The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Part II of VII in a series of articles written for Das Goetheanum (Vol. 2, 21 January 1923) celebrating ten years of the Goetheanum. This translation was originally published in Anthroposophy Vol. 2, No. 1-2, January/February 1923, pages 4-7. Translation revised for Anthroposophy Today, No. 9, Spring 1990.

The first course at the Goetheanum was held in September and October 1920. In my opening address I felt that more than anything it was necessary to point out that in anthroposophy we go to one and the same source for knowledge of the science of the spirit, artistic form and religious depth of inner life. In my opening address I made only brief reference to this; in my lectures on the underlying concept of the building at Dornach I tried to show how the art of the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spiritual source as the ideas that come to the fore when anthroposophy takes the form of a science.

The attempt that was made in creating the Goetheanum has been widely misinterpreted in this respect. People have said that it was intended to be symbolic. It has always seemed to me that the people who said such things cannot have used their eyes and really looked at the Goetheanum when they visited it. They came with the fixed idea that the building represented a certain philosophy and that creators of that philosophy wanted to use architectural design and other means to represent their teachings in symbolic form. They found their ideas confirmed because they did not see the building for what it was. In their view anthroposophy was the same as any other intellectual discipline, and it is true that if such a discipline wants to find expression in art it will usually get no further than symbolism and allegory.

But the Goetheanum did not portray abstract ideas. Nothing was further from the minds of those who let the shape of the building arise out of artistic feeling, letting line follow line, surface follow surface out of artistic sensibility, and presented in colour on the walls and cupolas their direct vision of images that were in colour.

Occasionally, when I had the opportunity to show visitors around the building, I would say that I felt it would be wrong to ‘explain’ the forms and colours, for art should not be brought home to people by presenting thoughts about it; art is there to be looked at, to let our feelings respond to it.

Art that springs from the same ground as the ideas that make up true anthroposophy can become genuine art. The powers of soul that give form to these ideas that make up anthroposophy penetrate to the spiritual source that can also produce the impulse to be creative as an artist. Thoughts formed on the basis of anthroposophical insight exist in their own right and one simply does not have the desire to give them symbolic form in some kind of half-baked art. On the other hand when we experience the reality that anthroposophy reveals, the desire arises to let it come alive in colour and form. Those colours and forms exist in their own right and do not represent ideas; they do so just as little, or as much, as a lily or a lion represent an idea.

This is of the very essence of anthroposophical life and anyone visiting the Goetheanum and using their eyes rather than their dogmatic intellect will have found genuine attempts in artistic expression rather than symbols or allegories.

Something I had to say over and over again in speaking of the design concept of the Goetheanum is that it would be quite impossible to engage an artist who would create a home for anthroposophy in the Classical, Gothic or Renaissance style. We could have done so if anthroposophy were no more than a body of knowledge, of ideas. Anthroposophy is a way of life, however; it means taking hold, both in and through the human being, of all that is human and of the world.

The initiative to build the Goetheanum, taken by friends of anthroposophy, could only be brought to realisation by letting the design, down to the smallest detail, arise from the same living spirit that is the source spring of anthroposophy itself. I have sometimes used the metaphor of a nut in its shell. The shell certainly cannot be called a symbol of the nut. It has however been formed out of the same laws and principles as the nut. In the same way the building can only be a shell the form and images of which reveal in art the spirit that lives in the word when anthroposophy uses the language of ideas. Every style in art has in fact been born out of a spirit that also came to expression in the ideas of a philosophy.

The style of architecture that developed for the Goetheanum arose entirely in the sphere of art; symmetry, repetition and so on had to give way to living organic form principles. The auditorium for instance had seven columns on either side. Only corresponding columns on the left and the right had matching capitals. Apart from that, every succeeding capital was an evolution in metamorphosis from the preceding one. The whole had arisen out of artistic feeling; the element of thought had not come into it. It simply had not been possible to repeat the same design for different places; every form was individually created in its particular place, just as the smallest part of an organism has its own individual and necessary form for its own particular place.

The mystical significance that has been attached to the fact that there are seven columns does not exist. The number of columns is entirely the result of artistic feeling. As the form of one capital developed out of another, artistic feeling had taken us to a point with the seventh column where we could go no further without returning to the motif of the first column.

I think we are not deceiving ourselves if we say that not everyone looked at the building with prejudiced eyes. There have been many people over the years who were prepared to look with open and unbiased eyes, aesthetically, at something that had arisen from open and unbiased feeling.

Goethe spoke out of his own feeling for art when he said that when nature begins to reveal her open secret, those to whom it is revealed feel an irresistible longing for her most worthy exponent, which is art. He also said that beauty manifested the hidden laws of nature, laws that would have remained hidden for ever if beauty did not exist.¹ The notion has come up in our modern age that true knowledge of the things of nature can only be presented by developing theories as to the laws of nature. But what if nature were creating those things out of an artistic impulse? This would mean that anyone caught up in the prejudice that nature can only be presented in terms of rational thought would be unable to grasp the whole of it. And that is indeed the case. Having penetrated the secrets of nature in our ideas in a way that is truly alive, we find that something remains that cannot be reached by means of thought; it can only be reached if we change from the thoughtful to the artistic approach in heart and mind. That was how Goethe felt when he wrote the lines referred to above. The Goetheanum was created out of that kind of feeling.

Anyone who considers anthroposophists to be a sect will find it easy to see the symbolism of sectarian ideas in the architectural design of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is anything but sectarian. It seeks to be wholly and completely human in all it does, without prejudice.

The inside of the small cupola was painted not by starting from figurative ideas and applying colour; instead, colour was first experienced and the figurative aspect developed out of this. If we give ourselves up to colour, the creative powers of the soul are enhanced until the forms and figures are actually demanded by the colours themselves. As you paint you come to feel – in the moments of creative work – as if nothing else existed in the world but living, weaving colours, colours that are creative in themselves and beget realities of being.

Man in his inner being does not belong to the earth;
he is of another world and therefore needs forms that
belong to him in his character as a native of that world.

—Rudolf Steiner, The Arts and Their Mission, p. 21, from a lecture given in Oslo in 1923.

• 1. J. W. Goethe, Sprüche in Prosa.

Question: What was the youth movement, what is it, and how can one arrive at anthroposophy through it? Those who went through the youth movement believe that they will find in anthroposophy a continuation of what they sought in the youth movement. They want to hear about the significance of the youth movement from a spiritual scientific point of view.

Rudolf Steiner: The youth movement belongs to an age in which I myself was no longer young; so those who belong to the youth movement must be better informed about it than I am.

Taken externally, the youth movement is not an entirely abstract, unified movement, but rather it brings together people from the most diverse worlds of ideas and worldviews. People may come together through their feelings. That is one aspect of the youth movement. Other forces, more fundamental than ideological ones, for example, hold it together and keep it together. There are many personalities within the youth movement who could not give a clear and precise answer to the question of what they want; they could not say, consciously, what they want.

The second aspect of the youth movement is that it has emerged everywhere to such an extent that, for example, one cannot say that 'the youth movement in Switzerland and the youth movement in Germany have influenced each other reciprocally, but rather that the youth movement has shot up internationally out of elementary forces. It is a general human cause. One must conscientiously observe the characteristics of the youth movement. When one encounters something like this, one has the feeling that one can only understand it from a profound point of view. If one approaches the youth movement with knowledge of history and the humanities, it becomes clear that it is connected with the inner-human, historical change that is strongly characterized for the humanities scholar as having occurred at the end of the 19th century. This becomes clear when one looks closely at the characteristics found in the pronouncements of those who were still young or children at that time.

I have examined these moments more closely and, on the basis of my observations, have come to the conclusion, or rather, the insight that the youth movement is connected with the great upheaval at the end of the 19th century and is one of the symptoms that points to the advent of a new era at this point in time. When one is very close to something, one does not recognize it in its full essence; one only recognizes it when one moves away from it. Through the spiritual scientific method, one can achieve a certain distance and thereby learn to observe accurately and gain insights into interrelations. In this way, people will one day think about the end of the 19th century and realize that a significant impulse came in that time, which is still hidden today.

This impulse, which is a human impulse, seems to live in the minds of those who have turned to the youth movement. In these minds there is a flash of the tremendously significant turning point at the end of the 19th century. Sometimes it can be quite unimportant to get involved in discussions about it, but it is important to recognize that important impulses are at work and are felt by those who have joined the youth movement. Spiritual science aims to consciously capture what is at work in the development of humanity, and it takes the view that without it, the great world catastrophe cannot be understood either. The philistines, who cannot understand a thing, will think they are eccentric and do not know that they themselves are eccentric. The people who grew old in the ideas of before can no longer keep up. Decadent brains live in those who still carry the old into the 20th century.

It is not a contradiction for the youth movement to live into spiritual science. One can even speak of a certain predestination of the youth movement for spiritual science. The youth movement is conditioned by a feeling for what is more or less consciously present in spiritual science. One must not become vain. One must not come to say, for example, “The epoch lives in me”. We are partly conditioned by the impulse of the end of the 19th century. We have to look at such things externally, not patriarchally like our forefathers. You can't get along with something like that in our time.

Question: How do you find the bridge from the youth movement, in which there are people who rebel against the prevailing worldview, to anthroposophy? One can find a certain rejection of anthroposophy. Some people find it a bit brusque. The path is too strictly prescribed for them. Anthroposophists put the spiritual too much in the foreground, while they are trying to find themselves.

Rudolf Steiner: This is connected with the impulse I mentioned earlier. We can look at the same question from the opposite point of view. Anthroposophy is the one spiritual movement that can approach certain spiritual things in our age. People who find their way into anthroposophy are uprooted from what immediately preceded it in terms of culture. One example is Friedrich Nietzsche. He lived in the transitional epoch; he was condemned by fate to go through all the most intimate cultural sufferings of the soul. Nietzsche went through everything that one can suffer in culture. If you look at him during his student days, in the Wagner-Schopenhauer period, in the period of positivism, he suffers from what was most uplifting for the culture of the time. You can see how this person first suffers from the culture of the 19th century and then perishes because of it. He was still stuck in the culture of the 19th century.

Some individuals were able to work their way out of it and then came to anthroposophy. They found something in it that, at the end of the 19th century, had no father and no mother, so to speak; it was something that had to be placed on new ground. Compared to what has gone before, anthroposophy stands alone. One does not become an anthroposophist in order to have a world view, but rather one does so with one's whole being. Those who do not want to develop a relationship to anthroposophy expose themselves to danger, and if those who are capable of it, who are from the opposite pole even without a father or mother, do not try to find the bridge, then the others may miss out on connecting to the development of humanity.

I can well understand that such misgivings are expressed. One should, however, make an effort to seek the bridge. But if this is anxiously avoided, one would quite expose oneself to the danger that has just been characterized, and no progress would be made at all. The youth movement has recently come to a halt. It strove everywhere towards union; people wanted to find each other and come together. In recent years this has changed in some individuals; they strove towards a certain shutting themselves away. This also appeared as a sweeping international nuance. Not fulfilling oneself with a spiritual content leads to an encapsulation of the individual.

There are numerous paths to anthroposophy. One should go beyond being bothered by the nature of individual people who want to be anthroposophists and should try to really experience anthroposophy. At present, anthroposophy is actually the only thing that is not dogmatized and that is not keen on presenting something in a very specific way, but that strives to look at something from different sides. The essence of anthroposophy lies in life and not in form. If one wants to be understood, one is indeed forced to use forms that are currently customary.

An American once asked me: I have read your writings, including your social writings. Do you think they will still be valid for future ages? I answered: They are constructed in such a way that they can metamorphose, and then quite different conclusions can arise for the coming time than for the present. What matters is that life finds life.

A participant: A bridge must be found for young people by implementing in life that part of the teaching that directly concerns them. Young people cannot relate to the teaching. Teachers, for example, who have emerged from the youth movement, have been fighting for a long time for what happens in the Waldorf school; bridges could be built there. Also, what has been made intellectually accessible through the various courses of anthroposophy has already been unconsciously experienced in the youth movement.

Rudolf Steiner: We have to bear in mind that in our age the individual must find access to general evolution through thought; it is only through thought that they can do so. It is entirely possible to introduce anthroposophy to young people and even to children. Of course, we must not approach it from the standpoint of the old. For example, if you want to teach a child the idea of the immortality of the soul, you take the example of the butterfly and the chrysalis. The child will be able to understand what it is about, because it is a truth. In the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis, nature itself presents the same thing at a lower level as what is the immortality of the soul at a higher level. If we start from the standpoint that the child is stupid and I am clever, then the child will never learn anything right, especially if we ourselves do not believe in what we are teaching the child. This is where there is the possibility of introducing everything from anthroposophy to children. In history lessons, what is effective as life in history must be properly introduced to life.

Question: A large part of the youth movement has now moved over to the philistine camp. The youth movement is very much a spiritual movement. They are guided by a strong life of nature and feeling, and this leads people to rebel against much of what has gone before. People wanted to live out their own laws, they could not get out of their emotionalism, they could not recognize that life can only truly become fruitful out of inner truthfulness if it is fully thought through. That is why there is a tendency not to think things through to the end. If one recognizes the importance of anthroposophy for young people, one can prove to young people, whether in terms of world view or philosophy, that they must come to anthroposophy, that anthroposophy only wants them to be more aware, and that it wants the same thing that they want. So far, three solutions have been proposed for the gender question: Kurella's body soul, asceticism and marriage at a young age. However, none of these three solutions has brought a real solution.

Rudolf Steiner: In these three ways, a new problem that confronts humanity is being tried to be solved with old dogmatic thinking. The essence of the free human being cannot be reduced to mere thought.

In anthroposophy, I see something that is alive, that is capable of making a different being out of the human being than he was before. He becomes free through this substantiality, he becomes a truly free human being in the course of a short development. You cannot solve a question that is posed by life through thinking. The question will resolve itself through the practice of life, when it is grasped from the standpoint of freedom. There is no need to worry that something unsocial will come about as a result. Imagine that one day someone wanted to know how to arrange the conception so that a male or female being would be born. If this were made a matter of the intellect, there would certainly not be as many men as women in the world. Although this only takes place at the individual level, social conditions arise through inner laws. [Rudolf Steiner points to his book “The Philosophy of Freedom” and continues:] You cannot arrive at a new life in one leap, least of all through programs. You prepare yourself for it by having a free attitude as your inner foundation. This problem must be solved by each individual. Youth literature is quite dogmatic when it comes to the gender issue.

Question: The youth movement was initially quite romantic. They recognized something that came to them out in nature. They recognized that they could grasp the divine not only with their minds. Anthroposophy wants to draw everything into consciousness. It aims at a striving for knowledge. Most people do not find the bridge between these two, nor can they.

Rudolf Steiner: In this, people think too selfishly; they do not consider how to find a connection to the overall development of humanity. The age is characterized by thinking and conceptualizing. Today, we experience the world through thinking. It is necessary to rise from the dullness of feeling and come to a luminous conception through thinking. We are only truly human through thinking. Our emotional life is transformed through thinking, and we are more human through what thinking releases in us. Life in feeling is sought because there is a fear of clarity. Feeling can be very intense when it passes through thinking. 'Living in nature' is so often understood as if one were striving for something special. One must realize that in so doing one is not bringing anything new, but only regaining something that was lost earlier. Yes, the longing must live in the modern human being. Too little was given to him by the old; he must acquire something for himself. It is recommended to read Schiller's essay “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry.” “The Philosophy of Freedom” is built on a natural relationship with nature.

Question: There is a gulf between older and younger youth. The youth that is now in secondary school is different from the youth of the youth movement. The spirit of the secondary school youth, from which the youth movement grew, was characterized by the slogan “romanticism of rebellion.” The spirit of today's secondary school youth should be described as “resignation of reconstruction.” Everything that was a profound experience for the youth movement: nocturnal journeys, campfires, aimless wandering – that appears to today's youth as Bolshevism. They reject it and long for boundaries to which they can adhere, for authorities. Is this fact to be seen only as a temporary reaction or as the emergence of a new epoch by young people?

Rudolf Steiner: The period that people between the ages of thirty-five and fifty have gone through was a difficult one. The last years of the 19th and the first years of the 20th century were a difficult time; spiritually, people were focused on material things. The good, spiritual life of the fifties and sixties of the 19th century has been buried. The people who are effective today have grown too old; most of those who do something in the world are at least fifty years old. And those young people who have plans to do something are not being allowed to. Between the two stands an inwardly inactive generation, and these are the fathers of today's high school students. These fathers have gained a bad influence on the youth, who look up to them as their leaders. Authority is all very well, but it depends on what kind of personalities it is linked to. And what are the ideals that live in the generation between thirty-five and fifty and are transferred to their sons? One can only feel sorry for these young people.

Question: Does Dr. Steiner consider it desirable for an organization to develop among young people who are involved in the movement and are also anthroposophists?

Rudolf Steiner: Well, I don't think much of organization. You see, in my “Key Points” I deliberately spoke of the social organism, not of organization. We have been overfed with this food in recent years.

Question: The question was whether there would be common tasks for young people in the anthroposophical movement, or whether each person has their own task.

Rudolf Steiner: In the future, all the tasks that individuals have will be the tasks of the community, and each person must make the tasks of the community their own. There is no other way. But you can't organize something like that, only associate.

Having now given you a picture of certain prominent features in the spiritual movements of the modern age, as well as of the tendencies underlying them,—modern spiritual movements, for which the anthroposophic movement should afford, as it were, a channel suited to the demands of these times,—I should like to go on to-day and tomorrow to certain phenomena that made their appearance in the third period of the anthroposophic movement, and try from these to construe for you what are, truly speaking, the life-conditions of the Anthroposophical Society.

Let us be clear as to how we stood at the time when the second period of the anthroposophie movement was drawing to a close,—about, that is, the year 1918 or '14,—and as to how we stand to-day; and let us try to examine more closely what these two stages signify for us,—I mean the beginning of the third period and the end of the third period.

During the past few days I have been trying more to go into the inner depths of the picture; but to-day and tomorrow I would like to put before you what is, for Anthroposophists, so to speak, of actual moment, and of a kind to enter directly into the impulses of the will.

Let us just look back again for a minute and see how, in the first and second periods, by keeping in the main to the rule of going step by step with the concrete facts and carrying forward the movement, so to speak, in pace with the developments of the inner anthroposophic life, ... how far we had actually got in this way? We will turn our eyes to this for a minute.

As I said: in the first period to begin with,—down to the years 1907—8—9,—the work was one of slow and steady acquisition, a laborious acquisition of inner, spiritual material. The foundations were laid of an actual, modern science of the spirit, and pursued into their various consequences. Down to the end of this period one may say, too, that the paper continued to appear, Lucifer-Gnosis; which periodically brought out things by myself and others, that, step by step, built up a certain solid substance of Anthroposophy.

And then, with the second period, came the time when in lecture-cycles and lectures,—and in a way, too, for the general public,—new ground was acquired. from those writings which have their very special importance for the spiritual evolution of the West; namely, from the Bible: the Gospels and Genesis.

Here, again, they were real steps that took place. One started with the Gospel of John; and then went on to the other gospels. And, led thus by the gospels, certain definite truths and treasures of knowledge came to light one after another; so that, from stage to stage, one piece of spiritual acquisition was added on to another. And everything recorded on the other side again, in the outward expansion of the Society, had its origin mainly in these inner progressive steps of spiritual acquisition.

Of course the external arrangements involved making all sorts of programmes and things of the kind. But that was not the essential feature. The essential feature was, that positive work was achieved, stage by stage; and then, of course, in proportion, the spiritual ground thus achieved could be worked out esoterically to further depths.

And so, with all this, it came to pass, by just about the end of the second period, that Anthroposophy, and all that Anthroposophy is, was widened out over the general field of human culture and civilization,—as we attempted in Munich with our performances of the Mystery Dramas.

And by the end of the second period we had got so far that it was possible to think of building our Bau, which has now met here with this disaster. One must reflect that this marked an exceedingly important stage in the development of the Anthroposophical Society. For, to put up such a building, presupposed the existence of quite a considerable number of people, who were sufficiently interested in what Anthroposophy had already produced of substantial reality, to wish to build such a home of their own.

At the same time, however, it meant taking the first essential step beyond the step-by-step work that had simply kept pace with the whole evolution of the Anthroposophical Society. It was the first step that went beyond this. For, obviously, a building like the Goetheanum was bound to attract the attention of the outside world to what was now the ‘Anthroposophical Society’, in a very different way from anything that had been there before.

Take opponents, for instance; they had existed, of course, before, opponents of every conceivable camp. Even in those days they had not only written, but printed their writings. But these opponents found really no particular public. For, assuming even that before the year 1914 an opponent of so indescribable a kind as Max Seiling had come on the scene, a certain sensational interest might possibly have induced some of the members of the Anthroposophical Society itself to read the thing; but people outside would not have bothered about it; there would have been no public. The building of the Bau first made it possible for opponents to come forward and find a public.

Things of this kind, when one is dealing with a reality like the anthroposophic movement, must by no means be regarded as matters merely of theoretic interest; they must be taken with the most intense and serious earnest; for all these things give rise day by day to ever growing problems and responsibilities.

And so we were at any rate able to put up our building, the Bau. But the fact that we could do so, my dear friends, presupposed, as I said, that there was something already there, for which the building could be put up. It was there. It was felt by really a large number of people to be something that was actually there and presented a sort of inner vitality. And there was plenty of practical experience, too, that had been collected through quite a long time. Experience was there in plenty; and there was no need to disregard it. And since a society was also there, such past experience might have been turned to very profitable use,—night to this day be turned to very profitable use. Everything I have been saying during these days was with the purpose of calling attention to certain past occurrences that imply so many pieces of practical experience.

And now this period has expired. And the terrible event, to which we may point as marking the expiration of this period, is the Burning of the Goetheanum.

And now to-day we have to ask ourselves ... you will remember that I said these lectures were intended at the same time as an aid to self-recollection for Anthroposophists . to-day we must look back in self-recollection and recall how, in those days, we were able to think with a certain security about the further course of Anthroposophy and how we purposed to carry it on; yet that nevertheless we were bound to foresee, and foresee, too, in our purposes, that directly Anthroposophy came before the open public, the opposition too would undoubtedly set in. And now, let us just note what was the starting-point of that period, and what was its end. The starting-point I have already characterized. It lay in the fact that we could venture to put up the Goetheanum. And now let us see what shape things have assumed to-day, and what the result is of Anthroposophy's being thus exposed, laid open by the Goetheanum to the judgment henceforth of a whole indeterminable number of people. Well, of this, my dear friends, I would like to show you the latest example,—in order that we may keep up-to-date, so to speak. The very latest example is contained in a leaflet recently published, and entitled The Secret Machinery of Revolution. On p.13 of this leaflet you will find the following account. (I will translate from the English.)

‘At this stage of my inquiry, I may refer briefly to the existence of an offshoot of the Theosophical Society, known as the Anthroposophical Society. This was formed as the result of a schism in the ranks of the Theosophists by a man of Jewish birth who was connected with one of the modern branches of the Carbonari. Not only so, but in association with another Theosophist he is engaged in organizing certain singular commercial undertakings not unconnected with Communist propaganda; almost precisely in the manner in which “Count St. Germain” organized his dyeworks and other commercial ventures with a like purpose. And this queer business group has its connections with the Irish Republican movement, with the German groups already mentioned’ (amongst the groups mentioned is, as an instance, the ‘Consul’ organization!) ‘and also with another mysterious group which was founded by Jewish “ Intellectuals ” in France about four years ago, and. which includes in its membership many well-known politicians, scientists, university professors, and literary men in France, Germany, America and England. It is a secret society, but some idea of its real aims may be gathered from the fact that it sponsored the “Ligue des Ancient Combatants ”, whose aim appears to be to undermine the discipline of the armies in the Allied countries. Although nominally a “Right Wing” society, it is in direct touch with members of the Soviet Government of Russia; in Britain it is also connected with certain Fabians and with the Union of Democratic Control, which opposes “secret diplomacy ”!’

Well, my dear friends, to this I need only add, that, as you know, my visit to England is planned for August, and that you may therefore see that the things of which I have many times spoken are to be taken with all seriousness; that the opponents are exceedingly well organized; and moreover, that in all circumstances and situations they very well know what they are doing. You will remember what I said some time ago to the effect that—as I said—one must never imagine that the last thing is the worst to come.

As you see, we have to-day an opposition; that is the other, final end of the third period. We have to-day an opposition, and one that shrinks from no sort of falsehood, and very well knows how to manipulate the effects of a falsehood. You must by no means imagine that it will do to pass over such things lightly and merely to say: ‘Well, with a thing like that, not only is not a single word of it true, but it is such clumsy lying that not a soul will believe it!’—Anybody who talks in that way, my dear friends, simply shows that he is going about asleep in the midst of this present-day Western civilization, and simply does not know the power of those impulses of false-hood, which the very best people, one might say, take for true, simply out of easy-goingness and sleepy-headedness.

What lies between these two dates is a matter now of peculiar importance for us to consider. For, to put it in this way: in the year 1914 the anthroposophical movement was unquestionably so far that it possessed a store of spiritual wealth, of spiritual material, with which it could have made its way through the world. As circumstances actually were, however, it was necessary to go on working very actively after 1914.—If you look back over what has taken place since that time, you will come to the conclusion that the work done since then was mainly one of deepening on the spiritual side. And in this respect again, the road taken was the straight one; this deepening in the spiritual direction was steadily pursued step by step, unconcerned indeed even with the events going on externally in the world; because, as a fact, the most urgent matter was then—and is still to-day—that that spiritual inner treasure, which is now seeking revelation for the progress of mankind, should, first and foremost, be incorporated in some actual form in the life of the civilized world. There can never be any question, in communicating or working up this spiritual store of wealth, of doing anything else than do everything direct from this spiritual store itself.

With regard to this, there came again an extension, as you know, in this third period, through the introduction of the eurhythmy. Of this eurhythmy at any rate it can never be said that it draws from anything else than straight from the sources of Anthroposophy itself. Everything in it is taken direct from anthroposophic sources. Are there not at the present day, my dear friends, all manner of schools of artistic movement,—all manner of attempts in one way or another to arrive at something, which perhaps on the outside looks a little like our eurythmy. But, if you go back through all that has happened, from the moment when Frau Dr. Steiner first took the eurhythmy in hand, and eurhythmy began to develop, so that from being carried on more, I might say, in a private circle during the war-time, it then was able to come out in public, and has aroused ever-increasing interest. If you take everything that has gone to the building-up of this eurhythmy, why! don't you think that there were numbers of people from one quarter or another continually hinting to one, ‘Here is something quite similar,’ ‘There is something quite similar,’ ‘This should be considered,’ ‘That should be adopted!’ The only way in which the thing could be carried forward successfully, was by looking neither to right nor left and troubling about nothing round one, but drawing simply and solely from the sources of the thing itself. The moment anything whatever in the nature of a compromise had been introduced, the thing would no longer have been what it is,—could never have become what it is. It is part of the life-conditions of a movement like this, that there should he absolute security: Everything can be drawn from the sources themselves, in ever-wider extension as it comes to be needed.

This practice of working solely from the central source, which was comparatively easy, because there could be no question about it, down to 1914,—this and this alone makes it possible to carry anything like Anthroposophy forwards in the right way.

Well, this third period, after 1914, witnessed a great many things of all kinds, in which of course,—like every other person and movement,—the anthroposophic movement too was involved. And now, of course, on the one hand for instance, it must emphatically be pointed out again and again, that during the world-war, whilst the different nations were tearing each other in pieces, there were here members of some sixteen or seventeen nationalities working together side by side, and that the Anthroposophical Society went through this whole time without deviating in the slightest from its true, original character. Rut still, one must not forget, that all the things which were surging in men's minds in those days, and therefore in the minds of Anthroposophists, were just of the sort to create divisions in the Anthroposophical Society, and to split it up. This is a fact which must be admitted.

You will understand, that in pointing out these things quite objectively I am not by any means belittling all the many good qualities of the Anthroposophists, not in any way denying them. They shall all be taken for granted. And certainly it is quite true that to a certain degree we managed to get over the things that were—let us say, ‘splitting-up’ mankind so disastrously, outside the Anthroposophical Society, between the years 1914 and 1918. Rut still, those who look a little closer will recognize, that waves of this kind, though in a different form perhaps from else-where, did nevertheless break in upon the anthroposophic movement; and in connection with this, there began to show itself somewhat markedly, my dear friends, something which I have frequently indicated before in these words: namely, that in this third period something began to take shape which I might call an internal opposition to what I myself am called upon to do in the Anthroposophical Society,—a sort of internal opposition.

Most of you, of course, are very much surprised when I speak of this internal opposition; because they themselves are not aware of it—many of them at least. But so much the worse! I could almost say; for this internal opposition came out very strongly in people's feelings, particularly during this third period. And there were external signa too in which it showed itself. When a movement like this has passed through two such periods as I have described, there by no means requires to be a blind confidence, if, in the third period, (seeing what has gone before, and that there are antecedents to go upon) something or other is then done for reasons of which the whole connection is not immediately obvious to everybody. Just reflect for a moment:—reasons, of which the whole connection could not possibly at that time be obvious to everybody, which required a great number of things to be taken together, and where, before all, it was a question of setting the anthroposophic movement permanently on the right lines! And these were the things, in which what one might call this ‘internal opposition’ showed itself.

I know, of course, that, directly I touch upon these things, a number of people will say: Aren't we expected then to have opinions of our own!—Of course one is expected to have one's own opinion as to what one does oneself: but when something is done by another person with whom one is in some way associated in life, it necessarily then becomes a question of confidence playing a part on occasions,—especially when there already are antecedents to go upon, of the kind I mentioned.

Now, at a certain moment in the third period, during the Great War, I wrote the little book called Thoughts in War-time. And thereupon this internal opposition made itself peculiarly manifest, in a quite remarkable way. Not only did people come to me and say: We thought Anthroposophy never meddled with politics!—as if this little book had meddled with politics in any way!—and more things of the kind; but it was also quite plain to see from the whole attitude, that many a heart had taken a certain tinge of something that should never be allowed to grow on anthroposophic soil,—that has its growth in very different soil! Well, it has been my lot to meet with a great many objections that were made especially to these ‘Thoughts during the Wartime’; but I never yet met, I really never yet have met with anyone who said ... and now I am going to say something dreadfully presumptuous, my dear friends; but it is quite objective ... I never found anyone say, ‘We don't rightly know what to make of the thing; but we'll wait a year or two, till 1985, and then perhaps we shall know, why this little book was written.’—And there have been a good many other things besides, all showing how very strongly the kind of thing was at work that simply tended direct towards the undermining of all natural freedom and independence of action inside the Anthroposophical Society. For one would think that the writing of the book might naturally have been left to me, as being my concern; instead of which, there had come to be a sort of notion: ‘If he means to be the person with whom we are to carry on the Anthroposophical Society, then he must only write what we please!’

These things have to be said somewhat drastically, or else, as you know, they are not understood. They are symptoms, and show the rise at that time of a certain temper of mind which is contrary to the life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement,—that within the society there arose a temper of mind contrary to the life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement!

One thing there was, however, in this third period, that cannot but be of quite peculiar importance: the consciousness namely, in founding this society, of having taken the first, leading step in a matter where a large part of the human race is bound to follow. Reflect upon it, my dear friends: a comparatively small body of people associated together, with the claim of doing something, in which they shall be followed by a large part of the human race! It imposes not only those obligations that the other people will have later, who follow after; it imposes obligations of a far higher kind, obligations that are many times, a hundredfold higher in degree, than any duties incumbent on the great mass of people who hereafter may take Anthroposophy as their guide in life.

The Anthroposophists of to-day must not suppose that they have simply the same obligations as those people will one day have, who believe in Anthroposophy, when Anthroposophists are reckoned by millions, and not by thousands. When a few thousands are forerunners in a movement, these thousands are under a far greater, a multiple degree of obligation. They are under the obligation namely, in all and every detail to exercise greater courage, greater energy, greater patience, greater tolerance and, above all things, greater truthfulness. And in this third period the test was laid in particular on truthfulness and on earnestness. What in a way was necessary, was that the thing should grow up, which formed the theme of discussion on one occasion during the course delivered to the Theologians. It was spoken of then. That was what there should have been amongst the little band of Anthroposophists, and that is what must come: namely, a feeling, a kind of sense, that Anthroposophy,—quite apart from the existence of Anthroposophists,—must be looked upon as an independent living Being in itself; as something, so to speak, that goes about amongst us, and to which we are responsible at every moment of our lives. It was said in this lecture to the theologians in so many words: Anthroposophy is herself an invisible person, going about amongst visible people, and to whom, so long as they are only a little number, they owe the very greatest responsibility,—something, that must really be treated as an invisible person, actually living amongst us, who must be consulted in every single action of life, as to what she says to it.

Whenever, therefore, so long as there is only a little band of Anthroposophists, anything is formed in the way of human associations,—friendships, or fellowships, or any sort of clique,—it becomes all the more necessary that this Invisible Being should be asked, and that everything should be so, that it can be justified before this Invisible Being.

Of course this will be, to the same extent, ever less and less the case, the more wide-spread Anthroposophy becomes. Rut so long as it is only the possession of a little band, it remains absolutely necessary that everything that is done should be done, so to speak, in consultation with this person, Anthroposophy. It is one of the essential life-conditions, that Anthroposophy should be regarded as a living Being. And this Being must only die, when the multitude of its adherents has grown past numbering. This, then, is the necessary condition: sincere and genuine earnestness in following after that Invisible Person of whom I spoke;—profound earnestness, which must grow day by day. If this profound and growing earnestness is there, then my dear friends, there can be no doubt but that everything, whatever is done, will be begun and will be carried on in the right way.

There is one fact to which I should like, in the next place, to call your attention.—Whereas the second period—from the years 1907, 8, 9, down to 1914—was more essentially the period that helped to develop Anthroposophy on the side of sentiment, of religious knowledge, in the third period there came in again something that had been there before in the first period, as I described yesterday. It came about, that Anthroposophy was again brought into a certain relation, for instance, to the scientific world, to the different branches of science and learning followed by a large part of the human race! It imposes not only those obligations that the other people will have later, who follow after; it imposes obligations of a far higher kind, obligations that are many times, a hundredfold higher in degree, than any duties incumbent on the great mass of people who hereafter may take Anthroposophy as their guide in life.

Already during the war, one might see some scientist or man of learning from one corner or another beginning to draw in to Anthroposophy. This gave the Anthroposophic Society helpers upon scientific ground. At first these men of science did not come much to the front. The scientific department, down to the year 1919 or 20 remained more of a hope, with the exception of what Dr. Unger extracted and turned to account for Anthroposophy from the Philosophy of freedom and other writings of the pre-anthroposophic time. Otherwise, apart from what was done in this respect in the further elaboration of the science of knowledge,—work which afforded valuable, substantial material for the future movement,—apart from this, one may say that at first, at the beginning of the third period, the scientific element was a hope. For this scientific element began now, in the third period, by making itself felt in precisely the reverse direction, to what it had done before, in the first period. In the first period, as I told you, the main point with the people I spoke of yesterday was, how to justify Anthroposophy in the eyes of Science. Anthroposophy was required to get her pass viséd by Science. That was the tendency in the first period. And since Anthroposophy could not do this, the scientific branch of the business gradually died out. In the second period it had ceased to exist, and towards the end of the time the whole thing leaned more towards the artistic side; interests of a general human kind came into the ascendant.

And then in the third period these scientific aspirations again crept out of their corners, but in the reverse way. Now it was no longer a question—not explicitly at least—of justifying Anthroposophy in the eyes of Science; but of refertilizing Science from Anthroposophy.

And now every kind of person began to turn up, all complaining: We can get no further with our particular science; it wants a new seed of life. It was no longer now a question, as before, in the first period, of inventing atomic constructions, because this was the customary thing, and borrowing atomic theories from physics and astronomics for the ether and the astral bodies too. Now, having experimented long enough in the hope of reducing it to Science, it was now a question of precisely the reverse tendency.

Well, this new tendency ... I will discuss it to-day only from the positive aspect ... will only work out to any-thing, will only be of any use or benefit to the anthroposophic movement, if it finds the way to work solely and purely from anthroposophic sources—much in the same way as we work in the artistic branches, in eurhythmy, for instance; and if this again is done with all the seriousness and earnestness of which I was speaking just now. So long as, after all, a good deal still of that style of thinking, which is nowadays ‘scientific’, is unconsciously introduced into the anthroposophic movement, so long nothing will profitably come of it. And, in particular, nothing will profitably come of it, so long as the idea prevails, that the people, who are to-day official representatives of science and learning, can possibly be convinced of anything whatever by argument, without finding their way themselves into anthroposophic lines of thought. They must erst find their way into the anthroposophic lines of thought; and then one can talk to them. With regard to the people to-day who are opposing Anthroposophy, our only business is to point out clearly where they are making false statements. That is a point one can discuss. But for matters more of debate, of actual substance, one obviously cannot discuss these with people, who are not only not willing to be convinced, but really indeed are not able to be convinced, because they lack the erst foundations!—This is the first thing that everyone must work at: to lay for himself the first foundations in each of the different fields of work; but to lay these foundations really from the centre of Anthroposophy, to work direct from the central sources.

And then, after the war, when the attempt was made to grapple with all manner of practical problems of life, with actual world-problems, here again it was a question of guiding everything, of letting everything take shape, from the central anthroposophic core, and of recognizing, that with these practical problems of life one can least of all deal in any sort of compromise. There can be no question of anything but simply and solely saying to the world what has to be said from the anthroposophic centre itself, and then of waiting, and seeing how many people have an understanding for it. But never in any case must anything whatever that is drawn from the anthroposophic central source be advocated in such a way before the world that one says, ‘There is some party, which perhaps one might win over’! ‘There is some person, whom perhaps we might get hold of’!—That won't do! All that is absolutely out of the question; all that is contrary to the innermost life-conditions of the anthroposophic movement!

And if, here, there is some Woman's Movement, and there some Social Movement, and somebody thinks that we ought to ‘get in’ here, or come to terms there, ‘for the people are quite close to Anthroposophy’ on the one side or other, ... all that won't do! it absolutely won't do! What is needed is to have such a firm inner security in Anthroposophy, that one manages really, wherever one may be placed, to stand for Anthroposophy and what is Anthroposophic.

I could tell you an amusing example again of this.—As you know, when people quarrel with my having taken the theosophic movement for my field of activity, I always reply, that I shall advocate Anthroposophy everywhere, wherever people ask for it; no matter where they ask for it, I shall always do so. I have done it in many places, where I was only able to do it once, for the simple reason that the people wouldn't hear any more from me a second time; but I didn't speak in any such way as to give them an external inducement, in their existing state of soul, to hear it over again a second time. And this is the thing to be avoided. If people desire to hear anything from one, then one must give them Anthroposophy,—Anthroposophy pure and simple, drawn boldly from its innermost core.

These things have all been gone through already, by way of illustration, as I might say—really just as though simply to illustrate them!—during the course of the anthroposophic movement. For instance, we once received an invitation from a spiritualistic society in Berlin; I was to speak on Anthroposophy. It never entered my head to say No;—why shouldn't these people have a right to hear something of the sort? I delivered my lecture; and directly the lecture was over, I saw how unsuitable the people were, and that in actual truth they didn't want to hear any more from me. For, after the lecture, something quite delicious occurred: namely, I was with one voice elected president of the society! Frau Doctor Steiner and her sister, who were with me, simply didn't know where they were!—‘Whatever is to be done now!’—said they—‘President of a society like this! Whatever is to be done!’—I merely replied: ‘Not come back again!’ For that, of course, was the obvious thing; the people had sufficiently shown by their whole idiotic procedure in electing a man, whom they had just heard for the first time, ... by the mere fact of electing him as president, they had shown, that what they wanted was something entirely different from Anthroposophy. What they wanted, in fact, was to make Anthroposophy spiritualistic, and they imagined that they could do so in this way.—But similar experiences maybe met with in abundant variety.

As you see therefore, there can really be never any question of not advocating Anthroposophy in whatever company. I was once, for instance, invited to speak on Anthroposophy in the Gottached Society in Berlin. And what reason could there be for my not speaking there? The only point was, that nothing should be sacrificed of Anthroposophy.

This was the problem of peculiar difficulty at the time after the Appeal to the German People and the Civilized World was written, and the Threefold Commonwealth had appeared. Then, it was really a question of doing nothing on any side whatever, except plainly urging what can be urged direct from this source, and then waiting and seeing, who will join in. And I must still express it as my conviction to-day, that, had we done this,—had we simply taken our stand on the positive ground contained in the Appeal and in the book, without seeking contact either with this party or that (a thing which I, for my part, was always for declining),—that we should then, to-day, not have been tripped up by the obstacles put in our way from those quarters; and we might very probably even have a few fruits to record;—whereas, as it is, we are so absolutely without any fruits to record in that field, my dear friends!

For in truth, it is one of the life-conditions of a society like this, that the way should always be found to work straight from the spirit itself. — One needn't, of course, imagine that one is required to do anything so senseless as to rush in everywhere in and out of season, and never on all occasions be able to fit in with actual life,—that one should behave altogether unpractically. What is necessary to-day is just the opposite! What is necessary to-day is to bring a little real practicality into what is termed practical life! For, to anyone who knows anything at all of the real conditions of life, the modern life of to-day seems ... well, very much like that of the ‘really practical people’, who take such a really practical stand in life, that they tumble down directly they try to stand on their two feet. That is what is commonly termed to-day, ‘practical life’! And when these experts in practical life make their way into a spiritual movement, then it is a bad look-out for the spiritual movement!

As I said, I want to-day to deal rather with the positive aspect of the matter; I do not want, as often before, to criticize the mistakes in what has been done, but merely to indicate how things ought to go on. The point, then, in going the straight road, is not to go it in the way of saying: I go my own straight road, — and then, if a post happens to be there, to run one's head against it! One naturally avoids posts; one naturally makes use of anything that may help one forwards. But the point is, in all one does, to put into it unreservedly that impulse which comes from the very centre.

If people took this way of going forwards, then we should soon see that the Anthroposophical Society would then in actual fact, and not just superficially or conventionally, but justifiably, at last get beyond being treated by the rest of the world as a mere sect.

What is the use of our telling people over and over again that we are not a sect, when we behave as though we were a sect! For the first thing of all, you see, that needs to be understood by the members of the Anthroposophical Society, is this condition of existence for any society what-ever in modern times: A Society cannot possibly be a Sect. And accordingly there can never really—if the Anthroposophical Society is to stand on its own true ground—there never really can be any we, where it is a question of views and ideas.

Over and over again one hears Anthroposophists saying, when addressing the outer world: ‘We (the society) hold this or that view. Amongst us,’ this or that is done. ‘We aim’ at this or that.—This kind of thing was possible in old days; then, societies could confront the world with this kind of solid uniformity. In our day, it is no longer possible. In our day, more especially with a society like this, every single person in it must be a really free individual. Views, ideas, opinions, are the property of the private individual only. The society has no opinion. And this must find expression even in the very terms in which the individual speaks of the society. The ‘we’, strictly speaking, must vanish.

¹ The really practical people, a humorous poem by Christian Morgenstern, frequently performed in Eurhythmy.

And with this there is involved something else besides. When this ‘we’ has vanished, then each person will not feel himself in the society as though it were a water-barrel that holds him up and carries him, and that he can fall back upon in case of need. Instead of which, when each person in the society has to stand for his own opinion and above all for himself, he will then also feel the full responsibility for everything that he himself says as a private individual.

This sense of responsibility,—this is what must grow continually greater and greater, so long as the society is still a little band only. And therefore it might be well to consider,—seeing that the Anthroposophical Society has not hitherto succeeded, through its habits and customs of life, in figuring before the outer world as an eminently modern society, and that these habits and customs of life have brought along with them the continual use of terms such as: ‘We believe’ this! ‘We think’ that! ‘We hold this view’! ‘Our world-conception is ...’ and so forth; until the world outside has come to believe that it is a collective mass with certain opinions, and that anyone, who wants to join, is obliged to subscribe to this collective opinion,—which naturally repels every soul with any self-respect. ... Now however, that this has happened, it becomes necessary to-day to consider a measure, which need not have been considered perhaps a year ago; because things had not then gone so far, because one had not yet been confounded with Carbonari and Soviet Governments and Irish Republicanism (all, of course, to certain non-ostensible ends). So that to-day it really looks as though we must very seriously consider the necessity of doing away with the three Points that are continually being quoted: Fraternity without distinction of races, etc.; and the comparative study of religions and study of spiritual worlds and spiritual methods. The fact that these three Points are always quoted makes the impression in the eyes of the world as though one were required to swear to these three Points. One must find a quite different form: above all one must put it into such a form, that everybody who is not willing to subscribe to an opinion, but who is interested in the pursuit of a spiritual life, doesn't need to think that he is subscribing himself body and soul to a fixed set of opinions.—This is the thing we have to consider to-day; for it is one of the life-conditions of the society, now that we have experienced the third stage and its peculiar features.

I have often been asked by different people, whether they could join the Anthroposophical Society, or not, since they were not yet prepared to subscribe to the anthroposophic doctrines. My reply was, that it would be a poor sort of society in these days, which thought of recruiting its members from the people who subscribe to its particular doc-trines. That would be something dreadful!—I invariably replied, that, for honest membership, there can be no question of anything but what can be expressed in the words: One is interested simply in the existence of a society that is looking for the way to the spiritual world. One has an interest in such a thing. How it is then done, is the concern of those who have entered the society; one person contributes one thing, another another.

I can very well understand anyone being unwilling to join a society for which he is required to pledge himself to articles of faith. But when one says, ‘Whoever is interested in the pursuit of spiritual life can be a member of this society’, then the different people will come together, who have this kind of interest; and the others, ... well, they may stay outside,—but they will be led ever further and further into the ad absurdum of life.

When we begin to reflect upon the conditions, like these, which are necessary for the life of the Anthroposophical Society; when we are no longer willing to vegetate on for ever in the old groove,—then first do we really fulfil the life-conditions of the society.

When this society, therefore, finds its way in actual fact to handling things in a perfectly free fashion,—with no sort of narrowness, but only broad-heartedly and generously,—then, and then only, will it be possible for this society to become in actual fact, what it can and should become in as much as the anthroposophic movement runs through it.—For the anthroposophic movement links on everywhere quite positively,—without compromise, but quite positively,—to all that can be found existing at the present day, and that can bear any sort of good fruit for the future.

These things mean acquiring a certain delicacy of under-standing. And it is necessary that this delicacy of under-standing should be acquired by the Anthroposophists within, I might say, the next few weeks. And then the further ways and means will be found.: that will all come in the course of actual practice.

But no one will be able to think along these lines, who does not come radically out of the more narrow circle of his private personality, and begin really to care for the cause itself,—really to recognize Anthroposophy as an invisible Being with a life of her own.

I was, in the nature of things, obliged, as you see, to speak of this third period in a different way from the two first. For the two first are really history. The third, although we are now at the end of it, belongs to the present day; and everybody ought really to know what are the necessary conditions of the day. Even in the smallest details we must work through to guiding principles like these. Such guiding principles are not dogmas; they result quite obviously, as matters of course.

What still remains to be said, I will leave over till tomorrow; and we will see if we can then bring these lectures to a conclusion.

Those who join this school as members are in a completely different position than those who join the Anthroposophical Society. You become a member of this school after being a member of the Society for a sufficiently long time. You have come to know what anthroposophy wants, what it truly is. You have been able to form an opinion about what it can be worth to you. However, this means that the intention to join the school can be associated with the assumption of a range of duties and the awareness that one wants to be a representative of anthroposophical work.

In contrast to the way in which Anthroposophy is presented within the Anthroposophical Society, it is not only absurd, but also quite tasteless when the opposing side repeatedly makes the defamatory accusation that Anthroposophy wants to exert a suggestive influence on anyone. Anyone who is in Anthroposophy knows this very well, or at least can know it. When members who have left the Society claim this, they usually know themselves that what they claim is objectively untrue. In the Society, no one is led to anthroposophy with blinders on. Therefore, they cannot become a member of the School without fully understanding the context of what anthroposophy sees as its task.

Everyone should judge for themselves whether they want to become a member of the school based on what they have come to know as a member of the Anthroposophical Society. When the school's leadership speaks of the duties that its members take on, they can be completely clear about what is meant. It is not intended to imply anything other than that the school's leadership cannot fulfill its tasks if such duties are not taken on. The relationship between each member of the school and the leadership remains completely free, even if such duties are taken on. This is because the school leadership must also enjoy the freedom to act in accordance with the natural conditions of their work. They would not have this freedom if they were not allowed to say to those who are free to join or not to join the school: If I am to work with you, then you must take on the obligation to fulfill this or that condition.

This should actually be self-evident and need not be stated. But it must be said, because all too often we hear: Those who join the school must give up some of their “human freedoms”. When this is said by members of the society, it is not surprising when malicious opponents spread the slander that Anthroposophy is gradually turning its adherents into will-less tools of what some people with bad intentions want. Anyone who has taken an interest in the Society's work for a sufficiently long time knows that Anthroposophy would lose all meaning the moment it undertook anything that went against the independent, level-headed, insightful will of its members. Anthroposophy cannot truly achieve its goals with will-less tools. For, in order to truly come to it, it requires precisely the free will of those involved. (Continued in the next issue.)

For many years past we have been studying anthroposophical truths, details of anthroposophical knowledge, trying to approach them from different sides and to assimilate them. In the course of the lectures now being given, and those yet to come, it will be well to ask ourselves what Anthroposophy should and can give to the men of our time. We know a good deal of the content of Anthroposophy and we can therefore approach the question with a certain basis of understanding.

We must above all remember that the anthroposophical life, the anthroposophical Movement itself, must be clearly distinguished—in our minds at any rate—from any kind of special organisation, from anything to which the name “Society” might be given. The whole character of modern life will of course make it more and more necessary for those who want to cultivate Anthroposophy to unite in a corporate sense; but this is made necessary more by the character of life outside than by the content or attitude of Anthroposophy itself. Anthroposophy in itself could be made known to the world in the same way as anything else—as chemistry, for instance—and its truths could be accessible just as in the case of the truths of chemistry or mathematics. How an individual assimilates Anthroposophy and makes it a real impulse in his life could then be a matter for the individual himself. A Society or any kind of corporate body for the cultivation of Anthroposophy is made necessary because Anthroposophy as such comes into our epoch as something new, as entirely new knowledge, which must be received into the spiritual life of men. Those who have not entered the sphere of anthroposophical life need a special preparation of their souls and hearts as well as the constitution of soul belonging to the present age. Such preparation can be acquired only through the life and activities in our groups and meetings. There we adapt ourselves to a certain trend of thinking and feeling, so that we realise the significance of matters which people in the outside world who know nothing of Anthroposophy will naturally regard as fantastic nonsense. It might, of course, be argued that Anthroposophy could also be made more widely known through public lectures given to entirely unprepared listeners; but those who belong to our groups in a more intimate sense will realise that the whole tone, the whole manner of delivering a lecture to an unprepared public must necessarily be different from that of a lecture given to those who through an inner urge and through their whole attitude, are able to take seriously what the general public would not yet be able to accept. Quite certainly this state of things will not improve in the immediate future—on the contrary, the opposition will become stronger and stronger. Opposition to Anthroposophy in every domain will increase in the outside world, just because it is in the highest degree necessary for our age, and because what is the most essential at any particular time always encounters the strongest resistance.

It may be asked: Why is this so? Why do human hearts resist so vehemently just what is most needed in their epoch? An anthroposophist should be able to understand this, but it is too complicated a matter to be made even remotely clear to an unprepared public.

The student of Anthroposophy knows of the existence of Luciferic forces, of Luciferic beings who have lagged behind the general process of evolution. They work through the hearts and souls of men and it is to their greatest advantage to launch their fiercest attacks at times when, in reality, there is the strongest urge towards the spiritual life. Because the opposition of the human heart against the progressive impulse in evolution originates from the Luciferic beings, and because these beings will launch their attacks when as it were they already have men by the throat, the resistance of human hearts will inevitably be strongest at such times. Hence we shall understand that the very reason why the most important truths for humanity have lived on from earlier times is that the strongest opposition had to be contended with. Anything that differs only slightly from what is customary in the world will rarely encounter fierce opposition; but what comes into the world because humanity has long been thirsting for but has not received it, will evoke violent attacks from the Luciferic forces. Therefore a “Society” is really nothing more than a rampart against this understandable attitude of the outside world. [1] Some form of association is necessary within the framework of which these things can be presented, with the feeling that in those to whom one speaks or with whom one is in contact there will be a certain measure of understanding, whereas others who have no link with such an association are oblivious of it all.

Everyone believes that what is given out in public is his own concern and that he has to pass judgment upon it; he is instigated, of course, by the Luciferic forces. From this we realise that it is indeed necessary to promulgate Anthroposophy and that Anthroposophy is bringing something essential into our age, something that is longed for by the present thirst and hunger for spiritual nourishment and—whatever the circumstances—will come in some form or other; for the Spiritual Powers who have dedicated themselves to the goals of evolution see to it that this shall happen.

We can therefore ask: What are the most important truths that should be implanted in humanity at the present time through Anthroposophy? Those for which there is the most intense thirst are the most essential. The answer to such a question is one that can very easily be misunderstood. For this reason it is necessary, to begin with, to make a distinction in our minds between Anthroposophy as such and the Anthroposophical Society. The mission of Anthroposophy is to bring new truths, new knowledge, to humanity, but a society can never—least of all in our age—be pledged to any particular tenets. It would be utterly senseless to ask: “What do you anthroposophists believe?” It is senseless to imagine that an “anthroposophist” means a person who belongs to the Anthroposophical Society, for that would be to assume that a whole society holds a common conviction, a common dogma. And that cannot be. The moment a whole society, according to its statutes, were pledged to a common dogma, it would cease to be a society and begin to be a sect. Here is the boundary where a society ceases to be one in the true sense of the word. The moment a man is pledged to hold a belief exacted by a society, we have to do with pure sectarianism. Therefore a society dedicated to the principles described in these lectures can be a society only from the aspect that it is under the right and natural spiritual impulse. It may be asked: “Who are the people who come together to hear something about Anthroposophy?” To this we may reply: “Those who have an urge to hear about spiritual things.” This urge has nothing dogmatic about it. For if a person is seeking for something without saying, “I shall find this or that,” but is really seeking, this is the common element which a society that does not wish to become a sect must contain. The question: What does Anthroposophy as such bring to humanity? is quite independent of this. Our reply must be: Anthroposophy as such brings to humanity something that is similar to all the great spiritual truths that have been brought to humanity, only its effect upon the human soul is more profound, more significant.

Among the subjects we have been studying in our lectures there are many that might be considered less distinctive from the point of view of something entirely new being presented to modern humanity. Nevertheless they are fundamental truths which do indeed penetrate into humanity as something new. We need not look very far to find this new element. It lies in the two truths which really belong to the most fundamental of all and bring increasing conviction to the human soul: these are the two truths of reincarnation and karma. It may be said that the first thing a really serious anthroposophist discovers along his path is that knowledge of reincarnation and karma is essential. It cannot, for example, be said that in Western culture, certain truths—such as the possibility of becoming conscious of higher worlds—present themselves through Anthroposophy as something fundamentally new. Anyone who has some knowledge of the development of Western thought knows of mystics such as Jacob Boehme or Swedenborg, or the whole Jacob Boehme school, and he knows too—although there has been much argument to the contrary—that it has always been considered possible for a man to rise from the ordinary sense-world to higher worlds. This, then, is not the element that is fundamentally new. And the same applies to other matters. Even when we are speaking of what is absolutely fundamental in evolution, for example, the subject of Christ, this is not the salient point as regards the Anthroposophical Movement as such; the essential point is the form which the subject of Christ assumes when reincarnation and karma are received as truths into the hearts of men. The light thrown upon the subject of Christ by the truths of reincarnation and karma—that is the essential point.

The West has been profoundly concerned with the subject of Christ. We need only be reminded of men in the days of the Gnosis, and of the time when esoteric Christianity was deepened by those who gathered under the sign of the Grail or of the Rose Cross. This, then, is not the fundamental question. It becomes fundamental and of essential significance for Western minds, for knowledge and for the needs of the religious life only through the truths of reincarnation and karma; so that those whose mental horizons have been widened by the knowledge of these truths necessarily expect new illumination to be shed on old problems. With regard to the knowledge of reincarnation and karma, however, all that can be said is that tentative indications are to be found in Western literature, for example, at the time of Lessing, who speaks of the subject in his essay, The Education of the Human Race. There are also other examples of how this question has dawned upon minds of a certain profundity. But for the truths of reincarnation and karma to become an integral part of human consciousness, assimilated by the hearts and souls of men, as in Anthroposophy—this is something that could not really happen until our own time. Therefore it can be said that the relation of a man of the modern age to Anthroposophy is characterised by the fact that certain antecedents have enabled reincarnation and karma to become matters of knowledge to him. That is the essential point. Everything else follows more or less as a matter of course if a man is able to acquire the right insight into the truths of reincarnation and karma.

In considering this aspect of the subject, we must also realise what it will mean for Western humanity and for humanity in general when reincarnation and karma become matters of knowledge which take their place in everyday life as other truths have done. In the near future, reincarnation and karma must pass into the consciousness of men far more deeply than was the case, for example, with the Copernican view of the universe. We need only remind ourselves of how rapidly this theory penetrated into the human mind. Only a comparatively short period in world-history has elapsed since the Copernican view of the universe first became generally known, yet it is now taught even in the elementary schools. As far as the effect upon the human soul is concerned, however, there is an essential difference between Copernicanism and the anthroposophical world-conception, in so far as the latter is based on the fundamental principles of reincarnation and karma. To be able to characterise the difference, one really needs a group of anthroposophists, of people who come together with good will to understand, for things would have to be said that would cause too great a shock to those outside the anthroposophical Movement.

Why is it that the Copernican view of the universe has been accepted so readily? Those who have heard me speak of it or of modern natural science in general know well that I pass no derogatory judgment on the modern scientific mode of thinking. Therefore in characterising the difference I shall not be misinterpreted when I say that for the acceptance of this world-picture, limited as it is to the presentation of external relationships and conditions of space, an epoch of superficiality was necessary! The reason why the Copernican theory took root so rapidly is none other than that for a certain period of time men became superficial. Superficiality was essential for the adoption of Copernicanism. Depth of soul—that is to say, the exact opposite—will be necessary for acceptance of the truths of Anthroposophy, especially of the fundamental truths of reincarnation and karma. If, therefore, the conviction grows in us to-day that these truths must become a much stronger and more widespread influence in the life of mankind, we must realise at the same time that we are standing at the boundary between two epochs: one, the epoch of superficiality, and the other, the epoch when the human soul and human heart must be inwardly deepened. This is what must be inscribed in our very souls if we are to be fully conscious of what Anthroposophy has to bring to humanity at the present time. And then comes the question: What form will life take under the influence of the knowledge of reincarnation and karma?

Here we must consider what it really means for the human soul and heart to recognise that reincarnation and karma are truths? What does it mean for the whole of man's consciousness, for his whole life of feeling and thinking? As anyone who reflects about these things can realise, it means no less than that through knowledge the Self of man grows beyond certain limits to which knowledge is otherwise exposed. In past times it was sharply emphasised that man could know and recognise only what lies between birth and death, that at most he could look up with faith to one who penetrates into a spiritual world as a knower. Such conviction grew with increasing strength. But this is not of very great significance when regarded merely from the aspect of knowledge; the subject becomes really significant when we pass from the aspect of knowledge to the moral aspect. It is then that the whole greatness and significance of the ideas of reincarnation and karma are revealed. A very great deal could be said in confirmation of this but we will confine ourselves to one aspect.

Think of the people belonging to earlier epochs of Western civilisation and the great majority of those living at the present time. Although they still cling to the belief that the being of man remains intact when he passes through the Gate of Death, it is imagined—because no thought is given to reincarnation and karma—that man's spiritual life after death is entirely separate from earthly existence. Apart from exceptional phenomena to which credence is given by those with spiritualistic leanings, when the dead are alleged to be working into this world, the current idea is that whatever takes place when a man has passed through the Gate of Death—be it punishment or reward—is remote from the earth as such, and that the further course of his life lies in a quite different sphere, a sphere beyond the earth.

Knowledge of reincarnation and karma changes this idea entirely. What is contained in the soul of a man who has passed through the Gate of Death has significance not only for a sphere beyond the earth, but the future of the earth itself depends upon what his life has been between birth and death. The earth will have the outer configuration that is imparted by the men who have lived upon it. The whole future configuration of the planet, as well as the social life of men in the future, depends upon how men have lived in their earlier incarnations. That is the moral element in the ideas of reincarnation and karma. A man who has assimilated these ideas knows: According to what I was in life, I shall have an effect upon everything that takes place in the future, upon the whole civilisation of the future! Something that up to now has been present in a limited degree only—the feeling of responsibility—is extended beyond the bounds of birth and death by knowledge of reincarnation and karma. The feeling of responsibility is intensified, imbued with the deep moral consequences of these ideas. A man who does not believe in them may say: “When I have passed through the Gate of Death I shall be punished or rewarded for what I have done here; I shall experience the consequences of this existence in another world; that other world, however, is ruled over by spiritual Powers of some kind or other, and they will prevent what I have within me from causing too much harm to the world as a whole.” A man who realises that the ideas of reincarnation and karma are based upon reality will no longer speak like this, for he knows that men's lives will be shaped according to what they have been in earlier incarnations.

The important point is that the fundamental ideas of the anthroposophical conception of the world will pass over into the souls and hearts of men and arise as moral impulses undreamed of in the past times. The feeling of responsibility will be intensified to a degree that was formerly impossible, and other moral insights will necessarily follow. As human beings learning to live under the influence of the ideas of reincarnation and karma we shall come to know that our life cannot be assessed on the basis of what has taken expression in one life between birth and death, but that a period extending over many lives must be taken into account.

When we encounter another human being with the attitude that has prevailed hitherto, we feel sympathy or antipathy towards him, strong or moderate affection, and the like. The whole attitude of one man to another in the present age is in reality the outcome of the view that life on the earth is limited to the one period between birth and death. We live as we should after all be bound to live if it were true that man is on the earth only once. Our attitude to parents, brothers, sisters, friends, is coloured by the belief that we have only one life on the earth.

A vast transformation will take place in life when the ideas of reincarnation and karma are no longer theories held by a few people as is the case nowadays—for they are still largely matters of theory. It can truly be said that there are numbers of people to-day who believe in reincarnation and karma; but they act as if there were no such realities, as though life were actually confined to the one period between birth and death. Nor can it be otherwise, for habits change less quickly than ideas. Only when we introduce into our lives right and concrete ideas of reincarnation and karma, only then shall we find how life can be fertilised by them.

As human beings we begin life in the circle of our parents, brothers and sisters, and other relatives; in our early years those around us are there owing to natural factors such as blood-relationship, proximity and the like. Then, as we grow up, we see how these circles expand, how we enter into quite different connections with human beings, connections that are no longer dependent on blood-relationship. These things must be seen in the light of karma and then they will illumine life in an entirely new way. Karma becomes of significance only when we grasp it as a concrete factor, when we apply to life itself the facts brought to light by spiritual-scientific investigation. These facts can, of course, be discovered only by such investigation, but then they can be applied to life.

An important question in connection with karma is the following: How does it come about that at the beginning of the present life, for example, we are drawn to certain others through blood-relationship? Spiritual-scientific investigation of this question discovers that as a rule—for although specific facts come to light there are countless exceptions—the human beings with whom we came to be associated involuntarily at the beginning of our life, were close to us in a former life—in most cases the immediately preceding one—in middle life, in the thirties; then we chose them voluntarily in some way, drawn to them perhaps by our hearts. It would be quite erroneous to think that the people around us at the beginning of our present life are those with whom we were also together at the beginning of a former life. Not at the beginning, not at the end, but in the middle of one life we were associated, by our own choosing, with those who are now our blood-relations. It is frequently the case that a marriage partner whom someone has chosen deliberately will be related to him in the next life as father or mother, or brother or sister. Spiritual-scientific investigation shows that speculative assumptions are generally incorrect and as a rule contradicted by the actual facts.

When we consider the particular case just mentioned and try to grasp it as a finding of the unbiased investigations of Spiritual Science, our whole relation to life is widened. In the course of Western civilisation things have reached the point where it is hardly possible for a man to do otherwise than speak of ‘chance’ when thinking about his connection with those who are his blood-relations. He speaks of chance and in many respects believes in it. How indeed could he believe in anything else if life is thought to be limited to one period only between birth and death? As far as the one life is concerned a man will of course admit that he is responsible for the consequences of what he himself has brought about. But when he leads the Self beyond what happens between birth and death, when he feels this Self to be connected with other men of another incarnation, he feels responsible in the same way as he does for his own deeds in this life.

The general view that a man has himself karmically chosen his parents is not of any special significance, but we gain an idea of this ‘choosing’ which can actually be confirmed by other experiences of life when we realise that those whom we have chosen so unconsciously now, were chosen by us in a former life at an age when we were more conscious than at any other, when we were fully mature.

This idea may be unpalatable to some people to-day but it is true nevertheless. If a person is not satisfied with his kith and kin he will eventually come to know that he himself laid the basis of this dissatisfaction and that he must therefore provide differently for the next incarnation; and then the ideas of reincarnation and karma will become really fruitful in his life. The point is that these ideas are not there for the sake of satisfying curiosity or the like, but for the sake of our progress. When we know how family connections are formed, the ideas of reincarnation and karma will widen and enhance our feeling of responsibility.

The forces which bring down an individual human being into a family must obviously be strong. But they cannot be strong in the individual now incarnated, for they cannot have much to do with the world into which he has actually descended. Is it not comprehensible that the forces working in the deepest depths of the soul must stem from the past life when he himself brought about the connections by the strong impulse of friendship, of ‘conscious love,’ if it may be called so? Conscious forces prevailing in one life work as unconscious forces in the next. What happens more or less unconsciously is explained by this thought. It is most important, of course, that the facts should not be clouded by illusions; moreover the findings of genuine investigation almost invariably upset speculations. The logic of the facts cannot be discovered until afterwards and nobody should allow himself to be guided by speculation, for that will never bring him to the right vantage-point. He will always arrive at a point of view that is characteristic of a conversation of which I have already spoken. In a town in South Germany a theologian once said to me: “I have read your books and have realised that they are entirely logical; so the thought has occurred to me that because they are so logical their author may perhaps have arrived at their content through pure logic.” So if I had taken pains to write a little less logically I should presumably have gone up in the estimation of that theologian, because he would then have realised that the facts presented were not discovered through pure logic! Anyone, however, who studies the writings thoroughly will perceive that the contents were put into the form of logic afterwards but were not discovered through logic. I at any rate could have done no such thing, of that I assure you! Perhaps others might have been capable of it.

Regarded in this way, these things bring home to us the deep significance of the idea that the most important impulses proceeding from Anthroposophy must necessarily be moral impulses. Emphasis has been laid to-day upon the feeling of responsibility. In the same way we might speak of love, of compassion and the like, all of which present different aspects in the light of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. That is why through the years it has been considered of such importance, even in public lectures, always to relate Anthroposophy to life, to the most immediate phenomena of life. We have spoken of “The Mission of Anger,” of “Conscience,” of “Prayer,”² of the different ages in the life of the human being, approaching all these things in the light in which they must be approached if we assume that the ideas of reincarnation and karma are true. The transforming power of these ideas in life has thus been brought home to us. In reality the main part of our studies has been to consider the effect of these fundamental ideas upon life. Even if it is not always possible in abstract words to convey the significance of reincarnation and karma for the heart, for conscience, for the character, for prayer, in such a way that we are able to say: “If we accept the ideas of reincarnation and karma, it follows that ...”—nevertheless all our studies are illumined by them. The important thing for the immediate future is that everything—not only the science of the soul but the other sciences too—shall be influenced by these ideas.

If you study a lecture such as the last public one on “Death in Man, Animal, and Plant,” you will see that it was a matter of showing how men will learn to think of death in plant, animal and man when they discern in themselves that which stretches beyond the single human life. It was made clear that the Self is different in each case. In man there is an individual Ego, in the animal there is a group-soul, and in the plant we have to do with part of the whole planetary soul. In the case of the plant, what we see outwardly as dying and budding is to be conceived of simply as a process of falling asleep and waking. In the animal there is again a difference; here we find a certain degree of resemblance to man inasmuch as in a single incarnation a self comes into some kind of evidence. But in man alone, who himself brings about his incarnations, we realise that death is the guarantee of immortality and that the word ‘death’ can be used in this sense only in the case of man. In using the word ‘death’ in the general sense, therefore, it must be emphasised that dying has a different signification according to whether we are speaking of man, or animal, or plant.

When the anthroposophist is able to accept the ideas of reincarnation and karma in the form in which we must present them, as distinct from earlier conceptions such as are found, for example, in Buddhism, his studies will lead him quite naturally to other things. That is why our work has been mainly devoted to studying what effect the ideas of reincarnation and karma can have upon the whole of human life. In this connection it is obvious that the work of any anthroposophical association or society must be in conformity with the mission of Anthroposophy. It is therefore understandable that when we speak about questions which may seem to those outside Anthroposophy to be the most important, the fundamental truths are the basis upon which we speak of matters closely concerning every Western soul. It is quite conceivable that a man might accept from Anthroposophy those things that have been described to-day as fundamentally new and not concern himself at all with any of the differences between the various religions, for the Science of Comparative Religion is by no means an essential feature of modern Spiritual Science. A great deal of research is devoted to the subject of Comparative Religion to-day and in comparison with it the studies pursued in certain societies connected with Spiritual Science are by no means the more profound. The point of real importance is that in Anthroposophy all these things shall be illumined by the ideas of reincarnation and karma.

In another connection still the feeling of responsibility will be essentially enhanced under the influence of these ideas. If we consider what has been said to-day about blood-relationship and companions once freely chosen by ourselves, a certain antithesis comes into evidence: What in one life is the most inward and intimate impulse, is in the next life the most outwardly manifest. When in one incarnation our deepest feelings of affection go out to certain human beings, we are preparing an outer relationship for another incarnation—a blood-relationship, maybe.

The same principle applies in another sphere. The way in which we think about some matter that may seem to us devoid of reality in one incarnation will be the most determinative factor in the impulses of the next; the quality of our thinking, whether we approach a truth lightly or try to verify it by every means at our command, whether we have a sense for truth or a tendency to fanaticism—all this, as the result of assimilating the ideas of reincarnation and karma, will have a bearing upon our evolution. What is hidden within our being in the present incarnation will be most in evidence in the next. A person who tells many untruths or is inclined to take things superficially will be a thoughtless character in the next or a later incarnation; for what we think, how we think, what attitude we have to truth, in other words what we are inwardly in this incarnation, will be the standard of our conduct in the next. If, for example, in this incarnation, we too hastily form a derogatory judgment of someone who if really put to the test might prove to be a good or even a moderately good man, and we carry this thought through life, we shall become unbearable, quarrelsome people in the next incarnation. Here is another illustration of the importance of widening and intensifying the moral element in the soul.

It is very important that special attention should be paid to these things and that we should realise the significance of taking into our very soul what is really new, together with everything else that with the ideas of reincarnation and karma penetrates as a revitalising impulse into the spiritual development of the present age . . .

My aim has been to bring home to you the importance of reflecting upon what constitutes the fundamentally new element in Anthroposophy. This of course does not mean that an anthroposophical society is one that believes in reincarnation and karma. It means that just as an age was once ready to receive the Copernican theory of the universe, so is our own age ready for the ideas of reincarnation and karma to be brought into the general consciousness of humanity. And what is destined to happen in the course of evolution will happen, no matter what powers rise up against it. When reincarnation and karma are truly understood, everything else follows of itself in the light of these truths.

It is certainly useful to have considered the fundamental distinction between those who are interested in Anthroposophy and those who oppose it. The distinction does not really lie in the acceptance of a higher world, but in the way thoughts and conceptions change in the light of the ideas of reincarnation and karma. And so to-day we have been studying something that may be regarded as the essential kernel of anthroposophical thought.

• 2. See: Metamorphoses of the Soul. Vol 1 and Metamorphoses of the Soul. Vol 2

As we may have gathered from yesterday's reflections, it is important for today's human being to orient themselves in the developmental process of humanity in order to imbue themselves with an awareness of what the present state of the soul must be so that the human being can be human in the true sense of the word.

The day before yesterday I used a comparison to point out the importance of the sense of time. I said that the insect has the task of always undergoing certain transformations within itself, coinciding with the course of the year. The insect undergoes the course of the year in its own transformation. It has very specific bodily functions in spring, summer, autumn and winter, and it completes the cycle of its life in connection with this course of the year. Thus, I said, the human being must find a way to consciously place himself in the present moment, not in a short period of time, but in the whole course of the earth, in the historical course of the earth. He should know how his soul experiences had to be shaped in ancient times, how they had to be shaped in medieval times, and how they have to be shaped today.

When we look back to the early days of human development and see how humanity drew its strength from the Mysteries, the strength to know, the strength to live, we find that those who were to be initiated into the Mysteries were always, as it were, given a very definite indication of the goal of their initiation. The initiates must realize that they will have to undergo exercises that ultimately lead to the experience of death; within their earthly existence, the human being must pass through death in order to gain the other knowledge of his own immortal, eternal being from this experience of knowing death. This, I would like to say, was the secret of the ancient mysteries: to gain the conviction of the human immortal being from the experience of knowing death.

Now we have seen in these days where this comes from. It comes from the fact that in those older times, man could not have come to his human self-knowledge otherwise than by realizing what happened to him immediately after death. Man of those ancient times only became the thinking, free being that he knows himself to be today in his earthly existence after death. Only after death could man in the early days of human development say: I am truly a being on my own, an individuality on my own. - Look beyond death, the ancient sages might say to their disciples, and you will know what a human being is.

That is why man in the mysteries should undergo dying in the image, so that he may receive from dying the conviction of eternal life and being. So essentially, the search for the mysteries was a search for death in order to find life.

Now things are different for people today, and therein lies the most important impulse in the development of humanity. What people went through in the old days after death, that they became a thinking being for themselves, that they became a free being for themselves, that is what people today must find in the time that lies between birth and death. But how do they find it there? He finds his thoughts first of all when he practises self-knowledge. But now we have found that throughout the time in which we have been dealing with the nature of man from a certain point of view, these thoughts, namely the thoughts that man has developed since the first third of the 15th century, since the time of Nicholas Cusanus, are actually dead as thoughts, they are corpses. That which lived lived in the pre-earthly existence. Before man descended to earth as a soul-spiritual being, he was in a spiritual life. This spiritual life died with the beginning of life on earth, and he experiences what is dead in him as his thinking. The first thing that man must recognize is that although in more recent times he can come to real self-knowledge, to a knowledge of himself as a spiritual-soul being, but that what surrenders to this self-knowledge is dead, spiritually corpse-like, and that it is precisely into this dead, into this spiritual corpse that what comes from the will must flow, from that will of which I said yesterday that it is actually in the nothing from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking up, anchored in the astral body and in the I. The I must shoot into the dead thoughts and must revive them.

Therefore, in the old days, all the care during the initiation was basically directed towards dampening something in the person. Actually, the old initiation was a kind of calming of the inner human abilities and powers. If you follow the course of the old initiation, you will find that in essence, the human being underwent an initiation training that led him to calm his inner excitement, to dampen the inner emotionality that would otherwise be present in ordinary life, so that what the human being had in ordinary life, the filling of his entire being with the divine-spiritual powers that permeate and animate the cosmos, would be subdued and he would consciously sink into a kind of sleep, so that he could then awaken in this subdued consciousness to a kind of sleep, which he otherwise only experiences after death: calm thinking, feeling himself as an individuality. The old system of initiation was thus a kind of system of quieting.

In the present time, this longing for reassurance has remained with man in many ways, and he feels comfortable when old initiation principles are warmed up and he is led to them again. But this no longer corresponds to the essence of the modern human being. The modern human being can only approach initiation by asking himself with all depth and intensity: When I look into myself, I find my thinking. But this thinking is dead. I no longer need to seek death. I carry it within me in my spiritual-soul nature. While the old initiate had to be led to the point where he experienced death, the modern initiate must realize more and more: I have death in my soul-spiritual life. I carry it within me. I do not have to look for it. On the contrary, I have to enliven dead thoughts out of an inner, willed, creative principle. And everything I have presented in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' is aimed at this enlivening of dead thoughts, at this engagement of the will in the inner life of the soul, so that the human being may awaken. For whereas the old initiation had to be a kind of lulling to sleep, the new initiation must be a kind of waking up. What the human being unconsciously experiences during sleep must be brought into the most intimate soul life. Through activity, the human being must awaken inwardly.

To do this, it is necessary to grasp the concept of sleeping in all its relativity. One must be clear about what anthroposophical knowledge is actually present with regard to this idea of sleep. If we place side by side two people, one of whom knows nothing of the things presented in anthroposophical knowledge, and we place next to him a person who has really taken in the anthroposophical with inner interest, with inner interest, not just with passive listening or passive reading, but with inner interest, the anthroposophical ophorophical has been presented, and we place beside it a person who has really taken in the anthroposophical with inner participation, with inner interest, not just with passive listening or passive reading, but with inner interest: then the person who has not taken in the anthroposophical is like a sleeper compared to the one who has taken in the anthroposophical and is awakened in the anthroposophical, as a person is awakened in the morning when he enters his physical body from unconsciousness. And we can only find the right place for ourselves within anthroposophy, we can only find the right orientation for the anthroposophical movement if we look at it in such a way that it gives us something like waking up in the morning, if we compare approaching anthroposophy in the right way with what we feel when we pass from the unconsciousness of sleep into the perception of an external world. If we can also have this in our feelings: just as immersing ourselves in the physical body when we wake up gives us a world, not just knowledge, but a world, so immersing ourselves in anthroposophical knowledge gives us a world, a knowledge that is not just knowledge, but a world, a world into which we wake up. As long as we regard anthroposophy as just another world view, we do not have the right feeling towards anthroposophy. We only have the right feeling about anthroposophy when the person who becomes an anthroposophist feels that he is awakening in anthroposophy. And he awakens when he says to himself: the concepts and ideas that the world has given me before are conceptual and ideological corpses, they are dead. Anthroposophy awakens this corpse for me.

If you understand this in the right sense, then you will come out on top in the face of all the things that are often said against anthroposophy and the understanding of anthroposophy. People say: Yes, a person who is not an anthroposophist is learning something in the world today. That is being proven to him. He can understand that because it is being proven to him. In anthroposophy, mere assertions are made that remain unproven - so the world says very often. But the world does not know what the reality is of what it considers to be proven. The world should realize that all the laws of nature, all the thoughts that man forms out of the world, that when he experiences them correctly, they are something dead. So what is being proved to him is something dead. He cannot understand it. Only when one begins to perceive what is today the ordinary world view as something dead, then one says to oneself: I do not understand what is being proved to me, just as I do not understand a corpse, because it is what is left over from a living being. I understand a corpse only when I know to what extent it was permeated by life.

And so we have to say to ourselves: what is considered proven today cannot in fact be understood if we look at it more deeply. And it is only when we allow the spark of anthroposophy to strike that which is otherwise offered by civilization today that we can truly understand it. — Those who, let us say, say to a mere natural scientist of today who comes to them and says, “I can prove my case, you cannot prove it,” are right. They then reply, “Of course you can prove anything in your way, but the very thing you have proved to me will only become intelligible to me when I allow the spark of anthroposophy to strike it.” That should be the information that an anthroposophist, speaking from a heart full of living spiritual life, can give to a non-anthroposophist. The Anthroposophist would have to say: You are falling asleep with your knowledge of nature; you are falling asleep to such an extent that you say: I have limits to my knowledge of nature, I cannot wake up at all, I can only state that with my knowledge of nature I do not approach the spiritual at all. You still have a theory for your sleep, for the justification of your sleep. But I want to refute precisely this theory of the justification of your sleep by bringing what is there sleep to wakefulness.

I pointed this out in the first chapter of my book 'Von Seelenrätseln'. There I expressed what has been repeated in lectures over and over again, namely that a person who remains with the present civilization simply says that there are all kinds of limits to knowledge that cannot be crossed. So he calms down. But this calming down means nothing other than that he does not want to wake up, he wants to remain asleep. The one who now wants to enter the spiritual world in the modern sense must begin to wrestle with the inner soul tasks precisely where the other person sets the limits of knowledge. And by beginning the struggle with these ideas, which are set at the boundary, the view of the spiritual world gradually opens up to him step by step. One must take what is presented in anthroposophy as it is intended.

Take this first chapter of 'Mysteries of the Soul'. It may be imperfectly written, but you can at least find out the intention with which it was written. It is written with the intention that you say to yourself: If I stop at present civilization, then the world is actually boarded up for me. Knowledge of nature: you move on, then the boards come, the world is boarded up for me. What is written in this first chapter, 'On Soul Mysteries', is an attempt to knock away these boards with a spade. If you have this feeling that you are doing a job, to knock away with a spade the boards with which the world has been boarded up for centuries, if you see the words as a spade, then you come to the soul-spiritual.

Most people have the unconscious feeling that a chapter like the first, 'On Soul Riddles', is written with a pen that flows with ink. It is not written with a pen, but with the spades of the soul, which would like to tear down the boards that cover the world, that is, eliminate the boundaries of knowledge of nature, but eliminate them through inner soul work. So, when reading such a chapter, one must work with it through soul activity.

The ideas that arise from anthroposophical books are quite remarkable. I understand these ideas, often do not contradict them, because they have their value for the individual; but take for example the “Geheimwissenschaft”. People have come to me who think they can do something for this 'Occult Science' of mine if they paint the whole 'Occult Science' so that it would stand before people in pictures. This longing has arisen. There have even been samples of it. I have nothing against it; if these samples are good, then one can even admire them, it is indeed quite beautiful to do such things. But what longing does it arise from? They arise out of the longing to take away the most important thing that is developed in “occult science” and to put images in front of people that are just boards again. Because what matters is - the way our language and the awful writing has become, this terrible writing or even the way it is printed - to take it as it is, not to rebel against what civilization and to take it in such a way that the reader can also overcome it immediately, that he can immediately get out and make all the images himself that have flowed into the awful ink, thus creating them himself. The more each person individually creates these images for themselves, the better it is. If someone else anticipates this, they are in turn walling up the world for him. I do not want to deliver a diatribe against the pictorial elaboration of what is presented in the Imaginationen of “Geheimwissenschaft”, of course not, but I would just like to point out what is fundamentally necessary for everyone as a living assimilation of this matter.

These things must be understood in the right way today. One must come to the point where one does not just take anthroposophy as something that one delves into in the same way that one delves into something else, but one must take it as something that requires a change in thinking and feeling, that requires one to become different from what one was before. So if, for example, an astronomical chapter is presented from the perspective of anthroposophy, one cannot take this astronomical chapter and compare it with ordinary astronomy and then start to prove and refute back and forth. That makes no sense at all. Instead, we must be clear about one thing: the astronomical chapter drawn from anthroposophy can only be understood when the rethinking and re-sensing is in place. So if a refutation of some anthroposophical chapter appears somewhere today and then a written defense appears that has been written with the same means as the refutation, then nothing has been done, really nothing at all, because one talks back and forth with the same way of thinking. That is not what is important, but that Anthroposophy be carried by a new life. And that is absolutely necessary today.

It is quite remarkable what ideas arise from reading anthroposophical books. I understand these ideas, often do not contradict them, because they have value for the individual; but take for example “Geheimwissenschaft” (Occult Science). People have come to me who think they can do something for this Secret Science by painting the whole work so that it would stand before people in pictures. This longing has arisen. They have even delivered samples. I have nothing against it; if these samples are good, one can even admire them, it is indeed quite beautiful to do such things. But what longing does it arise from? It arises from the longing to take away the most important thing that is developed in “occult science” and to put images in front of people that are just boards again. Because what matters is - the way our language and the awful writing has become, this terrible writing or even the way it is printed - to take it as it is, not to rebel against what civilization has brought, and to take it in such a way that the reader can also overcome it immediately, that he can immediately get out and make all the images that have flowed into the hideous ink himself. The more individually each person creates these images, the better it is. If someone else anticipates this for him, he in turn wallows the world. I do not want to deliver a diatribe against the pictorial expression of what is presented in the “occult science” in imaginations, of course not, but I would just like to point out what is fundamentally necessary for everyone as an active assimilation of this matter.

These things must be understood in the right way today. We must come to the point where we do not take anthroposophy as something we delve into in the same way we delve into anything else, but we must take it as something that requires a change in thinking and feeling, that requires us to become different people than we were before. So if, for example, an astronomical chapter is presented from the perspective of anthroposophy, one cannot take this astronomical chapter and compare it with ordinary astronomy and then start to prove and refute back and forth. That makes no sense at all. Rather, we must be clear about one thing: the astronomical chapter drawn from anthroposophy can only be understood when the rethinking and re-sensing is there. So if a refutation of some anthroposophical chapter appears somewhere today and then a written defense appears that has been written with the same means as the refutation, then nothing has been done, really nothing at all, because one is talking back and forth with the same way of thinking. That is not what is important, but that Anthroposophy be carried by a new life. And that is absolutely necessary today.

It is urgently necessary to talk about these things in this phase of the Anthroposophical Society, because these things are beginning to be misunderstood in the most fundamental way. To this end, let me today look back a little at the way in which the Anthroposophical Society has developed. You see, it came into being not through seeking it, but through arising out of the circumstances of life; it came into being by being in a certain loose, external connection with the Theosophical Society at the beginning of our century. This Theosophical Society has always endeavored to bring old principles of initiation into the present. Fate decreed that it was precisely within theosophical circles that anthroposophy could first be spoken of. I have often discussed the reasons for this, and I will not repeat them today. I did hint at them in the first essay I wrote in the series 'The Goetheanum in its first ten years' (in GA 36).

But at that time anthroposophy had to struggle out of the modern conception of the spiritual, which, I might say, tended more towards theosophy in the broadest sense: towards the reintroduction of old methods of initiation. The grotesque way in which these old methods of initiation do not correspond to the demands of modern civilization was shown very clearly when, around the years 1907, 1908, 1909, 1910, this spiritual movement, which had a theosophical character, approached the Christ problem. Then the theosophical movement produced the absurdity of an incarnated Christ Jesus in a present-day human being. And all the other absurdities that the theosophical movement produced were based on that. From the very beginning, anthroposophy, in contrast to theosophy, had to lead to a correct understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Therefore, in the first period of anthroposophical life, the explanation of the Gospels was given preference, the guidance to a correct understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And at a time when the other spiritual movement, with regard to the Mystery of Golgotha, fell into the worst absurdities, the anthroposophical movement approached more and more a real, real conception of the Mystery of Golgotha and went its way with this conception of the Mystery of Golgotha, while the theosophical movement could no longer be connected to it.

That was the first phase of anthroposophical endeavor. There was the significant cohesive impulse to connect the anthroposophical movement in the right way with the Mystery of Golgotha. And it can be said that at the moment when it was possible to write my Mysteries, this phase had come to a kind of preliminary conclusion. It was a general conviction among anthroposophists at the time that the anthroposophical movement had to be connected with a correct understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. And the momentum that the anthroposophical movement had up until around 1908, 1909 and so on, came from the fact that a correct understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha was gained in a new spiritual way, everything was oriented so that the Mystery of Golgotha could be at the center of understanding. That is how the Anthroposophical Society acquired its character at that time.

But the things that are part of real life outside are going through a period, and something that should be full of inner life, like the Anthroposophical Society, goes through a period at a faster “pace than others.

An important phase in the anthroposophical movement, for example, when anthroposophy had already become completely independent of theosophy, was when I gave the lecture cycle on “Occult Physiology” in Prague and more and more, I would say, also the knowledge of the world could be conquered through anthroposophical knowledge. In this way it could be shown to the world: this Anthroposophy is not something in cloud-high altitudes, only mystically hovering, but it really takes hold of modern consciousness. It takes into account the emergence of the development of consciousness souls. It ventures into areas that can only be grasped with spirituality, but which are the areas of the human world around us.

And so, after the Mystery of Golgotha was, so to speak, established within the anthroposophical movement, a scientific movement that was only possible if the Mystery of Golgotha was taken completely seriously took its first steps.

This was difficult to maintain during the period when everything in Europe was going haywire and the world war broke out. We were in the second phase of the anthroposophical movement. We had, so to speak, left behind us the fact that we had borne witness to the fact that we wanted to be firmly connected to the Mystery of Golgotha. We had just begun to work on expanding the anthroposophical impulse across the various fields of world civilization. And now came the time when people in Europe became so deeply divided from one another, the time when mistrust and hatred ran rampant. A time came when everything that was not allowed to live within an anthroposophical community came to life if it was to develop its true life impulse. And in a way, we really did succeed, despite the difficulties that existed at the time, in continuing the Anthroposophical Society.

Let us consider the difficulties that existed. One major difficulty was that the original foundation of anthroposophy had started from central Europe, that we had our Goetheanum here in a neutral area, and that, I would say, any collaboration between people from the most diverse European regions was viewed with enormous mistrust from many sides. Every interaction and every journey between different sides was, of course, an enormous difficulty at that time. But the difficulties were overcome at the time because they were treated – my dear friends, it must be said – because they were treated from an anthroposophical spirit. I know that many who were part of the anthroposophical movement at the time also criticized some things, even resented them, because it was not always immediately apparent what had to be done in the face of the divisive judgments that had been made about the world in order to ensure the cohesion that can only exist in an anthroposophical spirit! And so we were able to guide the anthroposophical movement through the difficulties that arose during the European crisis, and in a sense keep it pure. Those people who were downright mistrustful during that time could in many cases be brought to trust, to the point where they said to themselves as complete outsiders: Anthroposophy, however one may feel about it, is something that cannot be dismissed as a thing to be mistrusted, even if it works with the most diverse nations.

Even as the war was drawing near, and despite the fact that it was misunderstood by many, and that some people got involved in this or that issue that began to divide people in Europe at the time, and despite the fact that some people criticized much of what was done in the spirit of anthroposophy out of some national furor, it was still possible, if I may say so, the anthroposophical ship could be steered through the great difficulties that existed, and it was possible to continue working on our Goetheanum.

One would like to say: This second phase, in which Anthroposophy was no longer an embryo, as it was until 1908 or 1909, this second phase lasted until about 1915 or 1916. Of course, its after-effects remained in many ways.

But then a time began when the child naturally had to mature: the third phase of the anthroposophical movement, starting around 1916. Yes, my dear friends, what kind of time was that? It is the time when all kinds of personalities in the anthroposophical movement, which had grown significantly by then, had ideas, ideas that then grew particularly badly in the post-war period.

It is in the nature of such a movement that the individuals in it must have ideas, because such a movement must mature within itself. As it grows, leading personalities must gradually emerge within it. And then it was indeed right that individual personalities should have such ideas. But what was necessary was that these personalities should cling with iron will to these ideas, so that they should not be adopted merely as a program and then abandoned, but should be held fast by these personalities with an iron will.

The ideas that have sought to be realized to this day have all been good. What has not been good and what must change is the behavior of the personalities in relation to them: it is precisely a matter of gaining perseverance in the pursuit of ideas. A new element necessarily emerged.

Take the first phase of the anthroposophical movement. When anthroposophy was still in its infancy, people could approach it by simply absorbing what was offered. In the first phase, all that was required was to absorb, to join the movement, to take in what was offered.

In the second phase, it became necessary for the assimilation to be mixed with an understanding; for example, people from the world came who really knew this outside world, knew it as scientists, knew it as practitioners; who could therefore judge that what was offered to them by anthroposophy also had value for science and life practice. But you didn't have to be active yourself, you just had to take in the anthroposophical with a healthy judgment of the outside world. In the first phase of anthroposophy, one only needed to be a person with a warm heart and a healthy understanding to be able to say yes to anthroposophy. Of course, this must be the case throughout all phases of the anthroposophical movement, that such people with a warm heart and a healthy understanding take up anthroposophy. But there must always be some people who know the other world thoroughly and can judge from the point of view of the other world, whether scientifically or as practitioners, what is carried down from the spiritual worlds into anthroposophy.

Now, when the third phase came, people were needed who could act, people who would work with their will, but with a persistent will, on the things that had arisen in them as ideas. Just as one cannot succumb to the illusion that a child who has turned 16 is still twelve years old, one should not succumb to the illusion that the Anthroposophical Society in 1919 could still be the same as it was in about 1907. It was in the nature of things that every intention was met. But it was also always emphasized that such volition is only justified if one perseveres, if one remains steadfast in one's will. Now, this has often been lacking. I say this not as a criticism, but as something that points to what must come. But I have often pointed out what must come to pass in individual cases. Only in one instance was my attention paid to by the leadership! That was when I realized that it was necessary to intervene in a certain field, and then our friend Leinhas took over this intervention. Only in this one case has what I have repeatedly and repeatedly described as a necessity in one area or another actually been observed in recent times – I now expressly say: described as a necessity of the third phase of the anthroposophical movement. Because basically I did not need to make a special effort to explain what the impulses of the first phase and the second phase were. They were ongoing. They could be safely left to spiritual karma. It was different with what had emerged through the ideas of individual personalities as a good thing in itself, but which can only continue to be good if the persevering will of the individual personalities really intervenes in the matter. But they must not be allowed to develop in the way they have in many cases in recent times.

Let me give you an example. Among the many things that arose from ideas, let us assume that there was also the so-called Hochschulbund. Yes, my dear friends, this Hochschulbund either had to contain within it a serious will that did not weaken, or it was a stillborn child. This is something that I already said explicitly when it was founded.

What is the meaning of such a statement, my dear friends? It means only that people should be made aware: you must know that if you slacken your will, the matter will go wrong. What has become of the University Federation? In Germany it has become something that only annoys the representatives of the old ways and makes enemies of them, because the will was not behind it. In Switzerland, the Hochschulbund was never really born at all; therefore, a far-reaching will could not flash through something like that which gave the first events within our perished Goetheanum their character: the college lectures. They have basically remained quite ineffective because there was no driving force behind them. But they made enemies. And a large part of the third phase of our anthroposophical movement consisted of this: the arousal of enmity and opposition that is not necessary when there is a strong will behind the cause. Of course, enmity arises; but it is ineffective if it is not justified in a certain way. And it must always be the case that it can be said: however many enmities arise, they must not even have the appearance of justification, however vehemently they arise.

I have repeatedly pointed this out, including here, but let us see how it has come about. It is only natural that young people should approach the movement that arises from the burgeoning of the development of the consciousness soul. We should be glad that young people are approaching it. But what do young people think today about what the Anthroposophical Society is? Young people today think that it cannot be taken seriously. I don't want to talk about whether this judgment is justified or not, but it is there, and you have to deal with the facts in life.

I would like to give you just one external, factual testimony to this fact. Some time ago, a group of young people came together in Stuttgart to truly surrender themselves to the anthroposophical movement with all their hearts. These people had the best intention of devoting themselves to the anthroposophical movement. I was busy here and couldn't be there on the first day after they had gathered in Stuttgart, and so I expressed to one of the members of the central Council the wish that he should represent me by giving a lecture to the young people on the first evening. He went there and proposed the motion to them. They said: We thank you very much, we do not want a lecture from you.

Now, my dear friends, you may say: That was rude. — For my sake, say that; but it has no validity if you say it. The fact was that the people were convinced from the outset: No understanding is possible; he does not tell us something that strikes at our hearts. And I found in Stuttgart that the youth had gathered and that the previous anthroposophical leadership was actually completely out of touch with them. The people were left to their own devices, and they really approached the anthroposophical movement with warm hearts.

This way of relating to others was perfectly possible in the first and second phases of the anthroposophical movement; in the third phase it was no longer possible because in the third phase it began to depend on the individual person in the anthroposophical movement. And as I said, all this is not said to criticize anyone, all this is not said to criticize; all this is said because it caused me endless suffering, because I saw that the personalities who wanted to take the helm here or there in the Anthroposophical Society did not want to rule entirely out of the anthroposophical spirit. And I have always assured them that it is unspeakable what I had to suffer from the fact that it could be stated: This third phase of the anthroposophical movement does not want to progress as it should, because there are too many mere ideas and the energetic will behind them is lacking.

It is indeed a certain fateful connection that when we were struck by the great misfortune here at the Goetheanum, it became particularly clear that the real damage to anthroposophy lies in inaction, in not wanting to take action. And so we have been driven into the very conflicts that now exist in the bosom of the Anthroposophical Society, and which should lead to nothing other than an all the more powerful recovery. But for that to happen, it must first be truly and honestly recognized what is necessary. Above all, it is necessary not to harbor illusions about the facts that have gradually driven us into a kind of cul-de-sac. It would certainly be an illusion if we were to see the damage as lying in anything other than the failure of certain personalities to take a stand. But the Anthroposophical Society can no longer tolerate illusions today. It cannot tolerate the mere unfruitful criticism of the past, but only the actual pointing out of what is necessary. And that is to recognize that desire is not will, that one must not say, 'I have the best will', when in three weeks' time this best will proves to be nothing but will at all, but that one then sat down on one's chair and was, in title, what one is on this chair, but had only passive good will. But passive good will is a contradiction in terms. The will is only good will when it is active. The anthroposophical movement in its third phase cannot tolerate resolutions such as: We make ourselves available. It is the worst misunderstanding to pass such resolutions, the worst misunderstanding of the actual tasks.

What is at stake is for each of us to intervene where we stand, and not to stop at desire, but to develop the will. It might seem, my dear friends, as if I wanted to paint a gloomy picture of what is in the bosom of the anthroposophical movement today. I do not want to do that. But on the other hand, I must not create any illusions, or contribute to the creation of any illusions. Because the point is that we can only move forward if we grasp such an awareness as has been characterized.

But, my dear friends, I am only saying that the second phase of the anthroposophical movement has brought with it the necessity to spread the word about the outer world. I also said that those who have learned from the world in science or practice must come forward as judges. In the third phase, numerous such personalities then found themselves saying, “Yes, now we have to do something, now we have to start doing something!” They also made resolutions. But action is not part of it.

In the third phase, well, I don't want to say how many researchers in the most diverse scientific fields are among us. I don't want to say how many! If I told you the total, you would be amazed. These researchers are, in their opinion, motivated by the best will. In my opinion, they are extremely capable. Here, too, I believe that there is no lack of ability. On the contrary, in recent years we have even managed to bring together the most capable people through a wonderful selection process, here and in Stuttgart. The excuse that abilities are lacking does not hold water. What is lacking is the will. And as soon as one talks about this will, the strangest things happen.

We experienced it at the local science course when a lecture by one of our researchers was announced. He didn't come! But as if in mockery, he arrived a few hours later. Yes, my dear friends, if there is no sense of obligation within the Anthroposophical Society, then it just won't work. And if you want to tackle things, then, oddly enough, they slip out of your hands; they really do slip out of your hands. For example, I wanted to tackle this 'problem', as I would call it, that one of our researchers simply absents himself, skips his lecture – I wanted to deal with this in the appropriate way; I got the answer that he doesn't even really know how he came to be on the program in Dornach! Yes, my dear friends, when problems slip out of our hands like that, then there is truly no longer any concerted, energetic will.

But that is precisely what we need. We do not need a disintegration of all kinds of wishes and all kinds of what is often called goodwill; we need a dutiful will. All things can flourish if people approach them in the right way. Because what does not have the possibility of flourishing within it will not be undertaken, even within the anthroposophical movement. But we need the will, the truly good will, that is, the strong will of the personalities involved. We cannot tolerate curule chairs, but we need active personalities.

My dear friends, I did not bring about the situation that I have to express this, but rather it is the personalities themselves who have made themselves available to do everything possible. It has grown out of something else. Therefore, the issue today is that responsibilities should also be defined as broadly as possible, that they should really be nurtured and cherished, and that they should also be demanded.

That is what I wanted to tell you, because we are still not finished with the current trips to Stuttgart. I have to go back there tomorrow. The next lecture will be next Friday. This afternoon there will be a eurythmy performance here at 5 o'clock. I ask once again not to shy away from the second route; the preparations for the trip made it necessary for this lecture not to follow the eurythmy performance, but to be held in the morning.

I

The remains of the Goetheanum now cover the Dornach hill. Its construction was the result of an initiative by members of the Anthroposophical Society. Anthroposophy is the name I used when, twenty years ago in Berlin, I gave a lecture cycle on the world view that I believe is a direct continuation of Goethe's way of thinking. I chose the name in memory of a book by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann, “Umriß einer Anthroposophie” (Outline of an Anthroposophy), which appeared decades ago. The content of this book, however, has nothing to do with what I presented as “anthroposophy”. It was modified Herbartian philosophy in the most abstract form. I wanted to use the word to express a world view that, through the application of the spiritual organs of perception of the human being, brings about the same knowledge of the spiritual world as natural science brings about through the sensory organs of perception of the physical.

About a year and a half before the lecture cycle mentioned above, I had already given lectures on another area of this anthroposophical world view at the invitation of Countess and Count Brockdorff in the “Theosophical Library” in Berlin at the time. The content of these lectures is published in my book “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life”. As a result of these lectures I was invited to join the Theosophical Society. I accepted this invitation with the intention of never advocating anything but the content of what had presented itself to me as the anthroposophical world view. It was always my view that I should lecture to all people who wanted to hear me, regardless of the name of the party under which they had joined together in any group, or whether they came to my lectures without any such preconception.

At the same time that I was invited to join the Theosophical Society, a number of members of that society founded a German section of it. I was invited to become its General Secretary. Despite serious misgivings, I accepted. I did not change my intention to present the Anthroposophical worldview to the world. What I myself call “Theosophy” is clearly evident from my book “Theosophy”, which I wrote shortly afterwards. This Theosophy emerges as a special field of Anthroposophy.

At the same time that the members of the Theosophical Society were inaugurating the German section in Berlin with speeches by Annie Besant, I was giving the series of lectures on anthroposophy that I have just mentioned.

I was now invited to give lectures to members of the Theosophical Society quite often. But basically, from the very beginning of this activity, I was opposed by those members of the Theosophical Society who were dogmatically attached to the teachings of some of the older leaders of that society. The circle of those personalities who found something in the Anthroposophical worldview increasingly formed itself as an independent one. In 1913, these leaders expelled them from the Theosophical Society when I called the consequences drawn from the teachings of these leaders and presented to the world absurd and declared that I did not want to have anything to do with such absurdities.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded in 1912 under the influence of these events. With the help of those personalities who later held leading positions in the Society, I was able to add the performance of “mysteries” to my lecturing activities even before that. As early as 1907, the anthroposophically oriented members in Munich performed Schuré's adaptation of the Eleusinian mystery at the Theosophical Congress. In 1909, he presented the play “Children of Lucifer” by the same author, which was followed by the presentation of “The Children of Lucifer” by the same author in Munich in 1909. As a result, in the following years, 1910-1913, my four own, very modern mystery dramas were performed for the members of the anthroposophical circle, also in Munich.

This expansion of anthroposophical activity into the field of art was a natural consequence of the nature of anthroposophy. The reasons for this have been frequently presented in this weekly publication.

Meanwhile, the circle that had become the Anthroposophical Society had grown so much that the leading figures within it were able to build Anthroposophy a home of its own. Munich was chosen as the location for this, because most of the supporters of the building intention were located there and had developed a particularly dedicated activity at that time.

I myself saw myself only as the representative of these supporters of the building intention. I believed that I had to concentrate my efforts on the inner spiritual work of Anthroposophy and gratefully accepted the initiative to create a place of work for it. But at the moment when the initiative was realized, the artistic design was for me a matter of inner spiritual work. I had to devote myself to this design. I asserted that if the building was to truly frame the anthroposophical world view, then the same principles from which the thoughts of anthroposophy arise must also give rise to the artistic forms of the building. The fact that this should not be done in the manner of a straw-and-stone allegory of building forms or of a symbolism tainted by thought is inherent in the nature of anthroposophy, which, in my opinion, leads to real art.

The idea of building the structure in Munich could not be carried out because influential artistic circles there objected to the forms. Whether these objections would have been overcome later is not worth discussing. The supporters of the building intention did not want the delay and therefore gratefully accepted the gift of Dr. Emil Grossheintz, who had already purchased a piece of land on the Dornach hill for the building.

So the foundation stone was laid in 1913 and work began immediately.

The supporters of the building project named the building the “Johannesbau” in reference to a character in my mystery dramas named Johannes Thomasius. During the years of construction, I often said that I started from the study of Goethean forms of thought in the construction of the anthroposophical worldview many years ago, and that for me their home is a “Goetheanum”. As a result, non-German members of the Anthroposophical Society in particular decided to continue to give the building the name “Goetheanum”.

Since anthroposophy, at the time when the building was started, had already found members with academic training and experience in the most diverse fields, and therefore stood in prospect of applying spiritual scientific methods in the individual sciences, I was allowed to suggest adding to the name of the building: “Freie Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft” (Free University for Spiritual Science).

Friends of anthroposophy have been working on this building for almost ten years. Difficult material sacrifices came from many sides: artists, technicians and scientists worked together in the most dedicated way. Anyone in the anthroposophical circle who had the opportunity to work on the project did so. The most difficult tasks were willingly taken on. The spirit of the anthroposophical world view worked through enthusiastic hearts on the “Goetheanum”. To my great joy, the construction workers, who at first were at least indifferent to anthroposophy, have been of the opinion since 1922 that the misgivings about anthroposophy that were expressed in such wide circles are unfounded.

My colleagues and I had turned our thoughts to the continuation of our work. We had planned a science course for the end of December and the beginning of January. Friends of the anthroposophical cause from many countries were present again.

In addition to the artistic activities, eurythmy and declamation had been added years ago, under the direction of Mrs. Marie Steiner, who has made this one of her many fields of work. On New Year's Eve, we had a eurythmy performance from 5 to 7 p.m. My lecture began at 8 p.m. and ended half an hour after 9 p.m. I had spoken about the connection between human beings and the phenomena of the course of the year in an anthroposophical way. Shortly thereafter, the Goetheanum went up in flames; by New Year's morning 1923 it had burned down to the concrete substructure.

II

When I had the honor of inaugurating the first course of lectures held at the Goetheanum in September and October 1920, it seemed to me to be of primary importance to point out how spiritual-scientific knowledge, artistic form and religious inwardness are sought from a single source in anthroposophy. In the opening speech I briefly pointed this out, and in lectures on the building idea in Dornach I wanted to show how art in the Goetheanum was drawn from the same spirituality that seeks to reveal itself in ideas when anthroposophy appears in the form of knowledge.

In this respect, the attempt that was made with the Goetheanum has been misunderstood by many. It has been said that the work here is done in symbolism. Those who have spoken in this way always seemed to me to be people who had visited the Goetheanum but had not really looked at it. They thought: a particular world view is presented here. The people who produce it want to create symbols of what they teach in the building forms and in the rest of the artistic work that they add inside and out. With this dogma, one often visited the Goetheanum and found it confirmed, because one did not look at it and because one judged the matter as if anthroposophy were nothing more than a rational science. Such a science, however, if it wants to express itself artistically, will usually achieve nothing more than symbolism or allegory.

But at the Goetheanum, no abstract ideas were embodied. The shaping of ideas was completely forgotten when form was created from artistic perception, line from line and surface from surface. When colors were used on the wall to depict what was also seen directly in the color picture.

When I occasionally had the opportunity to personally show visitors around the Goetheanum, I said that I actually dislike “explaining” the forms and images, because the artistic should not be suggested by thoughts, but should be accepted in direct contemplation and perception.

Art that arises from the same soil as the ideas of true anthroposophy can become real art. For the soul forces that shape these ideas penetrate into the spiritual realm from which artistic creativity can also come. What one forms in thought out of anthroposophical knowledge stands for itself. There is no need to express it symbolically in a semi-artistic way. On the other hand, through the experience of the reality that anthroposophy reveals, one has the need to live artistically in forms and colors. And these colors and forms live for themselves again. They do not express any ideas. No more or no less than a lily or a lion expresses an idea.

Because this is related to the essence of anthroposophical life, anyone who used their eyes and not their dogmatizing minds when visiting Dornach will not have become aware of symbols and allegories, but of real artistic attempts.

But there was one thing I always had to mention when speaking of the architectural idea of the Goetheanum. When the time came to carry out this building, one could not turn to an artist who was supposed to create a home for Anthroposophy in the antique, Renaissance or Gothic style. If anthroposophy were mere science, mere content of ideas, then it could have been so. But anthroposophy is life, it is the grasping of the universal human and the world in and through man.

The initiative of the friends of this world view to build the Goetheanum could only be realized if this building, down to the last detail of its design, was created out of the same living spirit from which anthroposophy itself springs. I have often used an image: look at a nut and the nutshell. The shell is certainly not a symbol of the nut. But it is formed out of the same laws as the nut. Thus the structure can only be the shell, which artistically proclaims in its forms and images the spirit that lives in the word when Anthroposophy speaks through ideas.

In this way, every style of art is born out of a spirit that has also revealed itself ideationally in a world view.

And in a purely artistic sense, a style of building has been created for the Goetheanum that had to move from symmetry, repetition and so on to that which breathes in the forms of organic life. The auditorium, for example, had seven columns on either side. Only one on the left and right had capitals of the same shape. In contrast, each following capital was the metamorphic development of the previous one. All this resulted from artistic intuition; not from a rational element. It was not possible to repeat typical motifs in different places; rather, each structure was individually designed in its place, just as the smallest link in an organism is individual and yet designed in such a way that it necessarily appears in its formation in the place where it is. Some people have taken the number seven of the columns as an expression of something mystical. This too is a mistake. It is precisely a result of artistic perception. By allowing one capital form to arise artistically from the other, one arrived at the seventh with a form that could not be exceeded without falling back on the motif of the first.

It may be said, without indulging in illusions, that the building at the Goetheanum was not the only one to be confronted with the prejudices just mentioned. Gradually, quite a number of people came forward who wanted to look with unprejudiced eyes at what had arisen from unprejudiced perception.

Goethe speaks from his artistic feeling the words: “He to whom nature begins to reveal her secret, feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art,” and “Beauty is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would have remained hidden forever if it had not appeared.” According to the forms that the human concept of knowledge has taken in modern times, it is believed that the essence of natural things and natural processes can only be expressed by formulating laws (natural laws) in a conceptual way. But what if there were an artistic basis to nature's creative activity? Then the person who starts from the prejudice that it can only be expressed intellectually would not come close to the full essence of nature. And so it is. When one has penetrated to the secrets of nature through the realm of ideas, full of the life of the world, then one experiences: there is still something that does not yield to thought, that one can only reach when one tunes the soul into the realm of ideas through artistic contemplation. Goethe felt this when he wrote the sentences quoted. And the Goetheanum was shaped out of such a feeling. Anyone who sees a sect in people who practice anthroposophy will easily explain the symbolism of a sectarian view into the architectural forms of the Goetheanum. But anthroposophy is the opposite of all sectarianism. It strives for the purely human in full impartiality.

The small domed room of the Goetheanum was painted in such a way that it was not started from an ideational figurative, to which colors were glued, but rather a color experience was there first; and from this the figurative was born. In devotion to the essence of the color, the soul's creative power is strengthened to the figurative that the experienced colors demand. When painting, one feels as if there were nothing in the world but living, weaving colors, which are creative and generate essence out of themselves.

When one has to speak about the intentions behind the creation of the Goetheanum, one feels the pain of its loss, for which words are not there. For the whole essence of this building was geared towards contemplation. The memory hurts unspeakably. For one remembers soul experiences that urge towards contemplation. But the possibility of contemplation has been taken away since that New Year's Eve.

III

At the Goetheanum, an artistic sense could lead one to the insight that anthroposophy is not a sect or a religion. You can't build a church or a temple in this style. Two cylinder casings, with different sized bases, interlocked on the sides where they were cut out. They were closed at the top by a larger and a smaller dome. The domes were hemispherical and also interlocked, with sectors cut out where they touched.

The small domed room was to serve as a stage for mystery plays when it was completely finished. But it had not yet been set up for that purpose. Until now, only eurhythmy performances had taken place in this room. — The larger domed room enclosed the rows of spectators and listeners. There was nothing that would have given this two-part room the character of a temple or cult building.

The bases of the twelve columns around the small domed room had been converted into twelve chairs. One could recognize a meeting room for a limited number of participants; but not something church-like. Between the columns there was to be a sculptured group in the center of which was to be a figure in which one could recognize Christ. It was to be the emblem that genuine spiritual knowledge leads to Christ, thus uniting with the content of religion.

Those who entered through the main portal should be addressed by the whole in an artistic way: “Recognize the true human being.” The building was designed to be a home of knowledge, not a “temple.

The two rooms were separated by a curtain. In front of the curtain was a lectern that could be lowered when the stage area was used.

One need only look at the shape of this lectern to see how little was thought of it in terms of a church. All these forms were artistically drawn from the overall design of the building and from the meeting of the designs that led to the place where the speaker stood.

These forms were not an architectural and sculptural temple interior, but the framing of a place of spiritual knowledge. Anyone who wanted to see something else in them had to first interpret artistic untruth into them. But it was always satisfying for me when I was allowed to hear from those who were authorized to say: these forms speak in the true way of what they want to be. And that I was able to hear such words, that happened several times.

But it should not be denied that some things about the building must have been strange to those who approached it with familiar ideas about architecture. But that was in its essence; and it could not be otherwise.

When people become acquainted with anthroposophy, some of them also experience something of this kind of alienation. It initially appears as knowledge of the human being. But as it develops its knowledge of the human being, it expands into knowledge of the world. The human being recognizes his own nature; but this grasping is a merging with the content of the world.

When you entered the Goetheanum, you were surrounded by walls. But the treatment of the wall in its sculptural design had something that contradicted the character of the wall. We are accustomed to seeing the wall treated in such a way that it closes off a space from the outside. Such a wall is artistically opaque. The walls of the Goetheanum, with their protruding column forms and the designs that were supported by these columns, were intended to be artistically transparent. They were not meant to shut out the world, but to catch the eye with their artistic formations in such a way that the observer felt connected to the vastness of the universe. If one could not immediately focus one's attention on this peculiarity, these forms appeared as if one suddenly became aware of an incomprehensible window where one had expected an opaque blackboard.

The glass windows set into the outer wall were also adapted to this character of the wall. These were visible between two columns. They were made of monochrome glass, into which the artistic motifs were engraved. It was a kind of glass etching. The image was created by the different thicknesses that the monochrome glass acquired through the etching. It could only be seen as an image in strong sunlight. Thus, what had been artistically conceived in terms of form for the rest of the wall was also physically achieved in these windows. The image was only there when the wall interacted with the outside world. Two windows on the left and right were the same color. The windows from the entrance to the beginning of the stage were different colors, arranged in such a way that the colors in their sequence created a color harmony.

At first, what was seen in the windows might have been incomprehensible. But for those who had absorbed the anthroposophical world view, the strangeness would have been revealed purely through contemplation, not through intellectual or symbolic interpretation. And the whole was a home for those who sought anthroposophy. Anyone who claimed to understand these pictures without an anthroposophically oriented view resembled someone who wanted to enjoy a poem in a language artistically without first understanding the language.

The same applied to the pictorial motifs that covered the inner two dome surfaces. But it is wrong to say that one should first have a worldview in order to understand the images and forms. One did not need to read books or listen to lectures in order to have an anthroposophical orientation for these images, but one could also gain this orientation without the preceding word by simply looking into the images. But one had to come to it. If one did not want to, one stood before it, as – without, of course, even remotely suggesting an artistic comparison of values – before Raphael's Disputa, if one did not want to orient oneself to the mystery of the Trinity.

The auditorium was designed for nine hundred to one thousand people. At the western end of the auditorium, there was a raised space for the built-in organ and other musical instruments.

This entire wooden structure stood on a concrete substructure that was larger in plan, so that there was a raised terrace around the outside of the auditorium. In this substructure, under the auditorium, were the places for depositing clothes, and under the stage area were machines. It must have seemed amusing to those who had seen the contents of this concrete substructure when they heard that opponents of the anthroposophical worldview were talking about all sorts of mysterious things, even about underground meeting places in this concrete building. The Goetheanum had goals that truly did not require dark, mysterious meeting places or magic instruments. Such things would not have fitted into the architectural concept of the whole. They would have been artistically unmotivated.

The domes were covered with Nordic slate from the Voß slate quarries. The bluish-grey sheen in the sunlight combined with the color of the wood to create a whole that many a person who has made their way up the Dornach hill to the Goetheanum on a bright summer's day has welcomed with sympathy.

Now they encounter a pile of rubble with a low concrete ruin rising up out of it.

IV

The art of eurythmy seemed to come into its own at the Goetheanum. It is visible speech or singing. The individual performs movements with his limbs, especially the most expressive movements of the arms and hands, or groups of people move or take up positions in relation to each other. These movements are like gestures. But they are not gestures in the usual sense. These relate to what is presented in eurythmy as the child's babbling to the developed language.

When a person reveals himself through language or song, then he is there with his whole being. He is, so to speak, in the system through his whole body in motion. But he does not express this system. He captures this movement in the making and concentrates it on the speech or sound organs. Now, through sensual-supersensible observation – to use this Goethean expression – one can recognize which movement of the whole physical human being underlies a tone, a speech sound, a harmony, a melody, or a formed speech structure. In this way, individuals or groups of people can be made to perform movements that express the musical or linguistic element in a visible way, just as the speech and singing organs express it aurally. The whole person, or groups of people, become the larynx; the movements speak or sing as the larynx sounds.

Just as in speech or song, nothing in eurythmy is arbitrary. But it makes just as little sense to say that momentary gestures are preferable in eurythmy as it does to say that an arbitrary tone or sound is better than those that lie within the lawful formation of speech or sound.

But eurythmy is not to be confused with dance either. Musical elements that sound simultaneously can be eurythmized. In this case, one is not dancing to music but visibly singing it.

Eurythmic movements are derived from the human organism as a whole in the same orderly way as speech or song.

When poetry is eurythmized, the visible language of eurythmy is revealed on stage and at the same time the poetry is heard through recitation or declamation. One cannot recite or declaim to the eurythmy as one often likes to do, by merely pointing out the prose content of the poetry. One must really treat the language artistically as language. Meter, rhythm, melodious motifs and so on, or even the imaginative aspect of sound formation, must be worked out. For every true poetry is based on a hidden (invisible) eurythmy. Mrs. Marie Steiner has tried to develop this kind of recitation and declamation, which goes hand in hand with the eurythmic presentation. It seems as if a kind of orchestral interaction of the spoken and visibly presented word has really been achieved.

It turns out to be inartistic for one person to recite and perform eurythmy at the same time. These tasks must be performed by different people. The image of a person who wanted to reveal both in themselves would fall apart for the immediate impression.

The development of the art of eurythmy is based on insight into the expressive possibilities of the human body, insight that draws on both the senses and the supersensory. As far as I know, there is only scant evidence of this insight from earlier times. These were times when the soul and spirit were still able to shine through the human body to a greater extent than they are today. This scant tradition, which incidentally points to quite different intentions than those present in eurythmy, was of course used. But it had to be independently developed and transformed, and above all, it had to be completely reshaped into an artistic form. I am not aware of any tradition in the formal movement of groups of people that we have gradually developed in eurythmy.

When this eurythmic art appeared on the stage of the Goetheanum, one should have the feeling that the static forms of the interior design and the sculpture related to the moving human beings in a completely natural way. The former should, so to speak, accept the latter pleasantly. The building and the eurythmic movement should merge into a single whole. This impression could be heightened by accompanying the sequence of eurythmic creations with lighting effects that flooded the stage in harmonious radiance and sequence. What is attempted here is light eurythmy.

And if the forms of the stage took up the eurythmic designs as something belonging to them, so did those of the auditorium take up the recitation or declamation that occurred in parallel with the eurythmy, which sounded from a seat on the side of the stage, where it meets the auditorium, through Marie Steiner. Perhaps it is not inappropriate to say that the listener should feel in the building itself a comrade in the understanding of the word or tone heard. If one does not want to claim more than that such a unity of building form and word or music was striven for, then what has been said will not sound too immodest. For no one can be more convinced that all this has been achieved only in a highly imperfect way than I myself. But I have tried to shape it in such a way that one could feel how the movement of the word naturally ran along the forms of the capitals and architraves.

I would only like to suggest what can be tried for such a building: that its forms do not merely enclose what is depicted in them on the outside, but contain it in a living unity in themselves in the most direct impression.

And if I were to express my opinion on this, I would hold back. But I have heard what has been said from others.

I also know that I have shaped the forms of the building sensitively, out of the state of mind from which the eurythmy images also come.

The fact that the forms of eurythmy were continuously shaped in the experience of what could be experienced in the creation of the building forms will not be perceived as a contradiction of what has been said. For the harmony between the two was not achieved by intellectual intention, but arose out of a homogeneous artistic impulse. Probably eurythmy could not have been found without the work on building. Before the building idea, it existed only in its first beginnings.

The instructions for the soul-based shaping of the moving speech forms were first given to the students in the hall built into the south wing of the Goetheanum. The interior architecture of this hall in particular was intended to be a resting eurythmy, just as the eurythmic movements within it were moving plastic forms, shaped by the same spirit as these resting forms themselves.

It was in this hall that the smoke was first detected on December 31, which came from the fire that destroyed the entire Goetheanum when it grew up. One feels, when one has been lovingly connected with the building, the merciless flames painfully penetrating through the sensations that poured into the resting forms and into the work attempted within them.

V

Of course, some objections can be raised against the stylistic forms of the Goetheanum. I have always described them as a first attempt to undertake something artistic in the direction characterized in the preceding remarks.

Those who refuse to accept any transition from the cognitive representation of the nature of the world and of world processes through ideas to pictorial artistic embodiment must reject these forms of expression. But what is it ultimately based on, this desire to visualize something of the world's content through knowledge in the soul? But only because in the experience of the ideas of knowledge one becomes aware of something in which one knows the outer world to be continuously active within oneself. Through knowledge the world speaks in the human soul. He who merely imagines that he has formed his own ideas about the world, he who does not feel the world pulsating within him when he lives in ideas, should not speak of knowledge. The soul is the arena in which the world reveals its secrets.

But anyone who thinks of knowledge in such a realistic way must ultimately come to the conclusion that his thinking must pass over into artistic creation if he wants to experience the content of the world in certain areas within himself. One can close one's mind to such a view. One can demand that science must stay away from artistic visualization and express itself only in the formation of ideas that are demanded by logical laws. But such a demand would be mere subjective arbitrariness if the creative process of nature were such that it could only be grasped artistically in certain areas. If nature proceeds as an artist, then man must resort to artistic forms in order to express it.

But it is also an experience of knowledge that in order to follow nature in its creative work, the transition of logically formed ideas into artistic images is necessary.

For example, up to a certain point it is possible to express the human physique through logical thinking. But from this point onwards, one must allow the process to enter into artistic forms if one does not want a mere ghostly image of the human being, but rather the human being in his or her living reality. And one will be able to feel that in the soul, by experiencing the form of the body in artistic and pictorial terms, the reality of the world is revealed in the same way as in the logically formed ideas.

I believed I was presenting Goethe's view of the world correctly when, at the end of the 1980s, I described his relationship to art and science as follows: “Our time believes it is doing the right thing when it keeps art and science as far apart as possible. They are said to be two completely opposite poles in the cultural development of humanity. Science should, so it is thought, sketch out for us a world view that is as objective as possible; it should show us reality in a mirror or, in other words, it should adhere purely to what is given, divesting itself of all subjective arbitrariness. The objective world is decisive for its laws; it must submit to it. It should take the standard of truth and falsity entirely from the objects of experience. The two creations of art are to be completely different. The self-creative power of the human mind gives them their laws. For science, any interference by human subjectivity would be a falsification of reality, a transgression of experience; art, on the other hand, grows on the field of ingenious subjectivity. Its creations are the product of human imagination, not reflections of the outside world. Outside of us, in objective being, lies the origin of scientific laws; in us, in our individuality, that of aesthetic ones. Therefore, the latter have not the slightest cognitive value; they create illusions without the slightest reality factor. Anyone who understands the matter in this way will never gain clarity about the relationship between Goethean poetry and Goethean science. But this means that both are misunderstood. The world-historical significance of Goethe lies precisely in the fact that his art flows from the source of being, that it contains nothing illusory, nothing subjective, but appears as the herald of the lawfulness that the poet has overheard in the depths of natural activity to the world spirit. At this level, art becomes the interpreter of the secrets of the world, as science is in another sense. This is how Goethe always understood art. For him, it was a revelation of the primal law of the world; science was the other. For him, art and science arose from the same source. While the scientist delves into the depths of reality to express the driving forces of reality in the form of thoughts, the artist seeks to incorporate these same driving forces into his material. Goethe himself puts it this way: “I think that science could be called knowledge of the general, abstract knowledge; art, on the other hand, would be science applied to action. Science would be reason and art its mechanism, which is why it could also be called practical science. And so, finally, science would be the theorem, art the problem.” And Goethe expresses something similar with the words: ”Style rests on the deepest foundations of knowledge, on the essence of things, insofar as we are allowed to recognize it in visible and tangible forms.” (See my introduction to Goethe's scientific writings, which will soon be published as an independent book by the Stuttgarter Kommenden Tag-Verlag.)

What I meant at the time: that Goethe is right when he thinks of the relationship between art and science in this way; that seems right to me today too. That is why what was expressed in his work in the form of knowledge could be presented in artistic form at the Goetheanum.

Anthroposophy has the supersensible content of the world for its representation, insofar as it is accessible to human contemplation. One feels that every expression of this content through logically formed ideas is only a kind of thought-gesture that points to this content. And the artistic form appears as the other gesture through which the spiritual world responds to the thought-gesture; or perhaps the other way around, the world reveals the idea in response when one asks it through the artistic image.

The stylistic forms of the Goetheanum could not, therefore, be a naturalistic imitation of any inanimate or animate object in the world around us. The experience of what is happening in the spiritual world had to guide the hand that formed the sculpture and applied the paint to the surface. The spiritual content of the world had to be allowed to flow into the lines and reveal itself in the color.

No matter how many objections are raised against these stylistic forms of the Goetheanum, the attempt that was made was to create an artistic home for a striving for knowledge in the sense of Goethe's intentions, a home that was from the same spiritual source as the knowledge cultivated in it. The attempt may have been imperfectly successful; it was there as such: and the Goetheanum was built in the spirit of Goethe's view of art.

Thus one came to feel that the Goetheanum was the home of Anthroposophy; but after the disaster of December 31, after the one side, one also feels, with Anthroposophy, homeless. Sympathetic visitors came to the scene of the fire on January 1st, saying: we want to keep alive in our hearts what we have experienced in this building.

VI

The Goetheanum has only experienced nine major events. In September and October 1920, lecture series took place over three weeks on a wide range of scientific topics. The impetus for this came from the circle of scientists working in the Anthroposophical Society. The entire organization of the lecture cycles was also in their hands. Teachers from the Free Waldorf School and other personalities with training in various fields of knowledge — including artists — were involved. The idea behind the event was to show how the individual scientific fields can be illuminated by the anthroposophical method of research.

It struck me at the time, as I witnessed these cycles, that not everything appeared as if it had been born out of the spirit of the Goetheanum. When individual insights into nature or history were illuminated out of the spirit of anthroposophical concepts as a whole, one felt harmony between the structure and the presentation of knowledge. When individual questions were discussed, this was not the case.

I had to think of how, during the construction, the anthroposophical work had grown beyond the stage it was at when construction began. In 1913, the idea of those personalities who had decided to build it was to create a place for the anthroposophical work in the narrower sense and for those artistic performances that had grown out of the anthroposophical perception. At that time, the individual scientific fields were only included in the anthroposophical work of knowledge to the extent that they naturally integrated into the broader presentations of spiritual scientific observation.

The building was conceived as an artistic vessel for this spiritual content. This relationship was the basis for the design of the building. It was allowed to be so. For it was important to express artistically how anthroposophy should be placed in the context of human life as a whole. If the treatment of individual scientific fields was considered later, this should be done in separate extensions.

A different approach is needed for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum. The construction of a central place for anthroposophy in the narrower sense was obvious because it was the will of the personalities who advocated its construction to build this place out of wood. Such a central place can be artistically imbued with this material. Another material would then have been considered for the extensions. A second wooden structure is out of the question. Before the Goetheanum was tackled, I told the leading personalities what artistic feelings for wood and for another material would be considered. They decided on wood because at that time they took the view that they should proceed as idealistically as possible. This idealism bore the beautiful fruit that understanding souls had before them, at least for a short time, a home for anthroposophy that could not have been built in another material with such verve in the lines and such expressiveness in the forms. Today, this fruit is a tragic memory. There are no words for the pain of loss. The idealism of those who commissioned me to build in wood must therefore be given all possible credit.

The building is closely connected with the fate of anthroposophical development in recent years, precisely because of the lack of the marked harmony at the first event. The first series of lectures as a whole reveals itself as something that did not grow quite organically out of the same idea as the building itself. It was as if something had been carried into the purely anthroposophical building. In the outer reality of human coexistence, things do not always follow the path demanded by the inner workings of a spiritual context. Anthroposophy is absolutely predisposed to extend its developmental tendencies to where they also lead into the most specialized fields of knowledge. But that is not how it happened in the Anthroposophical Society. A different path has been taken. Scientifically educated personalities have become members of the Society. Science was their way of life and their education. Anthroposophy has become a matter of the heart for them. They have allowed themselves to be inspired by it for their science. Thus we have received scientific explanations from anthroposophically minded personalities before the individual fields of knowledge were born out of anthroposophy itself. Much has been achieved by the fact that, when the need arose, lecture cycles were held in front of small groups from the most diverse fields of knowledge, inspired by the anthroposophical spirit. What came out of this is not to be presented here as something that was hasty or the like. But just as, for example, in the pedagogical field, educational methods have emerged directly from anthroposophy, as is the case in the artistic field with eurhythmics, so it has not been destined by fate for the Anthroposophical Society to do so in other fields. In certain areas, a faster pace was demanded of anthroposophy out of a well-seen contemporary necessity. This requires that individual scientific fields that are already being worked on and anthroposophical development must first grow into each other.

This was also expressed in the disharmony of the first event in 1920, as described. If a reconstruction comes about, it will be able to contain - in a different material - individual rooms - for example on the first floor - for scientific events and artistic work, and thus the space for the anthroposophical in the narrower sense. On the one hand, such a building will correspond to its material, and on the other hand to the development that anthroposophical endeavors have taken in recent years.

The disharmony was only an expression of the endeavor to create a home for anthroposophy in the narrower sense that was artistically appropriate to its stage of development up to 1918. Perhaps I may cite this as proof of how Anthroposophy as a spiritual content and its home as an artistic unity were felt during the elaboration of the latter.

But today, in a strange harmony with this architectural idea of the Goetheanum, I feel what was then in me, when the first event was set up in it, to open the Goetheanum itself in a festive manner. The program of that series of lectures could not be taken as the occasion for such a celebration. It should only take place when an event had become possible whose whole would be in complete harmony with the original building idea. It did not come to that. The Goetheanum died away before then. In the hearts of those who loved it, there was a lasting funeral service.

The next essay will deal with the further events that could still take place in the dear building.

VII

Even if it was not possible for us to reveal the opening ceremony, the building idea and the event of the Goetheanum in full harmony, we were still able to make attempts in various directions over the course of more than two years to bring the anthroposophical spirit to bear.

The first three-weekly lecture cycle was followed by a second one-weekly cycle in April 1921. The aim was to show how the individual fields of human knowledge can be significantly expanded if their paths of research are continued into the spiritual realm.

On this occasion, it gave me particular satisfaction to be able to point out such a possible expansion for a number of fields of knowledge through my own lectures.

During these events, I was also always given the task of showing visitors around the building and talking about the artistic aspects of the Goetheanum. On the one hand, I was reluctant to say anything theoretical about art. Art is meant to be looked at. But these tours had another side to them. One could avoid wanting to 'explain' art in an unartistic way. I did that too, as far as it seemed permissible to me from those who were looking at the building. But there were plenty of opportunities to talk about anthroposophical matters in a free, fragmentary, aphoristic way, linking it to the forms and images that could be seen. And the lectures could then be woven into a whole with what was said during the tour. Then one felt very intimately how good the anthroposophically oriented word was when spoken at a pillar or under a picture that came from the same spirit as the word itself.

These events always included eurythmy performances. They made it clear how the building demanded that the insights presented in it had to be shaped into a whole by artistic means. The inner space of the Goetheanum seemed to brook no lecture cycle that was not rounded off by artistic elements. I believe it was felt to be a necessity when Marie Steiner added her art of recitation and declamation to the lecture events from the organ room.

We also had the joy of hearing Mrs. Werbeck-Svärdström unfold her wonderful art from this organ room, sometimes together with her three sisters. What the participants were able to hear there will certainly be unforgettable.

Personally, it always gave me the greatest joy to hear Albert Steffen speak from the Goetheanum podium. What he says is always meant to be felt in plastic forms. He is like a sculptor of language; a sculptor who carves in wood. I perceived a harmony between the building forms and his language sculptures, which he placed in the building at once deliberately and confidently.

In August 1921, we were able to hold an event that was thanks to the English painter Baron von Rosenkrantz. This event felt particularly at home in the building. The band stepped before the soul's eye, connecting spiritual-scientific research and spirit-revealing art. It is understandable that attention was drawn to what the building was intended to be an experiment for, on this occasion in particular.

At the end of September and the beginning of October, a number of German theologians who carried the impulse for a Christian religious renewal gathered at the Goetheanum. What was worked out here came to a conclusion in September 1922. I myself must count among the festivals of my life what I experienced with these theologians in September 1922 in the small hall of the south wing where the fire was later discovered. Here, with a group of nobly enthusiastic people, it was possible to follow the path that leads spiritual knowledge into religious experience.

At the end of December and beginning of January 1922, a group of English teachers gathered at the Goetheanum. That this was possible was due to the dedicated efforts of Prof. M. Mackenzie. She and Prof. Mackenzie had taken part in the course organized by Baron von Rosenkrantz in August. On this occasion, the distinguished English educationalist decided to invite English teachers to visit the Goetheanum during the Christmas holidays. Together with a number of teachers from the Stuttgart Waldorf School, I was invited to speak again in the hall of the south wing about pedagogy, education and teaching practice. The English educators were joined by others from Scandinavia, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany and so on.

In September 1922, I was invited to give ten lectures on “Cosmology, Philosophy and Religion from the Point of View of Anthroposophy”. Once again, the cycle of my lectures was rounded off by teachers from the Waldorf School and other personalities from the Anthroposophical Movement, through their lectures and the discussions they held with the participants. I went to each of my lectures and came away from them with a deep sense of gratitude to those who initiated the building of the Goetheanum. For it was precisely in these lectures, in which I had to cover a wide range of knowledge from an anthroposophical point of view, that I had to feel the benefit of being able to express ideas that had been given artistic form in the building.

Events such as the “Dramatic Course”, given by Marie Steiner in July 1922, and a National Economic Course, which I myself held in July and August 1922, did not take place within the rooms that were lost to us on New Year's Eve. But they belong to the circle of what the Goetheanum has inspired.

Eurythmy performances have been taking place at the Goetheanum for many years. I have tried to describe their close connection with the nature of the building in an earlier article.

A cycle of lectures on natural science was planned for the end of December and beginning of January 1922 to 1923. Once again, personalities working in the field of anthroposophy were to give lectures and hold discussions with me. I added other lectures on purely anthroposophical subjects to the lectures on knowledge of nature. Only the first part of this event could still take place at the Goetheanum. After the eurythmy performance and my lecture on New Year's Eve, the flames took the building in which we would have liked to continue working.

The lectures had to be continued in an adjoining room, while outside the flames consumed the last remains of the Goetheanum, which we loved so much.

Today I would like to report to you on the second lecture I gave in Stuttgart. It will not be so much a verbatim account of what was said there as a fresh discussion of the matters dealt with in that lecture, and I shall also want to include some comment on the Stuttgart conference itself.

The purpose of the second lecture was to show the reasons why certain things that ought never to happen, particularly in a Society like ours, do nevertheless so easily occur and are such a familiar phenomenon to those acquainted with the history of societies based on a spiritual view of life. As you know, there have always been societies of this kind, and they were always adapted to their period. In earlier ages, the kind of consciousness required for entrance into the spiritual world was different from the kind we need today. As a rule people who joined forces to establish some form of cognition based on higher, super-sensible insight included among their goals the cultivation of a brotherly spirit in the membership. But you know, too, as do all those familiar with the history of these societies, that brotherliness all too easily came to grief, that it has been especially in societies built on spiritual foundations that the greatest disharmony and the worst offenses against brotherliness burgeoned.

Now if anthroposophy is properly conceived, the Anthroposophical Society is thoroughly insured against such unbrotherly developments. But it is by no means always properly conceived. Perhaps it will help toward its fuller comprehension if light is thrown on the reasons for the breakdown of brotherly behavior.

Let us, to start with, review the matters brought up yesterday. I pointed out that we distinguish between three levels of consciousness: that of ordinary waking life, that of dreams, and finally that of dreamless sleep. Man's dream pictures are experienced as a world he inhabits. While he is dreaming, it is perfectly possible for him to mistake his dreams for reality, for events just as real as those that take place in the physical world where he finds himself during his waking life.

But as I said yesterday, there is a tremendous difference between dream experiences and those of waking. A dreamer is isolated in his dream experiences. And I pointed out that someone else can be asleep beside him and have quite different dreams, hence be living in a different world. Neither can communicate anything about his world of dreams to his fellow dreamer. Even if ten people are sleeping in a single room, each has only his own world before him. This does not seem at all surprising to one who is able to enter the often marvelous dream world as a spiritual scientist, for the world in which a dreamer lives is also real. But the pictures it presents derive in every case from factors of purely individual concern. To be sure, dreams do clothe the experiences they convey in pictures borrowed from the physical plane. But as I have often pointed out, these pictures are merely outer coverings. The reality—and there is indeed reality in dreams—hides behind the pictures, which express it only superficially.

A person who explores dreams in a spiritual-scientific sense with the purpose of discovering their meaning studies not the pictures but the dramatic element running through them. One person may be seeing one dream scene, another an entirely different one. But for both there may be an experience of climbing or of standing on the edge of an abyss or of confronting some danger, and finally a release of tension. The essential thing is the dream's dramatic course, which it merely clothes in pictorial elements. This unfolding drama often has its source in past earth lives, or it may point to future incarnations. It is the unwinding thread of destiny in human life—running, perhaps, through many incarnations—that plays into dreams. Man's individual core is what is involved here. He is outside his body with his ego and astrality. That is to say, he is outside his body with the ego that he takes from one incarnation to another, and he is in his astral body, which means that he is living in the world that embraces experience of all the surrounding processes and beings in the midst of which we live before we descend to earth and find again when we return to live in a world beyond the senses after death.

But in sleep we are also isolated from our physical and etheric bodies. Dreams clothe themselves in pictures when the astral body is either just coming back into contact with the ether body or just separating from it, that is, on awakening and on falling asleep. But the dreams are there, even though one has no inkling of their presence when in an ordinary state of consciousness. Man dreams straight through the time he is sleeping. This means that he is occupied solely with his own concerns during that period. But when he wakes, he returns to a world that he shares in common with the people about him. It is then no longer possible for ten individuals to be in one room with each living in a world apart; the room's interior becomes the common world of all. When people are together on the physical plane, they experience a world in common.

I called attention yesterday to the fact that a shift in consciousness, a further awakening is necessary to enter those worlds from which we draw genuine knowledge of the super-sensible, knowledge of man's true being, such as anthroposophy is there to make available.

These, then, are the three stages of consciousness.

But now let us suppose that the kind of picture consciousness that is normally developed by a sleeping person is carried over into the ordinary day-waking state, into situations on the physical plane. There are such cases. Due to disturbances in the human organism, a person may conceive the physical world as it is normally conceived in dream life only. In other words, he lives in pictures that have significance for him alone. This is the case in what is called an abnormal mental state, and it is due to some illness in the physical or etheric organism. A person suffering from it can shut himself off from experiencing the outer world, as he does in sleep. His sick organism then causes pictures to rise up in him such as ordinarily present themselves only in dreams. Of course, there are many degrees of this affliction, ranging all the way from trifling disturbances of normal soul life to conditions of real mental illness.

Now what happens when a person carries over a dream conditioned state of mind into ordinary physical earth life? In that case, his relationship to his fellowman is just what it would be if he were sleeping next to him. He is isolated from him, his consciousness absorbed by something that he cannot share. This gives rise to a special egotism for which he cannot be held wholly responsible. He is aware only of what is going on in his own soul, knowing nothing of what goes on in any other's. We human beings are drawn into a common life by having common sense impressions about which we then form common thoughts. But when someone projects a dreaming state of mind into ordinary earth life, he isolates himself, becomes an egotist, and lives alongside his fellowman making assertions about things to which the other can have no access in his experience. You must all have had personal experience of the degree of egotism to which this carrying over of dream life into everyday life can mislead human beings.

There can be a similar straying from a wholesome path, however, in cases where people join others in, say, a group where anthroposophical truths are being studied, but where the situation I was characterizing yesterday fails to develop, namely, that one soul wakes up in the encounter with the other to a certain higher state, not of consciousness, perhaps, but of feeling awakened to a higher, more intense experiencing. Then the degree of self-seeking that it is right to have in the physical world is projected into one's conceiving of the spiritual world. Just as someone becomes an egotist when he projects his dream consciousness into the physical world, so does a person who introduces into his approach to higher realms a soul-mood or state of mind appropriate to the physical world become to some degree an egotist in his relationship to the spiritual world.

But this is true of many people. A desire for sensation gives them an interest in the fact that man has a physical, an etheric and an astral body, lives repeated earth lives, has a karma, etc. They inform themselves about such things in the same way they would in the case of any other fact or truth of physical reality. Indeed, we see this evidenced every day in the way anthroposophy is presently combatted. Scientists of the ordinary kind, for example, turn up insisting that anthroposophy prove itself by ordinary means. This is exactly as though one were to seek proof from dream pictures about things going on in the physical world. How ridiculous it would be for someone to say, “I will only believe that so and so many people are gathered in this room and than an anthroposophical lecture is being given here if I dream about it afterwards.” Just think how absurd that would be! But it is just as absurd for someone who hears anthroposophical truths to say that he will only believe them if ordinary science, which has application only on the physical plane, proves them. One need only enter into things seriously and objectively for them to become perfectly transparent.

Just as one becomes an egotist when one projects dream conceptions into physical situations, so does a person who projects into the conceptions he needs to have of higher realms views such as apply only to things of ordinary life, becomes the more isolated, withdrawn, insistent that he alone is right. But that is what people actually do. Indeed, most individuals are looking for some special aspect of anthroposophy. Something in their view of life draws them in sympathetic feeling to this or that element found in it, and they would be happy to have it true. So they accept it, and since it cannot be proved on the physical plane they look to anthroposophy to prove it.

Thus a state of consciousness applicable to the ordinary physical world is carried over into an approach to higher realms. So, despite all one's brotherly precepts, an unbrotherly element is brought into the picture, just as a person dreaming on the physical plane can behave in a most unbrotherly fashion toward his neighbor. Even though that neighbor may be acting sensibly, it is possible for a dreamer under the influence of his dream pictures to say to him, “You are a stupid fellow. I know better than you do.” Similarly, someone who forms his conceptions of the higher world with pretensions carried over from life on the physical plane can say to an associate who has a different view of things, “You are a stupid fellow,” or a bad man, or the like. The point is that one has to develop an entirely different attitude, an entirely different way of feeling in relation to the spiritual world, which eradicates an unbrotherly spirit and gives brotherliness a chance to develop. The nature of anthroposophy is such as to bring this about in fullest measure, but it needs to be conceived with avoidance of sectarianism and other similar elements, which really derive from the physical world.

If one knows the reasons why an unbrotherly spirit can so easily crop up in just those societies built on a spiritual foundation, one also knows how such a danger can be avoided by undertaking to transform one's soul orientation when one joins with others in cultivating knowledge of the higher worlds.

This is also the reason why those who say, “I'll believe what I've seen there after I've dreamed it,” and behave accordingly toward anthroposophy, are so alienated by the language in which anthrosophy is presented. How many people say that they cannot bear the language used in presenting anthroposophy, as for example in my books! The point is that where it is a case of presenting knowledge of the super-sensible, not only are the matters under discussion different; they have to be spoken of in a different way. This must be taken into account. If one is really deeply convinced that understanding anthroposophy involves a shift from one level of consciousness to another, anthroposophy will become as fruitful in life as it ought to be. For even though it has to be experienced in a soul condition different from the ordinary, nevertheless what one gains from it for one's whole soul development and character will in turn have a moral, religious, artistic and cognitive effect on the physical world in the same sense that the physical world affects the dream world. We need only be clear as to what level of reality we are dealing with.

When we are dreaming, we do not need to be communicating with or standing in any particular relationship to other human beings, for as dreamers we are really working on our ongoing egos. What we are doing behind the façade of our dream pictures concerns only ourselves. We are working on our karma there. No matter what scene a dream may be picturing, one's soul, one's ego are working behind it on one's karma.

Here on the physical plane we work at matters of concern to a physically embodied human race. We have to work with other people to make our contributions to mankind's overall development. In the spiritual world we work with intelligences that are beings like ourselves, except that instead of living in physical bodies they live in a spiritual element, in spiritual substance. It is a different world, that world from which super-sensible truth is gleaned, and each of us has to adapt himself to it.

That is the key point I have stressed in so many lectures given here: Anthroposophical cognition cannot be absorbed in the way we take in other learning. It must above all be approached with a different feeling—the feeling that it gives one a sudden jolt of awakening such as one experiences at hand of colors pouring into one's eyes, of tones pouring into one's ears, waking one out of the self-begotten pictures of the dream world.

Just as knowing where there is a weak place in an icy surface enables a person to avoid breaking through it, so can someone who knows the danger of developing egotism through a wrong approach to spiritual truth avoid creating unbrotherly conditions. In relating to spiritual truth, one has constantly to develop to the maximum a quality that may be called tolerance in the best sense of the word. Tolerance must characterize the relationships of human beings pursuing anthroposophical spiritual science together. Looking from this angle at the beauty of human tolerance, one is immediately aware how essential it is to educate oneself to it in this particular period. It is the most extraordinary thing that nobody nowadays really ever listens to anybody else. Is it ever possible to start a sentence without someone interrupting to state his own view of the matter, with a resultant clash of opinion? It is a fundamental characteristic of modern civilization that nobody listens, that nobody respects anyone's opinion but his own, and that those who do not share his opinions are looked upon as dunces.

But when a person expresses an opinion, my dear friends, it is a human being's opinion, no matter how foolish we may think it, and we must be able to accept it, to listen to it.

I am going to make a highly paradoxical statement. A person whose soul is attuned to the intellectual outlook of the day has no difficulty being clever. Every single person knows the clever thing, and I am not saying that it isn't clever; it usually is, in fact. But that works only up to a certain point, and up to that point a smart person considers everyone who isn't yet of his opinion stupid. We encounter this attitude all the time, and in ordinary life situations it can be justified. A person who has developed a sound judgment about various matters really finds it a dreadful trial to have to listen to someone else's foolish views about them, and he can hardly be blamed for feeling that way.

But that is true only up to a point. One can become cleverer than clever by developing something further. Supersensible insight can endow cleverness with a different quality. Then the strange thing is that one's interest in foolishness increases rather than decreases. If one has acquired a little wisdom, one even takes pleasure in hearing people say something foolish, if you will forgive my putting it so bluntly. One sometimes finds such stupidities cleverer than the things people of an average degree of cleverness say, because they often issue from a far greater humanness than underlies the average cleverness of the average of clever people. An ever deepening insight into the world increases one's interest in human foolishness, for these things look different at differing world levels. The stupidities of a person who may seem a fool to clever people in the ordinary physical world can, under certain circumstances, reveal things that are wisdom in a different world, even though the form they take may be twisted and caricatured. To borrow one of Nietzsche's sayings, the world is really “deeper than the day would credit.”

Our world of feeling must be founded on such recognitions if the Anthroposophical Society—or, in other words, the union of those who pursue anthroposophy—is to be put on a healthy basis. Then a person who knows that one has to relate differently to the spiritual world than one does to the physical will bring things of the spiritual world into the physical in the proper way. Such a person becomes a practical man in the physical world rather than a dreamer, and that is what is so vitally necessary. It is really essential that one not be rendered useless for the physical world by becoming an anthroposophist. This must be stressed over and over again.

That is what I wanted to set forth in my second Stuttgart lecture in order to throw light on the way individual members of the Society need to conceive the proper fostering of its life. For that life is not a matter of cognition, but of the heart, and this fact must be recognized.

Of course, the circumstances of a person's life may necessitate his traveling a lonely path apart. That can be done too. But our concern in Stuttgart was with the life-requirements of the Anthroposophical Society; these had to be brought up for discussion there. If the Society is to continue, those who want to be part of it will have to take an interest in what its life-requirements are.

But that will have to include taking an interest in problems occasioned by a constantly increasing enmity toward the Society. I had to go into this too in Stuttgart. I said that many enterprises have been launched in the Society since 1919, and that though this was good in itself, the right way of incorporating them into the Anthroposophical Movement—in other words, of making them the common concern of the membership—had not been found. New members should not be reproached for taking no interest in something launched before their time and simply seeking anthroposophy in a narrower sense, as the young people do. But it is these new enterprises that have really been responsible for the growing enmity toward our Movement. There was hostility before, to be sure, but we did not have to pay any attention to it.

Now in this context I had to say something on the subject of our opponents that needs to be known in the Anthroposophical Society. I have talked to you, my dear friends, about the three phases of the Society's development and called attention to the fact that in the last or third phase, from 1916 or 1917 to the present, the fruits of a great deal of anthroposophical research into the super-sensible world have been conveyed to you in lectures. That required a lot of work in the form of genuine spiritual research. Anyone who looks dispassionately at the facts can discern the great increase in the amount of material gleaned from the spiritual world in recent years and put before you in lectures.

Now we certainly have any number of opponents who simply do not know why they adopt a hostile stand; they just go along with others, finding it comfortable to be vague about their reasons. But there are a few leading figures among them who know full well what they are up to and who are interested in suppressing and stamping out truths about the spiritual world such as can alone raise the level of human dignity and restore peace on earth. The rest of the opponents go along with these, but the leaders do not want to have anthroposophical truth made available. Their opposition is absolutely conscious, and so is their effort to stimulate it in their followers.

What are they really intent on achieving? If I may refer to myself in this connection, they are trying to keep me so preoccupied with their attacks that I cannot find time for actual anthroposophical research. One has to have a certain quiet to pursue it, a kind of inner activity that is far removed from the sort of thing one would have to be doing if one were to undertake a defense against our opponents' often ridiculous attacks.

Now in a truly brilliant lecture that he gave in Stuttgart, Herr Werbeck called attention to the large number of hostile books written by theologians alone. I think he listed a dozen or more—so many, at any rate, that it would take all one's time just to read them. Imagine what refuting them would entail! One would never get to any research, and this is only one field among many. At least as many books have been written by people in various other fields. One is actually bombarded with hostile writings intended to keep one from the real work of anthroposophy. That is the quite deliberate intention. But it is possible, if one has what one needs to balance it, to foster anthroposophy and push these books aside. I do not even know many of their titles. Those I have I usually just throw in a pile, since one cannot carry on true spiritual research and simultaneously concern oneself with such attacks. Then our opponents say, “He is not answering us himself.” But others can deal with their assertions, and since the enterprises launched since 1919 were started on others' initiative, the Society should take over its responsibility in this area. It should take on the battle with opponents, for otherwise it will prove impossible really to keep up anthroposophical research.

That is exactly what our opponents want. Indeed, they would like best of all to find grounds for lawsuits. There is every indication that they are looking for such opportunities. For they know that this would require a shift in the direction of one's attention and a change of soul mood that would interfere with true anthroposophical activity.

Yes, my dear friends, most of our opponents know very well indeed what they are about, and they are well organized. But these facts should be known in the Anthroposophical Society too. If the right attention is paid to them, action will follow.

I have given you a report on what we accomplished in Stuttgart in the direction of enabling the Society to go on working for awhile. But there was a moment when I really should have said that I would have to withdraw from the Society because of what happened. There are other reasons now, of course, why that cannot be, since the Society has recently admitted new elements from which one may not withdraw. But if I had made my decision on the basis of what happened at a certain moment there in the assembly hall in Stuttgart, I would have been fully justified in saying that I would have to withdraw from the Society and try to make anthroposophy known to the world in some other way.

The moment I refer to was that in which the following incident occurred. The Committee of Nine had scheduled a number of reports on activities in various areas of the Society. These were to include reports on the Waldorf School, the Union for a Free Spiritual Life, Der Kommende Tag, the journals Anthroposophy and Die Drei, and so on, and there was also to be a discussion of our opponents and ways of handling them.

Now as I said, Werbeck, who has been occupying himself with the problem of opponents, gave a brilliant lecture on how to handle them from the literary angle. But concrete details of the matter were still to be discussed. What happened? Right in the middle of Werbeck's report there was a motion to cut it off and cancel the reports in favor of going on with the discussion. Without knowing anything of what had been happening in the Society, it was proposed that the discussion continue. There was a motion to omit reports right in the middle of the report on opponents! And the motion was carried.

A further grotesque event occurred. Very late on the previous evening, Dr. Stein had given a report on the youth movement. Herr Leinhas, who was chairman of the meeting, was hardly to be envied, for as I told you two days ago, he was literally bombarded with motions on agenda items. As soon as one such motion was made, another followed on its heels, until nobody could see how the debate was to be handled.

Now the people who had come to attend the delegates' convention were not as good at sitting endlessly as those who had done the preparatory work. In Stuttgart everyone is used to sitting. We have often had meetings there that began no later than 9:30 or 10 p.m. and went on until six o'clock in the morning. But as I said, the delegates hadn't had that training. So it was late before Dr. Stein began his report on the youth movement, on the young people's wishes, and due to some mistake or other no one was certain whether he would give it, with the result that a lot of people left the hall. He did give his report, however, and when people returned the following day and found that he had given it in their absence, a motion was made to have him give it again. Nothing came of this because he wasn't there. But when he did arrive to give a report on our opponents, events turned in the direction of people's not only not wanting to hear his report twice over but not even wanting to hear it once; a motion to that effect was passed. So he gave his report on a later occasion.

But this report should have culminated in a discussion of specific opposition. To my surprise, Stein had mentioned none of the specifics, but instead developed a kind of metaphysics of enmity toward anthroposophy, so that it was impossible to make out what the situation really was. His report was very ingenious, but restricted itself to the metaphysics of enmity instead of supplying specific material on the actual enemies. The occasion served to show that the whole Society—for the delegates were representing the whole German Anthroposophical Society—simply did not want to hear about opponents!

This is perfectly understandable, of course. But to be informed about these matters is so vital to any insight into what life-conditions the Society requires that a person who turns down an ideal opportunity to become acquainted with them cannot mean seriously by the Society. The way anthroposophy is represented before the world depends above all else on how the Society's members relate to the enmity that is growing stronger every day.

This, then, was the moment when the way the meeting was going should really have resulted in my saying that I couldn't go on participating if the members were solely interested in repeating slogans like, “Humanness must encounter humanness” and other such platitudes. They were paraphrased more than abundantly in Stuttgart—not discussed, just paraphrased. But of course one can't withdraw from something that exists not just in one's imagination but in reality; one can't withdraw from the Anthroposophical Society! So these matters too had to be overlooked in favor of searching for a solution such as I described to you on Saturday: On the one hand the old Society going on in all its reality, and on the other a loose confederation coming into being, eventuating in the forming of communities in the sense reported, with some bridging group to relate the two opposite elements.

For we must be absolutely clear that anthroposophy is something for eternity. Every individual can therefore study it all by himself, and he has every right to do so, without taking the least interest in the Anthroposophical Society. It would be quite possible—and until 1918 this was actually the way things were—to spread anthroposophy entirely by means of books or by giving lectures to those interested in hearing them. Until 1918 the Society was just what such a society should be, because it could have stopped existing any day without affecting anthroposophy itself. Non-members genuinely interested in anthroposophy had every bit as much access to everything as they would have had through the Society. The Society merely provided opportunities for members to work actively together and for human souls to be awakened by their fellow souls. But on the initiative of this and that individual, activities going on in the Society developed into projects that are now binding upon us. They exist, and cannot be arbitrarily dissolved. The old Society must go on seeing to their welfare. No matter how little one may care for the bureaucratic, cataloguing ways and general orientation of the old Committee, it must go on looking after things it has started. No one else can do this for it. It is very mistaken to believe that someone who is only interested in anthroposophy in general—a situation such as also prevailed in 1902—can be asked to take on any responsibility for the various projects. One has to have grown identified with them, to know them from the inside out.

So the old Society must go on existing; it is an absolutely real entity. But others who simply want anthroposophy as such also have every right to have access to it. For their satisfaction we created the loose confederation I spoke of yesterday, and it too will have its board of trustees, made up of those whose names I mentioned. So now we have two sets of trustees, who will in turn select smaller committees to handle matters of common concern, so that the Society will remain one entity. That the loose confederation does take an interest in what develops out of the Society was borne out by the motion to re-establish it, which was immediately made by the very youngest members of the youth movement, the students. So it has now been re-established and will have a fully legitimate function. Indeed, this was one of the most pressing, vital issues for the Anthroposophical Movement and the Society.

An especially interesting motion was made by the pupils of the upper classes of the Waldorf School. I read it aloud myself, since it had been sent to me. These upper-class students of the Waldorf School made a motion more or less to the following effect. They said, “We have been developing along lines laid down in the basic precepts of the Waldorf School. Next year we are supposed to take our university examinations. Perhaps difficulties of some sort will prevent it. But in any case, how will things work out for us in an ordinary university after having been educated according to the right principles of the Waldorf School?” These students went on to give a nice description of universities, and in conclusion moved that a university be established where erstwhile pupils of the Waldorf School could continue their studies.

This was really quite insightful and right. The motion was immediately adopted by the representatives of the academic youth movement, and in order to get some capital together to start such an institution they even collected a fund amounting, I believe, to some twenty-five million marks, which, though it may not be a great deal of money under present inflationary conditions, is nevertheless a quite respectable sum. These days, of course, one cannot set up a university on twenty-five million marks. But if one could find an American to donate a billion marks or more for such a purpose, a beginning could be made. Otherwise, of course, it couldn't be done, and even a billion marks might not be enough; I can't immediately calculate what would be needed.

But if such a possibility did exist, we would really be embarrassed, frightfully embarrassed, even if there were a prospect of obtaining official recognition in the matter of diplomas and examinations. The problem would be the staffing of such an institution. Should it be done with Waldorf faculty, or with members of our research institutions? That could certainly be done, but then we would have no Waldorf School and no research institutions. The way the Anthroposophical Society has been developing in recent years has tended to keep out people who might otherwise have joined it. It has become incredibly difficult, when a teacher is needed for a new class being added to the Waldorf School, to find one among the membership. In spite of all the outstanding congresses and other accomplishments we have to our credit, the Society's orientation has made people feel that though anthroposophy pleased them well enough, they did not want to become members.

We are going to have to work at the task of restoring the Society to its true function. For there are many people in the world pre-destined to make anthroposophy the most vital content of their hearts and souls. But the Society must do its part in making this possible. As we face this challenge, it is immediately obvious that we must change our course and start bringing anthroposophy to the world's attention so that mankind has a chance to become acquainted with it.

Our opponents are projecting a caricature of anthroposophy, and they are working hard at the job. Their writings contain unacknowledged material from anthroposophical cycles. Nowadays there are lending libraries where the cycles can be borrowed, and so on. The old way of thinking about these things no longer fits the situation. There are second-hand bookshops that lend cycles for a fee, so that anybody who wants to read them can now do so. We show ourselves ignorant of modern social life if we think that things like cycles can be kept secret; that is no longer possible today. Our time has become democratic even in matters of the spirit. We should realize that anthroposophy has to be made known.

That is the impulse motivating the loosely federated section. The people who have come together in it are interested first and foremost in making anthroposophy widely known. I am fully aware that this will open new outlets through which much that members think should be kept within the Society will flow out into the world. But we have to adjust ourselves to the time's needs, and anthroposophists must develop a sense of what it is demanding. That is why anthroposophy must be looked upon now especially as something that can become the content of people's lives, as I indicated yesterday.

So, my dear friends, we made the reported attempt to set up looser ties between the two streams in the Society. I hope that if this effort is rightly understood and rightly handled, we can continue on the new basis for awhile. I have no illusions that it will be for long, but in that case we will have to try some other arrangement. But I said when I went to Stuttgart for this general meeting of the German Anthroposophical Society that since anthroposophy had its start in Germany and the world knows and accepts that fact, it was necessary to create some kind of order in the German Society first, but that this should only be the first step in creating order in other groups too. I picture the societies in all the other language areas also feeling themselves obligated to do their part in either a similar or different way toward consolidating the Society, so that an effort is made on every hand so to shape the life of the Society that anthroposophy can become what it should be to the world at large.

My dear attendees!

The extremely kind and warm words spoken by Mr. Dunlop and Mr. Collison in welcoming Dr. Steiner and myself, prompt me to say a few words today before the start of the lectures that begin tomorrow. I have been extremely gratified by Mr. Dunlop's wish to organize this summer course on anthroposophy together with his helpers, and I hope that the distinguished audience, whom I also warmly welcome here, will derive some satisfaction from the content of this summer course.

I am particularly pleased with Mr. Dunlop's choice of topic, because it will give me the opportunity to link what anthroposophy has to say about the present and the near future with the oldest wisdom and the oldest spiritual life of humanity. Of course, in a certain respect it is necessary – and I confess that I completely understand the inviting committee's point of view regarding the spirit of our time and civilization – that we are already somewhat out of step with the main purpose of the event, for an anthroposophical course, for anthroposophy in general. For in those most ancient times, which people like to remember so fondly because they revealed the most ancient wisdom of man about the spiritual home of souls, at those most ancient events in which this wisdom was cultivated, people gathered at times that they struggled hard to free themselves from the things that otherwise occupied them day after day in the course of the year. These were times that were, so to speak, set aside for the universe, for the cosmos, and when one did not ask: Do we have any worldly matters to attend to when we gather around the mysteries for these festivities of the year – which were read from the cosmos – for the cultivation of science, for knowledge of the spirit?

We cannot do this, because, for example, in winter, when we meet in summer schools, we all have something else to do. So we can no longer keep this old custom. And so today, since Anthroposophy is only to take hold of civilization in the future, we have to meet when we are on our summer vacations, when we have nothing else to do, so to speak. We have to go on summer trips and festival trips; we have to use our vacations to cultivate Anthroposophy.

Now, Mr. Dunlop has already mentioned what can happen to us; but even if we had lost one or the other suitcase on the journey, Anthroposophy would not have been in it, and we could still have brought it here safely. For Anthroposophy is precisely intended to lead us beyond what can happen materially in space and time. Anthroposophy will first be able to lead us up into the earliest times of human development when discussing the topic chosen by this committee, in which a living science was the basis for everything that civilization and culture have encompassed. What man was able to cognize on his path of wisdom were not dead ideas, but the living spirit itself, which then could flow into artistic creation, which could flow into religious experience, and which, through artistic creation, through religious experience, led man up into those regions where he can see those entities that otherwise speak only vaguely but still distinctly as ethical, as moral ideals.

In the course of human development, what was once an overwhelming unity – science, art, religion, moral-social life – has become separated. The one tree of human development has sprouted four branches: science, art, religion, morality. This was necessary within the development of mankind, because only in this way could each of these branches of civilization develop to the strength necessary for it and for humanity.

But today we stand at that important point in human development at which man can no longer unite those one-sidedness that have developed because that which was once a totality and developed in many branches can no longer be united with that which his entire being, from the soul, from the spiritual, from all subconscious and unconscious inner powers, must demand in order to fulfill his full humanity. We are truly at an important point in the evolution of humanity. Those brothers who have a mother - science, art, religion, morality, social life - after wandering alone in the world for a while, they demand to come back to the home where the common mother can be seen. And today we can no longer come to the spiritual light of humanity by the same paths that an ancient humanity took to do so. Humanity is in a living development. Today's humanity is different from that which strove in the old Indian, Egyptian, Chaldean, Greek mysteries for that which was once the mother of all knowledge and skill of humanity in the spiritual and material. We have to go new ways today because we have become a new humanity.

Anthroposophy would like to speak of these new paths, which are appropriate for the present and can lead into the future, of these new paths to the spirit, and it will perhaps be best able to express what is to be said for the present and for the near future if it succeeds in at least sketchily developing the theme that the esteemed committee has chosen for this summer course. And it will be particularly satisfying that we will be able to stage some performances of works from an art that is still in its infancy, but which, perhaps precisely because it is in a full struggle for its own essence, shows best how, in turn, an artistic work should and can be created from the spirit even today.

Of course, it is only possible to give a little of what one would like to present in the short time available to us. But still, when one's heart is filled with the feeling of the necessity to let Anthroposophy flow through the world today, one is also filled with warm gratitude from this heart towards those who make it possible to express in some way what Anthroposophy would like to strive for in the further development of human civilization.

Out of all these feelings, please believe me when I say from the bottom of my heart, from the bottom of my heart, I thank Mr. Dunlop, Mrs. Merry, all the members of the committee who have contributed to making this event possible. This sense of gratitude, it really also arises from an understanding of what such a committee has to accomplish before such an event can begin.

Just as you, dear attendees, will not see the efforts behind the scenes for a eurythmy performance, for example, which I would like to mention in passing, just as often one does not think of all the broad, wide efforts that such a committee has. However, anyone who has been on such a committee not just repeatedly, but repeatedly squared, will see when they arrive at such an event the pale faces of the committee members and will then be able to appreciate enough what has gone before and what fears and worries still haunt the souls of such committee members immediately before and during the event. Those who are able to judge such things from the right experience of life, who thus understand the degree of pallor of the committee members with expert knowledge, can truly express their feelings of gratitude with full warmth. This should also be expressed, both on behalf of Dr. Steiner, who has been so kindly welcomed, and on my own behalf.

I only hope that through our contributions to the events of the next few days, we can make these days as satisfying for you as we can, and that we can at least fulfill some of the expectations that you have brought with you to this event. We also know that you don't lose your expectations when you pack your bags, you bring them with you in all their weight. And then it is extremely difficult to fulfill these expectations.

But anthroposophy as such is something that should speak so deeply to the soul of contemporary humanity, arising from the needs of present-day civilization, from the needs that each person, each fully human being, carries within them, that even if only relatively weak things can be achieved with weak forces, at least something can be achieved in intention. And we need these intentions. We see everywhere how humanity can no longer get by with the glorious external material culture it has built up over the last three to four centuries. This civilization is now like a material body that has spread in all material perfection over a large part of the earth, but which, like everything that is meant to be alive, longs for soul and spirit. And anthroposophy will ultimately give soul and spirit to what has so gloriously emerged in the external material civilization in modern times as a body. And just as she is inspired by this spirit in everything she does, so I may hope that this spirit will also prevail during the days of this summer school. And I myself would like to extend to you today, in the name of Dr. Steiner and myself, a most cordial welcome inspired by this spirit.

The meeting was opened on Sunday, February 25, 1923, at 8:00 p.m., with a welcoming address by the chairman, Mr. Emil Leinhas of Stuttgart. Mr. Leinhas warmly welcomed Dr. Rudolf Steiner and Mrs. Marie Steiner, as well as the delegates and members of the Anthroposophical Society. He pointed out that the Anthroposophical Society had reached a significant turning point in its development and that it was now important for every single member to grasp the tasks of the Society with full awareness. Mr. Leinhas spoke of the feelings of terrible pain and “grief at the loss of our Goetheanum. He then pointed out the tasks of the Society with regard to the destroyed Goetheanum, the new art of eurythmy, the Waldorf School, the “Coming Day” and the other enterprises, as well as with regard to the religious movement and also with regard to the well-organized opposition to anthroposophy. He called for criticism to be unsparing, for things to be said freely and unembellished, but also for positive proposals for renewal not to be forgotten and for everything to be said in such a way that it is felt that the whole person is behind it with his or her lively interest and will, fired by the high ideals of truth, beauty and goodness. “We represent the most glorious cause in the world!” exclaimed Mr. Leinhas. “A cause that must not perish, no matter how much Europe falls prey to the forces of decline. Anthroposophy will live; for Anthroposophy is a new world!” He pointed out in urgent words the tremendous seriousness of the situation, the responsibility to the spiritual world and the magnitude of our task, which can only be fulfilled through love and enthusiasm for the cause.

Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Stuttgart: Lecture on The Situation of the Anthroposophical Society.

We have come together at an exceptionally important moment for our Society. This is the first significant meeting since the Anthroposophical Society was founded that is devoted solely to the affairs of the Society. There is an enormous difference between the circumstances of that time and those of today. At that time, all members were extremely enthusiastic about the affairs of the Society. When it was founded, leadership was taken on by three individuals, and the others followed suit. This was the beginning of the Society's self-management. The task of such independent leadership was thus already set for it at that time.

In those days there was a strong sense of union. Dr. Steiner's cycle of lectures and travels, who, through his tireless work between all branches, groups and individuals, always formed a mediating element, had contributed to this. The building of the Goetheanum, which has now been snatched from us, was a living testimony to the enthusiasm that united our members. At that time, an intense sense of belonging had also developed through the shared birth pangs of the Anthroposophical Society at the time of its separation from the Theosophical Society. Every member was aware of what was being undertaken by the opponents of the time. Each felt it as directed against his own person. What was available as achievements from individual personalities of the Society was known by everyone, and experienced by them. In the branches, intensive and constant inner work was done in the most diverse places through tireless work. In short, despite many bad habits and sectarianism that still existed as a tradition from the Theosophical Society, the Anthroposophical Society proved to be a reality in these early days. And we experienced this reality again on the terrible night of the fire on December 31, when everyone worked together in a way that was only possible because of a real sense of connection through anthroposophy.

However, a new phase of the movement began in 1919 with the founding of various initiatives by individuals from the bosom of society. I am referring to the movement for the threefold social order, the “Kommende Tag” (the coming day), the Waldorf school movement, the university movement, the research institutes and, finally, the movement for religious renewal. All the enthusiasm went into these foundations. The Society took action at that time. Leading circles emerged. Everyone flocked to Stuttgart. What disappeared, however, was the enthusiasm for the affairs of the Society itself. It was an enormous responsibility that the founders of the institutions took upon themselves. If these personalities did not stay the course, the consequences would fall back on the Anthroposophical Society. Through these foundations, something universal was to be given on the one hand, and wide circles were to be led to the anthroposophical movement. On the other hand, however, the Anthroposophical Society had to develop along with it, it had to keep pace with the foundations.

But the leading circles of the Society were not aware that the Society had to be consciously led in a new way. Dr. Steiner could no longer, as he had done before, take the leadership of the Society into his own hands. The leadership turned all its attention to representing the daughter movements. The individual members felt less and less supported by the leadership; they felt, so to speak, abandoned and isolated. The branch leaders also had no support from the leadership. They were completely alone. Members flocked to them, but no one took them under their wing. No measures were taken to turn the members into active participants in the common cause. In fact, the leadership had abandoned the periphery.

Looking back at developments in recent years, it must be said that the best forces in society went to Stuttgart, but did not give back to the membership at the periphery what they themselves gained through their work there. No information came out from the leadership to the members of the Society. There was no awareness that a continuous stream of messages about the spiritual wealth conveyed by Dr. Steiner, about the tasks of the Society, the achievements in the same, the opposition, etc. had to flow out.

And in Stuttgart, too, people had no heart for the Anthroposophical Society. We had good representatives of the individual daughter movements, good teachers, representatives of the three-folding movement, religious renewal, etc., but almost no good co-workers in the Anthroposophical Society. As Dr. Steiner mentioned in one of his last lectures here, the mother, the Anthroposophical Society, was increasingly neglected. The enthusiasm that people had from the early days was carried into the individual daughter movements, but they did not move on to working for the Society itself and looking at the necessity of continuing to cultivate the central anthroposophical life. “You can work without the Society.” That was the great error that existed in general.

This tendency developed particularly in Stuttgart. The individual personalities in the enterprises carried a scientific life, etc., that had not yet been completely transformed, into the Society from the daughter movements. Much specialization was carried into the branches in an unprocessed state, so to speak. The anthroposophical life of the branch could not keep pace with the rationalizations. In the face of the mostly successful conferences and other external events, people were unable to really solve the problems that arose for community life.

That was the “Stuttgart system”. In Stuttgart, researchers, teachers, etc. faced each other individually. A bureaucracy arose in Stuttgart. Many who came here felt a certain icy coldness. It was simply not possible to combine these two things in one person, when it was no longer possible, as it was before, to practice Anthroposophy only in one's private life and to have one's profession alongside it.

Actually, the leadership of the Society would have had to double, or even increase tenfold, its activities in order to continue anthroposophical life in the right way and to strengthen it. If the Anthroposophical Society as such does not make progress, ultimately the individual foundations will also suffer; for without the real Anthroposophical Society the foundations would not have been possible.

This duplication of concern for anthroposophical matters did not occur. There was a lack of awareness among the leaders and also among most members that the Society had to be brought to a level that could do justice to the fertility of anthroposophy in all fields. On the other hand, there was a lack of cooperation between the leadership and the members of the branches everywhere. Even at the time of the threefold social order movement, it was not pointed out that the central anthroposophical life should have been cultivated to an even greater extent than before. People heard about the tasks of the threefold social order movement, but not about the tasks of the mother, anthroposophy. The same lack of information also became apparent when the religious renewal movement came into being. Here too, the leadership did not provide the members with any information that could have clarified the situation. There was also a dwindling awareness of what anthroposophy can offer people by striving for a union of the scientific, artistic and religious.

This deficiency is also connected with the most recent events here in Stuttgart. To understand this, we must touch on the background to the appeal that has now been sent to the members. This prehistory began even before the Dornach catastrophe, had nothing to do with it, because it was rooted in the long history of the Society, as just described. The decision taken at the Stuttgart Congress (1921), when the new Central Executive Council was constituted, to create an organization of trust within the Society, had not been fulfilled. There was no real cooperation in the Central Board. On December 10, 1922, a conversation took place between Dr. Steiner and Mr. Uehli, a member of the Central Board. During this conversation, Dr. Steiner pointed out that either the Central Board had to bring about a consolidation of the Society by consulting with other prominent figures, or that it would have to address the members without the Board. Mr. Uehli did not recognize the scope and seriousness of this situation. Due to disagreements within the board of directors, this task was not carried out.¹ After the catastrophe at Dornach, a number of prominent individuals took the initiative and a large number of meetings were held, during some of which very strong criticism was expressed of the activities of the Central Board to date. Following this, Mr. Uehli resigned from his position as a member of the Central Board, and Dr. Unger did so conditionally, in case the initiative of the aforementioned prominent individuals should lead to positive goals. However, this did not happen. Dr. Steiner then gave a series of lectures here in Stuttgart on the problems of society, and further discussions also took place. Dr. Steiner had already characterized the “Stuttgart system” in his lecture on 6 January 1923 in Dornach, and this was also done in the most forceful way here in Stuttgart.

It became apparent that all these questions could only be resolved if a meeting were convened at which the entire membership would be called upon to participate.

Initially, after Mr. Uehli's resignation, a “provisional central committee” was formed by co-opting Dr. Eugen Kolisko. However, this solution could only be a provisional one. After long negotiations, this committee, which has signed the appeal, was formed as a kind of representative body for the individual institutions. It was co-opted by the provisional board. The intention was to make it clear that such a provisional body of trust could only be formed from the institutions and that these institutions intended to give back to the Anthroposophical Society what they had received from it. You can see from the composition of the committee that the most important institutions are represented in it: “Kommender Tag”, the Waldorf School, both publishers, the newspaper, the movement for religious renewal, the old central board, the scattered external interests.

We must therefore focus all our attention on the Society itself. For what is the situation of the Anthroposophical Society? We are facing a world of enemies without inner unity, and the members do not even know how strong they are and how they are working to put an end to the entire anthroposophical movement. We must be clear about this: the less is happening for the Society, the more a vacuum is forming within, and the more the opposition outside is strengthening and expanding. It will be necessary for the membership to become acquainted with this antagonism and its motives through reports, so that, through this knowledge, they can see how something can be done about it.

And then contact must be re-established between the leadership and the Society so that each individual member can take part in what is being achieved. The “Stuttgart system” must be broken. Only when there are open ears for all the needs of the membership can an anthroposophical life arise again. In the course of this conference, the individual institutions will have the opportunity to present their work and their status, so that this can also be made known to the members.

Now the Anthroposophical Society has the duty to take care of its internal affairs above all. For it is the neglect of the Society's internal affairs that has led to the current situation. Then the Society will not present an obstacle to the spread of anthroposophy, as has been the case so far. Then everyone who longs for anthroposophy can be satisfied within the Society, and those on the outside will not be repelled.

The delegates may now give a picture of the state of anthroposophical life in the branches. Then, through discussion, the possibility will arise for anthroposophical matters to be properly discussed, so that everyone can work on the reorganization of anthroposophical life.

Mr. Emil Leinhas, Stuttgart: It will now be necessary to supplement Dr. Kolisko's report by having the friends express their views on the tasks of the Society. The debate on this is to be opened now.

Mr. Kurt Goldstein, Berlin, suggests that the usual chronological order of speakers not be followed for the debate, but rather the logical order. — The motion is rejected.

Prof. Hermann Craemer, Bonn: In the branches outside, one often misses the kind of vibrancy of intellectual life that gives strength of will and clarity of thought. But the power and strength of community life is not only, as has been emphasized so far, lacking in the relationship between the leadership and the members, but also among the members themselves. If one takes Stuttgart as a whole and compares it with other branches, one sees the same phenomena within the branches. Dr. Kolisko thought that the problems in the branches were often due to the fact that the branches were put at the service of the threefold order. But the real reason for the problems is that the threefold order was brought in without being thought through. Half unconsciously, the members said to themselves: I only accept the ideas of threefolding because otherwise I would not be accepted as a full member. — We are told that there is still a strong belief in authority in our movement, so that the strength of our movement is highly endangered. But Dr. Steiner himself never gives so-called “instructions” that we should follow. Nevertheless, people often refer to Dr. Steiner in such a way as to say, “Yes, but... Dr. Steiner said this or that here or there.” This must not be allowed to form an argument in our lives.

What is needed, therefore, is independent action based on full responsibility, even at the risk of making a mistake. And as long as one cannot follow up criticism with something positive, one can spare oneself the criticism.

Mrs. Else Pfläumer, Dresden: I came here in response to the document that was titled “Call”. And from all that came to me from what was titled “Call”, something like the air of death came; as if one wanted to organize something that is actually an organism, what the body wants to become to a human, to the human “Anthroposophy”. And so I think we would really like to profess this “human being” first, and then begin to deal with this organism.

At the last college course, Dr. Steiner spoke the word: Anthroposophy is a human being. When this word fell into me, an image stood before me: John on the cross, in his arms Mother Sophia. “Behold, this is your mother. And he took her to his heart.

And just as anthroposophy entered my life, I felt that it was the power of catharsis, the power of Mother Sophia. And so I think: we experienced on New Year's Eve how a person died in our building. And before we can think of building a new structure, we must create, we must pour our heart and soul into it, so that the structure of this body of anthroposophy can arise. Only then can we think of it becoming Vitae Sophia, with which one can establish something, with which one can enter into science, which one can carry as anthroposophy into the religious movement. When we bring what Dr. Steiner transmits to us, as he gives it to us, into science, it is sometimes as if we had stolen something, if it has not come to life, if it has not simply become the power of catharsis.

I cannot express myself very well, but that is how it surges and surges within me. And I hope that the other people who can express it, who have the strength to express what I have just been able to say from my feelings, will accept it and fertilize it so that something really comes of our meeting. That we not only say: this or that is our task, but that we simply profess what has driven us into anthroposophy; that we stand by our longing, which has become a germ in the Anthroposophical Society, and that, when we grasp this longing, which has actually brought down the germ of an Anthroposophical Society, we allow this germ to grow, so that a society has grown and not been organized.

Mr. Otto Westphal, Hamburg, speaks to the agenda. He wants to help ensure that vigilance reigns from the very beginning of our meeting. Since he is not speaking to the agenda, he is interrupted.

Mr. Josef Elkan, Munich, explains that he had come to Stuttgart with a very specific agenda. He would like to express the most important of these in the form of a few wishes. First of all, he hopes that the Central Executive Committee that comes to the fore of the movement is aware of the tasks that need to be accomplished to bring the movement to the appropriate level. But for this it is also necessary, above all, that guidelines be provided by the center, on the one hand, while, on the other, the autonomy of the branches is fully maintained. The admission of members and the type of introductory courses cannot be handled according to certain rules or directives. But if the branch leaders were sufficiently informed by the central committee, they would be able to fully execute the will of the central committee. Now it would be important to organize the deliberations in such a way that the delegates return home with positive results.

Mr. Paul Knoop, Bochum, would like to see an appeal made to young people to join the movement.

Mr. Emil Leinhas, Stuttgart, reminds the meeting that the youth movement is still to be discussed.

Dr. Wilhelm Zitkowsky, Linz, speaks on the topic of “Organization of the Branches”. He warns against “encapsulating the branches from the outside world”. He suggests that more consideration be given to creating individual smaller working groups than has been the case so far. In particular, the “Philosophy of Freedom” should be addressed in such working groups, since without a philosophical basis, Anthroposophy cannot be brought to the outside world. The impulses of the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” must be realized.

Dr. Friedrich Rittelmeyer of Stuttgart points out the extreme seriousness of the situation in the face of the very numerous opponents. A meeting of “non-anthroposophical experts on anthroposophy” took place, at which the well-known accusations were again put forward and widely disseminated by sending the minutes. The main problem that the Society now faces, especially as a result of the cult movement, is the question of how the Anthroposophical Society can achieve true community on the basis of its own spiritual assumptions. They have made an egoism out of anthroposophy and should have made a great love of humanity out of it. We live on an island and should stand as a visible place of pilgrimage with a human sanctuary in culture. If the word anthroposophy really becomes truth inwardly, if knowledge becomes a personal wisdom and through it a new humanity, then and only then would the working class, would young people be able to gain trust.

Mrs. Lili-Maria Eljakim-Werner, Vienna, singles out some things in relation to the work in the outside world: namely, how a certain way of working has benefited us and how another way has harmed us. This should be communicated and exchanged. For example, “encapsulation” is particularly harmful if one wants to bring anthroposophy to people. If one wants to do this, then one must know people as they are. For this it would be desirable to also occupy oneself with other movements. One should not describe such movements as inferior. The people there have good will; but we have the answers to the questions that move them. One must note that there is a difference between whether Dr. Steiner says something or we do. If we have not experienced it ourselves, it is knowledge and not insight. Above all, criticism from opponents that is condescending is harmful. Dr. Steiner presents facts, and we have presented the judgments that we have formed from them to the world. Others must realize that there is something behind anthroposophy that one must know. We Anthroposophists stand between the world and Anthroposophy.

Mr. Louis Werbeck, Hamburg: Demands are being made here for things that are outdated or taken for granted. Since the congress, we have been waiting for the co-option of the Central Board via Germany to become a reality. This expansion has not materialized. It is necessary for the Central Council to have representatives in many places who work in harmony with Stuttgart. But things must be ripe. The other necessity points to community life. We need forms of communication, even if they are not exactly cultic. Things can be presented in such a way that everyone can understand them. Spiritual knowledge can be popularized in a good sense. The branches should develop into anthroposophical colleges. Each individual can achieve more than he or she realizes. Dr. Eugen Kolisko, Stuttgart: The difficulties in society are connected with the fact that the best minds have been called here. One could say that if only one could send them all back to where they came from, everything would be all right. What was meant by this was that all those who work in the Stuttgart institutions today have done intensive anthroposophical work in the branches, some of them even as branch leaders. But then everything that had to do with the founding would have to be undone, and we cannot simply restore the conditions of 1918. Besides, new forces that were to come from outside were more repelled than attracted. Building community is the most important problem, but it is particularly difficult here. For we cannot, as in the case of religious renewal, rely on a cult that brings about community, but we must start from the individualities and still have community building. The magnitude of the achievements of anthroposophy has not been recognized in society at all. What could not have been done for eurythmy? In many cases, the tasks that need to be solved are not even known. Unfortunately, today's discussion did not provide a picture of the situation in the individual branches: but we cannot form an opinion if the delegates themselves do not give us such a picture of the situation in the Society.

End 11 a.m.

• 1. The situation was that Mr. Uehli, not having recognized the scope of this task, saw no reason to inform Dr. Unger of it. It was only on December 24 that a conversation took place in which, among other things, steps for the reorganization of the Society were discussed. Dr. Unger only learned on January 17 that Dr. Steiner had given such an instruction.