The Rudolf Steiner Archive

See GA 223

Words on the Inaugural Meeting of the Austrian National Society

My dear friends! At today's afternoon meeting, you have adopted a resolution for which I must be grateful to you. I express my thanks to you from the depths of my heart. But you must not be angry with me if I also say a few words about what should be linked with what has been discussed so often this afternoon, and so passionately at times: the further development, the reorganization, the coming of age of the Anthroposophical Society. All this is certainly extraordinarily good when it is backed by a strong will. But, my dear friends, I am sometimes put in the position of having to speak more concretely about what is actually necessary. Since, to my regret, I cannot be in Vienna as often as I would like, I have spoken less concretely about these things here in Vienna than, for example, in February on other occasions in Stuttgart. But some of what I said in Stuttgart or Dornach with regard to what would be necessary for the Anthroposophical Society to come of age in the twenty-first year of its life may have been leaked. Again and again I had to point out a word that is very necessary in the development of the Anthroposophical Society: This is the word waking up, being attentive to what is going on around us, having a heart for life – not just for theories about life – in the Anthroposophical Society. Please forgive me if I then also characterize small things; but to him who observes life, it often reveals itself in small things. I would like to draw attention to one such detail. It is not meant in a negative way, but the following happened a few days ago.

It is true that I care as little as possible about what is said in public about my lectures or about what I do. But there are exceptions. On the day of my second public lecture, a newspaper article appeared here that – I will now completely disregard whether it is praising or not, I do not consider praising articles more valuable than terribly scathing ones – but it does have some characteristic words that say the following. I mention it because of the coming of age of our society. About supersensible knowledge it says:

"It (anthroposophy) has not met the challenge of the time to improve our existence, so it has not yet proved itself to be the challenge of the time. And it will not become so until it comes to truly beneficial insights in its ‘exact formulation of supersensible experience’. What it offers us is only old mysticism, which fell asleep when it experienced the supersensible and, upon awakening, forgot everything it had experienced. Overcoming such forgetfulness is the challenge of the times for Rudolf Steiner.

These words are extremely characteristic. I am only, I would like to say, as if by fate, somewhat absorbed in the discussion of this demand, in that I have pointed out that there are insights, for example, about the human heart, that lead us further in education. But just think: if I had received this article when the lecture was given, instead of a day after, then I could have replied: “What you are calling for exists!” I touched on it, but perhaps I would have gone into it in more detail otherwise. The things are there – they are just not taken into account. But then people come up with such demands!

If one of our friends here had been kind enough to give me this article during the day on the twenty-ninth, it would have meant: People are paying attention, they care about the things that are happening, they are getting involved! Because I would have said something very important, even if only in five lines, in connection with the end of this article, and something could have been done as a result. It is not enough to merely talk about the fact that we are founding a new phase of society. We really have to wake up and work together. We can do this on a small and large scale. Because just as I received this article when the cow was out of the barn, I could have received it when the cow was still in the barn. That is what I once requested as the coming of age of society. I have to be unpleasant when I characterize things from my point of view, but it has happened and it is not meant to be so bad!

But these things have to be pointed out, because they can really be worked with! It would have been quite good... I know that many have read the article, but they did not consider it worth the effort to hand it over to me the day before the lecture. It is only one symptom, and I choose to make it clear that I do not mean it badly, the most venomous symptom, but it is still characteristic for that reason.

And so I would ask you to take seriously what I mean by awakening. Awakening means: focusing attention on the environment, working with the world, working for our great cause when our great cause comes into consideration. Theoretical arguments that we are “now twenty-one years old” do not do it. What does it matter if one has now turned twenty-one? If, however, it has really reached the depths of your soul, waking up is what we need. What I am saying is actually meant as a kindness.

In the afternoon I was asked if I would like to speak myself, and I would like to say the following: In general, it would be good for our dear friends in Austria, if they — since I love Austria so much — would not just go along with this awakening, but if they would even be a prime example of awakening. But then it must begin with the most everyday things, insofar as it touches the life of society. In Austria, there is really an opportunity to do a great deal for this spiritual movement to which we are devoted. For Austria has always had, I might say, a certain development of an external or bureaucratic-mechanical spirit of life, and yet always a strong inwardness in the realm where the intellectual merges into the emotional. And I would never want to fail to mention this. If we go back to the 1850s, 1860s or even the early 1970s of the last century, we see that Austria had the best schoolbooks in the world, and this excellence extended not only to the so-called humanistic schoolbooks, but also to mathematics and geometry books. And we must be fair here. One can also be fair to those who are our opponents. It is really time that people realized that anthroposophy is not anyone's opponent: the others are opponents of anthroposophy. I recently had to complain about this in connection with an unpleasant matter in Stuttgart. People say that so-and-so treats me as an 'adversary'. They have no right to do so, since I do not behave as an adversary until I feel compelled to defend myself against attacks from others; only then do they become adversaries. A fine distinction needs to be made here. Therefore, one must be fair and say: From that fine education which chiseled the spiritual life, which in Austria was the education of the Benedictines and the Cistercians right up to the secondary schools, something of the spiritual flowed into the Austrian mind from this education, which you will not find anywhere else. I really don't want to flatter you otherwise, but the older ones of you have it unconsciously within you, perhaps you don't take it into account. The introduction of those horrible geometry books that came later, in place of, for example, Fialkowski or the old Močnik, which was used as a geometry book in Austria, where all of descriptive geometry, without anyone noticing, led to the imaginative, was not done so without consequence. This could be seen from the figures alone: they had a black background with white lines instead of the black lines that are most commonly found today. All of this was infinitely closer to the soul. Much of that still lives here. It lives in the soul; only people maltreat their own soul: they suppress these things. And precisely the fact that that reformatory Protestant-evangelical intellectualism did not sweep through the Austrian soul as a wave, that is precisely what conditions a very special Austrian spiritual milieu. Germanness in Austria is different from Germanness anywhere else in the world. One need only point to those fine minds that worked in Austria in the last third of the 19th century. I will not mention names, but they can be found everywhere, sometimes in the most unlikely places.

All this could indicate that this thought also occurred to me at a decisive moment: talk about anthroposophy and the human mind, especially in Austria and especially in Vienna. And even if you in your higher souls were to grasp all this in the same way as the world otherwise grasps it, in your lower souls you cannot grasp it at all in the same way! Because there is something there of that fine vibration that emerged from the profound education that was present in Austria around the middle of the last century. And one must answer the question: What can German-Austria do for anthroposophy? with the soul. You must not speculate about the difference between this or that area of the world, but you must feel how there is really a strong inwardness here. This is expressed in the smallest details. The other Germans sometimes feel this as something quite foreign.

Do you see that you have a special task here, to work from the heart, which may emerge from the details. I was once sitting with Herman Grimm in Weimar. In the course of our conversation we happened to mention Grillparzer, and Herman Grimm said: “I once heard Scherer (who was called from Vienna to Berlin) say that Grillparzer was also a poet.” Imagine! The man who at that time was the most brilliant representative of German intellectual life spoke in this way! And he continued: “Once, during a stay in Munich, I had a free hour and sent over to the court library to have something of Grillparzer's sent to me; and when I read it, it seemed to me as if it were not actually written in German at all, but in a foreign language, it seemed to me like something quite foreign.” That was Herman Grimm saying it!

Those who embrace Austria with their hearts cannot speak in this way; for them, precisely this language, which is so strongly emphasized by Grillparzer, will reveal itself as the language of the heart. One must answer this question with one's heart: What should Austria do for anthroposophy? — It is good for the Austrian that in the word 'anthroposophy' there is only one R; for you know — you will agree with me — the Austrian never really learns to pronounce the R properly. It is precisely his peculiarity that wherever there is an R, he actually speaks an A. We vocalize the R. Just explore your vowel and consonant secrets, and you will find that you are no great genius at R! It is the case with Austrians that they never actually grasp this “rolling” of the R with their speech organ. The Austrian speaks a “cozy” R; but it is just not cozy — and so it is not a proper R. But it is the case that you have to grasp the essence where it is.

And so I thought: I would like to touch your soul with this series of lectures! That is the answer to the question that our dear friend Zeißig asked me this afternoon. That is what I wanted to say as a farewell greeting. With this, I close this lecture series, and I would just like to add that it has given me great satisfaction to be among you in Vienna once again. And I do hope that, in our spiritual movement, even when we are apart in the physical sense, we will always know that we are together in the inner sense. And since we always know and feel that we are together, we will be together spiritually even when we are physically apart!

At Whitsuntide this year an international Congress of the Anthroposophical Movement was held at Vienna under the title of ‘East and West.’ Seventeen hundred people were present from all parts of Europe. It was an inspired gathering,—held in a city where Eastern and Western elements have met and mingled for many centuries. Dr. Steiner gave two courses of lectures on Anthroposophy and Knowledge, and Anthroposophy and Sociology. The problem of East and West, spiritually considered, was the main theme. The Viennese public felt the message and gave him a great ovation, a sign that his lectures, with all their intensity of thought, had been appreciated and their impulse understood.

The Congress opened boldly with the clear statement that the problems of today are to be solved neither on economic nor on political platforms, but only on the basis of a new spiritual understanding, a creation of fresh spiritual values and ideals. Dr. Steiner described the path of the soul to higher knowledge in ancient Eastern methods—for example, in the Yoga training and he described how the ancient spirituality of the East was led to Europe by the civilisation of ancient Greece. He showed how other elements of humanity in Northern and Western Europe, and later in America, had come into contact with this heritage from the ancient East and brought fresh faculties and impulses to bear on it. He claimed that Anthroposophy points to a deeper knowledge, born of new faculties of spiritual perception, and is the only power great enough to draw together the conflicting elements in Eastern and Western points of view. Convincingly he showed how these seeds of new spiritual faculties are ready to burst into life in Europe and in the West, and how in this alone lies the solution of the world's problems today. If the West develops these latent spiritual faculties and so permeates her industrial and economic civilisation with fresh spiritual values, the East will recognise her opportunity of a great spiritual revival and meet the West with understanding. Otherwise, despite all external appearances they will go on developing a latent hostility to our external Western civilisation.

Hence Dr. Steiner claims that the keynote of the most immediate and practical problems of the hour lies in an understanding of the esoteric evolution of humanity, and of the relationship of man in East, Middle and West, in Past, Present and Future to the spiritual worlds. The subject therefore that is dealt with esoterically in this book from a course of lectures given at private meetings of Anthroposophical students twelve years ago has now become the most urgent and practical problem before the world. For, again and again, Dr. Steiner has referred to the significant words of General Smuts, who said that the eyes of the world's statesmen must now be turned from the North Sea and the Atlantic to the Pacific, the immediate meeting-point of East and West.

Much will depend on a sufficient number of men and women realising and understanding these problems in the light of the deeper knowledge that is contained, for example, in the course of lectures which has now been revised and made public, with Dr. Steiner's permission, in this volume.

To assist those who seek the connection between the spiritual and practical side of this question, the Editor of Anthroposophy has kindly permitted me to print as the Introduction to this book a very able article in that journal from the pen of Mr. George Kaufmann.

The translation of these lectures has been done chiefly by Mr. S. M. K. Gandell, who has already assisted me so greatly in former translations, and by Miss D. Osmond. I take this opportunity of conveying to them my sincere thanks for their co-operation in a very difficult task.

H. COLLISON.
September 1922.

The addresses published here do not belong in a narrow sense to those ‘Private Papers’ of Rudolf Steiner which have been published as urgently desired study-material for seekers after true humanity and a world-conception in accordance with spiritual values. Nevertheless what Rudolf Steiner himself says in his ‘Lebensgang’ concerning the printing of words which were taken down by his listeners, though intended by the lecturer himself to be only spoken, applies also to these:

‘Of my anthroposophical work there are now two results; first, my books which are open to all the world, and secondly a long series of Courses, which were intended to be looked upon as private publications, for sale only to the members of the Theosophical, later the Anthroposophical Society. These were versions, made with more or less accuracy at the lectures, which, owing to lack of time, could not be corrected by me. I should have preferred if the spoken word were to have remained so. But members wanted the printed edition of the Courses, and so it came into being. Had I had time to correct things, there would have been no need from the beginning for the limitation “Only for Members.” Now it has been omitted for more than a year.

‘Here in my “Lebensgang” it is above all necessary to say how the two things—my published books and private editions—fit into what I established as Anthroposophy.

‘Anyone who wishes to follow my inner struggle and work to bring Anthroposophy before the consciousness of the present age, must do so by means of the general published writings. In them I elaborate everything that exists at present in the way of the pursuit of knowledge. There is given what was revealed more and more to me in “spiritual vision,” what became part of the building of Anthroposophy—although in many respects in an incomplete manner.

‘Side by side with this demand to build up Anthroposophy, and by doing so to take the consequence of giving messages from the spirit-world to the general world of culture to-day, there was also the other demand, to meet fully the spiritual needs and desires of the members as they manifested themselves.’

Also the lectures given publicly in Berlin had, beside the casual listeners each time, an audience of people who came regularly, whose intelligence and capacity to understand were from time to time taken into consideration by the lecturer. And the stenographer had to adapt his gradually increasing skill to catching lectures of one and a half hour's duration. The two addresses published here cannot pretend to give again the pure style of the spoken word, which Rudolf Steiner so sharply differentiates from the style of the written Essay.

As there is such a strong demand for the spoken wisdom of Rudolf Steiner, that we can scarcely keep up in the issue of his addresses with the wishes of readers, our obligation increases to place simultaneously the written Essays of Rudolf Steiner by the side of these as a corrective. They are contributions to several papers, notably to the Goetheanum. Under the title ‘Studies in Goethe, the Goetheanistic Thought Methods,’ a series of these Essays is to appear shortly in book form. In them one will recognize the continuity of Rudolf Steiner's thought and the impersonality and timelessness of his style as a form of expression of those thoughts which are directed towards the eternal, and grasp ‘all things transitory’ with the most intimate sympathy and the acutest accuracy, as a link in the chain from earthly growth to divine existence.

Explanations given by Rudolf Steiner at the founding meeting

The request ¹ The chairman of the Vidar Group, ¹, asked me to say a few words about the desirable formation of a Norwegian Anthroposophical Society and its connection with a kind of international center in Dornach for the Anthroposophical Societies. ²

As you know, my dear friends, over the past few years, during the war and especially after the war, circumstances for the anthroposophical cause have changed from what they used to be. We need only look back at how the anthroposophical cause has developed over the 21 years since it came into being, first as a group within the Theosophical Society and then, from 1912 and 1913, as an independent Anthroposophical Society.

The anthroposophical cause has always been approached by people who have had a yearning for spiritual depth; people who have believed that they could satisfy this spiritual need within the Anthroposophical Society from what they were able to experience in it. This has always given the Anthroposophical Society its character. It was mainly that as a member of the Anthroposophical Society, one expected to get something from it: spiritual teachings, spiritual life. And that went well for so long as the Anthroposophical Society had not reached a certain size. And you, who are older members, will know that things were actually always fine when the Anthroposophical Society was small. Now it is not so important that the Anthroposophical Society has grown in terms of membership; but in recent years – you will have noticed – the Anthroposophical Society has become something that people all over the world are talking about. Isn't it true that the Goetheanum, which unfortunately burnt down, was the first thing that made thousands and thousands of people aware of the Anthroposophical Society? It has become known throughout the world. And the Waldorf School, in turn, and everything that has joined the Anthroposophical Society, has made the anthroposophical cause very well known in the world. And this demands that the Anthroposophical Society also become more active than it has been up to now.

It is not just my sympathy or that of a few people within the Anthroposophical Society, but a world necessity that the Anthroposophical Society become more active than it has been. I myself could be quite satisfied if the Anthroposophical Society consisted of people who work in groups and who ensured that I myself can represent Anthroposophy here and there. I myself could be quite content with that, and perhaps I myself would be most satisfied of all if that were the case: because, you see, the anthroposophical movement has then progressed best. Since it has been talked about so much, it has also been increasingly misunderstood. The opposition has actually only formed since it has spread. And all this can be summed up in the sentence: The Anthroposophical Society needs to become more active, to do more work outwards, so that it stands before the world as something that is not ridiculed but taken seriously, like other societies. And now, with all these things emerging in recent times, it has become clear that everything that is going on in the world today must be taken seriously.

The anthroposophical movement was founded in Berlin, it started in Germany, and people joined it without regard to any national or international ties, purely out of the matter at hand. This caused great difficulties even during the war. These have of course not diminished. And so it has gradually become clear that the best way to further the anthroposophical cause would be for national societies to be established.

It so happened that right at the beginning, when the Anthroposophical Society was founded, the Swedish Anthroposophical Society was the first to be founded. The Swedish Society was always a national society. But in recent years the Swiss Anthroposophical Society has also been founded. The English Society was only able to continue during the war because the English did not say that they belonged to Germany; instead, they founded an English Anthroposophical Society.

One can say that the international life and activity of the Anthroposophical Society would flourish best if national societies were founded in the individual language areas and these were joined together in Dornach to form an international Anthroposophical World Society. That would be the best way for the Anthroposophical Society to continue working. You see, if things are to go on as they actually must go on, if our opponents are not to swallow us up — if you will excuse my using that word — if, that is, we are to work properly, there should always be a connection with a center. And that, given the circumstances, can only be Dornach.

So, for example, we would have to create the possibility of founding a kind of newsletter in Dornach, which would then be sent to the individual sections, so that all the individual anthroposophical branches would always know what is going on in Dornach, so that there would be a connection, an ideal, a spiritual connection.

All this can be achieved if individual national societies are formed that do not, as was the case here, for example, send contributions to Germany, which would serve no purpose at all, because it would not create any cohesion, but if the same contributions were sent to Dornach. One could then have a common newsletter, and one could run the Anthroposophical Society internationally in this way.

In France, for example, Mille Sauerwein came to me some time ago and asked me if I could recognize her as the General Secretary of the French Anthroposophical Society. I have done this because I have confidence in Miss Sauerwein.³ I am only declaring that I will do everything I consider right for the French Society with Miss Sauerwein as its General Secretary. It is only a document that declares my willingness to do everything I consider right for the Anthroposophical Society in France when this person is at the helm. So it has come about, for example, that a French Anthroposophical Society exists. The Swedish one has always existed, the Swiss one also exists; the German one was founded at the end of February as an independent society, and is therefore German and no longer international; it is the German Anthroposophical Society.

So if an Anthroposophical Society is now formed in each country, with a leader with whom we in Dornach can communicate by letter and so on, so that common matters can be dealt with through them, then a very good constitution will have been created for both national and international matters. We would gradually come to a point where the Anthroposophical Society would be represented to a certain extent in the world. Of course, for inner reasons we can be indifferent to this, because the spiritual world is already asserting itself. But we cannot be indifferent to the outside world. It is necessary that such a representation be there once the matter has become known in the world. The best way to do this is to found an Anthroposophical Society in each country – so a Norwegian one here – which in turn will join the international Anthroposophical Society, which is to have its center in Dornach. This is something that is entirely in line with the way the Anthroposophical Society has developed in recent years.

But we must also take the inner aspect into full consideration. Because, you see, wherever you go today, there is a deep need for spiritual life, much more than one might think. Everywhere you will find people who are really crying out for a spiritual life. Most of them do not yet have the courage to come to a spiritual science as pronounced as anthroposophy. They will get that courage! But we must work to help people have that courage.

You see, my dear friends, sometimes it is quite tragic. For example, among the many people who want to come to the Anthroposophical Society today, there are countless young people, young women and young men, all over the world. The young generation is striving towards the Anthroposophical cause. But I myself am always obliged to say to young people: Yes, you see, we can give you Anthroposophy, you can organize your whole study around Anthroposophy; but bear in mind that if you now want to achieve an external position in the world, we are not yet in a position to help you in any way. You will then face a strong conflict. And the better anthroposophists you become, the stronger will be the conflict that life brings you into. — So I am always obliged to preach caution to people rather than to push them into it.

Anthroposophy will never flourish if you are fanatical about it. One must be quite reasonable and must always tell people the truth honestly and sincerely. And it is really pitiful how today's youth strive for anthroposophy and how one cannot always advise them to strive for it [only] — because they have to go out into life again, and there they are rejected if they have become anthroposophists.

All this can change if we [the Anthroposophical Society] can become firmly consolidated internally, so that everyone who is inside knows: they represent a great cause in the world if they are an Anthroposophist. I believe that this could be helped by your founding a Norwegian Anthroposophical Society and, if you then joined Dornach, would help us to powerfully represent the Anthroposophical cause in the world, then it could be pointed out: There are national societies here, there and everywhere – and so the Anthroposophical Society will be seen as something to be taken seriously in the world. This is already the way it is.

But today's opponents are working so powerfully that it is necessary to see how they work. They are very well organized, the opponents – I could give you many examples of this. You see, today, for example, it is sometimes already dangerous when people are friendly to you. For example, in Switzerland in the last few weeks I gave a series of lectures entitled: “What did the Goetheanum want and what should anthroposophy do?” I came to St. Gallen; the American consul came to me on a completely different matter. He came to see me at the hotel, and what we were able to talk about there evidently pleased the man so much that he came to the lecture that evening, bringing his wife with him. It seemed that he also liked what he heard in the lecture. You know, if you know me, that I do not boast about such things. Well, two days later the consul received a stack of pamphlets sent to his house from a completely different quarter, containing the most abusive things about me and the anthroposophical cause. The man is a very reasonable person; he told us so himself. But you see how the opponents are organized! If they notice that someone important is talking to us, they immediately send him the most abusive counter-writings to his home.

This is how we differ from our opponents: we are poorly organized; the opponents are much better organized in all countries than you might think! That is why we need to start an organization so that we can work calmly and powerfully. I could give you many examples of how our opponents work. For example, I could tell you about an organization that extends from Berlin to Leipzig to Switzerland; they constantly communicate with each other through letters, and everything that can be done in an organization is done there. The people there are united! The Protestants and Catholics are always united there when it comes to opposing anthroposophy.

So you see, it is necessary that we find a basis on which we are well organized – although I myself do not have much sympathy for organizing – but we need it. Therefore, I would ask you to now discuss this matter as I have proposed. I believe it may have been understood.

During the discussions, questions are put to Dr. Steiner, which he answers as follows:

Regarding the question of admitting members:

The situation is this: the admission of members would naturally be handled by the national society; but in order for the whole Society to have a unified structure throughout the world, one could indeed strive for a mode that membership cards be issued in Dornach. In the 'Principles', which you have translated into Norwegian, there is no mention of admission, as is otherwise the case with societies or associations, but always of recognition. This must be understood somewhat differently in the case of a spiritual society. And then the final recognition that someone is a member would be provided by the signature of the center in Dornach. This is a suggestion that I am making; but in order for the international society to be a unity, it would be desirable for the national societies to take care of the admission, but for the membership card to be signed by the central office in Dornach. This is how it has been handled everywhere. Firstly, it would establish a certain federalism, which is very desirable, but on the other hand it would also document that a large society emanates from Dornach. For this, of course, it is necessary that there is trust from Dornach in the person who then represents the national society in relation to Dornach. That is what matters. After all, the entire constitution of the society is based on this system of trusted personalities.

Regarding the question of a general secretary:

A general secretary would take care of representation to the center in Dornach. How this is achieved is, again, a matter for the national society. The only prerequisite is that the person in Dornach enjoys the full trust of the society and can then form the bridge to the center.

Regarding the question of whether the board should simply be the general secretary at the same time:

This causes difficulties if one cannot turn to a person but always to a board. In a society like the anthroposophical one, it is always important to deal with personalities, not so much with abstract boards, but with personalities, if the intention is to achieve a certain continuity. The board of directors — I don't know how it is here in Norway — the board of directors can change under certain circumstances, whereas it would be good to have this office of secretary general on a continuous basis, so that people around the world would finally know: these are the secretaries general of the Anthroposophical Society. In practice, the Swiss Society has its General Secretary in Albert Steffen, the French Society in Mlle. Sauerwein; the English Society has not yet chosen one, because it is only in the process of being constituted; but the Dutch Society has already, so to speak, taken on board the prospect of a General Secretary. So in practice the trend is towards having certain General Secretaries.

• 1. No minutes of the meeting exist, except for Rudolf Steiner's words, which were written down in shorthand by Helene Finckh.
• 1. Karl Ingerö
• 2. These remarks were taken chronologically in advance in order not to interrupt the context of the documents beginning on p. 477 ff. (22. 4.-17. 6).
• 3. See page 488

This book is the first volume of a new edition of all Rudolf Steiner's written work—Classics in Anthroposophy. It can be called a classic for several reasons that I will describe, and it contains an important presentation of Rudolf Steiner's Christology (his research into the Christ impulse in earthly and cosmic evolution). It is one of the best accounts of this teaching with which to begin ones study, and one to which we can profitably return again and again.

Steiner had little time to revise his lectures—even during the early years of the century—due to the sheer amount of his lecturing activity, which increased each year; he sometimes gave two or more lectures in twenty-four hours. Today, about 6,000 of these lectures are in print. In addition to his lectures, Steiner's days were filled with administrative and other teaching duties, as well as meeting the needs of people who sought his advice for personal concerns. The lectures in this book and those now published as The Mission of the Folk-Souls are the only lectures he was able to revise in all his years as a spiritual teacher. Rudolf Steiner often emphasized the qualitative difference between his written works and his lectures, which are unrevised stenographic reports. Indeed, he did not write many books, and most of those that he did write underwent at least one revision during his lifetime, as he sought constantly for the clarity and precision which epitomize his approach to spiritual science.

Originally he had not wanted the lectures to be published at all, but his students began to pass around lecture notes to facilitate their study. One must imagine their excitement in those days, when each cycle of lectures seemed to present new revelations from Steiner's research. It was natural for those who could travel to the various cities and attend the lectures to want to convey these esoteric treasures to their friends. On the other hand, Steiner lectured to each specific audience according to what he thought they needed to hear out of their karmic backgrounds, and many of the lectures that are now available to the general public were originally given for members of the Theosophical Society and, later, the Anthroposophical Society. Many listeners had been personal students of Steiner for some years and had acquired a familiarity with the general outlines of his teachings. In 1923, after the founding of the Anthroposophical Society, he decided to make all his lectures available to the public. The public lectures contained a note that some familiarity with fundamental anthroposophy was necessary for an intelligent reading, and that criticism not based on such knowledge would have to be disregarded.

Yet, in the case of this book, he undertook to revise the lectures he had given June 5–8, 1911 in Copenhagen. He spent about two weeks on the revision, and the lectures were printed only two months later, on August 26, 1911. In his preface, Steiner says there were reasons he allowed these lectures to appear when they did. We may ask what those reasons were.

Rudolf Steiner sought for many years a place where he could speak openly out of his spiritual insights. Accordingly, he accepted an invitation in 1900 to lecture to the Berlin Lodge of the Theosophical Society. The enthusiastic reception of these and other lectures led to his assuming the position of General Secretary of the German section of the Theosophical Society in 1902. From the beginning, he asserted his intention to teach from the results of his own research in accordance with the needs of Western humanity, and this freedom was granted. Within the organizational framework of the Theosophical Society, Steiner worked to serve those souls who sought a spiritual impulse they could not find in either the sciences or in the established churches. For several years, Steiner's relationship with the Society was largely cordial and fruitful, and he lectured in many European cities to the lodges of the Theosophical Society.

The Theosophical Society took an increasingly Eastern direction, both spiritually and geographically, The headquarters was moved to Adyar, India. The leaders of the Theosophical Society, at first the remarkable Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and then Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, as well as many members had strong feelings against Western spirituality and the Christian churches. In 1911, in Mrs. Besant proclaimed Jiddhu Krishnamurti, then a young boy, the incarnation of the Christ, and she created the Order of the Star of the East to promote this idea. This, of course, directly contradicted Rudolf Steiner' s perception that the physical incarnation of Christ could occur once during the history of the earth, for reasons carefully delineated in this book.

In 1912, some of the German members, opposed to the Order of the Star of the East, decided to form a new organization; Steiner, when asked, offered the name “Anthroposophical Society.” Steiner neither desired nor actively pursued the break with the theosophists but, recognizing that it was impossible to work within the increasingly hostile atmosphere of the Theosophical Society, he agreed to work with the new “anthroposophical” organization. The first meeting was held in 1913, after Mrs. Besant had excluded the German section. Readers new to anthroposophy may see these events as typical of the regrettable yet apparently inevitable infighting that occurs within spiritual organizations of all kinds. They take on quite a different coloring, however, when seen in the context of Steiner's struggle to insure that his unique teaching of Christian esotericism could find its proper audience and the necessary methods of presentation.¹

Thus it was that Rudolf Steiner revised these lectures—an important element in the initial exposition of his Christology—during the height of difficulties within the Theosophical Society, just before the inaugurations of the Anthroposophical Society. During these years he also wrote and produced his four mystery dramas, and began the work that later matured as eurythmy and speech formation². Rudolf Steiner introduced something quite foreign to the mode of theosophical meetings when he began to include artistic presentations, begun by Rudolf Steiner in 1907. The effect of his dramas, which included eurythmy and the new method of speech, gave the impetus to create a special building in which to perform them. Looking back, we can see how Steiner's studies in Christology and his artistic work in drama, painting, and sculpture culminated in the building of the first Goetheanum in Dornach.³

It is not surprising, then, to find that The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity reveals an extremely artistic composition. Rudolf Steiner weaves together the themes of the beings that guide humanity, the working of the Christ impulse before and after the Mystery of Golgotha, and our common soul experience in a way that can best be called musical. Each new expression brings a variation that imports new information and yet relates to what precedes it. In some of his other lectures, Rudolf Steiner builds mighty pictures of the earth and of the cosmos, and portrays the activities of spiritual beings whose deeds are revealed externally through the natural sciences and through history. Until one achieves a sufficient background through contemplative study of a variety of anthroposophical concepts and makes the effort to allow these concepts to create the inner organs for further work, these initial studies can be overwhelming in their complexity and seem quite dry. For that reason, this book can be most helpful, because Steiner relates the entire subject matter to the human soul, to observations and experiences we share as human beings. These can help us find an inner strength to begin to take' anthroposophy more deeply into our own soul life.

The first chapter begins with a description of how, in the first three years of life, the higher self in each of us works to establish three capacities. Unlike the animals, we learn to orient our body in space in a way that is not innate or instinctual. Next, we learn the use of language; and then comes the ability to work with thoughts, with ideas. Thus, in the time before we are aware of our “I”, we have already done our wisest work on ourselves. If, however, our higher, divine self continued to work in this way, we would remain as children and not have the possibility of freedom. This active working must fall away as we achieve our own self-consciousness, which is constantly subject to the lure of pride and deceit, but which also gives us the possibility of self-development. Indeed, if the higher self lived within us in our present constitution for longer than three years, our body would die. In the same way, when the cosmic Christ entered the body of Jesus during the baptism in the Jordan, it could live even in this special human body for only three years.

Even if the Gospels had not been written, Steiner asserts, this knowledge of the first years of childhood would reveal that Christ lives in us: “To perceive and understand the forces at work in our childhood is to perceive Christ in us.” Through inner striving, we can contact again the wisdom that worked so powerfully in our first years, and we can find the Christ because of his incarnation into humanity. Indeed, the goal of earthly evolution, of the existence of this planet and our life on it, is to gradually make our entire being an expression of these divine cosmic forces—of the Christ impulse. Childhood is a perpetual reminder of the higher self, and it reveals the spiritual guidance that also lives in the Gospels and in the great initiates.

In the second chapter, Steiner describes humanity's own childlike condition in ancient times, and then he outlines how the higher spiritual beings have passed through their own “human” stage in earlier incarnations of the earth. As recently as ancient Egypt, people could recognize the spiritual beings who spoke through their leaders and teachers. The focus of the chapter is on the angels, the beings closest to humanity, who guided human development during the Egyptian epoch and again during our time. He shows how some of the angels have progressed properly in their development, while others have developed more slowly. These two types of angels bring to humanity both the possibility for our own progressive evolution, and also the two kinds of evil: the tendency to ignore our earthly responsibilities and become dreamers and visionaries, and the increasing temptation toward materialism. While their activities cause trouble in the present life of humanity, these beings actually work together in the spiritual world to guide human development. With delicacy and beauty, Steiner indicates the necessity for these retarding spirits in our evolution, for without them, we would not have the opportunity to achieve full self consciousness, diversity and freedom. The more progressive beings could only have produced uniformity in human nature.

This chapter concludes with a caution against fanaticism. “The most beautiful things can seduce and tempt us if we pursue them one-sidedly.” To guard against this, he urges us to insure that clairvoyance is augmented by an effort to grasp conceptually just the kind of spiritual facts that are presented in this book. Spiritual science helps us to avoid error; clairvoyance should be accompanied by initiation, the training that allows “a clear assessment of what is perceived in the supersensible world.” This is the difference between seeing and understanding, by being able to distinguish between the different kinds of beings and events of the higher worlds. Most important, through the study of anthroposophy, we begin to meet the Christ with our higher soul forces.

In the final chapter, Rudolf Steiner surveys the sweep of the Post Atlantean Age, the present age of the world.⁴ He shows how the progressive spiritual beings have also met the Christ, but the retarding beings have not. These latter spirits have inspired the natural science that has formed the present world culture. In the future, scientists will perceive that the Christ has arranged every atom of the earth, and a new physics and chemistry will result. We can say, then, that in the future there will live in people's hearts a Christ-idea whose magnitude will be beyond anything humanity has believed to know and understand so far. What has developed through Christ as a first impulse and has lived on as an idea of him until now is—even in the best representatives of the Christ—principle only a preparation for a true understanding of Christ. Christ first entered human hearts through the pictures from his life on earth in a human body. Today we must prepare for a spiritual meeting with the Christ, similar to Paul's experience at Damascus. An essential part of this preparation is a strengthened consciousness and a sense of responsibility toward spiritual perception, and this vital discrimination can be enhanced through the careful study of such a book as this one.

In conclusion, one hopes that this new edition will find the active readership it deserves. Many people who first approach anthroposophy for the first time are suspicious and even resentful of Christianity as it has manifested in the past two thousand years, and when they discover that anthroposophy is Christ-centered, they may feel disappointed or even upset. For others, it is perplexing that Steiner's Christology puts forward quite radical elements when compared to the theology of his day or ours. In this book, Rudolf Steiner gives both a broad, sweeping picture of human and cosmic evolution and the central place of the Christ impulse in that development, and also relates this evolution to our inner life, to the experiences and insights that anyone with the good will to look within can have, and from which they can then follow these anthroposophical thoughts to the reality of the Christ experience. Here we are given a deeply rewarding perspective of the age in which we live and in which we are witnessing the rapid dissolution of our cultural life; here also we can find the inner sustenance to work toward building the culture of the new age. From this point of view, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity is a “classic” work of spiritual science.

HILMAR MOORE

• 1. For further information, see Guenther Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner (Whittier Books, 1955) 158–193; and Stewart C. Easton, Rudolf Steiner: Herald of a New Epoch (Anthroposophic Press, 1980), chapters 6 and 8. It should be noted that Krishnamurti publicly repudiated the claims of Besant and Leadbeater and dissolved the organization, called the Order of the Star of the East, in the 1920s. Stewart Easton has managed to portray with admirable clarity the issues and personalities which are of great importance in Steiner's work. In chapter five of his Man and World in the Light of Anthroposophy (Anthroposophic Press, 1975) he has provided a succinct presentation of Rudolf Steiners Christology.
• 2. Eurythmy. System of movement created by Rudolf Steiner expressing both music and the sounds of speech. See Marjorie Raffe et al., Eurythmy and the Impulse of Dance (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1974). Speech. Steiner developed a particular mode of artistic speech in the production of his Mystery Dramas. See Rudolf Steiner, Speech and Drama (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press / London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968). Also, Steiner, Four Mystery Dramas, trans. Ruth Pusch (North Vancouver: Steiner Book Centre, 1973), and Steiner, Three Lectures on the Mystery Dramas (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1983).
• 3. The Goetheanum is the world headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland. Architecturally unique. See biesantz, The Goetheanum, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979) and Rex Raab et al., Eloquent Concrete, (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1979).
• 4. For a description of earth evolution, including post-Atlantean times, see Rudolf Steiner, An Outline Of Esoteric Science, trans. Catherine E. Creeger (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1997).

My dear friends!

We are gathered together for the last time in this Conference from which much that is strong and important is to go forth for the Anthroposophical Movement. So now let me shape this final lecture in a way that connects it inwardly, in its impulse, with the various prospects thrown open to us by this series of lectures as a whole,⁷⁹ but also in a way that will allow us to gain a sense for the future, especially the future of anthroposophical endeavour.

When we look out into the world today we see something that has already been there for many years: a tremendous amount of destructiveness. There are forces at work that give us an inkling of the abysses into which western civilization is still to plunge. Looking at those individuals who externally are the cultural leaders in the various fields of life, we notice how they are enmeshed in a terrible cosmic sleep. They think, and until recently most people thought, that until the nineteenth century mankind was childlike and primitive in its insights and views, and that now that modern science has entered into all the various fields truth has at last arrived, truth that must be upheld forever.

People who think like this are, without knowing it, living in a state of tremendous arrogance. On the other hand, here and there amongst mankind today there are some inklings that things are perhaps not as the majority would like to imagine.

Some time ago I was able to give a number of lectures in Germany organized by the Wolff agency.⁸⁰ The audiences were exceptionally large, so that people here and there began to notice that Anthroposophy was something for which people were looking. All kinds of foolish voices were raised in antagonism, among them one which was not much more intelligent than any of the others but which nevertheless expressed a kind of presentiment. It consisted of a note in a newspaper referring to one of the lectures in Berlin. This notice in the newspaper said: Listening to stuff like this you get the impression—I am quoting the article approximately—that something is happening not only on the earth but also in the whole of the cosmos that is calling mankind to a form of spirituality that is different from what has existed so far; even the forces of the cosmos, not merely earthly impulses, are demanding something of mankind; a kind of revolution in the cosmos which must lead man to strive for a new spirituality.

So there was this voice, which was in its way quite remarkable. For it is true: The proper impulse for what must now go forth from Dornach must, as I have emphasized from various angles over the last few days, be an impulse arising not on the earth but in the spiritual world. Here we want to develop the strength to follow the impulses coming from the spiritual world. In the evening lectures during this Christmas Conference I have spoken about manifold impulses present in historical development so that your hearts might be opened to take in spiritual impulses which still have to stream into the earthly world and are not taken from the earthly world itself. Everything that has hitherto borne the earthly world in the right way has had its source in the spiritual world. And if we are to achieve something fruitful for the earthly world, we must turn to the spiritual world for the appropriate impulses.

My dear friends, this encourages me to point out that the impulses we are to bear away with us from this Conference must be linked to a great sense of responsibility.

Let us spend a few minutes on the great responsibility that is now incumbent on us as a result of this Conference. In recent decades it has been possible for someone with a sense for the spiritual world to wander, in spiritual observation, past many personalities, gaining bitter sensations with regard to the future destiny of mankind on earth. It has been possible to wander past one's fellow human beings in the manner available to spiritual insight, observing how they lay aside their physical and etheric bodies in sleep and live in the spiritual world with their ego and astral body. Wandering among the destinies of those egos and astral bodies while human beings slept has, in recent decades, given rise to experiences which can point to a heavy responsibility incumbent on the one who can know such things. These souls, having left behind their physical and etheric bodies between going to sleep and waking up, were often to be seen approaching the Guardian of the Threshold.

The Guardian of the Threshold has entered the awareness of human beings in many and various ways during the course of human evolution. Many a legend and many a saga—for this is the form in which the most important things are preserved, rather than that of historical records—many a legend and many a saga tells of the approach by one personality or another to the Guardian of the Threshold in order to receive instruction on how to enter the spiritual world and then return once more to the physical world. Entering rightly into the spiritual world must bring with it the possibility of returning to the physical world at any moment with the full ability to stand on both feet as a practical and thoughtful human being, not as a dreamer, not as a dreamy mystic.

Throughout all the thousands of years during which human beings have striven to enter the spiritual world, this has been the fundamental stipulation of the Guardian of the Threshold. But especially in the final third of the nineteenth century hardly any human beings were to be seen approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in a state of wakefulness. And even more so in our own time, when mankind as a whole has the historical task of passing by the Guardian of the Threshold in one way or another, do you find, when wandering in the spiritual world, that souls are asleep when they approach the Guardian of the Threshold as egos and astral bodies. This most significant picture meets us today: There stands the Guardian of the Threshold surrounded by groups of sleeping human souls who do not have the strength to approach him in a waking state but who approach him instead while they are asleep.

Witnessing this scene, you become aware of a thought which is bound up particularly with what I would like to call the germination of a necessary great responsibility. The souls who thus approach the Guardian of the Threshold in a state of sleep demand entry into the spiritual world. They demand to be allowed to wander across the threshold in a state of sleep; their consciousness is that of a sleeping human being—which so far as the waking state is concerned remains unconscious or subconscious. And countless times the voice of the grave Guardian of the Threshold is heard: For your own good, you may not cross the threshold; you may not gain entrance to the spiritual world. Go back! For if the Guardian of the Threshold were to allow them to enter without more ado, they could come over into the spiritual world with all the concepts passed on to them by today's schools, today's education, today's civilization; with all those concepts and ideas with which human beings have to grow up nowadays from their sixth year onwards right, you could say, until the end of their earthly lives.

These concepts and ideas have a particular characteristic: If you enter into the spritual world with them, with the way you have become with them through present-day civilization and schooling, you become paralysed in your soul. And on returning to the physical world you would be void of thoughts and ideas. If the Guardian of the Threshold did not gravely reject these souls, if he were not to reject many, many of today's human souls but were to let them step over into the spiritual world, then, waking up on their return, waking up at the decisive moment on their return, they would have the feeling: I cannot think; my thoughts do not grasp my brain; I have to live in the world without thoughts. For the world of abstract ideas which human beings today attach to everything is such that one can indeed go into the spiritual world with them but one cannot bring them out again. And when you watch this scene, which is experienced today by more souls than you would ordinarily imagine, you say to yourself: If only these souls could be successfully protected from experiencing also in death what they are now experiencing in sleep. For if the inner condition experienced before the Guardian of the Threshold were to endure for a sufficiently long period of time, if human civilization were to remain for a long time under the influence of what can be taken in in schools by way of what is traditionally passed down by civilization, then sleep would become ordinary life. Human souls would pass through the portal of death into the spiritual world and then be incapable of bringing any strength of ideas with them into their new life on earth. For though you can enter the spiritual world with today's thoughts, you then cannot leave it with them. You can only leave it in a state of soul paralysis.

You see, present-day civilization can be founded on the kind of cultural life that has been nurtured for so long. But life cannot be founded on it. It would be possible for this civilization to endure for a while. During their waking hours, the souls would have no inkling of the Guardian of the Threshold; then while they slept they would be turned away by him so that they should not become paralysed; and the final consequence would be that a human race would be born in the future without any understanding, without any possibility of applying ideas to life when they were born in this future time, so that the faculty of thinking and living in ideas would have disappeared from the earth. A sick human race, living only in instincts, would have to populate the earth. Terrible feelings and emotions alone, without orientation through the force of ideas, would come to dominate human evolution.

Indeed, the soul failing to gain entry into the spiritual world, and being turned away by the Guardian of the Threshold in the way I have just described, is not the only sad sight to meet the one who has spiritual vision. If such a one were to take with him a human being from eastern civilization on his journeyings to where the sleeping souls can be observed approaching the Guardian of the Threshold, then such an eastern human being would be heard to utter spirit words of terrible reproach towards the whole of western civilization: See, if this goes on, then the earth will have fallen into barbarism by the time those living today return for a new incarnation; people will live by instincts alone, without ideas; this is what you have brought about by falling away from the ancient spirituality of the orient.

Thus a glimpse like this into the spiritual world bears witness to a strong sense of responsibility for the task of man. And here in Dornach there must be a place where it is possible to speak, to those who wish to listen, about every important direct experience of the spiritual world. Here there must be a place where the strength is found to point to those little traces of the spirit not only in the cleverly put together dialectical and empirical scientific manner of the present time. If Dornach is to fulfil its task, then it must be a place where human beings can hear openly about what is going on historically in the spiritual world and about the spiritual impulses which then enter into the world of nature and govern it. Human beings must be able to hear in Dornach about genuine experiences, genuine forces and genuine beings of the spiritual world. This is where the School of true Spiritual Science must be. And we must henceforth not shy away from the demands of modern scientific thought which causes human beings to approach the earnest Guardian of the Threshold in a state of sleep in the way I have described. In Dornach it must be possible to win the strength, spiritually, to look the spiritual world in the eye, to learn about the spiritual world.

Therefore we shall not let loose a tirade of dialectics on the inadequacy of present-day scientific theory. Instead I had to draw your attention to the position in which this scientific theory, and its consequences in ordinary schools, places the human being with regard to the Guardian of the Threshold. If we can face up to this in our soul in all earnestness during this Conference, then this Christmas Conference will send a strong impulse into our souls which can carry them away to do strong work of the kind needed by mankind today, so that in their next incarnation human beings will be able to encounter the Guardian of the Threshold properly, or rather so that civilization as a whole will measure up to the Guardian of the Threshold.

Compare today's civilization with that of former times. In all former civilizations there were ideas, concepts, which were turned first of all towards the super-sensible world, towards the gods, towards the world which engendered, which created, which brought forth. Then with those concepts, which belonged above all to the gods, it was possible to look down onto the earthly world in order to understand it with concepts and ideas which were worthy of the gods. And if souls then approached the Guardian of the Threshold with these ideas which had been formed in a manner that was worthy of the gods and that had a value for the gods, then the Guardian said: You may pass, for you are bringing with you into the super-sensible world something that is directed towards this super-sensible world even during the time of your life on earth in a physical body; therefore when you return to the physical, sense-perceptible world sufficient strength will remain to prevent you from becoming paralysed through having seen the super-sensible world. Nowadays human beings elaborate concepts and ideas which, in accordance with the genius of the times, they want to apply solely to the physical, sense-perceptible world. These concepts and ideas deal above all with anything that can be weighed and measured, but they are not at all concerned with the gods. They are not worthy of the gods and they are of no value to the gods. That is why the souls who have fallen entirely under the spell of the materialism of these ideas which are unworthy of the gods and valueless for the gods are met, when they cross the threshold in sleep, by the thundering voice of the Guardian of the Threshold: Do not step across the threshold! You have misused your ideas for the sense-perceptible world; therefore you must remain with them in the sense-perceptible world; if you do not want to become paralysed in your soul, you cannot enter with them into the world of the gods.

Such things have to be said, not because it is necessary to brood upon them but so that heart and mind and soul may become filled to the brim with them. Then we may come into the mood that will be the right mood to bear away from this solemn Christmas Conference of the Anthroposophical Society. The most important thing of all is the mood of soul we bear away with us, a mood of soul for the spiritual world that gives us the certainty: In Dornach a central point for spiritual knowledge will be created.

That is why it was so good to hear Dr Zeylmans speak this morning about a field which is to be cultivated here in Dornach, the field of medicine, and to hear him say that it is no longer possible to build bridges from ordinary science to what is to be founded here in Dornach. If we have the ambition to make what grows in the soil of our own medical research into something that can stand the scrutiny of present-day clinical requirements, then we shall never achieve any definite goal in the things that really make up our task, for then other people will simply say: Well, yes, here is a new method; we too have initiated new methods once in a while.

The important thing is that a branch of practical life, such as medicine, should be taken up into anthroposophical life. I think I understood rightly this morning that this is what Dr Zeylmans longs for. Did he not say in connection with this goal that someone who today becomes a doctor longs for impulses from a new corner of the universe. Let me tell you that in the field of medicine the work here in Dornach is to be carried on just as has that in a number of other fields of anthroposophical work which have remained within the bosom of Anthroposophy. With Dr Wegman as my helper, work is already in train on a system of medicine based entirely on Anthroposophy, a system which is needed by mankind and which will be presented to mankind quite soon. Equally it is my purpose to bring about the closest ties between the Goetheanum and the Clinic in Arlesheim which is working so beneficially. In the very near future such ties are to be brought about so that all that is flourishing there may be truly oriented towards Anthroposophy, which is indeed the intention of Dr Wegman.

In what he said, Dr Zeylmans was indicating with reference to one particular field what the Vorstand in Dornach will make its task in all the fields of anthroposophical work. Thus in future the situation will be clear. No one will say: Let us first show people eurythmy; if they hear nothing about Anthroposophy, then they will like eurythmy; and then, having taken a liking to eurythmy, if they hear that Anthroposophy stands as the foundation for eurythmy, they will take a liking to Anthroposophy as well. No one will say: First we must show people how the medicines work in practice so that they see that they are proper medicines, and will buy them; then, if they later hear that Anthroposophy is behind the medicines, they will also approach Anthroposophy.

We must have the courage to regard such a method as dishonest. Not until we have the courage to regard such a method as dishonest, not until we inwardly detest such a method will Anthroposophy find its way through the world. So in future here in Dornach we shall fight for the truth, not fanatically but simply in an honest, straightforward love of the truth. Perhaps this will enable us to make good some of what has so sinfully been made bad in recent years.

With thoughts which are not easy but which are grave we must depart from this Conference that has led to the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society. But I do not think that it will be necessary for anybody to go away with pessimism from what has taken place here this Christmas. Every day we have had to walk past the sad ruins of the Goetheanum. But as we have walked up this hill, past these ruins, I think that in every soul there has also been the content of what has been discussed here and what has quite evidently been understood by our friends in their hearts. From all this the thought has emerged: It will be possible for spiritual flames of fire to arise, as a true spiritual life for the blessing of mankind in the future, from the Goetheanum which is being built anew. They shall arise out of our hard work and out of our devotion. The more we go from here with the courage to carry on the affairs of Anthroposophy, the better have we heard the breath of the spirit wafting filled with hope through our gathering. For the scene which I have described to you and which can be seen so frequently, that scene of present-day human beings, the products of a decadent civilization and education, approaching the Guardian of the Threshold in a state of sleep, is actually not one which is found amongst the circle of sensitive anthroposophists. Here on the whole the circumstance is such that only a warning, one particular exhortation, resounds: In hearing the voice from the land of the spirit you must develop the strong courage to bear witness to this voice, for you have begun to awaken; courage will keep you awake; lack of courage alone could lead you to fall asleep.

The exhortation to be awake through courage is the other variation, the variation for anthroposophists in the life of present-day civilization. Those who are not anthroposophists hear: You must remain outside the land of the spirit, you have misused ideas for merely earthly objects, you have not gathered ideas which have value for the gods and which are worthy of the gods; you would be paralysed on your return to the physical, sense-perceptible world. But those souls who are the souls of anthroposophists hear: Your remaining test is to be that of your courage to bear witness to that voice which you are capable of hearing because of the inclination of your soul, because of the inclination of your heart.

My dear friends, yesterday was the anniversary of the day on which we saw the tongues of flame devouring our old Goetheanum. Today we may hope—since a year ago we did not allow even the flames to distract us from continuing with our work—today we may hope that when the physical Goetheanum stands here once more we shall have worked in such a way that the physical Goetheanum is only the external symbol for our spiritual Goetheanum which we want to take with us as an idea as we now go out into the world.

We have here laid the Foundation Stone. On this Foundation Stone shall be erected the building whose individual stones will be the work achieved in all our groups by the individuals outside in the wide world. Let us now look in spirit at this work and become conscious of the responsibility about which I have spoken today, of our responsibility towards the human being who stands before the Guardian of the Threshold and has to be refused entry into the spiritual world.

Certainly it should never occur to us to feel anything but the deepest pain and the deepest sorrow about what happened to us a year ago. But let us not forget that everything in the world that has any stature has been born out of pain. So let us transform our pain so that out of it may arise a strong and shining Anthroposophical Society by dint, my dear friends, of your work.

For this purpose we have immersed ourselves in those words with which I began, in those words with which I wish to close this Christmas Conference, this Christmas Conference which is to be for us a festival of consecration not merely for the beginning of a new year but for the beginning of a new turning point of time to which we want to devote ourselves in enthusiastic cultivation of the life of spirit:

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the limbs
Which bear thee through the world of space
In the spirit's ocean-being.
Practise spirit-recalling
In depths of soul,
Where in the wielding will
Of world-creating
Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.
And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

For the Father-Spirit of the heights holds sway
In depths of worlds begetting being.
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones!
Let there ring out from the heights
What in the depths is echoed
Speaking:
Ex Deo nascimur.
The spirits of the elements hear it
In East, West, North, South,
May human beings hear it.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the beat of heart and lung
Which leads thee through the rhythm of time
Into the realm of thine own soul's feeling.
Practise spirit-awareness
In balance of the soul,
Where the surging deeds
Of the world's becoming
Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.
And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

For the Christ-Will in the encircling round holds sway
In the rhythms of the worlds, bestowing grace on the soul.
Kyriotetes, Dynamis, Exusiai!
Let there be fired from the East
What through the West is formed
Speaking:
In Christo morimur.
The spirits of the elements hear it
In East, West, North, South,
May human beings hear it.

Soul of Man!
Thou livest in the resting head
Which from the grounds of eternity
Opens to thee the world-thoughts.
Practise spirit-beholding
In stillness of thought,
Where the eternal aims of Gods
World-Being's Light
On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.
And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

For the world-thoughts of the Spirit hold sway
In the being of worlds, craving for light.
Archai, Archangeloi, Angeloi !
Let there be prayed from the depths
What in the heights will be granted
Speaking:
Per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.^A

At the turning of the time
The Spirit-Light of the world
Entered the stream of earthly being.
Darkness of night
Had held its sway,
Day-radiant light
Streamed into souls of men:
Light that gives warmth
To simple shepherds' hearts,
Light that enlightens
The wise heads of kings.

Light Divine
Christ-Sun
Warm thou our hearts,
Enlighten thou our heads,
That good may become
What we from our hearts would found
What we from our heads would direct
In conscious
Willing.

And so, my dear friends,^B bear out with you into the world your warm hearts in whose soil you have laid the Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, bear out with you your warm hearts in order to do work in the world that is strong in healing. Help will come to you because your heads will be enlightened by what you all now want to be able to direct in conscious willing. Let us today make this resolve with all our strength. And we shall see that if we show ourselves to be worthy, then a good star will shine over that which is willed from here. My dear friends, follow this good star. We shall see whither the gods shall lead us through the light of this star.

Light Divine
Christ-Sun,
Warm thou
Our hearts,
Enlighten thou
Our heads!

• 79. See Rudolf Steiner World History in the Light of Anthroposophy, op. cit.
• 80. See Note 3.
• A. According to the shorthand report, the final words of the verse were not spoken on this occasion.
• B. In the following sentences, as in the gathering on 25 December 1923 at which the Foundation Stone was laid in members' hearts, Rudolf Steiner once again changed from the formal mode of address to the more intimate ‘Du’. (Tr.)

The Chair was taken by Miss Margaret McMillan, who gave a stirring address, and Dr. Steiner followed on.

My first words must be a reply to the kind greeting given by Miss Beverley to Frau Doctor Steiner and myself, and I can assure you that we deeply appreciate the invitation to give this course of lectures. I shall try to show what Anthroposophy has to say on the subject of education and to describe the attempt already made in the Waldorf School at Stuttgart to apply the educational principles arising out of Anthroposophy. It is a pleasure to come to the North of England to speak on a subject which I consider so important, and it gives me all the greater joy to think that I am speaking not only to those who have actually arranged this course but to many who are listening for the first time to lectures on education in the light of Anthroposophy. I hope, therefore, that more lies behind this Conference than the resolve of those who organized it, for I think it may be taken as evidence that our previous activities are bearing fruit in current world-strivings.

English friends of Anthroposophy were with us at a Conference held at Christmas, last year, when the Goetheanum (at Dornach, Switzerland)—since taken from us by fire—was still standing. The Conference was brought about by Mrs. Mackenzie, the author of a fine book on the educational principles laid down by Hegel, and the sympathetic appreciation expressed there justifies the hope that it is not, after all, so very difficult to find understanding that transcends the limits of nationality. What I myself said about education at the Conference did not, of course, emanate from the more intellectualistic philosophy of Hegel, but from Anthroposophy, the nature of which is wholly spiritual. And indeed Mrs. Mackenzie, too, has seen how, while fully reckoning with Hegel, something yet more fruitful for education can be drawn where intellectuality is led over into the spiritual forces of Anthroposophy.

Then I was able to speak of our educational principles and their practical application a second time last year, in the ancient university of Oxford. And perhaps I am justified in thinking that those lectures, which dealt with the relation of education to social life, may have induced a number of English educationists to visit our Waldorf School at Stuttgart. It was a great joy to welcome them there, and we were delighted to hear that they were impressed with our work and were following it with interest. During the visit the idea of holding this Summer Course on education seems to have arisen. Its roots, therefore, may be said to lie in previous activities and this very fact gives one the right confidence and courage as we embark on the lectures. Courage and confidence are necessary when one has to speak of matters so unfamiliar to the spiritual life of to-day and in face of such strong opposition. More especially are they necessary when one attempts to explain principles that seek to approach, in a creative sense, the greatest artistic achievement of the Cosmos—man himself.

Those who visited us this year at Stuttgart will have realized how essentially Waldorf School education gets to grips with the deepest fibres of modern life. The educational methods applied there can really no longer be described by the word ‘Pedagogy’ a treasured word which the Greeks learnt from Plato and the Platonists who had devoted themselves so sincerely to all educational questions. Pedagogy is, indeed, no longer an apt term to-day, for it is an a priori expression of the one-sidedness of its ideals, and those who visited the Waldorf School will have realized this from the first. It is not, of course, unusual to-day to find boys and girls educated together, in the same classes and taught in the same way, and I merely mention this to show you that in this respect, too, the methods of the Waldorf School are in line with recent developments.

What does the word ‘Pedagogy’ suggest? The ‘Pedagogue’ is a teacher of boys. This shows us at once that in ancient Greece education was very one-sided. One half of humanity was excluded from serious education. To the Greek, the boy alone was man and the girl must stay in the background when it was a question of serious education. The pedagogue was a teacher of boys, concerned only with that sex.

In our time, the presence of girl-pupils in the schools is no longer unusual, although indeed it involved a radical change from customs by no means very ancient. Another feature at the Waldorf School is that in the teaching staff no distinction of sex is made—none, at least, until we come to the very highest classes. Having as our aim a system of education in accord with the needs of the present day, we had first of all to modify much that was included in the old term ‘Pedagogy.’ So far I have only mentioned one of its limitations, but speaking in the broadest sense it must be admitted that for some time now there has been no real knowledge of man in regard to education and teaching. Indeed, many one-sided views have been held in the educational world, not only that of the separation of the sexes.

Can it truly be said that a man could develop in the fullest sense of the term when educated according to the old principles? Certainly not! To-day we must first seek understanding of the human being in his pure, undifferentiated essence. The Waldorf School was founded with this aim in view. The first idea was the education of children whose parents were working in the Waldorf-Astoria Factory, and as the Director was a member of the Anthroposophical Society, he asked me to supervise the undertaking. I myself could only give the principles of education on the basis of Anthroposophy. And so, in the first place, the Waldorf School arose as a general school for the workers' children. It was only ‘anthroposophical’ in the sense that the man who started it happened to be an Anthroposophist. Here then, we have an educational institution arising on a social basis, seeking to found the whole spirit and method of its teaching upon Anthroposophy. It was not a question of founding an ‘anthroposophical’ school. On the contrary, we hold that because Anthroposophy can at all times efface itself, it is able to institute a school on universal-human principles instead of upon the basis of social rank, philosophical conceptions of any other specialised line of thought.

This may well have occurred to those who visited the Waldorf School and it may also have led to the invitation to give these present lectures. And in this introductory lecture, when I am not yet speaking of education, let me cordially thank all those who have arranged this Summer Course. I would also thank them for having arranged performances of Eurhythmy which has already become an integral part of Anthroposophy. At the very beginning let me express this hope: A Summer Course has brought us together. We have assembled in a beautiful spot in the North of England, far away from the busy life of the winter months. You have given up your time of summer recreation to listen to subjects that will play an important part in the life of the future and the time must come when the spirit uniting us now for a fortnight during the summer holidays will inspire all our winter work. I cannot adequately express my gratitude for the fact that you have dedicated your holidays to the study of ideas for the good of the future. Just as sincerely as I thank you for this now, so do I trust that the spirit of our Summer Course may be carried on into the winter months—for only so can this Course bear real fruit.

I should like to proceed from what Miss McMillan said so impressively yesterday in words that bore witness to the great need of our time for moral impulses to be sought after if the progress of civilization is to be advanced through Education.

When we admit the great need that exists to-day for moral and spiritual impulses in educational methods and allow the significance of such impulses to work deeply in our hearts, we are led to the most fundamental problems in modern spiritual life—problems connected with the forms assumed by our culture and civilization in the course of human history. We are living in an age when certain spheres of culture, though standing in a measure side by side, are yet separated from one another. In the first place we have all that man can learn of the world through knowledge—communicated, for the most part, by the intellect alone. Then there is the sphere of art, where man tries to give expression to profound inner experiences, imitating with his human powers, a divine creative activity. Again we have the religious strivings of man, wherein he seeks to unite his own existence with the life of the universe. Lastly, we try to bring forth from our inner being impulses which place us as moral beings in the civilized life of the world. In effect we confront these four branches of culture: knowledge, art, religion, morality. But the course of human evolution has brought it about that these four branches are developing separately and we no longer realize their common origin. It is of no value to criticize these conditions; rather should we learn to understand the necessities of human progress.

To-day, therefore, we will remind ourselves of the beginnings of civilization. There was an ancient period in human evolution when science, art, religion and the moral life were one. It was an age when the intellect had not yet developed its present abstract nature and when man could solve the riddles of existence by a kind of picture-consciousness. Mighty pictures stood there before his soul—pictures which in the traditional forms of myth and saga have since come down to us. Originally they proceeded from actual experience and a knowledge of the spiritual content of the universe. There was indeed an age when in this direct, inner life of imaginative vision man could perceive the spiritual foundations of the world of sense. And what his instinctive imagination thus gleaned from the universe, he made substantial, using earthly matter and evolving architecture, sculpture, painting, music and other arts. He embodied with rapture the fruits of his knowledge in outer material forms. With his human faculties man copied divine creation, giving visible form to all that had first flowed into him as science and knowledge. In short, his art mirrored before the senses all that his forces of knowledge had first assimilated. In weakened form we find this faculty once again in Goethe, when out of inner conviction he spoke these significant words: “Beauty is a manifestation of the secret laws of Nature, without which they would remain for ever hidden.” And again: “He before whom Nature begins to unveil her mysteries is conscious of an irresistible yearning for art—Nature's worthiest expression.”

Such a conception shows that man is fundamentally predisposed to view both science and art as two aspects of one and the same truth. This he could do in primeval ages, when knowledge brought him inner satisfaction as it arose in the forms of ideas before his soul and when the beauty that enchanted him could be made visible to his senses in the arts—for experiences such as these were the essence of earlier civilizations.

What is our position to-day? As a result of all that intellectual abstractions have brought in their train we build up scientific systems of knowledge from which, as far as possible, art is eliminated. It is really almost a crime to introduce the faintest suggestion of art into science, and anyone who is found guilty of this in a scientific book is at once condemned as a dilettante. Our knowledge claims to be strictly dispassionate and objective; art is said to have nothing in common with objectivity and is purely arbitrary. A deep abyss thus opens between knowledge and art, and man no longer finds any means of crossing it. When he applies the science that is valued because of its freedom from art, he is led indeed to a marvellous knowledge of Nature—but of Nature devoid of life. The wonderful achievements of science are fully acknowledged by us, yet science is dumb before the mystery of man. Look where you will in science to-day, you will find wonderful answers to the problems of outer Nature, but no answers to the riddle of man. The laws of science cannot grasp him. Why is this? Heretical as it sounds to modern ears, this is the reason. The moment we draw near to the human being with the laws of Nature, we must pass over into the realm of art. A heresy indeed, for people will certainly say: “That is no longer science. If you try to understand the human being by the artistic sense, you are not following the laws of observation and strict logic to which you must always adhere.” However emphatically it may be held that this approach to man is unscientific because it makes use of the artistic sense—man is none the less an artistic creation of Nature. All kinds of arguments may be advanced to the effect that this way of artistic understanding is thoroughly unscientific, but the fact remains that man cannot be grasped by purely scientific modes of cognition. And so—in spite of all our science—we come to a halt before the human being. Only if we are sufficiently unbiased can we realize that scientific intellectuality must here be allowed to pass over into the domain of art. Science itself must become art if we would approach the secrets of man's being.

Now if we follow this path with all our inner forces of soul, not only observing in an outwardly artistic sense, but taking the true path, we can allow scientific intellectuality to flow over into what I have described as ‘Imaginative Knowledge’ in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment. This ‘Imaginative Knowledge’—to-day an object of such suspicion and opposition—is indeed possible when the kind of thinking that otherwise gives itself up passively, and increasingly so, to the outer world is roused to a living and positive activity. The difficulty of speaking of these things to-day is not that one is either criticizing or upholding scientific habits of thought which are peculiar to our age; rather does the difficulty consist in the fact that fundamentally one must touch upon matters which concern the very roots of our present civilization. There is an increasing tendency to-day to give oneself up to the mere, observation of outer events, to allow thoughts passively to follow their succession, avoiding all conscious inner activity.

This state of things began with the demand for material proofs of spiritual matters. Take the case of a lecture on spiritual subjects. Visible evidence is out of the question, because words are the only available media—one cannot summon the invisible by some magical process. All that can be done is to stimulate and assume that the audience will inwardly energize their thinking into following the indications given by the words. Yet nowadays it will frequently happen that many of the listeners—I do not, of course, refer to those who are sitting in this hall—begin to yawn, because they imagine that thinking ought to be passive, and then they fall asleep because they are not following the subject actively. People like everything to be demonstrated to the eye, illustrated by means of lantern-slides or the like, for then it is not necessary to think at all. Indeed, they cannot think. That was the beginning, and it has gone still further. In a performance of “Hamlet,” for instance, one must follow the plot, and also the spoken word, in order to understand it. But to-day the drama is deserted for the cinema, where one need not exert oneself in any way; the pictures roll off the machine and can be watched quite inertly. And so man's inner activity of thought has gradually waned. But it is precisely this which must be retained. Yet when once the nature of this inner activity is understood, it will be realized that thinking is not merely a matter of stimulus from outside, but a force living in the very being of man.

The kind of thinking current in our modern civilization is only one aspect of this force of thought. If we inwardly observe it, from the outer side as it were, it is revealed as the force that builds up the human being from childhood. Before this can be understood, an inner, plastic force that transforms abstract thought into pictures must come into play. Then, after the necessary efforts have been made, we reach the stage I have Called in my book, the beginning of meditation. At this point we not only begin to lead mere cleverness over into art, but thought is raised into Imagination. We stand in a world of Imagination, knowing that it is not a creation of our own fancy, but an actual, objective world. We are fully conscious that although we do not as yet possess this objective world itself in Imagination, we have indeed a true picture of it. And now the point is to realize that we must get beyond the picture.

Strenuous efforts are necessary if we would master this inner creative thinking that does not merely contain pictures of fantasy, but pictures bearing their own reality within them. Then, however, we must next be able to eliminate the whole of this creative activity and thus accomplish an inwardly moral act. For this indeed constitutes an act of inner morality: when all the efforts described in my book to reach this active thinking in pictures have been made, when all the forces of soul have been applied and the powers of Self strained to their very utmost, we then must be able to eliminate all we have thus attained. In his own being man must have developed the highest fruits of this thinking that has been raised to the level of meditation and then be capable of selflessness. He must be able to eliminate all that has been thus acquired. For to have nothing is not the same as to have gained nothing. If he has made every effort to strengthen the Self by his own will so that finally his consciousness can be emptied-a spiritual world surges into his consciousness and being and he realizes that spiritual forces of cognition are needed for knowledge of the spiritual world. Active picture-thinking may be called Imagination. When the spiritual world pours into the consciousness that has in turn been emptied by dint of tremendous effort, man is approaching the mode of mode of knowledge known as true Inspiration. Having experienced Imagination, we may through an inner denial of self come to comprehend the spiritual world lying behind the two veils of outer Nature and of man.

I will now endeavour to show you how from this point we are led over to the spiritual life of religion.

Let me draw your attention to the following.—Inasmuch as Anthroposophy strives for true Imagination, it leads not only to knowledge or to art that in itself is of the nature of a picture, but to the spiritual reality contained in the picture. Anthroposophy bridges the gulf between knowledge and art in such a way that at a higher level, suited to modern life and the present age, the unity of science and art which humanity has abandoned can enter civilization once again. This unity must be re-attained, for the schism between science and art has disrupted the very being of man. To pass from the state of disruption to unity and inner harmony—it is for this above all that modern man must strive.

Thus far I have spoken of the harmony between science and art. I will now develop the subject further, in connection with religion and morality.

Knowledge that thus draws the creative activity of the universe into itself can flow directly into art, and this same path from knowledge to art can be extended and continued. It was so continued through the powers of the old imaginative knowledge of which I have spoken, which also found the way, without any intervening cleft, into the life of religion. He who applied himself to this kind of knowledge—primitive and instinctive though it was in early humanity—was aware that he acquired it by no external perceptions, for in his thinking and knowing he sensed divine life within him, he felt that spiritual powers were at work in his own creative activity enabling him to raise to greater holiness all that had been impressed into the particular medium of his art. The power born in his soul as he embodied the Divine-Spiritual in outer material substance could then extend into acts wherein he was fully conscious that he, as man, was expressing the will of divine ordnance. He felt himself pervaded by divine creative power, and as the path was found through the fashioning of material substance, art became—by way of ritual—a form of divine worship. Artistic creation was sanctified in the divine office. Art became ritual—the glorification of the Divine—and through the medium of material substance offered sacrifice to the Divine Being in ceremonial and ritual. And as man thus bridged the gulf between Art and Religion there arose a religion in full harmony with knowledge and with art. Albeit primitive and instinctive, this knowledge was none the less a true picture, and as such it could lead human deeds to become, in the acts of ritual, a direct portrayal of the Divine.

In this way the transition from art to religion was made possible. Is it still possible with our present-day mode of knowledge? The ancient clairvoyant perception had revealed to man the spiritual in every creature and process of Nature, and by surrender and devotion to the spirit within the nature-processes, the spiritual laws of the Cosmos passed over and were embodied in ritual and cult.

How do we “know” the world to-day? Once more, to describe is better than criticism, for as the following lectures will show, the development of our present mode of knowledge was a necessity in the history of mankind. To-day I am merely placing certain suggestive thoughts before you. We have gradually lost our spiritual insight into the being and processes of Nature. We take pride in eliminating the spirit in our observation of Nature and finally reach such hypothetical conceptions as attribute the origin of our planet to the movements of a primeval nebula. Mechanical stirrings in this nebula are said to be the origin of all the kingdoms of Nature, even so far as man. And according to these same laws—which govern our whole “objective” mode of thinking, this earth must finally end through a so-called extinction of warmth. All ideas achieved by man, having proceeded from a kind of Fata Morgana, will disappear, until at the end there will remain only the tomb of earthly existence.

If the truth of this line of thought be recognized by science and men are honest and brave enough to face its inevitable consequences, they cannot but admit that all religious and moral life is also a Fata Morgana and must so remain! Yet the human being cannot endure this thought, and so must hold fast to the remnants of olden times, when religion and morality still lived in harmony with knowledge and with art. Religion and morality to-day are not direct creations of man's innermost being. They rest on tradition, and are a heritage from ages when the instinctive life of man was filled with revelation, when God—and the moral world in Him—were alike manifest. Our strivings for knowledge to-day can reveal neither God nor a moral world. Science comes to the end of the animal species and man is cast out. Honest inner thinking can find no bridge over the gulf fixed between knowledge and the religious life.

All true religions have sprung from Inspiration. True, the early form of Inspiration was not so conscious as that to which we must now attain, yet it was there instinctively, and rightly do the religions trace their origin back to it. Such faiths as will no longer recognize living inspiration and revelation from the spirit in the immediate present have to be content with tradition. But such faiths lack all inner vitality, all direct motive-power of religious life. This motive-power and vitality must be re-won, for only so can our social organism be healed.

I have shown how man must regain a knowledge that passes by way of art to Imagination, and thence to Inspiration. If he re-acquires all that flows down from the inspirations of a spiritual world into human consciousness, true religion will once again appear. And then intellectual discussion about the nature of Christ will cease, for through Inspiration it will be known in truth that the Christ was the human bearer of a Divine Being Who had descended from spiritual worlds into earthly existence. Without super-sensible knowledge there can be no understanding of the Christ. If Christianity is again to be deeply rooted in humanity, the path to super-sensible knowledge must be rediscovered. Inspiration must again impart a truly religious life to mankind in order that knowledge—derived no longer merely from the observation of natural laws—may find no abyss dividing it alike from art and religion. Knowledge, art, religion—these three will be in harmony.

Primeval man was convinced of the presence of God in human deeds when he made his˃ art a divine office and when a consciousness of the fire glowing in his heart as Divine Will pervaded the acts of ritual. And when the path from outer objective knowledge to Inspiration is found once again, true religion will flow from Inspiration and modern man will be permeated—as was primeval man—with a God-given morality. In those ancient days man felt: “If I have my divine office, if I share in divine worship, my whole inner being is enriched; God lives not only in the temple but in the whole of my life.”

To make the presence of God imminent in the world—this is true morality. Nature cannot lead man to morality. Only that which lifts him above Nature, filling him with the Divine-Spiritual—this alone can lead man to morality. Through the Intuition which comes to him when he finds his way to the spirit, he can fill his innermost being with a morality that is at once human and divine. The attainment of Inspiration thus rebuilds the bridge once existing instinctively in human civilization between religion and morality. As knowledge leads upwards through art to the heights of super-sensible life, so, through religious worship, spiritual heights are brought down to earthly existence, and we can permeate it with pure, deep-rooted morality—a morality that is an act of conscious experience. Thus will man himself become the individual expression of a moral activity that is an inner motive power. Morality will be a creation of the individual himself, and the last abyss between religion and morality will be bridged. The intuition pervading primitive man as he enacted his ritual will be re-created in a new form, and a morality truly corresponding with modern conditions will arise from the religious life of our day. We need this for the renewal of our civilization. We need it in order that what to-day is mere heritage, mere tradition may spring again into life. This pure, primordial impulse is necessary for our complicated social life that is threatening to spread chaos through the world. We need a harmony between knowledge, art, religion, and morality. The earth-born knowledge which has given us our science of to-day must take on a new form and lead us through Inspiration and the arts to a realization of the super-sensible in the life of religion. Then we shall indeed be able to bring down the super-sensible to the earth again, to experience it in religious life and to transform it into will in social existence. Only when we see the social question as one of morality and religion can we really grapple with it, and this we cannot do until the moral and religious life arises from spiritual knowledge. The revival of spiritual knowledge will enable man to accomplish what he needs—a link between later phases of evolution and its pure, instinctive origin. Then he will know what is needed for the healing of humanity—harmony between science, art, religion, and morality.

Dear attendees!

With your permission, I would like to expand on what I said during the tour of the Goetheanum by saying a few more words about our building today. For many years, our anthroposophical movement held its meetings in ordinary halls, just as they are available today. And even when we were able to present dramatic performances based on the impulses of the anthroposophical worldview, starting in 1909, we initially had to limit ourselves to having these performances in ordinary theaters and under ordinary theater conditions. As our anthroposophical movement grew, a large number of our friends came up with the idea of building a house for anthroposophy. And now I was given the task, so to speak, of creating a home for the anthroposophical movement. I would like to make it clear that the order to build did not come from me, but from friends of the anthroposophical worldview.

The question now arose: how should the construction of such a house be approached? If any other society, an association with any task or objective, builds a house for itself today – and today there are all kinds of associations with all kinds of objectives – then it consults with some architect. They agree on the style in which such a house is to be built: Greek, Gothic, Renaissance or some other style. This is the usual procedure today. If anthroposophy were a movement like all the others, it could have proceeded in this way. But anthroposophy takes into account the great demands of our time for a thorough renewal of our entire culture, and therefore it could not be built in this way.

Furthermore, anthroposophy is not a one-sided body of ideas, but the body of ideas of anthroposophy arises from the whole of human experience, from deep sources of the human being. And that which lives in the ideas of anthroposophy has sprung from a primeval source, just as it did in the case of the older cultures. And just as the words of Anthroposophy can be proclaimed by human mouths and given as teachings, so too can that which flows from the sources from which the Anthroposophical ideas also flow be given for direct artistic contemplation. It is not a matter of translating or applying anthroposophical ideas to art, but rather of another branch growing out of the same source of life from which anthroposophical ideas come, and developing as art. What Anthroposophy has to reveal can be said from a podium in words that signify ideas. But it can also speak from the forms, from plastic forms, from painting, without sculpture or painting becoming symbolism or allegory, but rather within the sphere of the purely artistic. But that means nothing other than: If anthroposophy creates a physical shell for itself in which it is to work, then it must give this physical shell its own style, just as older world views have given their physical shells the corresponding style.

Take the Greek architectural style, as it has partly been realized in the Greek temple: This Greek temple has grown entirely out of the same world view that gave rise to Greek drama, Greek epic poetry, and Greek conceptions of the gods. The Greek felt that in creating his temple, he was building a dwelling for the god. And the god is again nothing other than what older cultural views saw in the human soul that had passed through death in its further development; a certain qualitative relationship between the god and the human soul that has passed through death was felt in older cultural currents. And so, as in ancient times, when people believed that the human soul had passed through death, they built dwellings for it while still on earth, thus constructing houses for the dead, they designed something similar for the older times, as the Greeks then designed in their temples at a later stage. The temple is the dwelling of the god, that is, not of the human soul that has passed through death itself, but of that soul which belongs to a different hierarchy, to a different world order.

Those who can see forms artistically can still feel in the forms that have been created by carrying and other loads for the Greek temple, as in older times the dead, who still remained on earth after death, who, so to speak, as a chthonic deity, as an earthly deity, this house was formed out of this earth; so that a continuation of the gravitational forces of the earth, as they can be felt by man when he somehow looks through his limbs, such a connection of forces as a temple was erected. The Greek temple is only to be regarded as complete when one looks at it in such a way that the statue of the god is inside. Those with a sense of form cannot imagine an empty Greek temple as complete. They can only imagine, they can feel, that this shell contains the statue of Athena, Zeus, Apollo and so on.

Let's skip some of the art historical development and look at the Gothic building. If you feel the Gothic building with its forms, with its peculiar windows that let in the light in a unique way, you actually always feel that when you enter the empty Gothic cathedral, it is not a totality, nothing complete: the Gothic cathedral is only complete when the community is inside, whose souls resonate in harmony in their effects. A Greek temple is the wrapping of the god who dwells on earth through his statue in the people; a Gothic cathedral is in all its forms that which encloses the community in harmony and with thoughts directed towards the eternal.

Greek world view, world view that created form in the Gothic, are dead worlds for humanity. Only the degenerate forces of decline that originated from them can still live today. We need a new culture, but one that is not only expressed in a one-sided way in knowledge and ideas, but one that can also express itself in a new art. And so the development of art history also points to the necessity of a building style for anthroposophy, which wants to bring a new form of culture.

The way in which Anthroposophy is to be lived is based on the idea that a higher being, which is in fact the human being himself, speaks to the person who lives in the ordinary life that unfolds between birth and death. By feeling this, the two-dome structure presented itself to me as the necessary building envelope for this basic impulse of the anthroposophical world view. In the small dome, what is inwardly large and wide is, as it were, physically compressed; in the large dome, what is inwardly less wide, what inwardly belongs to the life we lead between birth and death, is spatially expanded.

And when a person enters this structure in the sense of such an anthroposophical worldview, they must find their own being. This is based on what has just been said. And while he is inside, he must feel the structure in such a way that he, as a human being, as a microcosm, does not feel constrained by the structure, but is externally connected to the universe, to the macrocosm, through the entire structure. But if you look at the structure from the outside, you must have the feeling: Something is going on in there that brings something unearthly, something extraterrestrial, to earthly existence. Something is going on in there that is hidden in the earthly itself. So it must be possible to look at the building in terms of its overall form and also in terms of the sculptural extensions, which, as I said over there, must represent organic structure.

I ask you to view the slides from this perspective, which I will now take the liberty of showing you. Of course, they show nothing other than what you have already seen; they are only intended to conclusively present what can be seen of the building. We will start by showing an exterior view looking towards the west portal.

The building seen from a little further away (Fig. 6), looking towards the west portal.

The next picture (Fig. 7): looking more towards the south portal, the west and south portals seen more together.

Here (Fig. 2) is a view of the building from the east, with a simultaneous view of the building that contains the lighting and heating units for the building. This boiler house is, of course, particularly controversial in its form because it looks different from the buildings we are accustomed to seeing today. And this boiler house is not built according to any principle other than everything that has been built here at all. The original idea was to have a number of heating and lighting systems. That is, in a sense, the nut. And now, as with the nut, only the nutshell can arise as a covering from an inner, logical necessity, and that, when one has such a utilitarian building, one cannot proceed otherwise than that one perceives everything that must be inside this structure in its essence and then makes a shell that corresponds to this content in the same way that the nutshell corresponds to the nut.

Of course, this can only be felt; it cannot be discussed. Another person may feel differently. But if one criticizes the ground, I would like to ask the people who do so to consider what would be there if no attempt had been made – even if it was not immediately successful at the first attempt – to find the right covering for heating and lighting, but had stuck with the current one, then there might be a red chimney here. Perhaps the philistines would have liked it more, but art would have been less satisfied.

The next picture (Fig. 4) will show a view from a greater distance of the north-west portal.

The next picture (Fig. 1) is supposed to show the building from an even greater distance.

It was always my intention, despite the fact that the building was not originally intended for here, but in the middle of houses, to design it here so that it fits into the overall configuration of the landscape, the Jura landscape. I cannot, while trying to avoid any illusion, but say otherwise than that I think the building is already growing out of the plastic forms of the landscape.

Here I take the liberty of showing you the ground plan (Fig. 20), which expresses exactly what I have just said. The point was to feel through the effect, I would like to say, of one side of the human being on the other, in the ground plan and in the whole form of the building.

What now follows is a cross-section through the entire structure (Fig. 21).

Now I will try to show this cross-section; I will try to show what can be built on this cross-section by showing you the model that I originally made (Fig. 22). This is the original model of the construction, the large dome, the small dome, as I made it here from the fall of 1913. It is largely made of wax, insofar as one is dealing with plastic forms, and partly of wood.

The next one will show a side wing, seen from the side (Fig. 13), where you can particularly see the metamorphosis that the motif, which can be seen above the west portal, can undergo in a smaller form. The forms become quite different on the outside, but according to the idea, they are the same on the inside.

The next motif is depicted in the piece above the south portal, which is above the southern entrance door (Fig. 11): the same motif as on the west portal, but in a simpler, more primitive metamorphosis. Next, we present part of the room that one enters when going down into the concrete sub-room, which is intended for depositing the clothes (Fig. 23). One goes up there via the stairs. In any case, all the honored attendees have become aware of the underlying feelings behind the design of this room.

The staircase with its surroundings (Fig. 24), which we can pass over particularly quickly because they are only intended for recapitulation. The next thing I bring is a column from the interior, which one enters when one has gone up the stairs, that is, before one enters the main room (Fig. 27). Everything that is worked here is already worked in wood.

Here I present the organ motif, but not as you see it now, but as it was as a model (Fig. 30). It is a photograph of the organ motif model and you can see it here (Fig. 29) in an unfinished state at the same time. I said in the description over in the building that an attempt was made to design the whole sculpture around the organ so that the organ does not appear to be inserted into the space, but rather to have grown out of it. Here you can see the work of this organ sculpture still half-finished. First, I had to work out the general shape, and only later did I adapt the general forms to fit exactly with what emerged as the lines through the ends of the organ pipes upwards.

We now see in the next picture [the capital of the first column in the west] (Fig. 33), and I ask you to pay attention to the next three pictures. They are presented here to show two consecutive capitals. You should note that a single capital is actually not something that can be viewed on its own. The thing on which everything is based is the way in which each subsequent capital emerges from a preceding one. Therefore, I show two capitals emerging from each other [of the second and third columns] (Figs. 36, 38), and in between the two together [with the architrave above] (Fig. 37), thus each individual one in succession and in between the two together.

We see here the fourth capital (Fig. 40). Now the two capitals in succession, the fourth and fifth (Fig. 41). Now the fifth alone (Fig. 42).

Likewise, I will now show two bases that have been formed one after the other, again the individual one is not to be understood in isolation, but only as emerging from what has gone before.

The first pedestal, the fifth (Fig. 52).

Now the sixth (Fig. 53). The next picture will show the motif that arises when we look east, standing in the building and see what is in the east (Fig. 57).

A column order: This is the view after the organ motif when standing in the building, looking from east to west (Fig. 29).

Here you can see the motif carved into the wood above the curtain slit (Fig. 55). The curtain is open, we look into the small domed room, and below we can also see the carving of the small domed room, only a little indistinctly, and above it the painting.

The next one shows the motif that was carved in the small domed room: as a kind of synthetic conclusion of the individual forms (Fig. 67). If you look from the auditorium into the small domed room, you will see, immediately below the painted Christ-like figure, with Lucifer above him and Ahriman below him, a wood carving that combines all the forms that are otherwise distributed throughout the building – but initially, I would like to say, only in an organic, not yet spiritualized way.

Psychically, it is only summarized in the Christ group (Fig. 93), which is a nine-meter-high wooden group that will stand in the far east and show the representative of humanity in the middle, who can be understood as the Christ – but must be understood in the feeling – [and] has the Luciferic principle above him and the Ahrimanic principle below him. Psychically, this will synthesize all the individual forms.

I will now describe some of the motifs in the small cupola painting.

First, you see the child, depicted in an orange tone (Fig. 72), in front of the blue figure, which looks like a fist (Fig. 70), holding a tablet with the “I” – the only word that will be found in the entire structure, for very specific reasons. I would be pleased, ladies and gentlemen, if you would feel something absurd from these pictures, which, after all, could only be viewed in black and white, because here the painting is done in such a way that everything is brought out in color. You can actually only give something in the reproduction in which, according to perception, something must be missing, something absurd. Perhaps one should see here that something quite unfinished, something absurd stands before one, and then one should give oneself the answer: it must actually be so, because the thing has meaning only in color. Whoever understands the inner meaning of the colored world will thoroughly grasp that even the figurative can, to a certain degree, be created entirely out of color. Those who see the blue above in the neighborhood of the other colors will perceive it purely as a possible creation from the color that a kind of Faust figure appears here. The next picture (Fig. 71) shows Death below Faust. The modern discerning person is placed between Death, the end of life, and Birth, the other end of life, which has been depicted in the child.

The next image (Fig. 78): a kind of figure that resembles an Egyptian initiate.

The inspirers hovering above him, initiating world powers (Fig. 77). From the way the treatment is presented, it will be clear that I may say: Although Figural is distinguished here from the colored, what I have said about the creative in color still applies.

Here you can see a detail, a kind of ahriman head (Fig. 81). It is only conceivable to paint from the color used in the dome above: a peculiar brown-yellow.

Here together: Ahriman head and Lucifer head (Fig. 79). They are only truly contrasted in color. The lower one shows what is inspired by Lucifer and Ahriman when they are grasped in their objectivity, when one is not grasped by them oneself, which is then particularly effective in man or can become so because man is of a special kind, who stands to the child as indicated in the lower figure.

The next picture shows Lucifer's head on its own (Fig. 80), that is, painted; in sculpture, it looks different.

Here (Fig. 82) you see the [Germanic] man with the child, who has Ahriman and Lucifer above him, as shown earlier.

Here (Fig. 87) you can see Lucifer in a reddish-yellow painting above the representative of humanity in the central image of the small dome.

The next image (Fig. 88) then represents Ahriman under the representative of humanity – Ahriman, who is embraced with his love rays as if by a crushing lightning bolt.

This is the painted Representative of Man, that is, the head of it (Fig. 90). This (Fig. 91) represents my model as it is initially worked in profile view of the Representative of Man; while what was shown earlier is a painting, this here is a sculpture. This is the first model of the Representative of Humanity in sculpture, the Representative of Humanity who can be felt as Christ.

The next part will show the plastic group (Fig. 98). At the top left, this elemental being will show itself, an elemental being that has, to a certain extent, grown out of the forces of the rock. Below, you can see Lucifer striving upwards. The elemental being has grown out of the forces of the rock here in the wood group, whereby it becomes clear how one first dared here to work out ways of overcoming mere composition through organic design by means of asymmetry work out ways of overcoming mere composition through organic design, thus working in asymmetry. What is important here is that the form is worked out precisely from the place, with all its asymmetries, from the place where this being is located in the nine-meter-high group.

I will now show you my first Ahriman model (Fig. 99), which was created in 1915 in wax. The other Ahriman heads here are modeled after this Ahriman head. I would just like to note: This is what a person would look like if he had no heart at all and only reason. For the Ahrimanic represents the super-intellectual, the super-rational in man.

I will now show two views of the boiler house, the boiler and lighting house (Figs. 106, 107).

Now we come to the glass house below, in which you have held many a meeting here (Fig. 103). You can see the double-dome structure in a different form, a metamorphosis of the large building, metamorphosed in such a way that the two domes have to be the same size and do not adjoin each other, but are separate. I would like to illustrate the fact that everything about these buildings is individualized down to the last detail by showing you the gate of this glass house (Fig. 104), where you will see the individualization down to the stairs and the woodcarving.

Now another picture (Fig. 110 or 112), which should show how what is intended by scratching out the colored glass pane, what is created from the feel of the material, so that it can only appear in the color in question. I ask you to look at this and see for yourself that if this appears uncolored, it is hideous.

In recapitulating these things, I believe I have once again been able to point out how anthroposophy does not want to be just a science, but wants to be something that can act creatively in culture, that can speak in words, but that can also reveal itself in artistic forms. And now I just want to add at this point that perhaps it has emerged to you from what we have seen here in the building, what you have heard here in the building, what is intended and how it is connected with the signs of the times. The project that has come to fruition could only be realized through the great willingness of some of our members to make sacrifices; but the exchange rate situation in the world and the poverty of the Mediterranean countries have led us to a point where I I had to say, which was also spread by a small brochure that was sent to members: If we do not receive active help from the world, we will not be able to complete the building, but the building will have to come to a halt. If our members apply themselves with the same zeal to the completion of the building as they did to the founding of the World School Association, which is intimately connected with the building idea of Dornach, then we will soon be able to see a torso in the fall, which can be seen as a torso.

Since your time is limited, in particular the time of some of our esteemed visitors, I will not add anything further to what has been said, but ask you to come over to the building, where I will then take the liberty of saying a few closing words for this summer event.

Since today must be our last session, we will be concerned with filling out and expanding upon what has been said; so you must consider this rather like a final clearance at a rummage sale, where what has been left is finally brought out.

First, I would like most of all to say one must keep in mind that the speaker is in an essentially different position than he who gives something he has written to a reader. The speaker must be very aware that he does not have a reader before him, but rather a listener. The listener is not in a position to go back and re-read a sentence he has not understood. The reader, of course, can do this, and this must be kept in mind. This situation can be met by presenting through repetition what is considered important, even indispensable, for a grasp of the whole. Naturally, care must be taken that such repetitions are varied, that the most important things are put forth in varied formulations while, at the same time, this variety of re-phrasings does not bore the listener who has a gift for comprehension. The speaker will have to see to it that the different ways he phrases one and the same thing have, as it were, a sort of artistic character.

The artistic aspect of speaking is, in general, something that must be kept clearly in mind, the more the subject matter is concerned with logic, life-experience, and other powers of understanding. The more the speaker is appealing to the understanding through strenuous thinking, the more he must proceed artistically—through repetition, composition, and many other things which will be mentioned today. You must remember that the artistic has its own means of facilitating understanding. Take, for example, repetition, which can work in such a way that it forms a sort of facilitation for the listener. Differently phrased repetitions give the listener occasion to give up rigidly holding himself to one or another phrase and to hear what lies between them. In this way his comprehension is freed, giving him the feeling of release, and that aids understanding to an extraordinary degree.

However, not only should different means of artistically structuring the speech be applied, but also different ways of executing it. For example, take the speaker who, in seeking the right word for something, brings in a question in such a way that he actually speaks the question amidst the usual flow of statements. What does it mean to address one's listeners with a question? Questions which are listened to actually work mainly on the listener's inhalation. The listener lives during his listening in a breathing-in, breathing-out, breathing-in, breathing-out. That is not only important for speaking, it is also most important for listening. If the lecturer brings up a question the listener's exhalation can, as it were, remain unused. Listening is diverted into inhalation on hearing a question. This is not contradicted by a situation when the listener may be breathing out on hearing a question. Listening takes place not only directly but indirectly, so that a sentence which falls during an exhalation—if it is a question—is really only rightly perceived, rightly taken in, during the subsequent inhalation. In short, inhalation is essentially connected with hearing a content in question form. However, because of the fact that inhalation is engaged by a question being thrown out, the whole process of listening is internalized. What is said goes somewhat more deeply into the soul than if one listens merely to an assertion.

When a person hears a straight assertion his actual tendency is to engage neither his inhalation nor his exhalation. The assertion may sink in a little, but it doesn't actually even engage the sense organs much.

Lengthy assertions concerning logical matters are, on the whole, unfortunate within the spoken lecture. Whoever would lecture as if he were merely giving a reasoned argument has gotten hold of a great instrument—to put his listeners to sleep; for such a logical development has the disadvantage that it removes the understanding from the organ of hearing. One doesn't listen properly to logic. Furthermore, it doesn't really form the breath; it doesn't set it going in varied waves. The breath remains essentially in its most neutral state when a logical assertion is listened to, thus one goes to sleep with it. This is a wholly organic process. Logical assertions are perforce impersonal—but that takes its toll.

Thus, one who wants to develop into a speaker must take care whenever possible not to speak in logical formulae but in figures of speech, while remaining logical. To these figures of speech belongs the question. Also belonging to figures of speech is the ploy of occasionally saying the opposite of what one really wants to say. This has to be said in such a way that the listener knows he is to understand the opposite. Thus, let us say, the speaker says straight out, and even in an assertive tone: Kully is stupid. Under certain circumstances that could prove to be not a very good turn of phrase. But it could be a good formulation if someone said: I don't believe there is anyone sitting here who presumes that Kully is clever! There you have spoken a phrase that is opposite of the truth. But, naturally, you have added something so that you could formulate the opposite to the assertive statement. Thus, by proceeding in this way, and with inner feeling, the speech will be able to stand on its own two feet.

I have just said that the speech will be able to stand on its own feet. This is an image. Philistines can say that a speech has no feet. But a speech does have feet!As an example one need only recall that Goethe, in advanced age, when he had to speak while fatigued, liked to walk around the room. Speech is basically the expression of the whole man—thus it has feet! And to surprise the listener with something about which he is unfamiliar and which, if he is to grasp it, he must go counter to what he is familiar with—that is extremely important in a lecture.

Also belonging to the feeling-logic of the speech is the fact that one does not talk continually in the same tone of voice. To go on in the same tone, you know, puts the listener to sleep. Each heightening of the tone is actually a gentle nightmare; thus the listener is somewhat shaken by it. Every relative sinking of tone is really a gentle fainting, so that it is necessary for the listener to fight against it. Through modulating the tone of speech one gives occasion for the listener to participate, and that is extraordinarily important for the speaker.

But it is also especially important now and then to appeal somewhat to the ear of the listener. If he is too immersed in himself while listening, at times he won't follow certain passages. He begins to reflect within himself. It is a great misfortune for the lecturer when his listeners begin to ponder within themselves. They miss something that is being said, and when—after a time—they again begin to hear, they just can't keep up. Thus at times you must take the listener by the ear, and you do that by applying unusual syntax and sequences of phrasing. The question, of course, gives a different placing of subject and predicate than one is used to, but you ought to have on hand a variety of other ways of changing the word order. You should speak some sentences in such a way that what you have at the beginning is a verb or some other part of speech which is not usually there. Where something unusual happens, the listener again pays attention, and what is most noteworthy is that he not only pays attention to the sentence concerned but also to the one that follows. And if you have to do with listeners who are unusually docile, you will find that they will even listen to the second sentence if you interlace your word-order a bit. As a lecturer, you must pay attention to this inner lawfulness. You will learn these things best if, in your listening, you will direct your attention to how really good speakers use such things. Such techniques are what lead essentially to the pictorial quality of a speech.

In connection with the formal aspect of speaking, you could learn a great deal from the Jesuits. They are very well trained. First, they use the components of a speech well. They work not only on intensification and relaxation but, above all, on the image. I must continually refer to a striking Jesuit speech I once heard in Vienna, where I had been led by someone to the Jesuit church and where one of the most famous Jesuit Fathers was preaching. He preached on the Easter Confessional, and I will share the essential part of his sermon with you. He said: "Dear Christians! There are apostates from God who assert that the Easter Confessional was instituted by the Pope, by the Roman Pope; that it does not derive from God but rather from the Roman Pope. Dear Christians! Whoever would believe that can learn something from what I am going to say: Imagine in front of you, dear Christians, there stands a cannon. Beside the cannon there stands a cannonier. The cannonier has a match in his hand ready to light the fuse. The cannon is loaded. Behind the cannonier is the commanding officer. When the officer commands, 'Fire,' the cannonier lights the fuse. The cannon goes off. Would any of you now say that this cannonier, who obeyed the command of his superior, invented the powder? None of you, dear Christians, would say that! Look now, such a cannonier was the Roman Pope, who waited for the command from above before ordering the Easter Confessional. Thus, no one will say the Pope invented the Easter Confessional; as little as the cannonier invented the gunpowder. He only carries out the commandments from above." All the listeners were crushed, convinced!

Obviously, the man knew the situation and the state of mind of the people. But that is something that is an indispensable precondition for a good speech and has already been characterized in this study. He said something which, as an image, fell completely outside the train of thought, and yet the listeners completed the course of the argument without feeling that the man spoke subjectively. I have also called to your attention the dictum by Bismarck about politicians steering by the wind, an image he took from those with whom he was debating, but which nevertheless frees one from the strictness of the chain of thought under discussion.

These sorts of things, if they are rightly felt, are those artistic means which completely replace what a lecture does not need, namely, sheer logic. Logic is for thought, not for speaking; I mean for the form of speech, not the way of expression. Naturally, the illogical may not be in it. But a speech cannot be put together as one combines a train of thought. You will find that something may be most acute and appropriate in a debate and yet really have no lasting effect. What does have a lasting effect in a speech is an image which grabs, that is, which stands at some distance from the meaning, so that the speaker who uses the image has become free from slavish dependence on the pure thought-sense.

Such things lead to the recognition of how far a speech can be enhanced through humor. A deeply serious speech can be elevated by a humor which, so to say, has barbs. It is just as I have said: if you wish to forcibly pour will into the listeners, they get angry. The right way to apply the will is for the speech itself to develop images which are, so to speak, inner realities. The speech itself should be the reality. You can perhaps grasp what I want to say if I tell you of two debates. The second is not a pure debate, but it still can be instructive for the use of images in a speech which wishes to characterize something.

Notice that those orations that are intended to be witty often acquire a completely subjective coloring. The German Parliament had for some time, in one of its members by the name of Meyer, just such a witty debater. For example, at one time the famous—or infamous—“Lex Heinze” was advocated in this particular Parliament. I believe that the man who gave the speech for the defense was the minister; and he always spoke, as the defender and as one belonging to the Conservative Party, of “das Lex Heinze.” He always said “das Lex Heinze.” Now, no doubt, such a thing can pass. But it was in the nature of the Liberal Party, of which the joker, Representative Meyer, was a member, that it took just such matters seriously. So later on in the debate Meyer asked leave to speak and said somewhat as follows: “The Lord Minister has defended die Lex Heinze¹ and has constantly said ‘das Lex Heinze.’ I didn't know what he was really talking about. I have gone all around asking what ‘das Lex’ is. No one has been able to enlighten me. I took the dictionary and looked—and found nothing. I was about to come here and ask the Minister, when it suddenly struck me to consult a Latin Grammar. There I found it, there stood the statement: 'What one cannot decline must be considered a neuter!”

To be sure, for an immediate laugh it is very good, this coarse wit. But it still has no barbs, it doesn't ignite deeply, because with such a ploy there is aroused subtly and unconsciously in the listener a pity for the afflicted one. This kind of wit is too subjective, it comes more out of a love of sarcasm than out of the thing itself.

Over against this I have always found the following to be a striking image: He who was later to become Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was, as Crown Prince, a very witty man. His father, King Friedrich Wilhelm III, had a minister who was very special to him, whose name was von Klewiz.² Now the Crown Prince could not bear von Klewiz. Once, at a court ball, the Crown Prince spoke to Klewiz and said: Your Excellency, I would like to put to you a riddle today:

The first is the fruit from the field
The second is something which,
when one hears it, one gets a light shock;
And the whole is a public calamity!

Von Klewiz turned red from ear to ear, bowed, and handed in his resignation after the ball. The King called him and said: What happened to you? I can't spare you, my dear Klewiz!—Yes, but, Your Royal Highness, the Crown Prince said something to me yesterday which made it impossible for me to remain in office.—But that is not possible! The dear Crown Prince would not say such a thing, that I can't believe!—Yes, but it is so, Your Majesty.—What has the Crown Prince said?—He said to me: The first is a fruit from the field; the second is something which, if one hears it, one gets something like a light shock; the whole is a public calamity! There is no doubt, Royal Highness, that the Crown Prince meant me.—Indeed, remarkable thing, dear Klewiz. But we will have the Crown Prince come and we will hear how the matter stands.

The Crown Prince was called.—Dear One, yesterday evening you are supposed to have said something very offensive to my indispensible minister, His Excellency, von Klewiz.—The Crown Prince said: Your Majesty, I am unable to remember. If it had been something serious I would surely be able to remember it.—It does seem to have been something serious, though.—Oh! Yes, yes, I remember. I said to His Excellency that I wished to put a riddle to him: The first syllable is a fruit of the field, the second syllable indicates something which, if one perceives it, one gets something like a slight shock; the whole is a public calamity. I don't think that it is a matter of my having offended His Excellency so much as that His Excellency could not solve the riddle. I recall that His Excellency simply could not solve the riddle!—The King said: Indeed, what is the riddle's solution?—Here, then: The first syllable is a fruit of the field: hay (Heu); the second syllable, where one gets a light shock, is “fear” (Schreck); the whole is: grasshopper (Heu-schreck), that is, a public calamity (or nuisance), Your Majesty.

Now why do I say that? I say it on the grounds that no one who tells such a thing, no one who moulds his phrases or figures of speech in such a form, has need of following the matter through to its end; for no person expects in telling it that he has to explain the tableau further, but rather expects each to draw for himself the pictorial idea. And it is good in a speech to occasionally work it so that something is left over for the listener. There is nothing left over when one ridicules someone; the gap is perfectly filled up.

It is a matter of heightening the vividness so that the listener can really get the feeling that he can act on something, can take it further. Naturally, it is necessary that one leaves the needed pauses in his speech. These pauses must be there.

Now along this line we could say an extraordinary amount about the form, about the structure, of a speech. For usually it is believed that men listen with their ears alone; but the fact that some, when they especially want to grasp something, open their mouths while listening, already speaks against this. They would not do this if they listened with their ears alone. We listen with our speech organs much more than is usually thought. We always, as it were, snap up the speech of the speaker with our speech organ; and the etheric body always speaks along with, even makes eurythmy along with, the listening—and, in fact, the movements correspond exactly to eurythmy movements. Only people don't usually know them unless they have studied eurythmy.

It is true that everything we hear from inanimate bodies is heard more from outside with the ear, but the speech of men is really heard in such a way that one heeds what beats on the ear from within. That is a fact which very few people know. Very few know what a great difference exists between hearing, say, the sound of church bells or a symphony, and listening to human speech. With human speech, it is really the innermost part of the speaking that is heard. The rest is much more merely an accompanying phenomenon than is the case with the hearing of something inanimate. Thus, I have said all that I did about one's own listening so that the speaker will actually formulate his speech as he would criticize it if he were listening to it. I mean that the formulation comes from the same power, out of the same impulse, as does the criticism if one is doing the listening.

It is of some importance that the persons who make it their task to do something directly for the threefolding of the social organism—or something similar to this—take care that what they have to say to an audience is done, in a certain way, artistically. For basically, one speaks today—I have already indicated this—to rather deaf ears, if one speaks before the usual public about the threefolding of the social organism. And, I would like to say, that in a sense one will have to be fully immersed in the topic, especially with feeling and sensitivity, if one wants to have any success at all. That is not to suggest that it is necessary to study the secrets of success—that is certainly not necessary—and to adapt oneself in trivial ways to what the listener wants to hear. That is certainly not what should be striven for. What one must strive for is a genuine knowledge of the events of the time. And, you see, such a firm grounding in the events of the time, an arousal of the really deeper interest for the events of the time, can only be evoked today by Anthroposophy. For these and other reasons, whoever wants to speak effectively about threefolding must be at least inwardly permeated with the conviction that for the world to understand threefold, it is also necessary to bring Anthroposophy to the world.

Admittedly, since the very first efforts toward the realization of the threefold social order, there have been, on the one hand, those who are apparently interested in the threefold social order but not in Anthroposophy; while on the other hand, those interested in Anthroposophy but caring little for the threefold social order. In the long run, however, such a separation is not feasible if anything of consequence is to be brought about.

This is especially true in Switzerland, some of the reasons for which having already been mentioned. The speaker must have a strong underlying conviction that a threefold social order cannot exist without Anthroposophy as its foundation. Of course, one can make use of the fact that some persons want to accept threefolding and reject Anthroposophy; but one should absolutely know—and he who knows will be able to find the right words, for he will know that without the knowledge of at least the fundamentals of Anthroposophy there can be no threefold organization.

For what are we attempting to organize in a threefold way? Imagine a country where the govern ment has complete control of the schools on the one hand and the economy on the other, so that the area of human rights falls between the two. In such a country it would be very unlikely that a threefold organization could be achieved. If the school system were made independent of the government, the election of a school monarch or school minister would probably shortly follow, transforming within the shortest time the independent cultural life into a form of government!

Such matters cannot be manipulated by formulas; they must be rooted in the whole of human life. First we must actually have an independent cultural life and participate in it before we can assign it its own sphere of activity within society. Only when that life is carried on in the spirit of Anthroposophy—as exemplified by the Waldorf school in Stuttgart—can one speak of the beginnings of an independent cultural sector. The Waldorf school has no head, no lesson plans, nor anything else of the kind; but life is there, and life dictates what is to be done.

I am entirely convinced that on this topic of the ideal independent school system any number of persons, be it three, seven, 12, 13 or 15, could get together and think up the most beautiful thoughts to formulate a program: firstly, secondly, thirdly—many points. These programs could be such that nothing more beautiful could be imagined. The people who figured out these programs need not be of superior intelligence. They could, for example, be average politicians, not even that, they could be barroom politicians. They could discover 30, 40 points, fulfilling all the highest ideals for the most perfect schools, but they wouldn't be able to do anything with it! It is superfluous to set up programs and statutes no one can work with. One can work with a group of teachers only on the basis of what one has at hand—not on the basis of statutes—doing the best one can in the most living way.

An independent cultural life must be a real life of the spirit. Today, when people speak of the spiritual life, they mean ideas; they speak only of ideas.

Consequently, since Anthroposophy exists for the purpose of calling forth in people the feeling for a genuine life of the spirit, it is indispensable when the demand arises for a threefold social organism. Accordingly, the two should go together: furtherance of Anthroposophy and furtherance of the threefold social order.

But people, especially today, are tired in mind and soul. They actually want to avoid coming to original thoughts and feelings, interested only in maintaining traditions. They want to be sheltered. They don't want to turn to Anthroposophy, because they don't want to stir their souls into activity; instead, they flock in great numbers—especially the intellectuals—to the Roman Catholic Church, where no effort is required of them. The work is on the part of the bishop or priest, who guides the soul through death. Just think how deep-rooted it is in today's humanity: parents have a son whom they love; therefore they want his life to be secure. Let him work for the government: then he is bound to be well looked after; then he doesn't have to face the battle of life by himself. He will work as long as he can, then go on to pensioned retirement—secure even beyond his working days. How grateful we should be to the government for taking such good care of our children!

Neither are people so fond of an independently striving soul. The soul is to be taken care of until death by the church, just as work is provided by the government. And just as the power of the government provides the physical man with a pension, so the church is expected to provide the soul with a pension when a man dies, is expected to provide for it after death—that is something that lies deeply in present-day man, in everyone today. Just to be polite I will add that this is true for the daughters as well as the sons, for they would rather be married to those who are thus “secure,” who are provided for in this way. Such seems to be the obsession of humanity: not to build upon oneself, but to have some mystical power somewhere upon which to build. The government, as it exists today, is an example of such a mystical power. Or is there not much obscurity in the government? I suspect much more obscurity than in even the worst mystic.

We must have a sense for these things as we commit ourselves to the tasks to which these lectures are addressed. This course was primarily confined to the formalities of the art of lecturing, but the important thing is the enthusiasm that lives in your hearts, the devotion to the necessity of that effectiveness which can emanate from the Goetheanum in Dornach. And to the degree that this inner conviction grows in you, it will become a convincing power not only for you but for others as well. For what do we need today? Not a mere doctrine; however good it could be, it could just get moldy in libraries, it could be formulated—here or there—by a "preacher in the desert," unless we see to it that the impulse for a threefold social order finds entrance, with minimal delay, to as many minds as possible. Then practical application of that impulse will follow by itself.

But we need to broaden the range of our efforts. A weekly publication such as the Goetheanum will have to be distributed as widely as possible in Switzerland. That is only one of many requirements, in view of the fact that the basic essentials of Anthroposophy must be acquired ever anew; but a weekly of this type will have to find its place on the world scene and work in widespread areas for the introduction and application of the threefold social order. The experience of the way in which the Goetheanum publication thus works will be essential to anyone attempting to assist in the realization of such an order in the social organism.

What we need above all is energy, courage, insight, and interest in world events on a broader scale! Let us not isolate ourselves from the world, not get entangled in narrow interests, but be interested in everything that goes on all over the world. That will give wings to our words and make us true coworkers in the field we have chosen.

In this light were these lectures given; and when you go out to continue your work, you can be assured that the thoughts of the lecturer will accompany you. May such cooperation strengthen the impulse that should inspire our work, if that work, especially in Switzerland, is to be carried on in the right way.

And so I wish you luck, sending you out not into darkness but into where light and open air can enter into the development of humanity—from which you will doubly benefit, as you yourselves are the ones who are to bring this light and openness into the world.

• 1. The proper form was apparently “die,” implying feminine gender. “Das” implies neuter gender.
• 2. The two syllables of the name are identical in sound with Klee (clover) and Witz (joke).

It will be relatively easy—I am saying relatively, of course—for a person to take up more or less theoretically what we understand by the spiritual-scientific world outlook, or anthroposophy. But it will not be easy to fill our whole being and life itself with the impulses coming from spiritual science. To absorb anthroposophy theoretically, so that you know that the human being consists of a physical body, an etheric body, an astral body and so on, in the same way as you know that one or another tone has so-and-so many vibrations, or that oxygen combines with hydrogen to make water, is the way we have grown accustomed to learning things through the natural-scientific approach mankind has gradually acquired over the last few centuries.

We are less accustomed, however, to allowing our feelings and attitude of mind to be affected by the kind of knowledge spiritual science has to offer. Yet the kind of approach we must have to spiritual science is fundamentally opposite to the approach we must have to natural science. Emphasis is often laid on the fact that everyone feels that science is dry and stops us having a warm contact with life and its happenings; that dry science has something cold and unfeeling about it and robs things of their dewy freshness. Yet one could say that to a certain extent this has to be so with ordinary science. For there is an enormous difference between the impression made on us by a wonderful cloud formation in the evening or morning sky and the bare reports an astronomer or a meteorologist gives us. There is such abundant richness in the natural world around us that its effect on us is to warm us through and through whereas, in comparison, science, with its concepts and ideas, appears dull and dry, cold, lifeless and loveless. Yet there is every justification to feel this way as far as external, natural-scientific knowledge is concerned.

There are good reasons why external, natural-scientific knowledge has to be like this, but spiritual science is not this kind of knowledge. On the contrary it ought to bring us nearer and nearer to the living abundance and warmth of the outside world and of the world altogether. But this means learning to bring certain impulses to life in us that a person of today hardly possesses at all. A present-day person expects it to be in the nature of what he calls science that it has a cold and sobering effect on him, like the character of Wagner in Goethe's Faust. He expects that if he assimilates science the riddles of nature will be solved, and then he will know how everything is constituted and be perfectly satisfied with what he knows.

Science even makes some people shudder nowadays, for a quite specific reason. They maintain that what made life so rich and fresh in the past, was the fact that man had not solved every riddle and could still wonder about the unsolved ones. And then science comes along, they say, and solves the riddles of nature one after the other. And they imagine how boring life will be in the future when science will have solved all the mysteries and there will be no further possibility of wondering about anything, or having any feelings of an unscientific kind. What terrible desolation would befall mankind; we have every reason to be horrified at the prospect.

But spiritual science can kindle different feelings than these, and although those feelings would be less in keeping with modern times than the solving of riddles, they show how awakening and life-giving spiritual science can be. If we absorb anthroposophy in the right way—not just take notes of what is being said, so that we can make use of them like they do in ordinary science, and perhaps even do a neat diagram, so that we can take it all in at a glance like physics—if we do not do it so much that way, but let what anthroposophy has to say reach our hearts and we unite with it, we shall notice that it comes to life in us and grows, it awakens our independence and initiative and becomes like a new living being within us, that is forever showing new aspects. To approach external nature with our souls thus filled with anthroposophy, is to find more riddles in nature and not less. Everything grows even more puzzling, which broadens instead of impoverishing our life of feeling; you could say that spiritual science makes the world more mysterious.

Of course the world becomes a desolate place when the physicist says to you ‘You see the sunrise . . . .’ and then, showing us a diagram, he tells us which particular refractions are taking place in the rays of light so that the glow of dawn appears. This is certainly horrible, not from the point of view of human reason, but for the human heart and an understanding connected with the heart.

It is quite different when spiritual science tells us, for example, When you see the sunrise or hear one or another piece of music, it must feel to you as though the Elohim were sending their punishing wrath into the world. Then we become aware of the mysterious living weaving of the Elohim behind the glow of dawn. To know the name of the Elohim and to be able to give them a place in the ninefold diagram we have drawn in our notebook, is not knowing anything about the Elohim. But out of the living feeling we can have in looking at the sunrise will come a perception of movement and life in rich abundance, just as we know that when we look at a human being, any amount of conceptual knowledge about him will not tell us the whole of his nature, nor fathom the universal life within him. Likewise, we shall become aware that the dawn is revealing something to us of the unfathomable life of the cosmos.

Spiritual-scientific knowledge makes life more enigmatic and mysterious in a way that kindles richer feelings within us. And it is a fundamental feeling of this kind our souls can acquire, when we bring spiritual science to life within us and when we try to make ourselves at home in the kind of ideas I have just indicated. Then we shall never be tempted to complain that spiritual science only appeals to our heads and does not take hold of our whole being. We just need to be patient until the message of spiritual science becomes a living being within us and forms itself anew, filling us not only with its light but also with its warmth. Then it will take hold of our hearts and our whole being and we shall feel the richer for it, whereas, if we take up spiritual science in the same way as ordinary science, we are bound to feel the poorer.

Yet, on the other hand, it is quite natural that, to begin with, anthroposophy seems to many people to lead to an impoverishment, because they have not yet been able to find the inner life of the message of anthroposophy that can reach their heart, and because anthroposophy does not yet have the same effect on them as, for instance, the warm words of a fellow human being speaking to us. But we have to learn that anthroposophy can become alive that it can give us as much support and encouragement as we can otherwise only receive from another human being.

Our hearts find this so difficult at the present time because we have lost the habit of uniting ourselves with the life of things. It is difficult enough if one tries in small doses to re-introduce this living with things. This was attempted in our four Mystery Plays. You have only to think of the scene in spirit land, in the fifth act of The Soul's Awakening, where Felix Balde is sitting on the left side of the stage—seen from the audience—after he has ascended to Devachan, and a spiritual being on the other side of the stage speaks to him of his experience of weight. Here one should feel the weight that is descending in the distance. When people see something descending, they are accustomed nowadays only to be aware of the descending and only to see the thing higher up to start with, and then coming lower and lower down. They are quite unaccustomed to creeping into things and feeling the experience of weight, feeling the thing pressing down all the time. With an expression like that I am hoping to lift people out of their egoistic bodies right in the middle of the play, and to plunge them into the life of things outside themselves.

If this cannot happen, then real artistic feeling will not be able to arise again. In order that, for instance, a true feeling for architecture can come again, the concepts we receive from spiritual science must come alive. To begin with it makes very little difference which particular anthroposophical concepts we carry round with us. But if we really do something like this we shall see how much richer our soul life becomes. We shall gain a lot if, for instance, as well as just seeing this diagram we try and submerge ourselves in it and try to feel what is going on: weight pressing down here, and weight being supported there.

We want to go even further and not just look at it, but feel that the beam needs to have a certain strength, otherwise the load will crush it, and the supporting pillars must also have a certain strength, otherwise they too will be crushed. We must feel the way the sphere on top is pressing down, the pillars supporting and the beam keeping the balance. Not until we creep into the elements of weight, support and balance, between the pressing down and the supporting, shall we feel our way into the element of architecture.

But if we follow a structure of this kind not only with our eye but, as it were, crawl into it and experience the weighing down, the supporting and the balance, then we shall feel that our whole organism is becoming involved, and as if we have to call on an invisible brain belonging to our whole being and not just our head. Then we can awaken to the consciousness, ‘Ah! now we are beginning to feel!’ To take our simple example, we shall feel a supporting element, an upward striving, supporting luciferic element; a weighing and pressing down ahrimanic element, and a balance between the luciferic and ahrimanic which is a divine quality. Thus, even lifeless nature becomes filled with Lucifer and Ahriman and their superior ruler, who eternally brings about the balance between them.

If we thus learn to experience the luciferic, ahrimanic and divine elements in architecture, so that architecture affects us inwardly, we shall become conscious of a richer feeling of the world which leads or, one could almost say, pulls the soul into the things of the world; for our soul is now not only within our body's skin but belongs to the cosmos. This is a way of becoming conscious of this. We shall become aware, too, that whereas outside, the architectural element is supporting, weighing down and creating a balance, we ourselves in this encounter with the architectural element, develop a musical mood. Architecture produces a musical mood in our inner being, and we notice that even though the elements of architecture and music appear to be so alien in the outer world, through this musical mood engendered in us, our experience of architecture brings about a reconciliation, a balance between these two elements.

This is where, from our epoch onwards, living progress in the arts will lie, through learning to experience the reconciliation of the arts. This was dimly felt by Wagner, but it can only really come about when the world comes alive with spiritual science.

Reconciling the arts: that is what we attempted to do—for the first time, and in a small, elementary way—in our Goetheanum building. We did not want only to talk in a cold, abstract way about it, but show in the architecture of the building itself an impression, a copy of this reconciling of a musical mood with architectural form. If you study what is presented in our series of pillars and everything connected with them, you will discover that we were making the attempt to bring the elements of support, weighing down and the balance into living movement. Our pillars are not merely supports, and our capitals no longer mere supporting devices, and the architraves that extend above the pillars do not just have the character of rest, serving only to round the pillars off at the top, but they have a character of living growth and movement.

We attempted to bring architectural forms into musical flux, and the feeling one can have from seeing the interplay between the pillars and all that is connected with them, can of itself arouse a musical mood in the soul. It will be possible to feel invisible music as the soul of the columns and the architectural and sculptural forms that belong to them. It is as though a soul element were in them. And the interpenetration of the fine arts and their forms by musical moods has fundamentally to be the ideal of the art of the future. Music of the future will be more sculptural than music of the past. Architecture and sculpture of the future will be more musical than they were in the past. That will be the essential thing. Yet this will not stop music from being an independent art; on the contrary, it will become richer and richer through penetrating the secrets of the tones, as we said yesterday, creating musical forms from out of the spiritual foundations of the cosmos.

However, as everything that is inside must also be outside, in art—all that lives in it must be embodied in a kind of organism—the world of soul within the series of pillars and everything belonging to them must also become embodied. This happens, or at least is about to happen in the painting of the domes. Just as the pillars and everything belonging to them are, as it were, the body of our building, so is all that is going to appear in the domes—when you are inside the building—its soul; and just as the world appears to be filled with spirit, when our organs are directed outwards, our windows executed in the new art of glass shading shall represent the spirit. Body, soul and spirit shall be expressed in our building. Body in the column structure, soul in everything to do with the domes, and spirit in what is in the windows.

Where these things are concerned karma has brought various things about for which we can be grateful, for just in the case of the Goetheanum building, karma has indeed helped us in several matters. The soul of a human being is so constituted that from outside we perceive it in his physiognomy, but we have to have resources like love and friendship to penetrate into a person's soul, if we want to get to know it from inside, as it were.

When I was travelling from Christiania to Bergen on my last lecture tour in Norway, I happened to see a slate quarry which gave me the idea of trying to get slate from there. We were successful, and it really was what one might call a karmic happening, for when we look at the roof of the domes that are now tiled with this slate with its quite unique qualities, we are sure to say that it has something of the quality of the life of the soul, that at one and the same time both discloses and conceals what is within. Now if we really want to feel the domes as soul life we shall have to develop a love for spiritual science. For what is going to be painted inside the domes should really appear to us as a kind of reflected image in colour and form, of what spiritual science can mean to us. To see this we have to go inside. But when the building is really finished, no one will be able to understand what he sees when he goes inside if he has not developed a love for spiritual science; otherwise what he sees there will probably remain something that can cause a bit of a sensation, but will not be anything that particularly appeals to his heart. What he gets from it will easily tempt him to deny that the architecture has anything to offer the feelings.

Just as we have seen in this instance that what comes to life out of anthroposophy can be rediscovered in the world, life can also be fructified through anthroposophy, in realms in which we can more readily see that our heart's understanding needs to be warmed and fructified. For it is not only artistic and scientific areas that are to be fructified by spiritual science, but the whole of life has to be.

Let me take as an example a realm in which we can see particularly well how anthroposophical concepts can come alive in outer life. I will choose the realm of education, any kind of art of education. Let us begin from the fact that children are educated by grown-ups. What does the materialistic age envisage when it speaks of a child being educated by a grown-up? Fundamentally speaking, the materialistic age sees in both of them, both the grown-up and the child, only what you get from a materialistic outlook, namely, a grown-up teaching a child. But it is not like that. Externally the grown-up is only maya, and seen from outside the child is only maya too. There is something in the grown-up not directly contained in maya, namely the invisible man, who passes from one incarnation to another, and there is also an invisible part in the child that goes from incarnation to incarnation.

We shall speak about these things again. But I would like to tell you a few things today from which you will see in the course of time—if you meditate on them—what else there is in spiritual science. I will start with the fact that a person, as he appears in the external world, cannot teach at all, nor can the person who stands before us, externally, as a child, be educated. In reality something invisible in the teacher educates something invisible in the pupil. We shall only understand this properly if we focus our attention on what is gradually unfolding in the growing child, as the outcome of previous incarnations. And when everything coming from previous incarnations has made its appearance, the child withdraws, especially in present times. What we are actually educating is the invisible result of previous incarnations. We cannot educate or have any effect on the visible child. That is how the matter stands with regard to the child.

Now we will look at the teacher. During the first seven years of the child's life he can only educate by means of what the child can imitate; in the second seven years it will be through the influence he has as an authority; and finally in the following seven years it will be through the educational effect of independent judgment. Everything that is active in the teacher all this time is not in his external physical part at all. The part of us which do the educating will not take on physical form until our next incarnation. For all the qualities in us which can be imitated, or the qualities upon which our authority is based, are germinal qualities and will form our next incarnation. When we are teachers our own next incarnation converses with the previous incarnation of the pupil. It is an illusion to think that as present people we speak to the child of the present. We only have the right feeling for this if we say to ourselves, ‘The very best in you which your spirit can think and your soul can feel, and which is preparing itself to make something of you in the next incarnation, can work on the part of the child that is sculpturing its form out of times long past.’ The musical element in us is what enables us to educate. What we should educate in the child is the element of sculpture.

Take as a whole all that I have said in these lectures about the musical element and of how, in its most exalted form, it corresponds to what man meets with in initiation. Music is related to everything that is in a process of development and lies in the future, and the realm of sculpture and architecture is related to what lies in the past. A child is the most wonderful example of sculpture we can see. What we need as teachers is a musical mood, which we can have in the form of a mood pervaded by the future. If you can have this feeling when you are involved in teaching it will add a very special tone to the relationship of the teacher to the child. For it will make the teacher set himself the highest aims, whilst having the greatest measure of understanding for the children's naughtiness. There really is an educational force in this mood.

Once the world comes to see that the right atmosphere for teaching arises when a musical mood in the teacher is combined with seeing the sculptural activity in the pupil; once it is established that this is what is required for a love of teaching, then education will be filled with the right impetus. For then the teacher will speak, think and feel in such a way that in the course of his lessons, what comes from the past will learn to love what reaches out to the future. The result will be a wonderful karmic adjustment between the teacher and his pupils. A wonderful karmic balancing.

If the teacher is egoistic and only tries to make the child an imitation of himself, then the teaching is purely luciferic. Education becomes luciferic when we try as far as possible to turn the pupil into a copy of our own opinions and feelings, and are only happy if we tell the pupil something today and he repeats it word for word tomorrow. That is a purely luciferic education. On the other hand an ahrimanic education comes about if the pupil is as naughty as possible in our lessons and learns from us as little as he possibly can. However, there is a state of balance between these two extremes, just as there is between weighing down and supporting. This is arrived at through the interplay of the musical-sculptural elements I have just been speaking about. We must learn to distinguish between the teacher's intentions and what the child turns out to be. If we have the right mood, then even though we have been trying to teach our pupil something quite specific, we shall be overjoyed to realise that he has not turned out as we intended, but that the child has developed into something quite different from what we intended him to be. This is the remarkable thing, that the teacher can only rid himself of his egoism in teaching, if he overcomes the desire to turn the child into a copy of his own views on what is good and right, and especially of his own favourite thoughts. The best thing we can achieve, as teachers, is to be able to face perfectly calmly the thought of the child becoming as different from us as possible.

But you cannot come along and say, ‘Please give me a recipe for it, write a few rules down for me on how to teach like that.’ That is the remarkable thing about the spiritual world outlook, that you cannot work according to rules, but you really have to absorb spiritual science, so that you are filled with it and your impulses of feeling and will are increased. Then the right thing will happen, whatever particular task you face in life. The essential thing is to tackle it in a living way.

Now you could ask, ‘Which is the right teaching method from the point of view of spiritual science?’ And the correct answer would be, ‘The best spiritual-scientific method of teaching is for as many teachers as possible to engross themselves in spiritual science in a living way, and to acquire the feelings that come from spiritual science’. This is less convenient, of course, than reading a textbook on the art of spiritual-scientific education. Yet spiritual science is forever being asked, ‘What is the spiritual-scientific point of view on this or that?’ Now spiritual science does not have a point of view, or, if you like, it has as many points of view as life itself. But spiritual science itself must become life. Spiritual science must be absorbed and brought to life within us, then it will be able to bear fruit in the various realms of life. People will then get beyond whatever it is that makes life so dry and dead: we could call it the request for uniformity. External science requires uniformity, but spiritual science gives manifoldness and variety, the kind of variety that belongs to life itself. Thus, spiritual science will have to bring transformation into the furthest reaches of life.

Let us look at what some realms of life are like today. Learning takes place up to a particular age; you learn one thing up to one age and something else up to another. Then comes the time when you go out into life, as we say, and do not want to learn any more; even when you go in for a scientific career you do not like having to learn any more. The ones who do go on learning in order to keep up with their science are thought to be the odd ones. In the general run people learn until a certain age and after that they play cards or other useless things in their spare time, or they develop an attitude like this one I came across. I had been invited to give a series of lectures on the history of literature in a circle that included some ladies with a thirst for knowledge. Now it could be said that the softer, or if you prefer it, ‘retarded’ brain that ladies have has retained more the receptivity and flexibility of ancient times, when learning continued throughout life. This is more often found among women than men. But these ladies had the feeling that they ought to bring the gentlemen along too, to the lecture cycle. So the gentlemen were there, and they did not all go to sleep. Some of them really listened. Then there was conversation, tea and cakes, in other words they did what is considered to be essential in some circles, if the lectures are not to be too dry. So there was conversation too. And after I had been lecturing on Goethe's Faust, some of the men summed up their attitude by saying, ‘When you see Faust on the stage it is not really the kind of art you can enjoy, it isn't even recreation, it is science.’ This was their way of saying that when a person has been working in an office all day, or has been serving customers, or standing in a court of law interrogating witnesses and sentencing the accused, by the evening he is in no state to listen to Goethe's Faust any more and needs recreation and not science.

This is an example of a common attitude with which no doubt you are familiar. You only need to mention it, for everyone knows how widespread it is, and that a lot of people would find it strange the way we gather here in such a studious fashion and want to go on learning, despite the fact that several of us are fairly old. They think they know a much better way of spending time. Yet a complete change will have to take place in people's approach to spiritual science, in that they will not just want to let it remain a study, but will want to have a living and permanent relationship with it. This will come. You cannot learn anthroposophy the same way as you learn science, by taking it down in a notebook; anthroposophy must stay alive. It becomes dead if we only learn its content and do not remain connected with it through living activity. It becomes dead and withers away, whereas it should be kept alive. Spiritual science must work in this way to enliven us and keep our hearts receptive for all they can receive from the spiritual worlds, so that we develop further all the time.

There is no doubt that in our epoch humanity shows a quality of old age; on the whole it does not have the kind of youthfulness it had in mythical times. Spiritual science must be people's draught of youth, so that they will feel able to learn from life throughout their lives. Nowadays we can experience odd things in this connection. I know a man with an active mind, a person who has had all kinds of connections with modern intellectual culture all through his life. Now he celebrated his fiftieth birthday recently, and gave a leaflet out on this occasion containing some very peculiar notions. For instance he said—but I want to alter things a little bit, so that you will not guess who it is—he said, ‘I have been offered a post in the realm of art that I had been longing for, for many years. But now that I have reached the age of fifty, old age in fact, I do not really want it any more. For to fill a post of that kind and to inspire the people around you, you need to be young, you need to be full of fantastic illusions. And these illusions have to consist of thinking that what you are doing and the people you have to deal with are the whole world and nothing else matters. What really counts is what is right there. Fifteen years ago I was of an age when I could have done it. Now I am past it. You should not wait until people have grown old before you offer them influential positions, but let them be privy councillors, for instance, when they are between thirty and forty.’ This was the gist of what this ‘old’ man said.

This mood is absolutely in line with the whole quality of our contemporary culture. It is a mood very easily acquired by people who accept what materialistic culture has to say about the human being, for materialism has not the power to penetrate the whole being of man; the content of this materialistic knowledge is not powerful enough to have the kind of influence on his soul life that will last right into old age. Spiritual science proves that even if a person grows old externally he can stay young in soul, and if he has not done anything special by the age of fifty, although he does not need to succumb to the illusion that what he is doing is of prime importance and everything else can fall by the wayside, he can still be young enough to devote all his strength to what he has to do. He can be youthful, in fact childlike enough to concentrate the whole of his forces on what has to be done, just as a child concentrates all his forces in play. Spiritual science must become a magic draught of youth and not just a theory. That is also an impulse of transformation. Tomorrow I will talk about other impulses of transformation.