The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the course of these lectures I propose to make some important additions to the enquiry which I undertook here last week.^T1 Our earlier investigation gave us a certain insight into the impulses which determine the recent evolution of mankind. What I now propose to add will emerge from a study of the various turning points in modern history. We will endeavour to study this recent history up to the moment when we shall see how the human soul at the present day is related to the universe, in respect of its evolution within the cosmos and of its inner development in relation to the divine and its ego development in relation to the Spirit. I should like to show the connection between these things and the more or less everyday occurrences which are familiar to you. Therefore I will first take as my point of departure today—and the reasons for this will be apparent tomorrow and the day after tomorrow—the historical survey of the recent evolution of mankind which was to some extent the background to the observations on modern history, observations which I suggested in my public lecture in Zürich yesterday.^T2

From my earlier lectures in which I discussed analogous themes you already know that from the standpoint of spiritual science what is usually called history must be seen as a complex of symptoms. From this point of view what is usually taught as history, the substance of what is called history in the scholastic world, does not touch upon the really vital questions in the evolutionary history of mankind; it deals only with superficial symptoms. We must penetrate beneath the surface phenomena and uncover the deeper layer of meaning in events and then the true reality behind the evolution of mankind will be revealed. Whilst history usually studies historical events in isolation, we shall here consider them as concealing a deeper underlying reality which is revealed when they are studied in their true light.

A little reflection will show how absurd, for example, is the oft repeated assertion that modern man is the product of the past, and this remark invites us to study the history of this past. Recall for a moment the events of history as presented to you at school and ask yourself what influence they may have had, as history claims to show, upon your own sentient life, upon the constitution of your soul! But the study of the constitution of the soul in its present state of development is essential to the knowledge of man, to the knowledge of oneself. But history as usually presented does not favour this self knowledge. A limited self knowledge however is sometimes brought about indirectly. Yesterday, for example, a gentleman told me that he had been given three hours detention because in class one day he had forgotten the date of the battle of Marathon. Clearly such an experience works upon the soul and so might contribute indirectly to a better understanding of the impulses which lead to self knowledge! But the way in which history treats of the battle of Marathon adds little to man's real understanding of himself. None the less, a symptomatology of history must take into account external facts, for the simple reason that by the study and evaluation of these external facts we can gain insight into what really takes place.

I will begin by tracing the main features of contemporary history. The history which we study at school usually begins with the discovery of America and the invention of gunpowder and opens, as you know, with the statement that the Middle Ages have drawn to a close and that we now stand on the threshold of the modern era. Now if such a study is to be fruitful, it is important to turn our attention especially to the real and fundamental changes in human evolution, to those decisive turning-points in history when the life of the soul passes from one stage of development to another stage. These moments of transition usually pass unnoticed because they are overlooked amid the tangled skein of events. Now we know from the purely anthroposophical point of view that the last great turning point in the history of civilization occurred in the early years of the fifteenth century, when the fifth post-Atlantean epoch began. The Greco-Latin epoch opened in 747 B.C. and lasted until the beginning of the fifteenth century which ushered in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Because people only take a superficial view of things they usually fail to recognize that, during this period, the whole of man's soul-life underwent modification. It is manifestly absurd to regard the sixteenth century simply as a continuation of the eleventh or twelfth centuries. People overlook the radical change that occurred towards the beginning of the fifteenth century and persisted in the subsequent years. This point in time is of course only approximate; but what is not approximate in life? Whenever one stage of evolution which is to some extent complete in itself passes over into another stage we must always speak of approximation. It is impossible to determine the precise moment when an individual arrives at puberty; the onset is gradual and then runs its course to full physical maturity. And the same applies, of course, to the year 1413 which marks the birth of the Consciousness Soul. The new consciousness develops gradually and does not immediately manifest itself everywhere in full maturity and with maximum vigour. We completely fail to understand historical change unless we give due consideration to the moment when events take on a new orientation.

When, looking back to the period before the fifteenth century, we wish to enquire into and compare the predominant condition of the human soul at that time with the progressive transformation of this psychic condition after the beginning of the fifteenth century, we cannot help turning our attention to the real situation which existed in civilised Europe throughout the whole of the Middle Ages and which was still intimately related to the whole psychic condition of the Greco-Latin epoch. I am referring to the form which Catholicism that was subject to the Papacy had gradually developed over the centuries out of the Roman Empire. We cannot understand Catholicism before the great turning point which marks the birth of modern times unless we bear in mind that it was a universalist impulse and that, as such, it spread far and wide. Now mediaeval society was hierarchically ordered; men were grouped according to social status, family connections; they were organized in craft and merchant guilds, etcetera. But all these social stratifications were indoctrinated with Catholicism, and in the form that Christianity had assumed under the impact of various impulses of which we shall learn more in the following lectures (and under the impact of those impulses which I mentioned in earlier lectures). The expansion of Catholicism was characterized by the form of Christianity which was decisively influenced by Rome in the way I have indicated.

The Catholicism which emanated from Rome and developed after its own fashion through the centuries was a universalist impulse, the most powerful force animating European civilization. But it counted upon a certain unconsciousness of the human soul, a susceptibility of the human soul to suggestionism. It counted upon those forces with which the human soul had been endowed for centuries when it was not yet fully conscious—(it has only become fully conscious in our present epoch). It counted upon those who were only at the stage of the Rational or Intellectual Soul and calculated that by its power of suggestion it could slowly implant into their affective life what it deemed to be useful. And amongst the educated classes—which consisted of the clergy for the most part—it counted upon a keen and critical intelligence which had not yet arrived at the stage of the Consciousness Soul. The development of theology as late as the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries showed that it relied upon a razor-sharp intelligence. But if you take the intelligence of today as the measure of man's intelligence you will never really understand what was meant by intelligence up to the fifteenth century. Up to that time intelligence was to some extent instinctive, it had not yet been impregnated with the Consciousness Soul. Mankind did not yet possess the capacity for independent reflection which came only with the development of the Consciousness Soul. None the less men displayed on occasions astonishing acumen to which many of the mediaeval disputations bear witness, for many of these disputations were debated with greater intelligence than the doctrinal disputes of later theology. But this was not the intelligence that was an expression of the Consciousness Soul, it was the intelligence which, in popular parlance, came from ‘on high’; esoterically speaking it was a manifestation of the Angelos, a faculty not yet under man's control. Independent thinking became possible only when he achieved self dependence through the Consciousness Soul. When a universalist impulse is diffused in this way through the power of suggestion, as was the case with the Roman Papacy and everything associated with it in the structure of the Church, then it is much more the community, the Group Soul element, everything that is related to the Group Soul that is affected. And this spirit of self-dependence also affected Catholicism, with the result that under the influence of certain impulses of contemporary history this universalist impulse of expanding Catholicism found in the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation its battering ram. We will discuss these matters from another standpoint later on. We see how the expansion of universal Roman Catholicism was prosecuted amid continuous conflict and contention with the Roman Empire. One need only refer to the period of the Carolingians and the Hohenstaufens¹ in the standard history books to find that the fundamental issue was the incorporation of Europe into a universal Christian church of Roman Catholic persuasion.

If we wish to have a clear understanding of these matters from the point of view of the dawning Consciousness Soul we must consider an important turning point which, symptomatically, reveals the waning of Catholic power which had dominated the Middle Ages. And this turning point in modern history is the transference of the Pope to Avignon in 1309.² Such a challenge to the papacy would formerly have been impossible and shows that mankind which formerly had been dominated by a universalist impulse now begins to undergo a transformation. That a king or an emperor could have entertained the idea of transferring the residence of the Pope from Rome to some other city would have been inconceivable in earlier times. In 1309 the matter was quickly dealt with—the Pope was transferred to Avignon and the next decades witnessed the endless quarrels between popes and anti-popes associated with this transference of the papal court. And a victim of this conflict within the Church was the Order of the Templars,³ which had been loosely associated with the Papacy, though of course its relationship to Christianity was totally different. The Order was suppressed in 1312 shortly after the removal of the Pope to Avignon. This is a turning point in modern history and we must consider this turning point not only in respect of its factual content, but as a symptom, if we wish gradually to discover the reality concealed behind it.

Let us now turn our attention to other symptoms of a similar kind at the time of this turning point in history. As we survey the continent of Europe we are struck by the fact that its life, largely in the Eastern areas, is profoundly influenced by those events which operate in the course of history after the fashion of natural phenomena. I am referring to the continuous migrations, beginning with the Mongol invasions⁴ in the not far distant past, which poured in from Asia and introduced an Asiatic element into Europe. When we link an event such as the transference of the Papacy to Avignon with these invasions from the East we establish important criteria for a symptomatology of history. Consider the following: in order to understand not the inward and spiritual, but the external and human tendencies and influences which were connected with the event of Avignon and prepare the ground for it, you need not look beyond a coherent complex of human acts and decisions. But you will find no such coherent pattern of events when you consider the time between the Mongol invasions and the later penetration of the Turks into Europe. But when studying any historical event, a complex of facts of this kind, you must consider the following if you really wish to arrive at a symptomatology of history.

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Let us assume for the moment that here is Europe and here is Asia. The columns of the invading armies are advancing towards Europe. One of these columns, let us assume, has penetrated as far as this frontier. On the one side are the Mongols and later the Turks; on the other side the Europeans. When considering the event of Avignon you find a complex of acts and decisions taken by men. There is no such complex across the frontier. You have to consider two aspects, the one on this side of the frontier, the other on the other side. For the Europeans the Mongolian wave that sweeps across the frontier resembles a natural phenomenon of which one sees only the external effects. The invaders pour across the frontier, invade the neighbouring territory and harass the inhabitants; behind them lies a whole culture of the soul of which they are the vehicle. Their own inner life lies behind the frontier. But this psychic life does not reach beyond the frontier which acts as a kind of sieve through which passes only energies akin to the elemental forces of nature. These two aspects—the inner aspect which is found amongst those who live behind this frontier and the aspect which shows only its external face to the Europeans—these are not to be found, of course, in the episode of Avignon, where everything forms a single complex, a composite whole. Now an occurrence such as these Asiatic invasions closely resembles what one sees in nature. Imagine you are looking at the world of nature ... You see the colours, you hear the sounds—but these are external trappings. Behind lies the spirit, behind are the elemental beings which are active up to the point where the frontier begins. (See diagram.) You see with your eyes, hear with your ears, you experience by touch—and behind lies the spirit which does not cross the frontier, does not manifest itself. Such is the situation in nature, but in history it is not quite the same, though somewhat similar. The psychic element behind history does not manifest itself, we see only its external appearance.

It is most important to bear in mind this strange intermediate zone, this no man's land, where peoples or races clash, revealing to each other only their external aspects—this strange intermediate zone (which must also be reckoned among the symptoms) between actual universal experience of the human soul such as we see in the event of Avignon and the genuine impressions of nature. All the historical twaddle which has come to the fore recently, and which has no idea of the operation of this intermediate zone, cannot arrive at a true history of civilization. For this reason, neither Buckle nor Ratzel⁵ (I mention two historians of widely divergent outlook), could arrive at a true history of civilization because they started from the preconceived idea: of two events, if one follows from the other, then the later event must be considered as the effect and the earlier event the cause—the common sense view that is generally accepted.

When we consider this event as a symptomatic event in the recent evolution of mankind, then, as we shall see in later lectures, it will provide a bridge from the symptoms to reality.

Now from the complex of facts we see emerging in the West of Europe a more or less homogeneous configuration at first, which later gives birth to France and England. Leaving aside for the moment the external elements such as the channel, which is simply a geographical factor separating the two countries, it is difficult at first to distinguish between them. In the period when modern history begins French culture was widespread in England. English kings extended their dominion to French territory, and members of the respective dynasties each laid claim to the throne of the other country. But at the same time we see emerging one thing, which throughout the Middle Ages was also associated with what the universalist impulse of Catholicism had to some extent relegated to the background. I mentioned a moment ago that at this time communities were already in existence; families were cemented by the blood-tie to which they clung tenaciously; men were organized in craft guilds or corporations, etcetera. All these organizations were permeated by the powerful and authoritative universalist Catholic impulse moulded by Rome which dominated them and set its seal upon them. And just as this Roman Catholic impulse had relegated the guilds and other corporate bodies to a subordinate role, so too national identity suffered the same fate. At the time when Roman Catholicism exercised its greatest dynamic power national identity was not regarded as the most important factor in the structure of the human soul. Consciousness of nationality now began to be looked upon as something vastly more important than it had been when Catholicism was all powerful. And significantly it manifested itself in those countries I have just mentioned. But whilst the general idea of nationhood was emerging in France and England an extremely significant differentiation was taking place at the same time. Whilst for centuries these countries had shared a common purpose, differences began to emerge in the fifteenth century. The first indications are seen in the appearance of Joan of Arc in 1429, a most important turning point in modern history. It was this appearance of Joan of Arc which gave the impetus and if you consult the manuals of history you will see how important, powerful and continuous this impetus was—which led to the differentiation between the French and the English character.

Thus we see the emergence of nationalism as the architect of the community and at the same time this differentiation which is so significant for the evolution of modern mankind. This turning point is marked by the appearance of Joan of Arc in 1429. At the moment when the impulse of the Papacy is compelled to release from its clutches the population of Western Europe, at that moment the consciousness of nationality gathers momentum in the West and shapes its future. Do not allow yourselves to be misled in this matter. As history is presented today you can, of course, find in the past of every people or nation a consciousness of nationality. But you do not attach any importance to the potent influence of this force. Take, for example, the Slav peoples: under the influence of modern ideas and currents of thought they will of course trace back as far as possible the origin of their national sentiments and forces. But in the period of which we are speaking the national impulses were particularly active so that, in the territories I have just mentioned, there was an epoch when these impulses underwent a profound modification. And this is what matters. If we wish to apprehend reality we must make strenuous efforts to achieve objectivity. Another symptomatic fact which also reveals the emergence of the Consciousness Soul—like the one I have just mentioned—is the strange fashion in which the Italian national consciousness developed out of the levelling influence of the Papacy which, as we have seen, relegated the national impulse to a subordinate role, an influence which had hitherto pervaded the whole of Italy. Fundamentally it was the national impulse which emancipated the people of Italy from papal sovereignty at this time. All these facts are symptoms which are inherent in the epoch when, in Europe, the civilization of the Consciousness Soul seeks to emerge from the civilization of the Rational and Intellectual Soul.

At the same time—we are anticipating of course—we see the beginning of the conflict between Central and Eastern Europe. What emerged from what I described as the ‘battering ram’ of the Papacy, from the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, came into conflict with Slav expansionism.

The most diverse historical symptoms bear witness to this interaction between Central and Eastern Europe. In history one must not attach so much importance to princely families or personages as modern historians are wont to do. After all only a Wildenbruch⁶ could throw dust in people's eyes by pretending that the farce played out between Louis the Pious and his sons had historical significance. Only a Wildenbruch could present these family feuds in his dramas as historically important. They have no more significance than any other domestic gossip; they have nothing to do with the evolution of mankind. It is only when we study the symptomatology of history that we develop a feeling for what is really important and what is relatively unimportant in the evolution of mankind. In modern times the conflict between Central and Eastern Europe has important implications. But in reality Ottokar's conflict with Rudolf⁷ is only an indication; it is a pointer to what actually happened. On the other hand it is most important not to take a narrow view of this conflict. We must realize that, during this continuous confrontation, a colonizing activity began which carried the peasants from Central to Eastern Europe and in later years from the Rhine to Siebenbürgen. These peasant migrations, through the mingling of Central and Eastern European elements, had a profound influence upon the later development of life in these areas. Thus the Slavs whose expansionist policy came into conflict with what had developed in Central Europe out of the Holy Roman Empire were continuously infiltrated by Central European colonists moving eastwards. And from this strange process emerged that which later became the Hapsburg power. But another consequence of this ferment in Europe was the formation of certain centres which developed a particular cast of mind within the urban communities. The main period when the towns throughout Europe developed their specifically urban outlook lies between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. What I have described in a previous lecture^T3 penetrated into these towns; in these towns men were able to develop their individual characteristics.

Now it is a remarkable and significant phenomenon that after the separate development of France and England, there emerged in England at this time, after slow and careful preparation, that which later became the system of parliamentary government in Europe. As a result of the long civil wars which lasted from 1452–1480, we see developing, amongst manifold external symptoms, the historical symptom of embryonic parliamentary government. When the era of the Consciousness Soul opened in the early fifteenth century people wanted to take their affairs into their own hands. They wanted to debate, to discuss, to have a say in future policies and to shape external events accordingly—or at least liked to imagine that they shaped events. This spirit of independence—as a result of the disastrous civil wars in the fifteenth century—developed in England out of that configuration which was markedly different from what had also arisen in France under the influence of the national impulse. Parliamentary Government in England developed out of the national impulse. We must clearly recognize that, through the birth of parliamentary government as a consequence of the English civil wars in the fifteenth century, we see the interplay, or, if you like, the interpenetration, the interfusion of the emergent national idea on the one hand, and on the other hand an impulse clearly orientated towards that which the Consciousness Soul seeks to realize. And for reasons that we shall see later, it is precisely because of these events that the impulse of the Consciousness Soul breaks through in England and assumes the character of that national impulse; hence its peculiarly English flavour or nuance. We have now considered many of the factors which shaped Europe at the beginning of the age of the Consciousness Soul.

Behind all this, concealed as it were in the background, a virtual enigma to Europe, we see developing the later configuration of Russia, rightly regarded as an unknown quantity because it bears within it the seeds of the future. But first of all it is born of tradition, or, at least, of that which does not come from the Consciousness Soul and certainly not from the human soul. ... None of the three elements which helped to fashion the configuration of Russia originated in the Russian soul. The first was the heritage of Byzantium, of Byzantine Catholicism; the second was that which had streamed in through the mingling of Nordic and Slav blood; the third was that which was transmitted by Asia. None of these three elements was the creation of the Russian soul; but it was these elements which moulded that strange, enigmatic structure which developed in the East and was concealed from the happenings in Europe.

Let us now try to find the common characteristic of all these things, of all these symptoms. They have one common characteristic which is very striking. We need only compare the real driving forces in human evolution today with those of former times and we perceive a significant difference which will indicate to us the quintessential character of the culture of the Consciousness Soul and that of the Rational and Intellectual Soul.

In order to see this situation in clearer perspective we can compare it with the impulse of Christianity which in every man must spring from the inmost depths of his being, an impulse which passes over into the events of history, but which springs from man's inner life. In the evolution of the earth Christianity is the most powerful impulse of this nature. We can, of course, consider impulses of lesser import, for example, those which influenced Roman civilization throughout the Augustan age, or we need only glance at the rich efflorescence of the Greek soul. We see everywhere new creative impulses entering into the evolution of mankind. In this respect, however, our present epoch brings to birth nothing new; at best we can speak of a rebirth, a revival of the past, for all the impulses which are operative here no longer spring from the human soul. The first thing that strikes us is the national idea, as it is often called—more correctly one should speak of the national impulse. It is not a creation of the individual soul, but is rooted in what we have received from inheritance, in what is already established. What emerges from the manifold spiritual impulses of Hellenism is something totally different. This national impulse is a rightful claim to something which is already present like a product of nature. As member of a national group man creates nothing of himself; he merely underlines the fact that, in a certain sense, he has developed naturally like a plant, like a member of the natural order. I intentionally called your attention earlier on to the fact that Asia's contribution to Europe (and only its external aspect was perceptible to European culture) was something natural and spontaneous. The irruption of the Mongols, and later of the Osmanlis⁸ into Europe, though their influence was considerable, did not lead to any creative impulse in Europe. Russia too produced no creative impulse, nothing that was particularly characteristic of the Russian soul. This was the work solely of the Byzantine and Asiatic element, this mixture of Nordic and Slav blood. In these peoples it is given facts, facts of nature which determine the lives of men—nothing in reality is created by the human soul. Let us bear this in mind, for it will serve as a point of departure for what is to follow. From the fifteenth century on the demands of mankind are of a totally different character.

Hitherto we have considered the external facts of history; let us now turn to the more inward happenings which are related more to the impulse of the Consciousness Soul which is breaking through the shell of the human soul. Let us consider, for example, the Council of Constance⁹ and the burning of Hus. In Hus we see a personality who stands out, so to speak, like a human volcano. The Council of Constance which passed sentence on him opened in 1414, in the early years of the fifteenth century which marked the birth of the Consciousness Soul. Now in the annals of modern history Hus stands out as a symbol of protest against the suggestionism of the universalist impulse of Catholicism. In Jan Hus the Consciousness Soul itself rebels against all that the Rational or Intellectual soul had received from this universalist Catholic impulse. And this was not an isolated phenomenon—we could show how this ground had already been prepared by the struggle of the Albigenses against Catholic domination. In Savanarola in Italy and in others we see the revolt of the autonomous personality who wishes to arrive at his religious faith by relying upon his own judgement and rejects the suggestionism of papal Catholicism. And this same spirit of independence persists in Luther, in the emancipation of the Anglican Church from Rome (an extremely interesting and significant phenomenon), and in the Calvinist influence in certain regions of Europe. It is like a wave that sweeps over the whole of civilized Europe; it is an expression of the inner life, something more inward than the other influences, something which is already more closely linked with the soul of man, but in a different way from before.

After all, what do we admire in Calvin, in Luther when we consider them as historical figures? What do we admire in those who liberated the Anglican Church from Roman Catholic tutelage?—Not new creative ideas, not fresh spiritual insights, but the energy with which they endeavoured to pour traditional ideas into a new mould. Whereas these traditional ideas had formerly been accepted by the Rational or Intellectual Soul which was more instinctive or less conscious, they had now to be accepted by the Consciousness Soul which is autonomous. But this did not lead to the birth of new ideas, a new confession of faith. Time-honoured ideas are called in question, but no new symbol is found to replace them. The further we look back into the past—just think of the wealth of symbols created by man! Truly, a symbol such as the symbol of the Eucharist had to be created one day by the soul of man. In the age of Luther and Calvin there were endless disputes over the Eucharist as to whether it should be administered in both kinds or in one kind! But an autonomous impulse, an individual creation of the human soul was nowhere to be found. The dawning of the Consciousness Soul signifies a new relationship to these problems but does not herald the birth of new impulses.

When this new epoch dawns the budding Consciousness Soul is operative in it and manifests itself in historical symptoms. On the one hand we see the national impulses at work, on the other hand we see, striking at the very roots of religious faith, the revolt of the personality that strives for autonomy because the Consciousness Soul seeks to burst its bonds. And we must study the effects of these two forces when we consider the further development of the two representative national states, France and England. These forces gather strength, but are clearly differentiated and show how the two impulses, that of nationalism and that of personality, react upon each other differently in France and England. They create nothing new, but show the traditional past under new forms as the basis for the historical structure of Europe. This reinforcement of the national impulse is particularly evident in England where the personal element that in Hus, for example, assumed the form of religious pathos, unites with the national element, and the impulse of personality, of the Consciousness Soul, increasingly paves the way for parliamentary government, so that in England everything takes on a political aspect. In France—by contrast—despite the national element that exercises a powerful influence by reason of the native temperament and other things—the independence, the autonomy of the personality predominates and gives another nuance. Whilst England lays greater emphasis upon the national element, in France the active tendency is visibly more towards the element of personality. One must make a close study of these things.

That these forces act objectively—they are in no way connected with the arbitrary actions of man—can be seen in the case where the one impulse is operative, but bears no fruit; it remains sterile because it finds no external support and because the counter-impulse is still sufficiently powerful to neutralize it. In France the national impulse had such a powerful impact that it was able to liberate the French people from the authority of the Pope and this explains why it was France that compelled the Pope to reside at Avignon and why in France the ground was prepared for the emancipation of the personality. In England too the national impulse exercised a powerful influence, but at the same time, as a natural inheritance, the impulse of personality was equally strong. In the field of culture the whole nation was to a large extent free from Roman influence and developed its own doctrinal structure. In Spain the same impulse was at work but could neither penetrate the existing national element, nor, like the personality, overcome the power of suggestionism. Here everything remained in an embryonic state and became decadent before it had time to develop.

External events, what are usually called historical facts, are in reality only symptoms. This is obvious after a moment's reflection. In 1476 an important battle was fought on Swiss soil. The defeat of Charles the Bold in the battle of Murten was an extremely significant symptom, for it gave the death blow to chivalry that was closely associated with the Papacy. In the battle of Murten we see a trend that was already spreading through the whole of civilized Europe at that time, a trend that to some extent only came to light in a typically representative phenomenon (i.e. the battle of Murten).

When a phenomenon of this nature emerges on the surface it meets with counter-pressure from the past. The normal course of evolution, as you know, is always accompanied by Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces which derive from backward impulses and seek to assert themselves. Every normal impulse entering into mankind must fight against the subtle invasion of Luciferic and Ahrimanic forces. Thus the impulse that was clearly manifest in Hus, Luther, Calvin and Wyclif had to battle with these forces. A symptom of this struggle is seen in the revolt of the United Netherlands and in the Luciferic-Ahrimanic personality of Philip of Spain. And one of the most significant turning points of modern times was the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. With this defeat those forces which, emanating from Spain, had offered the strongest resistance to the emancipation of the personality were finally eliminated. The Dutch wars of independence and the defeat of the Armada are external symptoms and nothing more. In order to arrive at the underlying reality we must be prepared to probe beneath the surface, for when these ‘waves’ are thrown up we are the better able to see the inner reality of events. The wave of 1588, when the Armada was defeated, illustrates how the personality which, in the process of emancipation, seeks to develop within itself the Consciousness Soul, rose in revolt against the petrified forms inherited from the Rational or Intellectual soul.

It is absurd to regard historical evolution as a temporal series of causes and effects, the present as the consequence of the past, cause—effect, cause—effect, etcetera. That is extremely convenient, especially when one takes the academic approach to historical research. It is so very convenient—simply to stagger along step by step from one historical fact to the next. But if one is not blind or asleep, if one looks at things with an open mind, the historical symptoms themselves show how absurd such an approach is.

Let us take an historical symptom which is most illuminating from a certain point of view. All the new developments from the fifteenth century onwards which are characterized by the impulses I have already indicated—the rise of nationalism, the awakening of personality—all this evoked conflicts and antagonisms which led to the Thirty Years' War. The account of this war as presented by history is seldom dealt with from the standpoint of symptomatology. It can hardly be treated after the fashion of café chatter. After all it was of little importance for the destiny of Europe that Martinitz, Slavata and Fabricius¹⁰ were thrown out of the window of the royal palace in Prague and would have been killed had there not been a dungheap beneath the window which saved the lives of the emperor's emissaries. In reality the dungheap is supposed to have consisted of scraps of paper that the servants of the Hradschin had thrown out of the window and had left lying there until they finally formed a pile of rubbish. This anecdote provides a pleasant topic for cafe chatter, but one cannot pretend that it has any bearing on the evolution of mankind!

When we begin to study the Thirty Years' War—I need hardly remind you that it began in 1618—it is important to bear in mind that the cause of the war lies solely in confessional differences, in what had developed in opposition to the old Catholicism, to the old Catholic impulses. Everywhere serious conflicts had arisen through this antagonism between the recent development of personality and the suggestionism of the old Catholicism. When the conflict was brought to an end by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648¹¹ we ask ourselves the question: how did matters stand in 1648 in respect of this conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism? What had come of it? What changes had taken place in the course of thirty years? Nothing strikes us more forcibly than the fact that in this conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism and in everything connected with it the situation in 1648 was exactly the same as it had been in 1618. Though, meanwhile, certain issues which had been the source of discord had been modified somewhat, the situation in Central Europe had remained unchanged since the outbreak of hostilities. But the intervention of foreign powers which was in no way connected with the causes of the conflict of 1618, this intervention, after the powers had found scope for their activity, gave a totally different complexion to the political forces in Europe. The political horizon of those who had been involved in the war was completely transformed. But the results of the peace of Westphalia, the changed situation in relation to the past, this had nothing whatsoever to do with the causes of the conflict in 1618.

This fact is extremely important, especially in the case of the Thirty Years' War, and illustrates how absurd it is to consider history, as is the usual practice, in terms of cause and effect. However, the consequence of these developments was that England and France owed their leading position in Europe to the outcome of this war. But their supremacy was in no way connected with the causes which provoked the war. And a most important factor in the march of modern history is this: following upon the Thirty Years' War the national impulses, in conjunction with the other impulses which I have described elsewhere, develop in such a way that France and England become the representative national states. There is much talk at the present time of the national principle in the East; but we must not forget that this principle passed from the West to the East. Like the trade winds, the national impulse flowed from West to East and we must bear this clearly in mind.

Now it is interesting to see how the same impulse—the national impulse in conjunction with the emancipation of the personality—assumes a totally different form in the two countries, where, as we saw, they began to be clearly differentiated in 1429. In France the emancipation of the personality within the national group develops in such a way that it turns inward. That is to say, if the national element is represented by the red line in the diagram below and on the one side of the line is the individual human being, and on the other side mankind, then in France the development of the national impulse is orientated towards man, towards the individual, in England towards mankind. France modifies the national element within the nation state in such a way that the national element tends to transform the inner being of man, to make him other than he is. In England the personal element transcends nationalism and seeks to embrace the whole world and to promote everywhere the development of the personality. The Frenchman wishes rather to develop the personal element in the soul, the Englishman to extend the principle of personality to the whole of mankind. Here we see two entirely different trends—in both cases the basis is the national element. In the one case the national impulse turns inwards, towards the individual soul; in the other it is directed outwards, towards the soul of mankind. In England and France therefore we have two parallel streams with two sharply contrasting tendencies. Only in France therefore, where the inner life of the personality was deeply influenced, could the political and social configuration which developed as I have described lead to the Revolution—via Louis XIV, etcetera. In England the national impulse led to a sober liberalism, because here it expressed itself externally, whilst in France it expressed itself inwardly, in the inner life of man.

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This phenomenon, strangely enough, manifests itself also geographically, especially when we consider another turning point in modern history as symptom—the defeat of Napoleon, who was a product of the French Revolution, by the English at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805. What is revealed to us here? Napoleon, a strange representative it is true, but nonetheless a representative of the French makeup, signifies the withdrawal inwards—and geographically too, the withdrawal to the continent of Europe. If the following diagram represents Europe—Napoleon, precisely as a consequence of the battle of Trafalgar, is thrust back towards Europe (see arrow) and England is thrust outwards towards the whole world in the opposite direction. At the same time let us not forget that these two tendencies have need of conflict, they must try conclusions with each other. And this is what happened in the struggle for supremacy in North America, which in some respects is a consequence of this turning point in 1805. Looking back a few decades before this date we see how the specifically French nuance, Romanism, is ousted in the interests of the world by the Anglo-Saxon element in North America.

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Thus you can sense, if you really wish to, the forces which are at work here; like the magician's apprentice the impulse of the Consciousness Soul conjures up national impulses which implant themselves in mankind in divers forms and with different nuances. We can only understand these things if we study the impulse of the Consciousness Soul in all its aspects, avoiding all prejudice and keeping our eyes open for what is important and what is unimportant and also for what is more or less characteristic so that from our observation of external symptoms we can then penetrate to the inner pattern of reality. For external appearances often belie the inner impulse of the personality, especially in an epoch when the personality is self-dependent. And this, too, becomes apparent when we study symptomatically the development of modern history. What is taught as history in our schools is quite unreal. The real facts are as follows: here is the surface movement of the water, here is the current (shaded red in the diagram.)

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Now there are times when there breaks through into historical events—like the waves thrown up here, sometimes with the violence of a volcanic eruption—what lies beneath the surface. At other times, events emerge on the surface, and isolated historical events betray what lies beneath the surface. As symptoms they are especially characteristic. But sometimes there are symptoms where one must totally ignore external appearances when looking at the symptomatic fact.

Now there is a personality who is especially characteristic of the emergence of the impulse of the Consciousness Soul in Western Europe, both on account of his personal development and on account of the place he occupies in contemporary history. At the beginning of the seventeenth century he was involved in this differentiation between the French impulse and the English impulse, a differentiation that had exercised a widespread influence upon the rest of Europe. In the seventeenth century this differentiation had been effective for some time and had become more pronounced. The personality who appeared on the stage of history at this time was a strange individual, whom we can depict in the following way: one could say that he was extremely generous, filled with deep and genuine gratitude for the knowledge imparted to him, infinitely grateful, in fact a model of gratitude for the kindness men showed towards him. He was a scholar who combined in his person almost the entire erudition of his day, a personality who was extremely peace-loving, a sovereign indifferent to the intrigues of the world, wholly devoted to the ideal of universal peace, extremely prudent in decisions and resolutions, and most kindly disposed towards his fellow men. Such is the portrait that one could sketch of this personality. If one takes a partial view, it is possible to portray him in this way and this is the external view that history presents.

It is also possible to portray him from another angle which is equally partial. One could say that he was an outrageous spendthrift without the slightest notion of his financial resources, a pedant, a typical professor whose erudition was shot through with abstractions and pedantry. Or one could say that he was timid and irresolute, and whenever called upon to defend some principle he would evade the issue out of pusillanimity, preferring peace at any price. It could also be said of him that he was shrewd or crafty and wormed his way through life by artfully choosing the path that always guaranteed success. Or that he endeavoured to establish relationships with others as children are wont to do. His friendships betrayed a frankly childish element which, in his veneration for others and in the adulation others accorded him, was transformed into romantic infatuation. One can adopt either of these points of view. And in fact there were some who described him from the one angle, others from the other angle, and many from both angles. Such was the historical personality of James I¹² who reigned from 1603 to 1625. Whichever point of view we take, in both cases the cap fits perfectly. In neither case do we know what he really felt or thought as a typical representative of contemporary evolution. And yet, precisely in the epoch when James I was King of England a hidden current rises to the surface and the symptoms manifested at that time are characteristic of the underlying reality. We will speak more of this tomorrow.

• T1. Das Geschichtsleben der Menschheit, Dornach, October, 1918. Lectures included in Die Polarität von Dauer und Entwickelung im Menschenleben (Bibl. Nr. 184).
• T2. Die Geschichte der Neuzeit im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung 17th October, 1918 (included in Bibl. Nr. 73).
• 1 . Carolingian and Hohenstaufen dynasties marked by the struggle between Empire and Papacy.
• 2 . A French bishop, Clement V, is elected to the papal throne. The papal court transferred to Avignon 1309. Beginning of the ‘Babylonian Captivity’.
• 3 . Knights Templar. Founded 1118 by Hugues de Payen to protect pilgrims on their way to the Holy Sepulchre. After their defeat at Acre 1291 they took refuge in Cyprus. The order was denounced 1307 by the Inquisition; their property was sequestrated. The Templars were arrested and most, including the leader, Jacques Molay, tortured and burnt. Papal Bull 1312 suppressed the Order.
• 4 . Mongol invasions. After destroying the power of China and Islam in Central Asia, the armies of Chingis Khan (1167–1227) advanced through Georgia, overran the Ukraine and the Crimea and destroyed three Russian armies (1222–3). A renewed invasion of Russia began in 1237 under Ögödei. The Mongols captured Moscow, Rostov, Yaroslavl and destroyed the army of the Grand Duke. In 1240 they advanced towards Poland and Hungary and reached Pesth. Another army overran Lithuania and East Prussia. Archduke Henry of Silesia was defeated at Liegnitz by a force under Kaidu and in 1241 all Hungary fell to the Mongols. The death of Ögödei in 1241 saved Western Europe from further invasion. A full account will be found in The Mongols by E. D. Phillips, Thames & Hudson, 1969. Also, The Mongols and Russia by G. Vernadsky, Yale, 1959.
• 5 . H. T. Buckle (1822–62) English historian. His chief work was the History of Civilisation in England (1857–61). He saw in the law of causality the determining factor in history. Freidrich Ratzel (1844–1904). Geographer and professor in Munich and Leipzig.
• 6 . Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909). Author of historical dramas Die Karolinger 1881, Die Quitzows 1888, etcetera. Filled with a sense of priestly mission. His plays are patriotic, rhetorical and rely upon stage effects. ‘He was capable of raising a storm to put out a night light!’
• 7 . Ottokar II (1253–78), King of Bohemia, was compelled to surrender Austria, Styria and Carinthia to Rudolf of Hapsburg. He refused to recognize the validity of Rudolf's election as emperor and was defeated and mortally wounded at the battle of Marchfeld 1278.
• T3. Die Geschichte des Mittelalters bis zu den grossen Erfindungen und Entdeckungen, Berlin, October—December, 1904.
• 8 . Osmanlis or Ottomans, a western Turkish race named after their leader Osman I or Ottoman (d. 1326) who founded the Turkish empire by conquering western Asia Minor. A nomadic people.
• 9 . Council of Constance (1414–18). John Hus was summoned to defend himself before the Church authorities against the charge of heresy. Refused to recant and was convicted and burnt.
• 10. Defenestration of Prague 1618. Protestant meetings prohibited by Imperial decree. Calvinists invaded the Hradschin Palace in Prague and threw the Imperial regents, Martinitz and Slavata, together with their secretary, Fabricius, out of the window on to the courtyard fifty feet below. A Bohemian rebellion now became inevitable.
• 11. Peace of Westphalia 1648. Religious clauses a return to the Peace of Augsburg 1565—‘cujus regio, ejus religio’. Territorial and political implications of the treaty of great significance in European history.
• 12. James I of England or James VI of Scotland aptly described by Henry IV of Navarre and Sully as the ‘wisest fool in Christendom.’

In the last few reflections, I have tried to introduce you to the ideas and impulses that have been moving proletarian circles for a long time, that are alive in proletarian circles, and that will contribute the most essential thing to what will be world-shaking events from the present into the near future. Today, in order to bring these considerations to some kind of conclusion tomorrow, I would like to point out some of the forces that are available for the present from the past, so to speak, that can be perceived by the observer, especially the observer of spiritual science, as forces that have been preparing themselves in the past, are now are there, but which are actually not as obvious as most people today believe, but which must be taken into account by anyone who, at any point in world development, and at one point everyone is indeed, wants to participate in the shaping of events - one can already speak of such a shaping of events - that will form from the present into the future.

What happens always happens out of certain forces that have their center here or there and then radiate in different directions. We have seen how, in the last four and a half catastrophic years, long-standing forces have been unleashed in many different directions, taking on the most diverse forms, so that what has happened in the last four and a half years has taken place shows clearly distinguishable epochs, even if they are short in time, and one cannot get by with simply referring to these events of the last four and a half years as the “war” of the last years. The events came to a warlike ignition at a certain point, I would say. But then quite different forces were added to the things that first, I might say, shone more illusively into human consciousness and were also interpreted in the most illusory way by the broadest circles. In a relatively short time, people's decisions and impulses of will became quite different from what they had been before.

All this must be carefully considered. In the future, one will see that here and there these or those impulses of will will emerge. In one place, in one center, people will want one thing, in another center they will want another. These impulses of will, which will emanate from groups of people, will interpenetrate and mutually oppose each other in the most diverse ways. There is no possibility of thinking of a harmony of the effective forces, but the only thing to be considered at first is that the individual really acquires understanding for what occurs here or there. Today very few people are at all prepared to assess this or that in the right way, because people have become too accustomed to judging things according to preconceived opinions, according to catchwords. In the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present day, people have gradually been educated in such a way that they have diverted their attention from what really matters. As a result, it is hardly possible today to easily assess the weight of the volitional impulses emanating from this or that group of people in the right way. The course of recent events has provided sufficient evidence of this. This evidence will one day be recorded by history. Perhaps sooner than people think, they will be recorded by history. But for those who want to form an opinion on events in any way, it is necessary that they develop the will today to assess the free events, to assess the events.

I say: there is plenty of evidence for what I have just said. One only needs to provide a striking example, a proof whose validity unfortunately still extends far into the present, in that in this respect, in places where the judgments should not be clouded, these judgments are often clouded. In the course of the past few years we have had the distressing experience that precisely people who were in positions of responsibility here or there in the most diverse fields, that people who had to direct or manage this or that or even just had to judge this or that – because a great deal depends on judgment, on so-called true public opinion, which is sometimes actually is the unexpressed thought of men and which has nevertheless a certain deep meaning -, we have made the experience and it still works in the present, that people in decisive places or also in non-decisive places, which however are still taken into consideration, have formed illusion judgments about everything, about which they should have had a healthy judgment. I have already mentioned the fact that the German people in particular have been given a bad reputation by foreigners, which has had more influence than one might think in the course of recent events: that is the reputation of the German Kaiser. This judgment of the German Emperor is now being somewhat corrected by the very latest events, but it is only just beginning to be corrected. The worst thing about these judgments was that it had an almost devastating effect, considering this man to be an important man. If he had not been considered an important man, but a highly insignificant one, not at all relevant to the events, as he was throughout the years since he came to power, then the terrible judgment of the foreign countries would not have come about, which – as history will show – has caused greater devastation than one can even imagine today.

Not true, it will certainly help to correct the situation if we look at the terrible fear that a few people in Germany had when this man, still reluctant to resign, fled to headquarters in the last few days, in order to find some information at headquarters that might help him to hold on, to somehow hold on to the old conditions. If one could correctly assess the voices of those who always advised him to return to Berlin, where he belongs, then one must say that this shows the weight of necessary judgments. Things must not only be thought, they must be weighed, they must be weighed. It is highly reckless when, for example, an article appeared in a Basel newspaper yesterday, effectively apologizing for the German Kaiser and accusing the German people. This German people has truly suffered enough over decades from all that has been achieved through the insignificance and theatrical exaggeration of all circumstances, through the tiresome bullying. And when, as happened in yesterday's Basler Zeitung, the German people are now being accused in the most foolish way, by making the foolish claim that this man was merely an exponent of the German people – which he was absolutely not – then this is an act of profound recklessness that must be condemned unconditionally. It is important today that such reckless judgments do not gain a foothold, especially in neighboring countries. People must look at such judgments, which are likely to poison the whole atmosphere into which we must enter.

These things must really be looked at today with a more penetrating eye. One must not sleep in the face of these things, one must be awake. One must really be able to take these things in with a non-emotional, but with a truly intellectual temperament, and one must feel an indignation, feel it intellectually, when such follies are brought into the world today that are likely to completely distort a proper judgment. And an objective judgment is necessary today above all. Try to take things really as they are to be taken today, by taking them in their weight, by not spreading opinions about things that stir up sentiment, with an indifferent humor, which is no humor, and let everything slide, since it is nevertheless about events that, each in itself, can have an enormous, far-reaching, world-historical significance. These things must be observed today against a more urgent background. And I would very much like to see something enter the hearts of those who want to profess anthroposophy that I would call a world-historical sense of judgment. I would like something to enter into your hearts that constitutes the importance of the moment, that you really get beyond the mood that has never been there since I tried to bring an anthroposophically oriented worldview into the world , that the mood would change from one that takes what is presented in Anthroposophy only as a Sunday afternoon sermon, as something intended only to warm the heart and to soothe, to temper the soul. No, everything based on an anthroposophically oriented worldview was intended to guide hearts and souls into that world current that has been gathering since the end of the nineteenth century, that pointed more and more to the significant, great events that have come to shake humanity and will continue to come more and more. Everything was geared towards directing hearts to the forces at work, not just to please people's ears with something that tempers souls and warms hearts a little, so that when they have absorbed what an anthroposophically oriented worldview offers, they can sleep with a certain more peaceful soul than they would otherwise be able to sleep with. Today, the individual is no longer able to look only to themselves, to simply receive a new religion to soothe their own heart. What is demanded of humanity calls upon the individual to participate in what surges and billows through human sociality.

To do this, it is necessary to look at things in a larger context. I admit that it was necessary in the course of the last few years, under the impulses that the anthroposophically oriented worldview was to bring to people's hearts, to bring a lot in quick succession because time was pressing, to let ideas quickly replace each other. If the material that had to be presented during the course of a week had sometimes been available a month or even longer, it could have been offered in small portions, which, due to the urgency of the times, necessarily had to be brought to the hearts quickly, it might have been absorbed more deeply into the souls. But that was not possible. Time was pressing, and events have shown that time was pressing. I admit that the speed with which the teachings of the anthroposophically oriented worldview were presented to the members of the anthroposophical movement sometimes led to the fact that the later erased the earlier. But one cannot be in such a serious matter without changing one's whole mind. And in a certain sense, the word that had to be spoken again and again at the time of the founding of Christianity is being repeated in the present: Change your mind. It is not enough that we accept this or that teaching in terms of content; what matters is that we change our whole way of thinking, that we strip away everything that was decisive for the direction of our judgment from the nineteenth century, which can truly be called, as I said earlier in reference to a saying, the century of indecent psychology, of indecent soul direction, where, because of that lack of trust in the divine spiritual powers of the soul of which I spoke yesterday, one can see only arbitrariness or only powerlessness or only inaction within the human soul, where one has never grasped anything like Fichte's saying: “Man can what he should; and when he says, ‘I cannot,’ he means, ‘I will not’.” This nineteenth century was a century of great scientific achievements. But these achievements were such that they paralyzed the will of men and awakened the belief that everything that comes out of the human breast comes out of it only as something purely accidental. That the Divine Eternal radiates out of every human breast and that every human being is responsible for representing the Divine Eternal through himself, that is what the nineteenth century completely suppressed, that is what the Goethean Age into the age of philistinism; that is what makes today's intelligentsia so unprepared for all that I have indicated to you and what runs through millions and millions of proletarian souls as an impulse.

Understanding is the first thing that matters in the present. Doing will only come when people have really tried to understand. None of the things that the bourgeoisie, for example, believes today could be good in the future, none of them will somehow attack the impulses that I have given you these days as the impulses of the proletariat striving from bottom to top. Some of the quackery emanating today from those who should have learned from the events of the past decades would be tragicomic if it were not so tragic.

So today, in order to prepare for something that is of immediate relevance and that I still have to present, I would like to say that we are creating a larger basic tableau, creating a background, so to speak. You see, everything that has an effect on modern society, everything that acts as forces that will discharge in the most diverse ways towards the future, comes from certain basic forces that interact in the most diverse ways. Yesterday I pointed out in conclusion that the struggle, which is a purely material struggle, will be staged more and more from the West and will plunge humanity into materialistic struggles. From the East, the blood will counteract what comes from the West as an economic struggle. We must interpret this word in more detail, for it will be extraordinarily important in the future in social terms and is important for anyone who wants to form a clear judgment. Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to talk to a wide variety of people about the things that should be taken from the active forces in order to give the future this or that direction here or there. At every opportunity to discuss something effective, I was almost horrified, I would say, oppressed by the short-sightedness that has gradually taken over the judgment of modern humanity. Today, it is taken for granted that anyone who wants to have a say in what is developing should know the national conditions here or there. But people do not seek this knowledge in the ways in which it must necessarily be sought today, and that is why grotesque and grandiose errors arise. The one error I have mentioned is only a partial error. In order to visualize the full weight of what is involved, it must be pointed out that the time is now running out when whole masses were driven into the most nonsensical judgments.

Yesterday I showed you that the majority of people, because that is the proletariat, have a power of belief that extends only to purely material things. I had to tell you: if the power of belief, which, for example, has developed over decades in the proletariat through Marxist impulses, if this power of belief had existed to even the slightest degree in the bourgeoisie, things would be somewhat different than they unfortunately are today. But it would then have been necessary for precisely those people who, by virtue of their social position, would have had the opportunity to take advantage of this opportunity — since they did not do so, they must do so in the future — to enter the paths to judgment, on which alone real judgment can be gained; I do not mean judgment about this or that, but judgment in general. Just consider that not just one nation, but people over a wide area, were able for years to consider two generals to be important people, who were in fact highly insignificant people: Hindenburg and Ludendorff. Such a distortion of judgment for entire broad sections of the population is a characteristic of our time. This is mainly due to the fact that people do not feel the responsibility involved in forming a judgment. Of course I know that one could say: Yes, if someone had already formed a judgment, a correct judgment, for example, about Ludendorff, who must be seen as a pathological nature, who must be seen as a nature that, so to speak, since the beginning of the war can no longer be judged from any other than a psychiatric point of view. I know that one could say: What would such a judgment have helped at a time when a judgment was not allowed to be pronounced? Of course that is true, but that is not the point. The point is that people should at least form their own judgment in the first place. And now it must be said all the more, because the power of events has meant that individual judgments have to be corrected by the so-called central powers. This power of events has not yet arrived for the correction of the judgments of the Entente and the American powers. And that would bring a tremendous disaster upon humanity if the correction of the judgments were also to wait until the power of events speaks; if now, for example, there were an inclination to worship the rulers of the Entente; if the hearts did not mature the resolve to see clearly how things really are. If worship of success should arise now, if the destiny of judgments should be determined only by the outer course of events, then it would have tremendously devastating consequences for the development of humanity. That will not be a sign of how one or the other will be able to express themselves under the gagging of judgment, but at least in his or her own way, man should form an independent judgment about that which is. One forms this opinion when one feels within oneself that one is not a personality flung into the world by chance, who can think whatever he wants, but when one feels that one is a member of the divine world order and that the power which places a judgment in this heart, in this soul, is a power to which one is responsible even with one's most intimate thoughts. In the course of the events of the last four and a half years, many things have happened. This or that has happened here or there. It can be said that almost nothing has happened about which, for example, the German government or the German military leadership has formed a correct judgment in a responsible position. They have judged wrongly about everything and continued to act under false judgment. These are clear proofs of how little the present and the recent past have educated people to judge things.

I said that I have had occasion to talk to a wide variety of people. People do have the opinion, in abstract terms, that one should get to know what is going on in the various popular movements, for example. They are satisfied when one or another journalist is sent to this or that area and writes his newspaper article, and people do not know what to make of it when the same principle is applied to the field of spiritual life, as is necessary in mathematics, for example, where elementary basic maxims are taken as starting points and the furthest conclusions are reached. When bridges or railways have to be built, people admit that science is needed to build them, a science that starts from the simplest things in order to arrive at the most far-reaching conclusions. But people want to do history, to make history, without any principles, and they will not be able to do anything with it when you tell them: No one can judge European conditions without at least knowing the elementary fact that on the Italian peninsula the sentient soul is the soul of feeling, which is primarily effective in the folk, in France the soul of mind or feeling, in the British Empire the soul of consciousness, and so on, as we have come to know it. These things are the basis of what happens, just as the multiplication table is the basis of arithmetic. And unless you start from these things in relation to knowledge of the real conditions in the world, you are an incompetent person, no matter what your position in the structure of social or political life in today's world, just as you would be an incompetent person in bridge building if you did not know the simplest things in mathematics. People must come to realize this; they must learn to see through it. For the future of humanity depends on people being able to see through this. That is what matters.

Because only when you know these basic facts can you understand the various forces that radiate into what is happening. You cannot properly assess the path of a country peddler to the city if you are unable to place the peddler's journey from the countryside to the city within the fabric of social life. Humanity was allowed to live through social life in an atavistically drowsy state to a certain extent, and in the nineteenth century people preserved this state in order to sleep more deeply. In the future, humanity will not be allowed to continue living in this way. Rather, it will be obliged to think about what the hierarchies of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and so on think about the course of human evolution and what they radiate into what people do. The smallest must be linked to the greatest in everyday judgment. If today you see councils, workers' and soldiers' councils, emerging in this or that country, if you are in danger of seeing workers' and soldiers' councils emerging everywhere except in the Entente countries, then you must be able to appreciate the significance of such a fact in the right way. What is needed above all is to gain a judgment about these things. Do not ask first: What is to be done? What is to be done will come by itself, if only a real judgment is present, so that the smallest thing can be linked to the great lines of world events. The great world event, that is the peculiarity of our time, is becoming topical in these days; it will no longer be a mere theory, but will become topical.

For example, in the course of European events – American events are only a colonial appendix to European events – forces are at play that have been in preparation for a long, long time. The observer of European conditions – and we have been pointing this out from various points of view in recent days – should pay attention to the particular configuration of, say, the social conditions in the British Empire, and he should pay attention to the particular configuration of the social conditions in Eastern Europe, in Russia and in Central Europe, and he should pay attention to the forces that are at play there. For on the surface of events these events mask themselves in many ways, and he who observes only the surface of events will easily arrive at, as one says, catchwords, one can also say catch-ideas, catch-concepts, through which he wants to master events. In many cases, superficial stuff is going on in people's heads today. But in people's impulses, forces are at play that have been preparing themselves not just for centuries, but for millennia, and that are only now beginning to take on their very significant form.

You see, there is no possibility that that international entity, which I have characterized as the mood of the proletariat, which is mainly nourished by Marxist ideas, in the broadest sense, of course, Marxist ideas, really spreads across Europe. That is an illusion of the proletariat. And since the proletariat will one day wield a certain power, this is a very pernicious illusion of the proletariat. We must not overlook the fact that the worst would come to pass if this illusion of the proletariat were to gain world domination, for then one would be compelled to overcome this domination again. It would be better to see how things are preparing and how they can be counteracted. Even assuming that the impulses of the proletariat come to power in certain areas, what would happen as a result? Well, they would come to power externally; you can kill as many people here or there as Bolshevism killed in Russia. But all these ideas are only suitable for plundering, only suitable for consuming the old and not for establishing the new. When the ideas of the proletariat are realized socially, when they become established, then the existing values will be gradually consumed, consumed in rapid progression. Please take only such facts – I will show you a few, they could be greatly increased – take just one such fact: the treasury in Russia, for example, still had an income of 2,852 million rubles in the ill-fated year 1917. Bolshevism broke in. It practiced plundering. The state revenue of Russia in 1918: 539 million rubles! That is about one-fifth of the previous year's revenue. From such figures you can calculate for yourselves the progression that must occur when plundering is carried out. One must not look at these things from the point of view of the judgments that are formed from above, but one must look at them from the point of view of how the objective course of events in human history unfolds under the influence of this fact. If this social order were to spread, one would arrive at zero, at nothing. But before this nothing happens, the reactions from the subconscious of people emerge here and there, and into the spreading proletarianism, which is permeated by Marxism, everything that has been prepared over the centuries, sometimes over millennia, in the beliefs, impulses, illusions or even follies of human beings must again mix in the most diverse centers. It will not mix in the same form in which it was there, but it will mix in a transformed form. Therefore, one must know it and be able to assess it in the right way.

Now the powers that are now partly doomed but partly still rule the world have always made it their more or less conscious or unconscious task to deceive people. How much has not been deceived by means of so-called historical instruction! In all kinds of countries, history is nothing more than a legend; history is only there to train people's minds to take the direction that seems pleasant to those in power and seems like the right direction. But the time has come when people will have to form their own judgment. Over the years, much has been done in this regard, precisely in order to correct one judgment or another. But today something else must be asked. Today, among the—one does not know how many to say in terms of numbers—among the hundreds of questions that arise urgently, above all the question must be asked: How did the various power relations, the various social structures come about, for which people here or there are enthusiastic or have been enthusiastic or have quickly forgotten how to enthuse in recent weeks? For years, humanity has lived by catchwords, catchwords such as “Prussian militarism” or “German militarism,” “League of Nations,” “international law,” and so on, which were just catchwords. These have dominated and confused people's minds. As I said, a lot has been said here to correct these judgments. But the important thing is to realize that, of course, these things will not appear in the same form in the near future, but we must know them so that we will recognize them when they appear in a new form.

It is not to be assumed, for example, that the Hohenzollern dynasty will reappear as such. But the feelings of the people among whom the Hohenzollern dynasty was able to live will continue to live, masquerading in a different form. Or, it is not even very likely that, even with the will of the Entente, which to a certain extent certainly exists, the unfortunate Habsburg dynasty will somehow resurface. But that is not the point. The sentiments which were able to keep this Habsburg dynasty in the hearts of men will live on. They will not, of course, go so far as to restore the Habsburg dynasty, but they will contribute to that reaction against proletarianism of which I spoke; they will reappear in quite a different form. Therefore, it is necessary to see through what will arise from the most diverse centers with a truly healthy judgment. Then it is a matter of looking at the circumstances, but looking with a gaze that is directed by reality. The facts as such have no value. In my books—you can find this in the most diverse places—I have spoken of fact fanaticism, which has such a devastating effect. This fanaticism for facts is rooted in the belief that what is seen outside is already a fact. It becomes a fact only by being harnessed to right judgment. But right judgment must have behind it the impulse of the right directing power.

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Take an example. You know that I have often said that in Central Europe all folk impulses are primarily conditioned by the fact that in this Central Europe the folk spirit works through the I, in contrast to the most diverse regions of Western Europe. But the I has the peculiarity, I might say, of circling up and down among the other regions, which are fixed. So let us assume: in the south and west, the sentient soul, mind or emotional soul, consciousness soul, but in the center the I (it is drawn). The I can be in the consciousness soul, in the mind soul, in the sentient soul. It oscillates up and down, so to speak, it finds its way into everything. Hence the peculiarity: If you look to the west of Europe, you have, I would say, sharply defined national contours. There is sharply defined nationality, nationality that you can really, I would say, define, that is within a good framework. Look to Central Europe, preferably to the German people, and you have a nature that is defined on all sides. And now follow history, judging these basic maxims in the right way. Look wherever you want, in the west as far as America, in the east as far as Russia, and see how German nationality has worked as a ferment everywhere. It penetrates into these foreign regions, is within them today, and will have an effect in the future, even if it has denationalized itself, as they say; it penetrates into these regions because the I soars and descends. It loses itself in it. You can find this out quite precisely from the fundamental nature of the people. Just look at how this whole Russian culture is permeated with the German character, how hundreds of thousands of Germans have immigrated there over a relatively short period of time, how they have given the national character its stamp to infinite depths. Look at the whole of the East and you will find this influence everywhere. Go back centuries and ask the question today. Take Hungary, for example, which is supposedly a Magyar culture. This Magyar culture is based in many ways on the fact that all kinds of Germanic elements have been introduced there as a ferment. The whole northern edge of Hungary is inhabited by the so-called Zipser Germans, who have naturally been majoritized, tyrannized, denationalized, who have suffered unspeakably, but who have provided a cultural ferment. If we go further east, to Transylvania, we find the Transylvanian Saxons, who once lived on the Rhine. If we go further to the so-called Banat, there you have the Swabians, who immigrated from Württemberg and who have left behind a cultural legacy. And if I were to show you a map of Hungary, you would see here the broad border of German people who have become Magyars, here the Zipser Germans, in the southeast the Transylvanian Saxons, here in Banat the Swabians, not counting those who have become individualized. And the peculiarity of this German nationality is that, precisely because its national spirit works through the ego, it perishes outwardly as a nation, so to speak, but forms a cultural ferment. That is what can contribute to the assessment of the effective forces. That is such an effective force.

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Let Andrássy and Karolyi work away, let an old politician in the old feudal sense, as they say, work away; the only reason that what they are doing is not a slogan is that we must take into account what will be brought about in the future from the subconscious of the people through such historical events, as I have shown you one - and hundreds of others are involved -, in the future. And that radiates into the rest of what is happening in Europe, and basically one has to proceed quite thoroughly if one wants to get to know this complicated structure of Europe today. For example, one must not forget, when judging an important participant in the future shaping of Europe, namely the European East, that to a certain extent everyone who spoke the truth about Russia in a historical context was not only a heretic, but also in mortal danger. Russian history is, of course, not much more than the other histories, but it is also a historical legend. For example, those who learn Russian history in the usual sense are not even aware of what was developed here a few years ago: that at about the same time as the Normans were exerting their influence in western Europe, Norman-Germanic influence was also being exerted in the east. And today's Russian history has an interest in showing, going back further and further, how everything, absolutely everything, comes from Slavic people, from Slavic elements, and also an interest in denying that the decisive element, the one element from which what is in the East is still deeply influenced today, comes from impulses that are Norman-Germanic in origin. You don't get much further back in Russian history than telling people – well, that's the stereotypical sentence that is always said –: We have a great country, but we have no order, come and rule us. That is more or less how it begins, while in truth it should be pointed out that what had spread in Russia by the time of the Mongol invasion was of Germanic-Norman origin and had a Germanic-Norman social configuration. But that means that something spread in Russia at that time that was overgrown by later conditions, which, I might say, has been preserved and conserved in its purest form, for example, within the social fabric of the British Empire. There you have a straight line of development. If you take the social development of the British Empire, you have a current that naturally changes over the centuries, but which is the straight line continuation of the old Norman-Germanic social constitution. In the east, towards Russia, you have the same current spreading out, but under the Mongol yoke, under the Mongol influence, I would say, from a certain point onwards it breaks off. That is to say, if the same thing that was prepared under Norman-Germanic influence in the social structure of the British Empire at the time of William the Conqueror and developed until the nineteenth century to occupy its present position in the world had developed further in Russia, Russia would be similar to England.

Nowhere has anything that has worked more deeply in the hearts and souls of people than in Russia. Now, we must not forget: what is it that comes with the Norman-Germanic influence? This Norman-Germanic influence, in working itself out, has also had counter-effects in the West. I say: here it has developed in a straight line, it has developed in the straightest line, but it has also had counter-effects here. What it encountered here as a counter-effect, from which it emancipated itself to a certain extent and which modified its developmental current, is, on the one hand, the Western Roman Catholic Church and, on the other, Romanism in general, which contains an abstract legal element and an abstract political element. So that we see the national influence, from which all the stratifications of the estates, all the formation of classes and castes, as they are found within the British essence, originate, joined by what came from the church and what came from Romanism. All this is at work in it, but in such a way that, to a certain extent, the British character emancipated itself early on from the profound influence of the Church, which then continued to have an effect and flourish in Central Europe and still does so today; but that, comparatively speaking, this character emancipated itself less from the Romanesque-abstract element of legal-political thinking. The truth is that this Norman-Germanic element has also extended into the various Slavic areas, which have been present on the territory of present-day Russia since ancient times, as the dominant element, as the element that has shaped the social structure.

This Norman-Germanic nature is based on a certain view, which then finds expression in social facts. This Norman-Germanic nature is based on the view that what has blood relationship, closer blood relationship, should also have this blood relationship in an inherited or hereditary way in a social way, based on a certain social institution of the clan and the superclan, the nearest family clan and the clan standing above it, which then leads to the prince, who rules over the sub-clan, the clan that goes further. This is what a social constitution brings about according to a certain blood configuration.

This is in the sharpest possible contradiction to what, for example, the Romanesque-legal-political essence assumes. The Romanesque-legal-political essence brings abstract connections everywhere, sets up everything according to contracts and the like, not according to blood. This is something that brings the facts less to mind than to paper, something radical. Only one thing was thoroughly diverted by this Germanic-Norman nature. If it had worked alone – this is, of course, a hypothesis, it could not have worked alone – but if it had worked alone, there would never have been a monarchical state constitution in any European territory. For a monarchical state constitution does not lie in the development of those social impulses that emanate from the Norman-Germanic essence, but rather, this Norman-Germanic essence is based on the impulse of an organization according to clans, according to family configurations, which are relatively individual and independent of each other, and only from certain points of view do they unite under a prince, who then controls the overarching clan. And above all: apart from this, a monarch could never have taken hold of this Norman-Germanic essence, and pure monotheism could never have come from this essence, because it came from the south – I would actually say from the south-east – through the theocratic-Jewish element. If the Norman-Germanic element had remained purely isolated, it would be easier today to assert the rightful monotheism, which in turn does not accept the abstract single God, but rather the succession of hierarchies, angels, arch angeloi and so on, and not the nonsense that the one God, for example, protects two armies that are furiously facing each other, the Christian and the Turk at the same time, because he is the one God of the whole world. The nonsense that proliferates as abstract monotheism would never have been able to take hold, because within this element, abstract monotheism was not present. The people were pagans in the modern sense, that is, they recognized the most diverse spiritual beings that guide the forces of nature, and thus lived in a spiritual world, albeit in an atavistic way. What monotheism is, a nonsense, was only imposed from the southeast by the theocratic element. That is why it is so difficult today to get across what must necessarily be accepted: the diversity of spiritual beings that guide natural forces and natural events, the gods. But it was on Russian soil that the damping down of what came from the north took place to a certain extent. Some time ago I even talked about the name Russian here. You will remember that I pointed out that the name Russian indicated where these people came from in the north. They called themselves Vaeringjar.

But the actual idea of the state is a construct that should be carefully studied. This idea of the state comes, in a certain respect, from the same corner of the weather where many other significant things for Europe come from. Especially when discussing such things, one must remember that history can only be considered symptomatically. When we consider some phenomenon that is an external fact, we must recognize it as a symptom. In Russia, as long as this Norman-Germanic influence was present and shaping the social structure, there was no sign of any state idea. The Slavic areas were, so to speak, closed in on themselves, and what had spread was what I have called the clan idea. The clan idea has entwined this in a network-like way. The various closed Slavic areas had within them what modern man might call the democratic element, but at the same time linked to a certain longing for a lack of domination, with a certain insight that centralized ruling powers are not actually needed to bring order to the world, but only to create disorder. This lived in these closed Slavic areas. And in what extended from the Norman-Germanic element, the clan idea actually lived, the idea that was connected with blood.

Now came the Mongol invasion. These Mongols are indeed portrayed as being quite evil. But the worst thing they did was actually demanding high tributes and taxes, and they were more or less satisfied when people paid their taxes, of course in the form of natural produce. But what they brought – and please take this as symptomatic and don't think that I am saying that the idea of the state came from the Mongols – what they brought at that time, taken symptomatically, is the idea of the state. The monarchical idea of the state comes straight from this corner of the world from which the Mongols also came, only that it was brought to the further west of Europe earlier. It comes from that corner of the world that one finds when one follows the culture, or, for that matter, the barbarian wave that rolled over from Asia. What remained in Russia of the Mongols is essentially the idea that a single ruler with his paladins has to exercise a kind of state rule. This was essentially borne by the monarchical idea of the khans, and that was adopted there. In Western Europe it was only adopted earlier, but it came from the same weather angle. And essentially it was a Tartar-Mongolian idea that put together the so-called state structure in Russia. And so for a long time precisely that which characterized the culture of the West from many points of view proved to be without influence in Russia: feudalism, which was actually without influence in Russia because, by skipping monarchy spread, which was always disturbed in the West, initially by feudalism, by the feudal lords, who actually always fought the central monarchical power and who were an antithesis to the monarchical power.

The Roman Church is the second. This was ineffective in the East because the Eastern Church had already separated from the Western Church in the tenth century. The Greek-Roman, Roman-Greek education, as it has worked in the West and has contributed very much to the development of the modern bourgeoisie, has been ineffective in Russia. Therefore, the monarchical idea of the state, which has been brought in by the Mongolians, has taken its deepest roots there.

You see, you have a few of the impulses that one must know, because they will appear in the most diverse ways, masked, changed, in metamorphosis. Here or there you will see this or that flash up. You will only appreciate it correctly if you appreciate it from this point of view, which I have now stated. And above all, you will recognize the importance of the fact that within the establishment of world domination by the English-speaking population, which I have been talking about for many years now, the training of the consciousness soul is essentially effective, that this is precisely appropriate to our age, and that a healthy judgment should be applied in assessing the circumstances.

The social question will play a major role in the shaping of conditions in the future. The social thinking that already exists among the proletariat can only lead to overexploitation, to degradation, to destruction. It is a matter of really realizing that the shaping that the social question assumes, the shaping in particular that the proletarian movement will assume, makes it necessary that what today is furthest removed from spirituality as proletarian feeling must be brought closer to spirituality. What seems to be furthest apart on the outside is intimately related on the inside: proletarian will and spirituality. Of course, the proletarian today fights against spirituality with his hands and feet – one can say with his hands and feet, because he does not fight much with his head. But what he wants, without knowing it, cannot be achieved without spirituality. Spirituality must join forces with it. And it must join forces in all areas. And one must really acquire a feeling that one is at an important turning point in time. The mood that has prevailed in the most diverse areas in the nineteenth century must pass.

If you observe individual events and evaluate them correctly, you can already see, I might say, if I may express myself trivially, which way the wind is blowing. Through Mr. Englert's kindness I was recently given a letter written from Russia, which very vividly describes present-day Russian conditions. It also talks about art. The way in which people are introduced to art is very interesting; but what they paint, these people who are brought in directly from the factory, people who have lung diseases and can no longer work in the factory and are then placed in an artistic institution so that they learn to paint something there, so that they are driven from the proletariat into art, the painting – they don't paint quite like they do in our dome, but you can see it, they start painting in such a way that from this beginning, what is painted in our dome will ultimately result, even if it is still called Futurism today. That is on the march. Especially in those things where there is no programmatic approach, it becomes clear what impulses lie in the present. Those who look at programs – not to mention government programs – will always go astray. Those who look at the impulses that develop alongside and between the programs, namely from the unconscious, will see much that is radiating in the world today. You can be quite sure that the paths will be found, even if it is difficult. Once people begin to read something straight from the impulses that are emerging today in the proletariat in such a primitive, predatory way, I will not say the things themselves, which are imperfect and must be replaced by others, but things like my mysteries or the anthroposophical books, they will only be read with the right interest by the better elements that are streaming upwards from the proletariat, while what the bourgeoisie licked its fingers around in the nineteenth century: Gustav Freytag's 'Soll und Haben' or similar works, or Gottfried Keller, will interest no one. Today, for example, it is an insult to humanity to mention Gottfried Keller in the same breath as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. While Conrad Ferdinand Meyer represents an element of the future, an element that actually contains true spiritual life for the future, Gottfried Keller is the bourgeois poet of the sleeping humanity of Seldwyler Switzerland.

This must be seen everywhere and in all areas. There will be no interest in the future for this when people put models in studios and imitate what nature can do much better and then delight in it, whether it looks really natural or whether it is really like the model. After that, one will demand that something is there in the world that is not made by nature itself. Understanding for this will have to be prepared. Therefore, the model as such had to be fought against here as well. You remember how I once spoke about art from this point of view years ago. An understanding must be created that one follows the impulses that are there. For example, the stupidity that people want to learn about how the people live, say, by reading Berthold Auerbach's “Village Stories” or similar stuff, where a person who knows the people, well, as one who goes out into the countryside on Sunday afternoons and looks at the people from the outside, describes how one has so beautifully described the people, must end. That is not what matters. What matters is not observing the temporary, but the eternal that lives in man must be observed more and more. That is what matters.

We will talk more about these things tomorrow.

It relates to an elementary need of every human soul that on the last day of the year our thoughts should dwell on the transitory nature of time. For this need we may well look back in self-examination to find what has entered our external life and also our soul during the course of the year. We may well cast a glance back to the progress we have made in life, to the fruits of the experiences life has offered us. From such retrospect some degree of light may fall upon feelings that made our life seem more or less worthwhile, more or less difficult, or more or less satisfactory. We are indeed never able to observe our life as if it were the life of an isolated human being; we are obliged to consider it in its connection with the world as a whole and mankind as a whole. And if we are earnestly striving for an anthroposophical view of the world, we will feel the need with particular insistence to consider our relation to the world again and again at this constant turning-point of time, this ending of one year and beginning of another.

Since, however, our present review takes place at a time when there is so much turmoil in our souls, when all that mankind has suffered in these last four-and-a-half years is still burdening us, when as anthroposophists we observe our relation to the world and to humanity against the background of unprecedented world events, then our survey of the past year takes on quite a special character.

The thoughts I particularly wish to bring you this evening may perhaps be looked upon as an insertion, irrelevant to our previous context. At the moment we are holding before our mind's eye the transitory nature of time and of events in time, and how all this affects the human soul. But as students of spiritual science we cannot forget that when we look upon time flowing by and upon our experiences during its passing, we meet with many difficulties. Those especially whose hearts and minds are given over seriously to anthroposophical thought confront these difficulties in their observation of the world.

You all know the strange experience people have who have not travelled very much in trains. As they look out the window they receive the impression that the whole landscape is moving, hurrying past them. Of course it is they themselves who are moving with the train, but they ascribe the movement to the land the train is passing through. Gradually by accustoming themselves to their situation they get the better of this illusion and put in its place the correct idea of the sights they see through the window. Now, fundamentally but in a more complicated way, we ourselves—where the affairs of the world are concerned—are in a similar situation to those good people in the train. They are deceived about what is at rest in the landscape and what is moving. We sit within our physical and etheric bodily nature that was given to us as a kind of vehicle when we left the spiritual realms to come into physical existence between birth and death, and in this vehicle we hurry through the events of this world. We observe the world by means of this physical vehicle in which we rush along the course of earthly existence. And the world as we observe it in this way is in most cases an illusory experience. So that really we may venture on the following comparison: we see the world as falsely as the man in the train who imagines the landscape is rushing past him. But to correct the illusory view of the world to which we are prone is not so easy as correcting the illusion one has while looking out of the train window.

It is at this special moment of New Year's Eve, dear friends, when we are still within the year in which we have had to correct so many current conceptions of the world, that such a thought may enter your souls. You know what I have told you of the experiences we would have if we were to live consciously the life from childhood to a ripe age that now we live unconsciously. I have told you how the human being matures in definite life periods, so that at definite stages he is able to know certain things out of his own power. People have to give up all manner of illusions concerning the various conditions of maturity in human life—for the reasons I have just been mentioning.

There are two kinds of illusions to which we are most subject in life, illusions that impress themselves upon our minds at such a time as this, as we glance over the past year and toward the coming one. These illusions arise from our having no idea in ordinary consciousness of how we relate to certain conditions of the outer world. This outer world is not only an aggregate of things kept in order in space; it is also a succession of events in time. Through your senses you observe the outer events taking place around you, in so far as these are natural events. You observe in the same way natural events in the human kingdom. The world is engaged in the processes of becoming. This is not generally recognized, but it is so. The processes go on at a definite speed. There is always a certain speed in what is coming about. But then turn your gaze from these events to what goes on within yourself. You know how processes go on in you both consciously and unconsciously. You do not stand in the world as a finished, self-contained spatial being, but you stand within continual happening, continual becoming, within processes continually going on and continually proceeding at a definite speed.

Let us consider the speed at which we ourselves hurry through the world in relation to the speed belonging to natural events. Natural science pays no heed to the tremendous difference existing between the speed of our own Passage through the world and the speed of natural events. When we compare the part of our life that is bound up with sense observation of the outer world and the drawing of our life experiences from such observation, when we consider this part of our life in its processes of arising and passing away and compare it to the external natural events toward which our senses are directed, we find that our passage through the stream of time is far slower than that of natural events. This is important for us to bear in mind. Events in nature take place comparatively quickly; we go more slowly. Perhaps you will remember that I referred to this difference when I gave a lecture at one time not far away, at Liestal, on “Human Life from the Standpoint of Spiritual Science.” From birth to change of teeth takes seven years for us human beings, that is, for the development of the physical body. Then we need another seven years for the development of our etheric body. Comparing ourselves with the plant kingdom, for instance—which can be regarded for the moment as corresponding to our etheric body—we can say that it takes just one year for the plant kingdom, represented by an annual plant, to go through all the development that can be gone through in the etheric body. We human beings need seven years for what the annual plant goes through in a single year. In other words, external nature, as revealed in the plant world, hurries along seven times more quickly than ourselves. And where the etheric world is concerned, everything is subject to the laws revealed in the plant kingdom.

You will see the significance of this, dear friends, if you reflect, for instance, on how things appear when you are traveling in a slow train beside another, faster train going in the same direction. When you yourself are traveling along slowly, the speed of the other train will not seem to you as great as if you were standing still. Or if you are traveling in a train fairly fast, but one that is still going more slowly than an express train, the express will appear to you quite slow. But go just as fast as the express and you will stay beside it. Thus the picture you have of the other train changes according to the speed at which you yourself are moving.

Now, the speed about which we want to talk here, that is, the speed at which we let our etheric body flow along, has to do with much more than merely spatial relations. It has to do with our whole judgment and experience of, and our whole attitude toward, the outer world. The spiritual scientist able to investigate these matters will say: How would it be if human beings were differently organized? if, for instance, we were so organized that we needed only one year to pass from change-of-teeth to puberty? How would it be if we had exactly the same speed as everything in outer nature that is subject to the laws of etheric life? if we got our second teeth in our first year of life, and by the end of our second year were as advanced as we are now at puberty at the age of fourteen or fifteen? Well, dear friends, then in the course of our own life we would be entirely within the course of natural events in so far as they are subject to the etheric life. We would no longer be able to distinguish ourselves from nature. For in reality we are distinguished from nature through the fact of having a different speed in moving forward through the stream of time. Otherwise we would take it for granted that we belonged to nature. And one thing above all must be pointed out: if we human beings were to parallel the speed of events in external nature, we could never become ill from an inner cause. For an illness coming to man from within actually has its origin in the difference in speed of human beings from that of natural events subject to the etheric life. Thus our human life would be quite different if we were not distinguished from the outer world by living seven times more slowly.

So we look back over the year on this New Year's Eve unaware that in our experience during the year we have fallen out of the life of the world. We first come to realize this when after having lived a fairly good part of our life, we begin to carry out repeatedly and really earnestly these New Year reflections. People who can judge these things and who practice this retrospect regularly, will agree with me out of their quite ordinary life-experience that by the age, say, of fifty, after constant practice of this retrospect, we are obliged to admit that we have never actually drawn out of the year what it is possible to draw out. In many ways we leave unused the experiences that could have enriched us. We learn seven times less than we could learn from nature if we did not go through life seven times more slowly than nature herself. Upon arriving at our fiftieth year we have to say to ourselves: Had you actually been able to make full use of each year by absorbing everything that the year wanted to give you, then you would really only need to be seven or eight years old, at the most ten or twelve; for during that much time you would have sucked out everything that has in fact taken you five decades to absorb.

But there is something else. We would never be able to perceive that the world is a material world if we had the same speed of movement. Because we do have a different speed, the world outside, moving more quickly, appears to us as material while our own life appears to us as soul and spirit. If we were to move forward with the same speed as external nature, there would be no distinction between our soul-spiritual character and the course of outer nature. We would consider ourselves part of outer nature and experience everything as having the same soul-spiritual significance as ourselves. We would be fitted into the world quite differently. When we look back over the year on New Year's Eve we are deceived by reason of our own speed being so much slower than that of the world. For although we may look back carefully, much escapes us that would not if we were proceeding at the same pace as the world. This, my dear friends, is an undertone arising from the ground of anthroposophy, that should permeate the serious mood that befits such retrospect on the part of those dedicated to spiritual science. It should tell us that we human beings must look for other approaches to the world than those that can only be found on the external path of life, for that way only leads us to illusions.

This is one illusion. In confronting the world with our senses we move much more slowly through the world than does external nature.

But there is still another illusion. It confronts us when we reflect upon all that lights up our thinking, all that lends wings to our thinking, in so far as this arises from within us. It confronts us when we observe the kind of thinking that depends upon our will. The outer world of the senses does not indeed give us what it could give us in response to our will. We have first to go to meet the things, or events come to meet us. That is different from when we grasp our concepts and ideas as they throw their faint light out of our will. This again has another speed. When we consider our soul-life in so far as it is a life of thought, though connected with our will, our desires and wishes, we find that we have a different speed from the speed of the world we are passing through between birth and death. And if we investigate the matter anthroposophically we come upon the curious fact that in our thoughts, in so far as they depend upon our will, we move much more quickly than the external world.

Thus you see that in all that is connected with our senses we move more slowly, in all that depends upon our thinking we move more quickly, than the pace of life outside us. Actually, we move so quickly in our thoughts—to the extent that they are governed by our will, our longing, our wishes—that we have the feeling, even though unconsciously, (and this is true of everyone) that the year is really much too long. For our sense perception it is seven times too short. For our comprehension through thought, in so far as thoughts depend on our wishes and longings, we have the deep unconscious feeling that the year is much too long. We would like it to be much shorter, convinced that we would be able in a far shorter time to understand the thoughts grasped from our own wishes, our own will. In the depths of every human soul there is something that is never brought into consciousness but that is working in the whole soul experience, the whole soul-mood, and coloring all our subjective life. It is something that tells us that so far as our thoughts are concerned, it would suffice us to have a year of only Sundays and no weekdays at all. For in this kind of thinking a human being lives in such a way that actually he only wishes to experience the Sundays. Even if he is no longer conscious of it, he thinks of the weekdays as holding him up; their place in his life is only as something of which he has no need for his progress in thinking. When we are concerned with thoughts dependent on our will, on our longings and wishes, we are soon finished; in this sphere we move quickly. This is one of the reasons for our egotism. And it is one of the reasons for our obstinacy about what we ourselves think.

If you were not organized, dear friends, in the way I have just described, if with your thoughts you would really follow the course of the external world and not go forward so fast—seven times as fast as the outer world, if you did not only want to use Sundays, then your soul would be so attuned to the world that your own opinion would never seem more valuable to you than anyone else's. You would be able to adjust yourself easily to another's opinion. Just think how large a part it plays in us as human beings, this insistence of ours on the value of our own opinion! From a certain point of view we always think others are in the wrong, and they only become right when we feel disposed to consider them so.

Human beings are indeed curiously contradictory creatures! On the one hand, in so far as we have senses we move much more slowly than the outer world; on the other hand, in so far as we have will in our thinking, we move much more swiftly. So our view is blurred when we look out upon the world, because we are always given to illusion. We do not realize that we have fallen away from nature and are therefore able to become ill. Nor do we realize how we acquire materialistic ideas about the world. Such materialistic ideas are just as false as the idea that the landscape is rushing past us in the opposite direction to our train. We only have these false conceptions because we are moving seven times more slowly than the world. And then also, we cherish the secret thought: if only it were always Sunday!—because, comparatively speaking, the weekdays seem quite unnecessary for the external ideas we want to form about the world out of our wishes and out of our will. Everyone has this secret thought. The human soul-attitude is not always described so truthfully as Bismarck once described it. Bismarck made a curious remark about the last Hohenzollern emperor. While expressing his opinion about what would happen to Germany because of this emperor, he said, “This man wants to live as if every day were his birthday. Most of us are glad to get our birthday out of the way with all its good wishes and excitements, but he wants a birthday all the time!” That was Bismarck's careful characterization at the beginning of the nineties of the last century. Now, it is human egotism that makes our birthday different from all other days. No one really wants to have a birthday all the time, but from a certain point of view one would like it always to be Sunday—one could easily manage with that much knowledge! And although it wears a deceptive mask, much in our mood of soul rests upon this wish of ours to have only Sundays.

In former epochs of evolution the illusions arising from these things were corrected in manifold ways by atavistic clairvoyance. They are corrected least of all in our age. What will correct them, however, what must arise, what I ask you to take into your souls today as a kind of social impulse, is this, that we go deeply into spiritual science as it is intended here, that we do not take it as theory but in the living way I have often described. We then have the possibility within spiritual science of correcting inwardly, in our souls, the illusions originating in those two sources of error. Anthroposophical spiritual science—and let us be particularly clear about this at the turning-point of the year—is something that lets us experience the world outside us in accordance with reality, the world that otherwise one does not experience truly, due to one's going through the world too slowly. Everything depends, actually, on how we ourselves relate to things. Just think for a moment how everything does depend upon our own attitude toward the world! To become clear about these things we should sometimes hold ideas before our souls that as hypotheses are quite impossible. Think how the physicist tells you that certain notes—C - D - E, say, in a certain octave—have a certain number of vibrations, that is, the air vibrates a certain number of times. You perceive nothing of the vibrations; you just hear the notes. But imagine you were organized in such a way (this is of course an impossible idea but it helps us to make something else intelligible)—imagine that you could perceive each separate vibration in the air: then you would hear nothing of the notes. The speed of your own life depends entirely on how you perceive things. The world appears to us as it does according to the speed we ourselves have as compared to the world speed. But spiritual science makes us aware of existing reality, apart from our personal relation to the world.

We speak in anthroposophy, or spiritual science, of how our earth has gradually developed by first going through a Saturn period, then a Sun period, and a Moon period, finally arriving at this Earth period. But naturally everything continues to be present. In the period in which we now live, our Earth existence, other worlds are preparing their Saturn period, still others their Sun period. This may be observed by spiritual science. Even now our Saturn existence is still here. We know that our earth has gone beyond that stage; other worlds have just reached it. One can observe how the Saturn stage arises. The power to observe it, however, depends upon first changing the speed in which one will follow the events; otherwise they cannot be seen. Thus spiritual science in a certain connection enables us to live with what is true and real, with what actually takes place in the world. And if we take it up in a living way—this anthroposophical spiritual science which I have described as the new creative work of the Spirits of Personality—if we do not merely take it as a work of man for our time but as a revelation from heavenly heights, if we receive the impulses of spiritual science into ourselves livingly, then the Spirits of Personality will do what is so necessary for our time: that is, they will carry us out beyond the illusions caused by our speed being different from that of the world. They will unite us properly with the world so that, at least in our feelings about the world, we will be able to correct many things.

Then we can experience the results of our spiritual scientific striving. In the course of the past year I have mentioned many of them. Tonight in this New Year's Eve retrospect I want only to remind you of something I have spoken of before from another aspect: that spiritual science, when taken up earnestly, keeps us young in a certain way, does not let us grow old as we would without it. This is one of the results of spiritual science. And it is of quite special importance for the present time. It means that we are able, however old we may be, to learn something in the way we learnt as a child. Usually when someone arrives at his fiftieth year, he feels from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness that he has lived in the world a long time. Ask your contemporaries whether at fifty they still feel inclined to do much in the way of learning! Even if they say “yes,” notice whether they really do it. A lively acceptance of anthroposophical concepts and ideas can gradually confer on people of a ripe age the power still to learn as children learn—in other words, to become increasingly young in soul—not abstractedly as often happens, but in such a way that they are actually able to learn just as formerly they learnt when eight or nine years old. Thereby the effect of the difference between our speed and that of the world is in a certain way adjusted. Thereby, though we may be of mature age chronologically, our soul does not allow us to be old; our soul makes us a child in a certain sense, makes us behave toward the world as a child. When we are at the age of fifty we can say to ourselves: by living more slowly than the external world we have actually only received into ourselves what we would have received in seven or ten years if we had lived at the same pace as the world. But by remaining fresh we have kept the power to behave as we would have behaved at seven, eight, nine or ten years. That makes a balance. And—because things always do balance in the world—this brings about the other adjustment: the reducing, in a way, what has a greater speed, namely, arbitrary thinking, those Sunday wishes as I described them. This will make it possible not always to want it to be Sunday but to use the weekdays too for learning, making a school of the whole of life.

It is true that I am suggesting a kind of ideal to you, one that is strictly anthroposophical. But perhaps, dear friends, many of you will have had deeper experiences on the last four New Year's Eves than on former ones. Anyone, however, studying world events very seriously may well regard this present New Year's Eve, in comparison to the last four, the gravest of them all. It demands of us that we enter deeply into world events, uniting our thoughts with all the ideas we can grasp through our relation to spiritual science, concerning what is necessary for the world now and in the nearest future. With the help of spiritual science we should stop sleeping in regard to world events. We must become fully awake. A mere glance today will show you that people are fast asleep. Compare modern life with the life of former ages, and you will see how much it has changed for young and old alike. How does this materialistic age affect youth today in an overwhelming majority of cases? Truly, the ideals of our modern youth are no longer as fresh, as bright, as alive, as they were in earlier times. Youth has become a youth that makes demands. There is no great desire on the part of youth to direct their soul-mood to looking forward in life, to painting ideals so full of light for the future that they are able to ennoble life. Already in youth there is the wish to exploit what they find in life. But this results in the old being unable to receive what can only be suitably received during old age. Youth uses up its forces, and old age leaves the treasures of life strewn on its path. Youth is no longer sufficiently hopeful, and old age has a resignation that is not real. Today youth no longer turns to the old to ask: will the young dreams that flow out of my heart be realized? Age hardly finds it possible today to answer: Yes, they will be realized. Too frequently it says: I too have dreamt, and alas, my youthful dreams have not been fulfilled.—Life has a sobering effect upon us.

All these things are bound up with the misfortunes of our time. They are all connected with what has so profoundly shattered mankind. When you look at them carefully, however, you will feel the need for anthroposophical impulses to be deeply inscribed in your souls. For if we wish to be awake at this turning-point of the year, we must ask ourselves: What does this era really signify? What can the future bring? What can possibly evolve out of all that civilized mankind has undergone in the chaos of these last years? If we face these questions as wide-awake human beings, then another question arises, one that is deeply connected with all our possible hopes for the future of mankind. These hopes, I could also say these anxieties, have often faced us in recent years, especially when we were giving our attention to the human beings who are now four, five, six, seven or eight years old. We who are older have much behind us that can support our souls against what is coming. There was much in the past that gave us joy, a joy that will not be experienced by those who are now five or six or eight or nine.

But when we look back over the year, dear friends, on this New Year's Eve, we find nothing in the world is absolute. Everything appears to be an illusion to us, because on the one hand we go too slowly, on the other hand too quickly in relation to the world. Nothing is absolute; all is relative. And, as you will see at once, the question that arises for us is not merely theoretical, it is a very real question: When people wonder about the future of mankind, how does it look in their souls if they have no connection with the ideas of spiritual science? One can, of course, sleep; but even if one is unconscious, this implies a lack of responsibility toward human progress. One can also be awake, and we should be awake.Then that question can still be asked concerning people's attitude in general: How is mankind's future regarded by the human souls who are not able to approach spiritual science? People of this kind are only too numerous in the world. I am referring not only to the dried-up, self-satisfied materialists, but to those countless others who today would like to be idealists in their own fashion but have a certain fear of the real spiritual. They are the abstract idealists who talk of all kinds of beautiful things, of “Love your enemy,” and of splendid social reforms, but who never succeed in coming to grips concretely with the world. They are idealists from weakness, not from spiritual vision. They have no desire to see the spirit; they want to keep it at a distance.

Tonight at this turning-point of time, I should like to put the following question: When a man of this kind is sincere in the belief that he lives for the spirit, when he is convinced of the creative weaving of the spirit throughout the world, but does not have the courage to meet it in all its concrete reality as it wants to reveal itself today through spiritual science: if such a man is a true representative of the whole, or even part, of the modern world, what kind of picture do we have of him? I don't want to give you an abstract description; I would rather give you one taken from the newspapers of the world, of a man whom I have already mentioned in another connection. It is a man who for the reasons just described holds back from taking up spiritual science, believing that he can attain social ideals without it, believing that he can speak of human progress and the true being of man without taking up spiritual science, a man who from his own standpoint is honest. I have often mentioned his name—Walther Rathenau—and I have pointed out what is decidedly weak about him; you will remember, however, that I once referred favorably to his “Critique of the Times.” He is so eminently a type, indeed, one of the best examples of the people of our day who are idealists, people who hold the belief that a spiritual something pervades and permeates the world, but who are not able to find it in its concreteness, that spiritual reality which alone can bring healing for all that is now pulsing so destructively through the world. It would be helpful, therefore, to learn how such a man regards the present course of the world from his standpoint outside spiritual science, what such a man says to himself in all honesty. That is always instructive, my dear friends. I would like, therefore—because all of you may not have read it—to bring before our souls the message Walther Rathenau²⁰ has just written to the world at large.

He writes the following: “A German calls to all the nations. With what right? With the right of one who foretold the war, who foresaw how the war would end, who recognized the catastrophe that was coming, who braved mockery, scorn, and doubt and for four long years exhorted those in power to seek reconciliation. With the right of one who for decades carried in his heart the premonition of complete collapse, who knows it is far more serious than either friends or enemies think it to be. Furthermore, with the right of one who has never been silent when his own people were in the wrong and who dares to stand up for the rights of his people.

“The German people are guiltless. In innocence they have done wrong. Out of the old, childlike dependence they have in all innocence placed themselves at the service of their lords and masters. They did not know that these lords and masters, though outwardly the same, had changed inwardly. They knew nothing of the independent responsibility a people can have. They never thought of revolution. They put up with militarism, they put up with feudalism, letting themselves be led and organized. They allowed themselves to kill and be killed as ordered, and believed what was said to them by their hereditary leader. The German people have innocently done wrong by believing. Our wrong will weigh heavily upon us. If the Powers will look into our hearts they will recognize our guiltlessness.”

You see here a man pointing to what Judaism and Christianity point, namely, a Providence—Who is grasped, however, in an abstract form.

“ Germany is like those artificially fertile lands that flourish as long as they are watered by a canal system. If a single sluice bursts, all life is destroyed and the land becomes a desert.

“We have food for half the population. The other half have to work for the wages of other nations, buying raw materials and selling manufactured goods. If either the work or the return on the work is withheld, they die or lose their house. By working to the extremity of their powers our people saved five or six milliards a year. This went into the building of plants and factories, railways and harbors, and the carrying on of research. This enabled us to maintain a profit and a normal growth. If we are to be deprived of our colonies, our empire, our metals, our ships, we will become a powerless, indigent country. If it comes to that—well, our forefathers were also poor and powerless, and they served the spirit of the earth better than we. If our imports and exports are restricted—and, contrary to the spirit of Wilson's Fourteen Points, we are threatened with having to pay three or four times the amount of the damage in Belgium and northern France, which probably runs to twenty milliards—well, what happens then? Our trade will be without profit. We will work to live miserably with nothing to spare. We will be unable to maintain things, renew things, develop things, and the country with its buildings, its streets, its organization, will go to rack and ruin. Technology will lose ground; research will come to an end. We have the choice of unproductive trade or emigration or profoundest misery.

“It means extermination. We will not complain but accept our destiny and silently go under. The best of us will neither emigrate nor commit suicide but share in this fate with our fellows. Most of the people have not yet realized their fate; they do not yet know that they and their children have been sacrificed. Even the other peoples of the earth do not yet realize that this is a question of the very life of an entire race of human beings. Perhaps this is not even realized by those with whom we have been fighting. Some of them say ‘Justice!’, others say ‘Reparation!’; there are even those who say ‘Vengeance!’ Do they realize that what they are calling ‘Justice,’ ‘Reparation,’ ‘Vengeance’ is murder?

“We who go forward mutely but not blindly to meet our destiny, now once more raise our voice and make our plaint for the whole world to hear. In our profound and solemn suffering, in the sadness of separation, in the heat of lament, we call to the souls of the peoples of the earth—those who were neutral, those who were friendly, those belonging to free countries beyond the seas, to the young builders of new states. We call to the souls of the nations who were our enemies, peoples of the present day and those who will come after us:

“We are being annihilated. The living body and spirit of Germany is being put to death. Millions of German human creatures are being driven to hunger and death, to homelessness, slavery and despair. One of the most spiritual peoples on the whole earth is perishing. Her mothers, her children, those still unborn, are being condemned to death.”

There is no passion, dear friends, in all this; it is shrewd forethought—dispassionately, intellectually calculated. The man is a genuine materialist able to assess the real conditions calmly and intellectually. He entertains no illusions, but from his own materialistic standpoint honestly faces the truth. He has thought it all out; it is not something that can be disproved by a few words or by feelings of sympathy or antipathy. It has been thought through by the dispassionate intellect of a man who for decades has been able to say “this will come,” who has also had the courage to say these things during the war.

It was to no avail. In Berlin and other places in Germany I always introduced into my lectures just what Rathenau was saying at the time.

“We, knowing, seeing, are being annihilated, exterminated, by those who also know and see. Not like the dull people of olden times who were led stupid and unsuspecting into banishment and slavery; and not by idolators who fancy they are doing honor to a Moloch. No, we are being annihilated by peoples who are our brothers, who have European blood, who acknowledge God and Christ upon Whom they have built their life and customs and moral foundations, peoples who lay claim to humanity, chivalry, and civilization, who deplore the shedding of human blood, who talk of ‘a just peace’ and ‘a League of Nations’ and take upon themselves the responsibility for the destiny of the entire world.

“Woe to those, and to the souls of those, who dare to give this blood-rule the name ‘justice’! Have courage, speak out, call it by its name—for its name is Vengeance!

“But I ask you, you spiritual men among all the peoples, priests of all the religions, and you who are scholars, statesmen, artists. I ask you, reverend Father, highest dignitary of the Catholic Church, I ask you in the name of God:

“Were it the last, most wretched of all nations, would it be right that for vengeance' sake one of the peoples of the earth should be exterminated by other peoples who are their brothers? Ought a living race of spiritual Europeans, with their children and those still unborn, ought they to be robbed of their spiritual and bodily existence, condemned to forced labor, cast out from the community of the living?

“If this monstrous thing comes to pass, in comparison with which this most terrible war was only a prelude, the world shall know what is happening, the world shall know what it is in the very act of perpetrating. It shall never dare to say: ‘We did not know this. We did not wish it.’ Before God, in the face of its own responsibility to eternity, it shall say openly, calmly, coldly: ‘We know it and we desire it.’

Rathenau also wishes mankind to awake and to see!

“Milliards! Fifty, a hundred, two hundred milliards—what is that? Is it a question of money?

“Money, the wealth or poverty of a man, these count for little. Every one of us will face poverty with joy and pride if it will save our country. Yet in the unfortunate language of economic thought we have no other way of expressing the living force of a people except in the wretched concept of millions and tens of millions. We do not measure a man's life-force according to the grams of blood he has, and yet we can measure the life-force of a nation according to the two or three hundred billion it possesses. Loss of fortune is then not only poverty and want but slavery, double slavery for a people having to buy half of what they need to sustain life. This is not the arbitrary, personal slavery of old that was either terrible or mild; this is the anonymous, systematic, scientific forced-labor between peoples. In the abstract concept of a hundred billion we find not money and well-being alone, but blood and freedom. The demand is not that of a merchant, ‘Pay me money!’ but Shylock's demand, ‘Give me the blood of your body!’ It is not a matter of the Stock Exchange; by the mutilation of the body of the state, by the withdrawal of land and power, it is life itself. Anyone coming to Germany in twenty years' time…”

What now follows is once more the result of cold intellectual foresight. This is not spoken in the way people speak who are asleep when they observe world events!

“In twenty years' time anyone coming to Germany who knew it as one of the most flourishing countries on the earth, will bow their heads in shame and grief. The great cities of antiquity, Babylon, Nineva, Thebes, were built of white clay. Nature let them fall into decay and leveled them to the ground, or rounded them off into hills. German cities will not survive as ruins but as half-destroyed stone blocks, still partly occupied by wretched people. A few quarters in a town will be alive, but everything bright, everything cheerful will have disappeared. A company of tired people move along the crumbling footpaths. Liquor joints are conspicuous by their lights. Country roads are in terrible condition, woods have been cut down, in the fields little grain is sprouting. Harbors, railways and canals have fallen into disrepair, and everywhere there stand as unhappy landmarks the high buildings of former greatness falling into ruin. And all around us are flourishing countries, old ones grown stronger and new ones in the brilliance and vigor of modern technique and power, nourished on the blood of this dying country, and served by its slave-driven sons. The German spirit that has sung and thought for the world becomes a thing of the past. A people God created to live, a people still young and vigorous, leads an existence of living death.

“There are Frenchmen who say, ‘Let this people die. No longer do we want a strong neighbor.’ There are Englishmen who say, ‘Let this people die. No longer do we want a rival on the continent.’ There are Americans who say, ‘Let this people die. No longer do we want an economic competitor.’—Are these persons really representative of their nations? No, indeed. All strong nations forswear fear and envy. Are those who thirst for vengeance voicing the feelings of their nations? Emphatically, no. This ugly passion is of short duration in civilized men.

“Nevertheless, if those who are fearful or envious or revengeful prevail for a single hour, in the hour of decision, and if the three great statesmen of their nations violently contend with one another, then destiny is fulfilled.

“Then the cornerstone of Europe's arch, once the strongest stone, is crushed; the boundaries of Asia are pushed forward to the Rhine; the Balkans reach out to the North Sea. And a despairing horde, a spirit alien to European ways, encamp before the gates of Western civilization, threatening the entrenched nations not with weapons but with deadly infection.

“Right and prosperity can never arise out of wrong.

“In a way that no wrong has ever yet been expiated, Germany is expiating the sin of its innocent dependence and irresponsibility. If, however, after calm and cool reflection the Western nations put Germany slowly to death out of foresight, interest or revenge, and call this ‘justice’ while announcing a new life for the peoples, a Peace of Reconciliation to last forever, and a League of Nations, then justice will never again be what it was and, in spite of all their triumphs, mankind will never again find happiness. A leaden weight will lie upon our planet and the coming race will be born with a conscience no longer clear. The stain of guilt, which now might still be wiped out, will then become ineradicable and lasting on the body of the earth. In the future, dissension and strife will become more bitter and disintegrating than ever before, drenched in a feeling of common wrongs. Never has such power, such responsibility, weighed upon the brows of a triumvirate. If the history of mankind has willed that three men in a single hour should make their decision concerning the fate of centuries and of millions of men on the earth, then it has willed this: that a single great question of faith should be addressed to the victorious civilized and religious nations. The question is: Humanity or power? reconciliation or vengeance? freedom or oppression?

“Think! consider! you people of every land! This hour is not only decisive for us Germans, it is decisive for you and us—for us all.

“If the decision is made against us we will shoulder our destiny and go to our earthly extermination. You will not hear us complain. But our plaint will be heard where no human voice has ever cried in vain.”

My dear friends, this is the product of sober intellectual foresight, most assuredly not arising from chauvinism but from materialistic thinking. I have brought it to you because we live in a world in which people are most disinclined, even today, to consider the gravity of the present situation. Plenty of people will celebrate this New Year's Eve not only as it has been celebrated during the last four years but also as it was celebrated before this catastrophe. And countless people will take it as disturbing their peace, as upsetting their carefree souls, if one merely draws their attention to the situation.

“Oh, it won't be as bad as all that!”—though it may not be put into words, this is what is inwardly felt, otherwise people would be judging the times differently.

For how many individuals will acknowledge the truth of what we have had to repeat over and over again during these years?—years in which we have always been hearing the following: “When peace comes, everything will be just the same as it used to be, this way and that way and the other way.” How many individuals are awake to what has had to be repeated so constantly: the impossible prospect of finding conditions again as people are still allowing themselves to picture them?

We are dealing here with matters that have been thoughtfully estimated. And things appear quite differently according to whether they are estimated in a spirit of materialism or from the standpoint of anthroposophical impulses. From an external view the statements seem so right! But since there is no prospect of individuals responding consciously to what Walther Rathenau has brought forward as a last-moment expedient—namely, that the peoples should consult their conscience—alas, this talk of conscience!—what can one say? it will certainly not be consulted! Outwardly that is the way events will happen.

One can see only one hope as one looks back at how this was all prepared in the past, certainly not by any particular nation but by the whole of civilized mankind. There is just one hope: to look back on this New Year's Eve to a great universal picture, to what has previously been experienced by mankind; to realize that in a certain sense men have now become sufficiently mature to bring this to an end; and to accept what the new Spirits of Personality now wish to bring down to earth from the heavenly heights. But here, dear friends, insight and will must meet. What the Spirits of Personality as new Creators are wishing to reveal will only be able to come into the world when it finds a fruitful soil in human hearts, human souls, human minds, when mankind is ready to accept the impulses of spiritual science. And what this prosaic materialistic mind has been saying about the material impulses that are actively working, is indeed correct. People should pay attention to what comes from a sober mind like Walther Rathenau—that is, the people who are asserting from a more frivolous standpoint what our times are going to bring forth. When people were in a state of utter intoxication and dreaming, when, if one speaks truly, they were talking complete nonsense—if they could only have looked ahead a little!—but they have stopped now, at least some of them—at that time one might have heard: Out of this war will come a new idealism, a new sense of religion. How often I have heard this! And it was being written over and over again, especially by professors, even professors of theology. You don't even have to go very far; it doesn't even have to be Sunday for you to find in less than ten minutes a theological professor announcing wise prophecies of this kind. But people are already talking differently. Some who have come to the top are saying that now a time of healthy atheism may well be coming, and mankind will be cured of the religion-game instigated in recent times so particularly by the poets and writers. Such opinions are already forthcoming. And they come from persons who should be listening to some of the things a man is saying who is able to judge soberly how reality is taking shape.

In response to all this one can only say: World affairs would indeed develop as we have just heard if only materialistic impulses were working in the world, in human heads and human hearts! If this were actually the case, truly not only Germany, Middle Europe and Russia would be in chains of frightful slavery but the whole civilized world would gradually be similarly enchained, never to know happiness again. For it is what has come from the past that has now made the world come to an end! New impulses do not come from that source. New impulses come from the spiritual world. They do not come, however, unless human beings go to meet them, unless they receive them with a free will. Deliverance can only come when there are human souls ready to meet the spirit, the spirit that will reveal itself in a new way through the Spirits of Personality. There must be human souls who will become creative through these very Time Spirits. There is no other way out. There are only two ways to be honest: either to speak as Walther Rathenau has spoken, or to point to the necessity of turning toward the spiritual world.

The latter way will be the subject of our New Year's Day reflections tomorrow.

Our survey on this New Year's Eve is not meant to be a mere comfortable transition into the new year. It should not be—for anyone who is awake. It should be taken in all earnestness. It should make us aware of what is lying in the womb of time if the Spirit-Child is not to be given its place there. A true perspective of the new year can only be experienced in the light of the spirit. Let us try at this moment between now and tomorrow to tune our souls to this serious mood. Tonight I would conclude only with an earnest word of direction. I myself do not yet wish to show you the actual way; I would only draw your attention to how this New Year's Eve has been received in the soul of an honest man who finds as he observes the world only material powers holding sway. It must be so regarded by the heads, the hearts, the minds and souls—if sincere—of those who do not want to turn to the spirit. There are others, also materialists, who are not sincere; they are sleeping, because then they do not need to admit their insincerity.

This is the view presenting itself to our retrospective vision. This is the New Year's Eve mood! Tomorrow we want to see, from a consideration of the spiritual world, what impression is made upon us by the outlook into the future, by the mood of the New Year.

• 20. Walther Rathenau: 1867–1922. Zürcher Zeitung, Dec. 28, 1918.

Rudolf Steiner: So, now you come full of plans – yes, then we will begin.

Emil Bock: This afternoon we met in a commission and tried to determine what we ourselves can contribute to clarity, what we ourselves must do. And at the root of our work was the question of the extent to which we should work publicly. Now that we have achieved such clarity among ourselves, we realize that this matter cannot be reduced to a single issue, but that we simply have to consider it as a question of modus operandi, and that in each individual case, each individual must know what he is allowed to do. We now have a concrete goal in mind, and that is the course that has been promised to us. We have set ourselves the goal of bringing together at least a hundred people for this course. After the course, we will then have to take a big step into the public, and we will do that. We have even discussed the whole question of joining our loose organization and drafted a text for those who want to participate. So we have not prepared an accession for individuals, but an attachment to the request for a course. This would be the most practical way to attract people. This wording is as follows:

The undersigned, who feels the urge to work towards the awakening of a new spiritual life to overcome the present forces of decline and hopes to achieve this goal in a new synthesis of worship and Christian teaching, hereby registers for a religious teaching course under the direction of Dr. Steiner and undertakes to treat the information provided for this purpose in strict confidence.

Representative (name, address)

Rudolf Steiner: When would you like to start the course?

Emil Bock: We have planned to continue into September if possible. I have been instructed to ask for an approximate date.

Rudolf Steiner: Not true, given my Swiss circumstances, it would be desirable if it could be at the same time as the other events here, if it coincided. They are counting the days I can be away from Switzerland. It is a tricky business. It would be desirable if [the course could coincide with other events]. It will be around September. [To Ernst Uehli:] When are the [Stuttgart] events planned?

Ernst Uehli: The start is planned for the last days of August, with the events continuing into September.

Rudolf Steiner: How much time would you need? Ernst Uehli: Ten days.

Rudolf Steiner: This course should have fourteen lectures. Possibly two lectures could take place on one day.

Ernst Uehli: A different event is planned for each day.

Rudolf Steiner: But not from me. I can of course devote myself entirely to this course, with the exception of the time when it is my responsibility to give lectures [at the conference]. If no other demands are made, this can work perfectly well.

Ernst Uehli: Yes, I hope not that such demands will be made; as I said, we want to start at the end of August, if it is possible for the gentlemen to come here. Are there any events in Dornach immediately afterwards?

Rudolf Steiner: I have checked, the last day in Dornach is August 27, and a eurythmy event on the 28th will not be possible. Of course, one must also rehearse for Goethe's birthday; one cannot have a eurythmy performance without rehearsal on Goethe's birthday. So nothing will be possible on the 28th if you want to have the eurythmy event. Of course, you can start with the general matter. But it seems to me that you are a little short of time. It would be possible, since there are still two and a half months left before September 1. It would not be necessary to start earlier than September 1. Do you think you will be ready by September 1?

Emil Bock: We hope to have a hundred people by then.

Rudolf Steiner: It is to be assumed that you will need more than two and a half months if you want to get more people than you can in two and a half months.

Emil Bock: We are also considering people at the universities. Rudolf Steiner: You think that is difficult?

Emil Bock: We have certain possibilities there, of course it is just a different set of possibilities.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, if you are not able to get the matter done by September 1, then it will be problematic to start in the fall. If you only get the people after the universities have opened, then we will have to wait again, probably until the second half of October, November I think. Isn't it?

Emil Bock: Then it is better to wait, because the way of recruiting people outside the semester is usually not suitable either. Would we also be allowed to ask for a course if there are fewer of us?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, certainly, I will say this: It would of course be the most wonderful thing if we could organize this course in Dornach — if it were somehow possible — and if it were financially feasible. That would be best. Because, isn't it true, it is of course easier to give samples of cultic things and so on there. So it would be more possible to organize the course better in Dornach. Well, we managed to hold the college course last fall by trying to get members from the Entente countries to keep [participants], so that the audience from Germany were guests. Of course, that would have to be the case here too. It would then only be a matter of possibly finding a way to get the money for the trip, which for many would not be much more expensive to Basel than it is here. Well, I think the fare from Berlin to Basel would not be much more than from Berlin to Stuttgart, and the stay in Dornach would have to be organized there. But that is not a question for us to decide now; it can be decided later. I just think it would be better in many ways if we could have the thing in Dornach. You would not rule that out in principle? The difficulty, my dear friends, lies only in the fact that one could well make the proposal to members from Entente countries to support a general study course, because that is an international matter, but whether many people from the Entente countries would agree to support German theologians in particular is the question. And of course we have to say why we need the support. That is the question. I almost believe that they would do such a thing, but whether they have a heart for supporting German theologians in particular...?

Because, it may interest you to know – I didn't emphasize it particularly in my discussions – that what I told you would only apply to German theologians. The question is nowhere more pressing than in the medium-sized states. Even in Switzerland it would be quite hopeless, in France, in England even more so, everywhere actually in the Entente countries it would be quite hopeless, one would be rejected immediately; one would not understand at all that one could do such a thing.

A participant: I thought that perhaps financial help could be expected from Holland. I also know young Dutch theologians who are sympathetic to our cause. Would Holland not come into question?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, if anything can be considered, then Holland most of all. I do believe that there are a few of them among the theologians themselves, but they will not be the ones who have the money. I do not doubt that there are individuals among the Dutch theologians who can be considered; but on the whole, no one has a heart for it, while I believe that the matter can also be financed here. To raise the money for the course in Dornach would be unaffordable from here.

A participant: What about Sweden and Norway?

Rudolf Steiner: I hardly think you would meet with a favorable response there. In Sweden and Norway there is such a strong consciousness that a reform can arise out of the church itself. In Sweden I was directly offered the prospect of negotiating with this or that person. People there have the idea that they can actually reform the church, and where this idea is still very much rooted, it has a very strong effect. Here in Germany it is not very deeply rooted.

A participant: We are not officially opposing the church to begin with. The Swedes could easily assume that it is a movement that is on a neutral footing with the church.

Rudolf Steiner: But they would ask you: What do you actually want? Do you want to found free congregations or work from within the church? — As soon as you say: found free congregations - it will be very questionable. Holland is then still the most likely option. In France and England, it is not understood. In Switzerland, it is completely out of the question. But I believe that there is as much to be gained from Germany as we need here. We cannot negotiate how to do this financing yet; we can negotiate that as soon as you are in office and in office. We will certainly try that. But as I said, I have my doubts about abroad.

You have no idea how terribly conservative Switzerland is. There were almost no Swiss students present at the Easter course. And theologians are simply naive. I don't think that what happened to me just before I left can happen to you. Two theology students from Basel came to me and asked if I would like to co-lecture against Heinzelmann. I can't possibly be involved in giving a co-lecture. Well, they weren't committed in any way, they didn't care. They said I should give independent lectures as well. Then they started talking about the subject itself – and that was really very naive. One of them said, 'I recently read the speeches of Luther; if there were something like that again, we would be fine; all we need is someone to speak as Luther spoke.' Yes, there is a great deal of naivety among Swiss theologians. Don't you have colleagues there? No? Switzerland is very conservative, it will be a strong obstacle to progress in Europe.

Nevertheless, quite apart from the fact that we have the course at all, it would be a very nice idea for me to have the course in Dornach. We could also combine it with the other courses so that you could also attend other lectures. But you would have to see to it that you manage to get a few more people.

Emil Bock: Do we now have to wait until we get a hundred?

Rudolf Steiner: I have nothing against it if there are fewer. I don't think at all in this direction, as you mean. I think that everyone who can be found in two months – if it's not the university vacation period – is perhaps not eighty, but perhaps only sixty.

Then we would just do the course at the age of sixty. We would then have the course rewritten, and those who come afterwards would have to commit themselves to reading it then. You would have to include that in your commitment formula, that those who come when the course is over would read the course. That is one way of doing it. I think you misunderstood that too; I did not claim that a certain large number of people had to come to the course.

Emil Bock: We thought that we would have to get two hundred people together for that.

Rudolf Steiner: What I actually meant was that you must have such a number if you want to do something practically.

Emil Bock: There would have to be two hundred people ready for action.

Rudolf Steiner: I can hold the course under certain circumstances for those who can be reached at all in two and a half months.

Emil Bock: Would the course in Dornach then coincide with the college course?

Rudolf Steiner: No School of Spiritual Science course has yet been planned. We have a kind of course in Dornach, a series of events from August 20 to 27. These are mainly British people who come, but of course we don't want to limit it to the British. And after that we are supposed to come here [to Stuttgart]. So that would be in the first fortnight of September. That would be an opportunity to hold the course here, in the same days of September.

Emil Bock: And the second half of September would not be considered?

Rudolf Steiner: Here it would be out of the question for the reason that I must return to Switzerland. However, if it can be arranged in Dornach, then the second half of September would be very well considered. I cannot say that today. It is extremely difficult to raise the financial resources for what is needed.

Emil Bock: Perhaps Dr. Heisler's first successes can [then] be recorded.

Rudolf Steiner: Consider, if the course here cost you 10,000 marks for my sake, that is very little, then in Dornach it would cost you 100,000 marks if you had to pay, wouldn't it? Of course we can do it over there if we get 10,000 Swiss francs there. It is much easier for us to get 10,000 Swiss francs over there than it is for you to raise 100,000 marks here.

Emil Bock: But it would not be a question of paying for everything for us. Many of us could perhaps pay for the thing itself. If we could live in barracks, that would be perfectly sufficient.

Rudolf Steiner: We have accommodation. But you have to calculate 4 Swiss francs per day for each participant. That's 400 Swiss francs for 100 people. For 14 days that's 5600 Swiss francs. So it will probably take 6000 Swiss francs. 6000 Swiss francs would be 60000 German Marks here. It is quite possible that we can get it there.

A participant: As for the time, the end of September would be much more favorable; there are many on their way to the School for Spiritual Science then.

Rudolf Steiner: This is a question that we cannot decide now. I think it would be easier to do it over in Dornach. It could also be done here, but then it would have to be in the first half of September because I have to go back to Switzerland; and then there would have to be a gap of six weeks before I can come back.

Emil Bock: It is very helpful if we know when to prepare for. Then we have discussed all the possibilities of bringing in people, and we have, after the previous discussions, drawn up the plan to consider pastors who are close to anthroposophy in order to bring in theologians. We would do this by sending circulars to all possible places. All the possibilities have also been discussed at universities, to enter into similar movements that have a longing to reform cults, and into certain youth movements. People have already declared themselves willing to do certain things.

Then we tried to divide the German universities among us and saw that some universities would not be reached by us, and we considered setting up a small travel organization to prepare so that a small number of us should travel to any such university town.

Then we want to exchange the experiences we have in our advertising work; the newsletter should serve this purpose.

Then we propose, at least here, to put together a brochure that will briefly explain what it is all about, especially for those who are to become collaborators. And it has been deemed practical for this brochure to contain three articles: Firstly, an orientation on the general cultural situation, under the title “Intellectualism and Religious Life”; the second article on worship and the third on the communication of religious teaching. - At least initially, we have set three assignments for each article in our circle of collaborators, so that the most valuable material from the contributions sent in can then be compiled.

Study groups should then be formed everywhere to study the transcripts of the lectures heard here. However, we have found it best to ensure that Mr. Uehli is given a signature for such transcripts, so that we use them correctly and only for ourselves, and that if the group is expanded, I should be contacted so that I can initially take personal responsibility. When the signatures have been collected, they could then be presented to Mr. Uehli. This group would also be greatly helped if we could get from Dr. Steiner the wording of the rituals already prepared, which we would also send from our headquarters to the various participants.

Then we found something valuable that does not directly aim at our cause, but indirectly, in that one should, of course, give lectures on the side to prepare the foundation and to support the advertising activity to a certain extent. These lectures should not advertise, but should create understanding for the fact that a renewal of religion is possible from anthroposophy and all sorts of suggestions were made, for example, that perhaps one of us could travel with the Haass-Berkow troupe and give lectures after the plays about the relationship between anthroposophy and religious renewal, that we could give such lectures where we are.

And then I have another request, which is perhaps a bit much to expect, along the lines of clearing up a certain general misunderstanding, namely that one works against this misunderstanding: that anthroposophy has a not so positive relationship to religious practice as we have found here. We have often found that people, particularly in anthroposophical circles and otherwise, think that anthroposophy has a rather negative relationship to religious practice, and that some people would be very surprised to learn what has been said in the main lines. We have therefore decided to ask Dr. Steiner to give a public lecture on anthroposophy and the renewal of religion in the near future if possible, so that, if it is possible, this lecture could be printed and made available to the public immediately. This would make the public aware of the positive relationship between anthroposophy and religion and prepare the ground for our work in every respect.

Rudolf Steiner: Do you think it would be particularly good if I gave this lecture? You see, the only thing to consider, of course, is how it will work best. So, if such a lecture were given and were well given by someone who is really involved in religious activity, it would undoubtedly be much better than if I gave it. I personally have no objection to giving this lecture; I would say what I have to say, but it would make a big difference if Rittelmeyer were to give such a lecture today. I would very much like to talk to him about it, and I think it would be very beneficial for the cause.

Ernst Uehli: This coincides with a thought regarding the conference. I had intended to include a lecture by Dr. Rittelmeyer in the program if possible; however, he is not well.

Rudolf Steiner: Dr. Rittelmeyer is not well, and it is hardly easy to find a replacement – at least not at the moment. It would indeed be very good if a churchman were to give the lecture.

Emil Bock: We have also discussed this and found that it would only add to the opinions already expressed. In fact, there is no unified opinion among theologians close to us, and as far as I know, there is always an antithesis between Heisler and Geyer.

Rudolf Steiner: I don't know it at all.

Emil Bock: Pastor Geyer says: Anthroposophy is not a religion at all, it is only science and can thus, like any world view, fertilize religion, while on the other hand at least one of Dr. Heisler's writings has been understood to mean that anthroposophy should replace religious practice; and in the discussions that one knows, the antithesis was always there. When Rittelmeyer comes in as a third party, people find it even more difficult to believe. We thought it should not be a lecture but a small booklet. The request for the lecture was only to tone down our presumptuous request for a booklet.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, it must be stated categorically: it is necessary in the general cultural process that the origin and source of anthroposophy lies in scientific considerations. That is the first thing, it must be stated. So that one could not claim that anthroposophy can directly take the place of religion or that anthroposophy as such is only a religious renewal. What I emphasized to you is that anthroposophy is needed for religious renewal and that a particular religious current must be sought that can use anthroposophy. This must be emphasized.

Hermann Heisler: The antithesis came about because Geyer said that if I accepted everything that Dr. Steiner said, it would have no meaning for my religious life. And I said: That is wrong, because anthroposophy is certainly not a religion, but it becomes religion when it is properly grasped, and forms religion. If the theology is right, it strives for religion; it does not matter what kind of theology I have; and it is the same with anthroposophy.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, with Geyer, it must be taken into account that, above all, he does not want to come into conflict with his church authorities. Geyer is not at all of the opinion that he does not expect essential religious impulses from anthroposophy for himself. On the contrary, he has received a great many religious impulses from anthroposophy and undoubtedly also impulses for his sermons. But what he says there, he has to say today, because if you don't draw this line of demarcation, you will be thrown out [of the church]. You don't really want to allow content for religious work and that's why he says he only cares about God and not about the world. But that is, forgive me, in reality just foolish - it is nothing more. God took care of the world, he just created it. I don't know how to do it - forgive the comparison - to take care of the turner without taking care of the turnery. It's just foolish, but you have to do foolish things if you don't want to be thrown out of the church.

A participant: Pastor Geyer gave a lecture and there was a very clear polemic against Pastor Heisler, and if another pastor comes forward with something like that, it will only create the impression that this is just another new opinion. — And it would depend on what is actually said.

Rudolf Steiner: Just take the tenor of how these things are said. If there is a real difficulty, then I will do it myself. But take the tenor. The tenor is the following: It is said that anthroposophy claims to found a religion. It cannot be, because no content such as that given by anthroposophy can found a religion. Gogarten, for example, says that anthroposophy wants to found a religion. In our circles, no one would be surprised if I myself were to argue that anthroposophy can bring about a renewal of religion. This does not weaken anything, but only reintroduces the whole discussion. But if Rittelmeyer delivers this lecture, quite objectively – he is basically pushed out of the church – that he is still inside is a consequence of his popularity with his large congregation – if Rittelmeyer were to do the whole thing and do it from his standpoint as a representative of the Protestant church – as such he feels – I think it might perhaps work.

One could even try something more daring. I think Rittelmeyer would be willing to collaborate if it were a brochure; he can write, after all. One could also think of combining the two, with me delivering one half and someone from the other side the other half. Maybe that wouldn't be so terrible. Now the question is whether someone other than Rittelmeyer could write. No one else [from the theological side] wrote the “life's work”?

Ernst Uehli: Apart from Geyer, no one.

Rudolf Steiner: Geyer wrote, and we don't really have a Protestant theologian other than Rittelmeyer and Geyer.

A participant: There are still some, but they are no longer in the public eye to the same extent; Schairer, for example.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, yes, he made a great story. Schairer gave a lecture full of warmth for anthroposophy, and on the same evening, when he did not quite finish his lecture, he received a rebuke. The next day was the continuation and that was against anthroposophy. That is the shining example.

Hermann Heisler: I don't have the list here, but there would be another one to consider, Pastor Klein, and then the old pastor over in the Palatinate...

Rudolf Steiner: Sauter, you mean, an old gentleman like that, he can't do it.

Hermann Heisler: Jundt in Mannheim...

Rudolf Steiner: You could do it. Don't you have the courage to come forward with it? Don't misunderstand me, I have nothing against writing such a brochure, but I believe that it would not have the same impact as if it came from someone who wants a renewal of religion, a renewal of religion from a religious point of view. “Well, he wants anthroposophy, and he wants to renew all areas of life” — that is what people will say about me. There are many such lectures on religious renewal, they just have not been printed. I have given such lectures in Berlin: ‘Bible and Wisdom,’ which contains them. I only need to renew what I have said many times about these things. I don't know, you seem to think that people believe Anthroposophy is not a religion. But neither Mr. Bruhn nor Mr. Gogarten believe that. All those who have written from the Protestant side do not start from the premise that Anthroposophy does not want to renew religion. They are fighting it precisely because they believe it wants to do so.

A participant: Rittelmeyer could do the brochure. Rudolf Steiner: He would be able to write.

Emil Bock: We were also thinking about the prejudices that exist among anthroposophical members, especially regarding religious issues.

Rudolf Steiner: Among the members?

Emil Bock: There are certain prejudices. Rudolf Steiner: Where do you see these prejudices?

Emil Bock: You never really find the right attitude towards those who are theologians.

Rudolf Steiner: That is only because the kind of theologian you describe has not yet emerged. You would not expect anthroposophists to have much different judgments about the majority of theologians than you have yourself. The anthroposophists are positioning themselves as you have positioned yourself, and that is entirely justified. We will be increasingly compelled, in order to protect anthroposophy, even more than has been the case, to seek out the lie in every field and to seek out folly in every field and to be unyielding against it.

And I can assure you that Protestant theologians indulge in as much folly as they do falsehood. An example of folly is Professor Traub, who says that I claim in my “Geheimwissenschaft” that spiritual beings move like tables and chairs. He wrote that. When he was asked for an authoritative judgment, Professor Traub wrote that I claimed that spiritual beings move in Devachan like tables and chairs in the physical world. Since he will not admit that he wrote this in a state in which tables and chairs move for him, I cannot help but assume that this is foolishness. You will find these follies at every turn. Read Gogarten and so on for logical fallacies!

And then they lie, these people; they are so terrible when it comes to dishonesty, it is quite monstrous. It is really true. Read the mischievous manner in which a Protestant church newspaper – its name is the Stuttgarter Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt – which invented this story about Bernhard of Clairvaux, takes up and exploits Rittelmeyer's response. You really have to study to see the level of dishonesty they come up with. They are capable of the following; I think I am quoting correctly: In his reply to the claim [in the Sonntagsblatt] that I appointed him as Bernhard of Clairvaux in gratitude for his book 'The Life Work of Rudolf Steiner', Dr. Rittelmeyer expressed his astonishment that someone would claim such a thing [which is untrue] in the Sonntagsblatt. Now it says [in the paper] that Rittelmeyer was astonished that I had named him as Bernard of Clairvaux. No, they twist it so that he would have been amazed that I did that. That's how cunningly dishonest people are. It's so cunning what people do, and you can't be expected to appreciate these things because modern theology is so unclear that it is perceived as untrue. It's not a matter of somehow being hostile to religion as such. There are some people among us who do some things, but at least that is not really the point. It has just been made impossible for us to continue to cultivate the cult-like through various events. Before the war, it was cultivated to a certain extent. In Seiling's brochure, which is also completely dishonest, you can even find it mentioned. We have already done things there, we can even talk about our experiences there, it is already like that.

In anthroposophical circles, since I have been active, perhaps a maximum of eight to ten people have left the church. That is very few. We have 8,000 members today – not followers – so eight or ten people are of course very few; those who have left the church are limited to that number. They have left for various reasons. Recently someone wrote again asking if I could advise them to leave the church. I do not advise anyone to leave the church, not even Catholics. I advise Catholics not to leave because, according to the current church constitution, they have no right to leave. Taken quite seriously. The Catholic has no right to leave the church because the infallibility dogma has made such a decision ex cathedra that the Catholic cannot leave the church; he is simply still in it, even if he himself declares that he is leaving. Since the dogma of infallibility was established, such things have been possible. It may seem a strange theory, but it is absolutely correct in the sense of Catholicism. As a Catholic, you cannot leave the church.

Hermann Heisler: Isn't a Catholic automatically excluded if he does not follow the commandment of Easter confession?

Rudolf Steiner: This is nowhere written, and it has never been asserted.

Hermann Heisler: I have been told this by Catholics. Catholics say that this is taught in class.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, it is possible that it is taught. But you know, many things are taught and said. I recall an exchange between a secular priest and a Jesuit priest. The Jesuit said: “Under no circumstances should a Catholic priest read newspapers, because they are godless today.” The secular priest, who is freer in his views, said: “Yes, but how are we supposed to preach? We have to know something about the world when we preach, and we can only do that if we read newspapers; and you also preach about all matters.” — “I don't read the newspaper.” — “Yes, but you know what's going on in the world.” — “I don't read the newspaper.” — “Yes, but how do you do it then?” “I have them read to me.” The Jesuit strictly observes the commandment. ”But, Doctor Heisler, you see, I don't know how one is excommunicated. Suppose a Catholic has not attended church for years. If I went to confession tomorrow, do you think I would be turned away? I don't know how it would show that one is excluded.

Well, the strangest thing happened with the philosopher Brentano. Not only did he resign – he was a priest, an ordained priest – but he not only resigned, he converted to Protestantism and got married. But the Catholic Church declared that he could not be appointed to a professorship at the university because he was still a priest. He was not considered a Catholic, he was even excommunicated and converted to Protestantism, but he was not admitted to the Vienna professorship he had previously held. Brentano had been appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1873. Then he wanted to marry; he could not do so because Austrian law prohibited the marriage of priests and an Austrian citizen who is a priest is therefore not allowed to marry. Brentano became a Saxon citizen, a Protestant, and married a Jewish woman. So he had to give up his professorship. He was promised that he would be reappointed later. This was not done because the church protested. They declared: He is a Protestant, but the consequence of the [Catholic] ordination is not taken away from him, and a priest who behaves in such a way may not become a professor in Austria. - Then the minister Conrad took heart, went to Emperor Franz Joseph and wanted to push it through in this way. The emperor looked at the story and said: “Yes, that's the devil's work, is the Jewess at least clean?” — “Clean,” that is, pretty. She was neither, and Conrad could not truthfully say that she was “clean.” “Then it will come to nothing,” said the Emperor. —

So, if you think I should write such a brochure – there is nothing to stop me from doing it, but it might be good if something were also written from another quarter.

Emil Bock: Rittelmeyer has now written precisely about anthroposophy and religious renewal, but I don't know if that is decisive, since Rittelmeyer does not know what we have heard here.

Rudolf Steiner: But tell me, do you not believe that it is not necessary for it to be a renowned practitioner of religion? Don't you think that something like that could be written by someone in your circle, by a younger person? Something that works purely through its inner goodness and solidity? That someone who is aiming for religious renewal does it themselves, and not someone who is known for writing from an anthroposophical point of view? Even if someone does it who doesn't want to become a priest at all, it would work. I don't know why a younger man couldn't do it. It just has to be done well. Think about the question. Well, I will never refuse to do it; I would do it.

Emil Bock: I have concluded my report by saying that a central office should be set up in Berlin so that, from Berlin, at least for the time being, the valuable work could be done, and that, if possible, we should be allowed to remain in constant contact with Dr. Steiner.

Rudolf Steiner: That will work very well.

Emil Bock: Then we have something that touches on Mr. Heisler's area. We have been working on the advertising flyer for the funds, but have not yet come to a clear conclusion. Now I would ask Mr. Heisler to present the report on the financial plans.

Hermann Heisler: We were clear about the fact that one must begin in a very planned way, and in such a way that one starts at a place where one has acquaintances, that one goes there. The acquaintances will be won from the circles of anthroposophists. It is not good to officially address the branches, but to seek out some people from the anthroposophists who appear suitable and to have these people provide addresses, and then to visit these addresses in order to obtain funds. We are convinced that our members would subscribe in the greatest number, but it would be better to turn to others first. The members are assured of us, we do not need to work on them now. The person concerned should now bring together the people he has collected into a committee of trusted people, who will then receive the instructions and continue the work.

Rudolf Steiner: I would certainly advise not to make the matter official through the branches, but to do it personally and to take great care to ensure that the members deign to give further addresses in non-member circles. I would certainly advise that. You will also find that, especially for this aspect of the matter, you will find a great many people who do not want to officially join as members but who have a great deal of interest in doing something in this direction. Unfortunately, it is a little too late for a very fruitful gathering. Of course, that will not prevent you from achieving a great deal nevertheless. It is quite remarkable how strongly the desire was everywhere two years ago, two and a half years ago, in Germany to give the money that people had available for such things. A large number of wealthy people had said to themselves at the time: We absolutely do not want to have the money taken from us by the state. The Keyserling matter lives only on such funds and there were many such people at the time.

Hermann Heisler: Is this aspect not still important now?

Rudolf Steiner: It is no longer as good as it was two years ago, but it is still available.

Hermann Heisler: The merchants have a lot of money in the drawer. It is the purest art for the business people now to get rid of the money, and they may give the money away quite easily.

Rudolf Steiner: The tax situation at that time was not yet like that, now the stupid tax story comes into it. I have no doubt that something can be obtained for this purpose. It is one thing to obtain funds for the “Coming Day”. But for such a cause one is more likely to obtain funds.

Hermann Heisler: I have also considered Austria. I have a plan to start in Baden first. I would go to Freiburg first – I have a specific thing in mind there – and then I would like to go down the Rhine to Cologne. I think it would take a good month. If it is to be fruitful, it has to happen quickly. And I had the further plan that some of our friends could help. The matter is urgent and I cannot possibly do everything alone. If the course is to be held at the beginning of September, I hardly have a month, because August will be very bad; this time is very inconvenient, September and October are better, I expect little from August. Therefore, I thought, if time is pressing, to ask Mr. Meyer to take over Hanover, then the gentlemen in Berlin would work for themselves. If I have enough time, which I doubt, then I will briefly visit the southern German cities; otherwise it would have to be done later. And then it would turn out that you would have a break in August. Then I would consider a trip to Saxony, perhaps also to Lake Constance, to Constance. There is no point in making further plans, because the rest must only arise from practical experience. Would the doctor like to say something about this?

Rudolf Steiner: I will think about it while I am here, we can talk about it later.

Hermann Heisler: I thought that we would not approach the branches officially, but we could knock on the doors of members of the branch.

Rudolf Steiner: Certainly, but only with the personalities, not officially; you won't get much by approaching the branches. They collect and then people give one mark each. That's how it is with collections. But if you approach individuals, you can achieve more.

Hermann Heisler: I always wanted to approach the board members and ask them to call together suitable people. Now, the question was what to do with the money initially. I was of the opinion that a postal cheque account should be opened in my name, and we would then invest the money in “Der Kommende Tag”, where we hope to get very high interest. Then there is a certain lack of clarity about the favor that “Der Kommende Tag” wants to do us. In addition to my salary, there would be travel expenses for the gentlemen who help us, such as Mr. Meyer and so on, then postage and the like, and for printed matter and everything that is needed. Then there is also the course for theologians. We hope that the “Kommende Tag” will support us for the first three months.

Rudolf Steiner: I have only engaged the “Kommende Tag” for the first three months; after that you would have to cover it from your income. I thought that the “Kommende Tag” would create the bridge, but that it would later get back what are travel expenses. You have to work much more thoroughly with the “Kommende Tag”. I had to be satisfied that I found out.

Hermann Heisler: I hope so.

Rudolf Steiner: He who says A sometimes also says B, if it is started right.

Hermann Heisler: Then we thought that this would be just the first step in having people everywhere we could turn to. Then we would take up a circular letter and the obvious follow-up work. When all this work is done, the course would be the next step. After the course, the main thing is the conceptual work.

Rudolf Steiner: The spiritual activity would have to begin as soon as one takes office or founds communities, if it is not to be detrimental. It must be approached practically, not just advocated theoretically.

Hermann Heisler: It might also be good to allow the religious element to flow into the lectures.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, I am of the opinion that it will succeed if all the young theologians who are now coming together in this loose association work directly towards entering into office and into practical religious activity. To propagandize the idea, to work for the idea in an agitating way – I don't know whether that will actually be of any real use. I rather think that it will weaken the momentum.

Emil Bock: We have not yet come to a decision about whether we should organize a cult or prepare for it by working.

Rudolf Steiner: You see, at the moment when you can think of founding communities, of starting your real pastoral work, at that moment you have to start to carry the real pastoral care with the cult.

A participant: Perhaps some are already so old that they could prepare themselves. In any case, very many are not yet; they should then follow behind them.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, but you are mostly younger theologians. Especially here are those who do not have much longer to go into office. I don't know if you should aim to wait until you have finished your studies. You can found free churches quite well when you have only three semesters behind you; if you just try to really get into the things. The course will help you to delve deeper into the subject. You must believe that you are doing a better job of pastoral care than the others, who have eight semesters under their belts, even now. Otherwise you will lack the necessary drive if you don't believe it. You can't get involved in that.

A participant: There is a danger that the academic degree will not be achieved.

Rudolf Steiner: But in other fields, too, many have done it in such a way that they were enrolled somewhere and then did a doctorate, for example, as an academic degree later on. That would be possible there.

A participant: We might not be allowed to do it.

Rudolf Steiner: That is the question. Of course it is necessary to achieve this academic degree, because otherwise the prejudice would arise that the failed existences do something like that; that should not be. If you educate yourself for a while and then graduate after a few years, it can still be done. People have done it that way, they stayed enrolled and then, right, did their rigorosum.

A participant: If it is enough to be a Scelsorger, then it doesn't have that much significance.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, do you think it is difficult to do a doctorate?

A participant: It takes six semesters.

Rudolf Steiner: Somehow it has always worked out. For example, about twenty years ago, Mr. Posadzy came to me and said: I want to do my doctorate in philosophy, could you not look through my dissertation? I want to write about Herder. —- And he did a good dissertation. He only made the big mistake of quoting my “Christianity as Mystical Fact”. And then he was told: No, if you quote Steiner, we will not accept the dissertation. — He did not want to cross it out, so he came to me again and I told him to go to Gideon Spicker, and that is where he received his doctorate cum laude. You can do it somewhere. Of course you can't do it with Gideon Spicker in Münster, he's no longer alive. In the past, you could also do it with the person who followed Spicker, who was actually a windbag, but he's not the worst; his name is Braun.

Ernst Uehli: Who wrote about Schelling?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes. There is also a colleague of yours who wants to do his doctorate in Basel, Altemüller, who also belongs to you.

Hermann Heisler: Lauer, Doldinger...

Rudolf Steiner: They are theologians. I am convinced that there are other students (to Gottfried Husemann) who are taking the opposite path. They have gone to chemistry? If there is a movement now, there will be philosophers who will turn to religious practice. Is Frau Plincke not also interested? There are undoubtedly many who will come to theology.

A participant: I would like to ask how one can get the lectures on “Bible and Wisdom”.

Rudolf Steiner: I'll see when I come to Berlin. There were still copies available. Dr. Steiner will know. I'll see if any are still available.

A participant: Perhaps there is some other literature?

Rudolf Steiner: I will have the lectures looked up. I have already spoken many times about the relationship to religion. It is so very difficult to deal with people, especially in the face of so much literature by theologians. If you refute something, they twist it a little differently; you never get done with people. It is much easier to write something than to talk to people about it. These people cannot actually be truthful in their minds. This leads them to tell untruths in other things as well. They find it quite appropriate to tell untruths. For example, in this article, where he has done the other thing I mentioned, Traub is so brazen as to write that he cannot remember the cultural appeal, nor has he read it carefully, but he can only say that he has rarely encountered anything so bombastic. — That is in this essay, which he should write as an authority; there are lots of things like that in it. It says this nice thing: Anthroposophy calls itself a secret science; but what is secret is not a science. And he calls that a self-contained contradiction. — Above all, the “secret science” is not secret, and even if it is, that does not prevent it from being a science, because “secret” and “science” are two different things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. But this literature is full of such things, it is terrible literature. One of our members has taken the trouble to compile the objective untruths in Frohnmeyer's brochure; I believe there are 183. - Then tomorrow at 8 o'clock.

Dear attendees! For quite a while now, I have been privileged to give lectures here in Vienna every year on topics from what I dare to call the spiritual-scientific worldview. The friends of our spiritual-scientific world view here in Vienna have been of the opinion that, even in these eventful and fateful times, it would not be inappropriate to hold two such lectures from this spiritual-scientific field this year, and this may well be because this spiritual-scientific field scientific field touches the deepest foundations of the human soul, those foundations in which the human soul is connected with the powers we call eternal, with those powers to which Goethe's words refer: “All that is transitory is only a parable.”

A consideration from the field of spiritual science is directed in particular to those foundations of the human soul, from which arise both life's harshest disappointments and its most difficult trials, as well as the admirable deeds that are being performed in such a significant way in our time for the salvation and progress of humanity. Spiritual science, dear attendees, is based on a view of life that is by no means one of the recognized ones in our present time, a view that is completely rejected by the most educated of our educated for a variety of reasons; rejected on the one hand because it is considered to be completely contradictory to everything that scientific world observation of our time, because, on the other hand, as we shall see, it is associated in a very misleading way with the shallows of human superstition, because, furthermore, it is erroneously regarded as a point of view that takes from many people that which gives them support and security in life, the right adherence to religious belief.

I hope, dear attendees, that all three misconceptions of the spiritual scientific point of view can at least be somewhat dispelled by what today's reflection will endeavor to offer. Nevertheless, it must be said from the outset that the opposition to spiritual science, and even the accusation that it completely contradicts what is even called common sense in the broadest circles today, that all these challenges and accusations are fully understandable to the person who stands completely on the ground of this spiritual science. And so understandable, so comprehensible are they to him that he must repeatedly remind people that in the course of human development, what appears to be self-evident to a bygone age, what alone corresponds to common sense, must be replaced by something completely opposite.

We must always be reminded of such a turnaround in human development, as it has been experienced at the present time, when the newer natural science has taken possession of the human world view. At the time when Copernicus introduced a new view of the spatial universe, people had to break with everything that for centuries, indeed one can say millennia, had been considered to be shown by the healthy five senses and understood by common sense. The human soul clings to that which it has become accustomed to in its thinking and imagining, just as there are people — although this is a grotesque example — who, after moving into a new apartment, still go home thinking about their old apartment in the evenings. Just as the people in this grotesque example show how they cling to their habits of thinking, so they also do so with regard to the great world-view questions and world-view standpoints. For centuries, humanity has been educated and has become accustomed to a world-view that is opposed to what spiritual science wants to bring to the present and the future. And so today one would be more surprised if, I would say, at the first hint, someone who has not yet heard of spiritual science in the sense in which it is meant here were to immediately agree with something, than if contradiction were to arise over contradiction at such a first encounter with this spiritual science.

In my last lecture here, I tried to illuminate the paths that lead to this spiritual science. Today, because I would like to touch on what the spiritual scientist can and may feel in our fateful time, I will only be able to briefly and sketchily hint at how spiritual science comes to its insights, to these insights that are just as contested and so difficult to understand today.

The first objection that must be raised, quite understandably, precisely in the souls of the present day, which are among the most educated, is that spiritual science seems to contradict everything that has been gained on the firm ground of natural science. It is difficult to realize that spiritual science, for our time and for the immediate future of humanity, seeks to achieve for the field of spiritual knowledge, for the knowledge of the soul, what natural science has achieved for external, spatial and temporal knowledge and its application in practical human life. It is also difficult to realize that this spiritual science, when examined thoroughly, is in complete harmony with all the remarkable advances that natural science has made in the course of the last few centuries. Indeed, spiritual science does not want to be anything other than the continuation of the natural scientific world view for the spiritual realm. Precisely because it aspires to this, the method of spiritual science must relate to all human activities, especially to the most intimate human activities of thinking, feeling and willing, quite differently than the external science recognized today.

The often-asserted claim that spiritual science is not in harmony with the religious feelings of man is also based on a complete misunderstanding. On the contrary, the opposite is true. Indeed, it can be said that while external natural science has often really alienated people from religious feeling, and has led many to believe that they are particularly enlightened when they reject everything religious, spiritual science, because it also scientifically points to the soul in the spiritual, will precisely strengthen religious life in people's minds. It will lead people back to religion in the most beautiful sense of the word, while external natural science has alienated them from it.

Above all, the path that spiritual science takes to its insights will be discussed. This path is described in detail above all in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” to which I must refer, since here I can only give a few, I might say charcoal strokes to sketch the path of spiritual science.

Human thinking and human imagination must be treated in a completely different way for the purposes of spiritual science than they are for the purposes of external science and external life. How do we behave, honored attendees, when we put thinking and imagining at the service of external science and external life? We behave in such a way that we form concepts, images and ideas about what surrounds us based on what our senses show us in our environment. And we are justifiably satisfied with this external view of the world when we come to the point where our ideas and images give us a picture of what is going on outside in nature and in human life. In the ordinary course of existence, people strive for a mental image of the life of nature and of historical life. But the power of thought, which is used in the manner indicated for ordinary science and ordinary life, must be used in a completely different way when the path of spiritual science, the path of spiritual research, is followed.

It is not a matter of the spiritual researcher thinking about what the senses externally reveal to man; it is not a matter of using thought to gain a picture of an external, perceived reality, but rather of using thought like a living force that lives in the pure inner life of the soul, I would say in a self-education applied to the soul. Thought is not used as a reflection of external reality; thought is used in such a way that it is experienced in consciousness. And it is experienced inwardly in such a way that the soul focuses on this thought, focusing in such a way that it turns its attention solely to one thought or a monotonous train of thought for a long, long time, so that what is thought , but what counts is the inner effort of the soul, the inner expenditure of the soul that one has to undergo when, through inner effort, through inner concentration, one focuses all one's attention on one inner point, on one thought, on one idea.

Where ordinary science, where the thinking of ordinary life ends, that is where the work of the spiritual scientist begins. What has to be kept in mind for ordinary science is taken up by the spiritual scientific method and is, as it were, sunk like a seed into the soil of the soul. You ask your own experience the question: What does your thought do, on which you have focused your entire soul life to the exclusion of paying attention to everything else? What does the thought do when you give yourself completely to it, when you forget everything you have ever you have perceived, what your habits, your experiences, your inclinations, your passions are, when you live solely and exclusively in this thought, when you completely immerse yourself in the life of your soul?

With this spiritual-scientific method, one comes to one's own relief when one does not even take a thought that is borrowed from the outer life. With such a thought, which reflects something from the realm of outer life, one is too tempted to look at this outer truth of the thought. But in this case it is not the external truth that matters, but what the thought brings about in us and what we experience when we allow the thought to take effect in our soul as a living essence. Therefore, it is best to fix a symbolic thought, a thought that does not depict anything external, inwardly, as it were. What I mean is this: the thought 'Wisdom shines in the light' is a simple thought; it is certainly not a truth in the sense of an external science. But that is not the point. What is important is that such a thought be placed at the center of the soul's life and that all the soul's powers, as I have just described, be directed towards this thought for a certain period of time. It is only with the experience of the thought, up to which external life and ordinary science go, that research in the spiritual realm begins. If one does not associate the word with any kind of mystical concepts in the bad sense, one calls such a life and weaving in thought, which must be continued for a long, long time with patience and perseverance and inner energy, a meditation in thought, a concentration on certain thoughts. These are, so to speak, technical expressions of the spiritual scientific method.

The spiritual researcher, esteemed attendees, when describing these things, cannot help but speak like the chemist when he briefly describes the methods he uses in his laboratory to eavesdrop on these or those natural forces and phenomena. The spiritual researcher must enter into an inner laboratory of the soul, in which he searches for everything connected with our soul's happiness, with our soul's upliftment, with all the deepest soul mysteries, soul pains and soul questions. And what he experiences in this purely inner laboratory is what he alone can speak of, the experiences of what cannot be presented in external vision, before the outer eyes, but only in the intimate inner, but objective, non-subjective inner experience. The task of spiritual science is to gradually incorporate the existence of such inner, spiritual laboratory work into the spiritual culture of humanity as a solid worldview.

Every single objection raised by the scientific worldview, honored attendees, is as well known to the spiritual researcher as what can be said against his research in general. For example, the spiritual researcher knows that it can be claimed that what the soul achieves by fixing its attention entirely on dwelling on thoughts in the intimate life of the soul is only that the soul can suggest itself, that everything the soul arrives at in this way is a kind of self-suggestion. Of course, the spiritual researcher knows this, but for someone who is not familiar with spiritual science and only knows what modern natural science has to say about the methods of suggestion, it is unknown that through the special way in which the spiritual researcher, purely inwardly, with all the soul forces that he has consciously developed, in full consciousness, directed towards some thought or other, towards some inner experience - it can also be an experience of the will -, [how] this spiritual researcher lives inwardly in that part of his soul that is put to sleep in hypnotic suggestion. It is precisely that which is put to sleep in hypnotic suggestion, while the outer physical, I might say imitates the soul functions, that is developed through the method of spiritual science. Precisely those forces are drawn from the innermost soul life, over which sleep and paralysis are spread in ordinary suggestion. All methods of spiritual research work towards making inner experience independent of outer physical experience, awakening in inner experience those strong forces through which thinking, imagining unfolds a life of its own.

And when the spiritual researcher has worked in the “laboratory of his own soul” for a sufficiently long time, then - and it is not a matter of making this happen, but of waiting for it to happen, as one must wait, as one must wait with a flowering, until its growth forces have developed through the objective world context to such an extent that it flowers - then what must appear fantastic, dreamy, absurd, and paradoxical to our present way of thinking occurs.

For what is achieved in this way, dear attendees, is a complete detachment of spiritual-mental experience from physical, bodily experience. As improbable as it may seem to someone who has never heard of chemistry that the water in front of you can be broken down into hydrogen and oxygen by the forces of electricity or in some other way, that the hydrogen, which is quite different from water, can actually be extracted from water, as improbable as it must seem to anyone who has never heard of chemistry, unlikely as it must appear to anyone who has never heard of chemistry, so unlikely must it appear, of course, to someone who does not want to engage in spiritual science, that there are such inner, I might say inner-growing, thought processes through which that in man is released that is not subject to birth and death , is not subject to external life, but passes through birth and death as the eternal part of man, that this is truly detached from physical conditions and that it is scientifically grasped in its independence, in its eternal significance, of which “all that is transitory is only a parable”.

It is obvious that especially in our time, real objections arise at every turn against what is asserted in this way. It is quite natural that someone who is, so to speak, schooled in the newer, well-founded habits of thought, comes and says: Now here, here comes the spiritual researcher and talks about the fact that there are inner methods of spiritual experience by which the soul-spiritual can be released so that it appears in its original essence and independently of birth and death, just as hydrogen appears when it is released from water, from all its properties and its entire behavior.

Can we not see that this leads into the darkest depths of superstition, when science has so thoroughly demonstrated how mental and spiritual experience is dependent on physical experience, how this mental and spiritual experience grows as the human being develops through the years from childhood onwards? The soul and spiritual experience grows to the same extent that physical functions develop. We see how the spiritual life fades again in old age, when bodily functions decline or gradually become paralyzed. Furthermore, we see – and this is precisely thanks to the great advances in psychiatric research – how the mental functions are switched off with the injury of only one part of the human brain and nervous system. Do we not realize here how everything of a soul-spiritual nature is, in the most eminent sense, only an effect of the physical-corporeal? Now the spiritual researcher comes and explains that this spiritual-soul nature can be detached from the physical-corporeal.

Yes, dearest ones, if the spiritual researcher had to rebel against the well-founded assumptions of modern science, then he would have no hope of ever introducing his knowledge into the world view of mankind, because this newer science is based on good reasons, even if it still has this or that hypothetical or unfounded assertion among its assertions today. Its whole attitude, its whole inner tendency is fully justified and leads to the greatest achievements of mankind. Spiritual science will not deny this, but will admit it just as much as every natural scientist or anyone professing natural science must admit it.

But, dear attendees, spiritual science in the true sense of the word is not based on any different ground than natural science, not even with regard to everything that natural science can talk about. When we consider ordinary thinking in everyday life and ordinary science, how does it appear to the spiritual researcher? It appears to him that this ordinary thinking, that which man can muster in thinking and imagining in ordinary life and in ordinary science, is bound in the strictest sense to the life of the human body, in the narrower sense to the human nervous system. And in so far as natural science today is already beginning to show a knowledge in this direction, which promises to give much more in the future, the spiritual researcher stands completely on the ground of natural science. But for natural science it is only a matter of ordinary thinking, of the inner power of thinking that has not yet been detached from the physical. The spiritual researcher is well informed about the thoughts of everyday life, about what can be imagined in ordinary science. All this thinking of everyday life is just as bound to the physical if it is to come to consciousness in the human being as the image that is to appear to us of ourselves is bound to the mirror before which we stand.

Spiritual science in particular recognizes, through the connections it sees when it progresses along the paths that have been described, that what has now been described as a higher power in the power of thought, and to which spiritual science can arrive at, that this is actively mirrored in the organs of the bodily life and that nothing can enter into the life between birth and death in the consciousness as that which appears to the consciousness with the help of the physicality that mirrors the soul life. Just as a person stands before the image reflected back to him by the mirror and sees not himself but the image reflected back to him by the mirror, so the soul, endowed with the power that is first discovered on the path of spiritual research, stands behind the thinking that is everyday thinking; and everyday thinking is a fleeting reflection mirrored from the life of the body. All the knowledge that natural science can provide in its field is true because it deals with that which has not yet been demonstrated as the actual power that lies behind the ordinary life of consciousness and that passes through births and deaths, which belongs to a completely different world from the one we see with our senses.

Thus it can be said: spiritual science says no to nothing that science says; it only explains that one can go beyond this natural science just as one goes beyond the hand movements of ordinary life in scientific chemistry. And anyone who wants to turn against spiritual science from a scientific point of view does not turn against it because something scientific about spiritual science is doubted, but turns against spiritual science out of pure tyranny, out of the will to accept nothing but what he likes to accept. One must artificially assume the standpoint that no one is allowed to know anything other than what one knows oneself if one wants to reject spiritual science in its claim to continue the path of natural science.

But now, dear attendees, as I said, the spiritual researcher can, to a certain extent, allow the other person, who has not yet approached spiritual research, to see into his or her “soul laboratory”. For this life in the soul laboratory of the spiritual researcher brings about many things that are not known to ordinary experience and observation either. Spiritual research is not only connected with those experiences with which external science is connected, spiritual research is connected with the deepest upheavals of the soul life, with the innermost tragedy of the soul life, with the carrying of the soul to lonely, icy heights, with the falling of the soul into terrible abysses of existence.

Certainly, dear honored attendees, the first steps of spiritual research, as indicated in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds,” can be taken by anyone, and anyone can thereby convince themselves of the correctness of the spiritual researcher's indications. But when one follows the path of spiritual research to its conclusion, it leads through experiences such as those just indicated. Above all, at the moment when, through the method described, one succeeds in detaching the inner power of thought from the support it has in the brain, at the moment when one's thinking in one's soul-spiritual experience rises out of one's body — I because it is literally correct — in the same moment when man's eternal powers are truly glimpsed in the soul, in this moment, a spiritual researcher feels as if, I would like to say, they could experience the growth of the plant.

Let us assume that the plant could experience, that it could experience all its own characteristics, all its own being, as it unfolds from leaf to leaf, to the flower, to the colorful flower, and then, having developed into the colorful flower, it would have to immerse itself with its entire being in the forces that form the seed, which is not at all destined for this life of the plant in the present, but is destined to carry this plant life beyond the present into the plant that will develop from this plant in the future. The plant would experience by concentrating all its powers of experience into this germ, as if, by gathering these powers together, it were developing precisely that which is like a killing, a dying off of the outer being that has developed in the leaves and in the colorful blossoms. She would experience how she would have to die herself, as what she was, so that she could live on through the seed. So the human soul must experience, if it really goes through what has just been sketched out in front of you with a few lines of charcoal.

Dear attendees, the spiritual researcher experiences how he becomes more and more absorbed in what connects his soul with what he has taken in through his thoughts. But this does not appear to him now in his soul life as if he were only experiencing something new, but as if he were now living in the forces that, through their inner peculiarity, would be killing forces for the outer life, that are connected with all that makes the outer life die, that paralyzes the outer life from day to day, from hour to hour. And so it is, as if one had stood in it in life, felt all joy, all zest in life, all justified joy, all justified zest in life, gladly applied all energy in life, and now, in order to recognize, must break out of this life, but must turn precisely to those forces that continually fight this life. One would like to say that one must leave the conviviality of life, the convivial togetherness with nature, its beauty and sublimity, and enter into solitude, where one is truly only with oneself, where one can only turn one's gaze to one's own innermost forces.

Now it might appear, esteemed attendees, that this whole process of spiritual research is highly unhealthy. But we must bear in mind that it is a cognitive process. Just as nothing in this room is changed in terms of its outward appearance by the fact that my eyes are directed towards this room and my thoughts are visualizing this room, so this knowledge changes nothing in this room. Everything that the spiritual researcher experiences is knowledge, and everything that he then beholds through his knowledge lies, unnoticed by the outer life, at the bottom of every soul life. Only through observation can the spiritual researcher be convinced of what really lives in every soul. In every soul live the powers that constantly draw on life from hour to hour, from minute to minute, from second to second, just as the plant germ draws on the present plant.

Only through this contemplation, esteemed attendees, only through this immersion in the powers that sustain life, does one become immersed in the realization of how, over and over again, that which is death is overcome. For as one sees that life is maintained by the forces being constantly active from birth to physical death, which the spiritual researcher experiences, so one also becomes convinced through spiritual research that these same forces also overcome death, which concludes physical life like a gate, and introduce man into the world of the spiritual. Spiritual science does not understand death in the way one would like to recognize it out of fear of death, out of the expectation of another life, but spiritual science recognizes it by leading the soul's spiritual powers of cognition to the of death and then sees how death works throughout a person's entire life, so that when it draws its conclusion, it can be overcome by the same forces that are always at the basis of our souls.

Yet another difficulty arises, honored attendees, for the one who thus explores the spiritual world, I would like to say again and again in an inner soul laboratory. This other difficulty is this: when thinking, when imagining, has thus detached itself from the physical, when the human being now knows: you now live in the spiritual-soul realm in such a way that you are not in your body, that you move purely in the fabric of the soul-spiritual itself, when man has developed to this degree in his inner spiritual laboratory, then he lives in soul-spiritual forces which are the least, the very least related to that which we call our memory powers. And when we consider what depends on our powers of memory, how our whole life could not exist in everyday life if we did not remember what we had experienced in the previous moment, if we did not remember in our whole life what brings coherence to our life brings coherence to our lives, when we consider what memory means, then we will be able to understand how differently those forces act on the soul that must almost stop before the power of memory, that appeal to nothing in the ordinary power of memory in everyday life.

Thus it is that at first, when the spiritual researcher reaches the point where he is truly liberated from the bodily life in his spiritual and soul life, his presentation hurries away like a dream that cannot be remembered, and only only when one continues patiently with the exercises mentioned, the exercises in meditation and concentration, does another power develop in place of the ordinary memory, which must not be involved in this. We could call this power an “inner force of habit”. We become capable of repeatedly performing, habitually, what we have thus appropriated as an inner experience. We perform the inner gesture again and again, as it were. Spiritual science cannot work on the basis of memory, but goes beyond this ordinary basic power of life, beyond memory, and imprints such habits on the spiritual-soul realm that has been freed from the physical, so that one can repeatedly carry out the inner tasks that need to be done in order to feel at one with one's free spiritual-soul realm in the spiritual world.

If I, dear attendees, may touch on something personal – just to make something clearer – then let it be this: When we talk about things that are experienced through the outer senses, then it is the case that if, for example, I have given a lecture once, I remember how I gave it, so that when I give it for the twelfth, for the thirtieth time, I present it from my inner being in a completely different way than the first, second, third time, when I have not yet fully memorized it. This is not the case when one speaks in all sincerity about matters of spiritual science, but rather, each time, through the inner gestures that have been acquired by the soul, what is the content of spiritual science must be brought forth anew. It makes no difference whether one speaks about something for the first time or for the hundredth time, because one's memory is basically more of a hindrance than a help. Of course, one can always recount from memory what one has spoken about the content of spiritual science, but the one who stands on the ground of genuine spiritual science, honestly and sincerely, feels an inner obligation to present in ever-renewed liveliness that which he himself experiences. Therefore, he must experience it again and again, for he presents it not from memory, not through knowledge, but through a skill that he has acquired.

But our entire inner soul life is changed in yet another way. When we proceed intimately in the manner described, again and again performing such inner, we can now say purely conceptual, acts of the will, through which we place simple thought-content at the center of our consciousness and become completely absorbed in it, then we also experience something through our will. But this life of the will is different from that which underlies outer actions. What underlies outer actions develops a life of the will in which the will is asleep. For the way in which the human being intervenes with his thoughts in his will – this is indeed an old riddle of philosophy, which will not be discussed further here – the connection between the thought and the outer action, is in the deep foundations of the soul life. But it is precisely into these deep layers of the soul that spiritual science must descend if it is to ascend to supersensible knowledge. And by repeatedly, repeatedly bringing to life inwardly that which is the object of meditation and concentration in thinking, by doing so again and again out of inner will, out of strong inner soul forces – repetition is important – other processes occur in the soul than those of outer action. Such activities occur in the soul that do not take place in the same way as external actions, where we always have to intervene with our thoughts, but rather those that repeat themselves with regularity, I would say internally, automatically.

This is often disturbing for those who deal with spiritual methods, that by practicing and repeatedly fixing their soul on this or that thought - but they have to do it repeatedly, patiently, patiently, energetically, persistently - it is often disturbing that the whole inner activity becomes as mechanical as breathing for the body, where we are also not aware of how the impulse of breathing intervenes. While on the one hand we lift ourselves up into the highest spiritual state of consciousness, of thought itself, which leads us to what is behind the thought, to the inner experience of the power of thought, the very tasks that we perform in perpetual repetition become as if they were mechanical, so that we gradually learn to feel how something takes place in this detached soul life, which is so peculiar to it, in rhythmic sequence, as breathing is peculiar to the body in rhythmic sequence. We experience our corporeality as external to us, and we experience our soul as being lifted out of the corporeal, but in such a way that it is as if it is in an inner action, but now faces the body with this inner action.

This, in turn, is linked, honored attendees, to what one might call: the deepest inner soul-shaking. Just as one descends into a loneliness, into a loneliness that kills all external world-witnessing, when one goes to the one side of mental power expressions, through which basically all our everyday life consists, so one descends on the other side as if to the automatic life, as to the life that takes place in us, but without our intervention. Just as we become fully active on the one hand, so active that we are not even supported by memory, on the other hand we become aware of something within us that is active by itself, which we can only look at, which we can only watch. Indeed, it is so that we feel as if bewitched, as if spellbound in such an automatism of life that goes with us through life, we feel all the faintheartedness of life, all that which shows the heaviness, the weight of life, all this can overcome us, and anyone who does not come to the stage of knowledge just mentioned with the right method and sufficient preparation can easily reach a point of complete despair in their inner life when they see what is in them.

For again, it is only through knowledge that we become aware of everything that is in us, that at the bottom of life is a life automatism, when one sees how one is placed in life and what through the human being like clockwork - but only in a spiritual way, not mechanically like clockwork - what is spread throughout the universe as the cosmic life forces. There one learns to empathize with the whole universe as one piece, as a part of this universe, but one feels in it as if one were completely alienated from oneself, as if one had become a petrification, a petrefact, in this life. Then one realizes that everything one experiences is only the realization of what is down there in the soul. And that is a perpetual struggle between what is petrified in us, as if striving for automatism, and on the other hand, as if rising into spiritual solitude for perpetual activity, an inner war, an inner life of struggle that is withdrawn from us in the sight of everyday life. What has been described is at the bottom of our soul. And from such an inner life of struggle, from a struggle that takes place in every soul, which the spiritual researcher only observes, from such a life of struggle, he draws his knowledge. And what you now find in the literature of spiritual science has been drawn from the depths of the soul, drawn from this life of struggle.

Of course, I say that anyone can go through the beginnings of spiritual research, and in this way everyone can be convinced today that what spiritual research presents is correct. But what one has to go through when one comes to decisive turning points in relation to spiritual knowledge comes from the soul's inner experiences, which are full of struggle, wild movement and tragedy. These experiences come from regions of the soul that stir up everything, everything, and one gains a respectful of life and of the wisdom that permeates life when one realizes that in everyday life, man has the grace of having a veil woven over all that is at the bottom of his soul.

But humanity is evolving, honored attendees. And the time of development in which people could only live in consciousness, deprived by a veil of that which rules and lives in the depths of the soul, these times are coming to an end, and the times are opening up in which humanity must, through the natural powers of the soul, become acquainted with that which lives and moves in the depths of the soul. Just as at a certain point in human development, people had to be disabused of the view, in line with earlier common sense, that the earth stands still and the starry sky and the sun move around it . It is within the bounds of earthly evolution that humanity must be disabused of the notion that all soul life is built upon such a foundation as that just described.

Humanity wants to recognize that the life concerns we carry with us, the life triumphs, the zest for life and suffering, the life force, the life disappointments and the life deeds we admire in our fellow human beings, that all this is achieved through a victory that takes place on the basis of subconscious soul experience. The fact that we live because forces are at work behind the world of the senses that are engaged in the most lively struggle to gain that which we rejoice in, that which gives our lives meaning, will give people invigorating soul strength in the future when they will know what must be fought for, what must be suffered, and what must be overcome in the world of the senses, through unknown powers. This will give man a living sense of his connection with the spiritual powers that stand behind the world of the senses.

And when man has an overview of the two battlefields of the life of thought, which is detached from the body, and the life of will, which is detached from the body, then he enters into that knowledge of repeated earthly lives, which today seems so fantastic to our way of thinking, although Lessing asserted it within the spiritual life of modern humanity. And he enters into the real connections of human destiny, which present us with so many riddles.

What I would like to touch on today is that when we look at life, this life appears to us with what it expresses in everyday life, as through victories and wars of unknown spiritual powers, but of recognizable spiritual powers; and so when we recognize life, we also recognize the great events of the times in a different way than usual.

We, honored attendees, are indeed standing in our fateful present in difficult events that also promise great things. The question can be raised: what effect can the things we are now experiencing – the daring deeds of courage, the daring deeds of overcoming fear of death, the noble deeds of willingness to make sacrifices – have on a soul that absorbs what spiritual research wants to give to humanity? We are not living in a small time! For months events in our surroundings have been presenting themselves to us in a way that, one might well say, has not been seen in all of human history, not in such magnitude and with such significance. If one adds up the various nationalities fighting on the side of the Central European powers, even leaving out minor tribal differences, one arrives at twenty-one different peoples from the most diverse parts of the world. And if we count the various nations fighting on the side of the Central European powers, we get, again leaving out minor tribal differences, fourteen fighting individual nations; so that we can say that over a large part of the inhabited earth, thirty-five nations, leaving out minor tribal differences, are fighting each other today. And if, from the point of view of spiritual science, we turn our eyes to that which is intervening in such a powerful historical way in our time, oh, there a very special nuance of feeling presents itself to us.

What does it actually mean that spiritual science basically only wants to be a continuation of natural science? Yes, honored attendees, what Goethe emphasized so much is that we will only arrive at a true science when we no longer look at nature, at that which visibly surrounds us, in terms of reasons of expediency, when we no longer ask, “Why does the ox have horns? So that he can gore,” but when one realizes that the ox gores because he has horns, when one regards everything in terms of cause, not in terms of expediency. If this is the peculiarity of the external world view, if the best minds have fought for this causal world view, asking about the causes everywhere, then spiritual science also stands on the ground of asking about the causes, but about the deeper causes that elude sensory perception.

In relation to what is going on around us, however, in terms of historical events, something else must develop as a counterpoint to spiritual science. If you see how the powerful play out around us, you see how humanity suffers and develops the boldest acts of heroism, then you are led by observing what human will unfolds to the feelings - you cannot prove this because it is based on a transformation of the whole life of feeling. Then one is led by the feeling to look at everything in this life in which one is placed, not in terms of how the causes prevail, but in terms of what must arise as goals, as effects, from what is fought for in hot struggle, what is achieved through great sacrifices. Just as in the life we are observing we have to look at the causes everywhere, so too in what we experience, as we experience today, we have to look at the effects everywhere. And these effects, oh, these effects, they become meaningful for us above all by enabling us to see from a spiritual-scientific point of view how what is called Central European spiritual life really forms a whole.

Oh, this Central European intellectual life, how it has basically been achieved and how it differs in its peculiarity – I do not want to make any value judgments now – from that intellectual life, from which it is now surrounded and besieged as if in a mighty fortress! For those who can grasp the spiritual connections, this peculiarity of Central European intellectual life is evident in full clarity. One can say that the blossoms reveal what is in the roots. And so let us turn our gaze, just as an example, to a flower of Central European intellectual life, to a flower that is well known to you, esteemed attendees, that you have all often let your soul dwell on, to that which, as if from all the depths of Central European intellectual life, the great spirit of modern times, Goethe, created in his “Faust”. And we shall point out only one passage in this Faust. We see Faust at the beginning of the story, having passed through life and learned everything that can be learned by ordinary thinking:

Now, alas! I have studied philosophy,
jurisprudence and medicine,
and unfortunately theology too!
very thoroughly, with great endeavor.
There I stand, poor fool that I am,
and am as wise as before.

Goethe wrote this in the 1770s, during the striving and yearning of his youth. What was achieved by people in external thinking and external research at that time affected his Central European mind. Now, let us follow the course of this Central European spiritual life after Goethe wrote this scene in Faust, which has become almost trivial today, but which, if you allow it to take effect on your soul in its elementary originality, is deeply moving. Since Goethe wrote this, has been through in his soul, there have been minds at work in Central European intellectual life that have tried to penetrate to the sources of life in a truly Faustian way, with bold intellectual courage, with bold philosophical courage.

Today, the great idealistic thinkers of Central Europe, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and the others, are misunderstood. There is no need to go into what they created in terms of content; in the strictest sense, one can even be opposed to much of what they created in terms of content. However, one need only look at the innermost, most honest and sincere urge and path to truth , out of which they strove and which they were willing to go, and one needs only to look at how such thinkers have truly made this Faustian word come true, to expand one's own self to the self of the whole world, to witness that which is in the whole cosmos.

And so, how does a thinker who is rooted in Central European culture in the most eminent sense, like a Johann Gottlieb Fichte, stand before us? From the innermost nerve of human will and thought, from the will borne by thought, from the thought permeated by will, he seeks to grasp that in man by which man can connect himself in his own self with the eternal, divine self that rules and blows through the world. And so, as he also demanded, there was one thing in him that he lived and thought and philosophically strived for, so one that, when he was in the last hours of his feverish delirium from the illness of his wife, which she had acquired while caring for the warriors, that he received from his wife's illness, he, the most Central European of philosophers, still lived in the feverish delusion in the immediate life of his time, in the life through which Central Europe wanted to free itself from the tyranny of Western Europe, with Blücher's crossing of the Rhine, the philosopher Fichte lived. This great, powerful personality, who inwardly awakened life and strengthened his people at that time with his mighty “Speeches to the German Nation,” left his mark on his feverish fantasies.

We see them passing by, these thinkers. And we could say something similar about the others, even if we do not agree with the content of their thinking, with reference to their great and powerful striving. We see the best forces of Central European culture blossoming and passing by, the same forces that we may believe are now working in a completely different way for the benefit and progress of Central Europe on battlefields in the east and west. We see them pushing up into the spiritual light in the future.

And now we ask ourselves, honored attendees, let us assume that Goethe had still lived in 1840, had still lived at that time, when Fichte's intellectual feat, Schelling's wonderful artistic construct of the universe, Hegel's magnificent logical image of the universe had been cast over Central European culture - oh these thinkers , they truly brought philosophy in a new form to humanity and, if we consider that Fichte wrote a “natural right”, Hegel wrote a “natural right”, they also renewed jurisprudence, Schelling published a medical journal, immersed himself deeply in medicine, and theologians wanted them to be, basically, all these philosophers. But what would Goethe have done if he had started his Faust in 1840 instead of 1770? What would he have put at the beginning of the Faust saga? Certainly not this, despite the fact that these great, powerful thinkers have walked the spiritual skies of Central Europe. Despite this, he would certainly not have put:

Now, thank God, I have
studied philosophy with Fichte, Schelling, Hegel,
law and now also medicine,
and I stand here now, highly satisfied, I wise man!

No, again he would have begun in 1840:

Habemun, sch! Philosophy,
Jurisprudence and Medicine,
And unfortunately also Theology!
I have studied them all, with great zeal.
And now I stand, poor fool,
And am as wise as before.

That is what characterizes Central European culture! This Central European culture will only gradually be understood in its deepest peculiarity by those who live in it. This Central European culture is truly the expression of what is also written in “Faust”: “Whoever strives, we can redeem” - eternal striving. And when one stage of striving has been achieved, striving itself leads beyond this stage. One is born as a Frenchman, one is born as an Italian, one is born as an Englishman, and one knows what one is; but one must educate oneself to become what one is as a Central European, one must strive in one's soul not only once but continually to attain that which makes us a Central European. In this way, it becomes an individual in the highest sense, in this way it becomes one in which every human being must work directly, one that must always be achieved anew.

If I may, just to make something clear, touch on something personal, I can say that, as an Austrian, I lived in my childhood, in the sixties and seventies here in Austria, in a time when there was full opposition in Austria to everything that was going on in the German Reich, when it was still difficult for Austrians, including Austrian Germans, to look with satisfaction at what was happening in the German Reich. And then we lived contrary to that which had to be overcome first, out of German individualism, so that the Reich could be forged together, which is now fighting at Austria's side against the besiegers of the great Central European fortress.

Everything must be achieved for Central European culture. One would like to say, if the word is not misunderstood: in other nationalities, in other states, one is born into what one is; in Central Europe, one has to acquire everything – again according to a Goethean saying: “What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it to possess it.” But this gives rise to an attitude that permeates all Central European culture like a magical breath, that forges together what is Central European, even forging together all national differences, that consciously strives towards what one is. And this also guarantees that everything that has already been achieved in Central Europe must always be increased and elevated in continued striving, that the spirit of striving, I would say the Faustian mood, must be continued.

Just as Faust would have said the same thing in 1840 at the starting point of his quest as in 1770, despite so much intellectual striving having been done about Central Europe, so too is that which has already been done constantly renewed by the Central European soulfulness. And so we stand, strengthened precisely by spiritual scientific feelings, full of hope for what must develop as goal and effect from blood and death, suffering and pain, from sacrifice and offering, from our time.

Oh, honored attendees, I cannot, of course, go into all the details of our fateful time. But if that which has conquered the world in a materialistic sense in recent times could only develop out of struggle, then that which must spread out of the spiritual life of Central Europe will develop more and more over the great world, over the territories of all the peoples who today still fight against this Central Europe. It must develop out of struggle and war. And the strengthening of the soul power, it will, if we consider that we can show through spiritual science how in individual human lives that which is the substance of life develops on the basis of what is the war and struggle in the depths of the soul, as we had to describe it.

Now, in the outer life, honored attendees, people are witnesses and participants in struggles over and over again, and these struggles must be there. Just as these struggles are veiled by a beneficent veil within the soul of the individual, so we must be placed in the outer, historical life in these struggles, from which that which is the outer, historical life must develop. Just as what Greek life became for the world developed in the struggle against the mighty Persian armies, and just as what was imported from Roman and Latin culture into world civilization developed on the basis of hard struggles, so what is in Faustian striving – and this Faustian striving also goes as far as those souls that know nothing of Faust – must spread out on soil that is soaked with the blood of our noblest, in an atmosphere that is permeated with the sentiments that can only develop today in our fateful time.

It has often been emphasized, especially in Germany recently, that it is due to the developmental conditions of modern times that this war is basically only being waged for external reasons, that it is being waged so that the infinite diligence of those in external industry and external trade can be applied freely in the world. Certainly, such statements are absolutely correct and should not be opposed in any way. We are living in a materialistic age, more or less, as regards our material life, and even the most difficult sacrifices we make are for the sake of material goods. But we are sure that from this Central Europe, even if only material culture is carried out into the world, through the gates opened by the struggle in the most diverse foreign areas, if perhaps not by the fathers themselves, then by the sons of those who go out into foreign areas in industry and trade , and which is carried everywhere by those who enter into industry and commerce. Everything that grows out of that spirit, which found its flower-like expression in that Faust who wants to “stand in an open space with an open people,” and who wants to attain freedom and life only by conquering them anew every day.

And if we look at the peculiarity of this Central European intellectual life, how it has forged the nations of Central Europe, if we look at this Faustian peculiarity, then we have to say: this Central European intellectual life is called upon to give the soul to the world-earth body, to incorporate soul into the earth development of humanity. It is very remarkable that, for example, we hear from the northwest - we can hear it every day, honored attendees - that those mighty external material conquests that the inhabitants of the British Isles, for example, have made, that these - as if mocking us, insulting us in Central Europe, such words are shouted over and over again from abroad, that everything that is to be undertaken is to be undertaken in the name of freedom, of the liberation of the peoples.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it cannot be denied that the inhabitants of the British Isles have made great conquests in the fields of external and material life. But look at what these conquests were made on account of! From 1856 to 1900, England waged 34 wars of conquest, conquered four million square miles of land, and made 57 million people new British subjects – that's over the course of about 44 to 45 years, 34 wars of conquest! The material culture that the British Empire alone could spread across the world has grown out of this. Out of blood and death, out of suffering and pain, out of numerous sacrifices, there must come forth that which, in the course of history, matures as the life-substance for humanity.

And if we want to shed light on Central European intellectual life in comparison with what spiritual science shows us for the individual, we will say: If we look at its effects, if we look at the goals that are hidden in what is watering the soil with blood today, we see that the threatened area must be reclaimed as such effects. Just as a person must continually re-conquer his body after a few years so that it may be an instrument for the soul, so too in the outer historical life must the people of Central Europe re-conquer their territory so that it is all the better equipped with the soul-like qualities through which this Central European humanity will be able to carry into the future that which is rooted in the depths of its soul life.

Oh, when we look at what we can see in the outer life of our fateful time, compared with what spiritual science says for the individual human life, then it becomes understandable not only for the mind, but for the whole heart, that we know what is being prepared for the future, because it can only be prepared through struggle and war, then we learn in a certain way - however painful it is in the individual case, which must take place around us - we learn to understand it as being in the service of the great development of humanity, in that we must feel that we are part of it with every moment of our lives. And so, through a true contemplation of individual life, the human being reconciles himself with the most fateful events that take place around him.

Allow me to summarize what I have just said in a few words, in which I express, I would like to say, what I have developed as individual results of spiritual research, in a way that is intuitive to me. I would like to express in a few words what spiritual science has to take hold of the human soul in its most intimate life, so that through this taking hold a basic feeling and a basic will can arise that understand and permeate life. What I took the liberty of saying can be summarized in the following words, which the soul strengthened by spiritual science can make the basic values of its own being:

Where sense knowledge ends,
There stands the gate,
The realities of life
To the soul's being opens;
The key creates the soul,
When she strengthens in herself
In the struggle, the world powers
On their own grounds
With human powers lead;
When it drives out of itself
the sleep that envelops the powers of knowledge
at the boundaries of its senses
with spirit.

In a series of lectures, I tried to explain the extent to which the present should strive for a division of the social organism into an area of the spirit with independent administration, an area of law on a democratic basis, and an independent economic area. The idea and practical formulation of this view of the threefold social organism, when it attempted to place itself in today's cultural and intellectual life, was expressed to those people who could be expected to have learned something for their work in relation to human development from the loud and clear facts of the last four to five years and also from our present. And one should actually believe that in the present time everyone living with a truly awakened soul should learn from these facts that speak loudly and clearly about the reorganization of social matters. Naturally, the idea could not actually arise in the mind of the bearer of this threefold thinking that those who, by virtue of their entire mental makeup – mentality is what one has been accustomed to calling it in recent times – want to hold on to old programs, to old party opinions, will readily profess their support for this idea of the threefold order of the social organism. For what must one actually have within oneself in order to grasp this idea as one that has really been plucked out of the life of the present in a practical way?

You have to be able to say: the terrible events of the world war catastrophe have shown how the old views on economic life have driven this economic life of humanity into external institutions, which, in the end, by combining the individual institutions into the great state imperialisms, had to lead to the world catastrophe. They were driven to this because economic life developed in a certain sense in such a way that it was, I might say, left to its own driving forces; that we neglected to arrive at truly comprehensive economic ideas which could have lived through themselves through economic measures. A man who is officially responsible for the reorganization of economic life in the Reich Ministry, Wichard von Moellendorff, recently stated that it was his conviction that, under all circumstances, even if the world war catastrophe had not occurred, or had not occurred in the form in which it did, economic life would inevitably have driven itself into a crisis of the most terrible kind, to the detriment of humanity and of nations, for the simple reason that this economic life lacked truly fruitful guiding ideas. And the forces that operated in the states and in the legal conceptions of nations were closely allied with this economic life. In the final analysis it had come about that only economic interests were reflected in the legal systems of the nations. And we had to experience that in 1914 the mutual relations between the states ran into such unclear currents that basically no state power, even with the most earnest goodwill, was actually in a position to avert the terrible threat at that time.

So it might seem that for economic life as for state life, there is much to be learned from the course of events that led to the impossibility of their own destruction for the inner drive that says: A new idea, a new willpower must be found if humanity is to flourish in its development; a new idea for economic life, a new idea for political or legal life. And is not, after all, the whole of political and legal life and of economic life based on the spiritual powers that humanity can unfold, that humanity can cultivate in the growing generation, and which can then intervene in the economy and in the legal life as rational thoughts? Can we not also say that intellectual life also shows how we have arrived at a critical epoch, and how we can learn from it, that we must reflect on and contemplate its further fruitful development and on a new foundation for it?

In the three most important areas of human life – economic, political and legal, and spiritual life – the big question arose, the question of the world war catastrophe and its aftermath. People should actually be around who have learned from the course of events. The fact that humanity's new phase of development cannot be mastered with old thoughts and old party opinions should actually be a basic conviction of the modern human being, based on the world of facts itself. It is out of this attitude, out of this conviction, that the lectures have been given so far here by me. In today's lecture and the one the day after tomorrow, I would like to add a few things to what has already been said, which could serve as a supplement to what has been said so far, from a more spiritual point of view today and from a more practical point of view the day after tomorrow. One thing has emerged that is, in essence, extremely instructive in view of the conviction and attitude just expressed.

What I would characterize as a strange alliance has emerged, a kind of coalition from the far right to the far left. In terms of their opposition to what has been presented here as the basic ideas of the tripartite social organism, Spartacists, independents, majority socialists, the Civic Party and extreme reactionaries are marching in complete agreement with each other today. It could hardly have seemed better, as it could have, to let the Spartacists and the bourgeois and the reactionaries converge in their attitudes.

This peculiarity therefore exists, that basically, at least in form and in attitude, the most amicable harmony reigns from left to right. From the extreme left, we could hear the following judgment about what has been said in these lectures very recently. We could hear that people agree, completely agree, with my criticism of the previous economic order, that they also completely agree with the threefold social order, that they even believe that this threefold order must come about, but – now comes the other thing: they will summon up all their strength to fight tooth and nail against what has been said here in criticism of the previous economic system and about the threefold social organism.

Strange things – one declares one's full agreement with the matter and at the same time declares that one must fight the matter at all costs! Similar arguments can also be heard from the extreme right. So there could perhaps have been no better opportunity for those who, whether from this or that hole of old views, wanted to come together to fight against that which absolutely does not and will not compromise with old views.

Today, by way of introduction to what I will have to say in detail the day after tomorrow, I would like to draw attention to a side of the modern social movement that has actually always been misunderstood, and which has been taken into account precisely in the formulation, in the conception of the idea and the practice of the tripartite organism. Today, I would like to touch on the spiritual basis of the current development of humanity, because I have to be aware that this spiritual basis is of the utmost importance and that the misunderstandings that arise with regard to what can and should be socially desired today stem precisely from the failure to take this spiritual basis into account.

And there is another reason why it is necessary, urgently necessary, to place a movement that today merely wants to be economic or, at most, political, on a spiritual foundation. For anyone who follows today's events as they unfold, not only on the surface, but who tries to penetrate deeper into what is actually happening in the depths of the development of nations today, must surely say to himself: the mighty, the terrible terrible, blood-drenched battle that has taken place is only a wave that has arisen from something in the depths of human nature, something that has been building for a long time. It is an inner restlessness in human nature that is showing itself almost everywhere in the world. One could feel it all these years since the outbreak of this world catastrophe by the facts, as more and more populations across the continents joined in what was actually taking place, joined in such a way that sometimes one truly did not know why, or that the reasons they put forward for joining made a very dubious impression. One could see from this that something elementary lies in this world catastrophe, something that is emerging from the depths of human existence over the whole earth. And it seems to me that nowhere is there more opportunity for a real recognition of what is actually taking place in the depths of humanity than in Central Europe, which has recently found itself squeezed between the whole of the Orient and the whole of the Occident.

This prompts us to ask: What is actually at the root of this? And it should be understandable that the understanding of such things must be based on a certain inner contemplation of the circumstances, on a certain experiential grasping of the facts, that something like instinctive, intuitive contemplation is needed to understand these things. Therefore, one should be understood when one draws attention to what arises from such a view, so that one encounters, I would like to say, what is happening to people. It will not be too much to say today that what has developed out of the world war catastrophe in terms of moods through Central Europe towards the East, towards Russia, towards Asia, and what is developing in terms of moods towards the West and across to America, if one understands that one sees in it only the continuation of that elementary restlessness of humanity that first found its horrific expression in the world war catastrophe. That was, as many have said, the most terrible external armed conflict that has taken place since the time when people have been talking about history. And this armed conflict has been waged with the most physical means by a large part of contemporary humanity. But we can see emerging, rising out of what has produced this armed conflict, something that will take hold of humanity with equal significance and equal impact, and we are actually only at the beginning of it. If what we have experienced was the most terrible armed conflict, then we will also experience - all the signs, which are present in the moods of the people, show it - the greatest spiritual battle, the greatest, the most terrible spiritual confrontation between the East, the Orient and the Occident. We are at the beginning of great and comprehensive spiritual struggles for humanity. And what is now taking place in social demands seems only to be the wave of a spiritual struggle of humanity that has been driven to the surface. Even those contemporaries who have already reached a respectable age will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle of humanity. In particular, however, the younger generations will have to engage themselves in this spiritual struggle that encompasses humanity. And what we can say to these growing generations about what we learn from the events, much, very much, will depend on the shaping of human development in the future. Today, the coming event is first announced by something that is outwardly connected with things: half of India, more than half of India, is half starved, and from starved India, the call goes up from a thousand and a thousand souls today: “Away from England!” This must not be judged merely from the political point of view that one is accustomed to from elsewhere today; it must be judged from a broader, more incisive point of view, one that is effective in the development of humanity. For what lives in the Orient is imbued with the heritage, with the heirloom of ancient spiritual life, which has only declined.

Expressed through the deeds of men, the heritage of ancient Oriental spiritual life will come into conflict with the spiritual aspirations of the Occident as far as America, and it remains to be seen whether those forces in the Anglo-American population that their tenacity and generous comprehension of their own selfish national interests have dealt with Central Europe in the well-known way, whether they will also be able to cope with Asia when, driven by the hunger of India, quite different forces will speak than those which the West has heard so far? This is only a hint of what is alive in the cultural atmosphere of the earth today. Because this is alive within, it is not enough today to judge what is actually happening from the traditional political and economic concepts. Therefore, it is necessary to extract the impulses for a new development of human conditions from a spiritual understanding of what is taking place in human moods across the whole earth today. Today, we must not only look at how the proletariat of Russia or Central Europe or the Entente is faring, although these are of course the most pressing questions for us.

Today, we must not just look at how certain people want to sit on their money bags. Today, if we do not want to miss the most important event, we must see as essentially involved in the social forces of the present that which the still half-asleep Orient will pour over the world. It is not necessary to say more than a few words, but when these few words are taken with all the weight that they carry for the spiritual development of mankind, then in these few words one will hear something that has a say in the reshaping of human development. The Orient, in so far as it is the cultured Orient – if we may apply this Occidental expression to the Orient – the Orient lived through thousands of years and, basically, to this day, yes, today, especially in its most spiritually minded representatives in the view that reality, true only that which man can experience spiritually and soulfully within himself, that which rises within the human being as inner soul content, that which can fill the human being so that he draws his true human consciousness from this inner soul content. This is true reality for the Orient, as far as it is the educated Orient. And the external, physical-sensual world, the world in which we work, the world in which the land for our work lies, in which we place the means of production for our work, this world is for the Oriental the Maja, the great appearance, that which is not real, which lives like a minor planet of the true spiritual-soul reality that arises only within. The Oriental is one with this view. He lives with it in his social community. This view fills him at all times, whether he withdraws in solitude for contemplation or whether he lends a hand in the oriental way to his fellow human beings in the physical world. One must consider such things if one really wants to see the world that presents itself to us in people living east of us, because basically, in Russia, it is already beginning to be as I have just characterized it. It only reaches its culmination, its peak, when one looks further east. On the other side, we see a completely different human disposition, a completely different inner life, when we cross the Rhine to the west, when we look in particular at the Anglo-American world. But on the other hand, everything that actually characterizes the attitude and the state of mind of the Western world is increasingly being shared by the basic character of Central European people, and there it reaches its peak in the attitude and state of mind of the present-day socialists, of socialists of all colors, basically.

We can find it again and again when we look at the people of the West and now also the people of Central Europe, as we have just looked at the people of the Orient. We will recognize what underlies the West when we grasp it in the way in which it has come to expression most clearly and most radically, when we grasp it precisely in the modern socialist mentality. What now prevails, no longer as a theoretical view but as a fundamental mood of the soul, is that the only reality is that which surrounds us in the physical, sensual world, that which we grasp when we do our work in the physical world for our fellow human beings. What is expressed in the land on which our work is done, what is expressed in the means of production with which our work is done, that is the only reality, and what appears in human souls as right, as custom, as art, as science, in short, as spiritual life, is only a result, a smoke, so to speak, of this single sensual-physical reality; this is, as every socialist thinker of the present day is firmly convinced, ideology. Ideology is the same thing seen from within, just as the Maya is for the Oriental. The Oriental says: physical sensuality, the physical world around us, the economic world, material existence, is Maya, it is an ideology, and reality is solely that which arises within the soul. And the Westerner says: Reality is only that which surrounds us externally, what is in the economic life, and an ideology, a maja, is what arises inwardly in the soul. If we know how such a basic mood of the soul actually makes a person, how it places him in life, then we see in what is happening today as a mood within the human race on earth this great, powerful contrast that I have just described. And this contrast has an enormous historical impact. From this contrast, not only a struggle between nations will develop, not only a race war, but a struggle of humanity, in which we and those who follow us will be placed. He who can see in the present mood of humanity the preparations for this struggle of humanity will not fail to be able to let himself be fertilized by what is really going on in present-day humanity in terms of the ideas and forces necessary for a social world view. What can be grasped in the present, I would like to say, as two abstract thoughts, but what will become reality, will grow out of fighting forces, although of a different form than the physical fighting forces of armed combat were, but to fighting forces that challenge the inner strength, the inner resistance of man to an even greater extent than the past armed combat did.

And further: a remarkable parallelism arises when one follows the moods that have just been indicated to you with more or less abstract but very real thoughts. We look towards the Orient and rightly ask ourselves today: What has become of the mood that created the greatest spiritual wealth in the ancient world of the Orient? Those in the know are aware of this. What has become of all this for today's cultural humanity of the Orient? The man of the Orient is weighed down in mystical-dark rapture, in half-sleepiness. That which used to give strength to the Oriental under the influence of the thought “sensuality is Maya, inner soul is reality, divine reality” used to give the Oriental strength and power, today it gives him weakness, it makes him a fatalist, someone who surrenders without will to the fate of the world. This is the fruit of a spiritual life that was directed specifically at the human, spiritual and soul. If one paints the corresponding counter-image of the Occident, then one says something highly, highly uncomfortable for very many people today – I am well aware of this – something that strongly provokes their antagonism. But I have often said: We are not living in the time of the small, but in the time of the great reckoning, and one must not shy away from telling people the truth.

We have seen how, in a certain higher development, what has been prepared for centuries in the West has found a particularly characteristic expression in modern socialism. Through Western development, the human mood has gradually emerged that actually sees the only reality in the physical-sensual world of economic life. And the leading and governing circles, that is, those who were there before, were the first to feel that the physical-sensual world and its material economic factors are the only reality, that the other things that arise in the soul are Maya, ideology. Socialism merely articulated what others also felt but did not dare to express. Under socialism, it has only emerged that the whole world of law, of custom, of art, of science, all that is called the spiritual life of man, is an ideology, a maja, for the newer humanity of the West. How did this basically genuinely Western view come to this climax? It has come about because more and more has emerged within modern economic life that which is referred to as modern private capitalism. This modern private capitalism has created the mood in economic life that has ultimately transformed our entire social system into a kind of acquisition society. Bit by bit, we have seen it come about over the last few centuries, how the current economic conditions have arisen from earlier ones. Even if people today do not pay attention to it, in earlier centuries there was a much greater interest in the objects and products of the environment, in everything that was part of the law and the economy, than there is today.

There was a much deeper factual interest than there is today. Owning this or that object because it has this or that form, because it has this or that origin, because it bears this or that signature, that was a human interest in earlier times to a much greater degree than it is today, where this objective human interest in external arrangements is often clouded and obscured by the fact that people arrange their home according to what they acquire purely for the sake of money and capital in the competitive struggle for survival. Torn away from the admiration for the beauty of what people create, torn away from the value of something simply because it was made by a human being, the interest of a large number of people today is in being able to see from their annual balance sheet whether they are in an active balance with their surroundings. That is a somewhat radical way of putting it, but it is the economic signature of the present. And this economic signature has given rise to another with regard to the concept of human labor. If we look back just a short time, we find how people, so to speak, allowed their work to grow together with their products. You can feel this when you are in a museum, standing in front of old door handles, old locks, even old boots. You can tell from the objects how the work of man has flowed into them. Today, the work of man is separate from the product; that is why most of the products that people delight in are so ugly. Today, human labor is something that has market value only in that it is rewarded with a certain payment. Today, human labor is what is calculated primarily according to its market value. And so, with regard to the administration of goods, the capitalist competition for the administration of goods, and with regard to his relationship to his work, man has become detached from the world. He stands, as it were, beside the machine, stuck in the soul-deserting capitalism of modern times, without connection to the external reality that he sees around him, which he cannot deny, and which has even become the only reality for him. And he cannot believe that what arises within him, the spiritual and soul-like, torn away from nature and economic order, is anything other than a Maja, an ideology. This is what the modern economic order has done.

The modern proletariat has grown into this modern economic order, has been pushed into it, especially over the last three to four centuries, gradually pushed in to the extent that it is in it today. This detachment from external reality has reached a climax in the development of humanity in modern times. One could demonstrate this in detail, how man has gradually, I might say, been alienated from himself. You see, today one can speak with countless members of the proletariat – if one has learned to think and feel with the proletariat, then one hears from their mouths also that which moves them above all – but then one hears you often hear: Above all, it must not be the case that we work all day and work with our hands and that our souls remain empty, because we come home tired in the evening and can do nothing but fall down and lie down. We want a reasonable working hours. And from what has been done with the working hours of people in recent centuries, which has now improved, the demand for an eight-hour working day emerges: 6 X 8 is 48, the 48-hour week. This is something that people who work want to achieve today. People talk about it: yes, of course, something like that is being striven for, humanity must move forward, but in the old days people had it even worse. In the old days, people had to work even harder, they were even more like beasts of burden. – I can share with you a decree from King Ferdinand I of Austria from the year 1550. In this decree it says: Every worker shall – and I ask you to pay particular attention to the following words – every worker shall work as has been the custom for many years, mornings and afternoons, with the exception of Sunday and Saturday afternoons, half a shift, that is, four hours. That makes 1550 hours for the year: 5 mornings of 8 hours (a half-shift in the morning and a half-shift in the afternoon, each of 4 hours) and 1 half-shift on Saturday of 4 hours, which adds up to 44 hours in the week for the year 1550. And of these 44 hours in the week, it is said: each laborer should work “as has been the custom for ages.” It is pointed out that this is the old custom. The modern age has not only brought us what is so celebrated from the progress of humanity; the modern age has also brought us the fact that we have to reclaim what already existed. These things should, I think, make us think! And under the influence of such things, especially the influence of the endeavor to extract as much as possible from work, this clinging of the Western man to physical sensual reality as the only reality has arisen. From this arose the feeling that the spiritual and soul is Maya, is ideology. But this has also brought about the modern proletariat's being placed in mere economic life. And so the great error of the modern proletariat has arisen. This modern proletariat was harnessed into economic life by the leading and guiding circles. They had to say to themselves: In this economic life, the soul is desolate, in this economic life, spirit is only smoke and sound, maya. We must have a different economic life. We must reshape economic life. From the reshaped economic life will emerge a spiritual life that is not a class spiritual life, but a universal human spiritual life.

It is not surprising that the modern proletariat has fallen prey to this error, because it was completely pushed into economic life. What it had was only born out of economic life. For the proletariat, the other world was a Maja, an ideology. As a proletariat, it could believe nothing other than that the only economic life it knew was merely to be transformed. Then everything else would fall into place by itself. Instead of – and this could not be the case at first, it could only arise from the lessons of the bloody world war – instead of saying to themselves, it is our situation that is to blame for the fact that we have only and solely entered into economic life, that this economic life has made the spiritual life dependent on itself, so in the future the spiritual life must no longer be dependent on the economic life, it must be freely based on itself - instead of drawing these radical conclusions, the proletariat drew the other: a different economic life will certainly arise, that will certainly produce a different spiritual life.

Today we are facing a great turning-point: either the proletariat will bring about its own misfortune if it remains only in the economic sphere and wants to transform only that, or it must realize what other people must realize with it , namely that spiritual life, as it is projected by the threefold social organism, must be taken out of the state and economic life, so that it is detached from them and placed on its own feet, in its own self-government.

And what has become of it? Through these influences, which I have just characterized, what has become of this Occidental belief that the spiritual-mental is Maya, the ideology, and that the outer economic life is the only reality? This has become what then found its ingenious expression in Marxism, because ingeniousness is also characterized by the fact that it produces not only the greatest positive achievements of humanity, but also the greatest errors. The view has become: Since you can't conjure into reality with the mind, with the thought, with what you ideologically develop – because only spiritualists believe that you just need to have a thought and then machines will move – since you can't work with thoughts, can't produce physical products, you can't control economic life with thoughts either. Therefore, economic life moves forward by itself alone. And if that is the only reality, then it must produce by itself what is to be achieved for humanity. Hence the Marxist doctrine – even if it is not stated by Marx, because Marx was not a “Marxist”, as he himself said, in the sense of many of his followers – hence the doctrine that at most can be promoted by man, what is brought about by the production process, by the economic-material process, by the external institutions themselves, but that all real progress actually takes place independently of man through the economic forces and factors themselves. This has developed into Western fatalism, into the belief that external reality will take care of itself without humans. The capitalists, for example, will concentrate the means of production more and more; the concentration of the means of production is taking place, and when these are sufficiently concentrated, they will automatically enter into the new socialization. The expropriation of the expropriators will take place. Fatalistic belief, combating as utopian all that is aware and convinced that man is the one who makes history, that what is to become action must first live in human thought – the drowsiness of the Oriental from his ancient spiritual life goes parallel to the fatalism of the Western majority in the belief that economic conditions will do it, one has only to wait and see how the development takes place. Is it not the case that we are clearly at a major turning point in human development? Fatalism in the East – fatalism among the most advanced people in the West. Fatalism here, fatalism there. A new force must flourish from what is in decline on both sides. How can we muster faith in the further development of humanity if we are unable to believe that something can arise from this mutual fatalism that will bring new impulses and new developmental forces for humanity? It is out of this faith that the ideas for the threefold social organism arose. Out of this belief, out of this belief in progress and in the development of humanity, arose the consideration of the world from two points of view: How does one engage with modern institutions, especially in economic life? How does one engage with modern spiritual life, so that it does not remain an appendage of economic and state life, but so that it becomes a free impulse in the development of humanity?

I believed that in the early 1890s the world would understand from the events of the time the impulse to point to the depths of human nature, from which a new, liberated spiritual life can gradually develop. And I tried to express this belief in my Philosophy of Freedom, which was first published in 1894. I did not reprint this Philosophy of Freedom even though it had long been out of print, because I could see that the ideas contained in it were not met with understanding, at least not during the decades immediately preceding the world war catastrophe. In particular, there was no response in Central Europe, where people were always saying, “We need the sun,” but they did not want to include the longing for a spiritual sun in this saying. And it was only when the belief arose that people could gain a new understanding of spiritual freedom from the lessons of the terrible world war catastrophe that I was impelled to produce the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” that is now available. For in what has been expressed, again and again, from subconscious, not conscious, depths of human nature in modern times, which is particularly expressed in the things that the modern proletariat now feels, although it cannot yet consciously express them because it has been deprived of education to do so, there is a threefold. There is the dark feeling that the external institutions of legal and economic life have taken on a form in which I, as a human being, am so constrained that I am merely inhibited, and that there is basically no point in of free will in the modern competitive market, where everyone must either acquire capitalistically or by wage labor, where all connection is dead between what man must do, that is, what he works, and what is then the product. There is no sense of connection: I am connected to the world in such a way that my will is free. One felt an inhibition of the will. And then, when one looked at one's relationship to other people: to a climax seems to have come under modern capitalist competition, under the forced labor of the newer times in the wage relationship, to a climax seems to have come what one can call a dwindling of trust from person to person. In the most extreme sense, anti-social instincts have taken the place of the old social instincts, which at least still existed in some form. These anti-social instincts have finally led to a lack of understanding between the modern classes of humanity, and have created the abyss between the proletariat and the non-proletariat, which is so difficult to bridge in modern times. This has given rise to the second experience of the inner man in modern times, the oppression with regard to the sense of right and wrong. And to this was added a third, which I already hinted at at the beginning of my discussion today: People saw each other exchanging their economic goods, they saw what lived in the exchange of these economic goods being entered on the left and right side of the books. But, as even Mr. von Moellendorff had to admit, no thought was given to the institutions of economic life. The third experience of the soul: It was as if one were plunged into darkness when looking into the maelstrom of modern markets, where the real thing for people was only what was acquired in a capitalist way. These have been the three experiences in modern times: the inhibition of free will, because there was nothing in which one could develop free will; complete oppression of the sense of right and obscuration of thought with regard to the external institutions of legal and economic life.

That was the feeling that gave rise to the impulse – it may have been weak and clumsy, it may still be weak and clumsy today, I readily admit – that gave rise to the impulse to seek the essence of the free human being, the human being who feels so integrated into the human order that he can say to himself: I lead a dignified human existence. The impulse to seek the essence of this free human being, the essence of the free spiritual human being, in the sense that all people can be such free spiritual human beings within the institutions of modern legal and economic life. One thing emerged above all others. People ask so easily and have asked again and again for centuries, and philosophers have speculated about it and countless opinions have been formed about it: Is man free according to his will, or is he not free? Is he a mere creature of nature who can only act out of the mechanical impulses of his inner being? The question has always been approached wrongly because more and more in the West the feeling for the actual reality of spiritual life has faded. For the Orient, the question of freedom or unfreedom has almost no significance; it plays no role at all there. In the West, it became the fundamental question of world view and ultimately even of political life, yes, of criminal law and so on. And one thing was not realized – you can read in detail about the individual steps that lead to this train of thought and this realization in my book “The Philosophy of Freedom” – one thing was not realized, namely that the question “Is man free or is he not free?” actually makes no sense at all, that it must be put differently, that it must be put like this: Is man, from his birth onward, through an education appropriate to his nature, to be developed in accordance with education and schooling in such a way that, despite external legal and economic institutions, something can arise within him as an experience that makes him a free being? Yes, that not only makes him a free being inwardly, but that develops the power of freedom in him to such a strength that he can then also set up the external legal and economic life in his own way? This arose as a basic impulse in modern developing humanity, on the one hand the democratic urge for equal rights for all, on the other hand the social urge: I will help you as you should help me. But one felt: such a social order with “equal rights for all” and with “help me as I want and must help you,” such a social order can only be established by people who, as free people, as free spiritual people, develop a true relationship to the whole of reality.

One must first understand that man is born neither free nor unfree, but that he can be educated and developed towards freedom, towards an understanding of freedom, towards experiencing freedom, if one brings him into contact with that spiritual life that imbues him with forces that first set him free in his development as a human being; that one can develop up to the point where our thoughts are no longer abstract, unreal, ideological, but thoughts that are grasped by the will. This is what I tried to present to the world as a realization in my Philosophy of Freedom: the marriage of the will with thoughts that have become inwardly free. And from this marriage of the will with the inwardly freed thoughts, it is to be hoped that the human being emerges who also develops the abilities, in living together with others, that is, in a social community, each for himself and each socially with each other, to produce such legal and economic orders that one accepts as necessary, just as one accepts the necessity of having to carry one's physical body, of obeying its laws, and not being free to grow one's right hand on the left side and vice versa, or one's head in the middle of one's chest. We do not fight against what is naturally reasonable out of our freedom. We fight against what is inhuman and unnatural about human legal and economic institutions with our freedom when we have come to the appropriate awareness, because we know that it can be done differently. And we know and want to know, as modern people, that every human being should work democratically on this transformation of the external economic and legal order to such a rationality that it does not impair our freedom any more than it impairs the natural lawfulness of our physical body. To understand this, however, one must have a heart and mind for the reality of spiritual life, because the kind of spiritual life that is an appendage of state and economic life, the kind of spiritual life that one acquires only if one is the son of rich people or has received state scholarships, or for the sake of acquiring a state position, this kind of spiritual life does not make one free. A spiritual life that stands on its own, that works out of its own strength, that is free, and that produces, in contrast to those moods, those three moods: inhibition of the will, oppression of the sense of right, obscuration of thoughts, which are present when the will is unfree, the other mood: the free development of the will in spiritual life.

If what I have described here in a series of lectures comes about as a free spiritual life, a spiritual life with self-administration of the pedagogical-didactic in the threefolded social organism, then the human being will no longer feel his will inhibited, but will be surrounded by an atmosphere generated from this free spiritual life, so that he will say to himself, this free spiritual life also accepts my will as a free one. And from the understanding of the self-governing spiritual life will emerge what the new social impulses are, which consist in the mutual, true, objective tolerance and understanding of one person by another in the field of the second link of the social organism, the constitutional state, where every person, provided they are mature, faces every other person as an equal. And thirdly, as we shall see in more detail the day after tomorrow, there will emerge a structure of economic life such that those who work in this economic life, from the highest intellectual worker to the last manual laborer, will participate socially as independent, free human individuals, so that the time when people were plunged into darkness at the thought of economic life will be replaced by the time when the reasonable action of works councils, the economy will be regulated by the rational activity of workers' councils, transport councils and economic councils, where the individual human being will no longer be at the mercy of the hazards of supply and demand and the crisis-prone nature of the capital economy, but where the individual human being will stand in life as an economic agent alongside other human beings; where fair distribution of prices and work will arise out of reason, so that we can place ourselves as free human beings in that which is once necessary in economic life. And just as we place ourselves in the body in its natural necessity, so man will achieve his freedom in modern democratic socialism, in modern social democracy.

To achieve this true humanity, it is necessary to overcome the old party patterns, the old party opinions, which, in the face of today's human demands, are nothing but mummies of thought and judgment. Truly, those who constantly speak of the fact that I want to use what underlies the threefold social organism to promote myself, know me badly. Oh, I would much rather have remained in quiet Dornach, where I worked before coming here, on a work that is very close to my heart, and I stand here only against my subjective will, out of the realization that today, in the face of the old party programs and party thoughts, which are mummies and which gather in the holiest unity from the extreme right to the extreme left, that it is a duty to work against these mummies as far as I can. I admit that it may be weak, then it may be fought factually and something better may be put in its place, but as a duty one must feel it towards the old and towards the new facts, to put a new thing before humanity. It does not seem to me at all as if humanity would not long for this new thing, as if humanity would not actually want this new thing to appear. For what is the real aim of this idea, this practice of the threefold social organism? They want people to finally understand that we are living in a time of great reckoning, in which the three main areas of human life, spiritual life, political or legal life, and economic life, have been set in motion and have become restless, and that we need a reorganization, a transformation of these three areas of our general human life.

So what does the idea of the threefold social organism want? Perhaps with weak, insufficient, or defective forces, then one may improve them objectively, may deal with them objectively. It wants a formulation of what is to become reality in order to bring about the necessary transformation of political life, economic life, and spiritual life.

Now, the Social Democratic Party Congress is meeting in Weimar, the party congress of the party that professes to want to transform modern life in the appropriate sense. And a minister, even the Reich Minister for Socialization, spoke the following words to the Social Democrats in Weimar: We need not only a political revolution, but also an economic and spiritual one. Whoever finds the formulation that also mobilizes the spiritual and moral forces in the people will bind them to his banners. The League for the Threefold Social Organism may still be insufficient, then it will be happy to make way for others who can do better, but the fact that at least the same direction must be taken as the League for the Threefold Social Organism is acting in, is admitted before its party members even by the present Reich Minister for Socialization, Wissell. And from his words: We need not only a political, but also an economic and spiritual revolution —, one may well hear that we at least, even if we cannot do it in a sufficient sense, at least we want what these people must also want when they are clear about the demands of the present in a spiritually clear moment. But then, if that is the case, it must not happen, as I very much fear it will, that people of Mr. Wissell's ilk, when they get hold of the writings of the Federation for the Threefolding of the Social Organism, do as other party members do: they say, “Well, we agree completely, but we will fight it tooth and nail.” We would agree if someone came along who did it better so that we could step down. But that is not the point. The point is not to fight things that you yourself have to describe as necessary, but if you want to do something about them, to do it better. And you can be sure that the appearance of this idea of the threefold social order is based on the attitude that arises, firstly, from the necessity of this threefold order in the present, and that arises from the realization that something must happen before it is too late. Therefore, she calls out to all those who want to fight this threefold order of the social organism: All right, we'll step down, but you do better if you yourselves have to admit that the threefold order of the social organism is a necessity!

Closing remarks.

No one wishes to join the discussion. Dr. Unger therefore asks Dr. Steiner to say a few final words.

Dr. Steiner: Dear attendees! I would just like to point out that despite some resistance, which has come precisely from party circles, it is nevertheless a success that some impulses in the field of economic life have already come from the Federation for the Threefold Social Order, and that, after all, some things have already happened in the direction of taking economic life into hand, of taking economic institutions into hand on the part of the people involved in this economic life. What form this should and must take will be discussed further the day after tomorrow. But the matter must not be taken in such a way that if one of the three limbs of the social organism shows a little that it is actually taking effect, then the others can sleep. If something is conceived as seriously as this threefold social order, then the one-sided success of one part of it is the greatest failure of the whole. Nothing endangers the threefold social order more than if only the advancement of one area, such as the economic, succeeds. Therefore, the present most serious concern of the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism is that a spiritual movement should join the economic movement, within which we stand as the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism, whether it is called a “cultural council” or a “spiritual council” or whatever, it is unimportant, that a large number of people should join, we have once distributed an appeal here “To All People,” because culture is actually a matter for all people —, an association of people, then, for whom the reorganization of our school and education system, in particular, is close to their hearts, so close to their hearts that they see how the free development of human physical and spiritual abilities is inhibited in the school system, which is clamped by the state. Therefore, the Federation for Threefolding fights for the liberation of the school system, for the self-administration of the school system from bottom to top. For this to happen in the right way, it is necessary that as many people as possible demand this self-administration of the entire educational system, indeed of the entire spiritual life, in public. To avoid the one-sided pursuit of economic forces from becoming a failure, it is the concern of the alliance to now bring together people who will work on this liberation of the school and spiritual life, the educational system. In doing so, there should be no dogmatism whatsoever. On the contrary, the more opinions are expressed and the more intelligent ideas are brought forward, the better. We shall not become inflexible in any self-made dogma, but shall be open to everything that may come from an informed mind. But anyone who believes that the new formations today also include those of intellectual life should actually feel the inclination, feel the necessity, to join others in such a union of people to form a kind of intellectual or cultural council, or whatever one wants to call it.

We have by no means failed to approach the positive as much as we can with our forces. There is a project here in Stuttgart that will probably be implemented as early as the fall: with the help of teachers who understand a truly humanistic concept of development conceived in the sense of a spiritualized anthropology, to bring about a truly comprehensive school that is not based on state omnipotence but on the development of the free human being. We hope that we will be able to bring such a school into existence here in Stuttgart for a small group – it should not be a “class school”, it will be a proletarian school – a school that, as far as it is already possible under today's conditions, will strictly reflect the views of the threefold social order in its pedagogy and didactics. The aim will be to develop the human being so that he grows into a truly free spiritual being. The aim will be to develop the forces that one has to develop in a human being between the ages of seven and fifteen in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing are cultivated to the full extent that they can be cultivated in these years of life, so that later life and its destiny cannot break these forces again. For anyone with sufficient psychological insight will notice how much of our present time, how much of the damage of our present time depends on the fact that thinking, feeling and willing are not developed with sufficient strength in the corresponding very young years of life, so that they cannot be broken later by the blows of fate in life. More than one might think, the undeveloped powers of the soul are crushed by our present-day cultural conditions; and more than one might think depends on these things in our circumstances, in relation to our decline.

I only want to point out this one example so that you can see that we are not visionaries, not ideologues, but that we want to work practically in all areas as far as our limited strength allows. But in order that such things may not remain isolated, and that by degrees our whole spiritual life may become free, it is necessary that many people with many opinions, many insights and knowledge and practices should join us in the cultural council or similar organization. This is what I did not clearly express in today's lecture, but it was the underlying desire that there should also be enough people in this spiritual link of the three-part social organism who, working together in this field, might achieve something of what is necessary in our time, which is not a small reckoning but a great one. For we do indeed need a transformation of conditions in the economic, political and spiritual spheres. If we cannot bring ourselves to work actively in this direction before it is too late, then it will have to be too late! And that would be the most terrible thing that could arise from this world war catastrophe. But if it leads many people to the realization that we must develop the strong will to reshape all three areas of life, then, even if not for the immediate present, then at least for the future of humanity, something great will come out of this will, and thus something great will come out of the disaster of the world war, even if it is not in the full sense. And we, as Germans, wedged between the Orient and the Occident, have this great task, to understand what is most in danger of falling asleep there and there and to awaken it from the center. And I believe that this is the best patriotism today, which will ultimately prevail against all that threatens us from the murky swamps of Versailles, in that what can prevail in the center between the East and the West will be that we will let arise from Germany's great time - from our Lessing , Herder, Schiller, Goethe, from the great period of our German philosophy, which summarizes German essence in its own way, the philosophy of Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, from the period of the German Romantics - that we allow to emerge, to shine forth, what our task is after the terrible experiences of the last years. This task is to awaken a spiritual life that is capable of shaping the material world reasonably and humanely and an economic life, a material life, that is capable of giving people the freedom to live a free spiritual life!

In our literature, we already have a rich and extensive body of material from which we can educate ourselves about the various facts that spiritual science is now able to bring down from the supersensible worlds, and our branches are able to work with the help of this material. Therefore, it will be advisable if, when we meet in person, we also talk about how this material may relate to our soul life, how we introduce it into life, how we ourselves can find refreshment, enlivenment and invigoration, in short, it will be advisable if, on such occasions, we focus more on the affairs of our spiritual movement, because, by the nature of things, we can only meet in person less often.

Many of you will notice that even today, when you immerse yourself in spiritual science or anthroposophy, you still face many difficulties. Isn't it true that you first find your way into spiritual science through the needs of your soul, in that the soul must ask questions about the most important riddles of life? One finds one's way into spiritual science in particular when one looks at today's life with all that it can give, and sees how little the various spiritual directions, be they religious or scientific, can really provide satisfying answers in the deeper sense to the great riddles of life. And then, when one has found one's way into this spiritual-scientific movement through one's urge for knowledge, through one's longing for knowledge, when one has immersed oneself for a while in what has been extracted from the spiritual worlds to date, then difficulties often arise, difficulties of the most diverse kinds. They are different for everyone, so it is not easy to describe them in a few words. Our friends often say: By finding my way into spiritual science I have indeed gained something extraordinarily valuable, something meaningful for life; but it has also isolated me in a certain way, torn me away from the views, from the community of other people, it has also made life difficult for me, so to speak. Those who, by the very nature of their spiritual striving, are dependent on the opinions of the outside world feel this particularly strongly. This really gives rise to the most diverse difficulties.

With other friends, after they have immersed themselves in spiritual science for a while, something arises that one might say is like timidity, something that causes anxiety, fear of all kinds of questions: how to cope with life and so on. Many of you have no doubt had similar questions arise in you. Such questions are often questions of feeling and perception. I would like to take such difficulties in our inner soul life as my starting point for today's reflection.

The right context of these manifold feelings, which can be different for everyone, the real connections, are sometimes difficult to see. We must always bear in mind that we, as people who feel drawn to anthroposophical truths, are still a very small group. We are in the midst of a life struggle that is being waged outside our circles with means that are sharply different from ours. And anyone who reflects a little on what Anthroposophy seeks to achieve in life will be able to see how fundamentally different the goals of thinking, feeling and willing become under the influence of Anthroposophical ideas from the goals that the vast majority of humanity sets itself today. And since thoughts and feelings are real facts, we must realize that our small group, that is, each one of us, is in a mass of energy that is still relatively small compared to the, one might almost say, in most cases completely opposite thoughts, perceptions and feelings of the rest of humanity. Even if the difficulties of life that arise for us take the most diverse forms and do not immediately show that they are connected with what I have just described, they are nevertheless connected with it; and we must try to how we can cope with such difficulties, with the difficulties that arise from the fact that we remain true to the cause of anthroposophy, but as a result come into conflict with the rest of the world.

As I said, things obscure themselves, and they do not always show the right face. What we have to introduce into our souls, as it were, as a remedy, in order to find more and more inner harmony despite the contradictions of the outer world, thereby strengthening the soul so that it can withstand the often arises in the form of disharmony, that is: a clear, correct view of the relationship between those who profess or are interested in anthroposophy and the rest of humanity. To think clearly and sharply about this matter purifies our soul so that we can also be strong when external powers that are full of contradictions beset us. If you think about it from a narrow perspective, you might say: Yes, but what does it help me if I am now clear about what separates Anthroposophy from the rest of the world? After all, it doesn't change my circumstances! It would be a mistake to think so; for our life circumstances may not change overnight through clear thoughts, insightful thoughts, but the strength we gain through such clear thoughts in the direction just indicated, these clear thoughts, they strengthen us little by little in such a way that they do change our life circumstances. Sometimes, however, we do not yet find the possibility to develop really clear, sharp and therefore sufficiently strong thoughts in this direction.

With regard to what we want to achieve through spiritual science or anthroposophy and what we want to achieve not only for ourselves but for the world - and we must once bring this before our soul as one of these clear thoughts before our soul, today's civilized humanity lives in a terrible, more or less conscious or unconscious lie, and the effect of this lie within civilized humanity is tremendous. This is actually saying something very significant, and let us try to clarify this point a little more.

It is hardly possible for a truly thinking person with a completely healthy mind to regard what exists today as general culture in the so-called civilized world without realizing that this culture lacks much, that above all this culture has no impulses for life that are sufficient for itself. Yet there is much in this culture that is far-reaching in its ideals. What a wealth of ideals there are in our time, as people call them, the reasons for founding associations and clubs that set themselves programs through which these or those ideals are to be expressed! All of this is extremely well-intentioned, so well-intentioned that one can say: Those people who, under the influence of these or those ideals, join together in smaller or larger associations from all walks of life, want to do good from their point of view, and these people's attitude is to be fully respected. But these people mostly live under the inhibiting influence of a certain constraint, arising from unconscious timidity, from unconscious spiritual cowardice, precisely in the face of what is most important for humanity today. We say: the most important! What humanity needs today is spiritual knowledge and the introduction of certain spiritual insights into our lives.

This was indeed a big question in the course of the 19th century. You know that there are spiritual laws, laws about the spiritual worlds. At all times certain people knew about this, and of course even in the course of the 19th century, when spiritual science had not yet appeared in the form in which it is now appearing, there were so-called occult societies, which were more or less worthy of the name, which wanted to cultivate occult truths, spiritual truths, in the most diverse ways, and which also had a certain insight into what spiritual truths mean for the world. Now, in the middle of the nineteenth century, a crisis occurred in relation to the deepest impulses of modern human development. This crisis consisted in a particular rise of materialism in all areas, in the area of knowledge, in the area of life. Materialism reached a high tide. We know, of course, that numerous people emerged who wanted to establish a comprehensive world view based on scientific materialism. But this theoretical materialism would not have been the most pernicious aspect; rather, it is the practical materialism, the materialism that is particularly involved in ethical and social life and in the religious feelings of people, that has led humanity to a crisis in the course of the 19th century. And those who still knew something, precisely from the more or less reputable occult societies mentioned, directed their attention, especially from the middle of the 19th century onwards, to how one could remedy the rampant materialism. In certain circles, those who had spiritual-scientific insight - only not yet the kind that alone can be effective and that is striven for in the form that we humbly attempt to strive for - those, that is, who had an ancient traditional or otherwise somehow outdated spiritual insight into the development of humanity, they asked themselves: How do we help from the point of view of what, like a disaster, dawns on modern humanity through materialism? And they said to themselves: We can help by providing people with proof that just as there are sensual facts in our environment, so too are there spiritual facts and spiritual beings in our environment. But, I would like to say, people were only accustomed to experimental thinking and to external experience and perception. And so these people with spiritual insights, who had concerns like those mentioned, knew of no other solution than to prove the spiritual world in the same way that one proves the natural processes of the external sensory world. And so then all kinds of things were tried. And we see movements emerging in the course of the 19th century that are aimed at convincing people of the existence of a spiritual world. The crudest of these movements, I might say, is the spiritualist movement. While scholars today find it difficult to get to grips with the relatively transparent methods of our spiritual science, truly brilliant scholars of the 19th century seriously studied spiritualism.

Now, spiritism has the peculiarity that it should work in an external way, through something that can be presented to the external senses like a chemical or physical experiment. To a large extent, this method, which seeks to emulate the spiritual science of natural science, is already bankrupt today – to a large extent, I say – and it will become more and more apparent that it is bound to fail, because, of course, you cannot let people see the spirit with their own hands, figuratively speaking. Therefore much of what has been done by certain so-called occult societies in the course of the nineteenth century and up to our day, through all kinds of mysterious machinations, has done more to discredit spiritual scientific research than to support it. And so we see that especially among the best-intentioned people, who have insight, especially in social matters, but also in other areas relating to the practical conduct of life, there is much that has to happen from the present on into the future. We see that people who understand this are almost shocked when it is said that the most important impulses needed in our time and in the near future must come from true spiritual insight, from the realization that real spiritual forces and spiritual beings are in our human environment just as there are sensory facts and sensory beings. People who are well-meaning about the progress of humanity are truly shocked. Let me give you an example first. We can learn a lot from examples like these that deal with comprehensive life phenomena. When we turn our gaze to a great movement, it also shows us clearly what we, each and every one of us, actually encounter every day in small ways.

A truly important man who was truly sincere about the social progress of humanity was murdered in Paris the day before the outbreak of this unfortunate world war: Jaurès. Jaurès was certainly one of the most honest personalities of the present day in the field of social endeavor, and he was also one of those who, with all human insight, sought to gain insight into the present conditions of life and into the reasons why they are increasingly leading to absurdity, increasingly and increasingly to impoverishment and immiseration in the spiritual and material spheres of humanity. And he strove with all his might to find ideas and thoughts that he could convey to people, so that, in a joint effort, the great issues of the present day could be resolved to some extent. We can learn much from personalities such as Jaurès, for we learn most when we see the great defects of our own time from the spiritual-scientific point of view, when we realize the necessity of thinking clearly about them, and when we see these defects embodied, not in small but in great personalities, in whom we can be convinced, above all, of their pure intentions and honest striving for knowledge, and also of a certain ability to understand the times. We have much more to gain by testing the damage of our time on people whom we respect and esteem than by testing it on people whom we respect less because we cannot ascribe to them a benevolent and good attitude in the highest sense. Now such people, who have devoted all their thoughts, feelings and willpower to the service of humanity, to the service that must be performed in raising humanity to a higher social level, such people as Jaurès find it extraordinarily difficult – and he is truly no exception, but we see the best people of our time in this difficulty – such people find it truly difficult to talk about things like our spiritual science. And it is precisely these very gifted people who would only be able to achieve what they want to achieve for humanity if they could say: Everything that I can achieve with my ordinary means of thinking and scientific means only provides me with impulses that are too weak to really take hold of life; I have to realize that all these impulses that I want to provide to humanity on my way have no foundation. First I must create a foundation for myself; I must penetrate and suffuse what I have believed up to now with the deeper foundations of spiritual science. I must recognize spiritual facts, real spiritual facts.

You see, the person who does not recognize such spiritual facts and who forms all kinds of thoughts and ideals about how human progress can be promoted today is like the person who has a garden in front of him with many plants that are beginning to show signs of dying, and he does this, that, and much more, and strives all the time - but he achieves nothing. Yes, one plant is a little better, the other a little worse, but overall the plants are not getting better. Why does it not get better? Because some disease may have seized the roots, which he does not check. It is the same with the social endeavors of people like Jaurès. They put an enormous amount of effort into it, and they also achieve an enormous amount with regard to the surface, but they do not penetrate to the roots, because in the roots of our present human life, there is a lack of recognition of a real spiritual world. And no matter how many seemingly well-founded social insights are established, they will not bear fruit for humanity in reality if they are not based on those insights that can only come from spiritual science. Therefore, real progress for present-day humanity will only be possible when spiritual science can be recognized to the extent that the most important part of spiritual science for our time – the recognition of real spiritual entities and spiritual forces – no longer encounters any difficulties among people, especially among the best people. Let us just realize that the best people, those of good will, have difficulties precisely with regard to the most important thing in our cause: the recognition of the spiritual world as such.

I called attention to a point over there in Zurich that makes this particularly clear. There is a person who has spoken very favorably about our spiritual science and has even had what he said printed. This man has also taken courage before a very educated audience and no longer regards what lives within our spiritual movement as mere folly. But this man cannot help but stop precisely at the most important thing, at the recognition of the spiritual world. What does he say? “We must seek to understand it [this spiritual movement], at least in the circle gathered around Steiner, rather as a religious movement among our contemporaries, if not of an original but only of a syncretic kind, but still directed to the bottom of all life; we may judge it as a movement to satisfy the , and thus as a movement beyond realism, which clings to the sensual; we may recognize in it, above all, a movement that points people to self-reflection on the moral problems that face them, and that aims at a work of inner rebirth, ing out of a scrupulous attention to self-education; one need only read Steiner's book An Introduction to Theosophy to notice the earnestness with which man is pointed to the work of his moral purification and self-perfection."

I am not reading these words to you out of some kind of silliness, but because we really want to see clearly how the outside world relates to our aspirations. We see that he is a well-meaning person who, however, regards our movement as a syncretic one because, above all, he does not know it. He does not know how it is a thoroughly new movement simply because it is also based on something that is new in the world: on the new direction of natural science, which is, after all, its foundation. He cannot give any information about this because he does not understand it; but he is well disposed towards our movement. And if you now let this whole lecture, which he has given - “The Thought World of the Educated” - sink in, you can see that the man reflects that a spiritual education of the human being is necessary in our time, and he finds one of the attempts to promote this spiritual movement of humanity in our movement. But then he says, and this is the characteristic thing: “In its speculation directed to the supersensible, it is further a reaction against materialism; in doing so, however, it easily loses the ground of reality and gets carried away in hypotheses” — he believes that real spiritual knowledge is hypotheses, not knowledge - “in clairvoyant fantasies, in a realm of dreams, so that it no longer has sufficient strength for the reality of individual and social life.”

You see, despite his benevolent judgment, he says afterwards: “But after all, we want and must register Theosophy as a corrective phenomenon in the course of education in the present day.” He feels compelled to stop short of all that, without which our movement cannot be conceived without, and what we bring right at the start: supersensible facts; because without man gaining connection with supersensible facts, humanity cannot be brought out of the impasse into which it is now mired. But even well-meaning people believe that – while our movement is seeking firm ground under its feet, without which all other social ideals are left hanging in the air – this movement leads to the realm of dreams, that it no longer has “sufficient strength left” in terms of shaping social life. As I said, this is not due to ill will or mistrust, but rather to a mistrust that arises from unconscious timidity, unconscious discouragement in the face of the recognition of spiritual facts. It is the clear lack of insight, or rather, it is clear that it is the lack of insight into what spiritual science can contribute to the foundation of social striving.

And so, of course, people like Jaurès find themselves in life today without any possibility of recognizing, from the thoughts they have absorbed from their education and from their entire contemporaneity, that everything that happens physically is dependent on spiritual worlds, and that man, in the sphere in which he is called upon to intervene in life, for example also with regard to social life, can only intervene correctly if it is made possible for him by knowing the spiritual laws by which the spiritual world can be introduced into the physical. And the fact that such men are confronted with this impossibility, that this is really a widespread modern-day phenomenon among the best people of the present time, is due to the significant, albeit unconscious, but no less significant life-lies in our age. These life-lies can be found almost everywhere.

Let us consider the case of Jaurès, as a typical example. He was a man who stood before the rest of humanity and sought by every means of social knowledge to improve what he rightly recognized as leading people only to a dead end. There stands a man before the rest of humanity who, in order to gain the necessary insights in this field, really familiarizes himself with all historical facts, who studies the history of past times and wants to learn from the facts of earlier times what can happen in the present, so that mistakes that have clearly shown themselves to be mistakes in earlier social experiments by humanity can be avoided. In all his endeavors, Jaurès, like others, is confronted with the impossibility of truly recognizing a spiritual world, of truly recognizing that through human beings, continuous streams of spiritual life flow down from the spiritual world into this world. One of the fine essays that Jaurès wrote is about the relationship between socialism and patriotism in the Jaurès sense. There Jaurès tries to show how historical events intervene in the development of humanity and have an effect on it. After he has brought various things before his mind that had an effect in the Roman Empire, in order to learn from them how to act in the present, what had an effect in the Greek world, in order to learn from it how to act at other times, after he has really brought various things before his mind with an extraordinarily thorough urge for knowledge, he also brings a chapter from more recent times before his mind. A remarkable chapter is in this book Jaurès, which deals with the proletariat and patriotism, and it is interesting to present this little chapter to oneself in order to see what is actually going on in the souls of the best people around us today.

In this chapter, Jaurès's aim is to show that in recent social progress, it is not land that is the main thing, but industry and so on, but we will not go into these things; the important thing is that here he is forced to refer to the personality of Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans. Now imagine, a man who lives entirely in the ideas of the present points to the Virgin of Orleans, a personality whom everyone who knows modern history knows – anyone who objectively recognizes the fact will have to admit – that the map of Europe today would simply be completely different if she had not intervened. Of course, Jaurès also sees this. He says:

Here we see a man who is condemned because he, steeped in the materialistic thinking of the present, can only think on the basis of materialistic principles, so to speak, but who, because he also wants to be historically honest, is forced to point to this remarkable phenomenon of Joan of Arc and to take it as seriously as we can see from his words. So Jaurès is confronted with the full historical significance of Joan of Arc. But now we ask ourselves: what, after all – and this may be taken too far, even for Jaurès personally, when we assert it – but for many others who act in Jaurès' spirit it is certainly not taken too far – what, for a person like that, who lives in such a social view of society as Jaurès did, be other than someone who, through a certain religious ecstasy, which one should not aspire to if one wants to remain a reasonable person, has arrived at the impulses that she has now arrived at? These people will certainly not recognize what must be clear to us from spiritual science: that at a time when the modern developed spirit knowledge that we have today could not yet be attained, streams of spiritual life flowed from the spiritual worlds through such more or less consciously active personalities such as the Maid of Orleans, that she was a medium, not for people, of whom mediums are so often misused in modern times, but for divine spiritual worlds that wanted to have an effect on the physical world. It had to be recognized that what came from the Maid of Orleans was of more value than what the others could and wanted to communicate from their human insights. That the spiritual world spoke through this Joan of Arc, of course, such people could not recognize. And yet, if they speak of the real facts, they must speak of such people as the Maid of Orleans, they must even recognize them. They must therefore attribute what is happening - just consider that: what is happening - to personalities whose spiritual life they do not recognize, whose spiritual life they certainly would not want to emulate.

Even if people do not want to admit it today – one can also numb oneself to this fact – this is nothing but the deepest lie of life. This is a real lie, and I am characterizing for you only one case of the lie that pulsates everywhere today through our social life, and which is due to the fact that people do not recognize what really is, what is most real, but must regard it as a fact through what the newer development of the spirit brings forth. Lies are now also facts, and they work accordingly. And even if they are well-meaning, earnestly striving, significant people, like Jaurès – since they are bound by the conditions of the times in such a lie of life, what comes from them cannot, nevertheless, have a liberating effect on humanity.

Yes, we are faced with this in a present-day fact of life, which we must allow to have a clear and distinct, a profound effect on our souls. We must have the courage to look at such life-lies with clear insight, and we must find the strength from this clear looking to sustain ourselves against all that comes from all sides, and which sometimes comes from one or the other side very masked and concealed from this life-lie. What real inner insight into the interrelationships of human life can people who live in such a lie actually gain? They must think: Oh, there are such strange characters who want to have a relationship with the spiritual worlds like the Maid of Orleans, and one must even ascribe historical significance to them; but one really does not have to present this as an example to follow, so that one can somehow introduce spiritual powers into the physical world! Much water will flow down the Rhine before wider circles of people understand and recognize the full gravity of the fact we have been talking about. Today, even the natural scientists have adopted the airs and graces that theologians once adopted towards Joan of Arc. For what Jaurès draws attention to at the end is part of the deep tragedy of the phenomenon of Joan of Arc at the time. The theologians of the day said: What she brings forth as her spiritual knowledge of the world does not correspond to what we recognize through our theology! In those days, the theologians spoke from the same attitude; and today, after a relatively shorter time than was the case with theology, the natural scientists are speaking from the same attitude. The Maid of Orleans of old replied to those who judged her from the standpoint of theology and said that she must justify her miracles and her mission from the Holy Books: There is more written in the Book of God than in all your books! These are historic words. But they are also words that are still valid today. From the standpoint of spiritual science, they can be used to counter all objections, theological and scientific: More is written in the Book of the spiritual worlds than all that the adversaries could dream up. And Jaurès adds to these words: “A wonderful word, which in a certain respect stands in contrast to the soul of the peasant, whose faith is rooted above all in tradition. How far removed is all this from the dull, narrow-minded patriotism of the landowner! But Jeanne hears the divine voices of her heart by looking up to the radiant and gentle heights of heaven.”

Yes, such an acknowledgment may sound good in the mouths of our contemporaries, but what is it in the mouths of even the best of our contemporaries? An acknowledgment of something that they more or less consider a work of fiction, a work of fiction that can make life more or less beautiful, but which they do not admit is real. And that is what the living lie does!

We can see, then, that we need clarity about the existence of this life-denying delusion. We encounter its effects everywhere, and it is preventing spiritual science from gaining the influence it should have. But more and more people will not only have to gain a theoretical insight into spiritual science, they will also have to find the strong inner strength to introduce spiritual science into the various branches of life. This could be demonstrated in the most diverse areas of life. And again, one can say that the true facts are masked here. For apparently one can object to everything that is said about spiritual science. Let us take an area of life that is most likely to be appreciated by humanity, for the simple reason that it is very close to external healing. You see, spiritual science could have an enormously beneficial effect if people would only bring themselves to allow the medical faculties, medicine and pharmacology to be influenced by this spiritual science. For modern scientific development has led more and more to medicine itself taking on a materialistic character. Of course, through this materialistic character it has also brought about many beneficial effects, and one need only point to the extraordinarily great progress that has been made in the field of surgery to find some justification for saying again and again what I also say: that one must admire the more recent advances in natural science. But there are other, no less important aspects of medical knowledge and skill that suffer tremendously under the materialistic approach and that can only approach a beneficial future by introducing spiritual-scientific knowledge into the relevant investigations.

Through such spiritual scientific knowledge, connections in the human organism are recognized for which today's medical science only knows the details. Of course, such things are often instinctively suspected by more insightful researchers; but progress cannot happen fast enough as a result, and one can say: if such a fantastic rejection of everything spiritual did not prevail in the medical field and medicine did not strive to be monopolized as a power by the corresponding authorities and governments, then, for the benefit of humanity, tremendous achievements would be made in the field of medicine on the basis of spiritual science. You may say: Well, nothing prevents a spiritual researcher from bringing about such progress! - That is precisely why things are masked, because it is simply not true. The materialistic practice of medicine as it prevails today does indeed prevent spiritual research from intervening. For it is a completely false belief that the spiritual researcher, who sees through things today, can help an individual person in all cases. He is prevented from doing so by the external materialistic practice of medicine, and will be prevented more and more if the materialistic practice of medicine continues for a long time. One cannot say to the spiritual researcher in the field of medicine: “Here is a problem, now solve it,” because his legs are not freed to dance. Certainly, there are many commendable efforts being made to counter the prevailing materialism in medicine; but these efforts are all insufficient because, above all, there is a lack of insight that one must not only must oppose materialistic medicine, but that above all it is necessary to work with what modern medicine has acquired: namely, the external aids that are needed in this particular field. But humanity would be amazed at the results if spiritual-scientific views were to be introduced into clinics and dissecting rooms today, and if spiritual-scientific views were to be applied to all the other resources and remedies of the medical profession. But efforts must also be made in this direction. The aim must not be to disregard materialistic medicine, but to bring spiritual science into this materialistic practice. And until that is done, it is not possible to help in individual cases. The reasons why this cannot be, cannot be discussed in such a short lecture; but it is so. Thus, in a field that is so closely related to the outward well-being of man, an enormous amount could be achieved if only there were a little unprejudiced thinking.

And with regard to the burning social questions, it would become evident that although many attempts are still being made to improve this or that in the social field, to improve these or those conditions of life, all these attempts will fail. Only when we come to base social knowledge on spiritual-scientific axioms, just as mathematics or geometry are based on axioms, only then will we find truly effective means.

And so we live in a world that, above all, our own soul, when we are seized by spiritual science or anthroposophy, must encounter with radically different thoughts and feelings. We live, as it were, in an atmosphere that demands of us a strong display of strength, a strong sense of self-preservation. And these are the deeper reasons why we can often become disheartened, feel lonely, and why perhaps one or the other cannot cope easily with life because of their commitment to spiritual science. But if we have a clear insight into the magnitude of that in which we are placing ourselves in the context of humanity as a whole, and how it appears only as something small today because we are still at the beginning, we can also find this strength, can then really find it. Everything great in the development of humanity must take a small beginning.

I would also like to point out here, as I have done in Zurich these days, how limited, illogical and incoherent our present-day thinking is. This is because, in the more recent development, natural science has had a blinding effect on this newer humanity. This natural science has produced magnificent, admirable results with regard to the external world of the senses, and those people who used to administer the spiritual wealth of humanity felt, I might say, pushed aside, pushed aside more and more. In particular, certain theologians have not fared well. It is wrong to simply reject out of hand what people have brought forth as theology through the development of humanity. This “theology” contains profound, significant basic truths about the human soul; even if they first have to be examined more closely by spiritual science in many respects, there are basic truths in it. Just because they are not advocated in a way that meets the needs of today's humanity, today in the thinking man and in the feeling soul the longing for an answer to the question of spiritual science must arise. But the theologians, who did not want to go along with such a spiritual-scientific endeavor, ended up in a strange state: they had truths, but these truths could not be applied to anything because the other sciences had taken away the objects for these truths. The theologians had truths about the soul – but the soul was taken away from them by natural science. And now theology perhaps expresses truths in words, but it does not concern itself with the objects; it even wants to let natural science examine the objects, because theologians are in many respects too idle to really take on natural science. And that is what we must see as significant in spiritual science: that this spiritual science completely takes on the natural sciences, gets involved in everything that natural science has acquired, and has its say by adding the spiritual scientific principles to the natural scientific endeavor. The theologians did not want to do this; they are sometimes there when it matters to participate, to hold the objects, inspired by a very strange attitude.

One who is considered an extraordinary theologian in certain circles, both as a professor, who he used to be, and as a pastor, has written a little book in which he reproduces religious lectures; and in this little book he expresses thoughts that one might find strange coming from him. One sees into the soul of an important man of the present time. Yes, I cannot say otherwise, one is sometimes overwhelmed by the thoughts that an important man can bring to light today! For example, in the very first lecture, this famous, important man says that one must approach natural science and give up the natural man; only the man of freedom may be retained as a theologian. But in this sense, freedom itself becomes a mere word! Does he not say that he leaves the soul's entire content to natural science? He retains nothing but a wisdom of words, and he even gives a rather cute reason for his attitude, saying quite dryly that this is his attitude. So here is a theologian who, in these lectures, wanted to describe to his audience the most modern form of Christianity, and he says right in the first lecture: “Man, as we encounter him in zoology, the two-legged, upright walking homo sapiens, equipped with the finely developed backbone and brain, is just as much a part of nature as any other organic or inorganic organic or inorganic formation, is part of nature, is composed of the same mass, the same energies, the same atoms, interwoven and governed by the same power; in any case, the whole physical life of man, however complicated it may be, is scientifically determined in its entirety, ordered according to law like everything else in nature, living and non-living. In this respect, there is no difference between a human being and a jellyfish, a drop of water or a grain of sand.

Theological lectures, lectures by a theologian, a pastor! But this theologian does not only speak in this way with regard to the physical; he continues: “The mental functions that are accessible to the scientific approach are subject to just as strict a lawfulness as the physical processes; and the sensations we have, as well as the ideas we form, are just as much forced on us by nature” – please note: the sensations and ideas! - “as the nervous processes that lead to sensations of pleasure and pain. They are just as much mechanical ideas as those of a steam engine.”

You see, the soul slips away from the natural scientists, and the theologian retains only the old theological phrase, for which he comes up with empty phrases; because the last pages, the last lectures now consist only of empty phrases, in order to wrap what has been discussed in theological phrases. But he does reveal the attitude that lies behind his present liberal attitude in the surrender of the objects. And here one is caught out by a quite remarkable attitude: think, he says, theologians must act as he does, one must go even further, he says: 'This determination of man by natural law concerns not only his bodily but also his mental functions. That is what theologians have always refused to admit,” — only he has gone further, he has risen higher, he now admits it - ‘because we confused the scientific concept of the soul with the theological one and feared unpleasant consequences for the faith.’

But now he has come so far that he no longer fears unpleasant consequences for the faith that he admits! Then he says: “But these arise precisely when one does not allow science to reach its full result;”. So now he says: Let us give in to this science, otherwise it will have unpleasant consequences! Otherwise it will have nasty consequences, this science. – And then we see him in a truly remarkable light: “because then you lose the trust of thinking people.”

There you have what the great theologian strives for today! People have come to those feelings in all these ways that I have described to you today - the best ones - with which they turn their trust to us when we speak of the spiritual; one should not lose that, and therefore not apply the real inner soul power, which could stand on the ground of spiritual insight! We see that if we catch people in what we might call their innermost being, if we do not thoughtlessly pass by such things, then people today turn out to be strange. We must have clear insights into this. On the basis of these clear insights, we should not be surprised that when such thoughts are cultivated by those who are officially called upon to provide the religious and spiritual education of humanity today, we have a difficult time placing ourselves in the world with something that is radically opposed to it.

We must always remind ourselves of the cause we are actually serving in the context of humanity by countering the seductive thoughts that come to humanity today from such quarters with those that alone can be fruitful. And such a thought can always lift us up again and make us strong again, even in the deepest depression. Such a thought is absolutely important in every second of our life, and it is important that we practise spiritual science in such a way that we show it as little as possible in our outer life, but absorb it so strongly and intensely within us that we ourselves have the strength to say to the tests it imposes on us: they must be there! Since our karma has led us to it, we also want to accept what it can impose on us as a test. For the opposing forces in the world of spiritual science are today tremendously difficult, and basically people do not know. For of course, this man has no idea of what the nature of thinking and feeling actually is and what can only be revealed by gaining a clear view from the spiritual science into the whole corruption and destruction of such thinking. Therefore, no blame can be attributed to him, he cannot be disregarded, but such a fact must be accepted quite objectively like an earthquake, like a volcanic eruption, which also has a destructive effect on humanity - albeit in a small area - with external physical means. But the man really cannot think. And in this he is only one example of the most important people of the present time who cannot think. He cannot think! Imagine him saying: 'Of course we hand the human body over to natural science, there is no other way; after all, what should we theologians do with it? We cannot examine the body, can we? That if you really examine the spirit, this spirit is a co-builder of the body, that you cannot separate the body at all and give it away as it were, as was explained yesterday in the public lecture, this man has no idea. He gives away the body; but he also gives away the soul – because it feels practically like a steam engine – he only retains, as he expressly says, for theology, the “human being as freedom”. He even generously gives away “man as nature”; he retains “man as freedom.” But now, after he has kept back man as freedom, he says, of course: “Man as nature loses his independence and freedom as a component of nature; everything he experiences, suffers, he must suffer according to the law of nature.”

Thus man loses this freedom through his nature. And now just think about what this theologian actually leaves out! First he says: man as nature, he gives that to nature and reserves man as freedom; but then he states: man as nature is such that, as a component of nature, he loses his independence and freedom, and “everything he experiences, he suffers, he must suffer entirely according to the law of nature.” Now he has absolutely nothing! It is therefore not surprising that he then only speaks in empty phrases. But the good man does not notice this, and he is a typical example of how the most important people today are unaware of the discontinuity of thought that is at work today. Humanity has now reached a stage of development where that which is to be thinking about physical life must be fertilized by those thoughts that also relate to the spiritual world; otherwise, those thoughts that relate to the physical world will break down in all places because people who have a say today are not familiar with the simplest facts of the world's interrelations.

We know that people today are in a period of transition. We are not speaking in the superficial sense in which one speaks of transitional periods now, but in a different sense. We are in those transitional periods in which the old atavistic clairvoyant instincts have died out and in which conscious entry into the spiritual worlds must be attained. This is an obvious fact for the spiritual researcher. But those old atavistic clairvoyant abilities that people had also gave them effective thoughts, insofar as they needed them in their cultural epoch. History reports only a little of the greatness that the Chaldean cultural epoch or the Egyptian cultural epoch had in terms of thoughts that intervene in human life. However little they may be able to withstand our criticism today, they existed for their time. Our time must again gain thoughts that are capable of intervening in reality! But it can only do so if it is fertilized by the spiritual world just as the ancient times were fertilized by the spiritual world. But people today are not being fertilized unconsciously. Therefore, consciousness must arise if spiritual-scientific knowledge is really to be recognized by people. And we ourselves have this man, whom one can so easily prove to be seized by the worst effects of the thoughtlessness of our time, that he causes immeasurable harm by infecting so many people with his thoughtlessness, and one has no ill-willed man; one even has an insightful man before him, namely one who has precisely that insight that one can have in our time if one cannot advance in a certain respect to the real spiritual world, in the sense that even people like Jaurès cannot advance. But even people like the one who gave these religious lectures, even people like that know that humanity today is at a dead end in some respects, that we cannot continue with the thinking, feeling and willing that the old attitudes and the old elements of world view have given us. And he also knows that in modern times this has led to materialism, and he knows that things have to change. And basically he is not at all radical, because he talks about the fact that the 19th century has led people to have such concepts as sportism, comfortism, and mammonism. The man talks about all these things, which are the dark sides of materialism, and he is quite prepared to say: sportism, comfortism, mammonism, as they emerged in the 19th century, must be fought. But the way he says it, it remains a phrase for, at the end of the first lecture – one does not trust one's eyes, one does not trust one's powers of perception – the following is stated. The following can be said today by an important, famous man. He begins by saying quite correctly: All the things that happen should be evaluated differently, 'they must no longer be the ultimate goal. There must be no more merchants for whom the acquisition of money is an end in itself; enjoyment of life must no longer become the content of life; there must be no more people who live only for their health.

So, he is very radical. From the point of view of spiritual science, we will certainly not put forward such radical things; we will rather leave people to their own freedom, and we know that if they understand karma and reincarnation and the rest of what spiritual science gives, they will find their way in life in detail. But this man, who knows that people have brought themselves to a deadlock, says quite radically that people should no longer earn more money, no longer enjoy life, no longer live at the expense of their health. I once came to a sanatorium run by a famous man, which had nervous patients. I could see whole crowds of nervous patients marching past as they went to lunch. It seemed to me that the most sickly, fidgety nervous patient was the famous director of the hospital himself! But now our man, our theologian, is radical, he says: the content of life must become different; no one should live only for his health and so on. But now the following lines: “That means” - he says, and with that he comes to the end of his lecture - “everything that has been done so far should be done, but something else should be considered in the process.”

That is life reform! Just think, this is the life reform of a person who looks so deeply into what is necessary: everything must become different, that is, nothing must become different, but everything must be thought about differently: “These things must not represent the innermost, the goal, the highest value. They must be striven for with the same energy, but they must be valued – that is, they must be thought of – on a different scale than before.

Well, there is nothing more to be added about these things! It is necessary to draw attention to them, for they are not found in a single person; they are to be found throughout the civilized world today. And what people experience in their destinies comes from nothing other than this defectiveness in thinking and intuiting; that is the karma of this defectiveness of thinking and intuiting! This is what we must first focus on. At least as scholars of the spirit, we must find the strength not to listen to the things that are sweeping and raging through the world today and that are recognized as “highest values” from other impulses . But in this respect one must really be able to see these main things without being clouded by all kinds of other feelings that rule the world today and under whose influence so much lying takes place. These things have their influence. We live in such a sphere - I have already said it in Zurich - that this man, who passes on such stuff to people, so that, by listening to him, these thought beasts enter into their hearts and minds, may say: “The content of this booklet consists of 12 speeches that I gave last winter in...” — now comes the city, which I do not want to name — “before an audience of more than a thousand people.”

But – the city is completely unimportant – it now goes to thousands! That must be seen through. And it is necessary to really put all the seriousness and the whole meaning of such a consideration before the soul.

And having extracted much from the spiritual world, we must recognize what this extracted material from the spiritual world must be for us; thereby also recognizing that we are, as it were, looking into the counter-image of the world-view that is prevailing in people today much more than we realize. Unfortunately, people live far too thoughtlessly today! That is what weighs so heavily on the soul: having to look at the widespread dullness, the dullness in which humanity lives in relation to what works and guides the course of human development. We must also obtain the necessary nuances of feeling for the kind of truth contained in spiritual science by allowing ourselves to be given these nuances of feeling from the contemplation of the counter-image. What is important, therefore, is not just to look for all kinds of fine words that sound good, as if they were high ideals to be presented to humanity; rather, it is to recognize above all that it is the spiritual world that must be opened up, something that the best of our contemporaries cannot recognize. There are good reasons – and why this is so cannot be explained here because it would be too long – there are good reasons why, for centuries, humanity has been reluctant to understand Christianity in a spiritual sense. In the first centuries of Christianity there was a gnosis. You all know that our spiritual science is not a revival of gnosis, but in those days gnosis first made the effort to arrive at a spiritual science; it was suppressed because people did not want to see the Christian truths in spiritual light. The same tendency then continued and has also taken hold in scientific endeavor. Humanity has also learned a great deal from the fact that it has fought against the possibility of understanding the spiritual for centuries. But now the time has come when it will be most difficult for those who are completely immersed in our present-day culture – which is still materialism, even if it is not admitted – to recognize a real spiritual world; not just a vague talk about the spiritual world, but a direct knowledge of a spiritual world. We must, however, realize that the acknowledgment of this spiritual world is one of the most important things, and that only then can the rest come, that which must come as a new foundation of the ethical, the social, and also the other practical order of life, when one creates foundations through spiritual science, through the acknowledgment of real spiritual facts and spiritual entities.

It gave me great satisfaction that we were able to meet here in St. Gallen again after a long time, and so I considered it my task today to add to what you can learn from our literature, some of what may need to be said personally, from soul to soul, within our movement, so that it is understood in the right sense. For within our movement it is not just a matter of absorbing this or that from spiritual science in a catechism-like way, but it is a matter of finding the right relationship of our soul to the knowledge from the spiritual world. Then spiritual science will not just be a science for us, but truly a way of life, it will be soul food for us. But it is soul food that does not undermine our spiritual health and spiritual but, on the contrary, stimulates it in such a way that, despite all the resistance of the outer world, the nature of which we have partly sought today, we can still place ourselves in the world in a harmonious way. My intention today was to speak to you about the attitude of soul towards spiritual science. And if it was necessary to present to you contemporary phenomena that can perhaps only be illuminated in this way by spiritual science, it was because only a clear, distinct insight into the course of the world in which we live can also allow us, as professors of the anthroposophical world view, to find the right inner attitude, which is harmony. And from this inner harmony, harmony in our lives will also arise. And that this harmony in our lives is brought about more and more through spiritual science is, after all, our spiritual scientific ideal. In the spirit of this ideal, I wanted to give you a small contribution today.

My dear friends,

Today I would like to bring before you a few important considerations connected with the matters that we have now for a long time regarded as our task. When we reflect on the way in which spiritual science, as here intended, is able to consider and to give answers to the questions of life, we must above all take careful heed to the fact that this spiritual science, and indeed for that matter the whole present and the future time, makes new and different demands on man's powers of comprehension and of thought. He has to think in a different way from what he is accustomed to, in accordance with the habits of thoughts of the immediate past and of the present—especially the habits of thought arising from science and its popularization. You are well aware that all that spiritual science has to say concerning any sphere of life and hence too what it has to say on the social question, indeed especially what it has to say on the social question, is the expression of the results of research—results that have not been obtained on any merely rationalistic or abstract path, but that have been sought and found in the realm of spiritual reality. They can be understood, as we know, with the help of a sound and healthy human intelligence—they can, however, only be discovered when one rises above the ordinary consciousness, such as is comprised within rational thinking, abstract thinking, natural scientific research and so forth—rises above this ordinary consciousness to the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. What comes to light on the path of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—this it is, formulated in concepts and ideas that are capable of expression, that fills the content of the science which Anthroposophical research has to give.

We have to accustom ourselves—and this is what makes it so hard for many of our contemporaries to tread the necessary path from the usual thinking of today to the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy—we have to accustom ourselves to quite a new and different conception of wherein the finding of truth consists. Today men ask so lightly: can this or that be proven? The question is justified of course. But, my dear friends, we have also to look at the question from the standpoint of reality. If we mean: can what the spiritual researcher brings forward be proved in accordance with the conceptions and ideas that we have already acquired, in accordance with the customary ideas which we have imbibed through our education, through our everyday life?—If we mean this, we are making a great mistake; for the results of spiritual research are drawn from reality.

Let me make clear to you by a quite trivial, simple comparison, how the ordinary thinking that runs on purely abstract lines may fall into error. One thought is supposed to follow from another. The error is that if people see: As a thought it does not follow—they concluded that it must be false, while all the time from the point of view of reality it still may be perfectly true. The consequences in reality are not always the same as the consequences in mere thought; the Logic of Reality is a different thing from the Logic of Thought.

In our time, the metaphysical legalistic way of thinking has taken such hold upon men that they are wont to think that everything must be comprehended with the Logic of Thought. But that is not the case. Listen to this, for example. Take a cube measuring—let us say—30 centimeters each way. Now if someone were to say to you: “This cube, measuring 30 centimeters each way, is raised up a meter and a half above the floor”—if you were not yourself in the room where the cube is, you would be able with your pure thought-logic to say one thing: you would be able to conclude from what was said to you: The cube must be standing on something. There must be a table there of the corresponding height, for the cube can certainly not hover in the air. This, then, you can conclude even when you are not present there, even when you have no experience of it.

But now let us suppose: A ball is lying on the cube; something is lying upon it. That you cannot conclude by thinking, that you must see. You must behold it. And yet the ball, too, corresponds to reality. The reality is thus filled with things and entities that have of course a logic in themselves, a logic, however, that does not coincide with the pure thought-logic; the logic of sight is a different thinking from the logic of mere thought.

This necessitates, however, my dear friends, that we should at length learn that we cannot only call proof the so-called logical sequences to which modern thinking has grown accustomed. Unless we learn this, we shall never arrive at a true understanding of things. In the domain in which I have been speaking to you now for some weeks—in the domain of social life, of the structure of human society, many new demands result simply from the fundamental premises that I have set before you concerning the three-fold division of society which will be necessary for the future. One such result is, for example, a quite definite system of taxation. But this system of taxation, once more, can only be found by calling to our help the logic of things seen. The mere logic of thought is insufficient. It is this that makes it necessary that men should listen to those who know something of these things, for when the thing has once been said, then the healthy human intelligence, my dear friends, will always suffice; it can always corroborate and “control” what the spiritual researcher says. The healthy human understanding, however, is something very different from the logic of thought, which is developed especially through the way of thinking that is prevalent today, soaked and steeped as it is in the natural-scientific point of view. From all this you will understand that spiritual science is not intended merely to make us receive a certain collection of ideas and then think that we can handle these ideas much as we would handle information we acquire through natural science or the like. That is absolutely impossible and is not to be imagined for a moment. If we think that we are making a great mistake. Spiritual Science makes a man think in an altogether new way. It makes him comprehend the world in an altogether different way than he has done before, it makes him learn not merely to perceive other things than before, but to perceive in a new way. When you enter into spiritual science you must always bear this in mind, you must be able to ask yourself again and again: Am I learning to look at the world in a new way through my receiving of Spiritual Science—not clairvoyance but Spiritual Science—am I learning to look at the world in another way from what I have done hitherto? For indeed, my dear friends, one who regards Spiritual Science as a collection of facts, a compendium of knowledge, may well know a great deal, but if he still only thinks in the same way as he thought before, then he has not received Spiritual Science. He has only taken up Spiritual Science if the manner, the form, the structure of his thinking has changed, if in a certain respect he has become another man than he was before. And this can only come about through the might and the power of the ideas which we receive through Spiritual Science.

Now if we are to think about the social question, it is absolutely essential that this change, which can only come about through Spiritual Science, should enter our thinking, for only in this light can that be understood to which I directed your attention yesterday. Yesterday I spoke to you of the economists of the schools, the present-day exponents of the theories of economists. I pointed out to you how utterly helpless they are in the face of realities. Why are they so helpless? Because they are bent on understanding with the Natural-Scientific type of thinking something that cannot thus be understood. We shall have to make up our minds to conceive the social life, not with the kind of thinking that is brought up on Natural Science but in an altogether different way. Only then shall we be able to find fruitful social ideas—fruitful in life, capable of realization.

I have already once drawn your attention to a thing that may well have astonished one or another among you; yet it needs to be deeply thought over. I said: The logical conclusion which one will tend to draw from such and such ideas, maybe from a whole “world-conception” are by no means always identical with that which follows from such a world-conception in real life. I mean the following: A man may hold a certain number of ideas or even an entire world-conception. You may envisage this world-conception clearly according to the ideas it contains and you may then perhaps draw further conclusions from it—conclusions which you will quite rightly presume to be logical, you may imagine that such conclusions, which you can logically draw from a world-conception, must necessarily follow from it. But that is by no means the case. Life itself may draw altogether different conclusions. And you may be highly astonished to see how life draws its different conclusions. What do I mean by this? Let us assume a world-conception which appears to you highly idealistic, and—we may assume—rightly so. It contains wonderfully idealistic ideas. You yourself will probably admit only the logical conclusions of your world-conception but if you sink this into another mind, if you take into account the reality of life even where it leads you across the chasms that separate one human being from another—the following may happen: and only Spiritual Science can explain the necessity of such a sequence. You instruct your son or daughter or your pupil in your idealistic world-conception, and they afterwards become thorough scamps and rascals. It may well happen in the reality of life that rascality will follow as the consequence from your idealistic philosophy!

That of course is an extreme case, though one that might well happen in real life. I only wish to bring it home to you that other conclusions are drawn in real life than in mere thought. Hence it is that the men of today are so far removed from reality, because they do not see through such things as these; they are not really willing to bring to consciousness what was formerly done instinctively. The instincts of past ages felt clearly enough that this or that would arise from one thing or another in real life. They were by no means inclined only to presume the consequences that follow by the logical thought. The instincts themselves worked with a logic of their own. But today men have come into a kind of uncertainty, and this uncertainty will naturally grow ever greater in the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Soul unless we make the counterbalance, which is: consciously to receive into ourselves the Logic of Reality. And we do receive it the moment we earnestly consider in its own essence and process the Spiritual that lives and moves behind the realities of sense.

I will tell you a practical case to illustrate what I have just explained in a more theoretic way. It will serve at the same time to illustrate another thing, namely how far we can go wrong, if we merely look at the external symptoms. In my lecture this week, I spoke of the symptomatic method in the study of history. Altogether, the symptomatic method is a thing that we must make our own, if we would pass from the outer phenomena to the underlying Reality.

A Russian author and philosopher of the name of Berdiayeff recently wrote an interesting article on the philosophical evolution in the Russian people in the second half of the nineteenth century and until the present day. There are two remarkable things in this essay of Berdiayeff's. One is that the author takes his start from a peculiar prejudice, proving that he has no insight into those truths, with which you must by now be thoroughly familiar—I mean the truth that in the Russian East, preparing for the Sixth Post-Atlantean Age (the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Life), altogether new elements are on the point of emerging, though today they are only there in embryo. Berdiayeff being ignorant of this fact, his judgment on one point is quite incorrect. He says to himself (and as a Russian philosopher he must surely know the facts), he says: It is strange that in Russia as against the Western European civilizations we have no real sense (especially in philosophy) for what in the West they call the Truth. Russians have been much interested in the philosophy of the West, yet they have no real feeling for it inasmuch as it strives towards “The Truth.” They only take up the truths of philosophy inasmuch as they are serviceable for life, inasmuch as they are directly useful to some conception of life. The Socialist, e.g., is interested in philosophy because he imagines that this or that philosophy will provide him with a justification for his socialism. Similarly the orthodox Believer will interest himself in some philosophy, not, like a Western man because it is the Truth, but because it gives him a justification or a basis for his Orthodox Belief. And so on. Berdiayeff regards this as a great failing in the Folk-Soul of modern Russia. He says: In the West they are far in advance of us. They do not imagine that Truth must follow life; they really believe that Truth is Truth; the Truth is there, and life must take its direction from it. And Berdiayeff actually adds the extraordinary statement (albeit not extraordinary for the men of the present day, who will take it quite as a matter of course, but extraordinary for the Spiritual Scientists) he adds the statement: The Russian socialist has no right to use the expression “bourgeois science,” for bourgeois science contains the truth; it has at last established the concept of Truth, and that is a thing that cannot be refitted. It is therefore a failing on the part of the Russian Folk-Soul to believe that this Truth too can be transcended!

Berdiayeff shares this curious opinion, not only with the whole world of professors, but with all their faithful followers, to wit, the whole bourgeois of Western and Middle Europe, the aristocracy especially so, and the rest. Berdiayeff simply does not know what is now germinating in the Russian Folk Soul, which comes to expression for this very reason in a frequently tumultuous and distorted form. He does not know that in this conception of Truth from the standpoint of life, crooked as it may be today, there lies a real seed for the conception of the future. In the future it will right itself, of that we may be sure. When once what is preparing today as a germinating seed will have unfolded, I mean the directing of all human evolution towards the spiritual life, then indeed will that which men call the “Truth” today have an altogether different form. Today I have drawn your attention to some peculiar facts in this respect. This Truth, my dear friends, will among other things bring to man's consciousness what the men of today cannot realize, that the logic of facts, the logic of reality, the logic of things seen is a very different thing from the mere logic of concepts. And this transformed conception of the Truth will have some other interesting qualities. That is the one thing which you see emerging in Berdiayeff's essay. It is remarkable enough, for it shows how little such a learned author lives in the real trend and meaning of the evolution of our time, which he might well perceive in his own nation above all, but cannot recognize, laboring as he does under this prejudice.

The other thing must be considered in quite a different direction. Berdiayeff, as the whole spirit of his essay shows, witnesses the rise of Bolshevism with great discomfort. Well, in that respect, the one man or the other, according as he is a Bolshevist or the reverse, will say that Berdiayeff is right or wrong. I do not propose to dilate just now upon this question. I will describe the facts, I will not criticize. But this is the important thing: In the sixties, so says Berdiayeff, there was already the tendency to regard Truth and Philosophy as dependent on life, and at that time materialism found entry into Russia. Men believed in Materialism, because they found it useful and profitable for life. Then, in the seventies, Positivism, such as is held by Auguste Comte for example, came into vogue. And after that, other points of view, for example that of Nietzsche, found entry into Russia among the people known as the Intelligentsia. And now Berdiayeff asks the question: What kind of philosophy do we find among the Intelligentsia of the Bolsheviks? For, indeed, a certain philosophy is prevalent among them. But how this particular philosophy can go with Bolshevism, that Berdiayeff is quite at a loss to explain. He simply cannot understand how Bolshevism can regard as its own philosophy—curiously enough—the doctrine of Avenarius and Mach.

And, truth to tell, my dear friends, if you had told Avenarius and Mach that their philosophy was to be accepted by such people as the Bolsheviks, they themselves would have been still more astonished and angry than Berdiayeff. They would have been most indignant (both of them, as you know, are now dead) if they had lived to see themselves as the official philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine Avenarius, the worthy bourgeois, who of course had always assumed that he could only be understood by people who—well, who wore at any rate decent clothes, people who would never do violence to anyone in the Bolshevist manner, in short, good “respectable” people, in the sense in which one used the expression in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And it is true, if we consider only the content of the philosophy of Avenarius, we are still more at a loss to understand how it happened. For what does Avenarius think? Avenarius says: Men labor under a prejudice. They think: within, in my head, or in my soul or wherever it is, are the ideas, the perceptions, they are there subjectively; outside are the objects. But, says Avenarius, this is not correct. If I were all alone in the world, I should never arrive at the distinction between subject and object. I am led to make the distinction only through the fact that other people are there too. I alone beheld a table, I should never come to the idea that the table is out there in space and a picture of it here in my brain. I would simply have the table, and would not distinguish between subject and object. I only distinguish between them because, when I look at the table with another man, I say to myself: He sees the table, and I too perceive it. The perception is in my head too. I reflect that what he senses I am also sensing. Such are partly theoretical considerations (I will not go into them more fully, you would say: All these things do not interest us) within which Avenarius' thought lives and moves. In 1876 he wrote his book Conception of the World According to the Principle of Least Action. For on such premises as I have here explained to you, he shows how the concepts we have as human beings have no real value, but that we only create them for the sake of mental economy. According to Avenarius, the concept “Lion,” for example, or the concept that finds expression in a “Natural Law” is nothing real, nor does it refer to anything real. It is only uneconomical if in the course of my life I have seen five or six or even thirty lions and am now to conceive them each and severally. I therefore proceed in a more economical way, and make myself a single concept “Lion,” embracing all the thirty. Thus all our forming of concepts is a mere matter of subjective mental economy.

Mach holds a similar view. It was Mach of whom I told you how he once got into an omnibus where there was a mirror. As he got in, he saw a man coming in from the other side. Now the appearance of this man was highly antipathetic to him, and he said to himself: “What a weedy-looking schoolmaster.”—only then did he perceive that there was a mirror hanging there and that he had simply seen himself. Mach tells the story to indicate how little one knows oneself, even in one's external human form how little self-knowledge man has. He even tells of another occasion when he passed a shop window which acted as a mirror and thus again met himself and was quite annoyed to come across such an ugly-looking pedant.

Mach proceeded in a rather more popular fashion, but his idea is the same as that of Avenarius. He says: there are not subjective ideas on the one hand, and objective things on the other. All that exists in reality is the content of our sensations. I, to myself, am only a content of sensation, the table outside me is a content of sensation, my brain is a content of sensation. Everything is a content of sensation, and the concepts men make for themselves only exist for the purpose of economy. It was about the year 1881; I was present at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna where Mach gave his lecture on the Economy of Thought, entitled: “Thought as a Principle of the Least Action.” I must say, it made quite a terrible impression upon me, who was then a mere boy, at the very beginning of the twenties. It made a terrible impression on me when I saw that there were men so radical in their ideas, without an inkling of the fact that on the paths of thought there enters into the human soul the first beginning of a manifestation of the super-sensible, the spiritual. Here was a man who denied the reality of concepts to such an extent as to see in them the mere results of a mental activity bent upon economy.

But in Mach and Avenarius—you will not misunderstand my words—all this takes place entirely within the limit of thoroughly “respectable” thinking. We should naturally assume that these two men and all their followers are worthy folk of sound middle-class opinion, utterly removed from any even moderately radical, let alone revolutionary ideas, in practice. And now all of a sudden they have become the official Philosophers of the Bolsheviks! No one could have dreamt of such a thing. Perhaps you may read Avenarius' booklet on the “Principle of Least Action.” It may interest you, it is quite well written. But if you were to tackle his “Philosophy of Experience,” I fancy you would not get very far, you would find it appallingly dull. Written as it is in an absolutely professorial style, there is not the slightest possibility of your drawing even the least vestige of Bolshevism as a conclusion from it. You would not even derive from it a practical world-conception of the most gentle radicalism.

I am well aware, my dear friends, of the objection which those who take symptoms for realities might now bring forward against me. An easy-going, hard-and-fast Positivist, for instance, would say: The explanation is as simple as can be! The Bolshevists took their Intellectuals from Zurich. Avenarius was a professor in Zurich, and those who are now working as intellectual leaders among the Bolsheviks were his pupils. Moreover there was a University lecturer there, a pupil of Mach's Adler, the man who afterwards shot the Austrian statesman Count Stügh. Many followers of Lenin, perhaps even Lenin himself, were well-acquainted with Adler. They absorbed these ideas and carried them to Russia. It is therefore a pure coincidence.

Needless to say I am well aware that a cock-sure hard-and-fast Positivist can explain the whole thing in this way. But did I not tell you the other day how the whole poetic character of Robert Hamerling can be shown to have arisen from the unreliability of the worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, who forgot to forward Hamerling's application for a post in Budapest, as a result of which someone else got the post instead. If only Kaltenbrunner had not been so slack, Hamerling would certainly have gone as a schoolmaster to Budapest in the 1860's instead of to Trieste. Now if you consider all that Hamerling became through spending ten years of his life on the shores of the Adriatic at Trieste, you will see that his whole poetic life was a result. This was the external fact. The worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, headmaster of the Grammar School at Graz, forgot to forward his application and was therefore the occasion of Hamerling's going to Trieste. You see, these things must not be taken as realities but as symptomatic of inner things which come to expression through them.

Thus what Berdiayeff conceives in this way—that the Bolsheviks chose as their idols the worthy middle-class philosophers Avenarius and Mach—does indeed take us back to what I said at the beginning of the present lecture: The reality of life, the reality of things seen is very different from the merely logical reality. Of course you cannot deduce from Avenarius and Mach that they could have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. But, my dear friends, even what you can deduce by logic is only of importance as an external symptom. In effect, we only get at Reality by a research which goes straight for it. And in the Reality the Spiritual Beings work.

I might tell you many things which would indeed enable you to perceive it as a necessity, in reality of life, that such philosophies as that of Avenarius and Mach lead to the conclusion of the most revolutionary socialism of our time. For behind the scenes of existence it is the very same spirits who instill into men's consciousness philosophies after the style of Avenarius or Mach, and who instill once more into men's consciousness that which leads on to Bolshevism for example. Only in Logic you cannot derive the one thing from the other. But the Reality of Life performs this derivation. I beg you inscribe this deep into your hearts, for here too you will have something of what I am constantly emphasizing. It is needful to us to find the transition from the mere tangle of logical ideas, within which the people of today in their illusions imagine the realities of life to be imbued, to the true reality. If we look at the symptoms, and know how to value them, the thing does indeed become far more earnest. Here I will draw your attention to something to which another who is not a Spiritual Scientist will not pay so much attention; for he will take it more as a phrase, as something more or less indifferent. Mach, you see, who is a Positivist, and a radical one at that, comes to the idea that all things are really sensations. This doctrine, which young Adler also expounded in his lectures at Zurich, whereby he will undoubtedly have gained many adherents for himself, and for Mach and for Avenarius—this doctrine declares that everything is sensation, and that we are quite unjustified in distinguishing the physical from the psychical. The table outside us is physical and psychical in precisely the same sense as my ideas are physical and psychical: and we only have concepts for the sake of mental economy.

Now the peculiar thing in Mach was that instinctively, every now and then, he withdrew from his own world-conception—from his radical, positivist world-conception. He withdrew a little, saying to himself: These then are the results of truly modern thought. It is meaningless to say that anything exists beyond my sensation or that I should distinguish the physical and the psychical. And yet I am impelled again and again whenever I have the table before me, to speak not merely of the sensation, but to believe that there is something out there, quite physically. And again when I have an idea, a sensation or a feeling, I have not merely the perception of the phenomenon which takes place, but though by my scientific insight I realize that it is quite unjustified—still I believe that here within me is the soul, and out there is the object. I feel myself impelled again and again to make this distinction how does it come about? Mach said to himself: however does it come about that I am suddenly impelled to assume; in here is something of the soul, and out there is something external to the soul. I know that it is no true distinction, yet am I continually compelled to think something different from what my scientific insight tells me.

This is what Mach says to himself, every now and then when he withdraws a little from these things and considers them again. You will find it in his books. And he then makes a peculiar remark; he says: sometimes one has a feeling that makes one ask:—Can it be that we human beings are just being led round and round in a circle by some evil spirit? And he answers: Sometimes I really think so.

I know, my dear friends, how many people will read just such a passage, taking it as an empty phrase. Yet it is truly symptomatic. For here, every now and then, there peers over the shoulder of the human soul something that is real fact. It is indeed the Ahrimanic spirit who leads men round and round in a circle, making them think in the way of Avenarius and Mach. And at such moments Mach suddenly becomes aware of it. And it is the same Ahrimanic spirit who is working now, in the Bolshevist way of thought. Hence it is no wonder, my dear friends, that the logic of realities has produced this result. You see, however, that if we would understand the things of life, we must look into them more deeply. Truly this is of no small importance, especially for the domain of social life, today and in the near future. For the conclusions that must be drawn are not such as were drawn by Schmoller or Brentano, Wagner, Spencer, John Stuart Mill or whoever it may be. No, in the domain of social life, real conclusions must be drawn, i.e., conclusions according to the logic of realities. This is the bad thing, that in the social agitations and movements of today, and in all that they have produced, merely logical deductions—i.e., illusions—are living. Illusions have become external reality. I will give you two examples. The one is already well-known to you, you will only need to see it in the light in which I shall now place it.

The Marxian Socialists (and as I have often told you, this includes almost the whole of the proletariat today), the Marxian Socialists declare, under the influence of Marx: Economic life, economic oppositions, and the class oppositions that arise from them—these things are the true reality. Everything else is an ideological superstructure. What man thinks, what he creates in poetry and art, what he thinks about the State or about life in general, all this is a mere result of his economic mode of life. And for this reason the proletariat of today declares:—We need no National Assemblies to bring about a new social order. For in the National Assemblies there will be the bourgeois folk once more and they will have their say out of their economically-determined bourgeois minds. We have no use for that. We can only do with those who will voice the thoughts of Proletarian minds. It is they who must re-mold the world today. To this end we do not first need to summon National Assemblies. Let the few Proletarians who happen to be on top exercise a dictatorship. They have proletarian ideas, they will think the right thoughts. Not only Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, Karl Liebknecht in Berlin repudiates the National Assembly. He says: After all, it will be no more than a reassembly of the talk-shop—meaning the Reichstag, the Houses of Parliament.

What is the underlying reason, my dear friends? It is the same reason on account of which, in the main, I was driven out of the Socialist Working Men's College in Berlin sixteen years ago, as I told you recently when giving you the history of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. In that College I had to lecture among other things on scientific matters; I conducted practical lessons in public speaking. But I also had to teach History. And I taught it in the way in which I assumed, objectively, that it should be taught. This was certainly satisfying to those who were my pupils, and if it could have been continued—if it had not been brought to an artificial end—I know it would have borne good fruit. But the Social-Democratic leaders discovered that I was not teaching Marxism or the Marxian conception of history. Nay more, they discovered that I even did such curious wild things as I will now relate (which incidentally were very well-received by the workers who were my pupils). I said, for instance, on one occasion: The ordinary historian cannot make anything of the story of the seven Roman kings, they even regard it as a myth. For the succession of the seven kings, as described by Livy, shows a kind of rise and decline. Up to Marcius, the fourth, it rises to a kind of climax. Then it declines to decadence in the seventh, Tarquinius Superbus. And I explained to my pupils that we were here going back to the most ancient period in Roman evolution, the period before the Republic, and that the change to the Republic had in fact consisted in this: that the ancient atavistic spiritual regularities had passed into a kind of popular chaos; whereas, in the more ancient period, as we can see quite tangible in the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the social institutions contained a certain wisdom, discoverable by Spiritual Science. It is not for nothing that we are told how Numa Pompilius received influences from the Nymph Egeria, to order the social life. Then I explained how men did indeed receive Inspirations for the social institutions which they were to make; and how in truth it was not merely the one monarch following the other as in later times, but these things were determined according to the laws received from the Spiritual World. Hence the regularity in the succession of the Egyptian Pharaohs and even of the Roman kings, Romulus, Numa Pompilius, and so on down to Tarquinius Superbus.

Now you may take the seven principles of man which I summed up in my Theosophy and regard them one after another from a certain point of view. You will find these seven principles in the succession of the Roman kings. Here, at this present moment, I am only hinting at the fact, and among you I need do no more. Nevertheless it is a thing which, rightly expressed, can well be described as an objective truth, throwing real light on the peculiar circumstances which the ordinary materialistic historian cannot understand. Today indeed, the “genuinely scientific” historians simply regard the seven kings as non-existent, and describe them as a myth.

So you see, I really went so far as this. And in other matters, too, I spoke to them in this way. If it is done rightly, it gives the impression of answering to the realities. Still it is not the “Materialistic Conception of History.” For that would mean that we should have to investigate what were the economic conditions in ancient Roman times, what was the relation of the tillage of the soil to the breeding of cattle and to trade and the life; and how the cities were founded, and what was the economic life of the Etruscans, and how the Etruscans traded with the young Roman people; and how under the influence of these economic elements, conditions took shape under Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and so on, in succession.

You see, even this would not have been effected quite so simply. But here again the true Reality came to my assistance. Of course, such an audience did not consist merely of young people. There were many among them who had already absorbed the Proletarian thought to a considerable extent and who were well-equipped, well-armed with all these prejudices. Such people are by no means easy to convince, even when one is speaking of things remote from their domain of knowledge. On one occasion I was speaking about Art. I had described what Art is, and its influence, and suddenly from the back of the hall a lady cried out, interrupting: “Well, and Verism, isn't that Art?”

So you see, these people were not prone to take things simply on authority. It was a question of finding a way to them; not of finding the way to them by all manner of sly devices, but out of a sense of Reality and Truthfulness. And so it came about that one had to say—not only could, but had to say—“You folk are primed with ideas of the ‘Materialist Conception of History,’ which believes that all things depend on the economic conditions, and that the spiritual life is but an ideology, spreading itself out on the basis of the economic conditions, and indeed, Marx expounded these things with clear and sharp insight. But why did all this come about? Why did he describe and believe all this? Because Marx only saw the immediate and present age in which he lived. He did not go back to former ages. Marx only based himself on the historic evolution of man since the sixteenth century, and here in deed and truth there came into the evolution of mankind an epoch during which over a large part of the world the spiritual life became an expression of the economic conditions, though not exactly as Marx describes it. True, Goetheanism is not to be derived from the economic life; but Goethe was regarded even by these people as a man remote from the economic life.

Thus we might say that this was the mistake, that which held true only for a certain space of time, notably for the most recent time of all, was generalized. Indeed, only the last four centuries could be truly understood by describing them in the sense of the Materialist Conception of History.

Now this is the important thing: We must not proceed by the mere logic of concepts; for by the logic of concepts very little can be said against the carefully and strictly guarded propositions of Karl Marx. We must proceed by the logic of life, the logic of realities, the logic of things seen. If we do so, the following will be revealed. Beneath this evolution which has taken place since the 16th century in a way that can well be interpreted through the materialist conception of history—beneath this Evolution there is a deeply significant Involution. That is to say, there is something that takes its course invisibly, supersensibly, beneath what is visible to the outer senses. This is seeking to come forth to the surface, to work its way forth out of the souls of men; and it is the very opposite of Materialism. Materialism only becomes so great and works so in order that man may rear himself up against it, in order that he may find the possibility to seek the Spiritual out of the depths of his own Being during this age of the Spiritual Soul, and thus attain Self-consciousness in the Spirit. Thus the task is not, as Karl Marx believes, simply to look at the outer reality and read from it the proposition that economic life is the real basis of ideology; but the task is rather this: We must say to ourselves, the outer reality since the 16th century does not reveal the true reality. The true reality must be sought for in the spirit; we must find, above all, that social order which will counter-balance and overcome what appears outwardly or is outwardly observable since the 16th century. The age itself compels us, not merely to observe the outer processes but to discover something that can work into them as a corrective. What Marxism has turned upside down must be set right again.

It is extraordinarily important for us to know this. In this instance the logic of realities actually reverses the mere sharp-witted dialectics of Karl Marx. Alas, much water will have yet to flow down the Rhine before a sufficient number of people will realize this necessity, to find the logic of reality, the logic of things seen. Yet it is necessary—necessary above all on account of the burning social questions.

That is the one example. For the other, we may take our start from some of the things I told you yesterday. I said: It is characteristic how men have observed, ever since Ricardo, Adam Smith and the rest, that the economic order entails this consequence: That in the social life of man together, human labor-power is used like a commodity, brought on to the market like a commodity, treated like a commodity after the laws of supply and demand. As I explained yesterday, this is the very thing that excites and acts as motive impulses in the proletarian world-conception. Now one who merely thinks in the logic of concepts, observing that this is so, will say to himself: we must therefore find an economic science, a social science, a conception of social life, which reckons with this fact. We must find the best possible answer to the question: “Seeing that labor power is a commodity, how can we protect this commodity, labor power, from exploitation?” But the question is wrongly put, wrongly put not only out of theory, but out of life itself. The putting of questions wrongly is having a destructive, devastating effect in real life today. And it will continue to do so if we do not find the way to reverse it. For here once more the thing is standing on its head and must be set upright again, we must not ask: How shall we make the social structure so that man cannot be exploited, in spite of the fact that his labor power is brought on to the market like any other commodity, according to supply and demand.

For there is an inner impulse in human evolution which works in the logic of realities, although people may not express it in these words. It corresponds to reality and we can state it thus: Even the Grecian Age, the Grecian civilization which has come to mean so much for us, is only thinkable through the fact that a large proportion of the population of Greece were slaves. Slavery, therefore, was the premise of that ancient civilization which signifies so very much to us. So much that the most excellent philosopher, Plato, considered slavery altogether as a justified and necessary thing in human civilization. But the evolution of mankind goes forward. Slavery existed in antiquity and as you know, mankind began to rebel against it, quite instinctively to rebel against men being bought and sold. Today we may say it is an axiom: The whole human being can no longer be bought and sold; and where slavery still exists, we regard it as a relic of barbarism. For Plato, it was not barbarism; it went without saying that there were slaves, just as it did for every Greek who had the Platonic mind, nay every Greek who thought in terms of the state. The slave himself thought just the same, it went without saying that men could be sold, could be put on the market according to the laws of supply and demand, though of course not like mere cattle. Then, in a masked and veiled form, the thing passed over into the milder form of slavery which we call serfdom. Serfdom lasted very long, but here again mankind revolted.

And to our own time this relic has remained. The whole human being can no longer be sold, but only part of him, namely his labor-power. And today man is revolting against this too. It is only a continuation of the repudiation of slavery, if in our time it is demanded that the buying and selling of labor-power be repudiated. Hence it lies in the natural course of human evolution for this opposition to arise against labor-power being treated as a commodity, functioning as a commodity in the social structure. The question, therefore, cannot be put in this way: How shall man be protected from exploitation?—assuming as an axiomatic premise that labor-power is a commodity. This way of thinking has become habitual since Ricardo, Adam Smith and others, and is in reality included in Karl Marx and in the proletarian conception. Today it is taken as an axiom that labor-power is a commodity. All they want to do is, in spite of its being a commodity, to protect it from exploitation, or rather to protect the worker from the exploitation of his labor-power. Their whole thought moves along these lines. More or less instinctively or—as in Marx himself—not instinctively, they take it as an axiom. Notably the ordinary run of Political Economists who occupy the professional chairs assume it is an axiom from the very outset, that labor-power is to be treated, economically speaking, on the same basis as a commodity.

In these matters countless prejudices are dominating our life today: and prejudices are disastrous above all in this sphere of life. I am well aware how many there may be, even among you, who will regard it as a strange expectation, that you should spend your time in going into all these things. But we cannot possibly study the fullness of life if we are unable to think about these things. For if we cannot do so, we become the victims of all manner of absurd suggestions. How many an illustration the last four years have provided; what have they not brought forth? One could witness the most extraordinary things: I will only give you one example. Returning again and again to Germany—and in other places it was no different—every time, one found there was some new watchword, some new piece of instruction for the true patriot. Thus, the last time we went back to Germany, once more there was a new patriotic slogan: Do not pay in cash! Deal in checks as much as possible! i.e., do not let money circulate, but use checks. People were told that this was especially patriotic, for, as they thought, this was necessary in order to help win the war. No one saw through this most obvious piece of nonsense. But it was not merely said, it was propagated with a vengeance, and the most unbelievable people acted up to it—people of whom you might have supposed that they would understand the rudiments of economics—directors of factories and industrial undertakings. They too declared: pay in check and not in ready money, that is patriotic!

That fact is, it would be patriotic, but only under one assumption, namely this: you would have to calculate on each occasion how much time you saved in dealing in checks instead of ready money. True, most people cannot perform such a reckoning, but there are those who can. Then you would have to add up all the time that was saved, and come up and say: I have been paying my accounts in checks and have saved so much time, I want to spend it usefully; please give me a job! Only if you did so would it be a real saving. But of course they did not do so, nor did it ever occur to them that the thing would only have a patriotic importance on economic grounds on this assumption. Such nonsense was talked during the last four and a half years to an appalling extent. The most unbelievably dilettante propositions were realized. Impossibilities became realities, because of the utter ignorance of people—even of those who gave out such instructions—as to the real connections in this domain of life.

Now with respect to the questions I have just raised, the point is this: It must be the very aim of our investigations to find out—How shall we shape the social structure, the social life of man together, so as to loosen and free the objective commodity, the goods, the product, from the labor-power? This must be the point, my dear friends, in all our economic endeavors. The product should be brought onto the market and circulated in such a way that the labor-power is loosed and freed from it. This is the problem in economics that we must solve. If we start with the axiom that the labor-power is crystallized into the commodity and inseparable from it, we begin by eclipsing the essential problem and then we put things upside-down. We fail to notice the most important question—the question on which, in the realm of political economy, the fortunes and misfortunes of the civilized world will depend. How shall the objective commodity, the goods, the product, be loosed and severed from the labor-power, so that the latter may no longer be a commodity? For this can be done if we believe in that three-folding of the social order which I have explained to you, if we make our institutions accordingly. This is the way to separate from the labor-power of man the objective commodities, the goods, which are, after all, loosed and separated from the human being.

It must be admitted, my dear friends, that we find little understanding as yet for these things, derived as they are from the realities. In 1905 I published my essay on “Theosophy and the Social Question,” in the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis. I then drew attention to the first and foremost principle which must be maintained in order to sever the product from the labor. Here alone, I said, could we find salvation in the social question, and I emphasized that this question depends on our thinking rightly about production and consumption. Today men are thinking altogether on the lines of Production. We must change the direction of our thought. The whole question must be diverted from Production to Consumption. In detail, one had occasion to give many a piece of advice: but through the inadequate conditions and other insufficiencies, such advice could not really take effect, as one experienced—unhappily—in many cases. And it is so indeed; the men of today, through their faith in certain logical conclusions, which they mistake for real conclusions, have no sense for the need of looking at the Realities. But in the social domain above all it is only the Reality which can teach us the right way to put our questions. Of course people will say to you: Do you not see that it is necessary for labor to be done if commodities are to be produced? That is so indeed. Logically, commodities are the result of labor. But Reality is a very different thing from Logic.

I have explained this to our friends again and again from another aspect. Look at the thought of the Darwinian Materialists. I remember vividly the first occasion—it was in the Munich group—when I tried to make this clear to our friends. Imagine a real, thorough-going follower of Haeckel. He thinks that man has arisen from an apelike beast. Well, let him as a scientist form the concept of an ape-like animal and then let him form the concept of Man. If as yet no man existed and he only had the concept of the ape-like animal, he would certainly never be able to “catch,” out of this concept of the animal, the concept Man. He only believes what [in?] the ape-like creature, because the one proceeded out of the other in reality. Thus in real life men do after all distinguish between the logic of pure concepts and ideas and the logic of things seen. But this distinction must be applied through and through; otherwise we shall never gain an answer to the social and political questions, such as is necessary for the present and the immediate future. If we will not turn to that realistic thinking which I have explained to you once more today, we shall never come to the Goetheanic principle in public life. And that the Goetheanic principle shall enter into the world, this we desired to signalize by erecting, upon this hill, a “Goetheanum.”

In humorous vein, I would advise you to read the huge advertisement that appeared on the last page of today Basler Nachrichten, calling on everyone to do all in his power for the greatest day in world-history which is now about to dawn, by founding a “Wilsoneanum.” True, as yet, it is only an advertisement, and I only mention it in a jocular spirit. Nevertheless, in the souls of men, to say the least of it, the “Wilsoneanum” is being founded pretty intensely at the present moment.

As I said a short while ago, it has indeed a certain meaning that there is now a Goetheanum standing here. I called it a piece of “negative cowardice.” The opposite of cowardice was to come to expression in this action. And it is indeed the case, my dear friends, events are coming in the future—though this advertisement is only an amusing prelude—events are coming which will seem to justify this prophetic action which is being made out of the spirit of a certain world-conception. Though we need not take the half-page advertisement for a “Wilsoneanum” seriously, it is well for us to know that Wilsoniana will indeed be founded. Therefore a Goetheanum was to stand here as a kind of protest in advance.

Above all, I must ask for your forgiveness if I am unable to give the lecture I am supposed to give in one of the local languages. The fact that this lecture is being held corresponds to the wish of the friends of our Theosophical Society, for whom I was invited here, to hold a series of lectures for a fortnight, and who thought that there was a possibility of also inserting the two announced public lectures within this time. Of course, this means that I will have to apologize in advance if some of the names and terms, which are borrowed from the national epic of the Finns, are not pronounced quite correctly by me, as I am not familiar with the language. However, only next Friday's lecture will be able to introduce us to spiritual science itself. Tonight's lecture will rather concern a kind of neighboring area that can be illuminated from a spiritual scientific point of view. However, the talk will be about an area that, in the very deepest sense of the word, is one of the most interesting for human historical reflection and human historical thought.

Folk epics! We need only think of some of the better-known folk epics, the epics of Homer, which have become Greek folk epics, the Central European Nibelungen saga and, finally, Kalewala, and it will immediately become clear to us that these folk epics lead us deeper into human souls and human than through any historical research, so that important ancient times are brought to life and presented to our souls as if they were present, but in such a way that they touch us in the here and now like the fates and lives of people living around us. How uncertain and hazy are the historical times of the ancient Greek people, as told to us by the Homeric epics. And how do we look into the souls of those people when we let the content of the Iliad and the Odyssey take effect on us, people who have actually been completely removed from the usual view of history? No wonder that the study of folk epics holds something of a mystery for those who study them scientifically or literarily. We need only point out one fact about the ancient Greek epics that a spirited observer of the Iliad repeatedly expressed in a very beautiful book about Homer's Iliad that was only published a few years ago. I am referring to Herman Grimm, the nephew of the great Germanic myth, saga, and language researcher Jakob Grimm. By letting the figures and facts of the Iliad take effect on him, Herman Grimm felt compelled to say again and again: Oh, this Homer – we do not need to go into the question of the personality of Homer today – seems, when he describes something that is borrowed from a craft or an art, as if he were a specialist in this craft or art. When he describes a battle, a fight, he seems to be completely familiar with all the strategic and military principles that come into play in warfare. — Herman Grimm is right to point out that a strict judge in such matters was an admirer of Homer's factual depiction of battles, namely Napoleon, a man who was undoubtedly entitled to pass judgment on whether or not the military is directly and vividly presented to our minds in the spirit of Homer. From a general human point of view, we know how vividly Homer presents the figures to our minds, as if we had them directly before our physical eyes.

What about a national epic like this, how does it prove itself over time? For truly, anyone who observes the circumstances impartially will not get the impression that artificial arrangements of humanity, such as an artificial pedagogical discipline, have repeatedly held the interest of the centuries in the Iliad and Odyssey down to our days. This interest is a matter of course, it is a general human interest. But in a certain sense these folk epics give us a task, and if we want to study them, they immediately present us with a very specific, one might say interesting, task. They want to be taken very seriously in all their details. We immediately feel that something about the content of such folk epics will remain incomprehensible to us if we want to read them in the same way that we read a modern work of art, a modern novel or the like. We feel right from the first lines of the Iliad that Homer is speaking precisely. What is he describing? He tells us at the beginning. We know from other accounts, which are not contained in the Iliad, about events that follow on from the facts of the Iliad. Homer wants to describe only what he says succinctly in the first line: the wrath of Achilles. And if we now go through the entire Iliad and look at it impartially, we have to say: there is nothing in it that cannot be characterized as fact, that follows from the wrath of Achilles. - And further, a peculiar fact right at the beginning of the Iliad. Homer does not begin with the facts, nor with some personal opinion, but with something that modern times might be tempted to take as a mere phrase: “Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles!” And the deeper we penetrate into this national epic, the clearer it becomes to us that we cannot understand the meaning and spirit and significance of it if we do not take this saying seriously at the outset. But then we must ask ourselves: what does it actually mean?

And now the way it is presented, the whole way the events are brought before our soul! For many, not only expert and scientific observers, but also for artistically comprehensive minds like Herman Grimm, it was a question these words: “Sing to me, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles.” A question that went to their very hearts. In this Iliad, just as in the Song of the Nibelungs or in Kalewala, the deeds of spiritual-divine beings—in Homer's poems, first of all, the deeds and intentions and passions of the Olympian gods—intertwine with the deeds and intentions and passions of men who, like Achilles, are in a sense far removed from the ordinary human, and again with the passions and intentions and deeds of men who are already close to the ordinary human, like Odysseus or Agamemnon? When this Achilles appears before our soul, he seems lonely to us compared to the people with whom he lives. We very soon feel in the course of the Iliad that in Achilles we have a personality before us who cannot really talk about her innermost affairs with all the other heroes. Homer also shows us how Achilles has to sort out his actual heart affairs with divine spiritual beings that do not belong to the human realm, how he stands alone in relation to the human realm throughout the entire Iliad, and yet is close to supersensible, supermundane powers. And yet it is strange that when we gather all our human feeling into the way of thinking and feeling that we have acquired in the cultural process and direct our gaze to this Achilles, he then appears to us in such a way that we often have to say: How selfish, how personal! — A being in whose soul divine-spiritual impulses play, he acts entirely out of the immediate personal. For a long time, a war that was so important for the Greeks, such as the Trojan War of the legends, only progresses, and the special episodes that the thliad describes, are won by Achilles making up for himself what he has to make up for personally with Agamemnon. And we always see that supernatural powers are at play. We see Zeus, Apollo, Athena handing out impulses, so to speak, putting people in their places. It was always strange before the task came to me to approach these things from the standpoint of spiritual science, like a very spiritual man with whom I was lucky enough to often discuss these things personally, to find his way around these things like Herman Grimm. He expressed this not only in his writings but also often in personal conversations, and there much more precisely. He said: If we only consider the historical forces and impulses at work in the development of humanity, then we cannot get to grips with what lives and creates in the great folk epics. Therefore, for Herman Grimm, the brilliant observer of the Iliad and folk poetry in general, something that goes beyond the ordinary powers of human consciousness, beyond understanding, reason, sensory perception, beyond ordinary feeling, becomes a real power, a power that is creative just like the other historical impulses. Herman Grimm spoke of a real creative imagination that runs through the development of humanity, spoke of an imagination as one speaks of an essence, of a reality, of something that prevailed for people and that could tell them more in the beginning of the times we can observe, in the development of the individual peoples, than what the ordinary soul forces tell people. Herman Grimm's words always appealed to the creative imagination, which for him thus took on the role of a co-creator in the process of human becoming.

But now, when we look at this battleground of the Iliad, this representation of the wrath of Achilles, with all the interplay of divine, spiritual powers, we cannot get by with such view as Herman Grimm took it, and in his book on the Iliad we find many a word of resignation that shows us how the usual point of view, which one can take today, whether literary or scientifically, cannot deal with these things. Where does Herman Grimm come to in relation to the Iliad and the Nibelungen saga? He comes to the assumption that the historical dynasties and ruling houses were preceded by others. In fact, one might say, Herman Grimm literally thinks in such terms. He considers, for example, that Zeus and his entire entourage represent a kind of ruling house that preceded the ruling house of Agamemnon. He thinks, so to speak, of human history in a certain uniformity, thinks of the gods or heroes depicted in the Iliad or the Nibelungen saga as ancient humans, whom later humans dared to depict only by clothing their deeds and characters in the guise of superhuman myth. There are many things that cannot be understood if one takes such a premise as a basis, especially the particular way in which the gods intervene in Homer. I ask you, my dear attendees, to consider just one thing: how do Thetis, the mother of Achilles, Athena, and other divine figures intervene in the events of Troy? They intervene by taking on the form of mortal men, inspiring them, as it were, and leading them to their deeds. They do not appear themselves, but permeate living men. Living men figure not only as their representatives, but as the shells that are permeated by invisible powers that cannot appear on the battlefield in their own form, in their own essence. It would be strange to assume that ancient people of the ordinary kind should be depicted in such a way that they would have to take the representative people from the mortal race as their shell. This is just one of the indications that can prove to us all that we cannot get by with the old folk epics in this way.

But we are just as little at home with the figures of the Song of the Nibelungs, that Siegfried from Xanten on the Lower Rhine, who is transferred to the court of the Burgundians at Worms, woos Kriemhilde, Gunther's sister, and then, because of his special qualities, can only woo Brunhilde. And how strangely such figures as Brunhilde from Isenland, like Siegfried, are described to us. Siegfried is described as having overcome the so-called Nibelung race, as having acquired, conquered the Nibelung treasure. Through what he has acquired through his victory over the Nibelungs, he acquires very special qualities, which are expressed in the epic by saying that he can make himself invisible, that he is invulnerable in a certain way, and that he also has powers that the ordinary Gunther does not have, because the latter cannot acquire Brunhilde, who does not allow herself to be defeated by an ordinary mortal. Siegfried defeats Brunhilde with the special powers that come from being the owner of the Nibelungen hoard, and because he can conceal the powers he displays, he is able to present Brunhilde to Gunther, his brother-in-law. And there we find that Kriemhilde and Brunhilde, who we then see at the Burgundian court at the same time, are two very different characters, characters who are obviously influenced by things that cannot be explained by the ordinary human soul. This leads to quarrels between them, and also to Brunhilde being able to tempt Hagen, a loyal servant, to kill Siegfried. This again points to a trait that appears so peculiarly in Central European legend. Siegfried has higher, superhuman powers. He has these superhuman powers because he possesses the hoard of the Nibelungs. Ultimately, these do not make him an unconditionally victorious figure, but a figure who stands before us tragically. The powers that Siegfried has through the Nibelungen hoard are also a curse for the human being. Things become even stranger when we add the related Nordic saga of Sigurd, the dragon slayer, but this has an enlightening effect. There we are immediately confronted with Sigurd, who is none other than Siegfried, as the slayer of the dragon, who thereby acquires the Nibelungen hoard from an ancient race of dwarves. And we are introduced to Brunhilde as a figure of superhuman nature, as a Valkyrie figure.

We see, then, that there are two ways of presenting these things in Europe. One way, which directly links everything to the divine-supernatural, which still shows us how something in Brunhilde is meant that directly belongs to the supernatural world, and the other way, which legend has humanized. But we can still recognize how the divine can be found resounding everywhere in this way too.

And now let us turn our gaze from these legends, from these folk epics, to that region about which I can truly only speak as someone who can see things from the outside, only as they can be recognized if one does not speak the language in question. I ask you to bear in mind that I can only speak about everything that a Western European encounters in Kalewala as one who sees the spiritual content and the great, powerful figures and who, of course, must inevitably miss the subtleties of the epic, which only come out when one really masters the language in which it is written. But even when viewed in this way, how peculiarly the triad in the three presents itself to us, indeed, one is actually at a loss to use a name, one cannot say gods, one cannot say heroes, so let us say in the three entities: Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen and Lemminkäinen. These figures speak a strange language, when we compare their characters with each other, a language from which we clearly recognize that the things we are to be told go beyond what can be achieved with the ordinary human powers of the soul. After all, if we look at them only superficially, these three figures grow into the monstrous. And yet again, which is the peculiar thing, in that they grow into the monstrous, every single trait is vividly before our eyes, so that nowhere do we somehow have the feeling that the monstrous is a grotesque, a paradox; everywhere we have the feeling that what is to be said must, of course, appear in superhuman greatness, in superhuman significance. And then: what mystery in the content. Something that inspires our soul to think of the most human of things, but which in turn goes beyond what ordinary soul forces can grasp. Ilmarinen, who is often called the blacksmith, the most artistic blacksmith of all, forges the Sampo on pins for Wäinämöinen in a realm inhabited, so to speak, by humanity's older brothers or at least by more primitive people than the Finns, for some foreign realm. And we see this strange thing happening, that far from the scene of the facts under discussion, many things take place, that time passes, and we see how, after a certain time, Wäinämöinen and Ilmarinen are again caused to retrieve what was left to them in a foreign land, the Sampo. Anyone who allows themselves to be drawn into the peculiar spiritual language that emerges from this forging of the Sampo, from this keeping away and regaining of the same, has the immediate impression – as I said, I ask you to bear in mind that I speak, so to speak, as a stranger and can therefore only speak of the impression of a stranger – that the most essential, the most meaningful in this grandiose poem is the forging, the keeping away and the later regaining of the Sampo.

What strikes me as particularly strange about Kalewala is the ending. I have heard that there are people who believe that this ending may be a later addition. For me, this ending of Mariata and her son, this introduction of a very strange Christianity – I say explicitly a very strange Christianity – is part of the whole. It acquires Kalevala, through the presence of this conclusion, a very special nuance, a coloring that can, so to speak, make the matter even more understandable to us. I may say that, for my feeling, such a delicate, wonderfully impersonal presentation of Christianity is nowhere to be found at all than at the end of Kalevala. The Christian principle is detached from all locality. The journey from Mariata to Herod, who in Kalevala appears as Rotus, is so impersonal that it hardly reminds us of any locality or personality in Palestine. Indeed, one is not even remotely reminded of the historical Christ Jesus. At the end of Kalewala, we find a delicate hint of the penetration of the noblest cultural pearl of humanity into Finnish culture as the most intimate affair of the heart of humanity. And linked to this is the tragic train, which in turn can have such an infinitely deep effect on our soul that when Christianity moves in and the son of Mariata is baptized, Wäinämöinen takes leave of his people in order to go to an unspecified location, leaving behind only the content and power of what he knew how to tell through his art of singing about the ancient events that include the history of this people. This withdrawal of Wäinämöinen towards the son of Mariata seems to me so significant that one would like to see in it the living interplay of all that prevailed at the core of the Finnish people, of the Finnish national soul, from ancient times until the moment when Christianity found its way into Finland. The way in which this ancient power relates to Christianity is such that one can feel everything that takes place in the soul with a wonderful intimacy. I say this as someone who is aware of the objectivity of what I am about to say, which I do not say to please anyone or to flatter anyone. In this national epic, we Western Europeans have one of the most wonderful examples of how the members of a nation stand before us in the flesh, with their whole soul, so that through Kalevala we get to know the Finnish soul in a way that allows us to become completely familiar with it.

Why have I said all this? I have said it to characterize how something speaks in the folk epics that cannot be explained by ordinary human soul powers, even when one speaks of imagination as a real power. And even if to some what is said sounds only like a hypothesis, then perhaps what spiritual science has to say about the nature of these folk epics may be adduced in this consideration of folk epics. Certainly, I am aware that what I have to say today still touches on something to which very few people can give their consent in our present time. Many may perhaps regard it as a reverie, a fantasy; but some will at least accept it alongside other hypotheses put forward about the development of humanity. For those who penetrate spiritual science in the way that I will dare to describe in the next lecture, it will not be a hypothesis, but a real research result that can be put alongside other scientific research results. The things that have to be discussed sound strange because the very science that today believes it stands firmly on the ground of the factual, the true, the only thing that can be attained, limits itself only to what the outer senses perceive, what the mind, bound to the senses and the brain, can explore of things. And that is why today it is often considered unscientific to speak of a research method that reaches to other powers of the soul, which make it possible to see into the supersensible and the way the supersensible plays into the sensory. By means of this method of research, by means of spiritual science, one is not merely led to the abstract imagination to which Herman Grimm was led in regard to the folk epic, but one is led to something that goes far beyond imagination, that represents a quite different state of soul or consciousness than that which man can have at the present moment in his development. And so, through spiritual science, we are led back to human prehistory in a completely different way than through ordinary science.

Today, ordinary science is accustomed to looking back on the development of humanity in such a way that what we call human beings today have gradually developed from lower, animal-like creatures. Spiritual science does not confront this modern research with a combative attitude, but fully recognizes the greatness and power of the achievements of this natural science of the 19th century, the significance of the idea of a transformation of the animal forms from the most imperfect to the perfect, and an attachment of the outer human form to the most perfect animal form. But it cannot stop at such a view of the becoming of man, of the becoming of organisms in general, which would present itself if one could survey with an external sensory view that which has taken place in the organic world up to man in the course of earthly events. Today, in spiritual science, the human being stands alongside the animal world. We see the variously shaped animal forms in the world around us. We see the human race spread out over the earth as a unified entity in a certain way. In spiritual science, we also have an unbiased view of how everything in the outer form speaks for the relationship between man and the other organisms, but in spiritual science, when we trace the development of humanity backwards, we cannot go back so far that we can directly place the stream of humanity into the animal series of development in some distant past. For we find, when we go back from the present into the past, that we cannot, anywhere, directly attach the present human form, the present human being, to any animal form that we know from the present.

If we go back in the development of humanity, we first find, one might say, the soul forces, the powers of mind and feeling and will, that we also have in the present, developing in ever more primitive forms in humans. Then we go back to the mists of time, of which old documents tell us only very little. Even where we can go back as far as the Egyptians or the peoples of the Near East, we are led everywhere back to an ancient humanity, which, although more primitive in some respects, also has more magnificent the same powers of mind, and will forces, which have only recently reached their present development, but which we recognize as the most important human impulses, as the most important historical impulses, as far as we can trace back humanity by considering this present soul. Nowhere do we find the possibility of placing even the most ancient race of men in a special relationship to the present animal forms. This, which spiritual science must assert for itself, is recognized today even by thinking natural scientists. But if we go further back and consider how the human soul changes when we compare how a person thinks, say, scientifically or otherwise, how he applies his intellect and how his powers of feeling work, when we trace this back — oh, we can trace it quite accurately — to a certain time when it first shone forth in humanity. We might say that it first appeared in the sixth or seventh century before Christ. The whole configuration of present-day feeling and thinking does not go back farther than the times of which we are told as the times of the first Greek natural philosophy.

If we go further back and have an unprejudiced eye, we find, without yet touching on spiritual science, that not only does all present-day scientific thought cease in the past, but that the human soul is in a completely different state altogether, in a much more impersonal state, but also in such a state that we have to address its powers much more as instinctively. Not in the sense that we are saying that people in this period acted on instincts like those of animals today, but the guidance of reason and intellect, as it exists today, was not there. Instead, however, there was a certain instinctive, direct certainty in people. They acted on the basis of direct, elementary impulses; they did not control them through the intellect tied to the brain. There we find, however, that in the human soul those powers still prevail unmixed, which we today have separately as powers of reason, and those powers, which we today carefully separate from the powers of reason and lead to science, the powers of imagination. Imagination, understanding and reason, they all work together in those ancient times. The further back we go, the more we find that we can no longer speak of what prevailed in the soul of human beings, what worked there as imagination and understanding, as we call a soul power today, when we call it imagination. Today we know very well that when we speak of imagination, we are speaking of a soul force whose expressions we cannot really apply, to which we cannot ascribe reality. The modern human being is careful in this matter, he is careful not to mix together what imagination gives him with what the logic of reason tells him. If we look at what the human mind expresses in those prehistoric times before imagination and reason appear separately, then we feel an original, elementary, instinctive power prevailing in the souls. We can find characteristics of today's imagination in it, but what – if we use the term – imagination gave the human soul back then had something to do with a reality. Imagination was not yet imagination, it was still – I must not be afraid to use the expression directly – clairvoyant power, was still a special soul faculty, was the gift of the soul through which man saw things, saw facts that are hidden from him today in his developmental epoch, when understanding and reason are to be particularly developed. Those powers that were not imagination but clairvoyant power penetrated deeper down into hidden forces and hidden forms of existence that lie behind the sensual world. This is what an unbiased consideration must lead us to: that when we look back at the development of humanity, we have to say to ourselves: Truly, we must take the word evolution, development, seriously.

That humanity in the present, in the last centuries and millennia, has come to its present high level of rational and intellectual powers, so to speak, is a result of development. These soul powers have developed out of others. And while our present soul powers are limited to what presents itself in the external sense world, an original humanity, which of course had to do without science in the modern sense, without the use of reason in the modern sense, an original human soul power at the basis of all individual peoples looked into the foundations of existence, into a realm that, as a supersensible one, lies behind the sensual. Once upon a time, all peoples possessed clairvoyant powers as part of the human soul. It was out of these clairvoyant powers that the present human powers of understanding and reason were formed, as well as the present way of thinking and feeling. These soul powers, which we may refer to as clairvoyant powers, were such that the human being felt at the same time: I am not the one who is thinking and feeling within me. Man felt as if he had been given over, with all his physicality and also with his soul being, to higher, supersensible powers that were working and living in him. Thus man felt like a vessel through which supersensible forces themselves spoke. If one considers this, one also understands the meaning of the further development of humanity. Human beings would have remained dependent beings, who could only have felt themselves to be vessels, as shells of powers and entities, if they had not progressed to the actual use of intellect and reason. Through the use of intellect and reason, man has become more independent, but at the same time, for a while of development, he has also been cut off from the spiritual world in certain respects, cut off from the supersensible foundations of existence. In the future, this will change again. The further we go back, the deeper the human soul sees into the foundations of existence through clairvoyant powers, and sees how those forces that worked on the human being himself in prehistoric times emerged from these foundations of existence until a point in time when all conditions on earth were quite different from today, when they were such that the forms of living beings were much more mobile, much more subject to a kind of metamorphosis than today. Thus we have to go back far from what is called the present human cultural period, we have to observe human forms and animal forms side by side. And much further back than is usually believed today is the separation of the animal form from the human form. The animal forms then solidified, became more immobile at a time when the human form was still quite soft and pliable and could be shaped and molded by what was experienced inwardly by the soul. In this way, we come back to a time in human development that is beyond our present consciousness, but for which another consciousness was present in the soul, one that was connected to the clairvoyant powers that have just been characterized. Such a consciousness, which could look back into the past and saw the development of humanity in its origin from the past already in complete separation from all animal life, also saw how human forces ruled, but still in a living connection with the supersensible forces that played into it. It saw what in the times when, for example, the Homeric epics were written was only present as an old echo, and what was present to a much greater extent in even earlier times. If we go back to the time before Homer, we find that people had a clairvoyant consciousness that, as it were, remembered human events from prehistoric times and was able to tell the story of the origin of man from memory. By Homer's time, the situation was such that people felt that the old clairvoyant consciousness was dwindling, but they still felt that it was there. That was a time when man did not speak of himself as an independent, egoistic being, but when gods and supersensible spiritual forces spoke through him. So we must take it seriously when Homer does not speak of himself, but when he says: Sing to me, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles! Sing in me, higher being, being that speaks through me, that takes possession of me as I sing and say. This first line of Homer is a reality. We are not referred to ancient dynasties that are similar in the ordinary sense to our present humanity, but we are pointed to the fact by Homer himself that there were other people in primeval times, people in whom the supersensible lived. And Achilles is definitely still a personality from the transitional period from the old clairvoyance to the modern way of looking at things, which we already find in Agamemnon, which we find in Nestor and Odysseus, but which is then further developed into a higher way of looking at things. Only in this way do we understand Achilles when we know that Homer wanted to depict him as a member of the ancient human race who lived in a time that lies between the time when people still directly reached the ancient gods and the present time of humanity, which begins with Agamemnon.

Likewise, we are referred to a human prehistory in the Central European Nibelungen saga. The whole presentation of this epic shows us this. We are already dealing with people of our present time in a certain respect, but with such people of our present time who have preserved something from the time of ancient clairvoyance. All the qualities that Siegfried is said to have, that he can make himself invisible, that he has powers through which he overcomes Brunhilde, which an ordinary mortal cannot overcome, all this shows us, along with the other things that are told about him, that we have in him a man who, as in an inner human memory, has carried the achievements of the ancient powers of the soul, which were linked to clairvoyance and connection with nature, over into the present human condition. At what transition does Siegfried stand? This is shown by Brunhilde's relationship to Kriemhilde, Siegfried's wife. It cannot be explained in detail here what the two figures mean. But we can make sense of all these legends if we see in the figures that are presented to us pictorial representations of inner clairvoyant or remembered clairvoyant conditions. Thus we may see in Siegfried's relation to Kriemhilde his relation to the powers of his own soul as they rule in him. His soul is, as it were, a transitional soul, and this is because Siegfried, with the treasure of the Nibelungs, that is, with the clairvoyant secrets of ancient times, brings something into the new time that at the same time makes him unsuitable for his present time. The men of the old time could live with this Nibelung hoard, that is to say with the old clairvoyant powers. The earth has changed its conditions. Thus Siegfried, who still carries an echo of the old time in his soul, no longer fits into the present, and so he becomes a tragic figure. How can the present relate to what is still alive for Siegfried? For him, something of the old clairvoyant powers is still alive, because when he is overcome, Kriemhilde remains. She is brought the hoard of the Nibelungs, she can use it. We learn that later on, the hoard of the Nibelungs will be taken from her by Hagen. We can see that in a way, Brunhilde is also able to work with the old clairvoyant powers. In this way, she is opposed to those people who fit into the then-present: Gunther and his brothers, Gunther above all, for whom Brunhilde has no time. Why is that? Well, we know from the saga that Brunhilde is a kind of Valkyrie figure: in other words, something in the human soul, and specifically that with which, in ancient times, man was still able to unite through clairvoyant powers, but which has withdrawn from man, has become unconscious, and with which man, as he currently lives in the age of reason, can only unite after death. Hence the union with the Valkyrie at the moment of death. The Valkyrie is the personification of the living soul forces that are in the present human being, those soul forces that the old clairvoyant consciousness was able to perceive, but which the present human being only experiences when he passes through the gate of death. Only then is he united with this soul, which is represented in Brunhilde. Because Kriemhilde still knows something of the old clairvoyant times and the powers that the soul receives through ancient clairvoyance, she becomes a figure whose anger is described, as in the Iliad the anger of Achilles. This is sufficiently indicated to us that the people who were still endowed with clairvoyant powers in ancient times did not control with reason, did not let reason prevail, but acted directly from their most elementary, most intense impulses. Hence the personal, the directly egoistic, in both Kriemhilde and Achilles.

The whole matter becomes particularly interesting when we consider the folk epics, if we add Kalewala to the folk epics listed. We will be able to show, today, because of the limited time, that spiritual science in our present time can only point to the old clairvoyant states of humanity because it is possible today, again — albeit in a more advanced way, permeated by reason, not dream-like — to evoke clairvoyant states through spiritual training. Modern man is gradually growing into an age in which hidden powers will arise from the depths of the human soul, pointing to the supersensible. These powers will be guided by reason, not uncontrolled by it. They will point to the supersensible realm, so that we will become familiar again with the realms of which the old folk epics speak to us from the dim consciousness of ancient times. Therefore, we can say: One learns to recognize that it is possible to gain a revelation of the world, not only through the external senses, but through something supersensible that underlies the external physical human body.

There are methods – which will be discussed in the next lecture – by which man can make the spiritual supersensible inner being, which is so often denied today, independent of the sensual outer body, so that man does not live in an unconscious state as in sleep, when he becomes independent of his body, but perceives the spiritual around him. In this way, modern clairvoyance shows man the possibility of living cognitively in a higher, supersensible body, which, like a vessel, fills the ordinary sense body. Spiritual science calls it the etheric body. This etheric body rests within our physical body. When we detach it inwardly from the physical body, we can enter into the state of perception through which we become aware of supersensible facts. We become aware of two kinds of supersensible facts. Firstly, we become aware of it at the beginning of this clairvoyant state, when we begin to know that we no longer see through our physical body, we no longer hear through our physical body, and we no longer think through the brain that is bound to the physical body. At first, we know nothing of the external world. — I am telling you facts that can only be explained in more detail in the next lecture. — But the first step of clairvoyance leads us all the more to an insight into our own etheric body. We see a supersensible physicality of human nature that underlies it and that we can only address as something that works and creates like a kind of inner architect, inner foreman, that permeates our physical body in a living way. And then we become aware of the following.

We become aware that what we perceive in ourselves, what we perceive as the actual living part of our etheric body, is, on the one hand, limited and modified by our physical body, so that it is, as it were, clothed on the physical side. In that the etheric body lines the eyes and ears and the physical brain, we belong, as it were, to the earthly element. Through this we perceive how our etheric body becomes a specific, individual, egoistic human being, integrated into the sheath of our physical body. On the other hand, however, we perceive how our etheric body leads us precisely into those regions where we stand impersonally before a higher, supersensible reality, something that is not us, but that is present in us with full presence, something that works through us as spiritual, supersensible power and strength. In spiritual scientific observation, the inner life of the soul then breaks down into three parts, which are enclosed in three outer bodily sheaths, filling them. We initially live with our soul in such a way that we experience in it what our eyes see, our ears hear, our senses can grasp in general, and what our mind can comprehend. We live with our soul in our physical body. Insofar as our soul lives in the physical body, we call it the consciousness soul in spiritual science, because it is only through the complete integration into the physical body in the course of becoming human that it has become possible for the human being to become aware of himself. Then the modern clairvoyant, in particular, also gets to know the life of the soul in what we have called the etheric body. The soul lives in the etheric body in such a way that it has its powers, but the soul's powers work in such a way that we cannot say that they are our personal powers. They are general human powers, powers through which we are much closer to the hidden facts of nature as a whole. Insofar as the soul perceives these forces in an outer shell, namely in the etheric body, we speak of the mind or emotional soul as a second soul element. So that just as we find the consciousness soul enclosed in the shell of the physical body, we have the mind or emotional soul enclosed in the etheric body. And then we have an even more delicate body through which we can reach up into the supersensible world. Everything that we experience inwardly as our very own secrets, at the same time as that which is hidden from consciousness today and which in the time of ancient clairvoyance was felt as the formative forces in the human process of development, which was felt as if one could look back into the events of the dim and distant past, we ascribe all this to the sentient soul, ascribe it to it in such a way that it is enclosed in the finest human body, in what we — please, do not be put out by the expression, take it as a terminus technicus — call the astral body. It is the part of the human being that connects to the external earthly that inspires the human being, which he cannot perceive through the external senses, nor can perceive when he looks into the etheric body through his own inner being, but what he perceives when he becomes independent of himself, of the etheric body, and is connected with the forces of his origin.

Thus we have the sentient soul in the astral body, the mind or emotional soul in the etheric body, and the consciousness soul in the physical body. In the days of ancient clairvoyance, people were more or less instinctively aware of these things, for they looked within themselves and saw this threefold soul. Not that they analyzed the soul intellectually, but because they had a clairvoyant consciousness, the threefold human soul stood before them: the sentient soul in the astral, the mind or emotional soul in the etheric, and the consciousness soul in the physical body. Looking back, they saw how the outer man, the physical form, developed out of what is now before us as the threefold soul-forces. They sensed that this threefold division is born out of supersensible creative powers. They sensed that the sentient soul is born out of supersensible creative powers, which gave man the astral body, that body which he not only has like his etheric and physical bodies between birth and death, but which he takes with him when he passes through the gate of death, and which he already had before he came into existence through birth. Thus the old clairvoyants saw the sentient soul connected with the astral body and that which, so to speak, has an inspiring effect on man from the spiritual worlds and creates his astral body, as the one creative power that forms man out of the world as a whole. And as a second creative power, they saw what we have today as a result of the mind or emotional soul, and what creates the etheric body in such a way that this etheric body transforms all external substances, all external matter, so that they can permeate the physical human form in the human, not the animal, sense. The creative spirit for the etheric body, which manifests itself in our mind soul, was seen by the ancient seers as a superhuman cosmic power, working into physical matter as in magnetism, and into man. They looked up into the spiritual worlds and saw a divine spiritual power that shapes and forges the etheric body of the human being so that this etheric body becomes the master craftsman, the architect, who reshapes outer matter, confuses it, pulverizes it, grinds it, so that what otherwise exists as matter is structured in the human being and the human being acquires human abilities. The ancient clairvoyants saw how this creative power artfully transforms all matter so that it could become human matter. Then again they looked at the third, at the consciousness soul, which actually makes the egoistic human being, which is the transformation of the physical body, and they attributed those powers that prevail in this physical body solely and exclusively to the line of inheritance, to what comes from father and mother, from grandfather and great-grandfather, in short, what is the result of human powers of love, of human powers of reproduction. In this they saw the third creative power. The power of love works from generation to generation.

The ancient seers saw three powers, a creative being that our sentient soul ultimately evokes by forming the astral body in man, which powers can be inspired because it is the body that a person had before becoming a physical being through conception, the body that a person will have when he has passed through the gate of death. This formation of forces, or, as we might better say, this heavenly formation in man, lasts while the etheric and physical bodies pass away. At the same time, for the old seers this was what their direct experience revealed to them as being capable of bringing all culture into human life. That is why they saw in the Bringer of the astral body that power which brings in the divine, which itself consists only of the permanent, through which the eternal sings and sounds into the world. And the old seers, from whom — I say it unashamedly — the figures of Kalewala have sprung, have presented the living plastic embodiment of that power of creation that penetrates to us in the result of the sentient soul, that inspires the divine into the human, in Wäinämöinen. Wäinämöinen is the creator of that human limb that outlasts birth and death and that brings the heavenly into the earthly. And we see the second figure in Kalewala: Ilmarinen. When we go back to the ancient clairvoyant consciousness, we find that Ilmarinen creates everything that is an image in its living formation from the forces of the earth and from what does not belong to the sensual earth but to the deeper forces of the earth, starting from the etheric body. In Ilmarinen, we see the bringer of that which transforms all matter, that which surrounds it. We see in him the smith of the human form. And we see in the Sampo the human etheric body, forged by Ilmarinen out of the supersensible world, so that the sensual matter can be pulverized and then passed on from generation to generation, so that the human consciousness soul continues to work in the physical human body through the forces that the third divine supersensible being gives from generation to generation through the forces of love. We see this third divine supersensible power in Lemminkäinen. Thus we see deep secrets of the origin of mankind in the forging of the Sampo, we see deep secrets from the ancient clairvoyant consciousness at the bottom of Kalewala and thus we look back into human prehistory, of which we may say: Not at that time was the age when one could have dissected natural phenomena with reason. Everything was primitive, but in the primitive lived the intuition of what lies behind the sensual. Now it was the case that when these bodies of man were forged, when in particular the ethereal body of man, the Sampo, was forged, that it first had to be processed for a while, that man did not immediately have the powers that were thereby prepared for him by the supersensible powers. Once the etheric body has been forged, it must first become familiarized inwardly, as when we prepare a machine that must first be finished, so to speak, must first mature fully in order to be used. In the process of becoming human, there must always be intermediate periods between the creation of the corresponding limbs and the use of them. Thus man had forged his etheric body in distant primeval times. Then came an episode when this etheric body was sent down into human nature. Only later did it shine forth as the soul of the intellect. Man learned to use his powers as external natural forces, he brought forth from his own nature the hidden Sampo. We see this mystery of becoming human in a wonderful way in the forging of the Sampo, in the hiddenness, in the ineffectiveness of the Sampo, in the episode that lies between the forging and the recovery of the same. We see the Sampo first immersed in human nature, then brought out to the external forces of culture, which first appear as primitive forces, as described in the second part of Kalewala.

Thus everything takes on a deep meaning in this great national epic when we see in it descriptions of clairvoyantly acquired ancient processes of becoming human, of the coming into being of human nature from its various elements. I can assure you that I did not get to know Kalevala until long afterward. Once I had clearly visualized these facts about the development of human nature, it was a wonderful and surprising fact for me to rediscover in this epic what I was able to present more or less theoretically in my Theosophy, which was written at a time when I did not yet know a single line of Kalevala. And so we see how the secrets of humanity are revealed in what Wäinämöinen gives, he who is the creator of extrasensory inspiration: the story of the forging of the etheric body. But there is another secret hidden there. I understand, mind you, nothing of Finnish, I can only speak from the spiritual science. I would be able to express the word Sampo only and solely only by the fact that I would try to form a word that could arise in the following way: In the animals we see the etheric body so effective that it becomes the master builder for the most diverse forms, from the most imperfect to the most perfect. In the human etheric body, something has been forged that combines all these animal forms as if in a unity, with the only exception that the etheric body, that is, the Sampo, is forged over the earth according to climatic and other conditions, so that this etheric body has the special characteristics of the people, the special peculiarities of the people in its powers, that it shapes one people in this way and another differently. The Sampo is that for each people which constitutes the particular shape of the etheric body, which brings precisely this particular people into being, so that the members of this people have the same appearance in relation to what shines through their living and their physical being. Insofar as the same appearance is crafted out of the etheric in the human form, the forces of the etheric body lie in the Sampo. In the Sampo we thus have the symbol of the cohesion of the Finnish people, that which, in the depths of humanity, makes the Finnish nation have lived itself out in precisely this particular form.

But this is the case with every folk epic. Folk epics can only arise where culture is still enclosed in the forces of the Sampo, in the forces of the etheric body. As long as culture depends on the forces of the Sampo, the people bear the stamp of this Sampo. This etheric body therefore carries the character of the popular, the folk-like, in all of culture. When could a break in this popular, in this folk-like, occur in the course of the cultural process? It could happen when something entered the human cultural process that is not for one person, for one tribe, for one people, but for all of humanity. Something that is taken from such depths of human nature, from such subtleties and intimacies, and incorporated into the cultural process that it applies to all people without distinction of nationality, race and so on. But that was given when those powers spoke to people, not speaking to one people but to all humanity, those powers that are only so impersonal even in the sense of the folk, so finely and delicately hinted at in the end of Kalewala, in that the Christ is born of Mariata. When He is baptized, Wäinämöinen leaves the land, something has occurred that brings the special folk character together with the general human character. And here, at this point, where one of the most significant, concise, and magnificent folk epics flows into the description, into the completely impersonal – allow me the paradoxical expression – unpalestinianized description of the Christ impulse, Kalevala becomes particularly significant. It leads us particularly into what can be felt where the benefits and the happiness of the Sampo are felt as continuing to have an effect through all human development and at the same time in interaction with the Christian idea, with the Christian impulse. This is the infinitely delicate thing at the end of Kalewala. It is also what explains so clearly that what lies before this conclusion in Kalewala belongs to the pre-Christian era. But just as everything universally human will only continue to exist by preserving the individual, so the individual folk cultures, which derive their essence from the ancient clairvoyant states of the peoples, will continue to live in the universally human. And so everything that Kalewala indicates as Christian at the end will always combine and retain its special consequence through the never-ending effect that is hinted at in the inspirations of Wäinämöinen. For Wäinämöinen means something that belongs to that human part that is above birth and death, that walks with man through all human becoming. Thus, such epics as Kalevala present something to us that is immortal, that can be imbued with the Christian idea, but that will assert itself as something individual, that will always prove that the general human essence, just as white sunlight is divided into many colors, will live on in the many folk cultures. And because this general humanity in the essence of folk epics permeates the individual, which in turn shines into and speaks to every human being, that is why the individualities of the peoples live so much in the essence of their folk epics. That is why the people of old, who in their clairvoyance saw the essence of their own nationality as it is described in all folk epics, stand so vividly before our eyes. But we can get to know it in a very wonderful way when humanity is embraced in its intimacies by circumstances such as those in which the Finnish nation lives, where these, lying at the depths of the soul, are presented in such a way that they can be directly compared with what the most modern spiritual science can reveal to us about human secrets.

Thus, my dear audience, such folk epics are at the same time a living protest against all materialism, against all attempts to derive man from purely external material forces, material conditions, material entities. Such folk epics, especially Kalewala, tell us that man has his origin and primal state in the spiritual and soul. Therefore, a renewal, a re-fertilization of old folk epics can also provide immeasurably great services in the most vital sense of spiritual, of intellectual culture. For just as spiritual science today seeks to renew human consciousness in the sense that humanity is rooted not in matter but in spirit, so a close examination of an epic like Kalewala shows us that the best that man has, and the best that man is, comes from the spiritual and soul. In this sense, it was interesting to me that one of the runes, the kanteles, immediately, I would say, protests against an interpretation of what appears in Kalevala in a materialistic sense. That instrument, that harp-like instrument with which the old singers sang from the old days, is depicted as if it were made of materials from the physical world. But the old rune protested against this, protested in a spiritual-scientific sense, one might say, against the fact that the string instrument for Wäinämöinen was made of natural products that the senses can see. In truth, the old rune says, the instrument on which man plays the wise melodies that come to him directly from the spiritual world comes from the spiritual soul. In this sense, the old rune is to be interpreted entirely in the spiritual-scientific sense, a living protest against the interpretation of what man is capable of in the materialistic sense, an indication that what man possesses , what his nature is and what is only symbolically expressed in such an instrument as that attributed to Wäinämöinen, that such an instrument originates from the spirit and that the whole nature of man originates from the spirit. It can be regarded as a motto for the spirit of spiritual science, the old Finnish folk rune, which is translated into German as follows, and in which I can summarize the basic tone, the basic nuance of what the lecture wanted to explain about the nature of folk epics:

Those who believe that
And are in error,
Those who believe that Wäinämöinen
Made the kantele,
Our beautiful stringed instrument,
From the jaws of the pike,
And that he spun strings
From the tail of the hiisi horse.
It was made out of necessity,
Then sorrow bound its parts,
Bitter tears of longing span
And the sufferings their strings.

Thus all being is not born out of material, but out of spiritual-soul, so this old folk rune, so again spiritual science, which wants to place itself in the living cultural process of our time.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! What I have to say in these introductory words will, of course, differ somewhat from the usual format of these evenings for the simple reason that I have, so to speak, turned up out of the blue and it is therefore not possible to immediately continue where we left off last time. So perhaps today the focus will have to be on the discussion itself, in which I ask you to participate in large numbers.

When we began here in Stuttgart ten months ago to popularize the ideas underlying the threefold social order, this undertaking was conceived entirely in the context of the events of the time. We, as members of the Central European state, spiritual and economic communities, were facing all those questions that had to be raised from the point of view of how we, as people of Central Europe, who were, let us say it dryly, “the defeated” at that time, should behave. And here the view had to be taken that - in view of the terrible experiences, not so much the events of the war as the outcome of the war, which, of course in a different way, are no less terrible than the events of the war themselves - understanding would have to be awakened in a sufficiently large number of people for those ideas of a social reorganization that could have led to a reconstruction of European affairs precisely from the circle of the defeated.

When you are dealing with the propagation of some idea or other, you very often hear the word that these are far-reaching ideas. It is said that one can perhaps hope that such far-reaching ideas will be realized in the distant future – and depending on one's greater or lesser optimism, longer or shorter periods of time are then given – one can only work towards humanity approaching such ideals and so on. But at the beginning of our work, the situation did not really challenge the ideas that were moving in this direction. What was meant at that time was that the next necessity was to create understanding in as many minds as possible for the impulse of the threefold social order: for an independent spiritual life, for an independent state or legal life and for an independent economic life. It was hoped that the bitter events could have brought this understanding to people. But it has been shown that at the time when it was necessary, this understanding could not actually be brought forth in a sufficiently large number of people — for reasons that should not be touched upon further today. And today the question is rightly being raised from many sides: Can this idea of threefold order actually be cultivated in the same way as before? Have we not already progressed too far in the dismantling of our economic life?

However, anyone who understands the workings of today's economy cannot simply — I deliberately say “not simply” — answer this question in the negative. For, let us put forward the hypothesis that at the time when we began our work last April, if a sufficiently large number of people had been willing to help — and could certainly have brought about a change in circumstances — we would have actually had the necessary success: then, of course, our economic life would be on a completely different footing today. It may seem presumptuous of me to say so, but it is true. And the various articles that have appeared in our threefolding newspaper can serve as proof of what I have just said.

If we, who are working on the continuation of the threefold social order ideas in a narrower circle, nevertheless firmly believe that the work must continue, we are also thoroughly convinced on the other hand that the path that has just been taken – to convince a sufficiently large number of souls of the necessity of threefolding – that this path cannot lead quickly enough to success today. Therefore, we must think today of immediately practical undertakings, the form of which is to be presented to our immediate contemporaries in the near future. We must think of achieving our goal through certain institutions that can replace what would have been achieved through the collaboration of a sufficiently large number of convinced people. We must at least attempt to create model institutions, through economic institutions, by means of which it will be seen that our ideas can be practically realized in such economic institutions. These can then be emulated in the sense that people will believe the facts, which they previously refused to believe despite our convincing words. On the other hand, these model institutions will actually be able to have such economic consequences that some of the economic servitude that has already occurred can be redressed. Indeed, a large number of people in this Central Europe have come to the point where they do not care where their profits come from. They allow the victors to give them directives and even the material documents, if only it makes it possible for them to make corresponding profits. The way in which some people in some circles today are thinking of helping themselves economically in Central Europe is downright shameful. The idea is to create practical institutions from the threefold idea itself, which can provide the proof - even under the already quite difficult conditions - that this threefold idea is not utopian but practical.

You see, when we started our work, we were often asked: Yes, can you give us practical points of view for individual institutions? How should this or that be done? — The person who raised such a question usually completely disregarded the fact that it could not be a matter of maintaining one or the other institution, which had just proved its uselessness, by giving good advice, but that it was a matter of bringing about a complete social reconstruction through transformation on a large scale, through which the individual institutions would then have been supported. For this, it would not have taken advice on this or that, but rather a broad realization of the ideas, that is, by a sufficiently large number of people – because ultimately all institutions are made by people.

So today we are faced with a kind of change of direction that has truly not been brought about by our believing that we have been mistaken in our ideas. Ideas of this kind must always take into account the phenomena of the time. And if humanity does not respond to these phenomena, then the ideas must change, must at least take a different course. This is how we have pointed out that our not-so-old threefolding movement actually already has a story that is very much rooted in today's conditions and speaks volumes – a story that might perhaps be instructive for some people after all, if they would only pay attention to it.

I would like to illustrate what I have just said with an example: anyone who takes on the book “The Key Points of the Social Question”, as it was written a year ago, based on the economic explanations, will find certain considerations on the organization of economic life, which should acquire a certain necessary independence, which must not be dependent in the future on state institutions, state administrations, which must be thoroughly based on its own foundations, and which must be built up from its own foundations on the principle of associations. Of course, I can only give a few points of view today, but perhaps the discussion will provide more.

What then should be the actual purpose of such associations in economic life? The purpose of these associations should be that first of all, professional circles that are somehow related, that must work together objectively, and that manage their economic affairs completely freely and independently, without being subject to any state administration, should come together. And then these associations of professional circles should in turn associate with the corresponding consumers, so that what occurs as exchange between the related professional circles, but then also between the producer and consumer circles, is in turn united in associations. What arises from the free movement of economic associations should take the place of today's economic administration.

Of course, this network of economic institutions also includes everything that otherwise works in the legal and political spheres, and in the sphere of spiritual life. Spiritual life as such stands independently on its own feet, but those who are active in spiritual life must eat, drink and clothe themselves; they must therefore in turn form economic corporations of their own, which as such must be incorporated into the economic body, associating themselves in the economic body with those corporations that can serve their interests. The same must be done with the corporation of those people who are involved in state life. Thus, everything that is human in the social organism will be included in economic life, just as everything human that belongs to the social organism is included in the other two links, in state life and spiritual life. It is only that people are included in the three links of the social organism from different points of view. What matters is that the social organism is not structured according to estates, but according to points of view, and that every person is represented in every part of the social organism with their interests.

What can be achieved through such an economic life based on the principle of association? - What can be achieved is the elimination of the damage that has gradually arisen from the production methods of the last few centuries, especially the 19th century, from economic life and thus from human life in general. These damages are first experienced by man today in his own body, I would like to say. They have arisen because in the course of the more recent centuries, other conditions have arisen from the earlier conditions in relation to production in economic life.

If you look back to the period from the 17th to the 18th century, you will find that the way in which production took place is still to some extent connected with the people and their organization itself. You can see that in those days, when prices were set, they were dependent not on those factors on which they depend solely today, but, for example, on the abilities of the people, namely, for example, on the extent to which a person is able to work for so many hours a day on this or that production with a certain devotion and joy. The price was therefore determined by the extent to which the person had grown together with his production. Today, however, this is only the case in certain branches of intellectual life. If someone writes a book, you cannot dictate how many hours of the day he should work and set a wage for so many hours of the day. If, for example, an eight-hour working day were introduced for book writing, something beautiful would come of it, because it could very easily be that you should work for eight hours and get a wage for it, but that you should not get any ideas for four hours through three weekdays. Just as there is an intimate bond between human abilities, between the human spiritual organization and the products produced, so it was also the case for many more material branches - yes, the further we go back in human development, for all material branches. It is only in more recent times that the bond between the product and the producer has been broken. Looked at as a whole, it is basically utter nonsense to want to maintain this separation of the product from the producer. In individual branches of production, this can be blatantly obvious. Take, for example, the manufacture of books, considered purely economically. Books have to be written; this cannot be subjected to the laws of remuneration as represented, for example, by today's Social Democracy for the world of production. But books have to be printed, and the person who types them can indeed rely on the principles of today's social democracy, on the union principle. Because for typesetting, nothing more needs to be invented; there is no need for an intimate bond between producer and production. But if you go back to the sources, you will find everywhere that precisely the work for which you do not need such a bond would not even exist if it were not for the work on which all this external work depends. If the master builder were not there, all the wage laborers who build the houses could not work. If the book writer were not there, the typesetter could not set type for books. These are trains of thought that are not employed today, but they must be taken as a basis in the most eminent sense in economic considerations.

I could not go into detail about all the life experiences that have been incorporated into the “Key Points”, because they are, of course, intended for thinking readers. And I can assure you that it is still quite useful today to do a little thinking when reading a book and not always say: This is so difficult to understand, you have to think, it should have been written much more popularly. — But through the articles in our threefolding newspaper, which illuminate the same events from the most diverse points of view, this bond between producer and production has been loosened more and more. And only because in recent times, under the influence of the materialistic way of thinking, attention has been focused on the mode of production and not on the condition and ability of the producer, has the view even arisen among abstract, socialist agitators and thinkers that production as such is the one thing that dominates the whole of history, the whole of human life. This view arose because, in fact, through modern technology and certain other social conditions, a domination of the product over the producing people has occurred. So that one can say: While in the past, until about three centuries ago, much else was still dominant for people, in social life the economic person has since become the one who appears decisive today – the economic person and the economic process. People like Renner, for example, who even managed to become Austrian Chancellor, have indeed stated that there should be no more talk of “homo sapiens”, who haunted people's minds in the last centuries, but that n could only be talked about “homo oeconomicus” - that is the only reality. But since the 19th century, because things in reality undergo transformations according to their own laws, not even homo economicus, the economic man, the economic process, has remained decisive, but we can say: roughly from around 1810 - to set a starting point - the banker has become the dominant man. And more than one might think, in the economic life of the civilized world during the 19th century, the banker, the moneychanger, the one who actually merely administers the money, has become dominant. All the events that have occurred since that time are more or less subject to the influence of this historical change: in the economic context, the economic man and the economic process have gradually become the banker, the moneychanger, the lender above all, and the public social process has become the financial administration, the money administration.

Now, however, money has very definite characteristics. Money is a representative of various things, but money as such is the same. I can acquire a sum of money by selling a piece of music – a spiritual product. Or I can acquire a sum of money by selling boots. The sum of money can always be the same, but what I sell can be very different. As a result, money takes on a certain abstract character in relation to the real process of life. And so, under the influence of the world banking system, the obliteration of the concrete interactions in human social intercourse, the obliteration of the concrete interactions [between product and producer, and there arose] the intercourse of mere representatives, of money.

This, however, has very definite consequences. It has the consequence that the three most essential components of our economic process – land, means of production and means of consumption – which, by their very nature, are involved in the economic process in very different ways, are not only conceptually, but actually, placed under the same power and treated in the same way. For someone who is only concerned with acquiring or managing a certain amount of money may be indifferent as to whether this sum of money represents land or means of production, that is, machines or the like that serve for other productions but have been made by people, or whether it represents consumer goods, immediate articles of use. What matters is only that he receives a certain sum of money for something, or that, if he has it, it bears interest, no matter from what. The idea had to increasingly come to the fore that the interests one has in the individual products and branches of production are extinguished and replaced by the abstract interest in capital, which extinguishes all these differentiations, that is, in money capital. But that leads to very specific things.

Let's take land, for example. Land is not just something arbitrary, but is situated in a particular place and has a relationship to the people of that place, and the people of that place also have interests in this land that can be described as moral interests, as interests of a spiritual kind. For example, it may be an important point for the general interests of culture and humanity that a certain product be planted on this land. I will draw a somewhat radical picture of the circumstances. They are not so radical in ordinary life, but the essential thing can be shown with it. Anyone who has grown together with the land through their entire life circumstances will have an insight into how, let us say, the production of this or that from the land is connected with the entire life circumstances. They have gained their experiences in being together with the land. Questions can be important for this, questions that can only be judged if one has grown together with the local conditions of an area.

You can only gain such knowledge through experience. You can now fully appreciate that it is beneficial for the general human condition when a piece of land is utilized in a certain way, but only yields a certain result from this utilization. These considerations immediately disappear when the principle of monetary capitalism takes the place of the people associated with the land. In this case, it is a matter of land simply passing from one hand to the other as a commodity. But the person who simply acquires land by spending money is only interested in seeing that the money yields interest in the appropriate way. An abstract principle is imposed on everything that used to be a concrete human interest. And the person in question, who only has the interest of money, wonders whether, under the circumstances that the other person, who has grown together with the land, recognizes as necessary, the matter will yield enough for him; if not, then the land must be used for something else. In this way, the necessary human relationships are destroyed only from the point of view of monetary capitalism.

And so the aspects of monetary capitalism have been applied to all human relationships. In economics, they have distracted people from what can only arise when people are connected to production, connected to land, and connected to the products of consumption that circulate among people in some area. This was certainly present in earlier centuries. This has already disappeared under the influence of the economic man, but mostly under the influence of the banker in the 19th century. While until about 1810 the national economy was dependent on the traders and the industrialists, in the 19th century the traders and the industrialists, even if they did not admit it, essentially became dependent on the national and international money economy, on the bankers.

You can only be driven completely into economic egoism by this kind of money economy. But this kind of money economy should not be confused, as often happens today, with mere capitalism. Mere capitalism – you will find this explained in more detail in my Key Points – is meant to make it possible for only those who are capable of using large amounts of capital, whether in the form of the means of production or of money, the representative of the means of production, to grow together with production. And they should only remain connected to it as long as they can use their abilities in the service of production. This bare capitalism is absolutely necessary for the modern national economy, and to rail against it is nonsense. To abolish it would mean undermining the entire modern national economy. It is essential that we look at reality, that we see the difference, for example, that the administration of a large complex of land, in which the combination of forest and land may be necessary can be necessary, will mean one thing in the hands of a capable person and another if someone separates the forest and the land, then parcelled out the land into small holdings and the like. This can be good for certain areas, but in others it would ruin the national economy. Everywhere it depends on the specific circumstances. And we must finally find our way back to the specific circumstances.

But this [lack of concreteness] is not only evident in the national economy, in the individual economy, but is becoming more and more evident in the international economic system. It is quite clear to anyone who studies the matter that people, even if they are capitalists, when they are left to their own devices and supply certain branches of production according to their abilities, do not interfere with each other, but on the contrary work in each other's hands. The real problem only begins when people in some way outgrow their ties to the branches of production. I will give just one example of where this has become particularly apparent under the influence of the monetary economy of the 19th and 20th centuries: in the formation of trusts and cartels. Let us assume that a number of branches of production join together to form a trust, a cartel. What is the consequence?

A trust or cartel must have some purpose, and it is obvious that people make more profit through the trust than they would without it. But they can only do that if they create monopoly prices, that is, if they sell above the usual competitive prices that would be formed. So you have to create the possibility of raising prices, that is, agreeing on prices that are above the usual competitive prices. Yes, such prices can be created, they have been created in many cases. But it did not come to [healthy] production. You see, you can't produce in a healthy way under the influence of this kind of profit. If you don't want to create a mismatch with the costs of the facilities, which would be far too expensive if you only produced what you produce above the competitive price, then you have to produce so much more that the costs for the machines and the entire facility are covered, and you have to produce so much more that you would produce if you only got the competitive price. But you can only sell as much as you sell at monopoly prices. Because if you were to produce at competitive prices, you would have to sell a lot more and therefore also produce a lot more than you sell at monopoly prices. That is an economic experience: you sell less when you sell at monopoly prices, but you cannot produce less because otherwise production will not pay for itself. What is the consequence? You have to go to the neighboring country and get your sales there; you sell below the cost of production. But now you are entering into international competition. This international competition has played an enormous role. If you only take into account the fixing of the price caused by the monetary economy, you create competition that would otherwise not be there by selling differently: in the immediate sales area [above the cost of production] and in the neighboring country below the cost of production. You can do that; if you only calculate accordingly, you will even make more, but you will harm the corresponding producer groups in the neighboring country. If you look for the causes of the moods that led to the causes of war in the West, you will find the causes in these things. Then we will find what a huge step lies in the [social] damage on the way from capitalism to trust formation, to cartel formation, to monopolization by cartels. The capitalist as such, who produces at competitive prices, never has an interest in protective tariffs. The protective tariff is also something that has played a role in the causes of war. There you have the damage done by the monetary economy in international life. All this is so clear to anyone who studies modern economic life that there is actually nothing that can be said against it. The question must therefore necessarily arise: how do we get beyond these damages? There is no other way to get beyond the damages than to reconnect the human being with the product, to once again directly establish the bond between the human being and production.

This is the aim of the economic idea of social threefolding: what used to exist between the individual human being and production as a bond under very different circumstances can only be brought about today by the fact that those who produce in the same way connect with each other and those who are united by profession in turn join together in circles, in associations, with the other branches of production and the corresponding consumers. In this way the associations, the united people, will know how to set production in motion, and not just the money that flows over production as something homogeneous. But this could in turn bring about in a very essential way that which only a prosperous economy makes possible for humanity.

You see, it was necessary for someone to take a good look at reality today, because all the socio-economic stuff that has been talked about in recent times is basically said without looking at reality. Of course, individual people have made apt remarks about one thing or another. But most of what has been said, and especially all that under the influence of which modern world capitalism on the one hand and wage-slavery on the other have developed, this cancer of modern life, has come about because people have no longer really looked into the lawful context of economic life, and because they no longer saw – while living as a human being in economic life – how the. because money has obliterated everything. But when the associations are there, it will be clear and obvious how one thing or another must be produced. Then the person who has something to produce will receive customers through the people who are in the appropriate associations, and it will be discussed and determined whether so much of this or that can be produced. Without the enforced economy of Moellendorff's loquacity, something can arise; because one person is taught by the other in free exchange, everything can be organized so that consumption is truly the decisive factor for all.

This was the point of the idea of threefold social order: to speak to humanity from the full reality. Because people are so unaccustomed to approaching reality in the present, that is why it is so difficult to understand the matter; people are unaccustomed to approaching reality. What do people understand of economic life as a whole? The architect understands something of building, the master carpenter of carpentry, the shoemaker of shoemaking, the barber of cutting beards, everyone understands something of the corresponding economic activity with which he is connected. But all that these “practitioners of life” somehow know about economic life is only connected with their own and not with that of others. That is why it is so abstract. It was necessary to speak to humanity from the real context of the whole of social life. Because people have become unaccustomed to using the experiences of life as a guide, they regard as utopian precisely that which is born out of reality. But that is why this idea of social threefolding is recognized as the counter-image to all utopia, as something that is born out of real life and can therefore be applied to real life. And that is the only thing that matters: that people should understand these things. Then everyone, whatever their background, will understand the idea of the threefold social order, especially if they understand the connection between their production and the world's overall economic process. This idea of the threefold social order does not shy away from close scrutiny by those who understand something of economic life through their whole relationship to life. But today not many people understand anything about economic life or social life at all; they let themselves drift and are best off when they do not need to participate in any kind of decision-making about the social order, but when the government takes care of it for them. That is why people come up with such complicated ideas that they regard what is real in life as utopian. Of course, the situation today is somewhat obscured by the fact that the Western powers have fought for and won the opportunity not to come up to date. What is demanded today in the idea of threefolding is demanded by the times. This is the point that human development has reached today. The victory of the Western powers means nothing more than a reprieve to remain under the old social conditions. The Western Powers can afford this luxury; they have fought for it. But the Central Powers cannot afford this luxury; they are dependent on satisfying the demands of the time. If they satisfy them, it will have an effect on the whole world. If they do not satisfy them, they will perish.

This must be stated quite clearly today, because today it is an either/or situation. That is why it is so frivolous when clever people keep saying, for example, “Now there will be a disagreement between the French and the English.” The English do not want to conclude a militaristic alliance with the French out of their old traditions; they also do not want to grant any loans; they also do not completely agree with the intentions of the French regarding the Rhine border, and so on. This is the continuation of what had such a devastating effect during the war and before the war. There was always speculation: Now the enemies are once again at odds; perhaps we can make a separate peace with someone. With this diplomacy, they have finally managed to have almost the whole world against them. If people of this caliber continue to corrupt people's ideas and continue to speculate that the French and the English are once again at odds, then that is a pipe dream; it is not a grasp of reality. It is a continuation of the old diplomatic way of thinking, which Czernin described so well in his book, in which he demands that the extraordinary importance of diplomats must be recognized. But the extraordinary importance of diplomats consisted in their being able to move in the appropriate salons, observing the mood there and then writing long letters about this mood and so on. During the war, this was continued very nicely, as far as one could, only there one judged the mood more on secret paths. The catastrophe of the war was partly caused by this assessment of the mood before the war. And now people are starting to speculate in the same way again. But when people wake up, they will see that in reality they have only managed to sit between two chairs themselves. There is talk of a deep gulf opening up between the French and the English; the clever people are talking about it today. When people wake up, they will see that this gulf is indeed there, but people agree that they themselves are sitting in the middle of the deep gulf. The impulse for the threefold social organism is based on the realization that this way of thinking, which is so disastrous for humanity, must give way to a way of thinking that is in line with reality. And when this is understood, people will turn to this threefold social organism with an inner necessity.

After Rudolf Steiner's introductory words, the discussion was opened; various personalities spoke:

Georg Herberg believes that in view of the price increases in recent years - as an example, he cites the price of a ton of iron, which used to cost 13 marks but now costs 1700 marks - it is necessary to take a closer look at the price problem. In doing so, the opposite pole of consumers, that is, the producers, must be considered.

Before the actual discussion begins, Siegfried Dorfner would like to draw the attention of those present to three fundamental facts that could be seen as typical of the whole situation in the work of threefolding: firstly, party leaders had been invited for this evening; however, they are not present. Secondly, when they do come, they usually remain silent in the discussions; there are no speakers. Thirdly, the attitude of followers of anthroposophy is very often: “I like anthroposophy, but not the threefold social order.” And so the lack of success of the whole threefold social order efforts is not surprising. Carl Unger would like to come back to the above and points out the importance of trusts in today's economic life. The example of iron was mentioned; there one must assume that one was dealing with a steel trust in this area. The German sugar factories also have a similar monopoly position; there are an infinite number of beet fields in Germany, but the price is inflated compared to this large supply.

Walter Johannes Stein believes that the situation in the German sugar industry points to a very central problem, to the relationship between land and the means of production in general. The question arises, for example, of whether a cow is a means of production or whether it belongs to the land. But the matter becomes even more complicated when the cow is finally slaughtered; whether it then does not take on the character of a commodity. So he asks Rudolf Steiner to explain in more detail the relationship between land, means of production and goods.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! Regarding the distinction between land and the means of production, the essential thing is that land is limited, it is not elastic, and in a certain sense it cannot be increased, while the means of production, which themselves arise through human labor, can be increased, and by increasing the means of production, production can in turn be increased.

Now, when making such distinctions, it is often necessary to start from different points of view. By distinguishing land from the means of production, one designates what is there first and has not been made by human hands as “land”. From the point of view of the political economist, a cow, which man by his labor does not himself manufacture, simply belongs to “land and soil” as long as it is not slaughtered; when it is slaughtered, it is of course a commodity. But then it appears in a very specific way on the commodity market, and we are dealing with two facts: firstly, the fact that it is withdrawn from the productive power of the land, and secondly, the fact that it appears as a commodity; in a sense, the cow is a marginal product. Such marginal products are everywhere. But the point is to, so to speak, hold on to what you have in mind by using the terms that can be taken from the respective characteristic representative.

Is that not so? In the economic process, we are dealing, firstly, with what is necessary for production but cannot itself be produced. This includes land itself and a number of other things; we simply summarize this under “land”. Secondly, everything that serves to produce something else but must first be produced itself, such as machines, is part of the economic process. In the context of the national economy, the process of working, the labor that must be used to produce the means of production, does not apply to land. This is the essential economic point: the labor equivalent is only a valid way of looking at the means of production until the means of production are actually ready for use in production. At the moment the means of production are available, they are actually integrated into the economic process in exactly the same way as land. As long as one is working on the means of production and has to make use of the national economy in order to be able to work on the means of production, a distinction must be made between how the means of production and land are placed in the national economy. At the moment when the means of production are finished, they are subject to the same economic category as land. As long as I still have to fabricate the locomotive, I have to assess the economic process in which the fabrication of the locomotive takes place differently than in the moment when it is finished. When it [as a finished means of production] is on the rails and is moved by people for further production, it is just as much a part of the economic process as land. The difficulty in the distinction is that the finished means of production actually falls under the same category as land. What labor has to be expended to create a means of production is the essential thing, and that is added to the means of production and is lacking in land. Of course, this is connected with the following. If land were elastic, it could be increased. It would either have to grow by itself or people would have to produce it. But I do not want to discuss this question further. The fact that land is available to a certain extent is what distinguishes it from the means of production. It can only be used to a greater or lesser extent, which makes it similar to the means of production.

Now, of course, we must also consider the third element, the actual commodity. It is characterized by the fact that it is consumed. In the economic process, this makes it something essentially different from the means of production, which itself is not directly consumed, but only worn out. Thus, a commodity is also something different from land, which also serves little for consumption, but at most needs to be improved, and so on.

Thus, these three things are to be distinguished as essentially different in the economic process: 1. land, which [exists] without human labor having been expended on it; 2. the means of production, which begins when human labor has been used; both – land and means of production – are not there for immediate consumption; 3. the commodity, which is there for immediate consumption.

But you see, the thing is that the whole thing is also a question of time. Because the moment you think about the fact that means of production, for example of a mechanical nature, are used up within a certain time, the moment you do that, the means of production appear to you as a commodity – only as a commodity that takes a longer time to be used up. When you make distinctions in life, these distinctions tend to be highly inconvenient; they are never such that you can make a strict division. You have to remain flexible on these issues. Because in fact, the means of production also have a commodity character to a certain extent. Land does not have this commodity character, which the means of production can have, in the same way, which is why you have to make a stricter distinction there. It is nonsense to apply the concept of the commodity to land from a purely monetary-capitalist point of view. So you see, if you apply something in reality, you cannot stop at abstract concepts. That is something that people who read the “Key Aspects of the Social Question” raise as an objection: they want nicely boxed terms. Then what they read is nice for them; then you know after reading half a page what you have read. In reality, however, a means of production can only be grasped if one knows: it is not consumed at first, but if one uses it over a longer period of time, it is the same as a commodity. So you have to keep in mind that the means of production has both the property of being consumed and of not being consumed, and the concept must correspond to that.

We need to have flexible concepts. People today do not want that; they want nested concepts. They do not want to think their way out into reality at all. Otherwise, things like this could not arise: people saying, for example, “I like anthroposophy quite well, but I don't want to know anything about threefold social order.” Those who speak in this way are rather like someone who says, “Yes, I am interested in the spiritual, but this spiritual must not encroach on the political; this spiritual must be independent of the political.” Yes, my dear friends, that is precisely what the threefold social order seeks to achieve. But because the spiritual is nowhere independent today, it is an illusion to believe that you can only be interested in the spiritual. In order for your abstract ideal to become concrete, so that you have something to take an interest in that is not influenced by politics, threefolding must first conquer such a field, so that there is a field in which one does not need to take an interest in politics. Threefolding is fighting for precisely that in which sleepy souls want to feel at home, but only have it as an illusion. These sleepy souls, oh, how we would like to wake them up! They feel so tremendously at ease when they are inwardly mystics, when they grasp the whole world inwardly, when they discover God in their own soul and thereby become such perfect human beings! But this inwardness has value only when it steps out into life. I would like to know if it has any value when, in this day and age, when everything is in a rush and the world is on fire, people cannot find their way to have their say in public affairs. That is a nice interest in anthroposophy, which only wants to be interested in anthroposophy and does not even find the opportunity to have a say in what anthroposophy wants to inspire. Those anthroposophists who are only interested in anthroposophy and not in what can become of anthroposophy in relation to life are like a person who is charitable only with his mouth, but otherwise quickly closes his pockets when he should really be charitable. Therefore, what is found in people who only want to take an interest in anthroposophy in their own way is anthroposophical chatter. But the reality of anthroposophy is what is transferred into life.

Afterwards, a discussion about the future work on threefolding with the leaders of the local groups takes place. There are three main questions for discussion. First: Is it permissible to compromise? Second: Should one participate in the elections? Third: In what form should propaganda for the threefolding idea be carried out?

Paul Kretschmar, from Cologne, argues that one should try to influence the existing works council and parliament. The newspapers would play a not insignificant role in this regard. One would therefore have to form a kind of journalistic office to write articles for trade journals. It was also important to train competent speakers; these would have to be able to rely on a kind of primer on the threefold order, similar to the way Damaschke had published a brooch. It was also necessary to found a publishing house to effectively support newspaper propaganda. Basically, even participation in the elections should be considered.

Mr. Klug, also from Cologne, warns against participation in the elections that is completely independent. At most, it is debatable whether it would be possible to proceed together with other independent parties. Furthermore, it would be important to discuss whether consumer associations could be formed.

Hermann Heisler believes that a kind of “Catechism of Threefolding” is really needed; this should provide a guide to how threefolding can be introduced into practical life, especially into economic life. In the present situation, three questions arise in particular. Firstly, how could threefolding, if it were actually realized in Central Europe, counteract the expected European famine? Secondly, what goal must be given to the working class now? Thirdly, how far can one go in the practical events of the political parties and profess the objectives of threefolding?

Siegfried Dorfner is convinced that the best way to propagate the threefold order is to leave the party.

Walter Conradt believes that, as far as the treatment of the press is concerned, it must be assumed that a decentralization of opinions has occurred on the other side. As for the treatment of the proletarian party, however, the events of the last year – especially in connection with the “poster mission” – have shown that the proletariat has been “moved” for a year, so it can no longer be counted on for the time being.

Richard Seebohm says that it has certainly happened that a newspaper has addressed individual questions, but one should not forget that even if state supervision has now been lifted, the newspapers are still under the control of industry. And it should not be overlooked that there are also threefoldingers who do not want to have anything to do with anthroposophy. For these reasons, it is important to stand behind the existing threefolding newspaper.

Paul Kretschmar mentions the Cologne “Generalanzeiger”, in which articles on threefolding could certainly be accommodated.

Ernst Uehli mentioned a foreign friend who had confirmed to him that the press could not be won over for big ideas; in general, it could be said that the idea of threefolding was much criticized in the newspapers. The pursuit of true “humanity” and the press could not be reconciled, as the German philosopher Karl Christian Planck had already established.

Emil Molt points out that the Federation for Threefolding intends to conduct a course for agitators — a course for speakers — under the direction of Rudolf Steiner.

After the discussion, Rudolf Steiner is asked to comment on the various questions raised, despite the late hour.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved attendees! First of all, I would just like to say that I will be obliged to speak in brief hints, and I ask you to take this into account. So the individual questions asked can no longer be discussed in detail. Perhaps we can do that next time.

First of all, we want to pick out the relatively most important question, the question:

How would the threefold social order work in the context of the coming European famine?

I would like to say, although it may seem strange to some, that there is a completely different question behind this one that makes answering difficult. But in general, the following must apply to this question. Isn't it true that, say, ten years ago, the world did not have what is called a famine, at least not what can and probably will come as famine in the near future, since souls sleep. But we must consider the following, however simple and primitive they may appear: there are no fewer raw materials in the ground than there were ten years ago; there are no fewer fields than there were ten years ago; and there are essentially no fewer human workers than there were ten years ago – millions have perished in the war, but not only as producers, but also as consumers. So in general, the economic possibilities and conditions are exactly the same as they were ten years ago.

It was perhaps eight weeks ago when a letter written by the well-known politician, the Russian Prince Kropotkin, was published in the newspapers, in which he made two curious statements. One is that he is now working on an ethics - interesting that he is now beginning to write an ethics. The other message is that there is now only one thing that is being delivered from the West to Russia: food, bread. Of course, it is easiest when there is no bread to take it from the side where it is available. Well, other people also have such views sometimes. A fortnight ago I received a letter from a lawyer and notary in central Germany. The letter sounded very much like a lawyer and notary, for it was coarse and stupid. But it also said that you can't lure a dog out from behind the stove with some kind of idealism, that it's a matter of fighting for the naked loaf.

Now, you see, everything I have just explained does not take into account the simplest and most primitive. Because if you take that into account, you will know that it is only a matter of getting people to organize in such a way that it can and will be done from the antecedents that exist now as they did ten years ago. This will certainly not be achieved if people are fobbed off with either what the old “Czernine” regard as state and popular wisdom, or the old “Bethmänner”, written with or without h, nor what the old Social Democrats, this particular kind of “negative Bethmänner”, suggest; but what matters is that people are given goals again, that they see what we are working towards. And that can be given through the movement of threefolding. What matters is not to say what many people say today, even if it is relatively correct: We will not have a famine or we can overcome it if people work again. Yes, if! But when people face the hopelessness of work that arises from the old programs and old machinations, then they do not want to work. But if you bring something to humanity that ignites, so that people see something ahead of them that can lead them to a dignified existence, [then they will want to work], and then bread will also be able to be produced. This is an important prerequisite for making bread: trust in humanity. If we do not gain this trust, then famine will come with certainty. But in order for trust to arise, threefolding is necessary. I can only hint at this in this context. But if you pursue this thought, you will see that famine can essentially only be prevented by propagating threefolding. However, one necessity exists: that this idea of threefolding must take root in as many minds as possible, so that these minds do not fall for anything that is just a continuation of the old system. This continuation of the old system is becoming very, very widespread – only in a seemingly new form. Because, you see, on certain sides today it is as if the leading personalities had set themselves the task of bringing about famine. Today, all kinds of prices are rising in an incredible way. But prices only make sense if they are relative to each other. The prices of the most important foodstuffs are being artificially kept down today. I am not saying that they should go up, but they must not be disproportionate to the prices of other things. This disproportion prevents anyone from wanting to devote themselves to the production of raw products, of food, in the near future. The production of a famine has thus become a government measure. This must be seen through.

Secondly, it must be emphasized that this is indeed an international issue and the question can be raised:

Can anything be achieved in Central Europe alone by introducing the threefold order – or whatever it is called?

I must refer you to what I have written in the threefolding newspaper, and I have done so repeatedly and from a wide variety of perspectives: if only people would really pluck up the courage to propagate the threefolding, even under the most unfavorable conditions, even during a famine – that would have an effect if people in the western or eastern regions could see something positive being done by us.

So today we still stand on the same position as the world did when the peace offer was sent out to the world in 1916, where phrase after phrase was used, but nothing concrete was said before the world. Just try it out and see how it would work in international life if you came up with something that has hand and foot, that has substance and content like the idea of the threefold social organism. At present, we see how, for example, British statesmen in particular are becoming more and more afraid from week to week of what is happening in Germany. It is actually something highly unfamiliar to them. And because they cannot make head or tail of it, they are seized with fear that something worse than Bolshevism could arise here than in Russia. But if they knew Bauer, Ebert and Noske better, it would even be a good remedy for their fear. Because the truth is that nothing is happening here, that in reality month after month passes without anything happening. Just imagine what it would mean for international life if something substantial were to come out of Central Europe. Only when one is clear about these things can one approach such a question as how threefolding will work in the event of a famine; in relation to everything else, that is not the question. It is true that only the threefold order is capable of bringing about an organization in which work will be done again and trust can be restored. Then famine can be prevented.

In order to be effective internationally, however, the idea of threefolding must take root in people's minds. Then I would not be worried that it will not work in international relations. As long as negotiations are conducted only out of chauvinism, no progress will be made. If something of significance were invented here in Central Europe, it would gain international recognition. If sound ideas take hold here, international barriers will fall away by themselves; for people will act according to their interests and take what is good where they can find it.

And I wanted to give you a few more suggestions on the newspaper question: I do not want to deny that some of what has been said is very important. And it will be commendable if one or the other of our friends gets an article published in some newspaper or another. But the essential thing remains that just as little can be achieved by crawling to the parties, little can be achieved by crawling to the other newspapers. It can be done, but it is actually the same thing, only in a different color. I do not criticize it; I am quite in agreement when it happens. But I would see the positive side in our friends promoting our newspaper, our threefolding newspaper, as much as possible. You may say: That is all very well, but the newspapers in which we want to place articles are only available to people who already subscribe to them. They have to subscribe to them in addition. Not all of them will do it, but a number of them will. Then we will be able to transform the threefolding newspaper into a daily newspaper. Only then will we be able to publish the articles we want to publish; then it will be effective. So the point is to work so hard for the threefolding newspaper, which is still a weekly paper, that it can be converted into a daily paper through its own earnings. Then we won't have to “crawl” to the others; that's what matters. Why shouldn't it be possible to put something that is of such eminent importance on its own two feet!

Then various other points were made. Regarding participation in the elections, I would just like to say the following: Of course, in abstracto one can certainly say that participating in the election and entering parliament and working there supports the present state. - You can't say that just like that. I don't even want to speak so strongly for or against; whether or not to participate in the election depends on the various specific circumstances. But if you take a strict view of threefolding, it is not entirely right in principle not to participate in parliament. The right thing to do in principle, consistently thought out in terms of threefolding, would be to participate in the elections, have as many people elected as can be elected, enter parliament and obstruct all questions relating to intellectual and economic life. That would be consistently thought out in terms of threefolding. The point is to separate off the middle part, the life of the state. This can only be achieved if the other parts on the left and right are discarded. The only way to do this is to actually get elected, enter and practice obstruction in all that is negotiated and decided in the fields of intellectual and economic life. That would be a consistent way of thinking in terms of the threefold social organism. This idea is something that must be thought through consistently and can also be thought through consistently in relation to concrete circumstances, because it is derived from reality. — That would be to say in relation to the most important questions.

Regarding the new goal that should now be given to the workers, I have to say that, based on my experiences with the works councils, it seems to me to be more of an academic question. The question will have to be approached differently; [we have to ask] whether such a goal should be set at all. The question of the works council has been raised. Every possible effort has been made to get the works councils going. The workers have promised all sorts of things and kept none of them. At first they turned up at the meetings, then they stopped coming. The same thing would happen again with the next new goals if they were carried into the current workers' organizations.