The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today's meeting provides a further opportunity for me to speak to you who are friends of the anthroposophical movement before I leave. I wish to do something which in a way is particularly close to my heart, to discuss some of the things that really need to be discussed. It is possible that most of what I have to say today is a repetition of things that have been discussed on a number of occasions from all kinds of different aspects, things now also taken into consideration in public lectures. There are reasons, however, why it is necessary for us to consider some of them once again today.

I have often stressed that it is necessary for a sufficient number of people to fully understand the following. To prevent the decline into which we have got ourselves in the civilized world from continuing into utter ruin, certain impulses must be brought into modern civilization that can only arise if spiritual science reveals the nature of the world to its fullest extent.

Materialism has come to Europe over the last three or four centuries, coming to a crest in the 19th and then tumbling over in the 20th century. It has a peculiarity that seems paradoxical, particularly if one fails to realize the true causes. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it has no possibility of recognizing the material world as it really is. I think I have already given you an example of this. The materialistic way of thinking has in more recent times given rise to an idea that is believed by a great many people, namely that the heart is a kind of pump in the human organism that pumps the blood through the organism. This idea of the human heart being a pump comes up in all kinds of variations nowadays. The facts are rather different, however, and should be seen like this: The whole of our rhythmical circulatory system is something alive. It cannot be compared with a system of channels or the like with water flowing through them, water kept circulating with the aid of a pump. Our rhythmical circulatory system, our blood system, is something alive. It is kept alive by a number of factors, the major factors being breathing, hunger, thirst and so on. These clearly function at the level of soul and spirit. Our blood system is set in motion by entirely primary causes, and the movement of the heart arises when this spiritual principle enters into the rhythm of the blood. The rhythm of the blood is the primary, living principle, and the heart is caught up in this rhythm. The facts are therefore entirely the opposite of what every professor of physiology is teaching today, with the result that it is dinned into people's heads at school and indeed from their earliest childhood.

It therefore has to be said that materialism has not even managed to get a real understanding of the physical processes relating to the heart in the human organism. The material aspect in particular is completely misunderstood. This is just one of many examples. Material things in particular have found no explanation whatsoever under the influence of materialism. The heart is not a pump. It it something we might regard more as a sense organ incorporated within the human organism to give human individuals a kind of subconscious perception of their circulation, just as the eye perceives colour in the world outside. Basically the heart is a sense organ within the circulatory system, yet exactly the opposite is taught nowadays.

This would appear to be an example of limited relevance. I can imagine some philistine saying: ‘Well, it can't do much harm if people have entirely the wrong idea about the nature of the human heart. Of course, if doctors had the wrong idea about the nature of the human heart that would be cause for general alarm. After all, it does make quite a difference in human life if doctors have the right or the wrong idea about the heart.’ But this also holds true for other things. Everything is connected with everything else in life, and because of this humankind is absolutely full of wrong ideas, completely upside-down ideas. One might well think, if one was serious about it, that being hung up on wrong ideas would cause real havoc in our thinking processes. It certainly does. Our thinking is utterly ruined because it has been dinned into us and we have become used to thinking that things are the opposite of what they really are. That is why we never acquire the habit of steady, purposeful thinking. How can our thinking grow purposeful in social life, for example, if in areas where truth should be sought above all else we are in fact going in the opposite direction?

You see, some things that are important to know are a closed book for People today. When the human organism is investigated in conventional institutes nowadays, in physiological and biological laboratories, in hospitals and similar institutions, the brain for instance is examined by analyzing it bit by bit as it presents itself to the eye. The liver is examined by the same kind of analysis. In doing so, people never consider one thing that is absolutely essential if one wishes to understand the human being: The whole of the head organization as We have it today and everything it governs is entirely different from the rest of the human organism.

Let me show you what lies behind this. You can draw it like this. I intend to lead up gradually to what I really want to say. You can say that the human being has two organs of perception, and the direction in which they perceive is approximately like this [see (a) in the diagram]. Two other directions in which we perceive show a certain relationship to these. In diagrammatic form I would draw them like this (b):

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I deliberately did not tell you where these organs are to be found in the human organism. If I draw nothing but two arrows to indicate direction (a) here, where one stretches out, as it were, to perceive, and two others here, (b), where we perceive sideways, it makes no difference at all if these are the directions in which feeling and sensation pass through my legs and these where they pass through my arms. Here we have something that is in accord. I perceive my own gravity, as it were, I stand with my two feet on the ground. I really perceive something. And I also perceive something when I stretch out my hand, stretch out my arm, even if I do not actually touch anything. I can draw it like this (a). The same drawing can also stand for something different. Imagine this is the horizontal plane. The two arrows could represent the two visual axes; I could draw the two visual axes like this. And these arrows (b) could indicate the directions of my ears. The same diagram would serve to indicate perception by the eyes and ears. On the one occasion I have the whole organism within the head, though the plane has turned through a 90° angle, on the other within the rest of the organism. There is a higher point of view where both are the same. Our two legs are merely directions in which we perceive that have become flesh. The same directions exist in a less physical form where they extend from the brain through the eyes to perceive colour. Elsewhere we perceive gravity and everything connected with it. We see our weight and we step on colour, we could say, if we were to change the two things over, entirely in organic terms, of course. I hear the blackboard chalk, I touch a C or C sharp that is sounding. The difference is merely one of degree. In the head everything has gone through a 90° angle and is less physical; the other is in the vertical plane, and is physical. In the final instance both are the same. It is only that I am aware of the way my eyes step on colours, my ears touch sounds; I know about it, it is part of my ordinary conscious life. Everything my legs see with regard to gravity and all kinds of other things that my arms hear—all these are in the subconscious sphere. Conditions belonging to the cosmic sphere are present in the subconscious. With the whole of my subconscious I have knowledge of the cosmic sphere, knowledge of the way the earth relates to other bodies in the universe, knowledge of the universal background to gravity. I hear the music of the spheres with my arms and not with my ears.

Thus we may say that we have a lower organism, as it is called, with subconscious cosmic awareness, and we have a head with early awareness; this however is a ‘conscious’ awareness. The whole of the human being is organized on the basis of these differences. Our outer form and configuration depends entirely on these differences. You know that the head we carry today is the transformed body of our previous incarnation, our previous earth life, and that the rest of our present organism will be the head in our next life. The head, then, is the rest of the organism which has undergone a transformation. It is more perfect, more finished in a way. As a result the legs have become fine visual threads extending beyond the eye and stepping on the colours in a very lively way. The arms of our former life have become so ethereal that they now extend from our ears and touch the sounds we hear.

These are concrete facts about the human being. It does not get People anywhere to know about repeated earth lives and so on. Those after all are dogmas and it makes no difference if you have the dogmas of the Catholic or Protestant church or the dogma of repeated earth lives. Real thinking only starts when you enter into concrete events, when you come to realize that looking at the human head you are looking at the transformed body of your previous earth life, and that the head you had then was the transformed body of the preceding life—you must imagine it without the head, of course. The head you see now is the transformed organism of the last life lived on earth. The rest of the organism as you see it now will be the head in the next life. Then the arms will have metamorphosed and become ears, and the legs will have become eyes. We must look at the physical world and understand it in its transformed non-physical form, our intellect must illumine the material world in this way. Then at last we shall have what humankind is much in need of today. Once the human mind has been organized so that it no longer produces the kind of folly that has been put forward as a potential social theory, particularly in the second half of the 19th century, human beings will indeed be ready to develop social ideas that can be put into effect in this world. It is necessary to gain a thorough understanding of this today. It is a serious matter when people say today: Something else will have to take the place of the science which has evolved and is so highly respected, of all the things that are generally disseminated. There can be no other way.

It is nonsense, and I also said so recently in a public lecture,³⁰ to talk about setting up adult education thinking that the same kind of work can be done there as at ordinary universities. It is the work done at the universities that has brought us to these disastrous situations, because it has become the materialistic view of a few leading personalities. This is now to be presented to the masses; that is, millions are to head for the disasters that so far have come about because the wrong lead was given by a few. Something that proved useless for a few is now to be spread among many. It is not as easy as that, however. Popular education cannot be introduced simply by teaching outside the universities what until now has been alive inside them. It would mean teaching something that is altogether unsuitable for human beings. This may sound radical, but it is absolutely essential that it is fully understood if there is to be even the least hope of the decline being halted and something new and positive developing. These are the things one wishes one could speak of in words that truly go to the heart. These concrete truths must reach as many hearts as possible. It was therefore important to me to point out in my public lectures that something has been achieved in the Waldorf School, that anthroposophy has positively influenced the history lessons in some places. I was also able to refer to the teaching of anthropology in class 5. There, too, anthroposophy was effective. Not that one would teach anthroposophy to the children—we would never think of doing such a thing—but lessons come to life if anthroposophy is the foundation, if the inspiration of anthroposophy is there in what we teach. This brings the souls of the children to life; they are quite different when this influence is there. It would be taking the easy way simply to teach anthroposophy in our schools. No, that is not what we are about, but rather to use anthroposophy to enliven the subject matter. It will of course be necessary for anthroposophy to come alive in oneself first of all, and that is something that really comes hard, to let anthroposophy come alive in human beings. Otherwise the potential is there today for all kinds of disciplines, not only in science but all kinds of disciplines in life, to have the full benefit of what life in anthroposophy is able to give.

That is a general way of looking at it. Let me go on to something specific, so that you can see the things we are considering in their proper context.

Marxist philosophy, Marxist views are widespread today. They have their most radical expression in Leninism and Trotskyism, which are destroying the world. A view of history known as ‘historical materialism’ plays a great role in Marxist philosophy, particularly the dogma of the fundamental importance of the modes and relations of production. Millions of proletarians have accepted this dogma according to which tradition, law, science, religion and so on are like smoke, like an ideology rising from the modes and relations of Production—you will find further details in my book Towards Social Renewal³¹—and that the modes and relations of production are the Only reality on which to base one's view of history.

It was very important to me on past occasions—this has to do with the feeling I have that I was really able to achieve something and create a potential basis at the Worker's Education Institute in Berlin³²—to speak in proletarian circles about the view that the modes and relations of production are the only effective element, and to present a clear picture. My aim therefore was not to teach historical materialism but the truth. That was of course also the reason why I was thrown °in, for it offended those in charge at the time just as much as the idea of a threefold social order offends people today. Authoritarian thinking and belief in authority were and still are as great in the socialist movement as in the Catholic church.

What really matters is to gain a clear understanding of social relations in this world. Real understanding of the natural threefold order of the human organism, of the way the human organism is an organism of nerves and senses, rhythmical organism and a metabolic organism, as shown in my book Von Seelenrätseln,³³ leads to a way of thinking that can also apply to social life. People of little understanding will say: ‘You are using analogy in applying the threefold order of the human body to the social organism’. This is nonsense of course. Analogy is not the method used in Towards Social Renewal. All I said was that if people succeeded in letting their thinking escape from the strait jacket put on it by modern scholarship and particularly public opinion, they would free their thinking to the extent that it will be possible to think sensible thoughts concerning social issues. The kind of thinking that puts the human brain side by side with the liver, examining everything as though it were of the same substance, will never come to sensible conclusions.

Using external analogies we might say: The social organism is threefold by nature and so is the human organism. The head is the organ of mind and intellect; it should therefore be compared with the cultural and intellectual life in the threefold organism. The rhythmical system establishes harmony between different functions in the action of the heart, in respiration—that would be the rights sphere in the social organism. Metabolism, the most physical, material aspect—something mystics tend to look down on to some extent, though they say they also have to eat and drink--would be compared to the sphere of economics.

This is definitely not the case, however. I have repeatedly pointed out on other occasions that in reality things are very different than mere analogy would make them to be. It cannot be said, for instance, that summer is comparable to the waking state for the earth and winter to a state of sleep. The reality is different. In summer the earth is asleep, in winter it is awake. I have gone into this in detail.

The same applies if we consider the real situation in comparing the social and the human organism. The economic sphere of the social organism actually compares to the activities of the human head. As to the sphere of rights, the legal sphere, people were quite rightly comparing this, the middle realm, with rhythmical activities in the human organism. The life of mind and intellect however has to be compared with the metabolism. This means that economic life has to be compared with the organs that serve the mind and intellect, and the cultural and intellectual sphere of the social organism with the metabolic organs. There is no way round this. Economic life is the head of the social organism; cultural life is the stomach, liver and spleen of the social organism but not of the individual human being. It is of course too much of an effort for anyone whose thinking is in a strait-jacket to make distinction between social life and the life of an individual person.

Again the essential point is that spiritual science prepares us to see things as they really are and not to produce analogies and elaborate symbolism. We will then arrive at important conclusions. We shall find, for example, that we can say: But in that case economic life, if it really is the head in the social organism, will have to live on the rest of the organism, just as the head does in the human organism. In that case we cannot say morality, religious life and the search for knowledge are ideological elements arising from economic life. Quite the contrary, in fact. Economic life is dependent on cultural life, on the metabolism of the social organism, just as the human head depends on respiration, on stomach, liver and spleen. We then come to see that economic life arises out of cultural and religious life. If we did not have a stomach we could not have a head. Of course we also could not have a stomach if we did not have a head, but it is the head after all that is fed by the stomach, and in the same way economic life is fed by cultural life and not the other way round. The socialist theories that now threaten to spread through the whole of the civilized world are therefore quite erroneous, a dreadful superstition. No one has thought to look for the truth in recent centuries; on a purely emotional basis everyone has been promulgating the kind of truth their class and point of view suggested to them. Now at last it is realized that it is a total delusion to see historical evolution as the product of the modes and relations of production. The idea is now to compare the actual facts and not to talk in analogies. Now a realistic view is taken and it is realized that if the stomach is undermined in the human organism, the head will suffer. In the same way there can be no sound metabolism in the social organism and economic life must fall into decline if morality, religious life and intelligent thought are undermined in the social organism. Nothing in fact depends on economic life; primarily everything depends on the views, the ideas, the cultural life of humankind.

The head is always dying—I have spoken of this in other lectures—and we only maintain the head organism because it is constantly dying and the rest of the organism rebels against this. The same applies in the sphere of economics. Economic life is constantly bringing death and decay into the progress of history; rather than generating everything else it brings about the death of everything. This element of death constantly has to be counterbalanced by what the cultural organism is able to produce. The situation is therefore exactly the other way round. Anyone speaking in materialistic terms and saying economic life is the basis for progress is not speaking the truth. The truth is that economic life is the basis of something that is always dying in stages, and the mind and spirit have to make up for this dying process. To proceed the way people are now proceeding in Russia is to help the world to its death. The only possible outcome of proceeding in this way is to help the world to its death, for the simple reason that the laws of death are inherent in the things that are being done there.

You can see the eminent social importance of these things. We have now been working in anthroposophy for twenty years, and all the time I have tried to make it utterly clear and apparent in all kinds of lectures that what matters to us is not the cultivation of a philosophy full of inner self-gratification, a kind of spiritual snobbery, but to develop the most important impulse that is needed in the present age.

I wanted to present this to you again today in a slightly different form in connection with a number of things that can help us understand the essential nature of the human being. It is important that those who call themselves friends of the anthroposophical movement clearly perceive the connection between this anthroposophical movement and other events as we know them.

The ideas put forward by myself and other friends are often seriously distorted. It is therefore difficult to speak freely to such a large audience, even if it is anthroposophical. As there is no immediate opportunity, however, to discuss these things at a more intimate level and yet it is necessary to speak of them, let me draw your attention to a few things. We must be aware, particularly here in Stuttgart, that the anthroposophical movement we have now had for twenty Years has indeed reached a new stage. If we are serious about the movement this means we have accepted the obligation to follow this change, to adapt to this change. You must properly understand that because our friends Molt, Kühn, Unger, Leinhas³⁴ and others have attempted to take the anthroposophical approach to its practical conclusion something has happened that concerns us all. It concerns us all and we must take account of it in everything we say and do. The fact is—and let us be very clear about this—that until then the anthroposophical movement was a current in the life of the mind and spirit. Such things continue on their way, cliques and closed groups, however objectionable, that go by personal and heaven knows what other interests, may form; a spiritual movement may even proceed by the agency of privy councillors like Max Seiling.³⁵ One does of course have to approach it properly in view of what is called for, but for as long as it is a purely spiritual or cultural movement it can be ignored. Now, however, three things have grown out of this spiritual movement.

The first followed the appeal I made last year.³⁶ It now forms part of the struggling threefold movement, the Association for a Threefold Social Organism. This has not yet been able to get anywhere near the real objectives. What the appeal had to say has in a sense met with rejection, and it would be a good thing to be fully aware that there has been this rejection, that only very little of what was intended has come to fruition.

This does of course mean that I have many requests made to me. The idea has come up in Dornach, for example, of issuing a further appeal that would make it known internationally what Dornach means to the world. I had to explain to our friends that in the ordinary life outside that is now heading for a breakdown, appeal usually follows appeal, programme on programme. We cannot do this if we work out of anthroposophy. It is important to realize that, in a way, it is not at all healthy if something is undertaken that does not come off. It is important to make a careful assessment of the chances of success, and not just do what comes to mind but only the things that have a chance of success. This is why I then said—it is important and I must ask you to consider it carefully—that I would not dream of making a similar appeal again, for what has happened to the first appeal should not happen a second time. It was possible to let the appeal for a Cultural Council³⁷ go out, for that was not my work, but we must be very clear that things are getting a great deal more serious than people are inclined to think if something like the anthroposophical movement stands behind them.

Three things have now evolved out of the anthroposophical movement, in a way, each of them quite distinct. A threefold order following that appeal—we will have to work at it, for it partly meets with rejection; secondly the Waldorf School;³⁸ thirdly the financial, commercial and industrial enterprise called Der Kommende Tag (Dawn of Tomorrow).³⁹

Coming to Stuttgart in the past, when we only had the anthroPosophical movement—I am referring only to Stuttgart—I would spend three or four days here and you know how many personal interviews I managed. These things have had some effect, as is now becoming apparent. It was not without significance that whatever had happened in the meantime—people will understand what I mean if they want to—could be put to rights again in those personal interviews. Events could then proceed until the next time. Now the position is such that following those outer developments one has to attend meetings from morning till night, and indeed well into the night, and there is no question of continuing in the ways we got used to when we were only an anthroposophical movement. Now there are many people who feel that it is a nuisance that things are no longer the way they were. It is necessary, however, to look at all the changes and really say to oneself: Things have changed since the spring of last year and this will have to be taken into account.

The situation cannot remain as it is, but a united effort must be made to see that it does not remain this way. It cannot remain as it is because everything that is done—be it for the Waldorf School or the Kommende Tag—has its basis in spiritual work. Without the spiritual work that has been done and must continue to be done there is no point to it all. The spiritual work must give form, vigour and content to the whole. To continue the way we are going would mean that the institutions which have now been established would swallow up the original spiritual movement. We would be taking away the original basis. Nothing growing out of the anthroposophical movement should be allowed to swallow up the movement as such.

You see, these are serious matters we have to discuss today, and I think at least some of you will understand what I mean. Things will not be different unless we accept it as a reality that anthroposophical work has been done for many years, for decades. This work must be seen as something real.

I would ask you also to consider the following. There is much conflict in the world, but where is most of this conflict to be found? It takes a certain form and people fail to notice, but most of it takes place in the sphere of spiritual endeavour. There is no end to the conflict within the body we call the anthroposophical movement, for example. When our movement evolved out of older practices—it was necessary to start from these, you know the reasons—that is, when many people familiar with the old theosophical practices joined our movement, I had the feeling that a gentleman, who at the time was particularly vehement in his defense of the line we were following, would very soon be in conflict with various other people. Conflict is likely to be particularly bad in this sphere. In fact I always made it quite clear that the gentleman in question, a theosophist of the purest Water, would not only come in conflict with others, but that his right side and his left would be involved in a desperate struggle. People Will find that the left side of this individual will have the most dreadful quarrel with his right side.

It will of course be necessary to develop the other extreme, where the conflicts that constantly arise are overcome. Such conflicts are due to the very nature of spiritual movements, because they all aim to develop the human individuality. The other pole, the other extreme, of human understanding, must be there as well; it is the pole of human understanding where it is possible to enter into a human individual, to go deeply into the life impulses of another person, and so on. It must be possible for the Kommende Tag and the Waldorf School we are now running to be given a sound moral basis by the anthroposophical movement here in Stuttgart, the moral basis that is the work of decades, or at least should have been such. That has to be the foundation, for it is the only way in which we can go ahead and restore the balance between a life consisting of meetings and the necessary spiritual work which after all should be the basis. We cannot achieve this, of course, if things go on all the time where one is told, for instance, that dreadful things have been going on again, with someone causing trouble all the time, someone upsetting all the rest. Well, that may be so. To date—and on this visit such things have come up again countless times—I have not been able, however, to pursue such an affair to the point where the second person, when approached, told the same story as the first. When it came to the fifth or sixth person, I would hear the absolute opposite of what the first had told me. I do not want to criticize, to apportion praise or blame, really, not even the latter, but that is how it is. What is needed, particularly among anthroposophists, and I have said this on many occasions, is an absolute and unerring feeling for the truth. It is very difficult to continue working in all these areas unless there is a basis of truth, of genuine, immediate truth. If there is this basis of genuine truth, surely it must happen that when something comes up and one pursues the matter further a fifth or sixth person would still present the same facts. Yet it happens that I am told about something ‘dreadful’ and everybody I ask tells me something different. I cannot, of course, apply the things I have from other sources to external life; I have said this many times. It is not a question of whether I know about it, know who is right and who is wrong. The question is whether the first says the same as the sixth or seventh. What I know has nothing to do with it. As a rule I do not allow people to pull the wool over my eyes, and that is not why I ask people. The reasons are quite different. As a rule it does not interest me very much what people tell me. The point is that I hear what the first person says and then the seventh, only to find on many occasions that one person says one thing and the seventh says the opposite. It evidently follows that one of the two things cannot be true. It seems to me that this does follow.

In outer physical life which for this very reason is going into a decline people have always wanted to shut their eyes to the function, the crucial significance, of untruths. Even unintentional untruths are destructive in their effects. In spiritual science working towards anthroposophy it is absolutely essential to realize that an untruth in the life of mind and spirit is the same as a devastating bomb in physical life. It is a devastating force, an instrument of destruction, and this in very real terms. It would certainly be possible to do important and fruitful work in the spiritual sphere again, in spite of the many new developments, providing these things are given some attention—objective attention, however, not subjective attention.

You know I do not normally go in for tirades; it is not my habit to moralize. Just for once, however, I really must discuss the facts that have become very obvious at this time, because the situation is serious. We are looking at undertakings that must not fail, that will have to succeed, and there can be no question of any kind of failure; we have to say today that they shall succeed. They must not however swallow up the original anthroposophical movement, and this means that everybody must do his share to ensure that the moral foundation established in the work of many years really exists. Everybody must do his part. It is really necessary for everybody to to their part.

It saddens my heart that I am unable to respond to almost all the many requests that are made to me. I had to keep refusing to help my friends because time cannot be used twice, and meetings go on not only from morning till night, but even well into the night. Quite obviously I cannot use the same time to talk to individuals. The membership in the widest sense must come to its senses and get rid of the things that play a role in all aspects of life here, the kind of thing I have just been mentioning. Every single member must reflect and see that here in this very place these things have to be done away With Unless this is done—and these things are connected—it will not be possible to find the time to do real fundamental spiritual work. Everything arising out of anthroposophy will succeed. Yet unless some things change the original spiritual movement will be swallowed up. The will impulses of those who consider themselves the bearers of this spiritual movement would then lead to a new materialism, as the original spiritual movement will have been aborted. The spirit needs to be nurtured or it will die. Materialism does not arise of its own accord; you cannot create materialism, just as you cannot create a corpse. A corpse is produced when the soul leaves the organism. In the same way everything created here on a spiritual basis, out of something that has soul, will become entirely material unless there is a genuine desire to nurture the spirit. It means that above all the moral and ethical basis which we have been able to establish is given careful attention. It is necessary above all to ensure that we do not become subject to illusion, that we do not think it is enough to accept Certain views just because they are easy to accept. We must look at life without flinching.

It is really very bad for people to say things like: ‘The threefold order is a good thing; we must take it up.’ Feeling rather good about it they will say: ‘I am getting something organized and it is very much in accord with the threefold order; aren't I good! It makes me really feel good getting something organized that is a nucleus of threefoldness’. Licking your lips morally speaking, full of inner self gratification—you may feel like this when you are doing such things, but it does not mean that you have a sense of reality. The threefold idea is true to reality because it requires genuine effort to bring it to realization. Many people's ideas are however so unrealistic that the idea of threefoldness goes against the grain with them. The first and most essential thing is for this idea to be taken up by a sufficiently large number of people. We must have the necessary sense of reality and practical common sense.

Eight days ago I had to speak here in Stuttgart about the consequences the threefold order has for the management of landed property.⁴⁰ I said that the threefold order obviously aims to achieve a situation where social exchange, social conditions relating to landed property, are such that land cannot be bought and sold like other goods That is entirely based on reality; to say the opposite would be unrealistic. I had to discuss the subject on a day when I actually got here late because we had been going round the countryside all day trying to buy land. If we have a sense of reality we cannot base ourselves on the threefold order and say: ‘I must be good; I am forming a nucleus for the threefold order.’ No, it has to be accepted, and there can be no illusions, that in a certain respect the only possible way in which we can work for a threefold order is by working on the most important aspect, not basing our work on the immediate present.

It is not a question of morally licking our lips as we say that we follow a particular idea. This would make it unfruitful and abstract. It is a question of really seeing the reality, seeing what is necessary. This is the difference between people whose approach is utopian and dogmatic and those who take a practical view. The latter will take an idea as far as it can go, but they are not unworldly people living for some private pleasure; they take hold of the reality. We really only give ourselves up to illusion for our own private pleasure. This must be realized. It is also necessary to realize that many other things go in the same direction. I am sorry, it could not be helped. There were quite a number of things that I could have talked about on this last occasion before my departure. I might have drawn your attention to many things that were put to me more or less in passing, things that do have an effect on the fruitful activities. One of the main problems with those fruitful activities is that there is a constant need to have endless discussions on matters that should be dealt with in half an hour, because things are thrown into the pool that really should not be there. If you have sound thinking habits—and those are the habits we must acquire if spiritual science as it is presented here is to come about—and then find yourself—I am not speaking theoretically—right in the middle of what is nowadays called business practice, the best way of defining what goes on is that people kill as much time as possible, that time is wasted. There are practical people today who boast of being busy all day long. If they did not waste so much time, their work, which let us say takes ten hours, could be easily done in one hour. Time is killed particularly in what is called active life today. This killing of time causes thoughts to be drawn out. Entering into practical life as it goes on today one really gets the feeling that one is in a noodle factory where thoughts that ought to be concentrated are drawn out, pulled apart like strudel or noodle dough; everything is pulled well apart. It is dreadful to come across those spread-apart thoughts that are cultivated in practical life. If you wanted to use thoughts like these to get a clear understanding of the world, of the things I have spoken of today by way of an introduction, you would not get anywhere. All this ‘strudel-dough thinking’ has arisen in the process of killing time. Thoughts that ought to be concentrated, for that is the only way for them to be effective, simply come to nothing by being drawn out. Something which functions properly at a certain density will of course be useless once it has become thin and worn. Many of the things that play a large role in modern economics are quite useless when it comes to making world affairs progress. Our particular task would thus be to grow concise in our thinking also with regard to practical things, and not to kill time. However, time still has to be killed these days, unless the anthroposophical movement, which after all supports our enterprises, becomes what it ought to be: A movement based on truth in every respect, a movement where all untruth eliminates itself because we have no use for it and because it would immediately show itself to be what it is.

This is what I wanted to say to you today. It is not addressed to anyone in particular. Please do not continue to go around saying that I was aiming at one thing or another in particular. I wanted to give you a clear picture of the facts as they are in general. The world situation is serious today and the things that have been going on among us here in Stuttgart really reflect the serious situation that exists for the whole of civilization. The things that haunt us in our community here can teach us a lot about the things that haunt the world as a whole.

I do not wish to hurt anyone's feelings. Nor do I want to moralize, to preach at you. The intention has been to discuss the things that have been obvious to the eye and to the soul on so many occasions over the last two weeks.

• 30. ‘Die Erziehung und der Unterricht gegenüber der Weltlage der Gegenwart’ (Education and teaching in the light of the present world situation), Stuttgart 10 June 1920. Published in Geisteswissenschaft und die Lebensforderungen der Gegenwart 6, Dornach 1950. To be published in GA 335. No record of translation into English.
• 31. Die Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft (1919) GA 23. English translation: Towards Social Renewal. F.T. Smith tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1977.
• 32. See Rudolf Steiner's Mein Lebensgang (1923–25) GA. 28. English translation: Rudolf Steiner: An Autobiography. R. Stebbing tr. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977.
• 33. Von Seelenrätseln (Riddles of the soul) (1917) GA. 21. Parts translated into English in The Case for Anthroposophy. Owen Barfield tr. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1970.
• 34. Molt, Emil, see ref. 37.
  
  Kühn, Hans, writer and publisher.
  
  Unger, Carl, grad. engineer, owner of machine tool works, member of Council of the German Anthroposophical Society from 1905, lecturer and writer. Shot by a mentally sick individual in Nuremberg in 1929.
  
  Leinhas, Emil, businessman, managing director of Der Kommende Tag AG (see ref. 39), writer.
• 35. Seiling, Max, first a follower then an opponent of Rudolf Steiner. Bore the title Privy Councillor.
  
  TN. Rudolf Steiner used word-play here, calling Hofrat (Privy Councillor) Seiling an Un-Rat. The word Unrat means garbage, refuse, ordure.
• 36. An das deutsche Volk und an die Kultunvelt! (Appeal to the German nation and the civilized world), pamphlet, 1919, reprinted a.o. in Towards Social Renewal (ref. 31).
• 37. Appeal to establish a Council for Culture. Whitsun 1919, signed by many well-known figures in cultural life.
• 38. Waldorf School: intergrated primary and secondary school established by Emil Molt in 1919 for the children of workers in the Waldorf Astoria Cigarette Factory and the general public. This was done under the guidance of Rudolf Steiner who also appointed the teachers and himself gave the preparatory teachers' seminars.
• 39. Der Konunende Tag, Aktiengesellschaft zur F6rderung wirtschaftlicher and geistiger Werte (join-stock company for the promotion of economic and cultural values), established in Stuttgart in March 1920. Rudolf Steiner was Chairman of the Board until 1923. The company became a victim of post-war inflation in Germany and had to be dissolved in 1925.
• 40. Stuttgart 16 June 1920; published in Landwirtschafi und Industrie/Neuordnung des Bodenrechtes als soziale Forderung der Gegenwart (Agriculture and industry/New proposals for land ownership as a social requirement for the present age); quoted from the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner, Roman Boos ed., Stuttgart 1957, S. 84 ff. (to be published in GA 335). No record of translation into English.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, its Value for the Human Being and its Relationship to Art and Religion

Dear attendees,Yesterday I took the liberty of speaking during the lecture about one of the most recent critics of the anthroposophical world view, about the book by the licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, who, as I said yesterday, strangely enough, speaks about anthroposophy from beginning to end, but explicitly says that he retains the term “theosophy” in order to accommodate the general consciousness, but that he always means Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical direction.

Now, today, I would like to start with something that, to a certain extent, is one of the results of Kurt Leese's investigations into anthroposophy. After this man, who, as I also remarked yesterday, has read pretty much everything of mine that has been published, after he has illuminated anthroposophy and what belongs to it from his point of view, he comes to record a strange sentence on one of the last pages of his book. I will read this sentence first:

What is all the talk about the worship of knowledge, about the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the soaring of knowledge into primeval depths and primeval heights, if the Theosophist...

— that is, the anthroposophist —

... is unable to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, and why, then, seven world ages are so important for the becoming and the perfection of this ego!?

Now one could initially believe that the man means that only the anthroposophist does not know how to say why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego, but actually it is clear from the following that he means something completely different, that he actually believes that no one can somehow figure out why it is better to be an ego than a non-ego. Because he goes on to say:

In the face of such mysteries of the world and life, even the theosophist...

- that is, the anthroposophist —

... nothing more than a positivist who no longer explains, fathoms, solves, but who accepts the ethical-individualistic fate of Western-Christian cultural development as a matter of course that can no longer be justified because he simply cannot escape it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, actually means nothing less than the following: No one really knows how to say anything about the great question of life: Why is it not just as good to be a non-I as an I? And since the author of this book obviously concedes that one should simply take it for granted that one is an I, without brooding over it, he thinks that anthroposophy has nothing to say about it either.

Now, let us recall some of what emerged from what was said yesterday, and then allow me to add, in more of a lecture format, some of what you can find in the already extensive literature on anthroposophy.

As a human being grows up, emerging from unconsciousness into ever greater consciousness, awakening, as it were, from childlike slumber and dreams to a more conscious life, he feels confronted by the world. It is fair to say that this confrontation with the world is initially one that presents a truly human mind, a humanly spiritualized mind, with riddles, the solutions to which must be sought from within. As the human being grows up, the riddles of the world itself are revealed to him. At first, he feels, one may say, in a very vague way, as an ego. He feels, so to speak, this I as an inner point of life, to which everything he can experience flows, from which he also knows that everything he can do flows out. But he comes to realize, and he must gradually come to realize, that this is precisely the great question of life: How does this I relate to the whole environment that presents us with such a vast number of life and world riddles? This question, “How does the I relate to the whole human environment?” basically contains everything else that is there in the way of life and world riddles.

Now one can say that in a certain way, something of the relationship between the I and the environment is already evident in ordinary existence, in that this I grows together with the environment in a certain way. We develop from childhood on, which does not just show itself at some later age in the form of us awakening to full self-awareness, but we develop, above all, our inner life through memory, which was characterized in its significance yesterday, that connects our experiences, that allows our life to appear to us as a whole when we look back to the point in time up to which we can remember. We can say that by holding still and looking back on our lives, we feel our selves connected to all our experiences. We have gone through these experiences, we have taken them into our ideas, into our thoughts, we have experienced joy and suffering through them, we have experienced happiness and pain through them, we have been inspired to do this or that in our actions, which then flowed out of our strength into the strength of life. But when we stand still and look back, we also feel connected to what our experiences were in this form, and we cannot say that there is a moment in our lives when we are not fundamentally what we have been left with in our memories of our experiences, of the suffering and joy that we experienced in these experiences, the happiness and pain that we experienced in these experiences, the satisfaction or dissatisfaction that came to us from the fact that we were able to accomplish this or that from these experiences. We are what we have experienced. It becomes pathological when this thread of thought of memory breaks somewhere in a person. In medical literature, cases are well described where such pathological conditions occur, where a person's coherent awareness of memory for this or that breaks down and he feels, as it were, hollowed out, no longer able to fully experience his being.

You see, here life presents itself to us first as an expansion of our ego over that which our existence has brought us since our birth; life presents itself as an inward growing together of our ego with that which has come to us. Yesterday I showed how the human being awakens his supersensible nature by unfolding that which can be developed in him beyond the ordinary powers of knowledge and perception into the supersensible worlds, and thereby comes to an even broader overview of the world. And yesterday I was able to hint at some of the results of the anthroposophical world view. I was able to say that by rising to imaginative knowledge, the human being first comes to perceive his life not only towards birth as a sea from which individual memories emerge, but as a life panorama, as a large tableau, so that he can see the lasting in this earthly life. But I was also able to point out how, through a further development of the supersensible faculty of knowledge, man comes to the contemplation of that which goes beyond birth and death, that which is eternal in him, that which thus connects him with a world that is more comprehensive than that which he can experience between birth and death. And I then showed how this knowledge can continue to ascend to the contemplation of repeated earthly lives. There we have already seen how this I now grows beyond the ordinary contemplation of the I, how the I, which otherwise feels connected in ordinary life with the life events flowing to it, how this I expands its consciousness to include a broader world.

If you now add to what I was able to hint at yesterday the anthroposophical literature, you will see that by developing this cognitive faculty it is also possible to grasp the connection of the I with the whole rest of the cosmos. One may scoff at what Anthroposophy has to say about worlds and world transformations, as indicated, for example, in my “Occult Science”, but only someone who cannot put himself in the method by which such things are found can actually scoff. The essential point of today's reflection, however, is that anthroposophy finds nothing in the cosmos but what is connected with the nature of the I. The essential point is that anthroposophy teaches us to look at the whole cosmos, to see the whole cosmos in such a way that the I is connected in some way with everything in this cosmos, with this whole macrocosm as a microcosm, in the same way that in ordinary life the I is connected with its experiences. One is tempted to say that anthroposophy succeeds in expanding what is otherwise only a 'small' memory in our experiences into a world memory, into a world overview. Thus, through anthroposophical knowledge, we feel expanded, standing within the whole universe, the whole cosmos, we feel the I in its consciousness expanded beyond this cosmos, we feel this cosmos itself as spiritual and the I spiritually connected to this spiritual cosmos.

Those who cannot feel how such an expansion of consciousness affects what a person can actually long for in the world cannot judge the value of anthroposophical world knowledge for the human being either. What Anthroposophy can give, and what these ideas can then be for the perception of the world soul, for the longings of the human soul, must be inwardly experienced by each individual. And this can be experienced in such a way that it is felt as the solution to precisely this fundamental riddle: How does the I, which initially exists only vaguely like a point within us, how does this I relate to the world as a whole? How does that which we ourselves are for our consciousness confront us from the entire world?

The fact that, as this line of inquiry shows, no one can really say why it is better to be an I than a not-I, is answered by showing that such a question is not really posed correctly. What we want is not to answer this question from some abstract point of view, but what we really want is something that belongs directly to life, to growth, to the whole development of the human being. One could just as well ask: Why does a child want to become a great person, an adult? It becomes an adult. But it is not self-evident that one becomes an adult; rather, one must develop that which belongs to the adult. The child has consciousness within it, as it were, asleep; the adult expands consciousness over himself. The person who awakens to consciousness expands consciousness, this I, throughout the spiritual cosmos. In this way, the human being grows into the world in a way that is in keeping with nature. For his feeling, this gives rise to the question of the value of the I, because this value of the I is felt in relation to the value of the world. And anyone who does not want to know about what is far removed from the world and about world development will never be able to develop a true feeling for his ego, because this ego is rich within; it emerges from the whole content of the world. And only if one has a feeling for what is far removed from the world and for world development can one also feel from these what the ego has as its deepest longings. But one must have an inwardly fresh and courageous mind in order not to find it too uncomfortable, so to speak, to send one's mind into world distances and into world developments, so that one can have the rich, inward perception of the I and thus also of the value of the I. And it is a remarkable question that Leese asks: Why are seven world ages necessary to develop this I? If you look at the development of these seven world epochs, you will find everywhere how they contain forces that are connected with the development of human egos. You will find that you are grasped by the world, you feel, you grasp, you also find the forces for your actions from what will arise from the consciousness of your connection with the cosmos.

My dear audience, it is very strange when people judge everything that is to be recognized through anthroposophy, as they must judge it according to what they already have, when they do not engage with it, and then, having basically understood nothing of anthroposophy, say: Yes, what is it worth? What does it explain to you? What is not understood does not explain anything, but that is the fault of those who do not want to understand. But those who are open to what the anthroposophical worldview can be, who enter into the far reaches and the vast expanses of the world with their soul and their spirit, will find a complete answer. In the course of these contemplations, he finds a full answer to the riddle of the value of the human ego, for the whole world answers him. But nothing but the whole world is suitable to answer the question about the value of the I, and anyone who does not want this answer from the whole world will always come to a speech like this critic of anthroposophy, who says: What use can all this be to us, since it does not decide the question of why it is better to be an I than a non-I. But what is expressed here with a certain generality is then expressed in detail when such critics as Leese approach the specific tasks of anthroposophical science. For example, within anthroposophical science it must be said that when the human being observes that which, as it were, holds together as a reality, that which appears in thoughts, feelings and will impulses, anthroposophy speaks of the the carrier of thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will, regardless of whether or not it calls this carrier of the soul the astral body - as I said, words are not important, no special value need be placed on them. Now the same critic, the licentiate Kurt Leese, comes along and says: Why is it necessary, when one is already observing and describing the soul, the thoughts, the feelings, the impulses of the will, why is it necessary to assume a special vehicle?

Now, at this point, the complete inability of the approach that leads out of ordinary life into the truly supersensible life of the soul to follow what is going on becomes apparent. First of all, taken in the abstract, it can seem rather superfluous whether I stop at describing the life of thoughts, feelings and will, or whether I also speak of a vehicle. But one never comes to a real essential insight into what lives in the soul if one does not pass from what merely appears as thought, feeling, will, to the carrier. For, my dear audience, as I was able to show yesterday, when the soul becomes aware of its supersensible abilities, it becomes aware of what it is in those times when it is otherwise in an unconscious state between falling asleep and waking up. And the one who becomes a spiritual researcher experiences how this soul relates to the bodily life just as it otherwise relates during sleep, except that now it is not unconscious but conscious. Thoughts, feelings and will can only be observed during waking life; from falling asleep to waking up, no one can observe this except as after-images, often distorted images of the imaginative life in dreams; no one can observe what is of the soul without the spiritual-scientific. One comes to the reality of the soul precisely by observing the soul in the states where it stands out from ordinary thinking, feeling and willing. If one remains within the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, one does not grasp the essence of the soul. What then is meant when the anthroposophist says that one passes from imagining, feeling and willing to a “medium”? It means that the anthroposophist wants to suggest that we free ourselves from what never sheds light on the nature of the soul, that we should make an effort to grasp what life of the soul is.

And so it shows here what I mentioned yesterday, when such a critic says as a result: Anthroposophy is actually annoying and ill-tempered. He finds it annoying and ill-tempered because it makes a certain demand of him at every moment. He is supposed to go beyond what he has in his thinking and soul habits of ordinary life – he does not like that, he perceives it as an unreasonable demand that should not be made of him. And so he says: Why are you talking to me about a 'vehicle'? If he were to make this effort and speak of this vehicle, then he would find the way into the spiritual world.

You see, what at first appears to be mere mental games — something like the combination of thinking, feeling and willing in the bearer of this thinking, feeling and willing — is something that wants to achieve something real, that wants to provide an impetus for the development of the higher abilities of human nature, through which the essence of the human being is recognized. Thus, even what appears to be a mere intellectual game in the anthroposophical world view is actually meant as something very real for the value of human life. But another passage from this same book shows even more what the value of anthroposophical world view for the present and future life of science is to consist of; I will speak first of the life of world view and science.

In the appendix to my book Von Seelenrätseln (Mysteries of the Soul), I pointed out that for several years I have been speaking about how the human soul is actually connected to the human body. I have pointed out that it can really be seen that our thinking, our feeling and our willing are connected with three different aspects of the human being: that our thinking is connected with the actual nervous activity, but that what we develop as feeling is not is not directly but only indirectly connected with this nervous activity, what we develop as feeling is directly connected with the rhythmic activity, especially with the rhythmic activity in breathing and blood circulation, but that our will activity is connected with the metabolism. I only mention this here in a reporting way. I stated in my book “Mysteries of the Soul” that I had only been studying this subject for thirty years before I dared to publicly express the results of my research. It is commonly believed that the entire life of the soul is connected with the nervous system. The new aspect of this view is precisely that in reality the three aspects of the life of the soul are connected with three different activities of the human organization. Now, however, I was obliged to set something apart in this presentation that is completely foreign to today's habits of thought. In order for me to make myself understood about what is actually meant here, I would like to preface the following.

You see, today, especially in the field of philosophy, one often has a very negative judgment about what is presented in the development of spiritual life as medieval scholasticism. Despite the fact that anthroposophy and my own personality are attacked in the most nonsensical way by certain church authorities, this cannot prevent me from saying what can be said about a certain field, purely objectively, even if this field is linked, or at least seems to be linked today, to current church life. Those who are able to really delve into the blossoming of medieval scholasticism, namely the heyday of this scholasticism, the time of Albertus Magnus, of Thomas Aquinas, know that this scholasticism - it is so little recognized today - that this scholasticism has one thing that basically made it greater than any period in the development of human thought to date. It developed in those who belonged to it a gift for subtle thought development, for the finest dissection of thought. And this gift, which was developed in the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries, as an ability for the finest development of thought, would be very useful to us today, especially in the pursuit of science. For if, for example, a philosopher like Wundt had had a real inner understanding of the fine distinctions of scholasticism, his investigations would have produced different results from those which they have produced. For only a thinking that really has the will to enter into the finest distinctions, only such thinking can also delve into the foundations of reality, for this reality is complicated, and with a rough thinking one does not enter into reality. When one has to throw light on one or other of these subjects from the standpoint of spiritual science, one is obliged to arrive at such fine distinctions of thought.

And so I was obliged to say in my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries) in order to characterize what underlies the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the human being with the rhythmic organization, the human being with the metabolic organization: One cannot get along with this threefold human being if one imagines, for example, that these three parts are arranged spatially next to each other, the head at the top, the circulation human being in the middle, and then the metabolism human being at the bottom. I have shown how even in the nerve there is rhythm and metabolism, but that in the case of the activity of imagination in the nerve, rhythm and metabolism are not taken into account, but another activity, whereas in the case of the activity of feeling or of the activity of the will, rhythm and metabolism in the nerve are also taken into account. I had to make the subtle distinction that what one has to highlight, so to speak, in order to understand the human being, one sees interwoven in outer reality. A man like Kurt Leese reads through this and finds it to be a tour de force of thinking. And precisely because he finds it to be a tour de force of thinking, he says: It is precisely at such a point that anthroposophy becomes annoying and intolerable.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, the value of the anthroposophical world view will consist precisely in the fact that it cultivates not only clear but also highly discriminating thinking, thinking that reaches into the finest structures of reality. People do not want that; they become angry and ill-tempered, and that is why they say: Anthroposophy is annoying and unpleasant. But precisely this training of thinking to follow reality, which carries the finest distinctions and which cannot be followed with such coarse thinking as is so beloved in the present day, will be the value of the anthroposophical worldview for modern science and thus for modern man.

What should be cultivated through the anthroposophical worldview – and with this I will find the transition from what comes from anthroposophy for the value of the human being in an intellectual relationship, in a purely scientific respect — that which should be cultivated through the anthroposophical world view, that which really comes to the soul's eye through this anthroposophical world view: that is the transition to the moral. As the I expands more and more in its awareness of the content of the world, as the I feels itself as a member of the cosmos, having grown out of this cosmos, it feels its great responsibility within its world existence. The self knows that the thoughts and feelings that develop within it are part of the entire, immeasurable cosmos; the self learns to be responsible for what goes on within it by recognizing itself as having been born out of the entire cosmos. When one feels this responsibility towards the whole world, then one stops carelessly speaking over what the world is supposed to explain.

Such careless talk comes to mind when a critic like Kurt Leese, for example, says that anthroposophy tries to understand the world as developing, but that it does not take what he now understands by development - and he understands this to mean only the emergence of the later from the earlier — but that it is said of anthroposophy: in the course of development, in addition to what is the emergence of the later from the earlier, there is an inflow of something that comes from a completely different side. To his horror, says Kurt Leese, I would even talk about entities that develop in certain world ages being inoculated, and he particularly criticizes the fact that I say in The Education of the Child that the etheric body of the human being is born at the age of seven, just as the physical body of the human being is born at the time of physical birth. That is not development, he says, because it does not show that the etheric body develops out of the physical body.

Ladies and gentlemen, consider what is actually at issue here. Someone comes along and makes an abstract concept of development – the following must arise from the earlier -, he criticizes that I would not show how the etheric body arises from the physical body. But the etheric body does not do that, it does not arise from the physical body at all! If the person in question were to understand what is being presented, he would realize that the process is much more complicated in the development at hand. But when I now speak of the moral, I must nevertheless point out that for the real natural scientist of today, the development is by no means as simple as Mr. Leese now imagines.

You only need to read the first pages of Oscar Hertwig's book, which is truly leading in this respect, about a correction of Darwin's theory of descent, and you will see that Oscar Hertwig is obliged to include the concepts of natural science: firstly, evolution, the emergence of the later from the earlier; secondly, panspermia, that is, the coming into effect of that which is in space alongside the organism; and thirdly, epigenesis, that is, the emergence of completely new effects. Thus the concept of development in science today is such that it is constantly developing, that is, it itself is in a living development. What appears in anthroposophy as the idea of development is precisely what most conscientiously takes into account the idea of development in science. And people who come from such a side to criticize have simply not gone along with scientific development, but have only taken a few scraps out of it and criticize from these scraps. And they then call what is working with the full science “unscientific” because it does not agree with their prejudiced assumptions, which, however, do not coincide with the full science. In this respect, anthroposophy will have a great educational effect on a person's inner conscience and lack of prejudice. It will release forces in people that are particularly lacking in people today. Therefore, this spiritual-scientific worldview can find the courage to intervene directly in practical life, because it wants to develop a way of thinking and a whole human behavior that can be immersed in practical life.

We wanted to show this in the most diverse fields, for example in the field of education, in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was founded by Emil Molt and established by me. It has existed for more than a year. In this Waldorf School in Stuttgart, it is shown how the anthroposophical worldview wants to have a practical effect on pedagogy and didactics. This Waldorf School is truly not about raising children in anthroposophy – the Waldorf School does not want to be a school of a particular worldview – but rather about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science, because it is directly immersed in reality, can be pedagogically skillfully applied so that the pedagogical as such is created by spiritual science in a certain way as a pedagogical-didactic art. And in this respect, without wishing to boast, the first school year at this Waldorf School has already achieved something that can be talked about. Above all, we do not have the usual system of reporting at the Waldorf School. In some classes we had quite a large number of pupils last year, but nevertheless we do not need the strange relationship between teachers and pupils that arises from the fact that the teacher wants to find out, let's say, among twenty, thirty, fifty pupils, whether one or the other deserves an “almost sufficient”, “half almost satisfactory” and the like in this or that subject. We were able to avoid all of this, which was reduced to an abstract scheme. Instead, I would like to emphasize this: at the end of the previous school year, we were able to give each child a report card in which the child found something very remarkable: a life saying that was completely and utterly felt for the child's soul, spirit, and physical organization. Even in classes with fifty or more pupils, teachers were able to find a way of penetrating and immersing themselves in the individuality of the pupils so that they could write a core saying of life in the report that was completely individual and appropriate for the individual child. This report should not be a dead piece of paper on which one assesses this or that individual with “almost satisfactory”, but it should be something that the child remembers with a certain strength because it contains something that, when it works in his soul, can become life in him. I just wanted to emphasize this point. I could also speak of much that has been attempted, especially in practical application of anthroposophical spiritual science in the didactics of this Waldorf school.

Now, I have often mentioned here how anthroposophical spiritual science at a certain point in time found itself compelled to draw the social consequences from what emerges from its practical thinking. These social conclusions were first drawn in my book 'The Core Points of the Social Question'. They are now being drawn for practical institutions. People today complain a lot about these practical institutions because they have no idea how the apparent practice, which lives in a world of illusions, has led precisely into today's crisis, and how a real practice of life must flow out of a renewal of all thinking. It could actually be amusing if it were not distressing on the other hand, when today the schoolmasters of practice come and remind us that you cannot manage with idealism and belief in the future. They do not know that this economic activity is really not about idealism and faith in the future, but about direct practical intervention with a way of thinking that is more practical than that which the last decades have been able to produce. Through that which, in connection with real life, brings about a life-based grasp of this reality, it will be practically confirmed what Anthroposophy is, because reality is spirit through and through. And if we want to master reality in practice, we must connect with the spirit of that reality. We will succumb to illusions if we do not want to immerse ourselves in the spirit of reality. Therefore, anthroposophy will have to reveal itself in its value for people by making the spirit effective in practical life.

But the central question of life – and it is this that makes anthroposophy particularly relevant to human life – is the big question: how are the moral impulses of the human being, how is what the human being builds up inwardly in the moral world connected to the world of external reality? Let us look at what modern world view has produced: a universe conceived in such a way that at the origin there is a planetary nebula from which suns and planets have formed through circular motion. In the course of time, I would say purely mechanical events arose from this, agglomerations, which then developed into the human being, into the impulse of morality in the human being, which is felt by the human soul as the most valuable thing. But then our gaze is directed to the physical end of the world, when, as it were, what has come together sinks back into a frozen state, when a world grave will stand, and what man has developed within himself in his valuable moral ideals will be buried in this world grave.

One need only visualize this image to see how this modern world view has been unable to bring about harmony between what man feels to be most valuable within himself, his morality, and what surrounds him in the external world and what he seeks to understand in a mechanical-materialistic way. We have only to look back at what I was able to say yesterday, even if only in the most general terms, to see how anthroposophy builds a bridge between what is spread out in space and the world of morality within. There we grasp ourselves first on earth, so that we learn to recognize ourselves in the course of our awakening as the physical-sensual human being, born out of the physical-sensual universe; within us we unfold our supersensible will. Yesterday I showed how this supersensible will contains precisely that which is not accessible to ordinary sense perception, which only becomes accessible when the soul frees itself from the body and experiences the will outside the body. In this will we have something that is thoroughly spiritual. But at the same time this will contains as a power that which constitutes our moral will, our moral feeling, our moral ideal and which remains in the future. We know that in this future our own existence develops in such a way that our body falls away from us, that the elements of this physical body initially disperse into the physical world, but that, as I indicated yesterday, what is contained only as spiritual desire in the will passes through the time that lies between death and a new birth; this builds a new physical body in the future. We see into the future and see our physical body arising again, but out of the spiritual.

If you then turn to the rest of the anthroposophical literature, you will find that this also applies to the worlds. We look at the external worlds, we see light and color in them, we hear sounds in the external world, we hear a whole range of sounds in the external world; we see the three realms of nature. We look at the past in spirit, we see spiritual beings in the past in spirit. We know that what is physical here now has been formed out of spirit. But this physical of the present, this present beauty of the earth, carries spiritual in its lap, and when it will once have solidified as physical, then the spiritual will emerge from it. But the spiritual now only exists in that which is volitional. Future worlds will be built from present morality, just as the present physical world is built from the moral forces of past beings. We see that which shines towards us as stars, that which appears to us as the sun, as the results of that which was once moral. We see in what is moral now the germ of what will shine as worlds in the future, what will appear as worlds to the beings that will inhabit these worlds in the future. By looking at the moral with the insights that only arise when one develops the supersensible powers of the soul, a bridge is built between the moral and the physical. This bridge cannot be built if we look at the world only through the lens of today's natural science: in that case, the world falls apart into the world of mechanical-materialistic events and the world of morality, which then dissolves into illusions, whereas in the anthroposophical worldview, the moral contains the germ of the cosmic, and in this way that which we can call responsibility grows. We know that the outcome of our moral deeds and impulses is not due to some arbitrary assessment of guilt, but is rooted in the laws of the world themselves. And if we look at the starry worlds that affect our eyes, we recognize in them the physical consequence of moral impulses from the distant past. We feel that we are not only in a physical world with moral illusions, we feel that we are in a world of physical and moral realities, where the physical is the metamorphosis of the moral, and the moral is the metamorphosis of the physical.

This, esteemed attendees, gives strength to the human being by steeling his sense of responsibility by placing him with his ego in the whole world. Thus, by opening our view into the spiritual and by showing the physical in connection with the moral in relation to the spiritual, this anthroposophical spiritual science can meet the deepest needs of the present day in the field of art. Anthroposophical spiritual science wanted to achieve this in the field of art, as far as possible at the beginning of its existence. In my four mystery plays, entitled 'The Portal of Initiation', 'The Soul's Trial', 'The Guardian of the Threshold' and 'The Awakening of the Soul', I myself have tried to show how one can artistically embody, from a spiritual-scientific world view, what arises from supersensible observation. And in our Goetheanum outside, everything that this Goetheanum presents - in terms of its external architecture, in terms of its sculptural and painterly design - is shaped from this spiritual-scientific perspective.

Do we not see in the artistic development of the last generations how art longs for new impulses? Today, we need only look back to the time of Leonardo, Michelangelo and Dürer to see how that ancient conception of art, which strove upwards out of the physical-sensual, had indeed developed to the greatest heights, to depict the physical-sensual in such a way that the physical-sensual reveals the spiritual. One need only think of how human figures are first depicted in the Sistine Madonna, surrounded by the natural world, but how the spirit that embodied this image conjures up spiritual secrets from what it could see with its senses, and how it elevates the sensual so that this sensuality can reveal spiritual secrets to man.

In an age of scientific thinking and scientific research, we have ceased to have the intuitive perceptions that a Raphael or a Michelangelo had, in that they conjured up from the sensual-physical reality that which appeared like a reflection of the spiritual from this physical-sensual reality. Thus we see that in the naturalistic age, art also wanted to become naturalistic. But what is naturalistic art supposed to achieve if it does not unconsciously contain some idealistic factor? Do we still need to somehow transfer what nature presents to us outside onto the canvas or otherwise embody it, for example in drama? Can we really depict the secrets that nature holds in a naturalistic way? No, we cannot. Anyone who has traveled throughout Italy and been exposed to even the most beautiful and greatest works of art and then comes from Italy, let's say, to the top of the Rigi and watches a sunrise, knows immediately that what speaks out of nature is greater than what any painter, any sculptor, any artist could gain from nature. Only when artists, like Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, could not stop at nature, but conjure up the spiritual from the physical and sensual, is this artistic endeavor justified. But precisely those artists who are perhaps to be taken most seriously in the present have within them the deepest yearning for a new source of art. They feel that the impulse has been exhausted, which consisted of conjuring up the spiritual out of the physical-sensual. When we look back to ancient times of human cultural development - wherever the human gaze looked, it saw the spiritual in natural things, the nymph of the spring in the spring, the spirits of the air in the air. Thus it is a final, I would say a certain human ascent, when now the artists have conjured up a spiritual out of the physical-sensual existence.

Today we stand at a point in the development of the world where the longings of the most serious artistic natures of the present point to the fact that new sources must be opened for the artistic. And so the opposite must enter into the development of human civilization today. The old artists have demystified the spiritual from the physical-sensuous. The spiritual must be revealed by looking at the spiritual world, as anthroposophical spiritual science intends. But just as the artist, if he has artistic feeling, is compelled to reveal the spiritual in the physical-sensuous, so the man who beholds the spiritual has, if he has artistic feeling, the direct, naive need to shape the spiritual into forms, to translate the spiritual into material. The old school of art idealized the sensual; the new school of art will realize the spiritual. This will not be a creation in symbolism. Those who find only one single symbol in it are slandering the Dornach building. There is no symbol in it, but what is directly contemplated is poured out into forms. Everything should work in artistic forms. Those who speak of the symbolism of the Dornach building only show by doing so that they have not really grasped the characteristic style expressed in the way the whole artistic aspect of this building is managed. They have not seen have seen how the artistic spirit of nature herself was sought to be joined with the creative spirit of nature herself in the artistic work of this Dornach building, and then to express oneself artistically in forms towards which this spirit strives.

What was idealizing in the development of art in ancient times will be realizing when it is based on such a spiritual view as is meant by the anthroposophical world view. And this artistry will be naive in the best Goethean sense. As the spiritual researcher looks into the universe, he senses the secrets of existence, and he deeply feels what Goethe expressed from his artistic vision: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to someone, that person feels a deep longing for her most worthy revelator, art. He to whom the world reveals its secrets in the mind cannot leave these secrets in the mind as they are, just as a child cannot remain at the age of three or five; it must grow older. What is seen in the spirit wants to take shape. What art creates out of spiritual vision is not didactic, it is not symbolic, it is not in straw-like allegories, it is a real standing within life. And this standing within the spirit brings the human ego together with the whole cosmos. Today I have pointed out how those forces in man that lead to his actual human existence are feelings of responsibility towards the world, I could also say feelings of responsibility towards social existence. And I could list many other ways in which these feelings are aroused, by developing those ideas that initially lead the human being into worlds far away and worlds wide, that present him with all the development that the world must undergo in order to reach the summit, the summit of the self. Those who take such ideas into themselves, by incorporating them into their souls, do not merely absorb cold ideas; they take in something that seizes the feeling and the will, something that warms the feeling with that which flows out of the immeasurable greatness of the world. From these ideas, they take what each individual action that they perform places under the responsibility of the world's wisdom-filled guidance. Summarizing all this, one can only say: religious sentiment flows from what is handed down in anthroposophical spiritual science as images, as ideas, from all of this.

From the outset, spiritual science did not want to be something that would stand alongside any religion as a modern religion, especially not alongside Christianity. From the very beginning, it was asserted within anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that Christianity is the religion that encompasses all others, and that for anthroposophy it is important to explain the mystery of Golgotha in the sense in which it is necessary for modern humanity. But through Anthroposophy nothing religious should be placed beside it, other than what is the meaning of the earth itself, coming from the Mystery of Golgotha. Only those who, in a spiritually tyrannical way, want the world-wide mystery of Golgotha to be interpreted in only one sense - namely, their own - can defame anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as something that would be detrimental to Christianity.

But is it not necessary, my dear attendees, that although not in the essence of the mystery of Golgotha, new elements are included in the understanding of Christianity? One looks at the way in which the knowledge and the realization of this Christianity has developed in the course of the 19th century. One need only look back to earlier centuries. Those who can look at history not only in the abstract, but also with feeling, know that Christ Jesus was regarded as something that poured out of higher, supersensible worlds into the physical, sensual world. A connection between the spiritual world and the physical world has been established through the mystery of Golgotha. In older times, this mystery of Golgotha was understood according to the cognitive abilities of those older times. But as the modern age dawned, with its scientific advances, the old understanding gradually became impossible for those who conscientiously want to take the progress of humanity seriously. And so we have witnessed the strange spectacle of precisely the most advanced theologians of the 19th century having lost the Christ as a supersensible being and having arrived at the mere description of the simple man from Nazareth; because of naturalistic thinking, they could not see the Christ in Jesus. For the most modern theology, Jesus became an outstanding human being, perhaps the most outstanding, but that something took place in Jesus through Christ that cannot be grasped merely with the senses has been shown in the entire theological development of the modern age. We need a path back to spiritual science in order to spiritually comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ-secret.

What natural science has taken from Christianity for those who conscientiously want to take in this natural science, spiritual science will give back to Christianity for those who need an understanding of this Christianity from the depths of their soul. Just as little as all the progress of natural science could take away from man of the post-Christian era the mystery of Golgotha, just as little will spiritual-scientific progress be able to take away from man that which, out of the religious mood, but illuminated by spiritual-scientific ideas in accordance with the demands of the new time, flows to the divine, to that which is also given through Christ. The modern human being needs a spiritual view as the basis for his art and for his religion. Those who have lost the Christ through modern science have lost him because modern science was not initially a spiritual science. And I would like to remind those who today often slanderously claim that Anthroposophy wants to deliver something detrimental to Christianity: Is it courageous to say, in the face of the greatness of the Mystery of Golgotha, which towers above all other earthly forces and events, that those who seriously endeavor to understand this Mystery of Golgotha, in accordance with this or that science, in accordance with the progress of humanity, are anti-Christian? Is it courageous?

No! Again and again, I see before me that Catholic theology professor, who was my friend in the 1880s and 1890s, who, as a professor of Christian philosophy at a theological faculty, gave a speech about Galileo that fully lived up to Galileo by said at the time: No progress in science should be challenged by those who want to be truly Christian, because in truth everything that science can find of worldly secrets only serves to make people more aware of the magnitude of the wonders of divine guidance in the world, not less. Those are fainthearted who believe that Christianity can be shaken by any scientific progress. No, my dear audience, spiritual science knows: Even if millions of insights come in physical or spiritual fields, the event that gives meaning to the earth will stand in ever greater splendor precisely before spiritual-scientific contemplation.

But here it can also be seen how little impartiality there is in the world today. While one should understand - and if one were impartial, would also understand - that the spiritual-scientific world view is what certain people need in order to be led today to the mystery of Golgotha, anthroposophy, the spiritual-scientific world view, is being slandered. But perhaps this is only because there is too little religion in those who want to take on religion. Should it not be the case that one recognizes in particular the religiousness of the soul mood by the fruits, by the way the people concerned appear in life? Should there not be some phenomena today that show in the most intense way how an elevation, how an internalization of the religious mood is also necessary? Let me give just one small example.

Among the many recent refutations of anthroposophy, there is one in which there is a sentence to which I would like to draw your attention here. I will read it out loud:

Because the consciousness of the mind is lacking, ...

— namely, among anthroposophists, one might think.

... in theosophy there is also no savior of sinners. Despite all the praise and despite the exaltation of Christ to the “Sun-I”, Dr. Steiner's Christ is a completely alien personality to us. Here, too, a certain pantheistic tendency is disconcerting. Anthroposophy starts from the human being, and its goal is the ideal human being.

I have just shown how all of anthroposophy strives for the opposite; but the author of this brochure continues:

This and God apparently coincide. A nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach: with “Luciferian” features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom.

Now, my dear attendees, what is being carved out of wood in Dornach has been seen not by hundreds but by thousands of people. The one who has seen that something is being formed that has 'Luciferic traits above and animal features below' — I cannot do other than recall to the one who has seen this the anecdote that contains an instruction on how someone who comes home in the evening can tell whether he is drunk or sober. The advice was to go to bed and put a hat on the bed. If he sees the hat once, he can consider himself sober; if he sees it twice, he can consider himself drunk. Now, the person who sees the hat twice reminds me of the person who sees that something is being chiseled in Dornach - in reality it is carved out of wood -; the person sees something that is not there at all, because at the top is a completely human face, nothing of Luciferic features, a purely human face, below, there is nothing done at all yet, there is still a block of wood, there will also come human features, but below, there is nothing done at all yet. And then someone comes along who does not say that someone told him this – then one might believe that someone has told a tale – no, someone comes along who claims this as strict truth: a nine-meter-high statue of the ideal human being is currently being carved in Dornach, with Luciferic features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom. Thousands of people have seen that this is an objective untruth, and that it is not even just an objective untruth, but that it is one of the most incredible, idiotic distortions of what is intended. And, my dear attendees, what is more:

“This ideal human being...”, Steiner said to the observers present, “...must necessarily be the true image of Christ.”

Not one of the thousands of onlookers who were there will be able to say that I ever said these words. There are enough witnesses here in this hall who know that I have always said nothing but, carefully weighing my words, that the one I am forming here appears to me, according to spiritual vision, as the one who walked in Palestine. I cannot describe him any differently than he appears to me. I do not force this view on anyone. - Never, ladies and gentlemen, has it been said that what is here in quotation marks: “[...] must necessarily be the true image of Christ”.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is how one approaches the truth - that must be said. The name of the author of this brochure is preceded by the ominous “D.”, which stands for Doctor of Theology. So apparently, here too, as everywhere else, something like this arises from religious sentiments of the present time. Is there not a need for a renewal of people's religious sentiment when something like this can arise from religious teaching today? Can anyone seeking a spark of truth in such a work find such an example of objective untruth?

Oh, my dear assembled guests, what is leading to the fight against the anthroposophical worldview must be sought where one perhaps does not want to seek it: in the comfortable habits of thought and feeling of the present. I must say, quite apart from how one feels about the fact that the attack is directed against one's own cause, it can hurt, really hurt, when books are written today that are inspired by such a sense of truth. We need an increase of the sense of truth, of the sense of truth, and with it precisely an increase of the religious sense of people today.

And finally, my dear attendees:

Are people of such a nature allowed to claim that anthroposophists indulge in illusions?

Well, no one will find such an illusion in me. Above, one will find a human head, which has absolutely nothing of Lucifer, which is preserved from everything Luciferian; below, a block of wood that has not yet been worked at all. Anyone who looks at this with such an illusion that they see Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, anyone who can indulge in these illusions, should truly not ascribe to the anthroposophically oriented spiritual scientists a tendency towards illusions. The illusions may lie precisely with those who, out of these very comfortable illusions, would like to fight anthroposophy today.

Ultimately, everything that arises from such foundations is ultimately connected with what has been drawn upon as the materialistic view of the world. And we must go beyond this materialistic view. No matter how imperfectly anthroposophically oriented spiritual science may be today, it only wants to be a beginning, but a beginning that has within it the germination of vigorous further work in the fields of science, art and religion, a vigorous continuation that will be able to bring to people, precisely in these three fields, that which is demanded from the deepest longings of the human soul in the present, which will be demanded more and more in the future, and which ultimately also underlies the core of the burning social question. We must enter into true reality. The materialistically conceived realities that have formed the content of the world views of the last centuries and especially decades are not the true realities.

The true realities must be sought in ways such as those that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science at least attempts; however imperfect it may still be today; for the reality in which man wants to immerse himself when he wants to create something real, he does not find it if he only strives materially, if he does not strive spiritually. But he strives spiritually only when he does not allow a spirit hostile to human knowledge to be placed at the boundaries of so-called knowledge of nature, which says: No entry to the spiritual worlds. No, when he courageously fights his way out of his own strength to see the true inscription at the boundaries of knowledge of nature. This true inscription comes from the spirit to which man actually belongs, and it reads: Welcome the entry into the spiritual world at the boundaries of the knowledge of nature. For it is true, as it sounds from an important work of poetry to him who does not want to see the spiritual depth of the world: Your heart is closed, your mind is dead. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants nothing more than to find those counsels for the human soul and spirit that will lead to the heart being opened and the mind being enlivened, because through the closed heart, through the dead mind, we only enter into the material world. We can only enter into true reality through the spirit, when the mind is illuminated by the light of the spirit, when the heart opens to the true love of the world that comes from spiritual knowledge, and which brings the I into connection with the whole whole universe and thus brings together the human spirit in cognition, feeling and will in right responsibility, in right love for the universe with the whole of being in the universe - in cognition, in the life of the beautiful, in social life.

Spiritual-scientific Results and Life Practice

Dear attendees, Anthroposophical spiritual science, which I have had the privilege of representing here in Stuttgart for many years, was initially viewed by representatives of intellectual life, who are considered authorities by most people, as something that should be disregarded because it should be viewed as a kind of sectarian movement. It may be said that precisely in those circles that are regarded as authoritative from this point of view, this view is increasingly being abandoned. In recent weeks, a theology graduate who has written a thick book entitled “Modern Theosophy” has, after all, uttered words that testify to the desire to move away from the view that one is dealing with an obscure sect. The book is called “Modern Theosophy”, but strangely enough, the author explicitly states on page 18:

When the following expositions speak of Theosophy and Theosophists, it is always meant to refer to Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophical School. The terms Theosophy and Theosophist have been retained only because they are more familiar to the general consciousness than the terms Anthroposophy and Anthroposophist.

It is even a well-intentioned book in part. The author says:

If one had it in Theosophy...

– that is, he means Anthroposophy, one must always translate this in the whole book –

... with the random ideas of a fringe sect fishing in troubled waters, then it would not be worth the effort to pay it more attention.

Now he further characterizes that this anthroposophy is something that must be described as based on the foundations of a comprehensive worldview, powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

It is, after all, remarkable that even today the opponents – because you can certainly call the licentiate of theology Kurt Leese, who wrote the book, an opponent – it is, after all, significant that even today the opponents speak like this. Now, it is not my intention in today's lecture - which is intended to form the basis for my remarks next Friday, when I will then delve into practical life - it is not my intention in this lecture to take up anything polemically, but only in such a way that I choose starting points here and there in order to characterize the results of anthroposophical spiritual science. I do not wish to be polemical, but would like to take this or that as a starting point in order to be able to characterize spiritual science, especially in relation to practical life. Today this will be done more in relation to the inner life of the human being; next time it will be in relation to the outer life of social and economic life.

Since anthroposophy has made the attempt to intervene energetically in life, some people seem to have had to admit that this attempt has caused them some headaches. And so we see that since the Dornach School of Spiritual Science courses last fall — which I have already reported on here and which have recently been joined by our Waldorf school teachers and other experts on anthroposophy here in Stuttgart have been added to these, we see that since Anthroposophy has been more actively engaging in life in this way, some people are trying to think about this world view current in their own way. But the thoughts of these people are strange when you put them together, and you have to realize that when you are talking about the consequences of anthroposophy for the practice of life.

For example, a professor of education at the Jena School of Spiritual Science felt compelled to say that the promise of the anthroposophical college courses in Dornach for a revitalization and recovery of scientific life could only be fulfilled if a better ethical foundation were laid for anthroposophy. However, something very peculiar is now happening to this college teacher. He does not like the ethical worldview that I presented in my Philosophy of Freedom; he does not like it. He actually finds it unsuitable for human beings, but suitable for angels. Well, that may be his personal opinion. But something very strange happens to him, which points to a peculiar ethics of modern science. He discusses my book 'Philosophy of Freedom' as one of those books (for there is no other way to understand the things he says) that arose out of the chaos of the war catastrophe and that are indicative of the kinds of quests and longings that are present today. My book 'Philosophy of Freedom' was only mentioned in the second edition, which appeared in 1918, by a good gentleman who, as a university professor, would be obliged to take the matter a little more seriously and thoroughly. He therefore obviously considers the book to have been written after the war catastrophe, and he also characterizes it as if it had been written out of anthroposophical efforts. Now, my Philosophy of Freedom was published in 1893. So, for all the decades that the book has existed, the professor in question has not bothered with the matter, which is of course excusable. The title page of the new edition says 1918, and now he starts pontificating. I just want to mention this as an example of the kind of scientific thoroughness that is present when it is demanded that a better ethical basis be created for what the anthroposophical worldview is. Here, then, we have the voice of an academic who finds fault with the ethical side of anthroposophy.

The other academic, the licentiate of theology, finds, as you have heard, that the following are particularly significant:

...the foundations of a worldview powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

Now, to expand on this, he adds towards the end of his rather thick book that even if you think your way out of this anthroposophical world view, everything that it contains from the results of supersensible seeing, from results about supersensible world facts, still remains, and this academician characterizes in the following way:

The value of this worldly wisdom would not be affected by this...

- that is, by removing the supersensible side.

Also, there are many scattered ethical benefits in Steiner's writings. One could separate it out as worldly wisdom from the embrace of clairvoyant insights.

So this other critic finds: If you leave out everything else from the anthroposophical worldview, then something remains that has at least great ethical value.

Today, it can already be said that this anthroposophical worldview is, in a sense, being wildly raved about, but it cannot be said that it is uniformly understood by those who feel called upon to judge such things from certain curule chairs. And so there is nothing left for us to do, dear attendees, but to speak again and again about the foundations of this world view, about how it comes to its truths, to its insights, and what these insights themselves are and how they can then intervene in life itself.

This is precisely where one can start, if one wants to characterize anthroposophy from the perspective of the contemporary attitude, so to speak. I do not want to comment on the content of some of the assessments, but on the whole way in which these assessments are made. Kurt Leese, for example, who wrote this book 'Modern Theosophy', tried hard to read a large number of my writings. He even claims that he does not want to approach from the outside to criticize, but that he wants to characterize from within. At one point, however, to which I may perhaps return, he does make a strange statement that allows a deep insight into the state of mind from which criticism of anthroposophy is exercised. At a certain point, after he has talked a lot about logic and the like, this Kurt Leese says that my remarks are “annoying and unpleasant”. So it is not a rational objection, not an objection taken from logical grounds, but an objection based on emotion, on a bad mood. One feels offended, hurt, one feels annoyed. - With this I do not merely touch on what Leese says, but I touch on the mood that is felt by many sides of anthroposophical spiritual science: one becomes angry about it, one feels something that one would like to push away, not for logical reasons but for emotional reasons. If one investigates this fact, one finds that it is indeed connected with something that is very much a part of the nature of this anthroposophical method of research, which I represent.

When we speak today of any kind of scientific path, of any path to a worldview, then we are clear about the fact that we must tread the paths that we have been accustomed to walking in one way or another differently than they are trodden by this or that person. But it is not easy to admit what anthroposophical spiritual science expects of our contemporaries. Today's scientist and those who allow science to educate them for life say to themselves: At a certain point in life, you are finished as a human being. You have certain inherited qualities that have been transformed through education, perhaps even perfected or modified by certain experiences in the outer world, and you have reached a certain point in your life's development. From this point one now enters into some field of science. One is obliged, in this field of science, perhaps to formulate logic more precisely, perhaps to develop in some way still conscientiousness and thoroughness in the old form, to equip oneself with a telescope, microscope, X-ray apparatus, and so on, in order to make progress. But one wants to remain at the level of the powers of cognition that one has once acquired through ordinary inheritance, ordinary education, school teaching and life. Anthroposophical spiritual research cannot agree to this. For it is clear to it that if one only investigates existence, human life, the world, and wants to be active in them in this way, one comes up against certain limits, limits at which dissatisfaction arises about questions that arise, about riddles that life presents one with. Such questions, such riddles arise, in the face of which it is not enough to simply say: here the human being reaches the limit of his cognitive powers. For one feels quite clearly that if one does not come to a satisfactory, at least relatively satisfactory, solution to these questions and riddles, one cannot come to terms with life at all.

Now, anthroposophical spiritual science, as it is meant here, does not say that one may stop at these limits, but it says: When one has developed everything that can be attained today through the usual education or from ordinary life, has developed all of this, there is still the possibility of awakening dormant powers in the soul and of bringing these powers, which one can take into one's own hands, if I may use the expression, to a higher level of knowledge. Then, when one has reached these levels of higher knowledge, it is also possible to penetrate deeper into life than with ordinary science, ordinary education, and ordinary life practice. And then certain life questions and life puzzles take on a different appearance than in ordinary science.

Now, I have often spoken here about the development of such abilities of the soul, but these things can be presented again and again from the most diverse points of view. The peculiarity of spiritual science as it is meant here is that what is presented in it can only be truly brought to light by repeatedly and repeatedly viewing it from the most diverse points of view. Spiritual science does not appeal to any external processes for its methods; it does not form external apparatuses for its starting points or develop laboratory methods. It takes the standpoint that the supersensible cannot, of course, be made vivid through external activities, but that the supersensible can only be attained by supersensible means. Therefore, it points to intimate methods of inner soul training, to a stepping out of the soul beyond what is usual in ordinary science and in ordinary life practice. But it does not tie in with anything hidden and mystical, with anything in the bad sense of secret, but it absolutely ties in with abilities that are already present in the soul in ordinary life, only that it does not merely cultivate these abilities to the degree in which they are present in ordinary life and in ordinary science, but that she cultivates and nurtures these abilities further, thereby bringing certain powers in the soul to development, which actually remain dormant in this human soul due to today's culture.

The first thing that can be linked to is the research method, which is an inner soul path, and that is the ordinary human ability to remember, remembering – I have characterized this from the most diverse points of view over the years. The spiritual scientific research method does not link to something hidden, but to something that is quite accessible to people in their ordinary lives. We recall our experiences. We can draw from our memory the images of what we have experienced years ago – in other words, we can constantly do what we experience inwardly in the outer world. We bring it to a certain point in relation to this soul ability of remembering, and ordinary life is quite right to stop at this point for the time being. For the fact that we can remember in a healthy way, continuously back into our childhood, what we have experienced, the entire health of our soul, indeed the health of our human life, depends on it. And everyone can know what it means for the health of the soul to somehow lose the memory of something one has gone through in life. If there is a kind of blank space that we cannot go back into in the stream of life, then it means not only an erasure of our images of experiences, but in fact an erasure of our ego, or at least a partial erasure of our ego; our self-awareness is interrupted. We notice from this how intimately our self-awareness is linked to this ability to remember, and it is with this ability that spiritual science, with its method of research, first connects. Certain ideas that can be easily grasped are brought into the center of consciousness. In my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” I call this method of bringing certain easily comprehended ideas into the center of consciousness and then remaining there constantly meditation and concentration.

What happens when this method is practiced over a long period of time? What does one actually do? I would like to say: You consciously take in what you would otherwise do unconsciously by developing the power of memory since childhood. By remembering our experiences, we make our inner images permanent. We surrender to life and our organism; we draw from ourselves the images that have remained permanent, depending on what life causes us and our organism can do. But we do not control this lasting of our imaginative life in ordinary existence; spiritual science goes beyond this to controlling this lasting in the inner life of our imagination. Images are made lasting. And if you do this kind of exercise over and over again for years, it turns out that you have acquired a certain ability, just as a muscle acquires a certain strength when it performs an activity over and over again. But by voluntarily evoking durations of mental images that one would not otherwise voluntarily evoke, something is formed that, on the one hand, grows out of ordinary memory but, on the other hand, is quite different from it. A power arises from the depths of the soul that one does not have in ordinary life and in ordinary science. One releases something that otherwise remains dormant in the soul. One now realizes that by inwardly releasing this power in the soul, one stands in a completely new relationship to the world.

Now I have to make one comment today to prevent popular prejudices and misunderstandings against the spiritual scientific method from being carried forward. All sorts of people come who deal with spiritual science with the opposite of thoroughness and say that the spiritual scientific method is used to bring up repressed ideas from the subconscious. Suppressed nervous energy and all kinds of things that one usually pushes into the subconscious are brought up into the ordinary consciousness, so that one is not dealing with something that the spiritual researcher, who lives in such ideas, has acquired through a new power of the soul. Such objections are indeed raised from many sides.

But in answer to this, it may be said, first of all, that something is emphasized everywhere in my writings that is a fundamental condition of these inner soul exercises, namely, that the whole process of making ideas permanent, of immersing oneself in meditation in a certain content of thought – when one is dealing with the right spiritual scientific methods – must proceed in the same inner state of soul as the state of soul of the mathematician when he devotes himself to the combination and analysis of geometric figures or mathematical tasks in general. The soul's activity in the humanities must be just as permeated by the will as the mathematician's activity is permeated by the will. The soul's activity in the humanities must be as permeated by the will as the mathematician's activity is permeated by the will; everything that is done is fully permeated by the light of consciousness. That is the one thing I would like to say to those who repeatedly say that things are being brought up from the subconscious, and that the person who claims to be a spiritual researcher has no idea that it all comes from his subconscious. And those who make such criticism, who can see from their superconsciousness, from what they call science, these suggest how naive such a spiritual researcher is.

Now, my dear audience, I ask you to go through my writings. Leave out everything in them that belongs to spiritual science and try to see how ordinary scientific problems are treated. Then you will see that there is already a complete awareness of the state of mind of such critics. So what such critics demand of their scientific approach is well known. It is not suppressed or even dispensed with – no, in spiritual research, while fully maintaining this scientific approach, the other path is developed alongside it through the soul's activities. It must be taken into account: Only when the spiritual researcher shows himself incapable of following this ordinary scientific method, only then can one say that he is naive in his spiritual research, that he is presenting something that is cloudy, nebulous and mystical. But this is not the case, at least as far as the striving of the spiritual research method is concerned. In this method, the aim is to achieve an absolutely mathematical state of mind by bringing those abilities of the soul into consciousness that are initially higher abilities than the ability to remember.

What is the result? I said: One enters into a different relationship with the world. And here, by developing this transformed ability to remember, one enters into a new relationship with one's own human experience. When this soul ability, which I have just spoken about, really flows up out of the soul, then one begins to look at the life one has gone through since birth as if at a continuous stream that stays there and remains. How else does this life proceed in ordinary existence? It proceeds in such a way that it stands before our soul as something indeterminate. Individual memories arise like waves from a stream. We can look back at these images of our experiences, but the current itself remains in a certain vague darkness. We are, to a certain extent, in this current ourselves. As I said earlier, in a healthy soul life, one's self-awareness is connected to this current. Now one is outside of this current; one has torn oneself away from it. The life one has lived since birth stands before you like a panorama. Time has become space, as it were. What one has striven for by constantly forming images has been conquered by looking at the life between birth and the present moment as a continuous whole, as a panorama of life.

But such an inner state of mind is linked to something else: by the fact that one overlooks this life - and one only overlooks that which is outside of oneself, in the past one did not overlook life because one was in it - by the fact that one has been torn out of life through the development discussed, one gains an experiential understanding of the alternating states of sleeping and waking in ordinary life. And one learns to recognize how sleeping and waking truly relate to one another in ordinary life. A person falls asleep and then wakes up again. It is self-evident that the interplay of the soul forces, as they are present in connection with the body, does not cease and then resume when the person wakes up. But the human being's consciousness is initially such that he does not have the inner strength to grasp what takes place in his soul between falling asleep and waking up. As a result, it remains unconscious. But now this is becoming conscious. One first gets to know a state of soul experience that is, on the one hand, very similar to sleep: one feels free from the body; one feels outside the body in that one has learned to survey one's life since birth. And one learns to recognize what the moment of falling asleep and waking up is; one learns to recognize that the soul is a real thing, that when one wakes up one connects with the soul that leaves the body when one falls asleep. For one learns to recognize that the forces that one has developed from memory are rooted in the soul, insofar as this soul is something independent of the body in its essence. One learns to recognize that when one wakes up, the soul enters the body, and that when one falls asleep, it leaves the body. And just as in any other external science one begins with the simpler and adds complications, thus becoming acquainted with the more manifold, so it is here too. When one learns to recognize, through inner vision, the nature of falling asleep and waking up, this vision is ultimately expanded to include what birth and death actually are in human life. But in order for it to be expanded, some practice is still needed.

I have said: the exercises must be such that man does that constantly, which otherwise only fleeting images, caused by life or by the body, are in the memory. But it is not enough for the further progress in spiritual research that one merely develops this resting on a certain idea; one must go further, so to speak, push the will further. One must come to a point where one can rest on a certain idea as long as one wants, but is not captivated by it, not hypnotized and captured by this idea, but can reject this idea again at the moment one wants to. And this: to surrender to an idea, to withdraw again and to remain as if in an empty consciousness and not to let oneself be captured by any other idea – that must be practiced in the second place. Then one is indeed practising something that is an inner working of the soul forces, like inhaling and exhaling, like systole and diastole. One places an idea into consciousness, lets it last for a certain time, removes it, takes it up again into consciousness; inhaling into consciousness, exhaling out of consciousness. It is not a physical breathing process, but to a certain extent a spiritual breathing process, which one exercises and through which one draws up from the life of the soul the ability to perceive spiritual worlds. And now what one brings up from the soul as a new ability permeates the contemplation of waking and sleeping, and expands it into the contemplation of birth and death. And one learns to recognize, as a second result of spiritual science, what I would call: the eternal in man. For now one learns to recognize that what is outside the body from falling asleep to waking up was present before birth or conception in spiritual worlds. One learns to recognize that the simpler act that takes place each time one wakes up, and which consists in the soul and spirit returning to the still-present body, that this simpler process has a more complicated one, which consists in we live in a spiritual world before our birth or conception and that we then do not, as when waking up, move into our body that is available from the previous day, but that we move into a body that is made available to us in the hereditary current from father and mother. We become familiar with the more complicated waking up through conception or birth, and we become familiar with the complicated falling asleep through what is called death when we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual worlds.

In the second stage of supersensible knowledge, then, the result of spiritual science is the realization of the eternal. The first thing that arises is the realization of the lasting since our birth, which we survey like a stream of life that stands there, in relation to which time becomes like space. The second thing that arises is that we recognize ourselves as rooted in an eternal being that goes through births and deaths, that between death and birth leads a life in spiritual worlds that is just as full as here. One can describe this. I have described it in my writings. People call these descriptions fantasies, but for the one who acquires the abilities I have spoken of, that is, for the one who wants to become a spiritual researcher, these are not fantasies but objective realities that are present as the objective world of colors is before the eye, the objective world of sounds for the ear, and so on.

And I will mention a third step, in which one must indeed further develop an ability of the soul that is also present in ordinary life. And by speaking of the further development of this ability, one is naturally decried as a dilettante by those people who today believe they have a monopoly on science, because they demand that science should completely avoid this ability. But this ability, which I will characterize in a moment, can certainly be developed as a cognitive faculty, and it works like this: The first step is to create a certain image through meditation and concentration. The second step is to remove this constant image from one's consciousness and to control at will, like systole and diastole, the arising and sinking of the perception, then the third consists in further developing the ordinary ability to turn one's attention to some object in the external world. I would call this attention 'noteworthy'; it is the special ability to focus on something precisely, to contract the soul's abilities in such a way that this noteworthy quality is directed at individual objects or at individual beings. This ability, which in life is only prompted by external things – or also by internal things, which is irrelevant here – can be systematically developed by increasing one's noteworthy quality, one's ability to pay attention, by making more and more effort to concentrate the soul on individual objects, so that the soul is completely absorbed in an object, does not skim over it, but puts its whole being into the object. By cultivating this ability, you increase it to what I would call active, inner interest. Then you already notice how something rises from the depths of the soul, which permeates this ability from within. And you notice the affinity of what comes from within the person with a very, very necessary human ability in ordinary life, with the power of love.

Dear attendees, a straight line can be drawn between attention and love, with attention at one end and love at the other. This is because love is nothing more than highly developed attention, a complete surrender to the beloved object. Of course, one will be decried as a dilettante if one says: If one particularly develops that which otherwise unconsciously, instinctively, from attention to a person or to an object becomes love, and if that, through arbitrariness, in turn, becomes a state of mind that is permeated by such an inner consciousness as otherwise only mathematical life, if that is developed, then love is not just an ability of ordinary life, a quality and adornment of ordinary life, then it becomes a power of cognition, such a power of cognition through which one can truly live in the object. But this is necessary if we want to experience the spiritual contents, the spiritual processes of the world. We must develop love, which otherwise only appears in relation to external sense objects, in such a way that it becomes the power of knowledge, that the soul can truly give itself fully to the objects, because the spiritual world demands that we give ourselves to the objects when they reveal themselves, when they are to reveal themselves. This, then, is the third result of developing love into a power of knowledge. Then one learns to look at human life in a new way.

For example, one says to oneself: Now, I live somewhere, surrounded by people. Hundreds of people are around me, some of them I don't even know; I know others, but I pass them by indifferently; some of these hundreds are particularly close to me. An event occurs, a death within this group of people surrounding me. It may happen that I am indifferent to this; it can also happen that this death is a blow for me, because I have had a closer relationship with the person who has died. And now you learn from such things: When you see that from the fullness of life certain things are closer to you, certain events are more connected to you than others, you learn to look back on the way you came to these experiences. If you are endowed with the ability to recognize that is developed out of love, then you see the path you have taken in this life since birth. You get to know an inner, rational connection that otherwise runs unconsciously. You learn to say to yourself: I look back from now. Thirty years ago, I did something that was very far removed from the events I am experiencing today. But when I connect what I undertook then with what I undertook twenty-five years ago, twenty years ago, ten years ago, and then follow the current to what I am currently experiencing, then I notice an inner connection. Above all, I realize one thing: what otherwise seems to me as if only an external, mechanical life has pushed me, now appears to me as emerging from my will. I was not aware of it, and yet it was the will working within me that undertook things thirty years ago, which in their further progression lead to my present experiences of destiny. I experience fate in its connection with the will. Fate in its connection with the will of the innermost human nature reveals itself, but in such a way that one can now look back to earlier earthly lives with the power of recognition of love. One sees: the impulses stem from previous earthly lives, which initially remain unconscious and which make that one is not pushed by external mechanical natural laws toward one's experiences, but that one is pushed toward that which was planted in one was planted in you in a previous life, which was then further developed spiritually between death and the last birth and which now lives in you, which leads you from one life event to the next, insofar as these events are of such a nature that they take hold of you directly. You get to know the connection between your present life and previous lives.

Dear attendees, you do not learn to recognize such connections if you do not make love a force of knowledge. Because by making love a force of knowledge, you go deep, deep inside yourself, to where the causes lie that otherwise elude our awareness. And it is these causes that point us from this life to earlier earthly lives. It is really the case that through this ability to recognize, which is the transformed power of love, something is, as it were, laid bare out of ourselves, just as we otherwise lay something bare in a chemical laboratory out of certain substances through reagents, which one only sees through these reagents. When the spiritual researcher describes this, he does so entirely from the perspective of thinking that is as exact as it is through the mathematical conscientiousness, mathematical thoroughness and mathematical sense of responsibility that he has acquired. Just as this mathematics is created from within the human being, but is valid for the external world, so too is that which occurs as the third result, by looking back to earlier lives on earth. This is achieved through the faculty of knowledge, which develops through a transformation of those soul forces that otherwise only appear in external life and there place themselves in life as a practical force.

Now, my dear audience, I have now described the results of spiritual science anthroposophy. By looking at what can be described in this way, one easily sees that it is truly not something that is merely theoretical, but something that must take hold of the whole human being, because today I have presented precisely those insights that relate directly to the human being himself. Certainly, not everyone can become a spiritual researcher, just as not everyone can become a chemist or an astronomer. But with the help of common sense it is quite possible to comprehend what astronomy, chemistry and physics teach. In the same way it is possible to comprehend with the help of common sense what the spiritual researcher brings up from the depths of the human soul, if only one does not wall oneself off from these things through scientific prejudices. But when it is brought up and becomes wisdom, then it also becomes life practice. And because I do not like to describe in general abstractions, I would like to show by concrete examples how these things become life practice when they flow into people by permeating them with the insights of anthroposophical spiritual science.

I have mentioned before how this anthroposophical spiritual science has been applied not as a worldview but as a way of life in the Waldorf School founded here in Stuttgart by Mr. Molt. This Waldorf School does not aim to instill a particular worldview in children; anyone who claims otherwise is slandering the Waldorf School. It is not a school of world view, but rather a school that seeks to take the whole person, mind and will, by making the spiritual-scientific impulses fruitful; that through the application of spiritual-scientific ideas, the mind, feelings and will are changed and strengthened. And the methodology of the Waldorf school is concerned with what the art of education can gain through this transformation of the soul, this strengthening of the will. We do not want to teach the children a specific content, but we want skill in the art of education, in the practice of life, to follow from what can be gained through anthroposophical spiritual science, from the way we handle education and teaching.

Now, I would like to show you a practical example of what applies to many areas, indeed to all areas of life in relation to spiritual science. When a child enters a Waldorf school, they are at an age that is of great social importance to those in the know. This phase of the child's life, from the beginning of the change of teeth to the beginning of sexual maturity, is the one we are called upon to foster through education and teaching in the Waldorf school. Above all, it has great social significance. The social question is not solved by institutions. Those people who think that if only this or that in life were organized in such and such a way, a satisfactory social order would come about, are indulging in social superstition. It is only with a certain melancholy that we can observe social or socialist experiments that only look to external institutions. No, human life is not primarily shaped by institutions, by any external circumstances. Human life is shaped by people themselves. Whether or not this human life can be a socially satisfactory entity does not depend on how we make the institutions, but on how people behave within the institutions. One should not speak of social institutes and institutions, but of socially minded [and socially acting] people. Therefore, when we look at the social question as a practical question in life today, we must, above all, find ways of instilling social sentiment and social understanding into the human soul. That is why the Federation for the Threefold Social Order calls for the social order to be structured into an independent spiritual life, an independent legal or state or political life, and an independent economic life, because it believes that by looking at these three aspects of the social organism in their independence, the forces that make them social beings can be drawn from them. But the independent spiritual life, to which the educational system in particular belongs to a great extent, is of very special importance for the shaping of the social organism.

I have often explained here how children up to the age of puberty are primarily imitative beings. I have explained how, especially towards the end of this period of life, towards puberty – it continues a little beyond that – the child's nature strives to reproduce in its own activity what is being done in its environment, and even what is being felt and thought in its environment. This changes with the change of teeth. Although imitation remains a force to be reckoned with by the teacher in elementary school until the eighth or ninth year, something of particular importance occurs. It occurs in the child's soul, which I have characterized as the effect of a natural sense of authority. One can argue whether this authority should be cultivated in school or not. If one looks through the natural necessities of existence, one can argue about this just as one can argue about whether one should light something somewhere if one wants a fire, or whether one should choose some other inappropriate activity for this. If someone does not want to light a fire for particular reasons but still wants a fire, that is an impossibility. And if someone wants to guide children in a certain way from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, then they must place teachers and educators alongside them, who will be their authority and whom the children will look up to as their natural leaders. And all the declaiming about lively lessons is worth less than realizing what it means for the child to be drawn to a truth, to an insight, to a moral impulse, to an aesthetic sensation because the revered teacher and educator is oriented towards these impulses. From the child's experience, from the experience of the educating, teaching adult through the child, a force arises that must be developed between the ages of seven and fourteen. If the child is to flourish, it must be developed in the same way that life during the day must be illuminated by sunlight. What we are touching on here is a vital necessity.

What is being cultivated here? — To recognize this, my dear audience, one must go through life in its entirety. One must not have that artificially fueled pedagogical worldview or philosophy of life that only looks at the child, but one must have such a worldview that encompasses the life of the whole human being. We must ask ourselves: How does a child's life relate to later stages of life? Just as the laws of physics can be studied and, when they occur rhythmically, the effect is sometimes far removed from the cause, so the connections between cause and effect also occur in human life. From what is experienced by the child's soul from the seventh to the fourteenth year, during which years it naturally has a sense of authority towards the revered teacher and educator, during which it absorbs, on the basis of authority, what the teacher exemplifies, the child develops something that then, so to speak, descends into the depths of life and only emerges again between the twentieth and thirtieth year of life. And what comes out of it? It comes out transformed, metamorphosed. What develops in the child's soul through authority alongside the revered teacher is transformed, element by element, into social feeling in the twenties – this becomes social practice in life. What we have acquired as children from the individual teachers we have come to revere to a greater or lesser extent, we transfer to our dealings with other people. Anyone who takes a look at how life is practiced today and sees how much that is unsocial is alive in our present time will see that this unsocial element is looking back at an inadequate pedagogical art that was unable to develop in those who are now in social life, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity, what I have just characterized. But this will be developed by someone who has allowed their will and mind to be stimulated by the impulses of spiritual science. This will be encouraged by a teacher who has digested spiritual science in such a way that it has become skill, art, and the ability to act in the outer world. We can see, then, what can be done for social life in a limited field, such as education and teaching, when one has an understanding of life — and one can only understand life when one also understands it in relation to its spiritual foundations. And so, ladies and gentlemen, it is the same in the most practical areas of life — I will show this in more detail.

I would like to begin with a contemporary statement, again not to be polemical, but to show how this connection between anthroposophical world view and practical life actually manifests itself. It is strange – Kurt Leese, who has a doctorate in theology, accuses me, precisely where he says that anthroposophy is annoying and ill-tempered, of having performed a brilliant feat in terms of concepts. Well, I will only mention the matter briefly – I have already dealt with the fact to which this refers on several occasions. Those who do not immediately understand the matter can also read about the facts in question in my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Puzzles of the Soul), where I have presented them in the appendix. After devoting thirty years of research to the matter, I was obliged to show how the human being is structured in threefoldness. This has nothing directly to do with the threefold social organism. It is not that I am playing with analogies, as I expressly stated in my book 'The Core Points'. But it is a fact: the human being is a threefold creature. He is a threefold creature when we look at him physically, mentally and spiritually. He is also a threefold being in his bodily constitution. First of all, he is a nervous-sensory human being. This is an organization that manifests itself primarily in the head, but which is spread throughout the whole human being. Secondly, the human being is permeated by a rhythmic organization. This rhythmic organization expresses itself particularly in the rhythm of breathing, in the rhythm of the heart and so on, but basically it is spread throughout the whole organism. Thirdly, the human being is a metabolic organism, which expresses itself particularly in the abdomen and in the limb system, where it is especially evident in the work of metabolism and in muscle movement; this metabolic organism shows itself, but it is spread throughout the whole human being. Now I had to say that if you want to understand something like this, you can't use such schematic concepts: the head is at the top of the human being, so you draw a line there, even if you don't literally cut off the head; the rhythmic being is in the middle, so you add a third part. Because that is not possible, because, to a certain extent, each of the systems permeates the other, one must therefore adopt a different structure for one's thoughts than the structure to which the present-day scholar, accustomed to the schematic and pedantic, is accustomed. That, says Leese, is a conceptual tour de force.

Now, today's thinking could learn a lot from scholasticism. I certainly have no external reason to be particularly friendly in this direction, but I am not concerned with merely repaying enmity with enmity. Despite all the attacks from a certain quarter, I must emphasize that even today's philosophers could learn an extraordinary amount from the inner discipline of the scholastics. If you have learned from scholasticism, if you have learned to be as elastic, as internally mobile, as unschematic with your thinking as reality is unschematic, then you have learned something with which you can not only schematize scientifically, but with which you can immerse yourself in life, because life, reality, practice, they demand elastic, mobile thinking. And when we enter into the most delicate ramifications of practical, commercial, and technical life, we can only do so if we have been educated to think flexibly and adaptably. If we look at today's routine practitioners of life, we see what has been neglected in this respect on the part of intellectual life.

Today's natural science places particular emphasis on becoming objective, on investigating things in such a way that the human being does not add or bring anything to the process when he or she summarizes the facts into laws. So one occupies oneself, and that in a certain area absolutely rightfully, with an external fact of nature, by taking as little consideration of the human as possible, by eliminating everything human when one speaks about nature. And it is only and alone in relation to natural science that the present age has grown great; there one excludes everything that is human feeling and human will. But today, because the naivety, the instinctive nature of social life in its transition to a conscious one, one must consciously approach social actions and social institutions with a practice of life. We have learned and are learning through all the popular instruction that is given to the people today only to know something that stands apart from the human mind, from the human will. But then, when we are supposed to reflect, consciously reflect, on how industrial, technical, social life is to be mastered and treated at all, we are supposed to face the mind, the will of the other person. Today, people learn a great science that does not extend to the mind and will, and then want to apply it in practice. But it does not contain what nature provides; in life we face other people, people with minds and wills. And now, because of the way we are educated, we are not accustomed to reflecting on the mind and will.

You see, that's where spiritual science comes in, which doesn't just focus on what is outside of the human being, but which places the human being at the center of the whole cosmos, which treats the whole person. Spiritual science is by no means unintellectual, it is thoroughly intellectual, but in such a way that the intellectual passes over into mind and will, seizing mind and will. That is why this spiritual science can also become directly social knowledge and thus social living science, that is, social life practice. Now, one gets to know something else: one gets to know the spiritual; through the spiritual-scientific impulses, one approaches the spiritual. In this way, one takes hold of the whole human being. If one studies natural science today, one learns to recognize the causal connection in nature. This is far removed from what the moral world order is, from what moral life forces are. In the classification of minerals, plants and animals, in the phenomena of clouds, in the course of the stars across the sky, we do not observe any moral life forces today, according to our scientific method. If we now begin to attack the practice of life with what we are accustomed to from this science, then we stand amateurishly, insensitively, towards our fellow human beings, because we cannot think ourselves into them, cannot imagine ourselves into the feelings and wills of people, and above all we cannot carry ethical, moral, spiritual into the practice of life. But since spiritual science encompasses the whole human being, the moral element is present in the whole human being at the same time. And we discover the moral element together with the theoretical. We do not found a worldview without permeating it with the moral element. In anthroposophy, we do not look out into a world that is an indifferent natural order, but we see a world that is permeated by the moral throughout, not by fantasizing the moral into it, but by seeing the moral emerging from its own order. We see this in past lives, where morality appears to us directly in its causal effect within the natural order, but belonging to our world order. This is what springs from spiritual science as a correct practice of life when it permeates the human being.

But this also deepens this practice of life with religious impulses, with religious warmth. Because when the intellectual leads to spiritual facts, when it is ethically permeated, then at the same time it is carried by religious impulses. And when a person approaches the practice of life with spiritual, moral and religious impulses, arising from an understanding of his own nature, then he alone will be able to have a healing effect on social life. For then he stands at the point which I have often characterized and which spiritual science wants to reach, at the point from which it can truly be said: the moral life and the theoretical, the scientific life become one; they grow together completely. And through the fact that the moral and the scientific life grow together, we do not have some spiritual thing into which we want to withdraw as escapists, we do not have a nebulous mysticism into which we want to flee – no, we have the spiritual as a living force in us, so that we carry it into material life. With the spiritual in us, we become conquerors of the material. We imbue the material with the spiritual. We do not become dreamy, unworldly mystics who live in a web of lies, but life-affirming spiritual scientists who immerse themselves in the practical, material side of life with that which is enlivened by the spiritual. For it is not the one who speaks of the lowliness of matter and wants to flee from it, who, as a nebulous mystic, flees to some nebulous spiritual realm, but the one who clings to the spirit and makes his impulses into impulses of life practice, who at every step of life knows how to carry the spirit into the material, into the outer practice of life.

This is precisely what meets with the most resistance today. The writings that are written against anthroposophy are gradually becoming countless. In one of the most recent writings we read a passage that characterizes their attitude very well. There we read that through anthroposophy and what is related to it, the sacred untouchedness of the eternal is fatally dragged down into the lowlands of the earthly-sensual and that in this way man is deprived of the best forces for his moral uplift. So these things are being put forward today. This has been proclaimed from a university professorial chair. It is even said that it would be a sin against the Holy Spirit if people were to be deprived of their best abilities in this way. Today people are being made aware that anthroposophy sins against humanity because it wants to educate the whole person, because it wants to bring the spirit into every aspect of life. This anthroposophy will not let up in its efforts to introduce the spirit into the practice of life. For, my dear audience, anyone who looks into today's social disaster and knows how to see through it with understanding knows that it is precisely from such views, which do not want to carry the supersensible out of its sacred inviolacy into the lowlands of earthly-sensual life, that today's unwholesomeness in the social order stems. We live in social chaos because those who have held the leadership have wanted to carry the sacred untouchedness with the spiritual up into a mystical fog, and have no sense or heart for carrying the spirit into the practice of life. He is therefore not present in the most important places of this practice of life.

If this means that I will be reproached for being polemical, I still want to tie in with one thing in order to truly characterize something other than what attacks the anthroposophical worldview. You see, in Dornach, as I have often mentioned, a center for anthroposophical spiritual science is being built. Inside, when it is finished, there will be a nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group that will represent the essence of the human being, but thoroughly translated into art. In the middle of this wooden group is a figure similar to Christ. This figure – I showed a photograph of the head of this figure in the lecture I gave here in the Kunsthaus, and those who saw this head at the time will also have seen that it is a truly idealized human head. Not hundreds, but thousands of people have seen the work being done on this group in Dornach. They have seen that what is involved here is a thoroughly idealized human head. The lower part is not yet finished; there is only a block of wood. Now the work has progressed a little, but until very recently there was only a block of wood. Now, among the many such things that have appeared recently, there is also a little book by not just a licentiate, but by a doctor of theology named Johannes Frohnmeyer. I would perhaps not mention the little book if it had not been published in Stuttgart – “Calwer Vereinsbuchhandlung”. Therefore I may mention it, even if I expose myself to the accusation that I call those opponents who objectively want to characterize spiritual science. I must mention what can be found on page 107 of this strange book. There it is said - not that the things were told to the author by someone, but as if they were objective facts:

A statue of ideal man is being sculpted in Dornach, nine meters high. Its features are 'Luciferian' at the top and bestially beastly at the bottom.

Such madness is being written today by a Doctor theologiae, namely D. L. Johannes Frohnmeyer. Now, I may be accused of desecrating the podium here by bringing up such things, when I openly call them lies. I would like to ask: What do those people desecrate who bring such untruths into the world in such ways? I would like to ask - in view of the fact that this man is also a lecturer and, through his missionary work, the teacher of countless people -: How much truth will there be in the teaching of a person who is so concerned with the truth? Today it is already important that we can carry the spirit of truthfulness into our view of life from our spiritual view, from being permeated by Christianity.

Now, my dear audience, this Frohnmeyer, this Kurt Leese and others, they keep coming back to us with the idea that there is all sorts of fiction in anthroposophy, all sorts of fantasies, all sorts of myths. Well, myths are something our opponents seem to be able to do, even if they are not particularly valuable, because they fantasize the most incredible things about anthroposophical spiritual science. It is a myth to say, in this case, that what is at the top of an idealized human head has luciferic features, and at the bottom even animal features – and it was just a piece of wood at the bottom. Those who see in what is in Dornach remind me of an anecdote I once heard about the way certain people examine their state of mind when they come home in the evening. They lie down in bed, and in front of them is a top hat. If they see the top hat once, they feel sober; if they see the top hat twice, they know they are drunk. I believe that you can only make up myths like that about anthroposophical spiritual science if you see the top hat twice. And I would like to point out how, especially with regard to practical life, the realistic basis of spiritual science must be emphasized. And how little people appreciate this sense of reality is sufficiently demonstrated by such an example. Therefore, in a sense, one can be reassured when thick books today conclude with:

Theosophy...

- one means anthroposophy, because wherever the word theosophy appears in the book, it is meant to be anthroposophy, as stated in the preface, for the sake of general comprehensibility.

Like all forms of mythology, Theosophy is a tragedy of the mind.

Now, dear assembled guests, let me say it in conclusion: the one who has learned to research according to the pattern of the strictest mathematical experience and yet ascends to all heights of spiritual life and descends into all depths of the soul, who has learned to research as one must research in real spiritual science, will a certain sadness see how in many cases today the paths to practical life are blocked for spiritual science because it is not approached with a sense of truth but rather with myth-making, in that myths are invented about it in order to be able to defame it. On the other hand, however, we can also rely on the fact that truth will ultimately prevail against all those who, even in an idealized figure of Christ, see Luciferic traits above and animalistic traits below. The truth must prevail. And one day in the future – one can trust this with reassurance – it will be shown whether anthroposophy is really a mythology and therefore a tragedy of thought, or whether everything that many opponents, sometimes even well-meaning ones, still bring forward against it today will be revealed, not as a tragedy of thought, but as a comedy of thought.

Preliminary note: During the first three-week “Anthroposophical College Course” (September 26 to October 16, 1920 in Dornach), at which 30 representatives of various disciplines gave lectures in addition to Rudolf Steiner, Three evenings of conversation also took place, on October 4, 6 and 15, 1920. During these so-called “Conversations on Spiritual Science,” questions on any topic could be asked, to which Rudolf Steiner then responded in more or less detail. The stenographers did not record the conversation evenings in their entirety, and there are gaps in some of them.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! I imagine that today, in a kind of conversation, we will discuss all kinds of questions and the like that arise in one or other of the honored listeners in connection with what has been developed here in recent days as anthroposophy. Although, as I have endeavored to arrange, you will be offered a hundred lectures during these three weeks, it is not possible to do more than touch on individual topics in outline. What can be given to you here can only be suggestions at first, but these suggestions may perhaps show that the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science meant here is no less well founded

Asa is more firmly grounded than that which is taken from the external life of today's strict science, yes, that it absorbs all the methodical discipline of this science and also perceives that which stands as a great demand of the time, the demand for further development. This demand for further development arises from the fact that those impulses of scientific life, in particular, which have produced great things in the past epoch, are now in the process of dying out and would have to lead to the decline of our civilization if a new impetus were not to come.

The suggestions that have now been made for such a new impact can certainly be expanded in a variety of directions in the context of a discussion such as the one taking place today, and I would now like to ask you to contribute to this expansion. Please ask questions, express your wishes and in general put forward anything you wish to say. The questions can best be put in writing, and I ask you to make good use of this opportunity.

Mr. Conrad: The question I have to ask relates to a therapeutic area. In his lectures, Dr. Steiner pointed to certain illnesses that are currently occurring very frequently. There are certain mental disorders in this regard for which I would be grateful for an answer about the deeper causes. These are mainly speech disorders. I would like to point out that I am not motivated by personal interests, but am only asking to the extent that pedagogical interests are involved. Teachers have often asked me what to do about speech disorders. However, since this question touches on the field of therapy, I do not want to encourage questions that only concern illnesses. I would be very grateful for an answer because this question seems to be very pressing at the moment.

Rudolf Steiner: Perhaps we can start by answering this question. When something specific like this comes up, we must of course bear in mind that such specific disturbances in the human organism can have the most diverse causes and that it is extremely difficult to talk about these things in general if we want to get to the real cause. In all such matters, my esteemed audience, it is actually a matter of using spiritual science to enable one to assess the individual case in the right way. And here I would like to say something that perhaps has a much more general significance than this question requires.

You see, we live in an age of abstraction, in an age when people love to reduce the manifold world, the multiform world, to a few formulas, when people love to establish abstract laws that encompass vast areas of existence. They can only do so in an abstract way, ignoring the individual. Spiritual science will have to bring about a significant change in this direction in particular. It will indulge less in simplifying the manifold existence and will bring insights about the concrete spiritual. But by approaching the concrete spiritual, one's soul is stimulated in such a way that the ability to observe and judge is strengthened and invigorated. This will become apparent in people's general social interaction. A large part of the social question today actually lies in the fact that we no longer have any inclination to really get to know the person we pass by, because our inner being does not have the kind of stimuli that enable us to properly grasp the individual, the particular. Here spiritual science will achieve something different. Spiritual science will enrich our inner life again, enabling it to grasp the particular. And so our powers of observation and discrimination and all that will be particularly developed. Therefore, we will have less desire for abstract generalizations, but more desire for the particular, the individual. In a sense, we will adhere more to the exemplary than to the abstract. And especially when dealing with something like physical disorders, with speech disorders, one must say: almost every single case is different – it is of course a slight exaggeration, but still generally valid – almost every single case is different, and at least one must distinguish typical ones.

We must be clear about the fact that some of the things that cause speech disorders are, of course, organically determined, that is, in a certain way, based on the inadequate development of this or that organ. But a whole series of such disorders in the present day are due to the fact that the human being's spiritual and soul forces are not being developed in the right way. And it may even be said that if a proper development of the spiritual and mental abilities of the human being can be achieved through education in childhood, at a time when the human organism is still pliable, then organic disorders can also be overcome to a certain extent; they can be overcome more easily than at a later age, when the body is more solidified. Our entire education system has gradually become more and more abstract. Our pedagogy does not suffer from bad principles. In general, if we look at the abstract treatment of pedagogical principles, we can see that we had great and significant achievements in the 19th century. And if you look at today's abstract way of applying how to do this or that in school, you have to say that 19th-century pedagogy really means something quite tremendous. But the art of responding to the individual child, of noticing the particular development of the individual child, is something that has been lost in modern times through the rush towards intellectuality and abstraction. To a certain extent, we are no longer able to strengthen the child's soul and spirit in the right way through abstract education. Do not think that when such a demand is made, it is only to point to a one-sided, unworldly education of soul and spirit – oh no. It may seem paradoxical today, but it is actually the case that materialism has had the tragic fate of being unable to cope with material phenomena. The best example of this is that we have such psychological theories as psycho-physical parallelism. On the one hand, we have human corporeality, which is only known from the point of view of anatomy, which only learns from the corpse; on the other hand, we have theories about the soul and spirit that are imagined up or even only live in words , and then one reflects on how this soul-spiritual, which bears no resemblance to the physical body, how this soul-spiritual is to affect the physical body. Spiritual science will lead precisely to the fact that one will be able to deal with the physical in a concrete way, that one will know such things as those which I already hinted at yesterday in the lecture and whose importance I would like to mention again here: From birth until the second set of teeth has come through, something is at work in us as human beings that we can call a sum of equilibrium forces that organize us thoroughly, and something that is mobile forces, that are life forces. This is particularly strong in our organism within this human age. What is at work in the human being is what really, I would say, pushes out the second teeth, what finds its conclusion in the pushing out of the second teeth, what, for its effectiveness in the organism, comes to a certain degree - it continues, of course - but comes to a certain degree to a conclusion with the appearance of the second teeth. It then transforms into what we can call mathematical, geometric thinking, what we can call thinking about the equilibrium conditions in space, thinking about the conditions of movement in space, what we can call finding oneself in the conditions of life in space and in time. We study what emerges from this, what passes, as it were, from a state of latency into a state of freedom, when it has just been released. There it is, as spiritual soul, as a very concrete spiritual soul, as we see it growing up in the child, when the change of teeth begins and continues into the later years of life. And now we look at this and see: what is spiritual and soul-like has an organizing effect in the body during the first seven years of life. And again, we study the connection between the spiritual and soul-like and the physical organization when we consider what the human being can then experience - albeit consciously only in inspiration - that is, what he experiences with ordinary consciousness, but still unconsciously, in the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity. It is more of an immersion into physical corporeality, where in its course, first of all, as the most important phenomenon – but there are others as well – it awakens the love instinct, where it marks the end, for example, with the change of voice in the male sex, and with somewhat broader effects in the female sex. What we recognize when we observe the development of the emotional world, and when we observe, for example, something like the development of the sense of music, especially at the time when the emotional world is developing, we study this again as the connection between the soul and spiritual life and the physical organization from the seventh to the fourteenth or fifteenth year.

In short, spiritual science does not ask the abstract question: How does the soul affect the body?, but rather it studies the concrete soul, it knows that one must look at the concrete soul at certain ages and how it affects the body in other ages. Thus it transforms the abstract and therefore so unsatisfactory method of treatment of today's psychology and physiology into very concrete methods. And in the further course, one then comes to the point where one can not only determine in general through spiritual science: in the first seven years of life, equilibrium, movement, and life force are at work; but one can also specialize in how this spiritual force expresses itself in the organs, how it works in the lungs, heart, liver, and so on; one has the opportunity to really look into the human body in a living way. In this way, the knowledge of the material turns out to be quite different from what materialism can [recognize]. The peculiar thing about materialism is that it devotes itself to a false, namely an abstract, a deducted spirituality. The peculiar thing about spiritual science is that it is precisely able to assess the material in the right way. Of course, it also goes in the right way to the spiritual on the other side. More and more clearly should we fight the opinion, which starts from nebulous mystics, that spiritual science is something that deals with phantasms in general talk. No, spiritual science deals precisely with the concrete and wants to provide a view of how the spiritual and soul life works down into the individual organs. For it is only by getting to know the workings of the spiritual in a concrete way in the material existence that one recognizes the material existence. But through such a concrete penetration into the human organism, one gradually acquires — through a kind of imagination, inspiration and so on — an ability, I would say a gift, to really see the individual and then to be able to judge where any particular fault lies, for example, when speech disorders are present. At a certain childlike age, it will be possible to influence the development of the speech organs through special speech exercises. The important thing is to be able to observe what physical disorders may be present at the right age. And although all kinds of obstacles are present simply due to external circumstances – after all, today only that which is officially certified in this direction is recognized and allowed to be practiced in any way – although all kinds of obstacles are present, we can still say that, for example, some beautiful results have been achieved in the case of speech disorders simply by rhythmic speech exercises were carried out, that the particular defect was recognized, and that the person with the defective speech organism was then allowed to recite things in this or that speech rhythm, always repeating them, and that he was then instructed to place himself in the rhythmic process of these or those tones, feeling them particularly. In this direction one can achieve very significant improvements or at least relief from such disorders. But something else is also possible. For example, in the case of speech disorders, one can work particularly on regulating the respiratory process, a regulation of the respiratory process that must, however, be completely individual. This regulation of the breathing process can be achieved by letting the person you are treating develop a feeling between the internal repetition, or perhaps just thinking, but broad thinking, slow thinking of certain word connections [and the breathing process]. The peculiar thing is that if you form such word connections in the right way, then, by surrendering to such a rhythm of thought or inner rhythm of words, you convey a feeling to the person being treated: With this word and its course, its slow or fast course, you notice it in your breathing, it changes in this or that way, and you follow that. In a certain way, you make him aware of what arises as a parallel phenomenon to breathing for speech. You make him aware of it. And when he can then tell you something about it, you try to help him further, so that once he has become aware of the breathing process, he gradually reaches the point where he can consciously snap into it himself, I would even say in word contexts that he forms during this breathing process, which he can now consciously follow in a certain way, in an appropriate manner.

So you have to think of it this way: by first giving rhythms, which, depending on how the matter lies, are to be thought inwardly, murmured, whispered or recited aloud, you cause the person in question to notice a change in breathing. Now he knows that the breath changes in this way. And now he is, in a sense, forbidden from using the very word or thought material that has been given to him. He is made aware that he is now forming something similar within himself, and then he comes up with the idea of consciously paralleling this entire inner process of thinking or speaking or inwardly hearing words with the breathing process, so that a certain breathing always snaps into an inner imagining or inner hearing of words. In this way, a great deal of what I would call a poor association between the processes that are more mental, more soul-like, in speaking, and those processes that take place in the organism as more material, as physical processes, is balanced out. All of this has a particularly favorable effect when applied in the right childhood period. And it can be said that if our teachers were better psychologists, if they really had a concrete knowledge of the human body from the spirit, they would be able to work with speech disorders in a completely different way, especially in a pedagogical way.

Now, what I have mentioned can also be developed into a certain therapy, and it can also be used to achieve many favorable results for later stages of life. But it seems to me to be of particular importance – and here we could already point to certain successes that have been achieved in this direction – that such things can be cured by a particularly rational application of the principle of imitation. But then one must have a much more intimate, I might say subjective-objective knowledge of the whole human organism and its parts.

You see, people speak to each other in life; but they are hardly aware of the, I would say imponderable, effects that are exerted from person to person when speaking. But these effects are there nevertheless. We have become so abstract today that we actually only listen to the other person's intellectual content. Very few people today have a sense of what is actually meant when a person with a little more psychic-organic compassion feels, after speaking to another, how he consciously carries the other person's speech to a high degree in his own speech organism. Very few people today have any sense of what is experienced in this respect when one has to speak in succession with four, five or six people, one of whom is coughing, the second hoarse, the third shouting, the fourth speaking quite unintelligibly, and so on, because one's own organism is also involved; it vibrates along with everything, it experiences it all. And if you develop this feeling of experiencing speech, you certainly acquire a strong feeling, I might say, for defense mechanisms too. The peculiar thing is that it is precisely in the case of such things, which are so closely connected with the subjectivity of the human being as speech disorders, that one then finds out how one has to speak to someone who suffers from speech disorders, how one has to speak to him so that he can achieve something through imitation. I have met stutterers; if you have been able to empathize with their stuttering and then spoken to them rhythmically by name, then you could get them to really achieve something like forgetting their stuttering, by running after what is spoken to them, so to speak. However, you then have to be able to develop human compassion to the point where it is organic. In therapy, an enormous amount depends on the ability to make the patient forget the subjective experience associated with some objective process. And in particular, for example, a real remedy for speech disorders is, if the time between the ages of seven and fourteen is used correctly, by lovingly encouraging those with speech disorders to engage in the kind of imitation just described. It is often the case that one experiences that stutterers sometimes cannot pronounce three words properly without stumbling, cannot say three words

properly one after the other. If you give them a poem to recite that they can become completely absorbed in, that they can love, and if you stand behind it as it were as an attentive listener, then they can say whole long series of verses without stuttering. Creating such opportunities for them to do something like this is something that is a particularly good therapeutic tool from a psychological point of view. It is a bad thing to point out such defects to people, no matter what the reason. I had a poet friend who always lost his temper when someone tactless pointed out his stammering. When someone tactfully asked him, “Doctor, do you always stammer like that?” he replied, “No, only when I am confronted with someone who is thoroughly unpleasant to me.” Of course, I would have had to stutter terribly now if I had really wanted to imitate the way this answer was given.

But then, little by little, one will recognize what a significant remedy can be found in eurythmy for such and similar defects in the human organism. Eurythmy can be studied from two sides, as it were. I always draw attention to this in the introductions to the performances. I show how the speech organism and its movement tendencies can be perceived through sensory and supersensory observation of the human being today, and how these are then transferred to the whole human organism. However, the reverse approach is no less important. For, as has been very well presented to you today from a different point of view by Dr. Treichler, in the development of speech, a primeval eurythmy of human beings undoubtedly and most certainly plays a very significant role. Things do not have the sound within them, as it were, in the sense that the bim-bam theory asserts, but there is a relationship between all things, between the whole macrocosm and the human organization, this microcosm, and basically everything that happens externally in the world can also be reproduced in a certain way in movement by the human organization. And so, basically, we constantly tend to recreate all phenomena through our own organism. We do this not only with the physical organism, but also with the etheric organism. The etheric organism is in a state of perpetual eurythmy. Primitive man was much more mobile than he is today. You know, this development from mobility to stillness is still reflected in the fact that in certain circles it is considered a sign of education to behave as phlegmatically as possible when speaking and to accompany one's speech with as few gestures as possible. It is “considered” a mark of certain speakers that they always keep their hands in their trouser pockets, so that they do not make any gestures with their arms, because it is considered an expression of particularly good speech delivery when one stands still like a block. But what is caricatured here only corresponds to humanity's progression from mobility to stillness. We have to recognize a transition from a gestural language, from a kind of eurythmy, to phonetic language at the very bottom of human development in primeval times. That which has come to rest in the organism has specialized in the organs of speech, and has naturally first actually developed the organs of speech. Just as the eye is formed by light, so the speech organ is formed by a language that is initially soundless. And if we are aware of all these connections, we will gradually be able to use eurythmy particularly well by introducing it properly into the didactic process, in order to counteract anything that could interfere with speech. And in this direction, if there is even a little leisure time, it will be a very appealing task to develop our current, more artistic and pedagogically trained eurythmy more and more towards the therapeutic side and to create a kind of eurythmy therapy that will then extend in particular to such therapeutic demands as the one we have been talking about here. I am not sure whether what I have said is already exhaustive, but I wanted to address it briefly. Of course, as questions accumulate, the level of detail in the answers will have to decrease.

A participant asks how the movement of eurythmy is meant in relation to the ether body, and whether, according to spiritual scientific research, it has the same form as the body. Is the ether body localized at the larynx?

Did the Hungarians, who were recently observed by Dr. Steiner playing cards in a Hungarian border town, themselves fall under the tables or only their etheric bodies? Was this a process that could only be observed in the etheric body?

Rudolf Steiner: Please understand me correctly. Eurythmy is such that it can be performed in the physical body and through the physical body, which otherwise only the etheric body of the human being can perform. The fact that a person as a eurythmist performs the movements studied in the ether body with his physical body does not mean that the person who stands there doing eurythmy when he has some horrible thought is not carrying out this horrible thought with his ether body. He can perform the most beautiful movements with his outer, physical body, and then the etheric body, following his emotions, may dance in a rather caricature-like manner. But those people I characterized the other day as being at the Hungarian border playing cards were, of course, characterized entirely on the basis of their physical behavior. I only said that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit, the passions that led them to do such things above and below the table, and that one could study these passions in the soul and spirit.

I would like to say the following. It is generally the case, when you look at a person at rest, that the etheric body is calm and only slightly larger than the physical body. But this is only because, schematically speaking, the physical body has a dilating effect on the etheric body of the human being in all directions. If the etheric body were not held in its form by the physical body, if it were not banished from the physical body, then it would be a very mobile being. The etheric body has the inherent possibility of moving in all directions, and in addition, in an awakened state, it is under the constant influence of the mobile astral, which follows everything of a spiritual nature. The etheric body in itself is therefore something thoroughly mobile. As a painter, for example, one has the difficulty when one wants to paint something ethereal, that one must paint, I would say, as if one could paint lightning. One must translate the moving into stillness. So at the moment when you step out of the physical world, at that moment the concept of distance also ceases to apply, along with all the things that actually only relate to resting space; all that ceases, and a completely different kind of imagining begins. A form of imagining begins that can actually only be characterized by saying that it relates to the ordinary imagining of spatial things as a suction effect relates to a pressure effect. One is drawn into the matter instead of touching it and so on. This is how it is with the relationship between the etheric body and the physical body.

A participant (also speaking for others): Dear attendees, prompted by discussions with many friends, I would like to ask a few questions that may express some of what has been going through many minds and hearts over the past week. We have heard that young students in particular can hear and learn many things here that need to be carried out into our people to build a new culture. Now, in the midst of all the problems that are being discussed here, the question of the fate of our German people often arises. How must our youth place themselves in the context of the fate of our German people if they want to fulfill their inner duties in the right way and of their own free will? Just as Fichte brought forth great and powerful thoughts a hundred years ago, so too are we receiving powerful thoughts today, the realization of which we long for. In wide circles, at least in those circles that are close to the threefold order, the view prevails today that this threefold order will also be realized without intensive work, that it can thus come about all by itself, so to speak, even if people contribute nothing to it.

Now I would like to raise the question: What will actually be the fate of our nation if this fatalistic attitude prevails in our circles – which is, of course, very easily explained from our overall cultural development – and if it is not replaced by the courageous will that is wanted from here? Today one often hears that it is possible that Bolshevism will spread even further, that it is possible that anarchic conditions in Germany will continue to spread. How should we position ourselves in the face of these questions, when this fatalistic element, which I have tried to describe, is confronted with the courageous, forward-storming will?

A second question: we are talking here about anthroposophy, about human wisdom. Now the question has been repeatedly asked in recent days: what would the whole world view actually look like if one did not start from the point of view of the anthroposophist, but if one started from the point of view of some other consciousness? We know from Dr. Steiner's lectures, but also from other lectures, that the three lower realms, that is, the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are actually the brothers of man who have remained behind. How would this now present itself if we were to relate man again to the higher hierarchy, for example to the angelic beings? Is it conceivable that what is presented from a human point of view today as anthroposophy might be presented from the point of view of a higher consciousness, that is, from the point of view of an angelic consciousness - one could perhaps speak of an angeloisophy in this context - and how would the problems appear from this point of view? I ask this question because it has repeatedly come up in our conversations in recent days.

A third question: From the previous remarks by Dr. Steiner, it is clear that eurythmy is extremely important from a therapeutic point of view. Now I would like to point out that if we observe certain things today, things that appear to be trivial, we can see how absolutely necessary eurythmy is from a different point of view. Even in certain children's toys, we can see how certain forces appropriate to the present time want to come out, push towards manifestation. [There follows a reference to diabolo games and toys that were introduced by French and American soldiers in particular.] Do such toys not show certain forces that pull downwards? Is there not something in them that expresses forces that are polar to human nature, perhaps a hint of the devilish? And so I wanted to raise the question: Is it not possible that the harmful aspects of these or other materialistic games given to children today could be overcome through eurythmy? Just yesterday in children's eurythmy we had a living example of how children can respond to eurythmy in an ingenious way and then reject everything that is contained in such games.

Rudolf Steiner: I will try to answer the questions briefly, although each one would require a lecture in itself. However, I would ask you to bear in mind that if one says something in a brief answer to a question, it is of course easy for some inaccuracies or misunderstandings to arise.

First of all, the question of the fate of the German people: it is true that today an enormous sense of fatalism is emerging within broad sections of the German people. This fatalistic mood can be observed on a large scale and in detail. And this fatalistic mood was also, I might say tragically there when we began in April of last year in Stuttgart to seek understanding for the threefold social organism and for the upliftment of what lies in such a terrible way, that comes from this understanding. But on the other hand, it must be said that we have arrived at a very special point in the development of humanity. I must frankly admit that when I was invited by the Anthroposophical student group in Stuttgart to give a lecture for the students of the Technical University in their assembly hall, I was still under the impression of Spengler's book “The Decline of the West”. Yes, my dear audience, we have come to the point where today we can prove the decline in a strictly methodical way. Now, Spengler's book is by no means a talentless book. On the contrary, in many respects it is extraordinarily ingenious. What is presented there testifies to nothing other than this: if only the forces of which Spengler is aware were to be effective in the future – he is not aware of anthroposophy, but, as can be seen from some of his writing, he would probably turn red with rage just hearing about it — if only what Spengler knows remains effective, then the downfall of Western civilization would be absolutely certain well into the second millennium. Just let everything that has developed in humanity be effective — the downfall is certain. Just as a human being ages when he has reached a certain number of years and is heading towards death, so this culture is heading towards death. What people like Spengler do not know is what has developed in the successive cultural periods, which you will find described in my “Occult Science”.

In the first cultural period — I have called it the primeval Indian period — there was a primeval culture based on the wisdom of the time. Some of this has already been characterized in these lectures. From this there was an inheritance in the next age, in the ancient Persian, in the Zarathustra culture; from there, in turn, diluted into that age, what can be called the Egyptian-Chaldean culture, the third period, which closes approximately in the 8th century BC before the Mystery of Golgotha. Then very little goes into the fourth period, where Plato still lets his teaching and his writings be steeped in ancient mystery wisdom, but where naturalism and intellectualism already begin with Aristotle. During this period, in which human original wisdom is already beginning to decline, Christianity is founded. The Mystery of Golgotha is still understood with the last original wisdom. But as this ancient wisdom itself fades, it finally becomes modern theology, which either degenerates into a material dogmatism and church belief or into a description of Jesus as a simple man from Nazareth, in whom the Christ, the Christ-being, has been completely lost. But of course a new understanding of Christianity itself must come. The origin of Christianity extends into this fourth period, and from the point of view of Primordial Wisdom, it extends a little into our fifth period. The fifth period is the one in which Primordial Wisdom disappears, is paralyzed, and in which man must find a new spirituality from within himself. All talk about this spirituality coming from outside is in vain for the future. In the future, the gods must speak through the human soul. Today, the question is not addressed to any other power of the soul than to our will alone. That is to say, today it is a matter for all mankind to thoroughly overcome fatalism and consciously absorb spirituality into the will. This mission has already fallen to the German people to a very considerable extent. Anyone who studies this in more detail, by looking at the great figures of the German people, will notice how this people in particular has the mission to reshape its world, I would say its social world, out of its will, despite all the hardship and all the terrible things that are now unfolding within this people. Only for the time being there is no awareness of the actual facts and the great world-historical context.

I would like to do as I sometimes like to do, not just give my own opinion, but refer to the opinion of someone else, Herman Grimm, who certainly cannot be said to have been a Bolshevik or anything of the sort. As early as the 1880s, Herman Grimm wrote that the greatness of the German people is not based on its princes or its governments, but on its intellectual giants. But it may also be said that this is precisely what has been most misunderstood and most forgotten. Today there is a significant fact that one must only properly observe. Take the general intellectual life, untouched by a real spiritual upsurge. Study it as it lives itself out in popular literature, be it in Berlin, Vienna or elsewhere – I am not just talking about after the war here, but long before the war. study how it is lived out in Berlin, Vienna, Munich, Cologne, Hamburg, Bremen and so on, study it in popular literature, especially in newspaper literature, which can be said to represent the opinions of a very large number of people. Yes, especially during the war, it turned out that sometimes people also remembered that there was a Goethe, that there was a Schiller, that there was a Fichte – yes, even Fichte's sayings were quoted. But the fact of the matter is this: anyone today who has a feeling, a real receptivity for the inner structure, for the direction, for the whole signature of intellectual life, knows that what was written in the 20th century in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig was more similar to what was written in Paris, Chicago, New York, and London than to what a Herder, a Goethe, or a Fichte felt vibrating through their souls.

This fact is widely misunderstood. What Central Europe's greatness is actually based on has been forgotten. Once we describe figures like Frederick the Great according to the truth, not according to legend, then some of it will melt away in the face of the real intellectual greatness in Central Europe. And this must come. We must learn again, not just to quote the words of Fichte, not just to quote the words of Goethe, but to be able to live again in what lived at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. And we must become aware that only through the individual shaping of the peoples differentiated across the earth can something of what is to be achieved be achieved – not, however, by some unified culture emanating from some side, which is a Western culture, and one that is justified only for the West, has flooded Central Europe, not through the fault of the West alone, but above all because Central Europe allowed itself to be flooded and accepted everything. And this awareness of what is at stake is what must be spread today by those who mean well.

Dear attendees, I knew an Austrian poet; I met him when he was already very old: his name is Fercher von Steinwand. He wrote many important works that unfortunately have remained unknown.

I will just add what I wrote in my booklet [1895] about Nietzsche, a fighter against his time. Right at the beginning, I quoted a saying of Nietzsche that actually deserves to be better known: the saying that Nietzsche wrote down when he served in the Franco-Prussian War, albeit as a military hospital attendant. There he wrote [about the terrible, dangerous consequences of the victorious war and called it a delusion that German culture had also triumphed; this delusion posed the danger of transforming victory into complete defeat,] yes, into the extirpation of the German spirit in favor of the German Reich. In recent decades, when people spoke of the extirpation of the spirit, they understood little of this, if they spoke of the will to let this spirit flow in again.

And when all this is taken into account, it is necessary to recall what Fichte felt and what he expressed so magnificently in his “Addresses to the German Nation”: that the gods serve the will of men, that they work through the will of self-aware men.

And after Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and others, it is precisely this German nation that should be aware that the will must arise, but that will must be imbued with spirituality. What strange mental wanderings this German nation has gone through. There are many things that can be recalled that are only rarely presented in external history.

I advise everyone to buy the Reclam booklet by Wilhelm von Humboldt: “Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State”. You will see how much of it is already contained in the middle part of the threefold social organism, the legal, state part. Of course, the threefolded social organism is not in it, but what can be said about the state itself is there. In this writing, Wilhelm von Humboldt attempts to protect the individual against the state, against the increasing power of the state in the intellectual and economic realms. Wilhelm von Humboldt was Prussian Minister of Education from 1809 to 1819 – one almost dare not say this in view of what happened afterwards.

And so many more examples could be given. What is necessary, above all, is that those who feel this question before their soul really let history come to life in them. My dear audience, as an Austrian, one has a very special feeling for this when one gets to know the school history books of northern Central Europe. In 1889, I came from Vienna to Weimar to work on the publication of Goethe's works at the Weimar Goethe-Schiller Archive. And since I had previously been involved in education and teaching, I was also given the friendly task of guiding the director of the Goethe-Schiller Archive's boys a little. They were then in high school, and it was only then that I got to know their history books a little – I hadn't taken that into account before – starting with the creation of the world and going up to the development of the Hohenzollern dynasty, and only then the actual world history. Several textbooks presented it this way, one being roughly the same as the other. But is it not always a mere radicalism when speaking in this way, but sometimes it is also the right love for the German nation. And the right love, if it can really come through spiritual-scientific stimulation, will in turn give rise to a culture of the will from mere fatalism, and that is what matters. Unless we grasp this either/or, either destruction or ascent through our own will, we will not escape destruction. Of course, ascent will not come, but something quite different. Well, I could say a lot more about this topic, but perhaps that's enough for now. We'll see each other more often.

Regarding the question: What would our world view look like from the standpoint of a different consciousness, for example, an angelic consciousness?

Well, in a certain sense, spiritual science describes completely different forms of consciousness, such forms of consciousness that people had in the earlier stages of development, or such forms of consciousness that one can ascend to through inspiration or imagination. So, in a certain sense, one learns through spiritual science to recognize what the world view of another consciousness is. But as far as the question of an angelic consciousness is concerned, ladies and gentlemen, it is very important that we do not choose more abstract questions than are necessary for a certain, I would say elasticity, of our conceptual ability. Because, you see, we do not have our consciousness to satisfy ourselves with all kinds of sensational news from the most diverse worlds, but so that we can go through our overall human development through its development. And the angels have their consciousness precisely so that they can undergo angelic development. And if someone were to ask what the world would look like with a different consciousness, it would be like someone asking me how a person would eat if they had a beak instead of a mouth. It is a textbook example of moving out of concreteness and into abstraction. Anthroposophy is supposed to achieve precisely that, to remain within the realm of experience and to extend it only

extended only to the spiritual world, that one is always ready to broaden one's experience, but not that one constructs all kinds of questions out of pure abstractness. It is not at all necessary for us to speculate in any way about angelic consciousness or mammalian consciousness or the like, but it is necessary for us to simply abandon ourselves to experience. It gives us the input into our consciousness that we need for our orientation and for our further development in the world. And that is what we have to learn from anthroposophy: to remain within the sphere that concerns us as human beings, because that is where we make appropriate progress.

This is connected with the question I heard here just now, which is asked incredibly often: what is the ultimate goal of human development in the first place?

What is the ultimate purpose of human life, or rather of life?

You see, it is precisely in relation to such questions that spiritual science must be approached not in an abstract but in a concrete way. If you had no possibility of getting a timetable for the journey to Rome here in Dornach, but only as far as Lugano, and you knew that you could get a further timetable in Lugano to go on to Florence, and from there on to Rome, one would do well not to refrain from the journey or to speculate about how I have to organize the journey from here to Rome, but to travel first to Lugano, and then see how things go from there. It is the same with human life, especially if one knows that there are repeated earthly lives. If I now tell you something about the goal of all human life here with the abilities that one can have in this one earth life, then it could indeed be something more perfect next time and then one could answer more completely how one gets the timetable to Rome. So one has to take into account what is immediately given in the concrete, and one must know that human life is in a state of perpetual development. So one cannot ask about its ultimate purpose, but only about the direction of development in which one is moving. If you really look into it, there is truly a lot to be done for the physical, soul and spiritual life. And this path to Lugano is not quite close – I now mean the path in the development of humanity – and how that will continue, we want to leave that to the more fully developed abilities of the future. In short, it is a matter of remaining in the concrete, bit by bit, and of getting rid of the abstractness that also gives birth to such questions. Now, something else is needed here about eurythmy:

Can eurythmy, when used correctly, bring important achievements for our folk culture to light?

Yes, dear readers. From some of the comments I have already made about eurythmy, you will be able to see that eurythmy can have a great pedagogical-didactic significance. If you are convinced of this, and if you are not not only believe it but also recognize that it can even help to alleviate disturbances in life through appropriate eurythmic didactics, then there is much more that can be brought into the right channels in social life through healthy eurythmy. But of course one thing needs to be noted in this regard. You see, we should be able to take this eurythmy into children's play. The esteemed questioner spoke of children's toys and asked whether eurythmy could not be used for a lot of things. And it was also asked whether eurythmy can have a healing effect on children aged five to seven who suffer from epilepsy.

It can certainly do so if it is applied in the right way. Admittedly, we are only just beginning with eurythmy. But the continuation of this beginning does not always depend only on the intellectual momentum. For example, we had intended to build a kind of eurythmeum in Stuttgart to begin with, because of course the Waldorf School is there, and later here in the building itself. You really need opportunities if these things are to be developed bit by bit. You cannot pursue these things without practising them, without having the necessary premises and also the necessary connection with the rest of human culture; you cannot pursue these things out of the blue. It would have been terribly expensive to build a eurythmy in Stuttgart and we only had a small sum of money together. Perhaps I may say the following about this. In the first year, through the dedicated work of our Waldorf teachers, which cannot be sufficiently recognized, we really achieved everything possible for the Waldorf School in the first year. Although, in spiritual and psychological terms, everything that could be expected has been achieved – it is fair to say this without being immodest – this year began with extraordinary worries for those who were sincere about the Waldorf School. It is a fact that the Waldorf School had to be enlarged because a large number of children came from outside; the number of children has more than doubled compared to the previous year. We were facing a very considerable deficit, and the fund that we had for a eurythmy school was first eaten up by the Waldorf School. It is only natural that the Waldorf School should take this on, but it means that we cannot build a eurythmy school. What lets us down is people's lack of understanding. Nowadays people are willing to understand anything, except for work that comes out of the truly concrete soul and spiritual life. I do not want to be polemical here, but I could tell you many things that would show you the dilettantism and the philosophical emptiness that is added to it today, as it performs a few somersaults before all possible reactionary powers in the world. We do not easily find the understanding of those who could do something on the material side to help things move forward. And anyone who wants the didactic, pedagogical, and especially the folk-pedagogical side of eurythmy and other aspects of a spiritual-scientific art of education to be further developed must ensure that understanding of what is actually intended is drawn into as many minds and as many souls as possible, with what is asserted here as anthroposophical spiritual science.

Question: It is often mentioned in spiritual science that those or those of the higher hierarchies have gone through their stage of humanity in these or other circumstances. What does stage of humanity mean in this sense, that is, the goal of human development? Is the goal set as the development of the I, of freedom, which freedom is denied to the higher hierarchies? So what is the stage of humanity?

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, I don't know who has denied the higher hierarchies the freedom in its special form of education. What is meant when I speak, for example, in 'Occult Science' or in the other writings of the human stage of other beings, is essentially characterized by degrees, by the different states of consciousness. In spiritual science, the term “stage of human development” is to be understood as follows:

Today, within human development in the broadest sense, we live in a state of consciousness when we are awake, which we can call object consciousness. This state of consciousness can be described as Dr. Stein described it to you in his lectures, according to his activity in imagination, concept, judgment. One can also add perception and the special kind of emotional effect, the volitional emotion, volitional impulses and so on. Then present-day humanity also still knows, but only in reminiscences, in chaotic images, the dream state, but this points back, it is an atavistic remnant of an earlier state of consciousness, of an ego-less image consciousness; this is therefore an underhuman consciousness. And it is preceded by two other states of consciousness, so that we can say: the present state of consciousness is the fourth in the series. It will be followed by a fifth, which we can anticipate today through imagination, inspiration and so on. We can also characterize this progression as future states of the sixth and seventh states of consciousness. The fourth, however, the one we have today, is in the narrower sense the state of consciousness of humanity as it is today. So when we speak of the human stage, we mean beings with object consciousness. Beings who do not perceive through such senses as human beings do, who have a special education, perhaps through very different senses, but who, in their inner being, depend on imagining and grasping and then, in a more or less subconscious activity, connecting perception with ideas and concepts. The higher, fifth state of consciousness would thus be one in which one consciously differentiates between the inner, spiritual realm, which one first grasps in pure thinking, as has been attempted in the Philosophy of Freedom, and then has perception as such as a phenomenon of development in its own right, into which one no longer mixes concepts and ideas, so that, as in the process of inhalation, in inhaling and exhaling, an inner interaction between perception and concept consciously takes place. That would be the next higher state of consciousness.

When we speak of other beings and say that they were at the human stage of development at different times, we mean that they had a perception of the external world in the past – regardless of which senses were involved – which they connected in a more or less conscious way with the inner soul life, so that at that time they were not yet at a stage that humanity will reach in the future, the stage of a separate experience of perception, of the spiritual soul realm, and a conscious synthesis. That is what needs to be said about this question.

Dear attendees, it is now 10 a.m., I think I will collect the questions that have yet to be asked and save them, and we can meet again in the next few days. I think we will be able to discuss the matters on the other notes better and with more focus if we don't rush through it in a few minutes, but instead come together again to answer these questions. I also think you will agree to this, after we have spent two hours having this conversation. So we will conclude today and continue in some way soon.

Distinguished attendees! To the untrained eye, the circumstances of public life in the civilized world over the past 50 years have become unmistakable; their interrelationships have become difficult to grasp and confusing. The present misery has emerged from what might be called the great economic boom before 1914; the most complicated circumstances, caused by the most diverse facts, loom into our decline – facts that are in turn difficult to grasp. It is no wonder that the human being who must live in this decline, must work, must strive, feels from the depths of his soul the yearning for an ascent. But as understandable as this is, anyone who takes a deeper look at today's conditions must recognize that, in the present and in the near future, there is no way out of the decline to a recovery other than an understanding of the great tasks of the time, the great tasks of the time from certain sources, which cannot really be found within small areas. As well as I can in one evening, I will endeavor to try to offer some modest observations on some of these great tasks of our time – I would say that one can only do so in the face of these tasks.

It seems that if anything quite obviously indicates how we have to approach the great tasks, it is the great mistakes that have been made in this time. Two stages today characterize our entire public life in its immediate present development, and it seems to me that these stages point not only to external, economic conditions, but also to legal, moral and especially spiritual conditions within contemporary civilization. But when one names these two stages, Versailles, Spa and all that follows in their train, when one remembers all that they have brought us, then it becomes somewhat difficult to characterize them, because today one is suspected of striving for a certain objectivity. People's opinions are sharply opposed to each other: anyone who wants to judge the West as a member of Central European civilization can be quite sure that his objectivity will be very, very strongly doubted by Westerners. Therefore, I would prefer not to give my own opinion on what happened in Versailles, which is still a painful part of our present, but rather to follow the opinion of the Englishman John Maynard Keynes, who wrote the significant book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace”, which I have already referred to in my Stuttgart lectures from a different point of view than today.

Keynes was a person who, until a certain point in time, was present in an outstanding position at the negotiations in Versailles, and he judged [in his book] what happened and also what, in his opinion, should have happened. One might say that in three sentences he roughly summarizes the striking facts of Versailles that are so symptomatic of our present time. He, the Englishman, whom Lenin only recently called the “English philistine”, says quite simply: nothing, absolutely nothing of any magnitude has been achieved at Versailles by those who could claim to be the victors. What did Clemenceau do? He ruined Europe's economic resources and did nothing to rebuild the economy in France itself. What did Lloyd George do? He made a few deals that allowed him to shine in London for a short time. What did Wilson do? Wilson had good intentions regarding what was right and just – according to Keynes – but no way presented itself to him to somehow implement what he may have had in mind in a well-meaning way. The three most important men made the big mistakes of the time.

And now let us take a look at what has actually emerged for Germany from the terrible events that have taken place since 1914. I do not need to describe it to you. To the southeast of Germany, Czechoslovakia has become a relatively large empire. Born out of national aspirations, everything that rules there proves to be economically powerless in the face of the tasks that the economy in particular faces for these areas. To the north of it, Poland. Well, you only need to recall the last few weeks to see, on the one hand, how what has been formed there has only contributed to the unrest in Europe; and on the other hand, you only need to recall the perplexity of the leading European personalities in the face of what is seething and boiling there. One need only think of the “tragicomedy in the transformation of the view of the Polish ‘defeats’ to the Polish ‘victories’, how one was confronted without opinion, without great guidelines, today with this, tomorrow with the opposite. And if you go further east, it may seem today that Leninism and Trotskyism, especially when you add to that the devastating conditions in Italy, have no other guidelines than to develop, out of a phenomenal megalomania, all those forces that can serve to destroy what has been achieved by more recent civilization. The Germans of Austria are crushed, not to mention Hungary, where the sad spectacle is taking place that when members of the party that was at the helm until recently are led through the streets, bound and captured, they are then stabbed in the eyes with umbrellas by ladies in elegant, magnificent attire. This description could be continued for a long time, and one could see what has emerged for humanity from the circumstances since 1914.

And if we look at the ideas of those who are somehow active within this terrible decline – at the ideas of personalities who are often even capable of entertaining tragicomic illusions about an ascent that could be brought about by their intentions – we might be tempted to say: In the short-sighted, in the uncomprehending, that speech that Lenin delivered at the Second Congress of the Third International was monumental, where he once again, entirely in the old Marxist style, proved Western capitalism with all the banalities that have been heard so often. If one approaches what was said in this grandiose speech from a certain world-historical point of view, namely that capitalism, having developed into imperialism, tyrannizes over five-sevenths of humanity, then today, on the other hand, the question must be raised: What would have become of all of modern civilization if it had not been for the accumulation of capital? And should we not ask: Is it not self-evident, after all the forces that our modern times have brought forth, that such capital accumulation has also taken place for the sake of human progress? Can we still get by in today's collapsing world with such abstraction, which only proclaims the struggle in a very abstract form, or should we not ask: Is there not also something moral underlying our decline, especially when this note is struck? Do not perhaps precisely such fighters as Lenin confuse the harmfulness of capitalism in general with the kind of morality or, rather, immorality with which capitalism has operated? Can we not also trace this spiritual note in the effects of capitalism? And might we not arrive at deeper impulses than those which are constantly being declaimed today, and whose declamation has brought so little practical success for the better?

Now, one could say that the opposite view, which also comes from the Englishman Keynes, the harsh critic of the Western powers, is more indicative of today's intellectual, legal and economic situation. But that sounds somewhat different than Lenin's words. Keynes says, for example: Yes, terrible things happened in Versailles. Instead of doing something to build Europe, everything has been done to turn Europe into a heap of ruins of civilization; something terrible has happened, something worse will happen in the coming years. — I am quoting the sense, not the wording. And in an even stranger way, Keynes addresses some of the underlying mental states that have brought us into this present situation. It is interesting to see how this man, who sat through the negotiations led by Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George for weeks on end, realizes what actually caused Wilson, who beguiled so many people with his abstract Fourteen Points, to fail so utterly. This becomes a significant problem for the Englishman Keynes, and something very strange comes to light.

Keynes constructs – as I said, from the way Wilson was sitting – how the others did everything to deceive him, to keep him from finding out what they actually want. It is a remarkable psychological event that Keynes describes and dissects, which, I would like to say, shines a deep and significant light on the whole cultural state of the present. Keynes obviously means: If one had told Wilson that France wanted the Germans of Austria to be prevented from uniting with the Germans of Germany, if one had said this clearly and distinctly, so that Wilson would have heard these words, his sense of justice would have risen up against it. Now, if you are going to visualize the struggle of such a dull mentality - if I may use this Entente word - you have to realize how Wilson feels - as Keynes does - if you now bring the following to mind as a spectator. Keynes says: Yes, the people around Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not say: “The Germans of Austria will not be allowed to unite with the Germans of Germany,” because Wilson would have rebelled against that; that is why they said: “The independence of German-Austria is to be guaranteed by a treaty with the Entente powers until the League of Nations pronounces otherwise.” Wilson understood that the independence and freedom of the Germans of Austria had to be guaranteed. If he had been told that they were forbidden to unite with the Germans of Germany, Wilson would have understood the same thing that he had otherwise understood as freedom and independence as the highest compulsion. If one had told him – as Keynes continues –: “Danzig shall become a Polish city”, he would have revolted against it; that quite obviously contradicts the Fourteen Points. So one told him: “Danzig shall become a free city, but all customs matters shall be handled from Poland, as shall the supervision of all transport matters, and the Poles shall become the protectors of the nationals living abroad. Oh, that sounded different from saying that Danzig should become a Polish city. And one can almost say: Yes, when it is said like that: 'Danzig should become a free city', then Wilson's dull mentality is inspired. But if he had been told that Danzig should become a Polish city, that would have contradicted Wilson's view that every nation should be led to freedom. And if one had told Wilson that the Entente was to supervise the German rivers, he would not have been able to agree to that; but instead one said: 'Navigation, where it passes through several states, is an international matter.' Wilson was satisfied with that again.

If you want to see what the great forces are that are moving the world today, you have to look at what is developing between the – I will speak in German now and translate the Entente word – “state of mind” of the leading personalities who have grown out of the previous circumstances. Is there still any honesty and sincerity there? Is there still any healthy sense and openness? The opposite is true, and what is more, it lives in such a way that one is still convinced of being an honest, open person, because what actually works has become an unconscious habit. How could Wilson actually be so deceived as he has been in this way, as I have just described it after Keynes? People who still cannot bring themselves to believe that an abstract, theorizing mind like Wilson's is a disaster for Europe sometimes say benevolent words like, “He, this Wilson, knew European conditions far too little.” Hypothetically admitted, although I do not admit it, Wilson knew European conditions far too little. But Wilson wrote a work on the state comprising almost 500 pages, in which he describes the conditions of the European states in great detail, the state and legal conditions and so on. So we are faced with the fact that either it is not true that Wilson did not know the European situation, or an influential contemporary figure writes a work on European conditions that is influential in America precisely because he is ignorant of those European conditions. The latter would cast a bright light on the superficiality of our time, on everything that draws only from the superficial spirit and does not delve into what lives in the deeper foundations of things as the real cause of the present events, the present developments and the whole evolution of humanity. But there is something much more significant behind what I have presented.

Many years ago, during a lecture series in Helsingfors – at a time when Wilson was revered everywhere because two significant literary works had been published by him – I drew attention to something that characterizes the whole nature of Wilson's state of mind. Wilson says, for example, that if you look at the time in which, for example, Newton, the great physicist, lived, you find that, as in the theory of constitutional law or in the thinking of those who reflect on economic and financial conditions, the same forms of thought and the same mental images are found for the economic and political conditions that Newton, the physicist, created for physicists. And now Wilson says: We must free ourselves from such a dependence of thought in relation to public, political or economic conditions; we must think today in terms of the organic about politics, about the world economy and so on. And now he develops a kind of political idea, of which one must say: Just as those whom he criticizes for being dependent on Newton in their time, so he is entirely a copycat of Darwinism and thinks Darwinian as a politician, as an economist, and as a legal expert, just as those whom he criticizes thought in a Newtonian way. Darwin is fashionable – so Wilson, the world reformer, thinks Darwinian. But I said at the time: We are now in such a time that we must no longer allow ourselves to be blinded to the real conditions of public life by what comes to us from the natural sciences. What comes to us from the natural sciences – I have often said it here – is quite excellently suited to precisely explore the surface of things; but what ideas want to form about human action, about human coexistence, must go into deeper world reasons than natural science even needs. And that is why – I said – the dangerous thing in our time is precisely a way of thinking like that of Woodrow Wilson.

That was long before the war, at a time when Wilson was still being glorified as a world hero for a long time to come. What matters today, namely, is to avert one's gaze from everything that only holds people to the superficial. It is necessary to be able to sharpen one's gaze into the deeper reasons for becoming and happening. But, esteemed attendees, that is what the school of thought that, like science, approaches the spiritual and soul life in man from a scientific spirit is trying to do. It is the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that I have been representing here in my lectures in Stuttgart for almost two decades now, and more and more every year.

What must be striven for in our spiritual life in terms of the spiritual science that is meant here? I will only briefly indicate that this spiritual science does not arrive at its results in an external way, but rather through the fact that the human being first performs certain exercises, which are intellectual in nature. Time and again, the human being must say to himself what I characterized as a comparison in one of my last lectures here. I said: If a five-year-old child picks up a volume of Goethe's poetry, he will not be able to do anything with it, he will in any case do something completely different with it than what the volume of poetry by Goethe is intended for. But if he is ten years older, he will have gone through a development and reached a level of maturity by which time he will know what to do with this volume of poetry. The spiritual researcher referred to here says: With the form of consciousness that we use in ordinary life and that we also apply in conventional science, we face the higher world forces as a five-year-old child faces a volume of Goethe's poetry. Thus, forces slumber in every human being that he can develop within himself and that then show him a different, a spiritual, understanding of the world. Above all, they show him that although scientific thinking is a magnificent way to explore the surface of things, and that in this respect science has justly achieved the greatest triumphs, They show him that we cannot, however, understand natural things that play a role in human activity with the scientific way of thinking, if we do not resort to methods and ways of thinking that are permeated by the spirit and with which we can also grasp the human being and the forces within him in a thoroughly scientific way. But then we come from such a grasp of the human being to a completely different grasp of the world than through the conventional spiritual life in which we are immersed today. In the face of this conventional spiritual life, one would like to recall a word spoken by Hölderlin that cuts deep into the heart, when his mind was still bright, not yet clouded, but was finely sensitive to what was present in his cultural environment. Hölderlin, who had immersed himself in the harmonious humanity of ancient Greece and had grown fond of it, looked at the people around him, exaggerating to some extent, as a mind of his calibre would do in his time, and characterized them as follows, comparing them to the Greeks. He said: “Do people live among us ordinary Germans? I see no human beings around me, as the Greeks were; I see officials, teachers, professors, but no human beings; I see lawyers, artists and scholars, but no human beings; I see young and mature people around me, but no human beings; what I miss in my environment is the whole, full, developed humanity that can also gain a harmonious relationship with the universe. Such humanity also lived consciously and unconsciously, sensually and supernaturally in Goethe, and what Goethe himself valued even higher than his poetry — although it was then so little understood after Goethe: his scientific creations. In these lines of scientific thought, Goethe's physicist does not live one-sidedly when he presents a theory of colors, nor does his botanist live one-sidedly when he describes plants, nor does his anatomist live one-sidedly when he characterizes human bones. but in this way of thinking the whole human being lives always and in everything; and the whole human being grasps in the individual parts of nature that which can only be revealed when one experiences it in its effect on all of humanity within oneself.

Over time, this thinking was increasingly confronted with something that has been praised so much, but also occasionally criticized: specialization in all areas of life, the kind of specialization that has found its way into our higher knowledge in particular and has had an impact on it, for example, all the way down to primary school education. This specialization made man a physicist, a botanist, a lawyer, a professor, a teacher, and so on, but it drove out the human being. And we must ask ourselves: Is it really a furthering of knowledge itself, when this knowledge has developed in such a way in modern times that the knowledge that led to a world view has split into those small portions, from which one has lost the human element and can no longer keep an eye on the world? Again and again, a few influential personalities were portrayed as if they were knowledge itself. But anyone who can see into the development of modern times will find that this is not the case. He sees that knowledge and the striving for the abstract unified state, as it has developed over the last three to four centuries throughout the civilized world. He sees that the unitary state, which absorbed everything that we today want to re-organize through the impulse of the threefold social organism, that this unitary state, with its mixing of spiritual, legal and economic life into one fabric, made physicists and chemists, professors and teachers, in short, specialized people, and it was with these that it had to fill its positions if it followed its principles. It was this unified state that sucked the fullness of humanity out of people. This fullness of humanity lived so powerfully in Goethe and was so longed for by Hölderlin for his Germans. It is spiritual science that wants to give this fullness of humanity back to today's humanity, because only from this fullness of humanity can come what is at the same time knowledge, what is feeling with all humanity, what is real right and at the same time reasonable economic life.

If one proceeds according to the methods of spiritual research, one does not get a superficial view of something concocted from the individual disciplines, but one gets fully living spiritual knowledge. But this is like a light that can be cast on the individual areas. And with it one gets the possibility again to place the human being above the specialists; one gets the possibility to put the human being first and the social structure afterwards - and not the other way around, to put the social structure first and only then the human being, and thereby let him wither away into a system template. Because spiritual science is something that really comes from the fullness of the human being, but that must first be gained through spiritual research, that is why it can also have a fertilizing effect on what is fragmented in the world. Fragmented in the world, for example, is our present-day jurisprudence, the individual branches of our present-day economic life - everything is fragmented.

Those who have heard me speak at length and are able to grasp the actual meaning of what I have said know that I do not say such things out of immodesty or silliness. But I may well point out that in February, in Dornach, before an audience of more than thirty medical specialists, I attempted to present the therapeutic element of medicine from a spiritual-scientific understanding of the nature of the human being in such a way that one could really arrive at a genuine therapy that goes straight to the human core. In this single case I have tried to show how a central view of the nature of the natural, soul and spiritual can have a fruitful effect on a single science. And anyone who now considers the social effect of the striving of personalities imbued with our knowledge will reflect on the significance of what I have said.

ar A It is one thing for a physician to be educated in a closed circle and unable to see beyond the boundaries of his science, and quite another for him to grasp his science in such a way that it becomes a light for everything physical, mental and spiritual in the human being and that he thereby also acquires a true sense for all social interaction and coexistence of people and thus, from his art of healing, gains a living, fruitful judgment on the treatment of major social issues.

This fall, beginning on September 26, more than twenty individuals who have immersed themselves in the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science referred to here will give a course of nine lectures at the School for Spiritual Science in Dornach. We have, of course, established our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, which we cannot open because it is not yet ready, but we will hold these School of Spiritual Science courses at the unopened Dornach School from September 26 to October 16. Personalities from the fields of physics, chemistry, political science, economics and history, practitioners who are involved in life, in the factory or otherwise in life, artistic personalities from all fields, they will first show in this trial course how what specializes [in individual fields] is illuminated by the living spiritual , such a light is shed on these sciences that they are no longer something theoretical - not something one acquires and then has to peel off again for the most part in order to stand in one corner of life and see nothing but one's own specialization. No, it is shown how, through this enlivening of knowledge, which can arise from spiritual science, specialization is overcome, and how, through the new spirit, through a spirit that is just as strictly scientific as the one cultivated at universities today, yes, 'strictly strict science', how this spirit brings together specialists so that they will not go their lonely but humanity-damaging ways in mutual misunderstanding, but will work together socially and be able to help our ailing time to rise again.

These School of Spiritual Science lectures are held at our Goetheanum in Dornach, where every detail seeks to express the style, the architectural, sculptural and pictorial style, that arises out of the artistic aspect of our spiritual science, out of the whole of our intuitive perception. Everything, down to this framing, should act as a symbol, as it were, for what is to happen, what must happen, from the spiritual side. For it must be the spirit that, following its true threads, comes back to the truth, to a truth from which goodness, morality and healthy, strong will follow. This does not arise from superficial knowledge; it arises from deep spiritual knowledge. And I hope that our Dornach lectures will show much more than mere characterizations can express, how the forces to build up our languishing civilization should be sought from the spirit. We do not want to refute such arguments [about the decline of the West] logically, as I characterized them here last time, but through action we want to create that which can be set against the forces of decline. And I am convinced that we would truly not be able to accommodate all the listeners who would come to Dornach and its wider surroundings today - who will hopefully come in large numbers despite the drowsiness of souls today - if the communication difficulties arising from our decline were not so insurmountable.

If I may refer to something closer to home, I would like to return to what our Waldorf School is meant to achieve here. This Waldorf School, which we opened today for the second school year, we described here some time ago with reference to its successes in the first school year. It is exactly what it has become – it could not have become more in its first year – having become what it is because our teachers were inspired and imbued with those feelings towards the developing human being, the child – emotions that come from the research of spiritual science, that spiritual science that must indeed, with regard to certain spiritual things, behave in a completely different way than many people assume with regard to these same things.

We have, of course, confessions in our time that speak about the eternal in man. What have all these confessions come to? If one can really look at the world impartially and listen to everything that is said in sermons or theologies today about the eternal in the human soul, then it is not an appeal to the urge for knowledge, but basically it is an appeal to the finer instincts of the soul. Those who have often heard my lectures will know the foundations on which the spiritual science referred to here speaks of the immortality of man, how it makes certain statements about what man becomes when he has passed through the gate of death and shed his physical body. But the basis of this discussion is different from what has been customary in Western civilization for centuries. What is it that this Western civilization appeals to again and again? The finer instincts of the soul; people do not want their entire being to cease to be when their body decays into dust. This is the human desire for eternity. And I ask you to go through everything that is offered in this direction in traditional confessions, sermons and theologies: it is the appeal to this human egoism, not wanting to die. And because it is only this appeal to egoism, it is even conveniently separated for life: knowledge for the world of sense, and faith for the supersensible world. Naturally one can only speak of the instincts under discussion here if, with regard to the eternal in man, one arrives only at a belief and not at knowledge. But when we investigate the human being by means of spiritual science methods, which are not easier than chemical or astronomical methods, but essentially more difficult (for more details see my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” or “Occult Science: An Outline” and others), then we come not only to speak of immortality, that is, of the forms that the human soul and spirit takes after death, but one then comes to look at what the human being was before birth or conception, before he descended as a spiritual being from the spiritual world into the physical world through birth and assumed a physical body through descent from father and mother. This can become knowledge, but it is knowledge of such inner power that it flashes through our entire being.

If we approach the child as educators with such knowledge, we look at the child quite differently. Then we know something of how the soul and spirit form the human body from the deepest human depths, how the physiognomy and skills that arise from year to year are formed in the body out of the soul and spirit. As a teacher and educator, you develop a feeling without which there can be no fruitful education: the feeling that everything you come into contact with through the human body comes from spiritual worlds. It has been entrusted to you; the gods have sent it down to you. You stand before it with holy reverence.

Dear attendees, just as there are forces that can only be explored through their effects in the external, physical world, for example electricity or magnetism, so does what one acquires as a teacher or educator, as reverence, act as an imponderable force, as something that one only

a en learn to believe when one beholds its effects, when one sees how that which radiates from such sacred reverence for the teacher is something that surrounds the child's spiritual and soul growth just as sunlight surrounds the plant to make it flourish and thrive. A pedagogy that is based on the full human being, that is carried by feelings and perceptions, but by a perception that sees through world and human conditions, a pedagogy that naturally becomes art, that does not talk abstractly about education, it is a pedagogy of this kind that may aspire to make of the generation that will be decisive for the coming decades that which can lead out of our decline towards an ascent. And we can say: What anthroposophically oriented spiritual science has been able to achieve through our teachers has, after all, borne fruit in the first school year.

Only one thing stands ghostly before the mind's eye of the one whose whole heart and mind is with this Waldorf school, especially today, when we have opened the second school year. Out of the spirit we could bring Waldorf education to life through Waldorf education; in this way, one of the great tasks of our time would be solved step by step in practice, not in theory. But we need understanding, understanding in the broadest sense. We may hope that the spirit will continue to support us in our endeavors, because in a certain way it depends on us. But we need understanding, because the buildings in which the school is held are to be built; the teachers are to live in homes, and they are also to eat. All this is necessary. And already the spectre of destitution for such things and for what is behind it, of the lack of understanding of the broadest circles for what belongs to the great tasks of our time, stands before our soul and impairs what we would like to do for the second school year, especially in these days. So what is needed today for the great tasks of the time is understanding in the broadest sense. Many people have idealism, which says: ideals are lofty, it is not dignified to associate them with the material circumstances of the day, because the material world is something base; ideals are lofty, they must find their own way. Therefore, we keep our hands on our wallets and no longer spend anything on our ideals, because why should we give up dirty money, which is not worthy of serving ideals, for our ideals? That may sound trivial, but if you want to do something necessary for the Waldorf school in our days, then it may be said in this case. Today, idealism often expresses itself more through enthusiasm to hold together the material world and to cultivate the ideal in it.

I could now describe something to you that is related to something very new in our spiritual life. For a long time now, we have lost precisely that direction and current of our spiritual life that looks at what I want to characterize, at the prenatal human being. Even the language testifies to it: when we speak of the eternal in man, what do we say? Immortality. - We thus point only to the one end of life, which human egoism also looks at. We have no word for the other: one would have to say “unbornness,” for just as little as we lose our eternal being when we discard the body, we did not receive it with birth either. And when we speak of the eternal in man, we must speak of unbornness as well as of immortality. We do not even suspect what we lack in this direction. What we hope for after death inspires us little for action. But when we know what lives in us, what lives in us as having descended from the spiritual worlds, even if only in a reflection of the spiritual world, then we can say that we feel ourselves to be - I would like to use the word - missionaries of the spiritual world. Our feelings are stirred and our actions inspired by our earthly work, and this is what our task as human beings in earthly existence is. We have to draw strength from the spirit in order to truly penetrate into something like this, which is our task as human beings in earthly existence; for this it is not enough to stick only to the nearest districts of what surrounds us in life. We must look at what surrounds us in the spiritual life, what lives in us inwardly as the spiritual and permeates all life down to the economic. In this respect, people indulge in the strangest illusions.

Anyone with a sense of reality who follows the historical course of humanity will see that they must look for the actual sources of the somewhat more distant spiritual impulses in human life over in the Orient - although not in today's Orient, because today's Orient is in a state of decadence in this regard. What the source of this very special spiritual life is, as I described in that lecture, which I gave on the historical development of mankind, lived in the Orient thousands of years ago. There lived a race of men who understood nothing of what we call 'deductive' or 'logical thinking' — a race of men who, from the same sources that the spiritual science meant here, but in a different way, in a Western way, once knew that something could live in the soul of man that reveals to him the spirit that permeates the world. But it is not in the East that we find a knowledge of the spirit that is not based on proof or reasoning. Today, if we do not want to become antiquated, we can no longer penetrate this oriental spiritual life, but something of it still lives in our ordinary intellectual education. There is a direct line from the spirit that shone in the Vedas, in the Vedanta philosophy, in the ancient Indian yoga system, which itself lived in the Chaldean teachings and in ancient China. It is a direct line that moved in many currents through many channels to the Occident. And in our everyday thinking, we still have traces of that oriental spiritual life before us. Even when the Mystery of Golgotha entered into the development of mankind, when it became necessary to understand Christ Jesus, it was Oriental wisdom that sought to comprehend this event, which could only be grasped through supersensible knowledge. It was Oriental wisdom that was then transformed into the teaching of Christianity and spread with Christianity throughout the Occident. In this Oriental wisdom lives something that today's man can no longer feel and sense in the right way, for which he needs a support. What was present in the original soul life of the Oriental had to be anchored in the West - for centuries already - in dogmatically cohesive religious communities; because the inner source of spiritual life no longer flows in the same way, that is why man needed such religious communities. This is what initially extends into our public life like a first branch - a branch that still has the Orient as its “lifeblood”. And if one were to look at our spiritual life with an open mind, one would still discover effects of what originated in the Orient in what modern man thinks, feels and senses and what lives even in the sciences, right down to physics, but above all in religious beliefs.

In addition to this peculiar oriental spirit, which is little understood today in its entirety and which permeates the West in its own unique way, there was another school of thought that came more from the south and poured into Central Europe, but also fertilized the west. It came from what I would like to call, in a comprehensive sense, legal, state and political thinking. In the wonderful Greek civilization we see a remarkable mixture of what came from the East and still lived in the Greek people, as it had come from the Egyptians, and the now already legal thinking that was not yet fully revealed in Greece, which brought the peculiar evidential way into the imagination of man. In Greece, we see life only sparsely permeated by logical, legal, and state thinking, which was not present at all in the Orient. If, for example, there were commandments in the Orient, they were something quite different there from the commandments in the Occident. We then see the legal spirit essentially absorbed in ancient Rome. We see how there the process of proving, of reasoning, of combining and separating concepts is developed into a special art. We see how a second element is mixed into what flows from the Orient, how the legal and political current pours into the spiritual current, the “state machine”. And we see even the spiritual-religious, the spiritual-scholastic, permeated by this legal element. It would have been quite impossible for the Oriental to think of something like “guilt and atonement” or “redemption” in the original thought of his world view instead of the concept of “karma”. What lived in the Orient in “karma”, in the fate of the world, was something quite different. But then the legal element began to make itself felt in the world view, and it even found its way into the religious conception of the world. At the turn of the ages, man was thought of differently from the way he was in the Orient. Now he was thought of in such a way that he was “judged” by the world judges because he had incurred “guilt”. In the Orient, people spoke only of “guilt” and “judgment”. In the Occident, even the religious element has been infiltrated by the legal-evidential, the divisive-judgmental. And when we go, for example, to the Sistine Chapel in Rome and see the painting by Michelangelo, 'Christ as Judge of the World', where he judges the good and the bad, we see even there the legal, world-political spirit carried into the religious world view. This is the second branch of our civilization, which still has an effect in Fichte and Hegel and which imbues everything that is still emerging in German intellectual life at the turn of the 18th to 19th century. It is not without reason that Fichte and Hegel started their thinking precisely from the roots of right, from the political and state conditions, and the way in which these minds conceive the development of humanity is to be understood in an “emphatic of the state” sense, in contrast to earlier times.

Only in more recent times did a third current join this second one, which developed in the West out of the Western peoples' dispositions and instincts. In the East, in the times when the East was great, nature provided what man needed in such a way that he undertook the distribution of natural products as well as the distribution of what man produced out of his spiritual life. There was no economic thinking, there was not even any legal thinking. If we go back to the 18th century, we find little economic thinking in Central Europe. But we find everything dominated by an increasingly intense legal thinking, by a state-oriented, political thinking. In the West, economic thinking had developed long ago, and it developed more and more out of people's natural instincts and abilities. Circumstances developed in such a way that where people think in a truly “western” way, economic thinking is now also applied to what was previously grasped from the point of view of logic - to science, to truth. It came from America. There they have the doctrine of pragmatism, which roughly says: “True” and “false” is something that is only an illusion; we have taken that from the legal world view. Our view is this: if something proves useful in practical life, then it is right, it is true, and everything that does not prove useful is harmful, is false. According to this view of life, everything is judged only by whether it is “useful” or “harmful”. These ideas have become part of human thought and are also alive in philosophers. Yes, if, for example, one wants to understand Herbert Spencer and other philosophers correctly, one understands them only if one says to oneself: This Herbert Spencer devises philosophical systems, but he has ideas that, as such, are only in the wrong place; instead of devising philosophical systems, he should build factories with his way of thinking, set up trade unions and help the economy on its feet; his ideas are useful for this, but not in the philosophical field.

If we follow the path our humanity has taken in its historical development, we see that first a spiritual life develops, which points back to a heritage from earlier millennia in later times. Then, little by little, a state and political life, a legal way of thinking, develops. Later, the economic life develops alongside this, and this life develops in a differentiated way across the earth. But as we approach the modern age, we see how the spiritual life that came from the East has died out. The dry, pedantic and philistine nature of today's education and upbringing stems in particular from the withering away of that ancient spiritual heritage. But this also points with all vividness to the fact that we should not migrate back to the Orient, but must develop a free and original spiritual life through ourselves again, by opening the sources of this spiritual life for ourselves. The old inheritance is at an end. Our time demands a new spiritual life, and spiritual science now wants to proclaim this from Dornach. With this new spiritual life, it will permeate education, and through something like the Waldorf School, it wants to make it fruitful for modern life.

But there is also little left today for the old legal spirit. I advise you to read characteristic, symptomatic phenomena of the present day, such as the little booklet on jurisprudence by the Mannheim teacher Rumpf, and you will see that Just as religious worldviews today have to rely on outward appearances because the inner life no longer bubbles up, so jurisprudence and political science borrow from economic conditions because they no longer have anything that bubbles up from the inner life. Thus we see that today a mixture of economic thinking and legal thinking is coming about, which spreads chaos over our lives. And anyone who sees through things knows how much of this chaotic confusion has penetrated into the sphere of our public life, and how this is then expressed in deeds, causing social upheaval, social confusion and turmoil. We can only move forward if we seek a new spiritual life in the way I have described. The old spiritual life has passed away as an inheritance. But we will only find the new spiritual life if we do not hand over the school to the state, if we set up the whole spiritual life on its own, because then alone we can lift the spiritual life out of what it is now. When a human being steps down from spiritual heights into the physical world, he brings with him a new, real spiritual element for each generation from his human individuality and personality. We do not want to dictate to people that they must develop according to these or those rules, but we want to let this real spiritual element develop powerfully through love from the teacher to the child. This spiritual life can only be administered by those who are active in it. A new spiritual life will reintroduce the living spirit, which our social life so urgently needs, into the present; it will make fruitful for human coexistence the deep source that man brings with him when he enters physical existence through birth. This is one of the great tasks of our time.

A second task is how we can once again develop a living sense of duty in the social community, through the living interaction between individuals in the democratic structure of the state – not by regurgitating old Roman or old concepts in general, but by original thought. No law dictated from above will ever develop a sense of duty. Only that right which arises between equals, between one mature human and another mature human in lively intercourse, only this right will also make people keen to work, and this right will have to incorporate the [regulation of] labor.

The spiritual life, as I understand it, is described in my “Key Points of the Social Question” in such a way that it must become the regulator of capital. Then the accumulation of capital or means of production, which is necessary for more recent development, will, through the spirit – which will illuminate it when the spirit is formed anew in its freedom, in its fertility, in its progress from generation to generation – then capital will also carry within itself, through the spirit, what, for example, Keynes and others miss: morality. And then, economic life will not be characterized by a capitalism based on egoism and mere self-acquisition; instead, it will be imbued with spirituality, arising from an understanding of the necessities of the world and of humanity and of existence, and it will work in the spirit of the people educated in the new spiritual life. Then labor will no longer be a commodity, but will be incorporated into the independent, self-developing constitutional state; then, in the social fabric in which the mature human being works with every other mature human being on the basis of equal rights, labor will come into its own. And only from the feeling for our duty to work in freedom can arise the upswing in our lives, not from the demand for barracking and duty, which must stifle every sense of justice in man. From an independent spiritual life, from an independent legal life, one must grasp the great tasks of our time.

If we look at economic life, we see that if we separate out everything that is in it today and needs to be separated out – the right to land, because that belongs in the constitutional state, labor, which is paid for like a commodity today, because it belongs in the legal state, and means of production, insofar as they can be capitalized, because they belong in the spiritual link of the social organism. If we take all this out of economic life, what remains is the production and consumption of goods. A product of human labor, a commodity is not only concerned with one person; a commodity passes from one person to another. Not only does the person who produces the commodity and has experience in its production have something to say about it, but so does the person who creates the conditions of exchange for the thing or who has to decide on the needs. Thus, many different kinds of people are involved in economic life, and everything in economic life is a commodity. If we have, on the one hand, the administration of capital in the spiritual element and the administration of labor in the legal element, then what remains for the administration of economic life is the only thing that is justified: the price level, the mutual price value of the goods. But if it is to be carried up from chance to reason, it can only be determined through associations. The various groups of people who, from the point of view that I have characterized, have to do with a product, must be summarized in associations; because people have to do with the product from different starting points in order to determine the price of one product in relation to the other, so that money can only be the external indicator of the value of the product. It is only through associations of economic life that it is possible to arrive at the true price of a product for economic life - that is what matters. And this cannot be determined by dictates and so on, but only by the experiences that are made from association to association.

If, for example, a person is employed in a particular branch of industry and works in it, the price of his product of labor must be set so that it is not too expensive and not too cheap. So if I make a pair of boots, when I have finished them I must get so much in the way of sundry goods for what I get for them that I can satisfy my needs and those of my family with them until I have finished another pair of boots. This cannot be calculated, it can only be experienced in the living interaction of associations. In order to understand that the price problem is at the center of the whole economic life, a more precise study of the “key points” and those writings that point to them will be necessary, especially for example my essays in the Dreigliederungs-Zeitung, which will soon be published in a collection by the publishing house of Kommenden Tages. There you can see what we need to get the spirit back that we need for our ascent.

To solve this one great task of the present, we must have a new spiritual life to cultivate individuality; we must bring out human self-importance and human abilities, which can only be properly placed in a human context through a proper understanding of human personality and human individuality. In order to bring intellectual life into effect in the right way, we need the self-contained – not the intellectual life encompassing, but letting it out of itself – state or legal life or political life in its parliamentary structure; this can never be in intellectual life or in economic life. Morality and mutual assistance can then be produced from this again, in other words, everything that must take place between all people in order for a dignified existence to be possible. And in economic life, we need to solve the price problems as a major task of the present. We can only solve them if we first base economic life on itself, on the basis of association.

And we can only move forward if we allow these three independent links to interact in a certain free way and do not fear any possible “division” or “cutting up” of these three links. One need only reflect a little on the human organism to lose this fear. In my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Soul Mysteries) I indicated how the human organism also consists of three independent members: the nervous-sensory activity, the rhythmic activity and the metabolic activity. The entire function of human life is structured from these three activities as activities. Just as one cannot breathe with one's eyes or see with one's lungs, so the state should not determine spiritual life, nor should spiritual life interfere with legal life. And just as one cannot think with one's stomach, so one should not dictate politics or determine rights from the economic point of view. And just as the lungs breathe, the head sees and thinks, and the stomach digests, so the three independent limbs of the human organism work together in unity; this unity does not exist in the abstract, but arises as a living unity from the three independent limbs.

In the same way the true unity of the social organism will come into being when we grasp the three great tasks of the present time in the life of the spirit, in the life of the right and in the life of the economy. These three great tasks are certainly utopian for many people. But even for the people of the 1830s, what developed in Central Europe from 1870 to 1913 would have been utopian in purely economic terms. If we just think that in 1870, 30 million tons of coal were mined and processed in Germany, whereas in 1913, 190 million tons were mined and processed — truly, for a person in the 1930s, that would have been a utopia if one had spoken of such a surge in coal mining and processing at the time. We should not be afraid of being accused of utopianism or fantasy. Even if what is presented as a threefold order cannot be realized immediately, we should remember a saying of Fichte's, spoken to his audience when he was talking about the nature and destiny of the scholar. He said something like this: We know that ideals cannot be immediately realized in practical life, but we also know that great impulses and great powers lie in such ideals, which can advance humanity. If the so-called practitioners do not recognize this, then they are merely testifying that they were not reckoned with in the evolution of the world. And so may a benevolent Deity grant them light and sunshine, good digestion and, if it can be, a little sense as well! Those who are true practitioners count on the real practical forces of life and do not let themselves be annoyed by those objections that are so characteristic of the way Fichte characterizes them, and which say: What is downcast Germany, what is humanity, reduced to misery in Central Europe, to do alone if all the others do not want to go along with the threefold social order?

Dear attendees, if we work with all our strength – even today, when it is almost too late – on this threefold social order, so that it enters as many minds as possible, and really present it to the world in a living way, then the others, even if they are the victors, will accept it as something fruitful and beneficial for the world and for humanity. When the “key points” were translated into English, one could see how almost every discussion of this book began with the words: “One can hardly read this book with any other frame of mind,” but even then one approached the content with a certain objectivity. We lack only people to help us make these ideas fruitful for life. We need people who have a spirit of progress, but not a spirit of empty phrases. And the more we can win such people, the less we need to fear the accusation that we in Central Europe can achieve nothing against the others.

Another objection that is often made is: What can the individual do, even if he sees something like the fertility of the impulse for threefolding? Oh, let no one grieve because the “others” do not see through it, let him alone see it himself as an individual, then he sets an example for others and enters the path where individuals become many. And let us not be annoyed by the other reproach either, when people say again and again: If you seek ascent by such a path, it will take a long time. We do not want to waste time wondering how long it will take, but we do want to be clear about one thing: the more we want it, the sooner it will come! We do not want to engage in idle speculation, but we want to think and act in such a way that our actions, our will and our thoughts make it happen as quickly as possible.

When a person brings to life in his soul the right ways for the right social coexistence, when he ignites his soul and lives through it with these impulses, which show us how spiritual, legal, state or political life and from economic life, then he can work from a single earthly territory, even against the prejudices of the whole world, in such a way that many individual territories arise that take up the impulses and carry them forward for the progress and welfare of humanity. In this way, a long period of pain can become a short one; in this way, one can overcome space and time and manifold [obstacles] if one really wants to find the true good of humanity for a new ascent, based on independent legal consciousness and on the correct economic consciousness of the present.

The present edition of this course—which Rudolf Steiner gave in 1921 in order to bring to realization the hygienic-therapeutic side of eurythmy, which, as he explained in his introductory words to eurythmy performances, was given this name to distinguish it from artistic and pedagogical eurythmy—is the first edition to appear in print and be available to a wider public. Since those days curative eurythmy has become much used on a worldwide scale as a therapy in connection with medicine, and it takes its place alongside other recognized therapies in the same way as, according to Rudolf Steiner, artistic eurythmy does among the other arts.

In the main there are two things to be said about this edition. Firstly,—and Rudolf Steiner said this very strongly—curative eurythmy must only be given when a doctor prescribes it and is in charge of it. Secondly, a proper training in eurythmy is required as a preliminary to learning curative eurythmy for use as a therapy. Rudolf Steiner said that at least two years should be spent on a thorough study of eurythmy. The normal eurythmy training takes four years at present. As this course is now available to everyone, it should be said that it is quite impossible to study curative eurythmy on one's own with the help of this book. Collaboration with a doctor and the study of eurythmy are both inescapable. Rudolf Steiner puts it in the following way in the “Course for Curative Education” (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1981)

“When you bring curative eurythmy into curative education you are bringing the whole of eurythmy into it. So you should be aware that you must acquire a living connection with it, and this should be such that anyone who does curative eurythmy ought to a certain point to have learnt basic eurythmy. Curative eurythmy ought to be based on a general knowledge of speech and tone eurythmy, even if artistic perfection has not been attained. Then, above all, people must be filled with the conviction that they must work with others, and therefore, when curative eurythmy is going to be put into practice the therapist must get the support of a doctor. When curative eurythmy was given to the world it was stipulated that it should not be put into practice without the collaboration of a doctor. All this points to how inter-connected in a living way, things have to be when they come out of Anthroposophy.”

The present lectures—with the exception of the one given on April 18,—were made available in manuscript form by Frau Marie Steiner in 1930. They were edited by Elisabeth Baumann, who had taken part in the course. Rudolf Steiner's executors produced a new edition in 1952 edited by I. de Jaager. The lecture to doctors given on October 28, 1922 was included in this edition. Both these editors made important comments on the course and summaries of these will follow.

For the present edition the notes were examined and the whole text checked against the available shorthand reports. Some additions and corrections could consequently be made. Some parts that had been revised now follow the shorthand notes more closely.

Where the story of eurythmy is concerned a detailed account is given in the volume of Rudolf Steiner's complete works “Die Entstehung and Entwickelung der Eurythmie” (the origins and development of eurythmy).

The following words are taken from Frau Baumann's introduction: “Children of all ages grasped and carried out the movements of eurythmy so naturally that we experienced every day of our lives that the visible language of eurythmy movement is a language that is in genuine harmony with the laws and requirements of both man's spiritual-soul nature and his bodily nature. We also experienced daily that hindrances the children had, whether in the realm of the will or in the realm of thought—the thinking activity—could be loosened up or actually overcome by eurythmy. At the Waldorf School we had to deal with children, almost from the very beginning, who had hindrances of this sort. Sometimes these difficulties were only slightly in evidence, sometimes the children were so overwhelmed by them, that they could not keep up with the lessons of their class, and a special remedial class was started where they could be given what Rudolf Steiner prescribed for their care.

Experience showed that for children of this sort eurythmy more than anything else could get across to them and they could take immediate hold of it. Therefore we asked ourselves whether it would be possible to find exercises that would help the spiritual part that was having such difficulty in incarnating because it met with such strong bodily resistance—exercises that would give the physical sheath a better form, movement exercises which would help the etheric formative forces to penetrate better and give their support to the creative upbuilding forces of the organism.

Out of our close connection with so-called difficult cases, with retarded children, with those in need of special care, we acquired the most intense desire to discover and take hold of the hygienic, curative element of eurythmy. From many conversations with Erna van Deventer-Wolfram, who was actively engaged in eurythmy in various parts of Germany, it transpired that through the work she was doing she, too, had been powerfully drawn to this curative aspect of eurythmy. After due reflection we decided to ask Dr. Steiner for instructions on curative eurythmy. Rudolf Steiner agreed with alacrity and promised to think about it. It was not long before Frau van Deventer and I were requested to go to Dornach in April where he wanted to give lectures on curative eurythmy alongside the doctors' course he was going to give at the Goetheanurn.

And so during the clays of April 12 to 17, 1921, Rudolf Steiner presented the gift of the third element of eurythmy, and the doctors and eurythmists who were present experienced a whole new world of possibilities for therapy opening up before them, which, in its variety and effectiveness and the way in which Rudolf Steiner presented it, is bound to have made an unforgettable impression on them. Instead of the few instructions and indications we had asked for we were given a complete and detailed method of eurythmy therapy in which we could directly experience that even today the creative and curative power of the Word, with its capacity to take hold of the movement potential in the human body, is still at work. It often happened that it was not easy to find our way into it, for even those of us who had been familiar with the eurythmic art of movement for many years found that the exercises Rudolf Steiner either performed himself or asked Frau van Deventer-Wolfram and myself to perform were utterly new and surprising. It was especially difficult for the doctors present, as only a minority had had anything to do with eurythmy up till then. Two eurythmy courses were organized where we discussed and practised basic eurythmy with the doctors, and also the exercises that had been given by Dr. Steiner in the curative eurythmy lecture that day.

Regular work at curative eurythmy now started up in various places. In the clinics in Arlesheim and Stuttgart and also at the Waldorf School, Rudolf Steiner gave several more indications for the use of curative eurythmy in special cases, he himself varied one or another exercise, and he gave certain sound sequences that were to be practised with individual patients under his special observation. These indications offer doctors and curative eurythmists a rich opportunity to learn more about a methodical approach, adapting of exercises to the individual needs of patients, and the scrupulous observation required for this.

The real basis of all curative eurythmy work is given in this course, as is clearly stated in Rudolf Steiner's own words. In October 1922, on the occasion of a medical week in Stuttgart he was again asked to speak about curative eurythmy, this time by doctors. That lecture is included here with the 1921 course. Right at the beginning Rudolf Steiner says ”I have been requested to say something more about this curative eurythmy of ours. Fundamentally speaking I presented the empirical material for this curative eurythmy at the last doctors' course in Dornach (see “The Spiritual Scientific Aspect of Therapy”), and it is hardly necessary to go further than that. For if it is put to proper use it can have far-reaching significance.”

From Frau I. de Jaager's epilogue (1952 edition):

“It will soon be evident to the reader that unless you make a thorough study of Anthroposophy you will not get very far with this curative eurythmy course. Curative eurythmy arises out of Anthroposophy just the same as artistic eurythmy does. A living grasp of Man and the world is a necessary basis for its use. Only on this assumption will it avoid becoming a system or something that is grasped and applied in an abstract, intellectual way; a danger that is ever present in our times. Curative eurythmy also requires an extensive knowledge of artistic eurythmy. Imaginative forces, the coming into motion of the whole being of man, are prerequisites for the application of this therapy, where it is essential to have an artistic understanding of the patient. All the delicate and minute nuances we need in order to help a sick child or adult come to us out of artistic eurythmy. You will continually find new inspiration there.

I would like to stress that a young person should not devote herself exclusively to curative eurythmy. Up to the age of 28 a person should be able to give her imagination and creative forces free rein. The more this can happen the better she will be able to develop devotion, patience and empathy when doing eurythmy later on. It is essential to devote oneself wholly to the patient and carry him with artistic warmth of heart.

As Rudolf Steiner often mentions in the course, curative eurythmy should never be used without a doctor's thorough diagnosis. The greater the collaboration with the patient's doctor the more effective the curative eurythmy will be.”

This course of nine lectures was given by Doctor Rudolf Steiner at Mansfield College, Oxford, in August, 1922, three years after the foundation of the Waldorf School. It is the first of the three courses of lectures on education given by Rudolf Steiner for an English audience.

Mrs. Millicent Mackenzie, at that time professor of Education at University College, Cardiff, was an active member of the committee who promoted the conference and she took the chair throughout these lectures. Principal L. P. Jacks, then head of Manchester College, gave an address of welcome to Dr. Steiner at the opening of the conference. Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, then Minister of Education (to whose message Dr. Steiner refers in Lecture II) had signified his intention to be present.

The colloquial style has been retained in translation since, although Steiner would no doubt have revised the MS. for publication, it seems less presumptuous to leave in what he might have left out than to risk leaving out what he might have left in.

D.H.

We must not close our minds to the fact that the relations of man to his surroundings are far more complicated than the part of which we are always conscious. I have attempted to make clear to you from the most various angles the nature and significance of the unconscious and subconscious soul-processes. And it is especially important in the sphere of education, and of educational method, that man should be educated in a way suited not only to his consciousness, but also to his subconsciousness, to the subconscious and unconscious forces of his soul. In this sense, if we are to be true educators and teachers, we must enter into the subtleties of human nature.

We have learnt that there are three stages of human development traceable between the losing of the first teeth and puberty (seven to nine, nine to twelve, twelve to fourteen). We must realize that particularly in the last of these stages of life the subconscious plays a great part along with consciousness—a part which is significant for the whole future life of the individual.

I should like to make the position plain to you by approaching it from another angle.

Just think how many people to-day travel in electric trains without the ghost of a notion of the real nature of locomotion by electric rail. Just think how many people to-day see even a steam-engine, a railway-engine, steam past them, without any suspicion of the physical and mechanical processes involved in the motion of the steam-engine. But think further, in what relation, in view of such ignorance, we stand as human beings to the surroundings of which we even make a convenience. We live in a world produced by human beings, moulded by human thought, of which we make use, and which we do not understand in the least. This lack of comprehension for human creation, or for the results of human thought, is of great significance for the entire complexion of the human soul and spirit. In fact, people must benumb themselves to escape the realization of influences from this source.

It must always remain a matter of great satisfaction to see people from the so-called “better classes” enter a factory and feel thoroughly ill at ease. This is because they experience, like a shaft from their subconsciousness, the realization that they make use of all that is produced in the factory, and yet, as individuals, have not the slightest intimacy with the processes taking place there. They know nothing about it. When you notice the discomfiture of an inveterate cigarette smoker going into the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory without any idea of the process of manufacture to provide him with a cigarette, you can at least notice the satisfaction that human nature shows of being itself worried through its ignorance. And there is at least some pleasure in seeing people who are completely ignorant of the workings of an electric railway, get in and out of it with a slight feeling of discomfort. For this feeling of discomfort is at least the first glimmering of an improvement in attitude. The worst thing is participation in a world made by human heads and hands without bothering in the least about that world.

We can only fight against this attitude if we begin our fight as early as the last stage of the elementary school course, if we simply do not let the child of fifteen or sixteen leave school without at least a few elementary notions of the most important functions of the outside world. The child must leave with a craving to know, an insatiable curiosity about everything that goes on around him, and then convert this curiosity and craving for knowledge into further knowledge. We ought, therefore, to use the separate subjects of study towards the end of the school course as a social education of the individual in the most comprehensive sense, just as we employ geography on the lines already described as in a resume. That is, we should not neglect to introduce the child, on a basis of such physical, natural-history concepts as we can command, to the workings of at least the factory systems in his neighbourhood. The child should have acquired some general idea at fifteen and sixteen of the way a soap-factory or a spinning-mill is run. The problem will be, of course, to study things as economically as possible. It is always possible, if a comprehensive process is being studied, to arrange some kind of abbreviated epitome and very primitive demonstration of complicated processes. I think that Herr Molt [General Managing Director of the Waldorf-Astoria tobacco factory and founder of the Waldorf School as a school for the children of his employees.] will agree with me when I say that one could teach the child, in an economical fashion, the entire factory process for preparing cigarettes, from beginning to end, in a few short sentences. Such shortened instructions of certain branches of industry are of the very greatest benefit to children of twelve to fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. If people at this age were to keep a kind of notebook containing: manufacture of soap, spinning, weaving, etc., it would be an excellent thing. There would be no immediate need to teach him mechanical or chemical technology, but if the child could keep such a notebook he would derive a great deal of benefit from it. Even if he lost the notebook the residue would be there. The individual, that is, would not only retain the knowledge of these things, but, most important of all, he would feel, in going about life and in his own vocation, that he once knew these things, that he once went into them. This influences him, as a matter of fact, and gives him the assurance with which he acts and the self-possession with which the individual effects a footing for himself in life. It is very important for the individual's will-power and his capacity to make decisions. In no profession will you get people with real initiative unless their relation to the world is instinct with the consciousness that, even about things which do not fall within their province, they once acquired a certain knowledge, however elementary. Whether they have remembered it or not, they have the residue, the traces. Granted, we learn a good deal in the average school. But there, in the object lesson, which so often degenerates into platitudes, the child learns many such things, but it probably happens that he does not retain the feeling that he went into a thing with pleasure and felt himself lucky. On the contrary, he feels: I have forgotten what I learnt about that, and a good thing, too. We should never be responsible for producing this feeling in a person. When, later, we go into business and other walks of life, innumerable recollections will flicker up from our subconsciousness if we have been taught in our childhood with the care which I have described. Life to-day is exclusively specialized. This specialization is really fearful, and the excess of it in practical life is chiefly due to the fact that we begin to specialize already at school.

The gist of these remarks might well be summarized as follows: All that the child learns during his school years should ultimately and in some way be so applied that he can everywhere trace its connections with practical human life. Very many features, indeed, which are unsocial to-day could be transformed into social ones if we, at least, could have glimpsed an insight into things not immediately connected with our occupation.

For example, certain things should really be respected by the outside world which are, in fact, respected in spheres still dominated by older, better, if perhaps rather atavistic principles of teaching. In this connection I should like to refer to a very remarkable phenomenon. When we, now elderly folk, went through the senior school in Austria, we had relatively good geometry and arithmetic textbooks. They have disappeared now. A few weeks ago I ransacked all the imaginable bookshops in Vienna to get older geometry books, because I wanted to see again, with my physical eyes, what gave us young fellows such joy in Vienna-Neustadt, for instance: when we got into the first or lowest class of the senior school the lads of the second class always used to come into the corridor the first day and yell: “Fialkowski, Fialkowski! You'll have to pay up tomorrow!” That is, as pupils of the first class we took over the Fialkowski geometry books from the boys of the second class and brought the money for them the next day. I have hunted up one of these Fialkowskis again, to my great joy, because it proves that geometry books written in this older tradition are really much better than the later ones. For the modern books which have replaced them are really quite horrible. The arithmetic and geometry books are very bad. But on thinking back only a little way and taking the generations before us as our models, there were better textbooks then. They nearly all came from the school of the Austrian Benedictines. The mathematics and geometry books had been written by the Benedictines and were very good ones, because the Benedictines are a Catholic order who take a great deal of care that their members receive a good education in geometry and mathematics. The Benedictine feeling in general is that it is really ludicrous for anyone to mount a pulpit and address the people unless he is familiar with geometry and mathematics.

This ideal of unity, inspiring the human soul, must pervade our teaching. In every vocation something of the whole world must be alive. In every vocation there must exist something of its very opposite, things which we believe are almost inapplicable to that vocation. People must be interested in more or less the opposite extreme of their own work. But they will only feel the desire to do this if they are taught as I have described.

It was, of course, just at the time in which materialism reached its final expansion, in the last third of the nineteenth century, and penetrated so deeply into our educational method, that specialization came to be considered very important. Do not imagine that the effect is to make the child idealistic if you avoid showing him in his last years at the school the relation of subjects of school study to practical life. Do not imagine that the child will be more idealistic later in life if, at this time, you let him write essays on all kinds of sentimentalism about the world, on the gentleness of the lamb, on the fierceness of the lion, and so on, on the omnipresence of God in nature. You do not make the child idealistic in this way. You will do far more, in fact, to cultivate idealism itself in the child if you do not approach it so directly, so crudely. What is the real reason why people have become so irreligious lately? Simply because preaching has been far, far too sentimental and abstract. That is why people have become so irreligious—because the Church has respected the divine commandments so little. For instance, there is, after all, a commandment: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” If people respect this and do not say “Jesus Christ” after every fifth sentence, or speak of “divine Providence,” accusations are immediately levelled against them by the so-called Church-minded people, by those who would be happiest hearing “Jesus Christ” and “God” in every sentence. The reverent surrender to the presence of the divine Immanence, which hesitates to be for ever saying “Lord, Lord,” is sometimes considered an irreligious attitude. And if human teaching is pervaded by this modest divine activity, not just a sentimental lip-service, you hear people say on all sides, because they have been wrongly educated: “Ah yes, he ought to speak far more than he does about Christianity.” This attitude, even in teaching, must be clearly kept in mind, and what the child learns at thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen must be given less of a sentimental turn; on the contrary, it must be directed into the channel of practical life. In fact, no child ought really to reach the age of fifteen without being led from arithmetic to a knowledge of the rules of at least the simplest forms of book-keeping. And in this way the principles of grammar and language-teaching should be applied instead of that form of essay which represents human mind by introducing phrases.

Yes, indeed, this “sort” of essay which children have to write between thirteen and sixteen, is often employed as a sort of improved edition of the mentality arising when men gather round their beer in the evening or women have their chitter-chatter at tea-time. Far more attention should be given to applying language teaching to the essay of a business type, to the business letter. And no child should pass the age of fifteen without taking a course of writing specimen practical business letters. Do not say that he can learn this later. Certainly, by overcoming great difficulties, he can learn it later, but the point is: not without overcoming these difficulties. You do the child a great kindness if you teach him to apply his grammar knowledge, his language knowledge, to essays of a business nature, to business letters. In our day there should really be no single individual who has not learnt to write a decent business letter. Certainly he may not have to apply this knowledge in later life, but there should not be one single individual who has not been at one time trained to write a respectable business letter. If the child has become satiated with sentimental idealism from thirteen to fifteen, he will later experience a revulsion from idealism and become a materialist. If, at this early age, he is introduced to the practical side of life, he will also retain a healthy relation to the ideal needs of the soul. But these will just be extinguished by senseless indulgence in them in early youth.

This is extremely important, and in this connection even certain externals, such as the division of subjects, might be of great significance. We shall have to make compromises, as you know, with regard to religious instruction, which will have the disadvantage that the religious element will not come in close connection with the other subjects. But even to-day, if the religious parties would make the same compromises from their side, much might be achieved by the close association of religious instruction with other subjects. If, for example, the teacher in religious instruction condescended now and then to take up some other aspect of study; if, for instance, he were to explain to the child, as an incidental part of his religious teaching, and connected with it, the steam-engine or something of a quite worldly nature, something having to do with astronomy, etc., the simple fact that the teacher of religion is doing this would make an extraordinary impression on the consciousness of the growing children. I am mentioning this extreme case because in the other subjects things must be noticed which unfortunately cannot in our case be observed in the course of religious instruction. We must not have to think, like pedants: Now teach geography, now history, and don't care two pins for anything else. No, we must remember, when explaining to the child that the word “sofa” came from the East during the Crusades, to find room for some explanation of the manufacture of sofas as part of the history teaching. Then we proceed to other more Western fashions of furniture and extract something quite new from the so-called “subject.” This will be a tremendous boon to the growing child, particularly from the point of view of method, for the reason that the transition from one subject to another, the association of one fact with another, has the most beneficent influence imaginable on the development of the spirit, the soul, and even the body. For one can say: A child to whose joy, in the middle of a history lesson, the teacher suddenly begins to talk about the manufacture of sofas, and perhaps from that goes on to discuss designs of Oriental carpets, all so that the child really has a survey of the whole topic, will have a better digestion than a child who simply has a geometry lesson after a French lesson. It will be healthier for the body, too. In this way we can organize the lessons inwardly according to the principles of hygiene. In these days, as it is, most people have all kinds of digestive troubles, bodily indispositions, which come about very often from our unnatural methods of teaching, because we cannot adjust our teaching to the demands of life. The most badly organized in this respect, of course, are (in Germany) the High Schools for Girls (höhere Töchterschulen). And if someone were to study some day, from the point of view of the history of civilization, the connection between women's illnesses and the educational methods used in the Girls' High Schools, it would form quite an interesting chapter. People's thoughts must be directed to things of this kind simply so that, when aware of much that has grown up recently, healthier conditions may be brought about. Above all, people must know that the human being is a complex being, and that the faculties which it is desired to cultivate in him must often be prepared beforehand.

If you want children to gather round you so that you can convey to them in profoundly religious feeling the glory of the divine powers in the world, and you do it with children who come just anyhow from anywhere, you will see that what you say goes in at one ear and out at the other without touching their feelings. But if, after the children have written business letters in the morning, you have them back again in the afternoon and try to regain what was in their subconsciousness while writing the business letters and you then try to instil religious ideas into them, you will be successful, for you yourself will then have created an atmosphere which craves for its antithesis. Seriously, I am not making these proposals to you from the point of view of abstract didactic method, but because they are of enormous importance for life. I should like to know who has not discovered in the world outside how much unnecessary work is done. Business people will always agree if you say: “Take a person employed in some business; he is told to write a business letter to some branch connected with the firm or to people who are to take a matter in hand. He writes a letter; an answer is received. Then another letter has to be written and another answer received, and so on. It is particularly in business life a very deep-seated evil that time is wasted in this way.” The fact simply is, that by this means public life is carried on with colossal extravagance. It is noticeable, too. For if, with nothing but ordinary sound human intelligence and common sense to your credit, you get hold of a modern duplicating book and carbon-copy belonging to a business, you literally endure agonies. And this is not in any way because you feel disinclined to show sympathy for the jargon of words or dislike the interests represented there, but you experience agonies of exasperation that things are written down as un-practically as possible, when the copy-book in question could be reduced to at least a quarter of its size. And this is simply and solely because the last year of elementary school teaching is not suitably organized. For the loss during this year cannot be made good in later life without almost invincible difficulties. You cannot even repair in the continuation schools (Fortbildungsschule) the omissions of this period because the powers which develop in it become choked as with sand and are no longer active later on. You have to reckon with these powers if you wish to be certain that a person will not just superficially concoct a letter with half his mind on it, but that he will have his mind on the work and will draw up a letter with discretion and foresight.

The point in the first stage, when the child comes to school until he is nine, is that we should be well grounded in human nature and that we should educate and teach entirely from that point of view; from thirteen to fifteen the point in drawing up the time-table is that as teachers and instructors we should be rooted in life, that we should have an interest in and a sympathy for life. I had to say all this to you before going on to the ideal time-table, to compare it with time-tables which will concern your teaching as well, because, of course, we are surrounded on all sides by the outside world and its organization.

Dear attendees! For many years I have had the privilege of speaking here in this place about anthroposophical spiritual science, its essence and significance for the present spiritual life of humanity. Since I last had the opportunity to do so, the School of Spiritual Science courses have taken place at the Goetheanum in Dornach in September and October of this year. These School of Spiritual Science courses were also intended to demonstrate in practical terms the task that the anthroposophical spiritual science in question seeks to fulfill in relation to the other sciences and to practical life. About thirty personalities from the various branches of science, artistic creation, and also practical life, industrial and commercial life, contributed to this; through them it should be shown how spiritual science can have a fruitful effect not only on the individual branches of science and on artistic creation, but also, and above all, on practical life. Spiritual science should not be limited to theoretical discussions and sentimental descriptions, but should show how it has the means to do precisely that which, in many respects, cannot be done by other sides in the present and in the near future, but which can be undertaken by spiritual science.

Those who are more familiar with the course of intellectual life in the present day know that the opinion and feeling is widespread throughout the individual branches of science that the individual sciences are coming up against certain limits that it is impossible for them to cross. Often it is even thought that it is impossible for humans to go beyond such limits.

But on the other hand, there is also practical life in relation to science. Science should and wants to intervene in practical life. And anyone who is involved in the life of science will not be able to deny that the limits that the various sciences find themselves up against — I need only draw attention to medicine —, that these limits can be settled by philosophical-theoretical arguments that are intended to justify these boundaries, but rather that life often demands human action precisely where science is confronted with such boundaries. The fact that it is indeed possible, through the special method of spiritual science, to enter precisely those areas that modern science points to as boundaries, should be shown on the one hand in the Dornach School of Spiritual Science. It should be shown, not by individual personalities who are merely familiar with spiritual science, but precisely by all people, by personalities who have thoroughly mastered their individual subject just as others have and who are immersed in it, who are the only ones who are able to show how this subject can be stimulated and fertilized by spiritual science. It was also of very special importance that personalities in practical life showed that this special way of thinking, which is based on reality, on full, total reality, to which the spiritual forces of the world certainly belong, that this way of looking at things is capable of accomplishing in practical life what has often had to remain unaccomplished in modern times, and which has indeed been outwardly documented as unaccomplished by the social and other necessities of life in our present time.

Of course, at this point we cannot yet say how successful this anthroposophical spiritual science has been in demonstrating its legitimacy in the spiritual life of the present day through such practical measures. On the other hand, however, it can be said that despite the attacks, of which you have been informed in the preparatory remarks, that despite these attacks, it has been recognized in recent times, even by serious parties, that what is believed by many is not true at all, that one has to deal with anthroposophy [as] with the activity of some obscure sect or the like.

I would like to give just one example to show you how, despite all the opposition, which is not always well-intentioned and, above all, not always well-meaning; how, despite all the opposition, spiritual science is slowly coming to what it must come to, at least to recognition of its earnest striving and its open eye for the cultural needs of the present.

I would like to cite just this one example. The opposing writings are gradually growing into books, and a book has been published in recent weeks called “Modern Theosophy”. For a reason that is, of course, strange, the author states that he is concerned with nothing but spiritual science. He says in the following remarks: Wherever the talk is of theosophy and theosophists, this is always the mode of expression that is more familiar than the expressions anthroposophy and anthroposophists.

Now, one cannot say – and this is addressed to those present – that the author of this writing, Kurt Leese, who has a licentiate in theology, is appreciative of anthroposophy. On the contrary, the whole book is written as a refutation. Nor can it be said that the author of the book understands an enormous amount about anthroposophy. But what he presents on the very first page and repeats many times in the book is something that shows that even from the position of an opponent, it is gradually no longer possible to deny the seriousness of anthroposophy's intentions. Here is what an opponent says:

“If Theosophy were only the random ideas of a small sect fishing in troubled waters, it would not be worth the effort to pay it any attention.”

And then he says that one is dealing with something that shows the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully interwoven with an ethical spirit. The fact that this ethical spirit remains even if one negates everything else in anthroposophy is something that the author of this book openly admits:

"Its most active contemporary promoter, Rudolf Steiner, with the tools of great reading and undeniable acumen, has compiled a great wealth of religious-historical, scientific and philosophical material in detail, in order to lay the foundations of a comprehensively designed world view, powerfully imbued with an ethical spirit.

Nevertheless – and now I come to the positive part of my argument – this opponent, who strives to be objective, wants to look for the reasons for refuting anthroposophy from within anthroposophy itself. He wants to take up what the anthroposophist says and prove contradictions and the like, namely, to demonstrate an unscientific character. But at one point he betrays himself in a very strange way. He says, at a particularly characteristic point, that Anthroposophy has an inflammatory effect and is “ill-tempered”.

Such feats of tricky distinctions, which from the outset are in the service of an ideational preconceived scheme, make reading Steiner's writings not only difficult, where multiple misunderstandings of the uninitiated could occasionally occur, but also annoying and unpleasant.

So not only challenging logical judgment, challenging scientific judgment, but challenging feelings and emotions, that is how one views anthroposophy! And why is this so? This is certainly connected with the very special way in which anthroposophy, precisely because it wants to be as scientific as any other science, relates to the paths of knowledge of mankind.

Anthroposophy – of course, as I have said here very often – Anthroposophy would certainly not be taken seriously if it were somehow foolishly dismissive of the great, the significant achievements of the scientific method in modern times. Nor would it be taken seriously if it were to behave in some dilettantish way towards the spirit, the whole inner attitude of scientific research. It starts out from an acknowledgement of modern scientific endeavor. It does this by seeking to deepen its understanding of the scientific method, but at the same time it seeks a path from the comprehension of the external sense world into the comprehension of the spiritual world. And she would like to answer the questions that matter, the questions about the path of knowledge, in such a way that the spiritual realm is given its due, just as the sensory realm is given its due through scientific research. In doing so, she sees herself compelled — not by the scientific method as it is commonly practiced, in which one believes one is limited if one only works in the sensory world — she feels compelled by this scientific method, as it is commonly practiced, not to stop. It devotes itself more to the education, the inner discipline of research than to scientific methods, and for this reason cannot accept what is often dogmatically stated today as to the necessity of remaining in the world of sense and in the world of appearances through understanding.

And from this point of view, spiritual science seems provocative, as this critic says, and “unpleasant”. For on the whole, today's man is not inclined to accept any method of knowledge that does not arise from the ordinary characteristics of human nature, that one has in the world, that one has been educated to, or that follow from the course of ordinary life. The great and most wonderful achievements of modern natural science are based on the fact that one remains at a certain point of view of sense observation, of experiment and of combining through the intellect, that one carries out this kind of research further and further, conscientiously, but that one wants to remain with the point of view that one has once adopted in this way.

Spiritual science, as it is meant here, cannot remain at this point of view, but it must, it feels compelled, precisely because of the strict scientific education that the spiritual scientist has to undergo. It feels compelled – not only to knowledge applied in natural science, to expand it, to make it more precise through all kinds of aids — but she feels compelled to develop a completely different kind of knowledge in the soul, a different way of knowing than the one used in natural science today. She therefore feels compelled to continue the work of the scientist into the spiritual realm, so that the development of this spiritual scientific method can be characterized more as a natural outgrowth of the scientific method than as a mere extension of it. And so one arrives at what has been expressed by me from the most diverse points of view over the years.

One comes to the conclusion that in the life of the human soul there are certain forces that are hidden, just as they are hidden from ordinary perception and from ordinary scientific perception, just as those soul forces that only emerge after five or ten years are hidden in a ten-year-old child. What must be borne in mind is a real growth of the human being, a sprouting forth of that which is not yet there in the tenth year but continues into the fifteenth or twentieth year. And this is discovered by the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here, that even if one has developed to the point of having the methods by which one can conduct scientific research in the most conscientious way, it is still possible – so that it can be compared with a real growth of the human being – to soul forces, that it is possible to extract soul forces from the human soul, which the world can now not only see, I would like to say, more precisely with a microscope or more closely with a telescope, but which see the world quite differently, namely spiritually and soulfully, in contrast to the merely sensory view.

And it is not attempted – esteemed attendees – to somehow explore the spiritual through external measures or external experiments. How could one recognize the supernatural through laboratory experiments! That is what those who are inclined towards spiritualism want, that is what those people who gather around Schrenck-Notzing or others want. The anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here takes precisely this view, that what can be observed externally through measures that are modeled on the external scientific experiment - however astonishing they may be - that by world in some way, be it by deepening or refining it, or by allowing it to work more into the etheric in some way —, that by remaining in the sensory world, one can by no means gain knowledge of the supersensible world. But modern man often finds this unacceptable, that he should now do something with his soul forces, that he should develop these soul forces himself before he can research in the spiritual world.

It is, however, necessary to develop a certain intellectual modesty, which consists in saying to oneself: the powers that are so well suited for the sensory world, such as those applied by modern science, cannot be used to enter the spiritual world. Man must first awaken his own supersensible when he wants to explore the supersensible in the external environment, to which he belongs as a spiritual-soul being just as he belongs to the physical world through his sense of being, when he wants to explore this spiritual-soul entity in the environment.

It is certainly not everyone's cup of tea, dear attendees, to become a spiritual researcher; but if one does not want to become a spiritual researcher, it is nevertheless not acceptable to say that spiritual science is idle because it opens up a field that only those who, in a certain sense, develop their soul powers can see into.

Modern humanity as a whole does not follow the path into the scientific method itself; but modern life is permeated by the ideas that we bring into it through science. We are simply compelled by common sense to accept what radiates from the natural sciences, to incorporate it into life, and to apply it in other ways to the human condition. Just as the researcher in the laboratories carries out his experiments, which then go out into the world, so too will there be a new spiritual research. But humanity in general wants to be able to relate to the results of spiritual research in the same way as it can relate to those of natural science, without having to face the reproach that something has been accepted on mere faith or on authority.

What is indicated as this special inner, intimate soul method is to be sought in a straightforward development of human soul forces that already exist in ordinary life and in ordinary science. I would like to say that it comes to mind that there must be something like this when one brings to mind the actual meaning of knowledge in modern scientific life.

I am certainly no Kantian, dear attendees. Everything that arises for me from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is basically anti-Kantian. But I may refer to one of Kant's sayings here, because what lies in this saying has basically been verified by the whole of more recent scientific development, insofar as this whole more recent scientific development really strives to be knowledge of the world, comprehensible knowledge of the world. There is Kant's dictum: In every science, there is actually only as much real science to be found as there is mathematics present in it.

Now, my dear attendees, this is not something that we need merely believe about Kant; rather, we see it as true everywhere in the scientific development of modern times, especially in the development that most clearly and most directly leads to a world view, in the physical sciences. Mathematical thinking is applied, experiments are carried out, and not only observed, but the observations are permeated with mathematics. What does that actually mean?

Yes, it means that one only has the feeling of bringing intellectual light into what can be observed in the external world when one has verified the observations in a mathematical way. And how is that? Yes, it is because one comprehends mathematical insights through oneself, and does not become acquainted with mathematical insights through external observation. The one who once knows through inner contemplation that the three angles of a triangle are 180°, who can grasp this for himself through his own contemplation, in ordinary Euclidean geometry, he knows it. He knows it clearly through his own intuition, even if millions of people were to contradict him, he knows it. He can affirm it as a truth for his inner contemplation. It is therefore the inner work of contemplation through which one comes to mathematical truths, through which one, so to speak, inwardly experiences mathematical truths. And external observation becomes scientific in that one carries what one has observed inwardly into these external observations and connects it with them.

Especially when one has experienced this urge of the modern scientific direction in oneself through mathematics, that is, through an inwardly clear, light-filled pursuit of certain ideas in order to arrive at scientific paths that also satisfy the human need for knowledge, then one is pushed further. And then something else arises. I would say that it arises from the depths of life. From the depths of our soul, all kinds of needs for knowledge arise in the face of the great riddles of existence.

At first, in a very vague way, the human being wants to know something about what his or her essential core is. He wants to know something, or at least, one can say, he assumes that there is something to know about that which lies beyond birth and death. He also assumes that, however dark his path may be with regard to what he calls his fate, there may be a path of knowledge that allows him to somehow see through the seemingly so confused threads of human destiny. In the very act of experiencing such surging up from the soul, the human being will, I would say, become more and more aware through inner soul practice of how he is prompted when he wants to observe his inner soul , this thinking, feeling and willing that is in him, when he wants to observe it in a similar transparent way to how he already manages to a certain extent today to penetrate the outer world with mathematical concepts. And from what one experiences there as a driving force for knowledge, the spiritual researcher starts from there, he comes to the conclusion that one can further develop certain soul powers than are present in ordinary life, that one can further develop certain soul powers that are absolutely necessary for a healthy human existence in ordinary life.

Now, one of these ordinary soul abilities, without whose normal functioning we cannot be mentally healthy, is the ability to remember. My dear attendees! We all know this ability to remember; but we also know how necessary it is for a healthy, normal soul life. We know of pathological cases in which the thread of memory is interrupted up to the point of childhood, which is the furthest we can remember in life, where we cannot look back at the life we have gone through since our birth. When a person's thread of memory, his stream of memory, is interrupted in this way, then he feels, as it were, hollowed out inside. His soul life is not healthy and he cannot find his way healthily into the outer life, neither into social life nor into natural life. So the ability to remember is something that is, so to speak, absolutely intertwined with normal human life. Memory is connected to what we experience through our senses, what we go through in our interaction with the outer world. How does this memory present itself to us?

We can summon it quite well in our being if we do so through an image. In a sense, our life lies behind us at every moment like an indeterminate stream. But we live in our soul in such a way that from this state indefinite currents can emerge, the images of individual experiences, that we can bring up these images through more or less arbitrary inner actions, that they also come to us involuntarily and the like. It is as if a stream of our being were there and from this stream these images of our memory could emerge like waves.

Those who do not think with prejudice but truly from the spirit of modern science know how closely this ability to remember is connected with the human body, with the physical nature of the human being. We can, we need only point to what physiology and biology can tell us in this regard: how the ability to remember is somehow connected with the destruction of the body. And we will see how all this points to the fact that a truly inwardly healthy body is necessary for the human being to have the ability to remember in a healthy state.

This ability to remember is such that, in the right way, I would say the vividness of the external sensory perceptions that we experience in our connection with the external world, that this vividness of external sensory perception must [fade] in a certain way. We may recall the images of our experiences only in a faded state, and we must recall these images in such a way that we can participate with our will in an appropriate manner in this recall. These images must emerge in our inner soul life in a pale and somewhat arbitrary manner. And it is well known that when these images of memory emerge with a certain vividness and intensity, and when the human will, when the structure of the ego, must recede before these images, when a person cannot firmly persist in his ego in the face of these images, then hallucinations, visions, everything arises through which the human being is actually deeper in his body than he is connected when he is in the ordinary life of perception and memory.

This must be assumed in order to avoid misunderstanding spiritual science, especially with regard to its method, that spiritual science is quite clear about it in the moment when what is called a vision, what is called a hallucination, what you can call more intense images of fantasy, that in that moment the person is not freer from his physical life, but that he is more dependent on the physical life through some pathological condition than he is in ordinary external existence. The belief that spiritual science has anything to do with such pathological conditions of the soul must be fought against. On the contrary, it emphasizes more sharply than the external life that those who believe that one can look into the spiritual world by indulging in such abnormal soul phenomena, caused only by pathological bodily conditions, as they are, for example, those that occur in mediumship, that occur as hallucinations, as visions and the like, are quite on the wrong track.

What the spiritual researcher does as an inner activity of the soul is much more – my dear audience – than that. This is brought into a state of mind that is entirely modeled on the way this soul proceeds when it devotes itself to mathematical thinking. Just as mathematical thinking is completely permeated by the ego, which is constantly in control of itself. And just as every transition is made in such a way that one is, as it were, everywhere inside and knows how one thing passes into another, so too must the spiritual researcher's method in the inner life of the soul proceed in such a state of mind. Starting from the ability to remember, he draws on the most important quality of this ability to remember. It consists in the fact that memory makes permanent that which we otherwise experience only in the moment. What we have experienced in the moment remains with us for our lifetime. But how does it remain permanent for us?

If we take what I have already said, the dependence of normal human mental life on the body, then we have to realize that we maintain our memory normally when it is based on our body helping us to have this ability to remember. It is based on the fact that we do not have to work with just our soul when we want to remember. We know, after all, that what later comes up as a memory has descended into the indeterminate depths of bodily life. And again, it also comes up from the indeterminate depths of life. These depths, so to speak, pass on to our bodily life what is brought about in us through sensory impressions and through the intellectual processing of these impressions. We then bring it up again by lifting that which is experienced bodily in the time between the bodily life and the memory, by lifting it up into the imagination. We thus borrow our ideas, by becoming memories, the clear perception, to which we devote ourselves in mathematical thinking.

The spiritual researcher nevertheless ties in with precisely this lasting of the ideas in the memory. And that then leads him to what I have called the appropriate meditation in my writings, especially in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in my “Occult Science: An Outline”. There it shows itself, I have characterized it many times, and you will find it discussed in more detail in the books mentioned. You bring into your consciousness an individual set of ideas or a complex of ideas and hand over — as I said — so that any reminiscences that emerge from the subconscious do not enter what you are to do only through human will, just as you do mathematical connecting and analyzing through human will. So you place certain ideas, which you have guessed or somehow obtained, at the center of your consciousness for a long time – and with the same completely clear, mathematically clear day consciousness – such ideas that you, so to speak, perform the activity, perform it mentally: to rest on ideas, as can otherwise only be achieved with the help of the physical body.

And then we see that this resting on certain ideas does indeed have a success. Then we see that we become aware of forces resting within our soul that have nothing to do with the physical body, that do not at all lead into the realm of hallucination or vision, that remain entirely within the realm in which the soul moves when it develops mathematics. But it is also an inner development of ideas, it is a spiritual experience of ideas. It is only necessary to bring other ideas than mathematical ones to the center of the soul's life, then a different ability than that of mathematical thinking will develop.

And one should not imagine that this is particularly easy and comfortable. Such exercises must be continued for years by those who want to become genuine spiritual researchers. But then it also turns out that forces were previously latent in the soul, hidden, which are now brought out. He then feels he has certain powers. Above all, the soul's ability to perceive, to perceive spiritually and mentally, is added to the ability to perceive sensually and intellectually that he had before. The human being becomes capable, as it were, of developing in real terms from within what Goethe more symbolically called the 'eye of the mind' and the 'ear of the mind'. The human being becomes capable of seeing differently than before, and above all, he first sees his own soul life differently.

I have pointed out that we have experienced this soul life since birth in an initially indeterminate stream, which we actually only have in mind in a very vague way, and from which the memory images then emerge. But it must be added that we ourselves are actually this stream. Just try to apply the “know thyself” correctly. You will see that in ordinary life you are actually nothing other than this stream, this stream that is so indeterminate, but from which all kinds of things we have experienced can emerge again and again. One is the Self. But one ceases to be the Self in a certain sense when one meditates in the way I have just indicated. I just called meditation this resting on certain ideas, although in practice it is necessary to develop the previously hidden soul powers within the human being. And the first success of this is that what we are otherwise always immersed in, what we are otherwise always, the context of our memories – because otherwise, in our ordinary state of consciousness, we are basically nothing but the stream of our memories – that this becomes more objective for us, that it becomes something external for us, that we learn to look at it.

That we have thus lifted ourselves out of it in full mathematical clarity and that we look at it. That is the first experience we have. In a certain moment of our consciousness, as a result of meditation, we have our life in front of us like a memory tableau, at least almost back to birth, like a unified whole, like a totality, like a panorama. It is not exactly what we have before us as memory images, but what we have before us is actually our inner self, inasmuch as we experience what existence has made of us, as in a totality. I would like to say that the whole stream, which we are otherwise ourselves, lies before us. We have lifted ourselves out of this stream.

This is the first experience that we have of ourselves in time, in the duration of the overview, that we actually do not merely remain in the moment through practical inner soul-making, but that we overview life as such.

But we learn something else through this as well. By making our soul life objective in this way, we learn to educate ourselves about processes that we actually go through every day, that we also observe externally, but that we certainly cannot observe from within in everyday life. This is the process of falling asleep, the process of waking up in ordinary life. One would indeed succumb to a bitter contradiction if one wanted to believe that what the soul contains dies every time one falls asleep and is reborn every time one wakes up. This soul content is there from falling asleep to waking up. But since in ordinary life a person can only have consciousness through the interaction of his soul with his body, but in the state of sleep the soul has detached itself from the body, so from falling asleep to waking up, within the ordinary consciousness, the person cannot know anything about himself.

But by having ascended to such a realization, as I have just characterized it, by having one's life as a continuous presence beside one, one can also enlighten oneself about the process of falling asleep and waking up. Because the human being is, by moving out of his ordinary experience, by learning to look at himself, he is in the same state – he learns to recognize that he is in the same state from direct experience, that he is in the state – in which he is otherwise, unconsciously, when he is between falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize the process of falling asleep and waking up. In this way, one learns to recognize that one knows: Now you have placed yourself in a state where you can see your life. But this is only a brief state of realization. Then you go back to ordinary life. So you have the state of the soul outside of ordinary experience and the ordinary state in which you are otherwise, where you are within your experiences. This re-entry into the state of ordinary life is exactly the same as waking up. And going out of oneself is learned by direct observation; going out and objectivizing of life is exactly the same as, when seen inwardly, falling asleep. So you learn to look at these two processes inwardly. But through that you get the elements to look at something else.

However, then there must be a certain expansion of what I have mentioned. I have said that today I can only point out – my dear audience – how the spiritual researcher puts certain ideas at the center of his consciousness. But he must actually attach very special importance to not just being able to rest with his consciousness on such ideas, but he must also be able to arbitrarily — and that must happen through completely different exercises, you can read about them in the books mentioned — he must be able to arbitrarily suppress these ideas again, to embrace them with his consciousness. He must thus inwardly become master — if I may repeatedly use the expression — over these ideas, which are essentially like pictures, viewed pictures, colored viewed pictures. No matter how people laugh at what Goethe called and what I also described in my “Theosophy” as “viewing images in the imagination,” what Goethe called “sensual-supersensory viewing.” Just as one can speak of a colored looking, just as one can speak of a colored looking towards the outside world, so one can speak of a colored looking at the inner images. It arises from the fact that something becomes objective. And the soul life becomes objective, as I have described it, through meditation.

But the person must also be able to remove all of this again. As you know, he is not capable of this in the case of a pathological state of mind. With mathematical clarity, the person must move in this bringing up of the ideas and in this removing of the ideas again. In that the human being, in this way, swings back and forth in his consciousness between ideas that he brings into his consciousness at will and then removes again, he practices a kind of systole and diastole, a kind of exhaling and inhaling. The spiritual-soul inner mobility comes about through this.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the method of entering the spiritual worlds that is entirely appropriate for our age. It is appropriate to enter the spiritual worlds consciously. In the old days, when people instinctively plunged into the spiritual worlds, especially through the Oriental method, they tried to consciously elevate the breathing process, thus also trying to perform an inner activity by striving to inwardly oversee the breathing process, and then to see in the breathing process that which is present as the inner being of the human being. This process does not lead people into the spiritual world in an appropriate way in the present time. Those who want to bring it back, to bring back old institutions, are actually acting against the development of humanity. Today it is appropriate for humanity to replace this method of physical breathing with a different systole and diastole – with that which I have just characterized as a sitting down of the images brought about by the will and then again arbitrarily bringing these images out of consciousness.

On the one hand, by coming to imagination and thereby describing the reverse path – and by moving further and further away from what I have described here as a conscious back and forth in meditative life – man then learns to recognize how to expand what one grasps elementarily in inhaling and exhaling. And one gets to know this as a soul process that is essentially based on a kind of longing for the body after being outside of the body for a period of time. And you learn to recognize what you experience with your soul from birth to death, how that brings the soul into the inner state in which you feel compelled to devote yourself to an [antipathy] towards life again for a while.

You then expand these ideas, but not through philosophical speculation, but by expanding your inner capacity for knowledge. And in this way one arrives at — just as one otherwise advances from a simpler species to a more complicated one — one arrives at inwardly beholding, from the inward beholding comprehension of [awakening], the complicated process that is present when the permanent part of a person, through birth or conception from the spiritual world into the physical body, when it develops the greater desire not only to return to the existing body as in waking up, but to embody itself in a new body, having been in the spiritual world for a while, having now embodied itself again.

And one learns to recognize from falling asleep, by getting to know the moment of dying in an embodiment, one learns to recognize: Through the gate of death, the soul that outlasts the course of a person's life goes to continue living in the spiritual world. One does not learn through a logical or elementary force, for example, but by falling asleep and waking up, the processes of being born and dying, or by becoming familiar with these processes in nature, but rather by moving from element to element of inner experience with mathematical clarity.

But this, dear attendees, is how one arrives at the second stage of a higher consciousness, which I have always called – please don't take offense at the term, it is just a terminology that one has to use – inspiration – through which one looks back at the lasting in ordinary physical life as at a flowing panorama. Through inner contemplation and spiritual science, it is possible to grasp the eternal in the human being. And it is possible to grasp this eternal in man. It is possible for man to recognize his connection with the supersensible-eternal just as man recognizes his connection with the sense world when he awakens the consciousness in himself through which man beholds his connection in the physical world.

These things, they certainly enter into present consciousness, my dear audience, in the same way as the Copernican worldview, for example, once entered, contradicting everything that came before, the Copernican worldview or similar. But even if what I have just mentioned still seems paradoxical to so many people today, we must remember that the Copernican worldview also seemed quite paradoxical to people at the time of its emergence.

And then, my dear audience, you also learn how to develop another human soul power, that of memory, which is trained in a way that I have just described. One learns not only to recognize this, but also another human soul power, which now also leads into ordinary normal life, only, I would say, leads into it, nevertheless, its origin is a physical one, in a more moral way into the higher life. One learns to recognize how this soul power is capable of a different development than that which it has in ordinary life. One learns to recognize how love can become a power of knowledge.

I am well aware, esteemed attendees, of how contradiction must arise from today's world view when one says: Love will be made into a power of knowledge. After all, love is seen as subjective, as that which must be excluded from all science. Nevertheless, anyone who experiences such things in their soul, as I have described to you, by developing into a spiritual researcher, knows that what develops in ordinary life as love is a human ability that is connected with the human being, and that this love cannot only be experienced by the human being when he is confronted with some beloved external object, but that it can also be experienced inwardly by the human being as a general human characteristic. It can be heightened spiritually, and I might say quite intimately, by developing that which one also applies in ordinary life. Precisely when we extend the ability to remember, to concentrate on any single content of consciousness, any object, just as in the past one repeatedly and repeatedly raised images arbitrarily in duration [by concentrating on the object, initially arbitrarily], by being in a certain interaction with the external world. By developing our will into concentration, we learn to recognize how that which otherwise expresses itself through the physical body of man as love can be grasped by the soul, how it can be detached from the body by the soul, just as in the ability characterized earlier.

But through this – my dear attendees – by learning to recognize how a person is inwardly constituted as a loving being, which otherwise only ignites in interaction with external beings, by absorbing these inner qualities, this inner impulsivity of the human being into the soul — the individual exercises for this you can also find in the books mentioned —, in this way one arrives at what I characterized earlier, this being born and dying as a physical waking up and falling asleep, not only to look at this inwardly, but also to see through it inwardly. But through this, human life is moved into a completely different sphere.

Let us take a look at this human life as it touches us by fate. We face this human life, meet hundreds and hundreds of people. In a place where life has brought us, something ignites in this or that being that brings us into a meaningful connection with fate. The one who only looks at life with an ordinary consciousness speaks of coincidence, speaks of the one that has just happened to him from the inexplicable depths of life. But the one who has brought the soul forces, which are otherwise hidden, out of his soul to the degree that I have characterized it so far, he certainly sees how, in the subconscious depths, not illuminated by ideas for the ordinary consciousness, but in the subconscious depths, in man, there rests that which is akin to desire, which drives one in life.

When you have prepared yourself to survey your life like a panorama, when you have become aware of the permanent, the eternal, that goes through birth and death, when you have developed the abilities to can see this, then – my dear attendees – then these abilities, when they are still warmed by a special training of the ability to love, then abilities in life develop in such a way that we learn how we have shaped our lives, in order to bring it – let us say – in individual cases, to the point where we have been affected by this or that stroke of fate.

We learn to recognize how life is connected in relation to what otherwise lies in the subconscious. And from there, the realization goes, how what now underlies this fateful connection of life points to repeated earthly lives. How that which we can follow with the developed soul powers, in the course of our destiny, warmed by the power of knowledge of the ability to love, how that brings us the awareness that we have gone through many earth lives and will still go through many earth lives. And that between the lives on earth there are always stays in the purely spiritual-soul world, in which the soul experiences what is conceptual from previous lives on earth, that which we have raised up into thinking above all, how this is transformed into an inner soul metamorphosis, into desire, which then pushes towards a new life on earth. This new life on earth is shaped in this way. What is the fateful connection of life becomes transparent.

Now, my dear attendees, I have only been able to sketch out the results that spiritual science, which is based on scientific education but which also develops this scientific education further, comes to. That this spiritual science is not a theory, not a collection of mere thoughts and ideas, is obvious when one considers its value for human life. At the same time, however, one must point out what this spiritual science can be, especially for people of the present and the near future and for humanity in various times.

It is very remarkable how the critic I spoke to you about earlier, who only speaks from the consciousness of the present and criticizes spiritual science to no end, nevertheless recognizes the value of which I spoke to you earlier, how this man speaks of the evaluation of life. This man is full of ideas about what he imagines to be the scientific nature of the present. He wants to evaluate spiritual science, but he has hardly got to know it, he has read everything that has been published, he claims. But then he can ask the following question:

What is all the talk of service [of knowledge, of the riddles of life and their solutions, what is all the momentum if, despite all the momentum, it leads to primeval depths and remoteness, if the theosophist]

— as I said, he means anthroposophist —

[cannot say] why it is better to be an I than a non-I.

Now, my dear attendees, imagine a person who states: What is all this talk about spiritual worlds for, if one cannot come to know why it is better to be a 'I than a non-I'? The answer to this question cannot be given theoretically. And the science that the man is talking about can actually only satisfy theorists. What does the science that the man is talking about actually have to say about everything? As I said, it is precisely from the humanities that the full value of the modern scientific method for the external sense practice should be fully recognized. It would certainly be foolish not to recognize what the X-ray method, what microscopy, what the telescope and numerous other [methods and instruments] have achieved in recent times for the knowledge of the external sense world. And it would be foolish, and above all amateurish, not to recognize the value of scientifically conscientious methods for disciplining the human capacity for knowledge. But everything that works in external experimentation, in external observation and in the mathematical processing of external observations, is basically only something that works on the human intellect. And however paradoxical it may sound, anyone who does not go through these things, I would even say not just professionally but in their whole way of life, comes to ask themselves: What can the ordinary scientific method, when it develops a world view, give us about human life? One sees it in such results. People with such a method then ask: Why is it more valuable to be “I than not-I”? Why not live as an unconscious [atom] in the universe? Why live as a conscious I?

Spiritual science, by looking more deeply, must say: What is it that gives you life, the science that has indeed achieved such great triumphs for the inner life of the soul? Does this science give us more than knowledge of the digestive processes, of the nutritional content of food for hunger? It gives us the intellectual, it gives us what can be described. It also provides clues as to how what is done instinctively can be done rationally in a certain way. But science as such can say how hunger should be satisfied, what is in the foods that satisfy hunger. But it could never satisfy hunger itself with its descriptions.

We must, however, translate this from the physical into the spiritual-soul realm. And here it must be said that spiritual-scientific knowledge, even if it has to be expressed in ideas and concepts, can be grasped by immersing oneself in these concepts and in what spiritual researchers are able to say about them from the spiritual worlds. By learning to recognize the enduring, the eternal, and the repeated earthly lives in the physical life of a person, the eternal, repeated earth-lives, the connection with destiny and thus also a world picture in connection, as it is presented in my “Occult Science in Outline”, in a spiritual-scientific way. He who lives into all this does not bring forth concepts that merely describe something about the human being, as the various scientific concepts do. Rather, they bring forth real images that, when experienced, have the power to affect the whole human being, to take hold of the feelings and will impulses of this whole human being and, so to speak, are simply soul food, spiritual-soul food — it is not just spoken of the thing — and which therefore also work into the spiritual-soul. So that the I does not have to answer the question theoretically, why it would be better to be an 'I than a non-I', but by giving itself to what radiates out of this spiritual science with all the warmth, with all the light of the spiritual, it does not merely have the possibility of giving a description from outside, but it lives in the concept the essence of the matter itself. The concepts are only the bearers of the matter itself.

This is the peculiar thing that is not at all seen in spiritual scientific literature, that it is spoken differently, not just words about something, but that the words are rooted in real experience, they are the carriers of the living experience. And that, indeed, anyone who listens carefully, if they have an ear for it, can feel all of this in the words, that they are not just descriptions of spiritual and mental processes, but these spiritual and mental processes themselves.

This, ladies and gentlemen, shows us that this spiritual science can indeed be of use in our practical lives. And it has indeed already tried to find practical application in a wide variety of fields, as I mentioned at the beginning. It has done so in a particularly important area. We have founded the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart. It is based entirely on the idea of those schools that will one day be there when the threefold social order, as I have described it in my “Key Points of the Social Question” and as I have also presented it here and repeatedly presented it in Bern, will become a fact.

This Waldorf School is a truly independent school. That is to say, it is governed by its own teaching body, which is a direct consequence of the loophole in the Württemberg education laws. The teachers are completely sovereign as a teaching body. The school is administered by the teachers. And the administration of the school itself is just as much a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses as what is taught is a consequence of the pedagogical-didactic impulses.

Of course, there is no longer time to describe to you in detail the principles of this Waldorf school. I will just say that an attempt was made not to found a school based on a particular worldview. Catholic priests teach Catholic religious education there, and Protestant priests teach Protestant religious education there. Those children who, through their own will or that of their parents, do not have such a religion, are instructed in a free religious education. But it is not at all intended to impose any kind of world view on the children. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view! What is to prevail from the roots of anthroposophical spiritual science is merely the art of pedagogy and didactics, the way in which one teaches. Anthroposophy does not want to be a theory; anthroposophy wants to be transferred into the practical handling of life. It has already proven itself in this way, although of course after one year one cannot say anything special, and especially in the pedagogical-didactic art of the Waldorf school.

I would like to mention just one thing from the end of the previous school year and the beginning of this school year. At the end of the last school year, we saw how it affects children when they are given the kind of report cards that we gave them at the Waldorf School, which was founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart and established by me. There are sometimes classes at the Waldorf School with fifty children, or even more than fifty children in the last school year. Nevertheless, it was possible to depart from the usual way in which teachers assess their pupils. All these patterns of 'sufficient', 'almost sufficient', 'halfway, almost satisfactory' and so on and so forth, you can't find your way around at all, you don't know how to grade it, where to take it from. All these things were left out in the Waldorf school. Each child was described individually, how they had been received at the school, how they had behaved, so that the teacher could see from the report what the child had gone through in that one school year. And each child was given a saying that was individually tailored to their soul life. Despite the fifty pupils in each class, the way in which the teachers practised the art of pedagogy and didactics, based on the spirit of the anthroposophical worldview, meant that they were able to formulate a life verse, a life force verse, for each individual child, which was included in the report card and which the child would visualize in his or her soul. And we have seen – for we seek the art of education in a living psychology, in a living study of the soul – how it affected the child, in that it allowed him to see himself in the mirror, so to speak. And if I may mention something else: when the children came back from their vacations, it was really the case that they came back with a different state of mind than children are usually seen to have after vacations in schools. They longed to go back to school.

And there is something else I want to tell you. Every time I came to this school for an inspection – esteemed attendees – I did not fail to ask a question very systematically, again and again, among other things: Do you love your teachers? And one can distinguish, my dear attendees, whether something comes wholeheartedly from the human soul or whether it is just some conventional answer. When this “Yes!” resounded directly and fundamentally from the soul, then one could see how what had been attempted as a pedagogical-didactic art from anthroposophical spiritual science had indeed found validity.

We are not yet allowed to work unhindered in many areas of life. But where it is possible, it must also be done in such a way that, on the one hand, what can be brought from spiritual science, as it is meant here, and, on the other hand, what corresponds to the needs, longings and hardships of our time in the true sense of the word, is brought together. In this context, it is also important to point out how numerous personalities in history who devote themselves to artistic creation instinctively seek new paths.

Such a new artistic path, but now not at all out of some theory, not out of ideas, for example through symbolism or straw-like allegory, but through living feeling, such a path was also sought in Dornach itself through the construction of the Goetheanum. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, was not in a position to simply take a master builder and say: Build me a building here in such and such a style, and there we will practice spiritual science in this building. No, my dear audience, spiritual science is something that life works because it is life. And so spiritual science, as it is meant here, as I said, cannot be allegorized, cannot be symbolized, but by looking at the human being at the same time, by working on the whole human being, it can stimulate the forces of artistic creation and the forces of artistic enjoyment. In this way it can also point the way for the future in the same way as it points the way for the new needs of the present in intellectual life, and can increasingly point the way for the future in artistic matters.

We need not only – my dear audience – see how the artistic has developed in the course of human development, how this artistic, which in the course of human development has indeed come to light in such peaks as in Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, how this artistic presupposes, in that it has always been drawn from the supersensible, how it presupposes that the sensory, the outwardly sensory, really strives towards what one wants to experience in the idealized. And this idealization is what basically characterized the artistic epoch that artistic personalities in particular feel is over and that new paths must be sought in relation to it. When one stands before the Sistine Madonna, one is confronted with something that is thoroughly material. But at the same time, one is confronted with something in relation to which one must say: the artist experienced it in such a way that the spiritual emerged directly from the material. He rose up out of the material into the spiritual; he idealized the material.

Now we are entering a stage of human development in which, in the spiritual life, in the life of knowledge, we must really look — as I have indicated — at the spiritual as such, so that the spiritual can be seen directly. We are thus also faced with the path that is artistically most appropriate for humanity in the present and near future. If an old art idealized, a new art must realize.

Spiritual beholding also longs for realization, just as sensual beholding longs for idealization. And just as one does not arrive at a truthful or dominant artistic creation by only having artistic spirit through idealization, so too does one not arrive at an allegorical or symbolic artistic creation by realizing what has been spiritually beheld. Those who, I might say, theoretically defame what can be seen in Dornach find all kinds of symbols and allegories, but they see them themselves. There is not a single symbol or allegory in the whole of the Dornach building, the Goetheanum. What can be found there has been seen in the spiritual world and realized out of the spiritual world. The architectural and sculptural elements of the building are there as a result of what was seen in the spiritual world and realized in the material world. What was seen spiritually is not shaped into ideas or concepts, but is actually seen. It is seen in full, living concreteness. And it is only incorporated into the material in a living way. It is seen in full concreteness.

This shows, dear attendees, how spiritual science can indeed also have a fruitful effect on artistic creation and enjoyment. And by leading people through its results to a life together with the spirit from which they themselves come, and towards which they seek their path out of the sensual world, which they hope for after death, out of which they know they are born if they only look at existence correctly; by Spiritual science brings man together precisely with regard to that which wants to develop most clearly, brightly, and luminously in him through the life of imagination, which otherwise remains only in abstractions that are foreign to life. It deepens in man that feeling which is the actual religious feeling. And that should be seen in the right light. One should not strive to block the path of this spiritual science based on denominations. For one can show by the example of Christianity itself what spiritual science can be for religious feeling, for the whole religious life.

What then does Christianity depend on, my dear audience? Christianity depends on the Mystery of Golgotha being understood in the right way. If one does not understand how, through the Mystery of Golgotha, something we call the Christ united with earthly life from extraterrestrial worlds, if one does not understand that there is something in the Mystery of Golgotha that cannot be exhausted by observation from the sense world, but must be grasped through spiritual contemplation, then one cannot do justice to the Mystery of Golgotha. That is why even the most modern theology has come to omit from the Mystery of Golgotha that which can only be grasped spiritually, and to speak only – in a sense naturalistically – of the simple man from Nazareth. Modern theology speaks of a man, however outstanding he may be, who at most had the consciousness of God within him. While spiritual science will bring back the Christian consciousness to grasp the mystery of Golgotha as a supersensible event in itself, as an event through which not only a man stands in the course of human development, who developed the consciousness of God a certain way, but who was the bearer of an entity that came from extraterrestrial worlds at a certain point in the development of the earth in order to henceforth, renewing human life, continue to exist with this human life.

The Christ event, in turn, is grasped by spiritual science as an impact from the extraterrestrial, from the spiritual-supernatural into earthly life. And the whole of earthly development is understood in such a way that it is a preparation for the Mystery of Golgotha, a leaning towards the Mystery of Golgotha of everything that has gone before, and a streaming forth of the impulse of this Mystery of Golgotha through the events that follow.

But one also learns to understand the difference between the event of Golgotha, which stands for itself and can be grasped by everyone according to their abilities, and what is taught about this mystery of Golgotha in any given time.

The first Christian centuries took their concepts from the Oriental world view and made the mystery of Golgotha vivid and explainable from these concepts. Then, gradually, another world emerged in the spiritual life of Western humanity. The natural sciences arose. The human spirit has become accustomed to other ways of understanding. We see today how these ways of understanding have also taken hold of theology in the nineteenth century, where it has tried to become progressive, how they have made of the Christ-Jesus being the “simple man from Nazareth”. And however much power may be brought to bear against what comes from this side, this battle will not be won unless the mystery of Golgotha is again grasped from the spiritual-scientific side, unless it can be said anew from the spirit how an extraterrestrial spirit entered into earthly life through the man Jesus of Nazareth. The explanation must be a new one in relation to human progress; it must become a new experience.

Spiritual science does not want to found a new religion, it only wants to fuel consciousness in accordance with the knowledge of modern times. It wants to show that which once gave meaning to the development of the earth in the light that this humanity needs for the culture of the present and future. Thus spiritual science, as I can show from this Christian example, can deepen a person's religious life. It can give him that which, according to modern consciousness, cannot be given to him in any other way; it can give him that.

Oh, he is timid towards Christianity who believes that through spiritual science, Christianity can be destroyed. No, on the contrary, only he looks at Christianity in the right way who has the courage to confess that, as with the physical, so the spiritual discoveries are also made. What is the Christian impulse cannot thereby appear in some lesser, weaker light, but in an ever stronger and stronger light. He would prove to be truly Christian who, out of a deep yearning, would accept the affirmations that, precisely from spiritual science, can lead to the realization of the mystery of Golgotha.

But it seems that humanity in the present truly needs religious deepening, my dear audience. For we are indeed experiencing strange things today. And I would like to mention one more example to conclude.

In Dornach, at an outstanding location in the Goetheanum, an installation is to be created that is directly related to the Mystery of Golgotha. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group is to be installed. We have been working on this sculpture for several years. At the center of this sculpture stands a figure of Christ. It is finished at the top in the head and chest parts, but still a block of wood below. The head is thoroughly idealized. Those who have seen it will certainly testify that I said: From a spiritual-scientific perspective, this image of Christ arises in me, as he walked in Palestine. I do not impose it on anyone, but it is developed out of humanity, when one projects into a human being that which one projects when one seeks the soul in the whole human being, not only in individual human physiognomic features in the face, but seeks the soul in the whole human countenance. But things are said and seen without knowing what is actually being done in Dornach.

Now, among the many writings by opponents, there is a very remarkable one. In it you will find the following sentence – I won't detain you long – you will find the following sentence:

Anthroposophy starts with the human being and its goal is the ideal human being. This and God are apparently one and the same. A nine-and-a-half-meter-high... with animal features at the bottom is currently being built in Dornach.

Now, dear attendees, I have told you about people who were there and know what has been worked on this group so far. Anyone who wants to see something like this in a wooden figure, which has an idealized human head at the top and is just a block of wood at the bottom, not yet finished, and which sees Luciferic features at the top and animal features at the bottom, reminds me of the anecdote that is often mentioned about how you can tell in the evening whether you are sober or drunk. You put a top hat on the bed. If you can see it clearly, you are still sober; if you see two of them, you are drunk.

Now, dear readers, anyone who, when looking at the woodcarving group in Dornach, sees a human being with 'Luciferian features' at the top and 'bestial characteristics' at the bottom, should not, in his drunkenness, complain about the fantasies or illusions of the anthroposophists! For anyone who is truly devoted to anthroposophy will certainly not be taken in by the same illusion, the same fantasy, which are also objective untruths. But this is how someone works with the truth — my dear audience — who can write on the title page the capital <«D> in front of his name, who is a doctor of theology.

Yes, my dear audience, we need a deepening, a refinement of religious consciousness. Those who are appointed guardians treat the truth in this way. From this it can be seen that we need a deepening of the sense of truth. After all, what is the science of a person who has only enough scientific conscientiousness to present an objective untruth of this kind in a single case in just such a way?

Now, my dear audience, as I said, it requires precisely this internalization of the human being, which will also be connected with a refinement of religious feeling, with a deepening of religious feeling. Spiritual science will be able to radiate its impulses into the most diverse branches of life. It wants to be completely practical, but it also does not want to go beyond scientific education. It wants to be scientifically grounded in that it arises out of the attitude, out of methodical conscientiousness, as only some mathematical method, combined with external observation, can arise out of the human soul in full scientificness.

Now, in conclusion, just a few personal words. When it is pointed out today, as it has been by Christian luminaries, for example, that this anthroposophical spiritual science in Dornach is not addressed to scholars but to educated laypeople, then one thing may be said. To a certain extent, this is still its fate today. I myself – if I may make a personal comment – began in the 1880s to develop something that is entirely in line with the whole direction of anthroposophical spiritual science, although it is only present in the elements, and although it was only later developed into details. What was then the guiding force is already contained in it. I was not always as much of a heretic as I am today. I was not always treated as badly by the sciences as I am today by the sciences, or from the point of view of religious denominations, but those writings that I wrote about Goethe at the time have already become known to a certain extent.

People just think that I have become a fool and a fantasist since that time, since it has become clear to me that what flowed out of that time should flow into the well-founded anthroposophical spiritual science. But what I actually often called for in my Goethe writings, and was not achieved even then, such as “Goethe's World View”, “Truth and Science”, “Philosophy of Freedom”, namely contained in my “Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings”, whoever assumes this, will see that for me it was not just about Goethe having this or that world view, but about standing up for this world view itself, asserting it, bringing it to its right and also developing it further.

The aim was not to develop a Goetheanism that died with the year 1832 and is merely historical, but to show the living Goetheanism as it has remained capable of development up to the present day. That Goethe's ideas were to some extent met, some have admitted. But that is also what is done out of habit in our time. People liked to boast: Yes, Goethe, Kant and so on had this or that idea. But to stand up for an idea with the full power of one's personality and help it to victory is not what lives in the thinking habit, especially not in the mental habits of the present. And so I must say that although I have been proved right in many respects in the explanation of Goethe's world view, I wanted something else: to advocate what can arise from it as spiritual science, as anthroposophical spiritual science, through the further development of Goethe's world view.

And what I wrote at the time was written entirely in the forms of science. I also spoke in this way; on the contrary, it was found to be too remote from ordinary life. At that time, those who were involved in science would have had the opportunity to address the matter. They did not take this opportunity. Therefore, it became necessary to address the educated lay public and speak to the heart and intellect of the educated lay public. Because, my dear attendees, that which is to be incorporated as truth into the development of humanity must be incorporated into it. Therefore, spiritual science must not be reproached, as is often done by its critics today, for not initially presenting itself to science as such – which it has now sufficiently done in Dornach, by the way – but in a true way, for that is what it has done. And it only approached the educated lay public when scholarship did not want to. But something like that has to happen! Why? Well, anyone who is imbued with the impulse, with the truth impulse of spiritual science, who knows the needs of our time, who knows the longings of our time, or at least believes he knows them, will have to say to himself: the truth must go out into the world, and if it does not succeed in penetrating the world through the one path, which might perhaps be the outwardly correct one, then other paths must be sought. If scholars do not want to, they may want to, when spiritual science takes hold in the hearts of educated laymen out of a natural, elementary sense of truth, and then forces those who have lagged behind it, even if they are scholars, to follow suit. Truth must come into the world. And if it does not come through one way, then the other must be sought.