The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear attendees, the terrible fire disaster of last December night destroyed an outer shell of anthroposophical endeavor. This event, which is so painful for many who have grown fond of this building – the Goetheanum in Dornach – may perhaps give me cause to address these reflections first to the Goetheanum in Dornach today. I have been privileged to give many reflections of this kind here from this place, and today's reflection, too, is only intended to be given in the same style as the others, and only the connection is to be made to the Goetheanum. This Goetheanum has certainly had many people who, out of an insight into the will that wanted to emanate from this Goetheanum, greatly revered and loved this Goetheanum. But one may say that the vast majority of visitors, the numerous visitors who have been there over the years, could not make anything special out of this Goetheanum. There were many people who were annoyed by the very name Goetheanum. And then there were many who looked at the forms of this overall structure, composed of two domed buildings, and found them to be simply peculiar, perhaps merely the expression of a fantastic aspiration. There were then people who, on one or other of these grounds, believed that all kinds of spookish, perhaps spiritistic, goings-on took place in the Goetheanum, that it had been built to represent some kind of unclear, hazy mysticism, and perhaps even, as some put it, to serve the most blind superstition and so on, and so on.

And yet one might be amazed at how far what is believed in the present day about this or that can be from the actual fact. Because the Goetheanum has certainly not served any of the above. And if there are those today who fight against all these more or less backward or superstitious tendencies, those who want what was really wanted in the sense of building the Goetheanum, they certainly belong to these opponents. But I do not want to speak of the negative today; I want to speak of what the Goetheanum wanted and what Anthroposophy, for which it was intended to be a place, actually wants for present-day humanity.

The fact that the name Goetheanum was chosen over time was basically in line with the heartfelt desire of a number of admirers of the Goetheanum and Anthroposophy. The name of one of the figures in my mystery dramas, Johannes Thomasius (not John the Evangelist, but a character in my mystery dramas) was the first name chosen for this building on the hill at Dornach. It was accordingly named the Johannesbau.

Of course, this in particular gave rise to many misunderstandings, as is easy to understand, and I have therefore had to emphasize again and again that for me this Dornach building is a Goetheanum. Why? I can say that for more than 40 years I have been occupied with that which is based on Goethe's knowledge, art and world view. And anyone who delves into Goethe's striving for knowledge, into Goethe's art, into Goethe's striving for a worldview with an open mind, anyone who immerses themselves in it, will not only be stimulated to look at what Goethe wanted externally, but Goethe works when one really engages with him and with the universality of his striving. One can imbue one's soul with what he wanted, as with a spiritual lifeblood. And from this imbued experience of what one might call Goetheanism, I am convinced that it was wanted by Goethe in accordance with his time for certain parts of human perception, from this experience of what one might call Goetheanism, Anthroposophy has arisen.

Of course, anyone who takes Goethe's world view, Goethe's artistic intention and looks at it from the outside will not be able to extract from Goethe, with any kind of logic or, let us say, with any kind of ordinary artistic taste, what is contained in Anthroposophy. But there is, I would say, a logic of thought, and there is a logic of life. Those who make the logic of life their own can immerse themselves in something like that which Goethe revealed to the world, so that it comes to life in them, and continues to grow and develop. And in this sense of a living logic, I feel how Anthroposophy emerges from Goetheanism without contradiction, however little one admits it today. And because anthroposophy basically owes its origin to Goethe, it was a natural emotional need to call the place where anthroposophy, the descendant of Goethe's world view, so to speak, was cultivated, the Goetheanum.

This is not meant to be a silly claim to represent what Goetheanism is with any kind of perfection, but rather, I would like to say, this Goetheanum wanted to be a kind of place of homage for what Goethe gave to the world. It should not serve to represent Goethe's way of thinking for the sake of prestige, but rather it should be an expression of gratitude for what can be obtained from Goethe's world striving. And those who feel that this naming is in line with the expression of a feeling of gratitude will probably no longer be annoyed by the name.

But if I am to go further – my dear audience – and show you what the Goetheanum was intended for, then I must continue today the reflections that I have often been privileged to make in this hall and say what anthroposophy is intended for. Anthroposophy is indeed intended to find the answer, as far as it can be found by man, to the highest questions of human existence, to those questions that are related to human destiny and human dignity in the highest sense of the word. If a person does not numb their own soul life, then the question of the soul's eternity arises again and again. Then the question arises: Is the human soul a free or a non-free being? Then the question arises: To what extent does the human soul rest and work in that which can be called a divine world order?

Our present-day science, which has achieved such unspeakably great things for the external fields of life, has become rather timid about these questions, which are often called the last questions of existence, because this outer science wants to real, true science only that which can be perceived by the senses, which can be combined by human intellectual activity from sensory perceptions, and it rejects that which goes beyond the sensual. But in doing so, it also rejects any answer to the deeper questions of human existence, as just characterized. For without an entry of knowledge into the supersensible realm, man cannot even dare to attempt to approach a humanly possible answer to this question.

Anthroposophy, however, does not want to give the answers to these questions in a mere doctrine, to the extent that this is possible for man. Nor does anthroposophy want to give the answers to these questions through an unclear mysticism, but anthroposophy wants to penetrate as far as possible into these answers in the same way as today's sciences actually strive. The only thing is that anthroposophy is clear about the fact that what man calls knowledge still has to be grasped in a completely different way than it is often done today, especially by the most authoritative authorities, if one wants to see these questions in the right light at all.

I would like to start from a parable-like observation, but one that is supposed to be more than a mere parable. You see, my dear audience, every soul that contemplates the world, without thinking that it can gain special insights into the answers to the riddles of the world, every soul stands, perhaps only in amazement and admiration, before the images of that muffled world that we call the world of dreams. I start from the world of dreams, certainly not in order to mystically extract something from this world of dreams, but to illustrate how anthroposophy thinks about that which must become knowledge for humanity if the characterized questions are to be approached.

Imagine the manifold, colorful dream world before the sleeping soul. Imagine how, on the one hand, the content of the dream is a reflection of what we know well from the world we live in during the waking hours. But one should also imagine the soul, in which the dream world floats and envelops the soul in a freely moving way, transforming it, becoming more fantastic. And anyone who has an open mind, anyone who has a healthy mind and, above all, a healthy will in the world, will have no choice but to say to themselves: We can never recognize the reality value of the dream world during the dream itself.

We could, I would say, dream our whole life long, then we would simply, as we do in the dream experience, consider the dream content to be our reality. We would believe that the world we dream is the real world. But since we wake up from the dream world through our organization, we gain the perspective in waking life to examine the reality value of the dream world. Only when we are outside the dream, only when our senses and our will are, as it were, switched on to the external world around us, do we have a point of view from which to assess the reality value of the dream world. Of course, no one may judge what is spatial reality from the point of view of a dream. For healthy thinking and healthy willing, only the reverse assessment is possible.

Now, while someone is absorbed not in a dream world, but precisely in the world of daily reality, which, although in a different way from a dream, also provides us with diverse, colorful images, but images whose inner content we only recognize when we penetrate them, when we penetrate them in their interaction with what our mind gives us. As anthroposophy delves into this world of reality, as anthroposophy approaches the world of everyday reality in the same way that a dreamer approaches his dream world, you come to the question: Yes, is it not possible that a second awakening takes place, so to speak, in the human soul life? Just as the natural workings of our organism tear us out of our dreams, as our will is switched on during awakening into the external sensual world of reality, so it could indeed be possible that a further awakening is possible from the world that concerns our everyday consciousness. If that is the case, then it must be said that the reality value of the sensory world can only be assessed from the point of view of the world into which one awakens, the supersensible world, just as the reality value of the dream world can only be assessed from the point of view of the everyday world. I would like to say: Anthroposophy first asks itself the big question: Is such a second awakening possible? It does not want to sink back to recognize the world, into dream-like reality. It wants to go the opposite way; it wants to go the way that man goes from the dream into sensory reality. It wants to go further from sensory reality into supersensible reality. Whether one can do this depends, of course, on how one is able to penetrate the human soul life, in fact the whole human life. I would like to say: one must simply subject the soul and its life to examination to see whether it has the possibility of such a second awakening.

Now, my dear audience, such a second awakening is possible. Above all, it is possible if a person does not give in to intellectual arrogance, by which he says to himself: You were a small child at first, you were not yet equipped with the ability to think, feel or willpower as you have as an adult; you had to develop them with the help of your human environment, with the help of your education, with the help of life, these abilities, to the degree that you now have them. But if, as an adult, you discard intellectual arrogance and ask yourself: Is it possible for the abilities to be further developed from the level at which you have brought them as an adult, just as they have developed from the childlike stage to the stage of everyday life? And you are led on the path of such further development of human abilities when you pay special attention to individual such abilities.

Let us first turn our attention to that faculty of the human soul or, let us say, of the human being that is usually called memory in life, the gift of remembrance. Let us first consider it as memory presents itself in everyday life. Out of the realm of the soul, in the midst of impressions of the present, perhaps evoked by these impressions of the present, thought images emerge, pale thought images of something we may have experienced years ago. And so what emerges from the depths of the soul or is brought up by present-day perceptions is mixed with the all-embracing, transforming power of the imagination, perhaps with some fantasy too. And so, through the power of memory, we have before us images of something that can undoubtedly be said to It is in a fairly realistic way, in the kind of reality that we are accustomed to when we open our eyes and when we hear our surroundings with our ears; it is not present in this reality. We take events into our memory images that simply consist of our having entered into this or that relationship with this or that person, this or that natural event, or something else, years ago.

What took place there is no longer reality today. But we have the ability to present to ourselves from the depths of our soul, in more or less pale or more or less meaningful images, what, in the way we otherwise perceive reality through the senses, is not present reality. This ability to remember can be cultivated. And it is cultivated when a person delves into his or her own thought life in a way that is not usually done in everyday life, particularly today. When people devote themselves to their thoughts today, they are usually thoughts that have been inspired from outside or that arise as memory thoughts in the way I have described. If someone is honest with his soul life, he must say to himself: what the external impressions provide, what arises from the depths of the soul life as memory, is actually what makes up this exterior of the soul life.

But there is something else we can do. We can tear ourselves away from this, I would say passive role that we play in relation to our thinking. We can try to live in our thoughts with an ever-increasing inner activity. You can live in thought in such a way that you simply form thoughts that you can easily grasp; so that you can be sure that if you devote yourself to these thoughts with strong inner activity, you will not fall prey to suggestion or mystical dreams, if you only present thoughts that are easy to grasp to your soul in such a way that you do not let them scurry away like thoughts that are stimulated from outside or inside. Then you realize that in this thinking, which is brought about by your own arbitrariness – in this life, in the activity of thinking, something develops within the soul life that can be compared to what happens when we use a part of our muscles in external physical work, for example. They become stronger, they become more powerful, it is precisely in active application that the muscles become stronger and more powerful. However, we notice this in a different way, in that we repeatedly and repeatedly immerse ourselves in thoughts that we have woven ourselves or even made ourselves or acquired from some spiritual researcher, through our inner will — if I may put it that way. We become inwardly stronger in soul, and we notice when we do such exercises – for some it takes longer, for others shorter, it can take weeks, it can take years – when we continue such exercises, we notice: the inner strength of our soul awakens. And it awakens in such a way that we become acquainted with that which we previously only knew as a memory in a transformed, reshaped form. A new inner ability, I would say an increased ability to remember, but one that does not simply deliver memories to us, we feel them in our soul.

And in the moment when this power has become strong enough, when the thinking that has been repeatedly and repeatedly seized in inner activity – the thinking that is now not only thought but is experienced, so that one feels it as an inner reality – in the moment when this inner thinking has become strong enough, something occurs, it usually occurs piece by piece, something occurs before this human soul that it has not known before. It is not just memory that comes before the human soul, but the direct perception of what the person has experienced since about the first years of childhood within this earthly existence. But what the person experiences is not a collection of laboriously recalled images, but something that suddenly presents itself to the soul like a vast tableau of life, so that one can see one's past life as it is present, as if time had become space. If one is able to do this, then one also feels one's self in a completely different way than is possible in ordinary consciousness, actually no longer in the physical body. One feels connected with one's self with all the experiences one has gone through and which now come up in this enormous memory tableau for the consciousness.

I would like to call that in which one now experiences oneself, as one experiences oneself in physical life in one's earthly life in the arms, the head, in the legs, I would like to call this sum of life images, of which one feels: It is oneself, it is one's self, only extended beyond one's earthly lifetime. I would like to call it the temporal body in contrast to the spatial body, in which one perceives oneself for the ordinary consciousness. It is the first supersensible experience that one has in this way.

But now — and this is the significant thing — one does not experience this tableau, this time body, in such a way that one looks at it externally, but rather, by immersing oneself in thinking again and again with activity, with inner activity, one has acquired the possibility of being immersed in the experiences, of having them as if they were present, of really being one with this temporal body, not just existing in space but moving through time and feeling like a human unit through the time that one moves through. One expands one's existence almost to the point of one's birth as a continuous reality.

That is the result of what I would call transformed memory. While you are in this state, looking at yourself as being immersed in your previous life, you do not have the opportunity to develop the memory in any particular way. In fact, the one who experiences this must experience it again and again, at least in a shadowy way, if he wants to have it before him. The fact that one has turned memory into something else for this supersensible world, into the contemplation of a finer world of time, has the effect at the same time that memory itself is extinguished for the moments when one beholds this higher world. But the one who develops in this way in a healthy way will not, like a mystical dreamer or a somnambulist, involuntarily come to a different way of imagining, but will come to this different way of imagining with full consciousness. This also enables him, I might say, to return again and again to the ordinary consciousness of everyday life. He is able, despite looking first into the first realm of the spiritual world, to stand with both feet in sensual reality in a healthy way and not to become a mystical dreamer and fantasist.

But in this way, man attains true self-knowledge. For it is not what has approached me from the outside that appears in this tableau of life, but precisely how one has intervened in external events. There is a difference between someone making an effort to recall the events they have experienced in their ordinary consciousness and memory, and what I have just described, when one recalls the events one has experienced at one's birth in one's ordinary consciousness and memory. Above all, one is interested in how the world has affected one, how this or that person has approached one, what effect this or that natural event has had on one. When you have this higher spiritual, transformed memory tableau before you, then you actually do not see what another person has done to you, but rather you see how you yourself have behaved towards the other person, how you have behaved towards this or that natural event, this or that fact of life. One sees oneself as acting, as active. In short, my dear audience, one has advanced to a real self-knowledge, to a vivid self-knowledge. This is due, if I may express it so, to the strengthening of thinking to such an extent that one feels one is now living in one's thinking as one otherwise lives in one's blood circulation, in one's breathing.

In ordinary life, thoughts are dull and shadowy. They are not compelling; they are not something in which one lives as one does in one's blood or as one does in one's breathing. By practicing in the way I have described, one senses one's life in thought, as it were, just as one otherwise senses one's life in the physical body. And then one knows that in addition to the physical body that a human being carries, there is this second time body, which is not spatial – it can be drawn spatially, but that is only an illustration – that there is this second time body, which is infinitely finer, if one may use this expression at all, than the physical body. In my writings I have called it the etheric or formative body, because one must have an expression for these things. One need not be offended by expressions. This, alongside the physical body, is the second link in the human being, and it leads up the first stage to the supersensible body in order to penetrate further. For one learns through such contemplation only one's own human being for this earth life.

To penetrate further, it is necessary, so to speak, to develop the opposite strength to that which consists of immersing oneself in thoughts. It is indeed the case that Anyone who is familiar with this immersion in thought knows how it captivates people. Indeed, if you do it the way I describe it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in 'Occult Science: An Outline', you do preserve yourself. You do acquire this world, however, if you do the exercises the way I describe them there, in a completely free way. You are not influenced by what you experience, you stand in it as a free human being in the sensual outer world.

But still, to the same extent that anything in the external world that particularly moves us captivates us, this world, which we experience when we immerse ourselves in thought, captivates us; little by little — it is not even an exaggeration, my dear audience — one has the feeling: you now live in this power of thought, just as you otherwise live in your physical body. And yet, if one wants to progress in supersensible knowledge, it is necessary to overcome precisely this stage. For one must be clear about this: this stage is actually only what I have called an [imaginative] stage in my books. One experiences what the world has implanted in one during one's life on earth, what one has, so to speak, imagined as one's own conception, feeling, will — not in the sense of a fantastic education, but in the sense of really imagining what one has imagined.

But one experiences only what one is in the strictest sense as a human being, one experiences only one's human soul. And one does not yet have the right to say that this human soul, which one experiences as in a time body, that this has a continued existence beyond earthly life. For this, higher exercises are necessary. For this, it is necessary that one can now inwardly put oneself – just as one has placed the thinking before the soul, how one has immersed oneself in the thinking, so that the thinking became a life – to suppress this thinking again at any time in complete inner freedom. But that means something special now.

If you have freed yourself from the physical body in the sense I have just described, if you have settled into the etheric body, then initially suppressing the life of thought does not mean falling back into the physical body, but remaining outside of the physical body. But what one has acquired from outside the physical body is suppressed. And one establishes what one might call an empty consciousness. That is the significant thing, that man develops his inner soul abilities to this level of empty consciousness.

I would like to say: just as a person breathes in ordinary life, how he inhales and then exhales again, how the inhalation contains the air of life and the exhalation the air of death, so too, at this higher level of experiencing the mind through thinking, the person must come to stir thinking within himself, just as he stirs the inhaled air as a physical organism. But he must also be able to bring this thinking experience out of his soul. Then the consciousness becomes empty. But once one has attained this possibility of an empty consciousness, one has penetrated to alternating in the soul between being filled with inner powerful thinking, which proceeds in the images as I have described in the tableau of life; once one has achieved being able to alternate between these images and between having nothing in the soul, then after a while – all these things have to be awaited with patience and energy – the empty consciousness that one has achieved in this way does not remain empty, but external perceptions do not arise either. A spiritual world appears around us. And we acquire the ability to live for a while in what we awaken within as images of our own earthly life, and to change it by suppressing these images, by taking the approach of creating empty consciousness by alternating with being filled with external spiritual world content.

Yes, my dear audience, into this empty consciousness now enters the phenomenon of a spiritual world, which we distinguish from what we know ourselves to be in the time body, just as we distinguish the outer colors and sounds from our physical body when we stand in the world of space, in the physical world. We learn to distinguish between what we perceive externally as the spiritual content of the world, as a world of spiritual beings that is around us just as the physical world of physical facts and physical beings is around us, and we learn to distinguish ourselves from this spiritual world.

If I was able to say that the first step of supersensible knowledge comes to a real kind of self-perception, which is an intensified thinking, then this second step, through which we recognize a real spiritual world, through which we experience that there is a spiritual world around us, like the sensual world. This second ability can be compared to the soul activity that we pour into our physical organism when we speak. Speaking is not just a physical, mechanical expression of the human organism. What the physical organism reveals when a person speaks is poured into what is the soul life, and what flows in the words and sentences is what soul life is. When we learn to suppress amplified thinking as I have described it, we learn something in addition to this suppression of thinking, which I will describe in a few words. It is something that is known, but in this case it is described differently with these words. One does not just learn to suppress thinking, but rather one learns to be inwardly silent in a higher sense than is the case in ordinary life. Yes, when the empty consciousness is established, the inner experience is there: now the soul is silent. I said that I use the word as it is used for not speaking in ordinary life. But the word means something different in this case. This silence after suppressed thinking is now a positive inner experience, so to speak, as we otherwise fill ourselves, say, with joy or pain, with what our speech contains, what our words contain. In the same sense, we now feel ourselves immersed in our supersensible being in the way described: we are filled with silence. And this silence is of a special kind in yet another respect.

I have to use a comparison to express myself clearly. I have to say: let's assume we are in the middle of a big city, with all kinds of noise around us. We move out of the city, the sounds get weaker and weaker because they sound further and further away; it gets quieter and quieter. We go out into the solitude of the forest – it becomes even quieter. Finally, we are surrounded by complete silence. But I would like to say: this silence is only the zero. We can go further. We can diminish even further what silence means simply as something that is not heard – if I may use a very trivial expression – just as we can diminish even further when we have spent our assets down to zero, we can diminish these assets even further by getting into debt, by having even less than zero. This is how we can diminish silence. There is something deeper in the soul after the thinking has been suppressed than there is in silence. There is an inner strength in this intensified silence, and in this intensified silence, this stillness, which goes beyond the stillness of zero, this stillness produces something that is not an external thing but an inner language , a language that does not come from the depths of the soul, but that – one experiences it clearly – comes from the supersensible world, in which one is now in this supersensible being, as I have described it. One now feels compelled to describe what one experiences in the inner silence of the soul. One experiences the spiritual world, and from the spiritual world it is as if it speaks to us through the silence of our soul. It really speaks to us. Only one must not pour this speaking into the words that are otherwise produced with our speech organs, but one must pour it by using the natural phenomena themselves to express that which is revealed there as the spiritual world. That is how it happens. But what happens is that — my dear audience — one wants inner elementary naturalness, as it is the behavior towards the outer sensory world. I perceive something spiritual in the world in the way described. This spiritual makes an impression on me, a very specific impression. This impression stands directly before my silent soul. It is the same as the impression made by the color red, not in the way I saw the red color, but just as when I see in my memory a red color surface completely illuminated, I see not the redness of the color, but the memory of the color, the redness of the color. But it is something completely different. So I now experience the direct presence of a spiritual in the soul. I have to express this direct presence of a spiritual in such a way that I remember, so to speak. This spiritual affects me like the red or blue color. I can compare the spiritual in the red or blue color with this or that sound, although it is not at all meant to be any sound of the external sensory world. In other words, my language in relation to the spiritual world becomes very special. My language in relation to the spiritual world becomes such that I make use of sensory phenomena to characterize and express what is revealed to me in the spiritual world. However, these sensory phenomena belong to the spiritual entities and events just as little as the word thinking ultimately belongs to thinking itself. One describes that which one beholds in the spiritual world, as I have described it, for example, in my “Theosophy”; but it is a language that one uses. One makes use of the colors of the senses, the sounds of the senses, in order to describe that which one has to describe in the spiritual world. It is a language, it is the language of the silent soul.

And when the soul has progressed in this way, then even if the power that suppresses thinking and creates silence in the soul is simply strengthened, the whole tableau of self-introspection can be erased. I can, as it were, extinguish my temporal body. Just as I would otherwise only extinguish individual images or isolated thoughts from my consciousness, I now extinguish everything that I have experienced as an earthly human being since my birth. Once I have learned to establish consciousness with the silence of the soul, not only does the comprehensive spiritual world emerge, as I have just described, but also one's own true being, which the person was before descending into a physical world in a previous existence. Now, through the suppression of what one has experienced as an earthly human being, through the empty, silence-filled consciousness, one gets to know one's pre-earthly existence, thus the soul in the state in which it is eternal, in which it was before it entered physical earthly life through the physical human germ. Now one attains, not through philosophical speculation, but through a real contemplation, the knowledge of the eternity of the human soul.

But with that, one also attains knowledge of the whole connection between this human soul and the human body. For one now learns to look into the world in which one was before one descended to earthly existence. And now one learns to recognize how, in this world, which is a purely spiritual one, in which one was before one descended to earthly existence, now one learns to know how this human being, the one who is before one, is the human being, just as the extra-human on earth is the world. One learns to recognize how the human being had developed his supersensible senses — if I may use this paradoxical expression —, his supersensible senses, before he descended into a physical body, precisely in terms of the nature and essence of the human being, how he then, in his pre-earthly existence, saw through the secrets of man, as he saw through these secrets of man in the spiritual world, while he was in his eternal nature, not clothed in his physical body.

And with that, the realization of it also presents itself, the vivid, not speculated realization of how the human being passes through that which it maintains in its eternal being when the human being passes through the gate of death. Beliefs can be formed about that which lives beyond death. It is not at all intended to say here that these beliefs need to be wrong or inadequate; nothing should be said against their correctness. However, we are already living in an age in which man is directed to penetrate to that which is given to him through knowledge and the content of knowledge, not through the content of faith. Therefore, the path of knowledge should be sought, not the mere path of faith.

One comes to understand how the human soul itself is connected to the physical body, how it lives within the blood circulation, lives in the breathing process, lives in every single bodily function. One therefore learns to recognize how not only an ascending, sprouting, and burgeoning life is present in physical life on earth, but, after getting to know the eternal character of the human soul, one sees how this human soul lives in the physical body. One learns to recognize that the will, the growth force, is bound to the sprouting and sprouting forces, but one also learns to recognize that thinking and a part of feeling are bound to the destructive forces of the human organism.

Yes, my dear audience, when you grasp a thought, an idea, it is not a process of growth that takes place, but a process of decay, a kind of atomistic dying process. We are constantly dying as we think, and the same applies to part of our feeling. As physical human beings on earth, we carry within us that which grows like a plant grows. But we also carry within us that which, within our nervous system, continually withers away like a plant withers. But while the plant, in withering away, only decays, we have, alongside what I would call the crumbling away of dying, the possibility of thinking and part of feeling within us. In this way, we look at human life on earth differently than we would through a mere external physiology. We see how the human being comes to his or her thinking, how thought first takes hold, so to speak, when matter is no longer alive in its growth force or even when the structure of matter is destroyed.

Matter is so little the master of our thinking that matter must give up its own nature in our organism where thought wants to rule. Thought rules in our organism in that its whole structure is not the growth of matter, but in that matter withers away. Matter first makes way for thought. If we learn to know partial death in this way, I would say, we learn to recognize how something always dies in us, precisely in order to make room for our spiritual, then we arrive, especially when we have trained our thinking and inner silence as I have described, then we arrive at being able to really see and recognize the human eternity on the other side, beyond death. But something else is needed for this.

And now, dear audience, I must briefly mention something that will certainly seem extremely paradoxical, but it is nevertheless a reality. There is still a soul power that needs to be specially developed if one is to see through the fact that death is just hinted at. While one is developing this empty consciousness, this inner silence of the soul, one also increasingly acquires the need to further develop a soul force that is otherwise present in us, that plays an extraordinarily important role in human life, such a soul force into the spiritual, into the soul. This is the power of love. Love, the noblest of the soul forces, can also be the lowest in a certain respect. It plays its great role in life. So when a person goes through this stage, first feeling at home in his temporal body, then looking to this much higher body – if I may use this expression – which he wore in his pre-earthly existence, his soul powers are so heightened that he also feels the need to increase his ability to love. That is why I have also indicated in my writing 'How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds' those exercises that increase the ability to love. If one increases this ability to love in parallel with the other abilities mentioned, then one gradually comes to experience in one's own life on earth that which one has seen as one's own nature in the pre-earthly existence. And now one experiences a third aspect of human nature.

In ordinary life, one has otherwise experienced one's physical body, through the way I have described, one's etheric or formative body, the temporal body. Now one experiences oneself in one's actual supersensible body, in which the soul life takes place. One now recognizes this as the one for whom space must always be created by matter, in that matter destroys its structure so that the actual soul-spiritual can spread throughout our organization. And now we also experience, by first seeing how, as it were, matter falls out of the nervous system, becomes dead, and the soul-thought element asserts itself, now we learn to recognize how the soul passes over into the spiritual world when the whole body falls away in death.

I had to describe to you, my dear audience, while speaking of human immortality – I wanted to characterize this question of the three mentioned today – while telling you this, I had to speak in a different way than is often spoken in a philosophical way. In philosophy, it is assumed that one can stick with ordinary thinking, that one can combine thoughts and that one can thus arrive at insights into the immortality of the soul through judgments and conclusions. But here I had to point out to you, based on anthroposophical striving, how one must first develop the human soul with the suppression of intellectual arrogance in order to arrive at the contemplation of the eternal essence, the soul-spiritual essence in man.

But this, dear attendees, is not a mystical activity in the soul, not a dream; it takes place in the soul with the same inner clarity, yes, I would even say with the same inner sobriety as breathing and thinking. Actually, anyone who engages in anthroposophy in the way I have indicated, as you can read in my books, always feels an obligation to treat their soul powers no differently than a mathematician does, to always give an account of the part of their soul life, step by step. It is the same activity that one performs in anthroposophy as in mathematics, except that mathematics deals with dead spatial and numerical relationships and thus what it inwardly grasps spiritually in its forms, in its geometric, arithmetic and algebraic and so on, is applicable only to the outwardly dead. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, creates in the living. Everything is alive. And therefore, what it has grasped, I would say in a mathematical way, it can apply not only to the living, but also to the spiritually existing dead.

When you are surrounded by his pictures in a room, you are alone with yourself as a human being. The person standing next to you, the other people who may be in the room, have a completely different world. If they are all dreaming, they may dream of different things. With his dream world, man is completely alone, isolated. The moment he wakes up, the moment he turns on his will and his senses into the surrounding sensory world, he is no longer isolated; he experiences a shared external world with the other people. But his inner life, his actual soul life, is something that man has only for himself, even within the sensory world of earthly existence. It is like a dream. We only have this for the sensory world outside; inside, everyone dreams their own soul world. In the moment when we look into the pre-earthly existence or, as I have described it, into the existence that a person enters before passing through the gate of death, in that same moment we also have a spiritual-soul existence with the other person. We live in a spiritual world like all souls. Therefore, anthroposophy does not merely open up the idea of immortality, but a real understanding of it: when you pass through the gate of death, you discard your physical body, you continue to live in the spiritual world in your spiritual and soul nature. But also those earthly relationships you had with other people – those you had with those you loved, were related to, or otherwise cared for, friends, like-minded people, and so on – all that is earthly about them falls away. But what your own soul lives on, you live that in community with those with whom you have entered into relationships, you also live that with those who have preceded you, perhaps or after they have also come to the spiritual world.

The real community relationship after people have gone through the gateway of death comes to the immediate realization of knowledge, which has achieved it — if I may use this expression — to develop inwardly transparently and clearly like mathematics, and on the other hand wants to reach up again to the highest questions of human existence. Anthroposophy honestly strives for such knowledge.

And since humanity has actually become accustomed to gaining clear and transparent insights into what it wants to know through the admirable science of nature, if humanity has not numbed itself, it will not be satisfied in the long run with mere beliefs – which, after all, also only incidentally emerged from ancient knowledge – humanity will have to attain spiritual insight just as it has attained natural insight over the past three, four, five centuries. The human soul would have to numb itself to the highest questions of its existence if it did not strive for such spiritual insight. Call it anthroposophy or whatever you like, but such spiritual insight is a need for most people of the present day, even if this need is still deeply rooted in the subconscious. So much of the weal and woe of present-day humanity stems from this need. If we shed light on what sits unconsciously in the mere perception of today's humanity, which feels unsatisfied, which has become nervous, which has all kinds of disharmony and chaos in the soul and also carries this into the world, then we come to the conclusion that that although these people do not grasp this or understand it, they have a deep need to gain knowledge about the spirit, just as humanity has gained knowledge about nature, which has led to external technology. This knowledge will lead people to an understanding of external experience, but also to a deeper understanding, to a truly inward soul understanding of morality. This too, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy is meant to achieve.

And the Goetheanum wanted to be the outer shell. Goethe spoke beautifully about art when he first encountered it in Italy. In his own way, he wrote beautiful words to his friends in Weimar: “I have a suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the very laws by which nature proceeds and which I am on the trail of.” Goethe was seeking in art a sensual expression, a sensual revelation of that which spiritual knowledge glimpses when Goethe spoke from the depths of his soul the words: “Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never be revealed without it” – without art, that is. Goethe was looking at the cognitive aspect of the human being in relation to the spiritual world – not the sensory world – as that which permeates the human being to such an extent that he then, as a sculptor, painter, musician and so on, wants to conquer form out of spirit. So, one could say, for Goethe, knowledge was one expression of human endeavor, artistic creation and artistic enjoyment the other. It is only in the course of human development, in the direction of abstract thought, of the theoretical, in which we have become so immersed today, that art of knowledge has become alien. Goethe, on the other hand, strove to bring knowledge to art and art to knowledge because he knew that nature, namely by creating the human form, creates itself as an artist.

What use is it – dear attendees – to say, however strongly you may want to, that you cannot visualize artistic images if you want to recognize something? If nature itself creates like an artist, then you simply do not learn to recognize nature if you only want to recognize it logically, and you least of all learn to recognize people if you are not able to gradually move from strict logical thinking to an artistic, visualizing comprehension of what lives in the human form, in colors, in everything human. A straight path leads from the cognitive to the artistic.

Now, in this sense, one also wanted to be Goethean in that moment when some friends of that world view, which I have again sketched out for you today with a few strokes, came together in a spirit of sacrifice to create a place in Dornach near Basel. I was commissioned to build this place.

Many people have got into the habit of saying: those who call themselves anthroposophists follow my word, they believe only in my authority. Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I believe that no one can say that they see their will fulfilled less through their followers than I do. I say this, although it may sound paradoxical: most of the time, what I want does not happen.

I was commissioned to build this very place in a certain way. If such a place had been built for any other worldview, one would have gone to this or that architect; the architect would have built a Gothic, Renaissance or ancient building in this or that style for the cultivation of this worldview or spiritual current. That could not be done for anthroposophy. For Anthroposophy wants to be — you will have recognized this from my description today — something that fits into the spiritual development of humanity as a new impulse. Anthroposophy really wants to lead to a change in knowledge: that the human being can achieve this second awakening, of which I have spoken, which is shown when the attempt is really made in the described way. Then the human being wakes up into the supersensible world. Then he can judge the sensory world here as he can judge the dream world from the sensory world. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is not abstract knowledge, it is not a sum of theories, it is not a thought-up world view, it is something that one must experience. It is not something that merely fills the head, it is something that fills the whole human being and seeks its human center in the heart. Then, however, it cannot be exhausted in a one-sided activity, then it must permeate everything that comes out of human nature. Then a person cannot advocate a worldview within a structure that was built from a completely different worldview. Within a Greek or antique, thus actually a Renaissance or Gothic building, one can advocate that which has emerged from the Greek or Gothic outlook. Anthroposophy needs its own envelope by its very nature. For it is not merely an outlook, it is not merely a theory, it is life and becomes life in man, as blood does in an organism. And just as blood builds up the human body artistically, so does the one who experiences anthroposophy build what he builds as a place for it. I have often used a simple, trivial comparison, but it is meant to be deeper. I have said: look at the nutshell. You cannot imagine that other forces are at work in the nutshell than those within [in the nut itself, which we eat instead of the nutshell]. Out of the same forces, in a similar form to which the nut itself is created, [the nut shell] is completely adapted to the nut; so the building envelope must be that which is not theory, but life, in the grasp of all the life forces of the human being.

And so the Goetheanum had to be such that, for example, when one stood on the podium and spoke, the words one chose to express what was revealed by supersensible vision thought-forms, they had to express what spoke to people's eyes from the forms of the columns and the paintings on the domes. The whole had to be in harmony down to the last sensual form.

And again, when the art of eurythmy was cultivated in Dornach, this art in which the human being comes to a visible language through complicated gestures that are completely drawn from his nature, so that one can express a poem in individual movements as well as through recitation and declamation — when the stage was filled with moving people, who were performing some kind of poetry or music in their movements, not dancing but singing in movement —, what was happening on stage was a continuation of what the forms were that surrounded the audience in the building. When the spectator turned his eye to the columnar forms, to the forms of the cupolas among themselves, when he turned his eye up to the cupola paintings, he had a similar basic feeling as when he looked at the stage and eurythmy was taking place.

Just as the nut can only be in its shell through the laws it has formed itself, so when Anthroposophy was given the opportunity to have its own house, it could only create this shell artistically out of the spiritual realm, out of which it itself experiences its world view, out of which the whole world view that takes hold of people is born. The Goetheanum wanted to be to the eye what Anthroposophy is to the direct apprehension of the soul through the word.

Because Anthroposophy still seems strange to people today and because all sorts of things are made of it by those who do not know it — I have characterized this in the beginning —, therefore what was the outer shell of a new architectural style seemed strange to people, just as the nutshell will seem strange to someone who knows nothing about nuts but believes that something is present in an arbitrary form and shape. Just as the world itself is shaped, so attempts have been made to create out of a spiritual world of impulses, taking hold of the anthroposophical world view, and also artistically, in Dornach.

The Goetheanum wanted to show this in its external forms under construction, entirely in the Goethean style: Art is a revelation of those secret laws of the universe that cannot be revealed without art – just as the Goetheanum speaks in sensual forms where the thought itself expired into sensual forms. There was no symbol, there was no allegory, there was artistic feeling everywhere, where the thought as mere thought is no longer enough, where the thought only becomes complete when it overflows into artistic form. But since the thought is born of the spirit, that into which it pours is also born of the spirit. Art is entirely for contemplation, but it is nevertheless, like everything in the world, born out of the spirit. Therefore, my dear audience, even for those who truly understand anthroposophy in their innermost being, something has been lost at the Goetheanum that is, in a sense, irreplaceable, because the Goetheanum was not intended for thinking up, explaining or describing, but for contemplation, because it was intended to visualize that which comes from the same source, namely anthroposophy. But what Anthroposophy can only give in words, which almost cries out to be poured out into a sensory form — what should be vivid —, that is what the fire has taken away, so to speak. In short, the way Goethe thought in relation to knowledge is what he wanted to be embodied in the Goetheanum. The Goetheanum wanted to reveal what Anthroposophy is meant to express.

Just as the human soul reveals itself as immortal in the mortal body through anthroposophical contemplation, so I may say without sentimentality: the body may fall away, even though all the pains and all the suffering that we know are attached to it. Only when the body falls away do we think of the immortality of the soul. And so today I may well conclude with the words that are only intended to illustrate what I meant not theoretically but humanly, emotionally, and intuitively today in answering the question: “What is anthroposophy and what did the Goetheanum want?” I would like to say — when the question arises: “What did the Goetheanum want?” it must be said: The Goetheanum wanted and needed to express the spirit in external matter, just as the human body is formed in external matter. That which is expressed in external material can be destroyed by the elements; but that which should live in the Goetheanum is itself of a spiritual nature. Anthroposophy does not want to be built and cannot be built out of external material; it can only be formed out of that which reveals itself from the spiritual, supersensible world. But this cannot be destroyed by any element, it is of a duration that may be characterized by saying: Yes, anyone who can look at the human soul impartially today knows that the human soul cannot remain calm for long when it comes to what it can learn today from knowledge about the [sensual]. It demands, even if still unconsciously, a supersensible knowledge. And because humanity will not be able to do without the knowledge of the supersensible in the long run, Anthroposophy may hope that, although it has now lost its home, it will revive all the more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity and to see through true human destiny. spiritual word, that it will come to life even more when humanity becomes aware that it needs it to grasp true human dignity, to see through true human destiny, as the realization of the true spiritual, eternal essence of the human soul.

Dear fellow students, dear attendees! First of all, I would like to address the esteemed speakers who were kind enough to greet me in such a friendly manner. I assume that this greeting also applies to the spiritual matter that is to be represented here in the course of this college event.

In response to these greetings, I would like to say that I am deeply gratified by them for two fundamental reasons that inspire me in all that I represent of what I call anthroposophical spiritual science. Of course, this anthroposophical spiritual science is still much attacked today, but it will be able to go the way it is meant to go through its inner strength if, among other things, two contemporary forces in particular stand by its side. And it is precisely from these two contemporary forces that your friendly greetings come. Firstly, from those who want to devote themselves to the cultivation of scientific life, and secondly, from the youth. Now, I am deeply convinced that, among the many different conditions that must be met if anthroposophical spiritual science is to go its way, two things are needed above all. The first is that people learn to recognize that this spiritual science, for its part, wants to work out of the strictest scientific spirit. And because it wants to do that, this welcome is particularly valuable to me. And secondly, I am deeply convinced that — however some people who are in the present life may still think about this anthroposophical spiritual science today — what is even more important is how young people think about it. For it is on what young people bring into human development in the coming decades that it will depend on whether we find our way out of the numerous forces of decline and into the forces of awakening. Working towards this goal should also be the aim of anthroposophical spiritual science. It must therefore be particularly satisfying for it to be welcomed by young people. And believe me – believe it, my honored greeters, and believe it, all of you sitting here: the anthroposophical spiritual science will never shy away from justified criticism, from what is above all a completely critical confrontation with itself. On the contrary, it will derive the greatest satisfaction from it when this criticism arises out of a real urge for knowledge and out of the urge to work practically on the goals of human development. Anthroposophical spiritual science is at the beginning of its development; it needs true and honest criticism. It does not need blind trust and cannot really use blind trust. It needs thinking evaluators. May these thinking judges grow up from the youth.

Therefore, because this is my dearest wish, I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for the kind words that have just been dedicated to me as the representative of this anthroposophical spiritual science. Thank you very much for that and let me express the wish that what will be presented here in a rather makeshift way in the course of this week, i.e. in a relatively short time, may at least to some extent correspond to your prerequisites in an inspiring way. These prerequisites are certainly such that they are in line with what has just been said, otherwise the event could not have taken place.

And in particular, I must express my heartfelt thanks for the kind invitation extended to me by the student body as a whole. I take this as an expression of the fact that more and more people are realizing that anthroposophical spiritual science, as I represent it, is the opposite of any sectarian endeavor, that it is also the opposite of anything that appeals to any narrow-minded belief or something similar. Therefore, I consider it a source of deep satisfaction to me that the general student body here in Darmstadt has accepted the invitation issued by the special anthroposophical groups. And for this invitation, let me express my heartfelt thanks to all those who have taken part.

Now, dear fellow students, dear attendees, what is called anthroposophical spiritual science today is often judged by wider circles from points of view that could actually be done away with by considering the starting point from which this anthroposophical spiritual science originated. This starting point was certainly not a sectarian one, not a religious confession in the narrower sense of the time, or the like - although the religious denominations, for their part, will have every reason to engage with this anthroposophical spiritual science. The starting point was an examination of the scientific thinking of our more immediate present, the present that roughly encompasses the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.

The scientific way of thinking has not only taken hold within science itself, but has also conquered a wider sphere of human thought, actually only in recent times. It has been rightly emphasized by insightful minds that the luminaries of modern scientific thinking – let us say Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, even Kepler himself – started out with the followers of an old belief in revelation, as they found it within their own time. The great confrontation between the scientific way of thinking and the great questions of world view only really occurred in the course of the 19th century. And this scientific way of thinking has also taken hold of what is now called “spiritual science”, not on the basis of anthroposophy but in today's official science. It has taken hold of history, for example.

If we look at the development of science on the one hand and the development of historical views on the other, then it must be said that anyone who, with all seriousness and from the inner experiences of the whole human being, the full human being, experienced the last stage of development of our spiritual life at the end of the 19th century and at the beginning of the twentieth century encountered, as it were, two cornerstones; two cornerstones, one of which once caused a great stir but is now almost forgotten, that is, forgotten from the point of view that it is no longer consciously remembered. But it lives on in the way in which questions of world view are treated today. This cornerstone is the once famous “Ignorabimus” – “We will never know” – of Du Bois-Reymond from the 1870s. Du Bois-Reymond, who was a representative natural scientist of his time, wanted to strictly define the boundaries of scientific thought, and he concluded the debates in which the natural scientist's ignorabimus was contained with the words: Natural science will never be able to fathom the essence of the material itself, that is, the essence of that which underlies the external world, the world that can be observed by our senses and dissected by our minds. In the face of this world, one must utter the ignorabimus — Du Bois-Reymond believed — because anything that would go beyond the indicated limits would lead to supernaturalism. This would lead to a kind of supersensible research — Du Bois-Reymond believes, by presenting the sentence in a monumental way, that where supernaturalism begins, science ends.

So the great question that stood at the starting point of anthroposophical thinking and observation was: Is it really the end of all science where supersensible research should begin, or, as Du Bois-Reymond believes, supernaturalism?

But that is only one of the cornerstones. The other cornerstone was provided not by a natural scientist but by a historian, the famous Leopold von Ranke. And again it was an Ignorabimus, a “We cannot and will not know!” Ranke, the great historian, tried with all objectivity to find his way into the course of human development that can be traced through historical documents. And he stated that what we see as the most far-reaching event in the course of the development of the earth, the event of the founding of Christianity, the appearance of Christ Jesus in the course of human development, reaches into this historical becoming. Ranke does not deny that this event was world-shaking in historical evolution; but he asserts that the historical approach must stop at the cause of the origin of Christianity, just as Du Bois-Reymond asserted that science must stop at the supersensible. That which flowed into historical development through the founder of Christianity – says Ranke, for example – belongs to the primal elements of historical becoming – so he expresses it – which methodical historical research cannot approach. Of course, many such primal elements could be pointed out. I have only emphasized the most important one for the Western world in the sense of Leopold von Ranke. That is the other cornerstone. It was erected for the reason that in the course of the 19th century, the education that scientific humanity has received over the last four to five centuries has also developed its powers in other scientific considerations. And even if Leopold von Ranke was far from combining his own historical perspective with natural science, it must be said that natural science, with its great and mighty triumphs and its rightful place in the modern intellectual development of humanity, has also asserted its authority in other fields. These had to, if I may say so, “resemble” it. And so, in essence, Leopold von Ranke's ignorabimus is nothing other than the historical answer to Du Bois-Reymond's scientific ignorabimus.

A confrontation with what was alive in modern spiritual life and – because spiritual life is, after all, at the basis of all human cultural and civilizational development – with all of modern human life: such a confrontation with these two cornerstones stands at the starting point of what anthroposophical spiritual science wanted to become: a confrontation with the scientific way of thinking. And I say explicitly: with the scientific way of thinking. For when this starting point is mentioned, it is not a matter of going into individual scientific results – which have already been so gratefully addressed in the lectures that have been given so far – but rather of looking at the way way in which the scientific researcher wants to relate to reality, and to look in particular at what one has as a human being in terms of one's own human development in the present in the practice of scientific research or even just in the appropriation of scientific results.

You will understand when I say that natural science, especially in the course of the 19th century – although it was prepared for earlier – has gradually developed research methods in which, in particular, those who is engaged in research in any branch of this natural science, acquires an inner scientific conscientiousness and an inner scientific discipline that cannot be acquired in any other way than in this natural scientific research work. And this inner mental discipline, this inner mental conscientiousness, which one can acquire in this way, we need in all of modern civilization and cultural life. The only question that arises is whether science can take what is being cultivated within humanity in terms of conscientiousness and inner discipline, and take it to its ultimate conclusion. No matter whether the results of scientific research are justified or not, and whether they need to be modified in the future or not – the relative lack of justification has indeed been put into perspective by some speakers at these events – the important thing is that even at the most radical extreme, to which science has turned more in the direction of theory than of practice or experiment, this conscientiousness and this inner discipline still underlie it.

We have seen how scientific research has gradually been pushed to work itself out of the qualitative, more and more towards the quantitative. This is, as I said, debatable in terms of results – I am not talking about that now. But I am talking about the education that the researcher has been able to receive precisely from the extreme of this tendency, which has gone so far as to only accept in the field of scientific observation that which can be measured, counted or weighed, that which can be expressed in numbers, in measure or in weight. In certain circles, people profess the view that one can only achieve a certain objectivity if one only accepts as objective that which is subject to number, measure and weight. As I said, in terms of the results, this will be very disputable.

I would now like to consider the other side, the side that may culminate in the question: What does a thinker, a researcher, himself gain by working towards achieving the objective through weight, measure and number? One gains by the fact that one is increasingly compelled to exclude from scientific investigation, from scientific experiment or scientific observation, everything that could flow from the subject, from the human personality itself, into the formulation of these scientific findings. Everything that comes from the human subject itself must go. The aim is to develop a completely objective picture of the world. But if we take this tendency to its logical conclusion, then, my dear audience, the very thing with which the researcher, as it were, moves away from his research, from his observation, from his experiment, with which he rises to the of the laws of nature, then that which he carries away, which he then keeps within himself, must not have any part, not the slightest part, in what he regards as the true external world, as the truly objective. And if we follow this train of thought to its conclusion, we are forced to say: If, in the strictest scientific sense, everything subjective is to be excluded, then what we ultimately carry in our minds, which has emerged from combinations of natural phenomena, must not be in any way part of this external world. But what then of this external world may be in us, that we carry within us when we research, when we are no longer in living interaction with this objectivity through our mental power, but when we only look back on what has worked subjectively in us while we were devoted to research? The subjective must not be stuck inside, it must be recognized as lying entirely within the human being himself. But in so far as the human being must also belong to objectivity, it must not be stuck in the objectivity of the human being himself either. We must therefore carry something of our research results, insofar as they are our soul-good, in us, which has nothing to do with our own objectivity, although it strives to represent a true image of the outside world. By thinking about nature, no kind of being, as we ascribe it to our own objectivity, may be present in this thinking about nature. Therefore, at the starting point of an epistemological consideration, the sentence must be: “I think, therefore I am not.” Only when we dare to contrast this sentence with the great Cartesian fallacy “I think, therefore I am,” only then do we really place ourselves on the ground of scientific thinking.

Today it is necessary to make this turn, to move from the revered, one might say, starting point of modern thinking, from the “cogito, ergo sum” to the “cogito, ergo non sum”, “I think, therefore I am not”! For it is only by realizing the non-being of what we gain from objectivity that we become aware of how we must now address our subjective experience: we must address it as an image. If we understand our soul nature correctly, we live in the image. This is now, in a certain way, the cornerstone – in so far as it is a matter of thinking – of what stands at the starting point of anthroposophical spiritual science.

But what has humanity as such achieved, in particular with regard to – if I may use Lessing's expression – the “education of humanity” through scientific thinking, through the characterized methodology and inner discipline? I would like to particularly point out what has actually been achieved in the course of more recent times. And if we want to appreciate and honor this in the right way, then we have to look back to older times in the development of humanity, to those times when there was not yet a scientific thinking in our present sense, when people did not draw such a strict, conceptual line between what man subjectively brought to the outer world and what is really objectively present in the outer world. Today, one need only take any literary work that wanted to have a scientific character and that still belongs to that older time, which did not have the scientific impact, and one will see how man was not yet able to really separate the subjective from the objective; but how he was also not able to develop something that is precisely one of the most important developmental forces of the latest phase of human history: full self-awareness, full human composure, that places itself in the universe and becomes more and more aware of itself as an individuality, as a personality in this universe. The growth of personality consciousness, the growth of the sense of self, the growth of composure, is what increases to the same extent that modern scientific consciousness arises. Man consolidates himself inwardly, one might say, in relation to all the forces with which he holds his personality together, precisely under the influence of this veneration of the principle of objectivity. Man becomes stronger inwardly as a personality, and his longing for free individuality grows to the same extent that scientific consciousness has developed in recent times. From this consideration alone, something can be inferred, which you will find confirmed when you penetrate into the now already somewhat widespread literature of our anthroposophical spiritual science. And what can follow from this consideration is this: the more man engages in the observation of the sense world and in the gradual processing of this sense world in a scientific way, the more he arrives at an inner consciousness of himself as I. With these two latter elements, that grows in man which securely places him as an I in his whole environment. This should be felt particularly by technicians, because one can develop a feeling there for how the human inner consciousness is changed by looking not only at the establishment of natural laws through observation, through experimentation, but at the weaving of natural laws into what one has to accomplish for the world in terms of instruments, tools, and entire undertakings. In this integration of natural laws into enterprise, in this integration of natural laws into reality, one can feel how human inner composure grows under the influence of a scientific way of thinking.

If we understand this in the right way, my dear audience, then we may ask the question on the other hand: Under what circumstances does this composure decrease? Under what circumstances does one lose this sense of self?

It is remarkable: with the expansion of material knowledge, the sense of self becomes stronger. If, so to speak, you are absorbed in material knowledge, you initially achieve the maximum of the ordinary sense of self. — When does it weaken? Well, you only need to recall the most ordinary, everyday phenomenon that shows when the sense of self weakens. I remind you of the dream, of dreaming. It is not necessary that something has an external reality meaning when you look at this something in order to recognize from it how to enter into true reality. Dreaming can ultimately be made the subject of extraordinarily interesting research, and Johannes Volkelt, a very important philosopher of modern times, published his book on dream fantasy as one of his first literary works. It is a pity that Volkelt then left the paths he had taken with it and through which he could have come very close to real spiritual scientific knowledge, under the power of the latest philosophy. If one really studies the life of dreams, one notices in the course of the dreams many things, but one of the most essential characteristics of interesting dreams is their symbolism. Let us say, for example, that there is some kind of fire alarm outside on the street, but we are still asleep and do not recognize the fire alarm as such. The dream sometimes symbolizes some event to us, which we then recognize when we awaken, as it is symbolic of what appears as an external fire alarm. This is an example of the symbolization of external events. But it is the same with internal states. We dream of a boiling oven and when we awaken we recognize that the boiling oven is the dream symbol that is placed before us for the pounding heart with which we awaken. The dream symbolizes the inner and the outer for us in the strangest way. But we will not be able to deny it: the dream realm represents that in which our ego, so to speak, loses itself again. It goes so far that we experience in our dreams what can only come from our own ego as if it were coming from an alien ego. The dream dissolves our ego, so to speak, as the chaotic manifestation of our soul life, our soul life that is not initially connected to the outside world. It brings us out of the composure into which we grow more and more, especially when we devote ourselves to material knowledge.

And if we follow what initially still appears in dreams in a healthy state, if we follow this through all the phenomena that follow the dream life, through the faint-like states, through the notorious internal states, through many things that otherwise lead the human being from the imaginative to the fantastic and the rhapsodic, if we follow this path to its end, where — in a sense in other metamorphoses — what appears is what characterizes the dream in that the dream is no longer able to grasp reality adequately, but grasps it in the symbol, which is still striving to grasp reality but can no longer grasp it, — if we look at all these phenomena, these feverish phenomena, and also on everything that emerges as pathological states of the soul, one sees the other pole, the pole which, when the I develops according to it, has such an effect on this I that it dissolves, that it comes out of its composure, that it passes over into the unconscious.

Now there is a remarkable connection between these inner experiences of the human being, which at first approach him in a healthy way in his dreams, and then, in the other cases I have listed, approach the pathological more and more. There is a remarkable connection between all these experiences, I would say, between the human being who is becoming egoless and what we can call: a soul life that is free from the body. This is shown simply by the ordinary observation that the actual soul life becomes freer from the body. So on the one hand we have this soul life that is becoming freer from the body. And if we then, as one could say, look for its scientific correlate, we come to something highly peculiar. There is now something that I want to mention here, which is well known in today's external science, but which is actually not always appreciated in its full value and significance.

You all know, my dear attendees, what a great influence the Darwinian direction, the Darwinian type of modern developmental theory, has exerted on all recent intellectual and cultural life. Now there is a point within Darwinian developmental theory that touches in a very strange way on what I have just characterized as inner experience. What I mean is this: the true Darwinist, who has of course been superseded by true science in a sense, but whose way of thinking is still in today's thinking trends, says: the different forms of living beings have developed from each other, in that small, very slight changes , which something that can only be called chance has brought about, have added up more and more, so that finally a living being with certain, let us say morphological peculiarities has developed by transformation into another living being with quite different morphological peculiarities. As a specific example, let us take the development as conceived in Darwinism, that gill-breathing lower creatures would have developed into lung-breathing ones. It has been assumed that the organ that gradually transformed into the lungs was the swim bladder. It was assumed that the swim bladder had undergone a small change by some kind of accident, and that then, again, as a result of such changes accumulating, one organ with a very specific function for the outside world had gradually developed into another organ, so that the gill activity could gradually recede and the lung activity could occur through the swim bladder that had been transformed into the lung.

But certain objections are repeatedly raised against this principle of small changes, and not by the least ingenious naturalists, in that it is emphasized that such changes are actually only pathological in nature due to the rigidity of a living being's organs. If, therefore, the deformation of the swim bladder is ever so slight, it is something pathological, it cannot prove expedient, it must be cast off again; and it is precisely because such slight deformations are to be understood as pathological that no transformations of animal or vegetable organisms can come about in this way.

The important thing for this consideration is that in order to explain progress, one was obliged, in the external study of nature, to look at the pathological, at that which deviates from the strictly organized, from that which is strictly ordered by laws in objectivity.

One can say – and especially when thinking technically, one will be able to develop a feeling for it – that which one can technically achieve, so that one can rely on it in terms of its usefulness, must be so thoroughly organized through the entire arrangement of the mechanical that it does not deviate anywhere from that which one has arranged according to law – precisely so that one can rely on it. Darwinism actually bases its principle of progress entirely on such deviations from the strict organization of nature itself, on deviations from what one might consider – for example in morphology – to be just as strictly organized or mechanized as the mechanism of a machine. It was therefore forced to base progress in the development of living things on deviations, on what many rightly regard as pathological. Is it any wonder that our ego — which draws itself to become a level-headed being precisely from that which is most highly ordered in the external world: from external phenomena — that our ego, when these external phenomena enter even a trace into the pathological, has as a mental antithesis the experience of the descent of consciousness, the loss of consciousness? We can see a remarkable parallelism, a connection between what wants to break out of the lawfulness, what wants to overcome what we have to recognize in external nature or in technology, and what tears the I away from the composure that it achieves precisely through the material observation of the cosmos.

We see here a reference to the other pole. And it is this other pole that spiritual science now refers to with all its energy. For spiritual science opens up methods that can prevent the unconsciousness of the ego when this ego tears itself away from the ordinary organization prescribed for it by the body. All methods of spiritual scientific research work towards tearing the I away from the activity of the body, and yet not allowing it to drift into the unconscious, but consciously guiding it into a world into which it would unconsciously and pathologically enter if the organization were to deviate, without its intervention, from what must be recognized as its own laws.

What has emerged in modern human consciousness is deeply significant: this clinging to the pathological as a principle of progress in development, and then looking at what occurs when there is a deviation from the fixed organization, at the fluttering of the I. The aim of the spiritual-scientific method is to prevent the ego from fluttering, to enable the development of soul and spiritual activity in a healthy and not in an unhealthy way. And this spiritual-scientific method is now being developed in the same strict way as the external scientific method is being developed. It is highly desirable, however, that those who want to do significant research in the spiritual realm have acquired the inner discipline and conscientiousness that I characterized at the beginning of my discussion as the inner discipline and conscientiousness acquired through scientific research. Those who have not undergone the training provided by modern science can basically only produce nebulous ideas in the field of spiritual science. What the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here aims to achieve should not be confused with the vague and hazy products of mystics or the like, who proceed without this inner discipline, sometimes with downright indiscipline, without this inner conscientiousness, indeed with a lack of conscience, when they present their so-called spiritual experiences to the world, which unfortunately are only too easily believed by the undiscerning. A truly scientific method must be acquired in the same strict sense and on the same presupposition as that on which the training of the natural scientist is based, as is the natural scientific method itself.

There are two things that must be considered first when developing the method of spiritual science. The first is what arises as a necessary force in our everyday soul life and also in our ordinary scientific research, namely the ability to remember or memory. Anyone who has studied the pathological conditions that overtake people when their memory is not intact, when, let us say, certain periods of time since their birth have been erased from their memory — you can find sufficient studies on this in psychiatric literature — anyone who has studied what people experience when their memory is interrupted, will see how this memory forms a basis for ordinary, healthy life. But what does this ability to remember mean? This is precisely what spiritual scientific research shows. We must have this ability to remember in our ordinary human life and also in ordinary science. But if we conduct psychological research, now with unbiased psychology, into what is actually contained in this ability to remember, if we research the development of this ability to remember from the first years of childhood, then we find that the 'ideas that emerge as memories emerge from the depths of our soul are what we have acquired through our experiences in the outside world, even if they appear in many metamorphoses, sometimes also transformed by justified or unjustified imagination. But if you study human development as a whole, you come to see in this memory something like a reflection of our experiential life in our own organism. Just as we see in the mirror what is in front of it — I am using a comparison here for what you will find amply substantiated in the anthroposophical literature —, just as we see in a mirror what is is in front of the mirror and you cannot see behind the mirror, then with ordinary consciousness you can, so to speak, see only as far as a mirror surface, a soul mirror surface, which reflects back the memory images. How the will plays into this cannot be touched upon today; perhaps in one of the next lectures. It is our own organism that reflects what we experience. And just as we cannot look behind the mirror when we stand in front of it, we cannot look inside our own organism and get to know it as a living organism. We have to get to know it from the corpse or from what it shows us in pathological and other deviations. We get to know it from the outside. We do not get to know this organism from the inside for the same reason that we cannot see behind the mirror. However, it is possible if one has first developed this ability to remember to such an extent that one can rely on it, through the special method of meditation as described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in the second part of “Occult Science.” In other words, if one is not a nebulous mystic, but a reasonable human being, who is equal to every degree of inner research, so that he cannot be “twisted” when he goes further, — it is possible to “interrupt” the memory through meditation, just as one can break a mirror and then see what is behind it. If this is done through full willpower, in a level-headed manner and while maintaining self-awareness, it leads the person to see beyond memory. It does not lead to pathological states. When a person, through spiritual scientific methods – which I can only describe here in principle – develops lasting ideas that should not be reminiscences, when he devotes himself to meditatively easily comprehensible ideas, when he lets his soul rest on them, concentrating on it, but in such a way that everything is excluded that does not arise from the human application of will, and if he excludes all nebulous mysticism, then the human being does indeed manage to look beyond memory; he manages to come to real self-knowledge. This self-knowledge, which anthroposophical spiritual science must strive for with its empirical methods, is very different from the poetic, in a sense admirable mysticism of a John of the Cross or St. Therese. Those who devote themselves to the writings of these spirits feel the high poetry, feel what reigns in these wonderful images. Those who have become spiritual researchers in the anthroposophical sense know another, know that it is precisely with such spirits from the depths of human nature, into which ordinary consciousness does not look down, that special facts flare up into consciousness, one might say. In the case of a Saint Therese or a Saint John of the Cross, in the human organs, especially in the so-called physical human organs, in the liver, lungs and digestive organs — however prosaic or profane one may consider this, it is not profane for him who sees through the matter. In these physical organs, abnormal things are happening, which “bubble up” into consciousness and become images there, as they then play out in such personalities who are suited to them. But the true spiritual researcher breaks through the mirror of memory. He does not arrive at such nebulous self-knowledge, which is called mysticism and idolized, but he arrives at concrete self-knowledge. He arrives at a living conception of what the human organs are. There the way opens to a real knowledge of the human organization, the way by which spiritual science also leads over into the medical field. But that is only the beginning. For when one looks in this way, through spiritual and supersensible powers, into the actual material substance of the human organism, then one also overcomes the mere material observation of this human organism. For ultimately one sees how that which presents itself as material in man is not merely born out of the hereditary current with which it has only connected itself, but how it is born out of a world that man has passed through before his birth or conception. One looks into the pre-existent human life by means of a detour through material inner knowledge. The pre-existent life becomes a reality through supersensible knowledge. Ordinary mysticism, as it is idolized by uncritical minds, is more of an obstacle to real spiritual knowledge. — That on the one hand.

Another human power that is necessary for life in the most eminent sense, and which must not be broken for this ordinary life, just as little as the power of memory or recollection, is the power of love. Now, you all know how this power of love is bound to the human organism in ordinary life. It only comes into being at a particular age in the way that it has its special significance for social life, namely when a person reaches sexual maturity; before that it is only a kind of preparation — but this love is only a special case of what we call 'love' in general. Just as sexual love is bound to the human organism, so too is love in the ordinary sense bound to the organism. But just as knowledge can be released when memory breaks down, so love can be freed from the human organism when it is developed spiritually and soulfully through a special methodology. We must not, however, call in a trivial sense every manifestation of “platonic love”, which is nothing more than some vapour from the organism, but this love must be developed in the higher sense through human self-discipline, again through exercises as they are given in the writings mentioned. This love, which in ordinary life is not a power of knowledge, can be developed so that it transforms itself into the power of knowledge of true intuition. When we take into our own hands that to which we otherwise only surrender in life, that which actually educates us in life, in self-discipline, when we become, so to speak, more and more our own companion in our self-education in a strictly methodical way, then we arrive at making love a free force in the human being, in the human organization, and then it becomes a power of knowledge. And just as we arrive at self-knowledge by overcoming memory, so we arrive at supersensible knowledge by making love a cognitive activity in relation to the external world. There must be limits to our knowledge of the external world, otherwise we would not be able to develop love in us. If we were not separate from the external world, we could not be so separate from person to person as to develop love in social life. But when we have developed this love to higher knowledge, when we have it in a sufficiently healthy degree, and then develop it to the power of recognition, then we attain knowledge of the world just as we attain self-knowledge in the other way. And this knowledge of the world leads us to the knowledge of that world in which we only live between falling asleep and waking up, when we have no consciousness, when consciousness again fades away. We experience a state that is in some ways similar to the one between falling asleep and waking up, but we experience this state in full consciousness. There we experience a new external world. We do not experience an atomistic world, which underlies the external sense world, but we experience a spiritual world. To educate ourselves in love means to take the step into the true reality of the external world, into spiritual reality; into the reality that our soul absorbs every evening when we fall asleep, when our ordinary consciousness, which is still bound to the body, becomes unconscious because of the longing to return to the body that lies in the bed. When we ascend to a higher consciousness, we become acquainted with the world that consciously receives us when we pass through the gate of death. Thus, the two ends of our human life initially confront us scientifically. Much more will be further characterized in a subsequent lecture. Today, I have only set myself the task of showing how what can be inwardly cultivated in the soul through natural science must be expanded if true spiritual knowledge is to be attained through true spiritual science. Therefore, because the soul wants to educate itself, not in some amateurish, dilettantish way, but in strict methodology, if it wants to ascend from nature-knowledge to spirit-knowledge, therefore one may also believe: Whoever is able to judge from the full humanity what material natural knowledge gives us, and who is able to recognize that we strengthened through material knowledge, will also be able to find his way into the contemplation that seeks this strengthening of the ego on the other, the spiritual side, into which we fall asleep, dream, or which we encounter in pathological states, but which we can develop in a completely healthy way, in order to then advance to a spiritual knowledge of the world. Therefore, I believe that anyone who can fulfill the recognition of nature in the right way will also ascend to a spiritual recognition that is accessible to every human being, but especially to those educated in natural science. Therefore, I believe that the recognition of spiritual science will come precisely through the strengthening of the scientific spirit and the recognition of nature.

Dear fellow students, esteemed audience! I would very much like to stick to the topic, and since we will be talking about threefolding afterwards, I would ask that any questions relating to threefolding be deferred to later. But I do believe that it is justified to say a few words about the threefold order here, because Dr. Unger himself, in his discussions, took the threefold order as the basis for his views on the creation of technology as a free art.

In a certain sense, it cannot be maintained – I also expressed this in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, and Dr. Unger probably meant it that way – that the idea of threefolding as such, that is, the threefolding of the social organism as an idea, as a concept, is a kind of new discovery in the strict sense of the word. Rather, there may be a kind of new discovery in the social laws to which I referred in the essays of 1905. The threefold social order is actually an old idea and has been mentioned many times before in this form. The essential thing about the way in which the threefold social order is presented here and how it appears in the present is not its actual character as an idea but the position it seeks to occupy in relation to the whole social organism. The idea of structuring the life of humanity as a whole into a spiritual part, a state-legal part and an economic part has had to come up again and again. And if, here and there, someone were to claim that this is something completely new as an idea, I believe that, as I am well aware, there are bound to be claims of primacy. That is why I pointed out in the “key points” that the way the idea of threefolding appears here is something quite different.

The idea of threefolding, as it is advocated by me, for example, is the result of decades of observation of the needs of contemporary humanity. If you look at the situation with open eyes in the present day, you had to recognize as early as the end of the 19th century that things were heading for a catastrophe. And in the spring of 1914, in a series of lectures that I gave in Vienna to a small circle (a larger one would probably have laughed at me at the time because of my remarks), I pointed out that in the near future the conditions of the civilized world (I did not just say “European conditions” at the time) were heading towards a decisive catastrophe. You see, that was at a time when disaster was already very close. Nevertheless, in the following weeks, people in positions of responsibility for the course of events spoke in the following way. A statesman with responsibility, to call outstanding - of course only in the sense of what our time so often calls “outstanding” - said, when it came to discussing the general world situation in a parliament: the relations between Central Europe and Russia were in the most favorable way imaginable; one could be convinced that peace would be consolidated more and more. He could see this from the friendly neighborly relations that existed, for example, between St. Petersburg and Berlin. — So it was in May 1914, spoken of by those in positions of responsibility, after it had been necessary, as it was by me, to point out with all energy beforehand that the circumstances were pushing towards a catastrophe, and simply because the three elements of human coexistence, the spiritual, the legal and the economic, had interacted in such a way in all of social life that the catastrophe in its depths can actually only be seen in the confusion of these three areas. One could see, especially if one had an eye for it, how the increasing intellectualism of modern times affected our entire public life, how the complete devotion of people to the intellectual element, as had developed in the usual scientific mind-set, which has permeated everything else as well – one could see how this devotion to the intellectual prepared everything for the catastrophe in a certain sense. That is where the deeper reasons lie, and anyone who does not yet see them there today cannot meaningfully participate in a discussion about constructive forces.

You see, back then you could experience something like this – I'm not saying this out of immodesty, but because it seems symptomatically significant to me as my own experience – in the summer of 1914, I gave a German lecture in Paris about the things I usually talk about and, for example, also talked about yesterday. This lecture was not given for a German colony there, but was translated word for word, so it was explicitly given for the French, not for German colonists living in Paris – they were not there either. So in May 1914, with what had flowed from German spiritual life in the strictest sense — for basically it is the case that everything that is asserted here as anthroposophy has flowed from German spiritual life — one could somehow make a certain impression with it all over the world. We were at that stage in the spiritual realm. But what worked against this was, again, the economic realm. And one only has to look through it carefully to see how this disharmonious working of the spiritual life with the economic life was the primal phenomenon of all the phenomena that were preparing in the 1880s and had reached their peak at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. Of course, countless forces and currents converge there, so that it is impossible to summarize everything in a few words.

But if one wants to emphasize an important phenomenon, a fundamental phenomenon, it could be done in the way I once did in a lecture in Nuremberg in 1908. At the time, I pointed out how characteristic it is of modern social life that the personal has actually been increasingly eliminated, especially in what is called capitalism, in capitalism in general – without wanting to belittle capital in the economy , of course, you cannot conduct modern economic life without capital investments, that is, without capitalism. And the way that capitalism is often talked about today is nothing more than the purest layman or dilettante behavior. What it is about is that the capitalist essence, basically since the beginning of the 20th century, let's say – it was already prepared earlier – has become more and more impersonal and impersonal. I like to tell an anecdote here; anecdotes are sometimes indicative of what happened. When international economic life was still more dependent on personality, it once happened that the finance minister of the King of France also had to come to Rothschild in Paris because the king, for reasons you can easily imagine, had to turn to the banker. He came just at the time when Rothschild was dealing with a leather merchant. Now, capitalism leads to a certain instinctive socialism; one must realize that. Rothschild, who was very powerful and who asserted the personal element in everything he administered in a capitalist way, not the impersonal capitalist – Rothschild was therefore dealing with a leather merchant. The servant entered and announced the finance minister of the king. He should wait until I am finished, said Rothschild. The servant could not really understand this and the one who was waiting outside could not understand it at all. He thought there must be a misunderstanding. “Please say,” he sent the servant again, “the minister of the king of France is here.” Rothschild had him say again that yes, he would just have to wait. The minister did not understand this at all, he tore open the door and was inside. He said: I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France. - Fine, said Rothschild, I still have work to do, please take a chair and sit down. - Yes, but I am the Minister of the King of France! - Please take two chairs, - said Rothschild.

I tell this story so that you can see from this anecdote, too, that under capitalism something was indeed at work that lay in personal will and personal emotions. This personal element ceased to exist. What I have said is, of course, not a line of argument, just an illustration. The argument would have to be developed in a whole series of lectures. But just at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, this personal element took a turn towards the purely factual. I would like to say: forces came into play through which the capital masses moved as if by themselves. Share capital came to the fore, as opposed to individual capital, and society took the place of the influence of the individual personality. This introduced an impersonal element, so that in modern economic life man was gradually harnessed as if into an impersonal element. And in place of personal initiative came what might be called routine. It was no longer possible to develop anything other than routine in economic life. Those who study economic history will find how these things are rooted in the development of modern economic life, and how they are the things that pushed towards the terrible world catastrophe. That was now there, and so one could believe, especially at that time, that the right time had come when people could understand from their practical lives that the interaction of these three areas must be sought in an appropriate way. And that is the essential thing about the threefold social organism: not the idea as such, but the way in which, in every detail, things are thought out of the concrete, out of direct life practice. There is something thoroughly anti-utopian in this impulse of threefolding, as it appears here, something that rejects every kind of utopia, that only wants to work out of the practical side of life.

This is what is so rarely seen and what is often not given due consideration, even by adherents of the so-called threefolding idea. It happens very often that the threefold order is discussed, even by its adherents, as if it were a utopia, as if it had not emerged from what all people actually want in their fields. One need only summarize the individual wills. Most of the time people are not consciously aware of what they want, but they do want it. The subconscious plays a much greater role in social life than one might think. That is why people have repeatedly said to me: Yes, what is written in the “Key Points”, which after all underlie the impulse for threefolding that is emerging today, that is what this or that society in this or that field also wants. Another came with a different area of specialization. “That is nothing new,” they said. — ‘All the better,’ I said. ”The less something is new, the better. The more it is rooted in what people already want, the better.” What matters is that a certain understanding should arise among the individual specialized fields. And here I do believe that Dr. Unger's lecture today could be of extraordinary importance because it was inspired by the thought that ultimately what the technician wants in his field cannot be solved as a special question without turning one's gaze to the whole of social life. It is therefore of little significance when people say that the specialized ideas have already been expressed or have appeared here or there in echoes, or when they say that everything has already occurred before. Let us assume the most extreme hypothesis. Let us assume that Dr. Unger had not said anything new, but that his ideas had been expressed for decades by the most diverse technical branches and societies for my sake. But I believe that one thing must be agreed, even if this hypothesis were correct: they have not been implemented, these ideas – surely no one will claim that. Some may claim that they have been nurtured, but no one can claim that they have been implemented. Today they are questions as they were decades ago. And that is because they were treated in a specialized way, so that the technician limited himself to his circle and dealt with all special technical questions from this point of view. But things cannot be solved that way today. We not only have a world economy, we also have a world consciousness, something that encompasses the whole world and that can only be dealt with as a world issue in the economic and technical fields. The reason why a solution could not be found is that the technician was, to a certain extent, isolated. The technician was even painfully aware of this isolation because, as a modern technician, he is the most modern aspect of the personality in modern life. It can be said of the most diverse other aspects of modern life: they have their roots here and there. The modern technician is what he has become through modern technology. He represents a class in the entire social order, and his particular profession gives rise to a social context that is itself a social issue. However, this can only be treated in the context of social life as a whole. Therefore, what Dr. Unger formulated with the words “Technology as a free art” will remain a utopia as long as the connection between the special wishes and ideas of technicians and universal social ideas is not found. The technician most of all needs to acquire a universal view of social needs, and this is because he has placed himself in modern life as something new. The farmer also needs this social perspective, inasmuch as agriculture itself is being spun by technology. But as a farmer, he is ancient. But the essence of the social question must emerge most significantly from that which has emerged as something completely new in modern social development. And that is perhaps what needs to be emphasized. I do not want to go into specific questions of threefolding, which arise when one is speaking about specific questions of the technicians. The essential point is that the questions of the technicians are treated as a chapter of the great general social questions. It is not a matter of assuming, for instance, that the anthroposophical side simply wants to draw the question of the technicians into the threefolding movement from the outside. The threefolding movement would be a mere slogan if that were the intention. But slogans are not at issue here. The point is that the movement, which could also call itself something else, aims to bring the three aspects of social life into the right relationship with one another. This is in contrast to intellectualism, which seeks to throw everything into one pot , even if it then takes out of that pot, for example, the Fourteen Points, which, insofar as they were Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, truly leave nothing to be desired in terms of their intellectualism. The idea of threefold social order was first expressed by me, just when, at a terribly serious moment, the solution of the questions was once again sought not from the practice of life, but from minds, from intellectualism, with Wilson's fourteen points. Particularly abroad, one could see how these fourteen points, when they arose, addressed something pathological in humanity, and it was highly regrettable that at the most serious moment in the recent development of German history, in the fall of 1918, 1918, Central Europe even agreed to these Fourteen Points and could not see how, at the present moment, we are compelled to engage directly in practical life without any vague theories and to study things from that basis. The Fourteen Points were a utopia; further development has shown that. Humanity will have to convince itself that nothing can be achieved with such utopias, but that something can only be achieved if one engages realistically with what is there; if one is able to think out of what exists not only logically — that is easy today — but realistically.

Anthroposophy strives for this kind of thinking, which can only be grasped when, when we speak of the spirit, we do not do as that farmer did when he was shown a magnet: “Oh, nonsense, that's a horseshoe, I'll use it to shoe my horse.” That is more or less how someone who denies the spirit of this reality behaves. And there is no way around it: if someone wants to think in a realistic way, they must also address the spiritual. That is why anthroposophy is a spiritual science. And what it has in common with the deepest, most significant demands of our time is that it wants to be realistic, that it wants to be practical when it comes to practical matters, especially in the economic and technical spheres. And although everyone has or believes they have this or that different opinion – for example, that anthroposophy does not deal enough with God, which is a completely unfounded opinion, or that for some people it deals far too much with God, who are opponents from this point of view, and the same applies to the other things mentioned here, they are said from different points of view again — but everyone, even if they have different views on one or the other, if they are serious about realistically shaping our social conditions in some specialized area based on the universal thinking of the whole, will then also find points of contact with what asserts itself as the anthroposophical movement. For it does not want to be fanciful, but human. And it will be happy to join forces with anyone who understands the human element.

Dear attendees, dear fellow students! Anthroposophy can be a matter that the individual deals with in his or her own little room, so to speak, as something that touches the most intimate questions of the heart and soul, something from which one can gain the conviction that it is connected with what binds the individual, in that he experiences himself in his full individuality and personality, to the eternal, to the divine. I spoke more from this point of view yesterday. Today I would like to speak to you about the other point of view, from which anthroposophical spiritual science can be a matter of our present age. This age, which has thrown a huge number of questions to the surface from the depths of human development, and which now not only concern the individual in his quiet chamber, but which are a common, a, if one may say so, thoroughly social affair of the whole of humanity.

If we wish to examine anthroposophical striving from this point of view, then we must first give some points of view about what I would call “the signature of our time”, which particularly characterizes certain forces and currents, certain aspirations in our time. Naturally I shall not have the opportunity to characterize the details of our age, but I would like to present the main lines of those aspirations and currents, which are of course well known in the widest circles, although unfortunately their full weight is all too rarely appreciated. These lines show how the individual moves, so to speak, in our age, without particular consideration being given to the individual.

Perhaps some people found it strange, even paradoxical, when I said something yesterday that actually contradicts a great deal of what has emerged in recent human history where worldviews are intended to be shaped. I have uttered the sentence that man, when he grows up in the scientific consciousness, which has long since become the general consciousness of mankind and which has also been incorporated into certain religious views, acquires a concept of being, a feeling of the existence of himself, which he can no longer hold on to when he looks back on his own thinking in his self-reflection. I have said that man can arrive at the proposition, “I think, therefore I am not”, only through the consciousness of time — and by that I mean the consciousness of the last three to four centuries. Man cannot apply the concept of existence, which he needs to justify his scientific view of the world, to what he opens up in his thinking, especially in his intellectual life. And perhaps in the striving for a world view that began with Descartes and has infected almost all of the world view striving of modern times, one must see in the sentence “I think, therefore I am” more of a kind of rescue attempt, a search for some kind of fixed point within oneself. One must grasp the emergence of this sentence “I think, therefore I am” psychologically, one could say. And psychology could tell us: philosophers and those who follow them occupy themselves with this sentence, believe in this sentence, because it offers them a certain illusory help against sinking into non-being, [which overtakes one] when one looks into one's own inner self and has been educated in the external scientific world view for one's existence. It might even seem paradoxical to anthroposophists when this sentence is spoken by someone who, with his Philosophy of Freedom, published in the early 1890s, sought to counter the dominant philosophy of the time. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I started out from pure thinking. It might therefore appear that what was said in the past about pure thinking, by means of which the general forces of the world are grasped as if by the corner of their cloak, should today be condemned. But that is not the case. And precisely because, starting from pure thinking, one rediscovers the being of the soul, precisely for this reason, in the sense of a matter of the times, it is for anthroposophical spiritual science. But one will only arrive at an understanding of what has just been said if, in the sense I have indicated, one familiarizes oneself a little with the signature of our time, with the most important characteristic properties of this our time.

And such a property, one can say, sheds light on all the others, and follows precisely from the way in which humanity of our age approaches scientific conviction, in which one has become accustomed to in the last few centuries. My dear audience, today man is so proud to say that he has cast off the belief in authority of the past centuries, as prescribed by the religious authorities. Man today is so proud to say that he only believes in what he can grasp in his own personal being. And yet, to the discerning, it seems as if the old authoritarian belief of the confessional religions has merely jumped to another area, and this area is precisely what is called “science” in the abstract, with a great deal of vagueness but with all the more conviction. Science. — As soon as a modern man hears the word “science,” everything within him that once went in quite different directions because of the old belief in authority is stirred. Nowadays, for reasons that people in wider circles do not really understand, anything that is said to be scientifically established is an authority of much greater power than any authority ever was. How often do we hear the answer to something that arises as a question from within the human mind: “Science says this or that.” This general power, science, has taken all authority for itself today. It has taken this authority from those people who consider themselves to be at the height of their time, including with regard to questions of world view.

But what is the relationship of today's humanity to scientific authority? It has become the case that what is scientifically recognized is what everyone is believed to understand, given the way they have developed up to a certain point according to ordinary human education, the usual human education. Science should, in principle, establish nothing but what every human being, given the necessary preconditions, can affirm. Science should be something very general. Science should live in every human being in the same way. For one knows how it is received by those who, above all, cling to the authority of science when a single personality somewhere rebels against this general validity of scientific judgment. So that one could say: The ideal of a scientific world view is that it provides a set of judgments about world and human affairs that apply equally to every human being with complete uniformity. One might say that a gigantic uniformity is the ideal of this scientific conviction.

When one expresses something like this, it might at first seem trivial. In life, however, this triviality means an extraordinary amount. For with the great influence that science, especially in so far as it is based on natural scientific foundations, has gained in our time – and as I explained yesterday, rightly so in certain areas – one must assume that, where science increasingly uniforms people, it increasingly becomes the case that one person becomes just a copy of another. And indeed, if we do not take science in terms of its content, but rather in terms of what it has achieved in the most recent period of human development, we see how this uniformity, based on scientific conviction, seeks to be made a general human affair. One need only look at the terrible, destructive forces that are raging in the east of Europe today – forces whose significance here, unfortunately, is still not sufficiently appreciated in terms of their destructive power – to see how, after all, the people who today devote themselves to such forces of destruction with a certain fanaticism, actually started out from the assumption that certain teachings, which come from scientific foundations, or perhaps it would be better to say a certain state of mind that comes from these scientific foundations, should also be made the basis of social thinking. And what is striven for by this transfer of the scientific state of mind into social thinking, that great prison of humanity, where one man is supposed to be just a copy of another in the social sphere as well, as for example in Leninism or Trotskyism, there it is taken to the point of paradox, but indeed to the point of the most tragic paradox. Everywhere one looks – and I have only pointed to an extreme, a radical case – one sees, one could say, how the scientific state of mind seeks to achieve this levelling of humanity, as if it were flowing out in the developmental tendencies of our time. This is basically one of the main forces that can be found in the signature of current human development: this levelling from the perspective of theory, of thinking, of research. This is not to say anything against the justification of this research, as can be seen from my remarks yesterday. For on the ground of natural science this research is fully justified, and it has led science and technology to the great, fully justified triumphs, which I do not need to describe here.

However, this one pole of modern human development is juxtaposed with another one that is no less characteristic of the present spirituality of humanity. To the same extent that humanity strives towards this levelling out through intellect and intellectual observation of nature, to the same extent does the individual and the personal take revenge on human nature; polarities arise everywhere in the world, and here too there is an inner polarity. And we see how, in contrast to the levelling out just described, the instinctive forces of human nature come to the fore. One is tempted to say that the impulses of the will emerge from the individuality of the human being with instinctive force, right down to the animal level. While people strive towards a certain leveling with their heads, the most personal element in the human being asserts itself everywhere, that which distinguishes the individual human being from every other human being to the greatest extent. So that at the moment when we disregard the thoughts that people might have about the world in the indicated scientific sense, and move on to what people feel, what people recognize as the basis, as the impulse of their will, we can see how people completely miss each other, how the individual no longer has any kind of understanding for the other. Only in the narrowest circles is there still an understanding, often artificially cultivated, from one person to another. People do not understand each other today. We talk so much about social ideals, about artificial institutions that are supposed to bring about a social life, and this is mainly for the reason of deceiving ourselves about the elementary fact that we have actually become terribly anti-social in our instinct, in our development of will and feeling. An anti-social element runs through humanity as soon as one disregards the life of thought and looks at what actually lives in the depths of the emotional life and in the depths of the impulses of the will. This is the great controversy of our time, in which humanity is embroiled: on the one hand, it seeks to level the mind and, on the other, it develops a differentiation from the very depths of the human organization that has an incredibly anti-social effect.

This is basically the situation in which man finds himself. And from this question, which is one of the most important components in the signature of contemporary intellectual life, basically all other questions arise; basically, that is what has developed into such a terrible catastrophe in the second decade of the 20th century.

If you follow the judgments floating on the surface, how nations and people judge each other, how they assign guilt and innocence to each other, how they talk about what they want to recognize as right or wrong, then you have only a surface view of everything that is said on the surface. In the depths below, the antagonism and polarities of which I have just spoken rage.

In a certain sense, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is juxtaposed to this. It wants to become a matter for the whole human being, for the fully human being, and wants to take hold of his feelings and will. On the one hand, as I explained yesterday, it draws from sources of knowledge that learn to look into the human interior. It draws from certain abilities that can be developed beyond the everyday through the method I mentioned yesterday. From these latent powers of knowledge, dormant in ordinary life and in ordinary science, it draws out something that looks down into human nature, into those regions that are covered in ordinary life by the so necessary power of remembrance, by memory, just as the space behind a mirror is covered by the mirror. If we break through what our memory power faces, as I suggested yesterday, and develop powers of supersensible insight, then we will indeed, as I indicated yesterday, first of all gain insight into the human organs themselves in their vitality. We arrive at the point where a living medicine must search, where a living anthropology must search. But we then go beyond what we find in the present human being as the spiritual-material, to the prenatal human being, or rather to the human being as he was in the spiritual world before he entered this earthly life through conception. We arrive at a real expansion of those powers of the human soul life that would otherwise - filling the period of time that lies between a few years after our birth and our present moment - only extend to this life within our earthly existence. By breaking through memory, we attain a higher soul power, a higher power of knowledge; we attain the ability to behold the spiritual-soul essence of the human being as it was before the human being was conceived for this earthly life. And from there the current then flows, which is so difficult for today's man to think about: the current of penetrating from self-knowledge to world knowledge.

I know very well, my esteemed audience, how much paradox is found in what I have described of world knowledge in my “Occult Science”. But anyone who can find their way into this growth of a supersensible power of knowledge, into this — I would rather not use the expression at all because it is so often misused today — into this true, genuine clairvoyance, will find how what is otherwise only given for a small span of time in the ability to remember expands, how it expands into a power of knowledge of the world.

What is presented here – of course, people always say that it should be proven. But those who constantly speak of proving at every opportunity have never familiarized themselves with the nature of proving itself. Only what is at least suspected as a fact can be proven. All other so-called proving is a dialectical playing with concepts, a piling up of concept upon concept. And humanity only succumbs to great illusions when it comes to this kind of proof, which is so often demanded; this is not to object to justified proof, of course. The anthroposophical researcher simply has to point out what arises when the cognitive faculty is expanded in the way indicated. And I would like to suggest what happens in the following way.

If we look at our ordinary, earthly memory, we can say that this memory, together with all the experiences we have gone through from a certain point in our earthly existence, forms us. These experiences are initially mostly in the subconscious of the human organization at the present moment. We either bring them up voluntarily or they drift up into consciousness by their own power. Memories emerge from the stream of experiences we have gone through. And the possibility of remembering must be continuous in order for our soul life, our soul condition, to be a healthy one. We as human beings, by having this possibility of remembering, not only stand within ourselves, but we are also connected with everything with which we are connected through experiences in the outer life. Through our healthy reflection, we can already find out the difference between the image that emerges today as an after-experience in our memory, and that intense, saturated experience that was once there, that lives in our memory, the memory of which has remained with us from what had united us with the world. When we had an experience, we were involved in it as human beings; we were connected to the objects; the objects poured their essence into our personality. Everything that was experienced intensely, that we went through with the outside world, with nature or with other people, was transformed into images, and from these images we conjure up the experience again. Why can we conjure up what we have experienced in the present? Because we were once connected to it as human beings, because we were one with the outside world during the experience.

If you take a look at what anthroposophical spiritual science has achieved in the most diverse fields of knowledge, you will realize how, in everyday life, we only ever see part of what we are. We must indeed expand our powers of knowledge if we want to look down into our own inner being. Take just what I have already said: that when we break through our ordinary powers of remembrance, we first look down into the living context of our organization, and then, through the organization, we look beyond into the forces within which we lived in a purely spiritual and soul existence before our earthly existence. Man's entire being is connected with the entire existence of the world. And just as he, as a human being, who is enclosed between birth and death, is only connected with what he has enjoyed or experienced together with the world in the characterized way, so he is connected with the entire human development of the earth and also with the development of the earth itself, through what one then discovers through further research within oneself. It is nothing less than an overcoming, a breaking through of memory, and a re-emergence of memory power on a higher level. By overcoming the power of memory on a small scale, which preserves our earthly experiences, we arrive at a higher level of a new power of memory, through which we can develop images of the destinies that the earth itself has gone through in other planetary forms, as I have described in my “Occult Science”. And just as we conjure up in pictorial form what we have experienced since our birth through our everyday memory, so, if we get to know the whole human being through spiritual science, we can conjure up what the whole human organization has been through, what it was connected with: the entire development of the world. For the human being is a microcosm. We are not dealing with a different world from the one with which we ourselves were connected. This is what I have shown in my “Occult Science”.

Thus we see, my dear audience, how anthroposophical spiritual science becomes an expansion of human consciousness. We see how, by descending into the depths of the human being, we simultaneously ascend into the objective evolution of the world. To the same extent that we momentarily renounce the ordinary inner life, we enter into this inner life that would otherwise have remained the objective outer life. In the same moment that one submerges into the regions that are otherwise withdrawn from consciousness, one emerges into those regions that have formed us as objective beings, as human beings, out of the entire cosmos. This is the only way that the world knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to provide can come about.

In view of the present situation, as I have characterized it, the objection of the modern human being to such world knowledge is: Yes, but there one enters a region in which subjectivity can assert itself in any arbitrary way. And it is always pointed out with a certain sense of well-being, one might say, by certain people that the most diverse spiritual researchers who were already there have given account in the most diverse ways of what they have seen in the universe. However, this diversity is mainly emphasized by those who have not really dealt with what is said by the most diverse spiritual researchers in an intimate way. Just as it seems understandable that a tree looks different when photographed from different sides – and that an overall picture of the tree is actually only formed in an external way when the tree is photographed from four or six sides, and these photographs are then viewed together – it should also be quite understandable that a person who applies the spiritual-scientific method to his own soul life naturally starts from his subjective point of view, but that as he advances in his research, the point of view from which he stands will surely become apparent. And just as photographing a tree from a certain side is objectively [correct], so too can the description of a spiritual scientist be objectively [correct] - even though it reads differently from that of another who has started from a different point of view. It will be noted, however, that the Anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have to represent, always endeavors to characterize that which is characterized from the most diverse sides, and that in this way it is to be compensated in a certain way for what can become one-sided through the description of only one point of view, which can occur when someone takes my books and compares them with each other in an abstract way and then says: Yes, this is what it says about one thing and that is what it says about another. This can easily be taken out of context and made to look like contradictions. But this arises from nothing other than the effort to describe things from the most diverse points of view, so that precisely through these particular turns of phrase in anthroposophical spiritual science a kind of comprehensiveness can be achieved.

Those who become thoroughly acquainted with what is sought and found on the inner path will be able to realize more and more clearly how an inner capacity develops there that is actually similar to what man has in the mathematical state of mind. It is the same in mathematics, where we have something that gives us a certain soul content that is derived entirely from the inner being. For mathematics is derived entirely from the inner being; we know that a mathematical truth is true when we have grasped it inwardly, even if millions of people say otherwise. What takes place in the soul when we know how to grasp a mathematical truth, which is both inward and outward at the same time, takes place in a similar way when we come to the inwardly objective through the subjective, which can really be present to us in anthroposophical spiritual science. Only the beginning of the research path is subjective, but the true anthroposophist remains silent about this. What then arises after the subjective idiosyncrasies of the researcher have been overcome is thoroughly objective, and one can speak of it as of an external observation made through the senses or also through the scales or with the measuring rod; just as one can speak of mathematical findings, only that these are formal, while the findings made through spiritual science are substantive.

This shows, however, that this anthroposophical spiritual science is above all concerned with speaking directly to the human being. That is also its task. While present-day science strives for standardization, in a sense strives to make one human being an imitation of another, anthroposophical spiritual science cannot but speak to each human being as to an individuality. This, I might say, is the direct social trust that one acquires in working for this anthroposophical spiritual science, that one does not want to put forward something that, because one has researched it, should now apply to all people, but through which one only wants to appeal to people by saying: one has researched the content of anthroposophical spiritual science oneself. But this content is the true content of human nature. When I speak to individuals, I do so in such a way that I do not speak to them in a generalizing way, but address each one as an individuality. I count on the fact that, because man is man, because human beings have the same soul, spirit and body, related strings will resonate, and what is struck by one person will come back from the innermost being in an individual way. One does not speak to people through anthroposophy as one otherwise does in science, as if one were seeking followers for something that has now been established. Rather, one speaks through anthroposophy in such a way that you appeal to the inner being of each individual and say: If you look into your own inner being, you will discover in this way in your own being that which I want to communicate to you because I have researched it. The way of speaking from person to person about spiritual science, all kinds of teaching, takes on a different tone, a different attitude, by wrapping the messages in formulas of anthroposophical spiritual science. This is what is effective in anthroposophical spiritual science against the signature of our time, as I have described it: that which, in turn, appeals from thinking, but from thinking from the fully human being, appeals at the same time to every single human being. The opposite of this is what is striven for in levelling. The individualization of the human being through knowledge and the development of the content of a worldview is striven for. This content of anthroposophical spiritual science is intended to be the most subjective and at the same time the most objective, the most personal and at the same time the most generally valid content of human scientific endeavor. Contemporary humanity needs this contrast to levelling. What I have described to you, which is basically an anti-social element, because it asserts itself as the opposite pole, arises from this leveling: the lack of understanding of one human being towards another. From anthroposophical spiritual science, loving understanding of one person towards another should arise; and above all, not only a general knowledge of human nature, a general anthroposophy, will come, but through what this general anthroposophy and world knowledge will be, a state of mind will be stimulated that in turn also includes loving understanding for every single peculiarity of our fellow human being.

A social life cannot be founded if it is not founded on the deepest, most sacred roots of human existence itself; but for the present phase of human development, these are the individual roots, as I indicated yesterday. Therefore, spiritual science will essentially give this other slant to the spiritual signature of the present time, which we need so urgently.

This means, however, that the other pole, which had to be characterized with reference to the signature of the present, will also take on a different character. In practical life, something will happen that is not an anti-social element, but a social element. This anti-social element, where does it actually come from? It comes from the fact that, precisely because head culture has reached a high point, the instincts of human nature prevail and take hold of feeling and will. What anthroposophical knowledge is shines into feeling and into will; it does not blunt the elemental power of feeling and will, as people so easily believe; it does not take away people's original naivety. No, when anything beautiful is illuminated, it does not lose its peculiarity, but it comes out even more. That which lies in the depths of human nature does not become duller when it is illuminated anthroposophically, but it is unfolded in just the right way, without the person having to suffer from today's disease, nervousness. Thought, in turn, shines into feeling; feeling takes hold of it, and by shining into feeling with thought, the “I think, therefore I am not”, the “I am only in the picture by thinking” — thinking is transformed into being. And only by immersing ourselves in the realm of the will, which is otherwise only experienced in sleep — for in ordinary cognition, what does man know of the relationship that exists between a thought that is to lead to the will and the raising of the hand? By means of this thinking, which delves spiritually into this volition, there develops what might be called the path leading from one human being to another in the clear light of spiritual knowledge. Humanity can only become a social whole if feelings and volitional impulses are illuminated, not by abstract, intellectualistic knowledge, but by higher vision. And it is through this infusion of higher vision that a true social science, a social ethics, will arise. It is precisely such a social ethics that my book The Philosophy of Freedom seeks to provide. There I showed that man can only feel free if he develops an impulse for action, for willing, out of purest thinking. Man could never feel free if he had to draw impulses of the will from any other basis. If we stand before a mirror and merely have an image before us – the comparison is more than a mere comparison – then this image cannot force us. If something pushes me, then I am forced by causality. If I look at the image, I cannot be forced; the image has no power in itself to force me. If I grasp my volitional impulses in the pure pictorial thought, then these pictorial thoughts have no causal power, no momentum. By recognizing the pictorial quality of thinking, one recognizes how, in pure thinking, free will is truly absorbed, so that the impulses for free action can only be found in the most individual part of the human being. But it is precisely through the will entering into this pure thinking, which is initially an image for us, and the will entering in, as is the case with loving social action or with higher supersensible knowledge, as you can see in the explanations in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, that otherwise pure thinking is filled with what is man's very own eternal being. And the first clairvoyance, ladies and gentlemen, is already there when a free decision of the will flashes through the mind. And basically all that I then give as a method for ascending to the highest spiritual worlds is nothing other than a metamorphosed formulation of what I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as underlying free will. When one recognizes how, in this pure thinking permeated by the will, there is something in which man can grasp world events as if at a corner, then one also gradually learns to see how one can expand this state of mind, which otherwise only exists in the free action of man, in the way described yesterday, and how one can thereby come to supersensible knowledge. If man wants to know himself as a free being, he must begin with this true supersensible vision, otherwise freedom will always be something impossible for him. Freedom is also irreconcilable with natural causality — not even for a Kantian or for someone who at least claims to be one. And there is no other way to harmonize natural causality and human freedom than to see things as I have just described.

But then something else is established. What I have described in my Philosophy of Freedom as the basis of social will has been much, much misunderstood. People have objected: How are people supposed to work together in the social organism if everyone only follows the inner impulses of their individual being? — But that is not the point at all. The point is that through a real, genuine, true spiritual development of the human being, what I would call real social trust can be cultivated. A dignified existence in social life is only possible if we are not forced to act from the outside by commandments or other means, but if we are free to act from the innermost urge of our being. But then we must be able to develop this great trust in the other person, the trust that he will gradually come to act from the innermost urge of his human nature as well. And as man progresses to the innermost part of his nature and gradually such an understanding develops from one to the other, a social ethic, a social organism, will be able to arise out of the individual shaping of the individual will through full mutual trust. - So what conscious trust is depends on what, in the sense of man's striving today, can only be seen as social will.

One can best see how anthroposophical spiritual science relates to the current signature of spiritual life by looking at what has gradually become of the religious conception of humanity from the underground movements that I have just characterized. Spiritual science is repeatedly attacked from this very quarter, with the accusation that spiritual science seeks to enter the supersensible worlds through knowledge, but that precisely in this, it is said, the essence of religious life consists: that one does not know that in which one has trust as a divine world order, that one therefore has a merely subjective trust. So, according to this, the essence of religion would consist precisely in developing a mere belief in it, and in excluding the certainty of knowledge. But my dear audience, this certainty of faith, which is identical with what we might call trust, cannot be established in the religious life by anyone who honestly reflects on these matters, except through what follows from a truly supersensible knowledge. A historical consideration could teach humanity this. Where do today's people, who rebel against anthroposophy in the manner indicated, take their religious trust from? Is it something truly elementary? That is a mere illusion. It is the remnants of the historical religions. They are the remnants of what has developed in history as the historical religions. In the sense of anthroposophical spiritual science, these religions have their full justification, and their ultimate height, through which the development of the earth has received its true meaning, has received its highest height in Christianity. Christianity contains what can be regarded as the original religion, the last form of religion to which humanity has been able to ascend, and which must continue to be the one for the rest of humanity's time. Anthroposophical spiritual science not only does not touch Christianity, but it is the first to establish it in a deeper sense. But on the other hand, it must be said: where did religions get their content from? They got it — this can be historically proven — from spiritual visions, albeit from ancient instinctive spiritual visions. Religions have acquired their supersensible content from ancient instinctive visions in no other way than that which spiritual science in anthroposophical orientation now seeks to show scientifically. This content has been handed down and is to be found in scripture and tradition. Religions would have no content if there had not once been instinctive supersensible visions of human beings. From this, and from many other things, it can be seen how wrong it is to say that the anthroposophical side should not point the way to the supersensible worlds, for the supersensible worlds must be preserved for the religions precisely as the distant unknown, to which one cannot come through knowledge, but only through naive trust and belief. The value of religions will reveal itself when it is illuminated by the light of knowledge. Those who believe that the greatness and significance of Christianity could be affected by any kind of spiritual-scientific discovery are fundamentally weak Christians. In my opinion, those who believe that one should not approach Christianity with any kind of science because it could suffer from it are weak Christians. Just as there is nothing about America in the Gospels, but America must be accepted as a reality, so must the repeated lives on earth be accepted, even though the Gospels say nothing about them.

This is what makes anthroposophy a matter of time, out of a certain state of mind. I have presented this in my “Riddles of Philosophy”, where I have shown how the individual philosophical views up to the present day tend to converge into the anthroposophical view. So that in fact from the signature of the spiritual present one can read how one can ascend to the anthroposophical worldview.

I would now like to sketch this signature of the spiritual present for you with a few strokes, from anthroposophy itself, so that you can see that the one who stands on the ground of anthroposophy does not shy away from to communicate the results of his research, which he has explored along the path I have described to you, and which are as certain to him as the results of astronomy, physiology, biology, and botany.

If we look back over a relatively short span of human development with an anthroposophically sharpened eye, we find, for example, that we cannot understand Greek culture. In the previous lecture, Dr. Heyer pointed out how human consciousness has changed in the course of historical development. In order to substantiate this purely empirically, we need only look at the special nature of the Greek consciousness. Herman Grimm, who, although challenged in many respects, had retained the keen eye of a historical observer for such things, pointed out our relationship to the Greeks with the following sharp words. He said: What the Romans have experienced, how a Caesar, a Brutus has lived, that we can understand. Our elements of consciousness have not changed so much since then that we could not understand that. What is told to us by Alcibiades, by Pericles, by Plato, by Sophocles, people only imagine they understand if they remain on the standpoint of today's understanding of humanity. The figures of Pericles and Alcibiades, who only emerge shadow-like before the ordinary ideas of humanity, are actually like fairy-tale heroes. Herman Grimm sees fairy-tale figures throughout Greek history. Spiritual science is called upon to bring about what can expand consciousness, so that one can truly change one's inner soul state, so that one can in turn stand within this particular inner experience of the Greeks. And here we must say: this experience of the Greeks was based on a historical law, the full extent of which is only now being recognized by anthroposophical spiritual science. It is the law that I will now characterize in the following way.

The further we go back in human development, to Greek, Egyptian, Persian and Indian cultures and prehistoric times, the more we find that the entire human constitution is actually different. We see today that in childhood life develops in such a way that the soul life is bound to a high degree to the bodily organization. Take my little book The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy or other things I have said about education, and you will see how, with the change of teeth in the seventh or eighth year, the whole soul constitution of the child changes. And from ordinary life we know how the whole soul constitution of a human being changes when he reaches sexual maturity. It is less noticeable that similar changes take place at the beginning and the end of the twenties; these take place more inwardly, but they are quite clearly still present even for the modern human being. When we come to the later years, to the thirties, the soul and spiritual life of the human being becomes highly independent of the physical. We enter a stage of our development in which we change our soul through external experience, through being with the world. We no longer change our soul through what happens in us in such a way as the change of teeth, sexual maturity, or the changes after the age of twenty. But what extends in us more during the youthful years until the end of the twenties, in ancient times extended up to the high age of man. This law is a historical law. This can be observed by those who have acquired the ability to observe the inner soul life, which shows us, in the remnants that still occur today in old people, that such a development was once present. If we know this, then we can look back, for example, to the ancient Indian times, to times that lead into prehistory, where man's soul and spiritual life was dependent on physical development up to the fifties. One became a patriarch at the same time through physical development and in spiritual development, just as today one becomes a sexually mature person both physically and spiritually. This harmony of the physical with the soul-spiritual went up into old age in ancient times. In those ancient times, man also experienced the descending line of physical development, which begins around the age of 35. Until then, our organism grows and sprouts; from then on, it goes downhill, from then on, there is a descending development. Today, we do not go through this descending development in the same way; we are certainly weighed down by old age, but that is different from what it was in ancient times. In ancient times, as the external physical body became stiffer and drier, there was a simultaneous bright illumination of spirituality, so that in the patriarchal age one grew into a certain spirituality through natural development. What was still present in older times for older ages was still present for the Greeks until their mid-thirties. What the Greeks still went through until about the age of 35, we as human beings in our thirties simply no longer go through and therefore no longer radiate it into our social lives. This brought into the whole social life of the Greeks what, for example, Goethe felt when he was driven by longing in Italy to relive Greek culture and where he said: But when I look at these Greek works of art and see how the Greeks, in creating their works of art, followed the same laws that Nature herself follows in creating her works of nature, then I feel necessity, then I feel God. The Greeks were only able to reproduce the laws of nature in their works of art by feeling themselves in the harmonization of the spiritual and mental and the physical and bodily, which occurs when a person reaches the middle of their life in full, physical development. They were only able to do this in their most excellent exemplars [...] because they were able to experience this themselves. From this organization of body and soul there arose the Greek way of artistic creation, the Greek way of religious feeling, and also the Greek way of thinking in medicine. That was the signature of the spiritual life in humanity, which simply arose from the fact that in the thirties what I have described was experienced. One could say: Just as the equilibrium of the balance-beam is experienced in the middle of the beam, so the Greeks experienced the equilibrium of human life in that they still grasped the interplay of soul and spirit into the middle of their thirties. We no longer grasp it. If I am to continue in the same vein, we only achieve physical development that still has an influence on the soul until the end of our twenties in today's age. As a result, in our later years, what arises from the depths of human nature and permeates the world view ceases. But this has also brought about the necessity that what no longer develops naturally in humanity after the age of 28 must be consciously achieved through anthroposophical spiritual education, that what used to arise from human nature itself must now actually be inwardly achieved by the soul. This has become the signature of our time: we only live within the physical realm in our younger years. This is what has now also, and in fact - now I may say it without being misunderstood - legitimately led into materialism. For the child, in looking at itself, must be materialistic, because spirituality first breaks away from matter. We have become materialistic as humanity in the newer centuries to the extent that we are bound to the age that is in the ascending material, organic development, and the less we still receive from nature in the descending development after the age of 35.

This is the signature of our time. It has led us into materialism, as we as humanity have abandoned ourselves to unconscious forces in the last few centuries.

What anthroposophical spiritual science wants is for us to receive from the spirit what nature no longer gives us, just as naively as we used to receive it from nature, to develop the courage to receive from the spiritual realm what we can no longer receive from the natural realm. The spiritual signature of our time points out to us the necessity of developing our full humanity, which we can no longer obtain from nature, out of spiritual, free will activity. This does not establish a decadence. No, decadence is established precisely by the fact that in a time that demands the spirit, one only wants to abandon oneself to nature. Materialism has emerged as a necessary phenomenon. Overcoming materialism must likewise occur as a necessary phenomenon. Anthroposophical spiritual science believes it can read this from the signs of the times, from the signature of the times. From this consciousness of the world and humanity, it wants to have an effect.

People who have delved a little deeper into the signature of our time and who have spoken out in recent times have basically only ever pointed out in a negative way what forces of decline are at work in our time and what must basically be the case if we consider the development of the human race that we have just characterized. There is no need to refer to Spengler, who is much referred to today, but one can refer to one of our best philosophers, Gideon Spicker, who wrote his work out of a broad-minded consciousness and who repeatedly pointed out how man in our time can no longer create the connecting bridge to that which, in full consciousness, gives him his true humanity, that which in turn connects him to the eternal, that which allows him to be permeated by the divine-eternal. And Gideon Spicker spoke words worth heeding in 1909, in which he described the signature of our time in his own way. He said: We have come to have metaphysics without supersensible conviction; a theory of knowledge without objective meaning; a logic without content, a psychology without soul, an ethic without commitment and a religion without reason. —

Now, my dear attendees, dear fellow students. Anthroposophy wants to give people a theory of knowledge again that leads to reality, because reality is both material and spiritual. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to give people a real conviction of the supersensible world by showing the way to see this world. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to establish a logic that in turn delves into the reality of things. Anthroposophical spiritual science wants to speak of a soul life as reality, not just of the soul life that we interpret pictorially from the scientific results of anthropology. Anthroposophical spiritual science aims to create a binding social ethic from the foundations of humanity. And anthroposophical spiritual science aims to provide a religious conviction that is based on knowledge, on the vision of that which must exist in religious life as the divine existence.

In this way, anthroposophical spiritual science aims to have an effect on the signature of our time, but not because it arises from some utopian sense or arbitrary decision, but because it appears necessary in the most essential sense for our age to those who are now able to observe the greatest need and deepest longing of our time.

Question: The principle of direct observation [in teaching] has been rediscovered in recent times. Now it turns out that when the child leaves school, they are helpless when it comes to thinking about life. They have been so taken by direct observation that they can only see the picture.

Rudolf Steiner: This is an extraordinarily important pedagogical question of the present day, the question of the concreteness or the exclusive concreteness of teaching. Now perhaps this question is not so specialized, but can only be treated exhaustively by looking at pedagogical thinking as a whole. I would like to mention first of all that teaching in the Waldorf school is based on our knowledge of human development. It is certainly not the case that the Waldorf school is a school of world view, but the educational skill, the educational methodology, the educational handling of things that can be achieved from an anthroposophical state of mind should be put into practice to benefit the Waldorf school. In this practical respect, the insight that children up to about the age of six or seven imitate everything plays a major role. Children continue to imitate up to this age. This means that at this age, at kindergarten age, one should not actually teach in the usual sense, but should rely on the child's ability to imitate. You see, when you have been dealing with such things for decades, as I had to, you gain all kinds of experience. People come to you and ask about all sorts of things. Once a father came to me, very unhappy, and said: What should we do, our boy, who has always been a good boy, has stolen. — I asked the father: How old is the boy? - Four to five years. – Then, I said, we must first examine whether he really stole. – The examination showed that he had not stolen at all, the little boy, even though he had taken money from a drawer. He had only seen every day that his mother gave money to the delivery people from her drawer. He thought: if that's how my mother does it, then it must be right – and he simply took money from the drawer too. He bought sweets, but did not eat them himself, but gave them away. The child was simply an imitator, according to his age. What he did was simply an act of imitation. The point is that you don't actually lead children of this age to believe anything that they are not allowed to imitate. Then begins the age of life that starts with the change of teeth and ends with sexual maturity, which is the actual elementary school age. This elementary school age simply demands – what is demanded today from some party lines must be set aside, the factual must be placed in the foreground – this age demands that the child learns to understand and act on the basis of authority. It is of the greatest importance for the whole of later life, especially for the education of the young for later difficult times and for everything that may happen in life, that the child at this age, from about seven to fourteen years, accepts something on the basis of authority. This relationship of a natural authority of the teacher and educator to the child is something that cannot be replaced by anything else for the human being in his or her whole later life. It would be easy to find proof of what cannot be replaced later in life if one has not had the good fortune to have a natural authority in one's life.

And so it is at this age that the question of object lessons arises. The object lessons that are demanded today have grown out of materialism in their extreme form. Everything is simply placed before the eye. They believe in nothing but what is before their eyes; so everything should be placed before the child. But not only the difficulties you have emphasized arise, but also others that arise on the part of the teachers. Take the auxiliary books written for teachers, in which instructions are given for visual instruction. The banalities and trivialities that are served up there are nothing short of monstrosities. There is an instinctive constant striving to push everything to the lowest possible level. This is the kind of visual instruction in which you teach the child nothing more than what he already knows. This is the worst possible teaching, which provides insight in this way. The best teaching is that which not only caters for childhood, but for the whole of a person's life. If life is not such that one still has something to gain from one's time sitting at school in one's forties or fifties, then the teaching was bad. One must be able to look back on one's school lessons in such a way that there are living forces in this reminiscing. We also grow, of course, as our limbs become larger and many other things within us are also transformed; everything about us grows. When we teach children concepts, ideas and views that do not grow, that remain, and on which we place great emphasis, we are violating the principle of growth. We must present things to the child in such a way that they are placed in the context of living growth. We cannot do this with trite, banal object lessons, but rather when we as educators face the child, imponderables come into play. I very often use an example like this: let us assume that we want to teach the child a concept - one that can be understood purely from the knowledge of the psychology of the child at a certain age -: the concept of immortality. One can make this tangible through natural processes, for example, through the transformation of a butterfly from a chrysalis. One can say: the immortal soul in man is contained in it, like the butterfly in the chrysalis, only that it develops in a spiritual world, just as the butterfly develops from the chrysalis. This is an image. One can teach this image to the child in two different ways. The first is this: one imagines, “I am the teacher, I am tremendously clever; the child is young and terribly stupid.” So I set up this symbol for the child to represent this concept. Of course I have long since outgrown this, but in this way the child is to grasp the immortality of the soul. Now I am explaining this in an intellectualistic way. This is not the way to teach a child; not because what I have said is wrong, but because I am not attuned to the child in the right way. When I immerse myself in anthroposophical spiritual science, it is not an image that makes me feel smarter than the child, but a truth. Nature itself has created the butterfly that emerges from the chrysalis at a lower level, and the passage through the gate of death at a higher level. If I bring what is so vividly alive in me to the child, then the child will benefit from it. You can't just say that something should be done in a certain way; instead, it depends on imponderables, on a certain state of mind that you yourself have as a teacher – that is what is important. Difficulties arise when one stops at the flat illustrative teaching, which is becoming more and more impersonal; at the age when the teacher should play the important role as a self-evident authority, he withdraws. There are, for example, certain things that should simply be handed down to the child on the authority of an adult. Not everything can be taught to the child on the basis of direct experience — for example, moral concepts: here one cannot start from direct experience, nor from mere commandments; these can only be conveyed to the child through the authority of an adult. And it is one of the most significant experiences one can have in later life, when one has absorbed something in the eighth, ninth, or twelfth year because a revered personality regards it as correct. This relationship to a revered personality is one of the imponderables of . You reach the age of thirty, and with a certain experience it comes up from the depths of human consciousness; now you understand something that you actually took in twenty or thirty years ago, at that time on authority. This means something tremendous in life. This is in fact a living growth of what one has taken in during childhood. That is why all this discussion about more or less intuition is not so important. These things must arise out of the object itself. Even the discussion about more or less thinking and so on is not very important. The important thing is that teachers are put in their rightful place, that the human element is brought together in the right way in a school organization. That is the main goal. You can't do anything with curricula or anything that can be formulated in paragraphs in real life – and teaching and educational life is real life. Because if three or six or twelve people sit down together, regardless of their antecedents, from which circle, from which education they come, they will be able to work out an ideally beautiful curriculum. If you somehow put something together in paragraphs out of reflection, it can become ideally beautiful, the most wonderful things can be in it. I am not mocking, it does not have to be bad, it can be extraordinarily beautiful and magnificent, but that is not the point. The point is that in the school, which has a number of teachers, real life takes place; each of these teachers has their own special abilities, that is the real thing, and that is what has to be worked with. What use is it if the teacher can see: this and this is the teaching goal? - That is just an abstraction. What he can be to the children as a personality, by the fact that he stands in a certain way in the world, that is what matters.

The question of schooling in our time is essentially a question of the teacher, and from this point of view all the more detailed questions, such as the question of practical instruction and the like, should be treated. Can children, for example, be taught in a very extreme way through visual instruction? I must say that I feel a slight horror when I see these tortures with the calculating machines in a class, where they even want to transform things that should be cultivated in a completely different way into visual instruction. If you just want to continue with pure visual instruction, you will, of course, end up with clumsy children. This is the result of unbiased observation. It has nothing to do with phenomenology, with phenomenalism: in order to develop proper phenomenalism, you first have to be able to think properly. At school, you are dealing with pedagogical methodology, not with scientific methodology. But one must know how closely proper thinking is connected not only with the brain and the mind of the person, but with the whole person. It depends on the way in which someone has learned to think, on the skill in the fingers. For in reality, man thinks with his whole body. It is only believed today that he thinks with the nervous system; in reality he thinks with the whole organism. And the reverse is also true: if one can teach a child quick thinking in the right way, and even presence of mind to a certain extent in a natural way, one is working for physical dexterity; and if one carries this quickness of thinking to the point of physicality, then the children's dexterity also comes to one's aid. What we have now established in the Waldorf school is much more important: instead of the usual visual instruction in manual skills, the children move on to self-forming, through which they get a sense of the artistic design of the surface. This then leads in turn to the mathematical conception of the surface in later years. This living into the subject matter, not through mere visual instruction for the senses, but through a living together with the whole environment, which is achieved for the whole human being, is what we must work towards.

I just wanted to point out that such questions should be placed in the context of pedagogical thinking as a whole, and that today we spend far too much time discussing specifics.

Rudolf Steiner (in response to other questions): What has been said and often emphasized must be noted: the Waldorf School does not want to be a world view school as such. The fact that it is based on anthroposophical soul-condition is only the case insofar as it is implemented in educational practice. Thus, what is at issue in the Waldorf School is the development of what can be achieved through the anthroposophical movement by purely pedagogical means. The Waldorf School does not want to be, and cannot be, a school of world view in any sense. That is why the Waldorf School has never claimed the right to provide religious instruction for the children in its care. What individual anthroposophists believe about worldviews is not the point. The important thing is that anthroposophy in schools and all that goes with it is intended to have an effect only in the pedagogical practice. For this reason, the religious education of the Catholic children was handed over to the Catholic priest and that of the Protestant children to the Protestant pastor. Now it turned out – this simply came about due to the current circumstances – that there were quite a lot of dissident children who would actually have grown up without religion. For these children, religious education is now provided, but it is not considered part of the school, rather it is presented as free religious education alongside Protestant and Catholic religious education. We have at least had the success that children who would otherwise not have been admitted to any religious education at all now grow up with a religious life as a result. This is a free religious education that is taught by someone who understands it and is called to do so, like the others who teach Catholic and Protestant religion. However, it must be strictly maintained that the intentions of the Waldorf School are not to promote any particular world view. The aim is not to indoctrinate children with anthroposophy but to apply anthroposophy in practice. So questions on this topic are irrelevant. At the beginning we had to find an appropriate approach to what follows from practice. We have our views about how a seven-, eight- or nine-year-old child should be taught, and these are appropriate. We believed that we had to decide these things on the basis of purely objective principles. Now, of course, the Waldorf school is not an institution for hermits or sects, but an institution that wants to fully engage with life, that wants to make capable people out of children for the sake of contemporary, very practical life. Therefore, it is important to organize the lessons in such a way that, on the one hand, the strict pedagogical requirements are met, and on the other hand, it is important that the Waldorf school is not just any institution for eccentrics. I then worked out the matter in such a way that from the time of entering school until the completion of the third class, you have an absolutely free hand in the individual years, but by the time they have completed the third class, the children are ready to transfer to any school. From the ninth to the twelfth year, you again have a free hand, and then the child must be ready to transfer to any other school, and the same applies when they have completed primary school. We are currently setting up one class each year; what happens next remains to be seen.

As you can see, it is not a matter of working from party-political views, worldviews or anything like that, but purely of putting anthroposophy into pedagogical practice. The ideal would be that the children initially — because Anthroposophy is only developed for adults, we have no children's teaching, and have not yet been in a position to want to have one — would not know that there is an Anthroposophy, but that they would be kept objective and thus placed in life. These things cannot be achieved in the ideal: no matter how hard the teacher tries to remain objective, one child will live in the circle of these parents, the other in the circle of those parents; there are also anthroposophical fanatics, and their children bring anthroposophical mischief into the school, as well as all kinds of other things. It must be made absolutely clear that it can never be a question of the Waldorf School in any way being a school of world view or anything of the sort. It is not that at all, but it wants to make children into capable people in the immediate present, that is, in the life in which we are placed within the state and everything else, so that they are capable within it. It is self-evident that the Waldorf school does not bring the ideas of threefolding into the school. This cannot happen through the efforts of Waldorf education. No party politics are brought into the Waldorf school from the anthroposophical side.

Question: Isn't the methodology that the pastor uses somewhat opposed to the rest of the teaching? Isn't there a conflict here?

Rudolf Steiner: You can't achieve anything completely in life. It would be very nice if we could find not only a Protestant pastor but also a Catholic one who would teach according to our methodology. As I said, our school only wants to put pedagogical practice into practice, not a worldview. The other can go hand in hand with this. Now it is self-evident that in free religious education — because after such, only by anthroposophists to be held, was asked —, also after our methodology is proceeded. It would be very dear to us if the Protestant and Catholic lessons were also given in this way, but we have not yet achieved that.

Question: What is the content of the material taught to anthroposophical children?

Rudolf Steiner: The material is determined in such a way that an attempt is made to take the child's age into account. This is what is always at the psychological basis. That is why it is important in all things that they are most effectively brought to the child when they are introduced at exactly the right age, when the child's inner being resonates most strongly with them. It is a fact that in the seventh or eighth year of life, little is achieved with objective gospel or Bible knowledge, and nothing at all with catechism knowledge. It is not absorbed by the child. This is an anthropological law. On the other hand, everything religious that can be directly formed from a certain shaping of natural processes is very well absorbed by the child at this age; all ethical and genuinely religious concepts that can be formed from natural processes. Above all, one can lead the child to religious feeling indirectly through images of nature. One can only lead the child to the actual Christian feeling from the age of eight, or even from the age of nine. It is only then that they begin to grasp what lies behind the figure of Christ Jesus, for example. These are the concepts that one must teach the child if they are to grasp the content of the Gospels. It is good if it has a foundation and is only introduced to the content of the Gospels around the age of nine, and then gradually led up to the deeper mysteries of Christianity. It must be emphasized that this free religious education is, in the most eminent sense, a thoroughly Christian one, in that the various denominations that take part in it are introduced to a real Christianity. It is the case that if you are a teacher at the Waldorf School, you have come to this [Christian] conviction yourself, from an anthroposophical point of view. You have entered into Christianity from this side. You might phrase it differently, but the children are introduced to a real Christianity. Just as we leave the Protestant and Catholic religious education to their own devices, we also leave the free religious education based on anthroposophy to its own devices. It has never been my intention to ensure that children come to this free religious education. They came in large numbers, but it is really not the aim to damage the external reputation of the school by making it happen in such a way that it could be said to be a school of world view. One does not want to be that at first. That is why we are careful about free religious education and only give it because it is requested.

I do not want to give a lecture in response to the remarks of the esteemed Mr. Strakosch, but please take what I am about to say only as a supplementary comment. Nor should it be taken as something conclusive in any sense.

When I was recently given the task of supervising the construction of the Dornach building, a saying kept ringing in my ears that I had heard when I was studying at the Technical University in Vienna and during that time the builder of the Votive Church in Vienna, the famous architect Ferstel, took up the post of rector at this university. He delivered his inaugural address on the history of architecture. Ferstel said something like this during his speech: architectural styles cannot be invented, they must emerge from the foundations of nationality. On the basis of this view, Ferstel explained the fact that the modern period could be less productive in terms of architectural styles because the folk soul, so to speak, did not bring anything like styles to the surface, and that it could only be more reproductive, which is why people resorted to ancient, to posophie talk, you can make anything out of these mystical foundations. You can do the craziest stuff. But anthroposophy is not allowed to do that. It is not allowed to do the craziest stuff. So that, as I said, you are in a position to have, on the one hand, the craziest stuff of modern mystics, and on the other hand, you have to perform an anthroposophical building that has to be justified before strict science, and you have the most modern material, concrete, with which you can do the craziest stuff, but you can't do that with a sense of style.

Now I want to make it clear: when you are working practically on the realization of a style, history is of no help at all. Historical observation is of no help at all. Everything that has to be done must come from a place of naivety, must truly come from a creative place. Otherwise, it cannot be done, and what must arise in a certain way, must practically arise in opposition to such a view as Ferstel expressed at the time: “Architectural styles cannot be invented, they must arise from the foundations of folklore.” One must simply come to the view with a certain stylistic conscience: the architectural style must be created out of a certain reality, out of a truth. It cannot be invented out of thin air, it must be created out of reality.

Now I would like to draw attention to a third point, which Mr. Strakosch also mentioned. He pointed out the Gothic style, which, with full justification, must be built out of concrete due to the circumstances, and the concrete substructure, which goes up to a certain height, had to be crowned by the actual structure, a wooden structure. You will also admit that the forms of the wooden structure are actually dictated by the material itself with a certain strictness. The wooden structure provides precisely what must arise from the interaction of need, purpose and sense of material. So in Dornach, there was a very specific style to be combined with something that Mr. Strakosch has said: you can do anything with it; you can build the craziest things out of concrete.

Now, if one is not predisposed to building the craziest things, then one actually has a different feeling towards concrete than towards wood. And here I must say, based on practical experience, the opposite of what has just been said. If you take all the antecedents of architectural styles, you can't really build anything out of concrete today. Not everything, but absolutely nothing. If you have a sense of style, you can't just take the “you can do anything” approach. You can only get started if you can use concrete as a material out of a certain stylistic conscience. In a certain respect, you are in a parallel situation with what sometimes occurs on anthroposophical ground at the moment. You see, from the misunderstood backgrounds of mystical contemplation and so on, which many people have in mind when they talk about mysticism, theosophy, anthroposophy today, you can make anything out of these mystical backgrounds. You can make the craziest stuff. But anthroposophy is not allowed to do that. It is not allowed to do the craziest stuff. So that, as I said, you are in a position to have, on the one hand, the craziest stuff of modern mystics, and on the other hand, you have to perform an anthroposophical building that has to be justified before strict science, and you have the most modern material, concrete, with which you can do the craziest stuff, but you can't do that with a sense of style.

Now I would like to make it clear: when you are working on the practical realization of a style, history is of no help at all. Historical reflection is of no help at all. Everything that has to be done must come from the realm of the naive, must really come from the realm of creativity. There is no other way to do it, which must in a certain way rebel, practically rebel against such a view as Ferstel expressed at the time: “Architectural styles cannot be invented, they must come from the foundations of folklore.” - One must simply come to the view with a certain stylistic conscience: The architectural style must be created out of a specific reality, out of a reality. It cannot be invented out of the blue, it must be created out of reality.

Now I would like to draw attention to a third point, which Mr. Strakosch also mentioned. He pointed out the Gothic style and showed, with full justification, how the Gothic style actually draws heavily from craftsmanship. And there is indeed a backward devotion to craftsmanship in the Gothic style. In one direction, the question of style was resolved by the combination of cross vaulting, pointed arches and flying buttresses that the Gothic style then developed. But if we consider the other aspect that has been emphasized, the matter takes on a different perspective. It was also said that the mere mechanical fitting together of the components would not result in the Gothic style, that certain forms and certain views live on in the Gothic style, which can be found in the Gothic style, and about which a certain secret has been kept, even in the “building huts”, which has been strictly guarded, and which now goes beyond the craftsmanship. We thus find an element that has been built into it, that can be found in the style, but which – it will be possible to admit this in the broadest sense – has actually been lost for the more recent period in terms of its actual essence, or at least in terms of its application. Today we no longer do what was done in those days out of the secrets of architecture, which arose out of quite different presuppositions, without the necessity of making strict calculations and the like. It is just these conditions that could, I am putting this hypothetically for the moment, be connected with other things. They could be connected with the fact that today the reproductive element rules: not really the productive creation of style rules, but the reproductive shaping of style rules. Perhaps it is precisely from those soul entities that have been very strictly preserved that those forces which underlie productivity and from which the productivity of style comes, flow. And perhaps this perplexity about style in recent times stems from the fact that we have lost a certain element in building. This element must be given special consideration in architecture because it has to conform to the strict laws by which a building must be constructed, must conform to the static and other conditions that Mr. Strakosch has discussed. In architecture, in the broadest sense, we are dealing with what scientifically based technology makes possible, and on the other hand we are obliged to incorporate a certain stylistic element into what we build.

The question now arises: Was not perhaps in older times what technology is much more closely tied to style than it is today? Was it not perhaps the case that the building rules that existed at the time were formulated in such a way that they included the technology, so that one could build safely, as it were, by simply following the results of these guarded rules? Were they not, despite being artistically stylish, perhaps also technically correct through and through?

You get such a feeling when you experience something like what could be experienced in Dornach. It occurred to me — as I said, the main things always arise out of naivety — to enclose the auditorium with a dome and to attach this dome to a smaller dome that was to crown the stage area. The question now was how to find the technique for the connection, and that was an important question in Dornach for quite some time. I felt the necessity to do it this way; on the other hand, it had to be technically feasible. Until we found the solution, I could only say that the right technical solution must be found for what arises out of the necessity of style, and that it must also show a certain perfection in terms of technique. These things must coincide. Of course, if something is conceived in an intellectualistic or inartistic way and one somehow wants to build a building without style, no technical problem will arise for it. But if something is really found in the foundations where the style must lie, then the appropriate technique must also be found for it.

Now, as I said, the historical is of no help if one - if I may put it this way - has to create something like a style from a naive point of view. But afterwards one can still orient oneself towards what the development may lead to. And here I would like to add something to what has just been said, which may initially seem somewhat paradoxical in the present, like so many things that have to be said from anthroposophical spiritual science, but which will probably prove to be thoroughly practical in the course of time, however fantastic it may seem to some people today.

I do not want to go back to Oriental or Egyptian architecture, which has been sufficiently considered just now, but I want to refer first to what is already on the foundations of what has emerged from Oriental-Egyptian architecture, I want to refer to Greek architecture, and there again - first disregarding everything else - to Greek temple construction. But I do not want to touch on the technical side of things now, but rather on the style.

I believe that anyone who studies Greek architecture more closely will find that the forms cannot really be grasped if one concentrates too much on the static element. Greek architecture definitely takes static elements into account – this is clear. They are there, but in an extraordinarily free way. They are everywhere in such a way that one sees: in a certain way, what we today call statics is handled quite freely. The bearing and the load are there. But they have not fallen into the trap of regarding what has been put there as decoration, nor, on the other hand, have they fallen into the trap of one-sidedness, of regarding it as merely static. There is an element hidden there that has perhaps been kept even more jealously than the secrets of the later masons' lodges, that has emerged from the original, instinctive views of humanity and that, in turn, can only be found through anthroposophical, spiritual scientific investigation. In a sense, these Greek temples are also functional buildings. A Greek temple, considered in itself as a mere structure, is never complete. If you take the statue of the god out of the Greek temple and look at it, you get the feeling that the most essential thing is missing. It was understood only as the dwelling of the god, and only if one assumes that the people actually only have something to do with the temple from the outside, that actually only the god should have his residence in it. But now it follows that the temple is the dwelling of the god, not much for those intuitions that flowed into the temple construction. One must go back to something else, especially with regard to the purpose of building a temple; if I may now call it that in a figurative sense: with regard to the question of need. In this regard, one can say that the purely external aspect of the temple's purpose is clear to anyone who wants to describe these things in a feature-like way; the fact that the temple is the dwelling place of the god. But this is not enough for those who want to go beyond the feature-like description and really understand the inner form of the temple. For this, it is necessary to add another element: that the Greek temple is to be seen as a transformation of the original burial vault, the burial building. The Greek temple cannot be understood otherwise than by seeing in it a metamorphosis of a burial building. But this leads back to times when the soul of the deceased was sought in the vicinity of the buried corpse. The building was actually erected in its forms for the soul, which should still be there, even when one passed from ancestor worship to the cult of the gods. The cult of the gods in the older religions was nothing other than a metamorphosed cult of ancestors; the old gods are basically ancestors, are thought of as ancestors, and the way in which the rule of the soul-spiritual was also a transformation of how the workings of the soul after death were viewed in the deceased person – in terms of the forms of perception, there was something that was strictly related to this. Now it was a matter of rebuilding a soul, and for that one had to come up with the right balance of power, the right statics, which was possible as an external statics, but at the same time served this purpose, to be a soul's reconstruction, so that the soul could dwell within; for the soul of the god had to dwell in just such a structure.

Where did the power relations come from? That is the big question. They were not calculated at all in such a way, as we are rightly learning today in our age. This was not understood in those older times. The little literature that still exists clearly shows that such a structure was not built from strict statics and mathematics and mechanics. But those older times had something else, and here I come to what is of course regarded as fantastic today, and can be regarded as such, however practical it actually is: the question is to find out by what means, let us say for example, the position of the center of gravity was found, the center of gravity that simply had to be placed in such a way that by looking at the building, one knew where it was. But not with the intellect, but with the feeling, the sense of style in particular, it was necessary to find out how to distribute the forces, how to distribute the material in order to get the right feeling. There was a soul dwelling within. In those ancient times, one did not have the abstract ideas of the soul that one finds today, for example, among our psychologists, where the soul is something very vague – for some it is a point that is sought at some point in the physical organization, and what more such nonsense is –; these abstract views of the soul did not have the old days. They had very definite views of the soul. It would be interesting to explain these views, but there is no time for that. It would be all the more interesting because the views that these ancients had about the soul, to a certain extent, contained what the descriptions of the old soul conceptions, for example in Wundt's philosophy, do not contain, but did not contain everything that Wundt describes of the old soul conceptions. These things are such that they cannot be grasped by a materialistic way of thinking. But they lived in ancient times and they lived so concretely that one could also connect with them concrete ideas with regard to the forming of the material. But how was that done? You see, everything that was built, everything that was designed in terms of static relationships, arose for older times, however strange it may seem today, from the human organization and its statics. And what was still considered in Greek times for architecture arose from the statics of the human limb organism. I do not mean the human limb organism only as a combination of arms and legs, but also, for example, the lower jaw and much in the middle human, the chest human and so on. But everything that lies within the human being with limbs could be studied. For example, you could try out how a certain connection of forces works when you squat down, say, with bent knees. You could see how the center of gravity relates to a certain system of forces, and you could see how the center of gravity relates to a certain system of forces when you tried out the best way to hold your mouth open to find the ideal center of gravity of the head, which you do at the lower jaw. It is interesting to study the strange shaping that is present in Greek sculptures with this slightly open mouth; it arose from a very specific study of the position of the lower jaw, which one experienced internally in its static and dynamic aspects.

And in the same way, you experienced the static and dynamic relationships that arise when you squat down and rest your arms on your knees, for example. You studied this dynamic in humans, and in older times especially in the human limbs. They observed the dynamics as they express themselves in the human being when walking – because the unfolding of very special inner static-dynamic conditions is needed for this walking – and from this they formed ideas about very specific static conditions; and what could be studied in the human organism itself, we find again in the formation of the temple buildings. It was said that what the human being has as a head is indeed a beautiful external expression of the physical human being, but it is just an expression for the physical human being. After all, the human being is a rational being precisely in order to be efficient in the physical world. Similarly, the trunk and respiratory system of the human being were thought of in a certain way. It was said that this is something that underlies the connection between the human being and the earthly environment. Head and chest were, as it were, left out when, in ancient times, people thought of the human being as a spiritual container. They thought in particular of what could not be directly animated in the human form; they thought of the balance of power that arises in the use of the limb-based human being. This limb-based human being was the vehicle through which the human being carried his soul into the earth here. The systems of forces that the person revealed entered into the soul; they were studied; and people wanted to see the soul surrounded by them even after death. What one could experience by carrying one's soul through life, that one most secreted into what one wanted as the enclosure of the soul, but not in an abstract way, but with all the concreteness and practicality of the old view.

Such things can only be studied externally by observing certain qualities of feeling. It is also possible – spiritual science provides complete certainty in what I have just explained – to gain a certain insight into such things from external symptoms. Consider what the Greek sculptor particularly wanted to show when he depicted the human being as a physical figure: tall legs and an extraordinarily large head by later standards; in Greek sculpture, the length of the head is contained eight times in the total length of the human being. He particularly looked at the head in that the head has a certain length, thus it has a limb organism. The Greek sculptor particularly studied the limb system of the head and in turn studied the limb system of the whole human being. Everything contained in one system of the human being is also contained in the other. The whole human being is in turn contained in the head, the arm and leg construction in the jaws, only one must then look at the head the other way around. So that one can say: In the case of the Greeks, the main focus of attention in man was the organization of the limbs — right up to the head. The limb system is expressed least in the chest and trunk of the human being; it recedes completely in Greek sculpture. It is actually the shortest and weakest part in Greek sculpture. High lower limbs, a large head in relation to the rest – that is precisely the focus of attention on that from which an inner static in man follows. And this inner static was carefully studied and carefully guarded. Therefore, in those days, being an architect was to be in possession of the knowledge that had been studied on the noblest of what could be studied, on man.

Now, the Middle Ages are approaching. Mr. Strakosch has excellently described how something else flows into the vaulting, into the pointed arch, how something lives in it. You can study what lives in it by turning your attention to how man was viewed in the Middle Ages. If you look at the medieval representation of man, you will see that the head is not contained eight times in the whole human figure, but about ten times. The legs are short. People have small heads, which means that the limb organism of the head recedes and that little attention is paid to the other limbs. Hence the huge, long trunk; it is the main thing in medieval sculpture, all attention is paid to it. If you study this statics – I have to express myself paradigmatically because of the limited time – if you study what was contained in the rules of the masons' lodges, you can find the secrets of that part of the human body that we today call the rhythmic part of the human body, that which is expressed in rhythm, in the statics of the rhythms, in that element that was added to the purely craftsmanship of the Gothic period. In a sense – one must not become fanciful when mentioning this matter – this is what trust in God is – Mr. Strakosch has correctly traced it back to its real meaning – it comes from the heart, it comes from the middle human being, not from the head human being. Thus we find that in the same period in which, as a result of the study of external nature and the study of pure mathematics and mechanics, which are to be applied to nature, the attention to man is lost, and those elements that lead to a style are also lost. For one can only achieve a style if one can shape in the external present that which one can study in the microcosm.

And if one is faced with the task of finding a new architectural style, then it is naturally a matter of creating from similar foundations again. It is a matter of returning to what follows from the human essence itself. Now, in our time of scientific development, this cannot be found as I have outlined it for two epochs of humanity, but only by ascending from the limb-man to the head-man through the rhythmic man. But you can't start with that, because he has already developed his abilities to the highest degree. The head human being is, after all, the one in which the individuality of the human being is most expressed in form. You can't use it in the same way as, for example, in Greek statics, where you had in the spatial drawing precisely what you can't see in a person when he is simply standing in front of you. Likewise in later times: one had this in the spatial drawing, which cannot be seen, but which only results from a feeling through those arches that make up the rhythmic human being.

Now, in the present, the only thing that can be done is to find the spiritually seen basis that underlies the actual spirituality of man. Therefore, something had to be done in the Dornach building that is not just a meeting room, but also a room that invites the individual to feel in it in such a way that he comes to self-knowledge at the same time. The Greek building was the frame for the soul. The Gothic building is, through everything I have just mentioned, the place of assembly; it is not complete unless the community, the assembly, is present within it. 'Assembly' is something that corresponds to the 'Duma' and is etymologically related to 'cathedral'. The assembly belongs there. Now we need a building that is so responsive to human beings that they can see the forms not in their external human form but in their imagination. If one wanted to build in the same way as before, one would fall back into intellectualized building, which would be impossible because it would no longer be art. In art, one must remain in intuition, but one must also find the style for what is now brainwork, namely our present-day statics. While the statics of the Greeks was entirely intuition, our statics today is a product of work, a brainwork, and we must find that which was precisely withheld from the Greeks. They built up what they saw as statics. For us, this comes from the intellect. Intuition must add what can only be given in intuition. The Dornach building, which is not at all symbolic, is constructed in this way. It is a slander to say that, because that would mean that the building was constructed in an unartistic way. It is absolutely the case that everything about this building is only artistically conceived, but in such a way that the artistic is shaped directly out of direct perception. It is, again, the arrival at a style, but in such a way that this style has been found in an equally naive way as it was created earlier, out of the necessity of direct perception. Therefore, anyone who comes to Dornach will be able to feel at home in this building, because it is executed in such a way that one finds oneself in it as one has always found oneself in real architectural works. There is truly nothing fantastic in the Dornach building; everything has arisen out of the stylistic conscience just concretely characterized. Therefore what would otherwise have happened could not occur. — Is that not so? Anthroposophy was there, had been there for many years before it needed a building like the Dornach building. Then a number of people who at that time considered themselves convinced of the basic truths of anthroposophy had the idea — it was not my idea — of building a structure of this kind for the special kind of life that arises from anthroposophy in an artistic and practical way. I was only given the task of finding the forms, the style, for this building. I was, so to speak, commissioned by the Anthroposophists. The building did not arise as a fact from my idea.

Now, it is not the case that today such things happen in such a way that one says: There is some kind of association, a society with this or that goal. That is the order of the day: you found societies and associations everywhere, and then you set up the programs that are to be carried out for this or that association. These programs are usually very clever, because when people get together, they can come up with the cleverest things intellectually, but with all that, they would get no further than a theory; with all that, they would get no further than, say, Wilson's Fourteen Points in the direction of world history. That is also a program of that kind, clever, but in relation to the real affairs of the world, something impracticable, something quite abstractly foolish, one might almost say. And then, when such an association is there that needs its own house, then it chooses some style from the available ones, according to which it has its building constructed. Anthroposophy, if it is honest with itself, cannot proceed in this way. That is not possible with anthroposophy. By being thoroughly honest with itself, it knows that it is bringing something into modern civilization, into modern cultural development, that has not been there before. Anyone who has a sense of style and other artistic feelings knows that all forms of art, including architecture, grow out of the way of thinking of a particular time, and that they cannot be understood at all without living with the whole person in the way of thinking of that time. That is why the old architectural styles are only reminiscences for us. We can only understand them to the extent that we can put ourselves in those ancient times. Therefore, for most people who cannot do that, much is incomprehensible.

Anthroposophy is something completely new, not in the sense of a theory but in the sense of life. It is something that can become art at the same time because it does not blunt the feelings as mere intellectualism does. Artists are often afraid of anthroposophy because they think of it as a theory like any other theory. Theory deadens everything artistic, but not anthroposophy. There, the impulses of feeling and will are stimulated. The whole human being is stimulated. Anthroposophy makes people more skillful in their hands — this should be considered today, when most men are so clumsy that they can't even sew on a torn-off trouser button. Therefore, we must really recognize that everything that is anthroposophical is included in skill, in manual dexterity, in human mobility. These are not just thoughts, but at the same time they are world forces in which man lives. Therefore, they can be built, sculpted, and painted in the same way that one builds, sculpts, and paints that which has been brought out of man in the way described.

Because anthroposophy is something new in our culture, a setting had to be found for it that could only exist for anthroposophy. That is to say, a style had to be found that arose out of its spiritual impulses. The building at Dornach stands in such a way that what can be said from the rostrum, the word that is there to proclaim the content of the spiritual world, is one way of speaking; another is the way seen in the setting of the building. Every column and every capital speaks exactly like the words spoken from the rostrum. There is a harmony, just as there was a harmony in the Greek soul between the vision of God and the building of temples. One must create from the impulses of the origin of art. Then something comes out that cannot be discussed: the style – the style that must be grasped from the whole person, from where one experiences the thoughts, which are more than mere thoughts, as forces that sit within one and pulsate through one's blood, so that one can also shape them externally.

I only wanted to make a few remarks, my dear fellow students, honored guests. I just wanted to point out how one can indeed arrive at finding styles again. No matter how imperfectly this may have been achieved in Dornach — I myself am the strictest critic of this building, which is only the first step — an attempt has been made to find the characteristic style of the period, to find again what belongs to the style. And that is why something is being placed in the style here that is real spirituality, one can also conquer the material that proves to be so brittle, as Mr. Strakosch described it, the concrete, so that one then says to oneself: Certainly, one cannot make anything out of concrete if one does not want to make the craziest stuff, but the craziest stuff is precisely the most style-less. You can only do something with concrete if you have the other prerequisites – whether they are practical prerequisites for a functional building or spiritual prerequisites for a building such as the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach – if you have what is alive within, within you; then you can say, even if you have concrete in front of you: It is not the case that concrete allows you to make anything out of it, but rather you can only place one thing in a single place. Where a human being has an earlobe, there could not be a big toe, nature would not allow it; when a certain mass of forces of the organism is present, only one thing can be formed in one place – if one lives in contemplation. That is what is meant when one speaks of a sense of style, of a firmly established sense of style, and of the absolutely plastic concrete material.

So you may be able to experience in Dornach that, despite the truth of what Mr. Strakosch said about the concrete material from certain points of view, the concrete material in Dornach has been treated in such a way — even if not everything has been successful — that what is situated in any given place is sensed as necessary precisely there, and that one says to oneself out of direct perception: just as only an earlobe can be in a certain place on the head, so only a very definite form can be here. But before that, the merely symmetrical, the merely moderate-metrical must be transferred into the organic, the internally experienced moderate, the internally experienced symmetrical, as one experiences it when one passes from the merely mechanical to the organism. In order to arrive at a style again, the step had to be taken from the geometric-symmetrical, metrical style and so on to the organic style. No matter how imperfectly this may have been achieved, it is undoubtedly in this direction that we must seek what the further stylistic development of architecture must be. And I believe that we will only find the [style for a] utility building, as well as [for] a building like the Goetheanum in Dornach, if we follow such paths; otherwise we will only ever get as far as the reproductive. We will only get to the productive by following this path. Then there will be no need for pessimistic observations about the fact that architectural styles are not being invented, but then the urge for new stylization, new stylistics, will arise out of the full, artistic life.

Question: I would like to ask whether Dr. Steiner has found the relationship between today's man and the new stylistic form of the Dornach building on the path of higher knowledge, as was previously suggested for spiritual-scientific things, and if so, whether this path may be applied where intuitive and artistic

creation is involved.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question that cannot be treated in such general terms. I have, I believe, described the process as far as it was possible in the sketchy presentation. The point is that the intuition is there, and this intuition comes with a certain inevitability. So you can't say that preparations could be made for something specific or something like that, so that these things will come. Rather, in the anthroposophical — whether one believes it today or not — there is something that, in contrast to the merely abstract, theoretical, is an element that is connected with organization, with growth and so on. It is the case that one can say: Even what I recognize as an idea, as some kind of essence in the spiritual world, is there, it is seen, but one does not now have the possibility of holding on to it in the same way as one holds on to a sensual experience that clings to the memory; one can only reconstruct the paths by which one has come to such a higher experience, that is, what lies before the experience, and then wait to see if the experience is there again. The experience is the direct perception; and just as I do not have this hall if I only have the memory of it, so I do not have the higher spiritual experience if I only have it in memory. It does not present itself at all in memory. That is the peculiar thing about higher spiritual experiences: they cannot be remembered in the usual way. I explained in my lecture that the higher spiritual experiences are due to a transformation of the power of memory, which is why they are not subject to memory, but must be experienced again and again in a new way. I have written four mystery dramas, and every single word was there, it was there. I cannot say that one can prepare oneself specifically, but through anthroposophy one enters into a living process. I could hint at what underlies it with something that might seem trivial to you. If you have learned something and have a corresponding memory, then you have it, you always have it present; but if you have eaten something, you cannot say: I do not need to eat today because I ate the day before yesterday. — What I learned yesterday is available to me today; that is an abstract process that underlies memory. What is a real process is not subject to memory, it is processed. This is how it is with the experience of what is experienced in supersensible worlds. It is a real experience. Therefore one can say: in general, the realization of what anthroposophy can give is already the path to such things, and will naturally be found in detail when the preconditions for it are there. But it is self-evident that one cannot say that one should now cultivate one thing or another through anthroposophy or that anthroposophy is the means to realize the ideal of Friedrich von Schlegel, the romantic, which consisted in nothing more than: one should resolve to become a genius. Anthroposophy is not the way to do that. But it is something living, that is what it is about. I have said that something like a new style emerges from the naive; historical considerations would be of no use in shaping a new style. It is not aimed at intellectualizing artistic production, but at what simply arises from the development of humanity, as I presented it yesterday, that the forces that used to be physically effective must now be sought spiritually. That is what matters. But I would like to warn against trying to regulate in any way the things that should actually lead to the fullest freedom, and thus also to artistic freedom, in the way indicated. I do not want to pass over these things without reminding you that artistic freedom must prevail in them, and that I very much fear that if you apply a rule to these things from the outset, even the golden section, that in the end it is not the free creation that lies there, but the feeling of being forced into those Spanish boots that a German poet once, let us say, “glorified” in a poem. The application of standards as to what may be achieved in free creation, and the judgment: “That is not beautiful” — if it does not meet a certain standard, that leads to the inartistic. And I fear that the Dornach building would become inartistic if one were to apply only the golden section [gap] —- the golden section is, of course, abstracted from what has been built so far; it is contained in countless works of art and is justified because it is contained in the human form; but if you apply it as a preconceived rule, you do not arrive at what is pleasing clothing, but at what was worn at the Spanish court and later at the Austrian court.

Question: How can it be explained that we can often solve problems in our half-asleep state that we cannot solve in broad daylight? ... [pause]

Rudolf Steiner: If we consider the current ideas of physiological science or even psychological science, which is almost the same thing nowadays, we cannot explain this fact, which is undoubtedly a fact. But if one has trained oneself without prejudice to observe human life in reality, then such facts become proof of this basic view. We must be clear about the following, and in the same way that one can be clear in a materialistic-physiological way about other things that can be achieved through such science. We must realize that man is actually only awake to a certain part of his being from waking to sleeping, namely only to his life of thinking. The life of thinking can be seen clearly when it is awake. On the other hand, there is no possibility of being in the same nuance of consciousness in the life of feeling as in the life of thinking. When analyzing the emotional life, it has the same nuance of consciousness as the dream life. Dreams are just images that string together. But the sequences of the dream life, especially in interesting dreams, do not correspond to the logic of the imagination, but actually to the logic of the emotions, the association of feelings. Feelings are basically only the waking parallel to what occurs in dreams in images, in instinctive imagination. Even when we are awake, we are completely asleep in terms of our will. No matter how we will, we only awaken in our imaginative life. How the will functions, what happens when we move just one arm, we do not have that [in consciousness]; we have the intention, we lift our arm in the imagination, but we only have the imaginative image of the act of the will. But now, for example, mathematical ideas do not come from that part of our consciousness that is exhausted in ordinary waking imagination. If we were only waking human beings, that is, only thinking beings — Dilthey describes this interestingly in a Berlin Academy treatise — we would not come to any mathematics, much less to mechanics. Mathematics and mechanics are grounded in the human being, and the human being comes to mathematics only through the movements of his own limbs. There is something similar at the basis of Greek statics, only we have it in reflection. We have mechanics, especially phoronomy, everything that we grasp with measure and number, only reflected in the imagination. Therefore, we are much closer to the mathematical, to what can be calculated, to what must be found by man. And if man would only experience it once – I have to express myself paradoxically – if he only really experienced how clever and ingenious he is in his sleep, he could become megalomaniac. It is actually very good that this fog of sleep spreads over this undeserved cleverness and that it only sometimes comes up in dreams. But it is absolutely right that when we wake up, we can just about catch what we are doing, if we are preparing some problem in our sleep. We solve many problems in our sleep. And if you want to proceed experimentally, you can do the following experiment. He should try to deal with a difficult task in the afternoon until the evening. He will see if he succeeds in formulating the question clearly towards the evening – the question is a difficult problem – and if he then has the composure to tackle it properly the next morning, he will see what he has worked on in the meantime. This can then seem like an inspiration. So you can even approach these things experimentally. Such things virtually confirm what anthroposophical spiritual science — in a methodical and thoroughly trained way, of course — wants to bring to light. I do not believe that we have yet reached the point where the “heaviness of the technician's trials” that Dr. Unger presented so brilliantly yesterday can be resolved by these means; we have not yet developed enough life pedagogy and didactics for that. But the problem can certainly be explained in the ways that I have just suggested.

Dear attendees, dear fellow students! We have come to the end of this event, and I too would like to express a wish that has already been expressed by the honored organizers: that some satisfying things may have sunk into the souls of our very welcome audience during these days, and that some satisfying things may also remain in their after-feelings. It is natural that in the course of such a short event one can only give a few samples of what anthroposophical spiritual science wants to be and what it wants to be in our time of science and life.

The fact that a number of personalities, especially from scientific circles, have come together to pursue anthroposophy out of youthful enthusiasm is one of the most satisfying things for someone who would like to devote his life to everything that lies within this anthroposophical spiritual science. Therefore, you will believe me when I express it from the bottom of my heart when I express my sincere thanks to the esteemed fellow students who have devoted their strength and effort and their good will to this event.

I am convinced that all those who have been involved here and who are active in one place or another in our anthroposophical movement also thank the organizers of these college courses most warmly and in the same spirit. These thanks are directed primarily to the working groups of the Federation for Anthroposophical School of Spiritual Science Work in Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Gießen, Marburg, Heidelberg and Würzburg, who have put so much effort into making this event a worthy one. But these thanks are also directed to all participants in this anthroposophical experiment.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, dear fellow students, if you would like me to say a few closing words, please do not ask me to say what I have to say, what I would like to say to you now at the end , but let me say a few things that seem necessary to me in part and that are very close to my heart in part, precisely in view of what I have been privileged to experience here among you during these days.

The fact that the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, where it had to be shown during the war how German spiritual life can be presented to the world, has been called the Goetheanum, has been strongly contested from many quarters. I myself have often used the name, but the will to call this educational institution the Goetheanum came from others. But perhaps it may be said that there is something in this name that is connected with my own growth into the Anthroposophical Movement in this life. And so I may begin by clothing what I want to say to you in the images of some reminiscences of my life.

When I myself came to the university in Vienna, it was still in those days when what has now gained such immense world significance was only just being established at technical universities: electrical engineering. In Waltenhofen, the Viennese “Technik” had the first representative of electrical engineering, but he had grown out of general physics. And since then, one has been able to follow everything that has come from this particular direction and which, as we have seen, has become so effective that the treatment of light and many other natural phenomena has now led to a world view of a scientific nature, one might say that it is based entirely on the observation of electrical phenomena. The mere elastic atoms, with which we still had to deal with our complicated differential equations, have been replaced by the present-day picture of electrons. And in these decades, something significant in the development of modern humanity has been included. But it also includes what I tried to hint at in yesterday's public lecture: the striving to move beyond the increasingly pervasive materialistic view of the world, which actually celebrates its triumphs in the electron theory, and to return to a spiritual understanding of the world. Within what we can gain from the electron theory, we simply do not find the human being. But we must find the human being again. And perhaps it has become clear to you from the aspirations that underlie our lectures that, first and foremost, we are striving for knowledge of the human being, but such knowledge of the human being that is connected with all other scientific knowledge and with all striving for the world, down to the individual social level, is what is to be brought to life in anthroposophy.

For me personally, when I was still allowed to feel as many of you feel today, something came to me in the midst of what surrounded me in my youth from a scientific and technical way of thinking, soon after I entered the Technical University of Vienna. In addition to the other subjects I devoted myself to, I also became a student of my old teacher and friend, the late Karl Julius Schröer. And it is one of the most profound experiences that I felt at the time when Karl Julius Schröer, in the first lecture on German literature, spoke a word that so clearly showed how the renewal of the spiritual life of modern humanity can be born out of German, Germanic being. Perhaps this word no longer seems as significant to you today as it sounded to me at the time. Karl Julius Schröer wanted to characterize how Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, the German Romantics, the German philosophers, placed themselves in the context of the entire spiritual life of humanity. To this end, he wanted to show that art, that aesthetic experience, had become a sacred matter for humanity in that time for the German, not just a luxurious addition to life. Something that is fundamentally human should flow into art. And that is what Karl Julius Schröer expressed in his own way in the sentence he uttered in the first hour of his lecture: “The German has an aesthetic conscience”. This was also the basis for his treatment of Goethe's Faust, where he tried to present Faust as the hero of invincible idealism, which at that time had to emerge from the depths of German intellectual life into the development of the world and humanity.

Then I took part in what Karl Julius Schröer called “Deutsche Gesellschaft” (German Society), by recreating something that Uhland and Grimm had developed in their teaching. Young people gave lectures; they could express themselves as they wished. The first lecture I had to give within this German Society was concerned with rejecting Kant and Kantianism, in my then awkward, youthfully immature way, that barrier that had been erected against the essence of the world by the special interpretation that phenomena have found in modern science.

And then I had the good fortune to speak about Johann Gottlieb Fichte to a circle of Viennese students at the University of Vienna's “Deutsche Lesehalle”. I tried to include in what I wanted to say about Fichte everything that seemed to me, in an immature way at the time, to be necessary for a fertilization of intellectual life from a very particular angle.

And one of the essays I wrote when I was briefly editing the “Deutsche Wochenschrift” in Vienna had the same title as the second lecture I gave here, albeit in a different form: “The Spiritual Signature of the Present”. But this essay endeavored to point to the true sources of German intellectual life that could lead to a spiritualization of modern culture.

I am not saying this to boast in any way, but I would like to present such images so that perhaps one or the other may get a truer picture of what I personally have contributed to the spiritual-scientific-anthroposophical movement than the image that is now being widely spread by untruthful sides.

Now, my dear attendees, dear fellow students, I had plenty of opportunities to get to know the forces of decline in modern scientific life at the time. And so it was a great satisfaction for me that during my time in Weimar working at the Goethe-Schiller Archive, I was able to devote myself to Goetheanism, if I may say so, for years through my study of Goethe. One felt very much at the center of German intellectual life. Weimar in the 1980s was still very different from what it is today. There was still a breath over the whole of Weimar that is no longer there today, and from this breath one sensed precisely what is specifically Goethean. At that time I tried to point the way to what was to come by giving a lecture in Weimar on “The Imagination as a Cultural Creator”.

What I attempted to give from a scientific-philosophical basis shows you, even in its very first attempts, that it is a matter of drawing the spiritual current from that which was the basis of Goethe's thinking and feeling in all areas of knowledge and life. I certainly did not start from Haeckel; anyone who follows the chapter I wrote in the first introduction to Goethe's natural science writings at the beginning of the 1880s can see that. But anyone who wants to be part of spiritual scientific life must take everything seriously, and actually carry out what they advocate in their ideas. Therefore, those currents of contemporary spiritual life that have entered this life with all their might and strength must also be lovingly experienced; and this immersion in Nietzscheanism and Haeckelism has been perceived as a following [on my part]. But if one wanted to, one could find the sources of anthroposophical spiritual science in my writings that preceded these discussions with Haeckel or Nietzsche. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I first tried to indicate in a practical way how spiritual elements must flow into moral and social action.

And when it is emphasized today that my work has been incorporated into that of the Theosophical Society, then, my dear audience, I must always emphasize again that I have never, anywhere, advocated anything other than what I have gained from my own inner path of research. That I was wanted to be heard within the circle of this or that society, that I was invited to work within that society in order to be heard, is something that I consider to be quite possible, indeed necessary. And I will never allow it to be taken from me in the future, to speak wherever I am wanted.

Therefore, I must emphasize that I did not seek out the Theosophical Society, but that it came to me. And I must always emphasize that when I had written my first book, “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relation to the Modern World Picture”, which was more derived from the natural sciences, I was told within the theosophical circles, to which I did not belong at the time, that this book contained everything that was actually sought in these theosophical circles. But this did not come from these circles; it was found by the path of research that I found compelled to take from the foundations of natural science up into the spiritual, to anthroposophy.

And so the transformation of the “Theosophical Society” into an “Anthroposophical Society” was also given by the facts. But what flowed through the work of these Societies was never different from what flows today. However, it is self-evident that this anthroposophical spiritual science, because it has been cultivated for decades in the most diverse fields, has slowly and gradually developed, and that what had to be said in a more abstract form at the beginning could be formulated in ever more concrete and specific terms. Therefore, when we speak today, we can draw much more from spiritual reality than we could in earlier decades. But spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense would not be alive if it were not so. And those who do not hold with the dead spiritual, but with the living spiritual, will understand this living development. They will understand that just as a mature person can no more be a child than can an anthroposophical spiritual science that has grown old speak in the same way as it spoke when it was still a child. Anyone who wants to look at these things properly will see that it must be exactly as it is, because the matter wants to be thoroughly alive.

Even the artistic and medical aspects, which were taken up relatively late, have been organically integrated because the need for them has basically come from the outer world of pure anthroposophy. I would say that we have given in to what had emerged from the necessities of the time, from the signs of the times, more in keeping with destiny. But understanding the signs of the times is what it is all about.

My esteemed audience, dear fellow students, I could use many other images to show how what has been incorporated into anthroposophy can be found in the original source of German intellectual life. I will not do so today for the sake of brevity. I have only given the individual examples for the reason that recently the fight against anthroposophical spiritual science has also been waged under the flag of hostility towards all things German. And in the face of what comes out of the most unobjective of motives and out of scientific inability, as for example with the Göttingen Professor Fuchs, and what is combined with all kinds of attacks by various other personalities who have never even sensed a whiff of what anthroposophical spiritual science and anthroposophical spiritual striving really are, and which are directed precisely at the German essence of anthroposophy, in the face of this it must be said: Whatever anyone wants to think or feel about Anthroposophy, we respect; Anthroposophy will face up to anyone who is an honest opponent. I have never opposed the harshest criticism when it has taken the form of judgment. But I will always oppose something else. The criticism of many circles that today approach anthroposophy with hostility is not based on judgment, for easily understandable reasons: because these circles lack this judgment, because they do not want to develop the diligence to really find their way into the anthroposophical and into the way in which this anthroposophical wants to flow into the outer social life; their criticism is based on something else. In the broadest circles today, the numerous attacks, which you have probably also heard about, are based on lies. The lies go as far as the forged letters. The lies go so far that at my April lecture, which was held in Stuttgart in self-defense, one of these attacks was made against me from the audience: it was claimed that I had said this or that in Cologne in the last few months. I had to reply that I had not been to Cologne for years. The person in question referred to a letter that had been written to him from Cologne, and he had the audacity to show me this letter. I had to reply: No matter what it says, it is a forgery, because it is a lie that I have been to Cologne in recent years. — This is typical of the attacks that come from certain quarters. They do not base their arguments on judgment and opinion, it is all a lie. Everyone is entitled to their own judgment and opinion according to their abilities and what they are capable of; I will only oppose these within the limits that they themselves have set. Because an honest opponent strives to get to the bottom of the matter; it would be a sin not to deal with these opponents in complete agreement. But anyone who resorts to dishonesty and even forges letters cannot be argued with in any other way than by calling attention to the fact that he is lying.

That is what I would like to express here with these few words, for the reason that I am speaking to dedicated younger people who, out of the depths of their enthusiasm, have made it possible for this lecture course and this lecture event to take place despite the fact that anthroposophy is presented to the world in such a distorted form today.

Now, my dear fellow students, those who have already shown how they can find their way into this anthroposophy despite the difficulties that the anthroposophical path presents, how they make sacrifices for it, wherever untruthfulness arises without a judgment about the true form of anthroposophical striving, they may perhaps be expected to unmask the untruthfulness with full force. After all, dishonesty plays a widespread role in the present world in other ways as well, and a good part of how we move forward from forces of decline to forces of ascent will be in developing enthusiasm for truthfulness. Truthfulness is the highest, never the individual party line. The whole system of anthroposophy must be built on truthfulness. For how can anyone who does not understand how to stand up for truthfulness in the outer life penetrate to those regions where one must be guided by truthfulness only through the inner direction, because one cannot always be corrected for being untrue, as one can in the outer life? What could be presented to the world from the regions of supersensible worlds if enthusiasm for truthfulness were not the basis? This enthusiasm for truthfulness – we see it particularly in the discussions about the war guilt – this enthusiasm for truthfulness is also missing today in so many cases, even in those who call themselves the bearers of civilization. This enthusiasm for truthfulness is something we need, and anyone who is as closely connected with Germanness as I am — I mention this in all modesty — will, will be convinced, must be convinced that Germanness will suffer in no way at all if truthfulness is insisted upon, even in the most difficult of matters. All attacks on anthroposophy that come from this quarter bear the stamp of a lack of truthfulness of mind. Therefore, my dear fellow students, do understand how much it must fill me with the deepest satisfaction that you have undertaken this event here despite all that is being directed against anthroposophy in a well-organized manner today. And those of you here today who already feel how sincere these thanks are, will also feel that in the ways that are unfortunately only partially open to us, attempts will be made to work together in the fullest harmony in the further pursuit of the anthroposophical path. I have often had to take refuge in Goetheanism, because of the urge for renewal in modern scientific and technical life. Today some of you, my dear fellow students, are seeking this path through anthroposophy, no doubt from the bottom of your hearts. And it may be said, from an unprejudiced observation of the development of the times: you are seeking this path from the true signs of the times. May we therefore succeed, through our collaboration with those who are already working in one place or another in the anthroposophical movement, in particularly in the most fruitful way developing the work of youthful minds. Then youthful minds will have no reason to turn to Spengler's pessimism. Spengler has, however, recently denied that what he strives for is pessimism. But in any case, anyone who is fully imbued with an inner content of the rising forces of our age in the anthroposophical sense has no reason to turn to Spenglerism. On the other hand, what has made a great impression on all young people, insofar as they have turned to science, if they have ever studied it, can be revived in a new, more spiritualized form: what Fichte once said in his 'Discourses on the Essence and Destiny of the Scholar' at the end of the 18th century. These thoughts can be expressed again, albeit in a transformed form, precisely in order to make fruitful the rising forces in the first third of the twentieth century. In particular, however, one may recall the words that Fichte spoke at the very beginning of his speeches, addressing all those who wanted nothing to do with scooping out of spirituality for real, practical life. To them he said: if they believed that all reality was exhausted in the world of sense, that ideals represented only utopias, then they should be convinced that he who speaks as he does, Fichte, also knows quite clearly, perhaps better than they, that ideals cannot be realized in real life as directly as that to which they always point. But Fichte also added that perhaps such minds cannot be convinced, and that therefore, because the governance of the world did not actually count on them, God may give them food, sun and rain at the right time, and, if it can be, also some good thoughts.

Thus spoke Fichte, the idealist, at the end of the 18th century, and thus may we speak again today, from the innermost impulse of anthroposophical spiritual science. I hope that you feel something of this attitude as we part, and that it was this attitude that led you to organize these lectures, this entire event.

I speak to you out of the gratitude that arises from all the attention and commitment you have shown to what we have been able to offer you. I speak to you in such a way that I truly believe that it will be of particularly essential importance for the emergence of a new spiritual movement when youthful humanity, touched in its inmost heart, turns to this movement. It will be up to you, dear fellow students, how conditions develop in the coming decades. It will be up to you whether the languishing German nation will be able to rise again. To do this, humanity needs strength, not just words – strength! But strength can only come to present-day humanity from the spirit. In many respects, the young generation has made a start by forming these student groups. They have continued by leading the honored student groups from Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Gießen, Marburg, Heidelberg and Würzburg to this event. May this event be the starting point for fruitful further work, work that will lead to a true dawning of humanity in the coming generations, and in particular in Central Europe. For basically everything that has been achieved here during these days was directed towards this goal, towards this ideal. So, my dear fellow students, let us work together in the spirit of true anthroposophy, so that what humanity needs may flow into it: above all, the strength of youth, the enthusiasm of youth – and that it may also be imbued with the seriousness that young people experience through their engagement with science. We want to stand firmly on the ground of strict scientific observation. But we want to get out of the abstract, out of the merely theoretical, out of the dead webs of concepts. We want to move on to the living grasp of the full reality, which lives itself out not only in the outer world of the senses, but also in the soul and spiritual world.

And if I am speaking here in particular to those who, as prospective technicians, are involved in this movement, I may say that this involvement in technical activity seems to me to be particularly significant for a spiritual movement. In the world, things develop in polar fashion. The technician experiences the highest level of scientific thinking in construction, in building, and in the laboratory. By pouring the laws of nature into the outer world, by developing technology, we bring our soul above all to what initially does not contain the spirit, but the human heart approaches everything. The human soul and the human spirit enter into this sphere. It is precisely through our feeling for technology that we must direct our feeling, our thought, to the other pole, to that which, as spirituality, permeates and interweaves the world. Technology is particularly suited to pointing to the other side, to the side of spirituality, because it most deeply intervenes in the outer world of the senses. I therefore believe that especially the prospective engineer can be a source of strength that can contribute the most to the development of humanity by bringing a spiritual attitude, a spiritual worldview.

It is in this spirit that I wanted to address these final words of the present event to you all. May they once again end in heartfelt thanks to all those who have contributed to this event, in heartfelt thanks to all those who

have turned their attention to this event.

If you board the tram here at Aeschenplatz in Basel and travel to Dornach, then take the small path through Dornach, you will come to a hill on which stands the Goetheanum, which is to become a School of Spiritual Science. Although it has been encouraging to note that an extraordinarily large number of visitors have been coming to see this building day after day, it must be said that, whenever the outside world world, for instance in newspaper articles, answers are given to the question of what is actually to be done inside this building once it is finished, these answers generally present the opposite of the truth, with a few exceptions of course. All sorts of things are said about what is to be done there in the past or present in this Dornach building. In any case, the answers given to the questioners are very far removed from what those involved in the spiritual current on which the Dornach building is based actually set as their goal. For this goal emerges from a careful consideration and observation of what I would call the cultural conditions for humanity in the present and future. And out of all the various presuppositions, which I shall venture to speak about this evening, this spiritual movement, which is to find expression in the Dornach building, is based on the conviction that the longings of wide circles of people today contain the realization that a complete recovery, a healthy further development of our human culture must come from the soul of the human being, from that which the human being can grasp in his soul as his connection with the spiritual world. It is based on the conviction that, in the face of the demands and difficulties that arise in our social life, we must try to find the impulses that correspond to the longings of a large number of people – and this number is growing ever larger and larger – from the spirit and soul.

Now, one can see – I would just like to mention in passing that now on Sundays and other days quite a few people come from Basel and the surrounding area to see what we call our eurythmy performances in the provisional hall of our carpentry workshop, where we have to hold these events for the time being until we can open the Goetheanum itself. , and it is reasonable to believe that a large number of those who have already made the pilgrimage to Dornach for these eurythmy performances have come to the conclusion that, in this particular area, too, an attempt is being made to spiritualize something, to raise something into the sphere of the spirit, which, under the influence of materialism of the last centuries, is still practised today by our culture in a more or less materialistic, physiological and similar way.

In this eurythmy, there is an art of movement of the human organism itself, which is taken from the organizational structures of the whole human being, the whole human being, who encompasses body, soul and spirit. And quite apart from the fact that this eurythmy aspires to a special new art form that cannot really be compared with what are often perceived as neighboring arts, it can also be said that these efforts to the spirit is based on what I would call the inspiration of the human organism's possibilities of movement, which, for example, in gymnastics, are understood only in an external physiological way, in a purely material way. The human being is meant to carry out movements, and that is why this eurythmy will also have a spiritual-educational value at some point. In addition to artistic movements, the human being should carry out movements that are not merely taken from anatomy and physiology, as in gymnastics, but that are taken from what can live in the moving human being: spirit and soul.

Now, it is difficult not to be misunderstood when you go out into the world with a thorough spiritual or soul current today. One would like to say that misunderstandings are coming from all sides. And so it may happen that in some places some misunderstandings regarding spiritual science itself have already been cleared away, to the extent that this spiritual science is even allowed to speak on social issues. But we have committed what we believe to be the right thing to do, but what others have thought of as ineptitude: in some places where I have had to speak about spiritual science and social issues, I have also given eurythmy performances at the same time. And lo and behold, the judgment was immediately made: how can a spiritual endeavor be of any value that also includes dance performances?

Well, I could easily add to the list of misunderstandings that come from all quarters, because the world still judges in many ways today as if everything that is to be done in the Dornach building is something obscure, something dark and mystical. So often today, when spiritual endeavors are mentioned, one hears that all sorts of mystical things are being done here or there, even in many places. The fact that the movement that is to be linked to the Dornach building has nothing to do with such obscure mystical movements could be taught to those who seek to see clearly and truthfully in such matters by the fact that one who stands before you and speaks to you about his cause, the cause of this building at Dornach, this Goetheanum, can point to a book written as early as 1894, The Philosophy of Freedom. And if anyone reads this 'Philosophy of Freedom', I think they will not get the impression that this 'Philosophy of Freedom' is intended to bring anything of obscure mysticism, enthusiasm or the like into the world. And I may say that, after all, everything that is to form the main content, the main impulse of this spiritual scientific movement, of which I am speaking, is permeated by that longing of present-day humanity, which expresses itself in the urge for such a way of life within which the individual human being can, on the one hand, fulfill his social duties, but on the other hand, can still be a free being as an individual human being.

I would like to begin by pointing out a phenomenon that is connected to something that is very familiar to you. And although I take as my starting point in today's reflections a politician, you should not think that I am going to devote myself even remotely to the political culture of the present day. I would like to speak about the cultural conditions of the present and the future in a much broader sense; but I would like to mention a characteristic that can show us how the call for freedom is, so to speak, emerging from the cultural aspirations and ideals of the present, only emerging in such a way that it is truly not taken deeply enough. And to take it deeply enough, to deepen what humanity's longing for freedom is, that is intimately connected with the view that spiritual science has of the cultural conditions of the present and future.

Those who have heard my lectures this year and in previous years, this visitors who remember how I spoke at that time, when Woodrow Wilson was, one might say, seen as a man honored throughout the world, to whom people looked up and to whom they attached great hopes for the future, these honored visitors will not hold it against me if I, who in the days when this man had many supporters freely expressed my opposition from a certain point of view, if I today take as my starting point the special conception of freedom, the special call for freedom, that resounds from the political world view of Woodrow Wilson. One must believe that the strong, otherwise, in my opinion, quite incomprehensible impression that Woodrow Wilson has made on the world so far, where the matter stops, is based precisely on the fact that all the program points, everything that has come from this man into the world, is ultimately based in a certain way on the impulse of human freedom. Let us see what this man did before he became President of the United States, let us see what made him great as President of the United States. We will find that it is his conception of a possible social organization of human coexistence in which man can have his freedom in a democratic way. Woodrow Wilson saw how, in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century, large accumulations of capital had come to be concentrated in the hands of a few people in the course of the life of America. He saw how trusts and the like had been formed. And he saw how a few wealthy people had gained control over other people as a result. This is where he began his reflection and his work. He first of all asserted the impulse of freedom. He demanded a complete democratization of human political life in the face of the accumulation of economic and political power in the hands of a few. He wanted every single person to have the opportunity to make use of their abilities in human coexistence. He did not want those who had established themselves in any branch of industry or trade to be able to have monopolies that the legitimate abilities of the weak could not compete against. He wanted us to look for the causes of what happens in social life in every single human situation, even the simplest. And he often expressed this. And it is characteristic of him that he has based his political aspirations on precisely this goal of freedom.

We need only consider his extraordinarily significant writing “The New Freedom”. One might say that on every page one finds the truth of what I have just said. I will quote just one of his most remarkable sayings. He said: There is only one way to create a free life, and that is to ensure that under every garment beats a free and hopeful heart. I truly believe that what had such a strong effect was this call for freedom.

Now, this call for freedom always resonated in the practical political and social effectiveness. The writing “The New Freedom” is actually just a collection of election speeches. There is no talk of a freedom that is only philosophically speculated, there is no talk of any abstract mere freedom of consciousness, there is talk of a freedom that is to be realized and realized in life .

Now, I also tried to grasp such a freedom, which should be realized and actualized in life, through my book “The Philosophy of Freedom,” which I wrote at the beginning of the 1990s. But now, after much hesitation, I have published a new edition of this book, and I can now openly express the belief that freedom can only be truly and practically lived out if we seek it not only in the outer social and political life, but if we seek it in the depths of the human soul itself. And it is in the depths of the human soul itself that freedom should be sought through my “Philosophy of Freedom.” If one stops at the surface of mere social and political life or of external social life, one will very soon see that the realization of freedom is not at all possible if one grasps it only in that sense. For freedom is something that must arise from the individual human being, something that cannot exist if individuals are not able to realize it, if individuals do not first pour it into the social life that they lead together. But if we wish to appreciate the full significance of what is suggested here for the culture of the present day, then we must overlook much of the mere phraseology of the present, and we must try for once to speak seriously and honestly and truthfully about many things. The call for freedom is, I would say, present throughout the entire educated world. Today it is there for those who want to hear it, for the American, the European, and the Asian world. And the only question is: how can the awareness of freedom be realized in the life of the present?

To answer this question, we must take a closer look at how a man inspired by the impulse of freedom, such as Woodrow Wilson, talks about freedom today, and how others talk about freedom today. It will sound strange to you, and I must confess that I hesitated for a long time about expressing the truth I have to say here as bluntly as I will, because such things still shock many people today, because people still take such things far too much at face value, far too little in terms of what is actually behind them. Read Woodrow Wilson's book 'The New Freedom'. Listen to how he talks about the social conditions in America and, ultimately, about the social conditions of contemporary civilization in general. What do you find in it? Actually, only criticism, criticism of how this freedom is not realized within today's civilization, how one must strive to realize this freedom within today's culture and civilization. There are sharp words in this direction of criticism in Woodrow Wilson's book 'The New Freedom'. And if you stop at the criticism - and there is not much else in this book except criticism - and now really seriously and honestly ask yourself: How does this criticism of freedom or social criticism by Woodrow Wilson relate to the criticism that is asserted from another side? you come to a strange result. For example, I have tried to examine Lenin's and Tyotzki's criticism of freedom in terms of how this criticism of freedom and social conditions relates to Woodrow Wilson's criticism in The New Freedom, and I believe that anyone who makes such a comparison honestly and truthfully can say nothing other than: With regard to the criticism of social conditions and the realization of freedom in them today, Woodrow Wilson agrees with Lenin and Trotsky, however different the conclusions they draw.

One must be able to admit such a truth to oneself, even if one finds it quite understandable that despite this criticism, Woodrow Wilson naturally comes to the opposite conclusions from Lenin and Trotsky. And even if one, like the person standing before you, is convinced that Lenin and Trotsky are the gravediggers, not the founders, of a social life, that hardly anything worse could happen to humanity than if the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky were to be realized - but an important, an important fact is expressed in what must be set apart right now; the fact is expressed that from the most opposing party standpoints, from the most opposing social passions, people today come to similar criticisms of the existing cultural conditions and finally also to the abstract call for freedom. Only they understand this freedom in very, very different senses.

If one penetrates to the fact that ultimately the true impulse of freedom can only come from the depths of the human soul itself, then one may well also ask: Why is it that despite all the politicking and calling for freedom in his book, and in his other books as well, there is so much that one must say are abstract, impractical truths that can never penetrate into reality? I believe that precisely what Woodrow Wilson thinks of as freedom is precisely what prevents him from being a truly practical person for the spiritual life of the present. It is very characteristic how Woodrow Wilson explains freedom. He explains it, one might say, as if he had absorbed the whole sum of his concepts from the art of machines. For example, he says: A ship moves freely when it is so equipped that its apparatus is precisely adapted to the movements of the wind and waves, when it experiences no obstacles or hindrances from the movements of the wind and waves, when it is, as it were, carried along freely, without resisting what carries it. And so a person would be free in the sense of Woodrow Wilson, who would be so adapted to the external social conditions that nothing in him would give rise to obstacles and inhibitions, so that he would feel nowhere, as it were, dependent, constrained, disturbed in any direction. If we take seriously only one sentence, we shall see what significance this statement by Woodrow Wilson has for the concept of freedom. If we compare seriously and honestly the human being who is to act freely from the innermost impulse of his soul in some humane social order with a ship that offers as little resistance as possible to the forces of wind and waves, then we completely ignore the fact that the ship must be held still by another force must be held still against wind and waves, cannot hold itself still, but that if man is to be free, he should certainly not be carried along by social forces, but that under certain circumstances he must be able to stop and also to oppose the forces that affect him. The opposite of this would have been the result for a real idea of freedom, which is found as a kind of definition of freedom in Woodrow Wilson. And we will find that the vague call for freedom sits in many human souls today, but that what they consciously connect with the impulse of freedom is different from what they unconsciously really strive for. This was already before my soul's eye when I conceived my “Philosophy of Freedom” out of the human spirit in the 1880s. I saw how the question, “Can man be inwardly free or unfree at all?” occupied philosophy and worldviews and religious convictions throughout the entire civilized development of mankind. If man is a being, a natural being, that is driven purely by natural causes, then he is not free. Or does a being live in man that possesses and uses what he is as an external physical being only like an apparatus out of his own innermost impulses? If he were that, then it could be said that he, this man, is a truly free being. Is man free or is he not free? Is he one or the other by virtue of his nature and being? These questions were before me. And anyone within today's scientific community who wants to tackle these questions must, however, give an account of how he deals with the various views that have been expressed here and there in the whole of civilized human development on the question of freedom

Now it seemed to me that the main thing was that the question is usually asked quite wrongly: the question is, “Is man by his own nature and essence a free being or is he not?” It is wrongly formulated. And as a wrongly formulated question, it can never be answered with a simple yes or no. And so you will find that my 'Philosophy of Freedom' is based on putting the whole question on a different footing. However, what I am going to explain now lies more than the foundation under what is presented in my 'Philosophy of Freedom' itself. The way modern man is, in whom the true consciousness of freedom has actually only awakened, is the way this modern man has developed out of earlier states of the human being. Today, far too little consideration is given to the fact that one should seriously and honestly apply the principle of development to humanity. Although it is thought that in the very, very distant past, man was once a kind of ape-like creature; then it is said: It is not yet scientifically time to talk about how today's man has become from this ape-like creature, from this animal-like ape that once climbed around in the trees. One leaves a long, wide desert between the ape-like man and today's man. But even if this is not admitted, essentially one does have the idea that once man has become man, his soul and spirit have not changed particularly radically. I know that this is a debatable statement. But anyone who allows the history of the development of humanity, as it is usually viewed, to take effect on them, will find this statement justified. And anyone who delves more deeply into this history of human development will find that, as man has developed, consciousness of freedom has awakened in him, so that from the depths of human souls the call wells up: First of all, you must be able to act freely out of your own passions, emotions, sensations and feelings; you must live in a social condition in which you can be free. But on the other hand, this call actually exists only as such. Today, there is also no human consciousness that would allow this call to come to its full meaning in man himself. That is to say, man does not find enough of his own being within himself, so that he could say of this within himself: yes, there is something in me that is a free being. In the course of human development, we have advanced to a magnificent development of scientific knowledge, and the last one will be the one who represents the spiritual science meant here, who - as I have often discussed here - would somehow like to deny the magnificent scientific progress or would like to object to the justified scientific views. But the way in which we have developed natural science in modern times means that the human being of modern times, of the last three to four centuries, can actually only understand himself as a physical being. From the depths of the human being, from the human consciousness that is given according to nature, it does not rise at all: you are just as much a real soul, you are just as much a real spirit – as it rises from the depths of the human being: there you have your arm, there you have your hand, they are made of flesh and blood and bone.

This is not just, I would say, a carelessness of worldview. One completely misunderstands what is actually at the root of it if one merely criticizes what I have just said and sees only a carelessness of world view in it, if one merely says: People today are so comfortable that they believe that the human being is only a material being, and that nothing of the soul and spirit is expressed in him. No, my dear audience, with such a criticism one does not get anywhere. One must rather recognize that, as man has developed, he is initially forced to see himself only as a material being if he takes in nothing into his soul but what today's external view of nature and external natural science and the consciousness of the times can offer. In other words, if we allow contemporary culture, which particularly loves time, to be what contemporary culture produces as time, as science, as art, as religious conviction, and also allows it to influence schools, if we allow this to influence today's man to such an extent that he is permeated by it, then, if he is honest, he will have to become a materialist. That is a harsh word. But I believe it is a true word. Today, in a certain respect, one can be dishonest, can say out of some prejudice: “I do believe in spirit and soul.” Then one is not serious about what has actually been produced by the consciousness of the times and by scientific convictions. And if you take these convictions seriously, there is no other option than for man to feel like a material being. He once developed in such a way that if he merely abandons himself to the conditions of life he has created for himself today, he can only come to believe that he is a physical being. A physical being, no more than any other natural being, can be a free being. Therefore, one can say: If the present consciousness is taken seriously, then nowhere does something like the impulse of freedom arise from this present consciousness. One can sound the call for freedom out of subconscious instincts, as Woodrow Wilson does. But if you become absorbed in the time consciousness of the present, you will arrive at false concepts of freedom, at a definition of freedom that says nothing about freedom and a free being, as Woodrow Wilson does. You have to have the courage to step outside of this time consciousness, which has taken hold of the widest circles, which has become popular. And one can say that, especially at the time when I wrote my “Philosophy of Freedom,” one could feel quite alone within contemporary culture with such ideas, no matter where one lived on earth. One can understand that Woodrow Wilson's particular views grew out of America's young life in terms of world history. And when I look at my “Philosophy of Freedom” today - I may also speak frankly about it - I know how justified those criticisms are that may strike today's reader of this “Philosophy of Freedom”. I know very well that if anyone reads the first thirty or forty pages of this book today, they will say: Well, this clearly bears the eggshells of German philosophy, professorial concepts, university concepts, school concepts.

Nevertheless, I have to stick to the form of this book and appeal to the present in such a way that I say: Just as one should not take the essence of man from his clothing, so one should not take my philosophy from its clothing in concepts, which had to serve as such a clothing for it for reasons of time and education, for reasons of the intellectual life within which this philosophy originated. Rather, something else seems important to me, which, I would say, has symbolically confronted me during the elaboration of my “Philosophy of Freedom”. At that time, while working on this philosophy, I was also working at the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar. For some time, an American scholar worked with me there. He was preparing a literary-historical treatise on Goethe's “Faust”. It was very interesting to talk with him, and anyone who can see reality in symptoms had American intellectual life in the midst of Central European intellectual life, so to speak, in the form of the excellent American literary historian Calvin Thomas. But you see, I felt as if I were working in a typical Central European office in the Weimar Goethe and Schiller Archive, with all kinds of scholars, including American scholars. I could only use my leisure time to work on my “Philosophy of Freedom” after office hours. But I often had to ask myself: How close is what is in Calvin Thomas's mind American knowledge, American insight, to what European scholars are writing on the same subject, and how alone one is in the face of this cultural formation, in the face of the whole world, with what can be conceived as a real idea of freedom from an independent intellectual life. To a certain extent, one also felt isolated when it came to what could be derived from the young sense of freedom in America, in terms of world history, in terms of an idea about the impulse of freedom. And at that time it was important to me to put the whole question of freedom, as I said, on a different footing. I had to say to myself: the way man is, if he leaves himself to himself, if he only takes what can first fill his soul out of the consciousness of the time, then he cannot know himself as a free being. Therefore, I put the question differently. And this other way of posing the question permeates what I recognize as the idea of freedom. I cannot ask: Is man free or is he not free? but rather: Can man, in the depths of his soul, after he has gone through what arises from himself, as it were, from nature and from his being, continue to develop his soul by taking his soul's development into his own hands, and can he then awaken something in him that is dormant in such a way that this actually deeper being in him comes into its own, so that only through this awakening of a second man in him does he become a free being? Can man educate himself to freedom, or cannot he? Can man become a free being or not? How does he become a free being? That was the new question that had to be raised.

But this pointed out that the present-day human being, if he wants to come at all to the consciousness of the full human being, must not stop at what arises of its own accord in the human being in his development, but that he must take his development into his own hands. Admittedly, this is a point of view that is highly inconvenient for a great many people today. For in order to make it plausible, one must say the following to people: Take a look at a five-year-old child. Let us imagine that this five-year-old child is standing in front of a volume of Goethe's lyrical poems. This five-year-old child standing in front of the volume of Goethe's lyric poems will do something with this volume of lyric poems; he will tear it up, perhaps bite it, or something else, but one cannot assume that this five-year-old child will do the right thing with the volume of Goethe's lyric poems. But the child can develop, the child can be educated so that later he will learn to do the right thing with this volume of Goethe's lyric poems. Now, what would it be like if we were to say to people today: Just surrender to what time consciousness itself gives you, and then you will relate to the actual secrets of nature, to the actual secrets of the world around you, as the five-year-old child relates to Goethe's lyrisches Band. It has the whole of Goethe's Iyrisches Band before it like a fully understanding human being, but of course it does not penetrate into that which one can penetrate into as a fully understanding human being. It must first be educated. Now the call for freedom actually presupposes that the human being has the great intellectual modesty to say to himself: perhaps I stand before nature, before the essence of the world, as the five-year-old child stands before the first volume of Goethe's lyrische Gedichte. I must first take the development of my soul into my own hands, and then, just as Goethe's volume of lyric poetry will mean something completely different to a five-year-old child after five or seven years, so the world will mean something completely different to me. While before, when I just leave myself to what comes naturally, I am a fettered being, a different person awakens in me when I take my development into my own hands. And as this other man glows through me, warms me, permeates me, I become a free being.

Yes, that was the foundation of a human conception of freedom in my “Philosophy of Freedom,” and it was not intended merely as a philosophical truth, but to show that through what man awakens in himself by advancing himself – as if he only achieves what is given to him of its own accord – by developing himself in this way, he develops, as it were, a previously dormant, hidden reality within himself. He creates something in himself that brings him to freedom. As long as one theorizes, as long as one thinks up abstract ideas, these will be a matter for the human mind. They will not particularly take hold of the whole person. Anyone who has dealt with such things could actually know how shadowy the most beautiful, the most ideal abstract ideas live in people. It is different when not abstract ideas but life itself is to be awakened in the human being, when the human being is to go through something vividly, through which something awakens in him that was not there before. This is something alive that takes hold of the whole human being, that is not just a matter of the head, that is a matter of the soul and spirit of the whole human being. Here all feelings and impulses, the whole human life of will, are brought together; freedom becomes a real force in the human being, freedom becomes something that is experienced. But then, when it becomes something experienced, then the human being also wants to develop it in the external life together, then, by living with other people, he comes from his experience of freedom to an idea of such a social structure of human life together, in which only can be realized.

Therefore, in the second part of my philosophy, I tried to establish a moral teaching for people, to establish a social outlook that, I would say, must then naturally arise from the awakened sense of freedom. If we take the impulse of freedom as something that is vividly grasped in the deepest essence of man, then freedom is not an abstract idea, then the philosophy of freedom is not a mere philosophy, then what is expressed by such a view of freedom is something that merges into all of man's actions, into all of man's objectives. Then it contains something that others long for when they speak of freedom, but that can only be found by those who, if they want to understand freedom, do not stop at the world views of the present, but ascend to what lies dormant in man and can be awakened. What I would call a language of freedom that can be spoken to humanity in such a way that it is intimately connected with the cultural conditions of the present and future human being, still needed another thing in its further development.

And here is the reason why we had to move on from the foundation of a philosophy of freedom to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Take one of the main books of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There you will find a detailed description of the paths that a person must take inwardly, in soul and spirit, in order to awaken in him the consciousness of the other person, of the truly free person. There you will find how it is possible for a person to truly come to such an understanding of his own being that the true form of thinking and also of willing appears before his soul. And here I may refer to something I already mentioned in one of the last lectures I gave here: thinking and willing becomes something different for the human being than it is for ordinary consciousness, which, as described in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds', penetrates the human being. By thinking one learns to recognize how the being, which one then grasps as the higher human being, was already there before man entered into physical existence through birth or conception. By thinking one learns to recognize the true form of the human will, how man carries his nature through the gate of death into the spiritual world. One learns to recognize by truly rising, by developing to the truer essence of man, to the eternal in man.

But this only properly sketches out the paths that lead people to, I would like to say, regard the “Philosophy of Freedom” as something self-evident; the paths to finding the truly free human being. But at the same time, this serves the deeper cultural conditions of the present and the future, which express themselves precisely in such calls for freedom as I characterized in the introduction to my lecture today.

What does a human being need when he feels intensely about a dignified existence, what does a human being need for the content of his innermost human consciousness? What I want to say here can perhaps be best illustrated by referring you back to the starting point of spiritual human culture in the last three to four centuries. For it was a great thing when, at the dawn of the newer development of humanity, minds such as Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno and so on appeared. What did they do, basically? They broke with the knowledge and worldviews of the old days and directed human attention to the unbiased observation of the external world. They wanted to dispel prejudices. They wanted to make clear what man can gain by observing the external world. But little by little something else has occurred, something that I have already partially characterized. What has occurred is that an old awareness of what man is in his innermost being has been destroyed by more recent observation. If today, in accordance with our newer natural science, we look at the starry sky, what is this starry sky? Something that we want to understand through mathematics and mechanics, something that we only feel related to – this abstract product of our minds, mathematics and mechanics. And if we compare this with the consciousness that people in older times had when they looked up at the starry sky, He did not have the abstract scientific consciousness: up there the stars revolve according to mathematical-mechanical laws, but you, earthworm, stand here on this earth, are born with birth and perish with death, and that which you are has nothing to do with the course of the stars. If we go back to the earlier stages of human consciousness, we find that this earlier human consciousness held the view that you, human being, as you stand here on this earth, you are not merely attached to this earth; that which lives and works in you is connected with that which circles up there in the stars. And when you perfect your knowledge, when you become aware of yourself as a complete human being, then you know yourself as being related to the animals and plants and stones of the earth, and thus to the entire cosmic space of the stars. We have paid for what we have learned mathematically and mechanically about the stars by cutting ourselves off from the cosmos, from the world. If one now walks the path to higher knowledge in the way I have described, and comes to recognize that human being that did not begin with birth or conception, but that was there in spiritual worlds before birth and conception, and that also lives in us now and which penetrates through the portal of death into the spiritual world, then one does indeed learn anew, with this human being, only in a new form, not in an old, worn-out form, one's kinship with the whole cosmos; then the human being is again imbued with world consciousness. His mere earthly consciousness is transformed into world consciousness. But then man has something that he needs precisely as a cultural condition of the spirit in the present and for the future. Humanity could never experience the moment without the deepest damage to its essence, where reference would be made to new external observations, and the old spiritual life would gradually be extinguished. Man needs faith, the reference to the realization of a permanent, that can withstand, as well as the outer observation of the world expands.

Thus it is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that shows man himself in such a way that he can in turn tie his world consciousness to the whole cosmos, that he in turn knows himself in connection with the world spirit. This is not just a theoretical idea, but something that comes to life in the whole human being, and what makes him, this human being, a different being. In the present and in the future, there will be much speculation about what social institutions are needed so that people can find a dignified existence within them. In recent times, people have even deluded themselves into believing that such institutions can be invented. We shall only arrive at institutions that give man a dignified existence when man is able to create such institutions from his deepest spiritual and soul life. But for that we do not need to dream of a transformation of the external social conditions; for that we need to seriously tackle a new spiritual culture, to awaken that which slumbers and sleeps in the human soul, and which must first be awakened so that man may know of himself that he is a free being. Today we completely overlook the deep rift in our spiritual culture. For many centuries, certain social powers have ensured that external science does not speak of the spiritual and the soul. That should be the concern of dogmatism. One was to experience it through mere belief, to let mere authorities dictate what one should think about spirit and soul; because certain social powers claimed a monopoly on dictating what should be recognized about spirit and soul, science was pushed aside to the merely material. It makes a very peculiar impression on the one who looks deeper into the development of humanity when he hears today how official science believes that it is pursuing the truths without prejudice and that through this unprejudiced pursuit of the truths it will find something that is today called science and that basically only wants to deal with sensual facts. In truth, it has become a developmental process, in truth, it is human research that has capitulated to the monopoly of certain social circles that alone wanted to deal with what people have to think about spirit and soul. A science such as I have characterized, such as leads to freedom, it leads at the same time to man not only being able to investigate the physical, his bodily nature, it leads to man also learning to investigate the spiritual and the soul. And when he learns to investigate the spiritual and the soul, he absorbs stronger, more realistic concepts than those he absorbs when he has to limit himself to mere external material. And so they have tried to allow only that into social thinking which arises out of the present-day consciousness. And from this point of view they believe that human ideas cannot actually penetrate into social conditions, or they fashion for themselves most perverted social ideas. In my book Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the Soul) — one of the last that I wrote and which, like the others, is only a continuation of what you will find in my book The Philosophy of Freedom — in this book Von Seelenrätseln, I have shown how truly anthroposophically oriented spiritual science not only capable of speaking abstractly about all kinds of spiritual and psychological phenomena, but that by grasping the reality of the spirit it is at the same time able to comprehend the human being, which is body, soul and spirit, in its wholeness. And so, for example, in these “Puzzles of the Soul” I was able to point out how it is a great error in present-day scientific physiology to speak of the fact that man has sensitive nerves that go from the sensory organ to the central organ, while the motor nerves go from the central organ to the muscles. An abstract science that speaks only abstractly of spirit and soul will never dare, and will never find the method, to say anything about the senses that cannot be proven merely by the senses. One can prove by stating that there is only one kind of nerve, that there is no difference between sensitive and motor nerves, that such phenomena as tabes dorsalis, which are cited in support of the opinion that motor nerves exist, actually prove the opposite proves the opposite of what is believed to be proven by them.

Thus, in this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, something is created that in turn penetrates all of nature, that has enough impact to penetrate all of nature. But this also allows this spiritual science to penetrate into that which must be of particular interest to contemporary culture. This spiritual science is allowed to penetrate into the structure of social life. And it is only through those experiences that people have with the higher human being that truly social concepts can be gained. That is why we live in such a confusing time today, why we live in such confusion and such chaos today, because people who deal with the solutions of various social issues are not able to dig deep enough into the human being itself to find the ideas that can truly govern social life. And so we are at a loss when faced with the most pressing and burning questions of the present day, and we are left standing before these most searing and burning questions in such a way that no answer comes from the depths of human nature as an echo.

We have seen how great transformations have taken place in the course of human history. Or was not one of the greatest transformations that have taken place in the course of human development that through which Christianity arose? Christianity, which has given the evolution of the earth its true meaning, has emerged through a mighty transformation. It left many things behind. Not all people recognized the truths of Christianity; but on the whole, Christianity was the one thing that worked transformatively in the old cultural element, and basically brought forth the whole of European civilization with its American civilization appendix. Later, something like the French Revolution was experienced. While Christianity was a purely spiritual transformation and has achieved its goal to the greatest extent, it can be said of the French Revolution, which was a political one, that it has achieved some of its political goals, but that important and essential things have been left behind, which have not been achieved of the goals that were set. And now in our time we are experiencing the longing of many people for a new transformation, for new revolutions. And we already see these revolutions at work in many ways. Mankind has had sad experiences. If it wants to be unbiased enough, it should also recognize this in proletarian circles. Mankind has had sad experiences with the extreme social revolutions in Eastern Europe, in Hungary, and a great lesson of world history should be the failure of these social revolutions. And an even greater lesson could be learned if people are at all capable of learning from world-historical events, namely the sad fate of the German revolution of November 9, 1918, a revolution that fizzled out. And if we take a comprehensive view of all that follows from such facts, from the failed revolutions in Hungary and Eastern Europe, from the sadly abortive German Revolution, then we see: spiritual transformations, such as those brought about by Christianity, can take place in the course of the development of humanity; political revolutions, such as the French Revolution, only in part; economic revolutions, such as are being attempted now, are doomed to failure, can only destroy, can bring forth nothing new, if they do not transform themselves into spiritual impulses for progress. One of the most important and essential cultural conditions of the present time is that, out of the correctly grasped impulses of freedom, people come to realize that all the questions that are being addressed today must be considered in the context of the whole spiritual development of humanity, with a renewal of the human spiritual life. And mankind must realize this clearly before the sad and terrible lesson of necessity can occur, which would occur if what is happening to the downfall of human culture in the east of Europe, what has happened in Hungary under such sad circumstances, what is happening in Germany, if what is happening in the way it is grasped by those , who have no conception of the real impulse of the spirit, takes its course, which is now regarded by many as appropriate for the times.

Even what is done economically is only done correctly out of the human spirit, and we live in an age where the old concepts no longer suffice, where we must find new concepts that can create a new economic culture for the present and for the future. Woodrow Wilson is right when he says: We have new economic conditions, people could not shut themselves out from the new economic institutions; but we think about this economic life with the old legal concepts, with the old traditional spiritual ideas. But then, nothing will sprout from that which is rooted in the soul that could now master the new economic life.

What is sought here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in what is communicated here, will on the one hand reach up to the highest heights of human spiritual and soul life, but on the other hand will also be strong enough to reach down to where the most everyday aspects of life need to be grasped. What is the situation today? Intellectual life has gradually taken on a very abstract character. Think about how the religious, aesthetic, artistic, and ideological convictions of, say, a merchant or an industrialist or a civil servant are formed. This is a matter for himself, which he experiences in his soul. It has nothing to do with the account book or with what he does in his office. In the realm where he generates his spiritual ideas, the ideas and impulses that are then expressed in his account book are not created at the same time. At most, it says “With God”; but that is also all that connects the activity that is expressed there with what he carries through the world as an abstract spiritual and soul life. But that is why it was said when people with good social ideas arose in modern times, such as Saint-Simon, Blanc, Fourier: These are good moral ideas, but good ideas alone will not transform social conditions. This can be heard everywhere today where the socialist point of view is discussed. And they are right. With such social ideas as Saint-Simon, Blanc, Fourier and so on had, you do not transform social life, because they arose from the consciousness of people that, when you think and reflect on the spiritual, this spiritual is a thing in itself, that should not grasp the world at the same time. In the end, all spiritual life has become abstract. On the one hand, man takes the upward surge religiously or artistically or ideologically to spiritual heights, if he takes it at all. On the other hand, he abandons himself, I might say, to the hazards of life; in natural science, by working in laboratories, in the observatory and the like, and what he brings out of it, whether in the social or in the scientific field, has no connection with the abstract spiritual life. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to pour out a unity of spiritual and material life over all of human civilization. And from that which is developed in the human being, through beholding the higher human being within himself, ascending to the eternal, the possibility should follow of grasping that which lies beyond birth and death for the human being, but at the same time to make the ideas so strong that they can intervene in everyday life. For it is not the person who speaks of the spirit who is serious and true about the spirit, but the person who is serious and true about the spirit who pursues the spirit to its last involvement in material existence, for whom nothing at all remains of spiritless matter even in the practical conception of life. That is what could be called the cultural conditions of the present and the future, that such spiritual and mental consciousness should be in people.

Then people who are imbued with such consciousness will also create social and political conditions that are desired by people like Woodrow Wilson. Today, however, the situation is such that people only criticize, that productive ideas are not yet there, because they do not want to descend to the spirit or want to ascend. Today we see how, starting from America – we have given the example of Woodrow Wilson himself, certainly a decisive personality – how, starting from America, there is criticism of contemporary social life, and the call for freedom is heard. But one does not want to decide to properly ascend to the real impulse of freedom. And we have seen how truly beautiful, ingenious ideas about freedom and social conditions have emerged in Europe. But it is characteristic of us in European civilization that we are incapable of bringing down from the abstractions, from the philosophical heights, what we conceive and feel so beautifully and introducing it into direct life. And we still do not understand it when there is talk of such an introduction of real, not merely imagined ideas into political life. And when we look across to Asia, we are confronted with a different civilization that criticizes the social and freedom life of the present just as aptly as America and Europe. One only has to read the beautiful arguments of Rabindranath Tagore to see how far the one who stands at the forefront of Asian culture can go in criticism. He does not achieve this in the productive sphere because he is not able to say to himself: if we are to speak of spiritual life again, we must strive for something new. He wants to preserve an old spiritual life, but only to be effective in it.

Now, unfortunately, we have seen in Europe that people have finally lost the direct connection between what they strive for in spirit and what everyday life, so that we now see numerous societies engaged in shaping Europe according to purely external economic aspects and trying to satisfy the needs of the soul, since the Christian religion no longer satisfies one in Europe, from Asia, through all sorts of theories and so on. Such relationships are not suitable for bringing about a new spiritual life; they are the last decadent shadows of an old one.

What is meant here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science takes all this into account. It is pretty much the opposite of what is said about it. And the building in Dornach, which is so often said to be symbolic, does not have a single symbol. Rather, it is said to be built, I would say, purely naturally, in such a way that it is envisaged that one day this and that will be , just as one learns to recognize the nut within its shell, and when one looks at the shell around the nut, one finds that it is naturally shaped to fit the nut. In the same way, we wanted to create a new shell for a new spiritual life, in architectural, artistic and pictorial terms. The building was not constructed out of abstract ideas or out of a complicated aesthetic view. I have often used a rather trivial comparison to try to express what I actually mean by this Dornach building. I am sure many of you know that in Germany, Austria or here, certain cakes are called Gugelhupf, and then the form in which the Gugelhupf is baked is called the Gugelhupf pan. Now, I said, if we imagine that what is to be done in this building is a Gugelhupf, a cake, then, if the cake is to be right, the Gugelhupf pan must be right. In the same way, the spiritual life that is to be cultivated there must have the right shell, just as the nut in the nut shell has the right shell. Except for this basic principle of the building, everything is still fundamentally misunderstood in wide circles today.

Now, as in other numerous lectures that I have already given here at the same place, I wanted to point out once again how the things that are really involved in the Dornach building and what is to be done in it for the civilized development of humanity, in contrast to the numerous misunderstandings that arise, that must arise very naturally. Perhaps it is possible to see from the few suggestions I have been able to make, but which are intimately connected with the most important human longings for the renewal of culture in the present and for the future, what is meant and wanted by this building and its purpose. When the call for freedom rings out from America, as I characterized it with Woodrow Wilson: the goal is to find humanity, a dignified existence, through a spiritual and soulful understanding that can meet this call as its realization, as the right answer to the question that is being asked. Some people today still avoid it. Out of dark, vague feelings, demands are made. The answers must be given out of a clear spiritual insight. I have to think how right Woodrow Wilson is in a certain respect when he points out that secret consortia should not decide on the affairs of the people, of humanity. Woodrow Wilson wants decisions to be made in every family home, be it in the country or in the city, but he wants people to come together in the schoolhouse in particular. It is a beautiful idea that the place of nurturing the spirit should be the place of origin for the formation of contemporary ideas. And it is a beautiful saying of Woodrow Wilson's when he says: Our goal is the reality of freedom. We want to work towards preventing private capital accumulation by law and to make the system by which private capital accumulation was created legally impossible. And another very nice saying is: Inside the country, on the farms, in the shops, in the villages, in the apartments of the big city, in the school buildings, everywhere where people meet and are true to each other , that is where the streams and rivers rise from their source, to form the mighty force of that stream that carries and drives all human endeavors on its journey to the great common sea of humanity. It is a fine idea to call people together in such a way that the stream can form from all the individual sources for the liberation of humanity, and it is a fine idea to let the goals that are to carry humanity forward be set precisely in the places where the spirit is cultivated, in the school buildings.

But if you take what I have tried to explain today, then perhaps Woodrow Wilson's call for schoolhouses will have to be different after all. For I believe that only when a cultural life is cultivated in these school buildings, permeated by a realistic, humane understanding of the free human spirit and the human soul, only then will the right current of human freedom come from the school building. Until we can implant in the human soul a correct understanding of freedom, we may gather in schools, but they will hardly find realistic goals there either. These will only be found when we have the courage to bring into the schools a spiritual, realistic worldview, an artistic outlook, and a religious confession. For what will come out of the schools for the future of humanity will be more important than what people in general decide on the basis of what they have learned at school.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! You will have realized from all we've said that our earth in its present form is only the last remains of what was once essentially different. If we want to compare its earlier condition with anything, we can only compare it really—as you have seen—with what one has in an egg cell. Our earth today has a solid kernel of all sorts of minerals and metals. And we have the air around us, and in the air two substances which especially affect us-we could not live without them: oxygen and nitrogen. We can say therefore that in the earth we have a hard kernel of all kinds of substances, seventy to eighty of them, and around us the air-envelope containing mainly nitrogen and oxygen.

Nitrogen and oxygen, however, are only the main constituents. The air always contains other substances, though in very small quantities, such as carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, among others. But these are also the substances contained in the white of an egg, in the white of a hen's egg. Oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon and sulphur! The difference is merely that in the egg white the sulphur, hydrogen and carbon are closely combined with the oxygen and nitrogen, while in the outer air they are present in a much looser way. So the same substances are in the air that are in the hen's egg. The same substances are present in a much smaller amount in the yolk, and we can therefore say that when it hardens, densifies, it becomes what the earth is. One must observe such things if one wants to know what the earth once looked like.

Today, however, things are done in quite a different way, and in order that your judgment of what I am telling you here may not be confused by what is commonly accepted, I would like to give you a small view of this general knowledge. It agrees perfectly with what I say if only one considers it in the right way.

People today do not think about things as we have done here in the last two lectures. They say: Here is the earth; it is made of mineral substance. This mineral earth is convenient to investigate, so let us examine first what lies on top, what we walk on. Then if we make quarries, if we make railway cuttings and open up the ground, we find there are certain layers or strata of earth. The uppermost layer is the one on which we walk. If we go somewhere or other into the depths, we find deeper-lying strata. But these strata are not always lying so nicely above one another that we can say: the one is always above the other.

When you really examine the earth, here you have one stratum [See drawing-red], it is curved over, not level; another stratum below is also curved [green]. And above them comes the stratum on which we walk [white]. Now, as long as we remain on foot on this side of a hill we find an upper layer that could become good arable land if we would use the right manuring methods and so on. But if we are building a railway we may have to remove certain strata and by making these cuttings we come into the depths of the earth. That has led to the discovery that strata are superimposed on one another, not level, but they have been jumbled up in all sorts of ways.

But these strata are sometimes very remarkable. People have asked how one can determine the age of the strata—which layer is older. Of course the most obvious answer is this: When the strata lie above one another, then the lowest is the oldest, the next above, younger, and the one at the very top the youngest of all. But, you see, that is not always the case. In some places it is so, but not everywhere. And one can show in the following way why it is not the case everywhere.

We are accustomed, as you know, in our civilized lands to bury our domestic animals when they die, so that they may not be injurious to people. But if the human race were not so far evolved, what would happen with the animals then? Wherever the animal died, there it would lie. Now at first it remains on the surface. But, as you know, when it rains the soil gets washed up and after a time part of the decaying creature is mingled with the soil thrown up by the rain. There it will remain, and after some time the whole animal is penetrated with earth by the rain or by water that flows down over a slope and then the rest of the earth goes over the animal. Now someone can come along and say: Heavens! The earth looks so uneven there, I must dig and have a look! He need not dig very far, just a little, and then he finds what is left of the skeleton, let us say, of a wild horse. Then he says: Well, now I'm walking on a stratum that only appeared later, the one below was formed when there were wild horses like that. And one can know that that is the next stratum, that the age in which this man lives was preceded by an age in which these horses lived.

You see, what that man does is what the geologists have been doing with all the strata of the earth, ever since the time when they could be reached by quarries, railway cuttings, excavations, and so on. One learns in geology to investigate quarries everywhere, with a hammer or some other instrument, in order to record what is exposed in the mountains through landslides or something similar. One goes hammering everywhere, makes various statements and then one finds in some stratum the so-called fossils. Then one can say: There are strata beneath the ground that contain animals quite different from those of today. Then one discovers in excavating the earth's strata what the animals were like that existed in other ages.

This is nothing so very special, for people often underestimate the time it takes for something like this to happen. People find today in southern regions churches or other buildings just standing there. The people come along, do some digging for some reason or other, and Heavens! there's something under this church that is hard; that's not earth. They dig down and find a pagan temple underneath! What had happened? A relatively short time ago this surface layer on which the church or building stands was not there at all. It was pushed up by man, perhaps with the help of nature-forces, and underneath there is the pagan temple. What was once above, is now below. Layer upon layer has in fact been piled up in the earth. And one must find out, not from the way the strata lie, but from the nature of the fossils, how these animals and the various plants have come into the strata.

Then, however, the following comes about: You find one layer of the earth [See drawing below, yellow], you find another [green]; you are able for some reason or other to excavate [arrow], and if you look merely at the stratification, then it seems as if what I have marked green were the lower layer and what I have marked yellow were the upper layer. You cannot get in here at all, you cannot excavate, there is no railway, no tunnel nor anything else by which one can get in. You make a note that the yellow is the upper stratum, the green the lower. But you must not decide immediately, you must first look for fossils.

Now one very frequently finds fossils in the upper stratum which are earlier, of fish, for example, strange fish-skeletons which are earlier. And perhaps below, one finds interesting mammal skeletons which are more recent. Now the fossils contradict the strata, up above appear the older, the earlier; below, the more recent, the younger. One must realize how that has happened. You see, it is because some sort of earthquake, some inner movement has flung what was below up above the top layer. It is the same as if I were to lay a chair on the table and the original position would be: here the chair-back and here the table-top, and then through an earthquake the table would be turned over the chair.

One can perceive in the most varied instances that there has been an inversion, a turning upside down. And one can come to the following conclusions as to when the inversion took place: It must have happened later than when all the animals were alive, it must have happened after the fossils were formed, otherwise they would lie differently.

One comes in this way not to judge the strata simply as they lie one above the other, but one must be able to see how they have changed their positions. The Alps, this mighty chain of mountains stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the region of the Danube, this main mountain range in Switzerland, is not to be understood at all unless one can go into such things. For all the strata that were built up in the Alps have later been thoroughly jumbled up. There what was lowest often lies at the top, and what was at the top is lowest of all. One must first find out how all these shifts have taken place.

It is only when all this is taken into account that one can tell which are the oldest strata and which are the newest. Modern natural science, only going by the externals of research, then naturally says: Those strata are the oldest in which the remains of the very simplest animals and plants are found. Later on, animals and plants grew more complicated, and so we find the most complicated remains in the latest strata. In the oldest strata one finds fossils because the calcium or quartz structure of the animal has been preserved, while everything else has been dissolved. When one comes to the later strata the skeleton has been preserved.

Now there is another remarkable way in which fossils are formed. Sometimes this is very interesting. Picture that there once existed some simple type of ancient creature; it had a body, perhaps with tentacles in front. I am drawing it rather large; in the strata known to geology it will as a rule be smaller. Now this creature perishes lying on this piece of ground, and this particular soil does not penetrate and permeate the creature; it avoids, so to say, the acids in the body. Then something very remarkable occurs: the earth in which the animal lies approaches it from all sides and envelops it, and a hollow space is made in the shape of the animal. That has happened very frequently; such hollow spaces are formed, earth is shaped around the animal. But there is nothing inside; the soil has not been absorbed by the body, but round about, because the animal was scaly, a hollow space is formed. Later, the scales are dissolved and still later a brook winds through.

This then fills the hollow space with stony gravel, [green] and there within, a cast of the animal is finely modeled, by a quite different material. Such casts are particularly interesting, for there we don't have the animals themselves, but their casts.

However, you must not imagine that things are always so easy. Of present man, for instance, with his organism of soft substance, there is extraordinarily little left—nor of the higher animals. There are animals of which only the casts of their teeth have remained. One finds casts of the teeth of a kind of primeval shark which were formed in this way. One comes to realize that every animal has its own form of teeth and man has a different form. The dental formation is always in keeping with the whole structure of the creature. One must have the talent to imagine the appearance of the whole animal from the form of its teeth. So things are by no means simple.

But as one studies these strata one finds out how things really developed. And then it simply becomes clear that there was a time when such animals as we have now did not exist, when there were much, much simpler creatures, somewhat like our snails, mussels, and so on. But one has to know how much has remained of them. Let us imagine that the following could happen. Just suppose that a small boy who did not like to eat crab sneaked a crab from his parents' dinner-table and played with it. He is not caught and buries it in the garden. Now there is earth over it and the whole business is forgotten. Later the garden belongs to new owners; they dig about and in one place they see some funny little things looking like lime-shells. (You know about the so-called crab's eyes which are not eyes, but little lime-shells in the body of the crab.) Those are the only traces left.

Now one cannot say that those are fossils of some kind of animal; they are fossils of only part of the creature. Similarly in older strata, especially in the Alps, one finds some sort of fossil having that shell-like appearance. That is how they look; they no longer exist today but are found in the earlier strata. One must not suppose, however, that this had been the whole creature. One must assume that there was something around it that dissolved, and only a small piece of the animal is left.

Modern science goes into this very little. Why? Well, it simply says that in this mighty Alpine mass the layers have been mixed with one another, the lowest flung to the top, the uppermost to the lowest—that the strata show it. But can you imagine, gentlemen, that with the present earth-forces such massive mountains could be flung up in that way? The little that happens now on earth is by comparison a dancing through, one fleck lightly tossed on another—today that is all, a sort of dancing through!

If a man lived 720 years instead of seventy-two, he would experience in his old age that he was walking on ground a little higher than before. But we live too short a life. Just think if a fly that only lives from morning till evening were to relate what it experiences! Since it lives only in the summer, it would tell us of nothing but flowers, that there were always flowers. It would have no idea of what goes on in the winter; it would believe that each summer joined on to the one before. We human beings are certainly a little longer-lived than a one-day fly, but still we have a little of the fly nature with our seventy to seventy-two years! We see indeed little of what goes on. Even with the scanty forces prevailing today, there is no doubt that more happens than man usually sees. Yet, comparatively speaking, all that happens is that rivers flow along to the sea and leave alluvial soil behind. So a little soil is deposited, and this then reaches beyond the shores and the fields get a new stratum. That is comparatively little. When one considers how something like this great mountain mass of the Alps has been jolted and shaken through and through, it is obvious that the forces which are active today were active in quite a different way in earlier times.

But now we must try to picture how such a thing can happen. Take, for instance, an egg cell from some mammal. It looks at first quite simple, a nucleus in the center with an albuminous mass all around. Now suppose that the egg is fructified. When it is fructified, the nucleus changes into all sorts of little forms; it develops very strangely into a number of spirals that go up like tails. And then the moment these little coils arise, star-formed structures develop out of the mass. The whole mass comes into formation because there is life in it. What goes on there is very different from what goes on in our earth today. The upheavals and over-turnings that are taking place in the egg cell are the same as what once took place in the massive Alps!

What then is more natural than to say: Well, then the earth must once have been alive, or these convulsions of inverting and overthrusting could not possibly have occurred! The present form of the earth does in fact show us that in past ages when neither man nor higher animal existed, the earth itself was alive. This obliges us to say that the present dead earth has come forth from a living earth. Yet animals can only live on this present dead earth! Just think if the oxygen and nitrogen in the air had not separated off and had not condemned hydrogen, carbon and sulphur to an almost complete passivity: we would then have to breathe in something like egg white—for that was what surrounded the earth.

Now we could imagine—for anything can happen in this world!—that instead of our lungs, we had developed organs able to draw in an albuminous atmosphere like that. Today, of course, we can take it in as food through the mouth. Why could not a sort of lung-organ have evolved, up nearer to the mouth? Anything can originate in this world; any possible thing might come about—even though we would never guess at such changes from observing man's present body. But think, gentlemen—we look today into lifeless air. It has died. Formerly the albumen was living. The air has died because the sulphur, hydrogen and carbon have gone and the nitrogen and oxygen have therefore also perished. We gaze into light-filled air that has died, but this has allowed our eyes to be physical, as they are indeed physical. If everything in our surroundings were living, then our eyes would have to be living too. But if they were living, we would be unable to see with them, and we would always be in a state of unconsciousness: just as a person becomes unconscious when there begins to be too much life in his head, when instead of the regularly developed organs he has all sorts of growths. He is then unconscious intermittently, and later it becomes so severe that he lies there as if he were dead. Likewise in our original condition on the earth, as it was then, we could not have lived consciously. The human being could only awake to consciousness as the earth gradually died. And so mankind evolves on an earth that is dead.

So it is, gentlemen! And this is true not only of nature but also of civilization. If you think back to what I said just now—that below the earth there could be pagan temples and above Christian churches—you will see that the Christian churches are related to the pagan temples just as the upper strata to the lower, only that in one case we have to do with nature, in the other with culture. But one will not understand how the Christian element evolved if one does not observe that it evolved out of paganism as its foundation. In culture too we have to consider these strata.

Now I have said that the human being has actually been there all the time, but as a spiritual being, not a physical being. And that again leads us to look for the real reason why man did not evolve as a physical being earlier. We have said that in the air today there are nitrogen and oxygen, with carbon, hydrogen and sulphur to a lesser degree. In our breathing we ourselves unite the carbon that is in us with the oxygen we inhale and exhale the two together as carbon dioxide. In our human existence we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide; our life consists of that. We would long, long ago have filled the earth and the air of the earth with carbon dioxide had there not been something else on the earth: the plants. They have the same hunger for carbon that we have for oxygen. They take up the carbon dioxide eagerly, hold on to the carbon and give out the oxygen again.

You see, gentlemen, how wonderfully these things complement each other! We human beings need the oxygen out of the air, we inhale it, unite it with the carbon we have within us and exhale carbon and oxygen together as carbon dioxide. The plants breathe this in and breathe the oxygen out again, and so there is always oxygen in the air.

Well, this is true today but in human evolution on the earth it was not always like that. When we find the fossilized creatures that lived long ago, we realize that they could not have been like our modern animals and plants, particularly not like our present plants. All the primeval plants must have been much more like our sponges, mushrooms, algae. There is a difference between our mushrooms and our other present plants. The latter take in the carbon and form their body from it. When they sink into the ground, their body remains as coal. The coal we mine today is the remains of plants.

All the research we are able to pursue into the kinds of plants that originally existed tells us the following: Our present plants, including the plants which are now providing us with coal, are built up from carbon. But much earlier plants were formed not from carbon but from nitrogen. That was possible because just as carbon dioxide is exhaled today by animal and man, in ancient times a combination of carbon and nitrogen was exhaled. That is prussic acid, the terribly poisonous hydrocyanic acid fatal to all life today. This poisonous prussic acid was once exhaled, and nothing that exists today could then have arisen. The early mushroom-like plants took in the nitrogen and formed their body from it. The creatures about which I spoke last time, the bird-like beings and the heavy, coarse animal-beings, breathed out this poisonous acid, and the plants around them took the nitrogen to form their plant-body. Here, too, we can see that substances still existing today were used in quite a different way in ancient times.

I spoke of this once before to those of you who have been here for some time. I related how in 1906 I had to give some lectures in Paris⁴ on the evolution of the earth, the origin of man, and so forth. The subject led me to say: Can anything in this world show that carbon and oxygen have not always had the role they play today, that nitrogen once had that role, and that once the atmosphere consisted of prussic acid, of hydrocyanic acid?

Now you know that there are old people and young children. Well, if a man of seventy stands here and a child of two next to him, they are both human beings; they stand beside each other, and the one who is now seventy was like the two-year-old sixty-eight years ago. Things of different ages stand side by side. And it is the same in the universe; there, too, the older and the younger are side by side. Our earth, from what I have just now described and what you can still see today, our earth is a greybeard, an ancient fellow, almost dead already-if one does not count the life newly sprung up, one can call it almost dead. But at its side in the universe there are again younger forms which will only later become what our present life is. For instance, we must regard the comets as one of these. We can know, therefore, that since the comets are younger, they must still have conditions that belong to a younger age. The comets are to the earth what the child is to the old man. And if the earth once had prussic acid, the comets must now have it, they must have hydrocyanic acid! If with today's body one were to touch a comet, one would instantly die. It is diluted prussic acid that is in them.

I said in Paris in 1906 that this follows from the premises of spiritual science. Those who acknowledge spiritual science accepted my statement even though it astonished them. Then later, a fairly long time afterward, a comet made its appearance. By that time people had got the necessary instruments and it was then found by ordinary scientific methods that comets do have cyanide, prussic acid, as I had said in Paris in 1906. So it was confirmed.

Naturally, when people hear of this, they call it a coincidence: Oh sure, Steiner made that statement in Paris, and then there was the discovery—just a coincidence. They say this because they know nothing else. But I have now told you why one must take it for granted that there is prussic acid in the comets. It was no accident, it was genuine science by which one first reached this knowledge. Physical research only confirmed it later. People realize now that this is true for all that anthroposophy sets forth; for everything is confirmed later. Quite a number of things will be discovered today outside the Anthroposophical Movement that were already given out many years ago by anthroposophy in a rather different way.

Yes, there are many other things that could be carefully investigated today by science. I am always saying that if people could really travel to a star, they would be amazed to find it different from the modern ideas about it determined by their life on earth. They imagine that it contains a glowing gas. But that is not at all what is found out there. Actually, where the star is, there is empty space, empty space that would immediately suck one up. Suction forces are there. They would suck you up instantly, split you to pieces. If people would work with the same consistent research and the same unprejudiced thinking as we do here, they would also come to see with intricate spectroscopes that there are not gases out there, but negative suctional space.

Some time ago I gave certain individuals the task of investigating the sun and stars with the spectroscope, simply in order to prove by external methods that the stars are hollow spaces, not glowing gases. That can be proved. The persons to whom I gave this task were tremendously enthusiastic when they started: “Oh! then we shall get somewhere!” But sometimes enthusiasm fades away; they delayed too long. And then a year-and-a-half ago news came from America that people were starting to investigate the stars and were gradually finding out that they were not glowing gases but hollowed-out space! It is no disaster, of course, for such a thing to happen. But naturally, it would have been more useful to us – externally—if we had done it. But it doesn't matter, as long as truth comes to light.

On the other hand, however, it can be seen through just such things that anthroposophy really wants to work in collaboration with ordinary science. So it would also like to work with ordinary science on the strata of the earth. One thoroughly accepts what science has to say about the upheavals and overturnings in the Alps. But one cannot go along with the scientists when they assume that these upheavals were caused by forces that are still existing today. The fact is that there were life-forces there then; only life-forces could have flung and tossed these strata of living substance through one another. Anthroposophy already incorporates ordinary science and extends far beyond it, but science always wants to stop whenever it is too lazy to approach things more closely.

So—we will continue on Wednesday at nine o'clock.

• 4. Paris, May 25-June 16, 1906: L'Esotérisme chrétien / Esquisse d'une cosmogonie psychologique, Paris 1957.

In view of the deliberations that have been going on here with reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society as their object, I would like to shape today's lecture in a way that may help my hearers form independent judgments in these decisive days. To this end I shall be speaking somewhat more briefly and aphoristically than I usually do when discussing aspects of anthroposophy, and shall confine myself to commenting on the third phase of our anthroposophical work. This evening I will speak for the same reason on the subject of the three phases of the Anthroposophical Movement.

We often hear references being made these days to the great change that came over Western spiritual life when Copernicus substituted his new picture of the heavens for the one previously held. If one were to try to state just what the nature of this change was, it might be put as follows. In earlier times man thought of the earth realm as the object of his study and the chief concern of learning, with little or no attention being paid to the heavenly bodies circling overhead.

In recent times the heavenly bodies have come to assume a great deal more importance than they used to be accorded. Indeed, the earth came to be thought of as a mere grain of dust in the universe, and man felt himself to be living on a tiny speck of an earth quite insignificant by contrast with the rest of the cosmos and its countless thousand worlds. But if you will permit me to give just a sketch of this matter for the sake of characterizing the third phase of our Anthroposophical Movement, it must be pointed out that by reducing the earth to a mere grain of dust on the one hand, man also lost the possibility on the other of arriving at valid judgments about the rest of the universe other than those based on such physical and more recent chemical concepts as may apply. Research that goes beyond this and devotes itself to a study of soul and spiritual aspects of the universe is ignored. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the whole stance of modern learning. Man loses the possibility of seeing what he calls his soul and spirit as in any way connected with what rays down to us from the starry world. You can judge from certain passages in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, how intent anthroposophy is on creating a renewed understanding of the fact that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. Anthroposophy aims at re-creating the possibility of knowing the cosmos as spirit.

In this quest anthroposophy encounters a serious obstacle on its path, an obstacle that I am going to describe without reservation.

People come forward, quite rightly proclaiming anthroposophy with great enthusiasm. But they emphasize that what they are proclaiming is a doctrine based not on their own experience but on that of a spiritual investigator. This makes for instant conflict with the way of thinking prevailing in present day civilization, which condemns anyone who advances views based on authority. Such condemnation would disappear if people only realized that the findings of spiritual research recognized by anthroposophy can be arrived at with the use of various methods suited to various ways of investigation, but that once they are obtained, these results can readily be grasped by any truly unprejudiced mentality. But findings acceptable to all truly unprejudiced mentalities can be made and still not lead to fruitful results unless those presenting anthroposophical material do so with attitudes required for anthroposophical presentations that are not always prevailing.

Let me be explicit. Let me refer to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, published about thirty years ago, and recall my description in its pages of a special kind of thinking that is different from that generally recognized as thinking today. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature, or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at the hand of nature, thoughts that, indeed, he has only recently developed the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh century, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of it—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did the Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader as he read to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relation to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing at the moment of awakening that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color-filled, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily motions to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, The Riddle of Man, where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thoughts. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit have on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking.) One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as a result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person; it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life-element of its thinking, and the thinking left to it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there, seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, though in that book I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works because matters like these have to be gradually developed, one finds that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into formerly passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we will. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily matter comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes a part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belong to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side given its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them, for it belongs to a different world than that that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see, but the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our will leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a grain-of-dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we re-discover elements in the universe that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its suffusion with will, and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the universe and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my more recent lectures have concerned themselves with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read, speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!

Now I want to try to improve the present state of things by speaking briefly about the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. A start was made with the presentation of anthroposophy about two decades ago. I say two decades, but it was definitely already there in seed form in such writings as my Philosophy of Freedom and works on Goethe's world conception. But the presentation of anthroposophy as such began two decades ago. You will see from what I am about to say that it did begin to be presented as anthroposophy at that time.

When, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, I gave my first Berlin lectures (those printed under the title, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age), I was invited by the Theosophical Society to participate in its work. I myself did not seek out the Theosophical Society. People who belonged to it thought that what I was saying in my lectures, purely in pursuit of my own path of knowledge, was something they too would like to hear. I saw that the theosophists wanted to listen to what was being presented, and my attitude about it was that I would always address any audience interested in hearing me. Though my previous comments on the Theosophical Society had not always been exactly friendly and continued in the same vein afterwards, I saw no reason to refuse its invitation to lay before it material that had been given me for presentation by the spiritual world. That I presented it as anthroposophy is clear from the fact that at the very moment when the German section of the Theosophical Society was being founded, I was independently holding a lecture cycle [From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. History of Human Evolution Based on the World Conception of the Orient up to the Present, or Anthroposophy, 1902–3. No manuscript of these lectures is available.] not only about anthroposophy but with the name anthroposophy included in the title. The founding of the German section of the Theosophical Society and my lecture cycle on anthroposophy took place simultaneously. The aim, right from the beginning, was to present pure anthroposophy.

That was the start of the first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement. It was first exemplified in those members of the German section who were ready to absorb anthroposophy, and further groups of theosophists joined them.

During this first phase, the Anthroposophical Society led an embryonic existence within the Theosophical Society. It grew, as I say, within the Theosophical Society, but developed nevertheless as the Anthroposophical Society. In this first phase it had a special mission, that of counterposing the spirituality of Western civilization, centered in the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Theosophical Society's course, which was based on a traditional acceptance of ancient Oriental wisdom.

This first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement lasted until 1908 or 1909. Anyone who goes back over the history of the Movement can easily see for himself how definitely all the findings made on the score of prenatal existence, reincarnation and the like—findings made on the basis of direct experience in the present, not of ancient traditions handed down through the ages—were oriented around that evolutionary development in man's life on earth that centered in the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse. The Gospels were worked through, along with a great deal else. By the time it became possible for the Anthroposophical Movement to make the transition over into artistic forms of revelation, as was done with the presentation of my mystery plays, the content of anthroposophy had been worked out and related to its central core, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time when the Theosophical Society was sidetracked into a strange development. Since it had no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it committed the absurdity, among others, of proclaiming to the world that a certain young man of the present was the reincarnated Christ. Certainly no serious person could have tolerated any such nonsense; it appeared ridiculous in Western eyes. But anthroposophy had been developed as part of Western civilization, with the result that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared in a wholly new light in anthroposophical teaching. This led to the differences with the Theosophical Society that culminated in the virtual expulsion of all the anthroposophists. They didn't mind that because it didn't change anthroposophy in any way. I myself had never presented anything but anthroposophy to those interested in hearing about it, and that includes the period during which anthroposophy was outwardly contained by the Theosophical Society.

Then the second phase of the Anthroposophical Movement began. This phase was built on a foundation that already included the most important teachings about destiny, repeated earth-lives, and the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual illumination fully keyed to present day civilization. It included interpretations of the Gospels that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present.

The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917, was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels. You need only consider such examples as my lecture cycles of that period, one held in Christiania in 1910 on the European folk souls, the other at Prague in 1911 on the subject of occult physiology, and you will see that anthroposophy's second phase was devoted to working out its relationship to the sciences and practical concerns of the day. The cycles mentioned are just two examples; the overall aim was to find the way to relate to modern science and practice.

During this second phase of the Society's life, everything centered around the goal of finding a number of people whose inner attitude was such that they were able to listen to what anthroposophy was saying. More and more such people were found. All that was necessary was for people to come together in a state of soul genuinely open to anthroposophy. That laid the foundation for an anthroposophical community of sorts. The task became one of simply meeting the interest of these people who, in the course of modern man's inner evolution, had reached the point where they could bring some understanding to anthroposophy. They had to be given what they needed for their soul development. It was just a matter of presenting anthroposophy, and it was not a matter of any great concern whether the people who found their way to anthroposophy during the Society's first two phases foregathered in sect-like little groups or came to public lectures and the like. What was important was to base absolutely everything on a foundation of honestly researched knowledge, and then to go ahead and present it. It was quite possible to do this satisfactorily in the kind of Anthroposophical Society that had been developing.

Another aspect of the second phase was the further development of the artistic element. About halfway through it, the plan to build the Goetheanum took shape. A trend that began with the Mystery Plays was thus carried into the realms of architecture, sculpture and painting. Then eurythmy, the elements of which I have often characterized in my introductory talks at performances, was brought into the picture. All this came into existence from sources to which access is gained on the path sketched in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sketched in sufficient detail, however, to be understood and followed by anyone really desirous of taking that path.

This second phase of the Society's life was made especially difficult by the outbreak of the frightful war that then overran Europe and modern civilization. It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period, when mistrust and hatred were flooding the entire civilized world. The fact that the Goetheanum was located in a neutral country in a time when borders were closed often made it hard to reach. But the reasons for believing in the sincerity of anthroposophical efforts were more firmly founded on fact, even during the war, than any reasons for mistrusting it afterwards. It can truly be said that the war period brought no real disruption of the work; it continued on. As I have already mentioned, a large number of individuals from many different European countries confronting one another in hate and enmity on the battlefields worked together in a peaceful and anthroposophical spirit on the Goetheanum, which we have now lost in the terrible disaster of the fire.

Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number of individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through. The Threefold Movement, later called the Union for Free Spiritual Life, the Union for Higher Education, and so on, had to be undertaken with the clear intention of putting one's whole being irrevocably behind them. It was no longer possible, in the third phase, to rest content with the simple presentation of anthroposophy and merely to foregather with people whose inner search had led them to it. Instead, a number of individuals wanted to undertake this or that project, and they did so. This created all kinds of groupings in addition to the original purely anthroposophical community.

One of them was the scientific movement. It was built on the foundation of relationships of anthroposophy to science that had been established during the second phase. Scientists made their appearance in our midst. They had the task of giving modern science what anthroposophy had to offer. But there should have been a continuation of what I had begun in the way of building relationships to contemporary science. Perhaps I may remind you of lectures I gave during the second phase of the Movement. I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics into anthroposophy. I did the same thing in the case of other aspects of learning. This attitude, this way of relating, should have continued to prevail. If that had happened, the result would have been a different development of scientific activity than the one we have been witnessing during this third phase. Most importantly, we would have been saved from what I described at the earlier meeting as fruitless argumentation and polemics. Then we would presently be faced with a positive task, and could say that anthroposophy does indeed have a contribution to make to science, that it can help science go forward along a certain path, and in what specific way that can be accomplished. The outcome would have been a different attitude toward science than that evidenced in a recent issue of Die Drei, indeed in several issues that I looked over in connection with the cycle of lectures on science given by me last Christmastide in Dornach. I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in such unfruitful polemics. I say this not for the sake of criticizing but to point out what the task of the scientists in the Society is.

Something of the same kind ought to be happening in other respects as well. Let us take a case in point; I called attention to it on the occasion of my last lecture here.

In the third phase of the Movement, we saw the Union for Higher Education come into being. It had an excellent program. But somebody should have stayed with it and put all of himself behind it, made himself fully responsible for it. My only responsibility was for anthroposophy itself. So when someone else starts an independent enterprise founded on anthroposophy, that project becomes his responsibility. In the case I am discussing, nobody stayed with that responsibility, though I had called attention to the necessity of doing so at the time the program was being drawn up. I said that programs of this kind should be started only if an iron determination exists to carry them through; otherwise, they ought never to be launched. In this case it was the group guiding the Society that failed to stay behind it.

What was the outcome? The outcome was that a number of young people from the student movement, motivated by an intense longing for true anthroposophy but unable to find what they were looking for in the Society, sought out the living source of anthroposophy. They said expressly that they wanted to know the artistic aspects of anthroposophy as well as the others. They approached Frau Dr. Steiner with the intention of being helped by recitation and declamation to experience what I might call the anthroposophical swing of things.

Another development was taking place alongside this one, my dear friends. In the third phase of the Movement, the spiritual worlds were being described in the way I described them at the beginning of my lecture today when I gave a short sketch of a certain matter from the standpoint of purely spiritual contemplation, from a level where it is possible to show how one develops a different consciousness and thereby gains access to the spiritual world. The first and second phases were concerned with relating the Movement to the Mystery of Golgotha, to science, to the practical conduct of life. The third phase added the direct portrayal of spiritual realms. Anyone who has kept up with the efforts that were made during these three phases in Dornach and here too, for example, anyone with a real feeling for the advance represented by the third phase over the first and second phases, anyone aware to what extent it has been possible in recent years to spread anthroposophy beyond the boundaries of Central Europe, will notice that we are concerned with bringing into being a really new third phase in direct continuation and further development of the first two phases. Had we not entered the third phase, it would not really have been possible to develop the Waldorf School pedagogy, which is based on taking man's eternal as well as temporal nature into account.

Now please compare the discussions of yesterday and the week before with what I have just been saying in the interests of frank speaking and without the least intention of criticizing anyone, and ask yourselves what changes these three phases of our work have effected in the Society. Would not these same discussions, identical as to content, have been just as conceivable sixteen or eighteen years ago as they are today, when we have two decades of anthroposophical work behind us? Does it not seem as though we were back at the founding of the Society?

I repeat that I have no desire to criticize anybody. But the Anthroposophical Society can amount to something only if it is made the nurturing ground of everything that anthroposophy is working to achieve, and only if our scientists, to take an example, always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics.

Teachers have a similar task, and, to a special degree, people engaged in practical life. For their functions are of the kind that draws the heaviest fire against anthroposophy, which, despite its special potential for practicality, is most viciously attacked as being impractical.

So the Society is presently faced with the necessity of being more than a mere onlooker at really anthroposophical work going on elsewhere, more than just the founder of other enterprises that it fails to provide with truly anthroposophical zeal and enthusiasm. It needs to focus consciously on anthroposophical work. This is a completely positive statement of its mission, which needs only be worked out in detail. If this positive task is not undertaken, the Anthroposophical Society can only do anthroposophy more and more harm in the world's regard. How many enemies has the Threefold Movement not created for the Anthroposophical Movement with its failure to understand how to relate itself to anthroposophy! Instead, it made compromise after compromise, until people in certain quarters began to despise anthroposophy. We have seen similar things happen elsewhere. As I said in my first lecture here, we must realize that anthroposophy is the parent of this movement. That fact should be recognized. If it had been, a right relationship to the Movement for Religious Renewal, which I helped launch, would have resulted. Instead, everything in that area has also gone amiss. I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that takes us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

Please do not take offense at my speaking to you as I have today, my dear friends. I had to do it. As I said in Dornach on January 6th last, the Anthroposophical Society is good; it is capable of listening receptively to even the sharpest parts of my characterization. But the guiding elements in the Society must become aware that if the Society is to earn its name in future, they must make themselves responsible for keeping it the conscious carrier of the work. The conflicts that have broken out will end at the moment when the need for such a consciousness is clearly and adequately recognized in a spirit of goodwill. But there has to be goodwill for that need to be brought out into the open and any fruitless criticism dropped. Furthermore, there is no use giving oneself up to comfortable illusions, making compromises in adjustments between one movement and another, only to end up again in the same old jog-trot. It is time to be absolutely serious about anthroposophical work, and all the single movements must work together to achieve this goal. We cannot rest content to have a separate Waldorf School movement, a separate Movement for Religious Renewal, a separate Movement for Free Spiritual Life. Each will flourish only if all feel that they belong to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I am sure that everyone truly concerned for the Movement is saying the same thing in his heart. That is the reason I allowed myself to express it as sharply as I did today. Most of you were already aware of the need for a clear statement that could lead to the establishment of the consciousness I have described as so essential.

The Movement has now gone through three phases, during the last of which anthroposophy has been neglected in favor of various offspring movements. It must be re-discovered as the living spiritual movement demanded by modern civilized life and, most especially, by modern hearts. Please take my words as meant to serve that purpose. If they have sounded sharp, please consider them the more sincerely offered. They were intended not as an invitation to any further caustic deliberations but as a challenge to join in a Movement guided by a true heart for anthroposophy.