The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of this short cycle, I should like to set forth several things connected in the most intensive way with the being of man, the formation of man's destiny, and what might be called the relationship of man in his entirety to world-evolution. I shall proceed immediately to the center of this matter by pointing out that the whole evolution of man's being, within the realm of earth-life, is connected not only with what we observe with our ordinary, waking consciousness while participating in earth-life, but is also connected closely and intensively with what takes place during sleep, from the time of falling asleep until awaking.

Doubtless external earthly culture, external earthly civilization derives its significance primarily from that which man is able to think, feel and accomplish out of his waking being. Man, however, would be utterly powerless, in an external sense, unless his human forces were continuously renewed, in the period between falling asleep and awaking, by contact with the spiritual world. Our spirit and soul being or, as we usually call it in Anthroposophy, our astral body and our ego, withdraw from the physical and etheric body when man falls asleep; they enter the spiritual world, penetrating the physical and etheric body again only after our awaking. Thus, if leading a normal life, we spend one third of our earthly existence in the sleeping state.

If we look back on our earth-life, we always join day to day; we leave out of this conscious retrospect all that we experience between falling asleep and awaking. We skip, as it were, all the things contributed by the heavenly realms, by the divine worlds to our earth-life. And we take into account only what is given us by earthly experiences. Yet, if we desire to attain correct conceptions of our experiences between falling asleep and awaking, we should not spurn ideas which diverge from those of ordinary life. It would be naive to assume that the same things occur in the divine-spiritual worlds that are occurring in the physical-sensible worlds wherein we dwell between awaking and falling asleep. For, on falling asleep, we return to the spiritual worlds—and here things are quite different from things in the physical-sensible world. All this must be taken into account most decidedly by anyone wishing to form a conception of man's super-sensible destinies.

In mankind's religious records, we find many strange allusions which can be understood only if penetrated by means of spiritual science. Thus a passage occurs in the Bible which, although known to everybody, is generally too little regarded: unless ye become as little children, ye may not enter the kingdom of God.

Often such passages are interpreted most trivially; nonetheless, they are always intended to convey an extraordinarily deep meaning.

The knowledge from which is drawn a conception of the spiritual-super-sensible has often been called by me, as well as by others, the Science of Initiation. We speak of this science of initiation when we look back at what went on in mankind's ancient Mysteries. Yet we also speak of the science of initiation—modern science of initiation—if we wish to characterize Anthroposophy in its deeper aspects.

Science of initiation points, as it were, to the knowledge of primeval conditions, of original conditions. We seek to acquire knowledge concerning that which existed in the beginning, which marked the starting-point. All these endeavors are connected with a matter of yet greater profundity which presently will be envisaged by our souls.

If we have fallen asleep on May sixteenth, nineteen twenty-three, and have slept until May seventeenth, nineteen twenty-three, we assume that this time has been spent by us in the same way as by a person who happens to stay awake and roam all night long through the streets of some city. We somehow picture to ourselves the experiences of our spirit and soul (ego and astral body) during the night as though similar to the experiences—although in a somewhat different state—of a reveler seeking nightly adventures.

Things, however, are not as they seem to us. One must consider that on falling asleep in the evening, or even in the daytime (it really does not matter when; but I want first to discuss the nightly sleep enjoyed by every respectable person), one invariably goes back in time until a phase of life is reached lying at the very beginning of one's earthly existence. Moreover, one goes back even beyond one's earthly existence: to pre-earthly life; to that world from which we descended after acquiring a physical body by means of conception. At the moment of falling asleep, we are transported backward through the whole course of time. We are brought back to that moment when we descended from the heavenly realms to earth. Hence, if we fall asleep, for instance, on May sixteenth, nineteen twenty-three, we are transplanted from this date to that period which preceded our descent to earth; and also to that time which we cannot remember, because our memory stops at a certain point of our childhood. Each night, if we pass through it in real sleep, we actually become children again with regard to spirit and soul. And just as we can walk, in the physical world, for two or three miles through space, so a person can walk, at the age of twenty, through time for a span of twenty years, thus arriving at a stage before he was a child—when he began to be a human being. We return, across time, to the starting-point of our earth-life. Hence, while the physical and etheric body are lying in bed, the ego and astral body have gone back across time to an earlier moment. Now the question arises: if we go back every night to an earlier moment, what happens to our ego and astral body while we are awake?

We would not ask such a question unless being aware of this nightly going backward. And, at bottom, even this going backward is only an illusion. In reality, our ego and astral body have not emerged, even during our waking day-time consciousness, from the state in which we existed during our pre-earthly existence.

If we desire to recognize the truth about these facts, we must grasp the idea that ego and astral body have, initially, no share in our earthly evolution. They remain behind; they stop at the point where we began to acquire a physical and an etheric body. We thus, even when waking, leave our ego and astral body at the point marking the beginning of our earth-life.

Fundamentally, we live our earth-life only with the physical body and, in a certain way, with the etheric body. Our physical body alone becomes old. As for the etheric body, it connects our beginning with that moment at which we happen to stand during a certain period.

Let us suppose that someone was born in nineteen hundred. His ego and astral body have come to a standstill at the moment of his birth. The physical body has reached the age of twenty-three; and the etheric body connects the moment at which this person entered earth-life with the moment experienced by him as the present one. Hence, if we did not possess an etheric body, we would awaken every morning as a newborn babe. Only by entering the etheric body before entering the physical body do we accommodate ourselves to the physical body's actual age. This accommodation must take place every morning. The etheric body is the mediator between the spirit-soul element and the physical body. It is a mediator forming the connecting link across the years of life. If a man reaches sixty or more years of life, the etheric body still forms the link between his very first appearance on earth—the point at which his ego and astral body have remained—and the age of his physical body.

Now you will say: Well, after all, the ego is ours; it has aged with us; so also has our astral body aged with us, our thinking, feeling, and willing. If someone has become sixty, then his ego, too, has become sixty.

This would be quite correct if our everyday ego and our true, our real ego were identical. Our everyday ego, however, is not the same as our real ego; that remains standing at the starting-point of our earth-life. Our physical body reaches, let us say, the age of sixty. By means of the mediation of the etheric body, the physical body reflects—corresponding to the respective moment at which it is living—the mirrored image of the real ego. And what we see is the mirrored image of the real ego reflected back to us, from moment to moment, by the physical body; but resulting from something that has not accompanied us into earth-life. This mirrored image we call our ego. This mirrored image will naturally grow older as the reflecting apparatus, the physical body, gradually loses the freshness of early childhood and finally becomes wobbly and unstable. Yet this “ego,” which is only the mirrored image of the real ego, appears to age for the sole reason that the reflecting apparatus functions less efficiently after the physical body has grown old.

Like a perspective, the etheric body stretches from the present moment to the real ego and astral body, both of which do not descend into the physical world.

You can imagine that these facts shaping human earth-life must acquire especial significance at the moment of human death. The physical body is the first that we discard in death. This body, however, is the one that determines our earthly age. In discarding this body, what do we retain? Primarily, that which we have not carried with us into earth-life, but which we have filled with all the experiences of earth-life: the ego and astral body. They have, as it were, stood still at the starting-point. Yet they have always looked at that which the physical body, helped by the etheric body, has reflected back as a mirrored image.

Thus, in passing through the portal of death, we stand at our life's starting-point; not filled, however, with what we carried within us when descending from the spiritual world, but filled with what was reflected back to us during earth-life as the mirrored image of this earth-life. With that we are filled to the brim. And this fact engenders an especial state of consciousness at the end of earth-life.

This especial state of consciousness at the end of earth-life can be comprehended only by someone who, endowed with imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge, is able to see that which generally remains unconscious, that which man experiences between falling asleep and awaking. Then one recognizes how man, during every night, retraces the life of the past day. One person does it faster, another slower—in one minute or five minutes. Concerning these things, however, time-conditions are entirely different from those of ordinary, outward earth-life. If we are gifted with super-sensible knowledge, we may take a look at what is experienced by the ego and the astral body. You may then actually, by going backward, recapitulate what you have experienced in the physical world since waking up in the morning. Every night we repeat the experiences of the day in reverse order. Every night we first recapitulate the experiences we had just before going to sleep; then the preceding hours; then those lying back still further, and so forth. Having passed in review, in reverse order, all the day's events, we usually awaken after arriving at the moment when we started in the morning.

You might make the following objection: But people are sometimes awakened by a sudden noise. You must consider, however, that time may elapse in different ways. For instance, someone goes to bed at eleven in the evening, sleeps quietly until three in the morning and, having recapitulated in reverse order all that he experienced during the past day up until ten in the morning, is roused by a sudden disturbance. In such a case, the rest of the time can be retraced very rapidly in the last few moments before waking. Thus events that have stretched themselves out over several hours may, in such a case, be passed through again almost instantly. The conditions of time change in the sleeping state. Time may be completely compressed. Hence we may truthfully say that the human being, during every period of sleep, passes through in reverse what he has experienced during his last waking period. He recapitulates the events not only by seeing them before him, but also by interweaving his experiences with a complete moral judgment of what he did during the day. The human being, as it were, is summoned to judge his own state of morality. And when, on awaking, we have finished this activity, we have passed something like a world judgment on our worth as human beings. Every morning, having experienced in reverse what we did during the day, we appraise ourselves as a being of greater or lesser worth.

This description conveys to you what man's spirit and soul element undergoes, unconsciously, during every night; that is, during one third of our earth-life (if spent in a normal way). The soul passes through life in reverse; only somewhat faster, because merely one third of our earth-life is taken up by sleep.

After our physical body has been discarded in death, the part called by me in my writings etheric body, or formative-force body, gradually separates itself from the ego and the astral body.

This separation takes place in such manner that the human being, having passed through the portal of death, feels his thoughts, heretofore considered by him as something inward, becoming realities which acquire ever greater expansion. Two, three or four days after his death man has this feeling: Fundamentally, I consist of nothing but thoughts. These thoughts, however, are driven asunder. The human being, as a thought-being, takes on ever greater dimensions; and finally this whole human thought-being is dissolved into the cosmos. But the more this thought-being (that is, the etheric body) is dissolved into the cosmos, the more arise experiences derived from other sources than ordinary consciousness.

Essentially, all that we have thought and visualized in the waking state is scattered three days after death. This fact cannot be evaded by hiding our heads in the sand. The content of conscious earth-life has vanished three days after death. But just because the things seemingly so important, so essential during earth-life are dissipated within three days, there arise from the depth memories of that which could not come forth until now: memories of what we always experienced at night, in a preliminary way, between falling asleep and awaking. As the waking life of the day is scattered, dissipated, our inward depth sends forth the sum of experiences undergone by us during the night. These are none other than our day-time experiences, but passed through in reverse order and acquired, in every detail, by means of our moral sense.

You must remember that our real ego and our real astral body are still standing at life's beginning; whereas the mirrored images that we have received from the physical body, regardless of its age, now flutter away with the etheric body. What we have not looked at in the least during earth-life, our nightly experiences, now come forth as a new content. Therefore we do not really feel as if our earth-life were ended, until three days have passed and brought about the scattering of our etheric body. If someone dies, let us say, on May sixteenth, nineteen twenty-three, he seems to be carried to the end of his earth-life by the arising, from nocturnal darkness, of his nightly experiences. At the same time, he is seized by the tendency to go backward.

Hence we pass again through the period spent by us, night in, night out, in the state of sleep. This amounts to about one third of our earth-life.

The different religions describe this stage of existence as Purgatory, Kamaloka, and so forth. We pass through our earth-life, just as we passed through it unconsciously in successive nights, until our experiences have gone back to its very beginning. The wheel of life, ever rotating, must again return to its starting-point. Such is the course of events. Three days after death our day-time experiences have fluttered away. One third of our earth-life has been passed through in reverse; a period during which we can evaluate, in full consciousness, our human worth. For what we have passed through every night unconsciously, rises into full consciousness once the etheric body has been discarded.

In ordinary life, we can conceive only of paths leading through space. Space, however, has no significance for the spirit and soul element; it is significant only for the physical-sensible. When reaching the spirit and soul state, we must also conceive of paths leading through time. After death, we must go backward across the whole span of time traversed by our physical body since breaking away—as might be said—from the heavenly realms. Actually we go back thrice as fast, because the time is balanced through the experiences undergone by us every night. Thus we return anew to the starting-point; but enriched by all that we experienced as physical beings. Enriched not only by what remains as a memory—for what flew away with the etheric body still remains as a memory—but also by the judgment passed unconsciously each night, out of our full human nature, on our worth as human beings.

Thus, depending on the kind of life lived by us, we sooner or later enter again (approximately after several decades) into the spiritual world whence we had departed—but departed only inasmuch as our consciousness was concerned. Actually, we have stood still at the starting-point, waiting until the physical body's earthly course would have been fulfilled, so that we might return again to what we were before birth, respectively before conception.

In describing these things, especially in public, we must beware lest people be shocked by such unusual concepts. Speaking metaphorically, it could be said that we advance after death. In reality, however, we retrace our steps after death; we live our life in reverse. Time, as it rotates, returns to its starting-point. The following might be said: the divine world remains where it stood at the beginning. Man but bursts out, wanders out of the divine world. Then he comes back to it, bringing with him all that he conquered while dwelling outside of the divine realms.

Then, in its turn, comes life. After returning once more to the spiritual world, enriched not only by conscious but also by unconscious earth-life; after “becoming as little children” who stand again within the heavenly realms, we pass into a kind of life that might be described in this way: now the human being beholds what he really is. Just as he perceived, with his ordinary consciousness, the plants, stones, and animals among whom he dwelt on earth, so he now perceives his new surroundings. What I am describing is the life after death. Here man sees himself surrounded by human souls who, having died or not yet having been born, undergo no earthly experiences, but those of the divine world. Moreover, he perceives the higher Hierarchies, such as the Angels, the Archangels, the Exusiai, and others still higher. You know these names and their significance from my Occult Science.

The human being gathers experiences in this purely spiritual world. I could characterize these experiences by saying: it is as if the human being were carrying his own being into the cosmos. What he experienced during the waking earth-life, during the nightly unconscious earth-life, he now carries into the cosmos. It is needed by the cosmos.

While standing amidst earth-life, we judge the whole surrounding cosmos, sun, moon, and stars, only from a terrestrial viewpoint. As astronomers, we calculate the movement of the sun, of the planets, the latter's' relationship to the fixed stars, and so forth. This entire astronomical-scientific method, however, could be compared to the following procedure: suppose, that a man stood here and a tiny being—for instance, a ladybug—observed him. Then this tiny creature would found a science. An “Association of Ladybugs for the Study of Mankind” would observe how man comes to life. (I presume that ladybugs, too, have a certain life-span.) This association would observe what happened to man; would investigate all the phenomena backwards and forwards. One thing, however, would be ignored: that the human being eats and drinks, thus renewing his physical being again and again. The ladybugs would believe that man is born, grows by himself, and dies by himself. They would not be able to recognize that man's metabolism must be renewed from day to day.

As an astronomer the human being behaves somewhat similarly in regard to the world. He pays no attention to the fact that the world is a gigantic organism which needs nourishment, otherwise would the stars long ago be scattered in all the directions of universal space and the planets would have deserted their orbits. This gigantic organism, in order to live, needs a kind of nourishment that must be received again and again. Whence comes this nourishment?

Here we encounter the great questions concerning man's relationship to the universe. It is simply stupendous how much physical science can prove. Only, somehow or other, these proofs have little meaning. People, who have been told that Anthroposophy contradicts ordinary science in many things, are inclined to believe that this ordinary science can prove anything in the world. This is true and not denied by Anthroposophy. Science can prove anything in the world. Only things happen to be constituted in such a way that, in certain cases, these proofs have nothing to do with reality.

Let us suppose that I could calculate how the physical structure of the human heart changes from one year to the next. Then we might say: a man of thirty-three will have such and such a heart structure; at thirty-four he will have a certain heart structure; at thirty-five he will have still another heart structure, and so forth. Having made these observations over a period of five years, I calculate how the heart structure of this man was constituted let us say thirty years ago. This can be done. Now the whole physical structure of the heart lies before me. I can also calculate how it was constituted three hundred years ago. Here, however, arises a slight difficulty: three hundred years ago this heart did not exist and could, therefore, have had no physical structure of any kind. The calculation was absolutely correct. We can prove that the heart was constituted three hundred years ago in such and such a way, only it did not exist. We can also prove that the heart will be constituted three hundred years later in such and such a way, only then it will have ceased to exist. But the proofs are completely infallible.

Geology can be handled today in the same manner. We can calculate that a certain layer of the soil indicates this or that fact. Likewise, we calculate how everything was twenty millions of years ago, or will be twenty millions of years later. The proof clicks with marvelous accuracy: only the earth did not exist twenty millions of years ago. It is the same as with the heart. Neither is the earth going to exist twenty millions of years later. The proofs are flawless, but have nothing whatever to do with reality. This is how things actually are. The possibilities of being deceived by physical life are immeasurably great. We must be able to penetrate spiritual life if we desire to gain a standpoint from which the physical world can be judged.

And now let us go back to that which was to be elucidated by this digression concerning proofs that have no point of contact with reality. Let us go back to the moment after death, as I characterized it, and observe how the human being adjusts his life to the world of spiritual facts, spiritual beings. He brings into this spiritual world what he has experienced on earth while waking and sleeping.

Just consider that these experiences are the nourishment of the cosmos; that they are continuously needed by the cosmos in order to live on. Whatever we experience on earth in the course of an easy or hard life is carried by us into the cosmos after death. We thus feel how our being as man is dissolved into the cosmos to furnish its nourishment. These experiences, undergone by man between death and a new birth, are of overwhelming grandeur, of immeasurable loftiness.

Then comes the moment when man appears to himself no longer as a unity, but as a multiplicity. He appears to himself as if some of his virtues and qualities moved, as it were, towards one star; others towards a different star. Now man perceives how his being is scattered out into the whole world. He also perceives how the parts of his being fight with one another, harmonize with one another, disharmonize with one another. Man feels how that which he experienced on earth by day or by night is scattered into the cosmos. And just as we held fast to our nightly experiences when, three days after death, our thoughts—that is, the essence of our waking life—dissipated out into the cosmos and we, concentrating on our nightly experiences, lived again over, but backward, our whole earth-life until the starting-point of our earth-life is reached; so now, when our entire earthly human experience is scattered out into the cosmos, we hold fast to that which we represent as human beings belonging to a super-sensible world order.

Now our real ego emerges from what might be called the Dionysically disjointed human being. Gradually there emerges the consciousness: You are nothing but spirit. You have only dwelt in a physical body; have only passed through—even in the nightly experiences—the events brought upon you by the physical body. You are a spirit among spirits.

Now we enter a spiritual existence among spiritual beings; whereas our substance as physical man is scattered and dissolved into the cosmos. What we passed through here on earth is divided and given to the cosmos: so that it might nourish the cosmos and enable it to live on; so that the cosmos might receive new incentives for the movement of its stars, the sustenance of its stars. As we must partake of physical nourishment in order to live as physical men between birth and death, so must the cosmos partake of human experiences, take them into itself. Thus we feel ourselves more and more as cosmic men; find our whole being transfused, as it were, into the cosmos—but a cosmos taken in a spiritual sense. And then the moment approaches when we must seek the transition from death to a new birth; from man become cosmos to cosmos become man. We have ascended by identifying ourselves more and more with the cosmos. A moment comes—I have called it in my Mystery Plays the Great Midnight Hour of Existence—which brings to us this feeling: We must again become human beings. What we carried into the cosmos must be returned to us by the cosmos, so that we may come back to earth.

Today it was my foremost purpose to describe man's being, as it is carried out of earth-life into the vast cosmic space. Thus this sketch—which will be enlarged upon during the coming days—has placed us into the center of life between death and a new birth.

[ 1 ] In the present social movement there is a great deal of talk about social institutions, but very little talk about social and antisocial human beings. Very little regard is paid to the “social question” that arises when one considers that institutions in a community take their social or antisocial stamp from the people who run them. Socialist thinkers expect to see in the community's control of the means of production something that will satisfy the demands of a wide range of people. They take for granted that, under communal control of the economy, human relations will necessarily assume a social form as well. They have seen that the economic system along the lines of private capitalism has led to antisocial conditions. They believe that when this industrial system has disappeared, the antisocial tendencies at work within it will also necessarily come to an end.

[ 2 ] Undoubtedly, along with the modern private capitalist form of industrial economy there have arisen social evils—evils that embrace the widest range of social life; but is this in any way a proof that they are a necessary consequence of this industrial system? An industrial system can, in and of itself, do nothing beyond putting men into life situations that enable them to produce goods for themselves or for others in a more or less efficient manner. The modern industrial system has brought the means of production under the power of individual persons or groups. The achievements of technology were such that the best use could be made of them by a concentration of industrial and economic power. So long as this power is employed in the one field—the production of goods alone—its social effect is essentially different from what it is when this power oversteps its bounds and trespasses into the fields of law or culture. It is this trespassing into the other fields that, in the course of the last few centuries, has led to the social evils that the modern social movement is striving to abolish. He who possesses the means of production acquires economic power over others. This economic power has resulted in the capitalist allying himself with the powers of government, whereby he is able to procure other advantages in society, opposing those who were economically dependent on him—advantages which, even in a democratically constituted state, are in practice of a legal nature. This economic domination has led to a similar monopolization of the cultural life by those who held economic power.

[ 3 ] The simplest thing would seem to be to get rid of this economic predominance of individuals, and thereby do away with their dominance in the spheres of rights and spiritual culture as well. One arrives at this “simplicity” of social thought when one fails to remember that the combination of technological and economic activity afforded by modern life necessitates allowing the most fruitful possible development of individual initiative and personal talent within the business community. The form production must take under modern conditions makes this a necessity. The individual cannot bring his abilities to bear in business if in his work and decision-making he is tied down to the will of the community. However dazzling is the thought of the individual producing not for himself but collectively for society, its justice within certain bounds should not hinder one from also recognizing the other truth—collectively, society is incapable of giving birth to economic schemes that can be realized through individuals in the most desirable way. Really practical thought, therefore, will not look to find the cure for social ills in a reshaping of economic life that would substitute communal production for private management of the means of production. Rather, the endeavor should be to forestall evils that may spring up along with management by individual initiative and personal talent, without impairing this management itself. This is possible only if neither the legal relationship among those engaged in industry, nor that which the spiritual-cultural sphere must contribute, are influenced by the interests of industrial and economic life.

[ 4 ] It cannot be said that those who manage the business of economic life can, while occupied by economic interests, preserve sound judgment on legal affairs and that, because their experience and work have made them well acquainted with the requirements of economic life, they will therefore be best able to settle legal matters that may arise within the workings of the economy. To hold such an opinion is to overlook the fact that a sphere of life calls forth interests arising only within that sphere. Out of the economic sphere one can develop only economic interests. If one is called out of this sphere to produce legal judgements as well, then these will merely be economic interests in disguise. Genuine political interests can only grow upon the field of political life, where the only consideration will be what are the rights of a matter. And if people proceed from such considerations to frame legal regulations, then the law thus made will have an effect upon economic life. It will then be unnecessary to place restrictions on the individual in respect to acquiring economic power; for such economic power will only result in his rendering economic services proportionate to his abilities—not in his using it to obtain special rights and privileges in social life.

[ 5 ] An obvious objection is that political and legal questions do after all arise in people's dealing with one another in business, so it is quite impossible to conceive of them as something distinct from economic life. Theoretically this is right enough, but it does not necessarily follow that in practice economic interests should be paramount in determining these legal relations. The manager who directs a business must necessarily have a legal relationship to manual workers in the same business; but this does not mean that he, as a business manager, is to have a say in determining what that relationship is to be. Yet he will have a say in it, and he will throw his economic predominance into the scales if economic cooperation and legal administration are conjoined. Only when laws are made in a field where business considerations cannot in any way come into question, and where business cannot gain any power over this legal system, will the two be able to work together in such a way that our sense of justice will not be violated, nor business acumen be turned into a curse instead of a blessing for the whole community.

[ 6 ] When the economically powerful are in a position to use that power to wrest legal privileges for themselves, among the economically weak will grow a corresponding opposition to these privileges. As soon as it has become strong enough, such opposition will lead to revolutionary disturbances. If the existence of a separate political and legal province makes it impossible for such privileges to arise, then disturbances of this sort cannot occur. What this special legal province does is to give constant orderly scope to those forces which, in its absence, accumulate until at last they vent themselves violently. Whoever wants to avoid revolutions should learn to establish a social order that shall accomplish in the steady flow of time what will otherwise try to realize itself in one historical moment.

[ 7 ] It will be said that the immediate concern of the modern social movement is not legal relations, but rather the removal of economic inequalities. One must reply to such an objection that our conscious thoughts are not always the true expression of the real demands stirring within us. Our conscious thoughts are the outcome of immediate experience; but the demands themselves originate in far deeper strata that are not experienced immediately. And if one aims at bringing about conditions that can satisfy these demands, one must attempt to penetrate to these deeper strata. A consideration of the relations that have come about in modern times between industrial economy and law shows that the legal sphere has become dependent upon the economic. If one were to try superficially, by means of a one-sided alteration in the forms of economic life, to abolish those economic inequalities that the law's dependence on the economy has brought about, then in a very short while similar inequalities would inevitably result as long as the new economic order were again allowed to build up the system of rights out of itself. One will never really touch what is working its way up through the social movement to the surface of modern life until one brings about social conditions in which, alongside the claims and interests of the economic life, those of politics and law can be realized and satisfied upon their own independent basis.

[ 8 ] It is in a similar manner, again, that one must approach the question of the cultural life and its bearings on that of law and the economy. In the last few centuries the cultural life has been cultivated under conditions that allowed it to exercise only the smallest independent influence upon politics or the economy. One of the most important aspects of culture, education, was shaped by governmental interests. People were trained and taught according to the requirements of the state. And the power of the state was reinforced by economic power. If anyone were to develop his or her human capacities within the existing educational institutions, this depended directly on his or her economic station in life. Accordingly, the spiritual forces that were able to find scope within the political or economic spheres bore the stamp of these economic factors. Free cultural life had to forego any attempt to make itself useful within the political state. And it could influence the economic sphere only to the extent that economics had remained independent of state control. For a vibrant economy demands that competent people be given full scope; economic matters cannot be left to just anyone whom circumstances may have left in control. If, however, the typical socialist program were to be carried out, and economic life were to be administered on the model of politics and the law, the cultivation of the free spiritual life would be forced to withdraw from the public sector altogether. However, a cultural life that has to develop apart from civil and economic realities loses touch with real life. It is forced to draw its substance from sources not vitally linked to those realities. Over the course of time the cultural life makes of this substance a sort of animated abstraction that runs alongside real events without having any concrete effect upon them. In this way, two different currents arise within cultural life. One of them draws its waters from political rights and economics, and is occupied with their daily requirements, trying to devise systems to meet these requirements—without, however, penetrating to the needs of our spiritual nature. All it does is devise external systems and harness men into them, ignoring what their inner nature has to say about it. The other current of cultural life proceeds from the inner striving for knowledge and from ideals of the will. These it shapes to suit our inner nature. However, such knowledge is derived from contemplation: it is not the precipitate of practical experience. These ideals have arisen from concepts of what is true and good and beautiful, but they do not have the strength to shape the conduct of life. Consider what concepts, what religious ideals, what artistic interests, form the inner life of the shopkeeper, the manufacturer, or the government official, outside and apart from his daily practical life; and then consider what ideas are contained in those activities that find expression in his bookkeeping, or for which he is trained by the education that prepared him for his profession. A gulf lies between these two currents of cultural life. The gulf has grown all the wider in recent years because the kind of thinking that is quite justified in natural science has become the measure of our relationship to reality as a whole. This way of thinking seeks to understand the lawfulness of phenomena that lie beyond human activity and human influence, so that the human being is a mere spectator of what he comprehends in a scheme of natural law. And although he sets these laws of nature into motion in technology, he himself does no more than allow the forces that lie outside his own being and nature to be active. The knowledge he employs in this kind of activity has a character that is quite different from his own nature. It reveals to him nothing of what lies in cosmic processes with which human nature is interwoven. For such knowledge as this he needs a world view that unites both the human world and the world outside him.

[ 9 ] Anthroposophy strives for such knowledge. While fully recognizing all that scientific thinking means for the progress of modern humanity, anthroposophy sees that the scientific method framed for the study of nature is able to convey only that which comprehends the outer human being. It also recognizes the essential nature of the religious world views, but is aware that in the modern age these concepts of the world have become an internal concern of the soul, and not something applied in any way to the transformation of external life, which runs on separately alongside.

[ 10 ] In order to arrive at its insights, spiritual science makes demands to which people are still little inclined, because in the last few centuries they have become used to carrying on their outer and inner lives as two separate and distinct existences. Thus the incredulity that meets every endeavor to bring spiritual insight to bear upon social questions. People remember past attempts that were born of a spirit estranged from life. When there is any talk of such things, they recall St. Simon, Fourier and others. The opinion is justified insofar as such ideas stem not from living experience, but rather from an artificial thought-construct. Thus they conclude that spiritual thinking is generally unable to produce ideas that can be realized in practical life. From this general theory come the various views that in their modern form are all more or less attributable to Marx. Those who hold them have no use for ideas as active agents in bringing about satisfactory social conditions. Rather, they maintain that the evolution of economic realities is tending inevitably toward a goal from which such conditions will result. They are inclined to let practical life more or less take its own course because in actual practice ideas are powerless. They have lost faith in the strength of spiritual life. They do not believe that there can be any kind of spiritual life able to overcome the remoteness and unreality that has characterized it during the last few centuries.

It is a kind of spiritual life such as this, nevertheless, that is the goal of anthroposophy. The sources it would draw from are the sources of reality itself. Those forces that hold sway in our innermost being are the same forces that are at work in external reality. Scientific thinking cannot penetrate down to these forces when it merely elaborates natural law intellectually out of external experience. Yet the world views that are founded on a more religious basis are no longer in touch with these forces either. They accept the traditions that have been handed down without penetrating to their fountainhead in the depths of human nature. The spiritual science of anthroposophy, however, seeks to penetrate to this fountainhead. It develops epistemological methods that lead down into those regions of our inner nature where the processes external to us find their continuation within human nature itself. The insights of spiritual science represent a reality actually experienced within our inmost self. These insights shape themselves into ideas that are not mere mental constructs, but rather something saturated with the forces of reality. Hence such ideas are able to carry within them the force of reality when they offer themselves as guides to social action. One can well understand that, at first, a spiritual science such as this should meet with mistrust. Such mistrust will not last when people come to recognize the essential difference that exists between this spiritual science and modern natural science, which is assumed today to be the only kind of science possible. If one can struggle through to a recognition of the difference, then one will cease to believe that one must avoid social ideas when one is intent upon the practical work of shaping social reality. One will begin to see, instead, that practical social ideas can be had only from a spiritual life that can find its way to the roots of human nature. One will see clearly that in modern times social events have fallen into disorder because people have tried to master them with thoughts from which reality constantly struggled free.

[ 11 ] Spiritual insight that penetrates to the essence of human-nature finds there motives for action that are immediately good in the ethical sense as well. The impulse toward evil arises in us only because in our thoughts and feelings we silence the depths of our own nature. Accordingly, social ideas that are arrived at through the sort of spiritual concepts indicated here must, by their very nature, he ethical ideas as well. Since they are drawn not from thought alone, but from life, they possess the strength to take hold of the will and to live on in action. In true spiritual insight, social thought and ethical thought become one. And the life that grows out of such spiritual insight is intimately linked with every form of activity in human life—even in our practical dealings with the most insignificant matters. Thus as a consequence of social awareness, ethical impulse and practical conduct become so closely interwoven that they form a unity.

[ 12 ] This kind of spirituality can thrive, however, only when its growth is completely independent of all authority except that derived directly from cultural life itself. Political and legal measures for the nurturance of the spirit sap the strength of cultural life, while a cultural life that is left entirely to its own inherent interests and impulses will strengthen every aspect of social life. It is frequently objected that humanity would need to be completely transformed before one could found social behavior upon ethical impulses. Such an objection does not take into account that human ethical impulses wither away if they are not allowed to arise within a free cultural life, but are instead forced to take the particular turn that the political-legal structure of society finds necessary for carrying on work in the spheres it has previously mapped out. A person brought up and educated within a free cultural life will certainly, through his very initiative, bring along into his calling much of the stamp of his or her own personality. Such a person will not allow himself to be fitted into the social works like a cog into a machine. In the end, however, what he brings into it will not disturb the harmony of the whole, but rather increase it. What goes on in each particular part of the communal life will be the outcome of what lives in the spirits of the people at work there.

[ 13 ] People whose souls breathe the atmosphere created by a spirit such as this will vitalize the institutions needed for practical economic purposes in such a way that social needs, too, will be satisfied. Institutions devised to satisfy these social needs will never work so long as people feel their inner nature to be out of harmony with their outward occupation. For institutions of themselves cannot work socially. To work socially requires socially attuned human beings working within an ordered legal system created by a living interest in this legal system, and with an economic life that produces in the most efficient fashion the goods required for actual needs.

[ 14 ] If the life of culture is a free one, evolved only from those impulses that reside within itself, then legal institutions will thrive to the degree that people are educated intelligently in the ordering of their legal relations and rights; the basis of this intelligence must be a living experience of the spirit. Then economic life will be fruitful as well to the degree that cultivation of the spirit has developed new capacities within us.

[ 15 ] Every institution that has arisen within communal life had its origin in the will that shaped it; the life of the spirit has contributed to its growth. Only when life becomes complicated, as it has under modern technical methods of production, does the will that dwells in thought lose touch with social reality. The latter then pursues its own course mechanically. We withdraw in spirit, and seek in some remote corner the spiritual substance needed to satisfy our souls.

It is this mechanical course of events, over which the individual will had no control, that gave rise to conditions which the modern social movement aims at changing. It is because the spirit that is at work within the legal sphere and the economy is no longer one through which the individual spiritual life can flow, that the individual sees himself in a social order which gives him, as an individual, no legal or economic scope for self-development.

People who do not see through this will always object to viewing the social organism as consisting of three systems, each requiring its own distinct basis—cultural life, political institutions, and the economy. They will protest that such a differentiation will destroy the necessary unity of communal life. To this one must reply that right now this unity is destroying itself in the effort to maintain itself intact. Legal institutions based upon economic power actually work to undermine that economic power, because it is felt by those economically inferior to be a foreign body within the social organism. And when the spirit that reigns within legal and economic life tries to regulate the activity of the organism as a whole, it condemns the living spirit (which works its way up from the depths of each individual soul) to powerlessness in the face of practical life. If, however, the legal system grows up on independent ground out of the consciousness of rights, and if the will of the individual dwelling in the spirit is developed in a free cultural life, then the legal system, strength of spirit and economic activity work together as a unity. They will be able to do so when they can develop, each according to its own proper nature, in distinct fields of life. It is just in separation that they will turn to unity; when an artificial unity is imposed, they become estranged.

[ 16 ] Many socialist thinkers will thus dismiss such a view: “It is impossible to bring about satisfactory conditions through this organic formation of society. It can be done only through a suitable economic organization.” They overlook the fact that those who work in their economic organization are endowed with wills. If one tells them this, they will smile, for they regard it as self-evident. Yet their thoughts are busy constructing a social edifice in which this “self-evident fact” is ignored. Their economic organization is to be controlled by a communal will. However, this must after all be the result of the individual wills of the people united in the organization. These individual wills can never take effect if the communal will is derived entirely from the idea of economic organization. Individual wills can expand unfettered if, alongside the economic sphere, there is a legal sphere where the standard is set, not by any economic point of view, but only by the consciousness of rights, and if, alongside both the economic and legal spheres, a free cultural life can find place, following only the impulses of the spirit. Then we shall not have a social order running like clockwork, in which individual wills could never find a lasting place. Then human beings will find it possible to give their wills a social bent and to bring them constantly to bear on the shaping of social circumstances. Under the free cultural life the individual will shall become social. When legal institutions are self-subsisting, these socially attuned individual wills shall yield a communal will that works justly. The individual wills, socially oriented and organized by the independent legal system, will exert themselves within the economic system, producing and distributing goods as social needs demand.

[ 17 ] Most people today still lack faith in the possibility of establishing a social order based on individual wills. They have no faith in it because such a faith cannot come from a cultural life that has developed in dependence on the state and the economy. The kind of spirit that does not develop in freedom out of the life of the spirit itself but rather out of an external organization simply does not know what are the spirit's potentials. It looks about for something to guide and manage it, not knowing how the spirit guides and manages itself if it can but draw its strength from its own sources. It would like to have a board of management for the spirit—a branch of the economic and legal organizations—totally disregarding the fact that the economy and the legal system can thrive only when permeated with the spirit that is self-subsistent.

[ 18 ] It is not good will that is needed in order to transform the social order; what is needed is a courage to oppose this lack of faith in the spirit's power. A truly spiritual view can inspire this courage, for such a spiritual view feels able to bring forth ideas that serve not only the inner needs of the soul, but also the needs of outer, practical life. The will to enter the depths of the spirit can become a will so strong as to suffuse every deed that one performs.

[ 19 ] When one speaks of a spiritual view having its roots in life itself, many people take one to mean the sum total of those instincts that become a refuge when one travels along the familiar paths of life and holds every intervention from, spiritual spheres to be a piece of eccentric idealism. The spiritual view intended here, however, must not be confused with that abstract spirituality incapable of extending its interests to practical life, nor with that spiritual tendency which actually denies the spirit flatly when it considers the guidelines of practical life. Both these views ignore the way in which the spirit rules in the facts of external life, and therefore feel no urgent need to penetrate to its foundations. Yet only such a sense of urgency brings forth that knowledge which sees the “social question” in its true light. The experiments now being made to resolve this issue yield such unsatisfactory results because many people have not yet become able to see the true nature of the question. They see this question arise in economic spheres, and they look to economic institutions to provide the answer. They think they will find the solution in economic transformation. They fail to recognize that these transformations can only come about through forces that are released from within human nature itself in the revival of independent cultural and legal life.

The seminar evening is based on the three previous lectures by Roman Boos on “Phenomenological Social Science” from October 4, 5 and 6, 1920. The discussion will be opened.

Hermann Eichenberger: I would like to ask the speaker a question. If we strive to transform public life in the spirit of threefolding, then we have to consider in which area we can begin. So I would like to ask: Can one start with the transformation of public life in the political and legal sphere? More precisely: Is it correct to think of the legal leadership in such a way that people place their trust in a certain leadership - or not? It concerns the way the legislative body is elected, the electoral system. In the “Key Points” this is described as a fundamental issue.

Eugen Kolisko is of the opinion that it is necessary to ensure that there is a base in parliament from which one can work for threefolding. For example, an appeal has been circulated by Dr. Thomastik calling for Austria to be combined into a single constituency, albeit without reference to the threefolding idea. But it is not possible to keep quiet about threefolding.

Roman Boos shares Dr. Kolisko's view. Above all, a national educational program is needed on a large scale; lectures must be given so that the idea of threefolding pervades people's minds. The matter that Dr. Thomastik has raised is only a surrogate, no matter how beautifully conceived and well-intentioned it may be.

Hermann Eichenberger emphasized that Mr. Thomastik had shown courage; he had also given lectures on the threefold social order.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I do not have much to say about this matter, after what I have heard about it. You can imagine from my previous work that at the moment I stood up for the threefold social organism, I considered it a necessity to introduce this threefold social organism into the public life of modern civilization first. And since then, I have repeatedly stated on a wide variety of occasions that, after a thorough examination of the conditions of modern life, the situation is as follows: either we manage to make the impulse of threefolding truly popular, so that it comes to life – it is not utopian, it must come to life – or we will not make any progress at all. You can read about this again in my collected essays on the threefold social order, which have just been published by the Stuttgart publishing house of Kommenden Tages; the book is called “In Ausführung der Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus”.

And so perhaps I may say that every such comment, that one should present the threefold order in a disguised way, reminds me of what I have experienced with anthroposophy for 20 years, namely that very clever people have come again and again and said: Yes, somehow presenting anthroposophy, we can't do that, we first have to somehow make it more palatable in some other way and the like. I myself have never chosen any other path than to present Anthroposophy to the world in an absolutely true and unadorned way, and I have always rejected everything that did not openly advocate for Anthroposophy, thereby incurring sufficient enmity, which is of no concern to me in essence. And so I can only say, my dear assembled guests, that when it comes to seeking the most direct and rapid way to work for the threefold social order, I am quite happy to speak wherever I am invited. If people want to come up with all kinds of secondary proposals, for example, with proposals for modifications to this or that electoral law, which would only be considered if we were in the process of implementing the threefold social order and had political-legal link had been crystallized out of the social organism. When people come up with such things, I have to say that they seem to me – and I say this entirely without emotion – like a renewal of old political wheeling and dealing, and I am not interested in that. I am not interested in it! Now the question is being asked:

I would like to ask Dr. Steiner about how one should imagine the organization of a free spiritual life. Experience shows that artists, scientists and other intellectual workers are the hardest to bring to reasonable cooperation. How can one think of such an organization? Can it even be an organization in the usual sense?

Dear attendees, I would like to start by emphasizing one thing in response to this question: The threefold order of the social organism, as presented in my Key Points of the Social Question and elsewhere, is very often spoken of as if it were some kind of utopia, whereas everything that is presented in it comes from a thoroughly practical way of thinking and also pursues the goal of being taken up in a practical way. On the other hand, however, the character of utopianism, of utopia, is being stamped on this threefold social order movement through numerous questions, even from well-meaning people. It really cannot be a matter of taking the fifth and sixth steps today if one wants to be a practical person without first taking the first step. Now, however, this question points to a difficulty in taking the first step. In the case of the life of the spirit, which in the direction of the impulse of threefolding must be a free life of the spirit, one can of course least of all expect that it can somehow be reorganized overnight. But one could realize threefolding overnight, realize it immediately. One can really do it. One would have to do nothing else but realize it in the same way as the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. And I must, if only to bring the whole discussion down from the abstract heights at which it has been conducted today, to something more concrete, point to this concrete manifestation of the Waldorf School, which has now been in existence for a year.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, when a number of people sit down to make decisions based on principle, for example, regulations for the school system with regard to curricula and teaching times, then – and I mean this quite seriously – these people are basically always very clever, of course. And if you put it together, paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 can be made in such a way that you say: the teacher should teach in a certain way, this or that subject must be taught according to these or those principles, and so on. And I am convinced that, in their abstract content, these dozens of paragraphs could contain something extraordinarily beautiful and powerful, but only in abstract form. Whether they can be applied depends entirely on whether the people are available to do so. Let us assume the most extreme case: let us assume that in a particular age and territory, due to some conditions, we only have people who cannot rise above a certain level of education because, in a particular territory and in a particular period of time, no geniuses are born, only 200 people of average intelligence. Now, one can be quite convinced – if one has real thinking, one sees this immediately – that even then these moderately clever people will elect their best representatives, and when these meet, that they will still make their best paragraphs 1, 2 and 3 and so on, for example, that teachers should teach in this or that subject in this or that way. But all that is not what matters in the world at all. If we really want to take account of the available forces, then it is first of all important to bring together those who are considered capable from among the people.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is what has been attempted, for example, at the Waldorf School. And no paragraphs have been drawn up; at most, I have given a lecture course and held seminars before we opened the school. We also had many discussions together during the school year. I have also held a short seminar course again before the opening of the second school year. But everything that is done in the Waldorf School is done by the community of those personalities who are there, that is, out of their abilities, out of their strengths; without any [paragraphs] being put in place, everyone does their best according to their abilities. And there we have a small circle of what you will now call it, an organization of the free spiritual life, there you have a small circle that is completely self-sufficient, that works entirely from its own abilities and intentions. At some point, something like a section had to be taken out of the other states. It was possible in Württemberg because there was still a gap in the school law, and this gap could be used to bring in this Waldorf school. Here in the canton of Solothurn, it could not be done, as is well known. The thing is, therefore, not to go to abstractions, but to people and let people do what they can really do. Now, however, a difficulty is indicated here. It would, of course, be possible if the impulse of threefolding were properly understood, that the representatives of intellectual life would simply find themselves in some territories, which have already been given from previous history, in a wide circle, wanting nothing more than to understand the to understand the self-sufficiency of intellectual life; that is to say, that these representatives of intellectual life – the majority will, after all, consist of the various teachers of the various institutions – that these various representatives of intellectual life would really find the courage to stand on their own.

We have begun in Stuttgart to found a so-called cultural council – I have already pointed this out here on another occasion – and of course we first had to approach those who are concerned. Now, my dear attendees, you cannot suddenly want to place other people in the cultural life than are already there. It is self-evident that anyone who thinks practically will first say to themselves: We want to realize the threefold social order, not create some utopia in a cloud cuckoo land. - So, of course, the first step is to take into account those workers in the spiritual life who are already there. And it is important to realize that this intellectual life is now on its own, that it has detached itself from the unified state. Just by doing that, something is really happening. But it was not very well received, because the university professors in particular said: Well, if the universities were to administer themselves, then my colleague would be the one to help administer it - no, I still prefer to have a minister on the outside. - Because no colleague actually trusts the other. Of course, this is something that must be overcome. But when it comes to real thinking, the situation is as follows: No matter how many artists, scientists and intellectual workers want to go their own way for my sake, the decisive thing is that the spiritual life is self-contained, so that in education and teaching, from the lowest school class to the university professor, nothing but the voice of those who are actively involved in this spiritual life is decisive. Whatever needs to be decided within the spiritual life must be decided on the grand scale, as it is decided in our Waldorf school, that is, only by those who are involved in this spiritual life, not by some parliament or the like or by some ministry that is outside, or at most by a consultant who, because he has grown too old for the teaching profession, has to take care of the department in the Ministry of Education afterwards.

What is important everywhere is that the idea of the threefold social order enters people's minds in its true form. Then it will be seen that it is not a matter of reflecting on these details, but of ensuring that spiritual life is truly externalized simply by the representatives of this spiritual life feeling that they are on their own, and of course being on their own, in that no state can do anything about it. When they feel they have to rely on themselves, a completely different kind of work will be done in this spiritual life. And then, out of this spiritual life, there will arise that which is progress in the sense of the threefold social order and of a true humanity. So it is a matter of not thinking that you have to line up and do something, like lining up lead soldiers in columns, but you have to take life as it is and just bring threefolding into it, and of course you have to take the people who are there now. But it is also a matter of nothing more than these people understanding what is really in the idea of threefolding. So this can be said in answer to such a question.

Yes, my dear audience, there is an organization in spiritual life, things are organized: primary schools are there, and secondary schools and universities are there; an organization, a certain fabric of spiritual life is there. It is not a matter of remelting it all, but of freeing the spiritual life and then letting things happen - and a great deal will certainly happen when the spiritual life is free and left to its own devices. Then those who are fools outside will not be heard. We have a great many complaints about our Waldorf School; we have a great many complaints, in all areas, including here in Dornach, that no one gives us money; but we really have no complaints that the Waldorf School is not heard. They are very gladly heard, one would like to hear the teachers everywhere, they cannot do enough and they are almost torn apart. Those who have something to say will be heard. But that is what it is about; I will also talk about it.

Now the second question:

How does the association present itself in comparison to corporate organizations?

Well, my dear attendees, I would like to tell you, again starting from something concrete: in economic life, too, it is important, as I said on another evening, to really think economically, that is to say, one can think economically in economic life and not think economically in the sense of legal or in the sense of how one has to think in the spiritual organism, but one can really think economically in economic life. Of course, difficulties still arise today; but that is not the point, because these difficulties could gradually be overcome in a very specific way, which I will indicate in a moment. But the point is not to see how the difficulties arise, but rather that one should first of all really take up the associative impulse.

Now, what did we do in Stuttgart after we started working there in April of last year? You see, we didn't just make some kind of abstract attempt and then declaim how the associations should be formed, for example among shoemakers. Instead, we took up a thought that was popular at the time. At the time we took it up, it was not only popular in the proletariat, but was even popular in the business world: the concept of works councils. But we wanted to have the concept of works councils, the institution of works councils, in the sense of threefolding. What did we do? We tried to make the following point to those people who were interested in it – and there were a great many of them at a certain point in time: if the institution of works councils is introduced in an economic area, then it is, of course, foolish to impose legislation in the factories, whereby works councils are introduced in the individual factories, which work there, supervise and the like – that is not the point. That this cannot be the case was most clearly demonstrated when the Soviet Republic was introduced in Hungary – please read the extremely interesting book by Varga, who, I might add, was at the cradle, where he was People's Commissar for Economic Affairs and President of the Supreme Economic Council.

The aim is not to introduce works councils in the way that has now been done in the completely absurd German laws, but to form a works council from the economic life and its individual situations itself. And the idea of allowing a council to emerge from the various branches of economic life, be they branches that are more oriented towards consumption or production, be they members of this or that class, in short, to allow the council members to emerge from economic life, this idea was also popularized among the proletarians. The electoral procedure would have been worked out, once it had been established that business personalities should emerge, who would then come together to form a kind of economic constituent assembly, which would have been a body to be formed across a closed economic area and which would have worked first of all. This was always my message at every discussion evening with the Stuttgart workers' committees, at which this matter was discussed – which had actually progressed quite a bit before it was made impossible. The next thing to be done is for the proletarian to stop talking out of habit in empty phrases and thinking he knows everything. This has been emphasized over and over again.

Now I will give an example, one I have always liked to give to proletarians: After the threefold social order had been discussed, a man stood up for discussion who spoke from a communist point of view and declared that he could say better than anyone else everything that was said about the threefold social order. And so he rattled off a few Communist phrases, and then he said that he was only a cobbler. Now, of course, there was no need to hold that against him, because it is truly not a matter of whether someone is a cobbler or something else. He meant that as a cobbler he could not be a civil servant, but he implied that he could very well be a minister, for example. Well, you see, above all, it was made clear to the people of us that it would be about working; and anyone who thinks practically knows that, through the community, if things are managed properly, a higher level can actually be achieved, at least a higher level than that which each individual, even the most ingenious in the community, has; more can be achieved in the community. The first task of this association of workers' councils as a community should be explained.

So what is the first step towards this association? Not asking all kinds of detailed questions before we have even taken the first step, before we have properly examined life and then, on the basis of this examination, formed an idea of how we can come to associations. But this is possible for everyone, at whatever point in life they are, if they are truly immersed in life, if life strikes them, they can in some way see how they can come together with those closest to them in an associative way – as long as they are not a mere rentier who is not immersed in real life, namely not in [real] economic life. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what must be considered the first step in economic life: that one must come to associations at all – just as in the spiritual realm, the main thing is that people understand what it means to become independent within the spiritual realm. That is what needs to be said about these two areas for the time being. And when these two areas now understand how to stand on the ground that must be recognized by their own essence as theirs, then the political and legal area remains in the end. Then this will already be found, because the first thing to do is to properly form these two wings: intellectual life and economic life. The other thing remains. That will only be found when order has been created in these two wings. That is what must be said about the political and legal life from the idea of threefolding.

Now to an objection:

In Mr. Ith's lecture, it was said that the relationship between the price of goods and the individual production costs should be regulated by the legal system.

Now, if that had really been said, it would of course be a mistake, because the legal field has nothing to do with the price of goods. The price of goods can essentially only arise from that which is determined by the associations as the mutual value according to the principle of the economic primal cell, which has already been mentioned here.

It has not been clearly stated that these relationships are not established in the legal sphere, but only in the economic sphere.

Now, the essential thing is this: that both the distribution of what is produced in the product of labor, which is of course a matter for the economic sphere, and the other thing, [prices], that is quite clear.

Another question:

Will the price of goods have to be fixed?

Dear attendees, if you think in real terms, then it cannot be a matter of setting the price of goods, and it is precisely the threefold social order that must be thought of in real terms and not in abstract terms. If you think in real terms, then you will come to the conclusion that the price of goods is something that arises simply in a particular territory due to the fact that a certain number of people within that territory need certain things in a certain quantity. And it will be necessary to know: only if this price cannot be maintained at a certain level, if the price becomes too high and if this is noticed, then it is necessary that the associations ensure that this product is not produced too little. After all, the aim is to organize economic life in such a way that a price that results from needs can really be maintained at its level. This cannot be achieved by setting a price, because it is clear that if the price of any product is too low, then too much of that product will be produced. And then it is a matter of regulating this production by redirecting the workers who work on it to another area. But if a price that is too high is paid for it, the opposite is the case.

It is not a matter of making laws. The associations will not have the power to make laws; the associations will have to work continuously to ensure that, firstly, unnecessary work is not actually done, with much being wasted, as I have already described here, and, secondly, that everyone is actually placed in the position where they can work best, but in the interest of the whole. These associations will have to work in just such a way as to give economic life its appropriate configuration. So it will be a matter of thinking about the first step first, about the formation of the associations, and then simply getting these associations started; they can simply start working as soon as they are in place. Then there is another question:

Is the distribution of the profit share determined only within the company?

This cannot be the issue at all. Rather, the question of the needs of the individual in an economic area will depend on the entire economic area. And this fact, which is being looked at here – the distribution of the profit share within the company – does not actually become a real fact at all, because it simply has to be brought out of the associative realm. Whoever works this or that must receive this or that for his product of labor. It cannot be a matter of determining one's share of the profits within the enterprise; rather, it is inherent in the whole structure of economic life that one must receive one's corresponding share of the profits.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize, because it is already half past ten and we cannot go on talking until midnight. I would have liked to say a lot more; of course, one always arrives a little late at the actual specific questions. I would like to summarize by saying the following: You see, the impulse of the threefold social order has been brought into the world on condition that people are found to take it up.

What do we need today? We do not need quackery, such as how to best arrange this or that, for example, lesson plans. Oh, I am convinced that even people who are not very talented, when they sit down and work out beautiful lesson plans for themselves, the lesson plans will be very beautiful. I do not mean that humorously at all, but quite seriously. The point is to have an understanding of reality so that you know what you can do with reality.

Now, of course, you can say: You tackled the cultural council, you tackled the works council, nothing came of it. — But things failed precisely because people got carried away and asked: Yes, what will become of my sewing machine in the tripartite social organism? My dear ladies and gentlemen, that is only a detail, a detail that has actually occurred; I could give you thousands of such examples. It should be clear that one should first understand the threefold nature of the social organism in much the same way that one understands the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics. Do you think that someone understands the Pythagorean theorem by approaching all right-angled triangles and trying out whether the theorem is correct? No, he knows that once he has understood it, it is only a matter of applying it in the right way in practice in each individual case. And so it is also a matter of seeing through the things of the “key points of the social question” in themselves. One must know that they can be applied in reality if one only acquires the practical hand and the practical attitude. That is what matters. The fact that things were not carried out was due to something that I do not want to discuss now, my dear audience. But I am not afraid to say what I have tried to do, and it will be the same with another step: you just have to keep trying until the matter is understood. You will just have to try everything – I know that the matter is still subject to misunderstandings and ambiguities – you will just have to try everything as long as this matter is not understood. And it has not been understood so far.

When I saw that I could not make headway with the illustrious representatives of intellectual life, that I could not make headway with the proletariat, which is turning to a belief in authority that is much worse than was ever the belief in authority in the Catholic Church. When it became clear that nothing could be done with the representatives of intellectual life and the proletariat, the question was not to discuss it, but to do something real. And so I thought that one should at least see if, in the wide area of Central Europe, which is truly suffering enough from misery and hardship, fifty people could be found who could simply be summoned to Stuttgart and taught the real foundations for working in public life. For today, most people in public life speak without any basis, without knowing anything about what has happened and is still happening, otherwise there could never have been a National Assembly like the one that met in Weimar; they speak out of some emotions that they form from experiences that are not even the very latest, but which are the expression of old historical and old political views. That is the essential feature of our present-day parties: what is represented within a present-day party has no objectivity at all, it is only a shadow of what once existed. The point was to find these fifty people so that we could initially develop real public activity in this way. They did not find each other, my dear attendees, these fifty people did not find each other!

What we are dealing with today is not that we are discussing election laws in an abstract way and whether an association can be compared to a corporation and so on, but what we are dealing with today is that we get as many people as possible with initiative, because today it is not about how we vote, but about the right people getting into the right places. And today, too, those who are inwardly imbued with understanding, imbued with insight, imbued with the practical sense of the threefold social organism, will, if there are only a sufficient number of them (you can't do anything with a small number), these people with initiative, they will work. They will be elected to the right places, no matter what the electoral laws, and what is to be will come about. Therefore, it is of primary importance that we have a sufficient number of people with insight into the necessities of the time and with the necessary initiative. If we were able to follow those who have led the world into ruin because they at least developed some learned initiative, we will certainly also follow those who develop healthy initiative. That is why we need people with initiative and insight today. And if we succeed in winning people with initiative and insight, then the threefold social order will march forward, which it did not do before. But we must work towards this goal openly and honestly, without masks or embellishment.

I think the main thing we will have to discuss should be discussed in connection with specific questions that you ask. I will only say a few words, I would like to say a few words in advance about the fundamentals.

In the course of human development, much of the reality has been lost because the knowledge of the spiritual, which also lives in everything physical, has gradually been lost. But medicine is undoubtedly one of the things that have lost the most, for the simple reason that by merely limiting oneself to knowledge of nature, all insight into the human being and his life must be lost. For it must be emphasized again and again that all processes that take place in nature are such processes that cannot take place in the same way within the human organism.

We want to disregard animal and plant organisms. Today, there is a belief that a process that is observed externally in nature can also exist in some way within the human organism. One speaks of combustion and all kinds of other physical processes within the human organism. Such do not actually exist in reality, and just as we have before us in the self-contained human organism something unnatural, which, to the external eye, is different from an extra-human natural object outside, so too is every single process in the human organism something thoroughly different. All the processes that take place outside of the human being in nature have a building and breaking down effect on the human being. And if we want to understand the human being, we must recognize three levels of breakdown.

The first degradation is the one that happens from the inside out, so to speak, through everything that affects the human being from the earth. The forces of the earth work in such a way that they degrade the human being from within. The forces that work from the air, primarily through breathing, and are transferred to the human being, have a degrading effect from the earth's orbit. And the forces of light from the Cosmos have a degenerative effect on man. Thus the extra-human forces of the Cosmos have a degenerative effect on man in three ways, and the degeneration occurs immediately if the ego organization and the astral body do not participate in the human organization. The astral body and the ego organization counteract the degenerative principles in man. In that moment, therefore, the breakdown by the extra-human forces must occur, in which the I and the astral body no longer work in man. But this also shows us that we cannot get by without gaining more and more real insight into the higher members of human nature, even when we consider the medical aspect.

Medicine has arrived at mere trial and error, experimentation, only because in recent times it has no longer dared to reckon with the higher limbs of human nature, with the supersensible. But the process of illness cannot be understood if it is not grasped as being connected with the higher limbs of human nature. And the process of recovery, the process of healing, cannot be understood either without being placed in such connections with the higher limbs of human nature. For, let us consider the following: In the human head, in the human skull, the processes of decomposition of the physical body and of the etheric body are essentially at work. These processes of disintegration that are active there make it possible for the astral and the I to be active in the human head. In contrast to this, in the metabolic limb organization, in all that is connected with the motor system and the metabolism, we are dealing with the building processes of the human organism, both of the etheric body and of the physical body. In these anabolic processes, only the ego and the astral body are active in the most eminent sense for the metabolic and motor system. The astral body and the ego are active in everything that takes place in the metabolism. The ego organization is active in everything that is movement. So that in the metabolism-limb system we have: I and astral body engaged; in the human head they are, as it were, exposed, there I and astral organization are quite free. So that if we wanted to draw schematically, we could draw: physical head, etheric head, but now free astral body and I, not engaged in physical and etheric. On the other hand, if we now omit the middle human being, the rhythmic, the blood human being, and consider the metabolic, limb-bearing human being, then, firstly, the etheric body is fully engaged in this. It is also present in the head, but in addition, the astral body and I-organization are engaged here – not left free internally, but rather effecting the processes.

When we look at the child, we see a complete connection between what is free in the head as the astral body and ego organization, and what is bound to the physical organization as in the body, whereas we do not have such an inner connection in the adult and therefore the whole body is not so dependent on what is going on in the head as it is in the child. In the child, the whole body is still dependent on what is going on in the whole head.

It is quite impossible to acquire a knowledge of human nature without really taking the higher aspects of human nature into consideration. For no one can really understand what is going on in the motor and metabolic systems of the human being without also taking the soul and spirit into account. At best, the organization of the head can be used as an aid, as it is very strongly modeled internally on physical, extra-human laws. The organization of the head is permeated by an etheric body and differs from the extra-human organizations, but it is most similar to the extra-human organization.

What does it actually mean to understand the disease? Assuming you are dealing with any organ of the metabolism, you have to assume a very specific connection between the physical and the etheric and how the astral body and I-organization intervene in this organ, say in the liver. The astral body and I-organization must intervene in a very specific way. The moment the I and the astral body withdraw somewhat from this organ, the organ becomes similar to the head organ, and one must always be aware that when any metabolic organ, and also anything related to metabolism, shows an irregularity, the astral body and I-organization are not involved enough in the organization of this organ; and in the head it is the other way around. If the astral body and the ego intervene too strongly, then the pathological condition occurs in the human head; so that actually the human head is that which is most strongly predisposed to the vegetable-mineral interior in man, and the motor and metabolic organs are those which are most strongly predisposed to the animal-human. Actually, one only sees the opposite. One believes that the head organization is the one that is most spiritual as an organization. But when the head organization becomes too spiritual, consciousness becomes clouded. At the moment when too strong vegetative processes intervene in the head organization, at that moment the head becomes diseased. In the moment when too few processes emanating from the ego or astral body intervene in the metabolic-limb organism, in the moment when the metabolic-limb system becomes similar to the head system, that system becomes ill.

The doctor's approach must therefore be to ask: How do I get it to happen that when I see any illness associated with clouding of consciousness, how do I get it to prevent this? I must prevent the too strong intervention of the I and the astral body. — Or, how do I get it to happen that the astral body intervenes more strongly when it intervenes too weakly? And you see, here we have a case where the way we think, our way of thinking, plays an extraordinarily important role, especially in medicine. For it is certainly necessary to become familiar with the healing substances, the healing remedies. But of course you will rightly ask how one comes to know the healing remedies. And you cannot get to know them unless you first experience in the spiritual what is really going on in the human being. Now, you see, in order to experience what is really going on in a person, a certain way of thinking is necessary. And that is what I wanted to say in principle in my introduction, that a certain way of thinking must already permeate the physician. For example, one must start, I would say, from more external natural things. First of all, the physician must realize that everything that can be called warmth, light, and so on, is actually present in two ways. You see, in summer, light and warmth come down to earth from the sun. Sunlight and solar heat take hold of what sprouts, sprouts, blossoms, and bears fruit on the earth. And actually, what is essentially interesting to us about flowering and fruiting is that they are the carriers of sunlight and solar heat.

But what about winter? In summer, sunlight and solar heat penetrate into the earth, and the sunlight and solar heat that are in the earth continue to have an effect throughout the winter. And so light and sun come into consideration from two sides.

But if we look at what the sun and the earth's orbit in general, the cosmic, brings to the earth from this orbit, we see that all of this has an effect on the human metabolic and limb system. The entire metabolic and limb system is already influenced by what comes in from the cosmos. Everything in the head is influenced by what was already preserved in the earth by cosmic forces. In this respect, the human being stands on the earth in reverse. His metabolic-limb system is influenced by what is extraterrestrial and cosmic. But you can extend this to every single substance. Take lead, for example, because lead is a particularly effective remedy for certain things. We find lead as it exists in non-human nature in the form in which it was created by the total cosmic forces; it works in the most eminent sense when it is there through the cosmic forces, and in the most eminent sense it works through the limb-metabolic system up into the head. If we melt the lead, that is, if we subject it to an earthly process, then it acts directly on the head system. This is the great difference.

Among our medicines, we have an essential remedy, antimony, grey spear luster. If we take it as it exists outside as a fibrous ore – the spear-like is formed out of the cosmos – then in antimony we have a remedy that acts on the metabolism. If we subject antimony to an earthly process so that it becomes antimony sulfate, then we are acting in a specifically human way on the human head.

And you see, it is a matter of penetrating everywhere with this way of thinking, not only into the substance, but into the processes, into what is happening. It is not right to say that lead is a remedy for this or that. It is a matter of knowing how the process has taken place, whether we have a raw material or whether we have subjected the substance to some process. The way in which substances are treated is, after all, the essential thing. And the way of thinking should stop looking for the remedy in the substance as such. We should increasingly say to ourselves: When there is disease, there is a process that is not embraced by the whole of the human organism. If we want a remedy, we must strengthen the person, we must subject the person to such processes that we understand exactly. That is what it comes down to.

I would now like to tell you something to which this whole introduction should lead, which may at first seem somewhat paradoxical to you, but which is necessary to be truly grasped in the whole of medical life. That is, if one studies all those processes that one has to study in the universe, one has to study them to see whether they are cosmic or telluric processes or those that vibrate between the two. We have no way of really getting to these processes if we cannot understand how the soul is structured in these three different regions of the human being. Without understanding the soul, it is actually impossible to really get to the person.

And you see, you have to take the following into account. In the adult human being, the soul is actually a much stronger unity than the physical organism. The physical organism is clearly divided into three parts: the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic-limb system. These can be distinguished from one another. But the soul fills both the head system, the nerve-sense system, and the rhythmic system, as well as the metabolic-limb system. It is only very sleepy, dreamy in the lower system, but it fills the whole human being according to its three parts. But when a person is supposed to develop a system in particular, when the soul is supposed to pour its activity into a particular system, what actually happens? It is true that a person can occupy themselves with thinking, walking, or working with their hands or legs – we have to speak of the middle system separately. But what happens to the soul when a person is actively engaged, when a person is walking? When a person walks or works with his hands, it is truly the case that the same power is expressed in all that is in the world that is called love, which remains in arms and hands, in legs and feet (gap in the text). A person must come to the boundary of his skin when he is active, which then, when it overflows beyond the human being, unfolds as love.

But what does it mean in practical terms: the human being walks? It means that he lovingly animates the human organism within his skin, that is, he energizes his astral or ego organization in an appropriate way. And when he walks, he energizes his ego organization in such a way that he draws it out to a certain extent from the physical and etheric organism. When thinking, he exercises it in such a way that he pours it into the physical and etheric organization. Man withdraws his astral and I-limbs when walking; while stretching out his legs, he withdraws the astral body and the I when walking. When he thinks, he radiates them in, of course, but only to the skin. And if we take this into account, we can say that we simply have the beginning of illness in the activity of the organism. Because when, without the person lovingly filling his organism, the astral body and I-organization withdraw from the metabolic limb system, then pathological conditions arise. If the etheric body and the physical body are filled in the head without it being caused by arbitrariness, pathological conditions will again occur. So that what a person does arbitrarily is immediately corrected. Daily life in thinking and moving: it is a continuous process of making oneself ill. Only the human organism can make itself healthy again immediately.

And an understanding of these things depends on the fact that one can now really muster so much love for what happens in the case of illness that one can look at it as what actually shows one in a physical way what the spiritual in man is. You see, when a person becomes ill in the liver, let's say he gets abnormalities in the liver, then his astral body is not sufficiently active in the liver. What is the corresponding spiritual activity where something similar happens? It occurs when I take a particularly strong inner interest in something external. At the moment when one looks at something with intense attention, one is actually suffering from liver disease at that moment. At that moment, the astral body withdraws from the liver, but it balances out again immediately. And by going through the various processes of illness in the human organism, one can always study what happens in a healthy person through their will, through their arbitrary life. If the arbitrary processes were not continually being balanced, the person would continually make themselves ill through the arbitrary processes. So one can learn what the soul and the spirit are like if one likes the processes of illness as processes of study, really loves them.

And this love of disease must, of course, be connected with something else. After all, one does not just want to study the disease; that is the less important thing. But if one can heal again, what does one have then? Then one has an insight into the way in which the divine world has come about from the most diverse spiritual activities and beings, how the world has been created. And that is the starting point for a doctor's work: to say to oneself, first of all, that disease processes lead one into knowledge of the human being. They are real processes of knowledge. But the healing processes can only be grasped with a religious attitude. To really relate to the world with a religious attitude must permeate all this medical work. Without that, knowledge will never come about in detail.

Of course, you will always be able to say: Well, yes, there we have the remedies, and anthroposophy also comes along and gives remedies, but the whole thing cannot be seen through! — It can be seen through if you take into account such things as have now been characterized, if you can permeate a real process of knowledge with the diagnosis and a real process with the therapy. These things must be taken very seriously. Only by adopting this attitude can we understand what has been put forward as what anthroposophy has to say for medicine. Of course, the details are only what can be put to practical use. But it is necessary to permeate all medical activity with this attitude that we have been talking about.

I would now like you to ask one or two more questions, so that we can move on to specific considerations tomorrow. I just wanted to touch on the qualitative side.

First question: As a doctor today, you are sometimes forced to use remedies that you don't like to use, and some of these remedies are certainly so that you shouldn't use them. Can't anything be said about remedies that you shouldn't use?

Dr. Steiner: I would like to say the following in principle to this question: There is a big difference between a remedy that I can understand how it works in the human organism and one that I cannot understand. That is a big difference. Of course, this difference is initially relative for external practice, as long as we do not have medical faculties where one goes through a course of study such as that taught by anthroposophy. Until then, it will always happen that the practical doctor will also take note of what is advised by anthroposophy: 'This is a remedy for this or that'. Of course, we would love to start by teaching the science of human nature, so that by looking at an onion we would know how the onion process works in the human organism under these or those antecedents. That would be our favorite, of course. But for the time being it is relative, and for the time being it can only be the case that a remedy is given for this or that. But from here, a remedy is hardly given without its inner effect in human nature being made known. For example, it is not said that silicic acid of equisetum is taken without knowing that it causes a kidney process. The irritated kidney is reduced in its over-irritability. So the over-irritability of the kidney is reduced when silica from equisetum is added to the kidney. This is obvious, and one should know (gap in the text). But now I ask you on the basis of trust: How do the investigations happen outside? They are done externally with the help of statistics, they are done in such a way that so and so many patients are given the remedy. Actually, we don't really know what is going on, and above all, the big difference between a real remedy and one that is not a real remedy is that with a real remedy, we understand the process and know how it affects the whole of human life. If today you heal something by any means, you cannot know what will become of it in five years. But if you understand the process completely, you do not need statistics. With our remedies, it is never a matter of statistics. You will see from the book that is about to be published how it is not dependent on statistics whether a remedy works or not, but on the study of the individual case. If you have a box of matches and try the match, you will not burn all the matches, but you know when you have burned a match that each one can burn. Likewise, you know that each process must proceed as you know it. It is therefore not a matter of statistics, but of understanding the individual case. Therefore, we will always have great difficulties when people say: Give out your remedies, they should be tried! — But that does nothing; it does not create trust in the remedies. Of course, our remedies will produce extraordinarily favorable results statistically, but the usual cases are either not correctly diagnosed or are cases where additional remedies have yet to be administered. Now, I believe that the essential thing when it comes to such remedies, which heal without being understood, is, above all, to really understand how things work. You see, it is remarkable that even the trial leads to all sorts of interesting things. Today, all kinds of remedies for syphilis appear. Arsenic plays a role everywhere. Why is that? With us you hear: Arsenic is something that stimulates the astral body to do so when it is lethargic, to stimulate it to intervene more in the physical body. This astral body is made active by introducing arsenic into the human being. These remedies, discovered by trial and error, are actually based on this effect on the astral body. Of course, you can also see how they are mistaken, how they are caused by an illusion. One relies on the penetrating effect of arsenic in cases where the astral body can really become so strong through arsenic. And in the case of syphilis, only arsenic really cures. So with all such remedies, one must always see through the effectiveness of the remedy. One should always strive to see through the effectiveness of a remedy. Our way of thinking must therefore become more and more known, and that is precisely what we want to achieve through the book, namely to introduce it into the medical way of thinking to be cultivated here and not so much to point out the remedies. It will also be important to point out the way of thinking for remedies that are not indicated by us. After all, there are good remedies outside our area, and if necessary one gives this or that.

Second question: When we were here last time, we talked about bronchial asthma. You indicated as a remedy that one should meditate on breathing. Are we justified in giving such a meditation in such cases? I didn't know what else to do, I found a saying by Goethe:

In breathing there are twofold blessings:
To draw in air, to discharge it,
The former presses, the latter refreshes;
So wonderfully is life combined.
You thank God when He presses you,
And thank Him when He releases you again.

I didn't know if that was right.

Dr. Steiner: You see, in such matters one must accept that because you are going half-spiritually or three-quarters spiritually for my sake, you also have something spiritual in your response when the attitude I have spoken of today is present. This being rooted in the earthly, then in the cosmic through the head, if the doctor has learned to think and feel spiritually and to behave in the same way towards the patient, then one can take responsibility for something like that. But if you approach the sick with an attitude that is often shaped by a materialistic world view, if you approach the sick with an attitude that is indifferent to the soul, then you can usually achieve the opposite of what you actually want to achieve with such things, even if they have nothing to do with the soul. You see, there are really many people who work with such things over and over again – and today it is not completely ruled out for doctors either – who work with such things. They will sometimes bring about relief, even if it is not a cure. If the sick person is strengthened by it, then this relief can really lead him to healing. But if people ask whether you can really achieve something like that, I have to say that if you really love the sick person, then it will be possible. But if you are indifferent towards the patient, then it will not help.

You should really have the courage to heal. That is why I have always mentioned the courage of healing here with our institute, where this is the case. It is the worst thing a doctor can do, even when a patient is very seriously ill and you want to cure him, to think of death. As a doctor, you should forbid yourself to think of the patient's death as a possibility. After all, the imponderables are so strong. It is an immensely strengthening force when you, under all circumstances, send the thought of death away to the very end – to the very end! — and think only of what I can do to save the patient's life force, to save what can be saved. If this attitude is developed, many more people will be saved than if the opposite attitude is developed, which somehow predicts death from these or those things. One should never do that. And one must indeed take such things into consideration. Then one is justified in having the courage to heal.

Question: If one works as an assistant at a hospital and has to prescribe morphine and other drugs to patients, can something one does to the patient that is wrong be counteracted by something else, by one's attitude towards the patient, for example?

Dr. Steiner: Much can be achieved through the attitude. But if the interventions are necessary with physical substances, then these should be taken directly from the plant kingdom, not derived preparations, depending on how necessary it is to use the juice of the poppy plant directly. And not with an awareness of the inner process, on the contrary, by focusing on the outer form of the plant, on what is pleasing about the plant. It is difficult to give rules in such matters, because even when one is obliged to give the remedy, one's attitude is of great importance in picking up what comes to light in the patient. You have to pay attention to the mood that arises in the patient through the remedy, then you can intervene. The patient has become more transparent through the remedy in terms of helping. We will continue tomorrow, when I ask you to ask anything you have on your mind.

[ 1 ] Our view about the sources of our knowing activity cannot help but affect the way we view our practical conduct. The human being does indeed act in accordance with thought determinants that lie within him. What he does is guided by the intentions and goals he sets himself. But it is entirely obvious that these goals, intentions, ideals, etc., will bear the same character as the rest of man's thought-world. Dogmatic science will therefore offer a truth for human conduct of an essentially different character than that resulting from our epistemology. If the truths the human being attains in science are determined by a factual necessity having its seat outside thinking, then the ideals upon which he bases his actions will also be determined in the same way. The human being then acts in accordance with laws he cannot verify objectively: he imagines some norm that is prescribed for his actions from outside. But this is the nature of any commandment that the human being has to observe. Dogma, as principle of conduct, is moral commandment.

[ 2 ] With our epistemology as a foundation, the matter is quite different. Our epistemology recognizes no other foundation for truths than the thought content lying within them. When a moral ideal comes about, therefore, it is the inner power lying within the content of this ideal that guides our actions. It is not because an ideal is given us as law that we act in accordance with it, but rather because the ideal, by virtue of it s content, is active in us, leads us. The stimulus to action does not lie outside of us; it lies within us. In the case of a commandment of duty we would feel ourselves subject to it; we would have to act in a particular way because it ordered us to do so. There, “should” comes first and then “want to,” which must submit itself to the “should.” According to our view, this is not the case. Man's willing is sovereign. It carries out only what lies as thought-content within the human personality. The human being does not let himself be given laws by any outer power; he is his own lawgiver.

[ 3 ] And, according to our world view, who, in fact, should give them to him? The ground of the world has poured itself completely out into the world; it has not withdrawn from the world in order to guide it from outside; it drives the world from inside; it has not withheld itself from the world. The highest form in which it arises within the reality of ordinary life is thinking and, along with thinking, the human personality. If, therefore, the world ground has goals, they are identical with the goals that the human being sets himself in living and in what he does. It is not by searching out this or that commandment of the guiding power of the world that he acts in accordance with its intentions but rather through acting in accordance with his own insights. For within these insights there lives that guiding power of the world. It does not live as will somewhere outside the human being; it has given up all will of its own in order to make everything dependent upon man's will. In order for the human being to be able to be his own lawgiver, he must give up all thoughts of such things as extra-human determining powers of the world, etc.

[ 4 ] Let us take this opportunity to call attention to the excellent article by Kreyenbuehl in Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. 18, no. 3, 1882.¹ This explains correctly how the maxims for our actions result altogether from the direct determinations of our individuality; how everything that is ethically great is not imposed by the power of moral law but rather is carried out under the direct impulse of an individual idea.

[ 5 ] Only with this view is true spiritual activity possible for the human being. If man does not bear within himself the grounds for his actions, but rather must conduct himself according to commandments, then he acts under compulsion, he stands under necessity, almost like a mere nature being.

[ 6 ] Our philosophy is therefore pre-eminently a philosophy of spiritual activity.^a9 First it allows theoretically how all forces, etc., that supposedly direct the world from outside must fall away; it then makes the human being into his own master in the very best sense of the word. When a person acts morally, this is not for us the fulfillment of duty but rather the manifestation of his completely free nature. The human being does not act because he ought, but rather be cause he wants to. Goethe had this view in mind when he said: “Lessing, who resentfully felt many a limitation, has one of his characters say, ‘No one has to have to.’ A witty, jovial man said, ‘Whoever wants to, has to.’ A third, admittedly a cultivated person, added, ‘Whoever has insight, also wants to.’” Thus there is no impetus for our actions other than our insight. Without any kind of compulsion entering in, the free human being acts in accordance with his insight, in accordance with commandments that he gives himself.

[ 7 ] The well-known Kant-Schiller controversy revolved around these truths. Kant stood upon the standpoint of duty's commandments. He believed it a degradation of moral law to make it dependent upon human subjectivity. In his view man acts morally only when he renounces all subjective impulses in his actions and bends his neck solely to the majesty of duty. Schiller regarded this view as a degradation of human nature. Is human nature really so evil that it must completely push aside its own impulses in this way when it wants to be moral? The world view of Schiller and Goethe can only be in accord with the view we have put forward. The origin of man's actions is to be sought within himself.

[ 8 ] Therefore in history, whose subject, after all, is man, one should not speak about outer influences upon his actions, about ideas that live in a certain time, etc., and least of all about a plan underlying history. History is nothing but the evolution of human actions, views, etc. “In all ages it is only individuals who have worked for science, not the age itself. It was the age that executed Socrates by poison; the age that burned Hus; ages have always remained the same,” says Goethe. All a priori constructing of plans that supposedly underlie history is in conflict with the historical method as it results from the nature of history. The goal of this method is to become aware of what human beings have contributed to the progress of their race, to experience the goals a certain personality has set himself, the direction he has given to his age. History is to be based entirely upon man's nature. Its willing, its tendencies are to be understood. Our science of knowledge totally excludes the possibility of inserting into history a purpose such as, for example, that human beings are drawn up from a lower to a higher level of perfection, and so on. In the same way, to our view it seems erroneous to present historical events as a succession of causes and effects like facts of nature the way Herder does in his Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Mankind. The laws of history are in fact of a much higher nature. A fact of physics is determined by another fact in such a way that the law stands over the phenomena. A historical fact, as something ideal, is determined by something ideal. There cause and effect, after all, can be spoken of only if one clings entirely to externals. Who could think that he is giving an accurate picture by calling Luther the cause of the Reformation? History is essentially a science of ideals. Its reality is, after all, ideas. Therefore devotion to the object is the only correct method. Any going beyond the object is unhistorical.

[ 9 ] Psychology, ethnology, and history ^a10 are the major forms of the humanities. Their methods, as we have seen, are based upon the direct apprehension of ideal reality. The object of their study is the idea, the spiritual, just as the law of nature was the object of inorganic science, and the typus of organic science.

• 1. Ethical-Spiritual Activity in Kant, Mercury Press, 1986. –Ed.
• a9. The ideas of this philosophy have been developed further in my later Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894). (Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, Anthroposophic Press, 1986)
• a10. After having worked through the different areas of what I call “anthroposophy,” I would now have to add anthroposophy to these were I writing this little book today. Forty years ago, as I was writing it, there stood before my mind's eye as “psychology”—in an unusual sense of the word, to be sure—something that included within itself the contemplation of the whole “spirit world” (pneumatology). But one should not infer from this that I wanted to exclude this “spirit world” from man's knowledge back then.

In connection with the Congress held by the “Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society” in Budapest in the year 1909, Dr. Steiner gave a Lecture-Course entitled: “Theosophy and Occultism of the Rosicrucians.” The Mystery of Golgotha is there indicated as the great turning-point between the old, now already fading Mystery-wisdom and the wisdom in its new form of revelation wherein account is taken of the faculty of thought possessed by a maturer humanity and of the advance of culture and civilisation. Theosophia, the Divine Wisdom, could not, as in earlier times, flow as inner illumination into the hardened constitution of man. Intellect, the more recent faculty of the soul, was directed to the world of sense and its phenomena. Theosophy was rejected by the scholars with a shrug of the shoulders and the very word brought a supercilious smile from the monists. Dr. Steiner, however, was trying to restore to this word its whole weight and spiritual significance and to show how the roots of all later knowledge lie in Theosophy, how it unites East and West, how in it all the creeds are integral parts of one great harmony.

This had also been the fundamental conception of the Founder of the Theosophical Society but she understood nothing of the essence of Christianity and disputed its unique significance. Her tendency to place too much reliance upon spiritualistic communications drew her into the net of an oriental stream only too ready to use this instrument for its own ends—to begin with under the cloak of Neo-Buddhism then represented in the person of Charles Leadbeater, a former priest of the Anglican Church. Annie Besant, a pupil of Charles Bradlaugh, a free-thinker and the most brilliant orator of the day in the field of political and social reform, had also been so deeply influenced by spiritualistic communications that on the advice of William Stead she went to Madame Blavatsky towards the end of the latter's life and became her ardent follower. Stead's spiritualistic circle was influential and the Theosophical Society, with its much purer spiritual foundations, had here a dangerous rival.

Dr. Steiner brought light to bear upon all these developments, upon their aims and aberrations, and raised Theosophy to heights far transcending the narrow sphere of the Theosophical Society. Alarmed by this, the Indian inspirers behind the Adyar Society, with their nationalistic aims, took their own measures.—The imminence of a return of Christ was announced and the assertion made that he would incarnate in an Indian boy. A newly founded Order, the “Star in the East,” using the widespread organisation of the Theosophical Society, was expected to achieve the aim that had met with failure in Palestine.

Not very long after the Budapest Congress, these developments began to be felt in the sphere of Dr. Steiner's lecturing activities. Disquieted by the beginnings of the propaganda for the Star in the East, Groups begged Dr. Steiner to speak about these matters. This caused alarm to the organisers of the Genoa Congress, who thought that the scientific as well as the esoteric discussions with Dr. Steiner would be too dangerous a ground, and for extremely threadbare reasons the Congress was cancelled at the last moment. Many of those taking part were already on their way—we too. A number of Groups in Switzerland took advantage of this opportunity to ask Dr. Steiner for lectures. They wanted to understand the meaning and significance of the Michael Impulse which denotes the turning-point in the historic evolution of the Mystery-wisdom. The Intelligence ruled over in the spiritual world by the hierarchy of Michael had now come down to humanity. It was for men to receive this Intelligence consciously into their impulses of will and thenceforward to play their part in shaping a future wherein the human “I” will achieve union with the Divine “I.” For this goal of the future men must be prepared, a transformation wrought in their souls; they must “change their hearts and minds.” To bring this about was the task of Rudolf Steiner. The moment had arrived for treading the path which liberates the Spirit from the grip of the material powers. The first healthy step to be taken along this path by the pupil of spiritual knowledge, is study.

As the theme chosen for Genoa had been “From Buddha to Christ,” it was natural that the lectures now given in Switzerland should shed the light of Spiritual Science not only upon the earlier connections between the Buddha and Christ Jesus but also upon the lasting connections indicated by the Essene wisdom contained in the Gospels. This is the theme which gives these studies their special character—which could only be brought out by outlining the historical development of the Mystery-wisdom. The ancient revelations of the Mysteries had shed light into many forms of culture, but were now spent; symptoms of decay and increasing sterility of thought were everywhere in evidence. Then, from heights of Spirit, the Michael Impulse came down to the Earth—in order gradually to stir and flame through the hearts of men. The intellect was pervaded by spiritual fire, the lower human “I” lifted nearer to the ideal of times to come: union with the Divine “I.” To awaken understanding of these goals, to establish them firmly on the ground of their spiritual origins and to place them in living pictures before the souls of men—such was the task of Rudolf Steiner.

This brought the inevitable counterblow from the opposing powers; into this they knew they must drive their wedge. The development of the human being in freedom, this gift bestowed by Michael, must be checked and the hearts and minds of men incited to resistance. In his Four Mystery Plays, Rudolf Steiner has given us living pictures of this: the human being between Lucifer and Ahriman—now succumbing to their promptings, now overcoming them, but nevertheless bearing them in the soul like a poison that may at any time begin to work. We too shall continue to bear this picture and its substance in our souls.

The full content of the lectures, however, has not been preserved, for we possess no good transcriptions. The fact that no really reliable and expert stenographist was available at the time seems like a counterblow from the opposing powers. Besides the abbreviated reports of the Cassel lectures, we have in some cases only fragments, in others, scattered notes strung together. But the essential threads have been preserved and an attempt at compilation has been made. The attempt does not always succeed from the point of view of convincing style, but the impetus for effort in thought and study will be all the stronger.

The activities of the Star in the East led, finally, to the exclusion of the German section from the Theosophical Society; this, however, had been preceded by the forming of a Union which included people in other countries who opposed this piece of Adyar sectarianism and led to the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society. For a time, care was necessary to prevent confusion as between the two Societies and so for the Movement associated with him, Rudolf Steiner chose the name Anthroposophy—the Divine Wisdom finding its fulfilment in man. Theosophy and Anthroposophy are one, provided the soul has cast away its dress. And Rudolf Steiner showed us how this can be done.

The new Indian Messiah soon cast off the shackles of the renown that had been forced upon him and retired to private life in California. Annie Besant was obliged to renounce her cherished dream and died at a very great age. It is rumoured that the question of the dissolution of the Adyar Society was considered but that this proved impossible owing to the extensive material possessions. Jinarajadasa, my good friend from the days of the founding of the Italian Section, succeeded Annie Besant as President. The branch of the Theosophical Society which had seceded at the time of the Judge conflict and to which Madame Blavatsky's niece belonged, had found in Mrs. Catharine Tingley a leader of energy and initiative, but she too had died.

The old conditions have now faded away. Those grotesque edifices of phantasy can no longer be associated with the Anthroposophical, formerly Theosophical, Movement, for they have crumbled to pieces. We can allow the word Theosophy again to come to its own, as did Rudolf Steiner when he was trying to restore to this word its primary and true significance.

Besides laying emphasis on the essential character of Spiritual Science in the post-Christian era, the aim of the lectures given in 1911 and 1912 was to explain karma as the flow of destiny and to point to its intimate workings. The lines of development running through the lectures have survived only as pictures of memory; the transcriptions often failed to catch the threads of the logical sequence and the notes or headings jotted down and collected here and there are really no more than indications. But the direction of the spiritual impulses given by Dr. Steiner has been preserved, and justifies, maybe, the attempt at compilation. Through meditative study these impulses will be able to work in us and deepen our souls.

[ 1 ] When Man looks back over his own evolution and reviews in spirit the peculiar character which his spiritual life has assumed during the last five centuries, he cannot but recognize—even in his ordinary consciousness, however dimly—that in these five centuries he has come to a critical turning-point in the whole earthly evolution of mankind.

[ 2 ] In the last letter I pointed out this critical turn in evolution from one of its aspects. One may look back namely into earlier ages of this evolution; then we observe how a transformation took place in that soul-force in Man which to-day is employed as the force of Intelligence.

[ 3 ] Thoughts now appear within the field of human consciousness—dead, abstract Thoughts. These Thoughts are tied to the physical human body. Man must recognize them as his own progeny.

[ 4 ] When, in days of yore, Man turned his soul's gaze in the direction where now his own Thoughts appear to him, he then beheld divine Spirit-beings. He saw his whole existence bound up with these Beings, in all that he was, down to his physical body. He must confess himself the product of these Beings,—not only their product in all that he was, but also in all that he did. Man had no Will of his own; all that he did was a manifestation of Divine Will.

[ 5 ] Step by step—as described in the last letter—the stage has been reached of a personal Will of Man's own for which the time began about five hundred years ago.

[ 6 ] The last stage, however, differs more markedly from all the preceding ones than these do from one another.

[ 7 ] As the Thoughts pass over into the physical body, they lose their aliveness; they become dead—spiritual dead constructions. Previously, whilst pertaining to Man, they were yet at the same time organs of the Divine Spirit-beings, to whom Man himself pertained. They willed in Man as living forms of Being. And hence Man felt himself through them livingly bound to the spiritual world.

[ 8 ] With his dead Thoughts, he feels himself released from the spiritual world,—he feels himself planted down completely into the physical world.

[ 9 ] But hereby he is at the same time brought into the sphere of the Ahrimanic Mind. The Ahrimanic form of mind has no great power in those regions, where the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies keep Man within their own immediate sphere,—either by working within him themselves, as in primeval times, or, as later, by the brightness of their ensouled or living reflection. So long as the workings of super-sensible Beings continue in this way to enter into all the workings of Man,—until, that is, about the fifteenth century A.D.—the powers of Ahriman find within the field of human evolution only a faint echo, one might say, of their strength.

[ 10 ]
The picture drawn by the Persian world-view of the workings of Ahriman, is in no contradiction to the above statement. For what is meant in the Persian view of Ahriman's workings, is not something going on in the evolution of the human soul, but within the neighbouring world, that borders on Man's soul-world. From this neighbouring world of spirit the web of Ahriman's weaving undoubtedly sent it s threads across into the world of the human soul, but did not directly encroach upon it.

[ 11 ] Any such direct encroachment only became possible in the period that began some five hundred years ago.

[ 12 ] Thus Man stands at the end of a stream of evolution in which his own human being has been built up by a form of Divine spirit-being which passes finally into the abstract Intelligence-Personality of Man, and there, so far as itself is concerned, died out.

[ 13 ] Man has not remained in those spheres where he had his own first source in the Divine Spirit-being.

[ 14 ] What was thus accomplished five hundred years ago for Man's consciousness, had already taken place on a broader scale throughout his general being at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha entered upon its earthly manifestation. This was the time when human evolution began—imperceptibly as yet for the consciousness of most people of that period—to slide gradually down, out of a world where Ahriman has but little power, into one where he has very much. It was in the fifteenth century that this downslide, from one world-stratum into another, reached its final completion.

[ 15 ] Here, in this world-stratum, it becomes possible for Ahriman to exert his influence upon Man, and with disastrous effects, because in this stratum the divine influences congenial to Man have died out. But there was no other possible way for Man to arrive at the development of his free will, save by withdrawing to a sphere in which those Divine Spirit-beings had no life, who were involved with him from his origin.

[ 16 ] In the very essence of this human evolution, cosmically viewed, lies the Mystery of the Sun. With the Sun, and all that Man—down to the important turning-point in his evolution—could see in the Sun, were involved the divine-spiritual Beings of his origin. These Beings have detached themselves from the Sun, and left on it only their extinct remains. So that what Man now receives through the sun, taken up into his bodily system, is the power of dead Thoughts only.

[ 17 ] But these Divine Beings have sent Christ from the Sun to Earth. He, for the salvation of mankind, has united His own living Being with the deadness of divine existence in the kingdom of Ahriman. Mankind have thus the twofold possibility, which is the pledge of their freedom: Either to turn to Christ in that mind and spirit which was theirs subconsciously when they came down from the vision of supersensible life in the Spirit until they could use Intelligence,—but to do this now in consciousness. Or else, in their detachment from Spirit-life, to seek to enjoy the sense of themselves—and thereby fall a prey to the Powers of Ahriman and be carried in the Ahrimanic direction of evolution.

[ 18 ] Such is the situation of mankind since the beginning of the fifteenth century. It has been preparing—for everything proceeds gradually in evolution—ever since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, that greatest of all earthly events, which is designed to save Man from the destruction to which he is unavoidably exposed in order to become a free being.

[ 19 ] Now it is true to say: what has been done by mankind in this situation hitherto has been achieved half unconsciously. In this half-conscious way it has led to what is good in a view of Nature living in abstract ideas, and also to many equally beneficent principles in the conduct of practical life. [ 20 ] But the age has gone by, when Man could afford to pursue his existence unconsciously in the dangerous Ahrimanic sphere.

[ 21 ] The scientific observer of the spiritual world is to-day obliged to rouse mankind's attention to the spiritual fact that Michael has now succeeded to the guidance of human affairs. Whatever Michael performs, is performed in such a way as to exert no influence from his part upon man; but they are free to follow him, and so, in freedom, with the Christ-Power to find their way out again from Ahriman's sphere, which they entered of necessity.

[ 22 ] Whoever honestly, from the innermost core of his soul, can feel himself one with Anthroposophy, is a true interpreter of this Michael-Phenomenon. Anthroposophy is intended to be the message of this Michael-Mission.

Leading Thoughts

[ 23 ] 1. Michael travels upwards again over the paths which Mankind traveled downwards through the successive steps of the spirit's evolution to the exercise of Intelligence. Only, by Michael, the Will will be led up the track, which was descended by Wisdom until she came to Intelligence, her final stage.

[ 24 ] 2. From this point in the world's evolution, Michael merely shows his road, so that Mankind may walk on it in Freedom. And this is what distinguishes this particular regency of Michael's from the previous regencies of all other archangels—indeed from all those of Michael himself until now. These other regencies worked as active forces within Man, and did not merely show him their own workings; so that Man in those times could not be free in his.

[ 25 ] 3. To recognize this, is the task of Man at this present day, so that with his entire soul he may find his own right spiritual road during the age of Michael.

[ 1 ] The downfall of the Roman Empire, accompanied by the appearance on the scene of peoples moving on from the East (the so-called Migration of the Peoples,) is an historic phenomenon on which the eyes of Man must be turned again and again in enquiry. For the present time still contains much that is after-effect of those tremendous occurrences.

[ 2 ] But it is just here that an understanding of what happened is not possible through a mere external study of history. One must look into the souls of the human beings engaged in this ‘migration’ and in the downfall of the Roman Empire.

[ 3 ] Greece and Rome are at the flower of their civilization during the period when in mankind at large the Intellectual or Mind-Soul is developing. The Greeks and Romans are indeed the more especial bearers of this development. But the evolution of this stage of the soul amongst these peoples is not such as to have in it a living seed which could properly evolve out of itself the Spiritual Soul. Every treasure of the soul and spirit latent in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul is brought in living profusion to the light of day in the civilization of the Greeks and Romans. But to carry its life-stream by its own innate power over into the Spiritual Soul—that it cannot do. [ 4 ] The stage of the spiritual soul naturally emerges in due course. Only it is as though this Spiritual Soul were not able to arise spontaneously out of the personality of the Greek or Roman, but rather, as though it had to be implanted in him from without.

[ 5 ] The state of union with, and again of detachment from, the divine spiritual beings—so often spoken of in these letters—takes place in the course of the ages with varying intensity. In old days, it was a power that intervened with very forcible effect in the evolution of human affairs. As it enters into the Greek and Roman life of the first centuries of Christianity, the power is a weaker one. Nevertheless it is there. So long as he was developing to the full the Intellectual or Mind-Soul within him, the Greek or roman experienced—not consciously, but with important effects for the soul—a feeling of detachment from the divine-spiritual form of being, an emancipation of his own human being. This came to an end in the first centuries of Christianity. The first glimmering dawn of the Spiritual Soul, because the Spiritual soul itself was not yet able to be received into the human being.

[ 6 ] And so they felt this Christian content as something that came ready-given to them from without, from the spiritual outer world, not as something with which they grew together and became identified through their own inherent powers of knowledge.

[ 7 ] It was otherwise with the peoples now coming into history out of the North-East. They had passed through the stage of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul in a condition which, in their case, was felt as one of dependence on the spirit-world. They first began to feel something of human independence when the nascent powers of the Spiritual Soul dawned in their first Christian beginnings. Amongst these people, the Spiritual Soul made its appearance as something closely bound up with the very being of Man. They felt themselves in the full joyous expansion of inward power when the Spiritual Soul was awakening to life within them.

[ 8 ] Into the first, fresh life of the dawning Spiritual Soul amongst these peoples fell the inner content of Christianity. They felt it as something coming to life within their souls, not as something ready-given from without.

[ 9 ] Such was the tone of mind in which these people came to the Roman Empire and all that this involved. Such was the Arian mood as contrasted with the Athanasian. A profound contrast was here emerging in human history and evolution.

[ 10 ] In the Spiritual Soul of the Greek and Roman, external to the man himself, the divine spirit-being began its work, not completely uniting with the earthly life but only raying in upon it. In the just dawning Spiritual Soul of the Franks, the Germanic tribes, etc., there was at work—but as yet faintly—so much of divine spirit, as was able to unite itself with the human being.

[ 11 ] What happened next was that the form of Christian content which dwelt in the Spiritual Soul hovering over and outside of Man, spread abroad in life; whilst that which was united with men's souls remained something that abode in the inner mind as an incentive, an impulse biding the time of its full development, which can only come with the attainment of a certain stage in the Spiritual Soul's evolution

[ 12 ] The period from the first centuries of Christianity down to the Age of the Spiritual Soul is a time when the dominant spiritual life of mankind is one which hovers above Man. It is a spiritual content with which he cannot connect himself knowingly, through the exercise of his own powers of mind. Accordingly, he establishes an external connection; he ‘explains’ this spiritual content, and examines in thought the precise limits where the soul's powers fall short of uniting with it in clear knowledge. He draws a boundary line between the province over which his knowledge reaches, and that where it does not reach. The result is a deliberate abstention from the employment of those soul-powers which rise with knowledge into the world of spirit. And so at last there comes a time, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when with the very powers that should be directed to spiritual realities men repudiate all spiritual reality, and turn away from the spirit with their life of knowledge altogether. They begin to live in those soul-powers only, which are directed to things perceptible by the outer senses.

[ 13 ] Dull grew men's powers of knowledge, blunted to spiritual things, in the eighteenth century more especially.

[ 14 ] The thinkers lose the spiritual content to their Ideas. In the Idealist philosophy of the first half of the nineteenth century, they represent the spirit-void ideas themselves as the creative reality and content of the World—thus Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Or else they refer to a Supersensible which fades away because the spirit is not in it—thus Spencer, John Stewart Mill and others. Ideas are dead when they do not seek the living Spirit.

[ 15 ] The spiritual eye for the Spiritual is, in fact, lost.

[ 16 ] A continuation of the old way of spirit-knowledge is not possible. The soul's powers, as the Spiritual Soul develops in them, must strive through to their own newly generated union, living and direct, with the spirit-world. This very striving is the essence and intention of Anthroposophy.

[ 17 ] In the spiritual life of the present age it is precisely the leading people who are most at a loss to know the meaning of Anthroposophy, or what its object is. And in this way large circles, who follows these leaders, are also kept aloof. The leaders live amid a content of soul and mind which has gradually lost the habit of using man's spiritual powers. With these people, it is as though one were to try and induce a man who is paralyzed to make use of his paralyzed organ. For it was paralysis that set in during the time from the sixteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth—paralysis of the higher powers of knowledge. And men remained all-conscious of it; they regarded the one-sided application of their powers of knowledge to the sense-world as an important step in human progress.

Leading Thoughts

[ 18 ] The Greeks and Romans are the peoples specially predisposed for the evolution of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul. They develop this stage of the soul to full completion. But they have not the living seed within themselves, through which to pass on in direct line to the Spiritual Soul. Their soul-life is completely merged in the Intellectual or Mind-Soul.

[ 19 ] What comes instead—during the time from the rise of Christianity to the age of evolving the Spiritual Soul—is the reign above of a spirit-world which does not unite with the human soul-powers. These soul-powers ‘explain’ the spirit world, but do not experience it.

[ 20 ] The peoples moving down upon the Roman Empire from the North-East in the so-called ‘Migration of the Peoples,’ take hold of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul more in the life of Feeling. Meanwhile, embedded in this Feeling element, the Spiritual Soul is developing its powers in their souls. The inner life of these peoples is waiting for the time when a complete union of the human soul with the spiritual world will once more be possible.

DR STEINER:

My dear friends!

Once again as before we begin with the verses we have taken into ourselves:

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.

And drawing all this together in the remembrance of the Event of Golgotha which gives meaning to the whole of earthly evolution:

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

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

And we imprint this into ourselves:

[Rudolf Steiner writes on the blackboard as he speaks. See Facsimile 4, Page XVI bottom.]

Light Divine,
Christ-Sun,

We imprint it in such a way that we especially relate to it the closing words, which will be spoken in their threefoldness once more tomorrow: how this Light Divine, this Sun of Christ shine forth so that like shining suns they can be heard from East, West, North, South. To this Light Divine and this Sun of Christ we relate especially the closing words which were spoken on the first day:

The spirits of the elements hear it
from
East, West, North, South:
May human beings hear it!

[As shown on the blackboard]

Light Divine
Chr.-Sun
The spirits of the elements hear it
from
E. W. N. S.
May human beings hear it!

DR STEINER: We come now, my dear friends, to the reports announced yesterday. Would Herr Maier please give his report first.

Dr Rudolf Maier, Stuttgart, speaks about ‘The Connection of Magnetism with Light’. [Note 66]

DR STEINER: It will be of the greatest importance that a truly anthroposophical method should be made customary in the different branches of scientific life by those individuals who are called to these branches within our anthroposophical circles. Indeed, seen from a certain point of view, this is of the utmost importance. If you seek the source of the great resistance of our time that has been appearing for decades against any kind of spiritual-scientific view, you will find that this resistance comes from the different branches of natural science. These different branches of natural science have developed in isolation, without any view of the world in general.

Round about the middle of the nineteenth century a general despair began to gain ground in connection with an overall view of the world. People said: All earlier overall views of the world contradict one another, and none of them has led anywhere; now it is time to develop the sciences purely on an exact foundation, without reference to any view of the world.

Half a century and more has passed since then, and now any inclination to unite a view of the world with science has disappeared from human minds. Even when scientific research itself urges an attempt to be made, it turns out to be quite impossible because there is insufficient depth in the spiritual-scientific realm.

If it should become possible for Anthroposophy to give to the different branches of science impulses of method which lead to certain research results, then one of the main obstacles to spiritual research existing in the world will have been removed. That is why it is so important for work of the right kind to be undertaken in the proper anthroposophical sense.

Today there is an abyss between art and science; but within science, too, there is an abyss between, for instance, physiology and physics. All these abysses will be bridged if scientific work is done in the right way in our circles. Therefore from a general anthroposophical point of view we must interest ourselves in these different things as much as our knowledge and capacities will allow. A scientific impulse will have to emanate from the Anthroposophical Society. This must be made evident at the moment when we want to take the Anthroposophical Society into entirely new channels.

Now, dear friends, since our stomach needs a very tiny interval between the courses of this feast of spirit and soul, we shall ask Frau Dr Kolisko to give her report in two or three minutes' time.

DR STEINER: May I now ask Frau Dr Kolisko to give her report on her special field.

Frau Dr Kolisko speaks about the biological work of the research institute in Stuttgart, ‘The Effects of Microorganisms’. [Note 67]

DR STEINER: Now, my dear friends, you have seen that quiet work is going on amongst us on scientific questions and that it is indeed possible to provide out of Anthroposophy a stimulus for science in a way that is truly needed today. But in the present situation of the Anthroposophical Movement such things are really only possible because there are people like Frau Dr Kolisko who take on the work in such a devoted and selfless way. If you think about it, you will come to realize what a tremendous amount of work is involved in ascertaining all these sequences of data which can then be amalgamated to form the curve in the graph which is the needed result.

These experiments are, from an anthroposophical point of view, details leading to a totality which is needed by science today more urgently than can be said. Yet if we continue to work as we have been doing at present in our research institute, then perhaps in fifty, or maybe seventy-five, years we shall come to the result that we need, which is that innumerable details go to make up a whole. This whole will then have a bearing not only on the life of knowledge but also on the whole of practical life as well.

People have no idea today how deeply all these things can affect practical daily life in such realms as the production of what human beings need in order to live or the development of methods of healing and so on.

Now you might say that the progress of mankind has always gone forward at a slow pace and that there is not likely to be any difference in this field. However, with civilization in its present brittle and easily destructible state, it could very well happen that in fifty or seventy-five years' time the chance will have been missed for achieving what so urgently needs to be achieved. In the face of the speed at which we are working and having to work, because we can only work if there are such devoted colleagues as Frau Dr Kolisko—a speed which might lead to results in fifty, or perhaps seventy-five years—in the face of this speed, let me therefore express not a wish, not even a possibility, but merely, perhaps, an illusion, which is that it would be possible to achieve the necessary results in five or ten years. And I am convinced that if it were possible for us to create the necessary equipment and the necessary institutes and to have the necessary colleagues, as many as possible to work out of this spirit, then we could succeed in achieving in five or ten years what will now take us fifty or seventy-five years. The only thing we would need for this work would be 50 to 75 million Francs. Then we would probably be able to do the work in a tenth of the time. As I said, I am not expressing this as a wish nor even as a possibility, but merely as an illusion, though a very realistic illusion. If we had 75 million Francs we could achieve what has to be achieved. This is something that we should at least think about.

In a few minutes I shall continue by starting to give a few indications about the idea of the future building in Dornach, indications which I shall continue tomorrow.

(A short interval follows, before Dr Steiner's lecture.)

The cultural ingredient that now permeates our whole external civilization began to rise to the surface at the turn of the 18th and 19th century. Think of the immense contrast between the present time and that time when a certain physicist prepared a frog's leg which accidentally came into contact with the window … the frog's leg quivered, and so he discovered electricity! How long ago was that?—Less than 150 years ago, yet electricity is now a cultural ingredient. Indeed, it is far more than this! You see, when the men of my age were young fellows, not one of them dreamt of speaking of the atoms in the sphere of physics otherwise than of tiny, unelastic, or even elastic spheres colliding with one another, and so forth, and then they calculated the results of these collisions. At that time, no one would have dreamt of conceiving the atom without further ado in the way which we conceive of it today: namely, as an electron, as an entity consisting altogether of electricity.

Human thought has spun itself altogether into electricity, and this occurred not so very long ago. Today we speak of the atoms as if they were small suns, centres around which electricity accumulates; we speak of electrons. Thus we suspect electricity everywhere, when we penetrate into the world's mechanism. This is where our civilization so closely connects itself with a definite manner of thinking. If people would not travel on electric tramcars they would not think that the atoms are full of electricity.

If we now observe the connections that existed before the present age of electricity, we may say that they allowed the natural scientist of that time to imagine, at least abstractly, the spiritual in Nature. Although a tiny rest of scholastic realism remained, electricity then began to affect man's nerves, expelling from them everything that tended towards the spiritual.

Things went still further. Even light, the honest light that surges through the world's spaces, was gradually defamed and brought into the ill repute of resembling electricity! When we speak today, as I am speaking now, then the people whose heads are deeply submerged in the electric wave of civilization necessarily believe that this is utter nonsense. But this is only due to the fact that the people whose heads consider such things as nonsense drag themselves along (like dogs whose tongues are hanging out because of the heat) with a load of history, a load of historical concepts on their backs, so that they cannot speak in an unprejudiced way, from out of the immediate present.

You see, when we speak of electricity, we enter a sphere that presents a different aspect to the imaginative vision than that of the other spheres of Nature. So long as man remained within the light, within the world of sound, that is to say, in the spheres of optics and acoustics, it was not necessary to judge morally that which appeared in a stone, a plant, or an animal, either as colours in the sphere of light, or as sound in the world of tones; it was not necessary to judge these things morally, because he still possessed an echo, weak though it was, of the reality of concepts and ideas. Electricity, however, drove out this echo. And if today we are, on the one hand, unable to discover a reality in the world of moral impulses, we are, on the other hand, even less able to discover a moral essence in that sphere which is now considered to be the most important constituent of Nature.

Today, if we were to ascribe a real power to moral impulses, if we were to say that they contain a force enabling them to become sensory reality in the same way in which a plant's seed becomes sensory reality, we would almost be looked upon as fools. And if someone were to come along today and ascribe moral impulses to the forces of Nature, he would be looked upon as a complete fool! But if you have ever allowed an electric current to pass through your nervous system, so as to experience it consciously with a genuine power of vision, you will realize that electricity in Nature is not merely a current but that electricity in Nature is, at the same time, a moral element. When we enter the sphere of electricity, we penetrate simultaneously into a moral sphere. If you connect your knuckle at any point with a closed current, you will immediately feel that your inner life extends to an inner sphere of your being, where the moral element comes to the surface, so that the electricity pertaining to the human being cannot be sought in any other sphere than that sphere which is also the source of the moral impulses. Those who can experience the whole extent of electricity, experience at the same time the moral element in Nature. Modern physicists have conjured and juggled about with electricity in a strange way, without the least suspicion. They imagine the atom as something electric, and through the general state of consciousness of the present time, they forget that whenever they think of an atom as an electric entity, they must ascribe a moral impulse to this atom, indeed, to every atom. At the same time, they must raise it to the rank of a moral entity. …But I am not speaking correctly ... for, in reality, when we transform an atom into an electron, we do not transform it into a moral, but into an IMMORAL entity! Electricity contains, to be sure, moral impulses, impulses of Nature, but these impulses are IMMORAL; they are instincts of evil, which must be overcome by the higher world.

The greatest contrast to electricity is LIGHT. If we look upon light as electricity we confuse good and evil. We lose sight of the true conception of evil in the order of Nature, if we do not realize that through the electrification of the atoms we transform them into carriers of evil; we do not only transform them into carriers of death, as explained in my last lecture, but into carriers of evil. When we think of them as atoms, in general, when we imagine matter in the form of atoms, we transform these atoms into carriers of death; but when we electrify matter, Nature is conceived as something evil. For electric atoms are little demons of Evil. This, however, does not tell us much. For it does not express the fact that the modern explanation of Nature set out along a path that really unites it with Evil. Those strange people at the end of the Middle Ages, who were so much afraid of Agrippa von Nettesheim, Trithem of Sponheim, and others, so that they saw them walking about with Faust's malevolent poodle, expressed this very clumsily, but although their thoughts may have been wrong, their feelings were not altogether wrong. For, when we listen to a modern physicist blandly explaining that Nature consists of electrons, we merely listen to him explaining that Nature really consists of little demons of Evil! And if we acknowledge Nature in this form, we raise Evil to the rank of the ruling world-divinity.

As modern men who do not proceed in accordance with old traditional ideas, but in accordance with reality, we would come across the fact that the electric element in Nature is endowed with morality in the same way in which moral impulses are endowed with life, with a life of Nature, so that, later on, they take on real shape, become a real world. In the same way in which the moral element one day acquires real shape in Nature, so the electric element once contained a moral reality. If we contemplate electricity today, we contemplate the images of a past moral reality that have turned into something evil.

If Anthroposophy were to adopt a fanatic attitude, if Anthroposophy were ascetic, it would thunder against the modern civilization based on electricity. Of course, this would be nonsense, for only world-conceptions that do not reckon with reality can speak in that way. They may say: “Oh, this is ahrimanic! Let us avoid it!”—But this can only be done in an abstract way. For the very people who thunder against Ahriman, and tell us to beware of him, go downstairs after their sectarian meeting and enter an electric tramcar! So that all their thundering against Ahriman, no matter how holy it may sound, is (excuse the trivial expression) simply rubbish. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that we must live with Ahriman. But we must live with him in the right way, that is to say, we must not allow him to have the upper hand.

The final scene of my first Mystery Play can show you what it means to lack consciousness in certain things.¹ Read this final scene once more, and you will see that it is a different matter whether I lull myself in unconsciousness over a fact, or whether I grasp it consciously. Ahriman and Lucifer have the greatest power over us if we do not know anything about them, so that they can handle us, without our being aware of it. This is expressed in the final scene of my Mystery Play. The ahrimanic electricity can therefore overwhelm civilized man only so long as he blandly and unconsciously electrifies the atoms and thinks that this is quite harmless. But in so doing, he does not realize that he is imagining Nature as a complex of little demons of Evil.

When even the light is conceived of electrically, as has been done in a recent modern theory, then the qualities of Evil are attributed to the divinity of Good. It is really terrifying to see to what a great extent the modern contemplation of Nature has unawares become a “demonology,” a worship of demons! We should realize this, for the essential thing is CONSCIOUSNESS: we live in the age of the consciousness-soul.

• 1. See The Portal of Initiation