development of the time required, and how these requirements should be studied if the right direction were to be given to the evolution of the 19th Century and the coming age.

Friedrich Schlegel was influenced at that time by two main historical impressions. On the one hand he looked back at the 18th Century, how it had gradually evolved to atheism, materialism, irreligion. He saw how what had gone on in people's minds during the course of the 18th Century then exploded in the French Revolution. (We wish to make no criticism, merely to bring forward a fact, to consider a human outlook.) Friedrich Schlegel saw a great onesidedness in the French Revolution. To be sure, one might find it today reactionary if such a man as Friedrich Schlegel sees a great onesidedness in the French Revolution, but one would also have to look on such a verdict from other aspects. On the whole it is fairly simple to say to oneself that this or the other was gained for mankind through the French Revolution. It is no doubt very simple; but it is a question whether someone who speaks enthusiastically in this way of the French Revolution is really altogether sincere in his inmost heart. One questions it! There is a crucial test of this sincerity which simply consists in this: one should consider how one would look at such a Movement if it broke out round one at the present day? What would one say to it then? One should really put oneself this question when judging these matters. Only then does one have a kind of crucial test of one's own sincerity, for on the whole it is not so very difficult to be enthusiastic over something that went on so and so many decades ago. The question is whether one could also be enthusiastic if one were directly sharing in it at the present day.

Friedrich Schlegel, as I have said, looked on the Revolution as an explosion of the so-called Enlightenment, the atheistic Enlightenment of the 18th Century. And side by side with this event to which he turned his attention he set another: the appearance of that man who took the place of the Revolution, who contributed so enormously to the later shaping of Europe—Napoleon. Friedrich Schlegel from the lofty standpoint from which he viewed world-history, pointed out that when such a personality enters with such a force into world-evolution he must really be considered from a different standpoint from the one that is generally taken. He makes a very fine observation where he speaks of Napoleon. He says: ‘One should not forget that Napoleon had seven years in which to grow familiar with what he later looked on as his task; for twice seven years the tumult lasted that he carried through Europe, and then for seven years more the life-time lasted that was granted him after his fall. Four times seven years is the career of this man.’ In a very fine way this is pointed out by Friedrich Schlegel.

I have indicated on various occasions what a role is played by this inner law in the case of men who are really representative in the historical evolution of humanity. I have pointed out to you how remarkable it is that Raphael always makes an important painting after a definite number of years. I have pointed out how a flaring-up of Goethe's poetic power always takes place in seven-year periods, whereas between these periods there is a dying down. And one could bring forward many, many such examples. Friedrich Schlegel did not look on Napoleon exactly as an impulse of blessing for European humanity!

Now in these lectures Friedrich Schlegel showed what, in his view, the salvation of Europe demanded after the confusion brought by the Revolution and the Napoleonic age. And he finds that the deeper reason of the disorder lies in the fact that men cannot lift themselves to a more all-embracing standpoint in their world conception, which indeed can only come from an understanding of the spiritual world. Hence, thinks Friedrich Schlegel, instead of a common human world-conception, we have everywhere party-standpoints in which everyone looks on his point of view as something absolute, something which must bring salvation to all. According to Friedrich Schlegel the only salvation of mankind would be for each man to be aware that he takes a certain standpoint and others take others, and an agreement must come about through life itself. No one stand point should gain a footing as the absolute. Now Friedrich Schlegel considers that true Christianity is the one and only thing that can show man how to realize the tolerance that he means—a tolerance not inclining to indifference, but to strong and active life. And therefore he draws the conclusion (I must emphasize it is in 1828) from what he has put before his audience: the whole life of Europe, above all, however, the life of science and life of the State, must be Christianized. And he sees the great evil to be that science has become unchristian, States have become unchristian, and that nowhere has what is meant by the actual Christ-Impulse penetrated in modern times into scientific thought or the life of the State. Now he demands that the Christ-Impulse should once more permeate the scientific and State-life.

Friedrich Schlegel was of course speaking of the science, the political life of his time, 1828. But for certain reasons which will shortly be clearer to us than they are now, one could look at modern science and modern political life as he regarded them in 1828. Try for once to inquire of the sciences which count for the most in public life: physics, chemistry, biology, national-economy, political science too, try to inquire of them whether the Christian impulse is seriously anywhere within them! People do not acknowledge it, but all the sciences are actually atheistic. And the various churches try to get along well with them, as they do not feel strong enough really to permeate science with the principle of Christianity! Hence the cheap and comfortable theory that the religious life makes different demands from those of official science, that science must keep to what can be observed, the religious life to the feelings. Both are to be nicely separate, the one direction is to have no say in the other. One can live together in this way, my dear friends, one can indeed! But it gives rise to the sort of conditions that now exist.

Now what Friedrich Schlegel brought forward at that time was imbued with a deep inner warmth, and his great personal impulse was to serve his age, to demand that religion should not merely be made a Sunday School affair but should be carried into the whole of life, above all the life of science and State. And one can see from the way he spoke at that time in Vienna that he had a hope, a great hope, that out of the disorder produced by the Revolution and Napoleon, a Europe would come forth which would be Christianized in its life of State and Science. The final lecture treated especially of the prevailing spirit of the age and the general revival. And as motto for the lecture, which is truly delivered with great power, he put the Bible text: ‘I come quickly and make all things new.’ And he headed it with this motto because he believed that in the men of the 19th Century, to whom he could speak at that time as young men, there lay the power to receive that which can make all things new.

Anyone who reads through these lectures of Friedrich Schlegel's leaves them with mixed feelings. On the one hand, one says: From what lofty standpoints, from what lucid conceptions men have spoken formerly of science and political life! How one must have longed for such words to kindle a fire in countless souls. And had they kindled this fire what would Europe have become in the course of the 19th Century! I repeat: it is with mixed feelings that one leaves off reading. For in the first place: that is not what came about; what came about are these catastrophic events which now stand so terribly before us. And these catastrophes were preceded by a preparation in which one could have seen exactly that such events had to come. They were preceded by the age of materialistic science—which had become stronger than it was in Friedrich Schlegel's time—preceded by the age of materialistic statesmanship over the whole of Europe. And only with sorrowful feelings can one now behold such a motto: ‘For lo, I come quickly and make all things new.’ Somewhere there must be a mistake. Friedrich Schlegel most certainly spoke from utterly honest conviction. And he was in no slight degree a keen observer of his time; he could judge of the conditions—but yet there must have been something not quite in accord.

For, my dear friends, what did Friedrich Schlegel understand by the Christianizing of Europe? One can admit that he had a feeling for the greatness, the significance of the Christ-Impulse. And hence he also had the feeling that the Christ-Impulse must be grasped in a new way in a new age, that one cannot stop short at the way in which earlier centuries had grasped it. That he knows; a feeling of that is present in him. But, nevertheless, with this feeling he finds support in the already existing Christianity, Christianity as it had developed historically up to his time. He believed that a movement could proceed from Rome of which it could be said ‘I come quickly and make all things new’. He was in fact one of those men of the 19th Century who turned from Protestantism to Catholicism because they believed they could trace more strength in the Catholic life than in the Protestant. But he was a free spirit enough not to become a Catholic zealot.

There is, however, something which Friedrich Schlegel has not said to himself. What he has not told himself is that one of the deepest and most significant truths of Christianity lies in the words: ‘I am with you always even unto the end of the Earth-time.’ Revelation has not ceased; it returns periodically. And whereas Friedrich Schlegel built upon what was already there, he should have seen, have felt, that a real Christianizing of science and the life of the State can only enter if fresh knowledge is drawn out of the spiritual world. This he did not see; he knew nothing of it. And this, my dear friends, shows us, by one of the most significant examples of the 19th Century, that again and again even in the most enlightened minds the illusion crops up that one can link on to something already existing. It is thought that one need not draw something new from the well of rejuvenescence. With these illusions people can no doubt say things and carry out things that are great and brilliant, but it leads to nothing. For Friedrich Schlegel's hope was for a Europe of the 19th Century with its science and political life permeated by Christianity. It must come quickly, he thought, a general renewal of the world, a general re-establishing of the Christ-Impulse. And what came? A materialistic trend in the science of the second half of the 19th Century, compared with which the materialism known by Friedrich Schlegel in 1828 was child's play. And then also came a materializing of political life (one must know history, real history, not the fable convenue which is taught in schools and universities) of which likewise in 1828 he could see nothing around him. Thus he prophesied a Christianizing of Europe and was so bad a prophet that a materializing of Europe came about!

Men live willingly in illusions. And this is connected with the great problem that is now occupying us, the problem that will become clear to us in the coming days: men have forgotten how really to become old, and we must learn again to become old. We must learn in a new way how to become old, and we can only do so through spiritual deepening. But, as I said, this can only become clear in the course of our study. Our time is in general disinclined for it, still disinclined, and it must cease to be disinclined and grow inclined for it.

In any case, my dear friends, the customary thought and feeling of today are not aiming at familiarizing themselves with a certain ease and facility with what, for instance, forms the spiritual challenge of the anthroposophical Spiritual Science. One can see that by various examples: I will bring forward one that lies to hand.

I had a letter the day before yesterday from a man of learning. He writes to me that he has just read a lecture of mine on the task of Spiritual Science,¹ which I gave two years ago, and that he now sees that this Spiritual Science has, after all, something very fruitful for him. There is a thoroughly warm tone in this letter, a thoroughly amiable, kindly tone. One sees that the man is gripped by what he has read in this lecture on the task of Spiritual Science. He is a trained Natural Scientist, standing in the difficult life of today, and he has seen from this lecture that Spiritual Science is not stupid and not unpractical, but can give an impulse to the time. But now let us look at the reverse side of the matter. The same man five years ago sought to attach himself to this Spiritual Science, to join a group where Spiritual Science was studied, begged moreover at that time to have various conversations with me, and these he had. He took part in group meetings five years ago, and five years ago he so reacted that the whole matter became repugnant to him, and he turned away from it so strongly that in the meantime he has become an enthusiastic panegyrist of Herr Freimark, whom you know from his various writings. Now the same man excuses himself by saying that it would perhaps have been better, instead of doing what he did, to have read something of mine, some books of mine, and made himself acquainted with the subject. But he had not done that, he had judged by what others had imparted to him, and then he had got such a forbidding picture of Spiritual Science that he found it was not at all suited to his own path of development. Now after five years he has read a lecture and has found that this is not the case.

I quote this example—and it could be multiplied—of the way in which people stand to what desires in the only possible way—not in the way of Friedrich Schlegel—a Christianizing of all science—a Christianizing of all public life. I quote it as an example of the habits of thought of today, especially of the science of our time. It is therefore no proof that a man has found something antipathetic to him, if he approaches the Anthroposophical Movement, has various talks, takes part in group meetings, grumbles vigorously about the members of these meetings and what they say to him, concludes that he must now abuse Anthroposophy as a whole, and afterwards becomes an enthusiastic panegyrist of Freimark, who has written the vilest articles on Spiritual Science. After five years the same person decides that he will really read something! So it is no proof at all, if so and so many people today are abusive or agree with the abuse, that deep down they might not have a natural tendency to attach themselves to anthroposophical Spiritual Science. If they have as much good will as the man in question, they need five years, many need ten, many fifteen, many fifty, many so long that they can no longer experience it in this incarnation. You see how little people's behaviour is any kind of proof that they are not seeking what is to be found in anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

I bring this example forward because it points to the profoundly important fact I have often mentioned—namely the lack of stability in going into a matter, the holding fast to old traditional prejudices, which people will not let go! And that again is connected with other things. One only needs to transpose oneself in feeling into those ancient times of which I have spoken to you earlier and today. Think of a young man after the Atlantean catastrophe in his connection with other people. He was, let us say—twenty, twenty-five years old; near him he saw someone of forty, fifty, sixty years. He said to himself: What happiness someday to be as old as that, for as one lives one goes on gaining more and more. There was a perfectly obvious, immense veneration for one who had grown old; a looking up to the aged, linked with the consciousness that they had something else to say about life than the young men. Merely to know this theoretically is of no consequence, what matters is to have it in one's whole feeling, and to grow up under this impression. It is of infinite consequence to grow up in such a way as not merely to look back at one's youth and say: Ah, how fine it was when I was a child! This beauty of life will certainly never be taken from men by any kind of spiritual reflection. But it is a one-sided reflection which was supplemented in ancient times by the other: How beautiful it is to become old! For in the same degree as one became weaker in body, one grew into strength of soul, one grew into union with the wisdom of the world. This was at one time an accepted part of training and education.

Now, my dear friends, let us look at still another truth which, to be sure, I have not expressed in the course of these weeks, but which in the course of years I have already mentioned here and there to our friends: We grow older. But only our physical body grows older. For from the spiritual aspect it is not true that we grow older. It is a maya, an external deception. It is certainly a reality in respect of physical life, but it is not true in respect of the full nature of man's life. Yet, we only have the right to say it is not true, if we know that this human being who lives here in the physical world between birth and death is something else than merely his physical body. He consists of the higher members, in the first place of what we have called the etheric body or the body of formative forces, and then the astral body, the ego—if we only speak of these four. But even if we stop short at the etheric body, at the invisible, super-sensible body of formative forces, we see that we bear it within us between birth and death, just as we carry about our physical body of flesh and blood and bones. We carry in us this etheric body of formative forces, but we see there is a difference: the physical body grows ever older, the etheric or body of formative forces is old when we are born; in fact, if we examine its true nature, it is old then and it becomes ever younger and younger. We can say, therefore, that the first spiritual member in us continually becomes more vigorous and younger, in contrast to the physical-corporeal that becomes weak and powerless. And it is true, literally true, that when our face begins to get wrinkled then our etheric body blooms and becomes chubby-cheeked. Yes but, the materialistic thinker could say this is completely contradicted by the fact that one does not perceive it! In ancient times it was perceived. It is only that modern times are such that people pay no attention to the matter and give it no value. In ancient times nature itself brought it in its course, in modern times it is almost an exception. But even so, there are such exceptions. I remember that I once spoke of a similar subject at the end of the eighties with Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the ‘Unconscious’. We came to speak of two men who were both professors at the Berlin University. One was Zeller, a Schwabian, then seventy-two years old, who had just petitioned for his pensioning off, and who thus had the idea ‘I have got so old that I can no longer hold my lectures.’ He was old and fragile with his seventy-two years. And the other was Michelet; he was ninety-three years old. And Michelet had just been with Eduard von Hartmann and said ‘Well, I don't understand Zeller! When I was as old as Zeller I was just a young fellow, and now, only now, do I feel really fitted to say something to people ... As for me, I shall still lecture for many long years!’ But Michelet had something of what can be called a ‘having-grown-young-in-forces’. There is of course no inner necessity that he had grown so old; for instance, a tile from a roof might have killed him when he was fifty years old or earlier. I am not speaking of such things. But after he had grown so old, in his soul he had in fact not grown old, but precisely young. This Michelet, however, in his whole being, was no materialist. Even the Hegel followers have in many ways become materialistic, although they would not assent to that, but Michelet, although he spoke in difficult sentences, was inwardly gripped by the spirit. Only a few, however, can be so inwardly gripped by the spirit. But this is just what is sought for through anthroposophical spiritual science: to give something that can be something to all men, just as religion must be something to all men, that can speak to all men. But this is connected with our whole training and education.

Our whole educational system is constructed on entirely materialistic impulses—and this must be seen in much deeper connections than is generally indicated. People reckon only with man's physical body, never with his becoming-younger. No account is taken of one's growing younger as one grows older! At first glance it is not always immediately evident. But nevertheless, all that in course of time has become the subject of pedagogy and instruction is actually only able to lay hold of men in their youth, unless they happen to become professors or scientific writers. It is not very often that one finds that someone cares to take up in the same way in later life, when he no longer needs it, the material which is absorbed today during one's schooldays. I have known doctors who were leaders in their special subject, that is to say, who had so passed their student years and youth that they had been able to become intellectual leaders. But there was no question at all of their continuing the same methods of acquiring knowledge in later years. I once knew a very famous man—I will not mention his name, he was so renowned—who stood in the front rank in medical science. He made his assistant attend to the later editions of his books, because he himself no longer took part in science; that did not suit his later years.

This is connected however with something else. We are gradually developing a consciousness that what one can absorb through learning is really only of service for one's youth and that one gets beyond it later on. And this is so. One can still force oneself later to turn back to many things, but then one must really force oneself—it does not come naturally as a rule. And yet, unless a man is always taking in something new—not just by allowing it to enter him through the concert hall, the theatre, or, with all due respect, the newspaper or something of that kind—then he grows old in his soul. We must absorb in another way, we must really have the feeling in the soul that one experiences something new, one is being transformed, and that one reacts to what one takes in just as the child reacts. One cannot do this in an artificial way, it can only happen when something is there which one can approach in later life precisely as one approaches the ordinary educational subjects when one is a child.

But now, take our anthroposophical spiritual science. We need not puzzle our heads over what it will be like in later centuries; for them the right form will be found. But in any case, as it is now—to the dislike however, of many—there is no primary necessity to cease absorbing it. No matter how extremely aged one may have become at the present time, one can always find in it something new that grips the soul, that makes the soul young again. And many new things have already been found on spiritual scientific soil—even such new things as let one look into the most important problems of today. But above all the present needs an impulse which directly seizes upon men themselves. Only in that way can this present time come through the calamity into which it has entered, and which works so catastrophically. The impulses in question must approach men direct.

And now if one is not Friedrich Schlegel but a person having insight into what humanity really needs, one can nevertheless keep to several beautiful thoughts that Friedrich Schlegel had and at least rejoice in them. He has spoken of how things must not be treated as absolute from a definite standpoint. He has, in the first place, only seen the parties which always regard their own principle as the only one to make all mankind happy. But in our time much more is treated as absolute! Above all, it is not perceived that an impulse in life can be harmful by itself, but can be beneficial in co-operation with other impulses, because it then becomes something different. Think of three directions that take their course together—I shall make a sketch.

One direction is to symbolize for us the socialism to which modern mankind is striving—not just the current Lenin socialism. The second line is to symbolize what I have often characterized to you as freedom of thought, and the third direction is Spiritual Science. These three things belong to one another; they must work together in life.

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If socialism, in the crude materialistic form in which it appears today, attempts to force itself upon mankind, it will bring the greatest unhappiness upon humanity. It is symbolized for us through the Ahriman at the foot of our Group, in all his forms. If the false freedom of thought, which wants to stop short at every thought and make it valid, seeks to force itself, then harm is again brought to mankind. This is symbolized in our Group through Lucifer. But you can exclude neither Ahriman nor Lucifer from the present day, they must only be balanced through Pneumatology, through Spiritual Science, which is represented by the Representative of mankind who stands in the centre of our Group. It must be repeatedly pointed out that Spiritual Science is not meant to be merely something for people who have cut themselves adrift from ordinary life through some circumstance or other and who want to be stimulated a little through all sorts of things connected with higher matters. Rather is Spiritual Science, anthroposophical Spiritual Science, intended to be something that is connected with the deepest needs of our age. For the nature of our age is such that its forces can only be discovered if one looks into the spiritual. It is connected with the worst evil of our time—that countless men today have no idea that in the social, the moral, the historical life, super-sensible forces are ruling; indeed, just as the air is all around us, so do super-sensible forces hold sway around us. The forces are there, and they demand that we shall receive them consciously, in order to direct them consciously, otherwise they can be led into false paths by the ignorant, or those who have no understanding. In any case the matter must not be made trivial. It must not be thought that one can point to these forces as one often prophesies the future from coffee grounds and so on! But nevertheless in a certain way and sometimes in a very close way the future and the shaping of the future are connected with what can only be recognized if one proceeds from principles of spiritual science.

People will need perhaps longer than five years to see that. But precisely because of these actual events—the signs of the time demand it—there must again and again be emphasized how it is the great demand of our age that people realize the fact that certain things which happen today can only be discovered and, above all, rightly judged, if one proceeds from the standpoint gained through anthroposophical Spiritual Science.

• 1. See: ‘The Mission of Spiritual Science and of its Building at Dornach.’