The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Automated Translation

It seems that at this present moment the question should arise in every soul: Where is humanity heading? Where is the path of humanity within the so-called civilized world going? It is the events of the present that undoubtedly lead to this question arising in every soul. Therefore, today, in the first part of our reflections, we will speak about this question: Where is humanity heading?

We have often spoken of purely human differentiations, of the differences that exist between the soul dispositions of people in the West and those in the East. And I have already indicated in a public lecture at the Siegle House how the present-day armed struggle, which is by no means over yet, will be followed by the great battle of spiritual life between the West and the East, and how this battle will be one of the greatest, most significant battles that humanity will have to fight out in the course of its earthly existence.

A truth that has often been spoken here and within our anthroposophical movement in general should be awakened again and again in the soul for the realization of the human being and his tasks, and that is the truth that in the fifteenth century a radical change took place within European humanity , a radical change which at first was little noticed by people, but which is very clear, both for the spiritual life and for the life of the soul, as well as for the outer physical, for the human body, for the prevailing laws of economic life. In all three areas, the emergence of human independence, the emergence of the human consciousness soul, is clearly noticeable around the middle of the fifteenth century. Since that time, man has had to gradually work his way out of the earlier patriarchal conditions of humanity in order to fully grasp his humanity, to rely on his own judgment, his own feelings, and on the will born of his own judgment and his own feelings. But since that time, human development has also, in essence, forked, if I may use the term. This means that humanity stands at a crossroads. While up until the middle of the fifteenth century humanity went more or less straight ahead, as guided by its instincts, from that point in time in the fifteenth century humanity could go either right or left, the path is forked. Such developments do not take place overnight; such developments allow old legacies to flourish in particular. And there are certainly old legacies left over from the stages of human development that were gone through before the fifteenth century. But those qualities of humanity have also developed alongside, which are precisely characteristics of nature, that have actually only moved into the development of humanity since the fifteenth century.

But we can describe in a very specific way what this turning point in the fifteenth century actually consists of. As you know, I have often emphasized that the history taught in schools is only a fable convenante, something that has terribly little to do with the inner development of humanity. One must go to what has truly happened if one wants to understand the development of humanity. If we now want to describe what actually happened in the middle of the fifteenth century, we have to say that until the middle of the fifteenth century, human beings lived more or less instinctively, carrying all kinds of ancient, atavistic abilities from the primeval times of humanity in their blood. This instinctive life must be replaced by a life of soul and spiritual consciousness. And this life of soul and spirit consciousness should actually become the characteristic life of modern humanity. The purely animal instincts that arise from the body should be transformed into soul and spiritual instincts. There are many forces that want to work against this development of the human being towards the soul and spirit. I have often emphasized that, for example, the Catholic Church, at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869, by establishing a dogma, forbade people who were Catholics from meditating on the spirit at all. In those days, the spirit was forbidden for European humanity, insofar as it belonged to the Catholic Church. That was, so to speak, the first resistance against what is most necessary for humanity, against the dawning of spirituality for civilized humanity. That is why it has also come about that this civilized humanity must work its way to the spirit, must work its way against all those powers that oppose the spirit, which, so to speak, would like to hold humanity back in the dullness of the old, instinctive life. What will happen to humanity if it continues to live only from the heritage of the old, the actually overcome, manifests itself in the most diverse ways. It manifests itself differently in the West, in the middle of Europe and in the East.

We must, however, first ask ourselves: What actually awaits humanity if it does not want to turn to a spiritual life, to an understanding of the spiritual life? And I have already mentioned in earlier lectures that something particularly characteristic in the development of humanity is that in ancient times, for example still in the time of pre-Christian cultures, people remained capable of development up to a much higher age than they are today. Today, as I have often indicated, a person is only capable of development up to about the age of twenty-seven. That is the furthest limit of his ability to develop. He then retains the forces that he has developed up to the age of twenty-seven, and lets them continue to flourish in his physical body. Just consider how capable of development man is in the first years of life. He goes through everything that leads him to the important epoch of the change of teeth, around the age of seven. People just become dull to what is going on inside them; they don't pay attention to it. But inner revolutions take place in a person as he approaches the change of teeth around the age of seven. Inner revolutions take place in a person again as he approaches sexual maturity around the age of fourteen or fifteen. The external history does not speak of such an inner revolution of man. The completely Catholicized external history of Europe does not speak of it, and it knows why. Such revolutions took place in ancient humanity, in pre-Christian humanity, up to a much higher age. Man was capable of development for a long time, and so he was able to use the developed powers of his age to penetrate into regions of the world, where he cannot penetrate today if he wants to remain in the ordinary method of education, in the ordinary outer life, because he is only capable of development up to the age of twenty-seven, and then lets that which has developed in him become distorted and ossified. So that actually people become old in their inner soul earlier and continue to vegetate. What has been taken from man by natural forces, clearly taken since the middle of the fifteenth century, must be replaced by conscious work on his soul. And if it is not replaced, man can only rush towards a state that ossifies, mechanizes and so on his later life again and again. These are inner laws of development exactly the same as the laws of development in outer nature, only today man is afraid to develop such strong thinking and cognition that he penetrates to these inner laws of human development. But he must penetrate, if certain things are not to occur in the development of humanity, which will otherwise certainly occur.

Through this law of development, humanity, if it remains as it has developed, faces continuous catastrophes, such continuous catastrophes for which the present catastrophe that has been unfolding since 1914 is only the beginning. These catastrophes cannot be averted by the means that humanity has developed as an old heritage. For man is approaching a development that would, in the future, make his entire soul useless for the later years of his life. Gradually, people would come over the civilized world who, in their youth, show all kinds of spiritual and soul enthusiasm, but who then fade away, and who would vegetate into old age, without soul. Mankind would become soulless, mechanized.

Anyone who has embarked on observing life, especially in our time, could also make observations in this direction in the outer life. I can tell you, especially in the decades of the last third of the nineteenth century, I was always able to observe the emerging talents and even geniuses as they developed. No phenomenon was more common than that people developed as poets, as artists, and also as scientists in their younger years, only to fade away in their twenties and then produce nothing of note. You don't observe such things, but they are there; you just don't train yourself to make such observations. But such observations show what threatens humanity in our time if it does not grasp what can only come from spiritual and soul development itself. And this is evident in the most diverse ways across the geographical territories inhabited today by civilized humanity.

The peoples of the West, in a sense, have strong instincts. These strong instincts of the peoples of the West will protect them from this withering away of the soul and spirit for a long time to come. I would like to say that instincts still arise from the animality of the peoples of the West that protect them from soullessness and ossification. Therefore, these peoples of the West need to cultivate spiritual-mental life less than the peoples of Central Europe and the East. These peoples of Central Europe and the East can do nothing worse than imitate Western culture in any field. Because when they want to imitate, they imitate something for which they have no instincts, something that can never flourish in them. And it was basically our misfortune, our self-inflicted misfortune, that we got so involved in imitating the West in the most diverse areas of life. And in certain circles of the West, which are privy to these things, they know all that I have told you now very well. Therefore, they attach great importance to forcibly de-animating and de-spiritualizing the East, which naturally, through its spiritual qualities, strongly resists de-animation and de-spiritualization. Hence England's efforts in India to work towards the greatest possible de-animation and de-spiritualization.

You see, this is the course of civilization if humanity does not take itself spiritually and mentally into its own hands. Then we will experience that certain democratic-social ideals will instinctively flourish in the West, while in the East that which has already begun will continue. This development in the East must indeed inspire us to special thoughts. We, who for decades have always emphasized that the future of Europe has its source in the Russian national spirit, in the national spirit of the East - we, who have always pointed to all the fruitful forces that must arise in the East of Europe, we must today take special care to consider this East. We can only look at it correctly if we look at ourselves correctly.

We in Central Europe have emerged from the developments that took place during the Thirty Years' War into a certain idealism of spirit, which flourished in Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, in the German philosophers, and which also had its reflection in German music. With that, what is usually called German idealism flourished. This German idealism reached its zenith in the philosophy of Flegel. What, then, is this philosophy of Hegel, which developed out of Goetheanism in Central Europe as the most inwardly sound system of thought? Well, this philosophy of Hegel only carries to its highest point what already lived in Lessing, Herder, but especially in Goethe. And this must be clearly recognized, especially today, in this time of crisis. What lived in this German idealism? Yes, it lived for the last time, in a magnificent way it lived for the last time, what in the form in which it lived at that time must not remain in humanity. German idealism must be regarded in a certain respect as a very beautiful, magnificent, mighty afterglow. And anyone who regards it as anything but a magnificent and mighty sunset regards it wrongly and commits an offense against the spirit of human progress. This is especially evident in Hegel.

It is difficult for people to delve into Hegel's thought-structure, which has been driven to the highest level of abstraction. But anyone who does so as a human being – not as a university professor, but as a human being – can form an opinion of where the human spirit has actually been driven by developing Hegelianism out of Goetheanism. Hegel explains human reason, which reigns in phenomena, as the actual divine-spiritual out of Goetheanism. Hegel places human reason on the highest throne; the reason that reigns in reality places Hegel on the highest throne. Basically, he only carries out what Goethe has already done. Now the peculiar thing is – if you really immerse yourself in Goethe and Hegel as a human being, you notice this – now the peculiar thing is that spirit reigns in Lessing, in Herder, in Schiller and Goethe, in Hegel, but that this spirit that reigns in them knows nothing of the spirit. This is something that people will have to understand, that today still sounds so familiar to people that they understand absolutely nothing of it. It is spirit that prevailed in this German idealism, it is spirit, but it knows nothing of the spirit, it does not deal with the spirit, it does not speak of the spirit.

Hegelian reason is first developed in logic, that is, in ordinary human thinking, which becomes world thinking; it is developed in natural philosophy, where all natural phenomena are administered according to reason; it is developed in the human soul, in human historical characteristics, in what man has produced as religion, as art, as science - but then it is over. This philosophy does not speak of the spirit as spirit. It is spirit itself, it speaks of everything that is not spirit in a spiritual way; but it speaks nothing of the spirit. It is the last sunset, the last beautiful, glorious sunset of that which actually set as the sunshine for all mankind in the middle of the fifteenth century. Therefore, it is necessary to take up a very special position precisely towards German Idealism. He who wants to conserve it, who simply wants to take up what Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller thought, or what Hegel then brought into magnificent abstract world formulas - whoever wants to do that merely in reflection, whoever wants to be a disciple in the ordinary sense of the word in this time, that person sins against the progress of humanity. We cannot take over into the culture of the present day, into the development of the newer times, that which has shone forth as the evening light of humanity, that which still contains within itself the last elements of the light of Greek and Roman antiquity, we cannot do this without it having a killing effect, simply as knowledge, as something absorbed and digested. This was already on my mind as a very young person. That is why, in the 1980s, I did not pursue Goetheanism as much as the others, that I wrote about Goethe, that I historically processed what Goethe researchers, for example, historically processed, but I tried to merely absorb Goetheanism and develop it further. I wrote my theory of cognition of Goethe's world view with the aim of showing how one can think and feel about the world in the spirit of Goethe. Yes, it is based on everything I have just said. It is based on the fact that we can learn from the dawn of German idealism how we can develop further, but that we do not have to continue this dawn in the form in which it has been handed down historically. We have to develop something different spiritually and mentally from this German idealism than it directly presents to us. We must learn from it, gather strength to move forward. Therefore, today Goetheanism is not a cult of Goethe, not a worship of what Goethe directly created, but Goetheanism is the transformed, the converted continuation of what one can develop inwardly, by studying Goethe, by penetrating oneself.

To an even greater degree, this is the case with Hegel. Whoever today would be a Hegelian, whoever would bring Hegelianism to humanity in this or that form, would appear as a withering influence on the progress of our culture. But whoever makes the nature of Hegel's subtle thought-formation his innermost soul-property and from there takes the step that Hegel could not take: into the spirit, he does the right thing, he does what lies in the sense of human progress. You see, our difficult position in the world is that we are least of all Goetheanists when we parrot Goethe, and we are most of all Goetheanists when we can rise to the challenge of saying we must do everything differently from the way Goethe did it if we want to work in Goethe's spirit; we must do everything differently from the way Hegel did and said it if we want to work best in Hegel's spirit. History already shows us the way in a certain sense. For Hegel, the Prussian state was the most reasonable institution in the world, because reason is sought in all things. “The real is the reasonable.” Therefore, the state in which he himself had found a place as a person was the most reasonable of all. All universities were good for him, the Central European universities the centers of the world, and the Berlin University the center of the center. These things are in fact mysteriously connected with those forces in the evolution of humanity, which I have often described as such that one cannot devote oneself to them if one wants to live comfortably in soul, because these forces lead one inwardly to all kinds of pitfalls and abysses, to transitions and inner upheavals. Those who today measure the right by the wrong kind of Hegelianism and false kind of Goetheanism are ignorant of this. And there are truly not a few such people today. And we must realize how these people hinder real human progress.

A book has been published that is truly written in the spirit of the present, written by an inwardly astute and artistically sensitive person, Ernst Michel. The book is called “The Way to Myth.” There is even goodwill to return to a spiritual and psychological understanding of life. But how does Ernst Michel judge the path of Goetheanism? You see, there is one passage I must show you because it is inwardly connected with our present consideration. He says on page 38: “The highest knowledge that, according to Goethe, is granted to man is the intuitive penetration to the archetypal phenomena, i.e., to the seeing comprehension of the created, the appeared as a moving, flooding effect of divine powers. But these themselves remain hidden from us in their metaphysical essence. Man can add nothing and take away nothing; he cannot influence the spiritual, he can only enter its sphere of activity by beholding it or not. Not even the greatest man can transcend this fundamental law of human existence. Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by him (Goethe). “

So you see, this is how a person views Goethe's way of thinking. He points out the instinctive element, the penetration into the archetypal phenomena, and then says: Theosophy, even in its form as anthroposophy, would have been unreservedly rejected by Goethe. What thoughts does one have in the present about something like this, if one really thinks in terms of progress? One has to say: certainly, Theosophy, also in its form as Anthroposophy, would have been rejected by Goethe. But to present it to humanity in the way it is presented here in this book is to sin against the progress of humanity. For it is not a matter of what Goethe would have rejected in his time and until his death in 1832, but of what must have an effect today and what Goethe, in his living spirituality, wants to make of himself. Those, then, who only look back in this way sin against the real progress of humanity.

This is the fear and hatred of today for the living spiritual life into which we must enter if we really want to strive for the development of humanity. It is therefore no wonder that people who look at world development in this way fall into error after error. This is how this author views today's expressionist art, and he finds something about this expressionist art – he speaks very unclearly – but he does not find out how this expressionist art, in all its awkwardness, is nevertheless a beginning of something new, a beginning above all of something that Ernst Michel could not even dream of. That is why Ernst Michel says: “Expressionism followed Symbolism as the second movement, consciously wanting to lead artistic creation back to its highest task: to be shaped confession, expression of a spiritual world view.”

Expressionism is very difficult to understand today, sometimes anti-artistic, not just inartistic, but it is the clumsy way to seek artistic embodiment of the inner spiritual. In this context, Ernst Michel considers the following judgment to be justified: 'Transcendentalism, as the new world view is emerging, does not, however, refer to a new religious revelation, but to the philosophical teachings of Henri Bergson and the new gnosis of Rudolf Steiner, which proclaim intuition as a latent spiritual power in man that is called to replace religious revelation. In the power of intuition, of the seeing consciousness, man is said to be able to overcome the intellect and its illusory knowledge and to penetrate directly to the spiritual essence of things.

At such a point, one must, so to speak, immediately catch the person who is growing out of the present in an oblique way. For here that which is our anthroposophy is thrown together with that which is a phraseology of Henri Bergson brought into the last phases of a development, which stirs up everything that is a world view and which seems to be the well-known personality who always revolves around himself to catch his own braid, who points everywhere to intuitions but never arrives at an intuition, who always talks about how one should penetrate to the soul, but never takes a step to penetrate to a real spiritual knowledge. It is becoming so difficult for people of the present time to distinguish the fruitful from the unfruitful. We in Central Europe have the possibility of making this distinction if we adhere to the great distinction: Goethe as he was until 1832, and Goethe as he must work in us. And the same applies to Hegel. For when they work in us in a transformed form, their spirituality is fruitful for us, helping us to find our way into the spiritual world.

What I have now explained to you is at the same time the key to understanding a very, very important phenomenon of the nineteenth century, which has not caused people to reflect more thoroughly because people in the present are averse to thorough reflection. But is it not strange that the dialectician Hegel, who only spoke from the air of the spirit, should have as his most brilliant disciple the completely materialistic Karl Marx, who only thought of the material and economic? In the mid-nineteenth century, extreme idealism suddenly turns into the most mindless materialism, and not Hegel, but Karl Marx becomes the spirit to which the most forward-looking people of the present adhere. We have not yet been able to really examine this underlying fact in its foundations because we have slept the sleep of Scelenz in the center of Europe. It can only be examined by asking: If the spirit of Karl Marx were to spread throughout Europe, what would become of Europe?

We must begin in the East. From there, the real inspiration of modern civilization would emerge from the national soul, and this East would face a fate that can be described as follows: The mechanization of the spirit, in an economic papacy the complete mechanization of the spirit, the killing of all productivity and freedom of the spirit in a large, extensive accounting over a large territory. Furthermore, the vegetarianization of the human soul. In particular, this vegetarianization of the soul would assert itself in the field of legal opinion and state life. Oh, it is interesting how in our age the unclear but genuinely Russian doctrine of 7o/stoi, the penetration of Dostoyevsky's soul, but also what was less observed in Central Europe and what I would like to call the Russian heroism of the legal idea, has emerged from the spirit of the East, which wants to move forward. This Russian heroism of the legal idea was widespread among many people before this world war catastrophe broke out. These Russian heroes no longer thought of the individual person, they only thought of the human being as such, of what should be right from person to person. And they would have gone not only through fire but also through physical death for the realization, and to a large extent they also died for the realization of the legal idea. And so, in other areas of this Russian life, too, before the outbreak of the world war catastrophe, weighed down by the terrible things the world has experienced through tsarism and imperialism, one finds a certain heroism of the Russian soul. And now it is flooded by that which wants to mechanize the spirit, which wants to vegetate the soul; so that if it continues like this, the Russian East would live through the development of humanity with a sleeping, numbed soul for centuries to come. It would also oversleep what it could have given to the world itself. Furthermore, in this European East, the animalization of the body and the birth of animal instincts in the body are being hastened. |

The old spirit of humanity would be imposed on this unhappy Europe, first in the East, if one did not agree to steer into the spirit of progress. For it is not progress that is now to be carried to the East, it is the most reactionary current, which is born entirely out of what was already destined for humanity to perish around the middle of the fifteenth century. What lives today in Russian Leninism is the continuation of the spirit that dogmatically abolished the spirit at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in the year 869. This must be seen through. And what rises up against it out of a truly democratic-social spirit is what counts on the real progress of humanity. For this most reactionary thing wants, even if it is not aware of it, the mechanization of the spirit, the vegetarianization of the soul, the animalization of the bodily instincts, which would express themselves more and more in the views of blood. It is no use closing one's eyes to these things. He who wishes to speak out of the spirit of truth must look facts in the face, whatever the consequences may be; and he must also look unsparingly in the face those facts in which a great number of people are foolishly seeking their salvation. And I would say: only in the most extreme case does this Russian East show where humanity wants to rush. It wants to steer with the old spirit into the mechanization of the spiritual life by absorbing the school completely into the state. It wants to rush into the deadening, into the vegetarianization of the soul, by dulling the real sense of right and wanting to replace it with the bookkeeping of a seemingly, but not really socialized state. And it thinks it is leading people to a natural human life by unleashing the most savage animalistic, bodily instincts that man carries within himself.

This is the task that we, born out of the deepest distress in Central Europe, should see clearly in this respect as well. We must clearly see how we have to absorb the great age of German idealism, how we have to transform and reshape it, so that people will not, as would happen in Russia, go around like living corpses when they reach a certain age. In the future, individual abilities would flare up in people at a young age, and all the old people would walk around like living corpses. And culture would die out, because the earth has not been able to give man anything in the way it did since the fifteenth century; he must seek it for himself if he wants to thrive on earth. We in Central Europe have the task of showing humanity how to develop through body, soul and spirit. We have to rebuild that kingdom of the spirit that was undermined by dogmatic Catholicism in 869 at the eighth ecumenical council in Constantinople. Otherwise, along with the spirit of humanity, the soul will also be lost, and it will become a living corpse on this earth, since the earth will no longer be able to give any more vitality. Hence the constant search for the spirit, hence the necessity for a real world view of freedom. Not of that freedom which can be connected with the blackest reactionaryism, but of that freedom which is born out of the spirit of modern man.

In the extreme rarity of its occurrence, Central European humanity was predisposed to bestow on Hegel and Goethe just enough spirit to enable it to function as spirit, but no longer able to grasp spirit , at most, could only hint at it symbolically in Goethe's Fairy Tale and in the second part of Faust. In Hegel's case, he described the world spiritually, but in such a way that this spiritual description of the world remained spiritless. If we see Hegel as a person who can speak about the world entirely from the standpoint of the spirit, but at the same time as the most spiritless person who has ever been born, then we see Hegel correctly. But this legacy of spiritlessness is precisely what is inherent in the Central European development. That is why we have come to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century in an absolutely spiritless way. We have come to a reign that no longer reflects on life at all. And from not reflecting on life, from the fact that one has unlearned all thoughts about life, it then followed in 1914, which one could express like this: in July 1914, at the end of the month, it was the case that in demonic spirits had confiscated all thoughts in Central Europe, so that these confiscated thoughts would not work in the souls of people, and out of the chaotic subconscious could arise that which then arose. For Central Europe, with its two empires, really gave the impression in July 1914 of people who act in such a way that all thoughts have been confiscated from them. Today, it is not enough to be naive about these things. Today, these things must be seen in the Spirit of Truth, and this Spirit of Truth must at the same time be allowed to be fertilized by what is necessary for the further development of humanity.

Therefore, one must also realize what kind of attitude would bring about humanity, which only comes from the scientific world view, from that scientific world view that wants to understand the whole world and which has then produced its idiotic, feeble-minded blossoms in the monistic associations, where only phrases and phrases were spoken because otherwise nothing could be spoken. Let us assume that this scientific world view, which has crept into all social thinking and feeling, would take hold of humanity. What would be the result? Yes, one must know what the peculiarity of the scientific world view is. You see, Flaeckel was a splendid man, really full of life, a brilliant fellow. I may have already told you the story I experienced myself: We were once sitting in Weimar, I with the old publisher Hertz von Berlin at one end of the table and Haeckel at the other. Now, Hertz, who was a man of the old school, said something like this in the conversation: Yes, what Haeckel teaches leads humanity to its downfall, it is a misfortune for humanity. — Haeckel was sitting, as I said, at the other end of the table. Hertz continued speaking, then this so pleasant, beautiful apparition of Haeckel caught his eye, and he asked: Who is that down there? No, he exclaimed, that cannot be, bad people cannot laugh like that! - You see, in such symptoms those things that came from the old were confronted with those that wanted to go towards the new. But a peculiar phenomenon must be observed: those people who first study natural science in the cabinet or with the nets in the sea, examining Medusa, as Haeckel has done so frequently, who do the research first hand in the laboratory, they can be inwardly active people, they can be there with their soul and even with their spirit. But the pupils, and this is already the third generation, show themselves to be absolutely spiritless and soulless. That is the peculiarity of the scientific world view: it drains people of their spirit and soul, and numbs them. But because it cannot yet drive the emaciation so far in those who do the research at first hand, that is why the original naturalists are often highly likeable guys. The next student, who still has the teacher's image before him, is not entirely without spirit; the third, who is the student's student, is usually already a spiritless and soulless fellow, a monist.

But there is something else connected with this monism. If you become imbued in soul with this monism, if you become imbued in soul with the spirit of modern natural science, then you become alien to man as man, and antisocial instincts develop in you. Sympathies between people fade, while antipathies increase more and more. That is why I have often had to say it here: however great the triumphs of natural science on the ground of nature, human nature, the human essence, is ruined by them from the foundations up, for they produce antisocial instincts and create abysses between human beings. Today we are already standing at such abysses between man and man, which is shown by the fact that only to the slightest degree can man understand man today, can man really empathize with man.

What must take the place of what has just been described? It must be replaced by the development of the soul, which makes its way by absorbing what you, perhaps with weak powers, will find described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. This is at the same time a book on the education of humanity. This is what should be begun with at the beginning of the twentieth century: to speak to people about how they should rely on themselves, on their own strength. Such a thing must also be made fruitful pedagogically. Such a thing is the foundation for Central European pedagogy.

Now, it is impossible for the forces that are to be revealed in “How to Know Higher Worlds” to be cultivated in any state school.

Establish state schools in any form, and people are driven away from what is to be developed in their souls and minds. This can only flourish if spiritual life is placed on its very own free basis, if spiritual life is placed in self-government. Therefore, this shift of spiritual life into self-government is the fundamental question of humanity in the present time. For through this movement of spiritual life into self-government, that which has been most lost under the scientific education of mankind will in turn be generated: the rule of an artistic understanding of the world, from which the imaginative understanding of the world will then arise. For the development of mankind has reached a certain point: when man encounters man today, they can no longer recognize each other at all, because the physicality for this has already been too much dried up. They can only recognize people if they can form a picture, an imagination of them. And more and more, direct personal contact, and everything that should be there for people, will have to be based on images, on imaginations that people can form of each other, on looking at the soul and spirit in people. The actual developmental impulses of people must be thoroughly changed. And there too, it must already be stated: suppose the way of thinking that dominates all of humanity today, the materialistic way of thinking, were to triumph – now we are at the fork in the road of culture – this materialistic view were to triumph: then, starting from Russia, all of humanity would mechanize in spirit, vegetarize in soul, animalize in body, because the evolution of the earth itself is pushing for it. The evolution of the earth gave off the invigorating forces of man, you can follow this into the fifteenth century, where even the prices in Central Europe were the normal prices of the individual economic goods. This is only obscured by history, which is a fable convenante. The earth could only give man what he could find within himself without consciousness until the fifteenth century; only until then could it be the unfolding of man. Since then, man has had to work his way into grasping a pictorial, spiritual view of the world and of other people, in order to come to a right relationship from person to person. If the materialistic world view were to prevail, what I have just characterized would happen, then desolation would flood the earth and the war of all against all would be accelerated.

There is only one way out of this situation: if people turn to spirituality, that is, to pictorial vision, to the imaginative; if they are able to replace that which comes from Greek culture and was beautiful about it, the birth of the spirit, with the realization of the spirit in the world ; if they replace what was alive in Romanism and what, proceeding from Romanism, wreaked havoc in Europe, the officialdom, if they know how to replace that with free legal intercourse, and if they know how to replace that which has particularly flourished in the West through instincts with an organized economic life.

But for this it is necessary that what is recognized scientifically on the one hand is also recognized spiritually. The world could not progress if there were no free spiritual workers in it. Imagine how the world would progress if nothing spiritual were produced. Things must be invented, people must live in art, in a free world view, otherwise humanity would become ossified. Humanity would become ossified under the mechanization of the spirit. But what is the basis of free spiritual creativity? Free spiritual creativity is based on the fact that we preserve for life certain qualities that we otherwise only develop normally in childhood. When someone is as old as Goethe was when he completed Faust, he does so with the soul forces that he acquired in the first third of his life; they must remain, they must be preserved. In the normal course of development, they die out today. In Goethe and in German Idealism, they were still there as inheritance, as the red afterglow of the day, a last stroke of luck in the development of humanity. Now it must be cultivated, cultivated in a spiritual life that really looks at people's individual abilities and develops them appropriately through spiritual pedagogy.

And what, then, is the spiritual and psychological basis of all economic life? This may still sound strange today, but all economic life is based only on economic experience and on having been immersed in economic life, and it is therefore best developed by those soul forces that have been immersed in life for the longest time, namely by the soul forces of the last third of life. Just as one develops a true art only through the very first soul forces, so one develops a true economic life through the last soul forces. If people cannot plunge into an age through the so-called normal development, in which we all break down and can no longer be young, we will not be able to manage, no matter how socialist a state or socialization is. For this it is necessary that we consciously immerse ourselves in the cultivation of the characteristics of old age in human beings; so that we do not grow old ourselves with them, but that we can put them on like a garment. To do this, we must grasp them in our imagination, we must grasp them in pictures. We are instructed to grasp the forces of youth in pictures, in our imagination, on the one hand, and to grasp the forces of old age in pictures, on the other. Humanity is compelled to educate itself towards such a goal. And it cannot educate itself if it does not take the whole of life seriously. Today people take this life so much for granted, as if it were basically already over when a person reaches their late twenties. By this time they are terribly clever, they can no longer become cleverer, they can do everything, can judge everything, and they could not judge better. That later life also has possibilities and absorbs forces is something that humanity knows nothing about because it does not want to develop these forces, because it renounces them. But we will all have to know how to manage our youthful energies, how to manage the energies of middle age, of old age. But we shall only learn this in the threefold social organism, when we lay the things apart, and not when we mix and melt everything together, as the most reactionary development of modern times has done, and as it is often intended to do to the detriment of humanity, to the sin against the spirit of human progress. Our education must arise entirely from a true understanding of the soul's life. For example, we must come to completely eliminate snap judgment, especially in relation to life. Quick-wittedness is nice, it can be there, but it should only be there so that we can make jokes, be amusing. One must be aware that the purpose and goal of quick-wittedness is to live out the phrase. Irony and humor can be beautiful, but they must be phrases, of course. We do not want to disparage the phrase in the place where it is justified. We should appreciate artistically designed phrases, but they must not appear in the wrong place, they must not appear where the word should be imbued with life. We can only get used to this if, for example, we look seriously at the following: there is a person who says something to me that does not suit me or that suits me. A certain revelation occurs from person to person. We quickly judge it. If people could get into the habit of doing it again the next day, after twenty-four hours, when they have slept in the meantime, when their spiritual and mental state has changed completely, then people could get into the habit of visualizing the whole situation again: The person said this and that, you are facing him - and then judging, then something important would happen. In the first place it is not the judging that is valuable, but the power of the soul, which always allows that to be involved which happens to the human being between falling asleep and waking up. This power is cultivated, and it is the gradual development of this power that is particularly necessary for the formation of the imagination. This conscious work of working one's way into an unconscious life will develop the imaginative world and the world that can actually underlie a social life in humanity.

It is equally necessary to understand certain things that have to be understood at some point. You see, as strange as it may sound today, one does not usually see what is for the good or ill of humanity when it occurs in humanity. If I tell someone today the law of corresponding boiling temperatures in physics, he believes me because he is used to it, not because it is logical, but because he has been used to believing in scientific laws for a few centuries. But if I speak today of a spiritual law that is just as well founded as a scientific law, he does not believe it, because it must first be known for a few centuries. But we do not have time to wait that long. People must consciously familiarize themselves with the upheavals of living life. 'People need discoveries and inventions, that is a natural law. When such discoveries, but especially inventions, especially technical inventions, are made by people who are not yet in their forties, then these inventions have a retarding effect on the overall context of humanity, actually holding something back in humanity, especially against the moral progress of humanity. The most beautiful inventions can be made by young people: it is not for the progress of humanity. If a person reaches their forties and retains their inventive spirit for what is to be done for the physical world, then they also give moral content to their invention, and this has a moral effect in the progress of humanity. When something like this is expressed, it is madness for humanity, since humanity does not recognize spiritual laws at all. But it is a spiritual law that man only reaches the point, through his inventive talent, of being able to work for the progress of humanity in the spiritual and especially in the technical field when he is forty years old. We have to take this into account in the laws of human development. Only when humanity decides not just to think: How do you set up these or those economic offices? but when it decides to think: What must be cultivated spiritually and emotionally among people? What must be considered? — then salvation for humanity can be expected.

The church has worked long enough for the sake of human selfishness. They have worked together quietly, this church and this state. I have already said recently that a person can only truly develop freely when he is a very young child, because he is still too unclean for the state. But as soon as he is clean, he is accepted by the state and prepared, not for a human being, but for a state official. But the human being is consoled by playing with his egoism to the highest degree. He is guaranteed a pension until death if he is no longer able to work. This is a very strong incentive for the souls of civil servants. And then, when the state no longer provides, the church takes care of the person by making his soul immortal without his intervention. First of all, the person is insured during retirement, and then, after death, the soul is insured. All of this is built on selfishness. In the future, it will not be built on selfishness. Why did Aristotelian Catholicism keep secret from people that their spiritual self is also there before it enters into existence through birth? Aristotelian Catholicism only wanted to take into account people's egoism, their fear of death and their desire for assurance of an immortal soul after death. But people find it too difficult to accept the idea that I have descended from the spiritual world and that I have to carry out here on earth what I have received as a spirit. This is the most radical thought that must strike present-day humanity: that man must not regard his physical life merely as a preparation for life after death, but that he must also regard it as a continuation of a spiritual life before birth. Then he will change from being a lazy person who does not want to do anything to a person who is aware that he has something to accomplish on earth, that he has a mission. Until this thought can penetrate people, there is no way to avoid their sinking into materialism.

With these considerations, I ask you to consider what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science should actually be for people today, what it should give them, and how it should work as an ingredient in the present soul for the whole of human cultural development. In the first part of my talk today, I wanted to present to you the picture that would arise if humanity were to continue to live in the traditional way: the picture of the mechanized mind, the vegetarized soul, the animalized body. This was the picture I wanted to present first. And in the second part, I wanted to present to you what must happen in order to achieve a spiritual life that the old earth can no longer provide, that man must seek out of inner freedom. Those who consider this path of our spiritual life will have the basis for reflecting on the important and essential aspects of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

Emil Bock: To show what is desired, it is perhaps better if the questions received in writing are asked personally.

Rudolf Steiner: There remains the question from yesterday about women. Perhaps I will first speak a little about this question, which was asked yesterday in relation to the participation of women in the movement we are dealing with here.

Now, I believe that the time has indeed come when women should participate in all branches of public life on an equal footing. So there should be no doubt that the entry of women into this movement is justified and that women should be treated the same as men. I would just like to say that it would be necessary to make this clear. That has been the great disappointment so far, that the entry of women into the movements in which they have succeeded in entering has not actually been noticed, at most it has been noticed in relation to some externalities, to subordinate things, but not actually in relation to the cultural nuances. You will all have experienced the deep disappointment when a woman even entered the German Reichstag and absolutely no kind of change resulted from a woman's participation.

I already pointed out yesterday that years ago I said to a woman's rights activist, Gabriele Reuter, who was moderate in one sense but very active in another direction, that women must bring their own character into the movements and not find their way into what is already given by the culture of the past, which is above all a male culture. As you know, Bebel once explained that there is a reason why women do not actually intervene in such a way that their intervention is noticed as a shade [in cultural life], which is justified in theory within Darwinism, but is strange in view of reality. He said that it is self-evident that every being, when it enters the world, must first adapt to the circumstances, and since women have not had the opportunity to adapt to the circumstances so far, one must first wait until a certain time has passed. If women then had the opportunity to discard their old inherited traits, then the adaptation would have been better executed. At present, women are still too much influenced by their inherited traits. Well, my dear friends, in the future, inheritance in women will not be any different than it is today, namely that they also descend from a father and a mother, just like their brothers, so that in this respect, there is obviously no inheritance through generations and no [necessary] adaptation. That is self-evident. So in the main it is just a matter of mere words.

On the other hand, it is of course very important to consider that precisely for such an area as religious life, an extraordinary enrichment can occur if women bring their particular nature to it. Although women have not [so far] thrown their share into the movements they have joined, this nature has nevertheless been noticed within the modern emancipation efforts of women. The point is that women have a different way of thinking. It is therefore entirely possible for women to achieve a certain more congenial understanding of things that cannot be expressed in sharply defined concepts because then they would not correspond to reality. So women's ability to grasp things is readily given. It is extremely difficult for a man to grasp things without sharply contoured concepts; this makes it difficult for him to find his way into such areas where female concepts are needed. So it is that women will have to play a major role in the spiritualization of our culture. She will only have to try to assert sharply that which is her own, with less sharply defined concepts, and not simply imitate the conceptual contours of men, for example in their studies. We would have gained something if, for example, in medicine or in other branches, in philology and so on, where women have begun to work, we could have seen that women, with their greater mobility, with their greater adaptability, would really have made a difference. As a rule, female physicians are such that in their thoughts they are really a copy of what they have learned, even more so than men. So it is necessary that these qualities [of women] be brought into the field sharply, but on the other hand, precisely because of these qualities, women need an extraordinary self-criticism. Women are more subjective or at least more inclined to subjectivity than men. A man, for example, has more sense of the fact that one must be convinced of the truth of a matter that one asserts. It will be much easier for a woman to judge according to subjective feeling. This will be important here because a woman, when she participates in this movement, will probably be able to discern the emotional coloring of what is to be given with extraordinary subtlety. But she will have difficulties when it comes to really asserting a will rooted in the objective, and it is precisely this will factor that comes into play strongly. In the case of man, the fact is that he can generally be characterized in such a way that the greater part of his intellect is used to enter into the organism in an organizing way; hence, I might say, he retains for his psychic life an intellect that is indeed sharp but not mobile. His will enters less into his organism, hence he has a strong will. In women, it is the case that the will enters into the organism more, and the intellect less. The female body is less intellectual, less constructed with the intellect in mind than the male body; therefore, in general, despite the greater mobility of the intellect, or perhaps because of it, women are endowed with a greater measure of concepts, with broader concepts, and even with a greater number of concepts than men. It will be found that within this movement woman will present things in such a way that one has more of a feeling of the spiritual, and that man, in this movement, will present things in such a way that one has more of a feeling of firmness; but when the two really work together, then something extraordinarily harmonious can come out, especially in community life.

Of course, when discussing such things, one speaks in generalities. There is no other way to do it, because the things one discusses must be more directive than something that is already based on observation. On the whole, however, it can be said that it is possible for a woman to develop a strong sense of responsibility through a strong self-education when she enters this movement, because the lack of a sense of responsibility is something that could certainly be observed where women have entered more spiritual movements in recent times. It is, for example, the case that a man is much more likely to be persuaded to keep something secret than a woman, who, if she has a female friend, is extremely quick to consider that friend as being completely trustworthy and then to divulge the matter to just one person, even though there are also numerous old women among men. This is simply a phenomenon that one has to experience and which carries a great, great deal of weight. So the sense of responsibility is something that will have to be particularly developed. It could be observed, for example, in medicine, how particularly the finer operations, eye operations and the like, can be performed much more precisely, better and more skillfully by women than by men. This will also be the case in the spiritual realm, and it will become apparent in the cult that women will truly be able to carry out the cult in a very special way, that they will also be able to empathize much more easily when performing the cult. On the other hand, something else has become apparent. I need only remind you that at the head of the Theosophical Society there stood for many years a woman, Annie Besant, who has a very skilled hand for many things, especially in the treatment of external matters, but who, on the other hand, is inclined to a very particular vanity. This is something that must then be developed: a keen sense of self-discipline to overcome vanity and ambition. In all this, women are much more easily tempted, both externally and internally, than men.

All these things ultimately lead to the fact that woman is in a certain way less constant, that she very easily swings between these two you have seen, Ahriman on the one hand, Lucifer on the other. Man naturally swings in rhythm from one to the other, but woman swings with extraordinary agility and very frequently in such a way that the equilibrium becomes very unstable. This must be taken into account, and I could go on in this matter, but it is not really necessary. The question must practically be answered in such a way that today there can be no doubt that women must be able to participate in such movements, but that they must practice the necessary self-education for such movements. It must be said that women must participate out of the general course of human development. You see, until the 15th century, the development of man was such that he had then reached the so-called intellectual or emotional soul. In relation to the intellectual or emotional soul, man and woman are very different. Therefore, it could not be otherwise than that within this period of time, woman was excluded from certain things, and where these old customs have been retained, for example in Freemasonry, women are still excluded today. This is based on traditions, and this can be seen in the cult of Freemasonry itself. That women as such have absolutely equal rights is not recognized by legitimate Freemasonry. It is the case that the cult of Freemasonry is such that it could not be practised in common [with women].

But since the middle of the 15th century, we have been developing more and more towards the unfolding of the consciousness soul, and in relation to the consciousness soul, such a differentiation no longer exists; the qualities of both sides [of man and woman] flow entirely into a unified configuration. It is, of course, not correct when, within certain movements that also take the position of reincarnation, one repeatedly finds that women – with rare exceptions – when they list their past incarnations – which of course is mostly fantasy – then list only women, while men list only men. These are, of course, things that are based on fantasy. It is of course the case that the successive earthly lives are experienced in different genders.

So that is what I have to say first about such a matter, which is always problematic and must always be unsatisfactory, with regard to the position of women. Do you (to Gertrud Spörri) have anything else in particular in this direction that you would like to discuss?

Gertrud Spörri: I would like to ask whether a woman today has the opportunity to found independent communities herself.

Rudolf Steiner: Whether a woman today has the opportunity to establish independent communities? Yes, you know, I believe that women will not only have the opportunity to found independent communities, but that it will sometimes even be relatively easy for women to found independent communities. They just have to be sustainable, that is, women will have to prove themselves. She will be able to found communities relatively easily, but she will have to reflect on what is a little sensational, a little novel, and so on. But we must not exclude these latter things just because we are afraid of them; we must rise above them. I am rather afraid that at first it could go for the world as it has gone for the anthroposophical movement, where, in newspaper reports, when there is an anthroposophical lecture somewhere, it is usually calculated that there are so many women in it and only very few men. In general, this has also been the case in reality, in that women are much more easily able to found groups, circles and so on. So that does make itself felt. I have always said that when it was emphasized that there were often more women than men, it was not the women's fault. They were quite right to do so, but if the men find it necessary to play cards and therefore stay away, then it is the men's fault. It does not testify to a strongly developed spirit in men, but to a backwardness in men. You have to be clear about that. Now, this sometimes occurs in an extremely disturbing way in the anthroposophical movement, in that women quickly find their way into it, but sometimes the depth of their finding their way in is lacking because the active, the will element, is missing. Therefore, when forming a community, a wise self-education of this element of knowledge and, in the beginning, a certain reserved element will be called for, I think. Perhaps it will be a matter of tact and then has to develop in cooperation with the central leadership, so that in the beginning women do not found ninety percent of the communities and only ten percent the men. Yes, you could experience that under certain circumstances, and it would not be wise if it happened that way. But that we have to fear that women will be less successful than men in founding communities is not something I think will happen. It will certainly not be the case that the women's churches would be attended only by women, that is, more than is now the case with the men's churches, because some churches are indeed attended by a majority of women; so nothing special needs to change there. We must be quite aware that in Central Europe, where it is a matter of attributing to women alone the ability to bring a certain kind of divine revelation from the supersensible world into the sensory world, only a light veil lies over the old conditions with regard to the things at issue here. The WALA principle is something that is absolutely true here and that, when it is resurrected in a dignified way, is not something that needs to be looked at with a jaundiced eye.

But there are a whole bunch of questions here.

Gernot Weißhardt: How can the priest achieve a life together with the dead?

Hubert Sondermann: I would like to ask about meditation or intercession for the benefit of the deceased.

Rudolf Steiner: In what way would you like to know about this question?

Hubert Sondermann: How this intercession can be justified and how it can be practiced. Then about the funeral ritual...

Rudolf Steiner: We will discuss the funeral ritual tomorrow.

Well, for spiritual scientific-anthroposophical research, it turns out that the human being is still connected to the physical-earthly conditions after death and that one can imagine this connection in a very specific way because one can observe it. However, it must be clear that life here on earth in relation to life after death is often something like a cause in relation to an effect. Let us assume that a family man has died, he was a materialist, but he led a life otherwise that he, for example, was very much absorbed in his love for his children. In the beginning there is a certain difficulty for those who are left behind to approach the soul of the dead person with prayers or meditations, because the dead person initially only perceives what he experienced up to his death, so that he perceives, let's say, his wife and children insofar as their life developed up to the moment he died. A wall opens up to the present experiences, to the present being of the bereaved, so that it is extremely difficult for the deceased to experience the connection with his relatives in the immediate present. It seems as if he can only get to this particular point in time, and then it stops; it is like a memory that has been torn away. But this shows, of course, that it has a meaning how the soul's attitude towards the spiritual world [in life] has been. You cannot be materialistic or spiritual without consequences for life after death. In people who are spiritually minded, it is immediately apparent [after death] that they can have an immediate connection with those who have remained behind. Now today, the human being's ability to experience anything supernatural is extremely coarse. People can hardly develop any kind of feeling for the numerous influences from the spiritual world, so that the real connection with the dead, which many seek and which is quite possible – not in the sense of an ordinary trivial interpretation, of course – is made more difficult. One can help oneself to strengthen and increase the sensitivity for these things through meditation, for example in the following direction: Imagine that you have decided to go out on a certain day, let's say at 11 o'clock; now someone comes and delays you by half an hour. Afterwards you discover that if you had left half an hour earlier, you would have found a ride, for example, and then you hear that everyone was killed in the accident – so you would have been killed too. I believe it is absolutely certain that a great many people did not die in the Paris disaster these days because they were prevented from doing so. Don't you read the newspapers? A large number of people have been killed in the Paris subway. When you think about such things, you will see how extraordinarily little man, in judging his life, takes into account the things from which he is protected. We live for the moment and only pay attention to what happens to us. We never perceive what we are protected from. Of course, it is difficult to prove something positively when you live in the spiritual world. I have already pointed out the following: Suppose I advise someone who is ill – let's say he is 40 years old – not to drink wine and not to eat meat. He dies at 48; now people say: He died young, even though he didn't eat meat or drink wine for the last eight years. But who can say whether he wouldn't have died at 44 if he had eaten meat and drunk wine? What people so carelessly call 'proving' is extraordinarily difficult when it comes to things in the supersensible world, but precisely reflecting on such things increases our sensitivity to the intrusion of the supersensible world into the sensual world. I only mention this because there can still be very little understanding of this relationship with the dead today, especially in the West. Of course, this does not prevent us from cultivating this relationship with the dead in such a way, and it is particularly effective if we cultivate this relationship with the dead in such a way that we try to live in such thoughts in which the dead can also easily live, and these are never abstract thoughts. The more abstract a thought is, the less the dead person can have such a thought in common with us.

These things are all very difficult to express when I am trying to make myself understood. For example, there are no nouns for the dead; the dead do not know non-nouns, which are the most abstract words. They still know verbs, but mainly those that are spoken from the heart. That is tangible for them. Then he can experience what is specifically vivid. So if you immerse yourself in something that you experienced with the dead person in all concreteness here on earth, let's say you remember that you were on a walk with him, he picked up an ear of corn, he spoke something —, and you remember it down to the smallest nuance, then the dead person can have the thought [with you]. All these are preparations for developing a relationship with the dead. We can then also read out loud to the dead person everything that relates to the spiritual world, as I always call it. If we simply imagine in a concrete way that the dead person is present and we read something, but as I said, it must relate to the spiritual world, then he can develop a connection with us. I would feel untrue if I did not first communicate these things, which are concrete observations of spiritual science, to you, because then you will know that the assertions of spiritual science with regard to the dead refer to concrete things. One also has the possibility of bringing about the turning to the dead especially by supporting what the dead person takes with him in a spiritual relationship.

I can tell you that it is extremely important to relate to the dead person in the following way: Immediately after death, right away, the person experiences a streaming memory of their life here, which does not proceed like an ordinary memory because, as I said, it is much more fluid, but it contains everything specific in this memory picture. If we then inwardly say something to the dead person that is in this memory picture, then that is an element, a force, which can now also contribute to his particular well-being, which will particularly satisfy him. All this shows you that we as people on earth can do something to come into a special relationship with the dead. From this you can see that anthroposophical spiritual science must definitely speak of the fact that everything we feel inwardly for the dead is something real. A funeral ritual, for example, is something absolutely real. In a similar way to how we initiate something for life here between birth and death through a baptismal ritual. We give something to the dead when we direct our thoughts to them, thoughts that are multiplied a hundredfold in the community, not just added up, but multiplied many times over. What is directed to the dead in this way is something that falls into the dead person's field of vision and enriches the dead inwardly. Just don't say that we are interfering with their karma. If you gave someone 500 marks – I don't know how much that is worth today – so that he could make an Italian journey and visit the art galleries in Italy, that was not at all an unlawful interference with his karma; it was something perfectly permissible, although it has something to do with his karma. And so it is also not an unlawful interference with karma when we do something for the dead. It is indeed an embellishment, an elevation, an enrichment for the life of the 'dead, when thoughts or actions or the like, clothed in ritual, flow from us to the dead, but it must remain the intercourse with the dead in the inner life of the soul.

A great deal of nonsense has been done with spiritualism, also in other respects. In recent times, in particular, communication with the dead through spiritualism has been brought into a terrible situation. You know that spiritist séances are mainly used to communicate with the dead. Now, of course, most of what comes to light in spiritist séances is false, but despite all the falsity, there remains a certain residue that should not be cultivated, because it is something that always brings a person down, not up. If a person does not develop in a higher world, but allows the ordinary world to enter deeper into himself, a kind of pathological relationship with the spiritual world can arise. This is, as a rule, also the case with mediums, who very often succeed in approaching the dead through suggestion. You will understand that all kinds of illusions must arise. It is, of course, absolute nonsense to believe that the dead are able to use speech and writing in the way that is manifested in spoken or even written communications. That is, of course, complete nonsense. What comes to light is only transformed by the medium. Imagine that we were all sitting here together in peace, when the floor opened up and a menagerie of lions came up into this room. Imagine that vividly! Just as it would look here if a menagerie of lions came up through a floor opening, so it is for the dead when we enter their realm in a spiritualistic way with all that we are as human beings here. It is an entirely accurate image. The dead suffer as a result if the contact is real. It is irresponsible what can be achieved through spiritualism.

Communication with the dead must remain entirely within the soul realm. In this context, it is only ever appropriate to address prayers to the dead when there is a tendency to find a bridge to the dead, and that meditation, ritual acts and so on are also directed towards the dead, so that one can relate to the dead on a spiritual level. In this way, both the world in which the dead find themselves and the world in which the living find themselves are served; that is, those who are living on earth; for much of what people, without having a real idea of its origin, summarize in the word “genius” is in reality an inspiration from the dead, who find their way into the thoughts of men. So what we develop in relation to the dead in cult, in prayer, in meditation, these are absolutely justified things.

A participant: This raises the question of whether the grave is a particularly favorable place to get in touch with the dead. Or is it not the case that shortly after the dead person is buried, there is no longer a special place here to get in touch with the dead person?

Rudolf Steiner: In general, I can say that when thinking of the dead, when praying for the dead, the place plays an extraordinarily small role. It can indeed happen that the dead person has a strong longing for earthly life, then he would develop a certain longing for the place and also have a point of reference for being met there, if I may say so, where he was last thought of in community. It could be that way roundabout, but apart from that, one cannot say that the place, or even the place where someone is buried, has a great influence on what we can do for the dead. It is indeed the case, is it not, that in the festivals of the dead, especially in the All Souls' festivals, in a certain way the dead are almost brought to their graves, but that is actually something more for the living than for the dead. Here I must again take up the thought I expressed earlier. The dead man does indeed reach out to the living in his effectiveness, and we can certainly say: the dead man takes part in the world, as we take part in the most eminent sense in the spiritual world, and it can have a certain significance for the living when they develop their memories and their thoughts at the grave, in connection with the grave. This was naturally the case with the martyrs, the so-called saints. In the early centuries of Christianity, worship was performed at the graves primarily not for the sake of the dead, but for the sake of those who had been left behind. The altar still has the form of a grave, and this is a relic of the time when the service of the supersensible was already a kind of cult of the ancestors; and this is how it must be judged in the early times of Christianity. It is more for the living than for the dead.

A participant: Does time play a role here? And what about the requiem?

Rudolf Steiner: The funeral service is essentially one of the things that can be done ritually for the dead. Now it is the case that the funeral service should of course be read soon after the “death, and that is also good because the etheric body and the astral body still interact then. The etheric body is discarded very soon after death, so that the requiem, if it falls into the time when the person still has his etheric body or at least has not discarded it for long, still has a very strong subjective meaning for him.

Regarding the other question, I would like to ask you to take into consideration that a person, on the one hand, has to consider the objective facts and, on the other hand, his or her ability to perceive. Certainly, if someone died thirty years ago, he or she is no longer as intimately connected to the earth as if he or she died three days ago, that is certain. But there is a connection, and it is only a question of the fact that after thirty years it is difficult for a person here to establish the connection. I cannot find that it does not coincide a little with earthly development, because I have met a great many people in whom the first intense pain, which may have been stormy in expression, after they lost someone, was very subdued after thirty years, but I have never met anyone in whom the pain would have increased. Circumstances arise in the lives of those who have been left behind that are quite contrary to the fact that in later years the connecting bridge can still be as lively as in previous years. But if someone asks me whether the dead person comes out of the earthly sphere completely after thirty years or after an even longer time, then I must always say no; there can be no question of that. The world is such that everything is together in it; it is quite the case that we could just as easily perform rituals or ceremonies for the dead after thirty or fifty years as we could earlier. This is to be firmly held.

A participant: In this context, I would like to ask for an explanation of the passage in 1 Corinthians, chapter 15, verse 29.

Rudolf Steiner: “What do those who are baptized for the dead do? If the dead do not rise, why are they baptized for the dead?” — What kind of question is that?

A participant: Whether baptism is thought to influence the state of the dead.

Rudolf Steiner: What kind of influence do you mean?

A participant: Whether there is any influence at all and if so, what kind. This passage is completely unclear to me.

Rudolf Steiner: What do those who get baptized for the dead do if the dead do not rise at all? – Is it not the question of resurrection for you? Well, it is not, because here it is a matter of the idea of resurrection being the underlying assumption, and then of our taking it very seriously that the dead person has a relationship with the living, with those living here on earth. If the dead person has an ongoing life, then this life is modified in the most diverse ways, and if his life was such in Christ, then the connection that remains with the dead person is indeed a strengthening element for us. We can therefore say the following: Let us assume that we have known someone who was particularly significant in some way. I do not want to talk about spiritual or psychological qualities, but only about a significant person who has died and with whom we ourselves have a living connection in the way we can, emotionally, in thought.

I will start from something else first. You will gain extraordinary strength if you develop a living pedagogy, namely strength that can be used to make children receptive to certain admonitions when you educate, as it were, in the name of a dead person. If you just have the strength to do that, for example, to walk around the classroom and bring this connection with the dead person to life within you, it will give you the strength to make the children receptive to admonitions. In this way, you will also gain a special strength for the rite for that which is to be attained through baptism – baptism is emphasized here because it aims to lead the person into the Christian community – if you gain strength through the dead. It is natural that this is cited by the founder of Christianity, for the reason that all of Christianity, including dead Christianity, should work in the continuation of Christianity, so that all those who have gone out of the world through death should be co-helpers in properly guiding those who are born into the Christian community. That is what I would like to summarize.

A participant: [On what do the relations between the living and the dead depend?]

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, according to the experiences one can have, it is the case that the most real relationships emerge when they are built on real relationships in life before death. In general, if I may express it this way, dying is as follows: when the individual dies, he steps out of his physical shell, and what he has experienced in the physical shell is often the cause of what he then experiences [as an effect after death]. That is just the way it is: after death, he is dependent on what he has experienced in the physical shell. What he can experience through the physical shell falls away, he acquires other perceptual abilities, but he slips out of the shell, so to speak. It is the same with the relationships that a person has entered into with other people in life; these relationships have developed, they are mediated through our physical existence here, but when we slip out of the shell, the relationships continue. If one can have experiences in this area, one really has to say: the more concrete the relationships were in life, the more concrete the relationships are with the dead person.

But there is something else to consider. Above all, it must be considered that relationships are formed between the dead person and a new birth itself. So the person then develops new perceptions, but he forms emotional relationships, so that when the person comes down from the pre-existent life with human relationships – and in fact our real human relationships are much greater than we actually believe – one cannot say that the general relationship that is developed through such things as you have in mind would be completely fruitless. It is true that, for example, the members of a church community also establish relationships for their afterlife, but the other things are by no means fruitless, that much can be said. Such things can really only be determined from experience, but the concrete aspect plays a much greater role.

Johannes Perthel: Can we expect in the present or in the immediate future that a religious movement, including ritual, as mentioned, is possible in the proletariat?

A participant: What about the difference between city and country?

Rudolf Steiner: In this respect, we have indeed had a certain experience. Was it not necessary for me to follow a call to Stuttgart in April 1919 and to advocate there in Germany for the threefold social order movement, just as the view of the threefold structure of the social organism arose for me from the foundations of experience to be cultivated through spiritual science? I had to regard it absolutely as something that was a task for precisely this point in time. Before I left Switzerland, a man came to me who wanted to sign the appeal I had written and said that I must tell him more than was in the appeal. The Kernpunkte had not yet appeared at that time. He thought that something must arise that could be counted on, something like the second German revolution. I asked him: Do you therefore count on the second German revolution? — He counted the one of November 1918 as the first. And just as one revolution followed another in Russia, so he counted on a second revolution and thought that I held the view that threefolding should fall into it. I told him at the time: Yes, a large number of people believe that threefolding will indeed have a rapid effect after all the events of the times. It simply has to be tried. Because if I were to say that it cannot have a rapid effect, it would not be done, and then it will not be possible to prove to anyone that if it had been done, it would have had a very good effect for the benefit of all humanity. I told him: Just as one can overlook something in an ordinary context, so can some things also escape one in a spiritual field. There may be factors that make a second German revolution promising, but I do not believe at all in an acute second revolution, but in a continuity that would make it impossible to count on a second revolution as a serious factor. I do not believe that there is any real basis for such things.

Well, the development of the years has also proved this view right, and the result was that, at first, the threefold order progressed relatively quickly. Then it faltered, and obstacles arose from various sides, which I do not want to discuss with you now. On the other hand, a certain connection with the proletariat has been created precisely through the threefolding movement, and this connection has brought anthroposophy into the proletariat in a way that would not otherwise have been possible. I would like to say that anthroposophy has remained, and that threefolding has passed by the proletariat. It has been shown that there is a very strong interest among the urban proletariat in getting to know these things.

I have already mentioned another thing to you. If we had not been able to give anthroposophical religious education in the Waldorf school, always in harmony with the parents' views, never against them, the vast majority [of children] would have been left without religious education. With anthroposophical religious education, it is the case that the teachers say: We can't keep up, we are not able to have a sufficient number of teachers [for religious education]. It might even look a bit malicious if I were to say that the other RE teachers sometimes express their displeasure: Yes, if they keep it up like this, all the children will run away from us. But we can't help it, the blame must lie with someone, I won't say who, but I think it lies with someone else. So you see again that there is actually a strong pull in the direction that can come into the world through anthroposophy.

So I am not at all worried about the urban population. I believe that the communities you will be able to found will indeed attract a large influx of people from the proletariat in particular. Experience shows this quite clearly, and the whole constitution of the proletarian soul today shows it, as one has experienced in the last time. It is really the case that the proletariat today is something different than it was in 1914. If you grasp it in the right way, it is very accessible to a religious deepening, it is really longing for it.

The situation is more difficult, however, with the rural population, but with the rural population it is more difficult in all areas. The rural population is very stubborn, very conservative and will in fact hardly be won over to a reasonable further development in any other way than by the fact that those who are their leaders gradually become reasonable, which of course causes terrible difficulties with certain sides. Today, one must actually say that it would be relatively easy to make progress with the led — I mean, as a general phenomenon — if only the leaders would bite, but they are so terribly comfortable. With regard to the rural population, the leaders would just have to bite, we would have to overcome the leaders' complacency. Then the question of the rural population would also be solved, because it will quickly be solved if the question is resolved there as a pastor. In the cities, pastors will be forced to be progressive because the churches will gradually remain empty. In the countryside, it is a matter of winning over the leaders.

Now, my dear friends, I cannot interfere in this matter given our situation here, because it is a question of how quickly it will be possible for those who are actually, I do not want to say for a hasty, but for an energetic approach, in the real sense, that is, future pastors, to be able to shape the leadership in their own way. That is what one has to say about it. Is your question going in a different direction?

A participant: I would like to ask whether it is to be expected that these new cult forms will find immediate appeal among the proletariat?

Rudolf Steiner: That is quite certain. It is only important to know how to treat the proletariat. Of course — as can also be seen from the first chapter of my 'Key Points' — the qualities that have developed in the souls of the proletariat today are essentially the heirlooms of bourgeois qualities from the last centuries. The proletarian today shows no other characteristics than those he has inherited from the bourgeois. If the bourgeois has become pedantic, the proletarian has become even more pedantic; if the bourgeois has become philistine, the proletarian has become even more philistine; if the bourgeois has become materialistic, the proletarian has become even more materialistic, and so on. The dislike of ritual and ceremony that you find among the proletariat today is nothing more than the continuation of that dislike that has gradually developed in the bourgeoisie. It is also a matter of our really being able to appeal from the external to the internal, and here it must be said: anyone who looks a little deeper into the course of human development knows that, as the social question stands today, it cannot be overcome by anything other than a serious religious renewal, and that can only be found through the ceremonial. You do not even get around to developing what you need to get into the proletarian soul without the ceremonial. But the ceremonial must be honest. Here imponderables play a great role. If the ceremonial is not honest, it is impossible to bring it to bear. If it is honest, it takes the lead. I would like to say that it is not necessary to be blunt, but the ceremonial must be honest.

You see, in this respect one must say: the ceremonial acts have gradually become so externalized that of course the proletarian today has only a smile for everything ceremonial. But let something come along that is honest, that is what it should be, then you will get through to people, even to the proletarian soul, perhaps even to this first of all.

Hubert Sondermann: May I ask from which side we could approach the soul of the countryman with what we want and where, so to speak, the key can be found, where we can unlock it.

Rudolf Steiner: This cannot be done theoretically, but must be taken as I have said it. We must be clear about the fact that the countryman, the farmer, is conservative, and that what is rigid in him is extremely difficult to get out of him, and this is much more common today than it used to be. I think that can be seen in a relatively short time. In the 1980s, it was still relatively easy to bring people over from the Roman Catholic Church to the Old Catholic Church. Today, it is almost unthinkable.

Constantin Neuhaus: The good elements no longer come at all.

Rudolf Steiner: The general effect is that receptivity has actually been lost in a relatively short time, especially in the countryside to an eminent degree. In the countryside, things can only improve if we work indirectly through the priesthood. If we are able to found a community in the countryside, even if it is still small, and if this community is there and the priest really works in a priestly way, then he can gradually have this community, but of course he must be prepared for the fact that the real issue is to overcome the leaders. Of course, they cannot do anything with the people of Arlesheim as long as Pastor Kully is there. It is clear that we are talking here about the leaders. The path that can be taken at all will be to first found communities in larger towns and then to simply try to have a convincing effect on people, so that a kind of further development takes place through the pastor himself. The moment you succeed in conquering any district as a leader, it will happen. You always have to see that it does not depend on individual souls, especially not in the compact rural communities. But attempts must be made everywhere, and it will be a matter of overcoming the leaders there.

A participant: I think we will have difficulties because in the countryside religious life is lived much less consciously. I don't think that many people in the countryside are really searching, but religiosity is more traditional, it is a movement that happens by itself. We can expect much more of a person who is searching hard than of people who are only in the religious life because of tradition. Is there any hope of success here, of raising religious life in the countryside out of the sphere of tradition and into the sphere of consciousness, or is that expecting too much?

Rudolf Steiner: Please bear in mind that what you describe is only a contemporary phenomenon. Just think of the time of the peasant revolts, which were entirely religious in character. The phenomenon you describe is actually much more connected with other things in the present than merely with religious things. If you want to present anthroposophy in Regensburg and there are farmers in the audience, they will naturally come and stamp on the ground: You have nothing to say to us here, our pastor has to say that to us, and you have to shut up! —- But this is connected with the fact that today, as a result of liberalism, of man's development towards freedom, there is an enormous belief in authority, not only in the religious field, but everywhere. We have acquired this belief in authority particularly by becoming more and more liberal people. It is because liberalism has spread that we have forfeited our freedom. This is a somewhat radical statement, but it is already proving true in the most diverse areas. This has much more to do with the things that are otherwise present in life than with religious matters. Just try to imagine what would happen if a truly free spiritual life were to take hold. A free spiritual life, where, for example, the school is completely autonomous and self-sufficient, where what is done in the school is, I might say, direct revelation from the spirit, then, of course, you come to the point where, through the free spiritual life, you overcome the leading personalities with their authorities. This is something that comes to the fore most strongly in things that develop in other areas than in the religious sphere, especially in the countryside, because in the countryside the principle of authority cannot be overcome as easily in all areas as it can in cities. But I do not wish to say that religious life is unconscious in the countryside for that very reason. It is simply that everything is more rigid and submerged in what the modern age has brought forth.

A participant: [Isn't the rural population particularly receptive to cults?]

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, certainly for the introduction of cults. The moment you appear with the cult, you will win the heart of the countryman much more easily than with a teaching; that is quite certain. The Catholic Church spread Christianity initially not so much through teaching as through cult, even if the teaching has flowed into external forms.

A participant: Wherever the remains of cults still exist, the position of the priest is different – a position of authority – and this makes it easier for the priest to gain access to the lives of the rural population. My only fear is whether the priest has the necessary expert knowledge to intervene and take the lead in all these areas.

Rudolf Steiner: Which priest?

A participant: The pastor in the countryside. If all the threads come together there, can he really do it?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, why do you think it can't be done?

A participant: Because we have become too unworldly as a result of our education.

Rudolf Steiner: This is indeed essentially overcome by a free spiritual life, as I think it is in the sense of the threefold social organism - that is, in the educational sphere according to the model of the Waldorf School through education in the free spiritual life. Don't we see the worst consequences actually coming from the lack of freedom in the spiritual life, that is, I mean now from the lack of social freedom. Just think, it was not so very long ago that there was a real and serious debate about whether or not to tolerate the Jesuits in the German Reich. Now, it is outrageous to even discuss the spiritual life from a political point of view. You will not expect me to have even a single hair left to praise the Jesuits, of course, but politically speaking, no kind of spiritual movement should be oppressed in any way if we want to advance in the general spiritual life. What have they achieved by politically fighting Jesuitism in Germany? To the same extent that they fought Jesuitism politically, to that same extent did its capacities increase from another side. Jesuitism is very astute; it has extraordinarily significant people working within it. If you want to fight it, you also have to develop sharp mental abilities. I must say that any kind of oppression of the free intellectual life leads to an oppression of the intellectual life in general. We should never think of using political measures to bind or restrict our opponents in the field of intellectual life, or anything of the sort; only in this way is it possible to really move forward. I think that when intellectual life sheds all the dark sides that still remain, for example specialization – which can be completely shed in anthroposophical education – then the pastor will actually be able to be the leader that he must be. There is simply no other way in the rural communities out there. There is no other possibility for the pastor than to really be involved in all matters concerning the community – I also want to talk about community building – he simply must be. One cannot say “he will be”, but one can say: he must be. We must say with Fichte: Man kann, was er soll, and when he says: ich kann nicht, so will er nicht. That should be our motto.

Christian Geyer: I would like to make a small suggestion. Unfortunately, some of us have to leave. It was originally planned that the course would last until tomorrow, and some will not be able to attend the continuation. I don't know if it is immodest of me to ask if you could at least give a rough outline of how the creed will be formulated.

Rudolf Steiner: Tomorrow. It is no longer possible for us to continue. Tomorrow, yes.

Following the third lecture of the cycle Balance in Teaching.

Dr. Steiner: Professor Abderhalden was in Dornach. He didn’t understand the significance of the anterior and posterior nodes of the vertebrae. That is where most such people have problems. They don’t go into anything, but rather think to themselves that if they were to delve into a subject, they would be uncomfortable. It’s better to stay away.

Otherwise, he has rather radical views. He said, “What you said about gymnastics—from a physiological perspective, gymnastics is barbarous.” I said to him, “Please tell people that. You have the position of a professor. If someone else says that, people become angry. Physiologists can easily say that to people.”

One thing was very interesting. He mentioned that during the time of the revolution some people found themselves out on a limb. He proposed that each professor teach the subject as he or she saw fit. The others could not imagine it. That is what he said.

Well, let us begin our pedagogical work. Today, we need to come to some clarity about a number of things that I had to leave somewhat in the dark, partially because of all the other work I had.

There had been a difference of opinion regarding the relationship of the school and the faculty to the Waldorf-Astoria Company. Bylaws had been prepared saying, among other things, that the teachers would no longer be employed by the Waldorf-Astoria Company, and designating Dr. Steiner as the head of the school.

Dr. Steiner: Do you want to say something Mr. Molt?

Emil Molt speaks in detail about the difficulties, particularly about his own position within the faculty, the bylaws, and the proposal to choose Dr. Steiner as chairman.

Dr. Steiner: From what our dear friend Mr. Molt just said, I believe we clearly can eliminate appointing me chairman. I don’t believe those paragraphs of the bylaws would change anything concerning me at all.

I ask you to recall, also, that we have always discussed the naming of new teachers among the faculty. That is something I would like to continue. I think we should certainly work toward the ideal of arranging things so that the faculty would look into certain things concerned with hiring a new teacher, and that we should pay attention to the faculty’s judgment. I would always report what occurs there. I would never exclude the possibility that when someone makes a proposal, I will look into it. Bylaws cannot firmly determine these sorts of things. If you make a firm rule, it will not be accurate. The bylaws should, perhaps, be no more than an indication of direction so that still more misunderstandings do not arise.

I have the impression that other things are in the background that could explain much of this. When I heard about it while I was in Berlin, it seemed to me to be rather superficial, but I also felt there were some problems living beneath the surface. Those things certainly have nothing to do with Mr. Molt, the patron of our school, and the faculty, but with certain other problems. It would certainly be desirable if we could look into the genuine basis, into the real common problems. External influences can play no role here. It is better to discuss our problems, like this one, which come to such an explosion, while they are only problems than to allow them to end in an explosion. Who would like to say something?

A teacher: I wrote the bylaws to delineate the form of our working together. What was important was the independence of the faculty in cultural matters, as a group of cultural workers. Part of that is also the hiring and firing of teachers. It was important to me to find a form that properly expressed Dr. Steiner’s relationship to the faculty.

Dr. Steiner: It is difficult for me to take a position in regard to these bylaws, since they are really unimportant to me. We can do things only as we need to do them from day to day. Bylaws are necessary for the external world, so that what we are doing looks like something. It is very difficult for me to take a position regarding these bylaws because they are really so useless to me. I don’t think such bylaws would change anything significant.

We can truly clarify the situation only when we speak as friends among friends. That is, when the faculty itself says how we are to understand these things, how we think, and how things should become.

A number of teachers describe their positions.

Dr. Steiner: You see, that is just what I meant. Some things that are actually interwoven into life have surfaced in the explosion of the bylaws. In the bylaws, we could separate them. We can see those problems that way. For instance, we could discuss for a long time whether or not the faculty is responsible for administering the finances of the school. You could show it would be proper to involve the faculty with the finances, but at the same time, we would need to feel certain the school will continue. We cannot eliminate that feeling of certainty or uncertainty regarding the continuation of the school. The last straw exploded in the last few days. It was already smoldering, but it burst out, and I think we can see that through this discussion. It burst out through what happened at the end of the past school year in the discussion of the school finances for the coming year. The things we discussed then were of such a nature that I said to myself at the time, “We certainly cannot know how things will look at our Waldorf School next Easter.” It is not so much that we do not have the money. Of course, we have to take into consideration that we do not have it. What appears necessary to me is that the teachers of the Waldorf School unite about how to achieve financial security for the future of the school. It is not possible for you to work as teachers if you have to work in absolute uncertainty about the future. The problem was most obvious when, at the end of last year, we couldn’t see how things would stand in regard to the future of the Waldorf School. I, myself, have no idea where we stand or how we will manage the more than 100 newly enrolled children. However, I said to myself that we will confront exactly the same problem next Easter. I had the feeling that the present relationships between the Waldorf School, the Waldorf School Association, and the faculty would render it impossible to imagine anything that would provide sufficient security for the future of the school. It seems to me that is what more or less quickly occurred. Through all these things, the question quickly arose about how to move forward.

I have to admit this troubled me greatly. You see, if we have to give up the Waldorf School someday, that would mean we would lose something that gives the entire anthroposophical movement a firm foundation. The Waldorf School must continue, it simply must succeed because it puts anthroposophy to the test. There are only two reasons why it may fail. First, because the school could no longer continue due to a change in the education laws, but we could endure that reason. The second reason would be that the school fails because the world does not sufficiently understand us and what we are doing and, therefore, does not finance us. The moment we say the school failed due to lack of understanding about the finances, the school fails in such a way that we can survive. I can think of no other possibility.

However, just that third possibility arose in what occurred in the last days, and that possibility is that differences arise within the faculty, to which Mr. Molt also belongs. That would make the world happy and that is what I perceive. Now something can happen that should not happen. Although we could fail with honor for financial reasons, we certainly may not endanger our position with discord. That would hide our financial miseries in a very horrible way. For that reason, I think it is much better to call things by their names. I think this whole thing has spilled out of the worries about what will happen with the Waldorf School. In all of these conflicts, I really see nothing other than a financial conflict. Why tiptoe around it?

I am certainly not criticizing anything. As you know, it is terribly difficult to talk about these things, because there is no interest in our circles for what is necessary. Until now, we have found no way of putting our ideas into practice, of actually doing them, because people have a sort of inner opposition and are unwilling to work to financially support our ideas. People are willing to undertake all kinds of confused business, but they have a certain kind of inner opposition to working in our way. This is most apparent in those people who must officially consider such things objectively. That is one of our main problems, and for that reason, we will have to do it ourselves. We, ourselves, must continue the work.

A teacher: Our desire to separate the school from the Waldorf- Astoria Company then carried over to Mr. Molt personally. That was certainly a misunderstanding. The faculty, of which Mr. Molt is also a part, represents the Waldorf School. The relationship of the faculty to the Waldorf School Association and to the Waldorf- Astoria Company is not clear, even today. The conflict we have is simply an expression of the fact that the faculty wants to take over the leadership of the school.

Dr. Steiner: In a certain way, we have now come to the core of the problem. The faculty is prepared to go with Mr. Molt in all the things resulting from the historical relationship, but it does not want to have anything to do with the Waldorf-Astoria Company. To the extent I am involved, that is what we have actually done. I most certainly wanted to work with Mr. Molt, but I could have nothing to do with the Waldorf-Astoria Company, simply because it wanted nothing to do with me. That is the problem, and we must overcome it in a wise and positive way. We should not simply say we are taking over the school, but instead, form the school so that we will have control.

You should also not forget what we had at the end of the last school year, namely, a spiritual profit due to the faculty and an absolute financial deficit that stood in sharp contrast to it. We must, therefore, conclude that the faculty understood the Waldorf School, but there was little understanding from those who certainly should have stepped forward to help resolve the problem of the school’s limited financial means. That is, from those within our circle who could certainly do something. You will recall that at the end of the last school year I mentioned, as an example, that the Waldorf-Astoria Company did not provide the building, that Mr. Molt provided it.

In my personal opinion, the school is simply a nightmare for the company, and Mr. Molt had considerable difficulty overcoming that and bringing about what lay in his heart. Those are the difficulties, and you can see that in the desire to separate the school from the company. That, of course, assumes Mr. Molt belongs to the faculty as the protector of the school and absolutely not just its financier.

If we accept that, we can also begin to discuss the problem in a healthy and objective way. We need only want to see Mr. Molt for himself and not in connection with the company. If we move onto this healthy ground, we can understand one another better. I think that is the core of the problem. The problems will become larger if we do not try to find some financially stable ground on our own. I don’t see any possibility other than that we come to a healthy basis ourselves.

Emil Molt: If the school had not grown beyond its original intent, these difficulties would not have arisen. The Ministry of Culture accepted the school because of the good name of the Waldorf- Astoria Company, and that good name continues to exist.

Dr. Steiner (speaking to Molt): It is certainly necessary in connection with what is said, to protect yourself from the opinions expressed about the Waldorf-Astoria Company. It is not quite correct that the school was dependent upon the Waldorf-Astoria Company children. We could have created such a school with anthroposophical children, and it most certainly would have succeeded. What is of value is that you were the first member of the Society who took up the idea of founding a school. That has nothing to do with the Waldorf-Astoria Company at all, but with your own person. I see no reason why you should identify yourself with the Waldorf-Astoria Company. They would not have understood it. This was your personal act. For that reason, I have spoken of the founding by Mr. Molt. That was absolutely intentional on my part. The fact that the workers’ children were involved lay entirely in the circumstances of the inauguration of the social movement in 1919. What we have here as a question of confidence is your trust in Anthroposophy, and what we have now arose from that. I certainly do not believe that the Württemberg Department of Education would have allowed less for you than for the good name of the Waldorf-Astoria Company. That is something we should clearly remember.

In a certain way, the desire to be independent of the Waldorf- Astoria Company is justifiable, because we must continue our work under all circumstances. At the time we presented the school to the world, it was not my intent to limit it to the Waldorf-Astoria Company, but to make clear to the world that it needed to do something so that the school not remain a Waldorf-Astoria school. According to their statements and present attitude, the Waldorf-Astoria Company would rejoice if you said someday that we should throw the school out. Perhaps that would in some way improve the name of the Waldorf Astoria Company, since perhaps it has sunk in some people’s opinions because of the founding of the school. You do not actually have a real reason for connecting the school with the company. You were, in fact, the person who understood the need to start such an initiative. It seems to me that we want to have everything to do with you and nothing to do with the company. Suppose someone else were in your position at the company. Then, the cultural fund would not have been increased by another 80,000 marks. That has nothing to do with the Waldorf-Astoria Company, but only with you. That is why, to use an unpoetic expression, this amount was coaxed out, not because the Waldorf-Astoria Company had any intent of making that money available. How many Waldorf children do we have? How many other children?

A teacher: We have 164 Waldorf children, 100 anthroposophic children, and 100 others.

Dr. Steiner: Now, the relationship of the numbers is the most unfavorable thinkable. If there were free access in Stuttgart, the number of enrollments would be limitless. There is no doubt of that. We have an extremely large number of requests that do not result in enrollments because the children have no place to stay. People cannot send their children or we would have many more from outside Stuttgart. For the time, the situation is such that the school is fairly ineffective in the outer areas. This is when we should have said that we will not accept the other hundred children because we do not have the money. We could have done that at the end of the last school year. Then, we would have only 365 when we opened the school this year instead of 465 children in the old rooms. We could have made things clear and said that the Waldorf-Astoria Company is paying for the classes. It is important now that we learn from the Waldorf School Association what the real budget is.

A teacher: We are preparing one.

Dr. Steiner: These things are always in preparation! You told me that just as I was leaving before. You must see to it that you prepare these things while I am away. All of these financial matters are always in preparation when I leave and usually still are when I return.

It is certainly clear that everything depends upon the financial question. Now that things have begun, we can certainly not so easily stop them as we could have done at the end of the last school year. Next Easter, we will be in the same situation. We need to get some money. It is certainly clear that the Waldorf School will need more financial support. The question is, though, whether the Waldorf School Association is the proper way to get it. At least according to its present capacities, it is not.

A teacher: Would a possible way be to tell parents now enrolling their children that we have nothing more?

Dr. Steiner: That would be a scandal. We could do that next Easter, but for now it would be better to see that we get some money. If we could only put this on a broader basis! It would be good to find some way of doing that. People also want to do something for the university course in Dornach. We must attack the problems of the school in another way.

I already said that we get the least amount of money for Dornach. It is easiest to obtain money for a sanitorium. Getting some money for schooling lies in between. We had an instance where we could see that a group of people had the least interest in doing anything for Dornach. Someone else wanted to do something like a sanitorium—that was taken up with the greatest interest. Everybody was like quicksilver. As soon as something like that is brought up, you get money. Schooling would likely fall somewhere in the middle. People would know how to find the way if hindrances were not always placed in front of what we have already done. What is important is that all the people working with us act together, and that we don’t have the kind of inner opposition we now have.

For now, we have the greatest desire to keep track of everything we spend, but we have not the least idea about what we receive. People have said they are ready to work all night when it comes to spending money, but when it comes to what is important, namely, to bringing in money, we find opposition.

If we do not place our financial affairs upon a firm basis, we will hardly be in a position to obtain money from people. We must find people who can administer the money we receive. For now, we cannot find any other people except those who want to create a new position for themselves by writing down a few numbers. I say that among us here in the faculty, but don’t let that be known. On the other hand, those working faithfully with us should know where the problem lies. The problems at the school relate directly to the fact that we have an extreme deficiency of people who can handle business affairs. That is our sickness. But, we don’t have to stay in that mire. Mr. Molt knows that as well as I, and he is suffering terribly under it. He is weighed down by the impossibility of extending the work in the economic area because he can find no one who can do it.

Credit for the school goes to you. The others have simply been passive. When people publicly speak about the Waldorf Company, we can do nothing about it. But, when they speak of the Waldorf School, it must be separate. They did not give the money, you coaxed it from them. They said they were in agreement in just the same way that a father is in agreement when the son spends too much. In the end, that’s how things are.

We will need to have a short faculty meeting, but first we must see to it that the board of the Waldorf School Association meets. Afterward, we will have a faculty meeting so that we can bring things into some sort of order.

The first specialized course for medical practitioners given by Rudolf Steiner took place at Easter, 1920. Several medical students also participated: Helene von Grunelius (1897–1936), Manfred von Kries (1899–1984), Henk and Madeleine [‘Maddy’] van Deventer (1888–1983). At an advanced age, Madeleine van Deventer wrote an article in which she recorded her memories: Die anthroposophisch-medizinische Bewegung in den verschiedenen Etappen ihrer Entwicklung [The Anthroposophical Medical Movement in its Various Stages of Development] (Arlesheim, 1982). The following material was taken from her article and also from Wer war Ita Wegman [Who was Ita Wegman] Volume I, by J. E. Zeylmans van Emmichoven, 1990.[1]

From the beginning, a number of medical students took part in the medical courses. [...] During the third course which took place in the autumn of 1922 in Stuttgart, there were about fifteen students. We often gathered in the cafés of Stuttgart. Intense conversations took place there. It had been clear to us for quite some time already, that although Rudolf Steiner's medical lectures satisfied our need for knowledge, they did not meet our humanity. We had repeatedly asked the physicians of the Stuttgart Clinic to request of Rudolf Steiner that he give other lectures to deal with the more human-moral aspect. The answer was: “We can't do that because we haven't yet fully understood the value of what he has already given us.” Where-upon we answered: “We can't wait for that. Who knows how long Rudolf Steiner will still be among us.” We knew, with that assurance which youth may have, that his time was measured, and that it would be unpardonable if he did not hear the questions which would enable him to deal with the more intimate aspect of medical work. When we realized that the path via the ‘older physicians’ led nowhere, we decided to appeal to Rudolf Steiner directly. So after discussing it amongst ourselves we decided to submit the following question at the end of the Stuttgart Course, during the time set aside for questions: “Is it not possible to show us students a way of becoming anthroposophical physicians even while we are still students?” The paper with the question on it was ignored by the discussion leader. It floated down under the table. Rudolf Steiner asked, “What is that note?” He was told, “It is a question from some students.” The only thing left to us was to turn to Rudolf Steiner directly. After the discussion we asked for a meeting with him and were asked to come the next day. Of the fifteen students, only four of us were present the next day (October 29, 1922) in front of Rudolf Steiner's apartment [...]

We brought forth our concern as well as we could. We said quite openly that we weren't able to do much with the lectures in this cycle; they seemed to us to be directed entirely toward the older physicians. We hoped to be able to understand more later, but for now we were unable to find our way there. We were searching more for what was human and moral. One of us mentioned medical school experiences. To get anything positive out of the negative aspects of university teaching, a high level of spiritual knowledge was already necessary. Another voiced the hope that there might be lectures concerning what was generally human with the subtheme of ‘Medicine’, just as there had recently been the Pedagogical Youth Course [The Younger Generation, GA 217] which had dealt with the generally human from the perspective of world history.

Rudolf Steiner listened intensely and then said: “If you want to form a humanitarian group of people, effective in the culture as the pedagogues want to be, that is a contradiction in terms. You see, for the pedagogues, the pedagogy itself could be completely absorbed in what is generally human. That is not possible in your case. You can gather either as a humanitarian group with general cultural tasks, or as medical practitioners and physicians. Both together cannot exist in this form. You may not forget the purely medical within the purely human. Also, the pedagogues are in quite a different situation: through their profession they have maintained a much stronger connection to the living human being, the child. Through their work they really cannot lose touch with the human being. But the academic medicine of today is entirely dead, has no connection at all to the human being and has no idea what happens when it concerns itself with a sick person.

In your case it is actually an entirely different matter. You feel in yourselves a vast abyss across which you have to find a bridge. You must find the bridge from the medical-scientific to that which is moral, loving. You see, if, for example, I speak of that which I call the warmth organization of the human being, then for the moment that is an abstraction for you. But you must find the bridge, so that you experience this warmth organization in such a way that out of the experience of this warmth differentiation in the individual organs, you find your way to what is morally-warm. We will have to arrive at the point where that which we call a ‘warm heart’ can be felt into the physical realm itself. You must find the way out of the scientific-physiological into the spiritual-moral and out of the spiritual-moral to the anatomical-physiological. Such a group of people, that have a ‘warm heart’ and who know right into the physical sphere how the ego in themselves works on the warmth organization, such a group will then be able to affect its surroundings out of much deeper warmth forces; it will be able, through these forces of love, which work into the physical realm, to affect the culture. On the other hand, if such people sink down, in spite of all, to the level of philistines, of narrow-mindedness, then it will become clear that sclerotic and other forces will become effective in a most radically destructive manner, much more destructive than for others!

Gather up fifty, sixty, seventy medical students who share your attitude, and bring them to me and I shall talk to you more of this. Naturally, they will have to be younger medical people, for you see, to the older ones, I really cannot speak of these things. But gather up fifty, sixty, seventy young medical students for me, they must be medical people, and young, of course not schematically according to age; for, indeed, there are old people, too, who are still young. Well, you understand what I mean, bring them to me and I will give a course for you to which one might give the theme: ‘The Humanizing of Medicine.’ ” (The quotations are unfortunately not exact. They were recorded later from memory.)

With that we were dismissed and the search for the young medical people began. [...] All inquiries flowed to Helene von Grunelius who carefully filtered and appraised them.

1923 saw several additional conversations with Rudolf Steiner in connection to our goals. I remember a meeting in the carpentry shop with Rudolf Steiner, Ita Wegman and the assistant physicians from the Clinic. Besides myself and my brother there must have been one or two other students there. The theme was Rudolf Steiner's indication that we ought to take a notebook and on the left hand side write what the professor says, or a good case history, while on the right hand side we were to transpose the medical symptoms into the language of the human sheaths. As an example, Rudolf Steiner gave the following: ‘The patient has edema of the lower half of the body’, would be transposed into: ‘Weak etheric in the lower half of the body’. It was advice which we did not follow enough, for we lacked confidence. [...]

Helene von Grunelius was, as van Deventer put it, ‘the soul’ of this group. That this was so can also be surmised from her invitation for medical students to the planned course which was to take place in Dornach in January, 1924:

Arlesheim, August, 1923

In the meantime you will have heard more about the incredibly significant lecture cycle held by Dr. Steiner from June 10 to 17, 1923, in Dornach [The Anthroposophical Movement, GA 258]. Through these lectures we anthroposophists should be moved to self-awareness. Why did we become members of the Anthroposophical Society, and are we conscious of the responsibility we have thereby taken on in relation to the spiritual world? If a society like the Anthroposophical Society is to be truly vital and capable of fulfilling its task in the world, then it must always follow a straight path toward its goals. That means that everything that is wanted and worked for in such a society must arise from the heart, the very center of Anthroposophy itself. Dr. Steiner emphasized this most particularly when he came to speak of the scientific tendencies which have sprung up within the anthroposophical movement in the last years. This is where our self-awareness must begin.

For a long time now, we younger physicians have felt that our medical movement is proceeding along a strongly intellectual track. We became particularly conscious of this during the medical course held in Stuttgart in October, 1922 [in Fundamentals of Anthroposophical Medicine, GA 314, Mercury Press]. With the exception of Dr. Steiner's lectures, these lectures, as regards the direction of their thoughts, might just as well have been given at any university. Inwardly, we rebelled against them because we perceived that the human being was not considered in his totality; warmth of heart and the pure will forces were ignored. We, however, really wanted to be able to stand within medicine as anthroposophists, meaning, as complete human beings. We perceived that all our medical work would get the proper impetus only if it arose directly out of the basic impulses of the anthroposophical movement.

We will find our way to true healing in the present time only if we really recall the core of what is anthroposophical. First of all, we must become conscious of our true humanity, and as physicians, especially of our will to heal. It is just Anthroposophy that gives us the possibility of acquiring those capacities which reveal the relation of every single thing in the outer world to the human being, so that we are then able to direct the forces of the outer world to the sick human being, so that they support his own forces of healing.

Another, no less important, task of the physician will be to accompany the human being as steady advisor, showing him how he can overcome the tendencies toward illness slumbering in him because of his onesided soul development, only by unfolding his entire human nature. For ruling the individual human being as well as all of contemporary culture are the destructive forces of the brain and of the intellect, striving toward decline. But if we want to be effective in the ascent of development we must develop in ourselves forces of the future, forces which will make us capable of true healing. We can only acquire perceptions of the human being which are necessary for such working by deepening our studies of the physical and chemical processes on the one hand, and on the other hand, by attempting to grasp, in a living way, the soul-spiritual in the other human being. Only then will we gain a real view of how these realms relate to each other in the human being. Then we will be able to see and to show how the soul-spiritual works into the physical structuring and differentiating, and how this physical in the human being can and must, in turn, be transformed into the soul-spiritual through the efficacy of moral impulses in the warm force of heart.

The task which we physicians must carry within the anthroposophical movement is so great, that only if we unite all our forces can we even attempt it. With the rebuilding of the Goetheanum, a new medical science must also be rebuilt, a humanizing of medicine.

If you would like to work with us in this way, please inform us in detail soon, so that we may begin our work together as soon as possible and meet during the fall or the Christmas holidays.[...]

On November 1, 1923, Helene von Grunelius wrote to her friend Madeleine van Deventer in Utrecht:

[...II was in Arlesheim from Friday evening until today (Thursday). I went there to inquire about the course, since we are now up to thirty-five people. After talking it over with Dr. Wegman, Dr. Steiner committed himself for eight days immediately after the Delegates Conference at Christmas (it will last from December 24 to January 1) in other words from January 2 to 9. I think this will be an opportune time for everyone. I gave him the list. He had no comment (about the names). Dr. Wegman thought he would consider it more closely in a few days, and comment on the individuals and ask questions. So he might cross people off the list if he has the impression that their attitude is not active enough and they're not really ready to follow through courageously on all he intends to bring (at least that's my impression). He expects total work from us. He said: initiative is necessary. There probably are individuals who have it, but it ought to come about that an entire group develops initiative. And that ought to be possible with a group of young people. Then he said how much the continuation and success of our work depends on its being spread in the outer world. We are now at a stage in the medical movement when it is mostly enthusiasm that can be effective, for we haven't much to show yet by way of success in healing.

[...] We can't say anything to the people yet about the course, because we have to wait to see whether Dr. Steiner will have anything to say about the list in the next few days. In any case, only people who have been invited by us or Dr. Steiner can take part in the course (we've already invited Steffen and Wachsmuth). If others ask us, we will say that we are not dealing with a 'medical course' but a particular study amongst a small group with Dr. Steiner. I gave my point of view about the Stuttgart physicians first and also mentioned how the medical conference in September had affected us, whereupon Dr. Steiner said: yes, they would actually be disturbing, if they were present. This judgment was very clear, as was the whole opinion he had of them, which wasn't exactly lofty. We agreed that we would not say anything about this statement, and if the Stuttgart physicians are insulted or complain, we, ourselves, will take the responsibility. I will try to prepare them as carefully as I can for the fact that we will not invite them to the course. [...]

Grunelius' unadorned language reflects the mood clearly. How things stood with those taking initiative for the first ‘Young Doctors' Course’ is evident. Their resistance to the older physicians was no doubt intensified by Dr. Steiner's remarks. On December 5, she wrote another letter to van Deventer with quotations from a letter of Ita Wegman's which show her attitude toward these students.

Dear Maddy, [...] Enclosed is the final (meaning, from our point of view, just about final) list. [...] Names underlined in red are those who have definitely committed themselves to the course. People responded very quickly and enthusiastically. [...] In the meantime, I did hear from Dr. Wegman. She says that, as regards the list, it is very difficult for her and also for Dr. Steiner, since both of them don't know all the people, to say whom they want and whom they don't want. Actually the organizers, meaning you and Maddy van Deventer, should choose the people, invite them and take responsibility for making sure that the people you have invited really understand what it's all about. [...] “What I gather from Dr. Steiner is that the emphasis of the course will be on the morally-human and the anthroposophical in medicine, in other words, mainly for those still studying, and for the young physicians, who, during their studies and the beginning of their practice did not find what they sought as satisfaction in their profession and their studies. So the main focus will be on this not-being-satisfied. Therefore, you must choose people who are really asking and seeking in this way. From what I can tell, not much by way of therapy will be given in this course.” [...]

By the way, we did not send a form letter, instead I wrote personally to everyone. In this case it surely was better and more effective. [...]

At the moment I am circulating the December, 1920 lectures [of December 17, 18 and 19 in GA 202, The Bridge between Universal Spirituality and Physical Man][2] and Hygiene [Health Care As a Social Issue, April 7, 1920 in GA 314][3] amongst the people, so that everyone will have read them by the time the course starts. [...]

Regarding The Bridge lectures [included in this volume] M. P. van Deventer has this to say:

In discussions between Helene von Grunelius and myself, we realized the significance of the lectures we had both heard in December 1920, which were later published and became known by the title The Bridge. The role of the warmth organization as mediator between soul and body appeared to us to be of fundamental significance. The Bridge lectures were available only in the Archives. However, upon being asked, Rudolf Steiner immediately gave us permission to duplicate and distribute them to all future participants for common preparation.

In late summer Rudolf Steiner asked me about the state of the preparations. In the course of the conversation he suddenly became very serious and requested that I tell him exactly what we really wanted. He demanded utter clarity of consciousness. I attempted to speak about the path which we already wanted to embark upon during our studies. I was too reticent, however, to speak about meditative practices. Afterwards I had the feeling as if I had failed an exam. I immediately wrote to Helene von Grunelius and asked her to go to Dornach as soon as possible and continue the discussion.

This continuation took place in late Fall 1923. Helene complained that it was impossible for her to follow the advice of keeping a notebook because she wouldn't know whether what she wrote on the right side was correct. Rudolf Steiner answered: “That doesn't matter. In the course of time you'll correct yourself; besides, you can send the notebooks to me. However, if you would like to gain greater certainty, I can give you a meditation.” Then he gave her the Warmth Meditation and told her that she could pass it on to all future participants. He himself would give it to Dr. Wegman. He called it a chain meditation (passed on from person to person by word of mouth), not a circle meditation. And he described it as the path of the physician towards beholding the Etheric Christ. [...]

In Dec. 1923 we could again report to Rudolf Steiner. By then we had unfortunately only found 30 participants. “Why shouldn't I speak to 30 people,” he said. As a date he gave us the week immediately following the Christmas Foundation meeting, beginning January 2. We wrote this to all participants and invited them at the same time to come already December 24 to participate in the Christmas Foundation meeting.

In this way, all were immediately united with the new stream which began with the new founding of the General Anthroposophical Society and the founding of the High School for Spiritual Science. The ‘Course for Young Doctors’ was thus the first event of the High School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum in Dornach.

Notes:

1. The English translation of that book, and thus much of the text in this introduction, was done by Dorit Winter and has been published in 1994 by Mercury Press.

2. These three lectures are included in this book starting on p. 221.

3. Available from Mercury Press

The lecture presented here is the 12th of 12 lectures in the series entitled: The Sun Mystery ... Death, Resurrection. This lecture is also known as: Anthroposophy, a Striving for Spiritual Understanding of Nature Permeated by Christ.

Mankind unfolded its intellectual life in the course of many centuries. This intellectual life gradually led it away from spirituality. The intellect itself is spirit, but its content is no longer a spiritual content. Indeed, the intellect is spiritual, but it seeks as its content external Nature, the external life of Nature. Hence the intellect is spirit, but it fills itself with something which cannot appear to it as spiritual. The great tragedy, the modern tragedy of the world, is that man may look into himself and that he must say to himself: When I am intellectually active, I am spiritually active, but at the same time my intellect, which is pure spirit, cannot absorb in a direct way the spiritual. I fill the spirit in me only with things pertaining to Nature.

This is what devastates and rends the human soul to-day. Even though we do not wish to admit this torn and devastated condition, it nevertheless exists in the spiritual regions of the human soul and constitutes the fundamental evil and the fundamental tragedy of our age.

If we wish to express in habitual terms what I have explained to you just now, we must draw attention to all the spiritual powers that are still active in the whole life of Nature; they enter into us because we fill our own spirit with the life of Nature, and we may designate these powers as the Ahrimanic powers.

Our intellect is thus exposed to the great danger of falling a prey to the Ahrimanic powers. During the past centuries, when the intellect was still unfolding and still possessed the inheritance of an old spiritual life, these Ahrimanic powers did not have that great influence on man which they have now. The life of Nature is apparently spread out round about us; but this is only apparent: for Ahriman lives in Nature. And by absorbing Nature, by believing that it is only controlled by neutral laws of Nature, we really absorb spiritual powers, even though we are not aware of this; we absorb Ahrimanic spiritual powers, who took over a special task in cosmic life, in the whole evolution of the world.

When we speak of the task of these spiritual powers, some people are easily inclined to say: But why does the divine guidance of the world admit these powers?—To this we must reply: All that exists in the earthly sphere may be grasped with the ordinary understanding; but when it is a question of grasping in a spiritual-scientific way that which transcends the earth, we must do this through spiritual vision (Anschauung).

Consequently we must say: These powers exist,—but the way in which they are connected with the divine-spiritual powers pertaining to man, can only be grasped in the course of long epochs; indeed, the powers belonging to the super-human sphere are perhaps quite inaccessible to the human understanding. We can therefore only say: These powers exist, they show themselves to those who have spiritual knowledge.

The tasks of the Ahrimanic beings is the following: To prevent the earth from continuing to develop as it should develop in accordance with the intentions of the divine-spiritual powers with whom man is connected from the very outset, inasmuch as he is a human soul. (You will find all these things mentioned in my “Occult Science”). In my “Occult Science” I have spoken of the future development of the earth, of the Jupiter and Venus phases of evolution: The aim of the Ahrimanic powers is to prevent this course of development.

Their aim is to harden and freeze up the earth, to shape it in such a way that, together with the earth, man remains an earthbound creature. He becomes hardened, as it were, within earthly substance and continues to live in the future ages of the world as a kind of statue of his past. These powers thus pursue definite aims, which undoubtedly appear as part of their own individual striving.

The earth could not reach its goal if the Ahrimanic powers were to gain the victory, if man were alienated from his beginnings, from the powers who supported him at the beginning of his evolution. Outwardly, the human being would develop in a way entirely in keeping with the earthly sphere, but by suppressing his innate disposition, which must lead him beyond the earth.

The Ahrimanic powers could not touch man while the intellect was still rooted in the spiritual through an old inheritance, as was the case during the past three or four centuries. But this has changed since the beginning of the 20^th century. The ancient Indian wisdom knew this, and fixed the end of the 19^th century as the end of the “Dark Age,” of Kali-Yuga. Thus it had an intimation of a new age. This new age was to indicate that from the beginning of the 20^th century, our deepest concern should no longer be that of clinging to an old spiritual inheritance, but of absorbing the new light, the pure light, in our earthly life.

During the first half of 1910, Rudolf Steiner gave lectures that marked a new development in the movement of spiritual science (later known as anthroposophy and founded at the turn of the century).

Earlier, he had repeatedly spoken of the dawn of the Light Age in 1899, following a period of spiritual darkness known as Kali Yuga, which had lasted 5,000 years. Now in 1910 a new dimension was added: a change of consciousness regarding man's relationship to the Christ being would gradually occur.

In the lectures of 1910, published here together for the first time in English, Rudolf Steiner, traveling from Scandinavia via the major cities of Germany to Rome and Palermo, and returning to Hamburg via Hannover, spoke to small groups of prepared listeners concerning the advent of the appearance of the Christ in the etheric life-element of the earth. To begin with, He would only be seen by a few, but as the century progressed He would be perceived by an ever greater number of human beings on earth, bestowing comfort and strength to people. Steiner pointed quite specifically to the period between 1930 and 1940 (he also mentioned 1950) in this respect. The years 1933 and 1935 are singled out in some lectures—years that later marked the beginning of events precipitating the Second World War, which led to appalling suffering for countless human beings. Steiner had warned, however, that opposing powers would conspire to darken the consciousness of humanity so that the second coming of the Christ, His appearance in the etheric, might go unnoticed. He further foretold that powerful attempts would be made on the part of certain groups to proclaim false messiahs to whom people would flock, convinced that the Christ could reappear in physical form in our time. Various other occult efforts to obscure the new Christ revelation are described in the four lectures of 1917, included in this book.

The main thrust of the present collection of lectures which also includes Steiner's key 1911 lecture, “The Etherization of the Blood,” lies in helping to raise the individual consciousness of those souls seeking to find the new Christ event in our age. This means learning to understand and experience the etheric world, a super-sensible sphere closely bordering on the physical, permeating all the kingdoms of nature and human beings with a life-giving element. This etheric realm is where Christ now lives, accessible to the whole of humanity.

Although what Rudolf Steiner brings with such variety and strong images in these lectures was the result of actual spiritual perception, the New Testament contains a number of well-known prophetic passages referring to the second coming and the new spiritual consciousness that will dawn in the future. In the opening of the Acts of the Apostles, written by Luke, a pupil of St. Paul, the event of Ascension is described. It is related how Christ vanished in the clouds and, just as he disappeared from the gaze of the Apostles into this airy, water-filled garment of the earth, from which all things receive their life, so out of the clouds He would reappear (Acts: I).

In several of these lectures, Rudolf Steiner refers to the experience of Saul (later Paul) who, having crossed the desert, was drawing near to the gates of Damascus. Not having known Christ on earth, Paul suddenly experienced in the spirit His mighty presence through the light, the word, and the fullness of His being. This initiation event—unusual at that time—would now in the dawning Age of Light, so Steiner proclaimed, become more and more wide-spread. Paul may, therefore, be considered a precursor of a new form of consciousness of the spiritual world.

In conclusion, it should be mentioned that the first eight lectures, spanning a period from January to Easter 1910, were followed by the writing and premiere of the first of Rudolf Steiner's four Mystery Dramas, The Portal of Initiation, performed in August of the same year in Munich. In the opening scene of this mystery drama, the character Theodora announces in artistic form the impending appearance of Christ in the etheric, which will not depend on faith but rather on a newly won, light-filled spirit vision. In the second part of Theodora's speech, addressed to a number of friends engaged on a spiritual path, she says,

A human being
emerges from glowing light.
It says to me,
You shall proclaim to all
who have the will to hear
that you have seen
what human beings soon will experience.
Christ once lived on earth,
and from His life it follows
that as soul He embraces
human growth on earth.
He is united with the spiritual part of earth,
but human beings cannot yet behold Him
in the form in which He reveals Himself;
because they lack the eyes of spirit
that will be theirs.
Now the time draws near
when with new power of sight
human beings on earth will be endowed.
What once the senses could behold,
when Christ lived on the earth,
will be perceived by human souls.

Readers seeking renewal in their active relationship to the Christ being will find in these lectures an elaboration of the substance poignantly and concisely expressed in the words of Theodora.

René M. Querido

My dear friends!

HERR WERBECK: Dear and greatly respected Dr Steiner! Dear friends! There is no other way for this Conference, so immensely meaningful for our Society and our Movement, to end except in an outpouring of deeply moved gratitude to the one whose work of love on the earth has brought us all together here. But my dear friends, what can words express! Was not perhaps all that a word can do shown at the beginning of this Conference by our respected friend Albert Steffen when, indicating that gratitude cannot be expressed in words, he said: Our gratitude is inexpressible. And yet on the wings of these words he did express everything our human hearts can give. Dear friends! Words, addresses, resolutions and all the rest are, measured against our Conference, nothing but outdated, cheap requisites of the cultural life that is collapsing all around us. And no one knows the background to these cheap requisites better than the one who has spoken to us this evening, moving us in the depths of our being. What is or rather can become honest gratitude, this virtue of great profundity, we shall still have to practise with the help of the one who spoke to us today. He alone has shown us through his spiritual work what gratitude really is. If we understand him aright, then we know that for us anthroposophists the hour has come when we must set the deed of gratitude in the place of the word of gratitude. We must requite his great, his immeasurably great deed of love with whatever deed of gratitude our puny strength can muster. For to him who spoke to us this evening we owe nothing less than our own spiritual felicity. And we know that the worth it bears will be eternal. It pertains not only to the few years we may still have to breathe on this physical earth; the felicity he has bestowed on us will stretch ahead to our future incarnations too. We know that this has been a turning point for our further destiny. What we are permitted to experience through his deed of love is incalculably significant. But we know that the felicity brought by this love cannot be measured with the yard-stick known to us from times preceding Anthroposophy, for it will be paired with severe pain, with fateful destinies. But we also know that it is nevertheless a felicity that will lead us to salvation. And when our knowledge is truly tempered with feeling, then we know that words of gratitude are meaningless in face of this fact and that our only answer to what we have received from here can be in deeds of gratitude. And we know, however weak our forces, that our deeds of gratitude can flow into his great deeds. And therefore we also know that they can flow into the plan for salvation that is given to mankind today. For just as the great deeds are devoted to human beings, so may also the small deeds be devoted to human beings. Over this mighty life's work stands the heading: Let everything be for the good of human beings. O my dear friends, we know that something superhuman, something divine is working in him! But when we answer with deeds directed towards human beings we know that our deeds of gratitude will be felt at a human level. Yesterday he expressed it with the mighty fire of his great heart: Faithfulness and yet more faithfulness. This is something human directed towards something human. And so my dear friends, please stand once more and let us say in our heart as we depart from this holy place: You great and pure brother of mankind, out of our forces that are so very weak we want to thank you; we want to thank you through our deeds, through overcoming what has to be overcome in the service of your holy mission for mankind. We beg you: Be with us with the heavenly strength of your fatherly blessing!

DR STEINER: My dear friends! I could not have said many of the things I have had to say during this Conference in the form in which I said them, and similarly I could not accept the kind words of our dear friend Werbeck, if I were to relate all this to a single weak individual. For actually in our circles these things should not be related to a mere individual. Yet, my dear friends, I know that I have been permitted to say what has here been said, for it was said in full responsibility looking up to the Spirit who is there and who should be and will be the Spirit of the Goetheanum. In that Spirit's name I have permitted myself over the last few days to say a great many things which ought not to have been put so forcefully had they not been expressed while looking up to the Spirit of the Goetheanum, to the good Spirit of the Goetheanum. So allow me, please, to accept these thanks in the name of the Spirit of the Goetheanum for whom we want to work and strive and labour in the world.

All that remains is to ask that the practising doctors come to the Glass House tomorrow morning not at half past eight but at ten o'clock.

I also have a message to read to you: ‘Out of our strong sharing in the experience of the Christmas Foundation Conference in Dornach we greet the President of the Anthroposophical Society. We thank him and his colleagues in the Vorstand for taking on the leadership and we also thank him for the Statutes. From the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Cologne who are meeting together at the close of the year.’

This is all I have to say. Tomorrow evening at 7 o'clock there will be a eurythmy performance for those friends who are still here.

I am of the opinion, that, in this course we are now starting, it is [a question of] a discussion of what is necessary in order really to connect one's self responsibly with the movement of Anthroposophy and the Threefold Idea. The course will therefore not be arranged for lecturers in general, but as a kind of orientation course for the personalities, who have made it their task to work in the direction indicated.

Personalities who receive what can come from Anthroposophy simply as a kind of information will not get much from this course.

Indeed, at present, we definitely need activity within our movement. It seems to be difficult to kindle this activity. It seems difficult to spread the insight that this activity is really necessary in our time.

Hence, it will not be a matter of a formal course in lecturing, but rather, of just those things which are necessary for someone who would like to accomplish a quite definite task, I mean the one just indicated.

On the whole, the Anthroposophical Movement has no use for general talk. Indeed, this is exactly the mark of our present culture and civilization that there is general talk around things—that people do not pick up concrete tasks—that they have, by preference, interest for talking in general terms.

Hence, I do not intend to treat the things in this course, (which I shall discuss as regards content), in such a way that they might serve as information. But I shall try to treat these things so—and this must indeed be the case in such an orientation course because it is intended as the very basis for a definite task—so that they can then link up directly with the spoken word. And I shall treat this spoken word so as to take into consideration, that he who sets himself the task of delivering a lecture for Anthroposophy is perhaps not working under conditions in which interest is already present, but is working to awaken interest by the first few lectures. Thus, I should like to shape this course in this quite concrete sense.

And, even the large points of view which I shall discuss today are to be meant entirely in this quite concrete sense. One would be reporting what is incorrect if—as is so popular nowadays—one set down what I shall say both today and in the next days as abstract sentences.

Today I intend to speak of certain set of rules.

Whenever through a lecture one sets out upon the task of bringing something near to one's fellow man, a responseful interchange will naturally take place between the person who has something to communicate, something to work for, something to be enthusiastic about, and the persons who listen to him. An interplay of soul-forces occurs. And to this interplay of soul-forces we propose at first to turn our attention.

These soul-forces live, as you know, in thinking, feeling and willing. And never is just a single soul-force in abstract form active by itself. But, into each soul-force the other soul-forces play, so that when we think, there are also feeling and willing always active in our thinking, likewise in our feeling, thinking and willing, and again in willing, thinking and feeling.

But still, one cannot consider the soul life—both by itself and in its responseful interchange between people—save from the point of view of this tending on the one side to thinking, and on the other to willing. And so, in the sense of our task today, we must know the following:

What we think interests nobody else, and whoever believes that his thoughts—insofar as they are thoughts—interest any other person, will not be able to put himself to the task of lecturing. (We intend to speak more precisely about these things.) The willing to which we would like to fire a gathering, or even one other person, this willing that we wish to put into our lecture, this annoys people, this they instinctively reject.

When one approaches people as a lecturer, then one has to do chiefly with the workings of various instincts: The thinking which one kindles in one's self does not interest people, willing annoys them. This, if some one were called upon for this or that act of will, we would find that we had called up, not his willing, but his annoyance. And if we were to sketch our most beautiful and ingenious ideas in a monologue before people, they would walk out. That must be the fundamental guiding line for the lecturer.

I do not say that this is so when we consider a general conversation among people, a gossip session or the like. For I am not speaking here about how these two are to be treated. Rather am I speaking of what should fill our souls, of what should live in us as proper impulse for lecturing, if the lecture is to have a purpose precisely in the direction I now mean. I am speaking of the guiding line one needs to set one's self: Our thoughts do not interest an audience—our will annoys every audience.

Now, we must take a further matter into consideration: When someone lectures, the fact is that he lectures for the most part not only out of his own being, but out of all kinds of situations. For instance, he lectures on some affair that has perhaps for weeks been discussed by, or described to many of the people who will be listening to him. He then naturally meets with quite a different interest than he does if his first sentences touch on something that, until now, had not occupied his hearers in the slightest. When someone lectures here in the Goetheanum, it is naturally something quite different from what it is when one lecturesat a hotel in Kalamazoo. I mean, even setting aside the fact, that in the Goetheanum one is likely to lecture to people who have for some time occupied themselves with the material, have read or heard about it, whereas this is probably not the case in Kalamazoo. I mean the whole surroundings: The fact that one comes to a building such as the Goetheanum makes it possible to turn to the public in quite another manner than is possible when one lectures at a hotel in Kalamazoo. And so there are countless circumstances out of which one lectures which must always be considered.

This however, establishes the necessity, especially in our time, to take one's lead somewhat from what should not be to what should be. Let us take an extreme case. A typical, average professor was supposed to give a lecture. At first he deals with his thoughts about the object, and, if he is a typical, average professor, he also deals with the conviction, that these thoughts which he thinks, are on the whole, the very best in the world on the subject in question. Everything else has at first no interest for him.—He writes these thoughts down.—And of course, when he commits these thoughts to paper, then they become fixed. He then sticks this manuscript into his left side pocket, goes off, unconcerned as to whether it is to the Goetheanum or to the hotel in Kalamazoo, finds a lecturer's desk that is set up in a suitable way, at the right distance for his eyes, lays his manuscript thereon and reads. I do not say that every one does it in this way. But it is a frequent occurrence and a characteristic procedure in our time. And it points to the horror one can have towards lecturing today. It is the type of lecturing for which one should have the greatest aversion.

And, since I have said that our thoughts interest nobody else, and our will annoys everybody, then it seems that it is the feelings upon which lecturing depends,—that an especially significant cultivation of feeling must be basic for lecturing. Hence it becomes of significance, of perhaps remote, yet fundamental significance, that we have acquired this proper aversion for the extreme type of lecture-reading just mentioned.

Once I heard a lecture by the renowned Helmholtz at a rather large meeting that was certainly given in this manner: The manuscript, taken out of the left side pocket and read off. Afterwards a journalist came to me and said: “Why wasn't this lecture printed, a copy slipped into the hand of each one there? And then Helmholtz could have gone about and extended his hand to each one!” The latter would have been more valuable perhaps to the hearers, than the terrible experience of sitting on the hard chairs to which they were condemned in order to have read to them the manuscript, which required more time than it would have taken them to read it themselves. (Most of them would have needed a very long time indeed if they wanted to understand it, but listening for a short time didn't help them at all.)

One must by all means reflect on all these concrete things if one wishes to understand how the art of lecturing can, in all truth and honesty, be striven for.

At the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna the most significant lecture was delivered in the following way: It lay on each chair, three copies, one in each of three languages. One had first to pick them up in order to be able to sit down on the empty chair. And then the lecture was read aloud from the printed copy, requiring somewhat more than an hour. Through such procedure even the most beautiful lecture is no longer a lecture, for understanding gained through reading is something essentially different from the understanding gained through listening. And these things must be considered if one wants to familiarize one's self in a vivid way with such tasks.

Certainly, even a novel can so move us that we shed tears at definite passages. I mean of course, that a good novel can do this only at definite passages, not from the beginning to the end. But what then is really present during reading so that we are carried away by what we read? Whenever we are carried away by what we read, we have to accomplish a certain work that coincides, that is connected very strongly, with the inner side of our humanity. This inner work which we accomplish when we read consists in this, that while we turn our glance to the single letters, we actually carry out what we have learned in the putting together of the letters. Through this activity of looking at the letters, putting them together and thinking about them, we draw forth a meaning. That is a process of receiving which occurs in our ether body and yet strongly engages the physical body in the perceiving.

But all this simply falls away when only listening. This whole activity does not occur when simply listening. Nevertheless, this listening activity is bound up in a definite way with the grasping of a thing. The person is in need of this activity whenever he wishes to grasp a thing. He needs the cooperation of his ether body and in part, even of his physical body. Not only of the sense organ of the ear! Moreover, when listening, he needs a soul life so active that it is not exhausted in the astral body, but brings the ether body to pulsation, and then this ether body also brings the physical body to swing along with it.

That which must take place as activity during reading, must also be developed while listening to a lecture, but—should like to say—in quite another form when listening, because that activity cannot be there in the same way it is for reading. What is called up in reading is transformed feeling, feeling that has been pressed into the ether body and the physical body. This feeling becomes a force. As lecturers we must be in a position to bring up feeling as feeling content, even in the most abstract of lectures.

It is really a fact that our thoughts as such do not interest people, our will impulses annoy everybody, and only our feelings determine the impression, the effect—in a justified sense, of course—of a lecture.

Hence, there arises the most important question. How shall we be able to have something in our lecture which in a sufficiently strong way, will enable the listener to bring forth the needed shade of feeling, the needed permeation with feeling—and yet not press him, lest we hypnotize or suggest.

There cannot be abstract rules by which one learns how to speak with feeling. For, in the person who has hunted in all sorts of manuals for the rules for speaking with feeling, one will notice that his lecturing most surely does not come from his heart, that it stems from quite another place than his heart. And truly, all lectures should come from the heart. Even the most abstract lecture should come from the heart. And that it can! And it is precisely this which we must discuss, how even the most abstract lecture can come from the heart.

We must understand quite clearly what is really stirring in the soul of the listener when he gives us his ear, not perhaps when we tell him something he is eager to hear, but when we expect him to want to listen to our words. Essentially it is indeed always a kind of attack on our fellow men when we fire a lecture at them. And that too is something of which we must be thoroughly aware, that it is an attack on the listeners, when we fire a lecture at them.

Everything which I say—I must ever and again add parenthetically—is to be considered as guide for the lecturer, not as characteristic for social intercourse or the like. Were I to speak in reference to social intercourse, I could naturally not formulate the same sentences. They would be so much foolishness. For, when one speaks concretely, such a sentence as “Our thoughts interest no one” can be either something very clever or very stupid. Everything we say may be foolishness or good sense according to its whole human connection. It depends solely upon the way it is placed into the context. Hence, the lecturer needs quite other things than instructions in the formal art of lecturing.

Thus, it is a matter of recognizing what is really active in the listener. Sympathy and antipathy are active in the listener. These assert themselves more or less unconsciously when we attack the listener with a lecture. Sympathy or antipathy! For our thoughts however, he surely has no sympathy at first. Also not for our will impulses, for that which we, so to speak, want of him, for that to which we want to exhort him.

If we want somehow to approach the art of lecturing, we must have a certain understanding for the listener's sympathy and antipathy toward what we say. Sympathy and antipathy have in reality to do neither with thinking nor with the will, but operate here in the physical world exclusively for the feelings, for what has to do with feeling. A conscious awareness in the listener of sympathy and antipathy has the effect of obstructing the lecturer's approach to him—our awareness of sympathy and antipathy must be of such a kind that it never comes to the consciousness of the listener, especially during the lecture. Working to rouse sympathy and antipathy has the effect of making it seem that we fall over ourselves. Such, approximately, is the effect of a lecture when we want to arouse sympathy and antipathy.

We must have the finest understanding for sympathy and antipathy in the listener. During the lecture however, his sympathy or antipathy should not concern us in the least. All that has an effect upon the sympathy and antipathy, if I may say so, we must bring into the lecture indirectly, beforehand, during the preparation.

Just as little as there can be instructions of an abstract kind for painting or sculpting, just so little can there be rules of an abstract kind for lecturing. But, just as one can stimulate the art of painting, so too it is possible to stimulate the art of lecturing. And it is chiefly a matter of taking in full earnestness the things that can be pointed out in this direction.

In order to start from an example, let us first take the teacher speaking to children. As far as his speaking is concerned, actually the very least depends upon his genius and wisdom. As to whether we can teach mathematics or geography well, the very, very least will depend upon whether we ourselves are good mathematicians, or good geographers. We can be outstanding geographers, but poor teachers of geography. The intrinsic worth of the teacher, which surely rests in large measure upon his speaking, depends upon what he has previously felt and experienced about the things to be presented, and the kinds of feelings which are again stirred up by the fact that he has a child before him.

Thus it is for example, that Waldorf School pedagogy amounts to knowledge of man, that is of the child—not to a knowledge of the child resulting from abstract psychology, but one that rests upon a fully human comprehension of the child. So far does this comprehension go that through feeling intensified to loving devotion, the teacher manages to experience with the child. Then there results—from this experiencing with the child and from what one has previously felt and experienced in the field in which one has to express something—from all this, there results quite instinctively the manner in which one has to speak and handle the class.

It doesn't serve at all, for instance, in instructing a slow child, to use the wisdom of the world which one has. Wisdom helps one in the case of a dull child, if one acquired the wisdom yesterday and used it in one's preparation. At the moment of instruction of the dull child, one must have the genius to be as slow as the child himself, and just have the presence of mind to remember the way in which one was wise yesterday, during the preparation. One must be able to be slow with the slow child, naughty, at least in feeling, with the naughty child, good with the good child, and so forth. As teacher one must be—I hope that this word will not arouse too great antipathy because it is directed too strongly towards thoughts or will impulses—one must really be a kind of chameleon, if one wishes to instruct rightly.

What many Waldorf teachers have, out of their genius, been able to do to increase discipline has pleased me very much. For example, a teacher is speaking about Jean Paul. The children start writing notes and passing them to each other. This teacher doesn't start reprimanding them; instead, he moves into the situation, and with great patience finds out what it's all about. He then dissolves the threatened disturbance with some instruction on postal affairs. That is more effective than any reminder. The note-writing stops. This result rests naturally upon a concrete grasping of the moment. But of course, one must have the presence of mind. One must know that sympathy and antipathy which one wishes to stir, sit more deeply in the human being than one is accustomed to think.

And so it is extraordinarily important, whenever the teacher has to deal with some chapter in class, that he first of all call up vividly into consciousness during the preparation how he himself approached this chapter when he was the same age as his children are, how he felt then,—not in order to become pedantic, of course, not in order when he treats it on the next day to succeed in feeling again as he once did! No, it is enough when this feeling is brought up during the preparation, when it is experienced in the preparation, and then it is a matter of working on the very next day with the knowledge of man just described.

Thus, also here, in teaching, it is a question of finding within ourselves the possibility of shaping the lecture-material which is part of one's teaching material, out of feeling.

How these things can work we can best become aware of, if we bring also the following before our soul's eye: whenever something of a feeling character is to work into what pulses through our lecture, then naturally we may not speak thoughtlessly, although thoughts do not really interest our listeners, and we may not lecture without will, albeit our will annoys them. We shall very often even want to speak in such a way that what we say goes into the will impulses of the people, that in consequences of our lecture our fellow-men want to do something. But we must not under any circumstances so organize the lecture that we bore the listeners through our thought content and arouse their antipathy through the will impetus we seek to give.

So it is a matter of establishing the thinking for the lecture, completely establishing it, as long as possible before we lecture; that we have beforehand absolutely settled the thought element within ourselves. This has nothing to do with whether we then speak fluently, or whether we speak haltingly. The latter, as we shall see, depends upon quite other circumstances. But what must, to a degree, work unconsciously in the lecture, is connected with our having settled the thought content within ourselves much, much earlier. The thought monologue which should be as lively as possible we must have rehearsed earlier, letting it take form out of the arguments for and against, which we ourselves bring forward during this preparation, anticipating all objections as much as possible.

Through this manner of experiencing our lecture in thoughts beforehand, we take from it the sting it otherwise has for the audience. We are, to a degree, bound to sweeten our lecture by having gone through the sourness of the logical development of the train of thought beforehand,—but, as much as possible in such a way that we do not formulate the lecture word for word. Of course, matters cannot be taken literally,—namely, that we have no idea of how we shall formulate the sentences when we begin to lecture. But the thought content must be settled. To have the verbal formulation ready for the whole lecture is something which can never lead to a really good lecture. For that already comes very near to having written the lecture down, and we need but to imagine that a phonograph instead of us stood there and gave it out automatically. When the lecture is given word for word, from memory, then is the difference between this and a machine that turns it out automatically even smaller than it is between a lecture read from a manuscript and the machine that turns it out automatically. Moreover, if we have formulated a lecture beforehand, so that it is worked out in such a way that it can be spoken by us verbatim, then we are indeed not differentiating ourselves very strongly from a machine by which we have recorded the lecture and then let it be played back. There is not much difference between listening to a lecture that is spoken word for word as it was worked out and reading it oneself,—aside from the fact that in reading one is not continually disturbed by the lecturer, as one is continually when listening to him deliver a lecture that he has memorized.

The thought preparation is experienced in the correct manner when it is carried to the point at which the thoughts have become absolutely part of oneself, and this all well before the lecture. One must be finished with what one would present.

To be sure, there are some exceptions for ordinary lectures which one delivers to an audience until then unknown to one. Whenever, before such an audience, one begins immediately with what one has to a degree worked out meditatively in thoughts, and speaks from the first sentence on under direct inspiration, if I may say so, then one does not do something really good for the listeners. At the beginning of a lecture one must make one's personality somewhat active. At the beginning of a lecture one should not immediately entirely extinguish one's personality, because the vibration of feeling must first be stirred.

Now, it is not necessary to proceed as did, for example, Michael Bernays, Professor of History of German Literature, at one time very famous in certain circles. He once came to Weimar to give a lecture on Goethe's Color Theory, and wanted to form his first sentences in such a way that certainly the feeling of the listeners would be engaged very, very intensively—but, to be sure, it happened quite otherwise than he had intended. He arrived in Weimar several days before the lecture. Weimar is a small city where one can go about among the people, (some of whom will be in the hall), and make propaganda for one's lecture. Those who hear about the lecture directly, tell others about it, and the whole hall is really “tuned up” when one delivers one's lecture. Now Prof. Michael Bernays actually went about in Weimar for several days and said: “Oh, I have not been able to prepare myself for this lecture, my genius will surely prompt me correctly at the right moment.” He was to deliver this lecture in the Recreation Hall in Weimar. It was a hot summer day. The windows had to be opened. And, directly in front of this Recreation Hall there was a poultry yard. Michael Bernays took his place and waited for his genius to begin suggesting something to him. For indeed, all Weimar knew that his genius must come and suggest his lecture to him. And then, at this moment, while Bernays was waiting for his genius, the cock outside began: cock-a-doodle-doo! Now every one knew: Michael Bernays' genius has spoken for him!—Feelings were strongly stirred. To be sure, in a different way from what he wanted. But there was a certain atmosphere in the hall.

I do not recount this in order to tell you a neat anecdote, but because I must call your attention to the following: the body of a lecture must have been so formed that it is well worked through meditatively in thoughts, and later formulated freely,—but the introduction is really there for the purpose of making oneself a bit ridiculous. That inclines the listeners to listen to one more willingly. If one does not make oneself a wee bit, ridiculous—to be sure, so that its not too obvious, so that it flows down only into the unconscious—one is unable to hold the attention in the right way when delivering a single lecture. Of course, it should not be exaggerated, but it will surely work sufficiently in the unconscious.

What one should really have for every lecture is this—that one has verbally formulated the first, second, third, fourth, and at most, the fifth sentences. Then one proceeds to the development of the material that has been worked out in the way I have just indicated. And one should have verbally formulated the closing sentences. For, in winding up a lecture, if one is a genuine lecturer, one should really always have some stage fright, a secret anxiety that one will not find one's last sentence. This stage fright is necessary for the coloring of the lecture; one needs this in order to captivate the hearts of the listeners at the end:—that one is anxious about finding the last sentence. Now, if one is to meet this anxiety in the right way, after one has perspiringly completed one's lecture, let one add this to all the rest of the preparation, that one bear in mind the exact formulation of the last one, two, three, four—at most, five—sentences. Thus, a lecture should really have a frame: The formulation of the first and last sentences. And, in between, the lecture should be free. As mentioned, I give this as a guiding principle.

And now perhaps, many of you will say: yes, but if one is not able to lecture just that way? One need not therefore immediately say that it would be so difficult, that one should not lecture at all. It is indeed quite natural that one can lecture a bit better or a bit worse, just so long as one does not let oneself be deterred from lecturing because of all these requirements: but one should make an effort to fulfill these requirements, at the same time as one makes such guiding principles as we develop here prevade all that he strives to do.

And there is indeed a very good means for becoming at least a bearable lecturer, even if at first one is no lecturer, even the opposite of a lecturer. I can assure you that when the lecturer has made himself ridiculous fifty times, that his lecture will come out right the fifty-first time. Just because he made himself ridiculous fifty times. And he for whom fifty times do not suffice, can undertake to lecture a hundred times. For one day it comes right, if one does not shy away from public exposure. One's last lecture before dying will naturally never be good if one has previously shied away from public exposure. But, at least the last lecture before one's death will be good if one has previously, during life, made oneself ridiculous an x number of times. This is also something about which one should really always think. And one will thus surely, without doubt, train oneself to be a lecturer! To be a lecturer requires only that people listen to one, and that one come not too close to them, so to speak; that one really avoid anything that comes too close to the people.

The manner in which one is accustomed to talk in social life when conversing with other people, that one will not find fitting to use when delivering a lecture in public, or generally speaking, to an audience. At most, one will be able to insert sentences such as one speaks in ordinary life only now and then. It is well to be aware that what one has as formulation of one's speaking in ordinary life, is, as a rule, somewhat too subtle or too blunt for a lecture to an audience. It just does not set quite right. The way in which one formulates one's words in the usual speaking, when addressing another person, varies; it always swings between being somewhat crude and, on the other hand, somewhat untruthful or impolite. Both must be entirely avoided in a lecture delivered to an audience, and, if used, then only in parenthesis, so to speak. Otherwise the listener has the secret feeling: while the lecturer begins to speak as one does in a lecture, suddenly he starts declaiming, or speaking dialoguewise,—he must intend either to offend us a bit or to flatter us.

We must also bring the will element into the lecture in the right way. And this can only be accomplished by the preparation, but by such preparation as uses one's own enthusiasm in thinking through the material, enthusiasm which to a certain extent lives with the material.

Now consider the following: first one has completed the thought content, made it one's own. The next part of the preparation would be to listen, so to speak, to oneself inwardly lecturing on this thought content. One begins to listen attentively to these thoughts. They need not be formulated verbatim, as I have already said, but one begins to listen to them. It is this which puts the will element into the right position, this listening to oneself. For while we listen to ourselves inwardly, we develop enthusiasm or aversion, sympathy or antipathy at the right places, as these responses follow what we wish to impart. What we prepare in this will-like way also goes into our wills, and appears during our lecturing in tone variation. Whether we speak intensively or more softly, whether we accentuate brightly or darkly, this we do solely as the result of the feeling-through and willing-through of our thought content in the meditative preparation.

All the thought content we must gradually lead over into the forming of a picture of the composition of our lecture. Then will the thinking be embedded in the lecture,—not in the words, but between the words: in the way in which the words are shaped, the sentences are shaped, and the arrangement is shaped. The more we are in a position to think about ‘the how’ of our lecture, the more strongly do we work into the will of the others. What people will accept depends upon what we put into the formulation, into the composition of the lecture.

Were we to come to them and say: “When all is said, every one of you who does not do his utmost in order to realize the Threefold Order tomorrow is a bad fellow”—that would annoy people. However, when we present the sense of the Threefold Order in a lecture that is composed in accordance with the nature of its content, that it is inwardly organized so that it is itself even a kind of intimate 'threefolding', and especially even if it is so fashioned that we ourselves are convinced of the necessity for the Threefold Order, convinced with all our feeling and all our will impulses—then this works upon the people, works upon the will of the people.

What we have done in the way of developing our thoughts, in order to make our lecture into a work of art, this affects the will of the people. What springs from our own will, what we ourselves want, what fills us with enthusiasm, what enraptures us, this affects more the thinking of the listeners, this stimulates them more easily in their thoughts.

Thus it is that a lecturer who is enthusiastic about his subject is easily understood. A lecturer who composes artistically will more easily stir the will of his listeners. But the main principle, the chief guide line must still be this: That we deliver no lecture that is not well prepared.

Yes, but when we are compelled to deliver a lecture on the so-called spur of the moment: when, for example, we are challenged and have to answer immediately; then we certainly cannot turn back in time to the preceding day when we brought the argument to mind, in order to meditate on its counter-argument—that cannot be done! And yet, it can be done! It can be done in just such a moment by being absolutely truthful. Or we are attacked by a person who accosts us in a terribly rude manner, so that we must answer him immediately. Here we have a strong feeling-fact at the outset! Thus, the feeling is already stirred in a corresponding way. Here is a substitute for what we otherwise use in order to experience with enthusiasm what we first represent to ourselves in thought. But then, if we say nothing else in such a moment except that we as whole man can say at each moment when we are attacked in this manner, then we are nevertheless prepared in a similar way in this situation too.

Just in such things it is a question of the unwavering decision to be only, only, only truthful and when the attack is not such that we are challenged to a discussion, then there are present, as a rule, all the conditions for understanding. ( About this I shall speak later.) It is then actually a question not of delivering mere lectures, but of doing something quite different, which will be particularly important for us if we wish to complete this course rightly. For indeed, in order to be active in the sense that I indicated today at the beginning, we shall have not merely to deliver lectures, but every man of us, and of course every woman, will also have to stand his ground in the discussion period, come what may. And about this, much will have to be said, in fact, very much.

Now I beg you above all, to look at what I have said today from the point of view that it indicates perhaps a bit the difficulty of acquiring the art of lecturing. But it is quite especially difficult when it is necessary not only to lecture, but even to have to lecture about lecturing. Just think if one were to paint painting, and sculpture sculpturing!

Thus, the task is not altogether easy. But we shall nevertheless try in some way to complete it within the next days.

I am of the opinion, that, in this course we are now starting, it is [a question of] a discussion of what is necessary in order really to connect one's self responsibly with the movement of Anthroposophy and the Threefold Idea. The course will therefore not be arranged for lecturers in general, but as a kind of orientation course for the personalities, who have made it their task to work in the direction indicated.

Personalities who receive what can come from Anthroposophy simply as a kind of information will not get much from this course.

Indeed, at present, we definitely need activity within our movement. It seems to be difficult to kindle this activity. It seems difficult to spread the insight that this activity is really necessary in our time.

Hence, it will not be a matter of a formal course in lecturing, but rather, of just those things which are necessary for someone who would like to accomplish a quite definite task, I mean the one just indicated.

On the whole, the Anthroposophical Movement has no use for general talk. Indeed, this is exactly the mark of our present culture and civilization that there is general talk around things—that people do not pick up concrete tasks—that they have, by preference, interest for talking in general terms.

Hence, I do not intend to treat the things in this course, (which I shall discuss as regards content), in such a way that they might serve as information. But I shall try to treat these things so—and this must indeed be the case in such an orientation course because it is intended as the very basis for a definite task—so that they can then link up directly with the spoken word. And I shall treat this spoken word so as to take into consideration, that he who sets himself the task of delivering a lecture for Anthroposophy is perhaps not working under conditions in which interest is already present, but is working to awaken interest by the first few lectures. Thus, I should like to shape this course in this quite concrete sense.

And, even the large points of view which I shall discuss today are to be meant entirely in this quite concrete sense. One would be reporting what is incorrect if—as is so popular nowadays—one set down what I shall say both today and in the next days as abstract sentences.

Today I intend to speak of certain set of rules.

Whenever through a lecture one sets out upon the task of bringing something near to one's fellow man, a responseful interchange will naturally take place between the person who has something to communicate, something to work for, something to be enthusiastic about, and the persons who listen to him. An interplay of soul-forces occurs. And to this interplay of soul-forces we propose at first to turn our attention.

These soul-forces live, as you know, in thinking, feeling and willing. And never is just a single soul-force in abstract form active by itself. But, into each soul-force the other soul-forces play, so that when we think, there are also feeling and willing always active in our thinking, likewise in our feeling, thinking and willing, and again in willing, thinking and feeling.

But still, one cannot consider the soul life—both by itself and in its responseful interchange between people—save from the point of view of this tending on the one side to thinking, and on the other to willing. And so, in the sense of our task today, we must know the following:

What we think interests nobody else, and whoever believes that his thoughts—insofar as they are thoughts—interest any other person, will not be able to put himself to the task of lecturing. (We intend to speak more precisely about these things.) The willing to which we would like to fire a gathering, or even one other person, this willing that we wish to put into our lecture, this annoys people, this they instinctively reject.

When one approaches people as a lecturer, then one has to do chiefly with the workings of various instincts: The thinking which one kindles in one's self does not interest people, willing annoys them. This, if some one were called upon for this or that act of will, we would find that we had called up, not his willing, but his annoyance. And if we were to sketch our most beautiful and ingenious ideas in a monologue before people, they would walk out. That must be the fundamental guiding line for the lecturer.

I do not say that this is so when we consider a general conversation among people, a gossip session or the like. For I am not speaking here about how these two are to be treated. Rather am I speaking of what should fill our souls, of what should live in us as proper impulse for lecturing, if the lecture is to have a purpose precisely in the direction I now mean. I am speaking of the guiding line one needs to set one's self: Our thoughts do not interest an audience—our will annoys every audience.

Now, we must take a further matter into consideration: When someone lectures, the fact is that he lectures for the most part not only out of his own being, but out of all kinds of situations. For instance, he lectures on some affair that has perhaps for weeks been discussed by, or described to many of the people who will be listening to him. He then naturally meets with quite a different interest than he does if his first sentences touch on something that, until now, had not occupied his hearers in the slightest. When someone lectures here in the Goetheanum, it is naturally something quite different from what it is when one lecturesat a hotel in Kalamazoo. I mean, even setting aside the fact, that in the Goetheanum one is likely to lecture to people who have for some time occupied themselves with the material, have read or heard about it, whereas this is probably not the case in Kalamazoo. I mean the whole surroundings: The fact that one comes to a building such as the Goetheanum makes it possible to turn to the public in quite another manner than is possible when one lectures at a hotel in Kalamazoo. And so there are countless circumstances out of which one lectures which must always be considered.

This however, establishes the necessity, especially in our time, to take one's lead somewhat from what should not be to what should be. Let us take an extreme case. A typical, average professor was supposed to give a lecture. At first he deals with his thoughts about the object, and, if he is a typical, average professor, he also deals with the conviction, that these thoughts which he thinks, are on the whole, the very best in the world on the subject in question. Everything else has at first no interest for him.—He writes these thoughts down.—And of course, when he commits these thoughts to paper, then they become fixed. He then sticks this manuscript into his left side pocket, goes off, unconcerned as to whether it is to the Goetheanum or to the hotel in Kalamazoo, finds a lecturer's desk that is set up in a suitable way, at the right distance for his eyes, lays his manuscript thereon and reads. I do not say that every one does it in this way. But it is a frequent occurrence and a characteristic procedure in our time. And it points to the horror one can have towards lecturing today. It is the type of lecturing for which one should have the greatest aversion.

And, since I have said that our thoughts interest nobody else, and our will annoys everybody, then it seems that it is the feelings upon which lecturing depends,—that an especially significant cultivation of feeling must be basic for lecturing. Hence it becomes of significance, of perhaps remote, yet fundamental significance, that we have acquired this proper aversion for the extreme type of lecture-reading just mentioned.

Once I heard a lecture by the renowned Helmholtz at a rather large meeting that was certainly given in this manner: The manuscript, taken out of the left side pocket and read off. Afterwards a journalist came to me and said: “Why wasn't this lecture printed, a copy slipped into the hand of each one there? And then Helmholtz could have gone about and extended his hand to each one!” The latter would have been more valuable perhaps to the hearers, than the terrible experience of sitting on the hard chairs to which they were condemned in order to have read to them the manuscript, which required more time than it would have taken them to read it themselves. (Most of them would have needed a very long time indeed if they wanted to understand it, but listening for a short time didn't help them at all.)

One must by all means reflect on all these concrete things if one wishes to understand how the art of lecturing can, in all truth and honesty, be striven for.

At the Philosophers' Congress in Bologna the most significant lecture was delivered in the following way: It lay on each chair, three copies, one in each of three languages. One had first to pick them up in order to be able to sit down on the empty chair. And then the lecture was read aloud from the printed copy, requiring somewhat more than an hour. Through such procedure even the most beautiful lecture is no longer a lecture, for understanding gained through reading is something essentially different from the understanding gained through listening. And these things must be considered if one wants to familiarize one's self in a vivid way with such tasks.

Certainly, even a novel can so move us that we shed tears at definite passages. I mean of course, that a good novel can do this only at definite passages, not from the beginning to the end. But what then is really present during reading so that we are carried away by what we read? Whenever we are carried away by what we read, we have to accomplish a certain work that coincides, that is connected very strongly, with the inner side of our humanity. This inner work which we accomplish when we read consists in this, that while we turn our glance to the single letters, we actually carry out what we have learned in the putting together of the letters. Through this activity of looking at the letters, putting them together and thinking about them, we draw forth a meaning. That is a process of receiving which occurs in our ether body and yet strongly engages the physical body in the perceiving.

But all this simply falls away when only listening. This whole activity does not occur when simply listening. Nevertheless, this listening activity is bound up in a definite way with the grasping of a thing. The person is in need of this activity whenever he wishes to grasp a thing. He needs the cooperation of his ether body and in part, even of his physical body. Not only of the sense organ of the ear! Moreover, when listening, he needs a soul life so active that it is not exhausted in the astral body, but brings the ether body to pulsation, and then this ether body also brings the physical body to swing along with it.

That which must take place as activity during reading, must also be developed while listening to a lecture, but—should like to say—in quite another form when listening, because that activity cannot be there in the same way it is for reading. What is called up in reading is transformed feeling, feeling that has been pressed into the ether body and the physical body. This feeling becomes a force. As lecturers we must be in a position to bring up feeling as feeling content, even in the most abstract of lectures.

It is really a fact that our thoughts as such do not interest people, our will impulses annoy everybody, and only our feelings determine the impression, the effect—in a justified sense, of course—of a lecture.

Hence, there arises the most important question. How shall we be able to have something in our lecture which in a sufficiently strong way, will enable the listener to bring forth the needed shade of feeling, the needed permeation with feeling—and yet not press him, lest we hypnotize or suggest.

There cannot be abstract rules by which one learns how to speak with feeling. For, in the person who has hunted in all sorts of manuals for the rules for speaking with feeling, one will notice that his lecturing most surely does not come from his heart, that it stems from quite another place than his heart. And truly, all lectures should come from the heart. Even the most abstract lecture should come from the heart. And that it can! And it is precisely this which we must discuss, how even the most abstract lecture can come from the heart.

We must understand quite clearly what is really stirring in the soul of the listener when he gives us his ear, not perhaps when we tell him something he is eager to hear, but when we expect him to want to listen to our words. Essentially it is indeed always a kind of attack on our fellow men when we fire a lecture at them. And that too is something of which we must be thoroughly aware, that it is an attack on the listeners, when we fire a lecture at them.

Everything which I say—I must ever and again add parenthetically—is to be considered as guide for the lecturer, not as characteristic for social intercourse or the like. Were I to speak in reference to social intercourse, I could naturally not formulate the same sentences. They would be so much foolishness. For, when one speaks concretely, such a sentence as “Our thoughts interest no one” can be either something very clever or very stupid. Everything we say may be foolishness or good sense according to its whole human connection. It depends solely upon the way it is placed into the context. Hence, the lecturer needs quite other things than instructions in the formal art of lecturing.

Thus, it is a matter of recognizing what is really active in the listener. Sympathy and antipathy are active in the listener. These assert themselves more or less unconsciously when we attack the listener with a lecture. Sympathy or antipathy! For our thoughts however, he surely has no sympathy at first. Also not for our will impulses, for that which we, so to speak, want of him, for that to which we want to exhort him.

If we want somehow to approach the art of lecturing, we must have a certain understanding for the listener's sympathy and antipathy toward what we say. Sympathy and antipathy have in reality to do neither with thinking nor with the will, but operate here in the physical world exclusively for the feelings, for what has to do with feeling. A conscious awareness in the listener of sympathy and antipathy has the effect of obstructing the lecturer's approach to him—our awareness of sympathy and antipathy must be of such a kind that it never comes to the consciousness of the listener, especially during the lecture. Working to rouse sympathy and antipathy has the effect of making it seem that we fall over ourselves. Such, approximately, is the effect of a lecture when we want to arouse sympathy and antipathy.

We must have the finest understanding for sympathy and antipathy in the listener. During the lecture however, his sympathy or antipathy should not concern us in the least. All that has an effect upon the sympathy and antipathy, if I may say so, we must bring into the lecture indirectly, beforehand, during the preparation.

Just as little as there can be instructions of an abstract kind for painting or sculpting, just so little can there be rules of an abstract kind for lecturing. But, just as one can stimulate the art of painting, so too it is possible to stimulate the art of lecturing. And it is chiefly a matter of taking in full earnestness the things that can be pointed out in this direction.

***

Guidelines for the preparation of a talk.—The thought content must be thoroughly settled in advance. Verbal formulation of the first and the last sentences. Our thought preparation affects the will; our enthusiasm the thinking of the listeners.

In order to start from an example, let us first take the teacher speaking to children. As far as his speaking is concerned, actually the very least depends upon his genius and wisdom. As to whether we can teach mathematics or geography well, the very, very least will depend upon whether we ourselves are good mathematicians, or good geographers. We can be outstanding geographers, but poor teachers of geography. The intrinsic worth of the teacher, which surely rests in large measure upon his speaking, depends upon what he has previously felt and experienced about the things to be presented, and the kinds of feelings which are again stirred up by the fact that he has a child before him.

Thus it is for example, that Waldorf School pedagogy amounts to knowledge of man, that is of the child—not to a knowledge of the child resulting from abstract psychology, but one that rests upon a fully human comprehension of the child. So far does this comprehension go that through feeling intensified to loving devotion, the teacher manages to experience with the child. Then there results—from this experiencing with the child and from what one has previously felt and experienced in the field in which one has to express something—from all this, there results quite instinctively the manner in which one has to speak and handle the class.

It doesn't serve at all, for instance, in instructing a slow child, to use the wisdom of the world which one has. Wisdom helps one in the case of a dull child, if one acquired the wisdom yesterday and used it in one's preparation. At the moment of instruction of the dull child, one must have the genius to be as slow as the child himself, and just have the presence of mind to remember the way in which one was wise yesterday, during the preparation. One must be able to be slow with the slow child, naughty, at least in feeling, with the naughty child, good with the good child, and so forth. As teacher one must be—I hope that this word will not arouse too great antipathy because it is directed too strongly towards thoughts or will impulses—one must really be a kind of chameleon, if one wishes to instruct rightly.

What many Waldorf teachers have, out of their genius, been able to do to increase discipline has pleased me very much. For example, a teacher is speaking about Jean Paul. The children start writing notes and passing them to each other. This teacher doesn't start reprimanding them; instead, he moves into the situation, and with great patience finds out what it's all about. He then dissolves the threatened disturbance with some instruction on postal affairs. That is more effective than any reminder. The note-writing stops. This result rests naturally upon a concrete grasping of the moment. But of course, one must have the presence of mind. One must know that sympathy and antipathy which one wishes to stir, sit more deeply in the human being than one is accustomed to think.

And so it is extraordinarily important, whenever the teacher has to deal with some chapter in class, that he first of all call up vividly into consciousness during the preparation how he himself approached this chapter when he was the same age as his children are, how he felt then,—not in order to become pedantic, of course, not in order when he treats it on the next day to succeed in feeling again as he once did! No, it is enough when this feeling is brought up during the preparation, when it is experienced in the preparation, and then it is a matter of working on the very next day with the knowledge of man just described.

Thus, also here, in teaching, it is a question of finding within ourselves the possibility of shaping the lecture-material which is part of one's teaching material, out of feeling.

How these things can work we can best become aware of, if we bring also the following before our soul's eye: whenever something of a feeling character is to work into what pulses through our lecture, then naturally we may not speak thoughtlessly, although thoughts do not really interest our listeners, and we may not lecture without will, albeit our will annoys them. We shall very often even want to speak in such a way that what we say goes into the will impulses of the people, that in consequences of our lecture our fellow-men want to do something. But we must not under any circumstances so organize the lecture that we bore the listeners through our thought content and arouse their antipathy through the will impetus we seek to give.

So it is a matter of establishing the thinking for the lecture, completely establishing it, as long as possible before we lecture; that we have beforehand absolutely settled the thought element within ourselves. This has nothing to do with whether we then speak fluently, or whether we speak haltingly. The latter, as we shall see, depends upon quite other circumstances. But what must, to a degree, work unconsciously in the lecture, is connected with our having settled the thought content within ourselves much, much earlier. The thought monologue which should be as lively as possible we must have rehearsed earlier, letting it take form out of the arguments for and against, which we ourselves bring forward during this preparation, anticipating all objections as much as possible.

Through this manner of experiencing our lecture in thoughts beforehand, we take from it the sting it otherwise has for the audience. We are, to a degree, bound to sweeten our lecture by having gone through the sourness of the logical development of the train of thought beforehand,—but, as much as possible in such a way that we do not formulate the lecture word for word. Of course, matters cannot be taken literally,—namely, that we have no idea of how we shall formulate the sentences when we begin to lecture. But the thought content must be settled. To have the verbal formulation ready for the whole lecture is something which can never lead to a really good lecture. For that already comes very near to having written the lecture down, and we need but to imagine that a phonograph instead of us stood there and gave it out automatically. When the lecture is given word for word, from memory, then is the difference between this and a machine that turns it out automatically even smaller than it is between a lecture read from a manuscript and the machine that turns it out automatically. Moreover, if we have formulated a lecture beforehand, so that it is worked out in such a way that it can be spoken by us verbatim, then we are indeed not differentiating ourselves very strongly from a machine by which we have recorded the lecture and then let it be played back. There is not much difference between listening to a lecture that is spoken word for word as it was worked out and reading it oneself,—aside from the fact that in reading one is not continually disturbed by the lecturer, as one is continually when listening to him deliver a lecture that he has memorized.

The thought preparation is experienced in the correct manner when it is carried to the point at which the thoughts have become absolutely part of oneself, and this all well before the lecture. One must be finished with what one would present.

To be sure, there are some exceptions for ordinary lectures which one delivers to an audience until then unknown to one. Whenever, before such an audience, one begins immediately with what one has to a degree worked out meditatively in thoughts, and speaks from the first sentence on under direct inspiration, if I may say so, then one does not do something really good for the listeners. At the beginning of a lecture one must make one's personality somewhat active. At the beginning of a lecture one should not immediately entirely extinguish one's personality, because the vibration of feeling must first be stirred.

Now, it is not necessary to proceed as did, for example, Michael Bernays, Professor of History of German Literature, at one time very famous in certain circles. He once came to Weimar to give a lecture on Goethe's Color Theory, and wanted to form his first sentences in such a way that certainly the feeling of the listeners would be engaged very, very intensively—but, to be sure, it happened quite otherwise than he had intended. He arrived in Weimar several days before the lecture. Weimar is a small city where one can go about among the people, (some of whom will be in the hall), and make propaganda for one's lecture. Those who hear about the lecture directly, tell others about it, and the whole hall is really “tuned up” when one delivers one's lecture. Now Prof. Michael Bernays actually went about in Weimar for several days and said: “Oh, I have not been able to prepare myself for this lecture, my genius will surely prompt me correctly at the right moment.” He was to deliver this lecture in the Recreation Hall in Weimar. It was a hot summer day. The windows had to be opened. And, directly in front of this Recreation Hall there was a poultry yard. Michael Bernays took his place and waited for his genius to begin suggesting something to him. For indeed, all Weimar knew that his genius must come and suggest his lecture to him. And then, at this moment, while Bernays was waiting for his genius, the cock outside began: cock-a-doodle-doo! Now every one knew: Michael Bernays' genius has spoken for him!—Feelings were strongly stirred. To be sure, in a different way from what he wanted. But there was a certain atmosphere in the hall.

I do not recount this in order to tell you a neat anecdote, but because I must call your attention to the following: the body of a lecture must have been so formed that it is well worked through meditatively in thoughts, and later formulated freely,—but the introduction is really there for the purpose of making oneself a bit ridiculous. That inclines the listeners to listen to one more willingly. If one does not make oneself a wee bit, ridiculous—to be sure, so that its not too obvious, so that it flows down only into the unconscious—one is unable to hold the attention in the right way when delivering a single lecture. Of course, it should not be exaggerated, but it will surely work sufficiently in the unconscious.

What one should really have for every lecture is this—that one has verbally formulated the first, second, third, fourth, and at most, the fifth sentences. Then one proceeds to the development of the material that has been worked out in the way I have just indicated. And one should have verbally formulated the closing sentences. For, in winding up a lecture, if one is a genuine lecturer, one should really always have some stage fright, a secret anxiety that one will not find one's last sentence. This stage fright is necessary for the coloring of the lecture; one needs this in order to captivate the hearts of the listeners at the end:—that one is anxious about finding the last sentence. Now, if one is to meet this anxiety in the right way, after one has perspiringly completed one's lecture, let one add this to all the rest of the preparation, that one bear in mind the exact formulation of the last one, two, three, four—at most, five—sentences. Thus, a lecture should really have a frame: The formulation of the first and last sentences. And, in between, the lecture should be free. As mentioned, I give this as a guiding principle.

And now perhaps, many of you will say: yes, but if one is not able to lecture just that way? One need not therefore immediately say that it would be so difficult, that one should not lecture at all. It is indeed quite natural that one can lecture a bit better or a bit worse, just so long as one does not let oneself be deterred from lecturing because of all these requirements: but one should make an effort to fulfill these requirements, at the same time as one makes such guiding principles as we develop here pervade all that he strives to do.

And there is indeed a very good means for becoming at least a bearable lecturer, even if at first one is no lecturer, even the opposite of a lecturer. I can assure you that when the lecturer has made himself ridiculous fifty times, that his lecture will come out right the fifty-first time. Just because he made himself ridiculous fifty times. And he for whom fifty times do not suffice, can undertake to lecture a hundred times. For one day it comes right, if one does not shy away from public exposure. One's last lecture before dying will naturally never be good if one has previously shied away from public exposure. But, at least the last lecture before one's death will be good if one has previously, during life, made oneself ridiculous an x number of times. This is also something about which one should really always think. And one will thus surely, without doubt, train oneself to be a lecturer! To be a lecturer requires only that people listen to one, and that one come not too close to them, so to speak; that one really avoid anything that comes too close to the people.

The manner in which one is accustomed to talk in social life when conversing with other people, that one will not find fitting to use when delivering a lecture in public, or generally speaking, to an audience. At most, one will be able to insert sentences such as one speaks in ordinary life only now and then. It is well to be aware that what one has as formulation of one's speaking in ordinary life, is, as a rule, somewhat too subtle or too blunt for a lecture to an audience. It just does not set quite right. The way in which one formulates one's words in the usual speaking, when addressing another person, varies; it always swings between being somewhat crude and, on the other hand, somewhat untruthful or impolite. Both must be entirely avoided in a lecture delivered to an audience, and, if used, then only in parenthesis, so to speak. Otherwise the listener has the secret feeling: while the lecturer begins to speak as one does in a lecture, suddenly he starts declaiming, or speaking dialogue-wise,—he must intend either to offend us a bit or to flatter us.

We must also bring the will element into the lecture in the right way. And this can only be accomplished by the preparation, but by such preparation as uses one's own enthusiasm in thinking through the material, enthusiasm which to a certain extent lives with the material.

Now consider the following: first one has completed the thought content, made it one's own. The next part of the preparation would be to listen, so to speak, to oneself inwardly lecturing on this thought content. One begins to listen attentively to these thoughts. They need not be formulated verbatim, as I have already said, but one begins to listen to them. It is this which puts the will element into the right position, this listening to oneself. For while we listen to ourselves inwardly, we develop enthusiasm or aversion, sympathy or antipathy at the right places, as these responses follow what we wish to impart. What we prepare in this will-like way also goes into our wills, and appears during our lecturing in tone variation. Whether we speak intensively or more softly, whether we accentuate brightly or darkly, this we do solely as the result of the feeling-through and willing-through of our thought content in the meditative preparation.

All the thought content we must gradually lead over into the forming of a picture of the composition of our lecture. Then will the thinking be embedded in the lecture,—not in the words, but between the words: in the way in which the words are shaped, the sentences are shaped, and the arrangement is shaped. The more we are in a position to think about ‘the how’ of our lecture, the more strongly do we work into the will of the others. What people will accept depends upon what we put into the formulation, into the composition of the lecture.

Were we to come to them and say: “When all is said, every one of you who does not do his utmost in order to realize the Threefold Order tomorrow is a bad fellow”—that would annoy people. However, when we present the sense of the Threefold Order in a lecture that is composed in accordance with the nature of its content, that it is inwardly organized so that it is itself even a kind of intimate 'threefolding', and especially even if it is so fashioned that we ourselves are convinced of the necessity for the Threefold Order, convinced with all our feeling and all our will impulses—then this works upon the people, works upon the will of the people.

What we have done in the way of developing our thoughts, in order to make our lecture into a work of art, this affects the will of the people. What springs from our own will, what we ourselves want, what fills us with enthusiasm, what enraptures us, this affects more the thinking of the listeners, this stimulates them more easily in their thoughts.

Thus it is that a lecturer who is enthusiastic about his subject is easily understood. A lecturer who composes artistically will more easily stir the will of his listeners. But the main principle, the chief guide line must still be this: That we deliver no lecture that is not well prepared.

Yes, but when we are compelled to deliver a lecture on the so-called spur of the moment: when, for example, we are challenged and have to answer immediately; then we certainly cannot turn back in time to the preceding day when we brought the argument to mind, in order to meditate on its counter-argument—that cannot be done! And yet, it can be done! It can be done in just such a moment by being absolutely truthful. Or we are attacked by a person who accosts us in a terribly rude manner, so that we must answer him immediately. Here we have a strong feeling-fact at the outset! Thus, the feeling is already stirred in a corresponding way. Here is a substitute for what we otherwise use in order to experience with enthusiasm what we first represent to ourselves in thought. But then, if we say nothing else in such a moment except that we as whole man can say at each moment when we are attacked in this manner, then we are nevertheless prepared in a similar way in this situation too.

Just in such things it is a question of the unwavering decision to be only, only, only truthful and when the attack is not such that we are challenged to a discussion, then there are present, as a rule, all the conditions for understanding. ( About this I shall speak later.) It is then actually a question not of delivering mere lectures, but of doing something quite different, which will be particularly important for us if we wish to complete this course rightly. For indeed, in order to be active in the sense that I indicated today at the beginning, we shall have not merely to deliver lectures, but every man of us, and of course every woman, will also have to stand his ground in the discussion period, come what may. And about this, much will have to be said, in fact, very much.

Now I beg you above all, to look at what I have said today from the point of view that it indicates perhaps a bit the difficulty of acquiring the art of lecturing. But it is quite especially difficult when it is necessary not only to lecture, but even to have to lecture about lecturing. Just think if one were to paint painting, and sculpture sculpturing!

Thus, the task is not altogether easy. But we shall nevertheless try in some way to complete it within the next days.