The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dr. Steiner: School has just begun, and we want to see how things go. This is likely to be a very important year. What do you have to report?

A teacher asks about purchasing a history textbook for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Well, it’s true the students must know something. In the last grade of high school, history class is mainly a kind of review. That is also the case here. Couldn’t you teach from your notes so that a textbook would not be necessary?

You see, what is really very important is that you summarize everything they need to know as efficiently as possible. I happily remember how, when I was in school, we did not have any geometry books. The teacher summarized the important things in dictations. A self-written book gives you reason to know what is in it. Of course, when the children first had to learn everything they need, we could not do it that way. If such things are to be fruitful, it must be possible to summarize what they need to know. Everything they will be asked about history in the final examination can be written down on fifty or sixty pages. It is clear that no one, not even an expert in history, remembers everything in Ploetz. Giving children such textbooks is illusory. They just have chapter titles, but you could summarize all of the material in fifty or sixty pages. It is possible that all the subject teachers would want textbooks, but we should try to avoid that.

In such questions, an efficient summarization is what is important. Other schools have the children underline the things they need to study. They also need to cover things in a given amount of time. You should dictate such history notebooks beginning in the tenth grade.

A middle-grades teacher asks about notebooks according to blocks.

Dr. Steiner: You should give a dictation at the end of the period about what was just covered. Create the dictation with the children. You can summarize the material in a written form during one period and review it in the next. Use key sentences rather than key words.

How are things going in twelfth-grade mathematics?

The mathematics teacher: Very well. We have covered nearly everything.

Dr. Steiner: I have no doubt that they can well understand these elementary concepts of higher mathematics. I would ask the twelfth grade if they can easily solve such examination questions as: Given an oblique circular cone with axis \(\alpha\) making an angle α to the base, with a radius \(\rho\), compute the height of the cone and the length of the longest and shortest slant heights.

\(9x^2 + 25y^2 = 225\). The coordinates are, \(x = 5\), \(y = 2\). Determine the equation of the tangent and its length. They may also need to solve construction problems: Construct the locus of all points equidistant from a given point and a given plane.

Another question might be: Construct the shadow of a surface of a plane bounded by a circle upon a cone. Or further: Draw a cycloid.

The children also need to become accustomed to writing German essays. You could use what you teach in class for such essays.

A teacher: I think we need to teach the children a little about the technique of writing such essays.

Dr. Steiner: You can show them that by correcting their errors. That is true of style also. I would not give any theoretical discussions about that, as they will be disappointed when their essays are poor. A teacher: They have poor punctuation.

Dr. Steiner: It will not be easy to find a reasonable way to teach punctuation to children. We need to look into this question further, including the reasons for punctuation. This is a question we need to examine pedagogically, and I will prepare that for our next meeting. There does not appear to be any natural way of justifying punctuation. Our German punctuation is based upon the Latin and is very pedantic. Latin has logical punctuation. It arose in Medieval Latin at the beginning of the Middle Ages. There was none in Classical Latin.

Morgenstern wrote a poem about that, “Im Reich der Interpunktionen” (In the realm of punctuation marks). Punctuation is something that cannot be understood before a certain age because it is very intellectual. Children can understand putting a comma before an and only after the age of fourteen, but then they understand it quite easily. A book from Herman Grimm shows that there is actually no higher law in regard to these things. You cannot say they are incorrect. You should read the beginning of Herman Grimm’s book about Raphael. He uses only periods. You should also read one of his essays about how a schoolmaster corrected his errors. Grimm gives an answer to that. He gives a very interesting picture in his volume of essays, in the last one. You can also learn a great deal by looking at a letter by Goethe. Goethe could not punctuate. A teacher asks about seating boys and girls together.

Dr. Steiner: It is better to take such dislikes into account when they exist.

A teacher of one of the middle grades asks about “round writing.”

Dr. Steiner: They can do that.

A class had been divided and the new class teacher thought that he had received almost all the poor students.

Dr. Steiner: I do not understand how this opinion could arise. Why didn’t we divide the class such that it would be impossible for such an opinion to arise? There is no reason for dividing in any way other than alphabetically. That is better than when all the good students are put in one class, and the other has only the poor students.

A gymnastics teacher: C.H. does not want to participate in gymnastics and does not want to do eurythmy because of his inner development.

Dr. Steiner: When little H. begins such things, he is starting along the path of becoming like his older brother. He needs to be moved to participate in all the classes. That is simply nonsense. If you give in, he will be just like his brother. None of the students can be allowed not to participate in all the classes without good reason.

A gymnastics teacher: The upper two grades do not want to take gymnastics. The way they come to class makes me really feel sorry for them.

Dr. Steiner: Part of the problem is that the children did not have gymnastics before. They do not understand why they should take it now. That is something we cannot overcome. It was an error when the Waldorf School was started, and something will always remain of it.

On the other hand, it is quite possible to do something we thought was important several years ago when Mr. Baumann was teaching deportment, namely, to have the children learn manners. That is completely lacking in the upper grades. However, if it is taught pedantically, though we do not need to do it that way, they will become uncomfortable, particularly the boys. We must teach them manners with manners, with a certain amount of humor. I still find that quite lacking. We need to bring in more humor. It is important that you bring more humor, not jokes of course, into the school and into your teaching. You are really too reserved in that regard.

The spirit of the Waldorf School is certainly here, but on the other hand, overcoming human weaknesses through anthroposophy—which itself is a human being—is not something general, but something unique for each person. You could become something very different through anthroposophy. A great deal could occur in that regard, so that it is not Mr. X. or Miss Y. who stands before the class, but Mr. X. or Miss Y. transformed through anthroposophy. I could, of course, just as well mention other people. We must continue to free ourselves from this heaviness. There is a feeling of heaviness in the classes, and we must remove it. Seriousness is correct, but not this lack of humor. People need to lose this humorless seriousness. We need to overcome ourselves through our higher I so that the children cannot come to us and justifiably complain about our behavior. The faculty needs to round off the rough edges of one another. You should, of course, not allow things to go so far that one person allows everything to slip by while another continually complains. With X., you could certainly put your hands in your pockets, but not with Z. That would not be appropriate. There must be a style in the school that acts to bring things together so that there is a real cooperation. This might be a topic for a meeting when I am not here.

A teacher reports about the behavior of one of the older girls.

Dr. Steiner: The girl will say, “Thank God.” She probably had an afternoon tea, and I could well imagine that she did not want to do gymnastics. That has nothing to do with gymnastics. You need to get past some of the children’s selfishness. X. would think it quite funny of the girls, whereas you think it is bad behavior. It has often happened that other teachers are not the least disturbed by such things, so the children do not understand the problem. We need to teach them social forms with some humor. Good social forms are something that influence moral attitudes and affect moral development later in life. They do not need to be carved in stone.

We must pay more attention to overcoming what is human through our higher self. That will become more possible as our workload decreases. In Norway, the teachers have thirty hours. This year, we will be in a position where some teachers have less than twenty hours. The fewer class hours we have, the better we can prepare, which also includes overcoming our individual idiosyncrasies. We do not need to overcome our individuality, only our idiosyncrasies. We may not let ourselves go. That is something that may not happen in any event.

The gymnastics teacher: Should P. I. do gymnastics?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, and he should also do some curative eurythmy. He should do all of the consonant exercises in moderate amounts. Do them all, but not for too long. He is inwardly crippled.

A teacher asks about a student in an upper grade who speaks very softly.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to have him memorize things. See to it that he learns things from memory, but says them poetically, or at least in well-formed language.

A teacher asks about gardening class for the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: We offer gardening class only until the tenth grade. We should leave gardening out of the upper grades. The children would like to learn grafting, if you can guide them into its mysteries.

The school doctor: One hundred seventy children have taken the remedies for malnutrition.5 I have examined one hundred twenty, and most of them look better. Eighty have gained two to five pounds.

Dr. Steiner: That is not bad for such a short time. The school doctor asks about tuberculosis of the lungs.

Dr. Steiner: Children who have tuberculosis of the lungs often have infected intestines as well. We should examine those who show the effects in their lungs for tuberculosis of the intestines, because intestinal tuberculosis does not often arise by itself at that young age. In that event, it would be best to try to heal the intestines first.

For cases of tuberculosis in the intestines and the pancreas, put the juice from half a lemon in a glass of water and use that in a compress to wrap their abdomen at night. Give them also the tuberculosis remedies one and two. As far as possible, they should eat only warm things without any animal fat, for instance, warm eggs, warm drinks, particularly warm lemonade, but, if possible, everything should be warm.

The school doctor: It is difficult to differentiate between large- and small-headed children.

Dr. Steiner: You will need to go more thoroughly into the reality of it. So many things are hidden. It sometimes happens that these things appear later with one child or another.

I would now like to hear about the first grade. Are the children taking it up? We need to follow the psychology of this first grade. Every class has its own individuality. These two first grade classes are very interesting groups.

A teacher: The little ones are quite individualistic. They are like sacks of flour, yet individualistic.

Dr. Steiner: You need to be clear that all their shouting is just superficial. You need to find out what excites them.

A teacher asks whether the tendency toward left-handedness should be broken.

Dr. Steiner: In general, yes. At the younger ages, approximately before the age of nine, you can accustom left-handed children to right-handedness at school. You should not do that only if it would have a damaging effect, which is very seldom the case Children are not a sum of things, but exponentially complicated. If you attempt to create symmetry between the right and left with the children, and you exercise both hands in balance, that can lead to weak-mindedness later in life.

The phenomenon of left-handedness is clearly karmic, and, in connection with karma, it is one of karmic weakness. I will give an example: People who overworked in their previous life, so that they did too much, not just physically or intellectually, but in general spiritually, within their soul or feeling, will enter the succeeding life with an intense weakness. That person will be unable to overcome the karmic weakness in the lower human being. (The part of the human being that results from the life between death and a new birth is particularly concentrated in the lower human being, whereas the part that comes from the previous earthly life is concentrated more in the head.) So, what would otherwise be strongly developed becomes weak, and the left leg and left hand are relied upon as a crutch. The preference for the left hand results in the right side of the brain, instead of the left, being used in speech. If you give in to that too much, then that weakness may perhaps remain for a later, a third, earthly life. If you do not give in, then the weakness is brought into balance.

If you make a child do everything equally well with the right and left hands, writing, drawing, work and so forth, the inner human being will be neutralized. Then the I and the astral body are so far removed that the person becomes quite lethargic later in life. Without any intervention, the etheric body is stronger toward the left than the right, and the astral body is more developed toward the right than the left. That is something you may not ignore; you should pay attention to it. However, we may not attempt a simple mechanical balance. The most naive thing you can do is to have as a goal that the children should work with both hands equally well. A desire for a balanced development of both hands arises from today’s complete misunderstanding of the nature of the human being.

They discuss a girl. She needs to be immunized since she just went through a bad case of flu.

Dr. Steiner: That lames the senses under the quadrigeminal plate. This is not an easy situation.

A school-age child needs to sleep eight to nine hours. We need to take care of these things individually. I wanted to show only that a child who sleeps too little will have insufficient musical feeling, and that a child who sleeps too much will be too weak for all the things that require a more flexible imagination.

That is how to tell whether the child sleeps too long or not enough. Those who sleep too much will have little capability with forms in geometry, for example. Those who sleep too little will have difficulty understanding music and history.

A teacher makes a comment.

Dr. Steiner: B.B. is periodically rude. He will have times when he is better and others when he is worse. Realistically, it will take many years for that to improve.

Today we will lead on from the lecture of the day before yesterday to certain matters which can promote a deep personal understanding of the anthroposophical life. If we pass over our life in review and make real efforts to get to the root of its happenings, very much can be gained. We shall recognise the justice of many things in our destiny and realise that we have deserved them.—Suppose someone has been frivolous and superficial in the present incarnation and is subsequently struck by a blow of fate. It may not be possible, externally, to connect the blow of fate directly with the frivolousness, but a feeling arises, nevertheless, that there is justice in it. Further examination of life will reveal blows of fate which we can only attribute to chance, for which we find no explanation whatever. These two categories of experiences are to be discovered as we look back over our life. Now it is important to make a clear distinction between apparent chance and obvious necessity. When a man reviews his life with reference to these two kinds of happenings, he will fail to reach any higher stage of development unless he endeavours to have a very clear perception of everything that seems to him to be chance. We must try, above all, to have clear perception of those things we have not desired, which go right against the grain. It is possible to induce a certain attitude of soul and to say to ourselves: How would it be if I were to take those things which I have not desired, which are disagreeable to me and imagine that I myself actually willed them? In other words, we imagine with all intensity that we ourselves willed our particular circumstances.

In regard to apparently fortuitous happenings, we must picture the possibility of having ourselves put forth a deliberate and strong effort of will in order to bring them about. Meditatively as it were, we must induce this attitude to happenings which, on the face of them, seem to be purely fortuitous in our lives. Every human being today is capable of this mental exercise. If we proceed in this way, a very definite impression will ultimately be made upon the soul; we shall feel as though something were striving to be released from us. The soul says to itself: “Here, as a mental image, I have before me a second being; he is actually there.” We cannot get rid of this image and the being gradually becomes our “Double.” The soul begins to feel a real connection with this being who has been imagined into existence, to realise that this being actually exists within us. If this conception deepens into a vivid and intense experience, we become aware that this “imagined” being is by no means without significance. The conviction comes to us: this being was already once in existence and at that time you had within you the impulses of will which led to the apparently chance happenings of today. Thereby we reach a deep-rooted conviction that we were already in existence before coming down into the body. Every human being today can have this conviction.—And now let us consider the question of the successive incarnations of the human being. What is it that reincarnates? How can we discover the answer to this question?

There are three fundamental and distinct categories of experiences in the life of soul. Firstly, our mental pictures, our ideas, our thoughts. In forming a mental picture, our attitude may well be one of complete neutrality; we need not love or hate what we picture inwardly, neither need we feel sympathy or antipathy towards it. Secondly, there are the moods and shades of feeling which arise by the side of the ideas or the thoughts; the cause of these moods in the life of feeling is that we like or love one thing, dislike or abhor another, and so forth. The third kind of experiences in the life of soul are the impulses of will. There are, of course, transitional stages but speaking generally these are the three categories. Moreover it is fundamentally characteristic of a healthy life of soul to be able to keep these three kinds of experiences separate and distinct from each other. Our life of thought and mental presentation arises because we receive stimuli from outside. Nobody will find it difficult to realise that the life of thought is the most closely bound up with the present incarnation. This, after all, is quite obvious when we bear in mind that speech is the instrument whereby we express our thoughts; and speech, or language, must, in the nature of things, differ in every incarnation. We no more bring language with us at the beginning of a new incarnation than we bring thoughts and ideas. The language as well as the thoughts must be acquired afresh in each incarnation. Hebbel once wrote something very remarkable in his diary.—The idea occurred to him that a scene in which the reincarnated Plato was being soundly chastised by the teacher for his lack of understanding of Plato would produce a very striking effect in a play! A man does not carry over his thought and mental life from one incarnation to another and takes practically nothing of it with him into his post-mortem existence. After death we evolve no thoughts or mental pictures but have direct perceptions, just as our physical eyes have perceptions of colour. After death, the world of concepts is seen as a kind of net stretching across existence. But our feelings, our moods of heart and feeling—these we retain after death and also bring their forces with us as qualities and tendencies of soul into a new earthly life. For example, even if a child's life of thought is undeveloped, we shall be able to notice quite definite tendencies in his life of feeling. And because our impulses of will are linked with feelings, we also take them with us into our life after death. If, for example, a man lends himself to fallacy and error, the effect upon his life of feeling is not the same as if he lends himself to truth. For a long time after death we suffer from the consequences of false mental presentations and ideas. Our attention must therefore turn to the qualities and moods of feeling and the impulses of the will, when we ask: What is it that actually passes on from one incarnation to another?

Suppose something painful happened to us ten or twenty years ago. In thought today we may be able to remember it quite distinctly and in detail. But the actual pain we felt at the time has all but faded away; we cannot re-experience the stirrings of feeling and impulses of will by which it was accompanied. Think for a moment of Bismarck and the overwhelming difficulties of which he was conscious in taking his decision to go to war in 1866; think of what tumultuous feelings, what teeming impulses of will were working in Bismarck at that time! But even when writing his memoirs, would Bismarck have been conscious of these emotions and resolves with anything like the same intensity? Of course not! Man's memory between birth and death is composed of thoughts and mental pictures. It may, of course, be that even after ten or twenty years, a feeling of pain comes over us at the recollection of some sorrowful event, but generally speaking the pain will have greatly diminished after this lapse of time; in thought, however, we can remember the very details of the event. If we now picture to ourselves that we actually willed certain painful events, that in reality we welcomed things which in our youth we may have hated, the very difficulty of this exercise rouses the soul and thus has an effect upon the life of feeling. Suppose, for example, a stone once crashed down upon us.—We now try with all intensity to picture that we ourselves willed it so. Through such mental pictures—that we ourselves have willed the chance events in our life—we arouse, in the life of feeling, memory of our earlier incarnations. In this way we begin to realise how we are rooted in the spiritual world, we begin to understand our destiny. We have brought with us, from our previous incarnation, the will for the chance events of this life.

To devote ourselves in meditation to such thoughts, and elaborate them, is of the highest importance. Between death and a new birth too, much transpires, for this period is infinitely rich in experiences—purely spiritual experiences, of course. We therefore bring with us qualities of feeling and impulses of will from the period between death and a new birth, that is to say, from the spiritual world. Upon this rests a certain occurrence of very great importance in the modern age, but one of which little notice is taken. The occurrence is to be found in the lives of many people today but usually passes by unnoticed. It is, however, the task of Anthroposophy to point to such an occurrence and its significance. Let me make it clear by an example.—Suppose a man has occasion to go somewhere or other and his path happens to take him in the wake of another human being, a child perhaps. Suddenly the man catches sight of a yawning chasm at the edge of the path along which the child is walking. A few steps farther and the child will inevitably fall over the edge into the chasm. He runs to save the child, runs and runs, entirely forgetting about the chasm. Then he suddenly hears a voice calling out to him from somewhere: “Stand still!” He halts as though nailed to the spot. At that moment the child catches hold of a tree and also stops, so that no harm befalls. If no voice had called at that moment the man must inevitably have fallen into the chasm. And now he wonders from whom the voice came. He finds no single soul who could have called, but he realises that he would quite certainly have been killed if he had not heard this voice; yet however closely he investigates he cannot find that the warning came from any physical voice.

In deep self-observation, many human beings living at the present time would be able to recognise a similar experience in their lives. But far too little attention is paid to such things. An experience of this kind may pass by without leaving a trace—then the impression fades away and no importance is attached to the experience. But suppose a man has been attentive and realises that it was not without significance. The thought may then occur to him: At that point in your life you were facing a crisis, a karmic crisis; your life should really have ended at that moment, for you had forfeited it. You were saved by something akin to chance and since then a second life has as it were been planted on the first; this second life is to be regarded as a gift bestowed upon you and you must act accordingly. When such an experience makes a man feel that his life, from that time onwards, has been bestowed upon him as a gift, this means that he can be accounted a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For this is how Christian Rosenkreutz calls the souls whom he has chosen. A man who can recall such an occurrence—and everyone sitting here can discover something of the kind in their lives if they observe closely enough—has the right to say to himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added such an experience to my karma.—This is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz chooses his pupils; this is how he gathers his community.—A man who is conscious of this experience knows with certainty that a path has been pointed out to him which he must follow, trying to discover how he can dedicate himself to the service of Rosicrucianism. If there are some who have not yet recognised the sign, they will do so later on; for he to whom the sign has once been given will never again be free from it.—That such an experience comes to a man is due to the fact that during the period between his last death and his present birth, he was in contact with Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. It was then that Christian Rosenkreutz chose us, imparting an impulse of will which leads us, now, to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are established. Materialistic thought will naturally regard all these things as hallucinations, just as it regards the experience of Paul at Damascus as having been an hallucination. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that the whole of Christianity is based upon an hallucination, therefore upon error. For theologians are perfectly well aware that the Event at Damascus is the foundation-stone of the whole of subsequent Christianity. And if this foundation stone itself is nothing but an illusion, then, if thought is consistent, everything built upon it must obviously be fallacy.

An attempt has been made today to show that certain happenings, certain experiences in life may indicate to us how we are interwoven in the spiritual fabric of world existence. If we develop the memory belonging to our life of feeling, we grow onwards into the spiritual life which streams and pulses through the world. Theoretical knowledge alone does not make men true theosophists; those who understand their own life and the life of other human beings in the sense indicated today—they and they alone are true theosophists.—Anthroposophy is a basic power which can transform our life of soul. And the goal of the work in our groups must be that the intimate experiences of the soul change in character, that through the gradual development of the memory belonging to the life of feeling we become aware of Immortality. The true theosophist or anthroposophist must have this conviction: If you so will, if you really apply the forces within you in all their strength, then you can utterly transform your character. We must learn to feel and perceive that the Immortal holds sway in ourselves and in everyone else.—What makes a man into a true anthroposophist is that his faculties remain receptive his whole life long, even when his hair is white. The realisation that progress is possible always and forever will transform our whole spiritual life.

One of the consequences of materialism is that human beings become old prematurely. Thirty years ago, for example, children looked quite different; there are children today of 10 or 11 years old who give the impression of old and aged people. Human beings—especially adolescents—have become so precocious, so old beyond their years. They maintain that lies such as that of babies being brought by the stork should not be told to children, that children should be “enlightened” on such matters. Those who come after us will know that the souls of our children hover down as bird-like, spirit-forms from the higher worlds. To have an imaginative conception of many things still beyond our comprehension is of very great importance. As regards the case in question, it is possible to find a much better imaginative picture than the legend of the stork; the reality is that spiritual forces are in play between the child and his parents or teachers; a kind of secret magnetism is in operation. We must ourselves believe in any imaginative picture we give to the children. If it is a question of explaining death to them, we must point to another happening in Nature. We say to the children: “See how the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. That is what happens to the human soul at death.”—But we must ourselves believe that the Powers behind the Universe have given us, in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, an image of the soul going forth from the body. The World-Spirit has inscribed such a picture in Nature to draw our attention to what here transpires. It is infinitely important to be always capable of learning, of always remaining young, independently of our physical body. The great task of Theosophy, or Anthroposophy, is to bring to the world the rejuvenation of which it stands sorely in need. We must get beyond the banal and the purely material. To recognise Soul and Spirit as powers operating in life—this must be the aim of the work in our Groups. More and more we must be permeated with the knowledge that the soul can gain mastery over the external world.

Today we will lead on from the lecture of the day before yesterday to certain matters which can promote a deep personal understanding of Anthroposophical life. If we survey our life and make real efforts to get to the roots of its happenings, very much can be gained. We shall recognise the justice of many things in our destiny and realise that we have deserved them. Suppose someone has been superficial and thoughtless in the present incarnation and is subsequently struck by a blow of fate. It may not be possible, externally, to connect the blow of fate directly with the thoughtlessness, but a feeling arises, nevertheless, that there is justice in it. Then again, looking back on our life, we find blows of fate which we can only attribute to chance, for there seems no explanation for them whatever. These two categories of experience are to be discovered as we survey our life.

Now it is important to make a clear distinction between apparent chance and obvious necessity. When a man reviews his life with reference to these two kinds of happenings, he will fail to reach any higher stage of development unless he endeavours to have a very clear perception of everything that seems to him to be due to chance. We must try, above all, to have a clear perception of those things we have not wished for, which go right against the grain. It is possible to induce a certain attitude of soul and to say to ourselves: How would it be if I were to take those things which I have not desired, which are disagreeable to me, and imagine that I myself actually really wanted them? In other words we imagine with all intensity that we ourselves willed our particular circumstances.

In regard to apparently fortuitous happenings we must picture the possibility of having ourselves put forth a deliberate and strong effort of will in order to bring them about. Meditatively as it were, we must induce this attitude to happenings which, on the face of them, seem to be purely fortuitous in our lives. Every human being today is capable of this mental exercise. If we proceed in this way, a very definite impression will gradually be made upon the soul; we shall feel as though something were striving to be released from us. The soul says to itself: ‘Here, as a mental image, I have before me a second being; he is actually there.’ We cannot get rid of this image and the being gradually becomes our ‘double.’ The soul begins to feel a real connection with this being who has been imagined into existence, to realise that this being does actually exist within us. If this conception deepens into a vivid and intense experience, we become aware that this imagined being is by no means without significance. The conviction comes to us: this being was already once in existence and at that time you had within you the impulses of will which led to the apparently chance happenings of today. Thereby we reach a deeply rooted conviction that we were already in existence before coming down into the body. Every human being today can have this conviction.

And now let us consider the question of the successive incarnations of the human being. What is it that reincarnates? How can we discover the answer to this question?

There are three fundamental and distinct categories of experiences in the life of the soul Firstly our mental pictures, our ideas, our thoughts. In forming a mental picture our attitude may well be one of complete neutrality; we need not love or hate what we picture inwardly, neither need we feel sympathy or antipathy towards it. Secondly there are the moods and shades of feelings which arise alongside the ideas or the thoughts; the cause of these moods in the life of feeling is that we like or love one thing, dislike or abhor another, and so forth. The third kind of experience in the life of the soul are the impulses of the will. There are, of course, transitional stages, but speaking generally these are the three categories. Moreover it is fundamentally characteristic of a healthy life of soul to be able to keep these three kinds of experiences separate and distinct from one another. Our life of thought and mental presentation arises because we receive stimuli from outside. Nobody will find it difficult to realise that the life of thought is the most closely bound up with the present incarnation. This, after all, is obvious when we bear in mind that speech is the instrument whereby we express our thoughts; and speech, or language, must, in the nature of things, differ in every incarnation. We no more bring language with us at the beginning of a new incarnation than we bring thoughts and ideas. The language as well as the thoughts must be acquired afresh in each incarnation. Hebbel⁵¹ once wrote something very remarkable in his diary. The idea occurred to him that a scene in which the reincarnated Plato was being soundly chastised by the teacher for his lack of understanding of Plato would produce a very striking effect in a play! A man does not carry over his thought and mental life from one incarnation to another, and he takes practically nothing of it with him into his postmortem existence. After death we evolve no thoughts or mental pictures but have direct perceptions, just as our physical eyes have perceptions of colour. After death the world of concepts is seen as a kind of net stretching across existence. But our feelings, our moods of heart and feeling these we retain after death, and we also bring their forces with us as qualities and tendencies of soul into a new earthly life. For example, even if a child's life of thought is undeveloped, we shall be able to notice quite definite tendencies in his life of feeling. And because our impulses of will are linked with feelings we also take them with us into our life after death. If, for instance, a man succumbs to a mistaken idea, the effect upon his life of feeling is not the same as if he devotes himself to the truth. For a long time after death we suffer from the consequences of false mental presentations and ideas. Our attention must therefore turn to the qualities and moods of feeling and the impulses of will when we ask ourselves what actually passes on from one incarnation to another.

Suppose something painful happened to us ten or twenty years ago. In thought today we may be able to remember it quite distinctly and in detail. But the actual pain we felt at the time has all but faded away; we cannot re-experience the stirrings of feelings and impulses of will by which it was accompanied. Think for a moment of Bismarck⁵² and the overwhelming difficulties we know he had to face when he took his decision to go to war in 1866; think of what tumultuous feelings, what teeming impulses of will were working in Bismarck at that time! But even when writing his memoirs, would Bismarck have been conscious of these emotions and resolves with anything like the same intensity? Of course not! Man's memory between birth and death is composed of thoughts and mental pictures. It may be, of course, that even after ten or twenty years a feeling of pain comes over us at the recollection of some sorrowful event, but generally speaking the pain will have greatly diminished after this lapse of time; in thought, however, we can remember the very details of the event. If we now picture to ourselves that we actually willed certain painful events, that in reality we welcomed things which in our youth we may have hated, the very difficulty of this exercise rouses the soul and thus has an effect upon the life of feeling. Suppose, for example, a stone once crashed down upon us. We now try with all intensity to picture that we ourselves willed it so. Through such mental pictures—that we ourselves have willed the chance events in our life—we arouse, in the life of feeling, memory of our earlier incarnations. In this way we begin to realise that we are rooted in the spiritual world, we begin to understand our destiny. We have brought with us, from our previous incarnation, the will for the chance events of this life.

To devote ourselves in meditation to such thoughts and elaborate them, is of the highest importance. Between death and a new birth too, much transpires, for this period is infinitely rich in experiences—purely spiritual experiences, of course. We therefore bring with us qualities of feeling and impulses of will from the period between death and a new birth, that is to say, from the spiritual world. Upon this rests a certain occurrence of very great importance in the modern age, but one of which little notice is taken. The occurrence is to be found in the lives of many people today, but it is usually passed by unnoticed. It is, however, the task of Anthroposophy to point to such an occurrence and its significance. Let me make it clear by an example.

Suppose a man has occasion to go somewhere or other and his path takes him in the wake of another human being, a child perhaps. Suddenly the man catches sight of a yawning chasm at the edge of the path along which the child is walking. A few steps further and the child will inevitably fall over the edge into the chasm. He runs to save the child, runs and runs, entirely forgetting about the chasm. Then he suddenly hears a voice calling out to him from somewhere: ‘Stand still!’ He halts as though nailed to the spot. At that moment the child catches hold of a tree and also stops, so that no harm befalls. If no voice had called at that moment the man would inevitably have fallen into the chasm. He wonders where the voice came from. He finds no single soul who could have called, but he realises that he would quite certainly have lost his life if he had not heard this voice; yet, however closely he investigates he cannot find that the warning came from any physical voice.

Through close self-observation many human beings living at the present time would be able to recognise a similar experience in their lives. But far too little attention is paid to such things. An experience of this kind may pass by without leaving a trace—then the impression fades away and no importance is attached to the experience. But suppose a man has been attentive and realises that it was not without significance. The thought may then occur to him: At that point in your life you were facing a crisis, a karmic crisis; your life should really have ended at that moment, for you had forfeited it. You were saved by something akin to chance, and since then a second life has as it were been grafted onto the first; this second life is to be regarded as a gift bestowed upon you and you must act accordingly. When such an experience makes a man feel that his life from that time onwards has been bestowed upon him as a gift, this means that he can be accounted a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For this is how Christian Rosenkreutz calls the souls whom he has chosen. A man who can recall such an occurrence—and everyone sitting here can discover something of the kind in their lives if they observe closely enough—has the right to say to himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added such an experience to my karma. This is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz chooses his pupils; this is how he gathers his community. A man who is conscious of this experience knows with certainty that a path has been pointed out to him which he must follow, trying to discover how he can dedicate himself to the service of rosicrucianism. If there are some people who have not yet recognised the sign, they will do so later on; for he to whom the sign has once been given will never again be free from it.

Such an experience comes to a man because during the period between his last death and his present birth he was in contact with Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. It was then that Christian Rosenkreutz chose us, imparting an impulse of will which leads us now to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are established. Materialistic thought will naturally regard all these things as hallucinations, just as it regards the experience of Paul at Damascus as having been an hallucination. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that the whole of Christianity is based upon an hallucination, therefore upon error. For theologians are perfectly well aware that the event at Damascus is the foundation stone of the whole of subsequent Christianity. And if this foundation stone itself is nothing but an illusion, then, if thought is consistent, everything built upon it must obviously be fallacy.

An attempt has been made today to show that certain happenings, certain experiences in life may indicate to us how we are interwoven in the spiritual fabric of world existence. If we develop the memory belonging to our life of feeling, then we live our way into the spiritual life which streams and pulses through the world. Theoretical knowledge alone does not make men true Anthroposophists; those who understand their own life and the life of other human beings in the sense indicated today—they and they alone are true Anthroposophists. Anthroposophy is a basic power which can transform our life of soul. And the goal of the work in our groups must be that the intimate experiences of the soul change in character, that through the gradual development of the memory belonging to the life of feeling we become aware of immortality. The true theosophist or Anthroposophist must have this conviction: If you really will, if you apply the forces within you in all their strength, then you can utterly transform your character. We must learn to feel and experience that an immortal element holds sway in ourselves and in everything else. An Anthroposophist becomes an Anthroposophist because his faculties remain receptive his whole life long, even when his hair is white. And this realisation that progress is possible always and forever will transform our whole spiritual life today.

One of the consequences of materialism is that human beings become prematurely old. Thirty years ago, for example, children looked quite different; there are children today of ten or twelve years of age who give the impression almost of senility. Human beings have become so precocious, especially the grown-ups. They maintain that lies such as that of babies being brought by the stork should not be told to children, that children should be enlightened on such matters. But this enlightenment itself is really a lie. Those who come after us will know that the souls of our children hover down as bird-like spirit forms from the higher worlds. To have an imaginative conception of many things still beyond our comprehension is of very great importance. As regards the fact in question it might be possible to find a better imaginative picture than the story of the stork. What matters is that spiritual forces operate between the child and his parents or teachers, a kind of secret magnetism must be there. We must ourselves believe in any imaginative picture we give to the children. If it is a question of explaining death to them, we must point to another happening in nature. We can say: ‘See how the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. The same thing happens to the human soul after death’ But we must ourselves believe that the world is arranged in such a way that the forces in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis present us with an image of the soul going forth from the body. The world-spirit has inscribed such a picture in nature to draw our attention to the process. It is tremendously important to be always capable of learning, of remaining young, independently of our physical body. And that is the great task of theosophy that has become Anthroposophy: to bring to the world the rejuvenation which it needs. We must get beyond the banal and the purely material. To recognise soul and spirit as powers operating in life—this must be the aim of the work in our groups. We must be permeated more and more with the knowledge that the soul can gain mastery over the external world.

• 51. Hebbel ... diary: ‘After his soul journey Plato is now possibly being caned at school for—not understanding Plato.’ Hebbel's diaries Nr. 1335.
• 52. Bismarck: ‘Gedanken und Erinnerungen’ (Thoughts and Memories), 1898, 2 volumes.

It is fair to warn the reader that this is not an easy book. Should he be broaching the territory, without any previous knowledge of Rudolf Steiner's work and techniques, simply as one option in his search for a convincing critique of the prevalent materialism (or, as it is more commonly called, reductionism), he might do better to begin with one or both of two other books by the same author, The Origins of Natural Science and The Boundaries of Natural Science. There is little doubt that dissatisfaction with reductionism is gradually becoming more widespread (compare the tiny minority that was touched by it in the Victorian age); and it is perhaps significant that another change in the current world-view appears to be accompanying it. I mean an increasingly wide acceptance of the notion that human consciousness itself is in process of evolution; that there has not merely been a ‘progress’ from one set of ideas (largely erroneous) about the nature of the world and humanity towards a more ‘advanced’ one, but that the very structure of consciousness, the whole relation between man and nature, has been changing through the millennia.

Nowhere is this perspective, and the revised cosmology it entails, more explicit than in the literary legacy of Rudolf Steiner, and nowhere is its importance more earnestly stressed. The title of the present work already contains the difference between evolution of consciousness and history of ideas. History is the record of a conscious process, and the term is often extended to signify the process itself. Evolution is a process occurring at a pre-conscious stage, and up to the present this has applied also to the evolution of consciousness. Thus, the karma of materialism is not the same as the history of materialism. Karma is the name of a process operating at an unconscious level in the development of a human individuality, a process normally observable only in its effects; and the Karma of materialism is such a process operating in the development of materialism. So underneath the history of materialism (which would amount to a history of ideas, culminating in reductionism) Steiner reveals an unconscious process extending both before and after that history. Reductionism as theory manifests first in natural science, but the change of consciousness underlying it began much earlier, and it continues now irrespective of theory and affects the whole life of humanity. These lectures were delivered in the year 1917, when the catalogue of global disasters, which Steiner saw as the Karma of materialism, was still not long past its dawn; and it is with the effects of materialism in the social and political life, of humanity, both national and international, that they mainly concern themselves.

Just as in Boundaries of Natural Science Rudolf Steiner argues the necessity of penetrating this hitherto unconscious realm for the future health of science itself, so here he argues its necessity in order to cope with social and political problems that are growing more and more intractable as they are less and less understood. Penetrating it with what? With strengthened and energetic thinking. Notwithstanding his admiration for the achievements of natural science, disciplined as it is by its constant relation to observable fact, he accuses it of one disastrous oversight. While it has devised and continues to devise ever more elaborate and more precise tools for investigation, it has left unexamined and unimproved the first and most essential, the most ubiquitously applied, of all its tools. It has never tried to examine the nature of thinking itself; the point at which unconscious process blossoms into, or rather “sets” as, conscious thought. In the Boundaries course Steiner describes a method by which scientists could embark on such an examination. Here he is more concerned with the effects that have stemmed from their failure to do so at the time of the scientific revolution and after it. This involves reverting to that period in history and to the period preceding it. It is no use just saying: yes, there has been an evolution of consciousness, and it has resulted in materialism. It is no use simply chronicling effects; the process itself must be penetrated, and penetrated in detail; and if this entails reference to the thought processes of such historical figures as Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, so be it.

The first step however is to delineate the process itself, as far as possible, and this he does in Lecture III by way of a careful treatment, both synchronic and diachronic, of the relation between intellect, perception and breathing. The lecture should be read carefully, for it is there that he lays the foundation for the doctrine which he will go on to inculcate. Namely, that the unconscious is not just ‘spirit’ (still less of course the Freudian psycho-physical jumble); nor is it simply an inferred and unknowable 'world of spirit'; it is a world of active spiritual beings, whose particular aims and influences are not wholly, and will become less and less, beyond the reach of human knowledge.

Or perhaps it would be truer to say the doctrine which he will go on to assume. That is one of the reasons why it is a difficult book, not simply because such an immaterial cosmology is repugnant to the contemporary mind-set: for repugnant it certainly is, except to a level of open-mindedness that is deplorably rare. Open-mindedness at a somewhat lower level is not so infrequent. There are many minds in our time acutely aware of the apparent impotence of the human spirit to deal with the complex and apparently insoluble problems that increasingly threaten its continued existence, and which go so far as to proclaim that a new kind of consciousness seems to be demanded of us. What is wanted, these uneasy people say, is altogether new ideas, a new kind of thinking. But they usually forget that the new is by definition unfamiliar; so that, when they are confronted with a picture of the universe that is not just a rearrangement of the old picture, but is really new and therefore wholly unfamiliar, they are offended or contemptuous. It becomes clear, Steiner repeats with emphasis and with examples to drive it home, that what they really wanted was something that looks new but is in fact old enough to feel quite comfortable. Confronted by anything beyond that they refuse even to examine the evidence for it. Exclamation marks are a sufficient refutation.

For many readers there will be the added difficulty of what they will feel as its author's tendency to plunge in medias res. Quite early in the book they will be confronted by references to named spiritual beings to whom they have not been introduced, notably certain of the spiritual hierarchies, who have been differently named in different traditions, but for whom Steiner uses the nomenclature found with their earliest recorded appearance in the extant literature of the West, that is the work of ‘pseudo-Dionysius’; and, over and above these, to the 'adversary' figures of Lucifer and Ahriman, especially the latter. If the reader is wise, he will reflect that, where knowledge of the immaterial itself is at issue, and not simply knowledge of its material effects, it is the same as with all knowledge. Neither things nor beings can be spoken of without being identified, or identified without being named: It remains true that some previous acquaintance with the literature of Steiner's anthroposophy will greatly reduce this difficulty, and will prevent the names being merely names. Nor is there much doubt that most of his original audience enjoyed such an acquaintance.

Some acquaintance then with the literature of anthroposophy is desirable in a reader of this book. But I would not say it is indispensable. There is another way of acquainting oneself with unfamiliar terminology besides starting with a set of definitions. Indeed definitions, though useful in forestalling error, may even hinder close acquaintance with the actuality of what is defined, inasmuch as they tend to substitute abstraction for experience. The other way of twigging the meanings of unfamiliar words is to plunge into contexts wherein they occur more than once, and sometimes perhaps by way of casual reference, and thus gradually to approach nearer and nearer to them by experiencing their use in those contexts. Incidentally if this way were not a way that is wide open to us, we should never have learned to speak or to understand anything at all.

I believe therefore that readers will not be lacking who will by-pass any initial stumbling-blocks as they enter into the substance of the book and become more and more impressed by its whole tone, by the authority born of wide learning, long reflection and exceptional insight and by the profound sense of responsibility, alike to the truth and to humanity, that breathe through its wide-ranging paragraphs.

Owen Barfield

Dr. Steiner greets those present with the words:

My dear friends!

Allow me forthwith to open the Foundation Meeting of the Anthroposophical Society. My first task is to announce the names of the General Secretaries who will speak on behalf of the national Societies:

America, the United States: Mr Monges.
Austria: On behalf of the Council: Count Polzer.
Belgium: Madame Muntz.
Czechoslovakia: Dr Eiselt, Dr Krkavec.
Denmark: Herr Hohlenberg.
England: Mr Collison.
Finland: Herr Donner.
France: Mademoiselle Sauerwein.
Germany:
on behalf of the Council: Dr Unger.
on behalf of the Free Anthroposophical Society: Dr Büchenbacher.
Holland: Dr Zeylmans van Emmichoven.
Honolulu: Madame Ferreri.
Italy: On behalf of the Council:
Baroness de Renzis, Rome,
The Duke of Cesaro, Fräulein Schwarz, Milan.
Norway: Herr Ingerö.
Sweden: Fräulein Henström.
Switzerland: Herr Steffen.

Secondly I have to read to you a telegram which has arrived: ‘Please convey to the gathering our cordial greetings and best wishes for a good outcome, in the name of Sweden's anthroposophists.’

Before coming to the first point on the agenda I wish to ask whether in accordance with the rules of procedure anyone wishes to comment on the agenda?

No-one.

Then let us take the first point on the agenda. I call on Herr Steffen, who will also be speaking as the General Secretary of the Society in Switzerland, within whose boundaries we are guests here.

Albert Steffen speaks:

He concludes by reading a resolution of the Swiss delegates:

The delegates of the Swiss branches have decided to announce publicly today, on the occasion of the Foundation Meeting, the following resolution:

‘Today, on the occasion of the Foundation Meeting of the General Anthroposophical World Society in Dornach, the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland wishes to express its gratitude and enthusiasm for the fact that the Goetheanum, which serves the cultural life of all mankind, is to be built once again in Switzerland. The Swiss Society sees in this both good fortune and great honour for its country. It wishes to verify that it will do everything in its power to ensure that the inexhaustible abundance of spiritual impulses given to the world through the works of Rudolf Steiner can continue to flow out from here. In collaboration with the other national Societies it wants to hope that the pure and beneficial source may become accessible to all human beings who seek it.’

Dr. Steiner: My dear friends, in the interest of a proper continuation of the Meeting it seems to me sensible to postpone the discussion on announcements such as that we have just heard to a time which will arise naturally out of the proceedings.

For the second point on the agenda I now wish to call for the reports to be given by the various Secretaries of the various national Societies. If anyone does not agree with this arrangement of the agenda, please raise your hand.

It seems that no-one disagrees, so let us continue with the agenda. Will the different General Secretaries please come to the platform to speak to our friends. I first call on the General Secretary for the United States of America, Mr Monges, to speak.

Mr Monges gives his report.

Dr. Steiner: I would now like to call on the General Secretary for Belgium, Madame Muntz, to speak.

Madame Muntz expresses her thanks for this honour, declares herself in agreement with all the statements that have been made and wishes the Meeting all the best.

Dr. Steiner: I now call on the General Secretary for Denmark, Herr Hohlenberg, to speak.

Herr Hohlenberg reports.

Dr. Steiner: I now call on the representative of the Council in Germany, Dr Unger, to speak.

Dr. Unger reports on the work of the German national Society. He concludes with words which have been recorded in the short-hand report:

At present we require in some aspects a rather comprehensive structure to accommodate this Society. This will have to be brought into full conformity with the Statutes presented here by Dr. Steiner for the founding of the General Society. We declare that the Anthroposophical Society in Germany will incorporate every point of these Statutes into its own Statutes and that these Statutes as a whole will be given precedence over the Statutes or Rules of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. In addition I have also been especially called upon to express deep gratitude to Dr. Steiner for taking on the heavy obligations arising out of the founding of the General Anthroposophical Society. Out of all the impressions gained from this Conference, the question will have to be asked whether every aspect of the work done in a large Society such as that in Germany can participate in and wants to participate in what is wanted by Dornach. Ever since Dr. Steiner took up residence in Dornach, ever since there has been work going on in Dornach, it has always gone without saying that what took place in Dornach was seen as the central point of all our work. Whatever else needs to be said about the work of the Society in Germany will be better brought forward during the further course of our gatherings. Let me just say, however, that in recent months we have begun a very intensive public programme. Hundreds of lectures of all kinds, but particularly also those arising out of a purely anthroposophical intention, have been given, especially in the southwestern part of Germany, even in the smallest places. All those who have participated, and there are many, agree without reservation that even in the smallest places there is a genuine interest in Anthroposophy, that everywhere hearts are waiting for Anthroposophy, and that wherever it is clearly and openly stated that the speaker stands on the soil of the spiritual research given to the world by Dr. Steiner it is really so that people feel: I am reminded that I have a soul and that this soul is beginning to be aware of itself once more. This is the case in all human souls, even those found in the smallest places, so we may look with confidence towards continuing our work in future.

Dr. Steiner: I now call on the representative of the Free Anthroposophical Society in Germany, Dr Büchenbacher, to speak.

Dr Büchenbacher reports and concludes with the words: I would like to express our feeling of deepest gratitude to Dr. Steiner for taking upon himself the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society. This gives us the will and the courage to work with what strength we have on the general stream of forces of the Anthroposophical Society. We express our profoundest thanks to him for having done this deed. And we request that the Free Anthroposophical Society for its part may be permitted to work according to its capacity towards the fulfilment of the tasks which Dr. Steiner has set it.

Dr. Steiner: May I now call on the General Secretary of the English Anthroposophical Society, Mr Collison, to speak.

Mr Collison reports.

Dr. Steiner: I now call on the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Finland, Herr Donner, to speak.

Herr Donner reports.

Dr. Steiner: I now call on the General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in France, Mademoiselle Sauerwein, to speak.

Mademoiselle Sauerwein reports.

Dr. Steiner: I now call on the Dutch General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society, Dr Zeylmans van Emmichoven, to speak.

Dr Zeylmans van Emmichoven reports.

Dr. Steiner: May I ask you to remain in your seats for a few more moments, dear friends. First of all, even during this Conference forgetfulness has led to the accumulation of a number of items of lost property. These have been gathered together and may be collected by the losers from Herr Kellermüller on their way out.

Secondly, the programme for the remainder of today will be as follows: At 2.30 there will be a meeting of the Vorstand with the General Secretaries, and any secretaries they may have brought with them, down in the Glass House, in the Architects' Office. This meeting will be for the Vorstand, the General Secretaries, and possibly their secretaries, only.

At 4.30 there will be a performance of the Nativity Play here.

Because of a eurythmy rehearsal my evening lecture will begin at 8.30.

I now adjourn today's meeting of members till tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock. I shall then have the pleasure of calling on the representative of Honolulu, Madame Ferreri, to speak, and representatives of other groups who did not speak today. The meeting is now adjourned till tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded on December 28th 1912 in Cologne, German, with about 3000 members. By 1923, the international growth of of the Anthroposophical Society made restructuring necessary. This restructuring took place during the Christmas Conference in 1923.

The General Anthroposophical Society is, “an association of people whose will it is to nurture the life of the soul, both in the individual and in human society, on the basis of a true knowledge of the spiritual world.” The Society is public, without political agenda or religious affiliation. Its activity is seen today in independent national societies and initiatives throughout the world, with members from all cultures and continents.

The aim of the Society, the School of Spiritual Science and the Goetheanum is to make a spiritually based contribution to the life of humanity in the world of today and tomorrow.

This text is from a pamphlet printed by the Anthroposophical Society of Great Britain.

1. TheAnthroposophical Society is a union of human beings who desire to further the life of the soul—both in the individual and in human society—on the basis of a true knowledge of the Spiritual World.
2. The persons gathered at the Goetheanum, Dornach, at Christmas, 1923—both the individuals who were present and the groups which were represented—form the foundation of the Society. They are convinced that there is in existence at the present time a real Science of the Spiritual World—discovered and elaborated for years past, and, in important particulars, already published. They hold, moreover, that the civilisation of to-day needs the cultivation of such a science. This is to be the task of the Anthroposophical Society. It will endeavour to fulfil the task by centering its activities on the spiritual science of Anthroposophy cultivated in the Goetheanum at Dornach, with all that results from it for human brotherhood, for moral and religious life, and for the artistic and cultural life in humanity.¹
3. The persons gathered together at Dornach in founding the Anthroposophical Society recognise and support the view of those responsible at the Goetheanum (represented by the Executive formed at the Foundation Meeting) in the following particulars:—“The Anthroposophy pursued in the Goetheanum leads to results which can be of assistance to every human being—without distinction of nation, social standing or religion—acting as an incentive in spiritual life. These results can in a real sense give rise to a social life based on brotherly love. The possibility of making them one's own and founding life upon them depends on no special degree of learning or education, but alone on a free, unbiased human nature. The researches, however, which lead to them, and the power of competent judgment on the results of research, are subject to a spiritual-scientific training which must be acquired step by step. The results are in their way no less exact than those of Natural Science; and when like these they attain general recognition, they will bring about a like progress in all spheres of life—not only in the spiritual but in the practical domain.”
4. The Anthroposophical Society is an entirely public organisation, and in no sense a secret society. Without distinction of nationality, social standing, religion, scientific or artistic conviction, any person feeling the existence of such an institution as the School of Spiritual Science—the Goetheanum in Dornach—to be justified, can become a member of the Society. The Anthroposophical Society is averse to any kind of sectarian tendency. Politics it does not consider to be among its tasks.

5. The Anthroposophical Society looks upon the School of Spiritual Science at Dornach as the centre of its work. This School will be composed of three classes. Members of the Society will—at their request—be admitted to the School after a period of membership to be determined in each case by those responsible at the Goetheanum. They thus gain entrance to the first class of the School of Spiritual Science. Applicants will be received into the second or third class respectively when those responsible at the Goetheanum deem them ripe for admission.
6. Every member of the Anthroposophical Society has the right to participate—under conditions to be announced in each case by the Executive—in all lectures, demonstrations and meetings of any kind arranged by the Society.
7. The establishment of the School of Spiritual Science is, to begin with, in the hands of Rudolf Steiner, who will appoint his collaborators and his eventful successor.
8. All publications of the Society will be open to the public as are those of other public societies.² The same will apply to the publications of the School of Spiritual Science; but in regard to these works, those responsible for the School reserve the right from the outset to deny the validity of opinions unsupported by the proper qualifications, namely by the training of which the works themselves are the outcome. In this sense, and as is customary in the recognised scientific world, they will admit the validity of no judgment which is not based on the requisite preliminary studies. The publications of the School of Spiritual Science will therefore contain the following notice:—“Printed in Manuscript for the members of the School of Spiritual Science, Goetheanum, Class ... No person is held qualified to form a judgment on the contents of these works, who has not acquired—through the School itself or in an equivalent manner recognised by the School—the requisite preliminary knowledge. Other opinions will be disregarded; the authors decline to take them as a basis for discussion.”
9. The object of the Anthroposophical Society will be the furtherance of spiritual research; that of the School of Spiritual Science the actual pursuit of such research. A dogmatic position in any sphere whatsoever shall be excluded from the Anthroposophical Society.
10. At the beginning of each year the Anthroposophical Society shall hold an annual General Meeting, when the Executive shall submit a full report and balance-sheet. The Agenda shall be issued by the Executive together with the invitation to all members six weeks before the meeting. The Executive may summon emergency General Meetings and fix the Agenda for such Meetings. Invitations to such Meetings shall be sent to members three weeks in advance. Motions by individual members or groups of members shall be sent in a week before the date of a General Meeting.
11. The members of the Society may join together in smaller or larger groups, on any geographical or other basis of activity. The seat of the Anthroposophical Society is at the Goetheanum, whence the Executive shall communicate to the members or groups of members what it considers to be the task of the Society. The Executive enters into communication with the officials elected or appointed by the several Groups. The admission of members is in the hands of the Groups; the forms of admission shall, however, be submitted to the Executive at Dornach for signature, the Executive signing them in confidence to the officials of the Groups. As a general rule every member shall join a Group. Only those who find it quite impossible to enter a Group should apply for admission at Dornach as individual members.
12. The subscription shall be fixed by the several Groups; each Group shall, however, send 12s. (twelve shillings) annually per member to the headquarters of the Society at the Goetheanum.
13. Each working Group formulates its own Statutes, but these must not be incompatible with the Statutes of the Anthroposophical Society.
14. The organ of the Society is the “Goetheanum” Weekly, which shall for this purpose issue a Supplement containing the official communications of the Society. This enlarged edition of the “Goetheanum” will be supplied to members of the Anthroposophical Society only.
15. The Foundation Executive of the Society will be as follows:—

    First President: Dr. Rudolf Steiner.
    Second President: Albert Steffen.
    Recorder: Dr. Ita Wegman.
    Members of Executive: Frau Marie Steiner,
    Members of Executive: Dr. Elisabeth Vreede.
    Hon. Secretary and Treas: Dr. Guenther Wachsmuth.

• 1. The Society is continuous with the Anthroposophical Society founded in 1912. With the same objects in view which were then defined, the intention is, however, to create a fresh point of departure, in keeping with the true spirit of the time.
• 2. The conditions, too, whereby one enters into the training of this School, have been described in published works, and their publication will be continued.

[ 1 ] When man looks back on his evolution, and calls up before his inner eye the special characteristics which his spiritual life has assumed for the last five hundred years, he cannot help recognising, even within the ordinary consciousness and if but faintly, that since this period the whole earthly evolution of man stands at a significant and critical point.

[ 2 ] In the last study I referred from one point of view to this significant turning-point. One looks up from this point into the distant past of evolution; one sees how the soul-force in man which today is active as the force of intelligence, has changed in the course of time.

[ 3 ] In the present period, thoughts—dead abstract thoughts—make their appearance in the field of human consciousness. These thoughts are bound up with the physical body of man; man is obliged to recognise that they are of his own generating.

[ 4 ] In primitive times, when man turned his soul in the direction in which today his thoughts are revealed to him, he saw Divine-Spiritual Beings. He knew himself bound to these Beings in his whole nature, even down to the physical body; he was obliged to recognise himself as their offspring. But he not only owed his being to them, he also owed them what he accomplished. Man had no will of his own. What he did was a manifestation of Divine Will.

[ 5 ] By degrees, as described in the last study, man attained to a will of his own, at a period which dawned about five hundred years ago.

[ 6 ] But this stage was far more different from all those which preceded it than any of them from one another.

[ 7 ] When the thoughts pass over into the physical body, they lose their livingness. They are dead forms, spiritually dead. Previously, though belonging to man, they were at the same time organs of the Divine-Spiritual Beings to whom man belonged. They were actual will in man. And through them the man felt himself in living union with the spiritual world.

[ 8 ] With his dead thoughts he felt himself cut off from the spiritual world. He felt himself entirely removed to the physical world.

[ 9 ] But this means also that he is now in the sphere of the Ahrimanic spirituality. The Ahrimanic spirituality had no great power in the regions in which the Beings of the higher Hierarchies retained man as in their own sphere—when as in primitive ages the higher Beings themselves acted directly in man, or when, as in later times, they worked in him through their ensouled or living reflection. As long as this working of supersensible Beings within the doings of man continued—that is until about the fifteenth century—the Ahrimanic powers had, within the evolution of mankind, only a faintly echoing power, if one may express it so.

[ 10 ] The description of Ahriman's activity given in the Persian religion is not in contradiction with this statement. For that religion refers to Ahriman's activity, not within the human soul, but in a world bordering directly upon the world of the human soul. Ahriman's action, as there described, does indeed affect the world of the human soul from a neighbouring spirit-world, but it does not directly interfere.

[ 11 ] This direct interference has only become possible in the space of time which began about five hundred years ago.

[ 12 ] Thus man is at the close of a stream of evolution within which his nature has developed out of a divine spirituality which finally dies to itself in the abstract intelligence of man.

[ 13 ] Man has not remained in the divine-spiritual spheres in which he originated.

[ 14 ] What began five hundred years ago for the consciousness of man had already taken place for a wider sphere of his whole being at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha took place on the Earth. It was then that, imperceptibly to the consciousness of the majority of human beings at that time, human evolution gradually glided out of a world in which Ahriman has little power, into one in which his power is great. This gliding into a different stratum of the world was completed in the fifteenth century.

[ 15 ] Ahriman's influence upon man in this stratum of the world is possible and can act so destructively because the activity of the Gods related to man has died in this sphere. But man could not develop free-will in any other way than by entering a sphere in which the Divine-Spiritual Beings connected with him from the very beginning were not alive.

[ 16 ] Considered cosmically, the Mystery of the Sun is contained in the nature of this evolution of humanity. The Divine-Spiritual Beings connected with his origin were united with that which—up to that important turning-point in his evolution—man was able to perceive in the Sun. These Divine-Spiritual Beings have separated from the Sun and have left there only the part of them that has died, so that the bodily nature of man can now receive through the Sun only the power of dead thoughts.

[ 17 ] But these Beings have sent Christ from the Sun to the Earth, For the welfare of humanity Christ has united His being with the dead part of divine-spiritual existence in Ahriman's kingdom. Thus two things are possible for man, and through this possibility his freedom is guaranteed:—to turn to Christ consciously in the spiritual frame of mind which he possessed subconsciously during the descent from the vision of supersensible spirit-existence to the use of intellect; or to wish to feel his severance from spirit-existence and thus fall in the direction taken by the Ahrimanic powers.

[ 18 ] Humanity has been in this situation since the beginning of the fifteenth century. It was prepared—for everything takes place gradually in evolution—after the Mystery of Golgotha, which, as it is the greatest event that has happened on the Earth, is destined to rescue man from the destruction to which he must be exposed because he is to become a free being.

[ 19 ] Now we may say that what has hitherto been done by humanity itself within this situation has taken place half unconsciously. It has led to what is good in the modern Nature-conception which lives in abstract thought, and it has led to many practical principles of life, equally good.

[ 20 ] But the age in which man could unfold his life thus unconsciously in the dangerous sphere of Ahriman has come to an end.

[ 21 ] It is the duty of the investigator into the spiritual world to draw the attention of humanity to the spiritual fact that Michael has taken over the spiritual guidance of human affairs. Michael does what he has to do in such a way that he does not thereby wield an influence over human beings; but they may follow him in freedom, in order with the Christ power to find the way out of that sphere of Ahriman which they were obliged to enter.

[ 22 ] One who honestly, out of the deepest being of his soul, can feel himself one with Anthroposophy, understands this phenomenon of Michael truly. And Anthroposophy would like to be the message of this mission of Michael.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 23 ] 106. Michael goes upward again along the paths by which mankind descended, stage by stage in the evolution of the Spirit, down to the exercise of the Intelligence. Michael, however, will lead the Will upward, retracing the paths by which the Wisdom descended to the final stage of Intelligence.

[ 24 ] 107. From this moment onward in world-evolution, Michael merely shows his way, so that man may follow it in perfect freedom. This distinguishes the present guidance by Michael from all preceding guidances of the Archangels, including even those of Michael himself. For the former guidances did not only reveal their working. They worked themselves out in man. Hence in the working of his own life man could not be free.

[ 25 ] 108. To see and understand that this is so: this is the present task of man. For then he will find, with all the forces of his soul, his spiritual path within the Age of Michael.

Before coming to the topic of today's talk, I would like to say a few words about the great and grievous loss on the physical plane we have suffered in recent days. You will undoubtedly know what I mean: the day before yesterday, Herr von Moltke's soul passed through the gate of death.¹

What this man was to his country, the outstanding part he played in the great and fateful events of our time, the significant, deep impulses growing out of human connections that formed the basis of his actions and his work—to appreciate and pay tribute to all this will be the task of others, primarily of future historians. In our age it is impossible to give an entirely comprehensive picture of everything that concerns our time. As I said, we will not speak of what others and history will have to say, but I am absolutely convinced that future historians will have very much to say about von Moltke. However, I would like to say something that is now in my soul, even if I have to express it at first symbolically; what I mean will be understood only gradually. This man and his soul stand before my soul as a symbol of the present and the immediate future, a symbol born out of the evolution of our time, in the true sense of the word a symbol of what should come to pass and must come to pass.

As we have repeatedly emphasized, we are not trying to integrate spiritual science into contemporary culture out of somebody's arbitrary impulses, but because it is needed in these times. There will not be a lasting future if the substance of this spiritual science does not flow into human development. This is the point, my dear friends, where you can see the greatness and significance we find when we think of Herr von Moltke's soul. He participated most actively in the busy life of our era, the life that developed out of the past and led to the greatest crisis humanity ever had to go through in its history. He was one of the leaders of the army and was right in the middle of the events that inaugurated our fateful present and future. Here was a soul, a personality, who did all this and, at the same time, also was one of us, seeking knowledge and truth with the most holy, fervent thirst for knowledge that ever inspired a soul in our day and age.

That is what we should think of. For the soul of this personality, who has just died, is more than anything else an outstanding historical symbol. It is profoundly symbolic that he was one of the leading figures of the outer life, which he served, and yet found the bridge to the life of the spirit we seek in spiritual science. We can only wish with all our soul that more and more people in similar positions do as he has done. This is not just a personal wish, but one born out of the need of our times. You should feel how significant an example this personality can be. It does not matter how little other people speak about the spiritual side of his life; in fact, it is best for it not to be talked about. But what von Moltke did is a reality and the effects are what is important, not whether it is discussed. Herr von Moltke's life can lead us to realize that he interpreted the meaning of the signs of the times correctly. May many follow this soul who are still distant from our spiritual science.

It is true, and we should not forget it, that this soul has given as much to what flows and pulsates through our spiritual science as we have been able to give him. Now souls are entering the spiritual world bearing within them what they have received from spiritual science. What spiritual science strives for has united with the soul of a person, who has died after a very active life. This then works as a deeply significant, powerful force in the realm we want to explore with the help of our spiritual science. And the souls now present here who understand me will never forget what I have just said about how significant it is that souls now take what has flowed for many years through our spiritual science into the spiritual world, where it will become strength and power.

I am not telling you this to assuage in a trivial way the pain we feel about our loss on the physical plane. Pain and sorrow are justified in a case like Herr von Moltke's death. But only when pain and sorrow are permeated by a sound understanding of what underlies them can they become great and momentous active forces. Take, therefore, what I have said as the expression of sorrow over the loss the German people and all humanity have experienced on the physical plane.

Let us stand up, my dear friends, and recite this verse:

Spirit of your soul, ever working Guardian!
May your wings carry
Our souls' imploring love
To the son in the spheres entrusted to your care!
United with your power,
May our prayer be a shining help
To the soul it lovingly seeks.

My dear friends, as I have often said, the occult substance that flows through our whole evolution has found its outer expression or manifestation in all kinds of more or less occult and symbolic brotherhoods and societies. In my recent talks I have characterized them in more detail as really quite superficial. We are now living in an age when the occult knowledge from the spiritual world must be given to people in a new way, as we have been trying to do for many years now, because the previous ways are obsolete. Granted, they will continue to exist for a time, but they are quite obsolete, and it is important that we understand this in the right way.

As you know, I like to call our spiritual science anthroposophy, and a few years ago when I gave lectures here, I called them lectures on anthroposophy. Last time, I referred to these lectures on anthroposophy, particularly to my emphasis on the fact that human beings actually have twelve senses. I explained that, as far as our senses are concerned, what is spread out over our nerve substance is organized according to the number twelve because the human being is in this most profound sense a microcosm and mirrors the macrocosm.

In the macrocosm the sun moves through twelve signs of the zodiac in the course of a year, and the human I lives here on the physical plane in the twelve senses. Things are certainly rather different out there in the macrocosm, especially in regard to their sequence in time. The sun moves from Aries through Taurus, and so on, and back again through Pisces to Aries as it makes its yearly course through the twelve signs of the zodiac. Everything we have in us, even everything we experience in our soul, is related to the outer world through our twelve senses. These are the senses of touch, life, movement, balance, smell, taste, sight, warmth, hearing, speech, thinking, and the sense of the I.

Our inner life moves through this circle of the twelve senses just as the sun moves through the circle of the twelve signs of the zodiac. But we can take this external analogy even further. In the course of a year, the sun has to move through all the signs of the zodiac from Aries to Libra; it moves through the upper signs during the day and through the lower ones at night. The sun's passage through these lower signs is hidden from outer light. It is the same with the life of our soul and the twelve senses. Half of the twelve are day senses, just as half of the signs of the zodiac are day signs; the others are night senses.

You see, our sense of touch pushes us into the night life of our soul, so to speak, for with the sense of touch, one of our coarser senses, we bump into the world around us. The sense of touch is barely connected with the day life of our soul, that is, with the really conscious life of the soul. You can see for yourself that this is true when you consider how easily we can store the impressions of our other senses in our memory and how difficult it is to remember the impressions of the sense of touch. Just try it and you'll see how difficult it is to remember, for example, the feel of a piece of fabric you touched a few years ago. Indeed you'll find you have little need or desire to remember it. The impression sinks down in the same way as the light fades into twilight when the sun descends into the sign of Libra at night, into the region of the night signs. And thus other senses are also completely hidden from our waking, conscious soul life.

As for the sense of life, conventional psychological studies hardly mention it at all. They usually list only five senses, the day senses or senses of waking consciousness. But that need not concern us further. The sense of life enables us to feel our life in us, but only when that life has been disturbed, when it is sick, when something causes us pain or hurts us. Then the sense of life tells us we are hurting here or there. When we are healthy, we are not aware of the life in us; it sinks into the depths, just as there is no light when the sun is in the sign of Scorpio or in any other night sign.

The same applies to the sense of movement. It allows us to perceive what is happening in us when we have set some part of our body in motion. Conventional science is only now beginning to pay attention to this sense of movement. It is only just beginning to find out that the way joints impact on one another—for example, when I bend my finger, this joint impacts on that one—tells us about the movements our body is carrying out. We walk, but we walk unconsciously. The sense underlying our ability to walk, namely, the perception of our mobility, is cast into the night of consciousness.

Let us now look at the sense of balance. We acquire this sense only gradually in life; we just don't think about it because it also remains in the night of consciousness. Infants have not yet acquired this sense, and therefore they can only crawl. It was only in the last decade that science discovered the organ for the sense of balance. I have mentioned the three canals in our ears before; they are shaped like semicircles and are vertical to each other in the three dimensions of space. If these canals are damaged, we get dizzy; we lose our balance. We have the outer ears for our sense of hearing, the eyes for the sense of sight, and for the sense of balance we have these three semicircular canals.

Their connection with the ears and the sense of hearing is a vestige of the kinship between sound and balance. The canals, located in the cavity in the petrosal bone, consist of three semicircles of tiny, very minute, bones. If they are the least bit injured, we can no longer keep our balance. We acquire our receptivity for the sense of balance in early childhood, but it remains submerged in the night of consciousness; we are not conscious of this sense.

Then comes the dawn and casts its rays into consciousness. But just think how little the other hidden senses, those of smell and taste, actually have to do with our inner life in a higher sense. We have to delve deeply into the life of our body to be able to get a sense for smell. The sense of taste already brings us a growing half-light; day begins to dawn in our consciousness. But you can still make the same experiment I mentioned before concerning the sense of touch, and you will find it very difficult to remember the perceptions of the senses of smell and of taste. Only when we enter more deeply into our unconscious with our soul does the latter consciously perceive the sense of smell. As you may know, certain composers were especially inspired when surrounded by a pleasant fragrance they had smelled previously while creating music. It is not the fragrance that rises up out of memory, but the soul processes connected with the sense of smell emerge into consciousness.

The sense of taste, however, is for most people almost in the light of consciousness, though not quite; it is still partly in the night of consciousness for most of us. After all, very few people will be satisfied with the soul impression of taste alone. Otherwise we should be just as pleased with remembering something that tasted good as we are when we eat it again. As you know, this is not the case. People want to eat again what tasted good to them and are not satisfied with just remembering it.

The sense of sight, on the other hand, is the sense where the sun of consciousness rises, and we reach full waking consciousness. The sun rises higher and higher. It rises to the sense of warmth, to the sense of hearing, and from there to the sense of speech and then reaches its zenith. The zenith of our inner life lies between the senses of hearing and speech. Then we have the sense of thinking, and the I sense, which is not the sense for perceiving our own I but that of others. After all, it is an organ of perception, a sense. Our awareness of our own I is something quite different, as I explained in my early lectures on anthroposophy. What is important here is not so much knowing about our own I, but meeting other people who reveal their I to us. Perception of the other person's I, not of our own, that is the function of the I sense.

Our soul has the same relationship to these twelve senses as the sun does to the twelve signs of the zodiac. You can see from this that the human being is in the truest sense of the word a microcosm. Modern science is completely ignorant of these things; while it does acknowledge the sense of hearing, it denies the existence of the sense of speech although we could never understand the higher meaning of spoken words with the sense of hearing alone. To understand, we need the sense of speech, the sense for the meaning of what is expressed in the words. This sense of speech must not be confused with the sense of thinking, which in turn is not identical with the ego sense.

I would like to give you an example of how people can go wrong in our time in this matter of the senses. Eduard von Hartmann, who was a most sincere seeker, begins his book Basic Psychology with the following words as though he were stating a self-evident truth: “Psychological phenomena are the point of departure for psychology; indeed, for each person the starting point has to be his or her own phenomena, for these alone are given to each of us directly. After all, nobody can look into another's consciousness.”² The opening sentence of a psychology book by one of the foremost philosophers of our time starts by denying the existence of the senses of speech, thinking, and the I. He knows nothing about them. Imagine, here we have a case where absurdity and utter nonsense must be called science just so these senses can be denied.

If we do not let this science confuse us, we can easily see its mistakes. For this psychology claims we do not see into the soul of another person but can only guess at it by interpreting what that person says. In other words, we are supposed to interpret the state of another's soul based on his or her utterances. When someone speaks kindly to you, you are supposed to interpret it! Can this be true? No, indeed it is not true!

The kind words spoken to us have a direct effect on us, just as color affects our eyes directly. The love living in the other's soul is borne into your soul on the wings of the words. This is direct perception; there can be no question here of interpretation. Through nonsense such as Hartmann's, science confines us within the limits of our own personality to keep us from realizing that living with the other people around us means living with their souls. We live with the souls of others just as we live with colors and sounds. Anyone who does not realize this knows absolutely nothing of our inner life. It is very important to understand these things. Elaborate theories are propagated nowadays, claiming that all impressions we have of other people are only symbolic and inferred from their utterances. But there is no truth in this.

Now picture the rising sun, the emergence of the light, the setting sun. This is the macrocosmic picture of our microcosmic inner life. Though it does not move in a circle, our inner life nevertheless proceeds through the twelve signs of the zodiac of the soul, that is, through the twelve senses. Every time we perceive the I of someone else, we are on the day side of our soul-sun. When we turn inward into ourselves and perceive our inner balance and our movements, we are on the night side of our inner life.

Now you will not think it so improbable when I tell you that in the time between death and rebirth the senses that have sunk deeply into our soul's night side will be of special importance for us because they will then be spiritualized. At the same time, the senses that have risen to the day side of our inner life will sink down deeper after death. Just as the sun rises, so does our soul rise, figuratively speaking, between the sense of taste and the sense of sight, and in death it sets again. When we encounter another soul between death and a new birth, we find it inwardly united with us. We perceive that soul not by looking at it from the outside and receiving the impression of its I from the outside; we perceive it by uniting with it. You can read about this in the lecture cycles, where I have described it, and also in An Outline Of Occult Science.³

In the life between death and rebirth, the sense of touch becomes completely spiritual. What is now subconscious and belongs to the night side of our inner life, namely, the senses of balance and movement, will then become spiritualized and play the most important part in our life after death.

It is indeed true that we move through life as the sun moves through the twelve signs of the zodiac. When we begin our life here, our consciousness for the senses rises, so to speak, at one pillar of the world and sets again at the other. We pass these pillars when we move in the starry heavens, as it were, from the night side to the day side. Occult and symbolic societies have always tried to indicate this by calling the pillar of birth, which we pass on the way into the life of the day side, Jakim.⁴

Our outer world during the life between death and rebirth consists of the perceptions of the sense of touch spread out over the whole universe, where we do not touch but are touched. We feel that we are touched by spiritual beings everywhere, while in physical life it is we who touch others. Between death and rebirth we live within movement and feel it the same way a blood cell or a muscle in us would feel its own movement. We perceive ourselves moving in the macrocosm, and we feel balance and feel ourselves part of the life of the whole. Here on earth our life is enclosed in our skin, but there we feel ourselves part of the life of the universe, of the cosmic life, and we feel that we give ourselves our own balance in every position. Here, gravity and the constitution of our body give us balance, and usually we are not aware of this. During life between death and a new birth, however, we feel balance all the time. We have a direct experience of the other side of our inner life.

We enter earthly life through Jakim, assured that what is there outside in the macrocosm now lives in us, that we are a microcosm, for the word Jakim means, “The divine poured out over the world is in you.”

The other pillar, Boaz, is the entrance into the spiritual world through death. What is contained in the word Boaz is roughly this, “What I have hitherto sought within myself, namely strength, I shall find poured out over the whole world; in it I shall live.” But we can only understand such things when we penetrate them by means of spiritual knowledge. In the symbolic brotherhoods, the pillars are referred to symbolically. In our fifth post-Atlantean epoch they will be mentioned more often to keep humanity from losing them altogether and to help later generations to understand what has been preserved in these words.

You see, everything in the world around us is a reflection of what lives in the macrocosm. As our inner life is a microcosm in the sense I have indicated, so humanity's inner life is built up out of the macrocosm. In our time, it is very important that we have the image of the two pillars I mentioned handed down to us through history. These pillars each represent life one-sidedly; for life is only to be found in the balance between the two. Jakim is not life for it is the transition from the spiritual to the body; nor is Boaz life for that is the transition from body to spirit. Balance is what is essential.

And that is what people find so difficult to understand. They always seek one side only, extremes rather than equilibrium. Therefore two pillars are erected for our times also, and we must pass between them if we understand our times rightly. We must not imagine either the one pillar or the other to be a basic force for humanity, but we must go through between the two. Indeed, we have to grasp what is there in reality and not go through life brooding without really thinking, as modern materialism does. If you seek the Jakim pillar today, you will find it. The Jakim pillar exists; you will find it in a very important man, who is no longer alive, but the pillar still exists—it exists in Tolstoyism.

Remember that Tolstoy basically wanted to turn all people away from the outer life and lead them to the inner.⁵ As I said when I spoke about Tolstoy in the early days of our movement, he wanted to focus our attention exclusively on what goes on in our inner life. He did not see the spirit working in the outer world—a one-sided view characteristic of him, as I said in that early lecture. One of our friends showed Tolstoy a transcript of that lecture. He understood the first two-thirds of it, but not the last third because reincarnation and karma were mentioned there, which he did not understand. He represented a one-sided view, the absolute suppression of outer life. It is painful to see him show this one-sidedness. Just think of the tremendous contrast between Tolstoy's views, which predominate among a considerable number of Russia's intellectuals, and what is coming from there these days. It is one of the most awful contrasts you can imagine. So much for one-sidedness.

The other pillar, the Boaz pillar, also finds historical expression in our age. It too represents one-sidedness. We find it in the exclusive search for the spiritual in the outer world. Some years ago, this phenomenon appeared in America with the emergence of the polar opposite to Tolstoy, namely, Keely.⁶ Keely harbored the ideal of building a motor that would not run on steam or electricity, but on the waves we create when we make sounds, when we speak. Just imagine that! A motor that runs on the waves we set in motion when we speak, or indeed with our inner life in general! Of course, this was only an ideal, and we can thank God it was just an ideal at that time, for what would this war be like if Keely's ideal had been realized? If it is ever realized, then we will see what the harmony of vibrations in external motor power really means. This, then, is the other one-sidedness, the Boaz pillar. It is between these two pillars we must pass through.

There is much, indeed very much, contained in symbols that have been preserved. Our age is called upon to understand these things, to penetrate them. Someday people will perceive the contrast between all true spirituality and what will come from the West if the Keely motor ever becomes a reality. It will be quite a different contrast from the one between Tolstoy's views and what is approaching from the East. Well, we cannot say more about this.

We need to gradually deepen our understanding of the mysteries of human evolution and to realize that what will some day become reality in various stages has been expressed symbolically or otherwise in human wisdom throughout millennia. Today we are only at the stage of mere groping toward this reality. In one of our recent talks I told you that Hermann Bahr, a man I often met with in my youth, is seeking now—at the age of fifty-three and after having written much—to understand Goethe. Groping his way through Goethe's works, he admits that he is only just beginning to really understand Goethe. At the same time, he admits that he is beginning to realize that there is such a thing as spiritual science in addition to the physical sciences. I have explained that Franz, the protagonist of Bahr's recently published novel Himmelfahrt (“Ascension”), represents the author's own path of development, his path through the physical sciences.⁷

Bahr studied with the botanist Wiessner in Vienna, then with Ostwald in the chemical laboratory in Leipzig, then with Schmoller at the seminar for political economy in Berlin, and then he studied psychology and psychiatry with Richet in France. Of course, he also went to Freud in Vienna—as a man following up on all the various scientific sensations of the day would naturally have to do—and then he went to the theosophists in London, and so forth. Remember, I read you the passage in question, “And so he scoured the sciences, first botany with Wiessner, then chemistry with Ostwald, then Schmoller's seminar, Richet's clinic, Freud in Vienna, then directly to the theoso- phists. And so in art he went to the painters, the etchers, and so on.”⁸

But what faith does this Franz attain, who is really one of the urgently seeking people of the present age? Interestingly enough, he wanders and gropes, and then something dawns on him that is described as follows:

He was no longer in a state of spiritual innocence. But wasn't there perhaps a kind of second innocence, an innocence regained? Was there not a piety of the intellect, humbled by the recognition of its own limits, wasn't there a faith for those who know, a hope born out of despair? Weren't there throughout history wise men, living in solitude and seclusion from the world, yet connected with each other through secret signs, and working wonderfully and quietly with an almost magical power in a region beyond nationalities and creeds, in the infinite, in the sphere of a purer humanity, a humanity nearer to God? Were there not even today, scattered all over the world and hidden in secret, knights of the Holy Grail? Were there not disciples of a white lodge, a lodge invisible and perhaps not to be entered but merely felt, yet working and predominating everywhere and determining human destiny? Hasn't there always been an anonymous community of holy men on earth, who do not know each other nor anything of each other and yet are working together and on one another through the very power of their prayers? Such thoughts had already much occupied him in his theosophical days, but he had obviously gotten to know only false theosophists; maybe genuine, true theosophists did not allow themselves to be known ...

These thoughts occur to Franz after he has hurried through the world and has been everywhere, as I have told you, and has at last returned to his home, presumably Salzburg. That's where these thoughts occur to him, in his Salzburg home. I would like to mention in all modesty that he did not come to us; and we can get an idea of why Franz did not come to us. In his quest for people who are striving for the spirit, Franz remembers an Englishman he had once met in Rome and whom he describes as follows:

He was a clever man in his mature years, of good family, a rich, independent bachelor, and a proper Englishman—sober, practical, unsentimental, lacking any musical or artistic sense; in short, a robust, cheerful, sensuous person. He loved fishing, rowing, sailing, eating and drinking heartily, he was a playboy disturbed in his complacency only by one single passion, the curiosity to see everything, to get to know everything, to have been everywhere—with no other ambition than to be able to say with satisfaction, regardless of what place was being talked about, that he knew this or that hotel, where Cook's had found accommodations for him, had seen the sights, and associated with notable people of rank and fame. To be able to travel more comfortably and to have access everywhere, he had been advised to become a freemason. He praised the usefulness of this association until he thought he had discovered a similar but better organized and more powerful association of a higher kind, which he now wanted to join by all means, just as he would have made travel arrangements with another better firm than Cook s if one could have been found.

He was not to be dissuaded from his conviction that the world was governed by a small group of secret leaders, that so-called history was made by these men who were as unknown to their closest servants as those in turn were to theirs. He claimed to have followed the traces of this secret world government, of this real freemasonry of which the other was merely a most foolish copy, made by inadequate means. He thought he had found its center in Rome among the Monsignors, most of whom, of course, only played a minor role as unsuspecting pawns, whose jostling provided the cover for the four or five true leaders of the world. And, looking back, Franz still had to laugh at the funny desperation of this Englishman, who had the misfortune never to meet the real leaders but always only their pawns. However, this did not deter the man in his attempts but only served to increase his respect for this very well-guarded and impenetrable association, which he was willing to bet he would be allowed to enter some day—even if he had to stay in Rome until the end of his life and become a monk or even if he had to be circumcised.

For since he was tracking everywhere the invisible threads of a power covering the whole world like a spider web, he was not averse to hold Jews in very high esteem. And occasionally he expressed his serious suspicion that in the ultimate, innermost circle of this concealed worldwide web, Rabbis and Monsignors might be sitting together in utmost harmony, which would have been alright with him as long as they would allow him to take part in their magic.

There you have a caricature of what I have told you, namely, that there is, as it were, a kingdom within a kingdom, a small circle whose power radiates into others. But the Englishman, and Franz with him, imagined this circle to be a community of Rabbis and Monsignors; as a matter of fact, they are precisely the ones who are not in it. But you see that Franz just gropes his way here. And why? Well, he remembers once again the eccentric whims of the Englishman:

It was only much later that it occurred to him to wonder whether perhaps someone who had not been born with such capacities could acquire them, whether one could train oneself to such powers, whether they could be learned. But the theosophical exercises soon disappointed him.

Those he had given up! You see, there is such a groping and fumbling in our time. People like Bahr reach their old age before they understand anything spiritual, and then they have such grotesque ideas as we see here. This Franz is then invited to the house of a canon. This Salzburg canon is a very mysterious personality, and of great importance in Salzburg—the town Salzburg is not named, but we can nevertheless recognize it. He is of even greater importance than the cardinal, for the whole city no longer talks about the cardinal but about the canon although there are a dozen canons there. And so Franz gets the idea that maybe this very man is one of the white lodge. You know how easy it is to get such ideas.

Well, Franz is invited to lunch at the canon's house. There are many guests, and the canon is really a very tolerant man; imagine, he is a Catholic canon, and yet he has invited a Jewish banker together with a Jesuit, Franz, and others, including a Franciscan monk. It is a very cheerful luncheon party. The Jesuit and the Jewish banker are soon talking—nota bene, the banker is one to whom practically everybody is indebted but who is really most unselfish in what he does and as a rule does not ask for repayment of what he apparently lends but instead only wants the pleasure of being invited to the house of a gentleman such as the canon once a year. The eager conversation between the Jesuit and this Jewish banker is altogether too much for Franz. He leaves them and goes into the library to escape their scandalous jokes, and the canon follows him.

The library, though not big, was very select. On theology there were only the most essential works, the Bollandist writings and a good deal of Franciscan literature, Meister Eckhart, writings on the spiritual exercises, Catherine of Genoa, the mysticism of Gorres and Mohler's symbolism. On philosophy there were more books: all of Kant's works, including the collected volumes of the Kant Society, also Deussen's Upanishads and his history of philosophy, Vaihinger's philosophy of the As if, and very many books on epistemology. Then the Greek and Latin classics, Shakespeare, Calderon, Cervantes, Dante, Macchiavelli, and Balzac in the original, but of German literature only the works of Novalis and Goethe, the latter in various editions and his scientific writings in the Weimar edition. Franz took down a volume of these and found a number of marginal notes made by the canon, who at this moment left the young monk and the Jesuit and joined Franz, saying, “Yes, no one knows the scientific writings of Goethe.”

Now what the canon finds in Goethe's scientific writings is characteristic, on the one hand, of what is actually contained there and can be understood by the canon and, on the other hand, of what the canon can understand by virtue of being a Catholic canon.

“Yes, no one knows the scientific writings of Goethe. It is a pity! In these writings, the old heathen that Goethe is supposed to have been suddenly appears in a different light, and only after reading them does one understand the end of Faust.”

There the canon is right. We cannot understand the end of Faust if we don't know Goethe's scientific views.

“I have never been able to believe that Goethe pretended there [in Faust] to be a Catholic just for artistic effect. [You see, the canon in him cannot be denied, but never mind.] After all, my respect for the poet, for all poets, is too great to believe that at the moment he utters his last words, he is putting on a mask.”

That is what most people believe, that Goethe really was only pretending when he wrote the magnificent, grandiose final scene of Faust. “But the scientific writings reveal on every page how much of a Catholic Goethe was.” Yes, well, the canon calls everything he can understand, everything he likes, Catholic. We don't need to feel embarrassed about that.

“... how much of a Catholic Goethe was, perhaps unknowingly and in any case without the courage of his convictions. These writings read as though the writer, on the whole nothing crucial, necessary, and essential is lacking, not even the dash of superstition, magic, or whatever you want to call it, that makes confirmed Protestants so suspicious of our sacred doctrine. Often I could hardly believe my own eyes. But once you are on the trail of the hidden Catholic in Goethe, you soon see him everywhere. His trust in the Holy Spirit (of course, Goethe prefers to call him ‘Genius’), his deep feeling for the sacraments, which he thought were too few, his sense for penitence, his gift for reverence, and even more so the fact that in totally un-Protestant fashion he is not content with faith but always insists on the acknowledgment of God in the living deed, the pious work this rare and most difficult realization that human beings cannot be approached by God if they do not first approach God themselves, the realization of this awesome human freedom to choose either to accept or reject the grace offered, this freedom through which alone God's grace will be deserved by those who decide to accept it—all this, even in his exaggerations and distortions, is still Catholic to the core.”

For us, it would be particularly interesting to know what the canon calls “exaggerations.” Well, in any case, he calls them Catholic and goes on to say:

“Therefore, as you see, I have often written in the margin the passages from the Council of Trent where the same content is expressed, sometimes even in almost the same words.”

Imagine, a Catholic canon writing the resolutions of the Council of Trent next to the words of Goethe!⁹ In this juxtaposition you have what permeates all humanity and what we may call the core of spiritual life common to all people. This should not be taken as just so much empty rhetoric; instead it must he understood as it was meant. The canon continues:

“And when Zacharias Werner tells us that a sentence in Goethe's Elective Affinities has made him a Catholic, I believe him implicitly. Of course, this is not to deny [here the canon comes through again] there is also a heathen, a Protestant, and even an almost Jewish Goethe; I don't want to claim him as an ideal Catholic.”

What the canon adds to this we can be pleased to hear; well, I don't want to press my opinion on you; at least I am pleased to hear the following:

“If Goethe had indeed been Catholic, which on the whole he was more likely to have been than the shallow and complacent run-of-the-mill monist the neo-German senior professors parade under his name ...”

Of course, the canon here refers to Richard M. Meyer, Albert Bielschowsky, Engel—neo-German senior professors who have written neo-German works on Goethe.¹⁰

You see, we are already doing what our times secretly and darkly long for, something that is indeed inevitable—this is a very serious matter.

Now please remember some of the first lectures I gave to our groups in these fateful times, where I spoke of a shattering occult experience, namely the perception that the soul of Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated in Sarajevo, plays a special part in the spiritual world.¹¹ As most of you will remember, I told you his soul has attained cosmic significance, as it were. And now Bahr's novel has been published and people have been buying it for weeks. In it the Archduke Franz Ferdinand is described by a man who had hired himself out, under the guise of a simpleton, as a farmhand by a Salzburg landowner who is the brother of the protagonist Franz. Now this man disguised as a simpleton is so stubborn he has to be whipped to work. At the time of the assassination in Sarajevo, this poor fool behaves in such a way that he gets another thrashing; and imagine, when he reads the news of Franz Ferdinand's assassination in an announcement posted on the church door, this fellow says: “He had to end like this; it could not have been otherwise!”

Well, people can't help assuming he was part of the conspiracy even though the murder took place in Sarajevo while the simpleton was in Salzburg. However, such discrepancies don't trouble the people who investigate the matter: Obviously this fellow is one of the Sarajevo conspirators. And since they find books written in Spanish among his possessions, he is evidently a Spanish anarchist. Well, these Spanish books are seized and taken to the district judge, or whatever he is. He, of course, cannot read a word of Spanish but wants to get the case off his docket as quickly as possible after the poor simpleton has been arrested and brought before him. The district judge wants to push this case off on the superior court in Vienna; the people there are to figure out what to do with this Spanish anarchist. After all, the district judge does not want to make a fool of himself; he is an enthusiastic mountain climber and this is perhaps the last fine day of the season, so he wants to get things settled quickly and get going! He understands nothing of the matter. Nevertheless, he is certain of one thing: he is dealing with a Spanish anarchist.

Then he remembers that Franz had been in Spain (I told you Bahr himself was there too) and could read Spanish. Franz is to read the book and summarize it for the judge. And so Franz takes the manuscript—and what does he discover? The deepest mysticism. Absolutely nothing to do with anarchism—only profound mysticism! There is actually a great deal that is wonderful and beautiful in the manuscript. Well, according to Franz this simpleton wrote it himself because his very mysticism led him to want to die to the world. Naturally, I do not want to defend this way of proceeding. The simpleton then turns out to be in reality a Spanish infante, a crown prince, and his description fits that of the Archduke Johann who had left the imperial house of Austria to see the world. Franz could not discern the simpleton's Austrian character, but his true identity shines through the disguise, and Franz hits on the idea to say the fellow is a Spanish infante. You can imagine what this means in poor old Salzburg! The people believed they had caught an anarchist and put him into chains—now he turns out to be a Spanish infante! But this man, who knew the heir to the throne, Archduke Ferdinand, what does he say about the latter now after he himself has been unmasked as an infante and a mystic?

The enchanted but now disenchanted prince, still in his old clothes and otherwise still the same old fellow, yet different since Franz knew the old clothes were a disguise, said with a smile, “Forgive me this deception, which, for my feeling, wasn't really one. I have long since stopped being the infante Don Tadeo. If circumstances force me now to play his role again, the part has become much more difficult for me. To myself I was really the old simpleton, and if I ever lied at all, I lied to myself, not to you. I could not know I would inconvenience you, and I am sorry enough for that. Naturally it was all the silliest misunderstanding.”

“I have known the successor to the throne well, without having actually met him; he was very dear to me, and we have been in touch albeit not in the ‘local’ way. [He means here in a way not on the physical plane.] He had long overstepped the limits of his earthly work and had already one foot in the realm of purely spiritual activity. He had to go over completely, I knew. In order to fulfill his work he could no longer stay here. It is only from there that his deed will be done. I only wonder why destiny hesitated so long with him. And that Sunday, as I came out of the church where in my prayers I had been assured again, when I saw the anxious crowd, I knew right away he had at last been freed. What is to happen through him, he can carry out only from the other side. Here he could only promise it; his life was only a preliminary announcement of what is to come. Only now can the deed come about. I have never been able to think of him as a constitutional monarch, with parliamentarianism and all that other humbug. He was a man of too much stature for that. But now he has seized the reins of action all at once. Only now in his death will this man live, really live. This is what I felt when I heard the news, and this is what I meant by the words I said at the time.”

“It had to end like this,” that's what he said at the time of the assassination. I have to admit that I was strangely and deeply moved when I read these words a few days ago in Bahr's Himmelfahrt. Just compare what we find in this novel with what has been said here out of the reality of the spiritual world! Try to understand from this how deeply spiritual science is rooted in reality. Try to see that those who are seeking for knowledge, albeit at first only in a groping, tentative way, are really on the same path, that they want to follow this path and that they also arrive at what we are developing here, even down to the details. After all, it is hardly likely that what I said back then could have been divulged to Hermann Bahr by one of our members. But even if that had been the case, he did at any rate not reject it, but accepted it.

We do not want to put into practice what is really only some hobby or other. We want to put into practice what is a necessity of our age and a very clear and urgent one at that. And now certain really slanderous things are making themselves felt, and we see that people nowadays are inclined to turn their sympathy to those who spread slander. It is much rarer these days for people to show sympathy for the side that is justified. Instead, precisely where injustice occurs we find people think those who have been wronged must appease and cajole the party who committed the injustice. We find this again and again. Even in our Society we find it again and again. My dear friends, today I do not feel in the mood to go into these things, and in any case that is not the point of my talk. I never mention such things except when it is necessary. But let me conclude by mentioning one more point.

In my recently published booklet, I have pointed out that what we are seeking in our spiritual science has been uniform and consistent since the beginning of our work.¹² I have also explained that it is indeed slander to talk of any kind of changing sides, of any contradictions to what we did in the early days of our movement. On page 49 you will find the following:

In a lecture I gave in 1902 to the Giordano Bruno Society, I referred to these statements by I. H. Fichte [which seemed to me the expression of a modern intellectual movement and not merely the opinion of an individual]; “that was when we made a beginning with what reveals itself now as the anthroposophical way of thinking ...”¹³

I was referring there to a lecture held in Berlin before the German Section of the Theosophical Society was founded. Continuing along the lines of Goethe, I wanted to create in that lecture the starting point for this new movement not on the basis of Blavatsky and Besant, but based on modern spiritual life, which is independent of those two.¹⁴ Yet there are people today who dare to say the name “anthroposophy” was only invented when, as they say, we wanted to break away from the Theosophical Society. As I explained in my book:

This shows what we had in mind was an expansion of the modern striving for a world view to an actual observation of spiritual reality. Our aim was not to take any old views from the publications then (and even still today) called “theosophical,” but to continue the striving that began with modern philosophy but then got stuck in the abstract and therefore did not gain access to the real spiritual world.

Circumstances sometimes bring about favorable situations in karma. Thus, what I wrote a few weeks ago so you can now read it no longer needs rely only on the memory of the few individuals who heard my talk to the Giordano Bruno Society back in 1902, that is, before the German Section was founded. Today I can present documentary evidence. Well, life's funny like that; due to the kindness of one of our members, Fraulein Hübbe-Schleiden, I have recently received the letters I wrote to Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden back then, just before and on the occasion of the founding of the German Section. Now, after his death, those letters were returned to me.

The German Section of the Theosophical Society was not founded until October 1902. This particular letter is dated September 16, 1902. There are a few words in this letter I would like to read to you. Forgive me, but I must begin somewhere. There was a lot of talk at that time about connecting with the theosophist Franz Hartmann, who was just then holding a kind of congress.¹⁵ I have no intention of saying anything against Franz Hartmann today, but I have to read what I wrote in those days:

Friedenau-Berlin, September 16, 1902. Let Hartmann continue to tell his rubbish to his people; in the meantime I want to take our theosophy where I will find people of sound judgment. Once we have a connection to the students [so far we have had only mediocre success with this], we will have gained much. I want to build anew, not patch up old ruins. [That is how the theosophical movement appeared to me then.] This coming winter I hope to teach a course on elementary theosophy in the Theosophical Library. [I did indeed hold this course, and one of the lectures was given during the actual founding of the German Section. The course title is mentioned here, too.] In addition, I plan to teach elsewhere an ongoing course entitled “Anthroposophy or the Connection between Morality, Religion, and Science.” I also hope to be able to present a lecture to the Bruno Society on Bruno's monism and anthroposophy. At this point, these are only plans. In my opinion, that is how we must proceed.

That was written on September 16, 1902. Here is the document, my dear friends, that can prove to you these things are not simply claims made after the fact, but they have really happened in this way. It is favorable karma that we are able to show who is right at this moment when so much slander is spread, and will increasingly be spread, about our cause.

• 1. Helmuth Johannes Ludwig von Moltke, 1848–1916, German soldier Chief of general staff (from 1906) and director of German strategy at beginning of World War I (1914). Lost the first battle of the Marne (Sept. 1914) and was relieved of his command (Nov. 1914).
• 2. Eduard von Hartmann, 1842–1906, German philosopher. Grundriss der Psychologie (“Basic Psychology”), Bad Sachsa, 1908.
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, 3rd ed., repr., (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 4. Jakim and Boaz are the words inscribed on the two columns at the front of Solomon's Temple. See the Old Testament, I Kings, Chapter 7, II Chronicles, Chapter 3. See also Rudolf Sterner, Bilder Okkulter Siegel und Säulen (“Pictures of Occult Seals and Pillars”), vol. 284/285 in the Collected Works (Dornach, Switzerland. Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1977).
• 5. Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Count, 1828–1910. Russian novelist and moral philosopher.
• 6. John Ernst Worrell Keely, 1827–1898. Claimed invention of a perpetual-motion system (1873). After his death, his apparatus was proven a fraud.
• 7. Hermann Bahr, Himmelfahrt (“Ascension”), Berlin, 1916.
• 8. Hermann Bahr, Himmelfahrt and see Lecture One, notes 13-17.
• 9. Council of Trent, council of the Roman Catholic Church, 15451563.
• 10. Richard M. Meyer, 1860–1914, German philologist.
• 11. Franz Ferdinand, 1863–1914, Archduke of Austria. Nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph and heir to crown. Was assassinated with his wife on June 28, 1914, by a Serbian nationalist at Sarajevo, Bosnia. This assassination led to World War I.
• 12. Rudolf Steiner, Die Aufgabe der Geisteswissenschaft und deien Bau in Dornach (“The Mission of Spiritual Science and its Building in Dornach”), Berlin, 1916.
• 13. Immanuel Hermann von Fichte, 1796–1879, son of Johann Gottlieb. Philosopher, exponent of an ethical or speculative theism.
• 14. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1831–1891, American theosophist. Organized Theosophical Society in 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott.
  
  Annie Besant, 1847–1933, English theosophist and Indian political leader.
• 15. Franz Hartmann, 1838–1912, doctor and theosophist. Founded his own movement within theosophy.

DR STEINER:

My dear friends!

Once more let us fill our hearts with the words which out of the signs of the times are to give us in the right way the self knowledge we need:

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

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

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

Once more out of these cosmic verses let us write down before our souls a rhythm so that we may gradually press forward spiritually to their structure. From the first verse we take the words:

Thine own I
Comes to being
Within God's I.

And from the second verse, which contains a second soul process, we take:

Thine own I
Unite
With the World-I.

And from the third verse we take:

On thine own I
Bestow
For thy free willing.

With these words, to form the corresponding rhythm, we now unite those words which always sound with them, having an inner soul connection with these that I have already written on the blackboard:

And thou wilt truly live
In the World-Being of Man.

And from the second verse:

And thou wilt truly feel
In the Soul-Weaving of Man.

The final harmony of the third verse is:

And thou wilt truly think
In the Spirit-Foundations of Man.

You will find, my dear friends, that if you pay attention to the inner rhythms that lie in these verses, if you then present these inner rhythms to your soul and perform a suitable meditation within yourself, allowing your thoughts to come to rest upon them, then these sayings can be felt to be the speaking of cosmic secrets in so far as these cosmic secrets are resurrected in the human soul as human self knowledge.

Now, dear friends, let us prepare to have—if you will pardon the ugly expression—a general debate about the Statutes. To start with let me draw your attention to what kind of points come into question for this general debate. Later—if you will pardon an even uglier expression—we shall have a kind of detailed debate on special concerns about the individual Paragraphs.

The first thing to be considered would be the fact that in future the Vorstand-committee situated in Dornach is to be a true Vorstand which takes into account the central initiative necessary in every single case with respect to one thing or another. It will be less a matter of knowing that there is a Vorstand in such and such a place to which it is possible to turn in one matter or another—though this too is possible and necessary, of course. Rather it will be a matter of the Vorstand developing the capacity to have active initiatives of its own in the affairs of the Anthroposophical Movement, giving suggestions which are really necessary in the sense of the final point in the last Paragraph of the Statutes:

‘The organ of the Society is Das Goetheanum, which for this purpose is provided with a Supplement containing the official communications of the Society. This enlarged edition of Das Goetheanum will be supplied to members of the Anthroposophical Society only.’

In this Supplement will be found everything the Vorstand thinks, would like to do and, on occasion, will be able to do. Thus especially through the Supplement to Das Goetheanum the Vorstand will constantly have the intention of working outwards in a living way. But as you know, for blood to circulate there have to be not only centrifugal forces but also centripetal forces that work inwards. Therefore arrangements will have to be made so that a number of members unite themselves closely in their soul with the Vorstand in everything that might concern not only the Anthroposophical Society in the narrower sense but also in the whole cultural life of the present day in relation to the working of the Anthroposophical Society. A number of members will be closely linked in their soul with the Vorstand in order to communicate back all that goes on outside in the world. By this means we shall achieve an entirely free constitution of the Anthroposophical Society, a constitution built on a free interchange. Then stimulus and suggestion will come from every direction. And these suggestions will bear fruit depending on the way in which things are recognized. So it will have to be arranged that there are correspondents for the Vorstand which is located in Dornach, where it works.

At the present moment of the Anthroposophical Society's development it is important that we make our arrangements on the basis of reality and not of principles. There is, is there not, a difference between the two. If you base your considerations on the structure of a society and arrange its affairs in accordance with this, then you have a theoretical structure of principles. We have had plenty of this kind of thing recently, and it was absolutely no use. Indeed in many ways it caused us serious difficulties. So I want to exert every effort to make arrangements in the future that arise out of the real forces of the Society, out of the forces that exist already and have already had their effect, and of which it can be seen from their context that they can work. So it seems to me that it would be a good thing to be clear at least in spirit about the establishment of correspondents of the Vorstand, people who would take on the voluntary duty of writing to us every week about what they consider noteworthy in cultural life outside in the world and about what might be interesting for the Anthroposophical Society. A number of people, which could always of course be extended, ought to take on this obligation here and now. I for my part should like to suggest several people straight away to constitute an externally supporting Vorstand that is exactly equivalent to the central Vorstand which, as I have already said, is located here in Dornach, which means that it cannot have any members who do not live here in Dornach. In this way we would achieve a genuine circulation of blood. So I want to suggest that certain persons of the following kind—forgive me for generalizing; we can certainly discuss this further—keep in regular contact with the Vorstand on a weekly basis. The kind of person I mean is someone who has already resolved to work very actively out there in the periphery for our anthroposophical cause: Herr van Leer. Secondly I am thinking of the following people: Mr Monges, Mr Collison, Mrs Mackenzie, Herr Ingerö, Herr Zeylmans, Mademoiselle Sauerwein, Baroness de Renzis, Madame Ferreri, Fräulein Schwarz, Count Polzer, Dr Unger, Herr Leinhas, Dr Büchenbacher.

I have started by naming these people because I am of the opinion that if they would commit themselves voluntarily to report in a letter every week to the editors of Das Goetheanum, not only on what is going on in the anthroposophical field but on anything that might be interesting for Anthroposophy in the cultural life of the world and indeed life in general, this would give us a good opportunity to shape this Supplement to Das Goetheanum very fruitfully.

The second thing to consider in the general debate about the Statutes is the fact that the establishment of a Vorstand in the way I have suggested to you means that the Anthroposophical Society will be properly represented, so that other associations or organizations which exist for the promotion of the cause of Anthroposophy, wherever they happen to be, can refer back to this central Vorstand. The central Vorstand will have to consider its task to be solely whatever lies in the direction of fulfilling the Statutes. It will have to do everything that lies in the direction of fulfilling the Statutes. This gives it great freedom. But at the same time we shall all know what this central Vorstand represents, since from the Statutes we can gain a complete picture of what it will be doing. As a result, wherever other organizations arise, for instance the Goetheanum Bauverein, it will be possible for them to stand on realistic ground. Over the next few days there will be the task of creating a suitable relationship between the Vorstand that has come into being and the Goetheanum Bauverein.⁴⁶ But today in the general debate about the Statutes we can discuss anything of this kind which might be worrying you about them.

The third thing to consider will be a matter raised in a meeting of delegates of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland, namely how to organize the relationship between the members of the Anthroposophical Society who live here close to the Goetheanum either permanently or on a temporary basis on the one hand and the members of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society on the other. It was quite justifiably stated here the other day at a delegates' meeting of our Swiss friends⁴⁷ that if people who happen to be present by coincidence, or perhaps not by coincidence but only temporarily, for a short while, interfere too much in the affairs of the Swiss Society, then the Swiss friends might feel pressured in their meetings. We need to ensure that the Goetheanum branch—though for obvious reasons it should and must be a part of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society—is given a position which prevents it, even if it has non-Swiss members, from ever becoming an instrument for persuasion or for creating a majority. This is what was particularly bothering the Swiss members at their delegates' meeting recently. This situation has become somewhat awkward for the following reasons:

The suggestion had been made by me to found national Societies on the basis of which the General Anthroposophical Society would be founded here at Christmas. These national Societies have indeed come into being almost without exception in every country where there are anthroposophists. At all these anthroposophical foundation meetings it was said in one way or another that a national Society would be founded like the one already in existence in Switzerland. So national Societies were founded everywhere along the lines of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society. However, it is important to base whatever happens on clear statements. If this had been done there would have been no misunderstanding which led to people saying that since national Societies were being founded everywhere a Swiss national Society ought to be formed too. After all, it was the Swiss Society on which the others were modelled. However, the situation was that the Swiss Society did not have a proper Council, since its Council was made up of the chairmen of the different branches. This therefore remains an elastic but rather indeterminate body. For things to appear in a more orderly fashion in the future, it will be necessary for the Swiss Anthroposophical Society to form itself with a Council and perhaps also a General Secretary like those of the other national Anthroposophical Societies. Then it will be possible to regularize the relationship with the Goetheanum branch. This is merely a suggestion. But in connection with it I want to say something else.

The whole way in which I consider that the central Vorstand, working here at the Goetheanum, should carry out its duties means that of necessity there is an incompatibility between the offices of this Vorstand and any other offices of the Anthroposophical Society. Thus a member of the Vorstand I have suggested to you here ought not to occupy any other position within the Anthroposophical Society. Indeed, dear friends, proper work cannot be done when offices are heaped one on top of another. Above all else let us in future avoid piling offices one on top of the other. So it will be necessary for our dear Swiss friends to concern themselves with choosing a General Secretary, since Herr Steffen, as the representative of the Swiss, whose guests we are in a certain way as a worldwide Society, will in future be taking up the function of Vice-president of the central Society. You were justifiably immensely pleased to agree with this. I do not mean to say that this is incompatible with any other offices but only with other offices within the Anthroposophical Society.

Another thing I want to say is that I intend to carry out point 5 by arranging the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach in Sections as follows. These will be different from the Classes.⁴⁸ The Classes will encompass all the Sections. Let me make a drawing similar to that made by Dr Wachsmuth; not the same, but I hope it encompasses the whole earth in the same way. The Classes will be like this: General Anthroposophical Society, First Class, Second Class, Third Class of the School of Spiritual Science.

The Sections will reach from top to bottom, so that within each Section it will be possible to be a member of whichever Class has been attained. The Sections I would like to found are:

First of all a General Anthroposophical Section, which will to start with be combined with the Pedagogical Section. I myself should like to take this on in addition to the overall leadership of the School of Spiritual Science. Then I want to arrange the School in such a way that each Section has a Section Leader who is responsible for it; I believe these must be people residing here. One Section will encompass what in France is called ‘belles-lettres.’ Another will encompass the spoken arts and music together with eurythmy. A third Section will encompass the plastic arts. A fourth Section is to encompass medicine. A fifth is to encompass mathematics and astronomy. And the last, for the moment, is to be for the natural sciences. So suitable representatives will be found here for these Sections which are those which for the time being can responsibly be included within the general anthroposophical sphere which I myself shall lead. The Section Leaders must, of course, be resident here.

These, then, are the main points on which I would like the general debate to be based. I now ask whether the applications to speak, already handed in, refer to these points. Applications to speak have been handed in by Herr Leinhas, Dr Kolisko, Dr Stein, Dr Palmer, Herr Werbeck, Miss Cross, Mademoiselle Rihouët, Frau Hart-Nibbrig, Herr de Haan, Herr Stibbe, Herr Tymstra, Herr Zagwijn, Frau Ljungquist. On behalf of Switzerland, the working committee. On behalf of Czechoslovakia, Dr Krkavec, Herr Pollak, Dr Reichel, Frau Freund. Do these speakers wish to refer to the debate which is about to begin? (From various quarters the answer is: No!)

DR STEINER: Then may I ask those wishing to speak to raise their hands and to come up here to the platform. Who would like to speak to the general debate?

DR ZEYLMANS: Ladies and gentlemen, I merely want to say that I shall be very happy to take on the task allotted to me by Dr Steiner and shall endeavour to send news about the work in Holland to Dornach each week.

DR STEINER: Perhaps we can settle this matter by asking all those I have so far mentioned—the list is not necessarily complete—to be so good as to raise their hands. (All those mentioned do so.)

Is there anyone who does not want to take on this task? Please raise your hand. (Nobody does so.) You see what a good example has been set in dealing with this first point. All those requested to do so have declared themselves prepared to send a report each week to the editors of Das Goetheanum. This will certainly amount to quite a task for Herr Steffen, but it has to be done, for of course the reports must be read here once they arrive.

Does anyone else wish to speak to the general debate? If not, may I now ask those friends who agree in principle with the Statutes as Statutes of the General Anthroposophical Society to raise their hands. In the second reading we shall discuss each Paragraph separately. But will those who agree in principle please raise their hands. (They do.)

Will those who do not wish to accept these Statutes in principle please raise their hands. (Nobody does.)

The draft Statutes have thus been accepted in their first reading. (Lively applause.)

We now come to the detailed debate, the second reading, and I shall ask Dr Wachsmuth to read the Statutes Paragraph by Paragraph for this debate in detail.

Dr Wachsmuth reads Paragraph 1 of the Statutes:

‘1. The Anthroposophical Society is to be an association of people whose will it is to nurture the life of the soul, both in the individual and in human society, on the basis of a true knowledge of the spiritual world.’

DR STEINER: Would anyone now like to speak to the content or style and phrasing of this first Paragraph of the Statutes? Dear friends, you have been in possession of the Statutes for more than three days. I am quite sure that you have thought deeply about them.

HERR KAISER: With reference to the expression ‘the life of the soul’ I wondered whether people might not ask: Why not life as a whole? This is one of the things I wanted to say. Perhaps an expression that is more general than ‘of the soul’ could be used.

DR STEINER: Would you like to make a suggestion to help us understand better what you mean?

HERR KAISER: I have only just noticed this expression. I shall have to rely on your help as I can't think of anything better at the moment. I just wanted to point out that the general public might be offended by the idea that we seem to want to go and hide away with our soul in a vague kind of way.

DR STEINER: Paragraph 1 is concerned with the following: Its phrasing is such that it points to a certain nurturing of the life of the soul without saying in detail what the content of the activity of the Anthroposophical Society is to be. I believe that especially at the present time it is of paramount importance to point out that in the Anthroposophical Society the life of the soul is of central concern. That is why it says that the Anthroposophical Society is to be an association of people who cultivate the life of the soul in this way. We can talk about the other words later. The other things it does are stated in the subsequent points. We shall speak more about this. This is the first Paragraph. Even the first Paragraph should say something as concrete as possible. If I am to ask: What is a writer? I shall have to say: A writer is a person who uses language in order to express his thoughts, or something similar. This does not mean to say that this encompasses the whole of his activity as a human being; it merely points out what he is with regard to being a writer. Similarly I think that the first point indicates that the Anthroposophical Society, among all kinds of other things which are expressed in the subsequent points, also cultivates the life of the soul in the individual and in human society in such a way that this cultivation is based on a true knowledge of the spiritual world. I think perhaps Herr Kaiser meant that this point ought to include a kind of survey of all the subsequent points. But this is not how we want to do it. We want to remain concrete all the time. The only thing to be stated in the first point is the manner in which the life of the soul is to be cultivated. After that is stated what else we do and do not want to do. Taken in this way, I don't think there is anything objectionable in this Paragraph. Or is there? If anyone has a better suggestion I am quite prepared to replace ‘of the soul’ with something else. But as you see, Herr Kaiser did think briefly about it and did not come up with any other expression. I have been thinking about it for quite a long time, several weeks, and have also not found any other expression for this Paragraph. It will indeed be very difficult to find a different expression to indicate the general activity of the Anthroposophical Society. For the life of the soul does, after all, encompass everything. On the one hand in practical life we want to cultivate the life of the soul in such a way that the human being can learn to master life at the practical level. On the other hand in scientific life we want to conduct science in such a way that the human soul finds it satisfying. Understood rightly, the expression ‘the life of the soul’ really does express something universal.

Does anyone else want to speak to Paragraph 1? If not, I shall put this point 1 of the Statutes to the vote. Please will those who are in favour of adopting this point raise their hands. This vote refers to this one point only, so you are not committing yourselves to anything else in the Statutes. (The vote is taken.)

If anyone objects to Paragraph 1, please raise your hand. (Nobody does.) Our point 1 is accepted. Please read point 2 of the Statutes.

Dr Wachsmuth reads Paragraph 2 of the Statutes:

‘2. The persons gathered at the Goetheanum in Dornach at Christmas, 1923, both the individuals and the groups represented, form the nucleus of the Society. They are convinced that there exists in our time a genuine science of the spiritual world and that the civilizaton of today is lacking the cultivation of such a science. This cultivation is to be the task of the Anthroposophical Society. It will endeavour to fulfil this task by making the anthroposophical spiritual science cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach the centre of its activities, together with all that results from this for brotherhood in human relationships and for the moral and religious as well as the artistic and cultural life in the human being.’

DR STEINER: The first purpose of this Paragraph is to express what it is that unites the individual members of the Anthroposophical Society. As I said in a general discussion a few days ago, we want to build on facts, not on ideas and principles. The first fact to be considered is most gratifying, and that is that eight hundred people are gathered together here in Dornach who can make a declaration. They are not going to make a declaration of ideas and principles to which they intend to adhere. They are going to declare: At the Goetheanum in Dornach there exists a certain fundamental conviction. This fundamental conviction, which is expressed in this point, is essentially shared by all of us and we are therefore the nucleus of the Anthroposophical Society. Today we are not dealing with principles but with human beings. You see these people sitting here in front of you who first entertained this conviction; they are those who have been working out of this conviction for quite some time at the Goetheanum. You have come in order to found the Anthroposophical Society. You declare in the Statutes your agreement with what is being done at the Goetheanum. Thus the Society is formed, humanly formed. Human beings are joining other human beings. Human beings are not declaring their agreement with Paragraphs which can be interpreted in this way or in that way, and so on. Would anyone like to speak to Paragraph 2?

DR UNGER: My dear friends! Considering the very thing that has brought all these people together here we must see this point 2 as something which is expressed as a whole by all those members of the Anthroposophical Society gathered here. Acknowledgement of the very thing which has brought us together is what is important. That is why I wonder whether we might not find a stronger way of expressing the part which says ‘are convinced that there exists in our time a genuine science of the spiritual world ... ’ As it stands it sounds rather as though spiritual science just happens to exist, whereas what every one of us here knows, and what we have all committed ourselves to carry out into the world, has in fact been built up over many years. Would it not be possible to formulate something which expresses the years of work in wide-reaching circles? I am quite aware that Dr Steiner does not wish to see his name mentioned here because this could give a false impression. We ought to be capable of expressing through the Society that this science exists, given by the spiritual world, and that it has been put before all mankind in an extensive literature. This ‘having been put before all mankind’ ought to be more strongly expressed as the thing that unites the Society.

DR STEINER: Dear friends, you can imagine that the formulation of this sentence was quite a headache for me too. Or don't you believe me? Perhaps Dr Unger could make a suggestion.

DR UNGER suggests: ‘represented by a body of literature that has been presented to all mankind over many years.’ This could simply be added to the sentence as it stands.

DR STEINER: Would your suggestion be met by the following formulation: ‘are convinced that there exists in our time a genuine science of the spiritual world elaborated for years past, and in important particulars already published?’

DR UNGER: Yes.

DR STEINER: So we shall put ‘elaborated for years past, and in important particulars already published ...’ Does anyone else wish to speak?

Dr Schmeidel wishes to put ‘for decades past’ instead of ‘for years past’.

DR STEINER: Many people would be able to point out that actually two decades have passed since the appearance of The Philosophy of Freedom.⁴⁹ I do not think there is any need to make the formulation all that strong. If we are really to add anything more in this direction then I would suggest not ‘or decades past’ but ‘for many years past’. Does anyone else wish to speak?

DR PEIPERS: I do not see why Dr Steiner's name should not be mentioned at this point. I should like to make an alternative suggestion: ‘in the spiritual science founded by Dr. Steiner.’

DR STEINER: This is impossible, my dear friends. What has been done here must have the best possible form and it must be possible for us to stand for what we say. It would not do for the world to discover that the draft for these Statutes was written by me and then to find my name appearing here in full. Such a thing would provide the opportunity for the greatest possible misunderstandings and convenient points for attack. I think it is quite sufficient to leave this sentence as general as it is: ‘elaborated for many years past, and in important particulars already published ...’ There is no doubt at all that all these proceedings will become public knowledge and therefore everything must be correct, inwardly as well.

Would anyone else like to speak?

HERR VAN LEER: The Goetheanum is mentioned here; but we have no Goetheanum.

DR STEINER: We are not of the opinion that we have no Goetheanum. My dear Herr van Leer, we are of the opinion that we have no building, but that as soon as possible we shall have one. We are of the opinion that the Goetheanum continues to exist. For this very reason, and also out of the deep needs of our heart, it was necessary last year, while the flames were still burning, to continue with the work here on the very next day, without, as Herr Steffen said, having slept. For we had to prove to the world that we stand here as a Goetheanum in the soul, as a Goetheanum of soul, which of course must receive an external building as soon as possible.

HERR VAN LEER: But in the outside world, or in twenty years' time, it will be said: In the year 1923 there was no Goetheanum in Dornach.

DR STEINER: I believe we really cannot speak like this. We can indeed say: The building remained in the soul. Is it not important, dear Herr van Leer, to make the point as strongly as possible that here, as everywhere else, we place spiritual things in the foreground? And that what we see with our physical eyes therefore does not prevent us from saying ‘at the Goetheanum’? The Goetheanum does stand before our spiritual eyes!

HERR VAN LEER: Yes indeed.

DR STEINER: Does anyone else wish to speak to Paragraph 2?

HERR LEINHAS: I only want to ask whether it is advisable to leave in the words ‘in important particulars already published’. Newspapers publish the fact that we do, actually, have some secret literature such as those cycles which have not yet been published. Keeping these things secret will now be made impossible by the Statutes. Is it right to indicate at this point the literature which has so far not been published?

DR STEINER: Actually, this is not even what is meant. All that is meant is that there are also other truths which are not included in the lecture cycles, that is they have never yet been made public, not even in the cycles. I think we can remedy this by saying: ‘elaborated for years past and in important particulars already published’ or ‘also already published.’ This should take account of this. The ‘already’ will take account of this objection. Would anyone else like to speak to Paragraph 2 of the Statutes?

HERR INGERÖ: I have a purely practical question: There are individual members here as well as representatives of groups. Obviously the groups who have sent representatives will agree to these Statutes. But otherwise will the Statutes have to be formally ratified when we get home? Will the members have to be presented with all this once again after which we would write to you to say that the Statutes have been adopted?

DR STEINER: No. I have assumed that delegates from individual groups have arrived with a full mandate so that they can make valid decisions on behalf of their group. That is what is meant by this sentence. (Applause and agreement.) This was also my interpretation in regard to all the different foundation meetings of the national groups at which I was present. It will be quite sufficient if the delegates of the national groups give their agreement on the basis of the full mandate vested in them. Otherwise we should be unable to adopt the Statutes fully at this meeting.

DR KOLISKO: I would like to ask about the fact that an Anthroposophical Society did exist already, known publicly as the Anthroposophical Society, yet now it appears to be an entirely new inauguration; there is no mention in Paragraph 2 of what was, up till now, the Anthroposophical Society in a way which would show that this is now an entirely new foundation. I wonder whether people might not question why there is no mention of the Anthroposophical Society which has existed for the last ten years but only of something entirely new.

DR STEINER: I too have thought about this. While the Statutes were being printed I wondered whether a note might be added to this point: ‘The General Anthroposophical Society founded here was preceded by the Anthroposophical Society founded in 1912.’ Something like that. I shall suggest the full text of this note at the end of this detailed debate. For the moment let us stick to the Paragraph itself. I shall add this as a note to the Statutes. I believe very firmly that it is necessary to become strongly aware of what has become noticeable in the last few days and of what I mentioned a day or two ago when I said that we want to link up once again where we attempted to link up in the year 1912. It is necessary to become strongly aware of this, so a strong light does in fact need to be shed on the fact of the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society here and now during this present Christmas Conference. I therefore do not want to make a history lesson out of the Statutes by pointing out a historical fact, but would prefer to include this in a note, the text of which I shall suggest. I think this will be sufficient. Does anyone else wish to speak about the formulation of Paragraph 2? If not, please would those dear friends who are in favour of the adoption of this Paragraph 2 raise their hands. (They do.) Please would those who are not in favour raise their hands. Paragraph 2 is adopted herewith. Please now read Paragraph 3.

Dr Wachsmuth reads Paragraph 3:

‘3. The persons gathered in Dornach as the nucleus of the Society recognize and endorse the view of the leadership at the Goetheanum: “Anthroposophy, as fostered at the Goetheanum, leads to results which can serve every human being as a stimulus to spiritual life, whatever his nation, social standing or religion. They can lead to a social life genuinely built on brotherly love. No special degree of academic learning is required to make them one's own and to found one's life upon them, but only an open-minded human nature. Research into these results, however, as well as competent evaluation of them, depends upon spiritual-scientific training, which is to be acquired step by step. These results are in their own way as exact as the results of genuine natural science. When they attain general recognition in the same way as these, they will bring about comparable progress in all spheres of life, not only in the spiritual but also in the practical realm.” ’

DR STEINER: Please note, dear friends, that something has been left out in the printed version. The Paragraph should read as follows: ‘The persons gathered in Dornach as the nucleaus of the Society recognize and endorse the view of the leadership at the Goetheanum:’ What now follows, right to the end of the Paragraph, should be within quotation marks. This is to do with my having said that here we ought to build on the purely human element. Consider the difference from what was said earlier. In the past it was said: The Anthroposophical Society is an association of people who recognize the brotherhood of man without regard to nationality—and so on, all the various points. This is an acceptance of principles and smacks strongly of a dogmatic confession. But a dogmatic confession such as this must be banned from a society of the most modern kind; and the Anthroposophical Society we are founding here is to be a society of the most modern kind. The passage shown here within quotation marks expresses the view of the leadership at the Goetheanum, and in Paragraph 3 one is reminded of one's attitude of agreement with the view of the leadership at the Goetheanum. We are not dealing with a principle. Instead we have before us human beings who hold this conviction and this view. And we wish to join with these people to form the Anthroposophical Society. The most important sentence is the one which states that the results, and that means all the results, of spiritual science can be equally understood by every human being and human soul but that, in contrast, for an evaluation of the research results a training is needed which is to be cultivated in the School of Spiritual Science within its three Classes. It is, then, not stated that people must accept brotherhood without regard to nation or race and so on, but it is stated that it is the conviction of those who up till now have been entrusted with the leadership at the Goetheanum that what is cultivated there leads to this; it leads to brotherhood and whatever else is mentioned here. So by agreeing to this Paragraph one is agreeing with this conviction. This is what I wanted to say by way of further interpretation.

DR TRIMLER: For the purpose of openness would it not be necessary here to state who constitutes the leadership at the Goetheanum? Otherwise ‘the leadership at the Goetheanum’ remains an abstract term.

DR STEINER: In a following Paragraph of the Statutes the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science is mentioned, and at another point in the Statutes the Vorstand will be mentioned; the names of the members of the Vorstand will be stated. Presumably this will be sufficient for what you mean? However, the naming of the Vorstand will probably be in the final point of the Statutes, where it will be stated that the Vorstand and the leadership at the Goetheanum are one and the same. So if you thought it would be more fitting, we could say:

‘The persons gathered in Dornach as the nucleus of the Society recognize and endorse the view of the leadership at the Goetheanum which is represented by the Vorstand nominated by this foundation gathering.’ This could of course be added. So it would read: ‘recognize and endorse the view of the leadership at the Goetheanum which is represented by the Vorstand nominated by this foundation gathering’. This will do. Who else would like to speak?

HERR LEINHAS: Does this constitute a contradiction with point 7 where it says that Rudolf Steiner organizes the School of Spiritual Science and appoints his collaborators and his possible successor? Supposing you were not to choose as your collaborators those who are in the Vorstand as it stands at the moment?

DR STEINER: Why should there be a contradiction? You see, it is like this, as I have already said: Here, as the leadership at the Goetheanum, we shall have the Vorstand. And the Vorstand as it now stands will be joined, in the capacity of advisers, by the leaders of the different Sections of the School of Spiritual Science. In future, this will be the leadership of the Goetheanum. Do you still find this contradictory?

HERR LEINHAS: No.

HERR SCHMIDT: I have one worry: Someone reading the sentence ‘Research into these results, however, as well as competent evaluation of them, depends upon spiritual-scientific training ... ’ might gain the impression that something is being drummed into people.

DR STEINER: What is being drummed in?

HERR SCHMIDT: It is possible for people to gain this impression. Personally I would prefer it if we could say: ‘depends upon spiritual-scientific training, which is to be acquired step by step, and which is suggested in the published works of Dr Steiner’, so that the impression is not aroused of something that is not quite above-board or not quite comprehensible for outsiders.

DR STEINER: But this would eliminate the essential point which must be included because of the very manner in which the lecture cycles must be treated. What we have to achieve, as I have already said, is the following: We must bring it about that judgments can be justified, not in the sense of a logical justification but in the sense that they must be based on a solid foundation, so that a situation can arise—not as regards a recognition of the results but as regards an assessment of the research—in which there are people who are experts in the subject matter and others who are not. In the subsequent Paragraph we dissociate ourselves from those who are not experts in the sense that we refuse to enter into any discussion with them. As I said, we simply want to bring about this difference in the same way that it exists in the field of the integration of partial differential equations. In this way we can work at a moral level against the possibility of someone saying: I have read Dr Steiner's book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and therefore I am fully competent to assess everything else that has been published. This is what must be avoided. Therefore the very point to be made is that on the basis of my published books it is not possible to form a judgment on all the other things that are discussed above and beyond these. It would be wrong if we were not to refuse such judgments.

Herr Schmidt feels that he has been misunderstood.

DR STEINER: It says here: ‘Research into these results, however, as well as competent evaluation of them, depends upon spiritual-scientific training, which is to be acquired step by step.’ Why is this not clear? It does not mean that anything is drummed into anybody but rather that as with everything in the world you have to learn something before you can allow yourself to form a judgment. What we are rejecting is the assumption that anthroposophical matters can be judged from other points of view. There is a history behind this too. Let me tell you about it, for all these formulations are based on the experience of decades, as I have already said. I once gave a cycle of lectures in Bremens⁵⁰ to a certain group of people who were permitted to attend not so much on the basis of their intellectual capacity as on that of their moral maturity. Now there was a very well-known philosopher, a Platonist, who reckoned that anyone who had read the whole of Plato ought to be able to form a judgment about Anthroposophy. On this basis he sent people to me about whom he said: These are good philosophers so they ought to be allowed to attend, since they are capable of forming judgments. Of course they were less capable of forming judgments than were some quite simple, humble people whose very mood of soul made them capable of forming judgments. I had to exclude them. So it is important that particularly in the case of this Paragraph we are extremely accurate. And it would not be accurate if we were to say that the necessary schooling can be attained on the basis of my published books. The interpretation of what constitutes the necessary schooling is stated in Paragraph 8: ‘All publications of the Society shall be public, in the same sense as are those of other public societies. The publications of the School of Spiritual Science’—let us say in future the cycles—‘will form no exception as regards this public character; however, the leadership of the School reserves the right to deny in advance the validity of any judgment of these publications which is not based on the same training from which they have been derived. Consequently they will regard as justified no judgment which is not based on an appropriate preliminary training, as is also the common practice in the recognized scientific world. Thus’ and so on. So you see, the requirement in Paragraph 3 must accord with that in Paragraph 8. If you have another suggestion, please go ahead. But the one you suggested just now is quite impossible.

HERR SCHMIDT: Perhaps there could be a reference to Paragraph 8 at this point, for instance in the form of a note which says that the published books reveal the principles of the schooling.

DR STEINER: This could certainly be pointed out in a note. But this note belongs at the point where it is stated that all publications shall be public, including the books about the conditions of the schooling. That is where such a note should be put. But I thought that saying that all books shall be public, all publications shall be public, would include the fact that all books about the schooling would be public.

FRÄULEIN X: Ought it not to say: anthroposophical spiritual science; ‘as well as competent evaluation of them, depends upon anthroposophical spiritual-scientific training?’

DR STEINER: What you want to bring out here is made quite clear in Paragraph 8 by the reference to Dornach. If we say ‘anthroposophical’ we have once again an abstract word. I especially want to express here that everything is concrete. Thus the spiritual-scientific training meant—it is shown in this Statute—is that represented in Dornach. If we say anthroposophical spiritual science we are unprotected, for of course anyone can give the name of Anthroposophy to whatever he regards as spiritual science.

HERR VAN LEER: I would like the final sentence to be changed from ‘not only in the spiritual but also in the practical realm’ to: ‘in the spiritual as well as in the practical realm.’

DR STEINER: I formulated this sentence like this because I thought of it as being based on life. This is what I thought: It is easy for people to admit in what is said here that it can constitute the foundation for progress in the spiritual realm. This will meet with less contradiction—there will be some, but less—than that Anthroposophy can also lead to something in the practical realm. This is more likely to be contradicted. That is why I formulated this sentence in this way. Otherwise the two realms are placed side by side as being of equal value in such an abstract manner: ‘in the spiritual as well as in the practical realm’. My formulation is based on life. Amongst anthroposophists there are very many who will easily admit that a very great deal can be achieved in the spiritual realm. But many people, also anthroposophists, do not agree that things can also be achieved in the practical realm. That is why I formulated the sentence in this way.

MR KAUFMANN: Please forgive me, but it seems to me that the contradiction between Paragraph 3 and Paragraph 7 pointed out by Herr Leinhas is still there. Paragraph 7 says: ‘The organizing of the School of Spiritual Science is, to begin with, the responsibility of Rudolf Steiner, who will appoint his collaborators and his possible successor.’ I was under the impression that the Vorstand suggested by Dr Steiner has been elected en bloc by the present gathering. But now if Paragraph 3 calls the Vorstand, elected at the foundation meeting, the leadership at the Goetheanum, this seems to contradict Paragraph 7. I had understood Paragraph 3 to mean the leadership at the Goetheanum to be Dr Steiner and such persons as he has already nominated or will nominate who, in their confidence in him as the leadership at the Goetheanum, in accordance with Paragraph 7, hold the views stated within quotation marks in Paragraph 3 which are recognized positively by those present at the meeting. But if this is carried out by the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society elected here, then this seems to me to be an apparent contradiction, at least in the way it is put.

DR STEINER: I should like to ask when was the Vorstand elected? When was the Vorstand elected?

MR KAUFMANN: I was under the impression that it was accepted when you proposed it; and the agreement of the meeting was expressed very clearly.

DR STEINER: You must understand that I do not regard this as an election, and that is why just now I did not suggest: ‘the leadership at the Goetheanum which is represented by the Vorstand elected by this foundation gathering’ but ‘formed’.

MR KAUFMANN: Is this Vorstand identical with that mentioned in Paragraph 7?

DR STEINER: Surely the Vorstand cannot be identical with my single person if it consists of five different members!

Mr Kaufmann asks once again.

DR STEINER: No, it is not identical. Paragraph 7 refers to the establishment of the School of Spiritual Science which I sketched earlier on. We shall name the Vorstand in a final Paragraph. But I regard this Vorstand as being absolutely bound up with the whole constitution of the Statutes. I have not suggested this Vorstand as a group of people who will merely do my bidding but, as I have said, as people of whom each one will bear the full responsibility for what he or she does. The significance for me of this particular formation of this Vorstand is that in future it will consist of the very people of whom I myself believe that work can be done with them in the right way. So the Vorstand is in the first place the Vorstand of the Society. What is mentioned in Paragraph 7 is the leadership of the School of Spiritual Science. These are two things. The School of Spiritual Science will function in the future with myself as its leader. And the leaders of the different Sections will be what might be called the Collegium of the School. And then there will be the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society which you now know and which will be complemented by those leaders of the different Sections of the School of Spiritual Science who are not anyway members of the Vorstand. Is this not comprehensible?

MR KAUFMANN: Yes, but in the way it is put it seems to me that the contradiction is still there.

DR STEINER: What is contradictory?

MR KAUFMANN: Reading the words, you gain the impression that the Vorstand has been nominated by you personally. This would contradict Paragraph 7.

DR STEINER: Yes, but why is this not sufficient? It has nothing to do with Paragraph 7. Paragraph 7 refers only to the preceding Paragraph 5, the School of Spiritual Science. What we are now settling has nothing to do with Paragraph 7. We are only concerned here with the fact that the Vorstand has been formed. It has been formed in the most free manner imaginable. I said that I would take on the leadership of the Society. But I shall only do so if the Society grants me this Vorstand. The Society has granted me this Vorstand, so it is now formed. The matter seems to me to be as accurate as it possibly can be. Of course the worst thing that could possibly happen would be for the Statutes to express that the Vorstand had been ‘nominated’ by me. And this is indeed not the case in view of the manner in which the whole Society expressed its agreement, as occurred here.

HERR KAISER: Please excuse me for being so immodest as to speak once again. As regards Paragraph 1,⁵¹ the only thing I would suggest is that you simply say ‘life’ and nothing else; not ‘intellectual life’ and not ‘life of the soul’, but simply ‘life’.

With regard to point 3, I would not want to alter a single word in the version which Dr Steiner has given with almost mathematical precision. But in order to meet the concern of our respected friend I would merely suggest the omission of the words ‘which is to be acquired step by step’.

DR STEINER: Yes, but then we do not express what ought to be expressed, namely that the schooling is indeed to be acquired step by step. We shall print on the cycles: First Class, Second Class, Third Class. And apart from this it is necessary to express in some way that there are stages within the schooling. These stages are quite simply a fact of spiritual science. Otherwise, you will agree, we have no way of distinguishing between schooling and dilettantism. Someone who has only just achieved the first stage of the schooling is a dilettante for the second and third stage. So I am afraid we cannot avoid wording it in this way.

DR UNGER: I should like to suggest that we conclude the debate about this third point.

A SPEAKER: I believe we should agree to recognize the formulation of Paragraph 1 as it has emerged from the discussion. ANOTHER: I should only like to make a small suggestion. A word that could be improved: the word ‘the same’^A in ‘the same progress’ in the last sentence of Paragraph 3. I would like to see it deleted and replaced by ‘also progress’.

DR STEINER: We could do this, of course. But we would not be—what shall I say?—using language in as meaningful a way. ‘Gleich’ is such a beautiful word, and one which in the German language, just in this kind of context, has gradually come to be used increasingly sloppily. It would be better to express ourselves in a way which still gives a certain fragrance to what we want to say. Wherever we can it is better to use concrete expressions rather than abstract ones. You see, I do actually mean ‘the same progress as in the other realms’. So that it reads: ‘These results are in their own way as exact as the results of genuine natural science. When they attain general recognition in the same way as these, they will bring about the same progress in all spheres ...’

Of course I do not want to insist on this. But I do think it is not at all a bad thing to retain, or bring back to recognition, a word in the German language which was originally so resonant, instead of replacing it by an abstract expression. We are anyway, unfortunately, even in language on the way to abstraction.

Now we are in the following situation: Since an application to close the debate has been made, I ought to adjourn any further debate, if people still want to speak about Paragraph 3, till tomorrow. We should then not be able to vote on this Paragraph today. Please understand that I am obliged to ask you to vote on the application to close the debate. In the interests of proper procedure, please would those friends who wish the conclusion of the debate indicate their agreement.

DR UNGER: I only meant the discussion on point 3. We are in the middle of the detailed debate.

DR STEINER: Will those who are opposed to closing the debate please raise their hands. I am sorry, that is not possible! We shall now vote on the acceptance or rejection of Paragraph 3. Will those respected friends who are in favour of adopting point 3 please raise their hands. (They do.)

Will those respected friends who are against it please raise their hands. (Nobody does.) Point 3 has thus been adopted at the second reading. Tomorrow we shall continue with the detailed debate, beginning with point 4.

We shall gather, as we did today, after the lecture by Herr Jan Stuten on the subject of music and the spiritual world. So the continuation of the detailed debate will take place in tomorrow's meeting, which will begin at the same time as today. This afternoon at 4.30 there will be a performance of the Three Kings play.

• 46. See Rudolf Steiner Die Konstitution der Allgemeinen Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft und der Freien Hochschule für Geisteswissenschaft—Der Wiederaufbau des Goetheanum. GA 260a. Different parts of this collection are available in English under the following titles: Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1973; The Life, Nature, and Cultivation of Anthroposophy, Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, London 1975; The Constitution of the School of Spiritual Science, Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, London 1964.
• 47. On 8 December 1923. See Note 22.
• 48. See Note 46.
• 49. Rudolf Steiner The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1979. This fundamental work was first published in 1894.
• 50. Rudolf Steiner never gave a cycle of lectures in Bremen. The shorthand report definitely states ‘Bremen’, but this might have been a mishearing of ‘Berlin’. In 1904 Rudolf Steiner did give a cycle of lectures in Berlin on German mysticism and its precursors. Three of these, on ‘Platonische Mystik und Docta ignorantia’ (Platonic Mysticism and docta ignorantia) are included in Rudolf Steiner Über Philosophie, Geschichte und Literatur. Darstellungen an der Arbeiterbildungsschule und der Freien Hochschule in Berlin 1901 to 1905. (On Philosophy, History and Literature). GA 51. The references made at this point in the Meeting could be taken to refer to these lectures.
• 51. See Paragraph 1 of the Statutes.
• A. The German word in Paragraph 3 is ‘gleich’, which is translated as ‘comparable’ in the official translation into English of the Statutes. For the purpose of the present passage in the discussion, the word ‘same’ has been substituted. It is an equally appropriate rendering for ‘gleich’ and makes the discussion as translated here more comprehensible. (Tr. )