The Rudolf Steiner Archive

A spiritual movement can be injured very much by one-sidedness; and when we devote ourselves to such a subject as the occult standpoints of the Stuttgart building¹ we must clearly understand that when some single truth is specially emphasised, a strong light falls upon this truth, and one may then easily fail to recognise what should also be observed — the other side of the matter. In order to arrive at an all-round view one should always bear this in mind. For example, to all that was said yesterday² something else must be added. Certainly, a still greater perfection is attained when we are able purely in thought to erect around us such a temple, when we are able to imagine ourselves surrounded in thought by such a home. To this end our thoughts must be so strong that they act like a physical home. This may be achieved by a great power of concentration when, alone by ourselves, we follow rules such as are given in my books, The Way of Initiation and Initiation and its Results.³

But now, in order that we may have the right ideas about the necessity of such a building, we must say that when we devote ourselves to our studies in our lodge work, we require not only that we as individuals shall produce the conditions for our concentration, but also that we shall be disturbed as little as possible by what is around us. As the human being consists not only of the physical organism but also of supersensible principles, and these are active and set up relations with our environment, it is necessary when we exert our physical thought, for us to support the efforts of our will for our etheric and astral bodies. This we can do by providing for our subconsciousness — that is, for our etheric and astral bodies — conditions which may best be set up when we are in occult surroundings.

For this reason such a building is a great benefit and becomes a necessity to us.

We must bear in mind that in a certain way the great truths are at the same time difficulties to a person, something which he must first learn to bear, something which at first may be shocking, which may upset him, because it agrees so little with his everyday life. Therefore, in order to come to the higher truths in as favourable a way as possible it is necessary to provide a building such as this so that the spiritual knowledge which awaits us may indeed come into us — and in our age the Masters of Wisdom and of Harmony of Feeling are able to give us a great deal.

Since the end of the 19th century many doors have opened to the spiritual world, and many streams of spiritual life may be led into us. It may be said that just in the immediate future, towards which humanity is now going, the conditions are becoming more and more favourable for the influx of important spiritual knowledge which can enable us to progress quickly in every respect; but in order to clear away the hindrances which come through people — after they have just slipped out of materialism — not yet being sufficiently mature to receive the great truths, we must develop within ourselves a frame of mind which brings less danger of disturbance. This can be accomplished by means of suitable surroundings; and everywhere where from our standpoint just at this time care should be taken to see all is in order, there everything will really be observed which the occult point of view demands. It is natural that the needs and wishes of one who comes into Anthroposophy should go very far to one side or another, and because on the other hand there cannot be the necessary insight, it is difficult to be obliged to deny things which the other considers right. Very often it is not perceived that the denial is for the other’s welfare, and it is especially the case that some can only await the answer to one question or another with very great difficulty.

Because all knowledge is exoteric, one has grown so accustomed to expect that fundamentally everything that a person may ask can always be answered; but to this belongs two things at least. One is that the person who wants the answer should be in the position to understand it, that is to say, that through his whole anthroposophical or theosophical development he had progressed far enough to understand the answer. Abstract reasons prompt him to put the question much earlier than it is possible for him to understand the answer which is given from occult worlds. The other is that the one asked knows the answer. In regard to certain spiritual knowledge we are just at the stage when a question may be very premature, not only for individuals but for our whole age, although the answer will doubtless be given to us in the right form in the course of time. For this reason I said in the course of lectures at Karlsruhe⁴ that an essential thing in occultism is: to be able to wait. Particularly one who perhaps has undergone a certain development must be able to do this, and most of all one who has reached a certain height of occult development. When a person considers it extremely important to answer a question at a certain time, the intellect, which is always ready to answer, may very easily conjure up an answer, even from the feeling of a trained occultist. This answer is not only false or insufficient, but it takes away for a long time the possibility of a coming to the right answer at all, hence it is necessary to be able to wait until one is favoured with an answer from the spiritual world.

This applies not only to the highest questions, but also to more elementary ones. Even to the trained occultist there is a great temptation to produce the answer out of himself, but then he will be liable to fall into error. These two pictures [in our building here in Stuttgart] are an example. Our friend Stockmeyer has said for a long time that he wishes to finish them. The answer concerning the idea was promised him as soon as it was possible. That went on for a long time. To the despair of the architect the pictures were only finished very late indeed. Where did the fault lie? It was because the answer which was necessary as a kind of occult sketch for these pictures could only be given very late. One had to wait until the intuition came. These ideas might very easily be thought out, but then they would be worthless. What is so necessary is that one should not only go the straight way, as it were, but one should also have the resignation not to excogitate something; only to exercise the intellect upon occult truths when they are there, but not in order to find them. For this purpose the intellect must be absolutely laid aside. When occult truths are there they must then be taken up and established by the intellect, it must give them a logical character. One must make a practice of this if one wishes to progress; just as when one uses details which may perhaps be elementary in order to fit them into a whole. Then what will happen if in Munich we wish to build a great hall and at the right time we have not the idea which is to be embodied? We are Anthroposophists and know that karma works not only in individual beings, but in all connections, and when we have this faith we know that when a thing is necessary it can let us wait, but it will come, and indeed at the right time. We cannot judge when the right time is, for this we need confidence in the future; if it does not come, then it is not the right thing for us. This is not fatalism, for such a faith does not prevent us from making every effort, but it directs these efforts into the right lines. We make no false attempts with our intellect, but prepare ourselves for the moment when we shall be favoured. Instead of worrying oneself in front of a sheet of paper it is better to sink into prayerful meditation and ask of karma that this moment of intuition may come.

With this is also connected what might be called the right view of the Rosicrucian principle. If one who is acquainted with the Rosicrucian Temple⁵ in a pedantic, external manner were to come into this building, and if he were to remember the rules taught him from old traditions, he would say: “You have done it all wrong, that is not Rosicrucian.” We should have to reply: That which you demand we do not wish, and could not wish it, for Rosicrucianism does not mean to carry on certain truths throughout the centuries, but it means to develop the sense for what each age can give to man from the spiritual world. That which in the l4th century might perhaps be wrong is right in our age, and in our age it must be done in this way, for our relation to the spiritual powers around us requires exactly this form. This building, therefore, is not constructed after an old pattern, but it is built in accordance with the requirements of our age.

For what is the demand made of us by the spiritual powers? I give hardly a single lecture without using the word ‘theosophical’, as this is linguistically possible, although it is not grammatically correct. Perhaps many would find our address, “My dear theosophical friends,” blameworthy.⁶ This word is purposely used because the heart of our mission may be characterised by this word. Theosophy, or Anthroposophy is something which has always existed in the world and has been cultivated in all ages in the way in which humanity had to cultivate it according to its requirements — at one time in wider circles and at another in smaller ones, according to the peculiarities of the several ages. It is something which — after all the preceding developments have taken place — may now be given in such a form that, within certain limits, it can enter into each human I, into every feeling and every stage of intellectual maturity.

Today there need be no one who, if he has the goodwill, may not receive Theosophy or Anthroposophy. For this reason it is on the one hand something external and on the other a special task of our age. From this standpoint we must consider ourselves as the vehicles of the world-movement which must be described as the theosophical or anthroposophical movement.

That within this movement, according to the capacities of the individuals, the most varied shades may be found, should be self-evident, and this has been the case in our movement in every age. When Theosophy becomes conviction it provides the ground upon which the most varied knowledge may blossom forth, but they have to be obtained on the paths of actual truth. Among those who understand the heart of occultism it is always the case that they cannot disturb one another; it is impossible for persons to disturb one another who are engaged in occult practice and through proceeding from different starting-points arrive at other formulations. That is a strict law. The occultist may not fight when he sees that other occultists have correct starting-points and are striving rightly, even if he finds their formulation clumsy. The fact that various occultists formulate what they have to say in different ways may depend upon the various starting-points, and according to how they consider it necessary to bring this or that from the higher worlds.

It is different when it becomes evident that other movements are not on the same level, when they simply set to work with more elementary conditions and then assert that this is the final truth. Not to recognise a higher standpoint is wrong. If someone were to say that Christ — whose nature we have tried for years in our spiritual movement to render more and more plain — can incarnate more than once upon the earth in a fleshly body — upon what would this assertion rest? From what you have heard and will still hear you will clearly understand that there is a Being Who works in such a way that He could sojourn but once in a physical body for three years, and cannot come again and again in a physical body. This is a truth which has always been emphasised by Rosicrucianism; and it was also clearly shown in the Mysteries. One who does not know this may arrive at an incorrect formulation from a knowledge which does not extend so far into these regions; incorrect because it uses the name Christ.

On the other hand it is possible to say: Why does the other speak differently? He speaks differently because he is not thinking at all of what we have here called Christ. He designates someone else as Christ, of whom perhaps might be said what he says, but it is not the one who is spoken of in this movement, because it is the unconditional necessity of our age — as the requirements of the Masters of Wisdom and Harmony of Feeling — that we should speak of this high Being whom we call Christ. And when we read the Gospels we may recognise and identify Him with the One who for 2,000 years has been thus described. This is an historical right, not an absolute one, of course! Although the knowledge of Him has been very imperfect for 2,000 years, He has been thus described, and we do the same for historical reasons. On this account this name ought not to be used for other beings. This is something which has always been emphasised and which today can really be quite easily understood by anyone.

It is, however, interesting to notice how difficult for some to understand this matter clearly, but those who from the very beginning have no particular inclination to enter into more detailed explanations will have felt it uncomfortable that we do not by any means make the matter concerning Christ so easy. This one could see again in Karlsruhe (when the preceding course of lectures on the subject of ‘Jesus to Christ’ was given). What was said there was only possible because of everything else which had preceded it. Thus at the present time it is not yet very easy to arrive at the Christ principle, but it is a necessity which is laid upon us by the leaders of the spiritual movement.

It is very remarkable that there has been a certain difficulty in introducing the special investigations of Rosicrucianism into the theosophical movement, and even the position of this movement is very misunderstood here; exactly in how far does this movement merit the name of a Rosicrucian movement? But I shall never say: “My Rosicrucian friends!” You may gather from this that it was never correct to consider what belongs to Rosicrucianism as something exclusive. If someone outside our movement were to say that we were Rosicrucians, that would not only be a misunderstanding, but it would be a somewhat defamatory designation for our movement. This always reminds me of a man in the market place who once said that so and so was a phlegmatic, and a woman said, “Oh, is that what he was? But I know he is a butcher!” It is somewhat similar when in order to distinguish us someone calls us Rosicrucians. This has no meaning. Rosicrucianism has flowed into our movement, it is assimilated and to a certain extent practised. How difficult it is to let this current flow in you may see in the remarkable fate of the personality to whom all we in this movement look up with great respect: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. If you follow her development from Isis Unveiled to The Secret Doctrine you will see that a great amount of Rosicrucian knowledge has streamed into Isis Unveiled. For reasons which cannot now be discovered she then swerved to one side in The Secret Doctrine, which did not further develop what could have been carried further, but on the contrary took a side path. But how strongly these Rosicrucian principles acted we may see in the third volume of The Secret Doctrine. There one finds the greatest truths next to really impossible things. One who is able to discriminate may connect this with what is being revealed today.

Thus it has come about that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky has very clearly said that it must never be thought that Christ Who is to come again will reappear in a fleshly body, but that the coming Christ must only be understood as an event which a person experiences through a connection with the spiritual world. We take the same ground that she did in this respect, when in a clearer way than was possible to her, we work out what she commenced. When she turns with such severity against the idea that Christ could incarnate again in the flesh it is not easy when the reproach is made against our movement that her most important knowledge, which sometimes is not well formulated, is violated. There is continuity, and there is no need to make this breach with the original starting-point, by coming into conflict with what concerns the coming of Christ. Although we always set what is true in place of what is false, in many things we may go back to the original statements of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. And we may know that in the form in which she now lives she wished that the continuity should be developed, which should not be an adhesion to the formulas but a working in the spirit which existed at that time. It was not a spirit of standing still, and least of all a spirit of retrogression! We work in the best way when we bring out that which was still closed to Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. The doors have opened in quite a different way, especially since 1899.

Without taking into account anything that has gone before, we try to penetrate into the meaning and importance of the Christ Principle. This leads us naturally to join on to the occult investigations which have been made with special care in Rosicrucian circles since the l3th century.

But those who have heard my various courses and lectures will know that we are not now teaching the Rosicrucianism of the 13th century. We are Rosicrucians of the 20th century! It is our task to join on to the principles which Rosicrucianism possessed, to utilise them in theosophical progress. We cannot do otherwise than recognise that what has thus been found is something higher in every way than anything else in the world with respect to the Christ Principle. We must, however, admit that on account of the energy with which this principle has been worked out the teachings regarding Karma and Reincarnation passed into the background. Therefore we are dealing not with the spirit of an historical epoch, nor with the spirit of Rosicrucianism, but with the Spirit of Truth. It is quite indifferent to us where one faith or another appears, we have to deal with the Spirit of Truth, and on this account all division into categories and forms must always give rise to misunderstandings in our movement; we desire only to serve the Truth, as was described with respect to our small festival. We wish to represent not what this or that age has said, but what comes directly from the spiritual world. That which can be recognised by the human intellect is our concern; in accordance with this we shall lead our movement further, and with respect to all other creeds we may call ourselves theosophists, according to the motto of our movement: No religion is higher than Truth. In this respect we take the most theosophic ground.

For this reason we surround ourselves not with a building modelled according to Rosicrucian pattern but with one that is planned for a particular object. For example, the size of the space is the external condition for this. Perhaps we should have been quite unable to add one thing or another if the space had been larger or smaller. No scheme is of any value, but we have to wait for what comes to us as a gift from spiritual worlds. In other words, our whole effort is to understand something that sounds so simple: To open our hearts to the spiritual world which is always around us, to understand words such as those which Christ said: “I am with you always, even to the end of the world.” If someone were to examine the work we have done in past years he will not be able to say that we present Christianity in a way it was thought in the early centuries. We desire to acquire the spirit which wishes to come close to Christ as He is today; and only when we have recognised that this Christ is a living One we shall illuminate what took place in former times.

In the same way we consider Buddha as a living One, who follows his principle that Buddha does not return any more in the flesh. If someone were to affirm this, we should have to reply that he understands nothing about Buddhism, for one who has risen from Bodhisattva to Buddha does not return. For Buddha lives, and he works in our movement and illuminates what he accomplished 2,500 years ago by what he does today.

Just as only he may speak of Buddha who knows him, so also only he who knows Christ may speak about Him. Therefore if someone says that a very important being will come in a fleshly body, that may be correct, but he has nothing to do with Christ. The fact is that if a person enters deeply into the nature of Christ he comes to understand that the other is making a mistake; it can never be the reverse. This brings difficulties, but it must be borne in mind — especially by one who has occasion to practise theosophical principles in the true sense — that one should exercise tolerance even towards error. But to exercise tolerance means, not to acknowledge error but to deal with it with love, otherwise it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit. We must exercise tolerance precisely because in regard to Christ we represent the Rosicrucian principle.

We can wait until opposition comes, exactly concerning Christ. If you understand this word, the principle of the most real search for truth and on the other hand real tolerance, you will be able to answer for yourselves the question: In what sense are we Theosophists and in what sense are we Rosicrucians?

• 1. The Branch-House in Stuttgart; the first building specially erected and designed for anthroposophical work; opened by Rudolf Steiner in October, 1911.
• 2. Special Building for Anthroposophy at Stuttgart from an Occult Point of View, Stuttgart, 15 October 1911
• 3. The Way of Initiation is an early version of the first half of the book entitled Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. The book Initiation and Its Results corresponds to the second half of Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.
• 4. Course of lectures From Jesus to Christ, GA 131
• 5. See description of the Temple of the Holy Grail in The Younger Titurel by Albrecht von Scharfenberg, about 1270 AD.
• 6. This lecture was given prior to the exclusion of the German Section from the Theosophical Society. Since then Dr. Steiner’s movement has continued as the Anthroposophical Society.

We have placed the Apocalypticer's concluding perspective before our souls. If we understand it correctly we see that this last perspective is described in a way which is in complete agreement with everything one can say about evolution from the viewpoint of the most exact spiritual science. We saw that the building of cultural phenomena and of the human body changed from a below upwards mode to an above downwards mode, and that this is reflected in the Apocalypse. At the end of the last lecture I pointed out that if one honestly tries to understand the Apocalypse one must become acquainted with the things which can be said about world evolution from the viewpoint of spiritual research.

However, we see that a meaning is incorporated in certain places in the Apocalypse which one will find one can only grasp if one goes into the knowledge of the human being which is found in Anthroposophy. This is definitely the case when one has to do with a revelation which is based on experiences of the spiritual world. Of course one has to be able to see that the images which are presented in the Apocalypse are revelations from the spiritual world. Here one will disregard the question as to whether the Apocalypticer would really have been able to present all of the details which we rediscover in his work in an intellectualistic way, that is, whether he understood them to that extent. For that is not important at all. The only important thing is whether he is a real seer. He looks into the things in the spiritual world, but it's not he who makes them true, they are true through their own content, and they have this content and reveal it through themselves and not through him. So that even outer, rationalistic experts could come and could prove: The one who gave us the Apocalypse had this or that amount of education, and one cannot really expect him to have had these wide perspectives of things through his own soul. I don't want to discuss whether the writer of the Apocalypse had them here; I: just want to point out that this is not important. We must place the Apocalypticer's pictures which are revelations of the spiritual world before; our soul and we must let their content work upon us.

Now we have the magnificent concluding picture of the new Jerusalem before us, which has the experiential backgrounds of which I spoke. We will do well to go backwards from this picture a little bit. Here we have the important passage where another magnificent picture appears before our soul, namely, that magnificent picture where the Apocalypticer sees what he calls heaven open, and where a power approaches him on a white horse of whom he speaks in such a way that we become aware: he doesn't just have the trichotomy or the threefoldedness of the Godhead in his intellectuality—he has it in his whole I human being. He speaks in such a way that he is really still aware with his whole soul that one has the three forms of the one God before one, and that if one places oneself outside of the physical world one can alternately speak of the one or the other of them, because they intermingle.

Of course, when they're put into the physical World one gets a picture of three persons, so that one has to distinguish between the Father God who underlies all facts of nature, including the ones which work into human nature, the Son God who has to do with everything which leads to freedom in the soul's experience and the Spirit God who lives in a spiritual, cosmic order which is far away from nature and foreign to nature. This is how sharply contoured the three persons of the Godhead appear here upon the physical plane.

Now when man crosses the threshold to the spiritual world, he gets into the condition which I described in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds? where he splits up into three beings, so that thinking, feeling and willing become somewhat independent. However, if we go to higher worlds from the physical plane we see the triune Godhead approaching us ever more as a unity. And so of course, the Apocalypse must be read in this light. One shouldn't distinguish between the Father God, the Son God and the Spirit God as directly as one would do this in the physical world.

Thus the one who approaches us on a white horse in that magnificent Imagination is none other than the unified God. And in the form in which he is' the Son of God, we have to see Him more in the free soul development of human beings on earth. But now something very strange occurs, which is what makes the picture that comes before the concluding one seem very magnificent. It is quite natural and a matter of course that John sees heaven open—I will call the one who wrote the Apocalypse John—for the new thing which is descending from the spiritual world. The whole culture must be arranged in such a way that it comes down from the spiritual world to the physical world. Now if we place this before our soul correctly, then of course the condition which must precede this is that John looks into the spiritual world. But this means: heaven is opened for him. However, he wants to indicate a future situation which will exist for human beings. He's actually saying nothing less than the following.

Before that state of affairs will arise on earth where the spiritual ingredients for the building up of the new Jerusalem will sink down from the spiritual world and will be received by men—just as men previously raised material ingredients from the earth upwards—before this state will come, before men become aware that they must build from above downwards—as I said recently, he considers this state to be a real one—before this will come, the state of affairs where man is mainly engaged with his will will be replaced by another one where he is only concerned with knowledge and where he has to look into the spiritual world: heaven is opened. The one who underlies the beings of the world in a radiating and creative and sanctifying way appears. And now the significant reason which makes the picture so magnificent: He has a name written on him which is known to no one besides himself. That is very significant. When one comes to the place in the Apocalypse where this is written, one sees another clear sign that one is dealing with one of the greatest spiritual revelations. The name which is given to the ego varies considerably in various languages, but I have pointed to the spiritually trivial fact that the name for the ego can never be spoken by someone in such a way that it can be given to someone else. I cannot say I to someone else; this distinguishes the name of the self from all other names. They are given to objects, to either inner or outer objects. But when I say “I” in any language I can only say it to myself; I can only say it to another person if I have slipped into him—which must be a real spiritual process; but there is no need to speak about that now.

Now let's imagine the things which describe the self in various languages the self was not given a name in the older languages; it was in the verb. The ego was not a direct designation. One described oneself through what one did in a kind of demonstrative way, but no name for the self-existed. This name for the self of one's human being only began to be used later; it's a significant symbolic fact that the German word for I—“ich”—contains the initials of Jesus Christ. But now let's think of an enhancement of this fact that we have a name in our languages which every one can only say in connection with himself. The enhancement consists in what is now said in the Apocalypse—that He who comes down from the supersensible world has a name written on Himself where He not only is the only one who can use it to refer to Himself, but where He is the only one who understands it; no one else understands it.

Now just think that this Revealer approaches John showing him in a prophetic picture what will later occur for humanity. There He comes down in future times the one who has the name which He alone understands. What can all of this really mean? If one honestly wants to understand it, the whole thing seems to be meaningless at first. Why does He come, the one who is to bring the salvation of the world, the justice of the world all of this is written in the Apocalypse—, “who shall make faith and knowledge true;” not what the (King James version has: “was called Faithful and True”) but “who shall make faith and knowledge true.” This is really like hide-and-seek, for if He has an inscribed name which only He understands, what is that supposed to mean? It makes us ask a question which goes deeper. What is this really all about?

Imagine it quite vividly: He has a name which only He understands. How can we relate to this name? It should really acquire a significance for us; this name should really be able to live in us. How can this occur? It can occur if the being who understands this name becomes united with us and enters our own self, then this being in us will understand the name and we will understand it also. We will have Him in us and we will continually have the awareness of Christ in us. He is the only one who understands the things, which are connected with His being; but He understands them in us, and the Christ-insight of the Christ being in us gives the light which is rayed out in us, because He becomes this light in us, in our own being. It will be an insight which dwells in men.

You see, something has occurred thereby. The first thing which has occurred is an intended, necessary consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha. This being who went through the Mystery of Golgotha, this being who must enter us, so that we comprehend the world with his understanding and not with our understanding, this being wears a garment which is sprinkled with blood, the blood of Golgotha. And we take in this picture. However, John the Apocalypticer tells us that this garment which is sprinkled with the blood of Golgotha has a name. This is not the same name he was talking about before; this is the name of the garment which is sprinkled with blood. And the name of this vesture dipped in blood is the logos of God, the Logos, God, the word of God. Thus the one who should live in us and should give the light in us through his own understanding fills us with the word of God.

The pagans read the word of God in natural phenomena. They had to receive it through outer manifestations. Christians must receive the word of God or the Creative word by taking the Christ into themselves. The time will come when all human beings who take Christianity into their souls in an honest way will know through the course of the events that the word of God is with Christ, and that this word of God has its seed in the understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha and of the garment which is sprinkled with blood. Thus we have the Christ, enclosed in the Mystery of Golgotha in the language of the Apocalypticer.

However, a third thing appears. Christ in three forms: firstly, through himself, secondly through his garment, and thirdly through the deeds which he does for men on earth. Here again a condition is described which must set in, and which will of course not begin in such a way that one can point to a particular year but Christian development must move in that direction.

The third thing that our attention is drawn to is the sword with which he works, which is the sword of his will, the sword of his deeds, the sword of what he has done among human beings upon earth by living in them. But what he's doing now, what he does in his comings and goings, as it were, bears the third name: King of all Kings, Lord of all Lords. That is the third form. What is the nature of a king or the nature of a lord? If we go into the real inner meaning of the Latin word dominus, we arrive at what linguistic usage indicates in this case, quite independently of spiritual investigation: A lord is someone who is designated to give guidance to some other being on earth or in the whole world. 3ut how long will external lords be necessary upon earth? How long will one need the commands of outer lords upon earth and even the commands of external spiritual lords above the earth? Until that point in time when Christ lives in men with the name which only he understands. Then everyone will be able to follow Christ in his own being and in his own soul. Then everyone will try to realize in himself what man's will wants to realize out of inner love. Then the Lord of lords and King of kings will live in each individual.

Seen from an inner spiritual viewpoint, this is really the time in which we're living now. The fact that we're living in it is concealed by the fact that men are continuing to live in their old ruts, and they're really denying this indwelling of the Christ as much as possible, denying it as much as possible, they're denying it as much as possible in all fields. One can certainly say that a great deal exists in a large number of people today which is preparing in the right way for the etheric appearance of the Christ, who is a being that came down from the divine world. But men must prepare themselves by finding the source of their actions and deeds in themselves.

Therewith we really touch upon a difficulty with the present-day activities of priests out of the spirit of the Apocalypse. A priest should guide and direct in a certain sense. A priest has the faithful before him, and his priestly dignity presupposes that he, the leader, is a king over the ones he is to lead' in a certain way. He is the giver of the sacraments; he is the minister. On the other hand, we live in a time where men have the potential to take in the Christ to such an extent that they can become their own leaders ever more.

You see, this is the situation which the one who wants to become a priest gets into today. And yet the ordination of priests is fully justified today, completely justified. It's fully justified because although men really do bear something in them as an essence, it must be brought out of them, it must really be brought out of them. And one really needs everything which lies behind priestly dignity in order to bring out what is in human beings today. For we live in a time which really requires something quite definite. The outer world cannot really completely confront what is required here. For the outer world must deal with men insofar as they are bearers of a physical body. But it would be a terrible prospect if men—the way they are through our civilization, which hasn't arrived at the standpoint on which man is standing—would live over into the next earth life in this form.

We know that one tries to avoid this in the Anthroposophical sphere. Human souls are offered something whereby they are supposed to live over into the next incarnation with the things men are supposed to take in today. But this must become universally human. Men must develop an ego or an individuality with which they can live over into the next incarnation. This is only possible if what is given through the grace of sacrifice, through the grace of a sacrament is added to men's experiences. This doesn't separate men from their karma but it does separate them from what is clinging to them in a very intensive way today. Human beings are walking around with masks on. They're going around masked. And it can lead to tragic conflicts if the need arises at some point to really see human beings and their individualities.

Such a tragic conflict arises with Hölderlin, who once said: when he looks around in the world he sees Germans, Frenchmen, Turks and Englishmen, but no human beings, young, mature and old people but no human beings. And he enumerates more types. Men bear an extra-human stamp, as it were.

We need a priestly activity today which speaks to human beings as human beings and which cultivates humanity. Of course none of the present-day confessions can really do this. Just consider how dependent the confessions are. The community for Christian renewal must get beyond the dependency of these confessions. It must do this through its own destiny. No one who grows out of Anthroposophy is in the same position that priests are. That is a quite special position. And it is perhaps quite right to point to what is present here out of the spirit of the Apocalypse. Just consider that in every other activity which grows out of Anthroposophy today, people become dependent upon the outer world in some way through the powers that be.

If someone becomes a teacher out of Anthroposophy, one can see the tremendous obstacles which are put in their way. People deceive themselves about this. But we won't get a second Waldorf school, because they will set up the condition everywhere that all the teachers one hires must be approved by the state in some way. The Waldorf School could only come into existence because we started at a time when no such school law existed in Württemberg yet.

Take doctors: we cannot make doctors out of people in the Anthroposophical movement from scratch without further ado. To be sure, we could make doctors. But they wouldn't be recognized, they would not be accredited. To some extent we even have this difficulty in artistic things. It won't be very long before things will tend in the direction of what is happening in Russia, and people will demand a stamp from the state. A priest who grows out of the Anthroposophical Society is the only one who can strip everything off, as it were. It's all right if he learned something, but he throws off everything in his work. He's really laying the first foundation stone of the new Jerusalem in the theology which he supports; for he represents a theology which doesn't have to be recognized by anyone besides himself. That is the important thing.

You are the only ones who are in this position. You should also feel that you are in this position, and you will feel the specific quality of your priestly dignity. If one is dealing with a country like Russia they can drive out certain kinds of priests, but people in such a country will never do anything which would make it necessary for priests to get an official stamp of approval. For one will either leave priests the way they are, or one will not want them, which has already been realized in Russia as far as the tendency goes. Thus priests are the first ones who will be able to feel the approach of the new Jerusalem, the approach of the indwelling Christ, the Christ who becomes the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords.

Hence it is very good for a priest to dwell on this passage \in the Apocalypse, to dwell on it with an ardent heart and to develop the entire enthusiasm of his priestly soul which he should develop at this place in the Apocalypse. For the Apocalypse should not be a teaching; the Apocalypse should be life which works in each of our souls. We should feel that we are united with the Apocalypse. We should be able to place what we're working and living with into the stream of prophetic things in the Apocalypse. Here we see ourselves gathered around John the Apocalypticer, who has the vision Heaven has been opened, the one who only understands his name himself comes, the one whose garment bears the name the “word of God,” the one who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords—he comes. The priesthood which gathers around the John who sees this, the priesthood that unites itself with the cultic rite which has been drawn from the spiritual world, that raises up the transubstantiation in the sense of the Holy Spirit again, that has the new act of, consecration of man, the transformed old one which has taken the valid things from the old one, but which has taken on the form which flows out of the spiritual world today—this priesthood may gather around John the Apocalypticer, who looks up into the opened heaven.

For we are permitted to look at the inauguration which took placed in the room which the fire then took hold of—, we should look at it in the light which rays out here when heaven opens—the white horse comes out with the one who sits upon it and who only knows his name himself, who must be incorporated into us if this name is to mean something to us, and who has the other characteristics which are mentioned. This is how one should understand the Apocalypse, for the Apocalypse must be understood in a living way and not just with the top of one's head.

However, I would like to say that very deep wisdom is connected with the magnificent Imagination that appears here. Just consider what appears in close proximity to this significant vision, as it were. The reader is told how active the beast that I described is—the beast which induces human beings to go down from the spiritual to the physical, which the Apocalypticer divided into three stages; the beast whose one form is a materialistic way of living and not just a materialistic view of life. However, the Apocalypticer refers to two points in time. He tells us how the beast is overcome, and on the other hand he tells us that the adversary of mankind, the stronger adversary of mankind, is bound for a thousand years and is then released again for a short time. Thus we really have to do with two adversaries of the good principle, with the beast and with what is traditionally referred to as Satan.

Now the beast is overcome with respect to the outer physical world, in the sense that a spiritual world view can always be opposed to materialism. And Satan is chained at the present time in a certain way. But he will be released again. Satan is fettered, and anyone who sees through the important things in evolution knows that he is fettered. For if Satan was not chained at the present time and if everything which could really pour out the vials of wrath would appear—if Satan was not bound,—the connection between the materialistic way of living and the materialistic view of life which is present on earth today would show up in the outer world in a ghastly way. Then the people who proclaim materialism as a truth with the deepest inner cynicism today would arouse such a desire in the unbound Satan that one would see this extraction of the materialistic view and a materialistic way of living and their acquisition by Ahrimanic powers, one would see this as the most horrible and most terrible diseases.

If Satan was not bound one would not only have to speak of materialism as a view and a way of living, one would have to speak of materialism as the worst kind of a disease. Instead of this people go through the world with the cynicism and frivolity of materialism and even with religious materialism, and nothing happens to them. But the only reason nothing happens to them is because Satan is bound and the Godhead still makes it possible for one to come to spiritual things without succumbing to Satan. If Satan was here, many a teacher who is standing in some confession and is infected by materialism would be a terrible, gruesome sight for mankind. The idea which arises when one points to the possible disease of materialism, to the leprosy of materialism which would really be there if Satan were not bound, if one points to this, it certainly gives rise to a terrible mental image.

However, anyone who is aware of his spiritual responsibility towards knowledge today will not make use of such an idea within any other context than the context of the Apocalypse. I myself would not speak of the leprosy of materialism in any other context than in the one I'm speaking of it here, where I have to connect things with the Apocalypse and where the one who becomes familiar with the ideas of the Apocalypse has these gruesome pictures before him, which however definitely correspond to the real state of the spiritual affairs.

The Apocalypse should not only permeate, our life, it should also permeate our words. If we take in the Apocalypse it is not only an enlivening element in priests' work, it is something that, permits us to point to things which we otherwise point to in exoteric life. The Apocalypse should not only live with our ego, if we want to understand it, the Apocalypse also wants to speak in our words: and if you are real priests there will be some things which you will say to each other when you are in a room with other priests so that they will live in you and remain amongst yourselves. Then you will gain the strength to say the right words when you are standing before your faithful followers.

Priests are priests today because they are the first ones who may speak about the Apocalypse freely amongst themselves. This Apocalypse is a priestly thing, that is, it is a priests' book which is appended to the Gospels. You will become priests all the more, the more you find your way into the inner spirit of the Apocalypse. We will speak about this some more tomorrow.

The reflections which we are beginning today are intended to encourage all those who have found their way to anthroposophy to think about their current position. They will present an opportunity for contemplation, for self-reflection, through a characterization of the anthroposophical movement and its relationship to the Anthroposophical Society. And in this context may I begin by speaking about the people who are central to such self-reflection: yourselves. There are those who found this path through an inner necessity of the soul, of the heart; others, perhaps, found it through the search for knowledge. There are many, however, who entered the anthroposophical movement for more or less mundane reasons; but through a deepening of the soul they have subsequently perhaps encountered more within it than they at first anticipated. But there is something which all those who end up in the anthroposophical movement have in common. And that is that they are initially driven by their inner destiny, their karma, to leave the ordinary highway of civilization on which the majority of mankind at present progresses, to search for their own path.

Let us think for a moment about the conditions in which most people now grow up. They are born to parents who are French or German, Catholic or Protestant or Jewish, or who belong to some other faith, and may hold a variety of beliefs. But among parents is the almost unquestioned assumption, which remains unspoken and sometimes unthought, that their children will, of course, grow up like themselves. These kinds of feelings naturally engender a social ambience, indeed social pressures, which more or less consciously push children into the kind of life which has been mapped out by these more or less clearly defined beliefs. The life of a child then follows its natural course of education and schooling. And during this time parents once again have all kinds of beliefs which exert a decisive influence on their children's lives. The belief, for instance, that my son will, of course, enter the secure employment of the civil service, or that he will inherit the parental business, or that my daughter will marry the man next door. It simply lies in the nature of social circumstances that they are governed by impulses which arise in this way. People have no choice in the matter because that is the effect of the beliefs which govern life. It may not always be obvious to parents, but schooling and all the other circumstances of childhood and youth imprison the human being and determine his position in life. The institutions of state and religion make the adult.

If the majority of people were asked to explain how they got where they are today, they would not be able to do so, because there would be something unbearable about having to think deeply about such matters. This unbearable element tends to be driven underground into subconscious or unconscious areas of our soul life. At best, it will be dredged up by a psychiatrist when it behaves in a particularly recalcitrant manner down there in those unknown provinces of the soul. But mostly one's own personality, the Self, is simply not strong enough to assert itself against what one has grown into in this way.

Occasionally people have the urge to rebel when their situation as a trainee, or even following qualification, unexpectedly dawns on them. You might clench your fist in your pocket, or, if you are a woman, create a scene at home because of such disappointed life expectations. These are reactions against what people are forced to become. We also frequently seek to anaesthetize ourselves by concentrating on the pleasant things in life. We go to dances and follow this with a long lie-in, don't we? Time is then filled up in one way or another. Or someone might join a thoroughly patriotic party because his professional position demands that he belong to something which will reflect his values. We have already been enveloped by the state and our religion; now that must be supplemented by surrounding what one has unconsciously grown into with a sort of aura. Well, there is no need for me to go into further detail. That is roughly the way in which the people who move in the mainstream of life have grown into their existence.

But those who find it difficult to accept this end up on many possible and impossible byways. And anthroposophy is precisely one of these paths on which human beings are seeking to realize themselves; on which they want to live with such an understanding of themselves in a more conscious manner, to experience something which is under their control to a certain extent at least. Anthroposophists are for the most part people who do not walk along the highways of life. If we investigate further why that should be, we find that this is linked with the spiritual world.

Having relived the course of their lives in the spiritual world after death human beings enter a region where they become increasingly assimilated into the spiritual world, where their lives consist of working together with the beings of the higher hierarchies, where all their acts are related to this world of substantive spirit. But a time arrives when they begin to turn their attention to earth again. For a long time in advance of their birth, human beings unite on a soul level with the generations at the end of which stand the parents who give birth to them—not only as far back as their great-great-grandparents, but much further down the line of preceding generations. The majority of souls nowadays look down, as it were, to earth from the spiritual world and display a lively interest in what is happening to their ancestors. Such souls move in the mainstream of contemporary life.

In contrast, there are a number of souls, particularly at present, whose interest is concentrated less on worldly happenings as they approach a new life on earth than on the question of how they can develop maturity in the spiritual world. Their interest lies in the spiritual world right up to the moment before they find their way to earth. As a consequence, when they incarnate they arrive with a consciousness which has its origins in spiritual impulses. With their spiritual ambitions they outgrow their environment, and are thus predestined and prepared to go their own way.

Thus the souls who descend from pre-earthly to earthly existence can be divided into two groups. One group, to which the majority of people today still belong, comprises those souls who can make themselves remarkably at home on earth; who feel thoroughly comfortable in their warm nest, which so fascinated them long before they came down to earth, even if it does occasionally appear unpleasant—but that is only appearance, maya.

Other souls, who may pass patiently through childhood—appearance is not always the decisive thing—are less able to make themselves at home, are homeless souls, and grow beyond the warmth of the nest much more than they grow into it. This latter group includes those who are subsequently attracted to the anthroposophical movement. It is therefore clearly predetermined in a certain sense whether or not one is led to anthroposophy.

The things which are being sought by these souls on the byways of life, away from the major highways, manifest themselves in many ways. If the others did not find it so agreeable to take the well-trodden paths and did not put such obstacles in the way of homeless souls, the numbers of the latter would be much more obvious to their contemporaries. But it is widely apparent today how many souls have a hint of such homelessness about them.

The tendency to such homelessness could be anticipated: the rapidly growing evidence of a longing in homeless souls for an attitude to life which was not laid out in advance; a longing for the spirit in the chaos of contemporary spiritual life. In sketching an outline of this gradual development, you can find in it, if you reflect, a little something of what I would like to describe as the anthroposophical origins of each one of you.

By way of introduction today I will do no more than pick out in outline some characteristic features. If you look back at the last decades of the nineteenth century—we could take any number of fields, but let us take a very characteristic one the cult of Richard Wagner began to take a hold. It is certainly true that much of this cult consisted of a cultural flirtation with new ideas, sensationalism and so on. But all kinds of people gathered in Bayreuth. One could see people who thought of the long journey to Bayreuth as a kind of modern pilgrimage. But even among the less fashionable there were those who were also homeless souls.

Now the essential effect of Wagnerianism on people—I speak not only about the musical element but about the movement as a cultural phenomenon—was to offer them something which went beyond all the usual offerings of a materialistic age. This gave people a feeling that here there was a gateway to a more spiritual world, a world differing from their normal environment. What went on in Bayreuth led to a great longing for more profound spiritual aspirations.

It was, of course, difficult at first to understand Richard Wagner's characters and dramatic compositions. But many people felt that they were created from a source very different from the crude materialism of the time. And the homeless souls who were driven in this particular direction were prompted into all kinds of dark, instinctive intuitions through what I might call the suggestive power of Wagnerian drama and specifically through the way of life that it introduced into our culture. Indeed, it is true to say that subsequent interpretations by theosophists of Hamlet or other works of art are very strongly reminiscent of certain essays which were written by Hans von Wolzogen, who was not a theosophist but a trained Wagnerian, in the Bayreuther Blätter.¹

Thus one can say that Wagnerianism was the reason why many people, possessed of a homeless soul, became acquainted with a way of looking at the world which led away from crude materialism towards something spiritual; and all those who became part of such a current, not because of a superficial flirtation with the idea but because of an inner compulsion of the soul, wanted to develop their experience of a spiritual world because they felt this kind of inner longing. They were no longer concerned with the certain evidence which underpinned the materialistic world view. That was true irrespective of their position in life, whether they were lawyers or artists, cabinet ministers, officials, parliamentarians or whatever—even scientists.

As I said, such homeless souls can be found everywhere. But Wagnerianism provides a particularly characteristic example of the presence of very many such souls.

I then encountered several of those people, whose first spiritual taste had been the Wagnerian experience, in Vienna² in the late 1880s, in a group which consisted entirely of such homeless souls. People no longer really appreciate the way in which that homelessness was visible for anyone to see even then, because many of the things which at that time required a great deal of inner courage have today become commonplace.

For example, I do not believe that many people today could imagine the following. I was sitting in a circle of such homeless souls and all kinds of things had already been discussed. One person started to speak about Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov,³ and spoke in such a manner that the group felt as if struck by lightning. A new world opened up: it was like suddenly finding oneself on a new planet. That is how these souls felt.

In all these observations of life which I am recounting by way of an introduction to the history of the anthroposophical movement, I never lost my connection with the spiritual world. It was always there. I mention this because it is the background against which I speak: the spiritual world accepted as self-evident, and human beings on earth perceived as images of their real existence as spiritual beings within the spiritual world. I was involved and came to know these people, not in order to observe them, but because that is how things naturally developed.

Having passed through their Wagnerian metamorphosis, they were involved in a second process of change. For example, there were among them three good acquaintances, intimate friends even, of H. P. Blavatsky,⁴ who were keen theosophists in the way that theosophists were when Blavatsky was still alive. But a peculiar quality adhered to theosophists at that time, the period following the appearance of Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. They all had a desire to be extremely esoteric. They had nothing but contempt for their normal life, including, of course, their work. The exoteric life, however, was not something which could be avoided. That was accepted. But everything else was esoteric. In that setting you spoke only to fellow initiates, only within a small group. And those who were not considered worthy of talking to about such things were seen as people with whom one spoke about the ordinary things in life. It was with the former that you discussed esoteric matters. They were people who, although they might be engineers from the moment they stepped into practical life, would avidly read a book like Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism.⁵ These people possessed a certain urge—partly still as a result of their Wagnerian past—to explain from an esoteric perspective everything which existed as legend and myth.

But as more and more of these homeless souls began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century, it was possible to see how the most interesting among them were not those who studied the writings of Sinnett and Blavatsky—with at most a nine-tenths honest mind—but those who did not wish to read for themselves because there were still great inhibitions about such things at that time, and who listened with gaping mouths when those who had been reading expounded on these things. And it was most interesting to observe how the listeners, who were sometimes more honest than the narrators, grasped these ideas with their homeless souls as essential spiritual nourishment; spiritual nourishment which they were able to transform into something more honest through the greater honesty of their souls, despite the relative dishonesty with which it was being presented to them. One could see in them the yearning to hear something completely different from what was offered in the ordinary mainstream of civilization. How they devoured what they heard! It was most interesting to observe how on the one hand the tentacles of mainstream life kept drawing people in, and how on the other they would appear at one of the meeting places—often a coffee house—and would listen with great yearning. The point is that the honest souls, the ones who had been subject to the vagaries of life, were there too.

The way in which souls unwilling to admit to their homelessness were unable to find their bearings was particularly evident towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. A person might, for instance, listen with profound interest to an explanation of the physical, etheric and astral bodies, kama manas, manas, buddhi and so on. At the same time he was obliged to write the article his newspaper expected, including all the usual goodies. It really became clear how difficult it was for some people to leave the mainstream of life. For there were several among them who behaved as if they wanted to slink away, and would prefer that no one knew where they had gone when they wished to attend what was most important and interesting to them in life. It was indeed interesting how spiritual life, spiritual activity, the yearning for a spiritual world began particularly to establish itself in European civilization.

Now you have to remember that circumstances in the late 1880s were really much more difficult than today. Even if it was less harmful, it was nevertheless more difficult then to admit to the existence of a spiritual world, because the physical world of the senses with all its magnificent laws was proven of course! There was no way of getting round that! All the proofs were there in the physics laboratories and the hospitals; all the evidence declared in favour of a world for which there was proof. But the world which could be proven was so unsatisfactory for many homeless souls, was useless to the inner soul, to such an extent that many crept away from it. And at the same time as this great contemporary culture was on offer to them by the sackful—no, by the ton, in giant quantities—they took what nips they could from what has to be seen as the flow of the spiritual world into modern civilization. It was not at all easy to speak about the spiritual world; a suitable point of entry had to be found.

If I may once again introduce a personal note. I had to find a suitable opportunity on which to build. One could not simply crash in on our civilization with the spiritual world. Especially in the late 1880s, I linked the points I had to make about the spiritual world, about its more intimate aspects, in many places with Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily.⁶ If one used something which had been created by no less a person than Goethe, and when it was as obvious as it is in the Fairy Tale that spiritual impulses had flowed into it, that was a suitable basis. I certainly could not use what was then being peddled as theosophy, what had been garnered from Blavatsky, from Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism and similar books by a group of people who were undeniably hard-working. For someone who wanted to preserve his scientifically schooled thinking in the spiritual world this was simply impossible.

Neither was it easy in another respect. Why? Well, Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism was soon recognized as the work of a spiritual dilettante, a compendium of old, badly understood esoteric bits and pieces. But it was less easy to find access to a phenomenon of the period such as Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine. For this work did at least reveal in many places that much of its content had its origins in real, powerful impulses from the spiritual world. The book expressed a large number of ancient truths which had been gained through atavistic clairvoyance in distant ages of mankind. People thus encountered in the outside world, not from within themselves, something which could be described as an uncovering of a tremendous wealth of wisdom which mankind had once possessed as something exceptionally illuminating. This was interspersed with unbelievable passages which never ceased to amaze, because the book is a sloppy and dilettantish piece of work as regards any sort of methodology, and includes superstitious nonsense and much more. In short, Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine is a peculiar book: great truths side by side with terrible rubbish. One might almost say that it sums up very well the spiritual phenomena to which those who developed into the homeless souls of the modern age were subjected.

In the following period in Weimar⁷ I was, of course, occupied intensively with other things, although even then there were numerous opportunities to observe such searching souls. For particularly during this time all kinds of people came to the town to visit the Goethe and Schiller archive. It was possible to become acquainted with the good and bad sides of their souls in a remarkable way. I got to know some strange people, as well as those who were highly cultivated, refined and distinguished. My description of meeting Herman Grimm,⁸ for instance, appeared recently in Das Goetheanum.⁹ One had a better understanding of Weimar when Herman Grimm was there.

We need only think of his novel Unütberwindliche Mächte¹⁰ to see how Grimm also exhibited a strong drive for spiritual matters. If you read the end of his novel you can see how the spiritual world intermingles with the physical through the soul of a dying person. It is very moving, very magnificent. I have spoken about this in previous lectures.¹¹

Of course some strange people also passed through Weimar. There was a Russian state councillor, for example. No one could discover quite what he was looking for: it was something or other in the second part of Goethe's Faust. Exactly how he hoped to achieve that through the Goethe archive was impossible to elicit. It was also hard to know what to do to help him. In the end he was simply left to continue his search. Next to him was a very intelligent American, who loved to sit on the floor with his legs crossed—a very peculiar sight. It was possible to see such cameos of contemporary life in their most real form.

When subsequently I went to Berlin, destiny once again introduced me to a group of homeless souls, and I became involved to such an extent that this group asked me to hold the lectures which have now been published in my Eleven European Mystics.¹² They were people who found their way into the Theosophical Society at a somewhat later date than my Viennese acquaintances. Only a few of them studied Blavatsky's Secret Doctrine. But these people were well-versed in what Blavatsky's successor, Annie Besant,¹³ proclaimed as the theosophical ideas of the time.

So I found myself once again in a similar situation to the one in Vienna in the late 1880s, in which it was possible to observe such homeless souls. And anthroposophy at first grew up, one might say, together with—not in, but together with—homeless souls who had initially sought a new home in theosophy.

Tomorrow I will try to lead you further in this process of self-reflection which we have hardly begun today.

• 1. Bayreuther Blatter: official organ of the Wagner Association, founded in 1878.
• 2. cf. Rudolf Steiner. The Course of My Life. Translated by O. D. Wannamaker. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1970. Also Briefe I. (Dornach, 1955).
• 3. Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821–1881, leading Russian novelist. cf. also lecture of 13 February 1915 in GA 174b. Rudolf Steiner speaks in some detail about Dostoevsky's book The Brothers Karamazov in the lecture of 13 February 1916 in GA 167; typescript (C42) in Rudolf Steiner House library, London.
• 4. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1831–1891. Her main works are Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Together with Col. H. S. Olcott, Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society on 17 November 1875 in New York, which soon thereafter moved its headquarters to India.
• 5. Alfred Percy Sinnett, 1840–1921. Esoteric Buddhism
• 6. J. W. von Goethe. Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1979. cf. Rudolf Steiner, Goethes Geistesart in ihrer Offenbarung durch seinen Faust und durch das Marchen von der Schlange und der Lilie (1918), GA 22. Also The Course of My Life, The Course of My Life, Chapter XXX.
• 7. From 1890 to 1896/7 Rudolf Steiner was employed at the Goethe-Schiller Archive to edit Goethe's scientific writings within the Weimar edition of Goethe's works. cf. Rudolf Steiner. The Course of My Life. Chapters XIII-XXIII. The Course of My Life, Chapter XIII–Chapter XXIII. Also Briefe I, idem.
• 8. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901. cf. The Course of My Life, p.150ff.
• 9. The article referred to is “Eine vielleicht zeitgemsse persnliche Erinnerung” in the periodical Das Goetheanum, Vol. 2, no. 43 of 3 June 1923. Reproduced in GA 36.
• 10. Herman Grimm. Unüberruindliche Machte. Berlin 1867.
• 11. In detail on 16 January 1913 in GA 62 (not translated). Also on 6 February 1915 in GA 161; typescript (Z140) in Rudolf Steiner House library, London.
• 12. In the winter of 1900/1901, Rudolf Steiner delivered 27 evening lectures in the Theosophical Library of Count and Countess Brockdorff. They were published as a collection in 1901 (GA 7) and appeared in English as Mysticism and Modern Thought. Revised edition: Eleven European Mystics. Translated by Karl Zimmer. Rudolf Steiner Publications, New York, 1971. cf. also Chapter XXX.
• 13. Annie Besant, 1847–1933. Was elected in May 1907 to succeed H. S. Olcott as President of the Theosophical Society.

My dear fellow students! It is clear from many statements of this kind that we are counting on you with all our hearts for what we are thinking of here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We are counting on you with all our hearts because, if we are to work against the impending downfall of Western civilization, it can only come from science, given the state of affairs today. Consider that what has brought us into today's situation, after all, basically also comes from science. I will point out much less what is actually, so to speak, on the palm of your hand: that the destructive anti-cultural institutions of the latest time are basically scientific results. It is easy to imagine that, so we don't have to discuss it here. But we want to consider something else. You see, the proletariat, if I may use the grotesque expression, has a kind of Janus face today. It is quite true that the proletariat must be brought in if the situation is to be reorganized today. That, again, is something that is as self-evident as can be. And perhaps I may remind you that in Stuttgart, among the nearer and more distant surroundings, the cold was at its worst when I once used a certain word in a public lecture, but which, I believe, was spoken out of a real insight into present conditions. I said that the bourgeoisie suffers first of all from a decadent brain and that it is absolutely dependent on replacing brain work with the work of the ether brain, with something spiritualized. That is as obvious as anything can be. By contrast, the proletarian, in the context of the present vertical migration of peoples, does not yet have a decadent brain. He can still work with his physical brain if only he can be persuaded to do so. This, of course, has caused a great deal of resentment among the bourgeoisie in the immediate and more distant vicinity. But today it is not a matter of whether people are more or less resentful, but of bringing the truth to light.

Now, however, the proletariat is revealing this. On the one hand, the proletarians will always be inclined to say to themselves: Yes, we don't want to know anything about what you are bringing us. It's too difficult for us; it's not of interest to us for the time being. But on the other hand, these proletarians are completely fed up with the waste products of the science of the 19th and early 20th centuries. They only work with what has fallen away from it. We must make up our minds to look at it that way. We must say to ourselves: Of course it will be quite difficult to enter the proletariat with what we are working out of science in a very serious way. But if we do not let up, if we do not let ourselves be deterred, but rather base ourselves on this social action: we must win the proletariat from science! then we will also certainly get through to the proletariat with something sound, just as one has come to the proletariat with Marxism and Bolshevism. It is only a matter of not losing our breath too soon, that we actually carry out what we have once recognized as correct. That was always and always my principle in anthroposophical work. Therefore, I never compromised, but simply made enemies with full insight into the matter, because there was no other way than to simply reject everything that came up amateurishly. And if it were worth the effort, it would be very easy to prove that the majority of our current enemies are people who were once rejected because of over-amateurism. You would see, if you went into the details, that this is the case. All you need is a substitute for memory. After all, memory is no longer as strong! If you have access to spiritual training, you know that. Then you know how to assess the enemies. They often emerge from the shallows only after years.

Therefore, you must not shrink from a powerful adherence to what was once recognized as correct, then it will also go with the proletariat. For the proletariat suffers only from an exaggerated sense of authority. But as soon as you have it for yourself, you would win it. It is still difficult today to make people understand that their leaders are their greatest enemies from the bottom to the top; that they are pests. But this must be taught to people little by little; then it will work. Then one will probably give the proletariat an interest in this healthy scientific work that we are scientifically developing. Then one will have an extraordinarily good audience in the proletariat. And for a long time to come, the proletariat itself must, of course, be an 'audience' in its mass.

But now I would like to point out something else. You see, for many years I have been active in the anthroposophical movement and have always tried to work in a certain direction, which consisted of bringing together the anthroposophical and the specifically scientific. I could give you specific examples of the difficulties that have always arisen in this regard. For example, many years ago a scholar approached us who was an extraordinarily learned man in terms of Orientalism and Assyriology. On the other hand, he was enthusiastic about anthroposophy. It would have been natural for someone who really had Orientalism and so on in his fingers as a scholar and was enthusiastic about anthroposophy to work on these two things at the same time. But he could not be brought to do that; the man could not be brought to build a bridge from one area to another. He could make progress in both, but he could not build a bridge. Nevertheless, it must also be the case that this bridge must be tried absolutely. And you can find it; you can find the entrance to every single science through anthroposophy.

On the other hand, I found a well-known professor of botany who was also an enthusiastic 'theosophist'. The man in question wrote botanical works and he wrote about theosophy. He did not belong to the Anthroposophical Society, but to the Theosophical Society. He wrote about theosophy in the same way that Annie Besant wrote about it. He was completely a botanist when he closed the book on Theosophy and completely a 'Theosophist' when he taught or wrote books on Theosophy, without one being able to recognize that he was a botanist. He even found it abhorrent when I spoke to him about botany and wanted to prepare a kind of bridge.

You see, this is the result of the culture of the last few centuries, this double bookkeeping – that is what I must always call it. One wants that which relates to life in the specialist journal, and that which one then needs for the mind, for the “interior”, as one calls it, in the Sunday supplement of one's political newspaper. Politics is in between; according to the “tripartite structure” that has existed up to now, you want to get that from the political paper. These things are the ones that you actually have to see through above all. And then you will perhaps be the ones most qualified to help find this bridge everywhere. In a sense — it won't always appear so radically — things are like that.

You see, poor Hölderlin already expressed the beautiful word at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century when he said to himself, when he looks around his Germany, he finds officials, factory owners, carpenters and tailors everywhere, but — no people. He finds scholars, artists and teachers and so on, but — no people. He finds young and older and old, sedate people, but – no people.

One would like to say today: We actually have the least of all in our learned professions, that there are people there! We have sciences, and the scientists actually swim around as something factual. Basically, we actually live to a high degree quite apart from science, in that we feel like human beings. Just think, if we today – I mean, if we summarize all of our scholarly knowledge – if we do a piece of work today to habilitate, what do we do then? We cannot just sit down and write what flows from our soul into such a scholarly work. That doesn't work. Then we would very soon be reproached: Yes, he writes from the wrist. You mustn't do that. You mustn't write from the wrist, but you have to study the books for your doctoral dissertation, which you otherwise don't pay attention to, maybe don't even read, only open at the pages where something is written that you have to quote. In short, you have to have as external a relationship as possible to what you are working on, and you absolutely must not have an internal relationship to it! When people meet again, I can tell you about a strange meeting in Weimar that took place during my working hours at the local Goethe-Schiller Archive, where I was able to attend the meetings of the Goethe Society. As soon as someone said something that was related to Goethe, or as soon as someone touched on something scientific, they would say: There's another group talking shop, that's not on! The purpose of the gathering was something that had to be avoided at all costs, so as not to be seen in a bad light of talking shop. But all of this is essentially to blame for the fact that we have ended up in this situation. In Weimar, one could really see all the specialists – many of them offered a kind of combination of all subjects – in these seven years, and there was basically no strong differentiation by nationality. For example, when Mr. Thomas from a very Western university in America writes, there is no real difference between the work and thinking of any Schmidt or Scherer student, even in his work and thinking - he worked on Goethe's “Faust.” It was basically international, because Thomas only differed from the others in that he sat on the floor and crossed his legs when he sat on the floor in front of the bookcase. That was how he distinguished himself as an American. But otherwise he worked like the others. The only exception was a Russian councilor. The man didn't know what questions he was researching. But when he came to an inn in the evening, where people would gather, they would always say to the others: “Don't look around, because the councilor is walking around!” Because he kept starting to talk about what he knew of Goethe's Faust, people avoided sitting with him. These things are actually more important than one would usually think; for they could be amply multiplied and would still explain something about how the scientific life has developed bit by bit. And we want to get out of this! We certainly do not want to become pedants or new-fangled simplifiers, but we must realize that man stands higher than all science, that he need not let himself be tyrannized by it. And the emancipation of the spirit is actually working towards combating science as such in its abstraction, and putting man first. So that we not only have science as Bölsche writes about the “immortality” of science. Wilhelm Bölsche has also set up a kind of spiritual science, but he seeks it in libraries, which are, however, full of paper and blackened print of the actual spirits.

But this is what we must work towards: this humanization of scientific life, this: putting people in the foreground in so-called objective science. Objective science must actually have its existence in life in man. And having this does not make one dry and arid. On the contrary, by combating abstract thinking, one becomes a useful co-worker in that which we so urgently need: the combating of barbarism in the life of Western civilization.

This is what is most urgently needed by those who enter the learned professions, or professions supported by the sciences. Therefore, I believe that it will be extraordinarily beneficial if you get together at the individual universities and freely address such topics scientifically, develop such topics, as it is to be attempted from the bodies that we already have, especially from the Waldorf school. I am not thinking that a school-like operation should be set up, not at all, my dear fellow students, but I am thinking of something else. We will try, so to speak, to shape the threads in such a way that they are woven out of the necessities of the time, that they are basically found in view of what actually lies in the ethos of the overall context of our culture. And then certain individuals among our Waldorf school teachers, the body of teachers, which in turn should maintain a kind of unity with those who have presented here, should simply be given the task of identifying the topics that need to be resolved today. And it should only be said to the student body what tasks are necessary according to the insights that these circles can have. The rest is therefore not letting oneself be led by the tasks, but it is a fathoming of what is particularly necessary today. And there will be the opportunity to work really correctly from scientific foundations. I would like to emphasize that it must be avoided that small scientific circles, more or less really or supposedly working, isolate themselves and believe that they can do enough with that today. This could, of course, be very useful and will be very useful, and it must also be done, but we also need a broad student movement that is truly aware today: things cannot go on as they would among young people if these young people were only to follow in the footsteps of those who still hold office today out of old traditions and old times. If one says that the Social Democrats must get rid of their leaders, then it is above all necessary that the youth of today get rid of the old leaders in a certain way. That will be more difficult than it should be.

Because, you see, I cannot, of course, avoid the issue that is actually at stake. And I must ask you to be quite clear about the fact that I am talking about these things with complete honesty and sincerity. You can be quite sure: we would make easy progress in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement if we had the freedom to work only for the spirit and as a stimulus to the spirit. Assigning posts, awarding degrees, letting students fail their state exams – that is what the others do. And that is an important factor. We certainly do not underestimate it in our field. For we know full well what courage and boldness are needed today, especially for the prospective scholar and prospective scientific worker, to be and remain with us. Because, in fact, we can offer him very little today. If we can gradually build up our individual movements, then things will improve. When the Waldorf School was founded, I said: the founding is nice, but it has no meaning if at least ten more schools are not founded in the next quarter, because then it is only established. And I have definitely envisaged – as I always follow up practical ideas, not just ideas that can be handed down – that if we can found schools everywhere, then we will be able to appoint to our schools those who, under certain circumstances, do it the way Dr. Stein told us himself. But it is not a system. He enrolled, saw what a few lectures were like, but otherwise he read cycles and other things, read what was quoted there, and completed his academic studies. Of course, this cannot be generalized, because probably only three quarters of the professors would agree that if there were only students like Dr. Stein, they could actually only attend the first three lectures and then go for a walk. This cannot be easily realized for the general public today. So I do not want to propagate that. But I just want to draw your attention to the fact that at any rate the spirit that sits on the chairs in the lecture halls today, if it is transferred to the school benches, does not bring us any future. Out of this necessity you must already find the courage to at least in some way ally yourselves with what is wanted here. But on the other hand, I thought practically, as the Waldorf School was founded: if we are able to truly emancipate spiritual life, we will have more and more Waldorf Schools, and then we will also be able to offer our young friends from the student body a future. It is not at all unidealistic for me to say that. But then it will be easier. But we have to support each other from both sides. We will only be able to work on founding independent schools and universities if we see an understanding student body coming towards us. To do this, we need not only small groups, but a student movement that wants to work on a large scale and advocate on a large scale for what is being considered here.

I must point out that what I have said in these days as the reason for the World School Association is meant very seriously. I think of it as international, so that it is to be created, so to speak, out of the thinking and feeling of today. If we can first make the world understand that there are really only two movements today that have to struggle with each other, on the one hand Bolshevism, which is leading the world into the swamp, and on the other hand the threefold social organism, then people will also be faced with a choice as soon as they see that the old impulses will no longer work! Either it must happen, that those who want to advance civilization in a reasonable way must gradually live into the impulse of threefolding, or, if people are too lazy to do so, Bolshevism will flood Europe and barbarize European culture. If people understand this, they will be easier to win than they are today.

There are three things that must be taken into account. When one speaks to the international world today about a project such as the one in Dornach, and that money is needed for it, people take the view that it must all be idealism! You can't be so mean as to give money for it! Money is much too dirty to be used for such an idealistic cause. In short, people are not easily won over to something like this unless they are prepared for it for a long time. And since we cannot complete our building in Central European countries because of the foreign currency, we are dependent on other parts of today's civilized world. But they don't give us any money just like that. Basically, they are very tight-fisted. On the other hand, people are still relatively easy to win over if you tell them you want to set up sanatoriums. You can get as much money as you want. We can't do that now, set up sanatoriums, but we can get involved in the middle way. The middle way is what I mean by the world school association. The World School Association can finance all cultural institutions if it is understood in the right way. And there is still some understanding for the establishment of the school-based approach, but less for something that is directly the building. We have to work for what is in the middle, so to speak. Therefore, it is important that this foundation of the World School Association, which we will have as something universal, be prepared in a certain way, that the mood be set for this World School Association. And so I would like to suggest that it would be best if you were to include in your decisions, in your strongest initiative, that you approach everyone you can, and convince them that this World School Association must spread across all countries, that it is up to them to emancipate intellectual life. That it must finance as many free schools across the world as possible. The emancipation of spiritual life must be pursued on the grandest scale. We must come to emancipate ourselves from that which, in essence, enslaves us spiritually. But we can only do that if we create the right mood. The tyranny is greater than one might think. From a place in Europe, I will attempt to inaugurate this founding of the World School Association myself. But what must come first is to create the right mood for it. Because today you can't achieve anything by forming groups of twelve or fifteen people to work things out. Rather, it is important that we spread this idea as widely as possible: a world school association must come into being. Now, I can well imagine, and I am quite satisfied with the fact, that of course the students can't exactly open their wallets very wide. That is not necessary. The others belong to this. But what the student can open, that is – you know, I mean this cum grano salis – what the student can open, that is his mouth. That is what I mean: that you can make it possible for the World School Association to open its mouth wherever you go. So that when we establish this World School Association in the near future, we will not fall on deaf ears, but on prepared people. That is what must be.

As you can see, we have enough to do. What we need is nothing more than real courage and a clear view of the world. Why should we not be able to overcome with youthful strength the things that must be overcome because they still tower over our time with all the hallmarks of the old age and seek to oppress us? We must not let ourselves be oppressed. We must realize today that we are dancing on a knife's edge, or, as we might say, on a volcano. It is not the case, my dear fellow students, that things will continue as they are now. We are heading for very, very sad times. But we can remedy these sad times by growing into them with courage and energy. And I believe that spiritual science, anthroposophy, can be of help to you in this. It can be of help to everyone.

I ask you in conclusion only: do not pursue things particularistically, sectionally, but in the broadest style. Do not exclude anyone, but include everyone who wants to work with you. The only thing that should count is the will to work honestly with us in the direction we have set, the direction of growing into the scientific professions. It seems to me, my dear fellow students, that we must not sin in this direction any longer. We must be broad-minded. We must regard everyone who honestly wants to work with us as a very welcome co-worker. We must not allow any distinction to arise between people and people, but we must let everyone who simply has the will to work with us, work with us. This should also be the case, as it has always been in the anthroposophical movement. We have never demanded that anyone give up anything they otherwise represent in the world. No one has ever had to give up anything; they only had to accept what the Anthroposophical movement could give them. And perhaps I may recall something personal. You know how I am always reproached for having once been part of the Theosophical movement. It was not a matter of me going along with it! The Theosophical Society actually approached me; it joined me for a time, until it threw out what I stood for. But I said to the Theosophists at our first meeting in London that it was not a matter of us accepting anything from the center, but rather of us bringing to the common altar what we had to bring at that particular time.

In this sense, we can work together to the greatest extent possible. And if you work in the style of such work, especially in student circles, then we will make progress.

This lecture is from the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. It is lecture 5 of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities throught Austria and Germany in the years 1908–1909.

The word “mission” is perhaps not quite the correct term for our examination of this extraordinary phenomenon at the end of the fifteenth century. Perhaps regarding connections to Savonarola's personality could urge us to say these links would be far more important than defining the mission of Savonarola. This other aspect could come to the fore as soon as members of our Anthroposophic world-view and world movement make themselves familiar with the being of Savonarola because out of his actions and characteristics various things can be learnt. In a being such as Savonarola's we may see the dawn of a new time and up to what point the development of Christianity had reached by the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is exactly clear what kind of activity was not effective. We can see what kind of activity was introduced into the development of mankind.

It is necessary to show how certain one-sided influences regarding the empowering and the presentation of Christianity became unsuitable. It didn't take long—with some single thorough strokes we would like to regard Savonarola's actions. Beside Savonarola we can place another figure, quite different in nature, of a Dominican monk. This monk of the monastery from which Savonarola's serious speeches were published, had painted the most wonderful, delicate paintings: Fra Angelico da Fiesole During this dawn of a new age it indicated how Christianity revealed itself in two gestures. This is the proof of how Christianity could be expressed through the soul at this time. This is one way, but the other way—and this is Savonarola's way—is how Christianity could be lived through during this time. One could, if one was such a person as Savonarola, with certain confidence, a strong will and a definite clear understanding, act as he did. Still comparatively young he believed that within such an Order, where the real rules of the Order should be fulfilled, a true life in Christianity could be experienced. If one still had what Savonarola had, the deepest moral courage of conviction, one could direct one's focus to everything happening in the world. One could compare Christianity with events happening in Rome, with the actual worldly life of the Pope, the Cardinals, or how it expressed itself in the wonderful creations of Michelangelo! One could observe how in all the catholic churches Mass was read according to the strictest Cult, giving people the feeling that they couldn't live without the Cult. One could also see that whoever came under the robe, the stole and chasuble, could in their civil lives honour a liberality but that this liberality which was striven for, seen in today's eyes, is by contrast mere children's games. One can take that which from a certain aspect had been striven for as a tendency, and see it become a reality up to the highest steps of the altar.

One could at that time connect the higher worlds in a glowing belief that was absolutely democratic: domination of the gods without any human rulers! This was the pull of Savonarola's heart. The Medici could be admired for all they had done for Italy and for all they had brought to Italy, but one could also, like Savonarola, see the great De Medici, of Lorenzo de Medici, as tyrants. Imagine being Lorenzo de Medici and considering allowing such a quarrelsome Dominican to preach as he wished. Lorenzo de Medici was a distinguished thinker. He could grasp various things, because things should be considered from both sides. He had drawn Savonarola to Florence but Savonarola went against the grain from the start in considering Lorenzo as his patron. When Savonarola became Prior of the monastery, he didn't even consider making the expected visit of thanks. When it was explained to him that Lorenzo had called him to Florence, he said: Do you believe that Lorenzo de Medici was the one who called Savonarola to Florence? No, it was God who called Savonarola to this monastery in Florence!

As a distinguished man Lorenzo donated something to the monastery and one can imagine Savonarola being calmed by what had been given to the monastery. However he gave all these gifts away and announced that the Dominicans were capable of regarding their vow of poverty and to gather no treasures.

Who were actually the enemies of Savonarola? All those who created the configuration and the reign on the physical plane. Nothing disconcerted Savonarola. He went straight ahead. He said: There is a Christendom. Its actual form is in fact unknown to people. The church disfigures it. It must disappear and be replaced by a new form which would reveal the true Christian spirit.—He continued preaching these proclamations. Initially his preaching was with great difficulty because he could only utter the words from his throat with great effort. However he became an orator whose following grew continuously, whose oratory talents increased ever more.

The ruling powers were initially liberal; they didn't want to oppose him. It was an Augustinian monk who felt obliged to deliver a speech which would annihilate Savonarola's power. His speech was delivered under the theme: “It doesn't befit us to know the day and hour when the divine Creator got involved with the world.” This Augustinian monk spoke in fiery words and one could say, being cognisant of the steams flooding Christian life, the entire declaration of belief of the Dominicans domain now opposed that of the Augustinians.—Savonarola prepared for battle and spoke about the same theme: “It befits us well to know things are not as they seem. It befits us to change them and know when the day and hour arrives.” The Florentine crowds cheered like they had cheered the Augustinian monk. He wasn't only considered a danger in Florence but also in Rome and in the whole of Italy. After the unbelievable agony of torture and falsified evidence he was condemned to be burnt at the stake.

Thus Savonarola lived while at the same time another Dominican monk painted a Christianity which hardly exists in the physical world. When we search for a specific word in our thoughts which was spoken by an extraordinary man regarding Savonarola, namely Jacob Burkhardt, the famous Renaissance historian, we can develop the opinion that life was so extensive in Italy that you stood directly before secularisation of the church, which meant the church turning into a worldly organisation, then we may conclude that Savonarola was the everlasting conscience of Christianity.

What caused the ineffectiveness of Savonarola despite his fiery entrance into Christianity? He is a historical figure. This was the cause: In this dawning of a new age and in this dusk of the church where Savonarola instilled his Christianity, something was introduced which worked against the external organisation of Christianity. This test proves it, not even such a figure as Savonarola could be produced again in Christianity. The spiritual-scientifically striving person should learn from this that there is something else necessary, something objective, which makes it possible for the deep springs of esoteric Christianity to be exhausted. Such an instrument can only be Anthroposophy. The figure of Savonarola is like a distant sign lit up in the future of what Anthroposophists should be learning, not through the means which one believed at the time, to re-discover Christianity, but with the means of anthroposophical spiritual science. As Anthroposophist one can learn much from this figure.

The aim of these talks has been, and must continue to be, to show from all kinds of different aspects how people today and in the near future are moving into a period of civilization which will make special demands in different spheres of life. Speaking of processes deep down in the life of the spirit, I have sought to show what is happening today supersensibly, but all the same with powerful effect especially in the present time and which will influence the whole of human life, the whole of culture and the whole social sphere. We have been able to gather from these considerations that human soul nature will essentially become more inward.

When it is said that human soul nature will become more inward we must not fail to realize that this growing inwardness will, in many instances, go hand in hand with people becoming more superficial in their intellect, for instance with regard to the sciences. This will be due to the circumstances we have already considered and others which are still to be considered. It really has to be taken into account that, in reality, evolution is never as consistent as those who present the modern scientific theories of evolution would like it to be. Their ideas are not incorrect; yet ideas which are biased, even if correct, will often cause greater confusion than completely wrong ideas. They assume simple linear evolution from incomplete life-forms all the way to the human being. This is not how it is, however, for in the evolution of humanity and also of the world outside the human being, a more outward stream is always complemented by an inner one. Thus we are able to say: if a particular stream continues for some time in the outside world, an inner stream will run parallel to it (see Fig. 11a). This stream may be more material or materialistic on the outside, whilst inwardly it is more spiritual or spiritualistic. Then a more spiritualistic stream comes to the surface and the materialistic or material stream goes down into the hidden depths of human nature. And then the situation is reversed again: the more spiritual line goes inward and the material or materialistic one comes to the surface.

In the time immediately ahead of us, outer life will very much follow the course shown by the red line here (see Fig. 11a) where material events and material attitudes and considerations are concerned, and the depth of the human soul will be more spiritual. It may well be that people do not even want to know about this growing spiritual inwardness; but it will happen nevertheless.

If you really dwell on this in your soul, you will be able to give due consideration to two aspects which will be extraordinarily important for the future. Remember we said yesterday that in 1879 ahrimanic powers of a special kind descended from the heights of the spirit into the realm of human evolution, and specifically into the evolution of the human intellect and soul. These powers are here, they are living among us. They seek above all to take possession of our heads, of anything we think and inwardly feel. They are angelic Spirits, I said, who cannot continue their development in the spiritual world and want to use human heads to continue to develop in the immediate future. It is therefore particularly important that this line (blue line in Fig. 11a) of secret, hidden soul development is given due attention. As I have told you, many people probably do not want to give it conscious attention; they would far rather it stayed down below, so they need only concern themselves with material things. If it is not given attention, those ahrimanic powers will take hold of this very process of growing inwardness. This is one thing we must take into account. We must be ready to face the danger soon to come in the evolution of civilization, and stand guard in our most holy, inner human reality against the influences of ahrimanic powers.

Educational issues will be particularly significant in the immediate future. The inwardness of the human soul will be most significant during childhood and youth in the near future. Perhaps it is difficult to believe this today, but the time has long since come for us to say: the children and young people we see do not show their true nature in what we see on the outside. We see the red line here (see Fig. 11a), but beside it runs the blue one, a hidden inner life to which we must pay real attention. Teachers must pay attention to it, lest they surrender it to the ahrimanic powers. Education and training will have to change completely in many respects in the near future.

Let us consider the origin of the principles in our present system of education and training. Certain things always lag behind in the cosmic order. ‘Enlightenment’, as it was called, was a special feature of the eighteenth century. People even wanted to establish a kind of rational religion based only on human reflection, on the starveling among the sciences, as I have said in my public lectures in Basle.¹ The way people feel they must behave towards growing children and young people in education and training has entirely come out of this stream of rationality: always do everything in such a way that the child can immediately understand; children should never experience anything deeper than they are able to understand.

It will have to be realized that this is the worst possible way of providing for the life of a human being, for it takes us to a truly disastrous extreme in human life. Just consider this: if we make every effort to give children only such things as are in accord with their level of understanding, things they can grasp, we do not give them anything for later life when they are supposed to have deeper understanding. Care is taken, so to speak, to ensure that for the whole of their lives they have nothing but the understanding of a child. This approach has already borne fruit, and the fruits are what you would expect! Much of the thinking in our present-day civilized world, where people consider themselves to be so wise and enlightened, remains at a childish level. No one in the newspaper world is, of course, going to admit that the thinking in their world is largely childish, but it is true nevertheless. Essentially this is connected with the fact that only the child's understanding is addressed. This then remains the same throughout life. Something quite different will have to be done: we must fill our souls, especially if we are educators, with the inner awareness, the consciousness, that a mysterious inwardness reigns in a child and we must present to the child's heart and mind much that will only be understood later on in life, not in childhood. Later in life they can then recall these things from memory and say to themselves: this is something you heard or learned on that occasion; now at last you are able to understand many of these things. Nothing will be better for the soundness of human life in the future than for individuals to recall things they were told in childhood, and then be able to understand them.

When people are able to live with themselves in such a way as to recall from memory the things they could not understand before, this will be the source for a healthy inner life. People will be spared the inner emptiness which enters into so many hearts and souls today, and causes them to end up in institutions. There, souls which have remained empty and barren inside because education has failed to give them anything that can be recalled later on in life may be offered something from outside.

Something else needs to be considered in this context. Because of the circumstances I have spoken of in recent times, people of our present age have lost awareness of the close connection between human beings and the universe. People today believe they are just hunks of meat walking on this earth or travelling in a railway carriage. They will not always admit this, of course, but this is in fact what they have in mind. It is not true, however. Human beings are closely bound up with the whole universe. And it is good to bring this clearly to mind again by considering the following.

Consider the Earth. The Moon moves around it; let us say this is the orbit of the Moon (see Fig. 11b). The Earth is, of course, anything but the abstract mineral entity imagined by modern mineralogists, geologists and physicists. It is very much alive, and we can observe many forms of existence in connection with the Earth. For the moment, let us merely consider the currents which move around the Earth all the time. They move around it in all kinds of directions. They are etheric and spiritual by nature and have a real, substantial effect. Something is always present in these currents.

It is good to consider the source and origin of these currents. We shall be going into more detail as time goes on; for today I merely want to make some preliminary statements. If you read my Occult Science you will find that in very early times the Earth and the Sun were one. Our present-day Earth has been eliminated from the Sun. These currents are remnants from the life of the Sun; Sun life is still present in the Earth.

Yet the Moon, too, was one with the Earth in the past. And the Moon which orbits the Earth today also has currents within it. Those currents are remnants from a later time, from Moon evolution.

We thus have two kinds of currents and we may call them Sun currents and Moon currents. They take quite a different course, and they are a living reality. Let us assume a creature walking this Earth in a certain way has Sun currents passing through it; these pass through easily. Let us assume another creature is constructed in a different way, so that the Sun currents pass through it coming from one side and Moon currents from the other. Sun currents are not limited to specific places and actuality pass through everything; they can therefore pass through this creature in one direction. Thus there can be creatures on Earth who have only the Sun current passing through them in one direction, and there may be others who have the Sun current pass through them in one direction and the Moon current in another.

Animals are creatures which can only have the Sun current going through them. Imagine a four-legged animal: as it walks, its backbone is essentially parallel to the Earth's surface. The Sun current, which has now become an Earth current, can continually pass through this backbone. This creature, then, is related to the Earth.

It is different with human beings. In the living human body only the head has the position held by animals. Think of a line drawn from the back of the head to the forehead—it is the direction of the animal's backbone, and the same Sun current passes through the head. The human backbone, on the other hand, is lifted out of the currents which run parallel to the Earth, including the Sun current which has become Earth current. Being lifted out, human beings are in a position (this does, of course, depend a great deal on the geographical latitude and so on, but it is also what makes people different from each other) where under certain conditions the Moon current goes through them; not through the head, however, but through the backbone. The difference between animals and humans is tremendous. The cosmic current which passes through the animal backbone passes through the human head; the old Moon current, which does not relate to anything in the animal, passes through the human backbone. The human backbone even reflects its relationship to the Moon current in its composition, for human beings have approximately as many vertebrae as there are days in a month, between 28 and 31 vertebrae. The reason why the figure is only approximate will be considered at a later time. The whole life of the human backbone, and indeed of the human breast, is intimately bound up with the life of the Moon. Hidden beneath the life of the Sun, which relates to sleeping and waking and takes 24 hours, lies the rhythmical life of the Moon.

This is a basic reflection on the relationship between the human being and the whole universe. For just as the currents passing through the human backbone are part of the current which relates to the life of the Moon, so other currents in the human being relate to the other planets in our solar system. All these things are utterly real. In modern science they have been completely abandoned, and no one even ventures to consider these relationships. In consequence, scientists are not able to appreciate that the conscious human life which is outwardly apparent here on Earth goes hand in hand with an unconscious life which is connected with the human breast and arises from mysterious inner depths. This must be especially taken into account in times like those which lie ahead; it must be especially taken into account in the sphere of education, for otherwise the adversarial ahrimanic powers will take hold of the unconscious life. It would be utterly disastrous if people were to fail to note that part of their inner life, the part which is in the process of becoming more inward—the blue line in the diagram—is in danger of falling prey to the ahrimanic powers, unless it is taken up in full consciousness and deepened through the insights of a spiritual science in which courage is taken actually to say something about realities which outer science is unable to discover.

We must look at this in entirely concrete terms. Consider the way outer science is going. It is entering into all kinds of abstractions and, indeed, is most useful when it enters into all kinds of abstractions. People will need this science for their outer life; it must become part of human civilization. To use the outer scientific culture, such as it is now, in education will be particularly detrimental in the immediate future. To teach children abstract notions of nature and the laws of nature which people need to know will become an absurdity in the near future. On the other hand, it will be important—I can always only give examples—to consider the lives of animals in a loving way, with their special conditions of life described to give the children a real picture of how ants behave in their communities, how they live together, and so on. As you know, the beginnings of this are to be found in Brehm's Tierleben,² though they are not fully developed. Such symbolized stories of life in the animal world need to be more and more fully developed. Individual stories should be told in a truly thoughtful way, rather than dishing up elementary zoology to children in the dreadful way it is done now. We must tell them of the special things the lion does, and the fox, the ant, the ladybird, and so on. It is of no real consequence if the details which are told actually happen or not; what matters is that they are thoughtful and come from the heart. The kind of extract of natural history which is dinned into children today should only come in later years; children must first of all be able to take delight in stories which represent individual aspects in the lives of animals.

It will be particularly important to consider plant life in such a way that one has many stories to tell about the relationship of the rose to the violet, of shrubs to the weeds which grow around them, and long stories about the Spirits leaping above the flowers as one walks through a meadow, and the like. This is the botany children should be told. And they should be told of how certain green-coloured crystals which dwell in the earth behave towards colourless crystals, or a cubic crystal to an octahedral one. Instead of the abstract crystallography which is dished out to children who are still quite young, much to their detriment, we should have a symbolistic presentation of the life of the crystals down in the earth. Our views on everything which goes on in the depths of the earth can only be fruitful if we make them fruitful with the descriptions which are given in our anthroposophical literature. It will not be enough just to list items; these things must be the stimulus and give us ideas, so that we can tell many stories about the life shared by diamonds and sapphires, and so on. Think about it and you will know what I mean.

In a similar way it will be important not to dish up those horrible abstractions which are taught as history today, but again to bring life and liveliness into the course of human history and help the children to develop a feeling for what human hearts and minds experience in the course of human evolution. Conversations which did not actually take place in the physical world will have to be invented, a conversation between an ancient Greek and someone living in the fifth postAtlantean age, for example. To let those living human figures appear before the mind's eye of the children will be much more useful than all the historical abstractions presented to them today.

You can see where this is leading. The point is to fill the souls of children with living ideas so that the mysterious hidden undercurrent in them can be reached. Then you will see an inner life which is less arid and infertile and people who will be will also be less nervous later in life, because they will be able to recall stories which were told out of an insight into cosmic laws. They will also be familiar with the laws of nature and able to establish harmony between what was given to them in a living, vital form and the laws of nature. Their minds can only grow barren if they are given the abstract laws of nature. These are a few thoughts I wanted to put to you with special reference to the field of education.

It is, of course, much easier to get together in all kinds of associations today and proclaim over and over again “Education must be put on an individual basis”—and other abstract formulations of this kind. Of course, this is easier than to do what is now needed, which is that people interested in education should enter into the spirit of human and natural evolution and find imaginative tales which allow the life of the spirit to be concretely grasped in exactly the form it will take in the immediate future.

We will always, and in every field, need the stimulus of spiritual science. It alone will be able to let new life arise from the dying forms of the present life of mind and intellect—new life which can act as a stimulant in the way I have described, especially for the minds of children. Without the stimulus of spiritual science, one will be a dried-up school teacher who also dries up the children's minds. Worst of all, people will increasingly have the idea, especially with regard to educating the young, that the best we can do with everything we learn is to forget it again as quickly as possible. If a situation is created where in later life people do not want to miss any of the things they were given in their childhood, this will not merely be a pleasure but prove a wellspring, a true wellspring of human life. I would ask you to take this to heart.

Science itself also needs new stimulus. Yesterday I spoke of how difficult it is to bridge the gap between spiritual science in general and the special fields in which people are engaged in scientific life. Yet this will be absolutely one of the most essential things in future. You must have realized from some of the things said here and elsewhere that paucity and impoverishment of concepts and ideas have led to the conditions we have today.

I have said it in my public lecture in Basle and I have also repeated it here, that people who considered themselves competent believed when this war started that it would last no longer than four months. They thought they had studied the social and economic structure and they formed the idea on that basis. Their ideas of this kind did not relate to reality, and reality has proved them wrong. It is strange how little people are prepared to learn from events. Someone who had arrived at such an idea on the basis of their own scientific understanding surely ought to say to himself now: ‘The premises on which I based my conclusions were clearly quite inadequate.’ Surely, he must now be inclined to learn something. But he sleeps on, drawing further conclusions from those same premises, which have only changed a little under the pressure of experience, because he does not want to consider the inner connections. Of course, anyone who wishes to consider the inner connections in life will have to take this hurdle, which is such a problem, particularly to people who are involved in scientific issues. The last thing they want is to be bothered in the limited field in which they are active; they do not want to establish links with related fields.

This type of specialization was quite a good thing for a time. If it continues, and if our university students continue to be ruined by the bias which comes with specialization, the calamities which result when people's ideas are divorced from reality will get worse and worse. We will have people in municipal, rural and national representative bodies who simply have no real grasp of the issues they are supposed to regulate according to law, because their ideas are too limited to encompass reality. Reality is far richer than those ideas.

There can be no question, then, of being inclined to leave specialized areas as far as possible to ‘experts’, nor of using anthroposophy to satisfy subjective and egotistical needs. It has to be a matter of knowing how to unite these two opposites, and let one prove fruitful for the other.

Something we find again and again—you would also find it so if you were to focus your attention on these things—is that if you speak about special subject-areas to people who are sincerely devoted to anthroposophy, they do find the matter rather tedious. The request is always to speak about central issues—soul, immortality, God, and so on. This will, of course, satisfy their immediate egotistical religious needs, but it leaves no opportunity to give them what is needed more than anything for the near future, namely that people make themselves a real part of this real life. This is why we must take note when someone seeks to make a real connection between impulses to look at things on the basis of spiritual science and the specialist areas.

I have previously drawn attention here³ to the important book our friend Dr. Boos⁴ has written on the Collective Agreement.⁵ The book is now generally available and I should like to draw your attention to it, for it is a perfect example of building bridges between the general approach used in anthroposophy and a whole specialist field, the sphere of law. The point is that our friends will not, I hope, consider special investigations of this kind as something outside their sphere but rather give them their attention, for in the time which lies ahead life itself will have to be the subject for anthroposophical consideration. If you read the book carefully and work through it, you will find aspects of everyday life are taken up in a living way, and also in such a way that one can see two things coming into play here: first, impulses to consider life in a truly comprehensive way, impulses altogether attuned to cosmic laws, and then also great historical perspectives. You will also find it infinitely helpful to consider the difference between Romance contracts and agreements on the one hand and Germanic social cohesion on the other. The relationship of Romance to Germanic human nature presents itself in a very profound way in a particular specialist field. And it is important, especially with this specialist book by Dr. Roman Boos, to work one's way up to what really matters for the immediate future from the point of view of spiritual science -to bridge the gap between the life that presents itself to the senses and in which we establish our social conditions, and the life which streams in from the spiritual world and lets the Spirit pulse through our forms of existence.

I also recommend that you read the new issue of Wissen und Leben,⁶ which has an article by Dr. Boos on the key issues in Swiss national policies.⁷ You will find that current political issues can also be considered from a different point of view than that of everyday journalism—if you do not mind my saying so. Awareness of the relationship between different forms of culture, such as different forms of art, for instance, and political forms, is brought out most beautifully in this essay.

Having read Dr. Boos' article, which takes a serious look at Swiss national policies and is truly in the anthroposophical spirit, you may glance at the first essay in the journal, which is on the significance of the Reformation and was written by Adolf Keller.⁸ It is an essay in the old style, even if it is thought to be in a very new style. In one and the same issue you therefore have a justifiably truly modern work side by side with the most antiquated stuff. People who write such antiquated stuff do, of course, believe they are particularly clever and logical, with penetrating thoughts. The significance of the Reformation is discussed from different points of view in elevated terms which are nothing but empty and vapid abstractions.

Having read Adolf Keller's article, which is decent and well-meant and one of the best pieces of work in this field, one is tired out from being tossed hither and thither between what are again and again the same abstractions: the Reformation created freedom of initiative; freedom of initiative arose through the Reformation; when the Reformation was in progress, free initiative came to life. One is tossed hither and thither in the typical fashion of all abstractionists who know no better than to wallow in a few impoverished notions, having nothing to do with the real world. Here you have a typical instance of the abstract way of thinking which must be overcome, when people live with notions that have little real thought to them, yet are positively smacking their lips with pleasure because they imagine they are saying something really outstanding when they put it in a particularly abstract way.

A few days ago I was sent a treatise on profound theosophical matters which was, in fact, merely a treatise on the ‘something’; it only dealt with the ‘something’—the ‘unimproved something’ and the ‘improved something’, and how the improved takes hold of the unimproved, and how the ‘improved something’ takes precedence over the ‘unimproved something’. And so: conscious and unconscious ‘something’, improved and unimproved ‘something’—going one way and then the other, here again, there again; and in the final instance you have no more than this strange modern way of working in the abstract—though here applied to things of the spirit—which likes to see itself in the abstract and in reality is flight from reality and no longer has anything to do with any kind of reality. This does, of course, have quite specific consequences. People's limited ideas make them unable to wend their way through the river of life. Their ideas are too limited to encompass the reality of life. As a result one reads things like the following, for instance, which is on page 51 of Adolf Keller's essay:

Yet although this experience causes the deepest wellsprings of heart and mind to open up, it is still more than a mere upsurge of feeling. Divine and human elements are not mixed together in this. Conscience takes care this does not happen. It keeps the distance and maintains reverence. Man remains man and God remains God. The Reformation and mysticism have it in common that the relationship to God is established through a personal experience; what separates them is that the Reformation experience does not come in a seething and boiling of emotions in the depths of the soul, as in the case of mysticism, but from a troubled and morally elevated conscience. Anything which is a must, an absolute demand, holds the greatest power in the inner life. Man can only withstand this with divine help that is inwardly experienced.

Nothing but abstractions, and we are pushed hither and thither among them. Then follow the words: ‘This is the gospel, Jesus Christ.’

The gentleman has gone so far in his abstract thinking that he identifies the message of Jesus Christ with Jesus Christ himself. This is what one gets when abstraction is taken to its extreme. What follows is strange indeed. He has rejected mysticism. With his limited ideas he says that the Reformation had nothing to do with mysticism but that it creates healthy life. As if mysticism were not exactly such a living experience. But you see, his limited ideas cannot encompass reality. They are therefore used to say exactly the same about completely opposite things Thus he rejects the ‘seething and boiling’ as something which true adherents of the Reformation should not have, for if they did they would be mystics.
Adolf Keller goes on to say:

This help is not merely presented outwardly, historically or in the sacraments. It, too, can only grow strong if it is inwardly made one's own. It does not act from outside, magically, but only in so far as it may become part of our inner feelings and will, and can set the soul aglow.

Thus the Reformation must not be a ‘seething and boiling’ in the depths of the soul, yet this same Reformation can only be active in the soul if it is able to set the soul aglow, that is make it seethe and boil. You can study the whole essay like this, and nowhere does its poverty of spirit prove adequate for entering into reality. Yet writings like these are read with real passion today. People consider them most erudite. They fail to realize that they only have to read two or three lines more and they get all confused in their minds, for the same ideas have to be used for quite different things, and there is such a paucity of ideas.

If, on the other hand, you study Roman Boos' beautiful essay on the key issues in Swiss national policies—I do recommend it, for it will show you how connections can be made between political life and other forms of culture, and how our ideas can really come alive and the life of ideas be enriched, how you can find an exemplary study here concerning the future of Swiss politics—you can compare this with the vapid maunderings of Adolf Keller's essay in the same issue of the journal. By spending just a single small sum you can have the opportunity of getting old and new absolutely side by side and really see for yourselves.

Sometimes I really have to take account of current issues which are in complete opposition, for anthroposophy does not exist for self-indulgence at exalted levels but to make exactly the observations which take us truly into the present, into the intents and purposes of the present time.

• 1. Lectures given in Basle on 18 and 19 October 1917. See Note 8, lecture 10.
• 2. Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829–1884) wrote Illustriertes Tierleben (The illustrated lives of animals), with the second, 10-volume edition appearing in 1876–1879. Later editions were revised by other authors, and the narratives that gave the kind of picture of which Rudolf Steiner was speaking were gradually replaced with ‘strictly scientific’ texts. Many other natural histories have been based on Brehm's work.
• 3. In an addendum to a lecture given on 6 August 1916 (GA 170). The addendum has not so far been published in German or in English.
• 4. Dr Roman Boos (1889–1952), social scientist, writer and lecturer; represented anthroposophy and later Rudolf Steiner's idea of the Threefold Social Order; he was head of a social sciences association at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
• 5. Der Gesamtarbeitsvertrag nach Schweizerischem Recht, Munich and Leipzig 1916.
• 6. Wissen und Leben (translates as ‘Knowledge and life’), a fortnightly Swiss journal edited by Alb. Baur which appeared from 1907 to 1925. The issue concerned was dated 15 October 1917.
• 7. ‘Die Kermfragen der Schweizer-Politik’, later reprinted in Boos' Michael gegen Michel, Basle 1926, pp. 36–47.
• 8. Adolf Keller (b. 1872), Swiss Protestant theologian, professor in Geneva and Zurich.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “Spirits” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word ‘Spirit’ to-day. Even in saying “Spiritual”; and indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use this word with very little application to spiritual things, on one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did the postman know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance was compelled to remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing; who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It will be incorrect to speak of ‘Sin’ or ‘wrong-doing’ as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions. Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice our feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can well be included in the hidden depths of Soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our Soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: ‘He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,’ if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own Soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: ‘readiness to bestow,’ ‘readiness to give’, even to giving oneself, so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a Soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although our Soul-life is fitted into our earth-body, an upper layer exists over this hidden Soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the Soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the Soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited to convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later Soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant in the depths below the superficial waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he would simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had however been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the Soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the Soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths one which governs every Soul and occasionally emerges in, its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted; perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as ‘home-sickness’. If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term ‘home-sickness,’ expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be more accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will towards an inclination which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable wish.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our Soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to exercise this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own Soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will, passes in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to highest Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of Soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had been forced to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to others all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this into themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called ego-nature which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their own Ego-nature, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a Being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other Being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to made sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer Him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the Soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of Soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But between the boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, and that which is an attribute of noble character in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world, there are many intermediate states—what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new Beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those Beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate--for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new Beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our Soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a ‘movement’ takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only one particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only accrue when it presents invariably the same aspect to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of Movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we know it up to the present, something else must follow. We know that in the whole Cosmic multiplicity in the upward course of development during this evolution, besides the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called ‘Bestowing Virtue,’ which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and Spirituality behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as ‘thoughts’ but as ideas. We can best picture these to ourselves by the ideas that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic ideas that succeeding one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a Being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other Beings. But when this is thus guided into a relation with the other Beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory idea of the other Beings, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the ‘arising’ of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human Beings our selves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing. We can in a certain fashion realise, if we do not regard these conditions of suffering as earthly that they could not possibly be so, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its Soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these Beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these Beings would have been empty-Souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the Beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for that has stretched over to the earth-stage of our nature. And this is so imbedded in the subsoil of our Soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have a Soul-life which can play its part. And when it does so, what does the Soul-life say? If we bear in mind the Cosmic subject of this subconscious Soul-life, we can say that what we can thus trace back to the subsoil of the soul is a bursting-forth within that which we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has moved across from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we really have an explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If we just grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, we obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human Soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should a picture remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly afresh in the background—and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. When these have been there for some little time the longing pushes up again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to the Soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: that if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something else, something that is able to redeem it by something other than mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we can the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the ‘Planet of Redemption,’ just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence may be called the ‘Planet of Longing’; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the Soul-life, is longing, which is the ocean-bed of our Soul. This strives continually to ascend to one who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very best he is capable of feeling. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have become acquainted with all that can satisfy the ordinary superficial individual consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which in its individuality can never be satisfied, but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality rather than with the individuality. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the mind of to-day be brought into touch with application to the study of universal Being living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the Soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the Soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his Soul, above all, when the unconscious Soul-forces akin to longings, burn up ardently as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great Soul. If only something could have flowed into his Soul, drowning, silencing the longing for ideas while he yearned for an end to this search for ideas—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the Spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing Soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—‘Who would desire to be happy in this world! I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we shun each other for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! There must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our Souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, He is only not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!’—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies Anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life 100 years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the planet of redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the Soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his ‘Penthesilea’; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her Soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called ‘her’ Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Katchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the Soul where dwells the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can trace the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Katchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been dryly called the forces of our planet's attractions? Yet only 100 years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done to-day. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his Soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness cannot be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our Souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the Soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows bygone men have so long desired—we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also theosophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “spirit” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word “spirit” to-day. Indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use the word “spiritual” with very little application to spiritual things. On one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did one know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance must remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing, who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It would be incorrect to speak of “sin” or “wrong-doing” as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions.

Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the mood of soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice this feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can be included in the hidden depths of soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: “He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,” if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: “readiness to bestow,” “readiness to give,” even to giving oneself; so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although the whole of our soul-life is inserted into our earth-body, an upper layer lies over the hidden soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited the convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the, child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant below in the surging waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he might simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had, however, been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths, one which governs every soul and occasionally emerges in its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted: perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as “home-sickness.” If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term “home-sickness,” expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be most accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that it is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable desire of the will.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to suffer this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will passes, in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to higher Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to another all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this unto themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called egoity which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their egoity, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to make sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations,” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But of this boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, there are all manner of in-between stages up to that which is an attribute of noble characters in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world. And what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate—for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a “movement” takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only a particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only result when it presents invariably the same side to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we have learnt to know up to the present, something else must follow. We know that during this evolution, in the whole Cosmic multiplicity that evolves upwards as the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called “Bestowing Virtue,” which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and is the spiritual element behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as “thoughts” but as “picture.” We can best realise this in the picture that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic pictures that succeed one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other beings. But when it is thus guided into a relation with the other beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory picture of the other being, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the “arising” of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human beings ourselves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing.

We could in a certain fashion imagine, if we do not remember such conditions of suffering as we know on earth, that they could not possibly exist, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these beings would have been empty-souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for it has been covered over by the earth-stage of our nature. And it is so embedded in the subsoil of our soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have such a soul-life as can play up into it. And when it does so, what does the soul-life say? If we bear in mind the cosmic subsoil of this subconscious soul-life, we can say that what we can sense arising from the depths of the soul is a bursting-forth within what we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has come over from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we have a true explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If you grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, you obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should the pictures remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly up from the depths and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. And when these have been there for a little time the longing arises again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to a soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something that is able to redeem it otherwise than by mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we call the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the “Planet of Redemption,” just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence—may be called the “Planet of Longing”; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the soul-life, lives longing, which is the ocean-bed of our soul. This strives continually to ascend to the One who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very very best for him to feel. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have learnt to know all the separate things that can satisfy the ordinary superficial consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which can never be satisfied in details but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality of life rather than with details. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the sense of to-day be brought into touch with the study of the universal existence living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his soul, above all, when the unconscious soul-forces akin to longings, would consume themselves as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great soul. If only something could have flowed into his soul, drowning, silencing the longing for pictures while he yearned for an end to this search for pictures—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—“Who would desire to be happy in this world!” I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we flee apart for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! there must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, it is merely not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!”—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life a hundred years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the Planet of Redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his “Penthesilea”; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called “her” Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Kätchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the soul where dwell the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can feel the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Kätchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been drily called the planet's force of attraction? Yet only one hundred years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done today. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness must not be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows—bygone men have so long desired we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also anthroposophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

Looking back at the past several meetings of this conference, I feel it is necessary to digress a little from our planned program and tell you something about the practical aspects of Waldorf education. From what you have heard so far, you may have gathered that the key to this form of education, both in its curriculum and in its methods, is the understanding of the human constitution of body, soul, and spirit as it develops throughout life. In order to follow this principle, it was necessary to take a new look at education in general, with the result that the Waldorf school is, in many ways, run very differently from traditional schools.

The first point we had to consider was how to make the most of the available time for teaching, especially in regard to the development of the student’s soul life. The usual practice is to split up the available time into many separate lessons, but this method does not bring enough depth and focus to the various subjects. For example, suppose you want to bring something to your students that will have lasting value for them, something they can take into later life. I will use the example of a subject taught in almost every school: history. Imagine that you want to introduce the era of Queen Elizabeth I, including the main events and people usually described to children. A teacher could do this by talking about the facts of that historical period in history lessons, and it might take, say, half a year. But you can also do this in a different way. After methodical preparation at home, a teacher can cultivate within a fine feeling for the salient facts, which then become a kind of framework for this period. The teacher allows these to work upon the soul, thus enabling the students to remember them without much difficulty. All additional material will then fall into place more or less naturally. If one masters the subject in this way, we can say without exaggerating that, in only three to four lessons, it is quite possible to give students something that might otherwise take half a year, and even in greater depth so that the students retain a lasting impression of the subject.

If you do a detailed survey of all that children are supposed to learn in school today, you will agree with the method I just described. In our present state of civilization, what our children are supposed to learn by the age of fourteen is such an accumulation of material that it is really beyond their capacity to absorb it all. No school is truly successful in teaching this much, but this fact is usually ignored. People merely pretend that the present system works, and the curricula are set accordingly.

The aim of Waldorf education is to arrange all of the teaching so that within the shortest possible time the maximum amount of material can be presented to students by the simplest means possible. This helps children retain an overall view of their subjects—not so much intellectually, but very much in their feeling life.

It is obvious that such a method makes tremendous demands on teachers. I am convinced that, if teachers apply this method (which I would call a form of teaching based on “soul economy”), they will have to spend at least two or three hours of concentrated preparation for each half hour they teach. And they must be willing to do this if they want to avoid harming their students. Such preparation may not always be practical or possible, but if the teacher wants to succeed in carrying a comprehensive and living presentation of the subject into the classroom, such private preparation is fundamental. It does make great demands on teachers, but such obligations are intrinsic to this calling and must be accepted in the best way possible.

Before we could practice this basic educational principle in our newly established Waldorf school, it was necessary to create a suitable curriculum and a schedule. Today I would like to outline this curriculum and its application, but without going into details, since this will be our task during the coming days.

And so, having prepared themselves as just described, the teachers enter the school in the morning. The students arrive a little earlier in the summer, at eight o’clock, and a little later in the winter. When they assemble in their classrooms, the teachers bring them together by saying a morning verse in chorus with the whole class. This verse, which could also be sung, embraces both a general human and a religious element, and it unites the students in a mood of prayer. It may be followed by a genuine prayer. In our “free” Waldorf school, such details are left entirely up to each teacher.

Then begins our so-called main lesson, which lasts nearly two hours; in traditional schedules, these are often broken up into smaller periods. But the principle of soul economy in teaching makes it necessary to alter the conventional schedule. Thus, during the first two hours of the morning, students are taught the same subject in “block” periods, each lasting four to six weeks. It is left to the class teacher to introduce a short break during the main lesson, which is essential in the younger classes. In this way, subjects like geography or arithmetic are taught for four to six weeks at a time. After that, another main lesson subject is studied, again for a block period, rather than as shorter lessons given at regular intervals through the year.

Thus one introduces the various main lesson subjects according to the principles we agreed on, which include a carefully planned economy of the children’s soul life. At all costs, one must avoid too much stress on the mind and soul of the child. Children should never feel that lessons are too difficult; on the contrary, there should be a longing in the child to keep moving from one step to the next. Students should never experience an arbitrary break in a subject; one thing should always lead to another. During the four to six weeks of a main lesson block, the class teacher will always try to present the material as a complete chapter—an artistic whole—that children can take into later life. And it goes without saying that, toward the end of the school year before the approaching summer holidays, all the main lesson subjects taught during the year should be woven together into a short, artistic recapitulation.

Just as we provide children with clothing with enough room for their limbs to grow freely, as teachers we should respond to their inner needs by giving them material not just for their present stage but broad enough for further expansion. If we give children fixed and finished concepts, we do not allow for inner growth and maturing. Therefore all the concepts we introduce, all the feelings we invoke, and all will impulses we give must be treated with the same care and foresight we use to clothe our children. We should not expect them to remember abstract definitions for the rest of their lives. At the age of forty-five, your little finger will not be the same as it was when you were eight, and likewise, concepts introduced at the age of eight should not remain unchanged by the time students reach the age of forty-five. We must approach the child’s organism so that the various members can grow and expand. We must not clothe our material in fixed and stiff forms so that, when our students reach forty-five, they remember it exactly as it was presented in their eighth or ninth year. This, however, is possible only if we present our subject with what I call “soul economy.” During the remaining hours of the morning, the other lessons are taught, and here foreign languages play the most important part. They are introduced in grade one, when the children first enter the Waldorf school in their sixth and seventh year. Foreign languages are presented so that the children can really go into them, which means that, while teaching a language, the teacher tries to avoid using the children’s native language.

The foreign language teacher naturally has to take into account that the students are older than they were when they first learned their own language and will arrange the lessons accordingly. This is essential to keep in harmony with the student’s age and development. The children should be able to get into the language so that they do not inwardly translate from their native tongue into the foreign language whenever they want to say something. Jumping from one language to the other should be avoided at all costs. If, for example, you want to introduce a particular word such as table or window, you would not mention the corresponding word in the child’s native language but indicate the object while saying the word clearly. Thus children learn the new language directly before learning to translate words, which might not be desirable at all. We have found that, during the early stages, if we avoid the usual grammar and all that this entails, children find their way into a new language in a natural and living way. More details will be given when we speak about the various ages, but for now I wanted to give you a general picture of the practical arrangements in the Waldorf school.

Another very important subject for this stage is handwork, which includes several crafts. Because the Waldorf school is coeducational, boys and girls share these lessons, and it is indeed a heart-warming sight to see the young boys and girls busy together engaged in knitting, crocheting, and similar activities. Experience shows that, although boys have a different relationship to knitting than do girls, they enjoy it and benefit from such activity. Working together this way has certainly helped in the general development of all the students. In craft lessons that involve heavier physical work, girls also participate fully. This is the way manual skills are developed and nurtured in our school.

Another subject taught during morning sessions could be called “worldview.” Please understand that a Waldorf school—or any school that might spring from the anthroposophic movement—would never wish to teach anthroposophy as it exists today. I would consider this the worst thing we could do. Anthroposophy in its present form is a subject for adults and, as you can see from the color of their hair, often quite mature adults. Consequently, spiritual science is presented through literature and word of mouth in a form appropriate only to adults. I should consider the presentation to students of anything from my books Theosophy or How to Know Higher Worlds the worst possible use of this material; it simply must not happen. If we taught such material, which is totally unsuitable for schoolchildren (forgive a somewhat trivial expression used in German), we would make them want “to jump out of their skin.” Naturally, in class lessons they would have to submit to whatever the teacher brings, but inwardly they would experience such an urge. Anthroposophy as such is not to be taught in a Waldorf school. It’s important that spiritual science does not become mere theory or a worldview based on certain ideas; rather, it should become a way of life, involving the entire human being. Thus, when teachers who are anthroposophists enter school, they should have developed themselves so that they are multifaceted and skillful in the art of education. And it is this achievement that is important, not any desire to bring anthroposophy to your students.

Waldorf education is meant to be pragmatic. It is meant to be a place where anthroposophic knowledge is applied in a practical way. If you have made such a worldview your own and linked it to practical life, you will not become theoretical and alienated from life but a skilled and capable person. I do not mean to say that all members of the anthroposophic movement have actually reached these goals—far from it. I happen to know that there are still some men among our members who cannot even sew on a trouser button that fell off. And no one suffering from such a shortcoming could be considered a full human being. Above all, there are still members who do not fully accept the contention that you cannot be a real philosopher if you cannot apply your hands to anything—such as repairing your shoes—if the need arises. This may sound a bit exaggerated, but I hope you know what I am trying to say.

Those who must deal with theoretical work should place themselves within practical life even more firmly than those who happen to be tailors, cobblers, or engineers. In my opinion, imparting theoretical knowledge is acceptable only when the other person is well versed in the practical matters of life; otherwise, such ideas remain alien to life. By approaching the classroom through anthroposophic knowledge, teachers as artists should develop the ability to find the right solutions to the needs of the children. If teachers carry such an attitude into the classroom, together with the fruits of their endeavors, they will also be guided in particular situations by a sound pedagogical instinct. This, however, is seldom the case in the conventional education today.

Please do not mistake these remarks as criticism against any teachers. Those who belong to the teaching profession will be the first to experience the truth of what has been said. In their own limitations, they may well feel they are the victims of prevailing conditions. The mere fact that they themselves had to suffer the martyrdom of a high school education may be enough to prevent them from breaking through many great hindrances. The most important thing while teaching is the ability to meet constantly changing classroom situations that arise from the immediate responses of one’s students. But who in this wide world trains teachers to do that? Are they not trained to decide ahead of time what they will teach? This often gives me the impression that children are not considered at all during educational deliberations. Such an attitude is like turning students into papier-mâché masks as they enter school, so that teachers can deal with masks instead of real children.

As mentioned before, it is not our goal to teach ideology in the Waldorf school, though such a thought might easily occur to people when hearing that anthroposophists have established a new school. Our goal is to carry our understanding gained through spiritual science right into practical teaching.

This is why I was willing to hand over the responsibility for religion lessons to those who represent the various religions. Religion, after all, is at the very core of a person’s worldview. Consequently, in our Waldorf school, a Roman Catholic priest was asked to give Roman Catholic religion lessons to students of that denomination, and a Protestant minister teaches Protestant religion lessons. When this decision was made, we were not afraid that we would be unable to balance any outer influence brought into the school by these priests, influence that might not be in harmony with what we were trying to do. But then a somewhat unexpected situation arose. When our friend Emil Molt established the Waldorf school, most of our students were from the homes of workers at his factory. Among them were many children whose parents are atheists, and if they had been sent to another school, they would not have received religious instruction at all. As such things often happen when dealing with children and parents, gradually these children also wanted to receive some form of religion lessons. And this is how our free, non-denominational, religion lessons came about. These were given by our own teachers, just as the other religious lessons were given by ministers. The teachers were recognized by us as religious teachers in the Waldorf curriculum. Thus, anthroposophic religious lessons were introduced in our school. These lessons have come to mean a great deal to many of our students, especially the factory workers’ children.

However, all this brought specific problems in its wake, because anthroposophy is for adults. If, therefore, teachers want to bring the right material into anthroposophic religious lessons, they must recreate it fresh, and this is no easy task. It means reshaping and transforming anthroposophic material to make it suitable for the various age groups. In fact, this task of changing a modern philosophy to suit young people occupies us a great deal. It means working deeply on fundamental issues, such as how the use of certain symbols might affect students, or how one deals with the imponderables inherent in such a situation. We will speak more about this later on.

I am sure you can appreciate that one has to make all kinds of compromises in a school that tries to base its curriculum on the needs of growing children in the light of a spiritual scientific knowledge of the human being. Today it would be quite impossible to teach children according to abstract educational ideas, subsequently called the “principles of Waldorf education.” The result of such a misguided approach would be that our graduates would be unable to find their way into life. It is too easy to criticize life today. Most people meet unpleasant aspects of life every day and we are easily tempted to make clever suggestions about how to put the world in order. But it completely inappropriate to educate children so that, when they leave school to enter life, they can only criticize the senselessness of what they find. However imperfect life may be according to abstract reason, we must nevertheless be able to play our full part in it. Waldorf students—who have probably been treated more as individuals than is usually the case—have to be sent out into life; otherwise, having a Waldorf school makes no sense at all. Students must not become estranged from contemporary life to the extent that they can only criticize what they meet outside.

This I can only touch on here. From the very beginning, we had to make the most varied compromises, even in our curriculum and pedagogical goals. As soon as the school was founded, I sent a memorandum to the educational authorities and requested that our students be taught according to the principles of Waldorf education, from the sixth or seventh year until the completion of their ninth year, or the end of the third class, without any outside interference. I meant that the planning of the curriculum and the standards to be achieved, as well as the teaching methods, were to be left entirely in the hands of our teaching staff, the “college of teachers,” which would bear the ultimate responsibility for the running of the school.

In my letter to the authorities, I stated that, on completion of the third school year, our students would have reached the same standards of basic education as those achieved in other schools, and thus would be able to change schools without difficulty. This implies that a child with a broader educational background than the students in this new class will nevertheless be able to fit into any new surroundings, and that such a student will not have lost touch with life in general. For us, it is not only important that teachers know their students well, but that there is also a corresponding relationship between the entire body of teachers and all the students of the school, so that students will feel free to contact any teacher for guidance or advice. It is a real joy, every time one enters the Waldorf school, to see how friendly and trusting the students are, not only with their class teachers but with all the teachers, both in and out of class.

Similarly, I said that our teaching between the end of the ninth and twelfth years—from the end of class three to the end of class six—is intended to achieve standards comparable with those of other schools and that our students would be able to enter seventh grade in another school without falling behind. We do not wish to be fanatical and, therefore, we had to make compromises. Waldorf teachers must always be willing to cope with the practical problems of life. And if a student has to leave our school at the age of fourteen, there should be no problems when entering a high school or any other school leading to a university entrance examination. So we try to put into practice what has been described.

Now, having established our school through the age of fourteen, every year we are adding a new class, so that we will eventually be able to offer the full range of secondary education leading to higher education. This means that we have to plan our curriculum so that young people will be able to take their graduation exams. In Austria, this exam is called a “maturity exam,” in Germany Abitur, and other countries have other names. In any case, our students are given the possibility of entering other schools of higher education. There is still no possibility that we will open a vocational school or university. Whatever we might try to do in this way would always bear the stamp of a private initiative, and, because we should never want to hold official examinations, no government would grant us permission to issue certificates of education without test results. Thus, we are forced to compromise in our Waldorf plan, and we are perfectly willing to acknowledge this. What matters is that, despite all the compromises, a genuine Waldorf spirit lives in our teaching, and this as much as possible.

Because we wanted a complete junior school when we opened our Waldorf school, we had to receive some students from other schools, and this gave us plenty of opportunity to witness the fruits of the “strict discipline” that characterizes other schools. At this point, we have a little more than two years of “Waldorf discipline” behind us, which, to a large extent, consists of our trying to get rid of the ordinary sort of school discipline. For example, just a few weeks ago we laid the foundation stone for a larger school building; until now, we have had to make do with provisional classrooms. To my mind, it seemed right that all our children would take part in this stone-laying ceremony. And, as so often happens in life, things took a little longer than anticipated, and by the time we were just getting ready for the actual ceremony, our students were already in the building. First I had to meet teachers and several others, but the children were there already. The adults had to meet in our so-called staff room. What could we to do with all those children? The chair of the college of teachers simply said, “We’ll send them back to their classrooms. They have now reached a stage where we can leave them unattended without bad consequences. They won’t disturb us.”

So, despite the dubious “discipline” imported from other schools, and despite having rid ourselves of so-called school discipline, it was possible to send the students to their classrooms without any disturbance. Admittedly, this peace was somewhat ephemeral; overly sensitive ears might have been offended, but that did not matter. Children who disturb overly sensitive ears are usually not overly disciplined. At any rate, the effects of imponderables in the Waldorf school became apparent in the children’s good behavior under these unusual circumstances.

As you know, various kinds of punishments are administered in most schools, and we, too, had to find ways to deal with this problem. When we discussed the question of punishment in one of our teacher meetings, one of our teachers reported an interesting incident. He had tried to discover the effects of certain forms of punishment on his students. His students had experienced our kind of discipline for some time, and among them there were a few notorious rascals. These little good-fornothings (as such students are called in Germany) had done very poor work, and they were to be punished according to usual school discipline and given detention. They were told to stay after lessons to do their arithmetic properly. However, when this punishment was announced in class, the other students protested that they, too, wanted to stay and do extra arithmetic because it is so much fun. So you see, the concept of punishment had gone through a complete transformation; it had become something the whole class enjoyed. Such things rarely happen if teachers try to make them happen directly, but they become the natural consequences of the right approach.

I am well aware that the problem of school discipline occupies many minds today. I had the opportunity to closely observe the importance of the relationship between a teacher and his students, a relationship that is the natural outcome of the disposition of both teacher and students. One could go so far as to say that whether students profit from their lessons or how much they gain depends on whether the teacher evokes sympathy or antipathy in the students. It is absolutely open to discussion whether an easygoing teacher—one who does not even work according to proper educational principles—may be more effective than a teacher who, intent on following perfectly sound but abstract principles, is unable to practice them in the classroom. There are plenty of abstract principles around these days. I am not being sarcastic when I call them clever and ingenious; their merits can be argued. But even when slovenly and indolent teachers enter the classroom, if they nevertheless radiate warmth and affection for their students, they may give their students more for later life than would a highly principled teacher whose personality evokes antipathy. Although the students of a genial but untidy teacher are not likely to grow into models of orderliness, at least they will not suffer from “nervous” conditions later on in life. Nervousness can be the result of antipathy toward a teacher—even one using excellent educational methods—who is unable to establish the right kind of contact with the students.

Such points are open to discussion, and they should be discussed if we take the art of education seriously. I once had to participate in a case like this, and my decision may evoke strong disapproval among some people. During one of my visits to the Waldorf school, I was told of a boy in one of the classes who was causing great difficulties. He had committed all kinds of misdemeanors, and none of his teachers could deal with him. I asked for the boy to be sent to me, because first I wanted to find the root of the trouble. You will admit that in many other schools such a boy would have received corporal punishment or possibly something less drastic. I examined the boy carefully and concluded that he should be moved into the next class above. This was to be his punishment, and I have not heard any complaints since. His new class teacher confirmed that the boy has become a model student and that everything seems to be in order now. This, after all, is what really matters. The important thing is that one goes into the very soul and nature of such a child. The cause of the trouble was that there was no human contact between him and his teacher, and because he was intelligent enough to cope with the work of the next class (there was no comparable class in his case), the only right thing was to move him up. Had we put him down into the next lower class, we would have ruined that child.

If one bears in mind the well-being and inner development of a child, one finds the right way teaching. This is why it is good to look at specific and symptomatic cases. We have no intention of denying that, in many ways, the Waldorf school is built on compromise, but as far as it is humanly possible, we always try to educate from a real knowledge of the human being.

Let us return to the curriculum. The morning sessions are arranged as described. Because it is essential for our students to be able to move on to higher forms of education, we had to include other subjects such as Greek and Latin, which are also taught in morning lessons. In these ancient languages soul economy is of particular importance. The afternoon lessons are given over to more physical activities, such as gym and eurythmy, and to artistic work, which plays a very special part in a Waldorf school. I will give further details of this in the coming days. We try, as much as possible, to teach the more intellectual subjects in the morning, and only when the headwork is done are they given movement lessons, insofar as they have not let off steam already between morning lessons. However, after the movement lessons they are not taken back to the classroom to do more headwork. I have already said that this has a destructive effect on life, because while children are moving physically, suprasensory forces work through them subconsciously. And the head, having surrendered to physical movement, is no longer in a position to resume its work. It is therefore a mistake to think that, by sandwiching a gym lesson between other more intellectual lessons, we are providing a beneficial change. The homogeneous character of both morning and afternoon sessions has shown itself beneficial to the general development of the students. If we keep in mind the characteristic features of human nature, we will serve the human inclinations best.

I mentioned that we found it necessary to give some kind of anthroposophic religious lessons to our students. Soon afterward, arising from those lessons, we felt another need that led to the introduction of Sunday services for our students. This service has the quality of formal worship, in which the children participate with deep religious feelings. We have found that a ritual performed before the children’s eyes every Sunday morning has greatly deepened their religious experience.

The Sunday service had to be enlarged for the sake of the students who were about to leave our middle school. In Germany, it is customary for students of this age to be confirmed in a special ceremony that signifies the stage of maturity at which they are old enough to enter life. We have made arrangements for a similar ceremony that, as experience has shown, leaves a lasting impression on our students.

In any education based on knowledge of the human being, needs become apparent that may have gone unnoticed in more traditional forms of education. For instance, in Germany all students receive school reports at the end of each school year, because it is considered essential to give them something like this before they leave for summer holidays. In this case, too, we felt the need for innovation. I have to admit that I would find it extremely difficult to accept the usual form of school reports in a Waldorf school, simply because I could never appreciate the difference between “satisfactory” and “near-satisfactory,” or between “fair” and “fairly good,” and so on. These grades are then converted into numbers, so that in Germany some reports show the various subjects arranged in one column, and on the opposite side there is a column of figures, such as 4½, 3, 3–4, and so on. I have never been able to develop the necessary understanding for these somewhat occult relationships. So we decided to find other ways of writing our school reports.

When our students leave for holidays at the end of the school year, they do receive reports. They contain a kind of mirror image, or biography, of their progress during the year, which has been written by their class teachers. We have found again and again that our children accept these reports with inner approval. They can read about the impression they have created during the years, and they will feel that, although the description was written with sympathetic understanding, they do not tolerate any whitewashing of the less positive aspects of their work. These reports, which are received with deep inner satisfaction, end with a verse, composed especially for each child. This verse is a kind of guiding motive for the coming years. I believe our kind of reports have already proved themselves and will retain their value in the future, even though in some parts of Germany they have already been referred to as “ersatz” reports.

Students have responded to life in the Waldorf school in an entirely positive way. To show how much they like their school, I should like to repeat something I recently heard from one of our mothers, for such an example helps to illustrate more general symptoms. She said, “My boy was never an affectionate child. He never showed any tender feelings toward me as his mother. After his first year in the Waldorf school—while still quite young—his summer holidays began. When they were nearly over and I told him that soon he would be going to school again, he came and kissed me for the first time.” Such a small anecdote could be considered symptomatic of the effects of an education based on knowledge of the human being and practiced in a human and friendly atmosphere. Our school reports also help to contribute towards this atmosphere. As an introduction to life in the Waldorf school, I felt it necessary to digress a little from our planned program. Tomorrow we shall continue with a more detailed account of the child’s development after the change of teeth. Meanwhile, I wanted to include here a description of what by now has become the outer framework of practical life in the Waldorf school.

For quite a number of years now Education has been one of those branches of civilised, cultural activity which we foster within the Anthroposophical Movement, and, as will appear from these lectures, we may perhaps just in this sphere look back with a certain satisfaction on what we have been able to do. Our schools have existed only a few years, so I cannot speak of an achievement, but only of the beginning of something which, even outside the Anthroposophical Movement, has already made a certain impression on circles interested in the spiritual life of the cultural world of today. Looking back on our educational activity it gives me real joy, particularly here in Holland, where many years ago I had the opportunity of lecturing on subjects connected with anthroposophical spiritual science, to speak once more on this closely related theme.

Anthroposophical education and teaching is based on that knowledge of man which is only to be gained on the basis of spiritual science; it works out of a knowledge of the whole human being, body, soul and spirit. At first such a statement may be regarded as obvious. It will be said that of course the whole man must be taken into consideration when it is a question of educational practice, of education as an art; that neither should the spiritual be neglected in favour of the physical, nor the physical in favour of the spiritual. But it will very soon be seen how the matter stands when we become aware of the practical results which ensue when any branch of human activity is based on anthroposophical spiritual science. Here in Holland, in the Hague, a small school has been founded on the basis of an anthroposophical knowledge of man, a daughter school, if I may call it so, of our Waldorf School in Stuttgart. And I believe that whoever gets to know such a school, whether from merely hearing about the way it is run, or through a more intimate knowledge, will find in the actual way it deals with teaching and education, something arising from its anthroposophical foundation which differs essentially from the usual run of schools in our present civilisation. The reason for this is that wherever we look today we find a gulf between what people think, or devise theoretically, and what they actually carry out in practice. For in our present civilisation theory and practice have become two widely separated spheres. However paradoxical it may sound, the separation may be observed, perhaps most of all in the most practical of all occupations in life, in the business world, in the economic sphere. Here all sorts of things are learnt theoretically. For instance, people think out details of administration in economic affairs. They form intentions. But these intentions cannot be carried out in actual practice. However carefully they are thought out, they do not meet the actual conditions of life. I should like to express myself still more clearly, so that we may understand one another. For example, a man who wishes to set up a business concern thinks out some sort of business project. He thinks over all that is connected with this business and organises it according to his intentions.

His theories and abstract thoughts are then put into effect, but, when actually carried out, they everywhere come up against reality. Certainly things are done, thought-out ideas are even put into practice, but these thoughts do not fit into real life. In actual fact something is carried over into real life which does not correspond with what is real. Now a business that is conducted in this way can continue for some time and its inaugurator will consider himself to be a tremendously practical fellow. For whoever goes into business and from the outset has learnt absolutely nothing outside customary practice will consider himself a “practical” man.

Today we can hear how really practical people speak about such a theorist. He enters into business life and with a heavy hand introduces his thought-out ideas. If sufficient capital is available, he may even be able to carry on for a time, after a while, however, the concern collapses, or it may be absorbed into some more established business. Usually when this happens very little heed is paid to how much genuine, vital effort has been wasted, how many lives ruined, how many people injured or impaired in their way of life. It has come about solely because something has been thought out—thought out by a so-called “practical” man. In such a case however the person in question is not practical through his insight but by the use of his elbows. He has introduced something into reality without considering the conditions of reality.

Few people notice it, but this kind of thing has become rampant in the cultural life of today. At the present time the only sphere where such things are understood, where it is recognised that such a procedure does not work, is in the application of mechanical natural science to life. When the decision is made to build a bridge it is essential to make use of a knowledge of mechanics to ensure that the bridge will stand up to what is required of it; otherwise the first train that passes over it will be plunged into the water. Such things have already happened, and even at the present time we have seen the results of faulty mechanical construction. Speaking generally, however, this sphere is the only one in practical life in which it can be stated unequivocally that the conditions of reality have or have not been foreseen.

If we take the sphere of medicine we shall see at once that it is not so evident whether or not the conditions of reality have been taken into account. Here too the procedure is the same; something is thought out theoretically and then applied as a means of healing. Whether in this case there has been a cure, whether it was somebody's destiny to die, or whether perhaps he has been “cured to death,” this indeed is difficult to perceive. The bridge collapses when there are faults in its construction; but whether the sick person gets worse, whether he has been cured by the treatment, or has died of it, is not so easy to discover.

In the same way, in the sphere of education it is not always possible to see whether the growing child is being educated in accordance with his needs, or whether fanciful methods are being used which can certainly be worked out by experimental psychology. In this latter case the child is examined by external means and the following questions arise: what sort of memory has he, what are his intellectual capacities, his ability to form judgments and so on? Educational aims are frequently found in this way. But how are they carried into life? They sit firmly in the head, that is where they are. In his head the teacher knows that a child must be taught arithmetic like this, geography like that, and so it goes on. Now the intentions are to be put into practice. The teacher considers all he has learnt, and remembers that according to the precepts of scientific educational method he must set about things in such and such a way. He is now faced with putting his knowledge into practice, he remembers these theoretical principles and applies them quite externally. Whoever has the gift for observing such things can experience how sometimes teachers who have thoroughly mastered educational theories, who can recount admirably everything they had to know for their examination, or had to learn in practice class-teaching, nevertheless remain utterly removed from life when they come face to face with the children they have to teach. What has happened to such a teacher is what, daily and hourly, we are forced to observe with sorrowing heart, the fact that people pass one another by in life, that they have no sense for getting to know one another. This is a common state of affairs. It is the fundamental evil which underlies all social disturbances which are so widespread in the cultural life of today: the lack of paying heed to others, the lack of interest which every man should have for others. In everyday civilised life we must perforce accept such a state of affairs; it is the destiny of modern humanity at the present time. But the peak of such aloofness is reached when the teacher of the child or the educator of the youth stands at a distance from his pupil, quite separated from him, and employs in a completely external way methods obtained by external science. We can see that the laws of mechanics have been wrongly applied when a bridge collapses, but wrong educational methods are not so obvious. A clear proof of the fact that human beings today are only at home when it comes to a mechanical way of thinking, which can always determine whether things have been rightly or wrongly thought out, and which has produced the most brilliant triumphs in the life of modern civilisation—a proof of this is that humanity today has confidence only in mechanical thought. And if this mechanical thinking is carried into education, if, for instance, the child is asked to write down disconnected words and then repeat them quickly, so that a record can be made of his power of assimilation, if this is the procedure in education it is a sign that there is no longer any natural gift for approaching the child himself. We experiment with the child because we can no longer approach his heart and soul.

In saying all this it might seem as though one had the inclination or desire only to criticise and reprove in a superior sort of way. It is of course always easier to criticise than to build something up constructively. But as a matter of fact what I have said does not arise out of any such inclination or desire; it arises out of a direct observation of life. This direct observation of life must proceed from something which is usually completely excluded from knowledge today. What sort of person must one be today if one wishes to pursue some calling based on knowledge—for instance on the knowledge of man? One must be objective! This is to be heard all over the place today, in every hole and corner. Of course one must be objective, but the question is whether or not this objectivity is based on a lack of paying due heed to what is essential in any particular situation.

Now for the most part people have the idea that love is far more subjective than anything else in life, and that it would be utterly impossible for anyone who loves to be objective. For this reason when knowledge is spoken about today love is never mentioned seriously. True, it is deemed fitting, when a young man is applying himself to acquire knowledge, to exhort him to do so with love, but this mostly happens when the whole way in which knowledge is presented is not at all likely to develop love in anybody But the essence of love, the giving of oneself to the world and its phenomena, is in any case not regarded as knowledge. Nevertheless for real life love is the greatest power of knowledge. And without this love it is utterly impossible to attain to a knowledge of man which could form the basis of a true art of education. Let us try to picture this love, and see how it can work in the special sphere of an education founded on a knowledge of man drawn from spiritual science, from anthroposophy.

The child is entrusted to us to be educated, to be taught. If our thinking in regard to education is founded on anthroposophy we do not represent the child to ourselves as something we must help to develop so that he approaches nearer and nearer to some social human ideal, or whatever it may be. For this human ideal can be completely abstract. And today such a human ideal has already become something which can assume as many forms as there are political, social and other parties. Human ideals change according to whether one swears by liberalism, conservatism, or by some other programme, and so the child is led slowly in some particular direction in order to become what is held to be right for mankind. This is carried to extreme lengths in present-day Russia. Generally speaking, however, it is more or less how people think today, though perhaps somewhat less radically.

This is no starting point for the teacher who wants to educate and teach on the basis of anthroposophy. He does not make an “idol” of his opinions. For an abstract picture of man, towards which the child shall be led, is an idol, it is in no sense a reality. The only reality which could exist in this field would be at most if the teacher were to consider himself as an ideal and were to say that every child must become like him. Then one would at least have touched on some sort of reality, but the absurdity of saying such a thing would at once be obvious.

What we really have before us in this young child is a being who has not yet begun his physical existence, but has brought down his spirit and soul from pre-earthly worlds, and has plunged into a physical body bestowed on him by parents and ancestors. We look upon this child as he lies there before us in the first days of his life with indeterminate features and with unorganised, undirected movements. We follow day by day, week by week how the features grow more and more defined, and become the expression of what is working to the surface from the inner life of soul. We observe further how the whole life and movements of the child become more consequent and directed, how something of the nature of spirit and soul is working its way to the surface from the inmost depths of his being. Then, filled with holy awe and reverence, we ask: “What is it that is here working its way to the surface?” And so with heart and mind we are led back to the human being himself, when as soul and spirit he dwelt in the soul-spiritual pre-earthly world from which he has descended into the physical world, and we say: “Little child, now that you have entered through birth into earthly existence you are among human beings, but previously you were among spiritual, divine beings.” What once lived among spiritual-divine beings has descended in order to live among men. We see the divine made manifest in the child. We feel as though standing before an altar. There is however one difference. In religious communities it is customary for human beings to bring their sacrificial offerings to the altars, so that these offerings may ascend into the spiritual world; now we feel ourselves standing as it were before an altar turned the other way; now the gods allow their grace to stream down in the form of divine-spiritual beings, so that these beings, acting as messengers of the gods, may unfold what is essentially human on the altar of physical life. We behold in every child the unfolding of cosmic laws of a divine-spiritual nature; we see how God creates in the world. In its highest, most significant form this is revealed in the child. Hence every single child becomes for us a sacred riddle, for every single child embodies this great question—not, how is he to be educated so that he approaches some “idol” which has been thought out.—But, how shall we foster what the gods have sent down to us into the earthly world. We learn to know ourselves as helpers of the divine-spiritual world, and above all we learn to ask: What may be the result if we approach education with this attitude of mind?

Education in the true sense proceeds out of just such an attitude. What matters is that we should develop our education and teaching on the basis of such thoughts as these. Knowledge of man can only be won if love for mankind—in this case love for the child—becomes the mainspring of our work. If this is so, then the teacher's calling becomes a priestly calling, for then the educator becomes the steward of what it is the will of the gods to carry out with man.

Here again it might appear as though something obvious is being said in rather different words. But it is not so. As a matter of fact in today's unsocial world-order, which only wears an outer semblance of being social, the very opposite occurs. Educationists pursue an “idol” for mankind, not seeing themselves as nurturers of something they must first learn to know when actually face to face with the child.

An attitude of mind such as I have described cannot work in an abstract way, it must work spiritually, while always keeping the practical in view. Such an attitude however can never be acquired by accepting theories quite unrelated and alien to life, it can only be gained if one has a feeling, a sense for every expression of life, and can enter with love into all its manifestations.

Today there is a great deal of talk about educational reform. Since the war there has been talk of a revolution in education. We have experienced this. Every possible approach to a new education is thought out, and pretty well everybody is concerned in some way or other with how this reform is to be brought about. Either one approaches some institution about to be founded with one's proposals or at the very least one suggests this or that as one's idea of how education should take shape. And so it goes on. There is a great deal of talk about methods of education; but do you see what kind of impression all this makes when one surveys, quite without prejudice, what the various societies for the reform of education, down to the most radical, put forward today in their educational programmes? I do not know whether many people take into account what kind of impression is made when one is faced with so many programmes issuing from associations and societies for educational reform. One gets the impression: Good heavens, how clever people are today! For indeed everything which comes about like this is frightfully clever. I do not mean this ironically, but quite seriously. There has never been a time when there was so much cleverness as there is in our era.

There we have it, all set out. Paragraph 1. How shall we educate so that the forces of the child may be developed naturally? Paragraph 2 ... Paragraph 3 ... and so on. People today of any profession or occupation, and of any social class can sit down together and work out such programmes; everything we get in this way in paragraphs 1 to 30 will be delightfully clever, for today one knows just how to formulate everything theoretically. People have never been so skilful in formulating things as they are today. Then such a programme, a number of programmes can be submitted to a committee or to Parliament. This again is very clever. Now something may perhaps be deleted or added according to party opinion, and something extremely clever emerges, even if at times strongly coloured by “party.” Nothing can be done with it, however, for all this is quite beside the point.

Waldorf School education never started off with such a programme. I have no wish to boast, but naturally, had this been our purpose, we could also have produced some kind of programme no less clever than those of many an association for educational reform. The fact that we should have to reckon with reality might perhaps prove a hindrance and then the result would be more stupid. With us however there was never any question of a programme. From the outset we were never interested in principles of educational method which might later on be somehow incorporated in a legalised educational system. What did interest us was reality, absolute true reality. What was this reality? To begin with here were children, a number of child-individualities with varying characteristics. One had to learn what these were, one had to get to know what was inherent in these children, what they had brought down with them, what was expressed through their physical bodies. First and foremost then there were the children. And then there were teachers. You can stand up as strongly as you like for the principle that the child must be educated in accordance with his individuality—that stands in all the programmes of reform—but nothing whatever will come of it. For on the other hand, besides the children, there are a number of teachers, and the point is to know what these teachers can accomplish in relation to these children. The school must be run in such a way that one does not set up an abstract ideal, but allows the school to develop out of the teachers and out of the pupils. And these teachers and pupils are not present in an abstract kind of way, but are quite concrete, individual human beings. That is the gist of the matter. Then we are led by virtue of necessity to build up a true education based on a real knowledge of man. We cease to be theoretical and become practical in every detail.

Waldorf School education, the first manifestation of an education based on anthroposophy, is actually the practice of education as an art, and is therefore able to give only indications of what can be done in this or that case. We have no great interest in general theories, but so much the greater is our interest in impulses coming from anthroposophy which can give us a true knowledge of man, beginning, as here of course it must do, with the child. But today our crude observation completely ignores what is most characteristic in the progressive stages of life. I would say that some measure of inspiration must be drawn from spiritual science if today we are to develop a right sense for what should be brought to the child.

At the present time people know extraordinarily little about man and mankind. They imagine that our present state of existence is the same as it was in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and indeed as it has always been. They picture the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians as being very similar to the man of today. And if we go back still further, according to the views of present-day natural science, history becomes enveloped in mist until those beings emerge which are half ape, half man. No interest is taken, however, in penetrating into the great differences which exist between the historical and pre-historical epochs of mankind.

Let us study the human being as he appears to us today, beginning with the child up to the change of teeth. We see quite clearly that his physical development runs parallel with his development of soul and spirit. Everything that manifests as soul and spirit has its exact counterpart in the physical—both appear together, both develop out of the child together. Then, when the child has come through the change of teeth, we see how the soul is already freeing itself from the body. On the one side we shall be able to follow a development of soul and spirit in the child, and on the other side his physical development. The two sides however are not as yet clearly separated. If we continue to follow the development further into the time between puberty and about the 21st year the separation becomes much more defined and then when we come to the 27th or 28th year—speaking now of present-day humanity—nothing more can be seen of the way in which the soul-spiritual is connected with the physical body. What a man does at this age can be perceived on the one hand in the soul-spiritual life and on the other hand in the physical life, but the two cannot be brought into any sort of connection. At the end of the twenties, man in his soul and spirit has separated himself completely from what is physical, and so it goes on up to the end of his life.

Yet it was not always so. One only believes it to have been so. Spiritual science, studied anthroposophically, shows us clearly and distinctly that what we see in the child today, at the present stage of human evolution—namely, that in his being of soul and spirit the child is completely dependent on his physical bodily nature and his physical bodily nature is completely dependent on his being of soul and spirit—this condition persisted right on into extreme old age—a fact that has simply not been noticed. If we go very far back into those times which gave rise to the conception of the patriarchs and ask ourselves what kind of a man such a patriarch really was, the answer must be somewhat as follows: Such a man, in growing old, changed in respect of his bodily nature, but right into extreme old age he continued to feel as only quite young people can feel today. Even in old age he felt his being of soul and spirit to be dependent on his physical body.

Today we no longer feel our physical body to be dependent upon what we think and feel. A dependence of this kind was however felt in the more ancient epochs of civilisation. But people also felt after a certain age of life that their bones became harder and their muscles contained certain foreign substances which brought about a sclerotic condition. They felt the waning of their life forces, but they also felt with this physical decline an increase of spiritual forces, actually brought about by the breaking up of the physical. “The soul is becoming free from the physical body.” So they said when this process of physical decline began. At the age of the patriarchs, when the body was already breaking up, the soul was most able to wrest itself free from the body, so that it was no longer within it. This is why people looked up to the patriarchs with such devotion and reverence, saying: “O, how will it be with me one day, when I am so old? For in old age one can know things, understand things, penetrate into the heart of things in a way that I cannot do now, because I am still building up my physical body.” At that time man could still look into a world order that was both physical and spiritual. This however was in a very remote past. Then came a time when man felt this interdependence of the physical and the soul-spiritual only until about the 50th year. The Greek age followed. What gives the Greek epoch its special value rests on the fact that the Greeks were still able to feel the harmony between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily. The Greek still felt this harmony until the 30th or 40th year. He still experienced in the circulation of the blood what brought the soul into a unity with the physical. The wonderful culture and art of the Greeks was founded on this unity, which transformed everything theoretical into art, and at the same time enfilled art with wisdom.

In those times the sculptor worked in such a way that he needed no model, for in his own organisation he was aware of the forces permeating the arm or the leg, giving them their form. This was learned, for instance, in the festival games; but today when such games are imitated they have no meaning whatever.

If however we have such a sense for the development of mankind then we know what has actually taken place in human evolution. We know too that today we only have a parallelism between the physical-bodily and the soul-spiritual until about the 27th or 28th year, to give a quite exact description. (Most people observe this parallelism only up to the age of puberty.) And so we know how the divine-spiritual springs up and grows out of the developing human being. Then we feel the necessary reverence for our task of developing what comes to meet us in the child, that is to say, of developing what is given to us and not developing those abstract ideas that have been thought out.

Thus our thoughts are directed to a knowledge of man based on what is individual in the soul. And if we have absorbed such universal, great historical aspects, we shall also be able to approach every educational task in an appropriate manner. Then quite another life will be brought into the class when the teacher enters it, for he will carry the world into it, the physical world and the world of soul and spirit. Then he will be surrounded by an atmosphere of reality, of a real and actual conception of the world, not one which is merely thought out and intellectual. Then he will be surrounded by a world imbued with feeling. Now if we consider what has just been put forward we shall realise a remarkable fact. We shall see that we are founding an education which, by degrees, will come to represent in many respects the very opposite of the characteristic impulse in education at the present time. All manner of humorists with some aptitude for caricature often choose the so-called “schoolmaster” as an object which can serve their purpose well and on whom they can let loose their derision. Well, if a schoolmaster is endowed with the necessary humour he can turn the tables on those who have caricatured him before the world. But the real point is something altogether different; for if the teacher, versed in present-day educational methods, carries these into school with him, and has therefore no means of learning to know the child, while nevertheless having to deal with the child, how can he be anything other than a stranger to the world? With the school system as it is today, he cannot become anything else; he is torn right out of the world. So we are faced with a truly remarkable situation. Teachers who are strangers to the world are expected to train human beings so that they may get on and prosper in the world.

Let us imagine however that the things about which we have been speaking today become an accepted point of view. Then the relation of the teacher to the children is such that in each individual child a whole world is revealed to him, and not only a human world, but a divine-spiritual world manifested on earth. In other words the teacher perceives as many aspects of the world as he has children in his charge. Through every child he looks into the wide world. His education becomes art. It is imbued with the consciousness that what is done has a direct effect on the evolution of the world. Teaching in the sense meant here leads the teacher, in his task of educating, of developing human beings, to a lofty conception of the world. Such a teacher is one who becomes able to play a leading part in the great questions that face civilisation. The pupil will never outgrow such a teacher, as is so often the case today. The following situation may arise in a school. Let us suppose that the teacher has to educate according to some idea, some picture of man which he can set before himself. Let us think that he might have 30 children in his class, and among these, led by destiny, were two, who in their inborn capacity, were far more gifted than the teacher himself. What would he want to do in such a case? He would want to form them in accordance with his educational ideal; nothing else would be possible. But how does this work out? Reality does not permit it, and the pupils then outgrow their teacher.

If on the other hand we educate in accordance with reality, if we foster all that manifests in the child as qualities of soul and spirit, we are in the same situation as the gardener is in relation to his plants. Do you think that the gardener knows all these secrets of the plants which he tends? O, these plants contain many, many more secrets than the gardener understands; but he can tend them, and perhaps succeed best in caring for those which he does not yet know. His knowledge rests on practical experience, he has “green fingers.” In the same way it is possible for a teacher who practises an art of education based on reality to stand as educator before children who have genius, even though he himself is certainly no genius. For he knows that he has not to lead his pupils towards some abstract ideal, but that in the child the Divine is working in man, is working right through his physical-bodily nature. If the teacher has this attitude of mind he can actually achieve what has just been said. He achieves it by an outpouring love which permeates his work as educator. It is his attitude of mind which is so essential.

With these words, offered as a kind of greeting, I wanted to give you today some idea of what is to be the content of this course of lectures. They will deal with the educational value of a knowledge of man and the cultural value of education.