The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Spiritual-scientific Results and Life Practice

Dear attendees, Anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have had the privilege of representing here in Stuttgart for many years, was initially viewed by representatives of intellectual life, who are considered authorities by most people, as something that should be disregarded because it should be viewed as a kind of sectarian movement. It may be said that precisely in those circles that are regarded as authoritative from this point of view, this view is increasingly being abandoned. In recent weeks, a theology graduate who has written a thick book entitled “Modern Theosophy” has, after all, uttered words that testify to the desire to move away from the view that one is dealing with an obscure sect. The book is called “Modern Theosophy”, but strangely enough, the author explicitly states on page 18:

When the following expositions speak of Theosophy and Theosophists, it is always meant to refer to Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical School. The terms Theosophy and Theosophist have been retained only because they are more familiar to the general consciousness than the terms Anthroposophy and Anthroposophist.

It is even a well-intentioned book in part. The author says:

If one had it in Theosophy...

– that is, he means Anthroposophy, one must always translate this in the whole book –

... with the random ideas of a fringe sect fishing in troubled waters, then it would not be worth the effort to pay it more attention.

Now he further characterizes that this anthroposophy is something that must be described as based on the foundations of a comprehensive worldview, powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

It is, after all, remarkable that even today the opponents – because you can certainly call the licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, who wrote the book, an opponent – it is, after all, significant that even today the opponents speak like this. Now, it is not my intention in today's lecture - which is intended to form the basis for my remarks next Friday, when I will then delve into practical life - it is not my intention in this lecture to take up anything polemically, but only in such a way that I choose starting points here and there in order to characterize the results of anthroposophical spiritual science. I do not wish to be polemical, but would like to take this or that as a starting point in order to be able to characterize spiritual science, especially in relation to practical life. Today this will be done more in relation to the inner life of the human being; next time it will be in relation to the outer life of social and economic life.

Since anthroposophy has made the attempt to intervene energetically in life, some people seem to have had to admit that this attempt has caused them some headaches. And so we see that since the Dornach School of Spiritual Science courses last fall — which I have already reported on here and which have recently been joined by our Waldorf school teachers and other experts on anthroposophy here in Stuttgart have been added to these, we see that since Anthroposophy has been more actively engaging in life in this way, some people are trying to think about this world view current in their own way. But the thoughts of these people are strange when you put them together, and you have to realize that when you are talking about the consequences of anthroposophy for the practice of life.

For example, a professor of education at the Jena School of Spiritual Science felt compelled to say that the promise of the anthroposophical college courses in Dornach for a revitalization and recovery of scientific life could only be fulfilled if a better ethical foundation were laid for anthroposophy. However, something very peculiar is now happening to this college teacher. He does not like the ethical worldview that I presented in my Philosophy of Freedom; he does not like it. He actually finds it unsuitable for human beings, but suitable for angels. Well, that may be his personal opinion. But something very strange happens to him, which points to a peculiar ethics of modern science. He discusses my book 'Philosophy of Freedom' as one of those books (for there is no other way to understand the things he says) that arose out of the chaos of the war catastrophe and that are indicative of the kinds of quests and longings that are present today. My book 'Philosophy of Freedom' was only mentioned in the second edition, which appeared in 1918, by a good gentleman who, as a university professor, would be obliged to take the matter a little more seriously and thoroughly. He therefore obviously considers the book to have been written after the war catastrophe, and he also characterizes it as if it had been written out of anthroposophical efforts. Now, my Philosophy of Freedom was published in 1893. So, for all the decades that the book has existed, the professor in question has not bothered with the matter, which is of course excusable. The title page of the new edition says 1918, and now he starts pontificating. I just want to mention this as an example of the kind of scientific thoroughness that is present when it is demanded that a better ethical basis be created for what the anthroposophical worldview is. Here, then, we have the voice of an academic who finds fault with the ethical side of anthroposophy.

The other academic, the licentiate of theology, finds, as you have heard, that the following are particularly significant:

...the foundations of a worldview powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

Now, to expand on this, he adds towards the end of his rather thick book that even if you think your way out of this anthroposophical world view, everything that it contains from the results of supersensible seeing, from results about supersensible world facts, still remains, and this academician characterizes in the following way:

The value of this worldly wisdom would not be affected by this...

- that is, by removing the supersensible side.

Also, there are many scattered ethical benefits in Steiner's writings. One could separate it out as worldly wisdom from the embrace of clairvoyant insights.

So this other critic finds: If you leave out everything else from the anthroposophical worldview, then something remains that has at least great ethical value.

Today, it can already be said that this anthroposophical worldview is, in a sense, being wildly raved about, but it cannot be said that it is uniformly understood by those who feel called upon to judge such things from certain curule chairs. And so there is nothing left for us to do, dear attendees, but to speak again and again about the foundations of this world view, about how it comes to its truths, to its insights, and what these insights themselves are and how they can then intervene in life itself.

This is precisely where one can start, if one wants to characterize anthroposophy from the perspective of the contemporary attitude, so to speak. I do not want to comment on the content of some of the assessments, but on the whole way in which these assessments are made. Kurt Leese, for example, who wrote this book 'Modern Theosophy', tried hard to read a large number of my writings. He even claims that he does not want to approach from the outside to criticize, but that he wants to characterize from within. At one point, however, to which I may perhaps return, he does make a strange statement that allows a deep insight into the state of mind from which criticism of anthroposophy is exercised. At a certain point, after he has talked a lot about logic and the like, this Kurt Leese says that my remarks are “annoying and unpleasant”. So it is not a rational objection, not an objection taken from logical grounds, but an objection based on emotion, on a bad mood. One feels offended, hurt, one feels annoyed. - With this I do not merely touch on what Leese says, but I touch on the mood that is felt by many sides of anthroposophical spiritual science: one becomes angry about it, one feels something that one would like to push away, not for logical reasons but for emotional reasons. If one investigates this fact, one finds that it is indeed connected with something that is very much a part of the nature of this anthroposophical method of research, which I represent.

When we speak today of any kind of scientific path, of any path to a worldview, then we are clear about the fact that we must tread the paths that we have been accustomed to walking in one way or another differently than they are trodden by this or that person. But it is not easy to admit what anthroposophical spiritual science expects of our contemporaries. Today's scientist and those who allow science to educate them for life say to themselves: At a certain point in life, you are finished as a human being. You have certain inherited qualities that have been transformed through education, perhaps even perfected or modified by certain experiences in the outer world, and you have reached a certain point in your life's development. From this point one now enters into some field of science. One is obliged, in this field of science, perhaps to formulate logic more precisely, perhaps to develop in some way still conscientiousness and thoroughness in the old form, to equip oneself with a telescope, microscope, X-ray apparatus, and so on, in order to make progress. But one wants to remain at the level of the powers of cognition that one has once acquired through ordinary inheritance, ordinary education, school teaching and life. Anthroposophical spiritual research cannot agree to this. For it is clear to it that if one only investigates existence, human life, the world, and wants to be active in them in this way, one comes up against certain limits, limits at which dissatisfaction arises about questions that arise, about riddles that life presents one with. Such questions, such riddles arise, in the face of which it is not enough to simply say: here the human being reaches the limit of his cognitive powers. For one feels quite clearly that if one does not come to a satisfactory, at least relatively satisfactory, solution to these questions and riddles, one cannot come to terms with life at all.

Now, anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not say that one may stop at these limits, but it says: When one has developed everything that can be attained today through the usual education or from ordinary life, has developed all of this, there is still the possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul and of bringing these powers, which one can take into one's own hands, if I may use the expression, to a higher level of knowledge. Then, when one has reached these levels of higher knowledge, it is also possible to penetrate deeper into life than with ordinary science, ordinary education, and ordinary life practice. And then certain life questions and life puzzles take on a different appearance than in ordinary science.

Now, I have often spoken here about the development of such abilities of the soul, but these things can be presented again and again from the most diverse points of view. The peculiarity of spiritual science as it is meant here is that what is presented in it can only be truly brought to light by repeatedly and repeatedly viewing it from the most diverse points of view. Spiritual science does not appeal to any external processes for its methods; it does not form external apparatuses for its starting points or develop laboratory methods. It takes the standpoint that the supersensible cannot, of course, be made vivid through external activities, but that the supersensible can only be attained by supersensible means. Therefore, it points to intimate methods of inner soul training, to a stepping out of the soul beyond what is usual in ordinary science and in ordinary life practice. But it does not tie in with anything hidden and mystical, with anything in the bad sense of secret, but it absolutely ties in with abilities that are already present in the soul in ordinary life, only that it does not merely cultivate these abilities to the degree in which they are present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but that she cultivates and nurtures these abilities further, thereby bringing certain powers in the soul to development, which actually remain dormant in this human soul due to today's culture.

The first thing that can be linked to is the research method, which is an inner soul path, and that is the ordinary human ability to remember, remembering – I have characterized this from the most diverse points of view over the years. The spiritual scientific research method does not link to something hidden, but to something that is quite accessible to people in their ordinary lives. We recall our experiences. We can draw from our memory the images of what we have experienced years ago – in other words, we can constantly do what we experience inwardly in the outer world. We bring it to a certain point in relation to this soul ability of remembering, and ordinary life is quite right to stop at this point for the time being. For the fact that we can remember in a healthy way, continuously back into our childhood, what we have experienced, the entire health of our soul, indeed the health of our human life, depends on it. And everyone can know what it means for the health of the soul to somehow lose the memory of something one has gone through in life. If there is a kind of blank space that we cannot go back into in the stream of life, then it means not only an erasure of our images of experiences, but in fact an erasure of our ego, or at least a partial erasure of our ego; our self-awareness is interrupted. We notice from this how intimately our self-awareness is linked to this ability to remember, and it is with this ability that spiritual science, with its method of research, first connects. Certain ideas that can be easily grasped are brought into the center of consciousness. In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” I call this method of bringing certain easily comprehended ideas into the center of consciousness and then remaining there constantly meditation and concentration.

What happens when this method is practiced over a long period of time? What does one actually do? I would like to say: You consciously take in what you would otherwise do unconsciously by developing the power of memory since childhood. By remembering our experiences, we make our inner images permanent. We surrender to life and our organism; we draw from ourselves the images that have remained permanent, depending on what life causes us and our organism can do. But we do not control this lasting of our imaginative life in ordinary existence; spiritual science goes beyond this to controlling this lasting in the inner life of our imagination. Images are made lasting. And if you do this kind of exercise over and over again for years, it turns out that you have acquired a certain ability, just as a muscle acquires a certain strength when it performs an activity over and over again. But by voluntarily evoking durations of mental images that one would not otherwise voluntarily evoke, something is formed that, on the one hand, grows out of ordinary memory but, on the other hand, is quite different from it. A power arises from the depths of the soul that one does not have in ordinary life and in ordinary science. One releases something that otherwise remains dormant in the soul. One now realizes that by inwardly releasing this power in the soul, one stands in a completely new relationship to the world.

Now I have to make one comment today to prevent popular prejudices and misunderstandings against the spiritual scientific method from being carried forward. All sorts of people come who deal with spiritual science with the opposite of thoroughness and say that the spiritual scientific method is used to bring up repressed ideas from the subconscious. Suppressed nervous energy and all kinds of things that one usually pushes into the subconscious are brought up into the ordinary consciousness, so that one is not dealing with something that the spiritual researcher, who lives in such ideas, has acquired through a new power of the soul. Such objections are indeed raised from many sides.

But in answer to this, it may be said, first of all, that something is emphasized everywhere in my writings that is a fundamental condition of these inner soul exercises, namely, that the whole process of making ideas permanent, of immersing oneself in meditation in a certain content of thought – when one is dealing with the right spiritual scientific methods – must proceed in the same inner state of soul as the state of soul of the mathematician when he devotes himself to the combination and analysis of geometric figures or mathematical tasks in general. The soul's activity in the humanities must be just as permeated by the will as the mathematician's activity is permeated by the will. The soul's activity in the humanities must be as permeated by the will as the mathematician's activity is permeated by the will; everything that is done is fully permeated by the light of consciousness. That is the one thing I would like to say to those who repeatedly say that things are being brought up from the subconscious, and that the person who claims to be a spiritual researcher has no idea that it all comes from his subconscious. And those who make such criticism, who can see from their superconsciousness, from what they call science, these suggest how naive such a spiritual researcher is.

Now, my dear audience, I ask you to go through my writings. Leave out everything in them that belongs to spiritual science and try to see how ordinary scientific problems are treated. Then you will see that there is already a complete awareness of the state of mind of such critics. So what such critics demand of their scientific approach is well known. It is not suppressed or even dispensed with – no, in spiritual research, while fully maintaining this scientific approach, the other path is developed alongside it through the soul's activities. It must be taken into account: Only when the spiritual researcher shows himself incapable of following this ordinary scientific method, only then can one say that he is naive in his spiritual research, that he is presenting something that is cloudy, nebulous and mystical. But this is not the case, at least as far as the striving of the spiritual research method is concerned. In this method, the aim is to achieve an absolutely mathematical state of mind by bringing those abilities of the soul into consciousness that are initially higher abilities than the ability to remember.

What is the result? I said: One enters into a different relationship with the world. And here, by developing this transformed ability to remember, one enters into a new relationship with one's own human experience. When this soul ability, which I have just spoken about, really flows up out of the soul, then one begins to look at the life one has gone through since birth as if at a continuous stream that stays there and remains. How else does this life proceed in ordinary existence? It proceeds in such a way that it stands before our soul as something indeterminate. Individual memories arise like waves from a stream. We can look back at these images of our experiences, but the current itself remains in a certain vague darkness. We are, to a certain extent, in this current ourselves. As I said earlier, in a healthy soul life, one's self-awareness is connected to this current. Now one is outside of this current; one has torn oneself away from it. The life one has lived since birth stands before you like a panorama. Time has become space, as it were. What one has striven for by constantly forming images has been conquered by looking at the life between birth and the present moment as a continuous whole, as a panorama of life.

But such an inner state of mind is linked to something else: by the fact that one overlooks this life - and one only overlooks that which is outside of oneself, in the past one did not overlook life because one was in it - by the fact that one has been torn out of life through the development discussed, one gains an experiential understanding of the alternating states of sleeping and waking in ordinary life. And one learns to recognize how sleeping and waking truly relate to one another in ordinary life. A person falls asleep and then wakes up again. It is self-evident that the interplay of the soul forces, as they are present in connection with the body, does not cease and then resume when the person wakes up. But the human being's consciousness is initially such that he does not have the inner strength to grasp what takes place in his soul between falling asleep and waking up. As a result, it remains unconscious. But now this is becoming conscious. One first gets to know a state of soul experience that is, on the one hand, very similar to sleep: one feels free from the body; one feels outside the body in that one has learned to survey one's life since birth. And one learns to recognize what the moment of falling asleep and waking up is; one learns to recognize that the soul is a real thing, that when one wakes up one connects with the soul that leaves the body when one falls asleep. For one learns to recognize that the forces that one has developed from memory are rooted in the soul, insofar as this soul is something independent of the body in its essence. One learns to recognize that when one wakes up, the soul enters the body, and that when one falls asleep, it leaves the body. And just as in any other external science one begins with the simpler and adds complications, thus becoming acquainted with the more manifold, so it is here too. When one learns to recognize, through inner vision, the nature of falling asleep and waking up, this vision is ultimately expanded to include what birth and death actually are in human life. But in order for it to be expanded, some practice is still needed.

I have said: the exercises must be such that man does that constantly, which otherwise only fleeting images, caused by life or by the body, are in the memory. But it is not enough for the further progress in spiritual research that one merely develops this resting on a certain idea; one must go further, so to speak, push the will further. One must come to a point where one can rest on a certain idea as long as one wants, but is not captivated by it, not hypnotized and captured by this idea, but can reject this idea again at the moment one wants to. And this: to surrender to an idea, to withdraw again and to remain as if in an empty consciousness and not to let oneself be captured by any other idea – that must be practiced in the second place. Then one is indeed practising something that is an inner working of the soul forces, like inhaling and exhaling, like systole and diastole. One places an idea into consciousness, lets it last for a certain time, removes it, takes it up again into consciousness; inhaling into consciousness, exhaling out of consciousness. It is not a physical breathing process, but to a certain extent a spiritual breathing process, which one exercises and through which one draws up from the life of the soul the ability to perceive spiritual worlds. And now what one brings up from the soul as a new ability permeates the contemplation of waking and sleeping, and expands it into the contemplation of birth and death. And one learns to recognize, as a second result of spiritual science, what I would call: the eternal in man. For now one learns to recognize that what is outside the body from falling asleep to waking up was present before birth or conception in spiritual worlds. One learns to recognize that the simpler act that takes place each time one wakes up, and which consists in the soul and spirit returning to the still-present body, that this simpler process has a more complicated one, which consists in we live in a spiritual world before our birth or conception and that we then do not, as when waking up, move into our body that is available from the previous day, but that we move into a body that is made available to us in the hereditary current from father and mother. We become familiar with the more complicated waking up through conception or birth, and we become familiar with the complicated falling asleep through what is called death when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual worlds.

In the second stage of supersensible knowledge, then, the result of spiritual science is the realization of the eternal. The first thing that arises is the realization of the lasting since our birth, which we survey like a stream of life that stands there, in relation to which time becomes like space. The second thing that arises is that we recognize ourselves as rooted in an eternal being that goes through births and deaths, that between death and birth leads a life in spiritual worlds that is just as full as here. One can describe this. I have described it in my writings. People call these descriptions fantasies, but for the one who acquires the abilities I have spoken of, that is, for the one who wants to become a spiritual researcher, these are not fantasies but objective realities that are present as the objective world of colors is before the eye, the objective world of sounds for the ear, and so on.

And I will mention a third step, in which one must indeed further develop an ability of the soul that is also present in ordinary life. And by speaking of the further development of this ability, one is naturally decried as a dilettante by those people who today believe they have a monopoly on science, because they demand that science should completely avoid this ability. But this ability, which I will characterize in a moment, can certainly be developed as a cognitive faculty, and it works like this: The first step is to create a certain image through meditation and concentration. The second step is to remove this constant image from one's consciousness and to control at will, like systole and diastole, the arising and sinking of the perception, then the third consists in further developing the ordinary ability to turn one's attention to some object in the external world. I would call this attention 'noteworthy'; it is the special ability to focus on something precisely, to contract the soul's abilities in such a way that this noteworthy quality is directed at individual objects or at individual beings. This ability, which in life is only prompted by external things – or also by internal things, which is irrelevant here – can be systematically developed by increasing one's noteworthy quality, one's ability to pay attention, by making more and more effort to concentrate the soul on individual objects, so that the soul is completely absorbed in an object, does not skim over it, but puts its whole being into the object. By cultivating this ability, you increase it to what I would call active, inner interest. Then you already notice how something rises from the depths of the soul, which permeates this ability from within. And you notice the affinity of what comes from within the person with a very, very necessary human ability in ordinary life, with the power of love.

Dear attendees, a straight line can be drawn between attention and love, with attention at one end and love at the other. This is because love is nothing more than highly developed attention, a complete surrender to the beloved object. Of course, one will be decried as a dilettante if one says: If one particularly develops that which otherwise unconsciously, instinctively, from attention to a person or to an object becomes love, and if that, through arbitrariness, in turn, becomes a state of mind that is permeated by such an inner consciousness as otherwise only mathematical life, if that is developed, then love is not just an ability of ordinary life, a quality and adornment of ordinary life, then it becomes a power of cognition, such a power of cognition through which one can truly live in the object. But this is necessary if we want to experience the spiritual contents, the spiritual processes of the world. We must develop love, which otherwise only appears in relation to external sense objects, in such a way that it becomes the power of knowledge, that the soul can truly give itself fully to the objects, because the spiritual world demands that we give ourselves to the objects when they reveal themselves, when they are to reveal themselves. This, then, is the third result of developing love into a power of knowledge. Then one learns to look at human life in a new way.

For example, one says to oneself: Now, I live somewhere, surrounded by people. Hundreds of people are around me, some of them I don't even know; I know others, but I pass them by indifferently; some of these hundreds are particularly close to me. An event occurs, a death within this group of people surrounding me. It may happen that I am indifferent to this; it can also happen that this death is a blow for me, because I have had a closer relationship with the person who has died. And now you learn from such things: When you see that from the fullness of life certain things are closer to you, certain events are more connected to you than others, you learn to look back on the way you came to these experiences. If you are endowed with the ability to recognize that is developed out of love, then you see the path you have taken in this life since birth. You get to know an inner, rational connection that otherwise runs unconsciously. You learn to say to yourself: I look back from now. Thirty years ago, I did something that was very far removed from the events I am experiencing today. But when I connect what I undertook then with what I undertook twenty-five years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago, and then follow the current to what I am currently experiencing, then I notice an inner connection. Above all, I realize one thing: what otherwise seems to me as if only an external, mechanical life has pushed me, now appears to me as emerging from my will. I was not aware of it, and yet it was the will working within me that undertook things thirty years ago, which in their further progression lead to my present experiences of destiny. I experience fate in its connection with the will. Fate in its connection with the will of the innermost human nature reveals itself, but in such a way that one can now look back to earlier earthly lives with the power of recognition of love. One sees: the impulses stem from previous earthly lives, which initially remain unconscious and which make that one is not pushed by external mechanical natural laws toward one's experiences, but that one is pushed toward that which was planted in one was planted in you in a previous life, which was then further developed spiritually between death and the last birth and which now lives in you, which leads you from one life event to the next, insofar as these events are of such a nature that they take hold of you directly. You get to know the connection between your present life and previous lives.

Dear attendees, you do not learn to recognize such connections if you do not make love a force of knowledge. Because by making love a force of knowledge, you go deep, deep inside yourself, to where the causes lie that otherwise elude our awareness. And it is these causes that point us from this life to earlier earthly lives. It is really the case that through this ability to recognize, which is the transformed power of love, something is, as it were, laid bare out of ourselves, just as we otherwise lay something bare in a chemical laboratory out of certain substances through reagents, which one only sees through these reagents. When the spiritual researcher describes this, he does so entirely from the perspective of thinking that is as exact as it is through the mathematical conscientiousness, mathematical thoroughness and mathematical sense of responsibility that he has acquired. Just as this mathematics is created from within the human being, but is valid for the external world, so too is that which occurs as the third result, by looking back to earlier lives on earth. This is achieved through the faculty of knowledge, which develops through a transformation of those soul forces that otherwise only appear in external life and there place themselves in life as a practical force.

Now, my dear audience, I have now described the results of spiritual science anthroposophy. By looking at what can be described in this way, one easily sees that it is truly not something that is merely theoretical, but something that must take hold of the whole human being, because today I have presented precisely those insights that relate directly to the human being himself. Certainly, not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist or an astronomer. But with the help of common sense it is quite possible to comprehend what astronomy, chemistry and physics teach. In the same way it is possible to comprehend with the help of common sense what the spiritual researcher brings up from the depths of the human soul, if only one does not wall oneself off from these things through scientific prejudices. But when it is brought up and becomes wisdom, then it also becomes life practice. And because I do not like to describe in general abstractions, I would like to show by concrete examples how these things become life practice when they flow into people by permeating them with the insights of anthroposophical spiritual science.

I have mentioned before how this anthroposophical spiritual science has been applied not as a worldview but as a way of life in the Waldorf School founded here in Stuttgart by Mr. Molt. This Waldorf School does not aim to instill a particular worldview in children; anyone who claims otherwise is slandering the Waldorf School. It is not a school of world view, but rather a school that seeks to take the whole person, mind and will, by making the spiritual-scientific impulses fruitful; that through the application of spiritual-scientific ideas, the mind, feelings and will are changed and strengthened. And the methodology of the Waldorf school is concerned with what the art of education can gain through this transformation of the soul, this strengthening of the will. We do not want to teach the children a specific content, but we want skill in the art of education, in the practice of life, to follow from what can be gained through anthroposophical spiritual science, from the way we handle education and teaching.

Now, I would like to show you a practical example of what applies to many areas, indeed to all areas of life in relation to spiritual science. When a child enters a Waldorf school, they are at an age that is of great social importance to those in the know. This phase of the child's life, from the beginning of the change of teeth to the beginning of sexual maturity, is the one we are called upon to foster through education and teaching in the Waldorf school. Above all, it has great social significance. The social question is not solved by institutions. Those people who think that if only this or that in life were organized in such and such a way, a satisfactory social order would come about, are indulging in social superstition. It is only with a certain melancholy that we can observe social or socialist experiments that only look to external institutions. No, human life is not primarily shaped by institutions, by any external circumstances. Human life is shaped by people themselves. Whether or not this human life can be a socially satisfactory entity does not depend on how we make the institutions, but on how people behave within the institutions. One should not speak of social institutes and institutions, but of socially minded [and socially acting] people. Therefore, when we look at the social question as a practical question in life today, we must, above all, find ways of instilling social sentiment and social understanding into the human soul. That is why the Federation for the Threefold Social Order calls for the social order to be structured into an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or state or political life, and an independent economic life, because it believes that by looking at these three aspects of the social organism in their independence, the forces that make them social beings can be drawn from them. But the independent spiritual life, to which the educational system in particular belongs to a great extent, is of very special importance for the shaping of the social organism.

I have often explained here how children up to the age of puberty are primarily imitative beings. I have explained how, especially towards the end of this period of life, towards puberty – it continues a little beyond that – the child's nature strives to reproduce in its own activity what is being done in its environment, and even what is being felt and thought in its environment. This changes with the change of teeth. Although imitation remains a force to be reckoned with by the teacher in elementary school until the eighth or ninth year, something of particular importance occurs. It occurs in the child's soul, which I have characterized as the effect of a natural sense of authority. One can argue whether this authority should be cultivated in school or not. If one looks through the natural necessities of existence, one can argue about this just as one can argue about whether one should light something somewhere if one wants a fire, or whether one should choose some other inappropriate activity for this. If someone does not want to light a fire for particular reasons but still wants a fire, that is an impossibility. And if someone wants to guide children in a certain way from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, then they must place teachers and educators alongside them, who will be their authority and whom the children will look up to as their natural leaders. And all the declaiming about lively lessons is worth less than realizing what it means for the child to be drawn to a truth, to an insight, to a moral impulse, to an aesthetic sensation because the revered teacher and educator is oriented towards these impulses. From the child's experience, from the experience of the educating, teaching adult through the child, a force arises that must be developed between the ages of seven and fourteen. If the child is to flourish, it must be developed in the same way that life during the day must be illuminated by sunlight. What we are touching on here is a vital necessity.

What is being cultivated here? — To recognize this, my dear audience, one must go through life in its entirety. One must not have that artificially fueled pedagogical worldview or philosophy of life that only looks at the child, but one must have such a worldview that encompasses the life of the whole human being. We must ask ourselves: How does a child's life relate to later stages of life? Just as the laws of physics can be studied and, when they occur rhythmically, the effect is sometimes far removed from the cause, so the connections between cause and effect also occur in human life. From what is experienced by the child's soul from the seventh to the fourteenth year, during which years it naturally has a sense of authority towards the revered teacher and educator, during which it absorbs, on the basis of authority, what the teacher exemplifies, the child develops something that then, so to speak, descends into the depths of life and only emerges again between the twentieth and thirtieth year of life. And what comes out of it? It comes out transformed, metamorphosed. What develops in the child's soul through authority alongside the revered teacher is transformed, element by element, into social feeling in the twenties – this becomes social practice in life. What we have acquired as children from the individual teachers we have come to revere to a greater or lesser extent, we transfer to our dealings with other people. Anyone who takes a look at how life is practiced today and sees how much that is unsocial is alive in our present time will see that this unsocial element is looking back at an inadequate pedagogical art that was unable to develop in those who are now in social life, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, what I have just characterized. But this will be developed by someone who has allowed their will and mind to be stimulated by the impulses of spiritual science. This will be encouraged by a teacher who has digested spiritual science in such a way that it has become skill, art, and the ability to act in the outer world. We can see, then, what can be done for social life in a limited field, such as education and teaching, when one has an understanding of life — and one can only understand life when one also understands it in relation to its spiritual foundations. And so, ladies and gentlemen, it is the same in the most practical areas of life — I will show this in more detail.

I would like to begin with a contemporary statement, again not to be polemical, but to show how this connection between anthroposophical world view and practical life actually manifests itself. It is strange – Kurt Leese, who has a doctorate in theology, accuses me, precisely where he says that anthroposophy is annoying and ill-tempered, of having performed a brilliant feat in terms of concepts. Well, I will only mention the matter briefly – I have already dealt with the fact to which this refers on several occasions. Those who do not immediately understand the matter can also read about the facts in question in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul), where I have presented them in the appendix. After devoting thirty years of research to the matter, I was obliged to show how the human being is structured in threefoldness. This has nothing directly to do with the threefold social organism. It is not that I am playing with analogies, as I expressly stated in my book 'The Core Points'. But it is a fact: the human being is a threefold creature. He is a threefold creature when we look at him physically, mentally and spiritually. He is also a threefold being in his bodily constitution. First of all, he is a nervous-sensory human being. This is an organization that manifests itself primarily in the head, but which is spread throughout the whole human being. Secondly, the human being is permeated by a rhythmic organization. This rhythmic organization expresses itself particularly in the rhythm of breathing, in the rhythm of the heart and so on, but basically it is spread throughout the whole organism. Thirdly, the human being is a metabolic organism, which expresses itself particularly in the abdomen and in the limb system, where it is especially evident in the work of metabolism and in muscle movement; this metabolic organism shows itself, but it is spread throughout the whole human being. Now I had to say that if you want to understand something like this, you can't use such schematic concepts: the head is at the top of the human being, so you draw a line there, even if you don't literally cut off the head; the rhythmic being is in the middle, so you add a third part. Because that is not possible, because, to a certain extent, each of the systems permeates the other, one must therefore adopt a different structure for one's thoughts than the structure to which the present-day scholar, accustomed to the schematic and pedantic, is accustomed. That, says Leese, is a conceptual tour de force.

Now, today's thinking could learn a lot from scholasticism. I certainly have no external reason to be particularly friendly in this direction, but I am not concerned with merely repaying enmity with enmity. Despite all the attacks from a certain quarter, I must emphasize that even today's philosophers could learn an extraordinary amount from the inner discipline of the scholastics. If you have learned from scholasticism, if you have learned to be as elastic, as internally mobile, as unschematic with your thinking as reality is unschematic, then you have learned something with which you can not only schematize scientifically, but with which you can immerse yourself in life, because life, reality, practice, they demand elastic, mobile thinking. And when we enter into the most delicate ramifications of practical, commercial, and technical life, we can only do so if we have been educated to think flexibly and adaptably. If we look at today's routine practitioners of life, we see what has been neglected in this respect on the part of intellectual life.

Today's natural science places particular emphasis on becoming objective, on investigating things in such a way that the human being does not add or bring anything to the process when he or she summarizes the facts into laws. So one occupies oneself, and that in a certain area absolutely rightfully, with an external fact of nature, by taking as little consideration of the human as possible, by eliminating everything human when one speaks about nature. And it is only and alone in relation to natural science that the present age has grown great; there one excludes everything that is human feeling and human will. But today, because the naivety, the instinctive nature of social life in its transition to a conscious one, one must consciously approach social actions and social institutions with a practice of life. We have learned and are learning through all the popular instruction that is given to the people today only to know something that stands apart from the human mind, from the human will. But then, when we are supposed to reflect, consciously reflect, on how industrial, technical, social life is to be mastered and treated at all, we are supposed to face the mind, the will of the other person. Today, people learn a great science that does not extend to the mind and will, and then want to apply it in practice. But it does not contain what nature provides; in life we face other people, people with minds and wills. And now, because of the way we are educated, we are not accustomed to reflecting on the mind and will.

You see, that's where spiritual science comes in, which doesn't just focus on what is outside of the human being, but which places the human being at the center of the whole cosmos, which treats the whole person. Spiritual science is by no means unintellectual, it is thoroughly intellectual, but in such a way that the intellectual passes over into mind and will, seizing mind and will. That is why this spiritual science can also become directly social knowledge and thus social living science, that is, social life practice. Now, one gets to know something else: one gets to know the spiritual; through the spiritual-scientific impulses, one approaches the spiritual. In this way, one takes hold of the whole human being. If one studies natural science today, one learns to recognize the causal connection in nature. This is far removed from what the moral world order is, from what moral life forces are. In the classification of minerals, plants and animals, in the phenomena of clouds, in the course of the stars across the sky, we do not observe any moral life forces today, according to our scientific method. If we now begin to attack the practice of life with what we are accustomed to from this science, then we stand amateurishly, insensitively, towards our fellow human beings, because we cannot think ourselves into them, cannot imagine ourselves into the feelings and wills of people, and above all we cannot carry ethical, moral, spiritual into the practice of life. But since spiritual science encompasses the whole human being, the moral element is present in the whole human being at the same time. And we discover the moral element together with the theoretical. We do not found a worldview without permeating it with the moral element. In anthroposophy, we do not look out into a world that is an indifferent natural order, but we see a world that is permeated by the moral throughout, not by fantasizing the moral into it, but by seeing the moral emerging from its own order. We see this in past lives, where morality appears to us directly in its causal effect within the natural order, but belonging to our world order. This is what springs from spiritual science as a correct practice of life when it permeates the human being.

But this also deepens this practice of life with religious impulses, with religious warmth. Because when the intellectual leads to spiritual facts, when it is ethically permeated, then at the same time it is carried by religious impulses. And when a person approaches the practice of life with spiritual, moral and religious impulses, arising from an understanding of his own nature, then he alone will be able to have a healing effect on social life. For then he stands at the point which I have often characterized and which spiritual science wants to reach, at the point from which it can truly be said: the moral life and the theoretical, the scientific life become one; they grow together completely. And through the fact that the moral and the scientific life grow together, we do not have some spiritual thing into which we want to withdraw as escapists, we do not have a nebulous mysticism into which we want to flee – no, we have the spiritual as a living force in us, so that we carry it into material life. With the spiritual in us, we become conquerors of the material. We imbue the material with the spiritual. We do not become dreamy, unworldly mystics who live in a web of lies, but life-affirming spiritual scientists who immerse themselves in the practical, material side of life with that which is enlivened by the spiritual. For it is not the one who speaks of the lowliness of matter and wants to flee from it, who, as a nebulous mystic, flees to some nebulous spiritual realm, but the one who clings to the spirit and makes his impulses into impulses of life practice, who at every step of life knows how to carry the spirit into the material, into the outer practice of life.

This is precisely what meets with the most resistance today. The writings that are written against anthroposophy are gradually becoming countless. In one of the most recent writings we read a passage that characterizes their attitude very well. There we read that through anthroposophy and what is related to it, the sacred untouchedness of the eternal is fatally dragged down into the lowlands of the earthly-sensual and that in this way man is deprived of the best forces for his moral uplift. So these things are being put forward today. This has been proclaimed from a university professorial chair. It is even said that it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit if people were to be deprived of their best abilities in this way. Today people are being made aware that anthroposophy sins against humanity because it wants to educate the whole person, because it wants to bring the spirit into every aspect of life. This anthroposophy will not let up in its efforts to introduce the spirit into the practice of life. For, my dear audience, anyone who looks into today's social disaster and knows how to see through it with understanding knows that it is precisely from such views, which do not want to carry the supersensible out of its sacred inviolacy into the lowlands of earthly-sensual life, that today's unwholesomeness in the social order stems. We live in social chaos because those who have held the leadership have wanted to carry the sacred untouchedness with the spiritual up into a mystical fog, and have no sense or heart for carrying the spirit into the practice of life. He is therefore not present in the most important places of this practice of life.

If this means that I will be reproached for being polemical, I still want to tie in with one thing in order to truly characterize something other than what attacks the anthroposophical worldview. You see, in Dornach, as I have often mentioned, a center for anthroposophical spiritual science is being built. Inside, when it is finished, there will be a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group that will represent the essence of the human being, but thoroughly translated into art. In the middle of this wooden group is a figure similar to Christ. This figure – I showed a photograph of the head of this figure in the lecture I gave here in the Kunsthaus, and those who saw this head at the time will also have seen that it is a truly idealized human head. Not hundreds, but thousands of people have seen the work being done on this group in Dornach. They have seen that what is involved here is a thoroughly idealized human head. The lower part is not yet finished; there is only a block of wood. Now the work has progressed a little, but until very recently there was only a block of wood. Now, among the many such things that have appeared recently, there is also a little book by not just a licentiate, but by a doctor of theology named Johannes Frohnmeyer. I would perhaps not mention the little book if it had not been published in Stuttgart – “Calwer Vereinsbuchhandlung”. Therefore I may mention it, even if I expose myself to the accusation that I call those opponents who objectively want to characterize spiritual science. I must mention what can be found on page 107 of this strange book. There it is said - not that the things were told to the author by someone, but as if they were objective facts:

A statue of ideal man is being sculpted in Dornach, nine meters high. Its features are 'Luciferian' at the top and bestially beastly at the bottom.

Such madness is being written today by a Doctor theologiae, namely D. L. Johannes Frohnmeyer. Now, I may be accused of desecrating the podium here by bringing up such things, when I openly call them lies. I would like to ask: What do those people desecrate who bring such untruths into the world in such ways? I would like to ask - in view of the fact that this man is also a lecturer and, through his missionary work, the teacher of countless people -: How much truth will there be in the teaching of a person who is so concerned with the truth? Today it is already important that we can carry the spirit of truthfulness into our view of life from our spiritual view, from being permeated by Christianity.

Now, my dear audience, this Frohnmeyer, this Kurt Leese and others, they keep coming back to us with the idea that there is all sorts of fiction in anthroposophy, all sorts of fantasies, all sorts of myths. Well, myths are something our opponents seem to be able to do, even if they are not particularly valuable, because they fantasize the most incredible things about anthroposophical spiritual science. It is a myth to say, in this case, that what is at the top of an idealized human head has luciferic features, and at the bottom even animal features – and it was just a piece of wood at the bottom. Those who see in what is in Dornach remind me of an anecdote I once heard about the way certain people examine their state of mind when they come home in the evening. They lie down in bed, and in front of them is a top hat. If they see the top hat once, they feel sober; if they see the top hat twice, they know they are drunk. I believe that you can only make up myths like that about anthroposophical spiritual science if you see the top hat twice. And I would like to point out how, especially with regard to practical life, the realistic basis of spiritual science must be emphasized. And how little people appreciate this sense of reality is sufficiently demonstrated by such an example. Therefore, in a sense, one can be reassured when thick books today conclude with:

Theosophy...

- one means anthroposophy, because wherever the word theosophy appears in the book, it is meant to be anthroposophy, as stated in the preface, for the sake of general comprehensibility.

Like all forms of mythology, Theosophy is a tragedy of the mind.

Now, dear assembled guests, let me say it in conclusion: the one who has learned to research according to the pattern of the strictest mathematical experience and yet ascends to all heights of spiritual life and descends into all depths of the soul, who has learned to research as one must research in real spiritual science, will a certain sadness see how in many cases today the paths to practical life are blocked for spiritual science because it is not approached with a sense of truth but rather with myth-making, in that myths are invented about it in order to be able to defame it. On the other hand, however, we can also rely on the fact that truth will ultimately prevail against all those who, even in an idealized figure of Christ, see Luciferic traits above and animalistic traits below. The truth must prevail. And one day in the future – one can trust this with reassurance – it will be shown whether anthroposophy is really a mythology and therefore a tragedy of thought, or whether everything that many opponents, sometimes even well-meaning ones, still bring forward against it today will be revealed, not as a tragedy of thought, but as a comedy of thought.

Announcement before the lecture on the occasion of the “Free Anthroposophical University Courses”

Please allow me to say a few words before I begin my lecture. A few minutes ago I saw the newspaper that published the “Reply to Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Emil Molt and Dr. Carl Unger in Stuttgart”. The article is signed “Major General (retired) von Gleich”. I will not bother you with a detailed response to the matter, but would just like to make the following comment.

I became aware of the statement that was printed in the Stuttgarter Tagblatt and that was made by Dr. Unger and Mr. Emil Molt after it had been written and already printed in the Stuttgarter Tagblatt. I did not exert the slightest influence on this declaration and need not point out to you here that I declare myself in retrospect in complete agreement with the content and with the fact of the declaration. But the other fact is, of course, that I have not addressed any correspondence to Mr. von Gleich – printed or otherwise – and I would like to emphasize this in particular. Mr. von Gleich has the audacity to send me a reply for which there is no request. I would just like to address these words to you so that you do not believe that I sent any request or any correspondence to that Mr. von Gleich, handwritten or printed - one could assume that one could have overlooked the matter. Of course, I would not personally address anything to a person who slimes himself out - excuse the expression - like Mr. von Gleich, but would only comment on it if the person in question could somehow manage to take some part of the public by surprise, and then I would not address Mr. von Gleich, but rather the public. Regarding such jostling, as it has been perpetrated there, I am in the habit, after reading it, to do nothing more than wash my hands. I want to stick to that in the future, but I don't want to fail to point out to you that a reply has been sent here to something that did not happen. Whether it is due to a brain diseased by hatred or to something else, I for one can only understand it in such a way that I would naturally write on such a reply letter: “will not be accepted” and that only if no reply is received does it appear to me as an impertinence.

Concluding Remarks after The Members' Meeting

Yes, my dear friends, that is what I wanted to take as my starting point today. I want to point out, however, somewhat stimulated by an article that was handed to me today, how unsuitable our present civilization is for such ideas to find their way into it, because, you see, this article asserts some peculiar things. I do not want to go into all the various stupidities that are said about anthroposophy. But I do want to draw your attention to the criticism that is expressed here about a section of my Theosophy. There the gentleman says:

Steiner has the most wonderful things to say about the spiritual world. All things in the physical universe have their images there, which are not only sensory but also spiritual. There is a “spiritual” space in which these spiritual images move, just as chairs and tables move in physical space.

Now, my dear friends, I have already seen that oxen, horses and “Traubs” move in physical space, but that tables and chairs move in physical space is an invention of this Mr. Traub. I suspect, however, that this Mr. Traub, who is a university professor, as indeed he should be, has perhaps interpreted the sentence on page 108 of my Theosophy in the following way:

When a person's spirit is awakened, it perceives these thought-beings just as the physical eye perceives a table or a chair.

Perhaps this sentence inspired him to this lavish fantasy that tables and chairs move in physical space. They do so for the spiritualists, but Professor Traub of the University of Tübingen obviously does not want to be a spiritualist. Who else does this? Yes, the person who saw the hat “twice,” the drunk; tables and chairs move for him as well. So I can only imagine this other alternative.

Another cute story is, for example, that Professor Traub comes up with a very special definition of what science is. And so he spins the cute sentence:

This brings us to the crucial question: ...

What came before actually has nothing to do with it, so Professor Traub says: This brings us to the crucial question – which is actually quite pointless. Professor Traub:

This brings us to the crucial question: Is Theosophy right when it deliberately claims to be a science? This question can only be flatly denied. It is not a science because it also wants to be a spiritual science. That is a contradiction in terms. Science is generally valid by its very nature. It seeks the truth and the truth is for everyone. A science that keeps some of its results secret is not a science.

Now I would like to know how a science could not know something and not keep its results secret; if you know something and knowledge is a science, it makes no difference to the essence of science whether you lock it in a desk or communicate it to someone! But a modern university professor makes a big deal out of something that is completely irrelevant to the essence of science. Basically, the whole article consists of nothing but such trivialities, and from such articles one can indeed summarize a little of what today must be called the terrible muddiness and incompetence of contemporary education, and it is certainly not suitable for enlightening the minds of our youth in any special way. Because when these things are presented to young people with the same common sense with which chairs and tables are made to dance through their own power in space – and the article already suggests that everything else is also in this way, from the same spirit – then truly not much can come of this youth.

Anthroposophy and Threefolding: Their Nature and Their Defense

Dear attendees! It has not been my custom to say a special word of thanks after greetings. Today I want to do it because I really thank you very much for this greeting in the interest of the matter. Anyone who is attached to the matter I represent here may also express his thanks when he sees that it has retained its old sympathies despite the attacks it has suffered here. For almost two decades I have been giving lectures here in Stuttgart every year on the anthroposophical worldview, and in these lectures everything has been mentioned that makes it possible to form an opinion about the anthroposophical movement. More recently, I have also spoken about things that are more loosely connected with what I represent as the anthroposophical worldview: the so-called threefold social order. And I do not believe that any of the words I have spoken in the latter context have in any way violated the spirit and content of what, as I said, I have been advocating for almost two decades as an anthroposophical worldview.

Today, however, I face the outside world as if before a caricature of what I myself have to describe as the anthroposophical worldview. From all sides, I am confronted with descriptions of what this anthroposophical worldview is supposed to be. I must confess that most of these descriptions are such that I do not recognize the picture of the anthroposophical world view that I have drawn here. Everything seems so alien to me, just as what has been said in numerous personal attacks from all sides seems alien to me. It will therefore be forgiven if today I depart from the custom I have otherwise almost always observed here of speaking purely impersonally about the anthroposophical world view, and that I also take into account in a few places the personal attacks that have been made against me. But I promise you that I will not go into these things any further than they are related to the matter in hand in any direction.

First of all, dear ladies and gentlemen, I would like to talk about the origin and starting point of the anthroposophical world view. This origin and starting point lies entirely in the scientific world view of modern times. Anyone who goes through the somewhat long series of my writings will be able to see that my starting point never lies in any religious problems, even though, of course, anthroposophy, by its very nature, as we shall see, must lead to religious feeling and religious views. The starting point was not religious views, the starting point was the scientific world view that I grew into in my younger years. Anyone who grows into this scientific worldview of the present day will initially feel an extraordinary respect for what science has achieved in modern times, and above all, they will gain an even greater respect for both the experimental and observational methods of scientific research and for the training in thinking and methodical schooling that contemporary science can introduce to people. And I must confess that, for me, since I entered the natural sciences, the most valuable thing about them was this training of thought, this conscientious discipline of thinking and researching. And more than from individual results of natural science, I have always started from what natural science research brings up in you as a training in thinking. But in doing so, one thing became clearer and clearer to me. When I — and I believe that what I am about to say is sufficiently clear from my 'Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings', which appeared in the 1880s — when I repeatedly looked at what lives in the human soul in terms of yearning for the spiritual world, what views of a spiritual world live in the human soul, then the fundamental question arose for me: How can that which undoubtedly forms the great triumph of modern times, scientific research, be reconciled with these longings, with these justified impulses of the human soul?

Dear attendees! This question has brought me together with personalities in particular who, familiar with the scientific way of thinking of modern times, led a tragic inner life of the soul in dealing with the same question. An example: In my early youth, I encountered a person who, I might say, was completely infiltrated by the scientific way of thinking - a way of thinking that is fully justified in its field and points to the origin of our planet Earth, our entire world system, as a purely material primeval nebula, through whose inner forces all being has gradually formed, ultimately including man. But in man, so this personality said to himself, the processes of this concentrated nebula world took on very special forms; ideals arise in man, religious convictions, the longing arises in man to know something about that which lies beyond birth and death, because a life that only covers the period between birth and death seems so meaningless. But everything that appears in the so-called life of the soul in a human being is, as this personality put it, just smoke and fog, something that arises like a haze from what alone can be scientifically accepted. And the mental life of this personality was tragic, for it said to itself: It must be a mere deception, a mere illusion, what emerges from material life and presents itself to man as a mirage.

One may find such a way of thinking more or less justified, more or less opposed, it was there in numerous cases, and it was there in such personalities, for whom it was in vain to object: Yes, natural science on the one hand is an exact science, on the other hand the world of faith is the subjective world. Our ideals arise from this subjective world, our religious convictions arise from this subjective world. One must know the one, believe the other. There were just so many such personalities who could not do this, who said to themselves: If it is the case that the human being has arisen from what science presents to us, then ethical ideals and religious convictions are illusions. I could cite many examples along these lines. But what I want to say with it is sufficiently indicated. And so the question arose for me more and more out of life itself: Is there not a possibility, between what lives inside of man in terms of spiritual aspirations and what natural science has established, is there not a connection in between, is there not a bridge from one to the other?

And now, what offered me above all the possibility of finding such a bridge, that was not, at first, looking at inner, subjective visions; that had become clear to me from the beginning. No matter how convincingly or intensely subjective visions may present themselves to the soul, one has no right to accept them as objective on account of their subjective appearance, if one is not in a position to build a bridge from the scientifically established to the spiritual world. I have already tried to build this bridge in my “Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings”. I then devoted special attention to this in the elaboration of my small work “Truth and Science” and my larger book “The Philosophy of Freedom”.

It is quite certain that if the scientific world view alone is right, then we as human beings are the works of a necessity, then the idea of freedom is impossible, then even in this so convincing experience of our inner life, the fact that we have free will seems to stand only as a deception before our soul. And so for me the question of the justification of freedom became one of those problems, one of those riddles that occupied me intensely as a young man, and I saw that it is impossible to find a foundation for the question of freedom without a foundation for all of philosophical thinking. That was therefore the task I set myself at the end of the 1880s and the beginning of the 1890s: to find a foundation for philosophical thinking. I first put aside everything that might arise to me as visions of a spiritual world. Above all, I wanted to have a secure philosophical foundation that was in harmony with the scientific research of modern times. And starting from this point of view, I examined above all the nature of human thinking. I tried all possible ways of arriving at the answer to the question: What is human thinking essentially according to its nature?

Anyone who reads my “Philosophy of Freedom” will find how these paths to fathoming the nature of human thinking were sought. And for me it turned out that only someone who sees something in the highest expressions of this thinking that takes place independently of our physicality, of our bodily organization, can understand human thinking correctly. And I believe I succeeded in demonstrating that the processes of pure thinking in man take place independently of bodily processes. In bodily processes, natural necessities prevail. What emerges from these bodily processes in the way of dark instincts, will impulses and so on is, in a certain respect, determined by natural necessity. What a person accomplishes in his thinking ultimately turns out to be a process that takes place independently of the physical organization of the person. And I believe that through this “Philosophy of Freedom” nothing less has emerged than the supersensible nature of human thinking. And once this supersensible nature of human thinking had been recognized, then the proof was provided that in the most ordinary everyday life, when man rises to real thinking, through which he is determined by nothing other than the motives of thinking itself, then he has a supersensible element in this thinking. If he then directs his life by this thinking, develops himself in this way, is educated in this way, that he goes beyond the motives of his physical organization, beyond drives, emotions, instincts, and bases his actions on motives of pure thinking, then he may be called a free being. To explain the connection between supersensible pure thinking and freedom was my task at that time.

One can stop at this point and pursue such a train of thought merely in theory. But if such a train of thought is not pursued merely in theory, but becomes a fulfillment of one's whole life, if one sees in it a revelation of human nature itself, then one pursues it not merely in theory, but in practice. What is this practical pursuit? Well, once one has grasped the supersensible nature of thinking, one learns to recognize that the human being is capable of becoming independent of his bodily organization in a certain activity. One can now try whether, in addition to pure thinking, the human being is also capable of developing an activity that is modeled on this pure thinking. Anyone who calls the method of research that I use to underpin my anthroposophical spiritual science clairvoyance must also call ordinary pure thinking, which flows from everyday life into human consciousness and into human action, clairvoyance. I myself see no qualitative difference between pure thinking and what I call clairvoyance. My view is that through the process of pure thinking, man can first develop a practice of how to become independent of one's physical organization in one's inner processes, how to accomplish something in pure thinking in which the body has no part. In 1911, at the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna, I explained in a very philosophical way that pure thinking is something that is carried out in man without the physical organization having any part in it. And here, in a large number of lectures, I have confirmed this from the most diverse points of view.

But then, when one knows the process by which one arrives at such pure thinking, something can be developed through what true, deeper philosophy gives, which I then presented in the most diverse ways as a method of knowledge for the higher worlds in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Secret Science”. Just as pure thinking ultimately emerges from the ordinary everyday activities of the human soul, for which no special training is needed, so, by further developing this process, one can arrive at what I have called in the above-mentioned book and in the second part of my “Occult Science” the stages of higher knowledge — that is, imagination, inspiration, intuition. What is expressed in pure thinking becomes our own simply by virtue of being born; it is inherited by us in our present stage of human development. That which, in accordance with the pattern of pure thinking, can appear as imagination, inspiration, or intuition, must likewise be cultivated in the adult, just as certain abilities are cultivated naturally in the child.

If some people find it astonishing, some paradoxical, and some even curious, what I describe as methods in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” then it must be clear that when a person tries to develop an inner life within himself, he needs something other than what is available in everyday life. Therefore, other terms are needed. Anyone who penetrates the meaning of these terms without being malicious from the outset will see that the only intention of my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” is to show people how to develop certain abilities that are latent, that is, dormant, in every soul: the ability to have certain images present in consciousness. The fact of the matter is that through those methods – which I will not describe again today, I have described them here very often – that through those methods, which I have described in the books mentioned, the human being makes himself capable not only of attaining such abstract concepts as are contained in pure thinking, but that he makes himself capable of presenting to his soul fully substantial, if I may use the expression, more saturated contents of consciousness, which are as full of content as otherwise only sensual impressions. What is called for here is essentially a strengthening of ordinary thinking power, and if one wishes to call it clairvoyant power, so be it. Certain exercises must be done to develop such abilities, just as certain exercises must be done by the child to develop certain abilities.

Professor Wilhelm Bruhn, who lectured on anthroposophy and related subjects in Kiel for a semester, has observed that the preparations to be made in order to arrive at such imaginative and then at an inspired knowledge are, in a certain respect, of an ethical nature, that certain ethical forces must be applied, must be trained if man is to penetrate to the knowledge of the higher worlds. And this Wilhelm Bruhn, who is an opponent of the anthroposophical world view in the strongest possible terms, emphasizes the ethical seriousness of these preparations, which is unmistakable. Bruhn alone – and I may well base myself on him here precisely because in his small work, which appeared in the collection 'Aus Natur und Geisteswelt' (From Nature and the Spiritual World), he has a kind of compendium of everything that can be said against anthroposophy – he particularly asserts that by encouraging people to develop their inner soul abilities, I am in fact leading them to initially have pictorial representations that are expressed in colors, lines or figures. This is one of the gross misunderstandings that must be corrected if Anthroposophy is not to be completely misunderstood.

In my “Theosophy” I expressly pointed out what is important here. I said: It is not important that the one who, as a spiritual researcher, seeks the way into the higher worlds, sees exactly the same thing that is described in the sensual life as yellow and red, as pointed or blunt, but rather, said: the person who has a somewhat finer perception does not simply gaze at yellow, at green, at red, but has an inner experience of the yellow, of the green, of the red. You can read about these interesting inner experiences of colors in Goethe's Theory of Colors in the chapter “Sensual-moral Effect of Colors.” When you have this experience, this particular specific experience of yellow, green, red, blue, then you know something that is purely spiritual. And you get this experience when you rise to imaginative knowledge. By soaring to imaginative knowledge, one has, as I say in my Theosophy, an experience such as one has with yellow, an experience such as one has with blue; the experience is a purely soul process. If one wants to have designations for it, then one expresses oneself in such a way that one experiences something that is illustrated by yellow, by blue, and one speaks just as little of this color yellow and blue as one speaks of a reality, as one, when one draws a triangle or a square on the blackboard, which is to depict something, confuses this triangle or square with the reality that is to be depicted.

Everything that is striven for in this anthroposophical schooling is striven for in full consciousness; nothing unconscious or subconscious prevails in it. Everything is striven for in such a way that one emulates those inner soul processes that one has acquired through mathematical schooling. In such consciousness, in such inner development of the will, one strives for that which is to lead up into the higher worlds. One simply comes to a visualization that one depicts through colors. And when one has progressed so far in a certain way that one can have a new world, a completely new world before oneself, a world that one is urged to represent by colors or by other sensualizations, then one is ripe to advance to inspired knowledge. When one develops the element of love, which is present even in ordinary life, to its highest expression as an inner soul power, then one is given the opportunity not only to have such images arising in one's consciousness, but also to be able to remove them from one's consciousness. One is not a slave to these images, nor is one a mere psychic; one is in full command of them. But just as one knows when one puts one's finger on a hot iron that one is not just dealing with the idea of the hot, but with a reality, as one can only state this through life, through the context of life, it turns out that what one experiences inwardly in this way in imaginative experience refers to an objectively spiritual reality. And if one develops the ability to love in the appropriate way, then one comes to erase these images from one's consciousness, so to speak, and then one has spiritual substance in one's pure, inner experience.

This spiritual essence, as far as it is accessible to me, I have described in my books, and at the same time I have followed the method that on the one hand, through books like my “Theosophy” and my “Secret Science”, I have described what arises from such research. And on the other hand, in such a book and in some other books, such as 'How to Know Higher Worlds', I have described exactly the path by which every human being can come to such knowledge. And I have expressly made it clear that every person can come to such realizations; but I have also made it clear that the one who handles the inner essence of pure thinking does not need schooling of the mind, but he can, when the knowledge gained by such schooling of the mind is communicated to him and he receives it without prejudice, he can receive it inwardly as a conviction, just as he receives what astronomy gives, without becoming an astronomer himself.

This, esteemed attendees, is the method for entering the spiritual world. One enters the spiritual world as into a reality, which one then knows to be a reality as that which is handed down to us by science. If we now turn back to the method of natural science, we say to ourselves: After all, we do not really apply any other method, any other inner soul activity, to the supersensible world than the one we have already applied in natural science, but adapted to things outside ourselves that can be perceived by the senses. Yes, one finally realizes that natural science has become great precisely because, I would say, the same inner training of thought was used in the first stage, which can then be applied to supersensible knowledge.

That is why I said that what interested me most about science was what emerged from it as a training in thinking. I have wrestled with such problems as those presented by Du Bois-Reymond in his “Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis” (The Limits of Natural Knowledge), where he comes to the conclusion that one can only arrive at the supersensible by going beyond science. But I have seen that one can only make such a statement as Du Bois-Reymond does here if one believes that the way in which one masters scientific facts, brings them into laws, is not already dominated by thinking, which is similar to the supersensible capacity for knowledge.

As for how the world judges such things, there are only a few hints. I must start by saying that Wilhelm Bruhn fundamentally misunderstands much of anthroposophy. He reproaches me, for example, with offering nothing more than a kind of filtered sensuality in supersensible knowledge. What I say in the passages quoted in my Theosophy and what I say in my Occult Science cannot be applied to words such as Bruhn utters. He says:

In any case, Steiner also teaches a sufficient knowledge of reality in some sensory form.

No, I have never taught that. Every such statement as Bruhn's is simply a misunderstanding of what I have always said as the most essential thing. When someone misunderstands so thoroughly, it seems understandable that he should make the strange statement: 'What I am giving as exercises to get up into the supersensible worlds is exactly the same as the spiritual exercises that Jesuit pupils have to do. Now, yet another Protestant theologian has found a similarity between what I write in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and the Jesuit spiritual exercises. But a Catholic theologian, Canon Laun, firmly rejects this and says that anyone who claims that my exercises are similar to those of the Jesuits does not know the exercises of the Jesuits.

Dear attendees! In this case, I must absolutely agree with Canon Laun, even though I do not agree with him on anything else, but what I have now explained to you in principle has truly nothing to do with the Jesuit retreats. No wonder that when something is misunderstood in the way I have indicated, people are led to believe that I am describing the content of the spiritual world as a series of cinematic images – that is how Bruhn expresses himself. Now, it is true that Whoever rises to the spiritual world, as I have described, also grasps his own spiritual soul, grasps this spiritual soul as it is as eternal. Through contemplation, he penetrates the riddles of death and immortality, for whom a scientific path to the eternal forces of that which lives in man reveals itself.

But if we consider the temporal forces that live in man between birth and death, what do we find? Well, we do not just have a consciousness of the moment. In our ordinary life, we look back to a very early point in our childhood, and we know that the human soul would be ill if one could not look back to this point in childhood in a continuous stream of memory. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that, fundamentally, we are nothing more at this moment than what we have become through our experiences, which can be brought up again through the memory stream. If one delves into one's temporal existence between birth and the present moment and reveals to oneself, not cinematically but in inner experience, the recent past of one's own self, then, if one sees through this process in the right way, it will no longer wonderful that if you now familiarize yourself with the eternal, with the immortality of the soul, which was present in all processes that preceded even our formation on earth, you can also familiarize yourself with what this eternal part of the soul has experienced. If you familiarize yourself with what the soul has experienced eternally, then you have the cosmic environment around you, just as you have your personal environment around you through ordinary memory. This supersensible ability to read is in the so-called Akashic Chronicle, that is, in what one surveys through the experiences of the soul in relation to the soul's eternal; it is nothing other than that the soul these experiences are presented and revealed, so that one's ordinary memory, which otherwise reaches back to birth – or at least to a point near birth – is expanded to cosmic vision.

That, my dear audience, people who listen to ordinary mystics cannot see through in its true essence. These ordinary mystics usually take what has been seen by others and embellish it with all kinds of nebulous things. And in this way, what I would like to call the justified rejection or even the justified caution towards everything that appears as spiritual-scientific results has also come about. Nebulous mystics have brought too much all kinds of number symbolism and the like to that which is observed just as accurately, only by applying the developed soul abilities of man, as for example in physics the rainbow or the seven-color spectrum. The true spiritual researcher, when speaking of the sevenfold human being, can only speak as one speaks of the seven-coloured rainbow, and he means nothing mysterious by it, any more than the physicist means anything mysterious when he speaks of the seven-coloured spectrum. But then come the mystics, the nebulous ones, who attach all kinds of stuff to these things; as a result, much of honest spiritual research has been discredited. And if one is forced to use the number seven or the number nine somewhere, it is resented.

You see, Bruhn, as I said, provided the compendium for the opposition. Bruhn, the Kiel professor, finds a kind of mythology in what I present and finds, affirms what he says about mythology by the fact that I have to use such numbers as 7 and 9 and the like. I find this strange in a gentleman who, for his part, admits: there is intuitive knowledge, there are intuitive truths, supersensible truths – and who now lists what he calls supersensible truths in this way, and he numbers them : 1. one's own ego, 2. the ego of others, 3. the existence of things in space, 4. events in time, 5. beauty, 6. morality, 7. the divine.

Yes, my dear audience, it does not occur to me to accuse Mr. Bruhn of some nebulous number mysticism just because he mentions seven truths. However, these truths are, I would say, very meager. And even though he admits that the content of these seven truths was attained intuitively, that is, in a way that signifies a purely inner vision, he must also admit the possibility that this path, which leads to these simple, meager truths, can perhaps be developed as a very exact path like the mathematical one, and that one can then also come to other, richer, more substantial truths. Instead, such seven truths are nailed up, and what is basically drawn from the same sources – only after these sources have first been sought in the right way – is called mythology.

In a peculiar way, one relates to what appears here as an anthroposophical worldview. Recently, a newspaper here turned to an authority so that this authority, which belongs to a neighboring university, would give an authoritative judgment on anthroposophy. Now, among the many things – and you really can't read them all – that now appear to be opposed, I just got this article and read it. I came across a passage where the author objects to my statement about supersensible facts and supersensible beings. He says that in my spiritual realm, supersensible beings move just as tables and chairs move in the physical realm! Now, ladies and gentlemen, just imagine the logic that leads to saying that tables and chairs move by themselves in physical space. I am aware of states of human life in which there is a subjective appearance of tables and chairs moving by themselves, but I do not believe that the good theologian meant to refer to such a state. Now, Bruhn also betrays himself through a similar kind of logic, but I would like to say explicitly, just so that I am not misunderstood, that the earnest way in which he approaches anthroposophy is thoroughly commendable. You have to take Bruhn seriously, so I take him seriously. But now he also says that I am clinging to the gross-sensual and that I only present the supersensible, the spiritual, as a sensual, which is why one has to object that one does not get closer to the unknown spiritual through such a method. You get just as little close to this unknown spiritual as a mountaineer – so says Bruhn – who moves away from the earth and climbs up a mountain; he may move away from what is below, but the sky is still just as far above him.

Now, my dear audience, the sky that arches above us is, as is well known, not there at all; one looks out into the infinite space of the universe. One can see from the sensualizations that these people give when they want to hit something that comes from spiritual science that their logic is in a strange way ordered. And so I would like to point out right away that it is said that in the account I give of the course of the world through supersensible knowledge, one could understand Christ in the same way as any other particularly distinguished personality, such as Socrates, Plato or Buddha. — This is simply an objective untruth compared to what I have presented in my book “Christianity as Mystical Fact”. There I showed how everything in the pre-Christian era was directed towards the mystery of Golgotha, but how nothing in the pre-Christian era can be compared with what appears in the being of Christ Jesus. I have characterized it concretely in the course of spiritual history, and I have further shown how everything that has happened since the mystery of Golgotha is thoroughly impelled by this event. I have expressly shown that anthroposophy leads to the placing of this event of Golgotha in the center of the becoming of the earth. But this is what must be taken into account, what must not and should not be criticized by simply applying quite different, alien thoughts to the same.

And so a critic like Bruhn also finds that what I present as supersensible intuitions I actually only get through my thoughts operating in some way unknown to me, that I construct them out of thoughts without knowing, however, that what then becomes an image only proceeds in the unconscious, that thus, so to speak, the intuitions are only ideas after all. In his essay on Theosophy and Anthroposophy, Bruhn says that Schiller had already objected to Goethe's Urpflanze, saying that Goethe's image of the Urpflanze was an idea and not a vision. In my books and lectures, I have often described how Goethe defended himself against Schiller's statement, and Bruhn says that I must accept the same objection. Well, I am happy to do so! But I would like to point out that such an objection arises from the fact that the objector does not recognize how imaginative knowledge, how beholding, rises from the abstract idea to something more saturated, to something more fully substantial, and only in this way can that which is still a formal element in the abstract become a visualization of higher spiritual realities.

If one misunderstands in such a way what is expressed by the spiritual science meant here, then one can also very easily come to the conclusion that this spiritual science wants to be a substitute for religion. And then one says, as Bruhn has often said, that religion must not be something that one grasps in clear recognition, but that religion must be something irrational. Bruhn expresses it, I admit, very beautifully. He says it should be a blissful enjoyment as a closeness to God and a homesickness as a distance from God. It should not be a supersensible knowledge, but it should be a touch of the divine.

Now, the error lies in the fact that anthroposophy does not want to be a substitute for religion. Religion is formed, however, through a personal relationship with the founder of the religion. This personal relationship to the founder of the religion is irrational, just as, on a smaller scale, every relationship we have with any human being is irrational. The relationship we have with any human being is something we naturally refrain from reducing to any kind of idea, however supersensible, because we would accept any tittle-tattle from him. Thus the relationship one has to the Christ Jesus is something irrational, something that should not be conceptualized, not even in supersensible concepts, but should become a fact in the inner, fully human experience alone. On the other hand, especially for those who have knowledge of nature, there is the necessity to strive for supersensible knowledge in order to have the possibility of penetrating to the soul and spiritual as something real. Once one is familiar with supersensible knowledge, one will seek to find through this supersensible knowledge that which is most valuable to one in the world. And so many people have the urge to understand that which they have as an irrational nature, which they blissfully enjoy as being close to God, which they feel homesick for as being far from God, in terms of its historical and cosmic reality. It can be understood in a philological way; this has been achieved through external science. It can also be approached through supersensible knowledge; this has been achieved through anthroposophy. The aim is not to shake people out of their irrational relationship with religion, but to seek a path of knowledge to Christ Jesus. The human being who needs it - and many people already need it today, and more and more will need it - must, on the one hand, form his view of the world of the senses and of the spirit, and on the other hand, of that which has become religiously valuable to him, in order to then find harmony between the two.

This is what tears the soul apart if one is not able to bring one's knowledge to what has become religiously valuable to one. Anthroposophy is not intended to found a religion. Anthroposophy is neither a sect nor the founding of a religion, but rather the realization of the supersensible. And since that which has embodied itself through Christ Jesus in the Mystery of Golgotha is a supersensible being, and since the event of Golgotha itself is a process in which the supersensible lives, there must be a path from supersensible knowledge to this Mystery of Golgotha. The aim is not to create a substitute for religion, but to expand our knowledge so that we can also understand what we experience religiously. This does not make religious experience more superficial, nor does it strip religious experience of its piety. Rather, it allows us to turn our inner gaze to what is religiously valuable to us in the mystery of Golgotha through contemplation, with firm inner strength.

Dearly beloved attendees, I can only give examples of what I have to say about the nature of spiritual science, of anthroposophy, and what I have to say in its defense. But just as the points I have touched on, others could be presented here if I were able to give many lectures and did not have to content myself with one lecture. Therefore, I will now move on to what has been added in recent years to what I have previously presented here over many years as the anthroposophical worldview: the idea of social threefolding.

The fact that this social threefolding exists at all can be traced back to the fact that a number of people came to me during the sad days of the war and afterwards and wanted to know my thoughts on how social life could progress from these tragic events of the war. I was asked, people came to me, ladies and gentlemen. I mention this explicitly for the reason that it is far too little seen, because usually things are presented as if I were some kind of fanatical agitator who would forcefully bring things to people. I have never done anything else in the anthroposophical worldview, except give lectures, dear attendees. I appealed to those people who wanted to come to these lectures; they came – whether they were from the aristocracy or the proletariat, they were always equally welcome to me. And those who then became my so-called followers became so because they heard me. I did not go after anyone – I would not say such a thing if I were not compelled to do so. And if anyone presents these things as if I, as a fanatical agitator, had followed one person one time and another person another time, then it must be said that I have never followed anyone with any idea. The social threefolding is even used today to cast suspicion on that aspect of the anthroposophical world view from which it actually draws its very best roots. And here I would like to come back to Bruhn, who at least is to be taken more seriously than other critics.

Bruhn says: No matter how much he may have to fight it, something like anthroposophy has its origin in the “bankruptcy of our intellectual culture”. One has to get out of this intellectual culture, and he attributes to me that I did not strive to get out of this intellectual culture in the same way as those whom I 97 as the nebulous Theosophists, but that I had gone through Goethe and Haeckel, had struggled through German idealism, that I was “occidentally” oriented, that the roots of my view would rest in “western-Germanic culture” and in “scientific training.

I am not saying this out of immodesty – you can read it in Bruhn's small writing, and you will find that this can be important to me in the face of the various hostilities that are now coming from all sides. As a young man, I was among those who, in Austria in the 1880s, had to fight a difficult battle in defense of Germanness against the other nationalities. I edited the Viennese “Deutsche Wochenschrift” for a short time. I got to know all the difficult struggles that one had to go through, especially in Austria, if one wanted to make the German character and German abilities, which are considered valuable for humanity, part of the content of the whole of human culture.

Dear attendees, I only refer to such small episodes in a spirit of urgency: when I was once asked to speak at a Bismarck Commers in Weimar, where I was in the 1890s, I concluded with the words of our Austrian poet Robert Hamerling – one only needs to know his works to know that his Germanness could not be doubted – I concluded at the time, when I spoke in Weimar, in Germany, as an Austrian at the Bismarck Commers, with the words of Hamerling: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland!”

Dearly beloved, in all my life I have never for a moment deviated from this view. And those who approached me in 1918 to ask me what Anthroposophy thought about how to proceed from there knew full well that my answer was rooted in German spirituality. I have – I make no boast of this, but in the face of the fierce attacks it must be said – I have given lectures from Bergen to Palermo, from Paris to Helsinki; I have given them everywhere in German. In May 1914 – please note the date – I gave a public lecture in Paris in German, based on German spirituality, not to a German colony but to the French. Every sentence had to be translated afterwards.

Now, out of the same spirit, what was then called the “threefold social order” has emerged. I would like to start by quoting something, again from an opponent, so that one can see how opponents think about the threefold order, which actually does not even belong to the most serious ones, because they overlook something, although they are nevertheless trained in thinking, as for example the Jena professor Rein. To begin with, he is preaching to the converted when he says: All ideas are sterile when the concept of humanity plays a decisive role in them. I quite agree, because the abstract, nebulous, mystical concept of humanity makes no sense. Humanity consists of people, of nations, and anyone who wants to work for humanity must, of course, move out of the national and into the general human. How one can do that, everyone who has any impartiality at all should admit that one can have a definite opinion based on one's own assumptions. And now Professor Rein goes on to say that the state cannot be overcome without further ado, because the state has already developed to such an extent among us Germans that one cannot go back to earlier conditions. Again, I agree! Yes, one can even completely agree with what Rein now cites as individual state demands. He says: The state must, first of all, be responsible for the care of art and science, morality and religion. Secondly, it must advocate the equalization and reconciliation of contradictions, the cooperation of the estates and professions, of employees and employers. All this, says Rein, must work together in the state as the three limbs work together in the human organism, of which Rein says - in a discussion of threefolding - that it is also threefold.

Now, just to make it clear how the three limbs should work together in the threefold social organism, I used the comparison with the threefold human being. It never occurred to me to speak of a “tripartite division”. Just as one cannot have the head separately from the human being, one cannot have the circulatory system separately, one cannot have the metabolic system separately, so one cannot have spiritual life, economic life and legal life separately in the social organism. Just as the blood supplies everything in the human organism, so within the state there are impulses that supply everything in all three limbs. And the opinion was that the three limbs of the social organism – spiritual life, legal life, economic life – work together in the right way when they exist in relative independence, just as the three limbs of the human organism are characterized by relative independence.

What, for example, does someone like Professor Rein want, who admits all this but then says that he must nevertheless fight the threefold order? He says, for example, that the state cannot be creative, but only regulatory and controlling. So what does he demand for spiritual life? A cultural parliament! And Professor Rein imagines this cultural parliament to consist of school chambers, state school chambers and so on; he imagines it to a certain extent as self-governing. And if I examine objectively how this cultural parliament of Professor Rein differs from what I have stated as the self-government of the spiritual member of the social organism, I find no difference other than that Professor Rein - and and this is open to discussion - wants to have the parents elected to his cultural parliament, but I would like to hand over the self-administration to those who are experts in this field, to the teachers and educators themselves. I do not want a cultural parliament, but something that arises without parliamentary chatter as a proper administrative organism made up of experts.

It is indeed strange that people like Professor Rein should fight against the threefold order. I really must ask myself why Professor Rein fights against the threefold order and describes it as dangerous to the state. Well, one may well ask why he does so. For in the same article in which he does so, he says: We Germans have every need to consolidate the freedom and unity of the national state. – So says Professor Rein, and then he says: Threefolding, rightly conceived, shows the way in which this can be done – namely, to consolidate the freedom and unity of the national state. And further: This way will be especially welcome to those who aim to eliminate the political parties, together with parliamentarism, which they repeatedly present as a corrupting institution.

I asked: What does Professor Rein want more than for threefolding to fulfill this ideal task of his? I cannot find any reason why he opposes it, since he says that, properly understood, threefolding points the way for what he wants to happen. I cannot find any other explanation than the one that emerges from a few words of Professor Rein: He says that he has explained his understanding of this threefold order in the new edition of his “Ethics”, which will be published soon. I am very interested to see when this threefold division appears in his Ethics, but I could not help speaking of this threefold division earlier, since I was asked about it earlier. And it seems to me that gentlemen like Rein are only angry because I forestalled them. I cannot help that.

Now, there is one more point I must mention: I have spoken here again today - and as I said, for 15 to 16 years - about supersensible knowledge. I have not only spoken of these supersensible insights as something that is, so to speak, shot from a pistol, but I have spoken of them in such a way that I have given precise details of the paths by which one comes to such insights. And with that, everyone is given the opportunity to verify it. Anyone who wants to go this way can come to the verification. And it is therefore quite unjustified when, today, out of the thought habits of the present — the thought habits that I have to fight against in many respects — the demand arises that what I call clairvoyant knowledge should be examined in a different way than the way I have indicated. I have said in my book “Theosophy”: For everything that I present in this book, I advocate that it be presented as a fact to me, as external sensory facts are. The one who has written them down does not want to present anything that is not a fact for him in a similar sense to how an experience of the external world is a fact for the eyes and ears and the ordinary mind.

Dear attendees, through such a method, the way is to be found to create a bridge from one human inner being to another. Above all, a pedagogical path is to be sought, the pedagogical path on which we base our teaching at the Freie Waldorfschule, founded by Emil Molt and led by me, the path without which a truly free spiritual life in the three-part social organism is not possible. We must seek such a path for the child too. But such a path is far removed from today's materialistic age; it is so far removed that it seeks the path to the child in a completely different way. And this has given rise to a strange psychology of the soul, which, according to many people, should also find its way into education. Because it is no longer possible to find the way to the child's soul through inner experience, the child is to be subjected to all kinds of procedures according to the methods of experimental psychology, whereby one determines what abilities the child has, for example, from the speed with which it absorbs certain words or with which it forgets words — quite externally, as if one were experimenting on an object because one can no longer do it inwardly. This examination of abilities is applied in a particular way in that area of Europe that has reached the extreme development of social materialism in social terms; this principle of examining children externally - as one examines external apparatus - is applied in a particular way in Bolshevik Russia. This has already been officially introduced there as a method of testing children's abilities – basically a terrible procedure, an indictment of the ability of the human soul to build a bridge to a person's mental abilities. And it is quite characteristic that it is precisely Bolshevism, this destructive worldview that destroys everything human, that is advancing to this pedagogical practice.

Now there are certain people who would like to apply this method to spiritual vision as well. They demand that I or one of my students should submit to such tests as one examines external apparatus. My dear audience, I have presented to humanity for decades what is created through my methods. I have indicated the methods by which it can be tested. I have shown how people who think of such tests, such as Professor Dessoir, who now even wants to form a society for such tests, approaches the anthroposophical spiritual science that I mean. I have shown in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' how he has presented objective untruth about objective untruth about anthroposophy. Well, anyone who wants to test any kind of fortune teller, card reader or sorcerer may demand such methods. I have never presented fortune telling, sorcery or such so-called soul abilities or clairvoyance, which Professor Dessoir or Professor Oesterreich or similar people speak of, who might also want to test mathematical abilities in such an external way. I can only say: anyone who demands such tests does not understand the slightest thing about what lives in anthroposophical spiritual science. And it would not occur to me to engage in what arises from a Bolshevist attitude. No, my dear audience, people may behave as German national as they like – but they shall be recognized by their fruits! If they make such demands as these, then it is not worth discussing their Germanness with them, and I will not engage in any further discussion. I have given my answer.

Now I come to something else. And there I would have to demand that the gentleman who asked the question, “What evidence can you give for your clairvoyant abilities?” First explain who “Mr. Winter” was, by whom I was supposedly converted to anthroposophy in 1900, before he acquires the right to ask me such questions. Dear attendees, the gentleman who wants to ask me questions today once spun his audience a yarn about how I was converted to anthroposophy by lectures given by a “Mr. Winter” in Berlin in 1900. He has probably read as closely as one reads when one only reads the first words of my writing about these winter lectures. In fact, I myself gave these lectures in Berlin in the winter of 1900/1901, through which I am said to have been converted. These, my winter lectures, became “Mr. Winter's” lectures in this gentleman's mind.

Ladies and gentlemen, I further demand that my Jewishness not be mentioned again and again in any insidious allusion, after I have spoken here in sufficient detail about my family tree. And I further demand that I not be slandered by saying that I worked under the tutelage of Mr. Liebknecht. What I experienced at the beginning of this century, however, is that I was thrown out of the proletarian schools where I taught because of my representation of a spiritual conception of history by the satellites of old Liebknecht; I was thrown out of the workers' training schools because I never bought into [the materialist conception of history] and the like.

And I demand that the claim of any kind of suggestive influence or even of post-hypnotic suggestion, as it has been raised by this side, be retracted. And I further demand that the first thing to be done is to clarify what has been stated by this side about my relationship with the late Chief of Staff, Field Marshal von Moltke. My dear audience, I have no need to entertain you this evening with these matters, but I do want to say something about some of the things that have been said here. I have, as I have already said this evening, never followed anyone. I never appeared at Mr. von Moltke's house without having been invited, without having been requested to do so; and so I have been a guest at Mr. von Moltke's house almost every week since 1904. I have learned to respect Mr. von Moltke, I have learned to respect him so much that I may describe him as one of the noblest of men; I want to leave no doubt about that. I have never been to his house without having been invited. Before the outbreak of the war, I never had a conversation with Mr. von Moltke about anything military or political. Whatever was discussed arose from Mr. von Moltke's need to get to know spiritual science. That was his personal matter; I accommodated him.

I was asked to come to Berlin in the first few days of August, as I was not in Berlin when the war broke out. I refused, in anticipation of what might come from a malicious source about these things. For only once, on August 27 [correctly: 26] of 1914, was I in Koblenz, but not at headquarters, but with a family of friends. Herr von Moltke visited me there for half an hour. My dear attendees, there was truly no reason to talk about war at the time. We were in the midst of the triumphal march; it was still relatively far to the Battle of the Marne. Not a word was spoken about military or political matters during that half-hour conversation that Herr von Moltke had with me back then, certainly not at a time when he could have missed something, because the triumphal march continued even afterwards. I did not see Herr von Moltke again until October, long after the Battle of the Marne. There is no way to place anything I discussed with Herr von Moltke before his dismissal in a political or military context. But what was said between Mr. von Moltke and me is one of those personal matters that no one should allow another to prohibit; and it would be sad if we had come to a point where snooping into such matters were considered justified today. From this, the objective untruth arose that some kind of theosophical events in Luxembourg had a paralyzing effect on Mr. von Moltke's health. Mrs. von Moltke herself has now stated that this is an objective untruth. None of this really concerns me; I have no business to speak about it.

Other untrue things have come to light in connection with the threefold social order. And it will be considered justified that, after I have been personally insulted in this way – I do not usually need the word personally – after I have been personally insulted in this way, I would not find it dignified to enter into a discussion with these people before these things are not taken back – despite the fact that I am open to any other discussion.

That is why I sent a registered letter that arrived a few days ago, with “General von Gleich” as the sender, back unopened by return of post. Ladies and gentlemen, I don't know how individuals would behave in such a case; I know how I behave. General von Gleich then wrote an open postcard – which of course I could not return because it was put in the letterbox – in which he repeated what he had said in his letter and in which he expressly confirmed that he had received the letter I had returned. Well, my dear attendees, with my understanding of the mutual relationship between people, I cannot understand such intrusiveness.

My dear attendees, it has been said at this time, and even in a well-known German weekly magazine, that the former minister Simons is supposed to be my student, that he was inspired by me for all the horrible things he did in London. Now, it seems to me necessary to look at this matter a little more closely. Some time ago I came across an interview with a French journalist. This French journalist said that he had just had an interview with Minister Simons. Minister Simons had spoken to him about the threefold order and said that he found something agreeable in it, just as he did in the views of the Italian minister Giolitti. It seemed to me that there was something fishy about it – I had never got to know Minister Simons very well before – and for me there was only one thing, and I said it in front of many people at the time, even in public meetings, long before the accusations against Simons started here. I said that a German minister would be more likely to know about the threefold order than a French journalist. You see, perhaps out of a prejudice that comes from national backgrounds, I had more sympathy for a German minister than for a French journalist. Then, however, I was urged to talk to Mr. Simons, and lo and behold, Mr. Simons told me that he had not known about the threefold order, that the French journalist had only just told him about it. Well, then I saw Mr. Simons again when he spoke here in Stuttgart about the politics of the time. He wanted to see the Waldorf School. How this visit went has been presented here in a public announcement.

No one who is familiar with what happened at the time will be able to deny that I did anything other than be courteous to the German Reich Minister of Foreign Affairs. Politeness, especially in such a case, does not seem to me to be particularly punishable. And anyone who claims that a different relationship existed is claiming an objective untruth. In this case, however, I am not surprised at this objective untruth. For when this public notice was posted, a letter was produced that was said to have been written in Cologne and which stated that I had boasted in Cologne that I had spoken to Minister Simons here in Stuttgart about the threefold order before his London mission. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have not been to Cologne for many years, and I have not been to Cologne at all recently.

Bruno Roos: Here is the letter!

That may be. The letter can only be a forgery! And that is no wonder, because a lot of work has been done here with forged letters. I don't care what the letter says. The truth is that there was never any relationship between me and Minister Simons other than the one I have described here, and that I have not been to Cologne at all in the last few years, I don't think I've been there for four or five years. So it is a lie that I could have said anything in Cologne. Someone may read or show you a letter – if it says what appeared in the newspaper, then the content of the letter is a blatant forgery. There is no need to engage with people who use such letters to wage a fight.

Dear attendees, many other things have been brought up recently. It is late, and I will only be able to address a few of them. The aim of all these opposing arguments is to distort the essence of threefolding and to present it as questionable by slandering me. For example, there is repeated mention of certain changes that I am supposed to have undergone in my world view. Now, anyone who reads what is contained in my first “Introduction to Goethe's Scientific Writings” about my engagement with Haeckel will see that I was not a blind admirer of Haeckel in my entire life, but that I did struggle with it in the nineties, trying to come to terms with the things said, even in the details, by such a brilliant naturalist as Haeckel. At that time, it was around the time when Haeckel's “Welträtsel” had not yet been published, but his Altenburg speech on “Monism as a bond between religion and science” had been published. At that time, I gave a speech against this monism at the Vienna Scientific Club about my spiritual monism. And at that time I wrote an essay on ethical questions in the “Zukunft”, and it was Haeckel who approached me at that time, at the beginning of the nineties. I answered his letter and later sent him a copy of the lecture I gave on spiritual monism. Then Haeckel developed the material that became his one-sided book 'The World Riddles'. This led to a fierce battle against Haeckel, especially on the part of philosophers. And I still admit today: the one who was the greater at that time, on whose side the principal right was, was not Haeckel's opponents, it was Haeckel. And I stood up for the one who was relatively more in the right. And from this point of view one must understand what I have often said. Anyone who wants to do spiritual scientific research must be able to immerse himself in everything. This must not be just a phrase; one must also be able to immerse oneself in foreign worldviews. That was always my endeavor: to be able to be objective about foreign worldviews. This may have justified the view of those who from the outset held malicious opinions that I somehow stood in the position myself, in which I found myself; no one who cannot find themselves in foreign points of view can come to spiritual-scientific views. This reproach regarding “changes” is settled by what I presented in an issue of Das Reich, where I showed how what I represent as spiritual science grows out of my original epistemological views in a completely consistent way.

However, I only want to point out these things. It has even been claimed – and this shows how everything is dug up today that can somehow lead to the disparagement of the bearer of the threefold idea – that I was connected with an occult society that practices some evil practices. Dearly beloved, whatever I have advocated, internally or externally, is contained in what I have said in my “Theosophy”: the person who has written it down - and I must say, who has spoken it - does not want to represent anything that is not a fact for him in a similar sense to which an experience of the external world is a fact for the eye and ear and the ordinary mind. The fact that a gentleman, who later in Berlin even became the director of a larger theater, once introduced me to a person as being in need of support does not change that, and that person then received support from me for years through a kind of, I would like to say foolish, good-naturedness. No other relationship than that I supported this person, who would otherwise have had nothing to eat, has led to the assertion that worthless things, which were spoken and agreed between me and this person, have led to the assertion that I had some kind of occult relationship with this person or with an order he represented. I never had a single spiritual scientific conversation with this personality, not least because this personality understood nothing of spiritual science. And when the brazen claim is now made that I received something of the content of my spiritual science from that side, it means that one has understood nothing of what courses through my writings and my speeches.

When such things are stated, one need not be surprised if the claim has also been made that the un-German, the un-national nature of anthroposophy has been revealed in its position on the Upper Silesian question. No one who has sought advice from us in any way has been given any advice other than that those who stand in our ranks should vote for Germany when it comes to the vote. No one was ever given any other advice. What was said in addition to this was, however, that one should not only bring about this vote, but that one should bring about such a relationship for Upper Silesia as an integral country, so that it would be united internally with the German spirit. The idea was not just to call for a plebiscite, but at the same time to introduce a nuance into the agitation that would not only result in a worthless yes-saying in the face of the terrible will of the Entente, but would also lead to something being established that would show Upper Oberschlesien as a region turns out to be, which, through its inner structure, through what it can develop in terms of German spiritual impulses precisely in these difficult struggles, can, I would say, establish its inner affiliation with Germany in the germ. That, my dear attendees, I say in response to all those variously nuanced and from all sorts of dark backgrounds emerging accusations regarding the Upper Silesian question.

This question has been used particularly as a slander because one knows how it works, even by those who then added: One does not get the impression that Steiner's mother tongue is German. - Well, my dear attendees, I have not yet shown anyone outside of this room a document that I have here right now. Those who know me are aware that I do not use such documents to boast about myself or to engage in any kind of self-aggrandizement, but I may read out a sentence here from a letter I received many years ago, immediately after the publication of my first independent work, 'The Epistemology of the Goethean Worldview':

I can only say here that your struggle to gain a firm point of view between idealism and realism is extremely interesting to me, that your booklet has revealed a meaningful life of thought to me, that so many fine and pretty remarks have spoken to me from it and that the tone and style of the whole - despite some content-related suggestions for objections - has touched me sympathetically from beginning to end.

Dear attendees, I have only ever made use of this document in my thoughts when people complained about my style. I have not yet responded to it, but I have remembered that what I have read to you was written to me from Graz on January 30, 1887 by the German poet Robert Hamerling, who probably also understands something about the German style and the German mother tongue. So when the threefold social order emerged here, it was born out of German idealism, oriented towards the West, and it is born out of the longing to present to the world what has emerged from the world forces in Goethe, Schiller, in German Romanticism, in German philosophy, as a German creation, as German power.

Dear attendees, do you think it was easy to work on an eminently German construction in the northwestern corner of Switzerland during the entire war, in a highly visible location? Do you think it was easy to be labeled a Pan-German, that is, an All-German, by the French and the English throughout the entire period? That is what happened to me: across the border I am an Alldeutsche, within Germany I am an enemy of the Alldeutsche and their like-minded people, a traitor to Germanness. Well, that is how the views face each other, just as the views of the Protestant and Catholic priests face each other. Whether I give people Jesuit or anti-Jesuit exercises, both are essentially a distortion and have nothing to do with what threefolding really wants to be. It wants to bring to independent existence that which is genuine German spiritual life. Therefore, it wants the self-administration of spiritual life. In order that man may rightly relate to man, everything that can exist among equals and that can sustain the other two members of the social organism, which must shape themselves out of their own specialized activities in self-government, must unfold in the state. The threefold social organism in Germany will certainly be a vital organism, arising out of the genuine German spiritual life, and if it is only understood, it will bear its fruits. It will work in such a way that German spiritual power will become for the whole world what it can be by its very nature. Much of this German spiritual power has now been shaken, and much of it is slandered, which wants to work precisely from the deepest German essence.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, they go to great lengths in this regard. And I would like to share the latest product of such processes with you at the end. Just a few days ago, an article appeared in the Chicago Daily News with the following content:

Chicago Daily News

The Germans have a pale pink theory about losing the war. The Battle of the Marne was lost because Moltke was studying science.

By Georg Witte. Spezial Kabel: Chicago Daily News, field service. Copyright. 1921. By the Chicago Daily News Co.

Berlin, Germany, May 4. – “Anthroposophy”, a new communist theory of the pale pink variety, is directing the fortunes of Germany according to the enemies of Foreign Secretary Simon. Yesterday they came out with the confirmation that he was only a puppet in the hands of his anthroposophical directors. The Vossische Zeitung, which has continually attacked Dr. Simon during the past week, prints the following:

"Dr. Steiner, creator of a new theory.

Recently, during a meeting of opponents of the new theory, it was confirmed that the influence of Dr. Steiner, the creator of the Theosophical theory, extended as far as Wilhelmstrasse and Dr. Simons, who, before leaving for the London conference, visited Dr. Steiner in Stuttgart and also had lunch with Director Molt, the founder of the Waldorf-Astoria School, where Anthroposophy is taught.

It has also been established that Dr. Simons is in constant touch with the exponents of the new theory, who are never refused entry to his house, even at this critical time.

Was General von Moltke a victim?

The anthroposophical theory was first widely noticed when its enemies claimed that the Battle of the Marne was lost because General Moltke, the chief of staff, neglected to go to the front because he was too absorbed in studying the new theory, which completely governed all his actions. General von Gleich, who makes this accusation, describes Anthroposophy as a “very dangerous idea, destined to have a pernicious influence on both the individual and family life, undermining the authority of the state and dissolving national unity.”

Dr. Steiner's theory, according to the Vossische Zeitung, provides for a division of national strength into three parts, with a communist system under anthroposophical auspices as the ultimate goal.

Now, you see, when someone spreads such a slander that General von Moltke lost the Battle of the Marne because of anthroposophy, and then makes a weak retraction of this claim, this does not prevent this disparagement of General von Moltke's personality from crossing the ocean to America, and that as a result of this slander, General von Moltke's good name is dragged through the mud across the sea.

I also had to mention this fact here, because I was asked by a certain party whether I had inspired a writing that was written against General von Moltke by a person close to him. Just as Hofrat Seiling once became an enemy and wrote a book full of objective untruths against me – because a book by him could not be accepted by our publishing house and was returned to him – so, basically, all of General von Gleich's hostility stems from the fact that a person close to him married someone whom he probably does not consider to be his equal. I am supposed to be responsible for this fact. Well, I can only say that the lady to whom that personality married spoke to me only once, long before the marriage; if she were introduced to me today, I would first have to get to know her again. I knew so little about this connection, and so far I have not been notified of the marriage by an announcement in the papers. I believe that in those circles where such outward appearances are highly valued, one could even argue that I know nothing about this marriage at all, because it has never been objectively indicated to me. And when the writing in question was composed, it was sent to me in Dornach. But I forgot about it. And when I was asked on the telephone about this writing - there are witnesses for it - I said: I completely forgot to read this writing. - That was just before it appeared in print. I have no connection whatsoever with this writing, and I am very far from infringing on anyone's freedom.

My Philosophy of Freedom, ladies and gentlemen, is meant seriously and honestly, and therefore do not count it as immodesty on my part if I - to affirm that threefolding originated in the attitude I have described to you today, I quote here the judgment of an opponent of my Philosophy of Freedom, for ultimately the idea of threefolding rests on my Philosophy of Freedom. I will read to you at the end, because time is already so short and I do not want to bother you any longer with going into all kinds of details - perhaps this will come up in the question - I will therefore read to you at the end the judgment of a fierce opponent of my “Philosophy of Freedom.” In this judgment, it says right at the beginning:

These lines are addressed exclusively to the philosopher, not to the anthroposophist Steiner. And in the main, to his by far most important book, 'Philosophy of Freedom', which the later work 'The Riddles of Philosophy' does not come close to. It goes without saying that Steiner the person is not considered here. I count myself among Steiner's most outspoken opponents and have also publicly expressed this opposition (in my writing “The Thinker”). But the form in which the polemic against Steiner often degenerates into wild agitation is more than unpleasant. And there it must be said...

— Please do not accuse me of immodesty, here it is written:

... that a man capable of a book like “The Philosophy of Freedom” could not possibly have the small and lowly character that is made out of him. In their clarity and noble calm, Steiner's philosophical and anthroposophical writings are among the most formally noble products of our new philosophical literature.

Dear attendees, in no other situation than the one in which anthroposophy and threefolding find themselves today would I somehow bother you with reading such a passage, which might seem immodest; but today it seems to me to be a duty to point out how someone can be an opponent but at the same time a decent person.

It has been said that I do not expose myself to scientific discussions. My dear audience, take the long series of my writings; they are available to the world. It is not my fault that the internal lectures are only now beginning to appear in public. They were urgently requested, but I did not have time to review them. It is not because of the slanderous intentions that they state that they have not been reviewed by me – for my sake they could always have been published for the greatest possible public after I had reviewed them – but I really have not had the time to review them, just as I really do not have the time to deal with all the possible hostile writings that have sprung up from all sides in recent times.

After today's allusions and after what a large number of you have heard in my many lectures over the past years, allow me to say: I stand for what I stand for because, from the innermost strength of my soul, I cannot stand for anything else, and because what I stand for lives in me in such a way that I must stand for it. If it is the truth, it will work its way through despite all opposition. If it is not the truth, which is, however, quite unlikely, then it will be replaced by the truth, because that which is truth will find its way through even the greatest obstacles. But anyone who believes that they can represent the truth from any side must do so. I have always stood before you from these underground bases, I stand before you today from these underground bases, and I will work from these underground bases as long as it is granted to me. No matter how many attacks are made, I will always use honorable means against honorable opponents. But what has emerged in recent times cannot claim that it can be dealt with by means of personal vilification, because it tries to attack the cause indirectly.

But I have to think in terms of standing up for this cause. I will stand up for it. That is what I must express to you today at the end of this discussion, and I have the confidence that if what I have to advocate is the truth, it will prevail because truth itself is something spiritual, something divine, and that which must triumph over all hostile powers is, after all, divine, spiritual truth.

After the previous great unrest in the hall.

Dear attendees, after this heated discussion, I would now like to answer the questions put to me in peace.

How is it possible, if, as you quite rightly noted, our thoughts are a resultant of previous impressions in the cerebral cortex, i.e. changes in a part of our body, that one can free oneself from the influence of the body with one's thoughts, as you explained at the beginning of your lecture. Do you have the ability to free your thoughts in this way?

Now, I have already spoken quite clearly about this matter; I now want to state here some more that follows from spiritual science itself for this question. We humans have in us, in a physical sense, an ascending life and also a descending life. This, I might say two-fold current of our life is usually not sufficiently taken into account. All ascending life consists in our developing growth forces and those forces that drive the absorbed nutrients to all, even the finest, organizational links in our organism. Now, alongside these processes, which are thoroughly constructive, others take place that are destructive, so that we constantly have destructive processes within us. This too is something that can only be established through spiritual science, which is not yet sufficiently known to ordinary materialistic physiology today. Now, all those phenomena that dampen our consciousness and put us into a state of partial or complete sleep are connected with the organic anabolic processes. The processes of our thoughts now go hand in hand with the catabolic processes in our organism, and all the other mental processes, such as instinctive perceptions, perceptions of drives, which actually always put us in a down-tuned state of consciousness, are connected with the organic ascending processes; the actual life of thinking is connected with the catabolic processes. This thinking life is already so in every single person that it develops independently of the organism; there must only be a process of degradation, that is, a process of dissociation in the brain, if thinking is to take hold in us.

If you consider this, my dear audience, you will say to yourself: Our organic building processes extend as far as thinking, then they recede, and thinking is precisely tied to the organic processes limiting themselves. So one becomes free of the organic processes through thinking, and one then continues this freedom by rising from thinking to higher spiritual knowledge. It is therefore absolutely the case – as is explained in more detail in my “Philosophy of Freedom” – that thinking, when it is practiced as pure thinking, is already a clairvoyant process. Even if people do not recognize it in ordinary life, we learn to know the peculiar true nature of higher knowledge precisely when we grasp ordinary thinking in terms of its essential being.

Why were you in a neutral country during the war and not in your homeland?

Dear attendees, I have had my work in Dornach. During the war, I was really, I may say it, more in Germany here than in neutral foreign countries, and I have done what could be done by me as a job, which has been recognized from various sides, during the war. And those who want to know about it, look at the events. It is not true that I did not work for the German people during this time.

Is it true that the ideas of threefolding are partly based on extrasensory knowledge and insights gained through it? And what are these extrasensory experiences and insights?

Dear attendees, I have specifically said that the idea of threefolding has loosely connected to the anthroposophical worldview because what appears in the anthroposophical worldview is a result of supersensible knowledge. For threefolding and for everything that I have presented in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, one does not need clairvoyance. Look through the entire Kernpunkte and see if at any point it appeals to anything other than common sense. Any association of clairvoyance with the threefold order is pure nonsense and malicious slander.

Anyone who follows the method according to your books “Geheimwissenschaft” and “Erkenntnisse höherer Welten” and so on, you claim that he will achieve supersensory knowledge or vision. As a master of this method, I can demand of you that you can do this. And so I ask you, tell me the feeling, not the physical one, that I have gained from you through your lecture: the feeling is, I ask you, is...

The rest cannot be read. Well, what the questioner asks on this piece of paper cannot be brought out, cannot be read.

Why does a doctrine, if it is good, have to defend itself? Good never needs to defend itself.

Ladies and gentlemen, no one would be happier than I if I did not need to defend myself in any way. And to the one who asks why the good must defend itself – if he regards what I have just presented as the good – I refer him to the address of my opponents, because what one clings to with all the fibers of one's soul must, when it is attacked, be defended.

If anthroposophy has nothing to do with Buddhism and Theosophy, then why are the Sanskrit words karma, reincarnation and so on used?

Reincarnation is not a Sanskrit word. And I use the word karma only because — and not even I always use it, those who have heard my lectures often will know this — because in an old, instinctive spiritual vision, the word “karma” was used. However, I very often replace it by saying: fate as it unfolds through successive earthly lives. I do not attach any importance to these words, but they are often used by others and by myself for the reason that our modern world view is intimately connected with our coinages and therefore one often has to go a long way for the words one has to form.

At the beginning of his speech, Mr. Steiner said that anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion. Why then does anthroposophy not remain neutral?

Dear attendees, I did not say that. I said: Anthroposophy, as I represent it, has arisen from natural science; it has its sources in natural science. — I said: It is not a substitute for religion. —- And I have said: It leads from the side of knowledge to that which is irrationally as a religious experience in the human soul. — And there I can say nothing other than: Just as external philology leads to the dissection of the Bible, so does a supersensible knowledge lead to the knowledge of the spiritual that underlies world development in a religious way. I did not say that anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion, I only said that it did not arise from it and that it does not want to be a substitute for religion.

Why is the neutrality of true and pure theosophy and Christianity not more sharply outlined and clearly presented?

Well, I have never lacked clarity in this respect in the various lectures I have given here, for those who are at all able to grasp the fundamentals of the anthroposophical worldview. And to anyone who demands that anthroposophy should relate to some religion in some subjective way, I can say nothing other than that, according to what I can discern, Christianity is at the center of earthly evolution , that all the other religions of antiquity are moving towards Christianity, culminating in the Mystery of Golgotha, and that everything we have in the way of civilization since then comes from the Christ impulse and is influenced by it. If someone wants a different neutrality, I cannot offer a different neutrality. It is not out of some subjective wish that I place Christianity at the center of earthly development, but out of what I believe I can support as objective knowledge.

I distinguish between what lives irrationally in man as Christianity, as a religion, and what then leads to the spiritual interpretation of the content of this religion. Anthroposophy is concerned with the latter in the sense in which I have expressed it. I will not allow myself to be influenced by the fact that non-Christians may not take kindly to my placing Christianity at the center of attention. For me, this is not a subjective fact, but an objective one. Those who disagree in any direction may be willing to go along with Anthroposophy as far as the discussion of religious questions; after that, they can leave.

But I believe I have presented the relationship between my anthroposophical worldview and the Christian religion very conscientiously in my book “Christianity as a Mystical Fact”. And in addition to all that I have said, I will only add this: When a malicious source says that I have taken something from Anglo-Indian Theosophy, the fact is that I wrote “Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life” entirely on my own, before I had any relationship to Anglo-Indian Theosophy before I had read any book that had emerged from the Theosophical Society, I wrote my “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life” and that I was invited to give lectures to Theosophists.

I said in the lecture: I did not follow anyone; I did not follow the Theosophists either. They came to me because they wanted to hear me. I did not tell you anything that I learned from the Theosophical Society; I said what came from me, and I will defend that in the future everywhere where people want to hear it. I will not ask what views or what kind of societies prevail among those who want to hear me, but I will take it as my right to speak whenever I am wanted in any circle.

Concluding remarks after the member's lecture

Dear friends,

On several occasions at the end of such meetings, I have had to tell you some unpleasant things, and I cannot change that because there are many things that have to be brought to the attention of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, I would like to share a few samples with you – I could multiply them – from the camp that rebels against everything that comes from spiritual science.

A brochure has been published that is now being distributed not in the thousands, but in the hundreds of thousands in Germany. This brochure tells a variety of stories about contemporary life and takes the opportunity to lash out at what the anthroposophical spiritual science, with all that it entails, must introduce into contemporary spiritual life, not of its own free will, but out of a recognition of necessity, speaking from the signs of the times. Now, this brochure points out what is to be done from certain quarters in order to set up large collections in Central Europe for the radical-revolutionary parties, for Bolshevism above all. And since Central Europe is very afraid of Bolshevism and Western Europe is even more afraid of it, it is always something with which one can create the right mood today by accusing someone of something along these lines. And that is why you will find the following sentence in this brochure:

We need only recall the collections that Rathenau organized at the Zoologischer Garten station and Councillor of Commerce Hermann Bamberg in his apartment at Landgrafenstraße 12 during the Kapp Putsch. We recently heard that a confidential meeting took place in southern Germany before the last communist uprising in central Germany, in which Rathenau, Rudolf Steiner, Parvus, Oscar Cohn and about 20 rabbis participated.

Furthermore, this brochure states that a widespread organization has formed that has addressed an indictment to the appropriate authorities, to the Chief Reich Prosecutor, regarding the necessity of prosecuting the former German Reich Chancellor Fehrenbach in league with his Foreign Minister Simons. And the discussion of this application of the widespread organization to the Chief Reich Prosecutor is conducted here in such a way that it is said:

The publisher Ludwig Schroeter has also filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office regarding the latest act of high treason committed by the lawyer and former German Chancellor Fehrenbach, in league with the theosophist and follower of Dr. Rudolf Steiner, former German Foreign Minister Dr. Simons, as they laid Germany's future without reservation into the hands of the President of the United States with dog-like humility, the publisher Ludwig Schroeter has also filed a complaint with the public prosecutor's office, which we will follow.

Today, things have the content of agitation, of action, and they are not to be understood as something that can only be laughed at. Then, a little pearl is added, where it is spoken about Heise's book about Freemasonry. It says:

Karl Heise has done a very diligent job in his book “Die Entente-Freimaurerei und der Weltkrieg” (The Entente-Freemasonry and the World War), which was published in 1919 by Ernst Finckh in Basel. Heise is not a Freemason, but he is quite well informed. He is an enthusiastic admirer of the late Guido List and an ardent supporter of the traitor Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Kraljewic, whose nationality has still not been definitely established. The confusion of the ideas of these two theosophists with the political events makes Heise's book so difficult to understand that it is really only of value to those in the know who can easily separate the wheat from the chaff.

I would like to make it clear that I would not have shared this with you if I did not know that it is a very widespread organization that knows very well how it works through such things and also knows very well why it has these emblems: a wild boar that sticks out its tusks. That is on the title page, on the cover: a wild boar sticking out its tusk, next to it is written: “With God for Germany's resurrection”. The magazine is called “On Outposts”.

Now, my dear friends, I don't want you to think that these things stop at the Swiss borders. Outside, it has already come to the point that there is a reasonably organized defense organization that, as I mentioned eight days ago, brought together 1,400 participants at the Stuttgart Congress. Here, however, it is absolutely impossible to wake the sleeping people in any way. But I will leave it at that.

Announcement before the lecture

My dear friends! It gives me great satisfaction to be able to greet you here again after a long time. This is after a long journey, which went via Stuttgart, Munich, back to Stuttgart, then Frankfurt, Mannheim, Cologne, Elberfeld, Hannover, then Berlin, Hamburg, Bremen, Dresden, Breslau. In all these cities one could see that at present there is a deep need in wider circles of humanity to hear something from the spiritual world. It can be said that this need, which has been strongly expressed by the fact that the largest halls in the respective cities were always completely full, that this need stands in great contrast to what is asserted in the official world or also in the journalistic world, as one can see, as an opposition that is admittedly strong today but is becoming increasingly ineffective. The need of today's humanity for knowledge of spiritual life arises from the sense of the hopelessness of what has been brought forth as a worldview from the conditions that must now be considered the right ones for the external knowledge of nature, but which are quite inadequate for the satisfaction of the longings and hopes of the human soul, and especially for the strength that the soul needs to endure in this extraordinarily difficult present, which holds out the prospect of an even more difficult future.

It is absolutely necessary – as the course of such a journey shows – that everything that has been said here about the position of today's so-called spiritual life in relation to the anthroposophical movement be taken into account more and more, and that we should not lose sight of what is necessary in this regard for a moment.

To do this, however, it is necessary within our ranks that we, each of us individually, can first find the right point of view in our hearts and in our souls, also with regard to our feelings. And since I am able to speak to you again today, I would like to start by pointing out something that has been a pleasing fact for me since the time when I started coming here to Dornach again. It is something that I found in the latest issue of the “Goetheanum” that appears here, the review of Professor Chastonay's lecture by our esteemed friend Albert Steffen. This review is such that it can actually, I would say, serve as a prime example of how we should behave in the face of opposition from the most diverse quarters. An essay about this lecture, which hits the nail on the head in every single point it touches, is absolutely essential if one wants to win the right position.

I am mentioning this lecture for the reason, my dear friends, that I would like to link it to the remark that is particularly close to my heart. That is this, that it is now necessary for us first and foremost to get the right assessments within our ranks for what is being achieved. Only when a larger number of our members are able to recognize something significant and exemplary in such a matter; and only when this larger number of our members are able to distinguish such things from what is less in line with our cause, even within our ranks, only then will the spirit of our movement gradually take hold, which we absolutely need. For we need not only an abstract way of talking about things, but we also need an ability to assess what is going on that is attuned to knowledge of the world. We must therefore appreciate what is being done in our ranks in an outstandingly correct way. This is what I have already emphasized on various occasions.

I would like to make it clear that I am not always able to emphasize every single detail; but on special occasions I would like to make it clear that this correct assessment of what is achieved within our ranks – which of course also requires the correct assessment of what is not achieved and what should be achieved – should definitely be given more consideration. If we do not realize what outstanding work is being done within our ranks, our movement will not be able to flourish. So I recommend to every single member that they should check each sentence of this essay to see what I actually mean by this remark in concrete, individual terms.

My dear friends! Before I begin my talk today, it will be necessary for me to say a few introductory words. We are experiencing a certain crisis in our Anthroposophical movement, which is becoming apparent in the ever-increasing opposition, especially in the character that this opposition is taking on. It is indeed something extremely unpleasant to talk about this antagonism, so I will not do so – or at least only in a very limited sense – but it is necessary, especially at the present time, that we become aware of the directions in which the individual endeavors within our anthroposophical movement have developed in the course of recent years.

I need only evoke the memory of those members of our movement who have been with us for a long time, those members who have participated above all in the older phase of our anthroposophical movement, which had a more esoteric character, which worked, I would say, more out of the spiritual substance itself. I would like to begin by evoking memories of the special way in which anthroposophy was disseminated to the public in those days. Its esoteric character has become particularly evident in recent times through the publication of the Munich cycle in 'Drei', which was intended to provide a forum for discussion of the contrast between the oriental and occidental spiritual views. The aim was to show how the Christ impulse has shaped the development of the occidental spiritual view in the world. And anyone who delves into what was discussed in that cycle – which is now publicly available – will be able to envision the particular way in which efforts were made at the time to bring Anthroposophy first to smaller circles and then to ever larger circles, but how the whole thing nevertheless bore a kind of unified character, which was dominated by a certain esoteric core. The fact that in recent years the anthroposophical movement in general has taken on a somewhat different character did not depend, my dear friends, on those who have to lead this anthroposophical movement in an active sense. I would like to say: what has become necessary in recent years was not something we sought; it has come to us as a demand from the outside world. Through the dissemination of anthroposophical literature – which has gradually become quite extensive – a wide variety of circles, which initially did not go along with the gradual esoteric development, have become acquainted with the anthroposophical worldview and then judged this anthroposophical worldview from the points of view that were accessible to them.

In particular, I would like to draw attention to the way in which scientific and scientific-theological circles gradually began to occupy themselves more and more with the anthroposophical worldview. As a result, anthroposophy, which can certainly take on a scientific character if it wants to, was in a sense dragged into this scientific character from the outside, and it was only natural that a number of younger co-workers with a good scientific training should now take it upon themselves to impress this scientific character on the anthroposophical movement. As a result, the public work of the anthroposophical movement, as it has emerged in recent times at congresses, university courses and so on, has taken on a completely different character than it had before. And perhaps, if that sounds a bit radical, I can describe this different character by saying — this is neither a criticism nor a praise, but simply something I want to state: When I look at some older members of the anthroposophical movement, I see that they say: We have found our way into the esoteric anthroposophical movement through the cognitive and religious needs of our hearts, insofar as it has lived out its spiritual substance; we have absorbed the character of this esotericism, even if it is, of course, in the way as it had to be lived in the public lectures of the earlier days of our anthroposophical movement, but now we hear a scientific keynote where anthroposophy is represented, which in a certain way also gradually and logically builds up the anthroposophical from the most elementary, as one is accustomed to in external science.

And so many such members would like to say: This is something that does not really interest us; in part we take it for granted, in part it only slows us down; we come much more quickly on the inner path of spiritual understanding to the insights that anthroposophy can give than if they are built up piece by piece through all sorts of thoughts and logical constructs that we don't need at all, that actually seem extremely superfluous to us and do not interest us. Why, my dear friends, should we not simply say these things as they exist in the feelings of many of our members? Today, I would say, we have these two currents — these two currents in the main. The fact that we have these two currents would actually be enough to satisfy everything that Anthroposophy must want from its own soul and everything that is demanded from outside, if it were not for another thing; and we must bring this other thing to our attention with a certain inner strength and a certain seriousness.

It is entirely possible, starting from the elementary discussions – for all discussions are elementary, and should be permeated by the forms of today's science – it is entirely possible, starting from these elementary discussions to establish anthroposophy scientifically on the basis of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, history, sociology and so on, in order to gradually ascend to that which is inwardly esoteric. However, to do this we would need a much larger circle of active collaborators, and above all, I would say, a work that would be dedicated solely to this. For the older members will not be able to complain that the esoteric tone of the older anthroposophical movement does not emerge at least where branch meetings are held, where what was previously practised in branch meetings with a certain esoteric character is continued. If what has been introduced into smaller circles as a certain continuation of esoteric life cannot now be continued in the appropriate way, it is not because this could not happen out of the inner forces of the anthroposophical movement, but only because the members involved have not taken it seriously enough and have treated it in such a way, especially in relation to the outside world, that they themselves have made its continuation impossible for the time being or have jeopardized it. I do not want to talk about that. But the fact that the old esoteric character has been preserved in the branch meetings can be seen from each of the branch meetings that have been held here in this place. On the other hand, the completely esoteric, which is based on science, has emerged more in our public lectures.

Today, there is an abyss between the two tendencies in our movement; there is no mediation, no bridge over this abyss. And we cannot build the bridge because we simply do not have the co-workers, and because those who are co-workers lack the time to build this bridge between what the world demands of us today – a scientific basis for anthroposophy – and what must be worked out from the esoteric. This is, of course, something that should actually be added in principle, that should be sought, but for which we still lack the time and manpower today. However, it cannot be denied that it is precisely because of this abyss that our anthroposophical movement as a whole is suffering to a certain extent, both externally and internally. For one thing, we shall always have a certain section of our members who love one aspect of it but are extremely critical of the other. Those who believe that they have the scientific character of anthroposophy in the fullest sense of the word within them often disdain that which, after all, also arises from justified reasons. And the opposite is also the case, understandably, but no less damaging to the movement as a whole. Those who can more quickly arrive at the final results find the slow path, which is already given by the demands of our time, the slow, scientific path, boring and uncomfortable and unnecessary. But quite apart from that: the fact that there is an abyss between the two currents, over which there is still no bridge today, so that I myself, for example, am obliged to maintain the scientific character as far as possible in public lectures, then to delve into the esoteric in branch lectures, means that our whole movement has something that hinders it, that does not allow it to advance in the appropriate way.

For there is something unhealthy, my dear friends, when, for example, let us say, a university course or a conference is held here or there, and then people come from outside; there are - and this There is no denying that people come who initially have no idea of what is to be given to the world through anthroposophy, what is to be given to science and also to practical life through anthroposophy. They now hear there what we are presenting today at such congresses and on such college courses, and most of them will reject it. But of course there are also those – and they are the ones who really matter, even if they are still so few in number – there are also those who already feel the seriousness and scientific character of anthroposophy, who can say to themselves: this is something that needs to be examined further. The reason for this is that they are addressed in the very forms in which all kinds of worldviews are discussed in the world today. If such a person were to come into a branch meeting in which something particularly intimate and esoteric was being discussed, and they would hear something that is completely out of context and for which they lack the prerequisites, it is quite possible that they would say: “They present this to us in public, but in their actual more intimate meetings, it is clear that they are completely insane.” You see, my dear friends, that is something that is entirely within the realm of possibility – it does not depend at all on the degree to which it is already becoming reality today. It has become a reality to a high degree because we have always had members among us who lack all sense of tact in their dealings with other people, and who throw all kinds of things at them about anthroposophy that the others then do not understand. As I said, all kinds of things happen. But it does not even depend so much on the extent to which these things become reality as on the nature of the movement itself, on what is possible within it, for its prosperity, its health and its illness depend on this. It is, of course, all too easy to fall prey to all manner of prejudices when it comes to spreading anthroposophical knowledge, because people believe that this person or that could easily be convinced of this or that. Yes, you see, I would like to tell you an example of this that I have often spoken of.

When the anthroposophical movement was still working within the theosophical movement, albeit quite independently, the chairman of a branch of the Theosophical Society once came to me. He was a very important scholar, a well-known scholar in his field; it was quite early on in the anthroposophical movement within the theosophical movement. Because I was dealing with a specialist in his field, I initially tried to touch on his subject here and there, to present to him something that could lead from his field to anthroposophy. I presented to him something about plant growth, about the plant's place in the universe, and then gradually moved on to more anthroposophically substantial things. He was not at all interested in that. And the right thing to do was to draw back at the right moment and say to oneself, when this man works as a teacher at his university, he wants to lecture in the same way as the others lecture; when he is in his botanical cabinet, he wants to instruct his students in the usual way and, with regard to how he presents himself to the world as a botanist, he wants to be left in peace: this has nothing to do with Anthroposophy. On the other hand, he immediately warmed to it when one began to speak directly of the astral body, to speak directly of the etheric body. He could have his erudition on one side of his bookkeeping, and on the other that which was given to him anthroposophically-theosophically. But it did not occur to him to want to establish any connection between the one or the other, so that it was self-evident that what was given was to be left out of the effort.

Of course, this is something that has not always been taken into account in recent times. People want to bring anthroposophy into the specialized knowledge of those people who do not want it at all, who want to get it out with all their might. Of course, there is no harm in making public what the various sciences have to say about anthroposophy, or in bringing it to those who can understand it with common sense. But time and again, we encounter the prejudice that when we discuss botany, we should invite botanists; when we discuss zoology, we should invite zoologists; and when we discuss aesthetics, we should invite aesthetes. What prevails there is a certain unworldliness. It is this unworldliness that has done us so much harm, especially in recent years, and it is this unworldliness that we should overcome. One should not think that we can spread anthroposophy indirectly through specialized learning. We should be clear about the fact that specialized learning must be forced from the outside to accept the anthroposophical – it will not do so of its own accord. This is not about slackening in our zeal and saying: so things have to be done differently. It is about seeing things in a healthy way, as they are in the world.

Exactly the same things that I have said now in relation to the scientific in anthroposophy, the same applies in relation to the social and the sociological, only that there is an even stronger tendency towards unworldliness, and we have thus ended up in the unfortunate situation that is expressed today in an opposition that is not at all interested in anthroposophy. This opposition wants something quite different, and it is regarded in a completely false way in our own midst and is therefore of course underestimated, so that the belief always finds adherents that is directed against what I have actually been saying for a long time: that one should not believe that this opposition is not spreading. It will spread, it will take on ever larger forms, and it is now on the way to actually wanting to gradually make every public activity for anthroposophy within Germany impossible. We must not be under any illusion that this endeavor already exists in a very forceful way today: to prevent all public activity for anthroposophy within Germany. It is my duty to say this, especially here, because of what has been undertaken here in recent years, and because it is impossible here to harbor illusions.

And you see, my dear friends, this gives us a picture of how we must become more and more aware of the conditions of anthroposophical life, how we must not get caught up in our favorite ideas, how we must always familiarize ourselves with the demands of the time, and how we must, above all, take the most serious approach to what is to penetrate the world through the anthroposophical movement. It has gradually become our custom to start things at many points, to do this and that and to completely forget that each individual thing only makes sense if the whole anthroposophical movement is healthy and if the necessary things are really done from each individual thing to the whole of the anthroposophical movement. And that is what is missing. Above all, there is little response to what I myself have said in the various branches, again and again and for years, especially since the movement has become more externalized. What has been said has simply not been taken seriously enough.

Above all, we must adhere to the basic facts that are peculiar to the contemporary anthroposophical movement. We must hold fast to these fundamental facts. We must realize that from the middle of the 15th century until well into the 20th century – or more precisely until the end of the 19th century – human development was primarily one that, firstly, engaged the mind, the intellect, for the progress of humanity, but secondly brought it to a certain level. The intellect has been wonderfully developed in the past centuries. But just as each individual age, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, corresponds to a particular kind of development of soul and body that does not carry over into the next stage of life, so it is with the development of humanity in general. The age that has passed is that of the intellect, of the mind. And this development of the intellect, it should not - this is in the laws of human development - go into the further progress of this development. It is so that we are now standing before the beginning of a spiritual development of mankind. That what the intellect can achieve, it has achieved for the time being; it can only be carried into the further development of mankind as it has been trained in past centuries, as an heirloom. On the other hand, human development depends on taking into account the wave of spiritual life that is flowing from the spiritual heights into the physical-sensual world in which man lives, and to replace pure intellectual development with a spiritual kind of development.

It may well be that the human race, which has so far been civilized, says to itself: We hold fast to the old mind; we hold fast to experiment and observation and to what the mind can make of them ; we reject what individuals claim: that precisely in our time a mighty wave of spiritual life is penetrating from spiritual heights into earthly life; we want to know nothing about it, we want to continue to serve the intellect. — They cannot do this, because the intellect has passed its peak, it can only be propagated; but this propagation also means that it is going into decline. Indeed, the intellect is declining; we can already see the beginning of this decline today, and can even prove it outwardly. What is the use of closing our eyes to such things? We only have to look impartially at a single phenomenon that can shed light on the matter. Look, for example, at how young people who devoted themselves to study some forty years ago, even together with their teachers, still had something of the individual in their intellectual activity. You could approach people forty years ago – they were good intellectuals, they sought to penetrate from the intellect into the sensory and spiritual world, as well as one can penetrate with the intellect. When you met them – sometimes they were quite young people – what they said was interesting in the first five minutes; individual things came out of a human personality; you said to yourself, now I am curious to hear what he will say next, and you listened with a certain satisfaction. Today, if you approach such people, young people for all I care, and you listen to them for the first five minutes – or maybe not even that long – so you listen to them at first, it turns out that their minds are already running down, like something coming out of a machine; you are not curious about what they will say next, because you can know it in advance: the machine continues to clatter on. It is as if people have become entirely mechanical; individuality has been completely lost, even in the realm of the intellect. You can't even tell the individual people apart anymore, because everyone says the same thing, especially in certain groups.

This phenomenon allows us to study the decline of the intellect in an extraordinarily clear way – quite externally, without going into the spiritual side of it. In short, the intellect has just passed its peak; it can be inherited, but it will be subject to decline, and humanity needs the reception of that spiritual life which flows from the spiritual heights into physical life on earth. This can be rejected. But if it is rejected, precisely for those people who reject it, the possibility of human progress, human culture, human civilization, ceases, and the further development of humanity must seek other peoples, other regions. That is what must be emphasized here with all sharpness, what should also be seen or heard with all sharpness. For, my dear friends, we not only live in an age of change in earthly conditions, but this change in earthly conditions is only an expression of the change taking place in the spiritual realm, which first reveals itself in the world of the senses, but which underlies this world of the senses as a spiritual realm.

Within the world that we can survey with our senses, we have the solid-earthly, the liquid-watery, the airy-gassy; we have that which lives in the warmth of the ether, and we then have the ether region. The way humanity has become, it speaks of earth, water, air and so on in a very external sense, as the senses see it, and it is not taken into account that all these effects are based on facts that take place in the solid, earthy: spiritual elemental beings and their activity. Nowhere do we have to do merely with gold, silver, granite and so on, with what is earthly; everywhere we have to do with underlying spiritual entities. The solid earth is inhabited by spiritual elemental beings. These spiritual elemental beings have been sensed in the old instinctive clairvoyance; they have been called gnomes. One need not, for the sake of poetic license, continue this designation for my sake, for the clever humanity of the present day laughs when it is said that gnomes exist, but they do exist, just as electricity, magnetism and so on do. There are also beings in the solid, earthly world that are not visible to the external senses, but they have a mind that is essentially wiser, smarter, more cunning than the human mind. One might say that in their entire being, these elemental spirits that underlie the earthly world are active minds, active cunning, active cunning, but also active logic. No matter how clever a person is in the intellectual field, he can never become as clever as these elemental spirits of the earth, not even a quarter as strong. We must realize that the intellect, as it is in us, can only ever reach a certain degree. And these elemental spirits are effective, they are there, they are truly there in the whole of the world just as much as people are.

People have brought their minds to a certain level in the age of the last few centuries. I would say that this was a time of dryness and drought for the elemental spirits that I have just described and characterized. They saw themselves, as it were, restrained in their rule by the interaction of what human beings developed as intellect. They also held back, but since the human intellect has been in decline, since that time, this intellect of the elemental spirits has been emerging in a very noticeable way into the reality of human life as well. And if people are such functioning automatons as they are today, it is because they are actually under the influence of the clever elemental spirits of the mind, which would never actually work in the very uppermost part of the mind. But in those people whom we do not want to listen to because they always say the same thing, the activity of the intellect has slipped down a little from the brain, and in these lower parts the characterized elemental spirits immediately assert themselves. They assert themselves so strongly that unsuspecting minds have opened up in recent times, imagining something like the following. They say: 'We don't know anything about this mind, which reveals this or that about the world to us; it is nothing special; there must be much, much more in the subconscious. Much comes up from the subconscious. You can no longer talk to people at all, because what you talk to them about does not reveal what is working in them as their mind. You have to analyze them, and then what has slipped down as the mind can be brought up through the analysis. In truth, all this analyzing is nothing more than a demonstration of how powerfully the cunning, the sly elemental spirits work in all sorts of hidden corners of human beings. Many minds are unsuspecting in the face of these phenomena because they themselves are suggestively influenced by the mind that has gradually become automatic, as it works in science. This is the difficulty of communication that has a real understanding of the facts in this area, in contrast to what is still powerful in many ways today, but powerful in such a way that it is simultaneously crumbling the whole of civilization.

Just as the spirits of cunning and intellect work within the solid, earthly realm, so within the watery element those spiritual entities work that are related in their whole being to human feeling, but can live this feeling in a much more intense way. We humans place ourselves before things, we place ourselves before the blooming, fragrant rose, we are in a sense delighted, enchanted by the blooming, fragrant rose. But the beings of whom I am now speaking do not place themselves before things, but they weave and live through things, they themselves then live through in the fragrance of the rose the feeling of well-being through and through, which we only have in its external effects; they live through the liquid, they live through the warming and cooling; they live in that within which emanates on its surface what we humans have in feeling. But the more people are given over to the decay of the mind, the more everything that belongs to the human emotional life in the human organism will be exposed to these spiritual beings, which have their element in the liquid; and again, the human being will be permeated in his subconscious regions by these spiritual beings.

The breathing of humanity will be influenced more and more, deep into the organization, by those entities that are more akin to the human will and that live more in the aerial element of our earthly existence. These entities are characterized above all by the fact that they exist as a multitude, as a diversity, so that one can say: their number is incalculable. Just when you approach the host of those elemental spirits that live in the solid, earthy, when you, let us say, come to a lump of the earthly – what use is it then not to express these things as they are? It must be possible to express these things as they are, even if the world then and presents it as twisted and paradoxical – when you touch such a lump, which is full of such clever, cunning creatures, they come out from all sides. You have a very small lump in your hand, but the number of creatures inside is immeasurable; it increases before the spiritual vision, everything wells up. You can start counting what you thought was a unit: 1, 2, 3, 4 - you count, you are used to counting what you otherwise have in your external life, but now you realize: If you are supposed to count these entities, their number is such that when you count: one, two, three, while you are going from one to two, it has multiplied so much that it is no longer correct. The three is already there before you have finished counting to two. Even our mental operations are not sufficient to penetrate, in terms of numbers, into the realms we are dealing with here.

Now, you see, that is the one world that is there. Today we can do wonderful chemistry and also make what is done in chemistry anthroposophical through all kinds of intellectual skills – initially quite justified – because oxygen, hydrogen, chromium, bromine, iodine, fluorine, phosphorus, carbon and so on, they are there; potassium, calcium are there, they have certain relationships to each other, certain effects on each other. We can do all that, and that is very nice. But all that we do is based on spiritual effects, on spiritual beings and their deeds. And we have to penetrate from what we consider externally, or even externally anthroposophically, to what is there as a spiritual basis. We have to penetrate to the spiritual elemental beings, we must not reject that. We must therefore be aware that if we merely continue the culture of past centuries in a rational way, even in the branches of science, we will not make any progress. We must be aware that we will only make progress if we take into account the wave of spiritual life that wants to enter our physical world everywhere and that we must meet halfway if we as humanity do not want to decline with our culture.

As soon as we ascend into the ether, we encounter the warmth ether, the light ether, the so-called chemical ether and the life ether. When we see through these ether forms with the spiritual eye, with the eye that finds the elemental beings of which I have just spoken, then we also find the elemental beings of the ether spheres. We find the beings of light, we find the beings of number, we find the beings that make life flow through the cosmos, that carry it. We find all of this. These entities have a completely different character than the entities in the lower elemental realms. I will characterize the qualities of the upper beings and the lower beings and will do so today only with number. I said that the essential feature of the lower elemental spirits is that their number is immeasurable, that we cannot keep up with the counting. The essence of the upper beings is that they all flow into one another; the beings of light still relatively little – they have a certain individuality – but the further we come to the life ether, the more we find in the beings have the endeavor to form a unity; and we begin to be no longer able to distinguish the one being from the other being, because the one being lives in the other, wants to connect with it to form a unity. A corresponding realization, which was particularly directed towards the ether, towards the spiritual aspect of the ether, therefore came to the monotheistic concept of the spirit, which reached its peak in the Old Testament Jewish monotheism. Yahweh is essentially the summary of what the various ether elemental spirits want to make of themselves by flowing together into a unity. Today's human being is not free to merely look at what lives in outer physical culture and civilization; it is incumbent upon him to see the happenings of the universe in an intensive, more comprehensive sense.

And there you can see how - if man does not grasp the spiritual that wants to flow into physical culture and physical civilization - you can see how these entities will achieve their specific goals if man does not decide to pay attention to the seething host of intellectual, sentient and volitional beings, that is, the earth, water and air beings, to the influx of all the beings that are connected with the etheric effects. Then these beings, uninfluenced by human knowledge, will go their own ways. And we can already see today, if we have an ability to observe such things, how the elemental spirits of the lower realms, of the earthly realm, of the watery and airy realms, have more or less decided to make something different out of the earth than what is suitable for human beings. These elemental spirits have decided to gradually turn human beings more or less into automatons, to turn the earth into something essentially different from what is suitable for human beings as an earthly existence. The form of the earth that I had to describe when I had to depict world evolution in the sense in which, I might say, it lay in the intentions of the beings who lived at the starting point of world evolution, these elemental beings do not want to have this form, for all these elemental beings of the lower realms would like to develop as the host of Ahriman. And as the human intellect declines and man does not develop that which he has developed as his intellect, enlightened by spirituality, so the human intellect, during its decline, is converted by the elemental spirits — who, if I may say, at their congresses know something much more intelligent than we do at our congresses, the human intellectual achievement is converted by the elemental spirits into the Ahrimanic intellectual achievement of the earth. And those elemental spirits that live in the etheric being join the luciferic beings and also want to work on this other-becoming of the earthly. I would like to say: the lower elemental spirits would harden and permeate and interweave the earthly in a different way than it should happen in favor of man; the higher elemental spirits would give that which is permeated by the lower spirits a character that would allow it to have an effect on the cosmos. But man would merely develop further in what is being worked on, I would say as a kind of vermin of this planet, which is to come into being in this way.

The only way to escape this is if humanity decides to pay attention to the fact that a spiritual wave wants to enter our earthly development, that this spiritual wave wants to guide us to feel and see the Christ impulse in the form in which it must be felt and seen in the present. This Christ impulse is, after all, most fiercely opposed by today's theology, and it is characteristic, my dear friends, that a theologian at the University of Basel, a colleague of Nietzsche, Overbeck, as a theologian in the 1870s, was led to reflect on whether today's theology — since as a professor he also had a say in the matter — is at all Christian. And in a very ingenious book, which made a very deep, if not exactly pleasant, impression on Nietzsche, Overbeck proved: There may still be much that is Christian in people's minds today, but there is certainly nothing Christian left in theology; it has certainly become unchristian. - This is how one would summarize what Overbeck presented. People are not even aware of this. They are not aware, for instance, that in a work like Harnack's Essence of Christianity, wherever Christ or Jesus appears, the name can be crossed out and simply replaced with Yahweh or Jehovah, and the meaning does not change at all. For he particularly emphasizes this meaning when he says: It is not the Son but only the Father that belongs in this Gospel; that which is called the Son is only the teaching of the Father. —That the essence of the Gospel is the message of the Son, that is the Christian element. But Harnack no longer has that; he is no longer a Christian.

There we can already see the effect of what happens under the influence of the higher, ethereal elemental beings, who only strive for unity, but not for the unity interwoven with the Christ impulse. We must absorb this Christ impulse within us, and we can only absorb it fruitfully if we turn to the insights that can come through the spiritual wave that wants to come in, wants to come in through many gates into our present physical earth. Those whose senses are open to it can perceive everywhere how the spiritual wants to come in and how the spiritual is only now, in our time, imparting to us the true form of the Christ, the Christ impulse and the mystery of Golgotha.

All this, however, has its strongest enmity in those who, even as theologians and philosophers - albeit speaking in terms of concepts and ideas - have become materialists, crass materialists. It is of no use today to speak in the same formulaic words about the mystery of the world as one speaks about chemical, magnetic, electrical phenomena. Our culture and civilization can only advance if we penetrate from the outside inwards to the inside, if we really have the will to look at the spiritual world in the same way as at the physical. It is remarkable how people today immediately say: Yes, we want to profess belief in the unified God and the unified spirit, but leave us alone with the many spiritual beings. The one who knows the truth in this field cannot leave them alone for the reason that there are really quite a lot of them, as I showed you with the example of earthly elemental beings, of which there are so many that one is surprised to come across any at all. In its lower realm, in the one sphere, the spiritual, where today it tends towards the Ahrimanic, is present in an immeasurable number - there it is dominated by number; in the realm where it strives towards the ethereal, towards the higher, it is dominated by the striving for unity, for union. But today there is a tendency within these realms for the many to connect with the one and for the one to connect with the many. However, this connection can only take place in the sense of the right development of humanity if humanity is willing to include these spiritual realms in the field of its knowledge and insight in the same way as that which can be seen with the senses.

And now, my dear friends, I have endeavored today to present to you, I would say, a very esoteric chapter, an esoteric chapter, but one that is at the same time connected with the most important phenomena of our time, of our present time. Today we cannot merely describe in historical terms what is happening externally; today we must also point out the facts that are taking place in the next realm – in the next realm, where the lower and higher elemental beings are preparing to take possession of the earth, to snatch it from people, through the decline of the human intellect and people's resistance to spirituality. They want to snatch it from those people to whom the Christ Impulse has been given, which went out from the Mystery of Golgotha, in order to develop the Earth with it in the sense in which it is to develop further according to the intention of those spiritual beings of the higher hierarchies who stood at the beginning of this development and who have given the Earth the direction of its development from the very beginning. Humanity must find its way into this direction, into this line.

Now, my dear friends, yet another must one day come before our soul. Every time spirituality has appeared in humanity and wanted to assert itself, the enmity of the opponents of this spirituality has also appeared. And indeed, there has always been a struggle within human development around spirituality. We see today among us how a wild fight is now beginning against that which wants to spread as an anthroposophical world view, a fight from sides that fight with means that can only be overcome if the mask is torn from their face at the right time. Not to criticize, but to draw attention to what is necessary, I would like to mention a few things. You see how much is going on today in the fight against anthroposophy by certain people, who are fighting in an outrageous, brutal, inhuman way, because they are fighting and fantasizing with lies and untruthfulness, people who actually know nothing about what they are fighting against. There has always been a struggle, my dear friends.

You see, it was many years ago that I was suspected, for example, by a certain group, of being a Jesuit emissary, that everything I do gets its impulses from the Jesuits. This accusation came from certain quarters – it was many years ago. Later came the other accusation: that what I was doing came from the Freemasons and that the Jesuits would have to oppose it with all their might. And I could mention many other sides from which the fight was waged, and the feathers with which the fight was waged – I mean the pens, because birds were not, at least not very beautiful ones – were not always dipped in the purest ink. But now a fight is beginning against which the other fight, which I have just characterized, was a really noble one. Such a fight is beginning now. And about this fight, one should have no illusions, especially not that one could somehow do something with refutations and the like. Of course, one cannot say in all details that this or that should be done, but one would like to evoke an interest in things, a compassion for things.

You see, with a personality whose name has been mentioned a lot here in Stuttgart, there is still a lot of brutal opposition. I am not saying that everything comes from there, but a lot of it is connected with it. Now, another brochure has been produced here recently against this personality on the occasion of a lecture she gave. I must always ask why such things are presented to us in private? Why are they not made known to a wider public? Why are these things, which we are dealing with, not discussed in our magazines? As I said, I do not say this in a reproachful way, but only to make a note of it. If things continue to be modern, if things continue to be done in such a way that on our side what should be done is not done, while - it is not believed, I have been saying it for years - on the other side, work is being done, and will continue to be done, in the most intensive way, with all means, in all ways - if, on our side, only when or there is a fuss, it goes without saying that individuals are doing their very best, and that is commendable, but the other side is not doing anything commendable, even those who are directly involved are twiddling their thumbs in the face of the subversive activities or at most writing philosophical treatises against them, which is of no use at all.

These things must be considered by each individual. Perhaps they will be considered when, on the other hand, it is seen how truly our physical culture is endangered by world conditions today, but how behind this physical culture there is a world that must be characterized spiritually, as I have done today, and to which we must turn when we want to talk about the fate of humanity at all. For it is not true that the fate of humanity can only be characterized by what can be perceived externally. The fate of humanity is intimately connected with those spiritual beings and their deeds that stand behind the outer nature kingdoms as the elemental kingdoms, which we must also recognize if we want to recognize how the world is run. This does not only mean that we pursue theories, but that we absorb with all our being the reality of the activity of the elemental and higher spirits, of which true spiritual science proclaims to us, just as we absorb through the external food that which maintains the processes of our physical body. Only when we know ourselves in a world of spirit as well as in the world of matter will we find the possibility of gaining the right position that we must take if Anthroposophy is to fulfill its task.

If this is not taken very seriously, then perhaps it will soon be seen in this now expanded house that the great hopes that many have placed in the anthroposophical movement cannot be fulfilled. But it can be considered! We could look up — in a living, not just theoretical, inwardly moved and enthusiastic, not just comfortable way — from what is happening on the physical plane to what is taking place in the spiritual world.

This is what I wanted to develop here today before your souls. I would just like to add: It must also be taken into account, of course, that what is now happening in the form of a noisy agitation against anthroposophy is only the outward product of the untruthful agitation that has been going on for years by the personalities behind it, who are often regarded as very spiritual. Some of the things that occur in scientific circles are, through their inherent untruthfulness and lack of will to really penetrate into the matter, have contributed their fair share to the fact that those who are driven into the fight blindfolded today, act in a somewhat unruly manner and agitate against Anthroposophy. I would like to say that those who are often regarded as “masters” have contributed their fair share to what the henchmen are doing, because the scientific fight against anthroposophy has not been fought with clean weapons either.

Correction in the weekly publication “Das Goetheanum”

September 27, 1922

Rejection of Untruths

I have been informed that it is being said in Switzerland that the former President of Württemberg, Mr. Blos, is supposed to claim with certainty that he received me several times. I hereby declare that this is a blatant untruth. I have never visited Mr. Blos, never spoken a word to him, never exchanged any written correspondence with him. I saw him only once from a distance. That was when I attended the lecture given by the then Reich Minister Simons in Stuttgart. At that time, next to me, Councillor of Commerce Molt pointed to a gentleman whom I did not know and said, “That is Blos.” At that time, he had long since ceased to be President of the State. But even then, it came to nothing more than “seeing from a distance”. Whether Mr. Blos himself made the above claim is unknown to me; it is said. And it is linked to his untrue statements, which are not based on anything, and which he had printed in his memoirs. I therefore further declare that I never authorized anyone to talk to Mr. Blos for me or in my name. If someone has done so, it has happened without my knowledge and against my will. I myself only read in the Blos memoirs that someone was supposed to have done this. The things that are being told so often are based on such falsehoods. It is particularly absurd that there is even talk of my wanting to become a minister in Württemberg. I have so far considered it unnecessary to publicly refute the pure fabrications, especially when they are as nonsensical as the one just mentioned. But since people are saying, “Why doesn't the person concerned refute such claims?” I declare, with regard to this too, that it is a blatant untruth. I have never said anything to anyone that could have given rise to such talk. I will not go into other things that are said repeatedly, but which are just as untrue, today. Perhaps that too will happen.

Dornach, September 27, 1922
Rudolf Steiner

after the talk for the workers on the Goetheanum building

I myself am absolutely opposed to any agitation on our part. Of course I cannot prevent everything. But anyone who reads, for example, in the little pamphlet 'Die Hetze gegen das Goetheanum' ('The Agitators Against the Goetheanum') – yes, if it were only my things in it, then of course one would not be able to find what one now finds in it. But of course I cannot do everything all by myself and must be prepared for the fact that many things happen that would not have happened if it had been up to me. But that is not true when I speak to you, for then I simply point out the strict facts. For what I have told you today are strict facts, and I have drawn from them only a general characteristic of scientific life. You yourselves must say: Where such facts are not taken into account, there is no will to do real science, but there is the will to throw dust in people's eyes, even if in a rather unconscious way.

[ 1 ] The inner nature of man demands that he experience his relation with ultimate reality. Among thinkers who pursue this goal with untiring energy we find a large number discoursing on certain “boundaries” of knowledge. And, if we listen attentively, we cannot help noticing how collision with these boundaries, when it is experienced by a candid mind, tends in the direction of an inner psychic apprehension, a “purely noetic experience” such as was indicated in the first paragraph of this book. Consider how the profoundly able mind of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, in the packed essay he wrote on Johannes Volkelt’s book Dream-Phantasy (Traumphantasie), reports its own reaction to one such limit of cognition:

“No mind where no nerve-centre, where no brain”, say our opponents. No nerve-centre, we say, no brain unless it had been first prepared for by innumerable stages from below upwards. It is easy to babble, with a sneer, about Mind careering through granite and chalk—just as easy as it is for us to ask, with a sneer, how the albumen in the brain flies up aloft into ideas. Human knowledge is extinguished at any attempt to span the distance from one step to the other.

It will remain a secret how it comes about that nature—beneath which spirit must somehow or other be slumbering—presents itself as such a backlash of spirit that we bruise ourselves on it. The direction appears so absolute that Hegel’s formulation of it as “Being other” and “Being outside itself”, brilliant as it is, says almost nothing; it simply drapes the abruptness of the party wall. We may look to Fichte for a really adequate acknowledgment of the abruption and of the shock of the backlash, but we still find no explanation of it.

(Compare F. T. Vischer: Old and New (Altes und Neues), 1881, Part I, p. 229 f.)

Vischer lays his finger on the kind of issue with which anthroposophy too engages. But he fails to realise that, precisely at such a frontier of knowledge as this, another mode of knowledge can begin. He desires to go on living on these frontiers with the same brand of cognition that sufficed until he reached them. Anthroposophy seeks to demonstrate that the possibility of systematic knowledge (science) does not cease at the point where ordinary cognition “bruises” itself, at the point where this “abruption” and these “shocks” from the backlash make themselves felt; but that, on the contrary, the experiences that ensue from them lead naturally towards the development of another type of cognition, which transforms the backlash into perception of spirit—a perception which at the outset, in its initial stage, may be compared with tactile perception in the realm of the senses.

In Part III of Altes und Neues Vischer says: “Very well: there is no soul alongside of the body (he means, for the materialists); what we call matter simply becomes soul at the highest level of organisation known to us, in the brain, and soul evolves to mind or spirit. In other words, we are to be satisfied with a half-baked concept, which for the divisive understanding is a simple contradiction.” Anthroposophy echoes and supplements this with: Very well: for the divisive understanding there is a contradiction. But for the soul, the contradiction becomes the point of departure of a knowledge before which the divisive understanding is pulled up short, because it encounters the backlash of actual spirit.

[ 2 ] Again, Gideon Spicker, the author of a series of discerning publications, who also wrote Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (Philosophische Bekenntnis eines ehemaligen Kapuziners, 1910) identifies incisively enough one of the confining limits of ordinary cognition:

Whatever philosophy a man confesses, whether it is dogmatic or sceptical, empirical or transcendental, critical or eclectic, every one, without exception, starts from an unproven and unprovable premise, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation ever gets behind this necessity, however deep it may dig. It has to be simply, and groundlessly, accepted; every attempt to prove its validity already presupposes it. Beneath it yawns a bottomless abyss, a ghastly darkness, illuminated by no ray of light. We know not whence that necessity comes, nor whither it leads. As to whether a gracious God or whether an evil demon implanted it in the reason, we are equally uncertain. (p. 30.)

Reflection on the nature of thought, then, leads of itself to one of the frontiers of normal cognition. Anthroposophy occupies this frontier; it knows how necessity confronts and blocks discursive thought like an impenetrable wall. But when the act of thinking is experienced as such, the wall becomes penetrable. This experienced thinking finds a light of contemplation wherewith to illuminate the “darkness illuminated by no ray of light” of merely discursive thought. It is only for the dominion of the senses that the abyss is bottomless; if we do not halt before it, but make up our minds to risk going ahead with thought, beyond the point at which it has to jettison all that the senses have furnished to it, then in that “bottomless abyss” we find the realities of the spirit …*”

[ 3 ] One could continue almost indefinitely exemplifying the reaction of serious minds before the “frontiers of knowledge”. And it would serve to show that anthroposophy has its proper place as the inevitable product of mental evolution in the modern age. There are plenty of prophetic signs, if we know how to read them.