The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 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.

You must remind yourselves that as well as living through his life here between birth and death, man passes again and again through the life between death and a new birth. Just as here on earth we have experiences through the instrumentality of our body, we also have experiences between death and a new birth, and these experiences are by no means without significance for what we do during our earthly existence in the physical body. But neither are they without significance for what happens on earth as a whole. For only part—and indeed the rather lesser part—of what happens on the earth originates from those who are living in the physical body. The dead are perpetually working into our physical world. The forces of which man is unwilling to speak to-day in the age of materialism are nevertheless at work in the physical world. Our physical environment is fashioned and permeated not only by the forces emanating from the spiritual world, from the Beings of the higher Hierarchies, but forces proceeding from the dead also penetrate into what surrounds and overtakes us here. So that a full and complete survey of man's life is possible only if we look beyond what can be told us by knowledge obtained through the senses and through history, here on earth.

The existence of such forces is in the end the one and only thing that can explain man in his whole being and the whole course of human evolution on the earth. A time will come in the physical evolution of the earth—it will be after the year 5,700—when, if he fulfils his rightful evolution, man will no longer tread the earth by incarnating in bodies derived from physical parents. In that epoch, women will be barren; children will no longer be born in the manner of to-day, if evolution on the earth takes its normal course.

There must be no misunderstanding about such a fact as this. Something else, for example, might come about. The Ahrimanic Powers, which under the influence of the impulses working in men to-day are becoming extremely strong, might succeed in preventing earth-evolution in a certain respect. It would then become possible for men—by no means for their good—to be held in the same form of physical life beyond this time in the sixth or seventh millennium. They would become much more like animals, while continuing to be held in the grip of physical incarnation. One of the endeavours of the Ahrimanic Powers is to keep humanity fettered too long to the earth in order to divert it from its normal evolution.

However, if men really take hold of the best possibilities for their evolution, then in the sixth millennium they will enter for a further 2,500 years into a connection with the earthly world of such a kind that they will, it is true, still have a relationship with the earth, but a relationship no longer coming to expression in the birth of physical children. In order to make the picture graphic, I will put it like this: In clouds, in rain, in lightning and thunder, man will be astir as a being of spirit-and-soul in the affairs of the earth. He will pulsate, as it were, through the manifestations of nature; and in a still later epoch his relationship to the earthly will become even more spiritual.

To speak of any such matters to-day is possible only when men have some conception of what happens between death and a new birth. Although there is not complete conformity between the way in which, between death and a new birth to-day, man is related to earthly conditions and the way in which he will be related to them when he no longer incarnates physically, there is nevertheless a similarity. If we understand how to imbue earth-evolution with its true meaning and purpose, we shall enter permanently into the same kind of relationship with earthly affairs that we now have only between death and a new birth. Only our life between death and a new birth in the present age is, shall I say, rather more essentially spiritual than it will be when this relationship is permanent.

Without the science of Initiation, understanding of these things lies leagues away. Most people to-day still persist in believing that the essential way to acquire knowledge of the science of Initiation is to amass all kinds of spiritual experiences, but not by the path that is proper for us in the physical body. Even the experiences gained by spiritualistic methods are apt to be valued more highly to-day than those which can be understood by the healthy human reason. Everything that is discovered by an Initiate, and can be communicated, is intelligible by the normal, rightly applied, human reason if only the necessary efforts are made. It is a primary task for the Initiate, also, to translate what he is able to proclaim out of the spiritual world into a language intelligible to human reason. Much more depends upon such translation being correct than upon the fact of having experiences in the spiritual world.

Naturally, if one has no such experiences, there is nothing to communicate. But crude experiences which arise without healthy reason being applied to their interpretation are really worthless, and have not the right significance for human life. Even if people were able to have many super-sensible experiences, but disdained to apply healthy reason to them, these experiences would be of no use whatever to humanity in the future. On the contrary, they would do serious harm, for a super-sensible experience is of use only when it is translated into the language that human reason can understand. The real evil of our time is not that men have no super-sensible experiences; they could have plenty if they so wished. Such experiences are accessible, but healthy reason is not applied in order to reach them. What is lacking to-day is the application of this healthy human reason.

It is of course unpleasant to have to say this to a generation that prides itself particularly on the exercise of this very reason. But at the present time it is not super-sensible experience that is in the worst plight; it is healthy logic, really sound thinking, and above all, too, the force of truthfulness that are worst off. The moment untruthfulness asserts itself, the super-sensible experiences fade away without being understood. People are never willing to believe this, but it is a fact.

The first requirement for understanding the super-sensible world is the most scrupulous veracity in regard to the experiences of the senses. Those who are not strictly accurate about these experiences can have no true understanding of the super-sensible world. However much may be heard about the super-sensible world, it remains so much empty verbiage if the strictest conscientiousness is not present in formulating what happens here in the physical world.

Anyone who observes how humanity is handling palpable truth today will have a sorrowful picture! For most people are not in the least concerned to formulate something they have experienced in such a way that the experience is presented faithfully; their concern is to formulate things as they want them to be, in the way that suits themselves. They know nothing about the impulses that are at work to beguile them in one direction or another away from a faithful presentation of the physical experience.

Leaving aside trifling matters, we need only observe the impulses which arise from ordinary human connections in life and prompt men to ‘varnish’ the truth in one respect or another. Further, we need only realise that the majority of people to-day are not speaking the truth at all about certain things, because of national interests or the like. Anyone who has national interests of some kind at heart can neither think nor say anything that is true in the sense in which truth must be conceived to-day. Hence the truth is virtually never uttered about the events of the last four or five years, because people everywhere speak out of one or other national interest.

What must be realised is that when a man desires to approach the super-sensible world, infinitely much depends upon such things. In times when procedures such as I characterised at the end of the lecture yesterday are possible—can you believe that many avenues to the truth lie open?¹ They certainly do not. For those who wallow in such swamps of untruthfulness as were disclosed yester-day, spread fog which completely shuts off what should be grasped as super-sensible truth by the healthy human reason. There is equal unwillingness to perceive that straightforward, candid relations between man and man must prevail if super-sensible truths are to penetrate in the right way into the social life. One cannot ‘varnish’ truth on the one hand and, on the other, wish to understand matters of a super-sensible nature.

When they are put into words, these things seem almost matters of course, but actually they are so little matters of course that everybody to-day ought constantly to repeat them to himself. Only so can there gradually be achieved what is necessary in this domain. As I said here recently, the essential principle of social community is that it must be founded upon confidence, in the sense indicated. This must be taken in all earnestness. In very many respects this confidence will also be necessary in the future with regard to paths of knowledge. The attitude adopted towards those who are in a position to say something about the science of Initiation should be to examine their utterances with the healthy reason only, not with sympathy, antipathy or the like, nor in the mirror of personal feeling. It must at all times be realised that the Anthroposophical Society should become in the real sense a bearer of super-sensible truths into the world. Thereby it could achieve something extraordinarily necessary and significant for the evolution of mankind.

But it must be remembered that to have experiences in sensible spheres is obviously a matter to be taken in earnest. I told you some time ago how a friend of our Movement, shortly before he died from the effects of war-wounds, wrote lines in which, in the very face of death, he speaks of the air becoming hard, granite-like.

I said at the time that this is an absolutely true experience.² Think only of the most elementary experiences connected with crossing the Threshold of the spiritual world and you will be able to gauge the importances of these things. In our life by day—or also by night, for then there is electric light—the sun, the light of the sun, illumines the objects around us; the sunlight makes them visible. In a similar way the other senses become aware of surrounding objects. If I limit myself at the moment to the example of the sunlight, directly the Threshold is crossed man must become one with the light in his inmost being. The light cannot enable him to see objects because he has to pass into the very light itself. Objects can be seen with the help of the light only as long as the light is outside. When man is himself moving together with the light, the objects illumined by it can no longer be seen. But when, in his being of soul, he is moving in the light itself, then for the first time he becomes aware that thinking is, in reality, one with the light weaving in the world.

Thinking that is bound up with the body is proper to physical life only. Directly we leave this body, our thinking loses definition; it weaves into the light, lives in the light, is one with the light. But the moment our thinking is received into the light, it is no longer possible to have an ego as easily as man has one between birth and death, without doing anything towards it. His body is organised in such a way that his being reflects itself through the body, and he calls this mirror-image his ego. It is a faithful mirror-image of the real ego, but it is a mirror-image, a picture only, a picture-thought, a thought-picture. And the moment the Threshold is crossed, it streams out into the light.

If another anchorage were not now available, man would have no ego at all. For this ego, this ‘I’, that he has between birth and death, is furnished for him by his body. He loses it the moment he leaves the body, and then he can be conscious of an ego only by becoming one with what may be called the forces of the planet especially the variations of the planet's force of gravity. He must become so entirely one with the planet, with the earth, that he feels himself to be a part of the earth, as the finger feels itself to be a member of the human organism. Then, in union with the earth, it is possible for him again to have an ego. And he perceives that just as here in earthly life he makes use of thinking in the physical body, after earthly life he can make use of the light.

From the standpoint of Initiation, therefore, one would have to say: Man is united with the earth's force of gravity and through radiating light concerns himself with the things of the world. Applied to the experience beyond the Threshold, this would express the same fact as when one says here on earth: Man lives in his body and thinks about the things of the world. Of the life between birth and death we say: Man lives in the body and concerns himself with things through thinking.

As soon as he leaves the body, we must say: He is united with the earth's force of gravity or with its variations, with electricity or magnetism, and through radiating light, inasmuch as he is now living in the light, concerns himself with the things of the world.

When things that have been illumined in this way—instead of being merely thought about, as is generally the case—are put into words, they are entirely comprehensible to the healthy human reason. And even the Initiate, if he has not developed his reason in the right way, gains nothing whatever from his super-sensible experiences. When someone to-day—please take what I am now saying as a really serious matter—has learnt to think in a way perfectly adapted to meeting the demands of school examinations, when he acquires habits of thought that enable him to pass academic tests with flying colours—then his reasoning faculty will be so vitiated that even if millions of experiences of the super-sensible world were handed to him on a platter, he would see them as little as you could physically see the objects in a dark room; for that which makes men fit to cope with the demands of this materialistic age darkens the space in which the super-sensible worlds come towards them.

Men have become accustomed to think in the one and only way that is possible when thinking is based on the bodily functions. This kind of thinking is ingrained in them from their youth onwards. But healthy human reason does not unfold on bodily foundations; it unfolds in free spiritual activity. And even in our Elementary Schools to-day children are educated away from free spiritual activity. The very methods of teaching hinder the development of free spiritual activity. Dare one incur the responsibility of concealing from the world these vital truths of the age? People may not realise why it was thought necessary to set into active operation an institution such as the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. But through this Waldorf School some at least of the children of men will be given a real chance to discard the bigotry of the times and to learn how to move in the element of thinking that is truly free. As long as such things are not regarded in this serious light, we shall make no progress.

Now I would like to call your attention to another tendency which is still far too common. Because people are tired of the old in its ordinary form, they like to get hold of something new; but for all that they want the new to be somehow veiled, whenever possible, in all the old, habitual conceptions. I have known many people—and it is well to be under no delusion about these things—who have realised that anthroposophical Spiritual Science is endeavouring to promulgate something true and right about Christianity, about the Mystery of Golgotha. But among them were some for whom this was right only because it exposed them to less disapproval in Church circles; hence they found Anthroposophy more opportune than some other form of spiritual science holding a different view of Christianity. In anthroposophical Spiritual Science the one and only question is that of truth; but with some people it has not always been a question only of truth, but often only of opportunism. Naturally it is unpleasant nowadays to have to witness the attitude to truth adopted by the representatives of the religious confessions and ultimately by their congregations who are also influenced by it. This is a trend of the times that must be kept clearly in view.

If it is desired to approach the super-sensible world in the right way, we must have interest in all things—but never mere curiosity. People are so ready to confound curiosity with interest. They must learn not only to think differently but to feel differently about all things. If anthroposophical Spiritual Science were ever to be given a mantle suitable for the atmosphere of coffee-parties or what corresponds to them nowadays, this would by no means conduce to the fulfilment of its task—for this task is of grave moment.

The reason for the hostility that is asserting itself at the present time in such ugly forms is simply this: People realise that here it is not a matter of a sect, or of a happier “family circle” such as many desire, but that something is truly striving to activate the impulses needed by the times. But what interest have the majority of people to-day in these impulses? If only they can bask in happiness or have something in the nature of a new religion! This egoism of soul, which impels very many people to anthroposophical Spiritual Science, must be overcome. Interest in the great affairs of humanity is necessary for any true understanding of Anthroposophy.

These great concerns of the life of humanity are clearly to be discerned in the most seemingly trivial facts of life. But in one respect our whole life of perception and feeling must change if we want so to orientate healthy human reason that it functions in the right stream of Spiritual Science. Let me repeat: The whole of our life of soul must change in one particular respect if our healthy human reason is to function within the stream of spiritual life that is to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy. What is the orientation given us here on earth by the culture that is smothered in materialism? Our orientation is such that we feel ourselves as bodily men—with bones, muscles, nerves. And our body acts as a mirror, reflecting the image of our ego to us—schematically, like this:

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Your true being is somewhere in spiritual regions. Here, in the physical world, is your body. It becomes a mirror, reflecting back to you the image of the ego. The ego itself is here (= = =), but the image of the ego is reflected back to you by the body. You know of this ego-image when you look at the body with that centre of your being of which most people at present know nothing, but in which they nevertheless live. So the ego, together with the thoughts, feelings and impulses of will, is mirrored by the body. Behind this ego-image is the body, and man calls these mirrored images his soul; behind the soul he perceives the body and uses it as his support.

But this picture: There, down below, is the body; there the ego emerges ... this picture must be entirely changed. It is a picture perceived in complete passivity, and is indeed perceived only because the body is behind it. We must learn to perceive quite differently. We must learn to perceive: You are there in your spiritual world, a world in which there are no plants, minerals and animals, but Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai, and the other Beings of the Hierarchies; in them you live. And because these Beings permeate us through and through, we ray forth the ego:

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We ray forth this ego from the spiritual world. We must learn to feel this ego, to feel that we have within us the ego behind which stand the Hierarchies, just as the body, composed of elements of the three kingdoms of nature, is behind the ego that is an image only. We must pass out of the passive experience into activity in the fullest sense. We must learn to feel that our real ego is brought into being out of the spiritual world. And then we also learn to feel that the mirror-image of our ego is brought into being for us out of the body that belongs to physical existence.

This is a reversal of the usual feeling, and to this reversal we must habituate ourselves. That is the important thing—not the amassing of facts and data. They will be there in abundance once this reversal of feeling has been experienced. Then, when thinking is active in the real sense, those thoughts are born which can fertilise social thinking. When the ego is allowed to remain a mirror-image, thinking can take account only of those social matters which are (as I said yesterday) merely the outcome of changes in phraseology. Only when man is active in his ego can his thoughts be truly free.

In past centuries, not so very long ago, this freedom in thinking was still present in men, although springing, it is true, from atavistic qualities of soul. Instinctively, they regarded it as an ideal to achieve this freedom in their thinking, whereas we have to achieve it in the future by conscious effort. There is an outer illustration of this. Just look at the diplomas conferring the Doctor's degree at universities in Middle Europe. As a rule, people are made not only Doctors, but Doctors and Masters of the Seven Liberal Arts—Arithmetic, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and so on. This no longer means anything, for the Seven Liberal Arts are nowhere included in the curriculum of modern universities. It is a relic, a heritage from an earlier period when through university life men strove to liberate their thinking, to develop a life of soul able to rise to truly free thinking.

At the universities to-day the degrees of Master of the Liberal Arts and Doctor of Philosophy are still conferred. But this is no more than a relic, for nobody understands what the Liberal Arts really are. They are justly named ‘Arts’ because they were pursued in a sphere lying above that of sensory experience, just as the artist's imagination unfolds freely and independently of material existence. The degrees inscribed in university diplomas once represented a reality, just as many other things still surviving in the formula current at universities were once realities. The title, Magister Artium Liberalium, is a very characteristic example.

This living grasp of the self (Sicherfassen) must again be achieved. But it goes against the grain, because people to-day prefer to move about on crutches instead of using their legs. Their ideal is to have what they are to think conveyed to them by the outer, material facts. It is unpleasant for them to realise that thinking in the true sense must be experienced in free spiritual activity, because it means tearing themselves away from the convenient things of life, from all props, all crutches in the life of soul. Whenever things are said from the standpoint of a kind of thinking that has nothing whatever to do with the sense-world, but in complete freedom creates out of intuitions, people do not understand it. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was not understood because it can be grasped only by one who is intent upon unfolding really free thoughts, one who is truly and in a new sense a ‘Master of the Liberal Arts’.

These are the things that must be understood today with the right feeling and with the earnestness that is their due. Especially to the English friends who are here for a short time only, I want to say this: The Building we have erected on this hill must be regarded as an outer beacon for the signs of the times. This Building stands here in order that through it the world may be told: If you go on thinking in the old way, as for four centuries you have become accustomed to think in your sciences, you will condemn humanity to destruction. With the help of crutches you may seek in the easy way to establish principles of social life, but in so doing you will only be preserving what already has death within it.

For the life of soul to-day it is essential to unfold thinking that is as free as are those forms out of which, in architecture, sculpture or painting, the attempt has been made to create this Building. Its purpose is that at one spot on the earth these things shall be said not through words alone, but also through forms. Men should feel that here, through these forms, something different from what can be heard elsewhere in the world to-day is intended to be said, and also that what is said is urgently necessary for the further progress of mankind in respect of knowledge and social principles, in respect of all the sciences and of all branches of social life.

• 1. Steiner was quoting scurrilous statements based on deliberate falsification published in newspapers in Germany about the alleged political aims, methods and activities of the Threefold Commonwealth Movement at the time it was founded. He also referred to articles in a Roman Catholic periodical, and to a book by a Professor of Psychology containing false information about Anthroposophy.
• 2. See lecture given at Dornach, 15th November, 1919: “An impression of this nature must be understood. ... For in wrestling to acquire the wisdom needed for the future, one of the most frequent experiences is this: the surrounding world presses in upon one, as if the air had suddenly hardened to granite. The reason for these things can be known, for it need only be remembered that it is the striving of the Ahrimanic Powers to cause the earth to become completely rigidified.”

The information given in the 1914 course of lectures on life between death and rebirth¹ rounds out what I have been saying in preparation in the last few days and weeks. Today I particularly want to draw your attention to alternating states of life between death and rebirth, which are rather like the alternation between waking and sleeping we know during life between birth and death. Between birth and death we have the normal conscious awareness that makes us human beings only when awake. In sleep, conscious awareness is toned down; it is below the threshold of the waking state. It is at its dimmest level when we are fully asleep; we may perceive dream images which arise out of sleep and represent things remembered from life, or processes that take place in the organism. A similar change occurs during life between death and rebirth, except that everything is the other way round. Yesterday I spoke of the radically different way in which we experience life between death and rebirth. And this also applies to our states of conscious awareness.

Between death and rebirth we have experiences which show us the activities and will impulses of the I. This awareness of the I is essentially the norm when we are in the other world, just as the waking state is the norm here. We have seen that here on earth we have a physical body, ether body, astral body and I, whilst in the other world we have an I, a spirit self, life spirit and spirit human being, or at least the first beginnings of these. Between death and rebirth, therefore, the I is the lowest principle. Here, we are inwardly aware of our I when we are awake; there, the comparable level of consciousness gives awareness of the I in the activities and will impulses on which we look back, so they are like outside experiences; it is as if our actions shone back towards us from the earth.

This state changes into another. Here on earth we are able to speak of waking consciousness and sleep consciousness, with a subconscious state added on to our waking consciousness, as it were. Between death and rebirth we have the kind of consciousness I have just described and a kind of super consciousness, in which higher entities are conscious in us, or, we may say, higher entities fill our conscious mind.

When we are asleep on earth we go down to a kind of plant level of existence. Between death and rebirth we rise to a kind of Archangel consciousness, which is above our own level of consciousness. As I said, in the normal state we have the hierarchies behind us, as it were. In the state of super consciousness we literally move back towards them and live in them. We learn things from them that we would not otherwise know. If we were limited to the experiences of the I which shine out after us and at the same time are part of us, we would not gain experience of all the processes we shall need to build a new organism in our next life on earth. As it is, our normal state of consciousness alternates with a state where the knowledge of the Archangels and even the Archai enters into us; this then also comes to normal consciousness as a kind of memories, just as here on earth dreams come from the subconscious to the conscious mind. Between death and rebirth we thus have the form of consciousness I described yesterday and in between come super conscious states in which we gain knowledge from higher entities. This knowledge enables us to build exactly the kind of existence we shall need in our next life on earth.

You can see analogies between the life we have here between birth and death and the other life we live between death and rebirth. But we must also take note of the radical differences that exist between the two kinds of life. We shall gain a clearer picture if we also consider the element that mediates between the two, a higher principle that extends both to life on earth and to life between death and rebirth. As we go through life on earth we have, in the first place, the impressions we gain through the senses, and we have seen how impulses of will and activity become interwoven with them. For the moment, however, we need to consider the impressions of the outside world that are gained through the senses.

Try to visualize for a moment the sum total of sensory impressions you gain all the time you are awake in life on earth, with all the human senses involved in weaving a whole tapestry. We usually consider sensory impressions to be attached to objects. Thus objects and creatures present themselves in colours that impress the eye. Others produce sounds that impress the ear. Let us call to mind the whole world of sensory impressions and ask ourselves what they truly represent.

I have made it clear to you on more than one occasion that the fantastic world of moving atoms that physicists dream of is definitely not to be found behind our sensory impressions. No, behind the world we perceive with the senses lies something which is of the spirit. It is present in the world of the senses, though we are not directly aware of it when we have the tapestry before us in ordinary consciousness. In reality the tapestry presented to the senses contains the totality of all the spirits which in my Occult Science are collectively called the Spirits of Form. Anything which presents itself in space has form, and the coloured surface also gives objects form. In everything which we experience in space through the senses live the Spirits of Form, which in the Old Testament are called the Elohim.

We do, quite rightly, call the world that presents itself to the senses the world of phenomena.² This is only correct, however, in so far as at our ordinary level of consciousness we human beings perceive no more than these outer phenomena of the world. It is the “maya” of the Orient. But the moment our conscious mind wakes up and is able to perceive in images, this whole world of the senses is filled with, or, even better, transformed into, a world of flowing, moving images which also reveals the world of the Angels that is woven into it. This is also the world which inspires us when we are capable of Inspiration. It is then transformed into the world of Inspiration in which the Archangels are active. Later we also experience the world of Intuitions, when we advance from the world of the senses to the world of the Archai.

When we come to have the world of the Archai all around us, it will be possible to look back, with the help of this world, to the things we have gathered from higher hierarchies in earlier lives between death and rebirth. We then become aware of the spirits who are behind the Archai in this world. In the Bible they are called the Elohim, and in my Occult Science you’ll find them called “Spirits of Form”. Thus we are able to say that when we look out into the world through the senses, we are really looking into the world of the Spirits of Form (see table—world of the senses).

Having entered with heart and mind into the world of the senses, where we’d have to say that we move in the world of the Spirits of Form, let us now enter yet more deeply into the inner life, into a part of the inner world that is still closely bound up with the outside world, however, its function being to create an inner image of the outside world that we can bear in us as memory. In other words, we move on to the world of thought (see table).

In the first place this world of thoughts has image character. You’ll not feel the least temptation to consider the thoughts that are ordinarily alive in your conscious mind to be real. But there are hidden realities in that world, just as the realities of the Spirits of Form lie hidden in the world of the senses. In ordinary consciousness we have in the first place the fleeting inner thought forms we know so well. Again it is possible to find spiritual entities at work if we advance to higher knowledge through Imagination and Inspiration. These spiritual entities live in the phenomena that accompany the thoughts as they evolve in us.

You’ll remember what goes on in us when we are thinking; it has been described in earlier lectures. Processes are continually occurring that may be compared to the way salt dissolving in a glass of water disappears completely so that we can look right through the glass. If we let the water cool down a little it becomes cloudy and the salt slowly precipitates out. This kind of condensation process occurs when we think; it is a kind of mineralization. And the spiritual entities which are active in the element of thought are involved in this process of mineralization. We have always called them the Archai, powers of origin. We are therefore able to know that when we live in our thoughts, the Archai are with us, just as the Elohim, the Spirits of Form, are active in the processes of sensory perception.

The Spirits of Form can only be found in the outside world if we use imaginative perception. If we study that world in the normal state of consciousness we have today, we discover the “laws of nature”, which are abstractions. When we advance to imaginative perception we find not the abstract laws of nature which can be formulated as statements, but images, a life in images. These are not the kind of images of which I have spoken before, but images that cloud the images we gain when we behold the Elohim, condensing into them, as it were. There you have the Archai at work in the outside world. It is something we can observe in the outside world and also in the inner world.

At this point it may help to turn our attention not so much to the inner life but to one way in which life comes to outward expression. In our thoughts we relate to the outside world, with the secrets of that world revealed in our thoughts. Our thoughts are, however, part of the inner life. Yet they can be uttered and conveyed to others. Speech is one element in human life by which our thoughts are given outward expression.

Let us consider the world of speech. As I have said on a number of occasions, we do, of course, experience more of our world of speech than we do of the world of thought which flows into our speech. Will also enters into the element of thought, but this is something of which we have little awareness in ordinary consciousness. The human will does, however, flow strongly into our speaking, and this is something which can be realized in ordinary conscious awareness. Nevertheless, we know extraordinarily little about what really lives in our speech. In our present intellectual age, people perceive little more of what lives in speech sounds than some kind of signals referring to something else. The inner life of speech sounds has gone very much into the background in modern minds. All we can do is show the people of today that they can reflect on something which lives in the speech sounds and may be perceived to be a distinct, separate element in life.

Take a phrase like “wending our way”. The vowel sound in “wend” conveys a calmness as we proceed, with nothing to excite us. Compare this to “run” and you can feel the increased demand on your breathing in the vowel sound of this word, for your breathing goes faster when you run.³ There is a spiritual aspect to language, which has a genius of its own. Modern people are not much aware of the life in their language, but in earlier times, when people still had a real inner experience of sounds, the spirit was very much active and alive in language for them, and they were more conscious of this inner experience than of anything perceived with the senses or any part of the world of thought.

The Archangels live in the element of speech and language, just as the Archai live in our thoughts. This makes them the spirits who guide nations and who come into their own in the element of speech.

People are much more the product of their language than we think, just as they are also the product of their thoughts. Our human form comes entirely from the world around us, and we in turn pour form into the world around us through the will. Our life comes from the same region as our thoughts, which is the region of the Archai. The language we speak as members of a nation gives expression to physical qualities that limit us as human beings to a much greater degree than is the case with our thoughts. Thoughts are common to all humanity; languages differ. People are different when it comes to language; but as they belong to a large or small nation they nevertheless have their language in common with quite a number of other people.

When we go down to the level of the Angels—and this is something I have told you before—people relate to their Angels on an individual, one-to-one basis. This shows itself in two ways. Inwardly it does so when we give ourselves up to the inner life in such a way that we transcend it. In ordinary life a luciferic element may immediately come in, but still, we can transcend ourselves and have an objective inner experience by using our imagination. In many respects our imagination is as creative as language is, but it is individual; language is essentially based on an active imagination. People normally experience language only in an abstract way and are not aware of the genius of language spreading its wings. They also fail to notice that in their imagination—which becomes sheer fantasy if the luciferic element comes into it—an Angel passes through the life they have as individuals.

True poets or artists who have not grown cynical or superficial will know, of course, that a higher spiritual principle enters into them when they do creative work. This higher spiritual principle also takes us from one life to the next as our personal guardian spirit; it is our Angel. And it is certainly the thinking of our Angel which enters into our imagination when it is active in the regular way. Goethe made certain statements to indicate, without making much of it, that he was aware of an unconscious element coming in which was very real when he used his imagination.

If we do not go out of ourselves inwardly when awake but do so in sleep, entering the region where the imagination we use when awake has its roots, the principle which shows itself in our imagination when we are fully awake comes to expression at a more subconscious level in our dreams. Imagination can become sheer fantasy if a luciferic element enters into it, and in the same way our dreams may degenerate into all kinds of strange things, which we may even take for real, if influenced by ahrimanic elements. Dreams are essentially luciferic, but an ahrimanic element may enter into them. Yet when our dreams are “innocent”, as we may put it, and purely human, the Angel lives in them, the same Angel which is in us when we use our imagination and inwardly go beyond ourselves, as it were.

The world of language which is governed by the Archangel now dims down inwardly into a world that is halfway between feeling and thought: the world of ideas, or ideas with feeling quality (see table below). Imagination and dreaming dim down to become the world of feelings, and of the will element that lives in our feelings, so that we may also speak of feelings with will quality. Going further down from the Angel we come to the human I. Here we need to go out of ourselves much more intensely than we do when the Angel lives in us. This happens when we let our will impulses become actions in the outside world, as I said yesterday.

We are definitely out of ourselves when we dream, but only in mind and spirit. Nor do we go out of ourselves physically in our acts of will, but we set the physical body in motion, and the I actually has its basis in such will impulses. We are thus able to say: The will that lives in our actions leaves its mark on the outside world.

We have now gone all the way down to the physical world, where independent development comes only in acts of will. The I lives in the sum of all our actions, a sum that remains after death and on which we look back, as I have shown yesterday. Higher spiritual entities live in everything else in us—in our imagination and our dreams, in the world of speech and language, the world of thought and the contents of the senses. These higher entities are always in us. Thus we are able to look at everyday life and see how the human being relates to the cosmos.

Another way of coming close to the truths spiritual scientists are able to discover by using more highly developed faculties is the following. Take your own life in the physical world. You gain all kinds of impressions in this world and may even be able to remember them the next day. I am not saying that everybody remembers; for instance I am not sure if everybody who is sitting here tonight will be able to let the things heard in this lecture come alive in their minds tomorrow. Generally speaking, however, it is fair to say that the things we perceive around us with the senses live on in us as memories. To take us a step further, let me show this in a drawing.

The light-coloured lines are the world around us and the red line represents the human being. The world around us and anything we experience in it lives on in us as an inner world. In a sense this is quite an abstract experience to begin with, at least in so far as the outside world, which we experience merely in the way it presents itself on the outside, lives on in abstract inner experiences, thoughts and feelings which then give rise to will impulses. But we can certainly say—let us bring this to mind very exactly—that our inner life represents experiences gained between birth and death, or rather birth and the present moment.

Let us now turn our attention from those inner abstractions and images to our internal organs, which are physical and tangible—lung, heart, liver, and so on. We have these inside us as well. Out-and-out mystics will say that they are only interested in things of the soul and spirit, in the inner impressions they have of the world that surrounds them. Physical objects like those organs are far too lowly and unimportant to them. In saying so, they merely show how much they are caught up in materialism and fail to realize that seemingly material objects are in reality deeply spiritual. Our lungs and livers are just as spiritual as the inner experiences we have as a reflection of experiences gained in the outside world between birth and death. They may appear to be present as physical, material objects to our ordinary consciousness, but they are very much the fruits of the spirit.

As you sit quietly at home, the thought may come to mind: The human being has a physical body, ether body, astral body and I. This thought is something you have inside you. At one time it was something outside you.

You first came across it in a book, maybe, or in a lecture, that is, in the outside world—as in the drawing. You also have your lung, heart, liver, brain, and so on inside you, and they are in physical form. They, too, are the fruit of experiences. If we make a simple sketch of the human being and the various organs, the things inside are the outcome of everything we have lived through between death and rebirth—not their physical substance, of course, for that only comes with conception, birth, and so on, but their form and internal organization. You hear me talk, and this becomes an inner experience; in the same way your heart, lungs and liver are the outcome of experiences you had between death and rebirth. We are able to say: I have physical matter inside me that is organized in a particular way; this is the outcome of experiences I had between death and rebirth.

The soul qualities in me
are the fruit of experiences gained between birth and death.
The physical organization in me
is the fruit of my life between death and rebirth.

A materialist will of course say that all the organs in our bodies have been physically inherited from our ancestors, but he’d be utterly wrong. Physical substance is inherited, that is true, but the germ cell is not seen in its true light if it is considered in purely material terms. Fertilization is not a matter of the human individual being physically derived from the generations that went before, but of an empty space arising, with matter broken down in the human being and the whole universe built into the human being. Matter then pushes its way into the spiritual form; for lung, heart and liver are essentially spiritual forms. The organizing powers are, however, entirely shaped out of the whole universe, out of experience gained between death and rebirth. This is what we experience when our consciousness rises above the waking state and we come to the region of Archangels and Angels in the way I have described. Between death and rebirth human beings experience consciously, or rather in a state of super consciousness, the things which they then build into their organs.

Our organs are built in accord with our karma, which comes from our earlier lives on earth. It may seem that purely physical processes occur as generation succeeds generation, but in fact these are processes brought about by the whole universe.

The following is an analogy I tend to use when small-minded materialists come and say: “Do not speak to us of the whole universe being involved as a human being develops in the womb, and whatever you do, don’t take us out into the universe; kindly speak of the germ plasma continuing on through the generations.” We can deal with this by saying: Someone has a magnetic needle which points north and south. Someone else will come and say: “There are crazy physicists who say the whole earth is a magnet and the magnetic south pole of the earth is attracting this pole of the needle. But in fact the reasons for the magnetic needle pointing north and south lie in the needle itself. The earth has nothing to do with it!” This is more or less the kind of thing modern biologists are saying about the germ cell. They look only at the germ cell. But just as the whole earth is active in a magnetic needle, so the whole universe is active in the creation of the embryo. The part which the human being plays in this is, of course, at an unconscious level.

Seen in this light, the human individual is with the whole of his being connected with a material and a spiritual universe. We say: We make the outside world our inner world when we perceive it in ordinary conscious experience. Yesterday I said, from a certain point of view: When a human being goes through the gate of death, inner becomes outer, and outer becomes inner. Today I presented a different point of view to show that the way we have to approach anything that comes before birth, or conception, is to look for our inner physical life and the processes that prepare it in the outside world during life between death and rebirth: The outer becomes inner. Something we experience as spread out through the whole universe becomes deeply unconscious experience in our organs.

The nature of our internal organs is truly such that a whole cosmos is alive in them. If we merely consider those organs the way they are presented in ordinary anatomy and physiology, this is maya to a much higher degree than the maya we face in the world around us.

Looking into the world of the senses, I said, we can see as far as the Elohim. Looking down into the inner physical body, we have to go higher to find the reality that lives in us and creates our organs. You’ll remember that in my Occult Science higher entities are mentioned who are above the Spirits of Form. These do not only exist outside human beings but are also active inside them. We learn about them from the Archai when between death and rebirth we raise our level of consciousness to theirs and learn things from them which we then pour into our organization. We truly carry the world of the hierarchies through life in the way we are made inside. Today these things can be investigated. In older times people knew about them out of an instinctive clairvoyant consciousness. Those were the times when it was said that the human organism is a temple of the gods, and people sought to gain insight into the whole world by interpreting the inner human microcosm.

Isn’t it true that we know about the world which has been our own for as long as we have had conscious awareness here on earth from memory? We are able to reflect on everything we are able to recall from memory. We look inwards and find that the world we have known outside is inside ourselves, and we realize that the outside life has entered into the images we have inside us. Looking back in memory we understand again what we experienced before. Now if we look at our physical organization and understand it, we also understand the cosmic process. Our memories let us understand life’s experiences. Our whole human organization lets us understand the cosmic process, if we know how to look at it. And this is what anthroposophy is all about—to understand the human being in every way.

It means that anthroposophy is also cosmosophy, for just as we bring our life back to mind when we remember, so we bring the whole cosmic process, cosmosophy, to mind when we gain insight through anthroposophy. The two cannot be seen apart. Cosmosophy and anthroposophy belong together. The human being is to be found in the world, and the world in the human being.

This is also why it is not anthropomorphism to speak of human evolution in the same breath as evolution through Saturn, Sun, Moon and so on in my Occult Science. Cosmic evolution is something that is given, and human evolution is something that is given, for the further we penetrate the secrets of existence, the more do cosmos and human being come together; the more does it become apparent that the separation between cosmos and human being that exists for us on earth is mere maya. The human being belongs to the cosmos, and the cosmos to the human being, and each is to be found in the other.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Inner Nature of Man and the Life between Death and a New Birth. Eight lectures given in Vienna in April 1914. English by A. Meuss. Bristol, Rudolf Steiner Press 1994.
• 2. “Phenomenon”, defined as “an immediate object of perception; something of which the senses or the mind take note directly”, derives from the Greek verb for “to shine, to appear”, which is also reflected in the German word for it—Erscheinung. Translator.
• 3. The two German words Rudolf Steiner was comparing were gehen and laufen. He went into considerable detail and this has been shortened. Translator.

Many reasons have led us to consider how the age of intellectualism—which we have often also called the age of the fifth post-Atlantean culture—begins in the transition from the thirteenth to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In this age, human beings come to regard the intellect as the dominant factor in all their endeavours. We have often spoken of the way in which this intellectualism has come to develop in the various realms of inner life. Everything that is characteristic for human evolution has its more inward aspect through which it live:, more expressly in people's feelings, in their views, in their dominant will impulses, and so on. At the same time it also has an outward aspect which manifests in the conditions and circumstances which arise historically in human evolution. In this connection it has to be said that the most significant expression of the intellectualistic age so far has been the French Revolution, that great world-wide movement of the end of the eighteenth century.

For long ages before it took place, much in the life of mankind pointed to ways of striving for the very kind of social community which then came to be expressed so tumultuously in this French Revolution. And since then much has remained of the French Revolution, flickering into life here or there in one form or another in the external social conditions of mankind. Only consider that the French Revolution, in the way it manifested at the end of the eighteenth century, could not have been possible previously. For prior to those days human beings did not seek full satisfaction on this earth with regard to everything they were striving for.

You must understand that before the time of the French Revolution there was never a period in the history of mankind when people expected everything human beings can strive for, in thought, feeling and will, to find an external expression in earthly life. In the times which preceded the French Revolution, people knew that the earth can never provide for every single requirement of man's spirit, soul and body. Human beings always felt that they had links with the spiritual world and they expected this spiritual world to satisfy whatever requirements cannot be satisfied by the earthly world.

However, long before the French Revolution expressed itself in such a tumultuous fashion there were endeavours in many realms of the civilized world to introduce a social order which would allow as many human needs as possible to be satisfied here on earth. The fundamental character of the French Revolution itself was the endeavour to found a social environment which would be an expression here on earth of human thinking, feeling and willing. This is essentially what intellectualism seeks, too.

The realm of intellectualism is earthly existence. Intellectualism wants to satisfy everything that is present in the sense-perceptible physical world. So it wants to organize the social situation here on earth to be an expression of the intellectual element. The endeavour to create in social conditions something which man can strive for here on earth, even goes to the extent of the worship of the goddess of reason—which means, of course, the goddess of the intellect. So we can say: In very ancient times human beings ordered their lives according to the impulses which came to them from initiates and mystery pupils; through them they took into their social order the divine spiritual world itself. Then social conditions moved on to those of, let us say, Egypt, when the social order took in what the kings learnt from the priests about the will of human evolution as it was expressed, for instance, in the stars. Later still, in older Roman times, the times of the Roman kings, the endeavour was made to bring about social conditions based on research into the spiritual world. The meeting of Numa Pompilius with the nymph Egeria is an expression of this.¹ More and more out of this interweaving of the spiritual with the earthly, social realm came the requirement: Everything on earth is to be arranged in such a way as to be a direct expression of the intellect.

To express this in a diagram you would have to draw a downward curve. The French Revolution comes at the lowest point (see sketch), and from here onwards things had to start moving upwards once more. This upward movement was indeed immediately attempted as a reaction to the French Revolution. Read Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays). There we can see quite clearly, for instance, how he was stimulated by what was expressed in the French Revolution in an external way to seek a new connection to the spiritual world within man's inner being. For Schiller the question arose: If it is impossible to create a perfect social order here on earth, how can human beings achieve satisfaction with regard to their thinking, feeling and will? How can they achieve freedom here on this earth?

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And Schiller answered this question by saying: If human beings live logically, in accordance with the dictates of reason, they are servants of the dictates of reason and not free beings. If they follow their physical urges and instincts alone, then in turn they are following the dictates of nature and are unfree. He then came to say: The human being is actually only free when he is working artistically or when he is enjoying something artistic. The achievement of freedom in the world can only come about when the human being works artistically or enjoys art. Artistic activity balances what is otherwise either a dictate of reason or a dictate of nature, as Schiller puts it. Living in the artistic realm, the human being feels the compulsion of thoughts less with regard to an artistic object than he does in the case of logical research. Similarly, what comes to him from the object of art through his senses is not a sensual urge. The sensual urge is ennobled by the spiritual seeing of something artistic. So inasmuch as a human being is capable of working artistically he is also capable of unfolding freedom within earthly existence.

Schiller seeks to answer the question: How can man as a social being achieve freedom? And the conclusion he reaches is that the human being can only achieve freedom if he is a being who is receptive to art. He cannot achieve freedom by being devoted to the dictates of reason or the dictates of nature.

At the time when Schiller was writing his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays) this came to expression in a wonderful way in the interaction between Goethe and Schiller. This is shown in the way Schiller perceived how Goethe was rewriting his Wilhelm Meister at that time. Schiller was full of enthusiasm for this way of writing and for this depiction of inner freedom, because Goethe as an artist was a creative spirit—not in his intellect but in the freedom of his thoughts—yet one who, on the other hand, still remained within a sensual experience of art. Schiller sensed this. He felt that Goethe in his artistic activity was as free as is a child at play. We see how Schiller is enthused by a free human artistic activity which is reminiscent of a child at play. His enthusiasm led him to say in one of his letters to Goethe: The artist is the true human being; in comparison even the best philosopher is a mere caricature.² But his enthusiasm also led him to say: The human being is only truly human when he is at play, and he only plays when he is truly human.³ Frivolous or merely entertaining play is not meant, but artistic activity and artistic enjoyment. The human being dwells within artistic experience, which means that the human being becomes truly free: This is what Schiller is saying.

At the point where the line starts to curve upwards from what had been—with regard to a social order—the goal of the French Revolution, towards something for which human beings have to wrestle inwardly and which cannot be given to them by institutions of the state; at this point, what price was the human being willing to pay for this social freedom? He was prepared to pay the price that it could not be given to him through logical thinking and that it could not be given to him through ordinary physical life, but that he could receive it only in the exclusive activity of artistic experience.

These feelings were indeed engraved within the best spirits of that age, in Schiller in a theoretical form, and in Goethe too, who actually practised this life in freedom. Let us look at the characters Goethe created out of life itself in order to reveal genuine humanity, the true human being. Look at Wilhelm Meister. Wilhelm Meister is a personality through whom Goethe wanted to depict the true human being. Yet seen from an overall view of life he is actually a layabout. He is not a person who is seriously searching for a world view which includes the human soul. Neither is he someone who can manage to hold down a job in external life. He loiters his way through life. This is because the ideal of freedom striven for in the work of Goethe and Schiller could only be achieved by people who had removed themselves from a thoughtful and hard-working way of life. It is almost as if Schiller and Goethe had wanted to point to the illusion of the French Revolution, to the illusory belief that something external, like the state, might make human beings free. They wanted to point out that human beings can only wrestle for this freedom within themselves.

Herein lies the great contrast between Central Europe and Latin western Europe. Latin western Europe believed in an absolute sense in the power of the state, and it still believes in it today. In Central Europe, on the other hand, came the reaction that the human ideal can only be found within. But the price for this would have to be the inability to stand squarely in life. Someone like Wilhelm Meister had to disentangle himself from life.

So we see that at the first attempt it proved impossible to find full humanity within a true human being. Naturally, if everybody is to become an artist so that, as Schiller put it, society can become entirely aesthetic, this may be all very well, but such an aesthetic society would not be very good at coping with life. I cannot imagine, for instance—let me be really down to earth for a moment—how in such an aesthetic society the sewers will be kept clear. Neither can I imagine how in this aesthetic society certain things will be achieved which ought to be achieved in accordance with strictly logical concepts. The ideal of freedom shone before mankind, but human beings were unable to strive for this ideal of freedom when they stood fully within life. It became necessary to search once more for an impetus upwards to the super-sensible world, but now this had to be done consciously, just as in former times there had been an atavistic downward impetus. A new upward impetus into the spiritual world had to be sought. It was necessary to hold on to the ideal of freedom but, at the same time, the upward impetus had to be sought. First it had to be made possible to secure freedom for human activity, for active involvement in life. It seemed to me that the only possible way was that described in my Philosophy of Freedom.⁴

If human beings can achieve the impetus to rise up to an inner constitution of soul which enables them to find moral impulses in pure thoughts, in the way I have just described, then they will be free beings even though they remain squarely within full, everyday life. This is why I had to introduce into my Philosophy of Freedom the concept of moral tact, which is otherwise not found in moralizing sermons, the concept of acting as a matter of course out of moral tact, by means of which moral impulses can flow over into habitual deeds.

Consider the role played by tact, by moral good taste, in my Philosophy of Freedom. There you see that in an aesthetic society true human freedom is only applied to the feelings, whereas it actually ought to be brought also into the will, that is, into every aspect of the human being. A human being who has achieved a soul constitution in which pure thoughts can live in his will as moral impulses, can enter fully into life, however burdensome it may be, and he will be able to stand in this life as a free being in so far as this life calls for actions, deeds.

Furthermore, with regard to the dictates of reasoning, that is, the grasping of the world in thoughts, a way also had to be sought of finding what it is that guarantees freedom for the human being, independence from external compulsions. This could only come about through anthroposophical spiritual science. Learning to find their way into what can be experienced in spirit with regard to cosmic mysteries and cosmic secrets, human beings live in thoughts with their humanness into a closeness with the inner spirit of the world. Through freedom they achieve knowledge of the spirit.

What is going on here is best demonstrated by the way in which people, with regard to this, are still strenuously resisting becoming free. This is a point of view from which opposition to Anthroposophy can very well be understood. Human beings do not want freedom in the spiritual realm. They want to be compelled, led, guided by something. And since every individual is free either to recognize or deny the spirit, most deny it and choose instead something which they are not free either to recognize or deny.

No free decision is required to recognize or deny thunder and lightning, or the combination of oxygen or hydrogen in some laboratory process. But human beings are free to recognize that angeloi and archangeloi exist. Or they can deny their existence. But those who truly possess an impulse for freedom come through this very impulse for freedom to the recognition of the spiritual in thinking. In Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (Aesthetical Essays), in the whole of Goethe's creative work, the achievement of human freedom through inner effort and struggle was first attempted. But this can only be achieved if we recognize that to our freedom in the realm of artistic experience must be added a free experience in the realm of thinking and a free experience in the realm of the will. These are things which must be properly developed.

Schiller simply took what the age of the intellect had to offer. In Schiller's time art still arose out of this intellectualism. Within this, Schiller still discovered human freedom. But what intellectualism has to offer in the realm of thinking is something unfree, something which is subject to the dictates of logic. And Schiller failed to recognize the possibility that freedom might also hold sway here, just as little as it might hold sway in deeds, in ordinary, hard life. What we have had to achieve through the introduction of anthroposophical spiritual science is the recognition that freedom can also be recognized in the realm of thinking and in the realm of the will. Schiller and Goethe recognized freedom solely in the realm of feeling.

But the path to a full recognition of human freedom can only be trodden if human beings are able to achieve an inner vision of the connection between the spiritual realm they can experience in their soul, and the realm of nature. So long as two abstract concepts, nature and spirit, are seen by human beings as being mutually exclusive, it will not be possible for them to progress to a proper conception of the freedom I have been describing. But even those who do not work their way towards life in the spiritual world, by means of meditation, concentration exercises and so on, can certainly experience something, if they are willing to recognize, simply with their healthy commonsense, what has been found through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Simply by reading in books or hearing in lectures what is brought to the fore in the world through Imagination—and provided they remain alert—people will soon need to approach these revelations from the spiritual world in a way that differs from their approach, say, to a book on physics or chemistry, or on botany or zoology, even though this different approach can just as much take a course which follows ordinary healthy common sense.

Without developing any great inner activity it is possible to absorb everything written today in a book about botany or zoology. But it is not possible to absorb what I have described, for instance, in my book Occult Science, without inner energy and activity such as that needed also for ordinary healthy common sense. Everything in this book can be understood, and those who maintain that it is incomprehensible are simply unwilling to think actively; they want to absorb it as passively as they absorb a film in the cinema. In the cinema there is certainly no need to think very much, and it is in this manner that people today want to absorb everything. What they find in the laboratory can also be absorbed in this way. But what is said in my book Occult Science cannot by absorbed in this way. Occasionally some professorial souls do attempt to absorb it in this way. In consequence, they then make the suggestion that those who perceive such things ought to be examined in psychological laboratories, as they are called today. This suggestion is just as clever as requiring someone who solves mathematical problems to be examined in order to ascertain whether he is capable of solving mathematical problems. To such a person it is said: If you want to find out whether these mathematical problems have been solved correctly, you will have to learn how to solve them, and then you will be able to check. Only if he were stupid would he retort: No, I don't want to learn how to check on the solutions; I shall go to a psychological laboratory in order to find out whether they are correct! These are the kinds of demands made today by some professorial souls, and their words are taken up by all sorts of ‘generals’⁵ and repeated parrot-fashion with evil intent. Such demands are foolish and stupid, but this does not prevent them from being made with the greatest aplomb.

But those who enter with inner activity into what comes from Imagination will certainly find that something bears fruit in their soul. It is not insignificant for the soul when an effort is made to understand something that has been discovered through Imagination. For instance, it is extremely difficult today to make medicines effective for the treatment of illnesses. But someone who has made the effort to understand something given through Imagination will have reactivated his vital forces to such an extent that medicines will once more be effective for him—provided they are the right ones—because his organism will no longer reject them.

It is stupidly suggested nowadays that anthroposophical medicines are supposed to heal people spiritually through hypnosis and the power of suggestion. You can read this in all manner of magazines which refer to remarks I have made on my lecture tours in recent months. But this is, in the first instance, not the point. The point is that today's medical knowledge needs to be advanced positively through spiritual knowledge. Of course it is not possible to heal somebody by inoculating him with an idea. Yet spiritual life, taken quite concretely, does have significance for the effectiveness of medicines. If a person endeavours to understand something given through Imagination, he makes his organism more receptive to medicines—provided they are the ones needed for his illness—than is the organism of a person who remains in the thought structure of today's external intellectualism, that is, of today's materialism.

Mankind needs to take in what can be given by Imagination, if only for the reason that the human physical body will otherwise succumb more and more to a condition in which it cannot be healed if it falls ill. Healing always requires assistance from the element of spirit and soul. All the processes of nature find expression not only in what takes place on the sense-perceptible plane. These processes on the physical plane are everywhere steeped in the element of spirit and soul. To make a sense-perceptible substance effective in the human organism you need the element of soul and spirit. The whole process of human evolution requires that the soul make-up of human beings should once more be filled with what can be grasped by soul and spirit.

It is true to say that amongst human beings there is certainly much longing for soul and spirit. But for the most part this longing remains within the unconscious or the subconscious realm. Meanwhile, what remains within human consciousness is no more than a mere remnant of intellectualism, and this rejects—indeed resists—anything spiritual. The manner in which spiritual things are resisted is sometimes quite grotesque. Before a performance of eurythmy I usually explain that eurythmy is based on an actual, visible language. Just as the language of sounds develops out of the way the physical organism is arranged, so it is with the visible language that is eurythmy. Just as—sound for sound—all vowels, all consonants struggle to be born out of the experience of the human organism, so in eurythmy is sound for sound gathered together, resulting in genuine language. You would think that on being introduced to eurythmy people might endeavour to find their way into the fundamental impulse which tells us that eurythmy is a language, is speech.

Of course it is perhaps not immediately obvious as to what is meant. But with serious intent it is not too difficult to find one's way quite quickly into what is meant. The other day someone read something really funny in a review of a eurythmy performance. The critic pointed out that the impossible nature of this eurythmy performance was revealed in the fact that the performers first gave a rendering of some earnest, serious items, and that they followed these with some humorous pieces. The extraordinary thing, said this witty critic, was that the humorous items were depicted with the same gestures as the serious ones. That is the extent to which he understood the matter. He thought that humorous things ought to be shown with sound gestures that are different from those used to depict serious matters. Now if you take seriously the fact that eurythmy is a visible language, then what this critic says would amount to saying that any language ought to have one set of sounds for serious things and another for humorous things! In other words, somebody reciting something in German or French would use sounds such as I or U, or whatever, but that on coming to a humorous item they would use other sounds. I don't know how many people noticed what utter nonsense this critic was writing in one of Germany's foremost newspapers; but this is what he was saying in reality. This shows that in such heads every capacity for thinking clearly has ceased; they are entirely unable to think any more.

This is the final consequence of intellectualism, which is gaining ground today in all realms of life. People begin by allowing their thoughts to become the dead inner content of their soul. How rigid, how dead are most thoughts which are produced these days; how little inner mobility they have, how much are they parroted from models created earlier on! There are extraordinarily few original thoughts in our present age. But something that has died—and thoughts today are mostly thoughts that have died—does not remain constantly in the same state. Look at a corpse after three days, after five years or after forty years. It goes on dying, it goes on decomposing. If somebody states that a eurythmy performance is impossible because it uses the same gestures for humorous and for serious items, this is a thought that is decomposing. And if this is not noticed it is simply because people are incapable of schooling their common sense by means of inspired truths such as those arising out of Anthroposophy. If people school their common sense by means of inspired truths, even if they do not undertake any spiritual development, then they acquire a delicate sense for the living truth, and for what is healthy and unhealthy in human thinking and in human endeavour. And then—if you will pardon my saying so—statements such as the one I have just quoted begin to stink. People acquire the capacity to smell the stench of such decomposing thoughts. This capacity, this sense of smell, is for the most part lacking amongst our contemporaries. Most of them do not notice these things, they read them without taking them in.

It is certainly necessary to look very thoroughly into what mankind needs. For human beings definitely need that freedom of thinking in their soul constitution which can only become possible if they raise themselves to a position in which they can take in spiritual truths. Without this we come to that decline of culture which is clearly to be seen all around us today. Healthy judgment, the right immediate impression—these are things which mankind has for the most part already lost. They must not be allowed to get lost, but only if human beings can press through to an acceptance of spiritual things will they not be lost.

We must pay attention to the fact that human beings can find in Anthroposophy a meaningful content for their lives if they turn with their healthy common sense to what can be won through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. By opening themselves to what can be discovered, for example, through Imagination, they can recapture that inner vitality which will make them receptive to medicines. Or, it may be that they will also become free personalities who are not prone to succumb to all sorts of public suggestions.

By entering in a living way into the truths revealed by Inspiration, they can gain a sure sense for what is true or false. And they can become skilful in putting this sure sense into practice in the social sphere. For instance, how few people today are able to listen properly! They are incapable of listening, for they react immediately with their own opinion. This capacity to listen to other human beings can be developed most beautifully by entering in a living way into the truths given by Inspiration.

And by entering in a living way into the truths given by Intuition, human beings can develop to a high degree something else which they need in their lives: a certain capacity to let go of their own selves, a kind of selflessness. Entering in a living way into the truths given by Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, this gives human beings a meaningful content for their lives.

Of course, it is easier to say that people can gain a content for their lives out of what Ralph Waldo Trine⁶ promises. It is easier to say they need only read the content of something in order to gain a content for their lives, whereas it is more difficult to obtain a content for life in an anthroposophical way. For along this path you have to work; you have to work in order to enter in a living way into what research reveals through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But then it becomes a content for life which unites intensely with the personality and with the whole human being. This secure life content is what is given by what wishes to enter the world as Anthroposophy.

• 1 . Numa Pompilius, 715-672 BC. Roman King. By tradition, the nymph Egeria was his wife and adviser.
• 2 . Letter to Goethe of 7 January 1795.
• 3 . Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Letter 15.
• 4 . Rudolf Steiner, Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1988.
• 5 . This is a reference to speeches given by General von Gleich.
• 6 . Ralph Waldo Trine, 1866-1958. In Tune with the Infinite, London 1915.

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.

Living Education

In these five lectures my task has been to describe briefly some guidelines for Waldorf education. Here I have not tried to get into details but describe the spirit of this method as a whole, which should flow from anthroposophy. Perhaps even more than details—though they may be important—contemporary humanity needs a complete renewal and strengthening of all spiritual life. Aside from the spiritual substance that is of course necessary, all spiritual callings require a renewed enthusiasm that springs from knowledge of the world—a worldview that has been taken hold of in spirit. Today it is becoming obvious to a wide range of people that teachers—who must be soul-artists—need such enthusiasm more than anyone else. Perhaps people seek along paths that cannot lead to the goal, because people everywhere continue to fear a thorough investigation of spiritual matters. We base our educational method on the discovery of a teaching method—conditions that will make education viable through reading human nature itself; such reading will gradually reveal the human being so that we can adjust our education to what is revealed to every step of the curriculum and schedule.

Let’s for a moment go into the spirit of how we read the human being. We have seen that children are naturally completely open—in a religious attitude, as it were—to their immediate human surroundings; they are imitative beings, and they elaborate in themselves through will-imbued perception all that they experience unconsciously and subconsciously from their environment. Children’s bodily nature has a religious disposition, from the moment of entering the world until the change of teeth—of course, not in terms of substance, but in its constitution as a whole. The soul is initially spirit, which reveals itself outwardly as a natural creation. Human beings do not enter the world without predispositions—they do not arrive only with the physical forces of heredity from their ancestors but with forces individually brought from a previous earthly life. Consequently, they may at first be equally open to beauty and ugliness, to good and evil, to wisdom and foolishness, to skillfulness and unskillfulness. Our task, therefore, is to work around children—to the degree that we control our very thoughts and feelings—so that children may become beings who imitate goodness, truth, beauty, and wisdom.

When we think in this way, life flows into our interactions with children; education very obviously becomes a part of that life through our interactions with them. Education, therefore, is not something we work at in isolated activities, but something lived. Children develop in the right way in their growth to adulthood only when education is lived with children and not forced on them.

Morality and the Child’s Natural Religious Feeling

What we have educated in children very naturally in a priestly way—what is really a religious devotion—we must now be able to reawaken at a higher soul level during the second stage of life, between the change of teeth and puberty. We do this by transforming pictorially everything we bring them, by transforming education into an artistic activity; nevertheless, it is a truly subjective and objective human activity. We educate children so that, through their relationship to the teacher, they are devoted aesthetically to beauty and internalize the images. Now it becomes essential that, in place of the religious element, a naturally artistic response to the world arises. This naturally artistic human attitude (which must not be confused with the treatment of “art as a luxury,” which is so much a part of our civilization) includes what now would be seen as a moral relationship to the world.

When understood correctly, we realize that we will not get anything from children between the change of teeth and puberty by giving them rules. Prior to the change of teeth, moralizing won’t get us anywhere with children; moralizing is inaccessible to a child’s soul during the first period of life. Only the morality of our actions have access at that age—that is, the moral element children see exprEssentialEd in the actions, gestures, thoughts, and feelings of those around them. Even during the second period of life—between the change of teeth and puberty—moralistic rules will not get us very close to a child. Children have no inner relationship to what is contained in moral commands. To them, they are only empty sounds.

We get close to children during this stage of life only by placing them in the context of natural authority. Children who cannot yet understand abstractly beauty, truth, goodness, and so on may develop this impulse through a sense that the teacher acts as the incarnation of goodness, truth, and beauty. When we understand children correctly, we understand that they have not gained any abstract, intellectual understanding for the revelations of wisdom, beauty, and goodness.

Nevertheless, children see what lives in the teacher’s gestures, and they hear something revealed in how the teacher’s words are spoken. It is the teacher whom the child calls—without saying it—truth, beauty, and goodness as revealed in the heart. And this is the way it must be.

When a teacher corresponds to what the child needs at this age, two things gradually grow in the child. The first is an inner aesthetic sense of pleasure and displeasure in the moral realm. Goodness pleases children when our whole personality exemplifies it. We must plan education so that the natural need to take pleasure in goodness can develop—and, likewise, displeasure in evil. How do children ask questions? Children do not ask intellectually with words, but deep in their hearts. “May I do this?” or, “May I do that?” They will be answered, “Yes, you may,” if the teacher does it. “Should I leave this undone?” “Yes, because my teacher shows that it may be left undone.”

This is how children experience the world through the teacher—the world as goodness or evil, as beauty or ugliness, and as truth or falsehood. This relationship to the teacher—the activity of the hidden forces between the child’s heart and that of the teacher—is the most important aspect of the teaching method; the conditions for life in education are contained in this.

This is how pleasure in morality and displeasure in immorality should develop between the change of teeth and puberty. Then, however, something appears in the background of that growing moral feeling. What first existed naturally during the first period of the child’s life—as a religious surrender to the environment—is resurrected, as it were, in a different form in this moral development; and, if the teacher’s soul forces are equal to it, it is easy to relate what arises as pleasure in good and displeasure in evil to what flows as soul through the manifestations of nature. First a child is surrendered naturally to nature itself; since the moral element in the environment is perceived as a part of nature, a moral gesture is felt, imitated and made part of the child’s being. But as we unfold the child’s sense of pleasure in the good, this religious and natural attitude is transformed into a soul quality.

Now consider what this means. Until the change of teeth, through the magic of completely unconscious processes, we allow the child’s religious attitude to develop naturally, through pure imitation; thus, we ground the religious element while we cannot yet touch the force of the inner, free individuality. We educate through nature and do not interfere with the soul and spirit. And when we approach the soul element between the change of teeth and puberty—since it is then that we must approach it—we do not force a religious feeling but awaken the child, and thus evoke the I in the human being.

In this way, we are already practical philosophers of freedom, since we do not say: You must believe this or that of the spirit; rather, we awaken innate human beliefs. We become awakeners, not stuffers of the souls of children. This constitutes the true reverence we must have for all creatures placed in the world by the Godhead, and we owe this especially to the human being. And thus we see how the I arises in the human being, and how moral pleasure and displeasure assume a religious quality.

Teachers who learn to observe what was initially a purely natural religious aspect as it strives toward transformation in the soul, embody through their words something that becomes a pleasing image of goodness, beauty, and truth. The child hangs on to something in the adult’s words. Teachers and educators are still active in this, but their methods no longer appeal only to imitation but to something that exists behind imitation. It no longer stimulates outer bodily nature but the soul element. A religious atmosphere permeates moral pleasure and displeasure.

The Intellect after Puberty

The intellect becomes active in its own way once children reach puberty. Because of this, I have suggested that it is actually a matter of bringing human beings to the point where they find within themselves what they must understand—draw from their own inner being what was initially given as spontaneous imitation, then as artistic, imaginative activity. Thus, even during the later period, we should not force things on the human being so that there is the least feeling of arbitrary, logical compulsion.

It was certainly a great moment in the development of spiritual life in Germany when—specifically in reference to moral experience—Schiller opposed Kant’s concept of morality. When Kant said, “Duty, you sublime and powerful name—you who bear no enticements but demand stern submission,” Schiller stood against it. He opposed this concept of duty, which does not allow morality to arise from goodwill but only from subjection. Schiller replied to Kant’s idea of duty with the remarkable words containing a true moral motto: “I willingly serve my friend, but unfortunately I serve him from inclination; alas, I therefore lack virtue!”

Indeed, moral life as a whole arises from human nature in purity only when duty becomes a deep human inclination, when it becomes, in the words of Goethe, “Duty—that is, where people love what they tell themselves to do.” It was a great moment when morality was purged of Kant’s influence and made human again through Schiller and Goethe.

What came at that time from German spiritual life nevertheless became immersed in nineteenth-century materialism, as it still is today. Something appeared in civilization because we forgot this powerful action in the moral realm, and our task is now to raise humanity out of it. This rehabilitation of the human being as a fully human and moral being is the special task of those who have to teach and educate. In this consciousness, the impulse of living education will be able to arise. We may say that the sun of German spiritual life shining in Schiller and Goethe in the moral sphere should shine down especially in the actions of those teachers and educators of the present who understand the task of this their own age, and who seek to develop through education a really human relationship of human beings to their own being and to the real needs of the civilization of the age. The task of this educational conference was to speak of the position of education in regard to human individuality and the culture of the age. We shall only accomplish this task if we can think with gratitude of the impulses that flowed into the evolution of Central Europe through great and shining spirits like Goethe and Schiller. When we seek to comprehend our true situation in the world, it is not merely in order to develop a critical sense, but above all things a gratitude for what has already been accomplished by human beings before us.

One could say, of course, that self-education should refer only to the education people give themselves. However, all education is self-education, not just in this subjective sense, but in an objective sense as well—in other words, educating the self of another. To educate (erziehen) means to “draw out,” and it is related to “drawing” (ziehen). The essence of what we invoke is left untouched. We do not smash a stone in order to pull it out of the water. Education does not demand that we in any way injure or overpower those who have entered the world; on the contrary, we must guide them to experience particularly the stage of culture reached by humanity as a whole when it descended from the divine-spiritual worlds into the sensible world. All these ideas, felt and experienced, are a part of the teaching method. The people who least understand the situation of education in our time are those in whom such ideas do not live.

In the moral realm we allow pleasure in the good and displeasure in the evil to grow; we allow the religious element, which was originally natural in the child, to awaken in the soul. In the depths, however, between the change of teeth and puberty there develops the seed and foundation—something already was present—that becomes free understanding after the age of puberty. We prepare a free understanding of the world that includes the religious and moral spheres. It is great when a person can recognize how pleasure and displeasure were experienced as a permeation of the whole life of feeling as the moral qualities of good and evil during the second period of life.

Then the impulse arises: The good that pleased you—this is what you must do! And what displeased you, you must not do. This principle of morality arises from what is already present in the human I, and a religious devotion toward the world arises in the spirit, which had been a thing of nature during the first period, and a thing of the soul during the second. The religious sense—and will applied to the religious impulse—becomes something that allows human beings to act as though God were acting in them. This becomes the expression of the I, not something imposed externally. Following puberty, if the child has developed in accordance with a true understanding of the human being, everything seems to arise as though born from human nature itself.

As I have already suggested, in order that this can happen, we must consider the whole human being during the earthly pilgrimage from birth to death. It’s easy to say that one will begin education by employing the principle of simply observing the child. Today people observe the child externally and experimentally, and from what they perceive in the child they think they can discern the method of teaching. This is impossible, since, as we have seen, a teacher whose uncontrolled choleric temperament leads to angry behavior sows a seed that will remain hidden, and later develop as gout, rheumatism, and disease of the whole organism.

This is what happens in many other relationships; we must keep in mind the earthly life of the whole human being. We must remember this when we are concerned with an event in a particular life period. There are those who limit themselves to a triviality often known as “visual instruction.” They entrench themselves behind the rule—as obvious as it is foolish—that children should be shown only what they can comprehend, and they fall into absurdities that could drive a person crazy. This principle must be replaced by that deeper principle that helps us to understand what it means for the vitality of a person when, at the age of forty, a sudden realization occurs: For the first time I can understand what that respected authority thought and accomplished earlier. I absorbed it because, to me, that individual embodied truth, goodness, and beauty. Now I have the opportunity to draw from the depths what I heard in those days.

When things are reinvigorated in this way, there is an infinitely rejuvenating and vitalizing effect on later life. The human being is deprived of all this at a later age if the teacher fails to insure that there actually is something in the depths that will be understood only later on. The world becomes empty and barren, unless something can arise anew again and again from the essence of human nature—something that permeates outer perception with soul and spirit. Therefore, when we educate this way, we give the human being full freedom and vitality for the rest of life.

Materialism and Spirit in Education

At this point, let me mention something I have often spoken of. A true teacher must always keep in view all of human life. A teacher must, for example, be able to see the wonderful element that is present in many older people, whose very presence brings a kind of blessing without much in the way of words; a kind of blessing is contained in every gesture. This is a characteristic of many people who stand at the threshold of death. From where does this come? Such individuals have this quality because, during childhood, they developed devotion naturally. Such reverence and devotion during childhood later becomes the capacity to bless. We may say that at the end of earthly life, people cannot stretch out their hands in blessing if they have not learned to fold them in prayer during childhood. The capacity for blessing when one grows old and comes near the threshold of death originates with folding one’s hands in prayer with reverent, childhood devotion. Everything visible as a seed in the child will develop into good or evil fruit as the person progresses farther along in earthly life. And this is something else that must be continually within view in order to develop a genuine teaching method based on real life in education.

Thus—at least in rough outline—we have the foundation for an attempt to bring anthroposophy to fruit in education through Waldorf schools. This education conference should illuminate what has been attempted in this way and practiced for some years. It has been illuminated from various perspectives and we have shown what the students themselves have accomplished—though, in relation to this, much has yet to be demonstrated and discussed.

At the beginning of today’s lecture, I was addrEssentialEd with loving words from two sides, for which I am heartily grateful; after all, what could be done with impulses, however beautiful, if there were no one to realize them through devotion and selfsacrifice? Therefore, my gratitude goes to the Waldorf teachers who try to practice what needs to underlie this kind of renewal in education. My gratitude also goes out to today’s youth, young men and women who, through their own educational experiences, understand the true aims of Waldorf education. One would be happy indeed if the cordiality felt by young people for Waldorf education carried their message to our civilization and culture.

I believe I am speaking for the hearts of all of you when I respond with words of gratitude to those who have spoken so lovingly, because, more than anything else, education needs human beings who will accomplish these goals. A painter or sculptor can work in solitude and say that even if people do not see the work, the gods do. When a teacher performs spiritual actions for earthly existence, however, the fulfillment of such activities can be expected only in communion with those who help to realize them in the physical realm of the senses.

As teachers and educators, this impulse must live in our awareness, especially in our time. Therefore, as we conclude these lectures—this lecture must be the last, since I am wanted elsewhere and cannot remain in Stuttgart—allow me to point to something. Based on anthroposophy and not forcing it on people as a worldview—based on anthroposophy because it gives a true knowledge of the human being in body, soul, and spirit—let me conclude by saying that this education serves, in the most practical way possible, the deepest needs and conditions of our modern civilization. The people of Central Europe can hope for a future only if their actions and thoughts arise from such impulses.

What is our most intense suffering? By trying to characterize our education I repeatedly had to point out that we stand with reverent awe before the human I-being placed in the world by divine powers helping to develop that I. The human I is not truly understood unless it is understood in spirit; it is denied when understood only in matter. It is primarily the I that has suffered because of our contemporary materialistic life, because of ignorance, because of the wrong concept of the human I. This is primarily due to the fact that—while we have hammered away at perception of matter and at activity in matter—spirit has been shattered, and with it the I.

If we place limits on knowledge, as is common, saying that we cannot enter the realm of spirit, this implies only that we cannot enter the human realm. To limit knowledge means that we remove the human being from the world as far as knowing is concerned. How can a soul be educated if it has been eliminated by materialistic concepts? Elimination of the soul was characteristic of the kind of materialism we have just passed through, and it still prevails throughout human activity.

What has happened in the materialistic attitude of the more modern time? It is an attitude that, as I have said, was justified from a different perspective because it had to enter human evolution at some point, but now it must pass away. In expressing this attitude, we may say that the human being has surrendered the I to matter—connected it to matter. Consequently, however, the genuine, living method of teaching, the real life of education has been frozen; only external techniques can survive in a civilization bound by matter. But, matter oppresses people. Matter confines each person within the bodily nature, and each individual thus becomes more or less isolated in soul. Unless we find other human beings in spirit, we become isolated souls, since human beings cannot, in fact, be found in the body.

Thus, our civilization’s materialistic view has produced an age when human beings pass each other by, because their perceptions are all connected with bodily nature. People cry out for a social life out of the intellect, and at the same time develop in their feelings an asocial indifference toward one another as well as a lack of mutual understanding. Souls who are isolated in individual bodies pass one another by, whereas souls who awaken the spirit within to find spirit itself also find themselves, as human beings, in communion with other human beings. Real community will blossom from the present chaos only when people find the spirit—when, living together in spirit, they find each other.

The great longing of today’s youth is to discover the human being. The youth movement came from this cry. A few days ago when the young people here came together, it became evident that this cry has been transformed into a cry for spirit, through the realization that the human being can be found only when spirit is found; if spirit is lost, we lose one another.

Last evening, I tried to show how we can find knowledge of the world—how the human being living on earth in body, soul, and spirit can develop out of such knowledge. I tried to show how a worldview can develop into an experience of the cosmos, and the Sun and Moon may be seen in everything that grows and flourishes on Earth. When we educate young people with this kind of background, we will properly develop the experience of immortality, the divine, the eternally religious element in the growing child, and we implant in the child’s being an immortal aspect destined for further progress, which we must carry in spirit through the gate of death.

This particular aspect of education is not what we are discussing here. The relationship between education and the human I, as well as culture, is what we had to look at first. Nevertheless, we may be sure of one thing; if people are educated properly on Earth, the heavenly being will also be educated properly, since the heavenly being lives within the earthly being. When we educate the earthly being correctly, we also promote the true development of the heavenly being through the tiny amount of progress that we make possible between birth and death.

In this way we come to terms with a view that progresses, in the true sense, to a universal knowledge—a knowledge that understands the need for human cooperation in the great spiritual cosmos, which is also revealed in the realm of the senses. True education recognizes that human beings are coworkers in building humankind. This is what I meant yesterday when I described the view of life that I said must form the background of all teaching and education.

From this, it follows that we cannot understand the world as a one-sided subject of the head alone. It is untrue to say that we can understand the world through ideas and concepts. And it is equally false to say that the world can be understood through feeling alone. It has to be understood through ideas and feeling, as well as through the will; human beings will understand the world only when divine spirit descends into will. Humankind will also be understood then—not through one aspect, but through the whole being. We need a worldview not just for the intellect, but for the whole human being—for human thinking, feeling, and willing—a concept of the world that discovers the world in the human body, soul, and spirit.

Only those who rediscover the world in the human being, and who see the world in human beings, can have a true concept of the world; because, just as the visible world is reflected in the eye, the entire human being exists as an eye of spirit, soul, and body, reflecting the whole cosmos. Such a reflection cannot be perceived externally; it must be experienced from within. Then it is not just an appearance, like an ordinary mirrored image; it is an inner reality. Thus, in the process of education, the world becomes human, and the human being discovers the world in the self.

Working this way in education, we feel that the human race would be disrupted if all human experience were tied to matter, because, when they deny their own being, souls do not find one another but lose themselves. When we move to spirit, we find other human beings. Community, in the true sense of the word, must be established through spirit. Human beings must find themselves in spirit; then they can unite with others. If worlds are to be created out of human actions, then the world must be seen in human beings.

In conclusion, allow me to express what was in the back of my mind while I was speaking to you. What I said here was intended as a consideration of education in the personal and cultural life of the present time. Now, in conclusion, let me put this in other words that include all I have wanted to say.

To spend oneself in matter
is to grind down souls.
To find oneself in the spirit
is to unite human beings.
To see oneself in all humanity
is to construct worlds.

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.

To some of you it may seem superfluous in discussing such weighty subjects at our annual meeting for me to include a consideration of what contemporary science has to say about these matters. I have no intention of constructing an elaborate bridge across the gap separating us from the aforementioned erudition. Nothing of the sort is necessary within our circles, because the great majority of those who join us feel in their souls a certain connection with the spiritual life. They do not come to us to have the spiritual world proved to them in a so-called scientific manner, but to become acquainted with it in a concrete form; hence the calling in of such erudition might seem superfluous.

Another objection could be made that anthroposophists often face the obligation to intercede for anthroposophy, to refute objections, produce evidence and substantiations, but it is only possible to a slight degree to convince our opponents by means of any proofs whatsoever. Philosophies depend not so much on proofs as on habits of thought, and if a person is unable to penetrate—his thought habits being what they are—into the spiritual-scientific way of looking at the world, he will for the time being certainly remain deaf to proofs.

Such matters as were discussed yesterday were brought up in order to meet and alleviate the confusion that might arise in the minds of our members when again and again they must hear people say, “Your philosophy lacks a scientific basis.” Anthroposophists should feel ever more strongly that their world view rests upon a solid foundation and is proof against whatever recognized science has to say.

To propound everything needed for coming to terms with modern science would take a long time, and references to external science are intended only to arouse a feeling for the fact that there are ways and means of meeting that science, and that in championing anthroposophy one stands upon a firm foundation. So the aim is to indicate the manner of approach, when the time is available, rather than the approach itself. A modern science of external corporeality may be fraught with many a disagreement, but one praiseworthy feature of such a science is that its subject, external corporeality, is not disputed. In dealing with the science of the soul, on the other hand, the science of psychology, one enters a region in which there are people who deny the reality of the subject itself, the soul. Not only must we nowadays face the materialistic world conception, but we find ourselves enmeshed in a sort of psychology intended to be a science of the soul without a soul.

Yesterday we made the acquaintance of an Aristotelian scholar of our time who turned his keen wits to an investigation of the subject known as the soul. Of Aristotle it can be said that there was no question of his denying the existence of the spirit, but we found that Brentano shrewdly halted before the spirit, so that we do, indeed, find there a standpoint concerned with pneumatosophy, or the science of the spirit, that denies not only this or that law but the subject itself, as such.

To many people the spirit is a highly debatable fact anyway, hence we must seriously consider the question why this can be so. The body is perceived through the outer senses and with all the force of facts that exist for us automatically. Outer physical facts affect the human soul with such force that it is incapable of denying what they have to tell. We are in a similar position with regard to the soul, for we do, in fact, experience its flowing content. We experience feelings, conceptions, impulses of will; we experience all that results as destiny from the course this soul life takes; we experience suffering and happiness, joy and sorrow. So unless you were to call all that nothing, or at most a sort of surface foam from the waves of physical facts, you cannot but recognize the soul in a certain sense, at least to the extent of admitting its reality. The spirit, however, is primarily something super-sensible, imperceptible, and this alone suffices to explain how plausibly its existence may be denied. It explains why one might marvel at the idea of searching for the spirit, on the ground that it does not enter the world in which we live.

From the standpoint of anthroposophy we have stated often enough that the real facts about the spiritual world are derived through a method of observation that must be created by means of a certain self-cultivation, a certain self-education through meditation, concentration, and so forth. Thus the facts of the spiritual world are not directly given to man. They can be gleaned only if he is able to rise to a cognition differing from that of everyday life. It might seem as though this spiritual world were completely hidden from man, perceptible only after he had entirely transcended his normal way of cognition and risen to another.

Well, if that were the way matters stood, we could ask how man happens to long for a world that really in no way discloses itself to him as he is in ordinary life. Against this objection only the man of faith, not the scientist, can really feel himself adequately armed. True, the former could answer this objection by stating that the spiritual world had indeed manifested itself through revelations received in the course of human development, so that man could have obtained his knowledge of the spiritual world through revelations from the super-sensible. One who is not inclined to recognize such revelations or such faith, however, will object that there may be a spiritual world, but there is no immediately apparent reason why we should take account of it, as it does not manifest itself in any way in the outer world. Against this, an objection has been raised again and again throughout the ages by an idealistic or spiritualistic philosophy, namely, that recognition of the spiritual world by this or that philosopher depends largely upon his having taken seriously the refutation of the first objection by means of the second. Certainly it is possible to transcend the world that is primarily revealed by outer perception; the human being can build up a world of truth in his own inner being, and he could never be satisfied with what the outer world of perception has to give for the simple reason that he is a human being. Thus he builds a world of truth within himself.

If we examine this world of truth seriously, we find that it comprises something that already transcends all that is external-physical as such. One then cites ideas produced by man about the world—grand, comprehensive points of view that never could have originated through the outer senses alone, and that must have come, therefore, from the other side. Thus, the fact of the world of truth is in itself sufficient to convince us that we participate in a spirit world and live in it with our truth. Naturally, a philosopher like Hegel, for instance, would find plenty of justification for a spiritual world, as opposed to the objection set forth—justification for recognizing a spiritual world that embraces thinking as well, in so far as thinking is independent of the senses. Philosophers whose whole disposition equips them to recognize the absolutely independent world of truth will find in this independent activity of the spirit, moving as it does in truth, sufficient reason for assuming the existence of the spirit. It can be said, then, that there will always be people in the world in whose view the concrete actuality of the true world of ideas is sufficient proof of the spirit. In a certain sense it can be said that even in Aristotle something like faith is discernible, faith that in his concepts and ideas, in the nous, as he calls it, man lives in a spiritual world, and because it exists in man, it exists, and is thereby sufficiently substantiated.

Granting this, it is permissible to draw conclusions from what can be learned within one's own spiritual world as such when moving within it, that is, conclusions regarding other beings and facts of the spiritual world. Thus Aristotle draws his conclusions concerning the Divinity, the immortality of the soul, and arrives at inferences such as were described yesterday. Hegel speaks of an independent activity of the spirit, meaning the independent activity of concepts, that has no connection, as regards the laws governing it, with the outer world, but is an activity of the spirit itself. He maintains that the spirit reveals itself in the presence of this independent activity.

More recent attempts such as that of Rudolf Eucken, which spiritual science certainly cannot regard as particularly inspired, talk of a self-grasping of the spirit and of self-proof of the existence of the spiritual being. This path leads to no proof, however, and it furnishes anthroposophists the opportunity of perceiving how difficult it is to prove anthroposophy as such. Truth per se and taken alone does not necessarily prove anything with regard to the spirit. That is a point that is never-taken seriously enough. The existence of the world of truth as such does not necessarily prove anything concerning the spirit.

I will now sketch briefly, somewhat in the manner of a parable, something that really should be thoroughly presented in a whole series of lectures. Let us assume that actually nothing existed but corporeality, the outer physical world. Let us further assume that this physical world with its forces, or “energies,” as it is now the fashion to call them, expressed itself in the mineral world and became complicated. That is, that it did not gather new energies but merely became more and more complicated in the plant and animal worlds, until finally it became so complicated that it built up man out of a combination and co-operation of purely physical energies—built him in such a way as to enable him to produce thoughts from the complicated instrument of the brain. All this we assume to proceed in the manner in which physical processes run their course within corporeality. Imagine for a moment that the materialists' extraordinarily crude assertion were to be taken seriously—the assertion that the brain secretes thoughts in the same way that the liver secretes bile. Suppose the human brain to be built up out of mechanico-physical energies in such a way as to produce what appears to man as his spiritual life. In short, suppose materialism were right, and that there were no spirit as such. Would it then be possible, in the materialists' sense, to speak of a world of truth—for instance as presented in Hegel's philosophy—in the world of concepts? If it were possible to answer this question in the affirmative, it would automatically show that materialism itself could explain—that is, prove—a philosophy like Hegel's. In other words, it could reject all spiritualistic or idealistic philosophies.

One need only imagine, and this is the point, which to explain thoroughly would call for many lectures, that what springs from the complicated human brain as thought, in so far as the world of truth is made up of thoughts, were nothing more than the reflection of the outer physical world. You can place an object before a mirror, the mirror reflects the object's image, image and object are identical. The image is not the object, but purely material objects bring about the image by means of the mirror. You need admit nothing more than that you are dealing with a mere image that has no reality; then you don't have to prove the reality of the image. In the same way, you can take a materialistic standpoint and say, “There is really nothing there but external energies reflected in the brain, and all we have in the way of thoughts are merely such reflections of the outer world.” Then you are not obliged to prove the existence of the spirit, for all thoughts are but reflections.

Nor would we stand much chance of convincing those who might get up and say, “But there are concepts that cannot be taken from outer perceptions, abstract concepts, like a circle or a triangle, that we never encounter in reality.” We can reply, “True, as they are, they do not appear in the outer world as images of the thought world, but there are innumerable approximations.” In short, though it cannot be denied that truth is super-sensible, materialism can undoubtedly cope with the objection that man creates super-sensible truth within himself; hence truth as such would furnish no argument against materialism.

Now we're in a pretty predicament. This truth, being undeniably super-sensible, appears to countless people as sufficient proof of the existence of a spiritual world, or an indication of one, but it is not a proof of the existence of a spiritual world! Truth is super-sensible, yes, but it is not necessarily real. It could be a sum of images, then no one need accept its reality. So we must keep in mind that the possession of truth is not proof of the reality of a spiritual world, and that merely by penetrating to truth and living and functioning in reality, man can never reach the spirit. The objection would always stand that truth might be but an image of the outer physical world.

At this point one might object that in that case it is difficult to see how anywhere in the wide world any argument could be found that might persuade man, such as he is in everyday life, to recognize a spirit. Then, when people like Feuerbach, for example, come along and say that men assume gods or a god, but that what they experience within themselves is nothing but the content of their soul, their thoughts, which they deify and project into the world, it is easy to prove the unreality of the divine world, because it is merely an outward projection of the unreal world of thought. Aristotle does not go about it right when he cites the objectivity of the thought world as proof of the existence of a god. He argues simply that man has a mind and the mind can be applied to objects. This presupposes that all objects are permeated by the divine nous, or mind, but as he describes the latter, it is nothing but the human mind projected outward, a reflected image. Thus the divine nous is merely an image reflected outward, and is incapable of forming the basis of any proof.

Anthroposophists must really be able to face such matters clearly, and to realize that the usual methods of attempting to arrive at recognition of the spiritual world from without prove, upon closer examination, to be inadequate. Are we compelled, then, to admit unconditionally that there is no possibility of achieving conviction concerning the existence of the spirit, other than through clairvoyance? It would almost seem as though only those people were justified in speaking of the spiritual world who either envision it as clairvoyants or believe what clairvoyants have to tell. It would seem so, but it is not the case.

The outer world as such, with its material content, does not of itself point to a spiritual world, unless we know of it already, nor does the inner world of truth, which might be a reflection of the outer world. Hence the question arises as to what else there is. Well, there is something else, and it is error. We must forget nothing in the world when dealing with a complete picture of it, and in addition to truth we have error. Now, error naturally cannot lead to truth, and it would be a strange thing to proceed from error as a starting point. The fact that the soil of truth is sterile is no reason for taking the standpoint of error; that would hardly reduce the number of our opponents. We shall not take error as the starting point in our search for truth; that would be not only foolish but absurd. There is one aspect of error that cannot be denied. It exists, it is present in the world, it is real; above all, it can arise in man's nature and achieve being there.

When the outer world has created for itself a reflecting apparatus in the brain and is reflected, and the sum of truth is the sum of the images, it could naturally still be possible that, instead of truth, error might arise through a condition analogous to a distorting mirror that reflects caricatures of objects. If you were to use a mirror of that sort, you would simply get a false image, and the error would be comparatively easy to explain. It is merely a matter of the organ producing a false reflection, and this, too, can be explained. Truth and error can be explained as reflections. But what cannot be explained? The correction of the error, the transformation of error into truth; this cannot be explained as a reflection. Try as you will, you cannot induce a mirror producing caricatures to convert these into true images; it abides by its error. The difference in the case of man is that he is not compelled to stop at error, but is in a position to conquer it and transform it into truth. Man thereby proves that while there is such a thing in the phenomenon of truth as a reflection of external reality, the transformation of error into truth shows that error as such is more than a mere reflection of the outer world, and hence has no raison d'être in the world that surrounds us. Truth has justification in the external physical world, but the acceptance of the external physical world is not sufficient justification for accepting error. Something must enter in that does not pertain to the outer world, that has no direct connection with it. If the sensible is reflected in truth as a super-sensible image, and if it is reflected as error, the cause of error must lie elsewhere than in the sensible itself.

What meets our eye, then, when we recognize the existence of error? We behold a world that is not made up of outer physical phenomena only. Error can only originate in the super-sensible world, can only proceed thence. That is for the time being a conclusion. Let us now see what super-sensible research has to say about this, not in order to prove anything, but to illuminate the matter. What does it tell us about the peculiar position of error in the world?

Suppose we were so far lacking in self-esteem that out of an inner urge we were to think, voluntarily, a conception that we knew for certain to be an error. Let us think an error. At first sight this might not seem a desirable thing to do, but in a higher sense it can be useful because, if you bring to bear the requisite force and energy and frequent repetition in voluntarily thinking an error, you will notice that this error is something real in the soul, that it has a real effect. The error we think voluntarily, knowing it to be an error, proves nothing, elucidates nothing, but it works in us. The effect is all the more remarkable in that we are not distracted by any prospect of arriving at truth; when we voluntarily think an error we are quite alone with ourselves. By continuing this process long enough we achieve what we have always described in spiritual science as the calling into being of forces hidden in the soul, forces that were not there before.

Continual devotion to outer truth does not get us very far along the path under discussion, but the voluntary encouragement of error within ourselves can lead to the birth of certain hidden soul forces. As I have presented it now, you will not be able to use it as a precept; hence in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment and in my Occult Science I omitted the advice to keep thinking as much error as possible (for the purpose mentioned). That was left out, but a certain other aspect of the matter is similar to something I did set forth there. I said that we should not proceed from some obvious, glaring error, but that two conditions must be fulfilled. We must visualize something that has no counterpart in external reality, like that of the rose cross, for example. Now, red roses don't grow on a black cross; looked at from one angle, that is an erroneous conception. The rose cross represents no external truth, but it is a symbolical visualization, an allegorical conception. It expresses no truth directly, but it is the allegory of a super-sensible truth. In its relation to sense reality it is an erroneous conception, but as an allegory it is spiritually significant. In meditating on the rose cross we yield ourselves to a conception that in its relation to external reality is an error. We are not yielding ourselves to an ordinary error, however, but rather, by meditating on the allegory, on the significant conception, we are fulfilling a definite condition.

This brings us to the second condition. A certain premise must be fulfilled when we devote ourselves to meditation, concentration, and so forth. If you penetrate into the whole spirit of what is set forth in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, or in the second part of Occult Science, you will see that a certain frame of mind is indispensable for proper meditation and concentration. Certain moral attributes of the soul are indicated that must be present if what is to take place is to take place in the right way. Why are these given as a condition? Why are certain moral qualities indispensable? To enable us to yield ourselves to an allegorical conception of this sort, to a conception that in the external sense is false.

This again is something that must be taken into account. As a rule, nothing desirable is attained by meditating and concentrating without first having sought the frame of mind that has been sufficiently described because experience shows that without such a foundation, the world that is opened up through the awakening of hidden soul forces is in reality one that acts destructively upon man, rather than tending to further his development. It has a health-giving, developing effect only when it grows out of a frame of mind such as has been explained. That is what experience shows. Further, it shows what pathological phenomena, as they may be called, are symptomatical in those who seek the higher worlds from motives of passion or curiosity, instead of in the right frame of mind. Such people do receive a reality into themselves, for error is a reality and it acts in the soul. It is a reality not present in the outer world as revealed by the senses; hence such people absorb a super-sensible force, a super-sensible entity into their souls. This error is actually something efficacious, but its roots can only be in the super-sensible world, not in the outer sense world.

This super-sensible world must not be permitted to act upon us unless we have the special foundation this moral frame of mind provides. This can only be because we are aware that error, though a superhuman force, leads us first into a super-sensible world that is not a good one. Though truly a super-sensible force, it is in the first instance quite certainly not a good force. It can only become such when it is implanted in a good moral frame of mind. Now translate that into words for yourselves such as are often used to discuss such things on an anthroposophical basis.

You see, by learning to know error we can get to know a super-sensible world. It is not necessary to approach the super-sensible world by artificial means. The super-sensible world looms into the sensible world through the medium of error, and then in turn through error it leads us out into the super-sensible world. But it is not a good world. We must bring the good world to it from the other side, a frame of mind through which alone error can have the right effect. Paradoxically it could be said that in the sense world we actually become acquainted with the super-sensible world because we have error. So the feature of the super-sensible world you meet first is the devil, for at first you encounter a world in no wise good, a world that reveals itself as anything but good.

For this reason Mephisto's remark could be appropriately applied here, “These fellows would not scent the devil out, e'en though he had them by the throat.” The devil is present. We can also say that our first acquaintance with the super-sensible world is made by way of the Luciferic power. We meet the super-sensible world first in the shape of the Luciferic forces, and these we can only escape by the ostrich method, that is, by burying our head in the sand. This can, of course, be done, but it does not do away with those forces. That is the point that should be elaborated in many lectures if it were not to be merely sketched. The super-sensible world is given with the existence of error, but at the outset all that is revealed is the Luciferic element, the adversary of the nature of man.

Is there any particular point in talking about just these matters? If a man lacks the requisite moral frame of mind when penetrating into the super-sensible world by means of an error voluntarily accepted in his thinking, he falls prey to Lucifer! Yesterday we cited Aristotle's statement that in addition to what man comes by from parents and ancestors in the line of heredity, he receives his super-sensible nature from the God, so that through a relation to the God every human being entering the moral world is endowed with the spirit as a new creation¹ by the Divinity. We could not come to terms, however, with Aristotle's assertion. We found it contained much that contradicted the assertion itself. Now, Dr. Unger has rightly shown and clearly proved the justification for contradiction in the outer world,² but certainly this recognition and justification cannot apply to a contradiction that leads to inferences refuting the assertion itself. Yet that is what we find in Aristotle.

If the God were to create a super-sensible man, then, as we saw, an unsatisfied state would arise in all men after death. It would follow that the God created man for a state of discontent, but that cannot lie within Aristotle's meaning either. We cannot admit a philosophy which maintains that, along with what is given through birth, a super-sensible part is received directly from the God—as more recent world conceptions interpret the concept “God.” Even if this is based on truth, nothing can be proved by it, for truth proves nothing concerning the super-sensible world. A proof of that sort can in no way be applied to the super-sensible world. That is the first point, and the second is that if we assume that man, in his super-sensible component, is created by a God, it would be unthinkable that after death he should pass to an imperfect state. Aristotle's position is therefore untenable.

What Aristotle failed to take into account is that the first element of the super-sensible world accessible to man—active even in our immediate human experience—is a Luciferic one, and that we can only make headway by admitting the Luciferic principle at the inception of super-sensible man, by letting it participate, so to speak, in so far as we look up from the man of the physical world to the super-sensible world. Thus man cannot derive from a God alone, but only from a God in conjunction with the Luciferic principle. I ask you to keep well in mind the facts just referred to. They have unconsciously passed over into the feeling of occidental peoples, whatever their theories about a spiritual world, and right into our own time they have prevented the learned lights of the West from ridding themselves of their prejudices against the idea of reincarnation and repeated earth lives.

In former times, of course, men did not express the matter as we have done today, by saying that at bottom there is greater compulsion to believe in the devil than in anything else that is super-sensible, but they felt exactly what has just been expressed in the form of ideas, felt the presence of the Luciferic along with the Divine. They also felt—the justification of which will become manifest later in these lectures—that side by side with what we have as corporeality, a spiritual element is vouchsafed us, something begotten of God. Try as they would, they never could harmonize the cognition of the external physical human being on the physical plane with the descent of man from a super-sensible origin.

They could not get around this contradiction. It was much more difficult for the occidental than, for example, for the Buddhist, whose whole way of thinking and feeling facilitates his acceptance of the doctrine of reincarnation. One could almost say that with him it is congenital to believe that external corporeality really represents a sort of denial of the Divine, a fall from Grace, and that he is justified in striving to be free of it and to rise into worlds in which it means nothing. Quite different is the standpoint of Aristotle from that of Buddha's disciples. Aristotle says that we pass through the portal of death and take with us our super-sensible part, but then we must look down on what we had been, and our further development depends upon that physical life. The Divinity introduced us into a physical body because we needed it. Aristotle proclaims the importance of outer sensual form, outer sensual life. It is not a question here of concepts, ideas, abstractions, but of the content of the philosophers' minds. The Buddhist's mind held no such content as Aristotle's. The essence of his attitude was a feeling that contact with the physical world constituted a defection. He was aware that in arriving at sensuality, man had encountered precisely that from which he must free himself, that a man became more of a human being after having cast off all that.

It was impossible for Aristotle, as a representative occidental, to feel Buddhistically, as indeed no one rooted in the Occident can genuinely feel. He can acknowledge Buddhism theoretically, but really only by repudiating the content of his inner soul. Aristotle values the sense world not for its own sake, but as a condition of rising into the spiritual world. Western feeling always leads in the end to a certain recognition of a divinely, spiritually permeated sense world. Though materialism denied this for a time, it nevertheless lived on in the soul and must persist as long as the fundamental conditions of the occidental spirit exist.

Aristotle felt this to be a condition of the total evolution of humanity. It lived on even into the nineteenth century, and it is one of the elements that have prevented prominent minds of the West from becoming reconciled to the idea of reincarnation. A sensing of the Luciferic principle on the one hand, and the assumption of a divine principle on the other, led to a feeling such as I should like to point out to you in the works (1889) of the distinguished philosopher, Frohschammer, on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. There he onsets his own philosophy against that of Thomas Aquinas. Among other things, he expresses his views on the plausibility of what we call reincarnation. In a certain respect Frohschammer must be regarded entirely as a representative of Western mentality. He says, “Deriving as it does from God, the human soul can only be regarded as the product or work of divine imagination, for while the human soul and the world itself must in this case originate in divine forces and activity (since nothing can derive from mere nothingness), yet this force and activity of God must act as a preparation for creation and as formative forces for its realization and perpetuation; that is, as creative force not merely formal but actual. It must be an imagination immanent in the world, continually active and creative, a sustaining force or potency; a world imagination, as was explained earlier.”

I must add here that Frohschammer also wrote a brilliant book dealing generally with imagination as a world-creative principle, as Hegel dealt with the idea and Schopenhauer with the will. “As concerns the doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul (souls that are regarded either as eternal or as transitory, but in any case created in the beginning and all together), a doctrine that appears to have been resurrected in recent times and is considered capable of solving all sorts of psychological problems, it is connected with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls and their confinement in earthly bodies.”

This was written in 1889, and in the Carlsruhe lectures. From Jesus to Christ (October, 1911), I mentioned that the doctrine had always had adherents, even in the nineteenth century. Naturally, Frohschammer knew that too, hence he continues,

“According to this doctrine, neither the direct, divine creation of souls nor the creative production of new human beings as regards body and soul would take place at procreation, but only a new union of the soul with the body, a sort of becoming flesh or an immersion of the soul in the body, at least partially, so that one part would be encompassed and bound by the body and the other would transcend it, asserting a certain independence as spirit. The soul, however, cannot break away from the body (according to this doctrine) until death severs the union and brings liberation and deliverance, at least from this union. The spirit of man would in that case resemble, in its relation to the body, the poor souls in Purgatory as they are usually represented on votive tablets by daubers; that is, as bodies half engulfed in roaring flames, but with their upper parts, the souls, protruding and gesticulating. Consider the position and significance this conception would imply for the contrast of the sexes, the concept of human species, wedlock, and the relation of parents to their children! The contrast of sexes is but a system of bondage; wedlock, an institution for fulfilling the task it involves; parents, minions of the law for holding and imprisoning the souls of their children, while the children themselves owe this miserable, weary imprisonment to their parents, with whom they have nothing further in common. Everything connected with this relationship would be based on wretched illusion, as would all that humanity associates with the contrast of the sexes. What a formidable rôle this bisexuality plays! How intensely man's planning and longing are determined by it! What yearning it excites, what bliss it yields, what a source of bodily and spiritual transport! What an inexhaustible subject of artistic and particularly poetic creation! Now we are to believe that this subject is but a process for embodying and imprisoning poor souls that are thereby committed to earthly misery, consigned to the toils, passions, temptations and dangers of this earthly existence, rising at best with only a portion of their being into a Beyond; are, as it is called, transcendental—or better, transcendent. The significance of such a sex relationship, then, is not to be found in a continuous renewal, a rejuvenation corresponding to the spring of existence; quite the contrary, and the underlying longing and rapture it engenders would not be based upon the satisfaction of a lofty creative urge, as one would assume should be the case, but would emanate from a pitiful ambition to imprison new souls in bodily forms that obscure and estrange the greater part of their real selves.”³

Here, as you see, is a man who speaks sincerely and honestly out of the spiritual life of his time, and we have every reason to inform ourselves concerning the difficulties encountered by occidental philosophies of the past in recognizing what must be the basic nerve of our world conception. All who approach it honestly will meet with great difficulties. One of the tasks of anthroposophy is to become acquainted with these problems that face those who, steeped in the occidental cultural life, would achieve recognition of the spirit as it is represented by spiritual science in general and pneumatosophy in particular.

• 1. “Aristotle's world picture presents itself as follows. Down below, objects and processes representing matter and ideas have their being, and the higher one looks, the more everything of a material character disappears. What is purely spiritual comes into view, disclosing itself to man as ideas—the world sphere in which the divine holds sway as pure spirituality that animates all. To this world sphere the spiritual human soul belongs. It does not exist as an individual being before combining with the elements of body and soul, but only as part of the world spirit. Through this union it acquires its individual existence, detached from the world spirit; and after the separation from corporeality it lives on as a spiritual being. Thus the individual soul being commences in conjunction with the human earth being, then lives on, immortal. A pre-existence of the soul before the earth life is assumed by Plato, but not by Aristotle.” (Rudolf Steiner, Riddles of Philosophy, Vol. I.)
• 2. Carl Unger, Gedanken zur Philosophic des Widerspruchs. Stuttgart, 1964.
• 3. J. Frohschammer, Die Philosophic des Thomas von Aquino, Leipzig, 1889

If we wish our human thought and action to be permeated once more by spiritual life, it will be necessary to receive again in full earnestness such conceptions of the spiritual world as have passed through our souls in these last lectures. For many centuries these conceptions have in reality been lacking to mankind and notably to civilised mankind.

Looking back into various epochs of human history we shall find how in earlier ages human action upon earth was everywhere connected with what was taking place in the super-sensible. It is not that a consciousness of the super-sensible—a certain abstract consciousness of it—has been lacking to the greater part of mankind in recent times. No—but the courage has been lacking to attach the concrete deeds and happenings in the earthly sphere to the equally real forms of life and movement in spiritual worlds.

With our recent studies we are coming to do this once more. And we do so especially when we bring the earthly life of men, as we have been doing here, into connection with the life between death and a new birth, when we connect what is taking place in one earthly life with that which is accomplished in the successive lives of man.

We have begun to consider that spiritual, super-sensible stream of which I was allowed to say that it is connected with our present stream of Michael in the service of which Anthroposophy has placed itself. We have thus entered upon the path which in a certain sense is to approach the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement itself, and at the same time, the karma of the individuals who unite the life of their soul and spirit sincerely, out of a straightforward inner impulse, with the Anthroposophical Movement.

I told you of a super-sensible event which took place under the aegis as it were of the Michael Power at the very time when the Council of 869 was taking place on earth. We know how deeply the whole life and civilisation of the Middle Ages was influenced by that Council. We need only watch the deep reserve with which enlightened spirits in the Middle Ages avoid speaking of the threefold human being, of body, soul and spirit. For the 8th Œcumenical Council at Constantinople had declared the doctrine of the threefold man heretical. Considering the power of such edicts in the Middle Ages it is quite clear that the whole of the spiritual life here on earth then had to take its course as it were under the shadow of this declaration which condemned Trichotomy as heretical.

But all the more intense was that spiritual life which has been working for a long time preparing the Michael stream for the 20th century, the Michael stream in which we stand since the last third of the 19th century and in which mankind will be for three or four centuries to come.

To-day we will speak of the course of this stream of Michael to which we have already begun to turn attention. Then, next Sunday, we shall approach more nearly matters connected on the one hand with the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement, and on the other hand karmically with the spiritual and intellectual life of the present time.

I told you of a kind of super-sensible Council which took place in spiritual regions over the earth at the same time as the 8th Œcumenical Council in Constantinople. In that spiritual council there met together the individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of his wise counsellor, and also the individualities of Alexander and Aristotle. Moreover there were also gathered there the individualities from the time of the spiritual service of King Arthur; and as I explained, all this took place under the aegis of Michael.

Then I told you how Haroun al Raschid appeared again, bringing with him into Europe an oriental spiritual life with an Aristotelian doctrine that had become unchristian. I told you how he appeared again as Bacon, Lord Bacon of Verulam, who had a great influence on the spiritual life of Europe, but an influence of an essentially materialistic tendency. Moreover I told you how the counsellor of Haroun al Raschid whom I had described, appeared again as Amos Comenius. Much is said, and justly, in praise of Amos Comenius. Nevertheless, in one aspect, in his striving to introduce clear pictorial representations into the methods of teaching, he worked powerfully for materialism. For in effect, he laid the greatest stress upon the immediate perception of things with the physical senses.

Thus we see bursting in upon this earthly life at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century, a stream which lies not in the straightforward line of Christian development, but which brings a foreign element, foreign to Christianity, into the spiritual and intellectual evolution of Europe. On the other hand the individualities of Aristotle and Alexander who remained united with the true stream of Michael worked on and on with all those who belonged to them. They went on working in the spiritual worlds.

Moreover other personalities were working within the same stream, partly in the spiritual worlds and partly on the earth itself. There were individualities connected with these spiritual streams and living between death and a new birth. There were others who appeared as personalities on earth in the course of the centuries. These were the individualities connected with Platonism rather than with Aristotelianism, connected also with all that the Platonic conception had since become.

Especially in the centuries following the 9th, we see Platonic spirits descending on to the earth, spirits of a Platonic trend and orientation. It was they who continued through the Middle Ages a Christian teaching regarded as heretical by official Christianity, official Catholicism, but which was nevertheless the truer Christian teaching. Meanwhile the individualities who continued the stream of Christian Aristotelianism remained, to begin with, in the spiritual worlds. For with the given conditions of evolution there was no real point of attachment for their stream down on the earth in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th centuries. On the other hand, those who were more Platonic in character could unfold their spiritual life with remarkable intensity in isolated places, in isolated provinces as it were of the spirit. Interspersed with the Roman Catholic kind of Christianity which asserted itself more and more officially, we find individuals gathered in schools here and there, carrying on traditions of the ancient Mysteries and illuminating Christianity from these ancient sources. And there was one place where all these streams of old tradition seemed to flow together. I mean, of course, the School of Chartres, to which I have so often referred in recent lectures, a school which was spiritual through and through and in which there worked such great spirits as Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others. Now what kind of a spiritual life was it which having thus evolved, flowed at length into the wonderful School of Chartres, only the external aspects of which have really become known to mankind? It was a spiritual life which has been completely silted up in modern times, a spiritual life in which the ancient traditions of the Mysteries were handed down.

Above all within that spiritual life we find a deep and spiritually penetrated conception of Nature, altogether different from that abstract conception of Nature which was afterwards made so much of, which knows only natural laws expressed in abstract thought. The spiritual stream to which I now refer received something spiritual from Nature into the human soul. So that in all Nature, not only abstract, dead, conceptual natural laws were recognised, but living creative activity. Men did not look so much to our present day chemical elements which have since commanded so much admiration, but they looked all the more deeply at what were called the Elements in the ancient sense: Earth, Water, Air and Fire. It was not a question of knowing them in words by mere tradition. The tradition was impregnated still with the most ancient of the Mysteries. And when this is so, we see in the Elements what is indeed not present in our seventy to eighty chemical elements, the world of elemental spirituality the world of certain elemental beings into which we penetrate when we enter livingly into the four Elements.

Then we see how man himself in his outer bodily nature partakes in the life and movement of the Earth, Water, Air, Fire which become in him the organic form and figure. They who thus looked into the life and movement of the Elements, of Earth, Water, Air and Fire did not see mere natural laws, but behind all this life and movement they saw a great and living Being, the Goddess Natura. And from their vision they had an immediate feeling that this Goddess Natura shows only one side of her being to man to begin with, while the other side remains hidden in the world in which man spends the time of sleep between falling asleep and reawakening. For then the ego and astral body are in a spiritual environment which lies at the foundation of Nature. The ego and astral body are with the elemental beings who underlie the Elements. Everywhere in the scattered schools and spiritual centres to which I have referred we find the teachers speaking to larger or smaller groups of pupils, and telling them how in the outer phenomena of Nature as they appear to men in waking life, the Goddess Natura shows only one part of her living and creative being. While on the other hand, in all the working in the Elements in wind and weather, in all that surrounds the human being and constitutes him, there also works what the human being cannot see, what is hidden from him in the darkness of sleep.

These scholars of the Middle Ages felt the great Goddess Natura as the Goddess who ascends for half of the time, revealing herself in the outer movement and activity of physical sense Nature and who on the other hand descends nightly and yearly to live and work in fields of creation hidden from man by the dark consciousness of sleep.

Now this was the direct continuation of the old conception of Proserpina as it existed in the ancient Mysteries. We must consider what this signifies. We to-day have a conception of Nature woven out of abstract thought, consisting of natural laws, speaking and thinking in abstract terms, containing nothing that is alive. But in that old conception of nature they still contemplated Nature as men had once contemplated the very active Goddess Proserpina, the daughter of Demeter. And in the ideas in which the pupils of those schools were instructed, proceeding as they did from a still living tradition, there were many sayings and expressions which were in reality an exact continuation of what had been said of Proserpina in the ancient Mysteries.

Then the teachers would lead the human being from a conception of his bodily life to an understanding of his life of soul. They made it clear to him: With respect to your bodily nature you consist of the Elements in which the elemental beings are working with you. But you also bear the soul within you. This is not subject to the influence of the Elements alone. On the contrary it rules over the organisation of the Elements within you and this your soul stands under the influence of the planetary world, of Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, of Sun and Moon, Saturn and Mars. Thus if psychology were to be studied, man's vision was directed upward to the secrets of the planetary world. The reality of the human being was extended from the bodily into the soul nature in such a way as to perceive always the living connection with the universe. From the working and weaving of the Elements, Earth, Water, Air and Fire, it was expanded to all that the planets do in the soul-life of man—the planets in their circling, in their glory, in the actions of their light, in their mysterious occult influences. Thus from the Goddess Natura, the successor of Proserpina, they looked up to the Intelligences, to the Genii of the planets when they wished to understand the human life of soul.

Then when it was a question of understanding the spiritual life (for the teachers of these isolated schools had not let the dogma of the 8th Council of Constantinople deter them from studying the spirit in itself)—when it was a matter of considering the spiritual life, they turned their gaze upwards to the fixed stars, and their configurations. They looked up above all to what is represented in the Zodiac. And they regarded what man bears within him as the spirit in connection with the constellations, the glory of the fixed stars, the spiritual Powers whom they knew to be there in the stars.

Thus from the whole universe, from the cosmos, they understood the human being. Thus the macrocosm was there in reality, and the microcosm, man. Such was the doctrine of Nature in that time, taught with enthusiasm in isolated schools and also offered to mankind by isolated individuals who were scattered here and there. And at length as in a kind of culmination, all these things were wonderfully reproduced by such individualities as Bernardus Sylvestris, Alanus ab Insulis and others in the School of Chartres.

Wonderful indeed was this School of Chartres. If we look at its writings to-day they seem, as I already said, like catalogues of names. But in that time it was not customary to write in any other way of things which one wished to have before one in full living spirituality. One simply catalogued them as it were. He however who can read such things, he above all who can read the order in which they are placed, can very well perceive how permeated by ancient spirituality are the writings that come to us from the teachers of Chartres. But the deep spirituality of the school worked not only in the teaching that was given, nor in the fact that there were many pupils who carried out again into the world what they had learnt there. No, it also worked in a direct spiritual way. The living spirituality that was present in that School radiated out even in an occult way into the spiritual atmosphere of mankind. We see the spiritual rays of the School of Chartres passing through France even into Italy. And in many schools whose outer name has been handed down to history, a teaching about Nature was given such as I have here indicated. Brunetto Latini, the teacher of Dante, returning from his post as an Ambassador in Spain suffered at the same time a slight sunstroke and a great shock as he came near to Florence, the city of his fathers. At that moment he was really touched by the occult radiations of the School of Chartres and underwent an experience which he himself describes as follows.—He said that as he came near the city of Florence he entered a deep forest. There he first met three animals and then he met the Goddess Natura who built up the kingdoms of Nature in the very way in which this had been taught for centuries as I have indicated. He, however, beheld it directly. In the semi-pathological condition which soon passed, what had been taught in the School became immediate vision to him. Then, having seen the Goddess Natura, the successor of Proserpina, in her creative work, he beheld how man is built up out of the Elements and how the soul lives and moves in the forces of the planets. Then with his thought he was uplifted even into the heaven of the fixed stars. Thus in his own person he experienced the whole of this majestic, medieval science. And he was the teacher of Dante. Had he not been so, had he not given to his pupil Dante what he had received in this majestic vision, we should not have the Divina Commedia, for the Divina Commedia is the reflection of Brunetto Latini's teaching in the soul of Dante.

Now you must see that in that time there was no other possibility than to work with such things within the institutions of the Church, and these indeed were much freer than they afterwards became. In effect, all these teachers of Chartres belonged to Monastic Orders. We see them wearing the garment of Cistercians. We see them connected with the good tendencies within the life of the Christian Monastic Orders.

Then came a strange phase of development. During the whole of this period, when the Platonists had been active in the way just described, the Aristotelians could not work on earth. The conditions were not there. But instead, they were preparing for the Michael stream in the super-sensible world, maintaining a continuous connection with those who were working on earth in the same direction and who then found their way to Chartres. The School of Chartres was in full flower from the end of the 11th and throughout the 12th century, and then a kind of super-sensible exchange of ideas took place between the Platonic souls from the School of Chartres who were now coming up into the spiritual world through the gate of death and the Aristotelian souls who had remained above. It was an exchange of ideas which took place in the Middle Ages at the turn of the 12th and 13th century, as to the manner of working in the future. (Earthly terms have to be used for these things, although naturally they are not really in keeping and can easily make one appear ridiculous.)

The outcome of this exchange of ideas—since different conditions now prevailed in the spiritual life of European humanity—was that the Platonists who had been so active in Chartres and were now coming up into the super-sensible world, passed on their mission to the Aristotelians. And these Aristotelian souls now descended into the physical world in order to carry forward in the way that conditions allowed, what I will call the cosmic service of Michael.

Within the Dominican Order, where they were active in the most manifold ways, we find again those souls who worked more in the Aristotelian sense. For the work on earth, the Platonic souls were replaced, so to speak, by the Aristotelian souls. And now there developed that system of thought which in truth can be rightly appraised to-day only within the Anthroposophical Movement—I once gave lectures here on the true form and background of Scholasticism [ The Redemption of Thinking. A Study in the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Three lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1920. Translated and edited with an Introduction, Epilogue and Appendices, by A. P. Shepherd and Mildred Robertson Nicholl (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1956).]—there developed medieval Scholasticism, the teaching which in an age already hastening towards materialism strove to preserve as much spirituality in human concepts as it is possible to preserve.

Before Bacon of Verulam and Comenius appeared on earth, Scholasticism had been carrying forward the service of Michael. We see how Scholasticism, the so-called realistic school of philosophy, strove to rescue the source of spirituality which man bears in his thoughts. The Scholastics ascribe reality to that which man grasps through his thoughts. It is a thin, attenuated spirituality that could there be rescued, but it is spirituality.

Thus is the spiritual life carried forward in the evolution of the worlds. Seeing it in its reality, possessing the science of Initiation, we can do no other: we must always perceive the physical, or that which takes place in physical history upon earth, together with the spiritual that permeates it, coming from spiritual worlds. Thus we reach a united and harmonious conception. First, until the time of Chartres, the Platonic souls are working, and then the Aristotelian. We first behold the Aristotelian souls influencing with inspiration from the super-sensible worlds the teachers who, as Platonic souls, are dwelling upon earth, teaching and unfolding science upon earth in earthly forms of understanding. We gaze into this living interplay; we see the teacher of Chartres sitting there on this earthly ground, unfolding his studies that are permeated by spiritual vision, while there penetrates into this earthly scene the inspiring ray from the Aristotelian soul above, bringing the Platonically coloured teachings into the right channels. It is a very different conception of life from what is usual to-day. For in external life men are so fond of contrasting and dividing Platonists from Aristotelians. But in reality it is not so. The times and epochs of the earth require teachings to be given, now in Platonic, now in Aristotelian terms. But if our wisdom includes the super-sensible life in the background, we perceive the one fructifying the other, the one enclosed within the other.

Then again, when the Aristotelians were teaching in the Dominican Order, the Platonic souls, who were now once more in the spiritual world, were the inspiring genii. They had already come to an understanding in the spiritual worlds with these Aristotelian souls who afterwards descended to the earth. Life was altogether different in those times. One may believe it or not, but it was so. Looking back spiritually into those Middle Ages we find such a spirit as Alanus ab Insulis sitting in his lonely cell, given up to his studies, and receiving from the super-sensible world, like a spirit-visitor who comes to him as a companion, an Aristotelian soul. Nay, even afterwards, when the Aristotelians appear in the Dominican Order, there is still a powerful consciousness of belonging to the spiritual world. We can see it in such an instance as the following. One of the Dominican teachers descends into the physical earth-life earlier than another soul with whom he is united. The other soul remains behind in the spiritual world to begin with, in order to accomplish something there which he will afterwards carry down to his companion who went before him. And at length the two are working together again on the earth. All this takes place with consciousness. In their work and activity they know themselves to be in living connection with the spiritual world.

Subsequent history has left no trace of these things. But, my dear friends, to know the truth about historical life we must not seek to derive it alone from the documents of modern time. Moreover, we must see life with open-minded vision. It may be that it unfolds in circles with which perhaps we can have little sympathy. Yet we must see it as something which is placed by karma into these very circles, and the inner significance of which is altogether different.

The task and possibility of thus reading in the real events has come to me in many remarkable ways during my life. Only now do I perceive and penetrate many an experience that I have met with in the course of my life, clear and distinct like an occult writing. Indeed for the most significant of our experiences karma works and weaves in deep and mysterious ways. And if I may say so, there is a very strong karma underlying the fact that to-day and in recent times, at many places, I have been speaking of such things as the School of Chartres, and what preceded and what came after it. For the greatest of those who taught in the School of Chartres belonged to the Cistercian Order. Now the Cistercian Order, like the other Orders in the Catholic stream of development, has become decadent, but in this growing decadence there is also much illusion of appearance. For individualities occasionally find themselves in outer life-connections to which they do not properly belong, while in reality they are carrying forward old threads of spiritual life which are indeed of the greatest value for Anthroposophy itself. But life and karma brings them into these outer connections. Thus I have always been struck by the fact that from my earliest youth, until a certain period of life, something of the Cistercian Order again and again approached me. Having gone through the elementary school, I narrowly escaped—for reasons which I explained in my autobiography The Story of My Life—becoming a pupil in gymnasium or grammar school conducted by the Cistercian Order. Everything seemed to be leading in this direction; but my parents, as I have explained, eventually decided to send me to the modern school instead. Thus I did not become a pupil in the grammar school connected with the Cistercians, and, needless to say, this was also for very good karmic reasons.

But the modern school which I attended was only five steps away from the Cistercian grammar school. Thus we made the acquaintance of all those excellent Cistercian teachers whose work was indeed of a high quality at that time. I need not speak of the Order itself; it is the individuals to whom I refer. To this day I think with profound appreciation of one of those Cistercian priests who taught German literature at that grammar school with deep enthusiasm. And I see the Cistercian priest before me in many other individualities, in the Alleegasse in Wiener Neustadt, where the teachers used to walk up and down before the school hours began—Cistercian priests in civilian costume, eminently gifted men. At that time I was far more concerned to read the essays of the teachers in the school year-book at the end of the year, than the ordinary text-books during the year. I read with keen devotion what these Cistercians wrote of their own wisdom in the year-book of the grammar school in Wiener Neustadt.

In short, the Cistercian Order was near to me. And without a doubt (though these of course are hypotheses such as one uses only for purposes of illustration), if I had gone to the Cistercian school I should, as a matter of course, have become a Cistercian.

Then I came to Vienna. (All these things are described in The Story of My Life). After a time I came into the circle around Marie Eugenie delle Grazie, where many professors of the theological faculty in Vienna used to gather. I learned to know some of them intimately. All those professors were members of the Cistercian Order. Thus once again I came together with Cistercians, and through the currents which flow through the Cistercian Order to-day, I have been able to follow many things back into the past.

To show how karma works I will refer to one event. I had to give a lecture. Now through the afternoon teas at delle Grazie's I had grown well acquainted with the Cistercian professors of theology who frequented her house. I gave a lecture. A priest of the Cistercian Order was there—a remarkable and excellent man. When I had finished my lecture he made a very peculiar remark, the nature of which I will only indicate by saying: he uttered words in which was contained his memory of having been together with me in a

Such things do indeed educate us for life. It was in the year 1889. In Das Goetheanum, former life on earth.

Thus I have shown how the Platonic stream and the Aristotelian worked together. Then the Aristotelians too went once more through the gate of death. And as we know, with the age of the Spiritual Soul, materialism became more and more predominant on earth. But at the very time when materialism took its start on earth there was founded in the super-sensible worlds a kind of Michael School. As I said, we can refer to these things only with our everyday terminology. It was a far-spread School of Michael in which spirits like Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis were united after death. And with them once more Alexander and Aristotle. These and other human souls who were not in earthly incarnation at that time, were united here with spiritual beings who, though they spend their lives without ever being incarnated on the earth, are yet connected with earthly souls. Michael himself was a Teacher, gazing back over all that had been the great teachings of the ancient Mysteries, comprehending in a marvellous sweep of vision the secrets of the ancient Mysteries, and opening out at the same time a mighty panorama of what was to come.

In one form or another we find certain souls who took part in that super-sensible school in the 14th/15th century. They had been connected together in many lives on earth. We find them among the hosts which strive towards the stream of Michael, receiving into the impulses of their will what we may call: The will to be united with the stream of Michael.

We gaze upon these souls. Very few of them were on earth. Most of them were in the life between death and a new birth, partaking in that super-sensible gathering, in that spiritual school. We find them there, these souls, we find them there, harkening to the teachings of Michael, and we find them again to-day in the souls who, connected on the earth, unfold a sincere and upright striving of their inner life towards the Anthroposophical Movement.

In the karma of those who tend with inner sincerity towards the Anthroposophical Movement, there lie the deep impulses, the karmic significance of which must again be studied in the spiritual worlds themselves. Of course the fact that those souls were driven by their karma to such a heavenly community at that time, is due again to the fact that in former earthly lives they had shaped their karma accordingly, so that it led them there. Nevertheless one cannot recognise the karma of human souls without looking, not only at what happens at any given time on earth, but also at what happens between death and a new birth.

Our outlook on the world is infinitely enriched by this. Contemplating the souls who labour in the world—and in the last resort this applies to all men—we no longer have to begin at the point where they enter earthly existence, or cease at the point where they die; for in effect they neither then begin to work, nor do they cease. And in all that takes place spiritually, not only the souls that are incarnated on the earth to-day are working, but other souls, who are now between death and a new birth, and who send their rays of influence in upon the earth. In our own actions their impulses are contained. For all these things work together, even as the deeds on earth penetrate into the heavenly regions, and continue working there, as I indicated pictorially, for instance, in the characters of Capesius and Strader in the first Mystery Play.

Brunetto Latini, Dante's teacher, he is there. He died. He went through the gate of death, but death itself is a transformation of life. He is still there. He works on, and we find him if we seek him spiritually.

The picture of the spiritual evolution of mankind is made complete if we are able to include the so-called dead. Nay, in reality, they are far more living than the so-called living. In very many things that happen on the earth we find Brunetto Latini living and working to-day, although he is not incarnate on the earth. Thus you will see how intimately united the earthly life is with the super-sensible. We cannot speak at all of a super-sensible world separated from the earthly world of sense. For everything that is of the senses is permeated at the same time supersensibly, and everything that is super-sensible is revealed somewhere and sometime in the world of sense. Moreover we can only truly receive and understand the earthly life if we recognise that these things are behind it.

This, my dear friends, is to be the future of the Anthroposophical Movement since the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must treat of the super-sensible facts openly and without reserve, confessing them in fullness of knowledge. This should be the esoteric trait permeating the Anthroposophical Movement. Thus alone will it be possible to give it its real spiritual content.

For you see, all that I described to you as the stream of Michael has gone on into our time. But individualities appearing again on earth have to make use, in the first place, of the physical bodies that are possible in a given age. They must find their way into the impulses of education which a given age provides. In the materialistic age all these things become their external garment. And our materialistic age offers the greatest imaginable hindrances to souls who had a rich spirituality in former lives on earth. To pour this spirituality into the bodies of this age, especially when they have to be prepared by modern educational methods, is extraordinarily difficult. Thus you need not wonder when I say: The souls which strive earnestly towards Anthroposophy are to be found in this way in former epochs of evolution. We cannot lay the foundations of true knowledge unless we can perceive the real interplay of all that lives and works in the world. For spiritual research itself depends on the spiritual life and requires us to seek the spiritual along its own true path. The paths of the spirit are different in every age. In our age they are possible only if we have beneath our feet the firm ground of a spiritual knowledge of external Nature.

The former age which I described within the stream of Michael was followed by one which here on the earth shows an altogether materialistic aspect, an age in which all things are developed materialistically. In the super-sensible evolution of this age there is the most intensive work of preparation for the impulses of Michael, which have now been carried down, so to speak, from heaven to the earth. But this new age to-day cannot take its start from what has gone before in the last few centuries. We must indeed be familiar with the things that have unfolded upon earth in the last few centuries, but we cannot take our start from them. With the consciousness of this modern age we must take our start from what has taken place in the super-sensible during the last few centuries. In saying this we touch upon ground which must become the basis of anthroposophical life and work in this present time. Conceptions such as I have explained in the last few lectures must not merely be received with cold intellect and indifferent hearts. They must be received by the full human being, by the whole compass of the human heart and mind. Anthroposophy can mean something for mankind only if it is received with the whole compass of the human heart and soul.

Such is the foundation of the will of the Anthroposophical Movement, which is united since the Foundation Meeting with the Anthroposophical Society. We long that this should enter deeply into the souls of human beings who are united with this Movement, that they should grow conscious of what is truly connected with their karma in the depths of their own souls.

Thus we have laid a kind of foundation, and from this point we will proceed next Sunday when we will study the further course of the stream of Michael, so as to perceive its resulting tasks for Anthroposophy and for the whole spiritual life of the present time.

You will have been able to realize from the lecture yesterday that a certain state of consciousness, which was an actual experience to men of earlier times, has to some extent been lost. I told you that the special sort of waking consciousness we have today, which consists predominantly in more or less abstract ideas or at the best in shadowy pictures, did not then exist in the same form, and that in its place there was a kind of waking-dreaming, or dreaming-waking. This was not experienced as we experience dreams but as a living picture which corresponded pretty well with spiritual reality. There was a condition of sleep which, though it was dreamless, left an after-effect of the kind described, and there was a third state of consciousness beyond this which was experienced as a resting in the surging Moon-forces, forces which, reaching under the Earth, lift man out of earthly gravity and allow him to experience his cosmic existence. The essential point about these older conditions of soul was that they allowed man to experience his cosmic existence. In our ordinary everyday consciousness there is only a shadowy image left of that older state of consciousness—a shadowy image that is noticed by very few and is mostly entirely unheeded.

I will try to describe this survival of a primeval state of consciousness. When we observe our dreams—chaotic as they are—we find that all sorts of experiences drawn from earthly existence flow into them. Things long forgotten crop up altered in many ways, even things which passed unnoticed at the time. The times, too, at which events took place may be thoroughly confused. But if you look more closely into the details of a dream, you will discover the remarkable fact that in essence practically everything which crops up in it is related to the happenings of the last three days. You may perhaps have a dream about something that happened to you twenty-five years before; you may dream of it in all its vividness, though somewhat altered in detail. But if you study it closely you will always discover something of the following sort: in this dream about an event of twenty-five years before, a character appears whom we will call Edward, and you will find that you have somewhere heard the name casually in passing, or your eye has caught it as you were reading. In the details of a dream, even the remotest, there is always some relation, however insignificant, to something which has happened during the last three days. The reason is that we bear within ourselves the events of the last two, three or four days—the period is of course approximate—in a quite different way from those which occurred earlier.

Our perceptions are, as you know, taken up into our astral organism and our ego-organism, and the events thus perceived do at first live in direct connection with our consciousness. What we have experienced in the course of three days—that is, when at least three days have passed—goes more intensively into our feelings. Ordinarily we do not notice these things, but they are realities all the same. The reason is that all we perceive or think, which is taken up into the astral organism and the ego-organism, has also to be somehow imprinted upon the etheric body, the body of formative forces, and at least to some extent even upon the physical body. This process takes two to four days, so that we have to sleep two or three times on anything we experience before it is imprinted on the etheric and physical bodies. Only then is it firmly fixed in the etheric body so that it may be a permanent memory. Thus in man there is a perpetual inner reciprocity, a sort of struggle, between the astral and etheric bodies, and the result is always that what we have experienced consciously is imprinted into the denser, more material elements of our being. After three or four days, what was at first only a transitory sense-experience is transferred into the body of formative forces and into the physical body.

But how little of what I have been describing actually comes into men's consciousness nowadays! Yet it is something which is perpetually taking place in the life of the human body and soul. Every experience of which we have been aware has to wait three or four days before it is fully our own. It fluctuates between the astral and etheric bodies, and cannot decide—one might say—whether it has really been impressed into the etheric and into the physical body.

This is something of extraordinary significance. Remember that basically our true being is only our ego and astral body. We cannot really claim that the etheric body is our own property. In this materialistic age people talk as though the etheric and physical bodies were their, whereas actually they belong to the whole Cosmos. And so when in the course of three or four days, what our ego and astral body have experienced is passed on to the etheric and physical bodies, it is then part, not only of ourselves but of the Cosmos. It is only for three days that we can claim any action of ours in the world as significant for ourselves alone. After that we have, as it were, imprinted it on the Universe, and it rests within the whole Universe and belongs not only to us but also to the gods.

In very early periods of human evolution, as a result of that state of consciousness which is now lost and which has deeper than sleep, men had a definite impression of this remarkable fact, and the Initiates were able to give information about what lay behind it. Particularly in the epoch of which I spoke yesterday, the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, it was only a vague feeling that men had. But the priests were initiated into the real nature of the fact. Whereas nowadays Initiation must be a purely inner experience of soul and spirit, at the most with symbols and rites of a physical nature only, in those earlier days Initiation was an external process and the effects of that external process passed over into man's inner being. To take one example: when a man was to be initiated, for three or four days he was put by the Hierophant who was initiating him, into this state of consciousness which we have now lost. The purpose of this was to enable him to see for himself what happens during these three days in the world external to him, and how it finds entrance into the real being of man. The Initiate was enabled to see what happens to an idea, to an experience or a feeling, before it becomes a man's own property.

Our materialistic attitude to the world today affords us no conception at all of the extraordinary significance of the wisdom that lay within this condition that is so deeply concealed from us. I can perhaps best explain to you what was accomplished in the three days of this Initiation during that dim condition of consciousness if I remind you first of our ordinary dream-life with an attitude based purely on what we might call scientific method, there is still something extraordinarily profound involved.

How is this dream-life really revealed? There are of course many kinds of dreams, but let us keep for the moment to what consists largely in the recollection of past experiences. Pictures of these experiences arise in dreams. How do they arise? You are aware that they appear radically transformed. This transformation may go a very long way; for instance, we may take the case of a tailor who in his ordinary life has never had the occasion of making a Minister's state robes; he may have made a number of coats and been very proud of them, but for all that he has not the slightest chance of making such a robe as he now dreams he makes. In a dream like this there may be a number of different influences at work. For instance, the man may in a former life have been the attendant of a Roman magistrate and among his duties had to help him on with his toga. A dim feeling of all this survives and what a man experiences in this life may be colored by what streams over from a previous one.

This is just an example of how the content of dreams may be altered; the important fact is that they undergo the intense transformations we all know. One must really ask what is contained in these dreams, what is at work in them. It is external events which give the occasion for this type of dream, but the external events make their appearance in a wholly altered form.

The reason for this is quite beyond the conception of our ordinary scientific ideas. The sort of law which we should recognize as scientific, the laws we look for in the external world by our method of observation and experiment, cease to be valid as soon as we pass inside the skin of a human being. We should be very much mistaken were we to assume that the natural laws laid down in the laboratory were valid within the human being. Not only are the substances transformed within our organism when we consume them in the ordinary course of nourishment, but the laws of the substances are also changed, down to the smallest atoms. What appears in our dreams is not just the abstract reflection of some reality; in our dreams we see the weaving of the organic laws within which man has his being. Dreams are much closer to us than is our normal abstract thinking; they show the way in which external substances act within man. Our dreams are a protest against the part of reality that is shackled within the laws of Nature. From the time you go to sleep until the time you wake, you live in a world where according to the scientist everything is controlled by these laws. Actually the moment you enter, even to the slightest degree, into the spiritual world through your dreams, your dream-experience arises as a protest against the laws of Nature. Dreams cannot run their course in the way of external events, or they would be very much like actual waking life. Dreams which emerge from real sleep are in their make-up a protest against the laws of Nature, and they concern us much more intimately.

In this regard modern investigators of a materialistic turn of mind have made some interesting discoveries. Some of you will know a book by a man called Staudenmaier, entitled Experimental Magic, which appeared a good many years ago and is typical of the spiritual constitution of many modern scientific thinkers. Staudenmaier wanted to find out if there is any reality in the spiritual world. Of Anthroposophy he admitted that he knew only what its opponents had written. People don't like studying Anthroposophy; they find it difficult, particularly if they are typical scientific thinkers of today.

Staudenmaier attempted, by spiritualistic methods, to get into the spiritual world. He dulled his consciousness until he was in a sort of mediumistic state; then he began automatic writing and was surprised that he wrote a lot of nonsense which did not at all agree with what he knew about reality. In particular, the fact that spirits seemed to be speaking to him did not agree with it! He knew that was impossible and yet what he wrote assured him that spirits were speaking. He was appalled by the lies that these non-existent spirits told him. You should read in his book all the incredible lies which flowed into his writing. He became—to use no worse a word—a medium, and he did not know what to make of it all. A friend advised him to give the whole thing up and to lead a normal, sensible life and go out shooting. So he did, and he went out after magpies; but even there he found that whatever it was he had stirred up inside himself continued its activity, and he could not rid himself of it. If he looked up at a tree, he saw, not a magpie but a fearful dragon with terrible fangs, which looked at him with horrifying eyes. The same things happened everywhere, and he lived in an inner struggle to get himself back into a normal condition.

I mention all this because here we have experimental evidence that there is an immediate protest against the external order of Nature as soon as we are not merely dreaming while awake but are using this device to contact and arouse the inner being of man. Obviously we regard it all as lies. When we have thought of a man as a friend and as a decent fellow, and if after he has got into this mediumistic condition we see him putting out his tongue at us or making long noses, then inevitably we say that the spiritual world is lying and that this experience is simply that of a dream. Now there is something in this. Whenever man approaches the spiritual world inside himself, within which everything inside his skin is enclosed, there is an immediate protest from this sphere against the natural order. It is not surprising that when a man enters it with underdeveloped faculties of judgment, all kinds of elemental beings appear and create delusion. But there is always this protest against the natural order when we approach the spiritual; and ordinary dreams make this clear.

We ought to realize that we then enter a quite different order of being, and, even though it appears only in the fleeting form of the dream, it is all the same a protest against those admirable laws of Nature which we establish by laboratory experiments. This is the first step into the spiritual world where we immediately find the protest against natural laws, which are, as it were, robbed of their dignity as soon as we penetrate a little into man's inner being.

The old Initiates knew very well through their three days' Initiation that there is not only a natural order, but that within and behind that natural order there is a spiritual one. It is moreover still possible for anyone who has acquired some knowledge of Initiation to penetrate with modern methods into these things and to pass through the experiences a really fearful torment of the soul. When dreams begin to weave their forms we actually enter a world where the laws of Nature collapse, and just because the ordinary laws no longer hold good, their interrelations change, however many recollections of ordinary life may still be effective. If we have come to regard natural laws as the last word, we find ourselves face to face with nothingness. It is painful, almost tragic, for a modern man, as he passes through Initiation, to experience entry into a sphere of being where this protest against the laws of Nature is encountered; he feels that everything he had got from his intellect, and which was determined by the laws of Nature is swamped. His soul can no longer breathe because he has been too much accustomed to the natural order. He finally realizes that an altogether different world is pressing in from a quite different direction. This is no longer a natural but a spiritual order, which is throughout permeated with what in the depths of our present-day human conscience we experience as a moral world-order. He gradually learns that on the one hand there is the order of Nature perceived by the senses, for which the laws have been established by natural science; on the other hand, if he moves out of this natural order, he moves into a world that protests against the natural order. As he experiences this protest, a sort of luminous water of life pours round him and he can once again breathe—this is the moral order which ultimately expands into the spiritual.

The highest knowledge gained by the ancient Initiates was when they discovered the protest against the physical world-order and saw the true moral world-order extend into the physical. It is indeed experienced in a much weaker degree during the three days described: whatever we experience in the external world, whether actions or feelings, takes three or four days to be imprinted on our organism. But when the process is completed, the imprinted form is not like that which we experienced externally; it becomes an impulse demanding a moral expression very different from the natural order. If we could see how our experiences have changed in our inner being during those three of our days, we should see that what we experienced in its natural form during our earthly existence has been imprinted in our external being and is no less real than it was in the external world. But now it lives within us as the impulse of a moral world-order by means of which we may move further over the ocean of life. Thus we carry the results of what we have experienced naturally as the moral foundation for our later life.

In recent periods of human evolution, however, when men plunged into that “lower sleep,” if I may call it so, that Earth-embraced sphere, he plunged into the outer ether. There his experiences find their compensation. He is not merely set within the moral world-order as regards the direction of his inner life; in that lower sleep he is set within the moral order of the Cosmos. Since this deep sleep has been lost to our forms of consciousness and we now have only a very faint echo of it in the three-days' experience described, this contact with the Cosmos has been lost also. Indeed, we should have been gradually thrust out of the self-subsisting moral world-order if a particular event had not occurred in the course of Earth-evolution. The experience undergone by the older Initiates so as to be able to tell men what happens during those three days, was undergone as a unique world-event, as an event in world-history, by the Christ Being who descended from spiritual worlds into the body of Jesus of Nazareth and, though a God, lived a truly human life. That experience of the three days now became available for all mankind. What could previously be discovered in the sleep of deep consciousness, taking place in man not consciously but at least subconsciously, in a natural way, had to be gone through in order that man might find his connection with what was brought about for earthly humanity by Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha. This was the vicarious deed of a God. Man was to take a step upwards in his evolution and to experience in moral form through Christianity what had previously come to him naturally. The Mystery of Golgotha is therefore closely related to the whole meaning of earthly evolution, because of its relation to the evolution of man's consciousness. We can understand what was to be accomplished by the Mystery of Golgotha only if we can look back on what had once occurred naturally and was now to occur morally.

In this respect, however, our modern consciousness, which runs its course between waking, sleeping and dreaming, has not yet attained inner harmony. Since the fifteenth century, when this modern consciousness first received its imprint, it has looked on Nature one-sidedly and has claimed to understand the order of Nature, considering that what is found there constitutes reality. Beyond this reality men will not look; they will not press forward to that strengthened form of human knowledge to which the spiritual reveals itself just as the natural order does. Thus it has become customary to speak of the moral order as of unknown origin. To do this was not strictly honest, since the common view of Nature cannot admit any reality in the moral order. One could, even if a little dishonestly, get over this difficulty by saying that on the one side we have knowledge, on the other, faith; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith; that knowledge cannot become faith nor faith, knowledge; and that the moral order belongs to the realm of faith. Such is the convenient formula which has become customary. The distinction has even come to be regarded as something specifically Christian, though even five or six hundred years ago no genuine Christianity, and certainly not original Christianity, would have admitted the distinction. Even today it is not yet Catholic dogma, however much it may be Catholic custom, to distinguish in this way between faith and knowledge.

We cannot get a proper notion of the relation between the natural and the moral-spiritual order because we are not aware of the transition between them; because the dream is not understood which leads out of the natural order and protests against it, thus preparing the way. If we have gone through this preparatory stage, we can make contact with the moral order of the world.

Only an honest view of the past of mankind, and of something which modern man does not yet possess, can lead to a satisfying picture of all this. Failing that, even historical documents of ancient times remain just things which can be studied but convey no real meaning. Now we spoke this morning a good deal about the opponents of Anthroposophy. I could say much that would be for their good, though certainly not in their favor. The comments of our opponents ... I often have to recall an anecdote supposed to be based on truth which the famous Professor Kuno Fischer was fond of telling. He used to relate how he had had two schoolfellows—they may have been brothers—with an uncle who was a thorough simpleton. The boys got to the stage of learning logarithms and having to buy log tables. The uncle caught sight of these tables and when he saw the mass of figures he asked his nephews what they were. The boys were completely at a loss to explain, but at last the young rascals conceived the idea of telling him they were the house-numbers of all Europe. The uncle believed them and finally thought it an excellent idea to be able to know at a glance all the house-numbers of London, Paris, and so on. Now people who are unable to see with insight into the meaning of the ancient documents are like the old uncle with his log tables. Our modern historians who edit these ancient documents do not tell us much more about them than the uncle did about logarithms when he took them to be the house-numbers of Europe. We must make it clear to ourselves how far their interpretation, based on present-day abstract thought, is removed from the real spiritual facts. We must have the determination to do that, or we shall never be able to see how man has developed into the present out of a past when he was very different.

We are living at a time when all sorts of inner conflicts must arise from our present-day experience of sleeping, waking and dreaming, if we are in the least capable of real self-observation. Just as men lost the real knowledge of that deep sleep which was so significant for them that the Initiates had to explain its nature to them, so in modern times our ordinary sleep tends to crumble to pieces. I do not mean that in the future men will dream the whole night through, but rather that their dreams will be dulled. Just as man has passed since olden times from that “waking dreaming” to our modern abstract thinking, our present-day chaotic dreams will be dulled, and that duller kind of sleep will become normal. Dreams will no longer extend into our consciousness, which will be overlaid entirely by our present-day form of abstract logical thinking. But then a super-consciousness will emerge, already apparent to anyone who can understand these things. This super-consciousness is concerned with the human will and with the effects of the will when it acts on the nervous system. If with the help of Initiation-knowledge you observe the unrestrained way in which human will is developing, you will be able to see how various psychological manifestations, sometimes going as far as actual physical illness, are really the herald of a form of consciousness higher than our present waking consciousness.

But there is something beyond this which men will not yet be able to experience unless they can actually acquire spiritual science: a science, that is, which needs a quite different sort of thinking from the normal and is in reality far more practical than the theoretical attitude to life, which is in fact completely unpractical. This spiritual science adds an inner living power of thinking to ordinary abstract thinking. Yet this is not something we can arbitrarily add or neglect; it occurs because an organism is coming into being within man which did not exist in earlier times and of which only the first foundations have so far emerged. The way in which the blood circulates through man's limbs, his arms, legs, hands and feet, is continually changing. What we often call “nervousness” (a nervous state) nowadays is an expression of the fact that a higher condition is striving to make its way into man, but that he is unwilling to accept it because of its strangeness, and this produces a restlessness which will cease only when he makes the new consciousness his own.

Thus we can visualize three further states of consciousness towards which man is making his way: a dulled dream life, waking, and a heightened state of waking. All the turmoil and upheaval which show themselves even in external conditions today are due to the fact that men are trying, for the most part quite unconsciously, to fight against something that is approaching humanity from the spiritual worlds. It is struggling to make its way especially into the human will. We shall have to understand—as nowadays we do not—that as soon as the spiritual comes into action, we pass at once into a sphere where a protest is uttered against natural laws. We shall also not properly understand the Mystery of Golgotha unless we can rise to the realization that the full import of that Mystery cannot be attained by our ordinary knowledge. To grasp its full meaning we have to develop a new faculty; we have to pass with right understanding beyond mere dreaming, which indicates a natural process, and penetrate to an understanding of the other side of being. It is from the side of the spirit that we have to acquire the elements of understanding adequate for future comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha. What we must do is to set our experience of the present in this way between the past and the future, and so feel ourselves as a sort of bridge between them. Thus we shall increasingly achieve the understanding required for the use of spiritual truths alongside the natural.

It is easy to understand our ordinary illusions, just because the things that are false are so uncommonly logical. We do not suspect that falsehood can be so logical. What could be more logical than to argue as follows: first observe how long it takes some particular geological stratum to reach a particular thickness, then, if we are dealing with another stratum, divide the smaller into the greater thickness and multiply it by the time taken by that stratum to form, and so reach the conclusion that some epoch, the Silurian or Devonian for instance, was twenty or 200 million years ago. The arithmetical calculation is quite correct and there is nothing to be said against it. It is only ordinary logic that is here deceiving us.

This sort of logic always reminds me of the logic one of the greatest mathematicians of all times applied to his own life. When he had already reached a considerable age he suddenly became ill with some kind of lung trouble; and seeing that he had had a good deal to do with doctors, he had the idea of calculating how many tiny abscesses would have to be got rid of in order to shake off the lung trouble. His calculations about the further development of the illness showed him that it would take fifteen years, and then he would be cured. But ... he died two years later. That was the reality; the other was only logic.

The same sort of thing applies to the relationship between reality in the Cosmos and our ordinary logic. Things are very easily proved by logic, and the logic is perfectly sound. It is just as sound as if we calculated as follows: Our heart goes through certain phases of development; in a definite period it will have reached a definite condition; then we calculate how long it would take to reach that condition and the answer is 300 years. Then we can calculate backwards 300 years and see what our heart looked like 300 years ago. Unfortunately we were not alive, at least as physical beings, 300 years ago, and we shall not be alive 300 years hence. Equally the Earth did not exist in those past ages that are worked out by the geologists. The destinies undergone by the Earth can be known only in spiritual terms. That is the distressing thing about modern science: it can prove so logically what is really an illusion, and its proofs tell us nothing about reality.

Human beings today, though people do not realize it consciously because they refuse to be aware of it, are living with the unconscious fear that they are on the way to losing touch with truth. We can see this fear manifesting itself in various forms. Fundamentally, the people who base their philosophy of life on materialism are very ill at ease. They are always harassed by anxiety about the limits they have set themselves, for their cherished limits create appalling obstacles to living a fully human life. People already feel intuitively that if they have nothing more than the natural order to rely on, they cannot draw life from it; above all, that the ideas derived from this natural order cannot lead them to any genuine artistic and religious experience or ideas.

We must always remember that our existing religious systems originated in the times when men were dependent on that deep sleep I have described for their understanding of the Cosmos. All our religious institutions derive from those times: the religious institutions, yes, but not the Mystery of Golgotha. That is independent of any religious view; it stands grasped by those conditions of consciousness that are still in course of preparation. For centuries now, even millennia, the religiously creative side of man has lain barren and the same is true of real artistic capacity. With rare exceptions we have to live on what we can get from various cultural revivals. We do not possess any original power of creation. But that is what is seeking to make its way into this age, and the general unrest typical of our civilization today is something like the birthpangs of a new age, a new age in the scientific and artistic spheres but also in the social, religious, and moral spheres. The future of mankind—that is what we must strive to take to heart. There has never been a time when humanity has been less disposed to listen to Initiation-knowledge and yet never a time when humanity has been in greater need of it.

That is why I wished particularly to speak to you about the past, present and future of humanity from the point of view of the evolution of consciousness. Of course, in three lectures I could do it only in outline, but you can work out within your own hearts what I have told you. Because our consciousness lies closest to our own being, it is there that men can become most easily fruitful and be stirred towards spiritual experience. In order that present-day man may develop into a man of the future, what we need is not any materialistic experience but spiritual experience. Ever since we have been victims of abstract thinking and ideas, our inner habit is really such that anyone participating in our present culture must have the same sort of impression from any talk of the spirit as the simple old uncle in the story about the log. tables, and will interpret all the powerful evidence for the entry of the spiritual as if it were like the house-numbers of Europe. The analogy is a little far-fetched but if you remember what I have told you, you will understand what it means. Our normal attitude to life, or rather our ordinary judgments about life, penetrate into all our scientific thinking and produce there a philistinism and banality raised to the nth degree, even a moral hypocrisy claiming scientific validity. If there is any, even the slightest, sign of the entry of the spiritual, it is assumed to be something which intelligent human reason, according to this materialistic view, can only call “mad.”

There is a good story, founded on fact, which also illustrates this attitude. At the beginning of the forties of the nineteenth century the old philosopher Schelling was called from Munich to Berlin. He had held his peace for several years, but a high reputation had preceded him. People looked forward to lectures on philosophy of a more positive kind, as opposed to those he himself called negative. Anyway, in these lectures at Berlin University he was to deal with the spiritual development of man, the essence of religion and the Mysteries, in a much deeper fashion than anyone had done hitherto.

When Schelling began his lectures, the front rows were occupied by the most brilliant intelligences, the professors of various subjects, the heads of the teaching departments and the most distinguished representatives of spiritual life—certainly not mere callow students, who had to sit at the back. They were all waiting—as far as they were able to wait—to see what Schelling's great reputation would accomplish. As the lecture proceeded, the faces of the audience grew longer and longer. Schelling did in fact speak in a remarkable way about the spirit; just at the moment when materialism was reaching its climax and coming to its fullest flower, he spoke of the spirit. As he spoke, the faces grew appreciably longer because the audience had no idea what he was after. Trendelenburg, well-known later on as a philosopher, who was sitting in one of the front rows, said he thought he had understood a little, though most of it was beyond him; but he was not even sure he had understood that little!

Then, some days later, two of the people who had been present at the lecture happened to meet. There had been a good deal of discussion among Schelling's hearers, and these two had taken part in it, wondering why on earth he had been called to Berlin, since not a word of what he had said was intelligible. But one of them now had the answer: Schelling's daughter had got engaged to the son of the Minister of Education! So everyone could understand why Schelling had been willing to come to Berlin. The whole thing was explained!

It may seem strange to tell you these things, but I am obliged to talk to you in this way. For the form of thinking characteristic of the present day is so far removed from the sort of thinking proper to Anthroposophy, which is moreover not just a whim of ours but an absolute necessity for man's future unless he is to fall into decadence. Only this new form of spirituality will be able to experience fully the three stages of consciousness which will emerge in the future: namely, a damped-down dream-sleep, ordinary waking, and a heightened consciousness. Otherwise man will never be able to experience his humanity properly in future lives on Earth. For the gods wish out of present threefold man to form the threefold man of the future, as they have formed the present threefold man, the dreaming, sleeping and waking man, out of the former threefold man who dreamt in pictures, slept, and on waking experienced the after-effects of his sleep, and also slept deeply. In this present age of freedom, as I have so often explained to anthroposophists, we must resolve by our own free knowledge to live towards the goal laid down for us by the divine Powers of the world. If we do that we shall not only think, we shall above all feel, in the right way about the past, present and future. Then we shall also have the right will with regard to this life on Earth, in accordance with the divine-spiritual ordering of the world—from the past, through the present, into the future.

This is what I wished to talk about, and with these words I will bring our studies to a close, not however without expressing a wish that tomorrow a discussion may begin here which will show that in the Anthroposophical Society some desire exists to promote a fully living consciousness in this Society of what man in his fullness is to be—the whole man who must be comprehended as including man of the past, man of the present, and man of the future. For these three are also one. What man has been in the past, what he is in the present, and what he is to be in the future, will embrace in face of the divine World-Order the whole being—anthropos. But in order to strive for this there must be an enthusiastic, heart-felt grasping of Anthroposophy to lead us to the true anthropos, the whole man, man in his fullness.