The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Two eurythmists in particular have helped with many valuable suggestions regarding this translation, for which I am deeply indebted. Dorothea Mier lent me the translation notes she kept from study groups held throughout the years she has spent in training eurythmists. Her colleague, Barbara Schneider-Serio, provided me with copious and detailed suggestions both before and after the editing stage. She is responsible for felicitous solutions to several difficult translation problems, and the final result should be termed a collaboration. Both of these artists helped me to keep as close as possible to Steiner's expressions (sometimes even at the expense of ‘smooth’ English) and to beware of making slight ‘interpretations’. The reader's access to Steiner's meaning should be as direct as possible. [Translator's additions are included between square brackets.] Margaret Miles and Maren Weissenborn also spent time checking the translation, and they made many valuable suggestions at several stages of the work. Suggestions from some of my own students have been included. Katherine Stewart's editing and exemplary professional attitude (she is an American eurythmist), I take to be another positive sign for international relations in the world of eurythmy as we approach the millennium. I am indebted to her for the interest and support she unstintingly gave. Dr David Rycroft kindly edited the Introduction and Endnotes at an earlier stage. Terry Boardman, a eurythmist who has lived in Japan, helped with Appendices 4, 5 and 8, and checked the text. Naturally I am responsible for certain choices in this translation (such as keeping to English as spoken in England), and I am responsible for all the defects of the final version. I am grateful to all those people who helped me to realize how important it is today to know what we are doing. I might also be allowed to express here my gratitude to all the performers, eurythmy students, and pupils of the Waldorf Schools for whom I have played, and from whom I have learned. Thank you, all of you.

Written on 20.9.93, the eightieth anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of the First Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen.

Today, we will again take the liberty of presenting you with a few samples of the eurythmic art we have inaugurated. As usual before these performances, allow me to introduce them with a few words. I do this not because I intend to explain what you are about to see on stage, but because what you are about to see aspires to be real art. Real art, of course, needs no explanation, but must speak for itself, must immediately make the impression that is intended with it, must appear directly. But I must say a few words in advance about the sources and the whole way in which this art was found. For it is an art that is only just beginning, that will only come to the stage where the laws work as something self-evident - for example in music - through further development. We are under no illusion that what we can already try today is just the beginning.

If I am to express the essence of this art in a few words, I would say: it is a kind of language, but a language that does not come about in the usual way that a person speaks with his speech organs in the phonetic language , but rather it is a language that works through visible movement, which either one person performs on himself or groups of people perform together in space and the like, thus a kind of mute, visible language, performed by the whole person.

All this is fundamentally based on the development of a Goethean concept of art, like everything that is attempted here, or is attempted within the movement for which this Dornach building is intended to be the representative, the external representative. Like everything, this too is based on a further development of Goetheanism - whereby Goethe is not what he was when he died in 1832, but what he is in the living, spiritual movement to this day, in the artistic principles, in the cognitive and spiritual principles in general, which are in his sense.

It may look abstract, but I am being very specific and factual when I recall what Goethe actually meant by his theory of metamorphosis. This theory is still not sufficiently understood today. It will only be fully appreciated in its full scope and depth when our views on true science have changed from those of today, which are still rooted in materialism. It may sound simple when Goethe says: If I take a single plant leaf, then everything that makes up the whole plant is present in this single leaf, only various aspects — the ramification of the plant, the formation of the flowering part, the fruit part, and so on — are not visibly expressed in the leaf, but are, so to speak, within the leaf in thought. What is visible in the leaf is much less than what is present in the thought in each individual leaf, so that each individual plant leaf – simply formed – is the whole plant. And again, that the whole plant is nothing more than a complex leaf. As I said, once the full scope of what Goethe suggests for plant life, and what he has also developed in a certain sense for the animal kingdom, has been thought through and researched, it will make a significant impression on all spiritual life.

We are trying to implement here what Goethe merely applied to the form of organic growth, the growth of living beings; we are trying to apply it – albeit transformed into the artistic – in our eurythmic art by studying. All that is contained in the art of eurythmy is based on a deep spiritual study of the underlying movement tendencies of the larynx and all neighboring organs that come into play when speaking. Not the individual vibrations that then pass into the air and convey the sound that I am speaking to you now, for example, and that reaches your ear, but the large, comprehensive movements, which are clearly evident in the configuration of the vocal cords and the configuration of the other organs that come into play when speaking. All this had to be carefully studied. These movements, which one gets to know, if I may again make use of Goethe's expression, through sensual-supersensory observation, are then transferred to the whole person, so that the person expresses through his arm movements, through the movement of his whole body, what the larynx and its neighboring organs want to carry out.

Just as Goethe takes the whole plant, like a complicated designed leaf, so too is what a single person or groups of people present on the stage in front of you, it is a transformation of the larynx and other speech-organ movements. In the people and groups of people who appear before you, you see, I would say a moving larynx. The whole human being becomes a moving larynx. It is only natural that not everything is immediately comprehensible, since this art is in its infancy. But just think of when you hear a language you do not understand, it is also not immediately comprehensible to you. And if you are also to receive artistic and poetic elements in the language, it is not immediately comprehensible either. Eurythmy will only gradually develop into a self-evident impression. But those who have artistic feeling will already be able to see the movements that are performed as a kind of moving language or moving music. All it takes is a little artistic intuition.

However, as eurythmy is emerging, it must strive, I would say, in our truly art-poor time, in the time when there is so little real artistic sense, it must strive to deepen this artistic sense. If you listen to things today, it is really the case, ladies and gentlemen, that you have to say that ninety-nine percent of everything that is written today is written completely unnecessarily, and only one percent of it really arises from artistic inwardness. Because it is not the prosaic content, the literal content, that makes a poem artistic, but only the form, either the musical background or the plastic-pictorial background.

The times are actually over, but they must come again, when the romantics found it particularly satisfying to listen to poems in foreign languages, when they did not understand the content at all, but only the rhythm, only the musicality, in order to delve only into the musicality, into the formal of the artistic creation that underlies poetry. We must come back to this, to understanding correctly, in turn, what it actually means when one becomes aware that Schiller did not initially have the literal content of his most important poems at all – that was of no great importance to him at first. There was something vaguely melodious in his soul, and one poem or another could arise from it later. It was only later that the prose content was added – that is the unartistic aspect of the content. The actual artistic aspect, that is, the rhythmic, the metrical, the melodious, or even the plastic, is what is actually artistic about the poetry. So you will notice that when we perform poetic eurythmy, we do not strive for pantomime, for anything mimetic. If it still occurs today, it is only because we are just at the beginning of the eurythmic art and must strip away all physiognomic, mimetic and other aspects in eurythmy. That is another imperfection. Insofar as it occurs today, it will be discarded later.

What is important is that what the poet himself does artistically in the formation of the verses, in the rhythm and so on, is also grasped in the flowing out of the eurythmic. So that it is not a matter of asking: how does a eurythmic movement express this or that? but rather: how does the eurythmic movement properly follow the preceding movement, how does the third follow the other two and so on, so that one really has a musical art unfolding in space. Therefore, on the one hand, you will see that what is to be eurythmized is recited, and on the other hand, you will hear something musical. And on stage you will see only human movements, in which either the musical or the poetic is realized.

I would like to point out that in this way, the art of recitation must in turn be pushed out of the non-art in which it is actually included today. This art of recitation is, of course, regarded as particularly perfect today when the reciter pays particular attention to the literal content, to the prose, to that which is expressed through poetry. And one is particularly satisfied when the reciter, the declaimer, as one says, expresses the prose content quite inwardly. It cannot be expressed in the same way as it is striven for in today's inartistic culture. If you want to practise eurythmy after reciting, the reciter must also respond to the rhythmic, the musical or the plastic-picturesque aspects of the poetry. So that precisely what is neglected today must also come to the fore in recitation.

During the course of this evening, you will also see children perform. I would like to draw particular attention to the fact that these children's performances already play a major role in the curriculum of our Stuttgart Waldorf School – as a supplement to purely mechanical gymnastics through the art of eurythmy for children. I would like to say that what otherwise appears as art is inspired gymnastics. A later time, which thinks more impartially than today about spiritual progress, spiritual human needs and so on, will think quite differently about these things than we do today. Today, of course, children do gymnastics as the physiological, the purely mechanical laws require. But no consideration is given to the human being as a whole; only the human being as a physical being is taken into account. When our children perform movements that are also movements of the eurythmic art, the whole human being is set in motion in body, soul and spirit. And the effect of this is that - if it is introduced to children at the right age in a fully curriculum-based way, as we do in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart - then not only what gymnastics brings about is brought about, but much more. Today, this is not believed because the whole spirit of thinking is materialistic. Gymnastics certainly has many good things. But what eurythmy can bring out in children and what gymnastics cannot do is develop initiative of the will, independence of the soul life. This comes from the soulfulness of the movements, which is not present in mere gymnastics.

So what we do as eurythmy has, firstly, an essentially artistic significance, but secondly, it also has a pedagogical-didactic significance. And I could talk about a third significance, a hygienic one, but I do not want to today. Because what is done in eurythmy has something essentially healing about it, this hygienic aspect can provide essential practical support in cases of illness. Unfortunately, the time available to me here is not enough to go into more detail.

In any case, what might be called the following should come to light in eurythmy: The human being attempts to express through outward movement what lies within him in the way of movement possibilities. In this way we have something truly spiritualized and ensouled, something that can be directly perceived by the senses in its spiritualized and ensouled form. We have nature, for the whole human being stands before us as nature. But we have ensouled nature, for it is the human being who performs these natural movements. We have, in the most eminent sense, the human mystery expressed in the movements of the will, so that when the human being is the instrument in the art of eurythmy, Goethe's beautiful saying is truly fulfilled: When man is placed at the summit of nature, he brings forth a whole nature within himself, takes order, harmony, measure and meaning together and rises to the production of the work of art. And in eurythmy, he takes his own movement possibilities, his form, everything available to him, and brings order, harmony, measure and meaning together to express what is in his soul.

I believe that what Goethe longed for so much in art, namely that it is at the same time an unraveling of the great secrets of nature, comes to expression in a eurythmic performance, because Goethe says: “When nature begins to reveal its manifest secret to someone, that person feels a deep longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. Art is something that Goethe, like every true human being, thinks of in intimate connection with the secrets of the world.

But I ask you to bear with me on this, as far as we can demonstrate it in rehearsals today, for we ourselves know very well that everything is still in its infancy, and perhaps only the attempt at a beginning. But anyone who looks at the essence of this eurythmic art and is active in it must be convinced that what it is at the beginning is capable of being perfected, which will one day – perhaps through our own efforts, but more likely through those of others – enable this youngest of the arts to stand fully equal with the older, more established ones.

Dear Sirs and Madams:

Allow me to say a few words in advance today, as I usually do before these eurythmic experiments. This is not done to explain the idea itself, that would be an inartistic undertaking. Art must work through direct impression of what it is, and does not need an explanation. On the other hand, it seems necessary to me, since we are not dealing with something that is already fully developed in eurythmy, but with a beginning, perhaps one could even say: with the attempt at a beginning. It seems necessary to me, therefore, to say something about what you see in this eurythmic art and about the sources and tools of the eurythmic art.

This eurythmic art, by being completely derived from the Goethean worldview and Goethean artistic ethos, seeks to be a visible language. When I say that it is derived from Goethe's world view and Goethe's artistic outlook, I must point out, on the one hand, that when we speak of Goetheanism here, we are not concerned with somehow merely expanding what came into the world through Goethe up to 1832, but that for us Goethe is a living power, spiritually effective, and that we are not speaking today of the Goethe who died in 1832, but of the Goethe of 1920, that is, of what can further develop within the spiritual world view, the whole spiritual current that has been introduced into Western culture through him.

On the other hand, I would like to point out that Goethe developed what he called his metamorphosis doctrine for understanding living forms, especially plant forms. What Goethe published as such a unique work in 1790 is, despite many efforts in this field, still not sufficiently appreciated in wider circles today. Once it is appreciated, we will most certainly have access to a rich source for developing an understanding of living beings that can be gained from this idea of metamorphosis.

For us, it is not just any old theoretical insight that is to be gained from this idea of metamorphosis, but, above all, it is the artistic exploitation of this idea of metamorphosis that is at stake for us. Goethe begins by looking at the individual leaf in the context of the whole plant. Goethe begins by distinguishing between what is simply shaped in an outwardly sensual way, but in terms of the idea, in terms of the invisible, what weaves and works in the leaf: The leaf is a whole plant. The whole plant is actually also only a leaf artistically formed within itself, notched, ramified; in turn, the metamorphosis into flower, fruit and so on - for Goethe it is an artistically formed leaf.

The same thing, implemented in many other ways, gives us the opportunity — as I said, in addition to many other things — to create a visible language in such a way that we truly do not unintentionally express this art through people who initially serve as tools, as real tools, for the eurythmic art. However arbitrary such movements may appear at first glance, let me explain that they have little in common with dance movements or the like, which arise from instincts, from drives and so on. Rather, what you will see here on the stage, the movements of the individual human being, the movements of groups of people in space, is all thoroughly studied movement – to use Goethe's expression again – that has been penetrated by sensual and supersensual observation.

The movements correspond to the movement patterns present in the human larynx and other speech organs when speech is formed. Everyone knows that a movement element is at work here. After all, when I speak to you here, the movements of my speech organs are transmitted through the air, and when the air reaches your auditory organ with these movements, you hear what I am saying. When it comes to the design of eurythmy, it is not these tremulous movements, these undulations that are of primary interest, but rather the underlying movement tendencies of the larynx and its neighboring organs, which only then, through a complex process, translate into the combined movements of undulation, waves, vibrations in the air, and so on.

These movement tendencies are now carefully studied to see how they express the being, the character of the person through higher gestural abilities than those actually produced by speech sounds. And just as Goethe regards the individual leaf as an entire plant, so too can the larynx with its neighboring speech organs be understood as a whole human organism in miniature. And what the human being wants to express, but which is held in the “status nascendi”, in the process of being born, in order to be realized in speech, can be perceived through sensory-supersensory observation and can then be realized in movements of the human hands, the human limbs or in forms.

This is what we have been working on more and more, especially recently: the forms that the whole human body or groups of people execute in space. So what you will see is transferred to the whole human being, which otherwise underlies the speech organs as movement tendencies of the spoken language.

It is possible to treat this visible language artistically in such a way that what appears in poetry on the one hand also appears in music on the other, and can be transformed into what can be revealed in the visible language of eurythmy. On the one hand, you will hear music today, on the other hand recitation, and in the middle you will see the moving human being and moving groups of people - virtually the whole person or groups of people - as a large larynx that performs a moving language. What appears as moving language can now be treated artistically.

I would like to say that it is even possible to accommodate certain artistic longings that live in artistic circles today and therefore find little expression, sometimes even caricatured expression, because the various fields of artistic development have not yet reached the point of handling the means. Expressionism and Impressionism are there; but the treatment of the means, that is what has not yet reached a certain significant conclusion in the old arts. There, I believe, even the eurythmic art can, in a sense, provide a kind of stimulus – I will not say serve as a model.

For when we are dealing, for example, with human language, which art makes use of, then, especially in our very advanced languages, an inartistic element always mixes into speaking, into poetry, as a result. And we may say that a large percentage of what is being written today is not really real art. For in poetry, real art is only that which is either based on music or on the plastic, on the pictorial. The literal content is actually prose content that is only used to reveal through language, in rhythm, beat, melodious element and so on, what is to happen in the artistic of the actual poetry. That it is so today has its reason in the fact that precisely the most highly developed languages have almost – because of their use for human communication, for ever more complicated human communication – acquired an extraordinarily strong prosaic element, which is not always, I might say, readily restrained and made useable for that elementarily original, which one needs if one wants to create artistically. On the other hand, the languages formed in the formed cultures and civilizations are the expression of highly developed thoughts. But the thought as such is an image that, when used in art in any way, whether as knowledge or as an underlying expression, kills art, paralyzes art.

Now, in spoken language, in phonetic language, we have a kind of interaction between the intellectual, the thinking, the imaginative and the volitional. When we set our larynx in motion, two currents of the human organization work together in the movements of the larynx. That which is permeated by the imaginative mixes with that which comes from the will. The will comes from the depths of the personality, which in turn is an expression, a microcosm of universal world law. The artistic can live in this. But in spoken language and therefore also in poetry, which makes use of it, this actually elementary-artistic is weakened, dulled by the abstract thought element, which is nevertheless connected with the thought element in word formation.

Now in eurythmy we have the opportunity to strip away this element of thought by not using phonetic language, but by taking that which arises from the depths of the human being, which contains the laws of the world in its depths, in the microcosm, that wells up from these depths, the will-element in the human being, that we stop this will-element before it becomes visionary, that we transform this will-element, quite lawfully, as only speech itself is lawful, into movements of the human limbs or of the whole human being. There is just as little something arbitrary in any single movement as there is something arbitrary in phonetic language or in the tones of a melody. Everything is based on the lawful, internally lawful progression of the movements. And what is involved is far from being merely mimic or pantomime. As long as there is still something of that in it, there is still a beginning to be overcome bit by bit. What is presented in eurythmy – you will see this particularly in the forms we are striving for today – is not a pantomime expression of the prose content of the poem, but a translation into this visible language of what the real artist has made out of language.

Therefore, the accompanying recitation must be different from what is called recitation today. Especially when one finds it good today, one emphasizes the prose content of the poem in the recitation and pays less attention to the rhythm, the beat and the melodious element. But one could not work with the present-day unformed recitation — which is only an artistic bad habit that has an unartistic element in it — one could not work with it in the eurythmic art, but the aim is to really try to find the underlying melodiousness and rhythmic in the recitation, in the declamation. On such occasions I am always reminded of how Schiller did not initially have the literal content of some of his significant poems in his mind, but rather something like an indeterminate melody. And then, out of this melodious element, which contained nothing literal at all, one or other of the poems could become literal. The prose content, which was then used without being, so to speak, the vehicle of the actual artistic content, which consists of the plastic and the musical, was only secondary for Schiller.

We seek to bring all these truly artistic elements to expression in eurythmy by making them the essence of the actual eurythmic art, and thus the essence of everything that we must bring into connection with it and will present to you.

Then there is another essential side to eurythmy: it also has a hygienic side, for example – but I do not want to talk about that today. Since it directly brings movements to people that arise from human nature in a lawful way, it is something truly healing. But that needs to be discussed in detail, and that cannot be done with these few introductory words.

Just one more point should be mentioned. Today you will also see performances for children, and I would like to emphasize that this eurythmic art has an essential pedagogical, didactic side, and thus has an element in it that we have already introduced in our Waldorf School in Stuttgart, the Free Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt, alongside purely physiological gymnastics. This eurythmy is, at the same time, not only of artistic value for the growing human being, but also of importance as a soul-filled form of exercise. When we are able to think about these things more objectively and impartially than we can today, then you will realize, dear ladies and gentlemen, that gymnastics, which is based on the materialistic understanding of the human being – which certainly deserves all the praise that is given to it today, but which at least cannot do one thing that the inspired gymnastics, the eurythmy, can: Where the child is required to permeate every movement it makes with its soul, the soul draws upon an element that cannot lie. This cannot be achieved through physiological gymnastics, which has grown out of materialism. Our soul-filled gymnastics, our eurythmy, awakens in the child the will to act at the right time, in the right age, and thus gives something immensely necessary to our time, which is so sorely lacking in the will to act in the broadest sense.

These are the underlying intentions of the eurythmic art, as I said at the beginning of my welcome. The point is that this art is still in its infancy. We are still very modest about it today and are our own harshest critics. However, we are also convinced that this beginning can be perfected and that, if – probably through others, no longer through ourselves – what can be given today as a stimulus can be given at the very beginning as a stimulus, if this is further developed, then this youngest of eurythmic arts will stand in dignity alongside its older sister arts, which have always been recognized.

Dr. Steiner: The first thing I would like to discuss is my discussion today with the present twelfth-grade students. With one exception, the students stated they did not need to take their final examinations at the end of this year, but could wait a year. At the end of the Waldorf School, they would go through a cramming class. It was important to them, however, that this cramming for the final examination be taught by the Waldorf School.

A teacher comments.

Dr. Steiner: The point is that we said we wanted to resolve this matter after meeting with the twelfth-grade students. We cannot handle such things if someone comes afterward and says there is still one more thing. If arguments are always presented about everything after it is done, then we will never finish anything. Things will only become confused. How is it that now there are suddenly two? Where did that come from? The problem is, that was overlooked. It makes no sense that such things occur suddenly. Is the faculty in control, or the children? The results should remain as they were today at noon, and that girl will need to have some sort of private instruction. In general, we should teach the class in a way appropriate to a twelfth-grade Waldorf School class.

The first thing we need to consider for the curriculum is literary history. Yesterday, I mentioned that, in general, they should have already covered the main content of literary history. A cursory survey will have to suffice for the things they have not learned. On the other hand, you should undertake a complete survey of German literary history in relation to things that play into it from outside.

Therefore, you have to begin with the oldest literary monuments and work them all into an overview. Begin with the oldest literary monuments, starting with the Gothic period, then go on to the Old German period and continue into the development of the ,em>Song of the Nibelungs and Gudrun. Do that in a cursory way, but so that they get a picture of the whole. Then, go on to the Middle Ages, the pre-classical period, the classical and romantic periods, up to the present. Give them an overview, but one that contains the general perspectives. The content should enable them to clearly know what they need to know about such people as Walther von der Vogelweide, Klopstock, or Logau. I think you could cover that in five or six periods. You can certainly do that.

I would then follow that with the main things they need to know about the present. You should discuss the present in much more detail with the twelfth grade. By present, I mean you would discuss the most important literary works of the 1850s, 60s, and 70s, then follow that with a more detailed treatment of the subsequent movements, so that they would have some insight into who Nietzsche and Ibsen were, or such foreigners as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and so forth. The result should be that we graduate well-educated people.

Next is history, which you should do in a similar way. Start with a survey of history as a whole, beginning with the history of the East, which then gives rise to Greece and more modern Christian developments. You can surely go into these things without teaching anthroposophical dogma. You can present things that have a genuine inner spirituality. At the workers’ school, for example, I once showed how the seven Roman kings followed the model of the seven principal aspects of the human being, since that is what they are. Of course, you cannot simply say that Romulus is the physical body, and so forth. Nevertheless, Livius’s History of Kings has that in its inner structure. We find that the fifth king, Tarquinius Priscus, is clearly a person of intellect, corresponding to the I. He brings a new impulse, just as with the spirit self, the Etruscan element. You should treat the last one, Tarquinius Superbus, such that the highest we can reach sinks in most deeply, as it, of course, did with the Roman people, where it sunk into the Earth.

In the same way, you can very beautifully develop oriental history. In Indian history, we find the formation of the physical body, in Egyptian history, the etheric body, and in Chaldaic- Babylonian history, the astral body. Of course, you cannot teach it in that form. You need to show how those human beings living in the astral developed astronomy, how the Jews have the principle of the I in the principle of Yahweh, and how the Greeks for the first time developed a true understanding of nature from a human perspective. The viewpoint of the earliest peoples was still within the human being. You could give them an overview you can be proud of. Historical events form a complete series.

Geography class will also consist in giving them an overview. In both history and geography, what is important is to give them an overview. They can then search out the details by themselves.

You could divide aesthetics and art class as we discussed yesterday: into symbolic, classical, and romantic art. You could also treat not only the science of art by saying that in Egypt it was symbolic, in Greece classical, and in what followed, romantic, but also, the arts themselves, in that architecture is a symbolic art, sculpture is a classical art, and painting, music, and poetry are the romantic arts. Thus you can view the arts themselves in a way that offers a kind of inner division.

In teaching aesthetics and art, you can treat the elements of architecture so that the young people will have a proper understanding of how a house is constructed, that is, you could include construction materials, the construction of a roof, and so forth, in aesthetics.

Then we have languages. There, it is better if we describe the goals by saying that in English or French the students should get an idea of modern literature.

Now we have mathematics. How far did the eleventh grade come in mathematics?

A teacher: In the eleventh grade we got as far as indeterminate equations in algebra. In trigonometry, aside from spherical trigonometry, they went as far as computing acute-angle triangles. In complex numbers, as far as Moivre’s theorem, then polynomial equations. In analytic geometry, we went as far as working with second-order curves, but we worked in depth only with the circle. In constructive geometry, we did sections and intersections.

Dr. Steiner: Our experience with last year’s class has shown that we cannot do it that way. It is too much for the human soul to do such things.

What is important is to go through spherical trigonometry, that is, the elements of analytical spatial geometry, in a way that is as clear as possible.

In descriptive geometry we have Cavalieri’s perspective. The students should be able to draw a complicated form, such as a house, in Cavalieri’s perspective. The inside as well as the outside.

In algebra, you need only cover the beginnings of differential and integral calculus. They do not need to be able to compute maximums and minimums. They will learn that in college. You should teach them only the basic concepts of calculus, but do that thoroughly.

You should emphasize spherical trigonometry and how it is used in astronomy and geodesy in a way appropriate to their age, so that they have a general understanding of it.

Spatial analytical geometry should be used to teach them how equations can express forms. I would not be afraid to complete this subject by giving them examples of questions like, What curve is represented by the equation

which results in an astroid. The main thing is to make equations so transparent that the students have a feeling for how things are hidden within equations.

You should also do the opposite. If I draw a curve or place a body in space, they should be able to recognize the general form of the equation without necessarily having it correct in all details, but at least have an idea of what the equation would be.

I don’t think the normal mathematical education that connects differential and integral calculus with geometry is particularly useful. I think it should be connected with quotients instead. I would begin with the quotient

then make the dividend and the divisor smaller and smaller, simply as numbers, and then go on to develop differential quotients. I would not begin with the idea of continuity, because you do not really get an idea of differential quotients that way. Don’t begin with differentials, but with differential quotients. If you begin with a series, then go on to geometry only after you have presented tangents, that is, move from the secant to the tangent. Go on to geometry only after the students have completely comprehended differential quotients purely as numbers or through computations, so that they are presented with the picture that geometric visualization is only an illustration of what occurs numerically. You can then teach them integrals as the reverse process. Thus, you will have a possibility of showing them that the computation is not a fixing of geometry, but that geometry is an illustration of the computation. That is something people should consider more often. For example, you should not consider positive and negative numbers as something in themselves, but as a series of numbers such as

In the last instance, I do not have enough, I am missing one, and I write that as (-1). Emphasize only what is missing without using a number line. You will then remain within numbers. A negative number is the amount that is not present. It is a deficiency of the minuend. There is much more inner activity in working that way. You can excite some of the students’ capacities in a much more real way than when you do everything beginning from geometry.

A teacher: Where should we begin?

Dr. Steiner: Now that the class is ready for spherical trigonometry, you will need to move from trigonometry to developing the concept of the sphere qualitatively, that is, without starting computations. Instead of drawing on a plane, they need to begin drawing on a sphere, so that they get an idea of what a spherical triangle is, that is, how a triangle lies upon a sphere. You need to make that visible for the children, then go on to show them how the sum of the angles is not equal to 180°, but is larger. They need to really understand triangles on a sphere, with their curved lines, and then begin the computations. In geometry, the computation is only the interpretation of the sphere. I do not want you to begin by considering the sphere from its midpoint, but from the curvature of the surfaces. Then you can go on to a more general discussion of the non-linearity, how you could look at a corresponding figure on an ellipsoid, or how it would look on a paraboloid, where it is no longer completely closed. Don’t begin with the center, but with the distortion of the surface; otherwise you will have difficulties with other solids. In a way, you will need to think of yourself on the surface; in a sense, you will have to form a picture of what you would experience if you were a spherical triangle. You need to ask yourself, What would I experience as a triangle on an ellipsoid?

In that connection, you will also have to show the students what would happen if you used the normal Pythagorean theorem on a spherical triangle. You cannot, of course, use squares for that. Doing things this way has an effect upon the general education, whereas normally they affect only the intellect.

You can cover permutations and combinations quickly, and, if there is enough time, the beginnings of probability theory, for instance, the life expectancy of a human being.

In the eleventh grade, you need to go through sections and intersections, shadows and indeterminate equations, and analytical geometry up to conic sections. In eleventh-grade trigonometry, teach the functions in a more inner way, so that you present the principle relationships in sine and cosine. There, of course, you will have to begin from geometry.

Begin twelfth-grade physics with optics, as we discussed yesterday.

Natural history. We have already discussed zoology. In geology and paleontology, begin with zoology, since only then do they have some inner value. You can begin with zoology, go on to paleontology, and arrive at the various layers of the Earth. In botany, you can begin with flowering plants (phanerogans), and then also go on to geology and paleontology.

Chemistry. We want to consider chemistry in its innermost connections to the human being. In the twelfth grade, our students already have an idea of organic and inorganic processes. It is now important to go on to those processes found not only in animals, but also in human beings. We can speak without hesitation about the formation of ptyalin, pepsin, and pancreatin. You should teach the metallic processes in the human being by developing things from principles, for instance, something we could call the lead process in the human being, so that the students understand them. You need to show that within the human being all materials and processes are completely transformed. In connection with the formation of pepsin, what is important is to begin with the formation of hydrochloric acid, showing that it is lifeless. Then go on to consider the formation of pepsin as something that can occur only within the etheric body, even though the astral body has some effect upon it. In other words, show how the process completely disintegrates and then is rebuilt. Begin hydrochloric acid, with the inorganic process using salt. Discuss all the characteristics of hydrochloric acid, then go on to show how that differs from what occurs in an organic body. The result should be the demonstration of the differences between vegetable protein, animal protein, and human protein, so the students have an idea that there is a progression of protein based upon the various structures of the etheric body. Human protein is different from animal protein. You can also begin with differences by looking at a lion and a cow. In the lion, we find a process that is much more directed toward the circulation than in a cow where the entire process is more directed toward the metabolism. In the lion, the metabolic process is formed together with the breathing, whereas in the cow, the breathing is supported by the digestion. This will enliven the processes more. You need to have an inorganic, an organic, an animal, and a human chemistry. Some examples for children might be hydrochloric acid and pepsin, or blackthorn juice and ptyalin. Then they will get the picture. You could also use the metamorphosis of folic acid into oxalic acid.

A teacher asks whether to include quantitative chemistry.

Dr. Steiner: Well, it is certainly very difficult to explain these things with what you can normally assume. You need to begin with cosmic rhythm to explain the periodic system. That is the way you need to go, but you cannot do that in school. It is complete nonsense to begin with atomic weights; you need to begin with rhythms. You can explain all of the quantitative relationships through harmonics. The relationship between oxygen and hydrogen is, for example, an octave. But, that would go too far. I think you should develop the concepts we mentioned before and that will be enough for the twelfth-grade curriculum.

Eurythmy is not intended for the final examination.

Religion class. In general, the character of religious instruction is already in the curriculum. I can certainly not add much to what you have already presented. There is nothing we really need to change. The question is what to do in the upper grades. In the end, you should be able to give the twelfth grade a survey of world religions, but not in a way that gives the children the idea that some of them are untrue. Instead, you need to show the relative truths in their individual forms. That would be the ninth level. In the eighth level, you need to go through Christianity so that it appears in the ninth level as the synthesis of religions. Develop Christianity in the eighth level, and in the ninth level emphasize world religions so that, once again, their high point is Christianity. In the seventh level, you should present a kind of evangelical harmony, present Christianity in its essence and in the way it appears. By then, the children will all know the Gospels. Therefore, at the seventh level, a harmony of Gospels, at the eighth, Christianity, and at the ninth, world religions.

I will prepare the curriculum for modern languages in the ninth through twelfth grades and give it to you at a meeting about the foreign language classes.

There is a discussion about the university classes in Stuttgart.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to hear whether you think what has been proposed for the courses is too much or not. I would like to hear what you expect. What you thought of for the course that is just beginning and will continue until the next summer vacation? If we want to avoid a terribly chaotic situation, we certainly should not do things more than five days a week. I thought of doing a five-lecture series; Wednesday and Friday are not available. I could give lectures on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, and two on one day.

I think we should present only five areas. We cannot present social understanding yet. It would also be very good to teach some practical subject, say, geodesy. We don’t want to have any specific themes. I think Dr. Schwebsch could teach aesthetics and literature; Stein, history; Unger, epistemology; Baravalle, mathematics; and Stockmeyer, geodesy.

It seems that one error has been that there is too much lecturing. Sometime we will also need to present something about music theory. We should do that in the course next winter. So that there will be a certain amount of liveliness, I propose that wherever possible, you bring the most recent events into the discussion. It would be good, for example, to work through our perspective on aesthetics as I discussed in the two little essays. Since there is only one lecture per week, you can only give a sketch. You should, for instance, handle the theme “Beauty arises when the sense-perceptible receives the form of the spirit” as I did that in my essay “Goethe as the Father of a New Aesthetic.” You could show that for the various arts, for architecture, painting, and so forth. In literature, I think you should discuss the most recent publications, namely, how Ibsen, Strindberg, and so forth reveal an unconscious movement toward a certain kind of spirituality, and then also, of course, the pathological, like for instance, Dostoyevsky.

Marie Steiner: Shouldn’t we also discuss Morgenstern, Steffen, and Steiner?

Dr. Steiner: You could extend Steffen’s characterization of lyrics.

In history, you could present an overview of the period from 1870 until 1914, stopping at that point. People would leave with rather long faces saying that you have only gotten to the World War and now they need to give some thought to the war itself. Go only to the assassination at Sarajevo.

In mathematics, you will have to orient yourselves by what was presented previously. I think it is important to treat the most important mathematical things. (Speaking to Dr. von Baravalle) You could present the things you have in your dissertation. It would also be very good if you developed mathematical concepts, such as those of normal functions or elliptic functions, in a visual way. Don’t just drone on about formal mathematics. Present how things are qualitatively. It would also be good to use that as a starting point to go into the entirety of relativity theory, how it is justifiable or not. I think people should have an idea of the following: You could present the question of relativity theory through the example of a cannon that is shot in Freiburg. It can be heard at some distance and you can compute the distance. You would then go on to compute how the time would change if you moved toward or away from the noise. The time it takes to hear the noise would lengthen if you moved from Karlsruhe to Frankfurt. If you then moved in the opposite direction the time would shorten until it was zero when you heard the cannon in Freiburg itself. You could then continue past Freiburg, so that you would have to hear the cannon before it was shot. That is the basic error of the theory of relativity. It can’t be so difficult to develop this mathematical concept of movement.

I think the problem with these courses is that they are actually unnecessary. With some differences, you have simply continued what other popular lectures offer, which is unnecessary; there is no real need for them.

What is important in geodesy is to get away from presenting a copy of the Earth. For example, if you begin, as people do, to try to avoid error through differential methods, you will need to explain geodetic methods to a certain extent. You will then have asymptotic methods. You could then discuss to what extent human beings depend upon approaching only certain things. You can show how extremely useful it is not to think in a determined way about some things, such as the character of a human being, but to think in a way similar to the way you measure with a diopter, where there is always some small difference. You can come closer to the truth in that way than you can when you state everything in specific words. We should characterize people only by looking at them from one side and then another. A person can be a choleric and a melancholic at the same time. This is the perspective you should bring to the fore. If you use geodesy as a basis for explaining the problems of the Copernican system, you can achieve a great deal.

You should form the lectures series by using such titles as: “What Can Aesthetics and Literature Add to Life?”; “What Can History Add to Life?”; “What Can Epistemology Add to Life?”; “What Can Mathematics Add to Life?”; and “What Can Geodesy Add to Life?” Under that, you could put “The Board of Directors of the Anthroposophical Society and the Faculty of the University Courses,” and above it, as a title, “Goetheanum and University Courses.”

These proposals are being made to you from Dornach.

The colored booklet of the Waldorf-Astoria, Stuttgart n.d. [1918], No. 31; also in: Through the Spirit to the Realization of the Human Mystery, Berlin [1918]

The following two scenes belong to the last of four interrelated dramas that depict the experiences of people undergoing an inner psychological development. These four dramas are: 1. The Portal of Initiation; 2. The Test of the Soul; 3. The Guardian of the Threshold; 4. The Awakening of the Soul (all published by Philosophisch-anthroposophischen Verlag, Berlin W., Motzstr. 17). This development should lead them to a living insight into the spiritual world and to permeating their will with the ideals of this world. The experiences they undergo on the way to this goal are manifold. Among these experiences, there are also those in which they see in pictures people from earlier ages of culture striving towards the same goal under different circumstances. These are people in whom they recognize their own being, their soul qualities, and the direction of their will. They can recognize from the destinies of these people the difficulties and obstacles that such striving encounters. By recognizing themselves in these people, they find the strength to continue on their path. They feel integrated with the whole spiritual development of humanity through their own being. They can see how that which is currently working in their soul has worked in other times. They learn to understand how it must reveal itself now, by becoming a repetition and consequence of what was revealed in times gone by. The two dramatic pictures printed here present the souls looking back to an earlier cultural age. The Egyptian cultural age, already in decline, is to be visualized. The 'sacrificer' who appears recognizes that a new era must dawn. The other guides at the wisdom site insist on the traditional forms. They want to introduce a disciple to the experience of the spiritual world in the sense of these forms. It does not matter to them whether this disciple is truly mature, but rather that their forms should live on. The “sacrificial way” thwarts their efforts by revealing the immaturity of the disciple through his behavior, which is guided by higher goals. In doing so, he brings about a pictorial event that shows how the doomed culture must be replaced by a new one.

Rudolf Steiner.

The meetings at Stuttgart came to a close two days ago, and you are probably thinking that I ought to give you a report on some of the things that happened there. We arrived at a certain definite conclusion, which seemed inevitable under the conditions that prevailed.

It will be essential to an understanding of what came about that I give you a sketch of how things developed. You know from comments I have been making these past several weeks that lengthy preparations preceded the Stuttgart meetings. The aim of these preparations, which proved extremely tiring to all concerned, was to try to create a situation in which the life-needs of the Anthroposophical Society could be met, thus ensuring the Society's continuance in the immediate future.

In everything that follows it should be kept in mind that what went on in Stuttgart did not have its origin in the sad events surrounding the Goetheanum fire, nor was it influenced by them. For I had already talked with a member of the Executive Committee early in December and discussed with him the necessity of doing something to consolidate the Society, and he was given the assignment of getting the whole Executive Committee and various others to take on the problem. So what occurred in Stuttgart was a direct consequence of the talk I had on December tenth with Herr Uehli to acquaint him with my observations on the current state of affairs in the Society.

The burning of the Goetheanum came as a most painful experience while we were in the midst of these developments. But even if we still had the Goetheanum standing here in its pristine form, these things would have happened exactly as they did. For what was it we faced? We were facing the fact that the Anthroposophical Society had taken on a form in the past two decades that had undergone considerable modification since 1919 as a consequence of including various enterprises among its concerns.

My words could easily be taken as deprecating these undertakings, but nothing of the sort is intended. I need only mention the name of the Waldorf School, which is one of the enterprises I was referring to, to convince you that my remark was made for quite a different purpose than to express some superficial judgment. It implied no reflection on the worth and significance of any of these enterprises or on anyone responsible for their guidance.

The transactions in Stuttgart were meant to—and indeed did—concern themselves solely with the Anthroposophical Society from the aspect of its whole configuration and how it should be shaped.

Now it is not an easy matter to describe this configuration as it really is, since it branches out in so many directions. But I believe that everyone of you has some idea of how the Society has developed up to the present, and can picture things for himself with the help of the comments I have been making here in the past several weeks to round out the picture.

One of the especially important developments that have taken place in the Society's life has been the incurring by leading individuals—or at least by a considerable number of them—of quite specific anthroposophical tasks for the Society that have grown out of the work. These tasks have been waiting for completion since 1919, but they were not carried out. When the problem this caused became only too plain, I had to speak to the Central Executive Committee in Stuttgart as I did on December tenth last.

One of the latest undertakings to grow out of the soil of the Anthroposophical Movement was the Movement for Religious Renewal, which has contributed heavily to the current crisis in the Society. That is one aspect of the facts that have developed in the Society's life.

The other aspect is that youth has approached the movement—youth full of deep inner enthusiasm for anthroposophy and everything it includes, and university youth has also come into the picture with quite different expectations, with a quite definite picture of what is to be found in the Society, with quite definite feelings. One might say that these academic young people approach the Society with strong heart impulses and a special sensitivity to the way the anthroposophists reacted to them, and that they took everything not so much from a rational angle as in a spirit of keen feeling-judgment.

Now what lay behind all this?

The fact is, my dear friends, that young people today are having soul experiences that are making their first appearance on the stage of human evolution. This fact is not to be summed up in abstract, superficial phrases about a generation gap. That gap has always existed in some sense, and been especially marked in strong personalities while they were young and preparing themselves for life at an educational institution. We need only recall certain characteristic examples. You can read in Goethe's Truth and Science how, when he was a student in Leipzig, he stayed away from lectures because he found them so terribly boring, and went instead to the pretzel bakeshop across the street to chat with companions while Professor Ludwig and others held forth in the lecture halls on learned doctrines.

But despite the ever-present generation gap, even these somewhat radical members of the younger generation eventually took over their inheritance from their elders. The geniuses among them did likewise. Goethe most certainly remained an incomparable genius to the day he died. But when it came to taking part in the life of his time, he became not simply Goethe the genius but the fat privy councillor with the double chin. That must also be recognized.

These things have to be looked at in a completely unprejudiced way. Until the last third of the nineteenth century, the generation gap about which people talk superficially today was always there, but it was resolved in good philistine style, with youth gradually absorbing more and more philistine characteristics and entering, as it always had, into what its elders passed on to it.

Today, however, that is no longer possible. If one were to use terminology borrowed from Oriental wisdom, one would have to say that it became impossible when Kali Yuga ended, because from that time forward social life was no longer ruled by the principle of authoritarianism as it had been heretofore. Mankind's involvement in the consciousness soul phase of its development took ever more marked effect. This lived in the souls of people born in the 1890's and in the first few years of the twentieth century, perhaps not in a sharply defined form, but nevertheless in an extremely strong instinctive way. This inner life of theirs has to be really lovingly contemplated by older people if they want to understand it. That takes quite a bit of doing. For our culture, our civilization has assumed a form, especially in educational institutions, which makes the resolving of problems between youth and age that always used to take place no longer possible. Young people of the present feel this; it is their inner destiny. It shapes every aspect of their lives, and means that they approach life with a quite definite craving or demand. This predisposes present-day young people to become seekers, but seekers of a wholly different stripe than their elders.

This holds true of them in every area of life, and especially in the spiritual area. It is very strange how the older generation has been reacting to them for some time past. I have not neglected to call your attention to characteristic instances. Let me remind you of the lecture I gave on Gregor Mendel. Every now and then, scientists of the twentieth century have rather vehemently stated it as their opinion that Gregor Mendel, a Moravian, the solitary schoolmaster who later became an abbot, was a genius who had made remarkable contributions to the work of determining the laws of heredity. If we review Gregor Mendel's relationship to the educational institutions he attended, we cannot miss the fact that when he was old enough to take his examinations for the teaching profession he failed them by a wide margin. He was thereupon given time to prepare himself for a second try. Again he flunked. At that time—I am speaking of the 1850's—people were a lot more tolerant than they became later. So, in spite of his two failures to pass his teacher's examinations, Mendel was appointed to a secondary school position, and he became the man who accomplished something regarded as one of the greatest feats in the field of modern natural science.

Let us take another case closer at hand: that of Röntgen. Nowadays nobody doubts that Röntgen is one of the greatest men of modern times. But he was dismissed from secondary school as a hopeless case. He had the greatest trouble getting a position as a tutor because he couldn't finish school; he had been thrown out, and later just barely managed to get into a college, where he finally graduated. But even then he was unable to get a tutorial post in the field in which he sought it. In spite of this, he performed one of the most epoch-making feats in the fields of practical and theoretical science.

These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. On every hand we find indications of the unbridgeable gap between what older times had to offer and what lives in youth in an indefinable way.

Putting the matter in rather radical terms, one can say that modern youth could not care less how many Egyptian kings' graves are opened; they are not much concerned with that. But they do care about finding far more original sources of serving human progress than the opening of ancient kings' graves offers. Youth feels that we have entered upon a phase of mankind's evolution in which much more elementary, more original sources will have to be drawn upon for its furthering.

Now we can certainly say that young people with this longing have done a great deal of searching during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then they came to know of anthroposophy and felt at once that it led to the primal sources of their seeking, to the deepest origin of humanness. They then approached the Anthroposophical Society. And last Monday or Tuesday a representative of these young people said in Stuttgart that they had received a shock on approaching it, that the contrast between the Anthroposophical Society and anthroposophy had startled them. This is a very weighty fact, is it not? It cannot simply be dismissed. You have to consider what young people, especially those from the universities, have had to suffer.

Let us say, for example, that they wanted to take a doctorate in one of the freer branches of learning and teaching, such as the history of literature. How were things done in the last third of the nineteenth century? Where did most of them get the themes for their dissertations? For brevity's sake I will have to put it rather radically. The professor had undertaken to write a book about the Romantic school. So he assigned one student Novalis, another Friedrich Schlegel, a third August Wilhelm Schlegel, and a fourth Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann—if they were lucky. If they weren't, they were assigned dissertations on Hoffmann's punctuation or his use of parentheses. The professor then read through these dissertations and took the substance of his book from them. It had all become quite mechanical. The young person was just part of a mechanism, a learned mechanism, and if I may repeat myself, after the end of Kali Yuga everything that lived in an elemental way in the youthful soul rebelled against this sort of thing. I am citing just one of countless possible examples of the same phenomenon.

Now here we have these two factors side by side: the Anthroposophical Society, in the form it had assumed during its two decades—a form I need not describe, as everyone can picture it for himself from his own standpoint—and the young students. But what the Society was encountering in these young people was simply the keenest and most radical fringe of an omnipresent element. This fact stood out only too plainly at the Stuttgart meetings.

On the one hand, the leaders of the old society were committed to what had gradually taken on fixed forms. One was perhaps a Waldorf teacher, another an office manager at “Der Kommende Tag.” We have to give all due weight to the fact that all these people were overwhelmed with work. Everybody in the Society who had any free time had been drawn into these enterprises. Rightly or wrongly, this caused a certain bureaucratic spirit to spring up in the Society.

Among these undertakings was the “Union for the Threefold Membering of the Social Organism.” Right from the moment of its founding in 1919, it had a director, and after I had worked awhile with this Union I was compelled to say that I could not go on, that I would have to withdraw. As I said in Stuttgart recently, I had to strike out and simply declare that I could not go on.

Then another director, an excellent man, took things over. I was unable to get to Stuttgart for several weeks, but when I eventually arrived, I was anxious to find out what had been happening. There were a number of matters awaiting disposition, so a meeting was held and I was informed about what had transpired. I was told, “Well, we've been setting up a card file. We have small cards on the lower right-hand section of which we clip the smaller newspaper items, and then we file them in cabinets. Then there are larger cards made of heavier paper to which we attach longer magazine articles, and there are other cards of still another size for filing letters that come in.” This went on and on. Hours were spent describing the way the card file was set up, the sacrifice and devotion with which people had been working on it for many weeks, what it contained, how everything had been so neatly stowed away in it. Now I had a mental picture of this card file with all the various sizes of cards in it, and the marvellous record there of everything that had been going on in the Society and what our opponents had been up to. It was all beautifully recorded! There must have been a simply huge pile of these cards stacked up in layers. But the people sitting there vanished as though they were ghosts; only the card file was real. Everything had been recorded!

I said, “Well, my dear friends, do you have heads as well as a card file? I am not in the least interested in your files, only in what you have in your heads.”

I am sure you will understand that I am not criticizing, just reporting, for the people who had arranged the files were groaning under the tremendous burden of their work. But on the other hand, just imagine youth coming there with their hearts on fire with enthusiasm for ideals that encompassed the whole future, only to be told the story of the card files. I am not saying that it was superfluous to have files or that they were of no value; I am saying that they were excellent and vitally necessary. But that is not the way things should be going. Hearts were needed to go out to hearts.

Now this created all sorts of impossible situations. These and many other problems finally reached a point where a reorganization of the Society had to be considered. There had to be a chance for the Society to provide human beings with opportunities to work in it, to live out their special individual capacities, to find and breathe an atmosphere in which they could go on developing. These were absolutely fundamental problems that the Society was facing. A complete revision of all the conditions surrounding its life was indicated, and that it has a tremendous life-potential is shown in the fact that youth has now approached it full of teeming inner life. But the contrasts grew and grew.

Of course, there were some individuals in the older group who had never taken any interest in the card files (if I may use the files as symptomatic of the whole approach in question). Some of these others may have been very old indeed, but still not have wanted to bother with things like the files, which had gradually become a necessity. There were definitely such members who had joined the Society as early as 1902 or 1903, who, though they may have been very different from the young people in many other respects too, had also never concerned themselves with what I will term the history of the Society.

So we faced extraordinarily difficult problems at the preliminary meetings. An incalculable weight of worry burdened one's soul.

But we don't need to talk about those sessions now. The Delegates' Conference, a summons to which was the outcome of the preparatory meetings, was held in Stuttgart last Sunday. The first order of business was to hear what the provisional steering committee, which was made up for various reasons of members of the erstwhile Central Executive and called the Committee of Nine, had to say about the past and present and future of the Anthroposophical Society. Then the German and Austrian members were to be given a hearing in the persons of their delegates.

Well, things proceeded as planned. But since I want to give you just a brief sketch of what led to the final decision, I will refrain from describing what amounted to a veritable hailstorm of motions. Scarcely was one taken care of and the business of the meeting resumed than two or three more fairly flew up to the chairman's table. It can only be described as a hailstorm, and there seemed to be no end to the discussion about them. But I will skip over all this and stress instead that absolutely excellent talks were given, penetrating, deeply anthroposophical talks. Albert Steffen spoke wonderful, heartfelt, profound words. Mr. Werbeck gave a masterly description of the categories of our opponents and of their relationship to the Anthroposophical Movement and to the rest of civilization. Dr. Büchenbacher gave a vivid account of the way people who entered the Society from about 1917 on responded to what they encountered in it. As to the fact that not everything said was first-rate and as to some lesser contributions in between, it is probably better to maintain a courteous silence. But excellent, magnificent contributions were interspersed among what I will refer to as “others.” In spite of this, Sunday and Monday and Tuesday passed, and by Tuesday evening a point was reached where one could see clearly that if the next day, the final one, were to be anything like the preceding ones, the delegates would leave as they had come. For almost nothing of what lived in the many individuals assembed in the hall had really come out, even though much anthroposophical substance had been contributed in excellent speeches. This was an assemblage of human beings and the speeches all dealt with realities, but there was no living reality in the meetings, just abstraction; they were a classic example of life lived in the abstract. By Tuesday evening real chaos reigned. Everybody was talking past everybody else.

Now I had no choice but to decide to make a proposal of my own directly after the Tuesday lecture that had been scheduled for me—a proposal based on what lived in the people represented there—and almost the entire membership of the German and Austrian Societies was present. But one had to get at what was real there and pull it together. I was to speak on Tuesday about community building, a theme called for by much that had been said. So I made a proposal. I said that we could see how everyone was talking past the others and that nothing that was being said was bringing the underlying realities of the situation to the surface. Leaving other aspects aside for the moment, one could distinguish two types of feeling, two differing viewpoints, two sets of opinions. One type is represented by the old Anthroposophical Society and the committee speaking for it; the other is made up of individuals who, to put it as exactly as possible, have no real interest in the stand taken by the committee representing the Society. They are individuals completely without interest in what the committee had to say, though they are fine anthroposophists: One can scarcely imagine anything finer than the contributions made by the young people at the Stuttgart conference; they reflected an energetic, wonderful spirit. The soul of youth made a noble impression as it urgently stormed the gates of anthroposophy. But here too there was no interest in what the Society was as a society, or in what it stood for.

A phenomenon like this has to be taken as a reality. We have to learn to see it as a fact; there is no use acting like blind men and closing our eyes to it. So I had no choice but to say that since we were confronted there with these two types, any abstract talk about reaching agreement was simply false. The old society cannot be other than it is, nor can the second group. The Society as a whole will therefore have the best chance of continuance if each faction goes its own way, with the old aristocracy—no, let me rather call them the members of the older society, laden down with history—forming one group, and the stormily progressive old and young forming another.

There is in existence an ancient draft of a constitution for the Anthroposophical Society. I can recommend its study to both parties! Each of them can carry out its provisions quite literally, but the outcome will be entirely different in the two cases. That is the way things are in real life, no matter how they may look in theory.

So I made the proposal that the old Anthroposophical Society continue with its Committee of Nine. I characterized things in the following way. I said that the old society included the prominent Stuttgart members who carry on their separate undertakings in exemplary fashion and do a tremendous lot of work; in fact, one of their outstanding characteristics, demonstrated during the four days of the conference, was the weariness they brought with them from their previous labors. I said that when I come to Stuttgart and find something needing to be done, I have only to press a button; that is the way it has been in recent years. These leading personalities in Stuttgart are extremely insightful. They grasp everything immediately without one's having to say very much. There would never be time enough to discuss everything at length. Theirs is a lightning grasp; one need only touch on a matter to have it absolutely clear to them. But for the most part they do nothing about it. Then there is the other party, full of anthroposophical soulfulness, whole-heartedly immersed in anthroposophy. I can also say something to the leaders of this group. They understand nothing of what I am saying, but they do it that very instant. That is a tremendous difference. The first group understands immediately, but does nothing. The second category understands nothing; they only give promise of eventually understanding everything; they are full of energy and feeling, but they do the things at once. They do everything without understanding it.

So there will have to be two quite differently constituted groups in the Society if it is to stay united. One group should never be allowed to get in the way of the other's functioning. There is the one group—what name shall I give it, since we have to have one? It's just a question of terminology, of course. Let's call it the conservative, the traditional party, the neatly-filed members (not to limit the term to just a set of cards), the party that occupies the curule seats. People in this party have titles: president, vice president, and so on, and administer the Society. They sit there and have a routine procedure for everything. I see a man in the audience looking at me significantly who, while I was still in Stuttgart, was in a position to inform me what such procedures sometimes lead to. For example, a credit slip for a sum like 21 marks was sent out, and it cost 150 marks to send it. That is what it costs these days to send mail to foreign countries: 150 marks. If one wants to write somebody that a credit of 21 marks has been entered on the books to his account, it costs 150 marks to do it properly. That is the way things go in an orderly ABC set-up. So there we have the party of routines, the old Anthroposophical Society. One can belong to it and be a good member. Then there is the free union of individuals who care not a whit for all that sort of thing, who simply want a loose association based on a purely human element. These two streams should now be acknowledged.

I started by giving just a thumbnail sketch of this, a mere indication. That same evening a speech was made, maintaining that it would be the worst thing that could possibly happen, for it would split the Society in two, and so on. But that was the reality of the situation! If a move were to be made that fitted the facts rather than the way people thought—for what they think is seldom as significant as what they are—it had to be the one suggested, for that would fit the realities involved. As I said, a speech was instantly made about it, warning of the terrible consequences that would ensue if anything of the sort were to prove necessary, and so on.

Even in an external, purely spatial sense, the outcome was chaos. The hall was crammed with people huddled in groups, leaving no loopholes to squeeze through between them, and they all stopped me to ask what this or that had meant. The inner chaos of the situation had become outer chaos by eleven o'clock that Tuesday evening when I tried to leave the assembly hall.

I arrived, rather weary, at the place where I was staying. At midnight someone came to fetch me. I wasn't quite on the point of going to sleep. Someone came and said that a meeting was underway down in the Landhausstrasse. I was stopped again on my way to the floor where the meeting was in progress, and drawn into a side-meeting, so that it was nearly one o'clock in the morning by the time I arrived where I was supposed to be. But it was at once apparent that my proposal had been understood after all, quite correctly understood. Now the details could be profitably discussed. It had become clear that something could really be done on the basis proposed.

Certain doubts were expressed, as was perfectly natural. It was said, for example, that there were members who sympathized with the young people and wanted to go along with their aims, but who nevertheless belonged historically to the old society and even held positions in it, which they wanted to keep so they could go on working there.

I said that this could easily be solved. The only problem in the case of individuals who join both sections is to arrange that they pay only one membership fee. Surely some technical means of doing this can be worked out. There should be no question of anyone being excluded from one of the sections because he is a member of the other. In all such matters, we should simply see to it that the realities of a situation have a chance to be recognized.

I went on to say that the various institutions can also accommodate both directions. I can easily conceive the possibility of a Waldorf teacher leaning toward the looser association and becoming part of it while a colleague feels drawn to and joins the more tightly organized group. They will, of course, still work together at the Waldorf School in a perfectly harmonious spirit.

Yesterday some people were wondering how life in this or that branch of the Society would be affected. I asked why adherents of the two groups should not be able to sit beside each other at branch meetings. But the inner realities must always be given a chance to live themselves out. When a thing is conceived in a realistic spirit, there is always a way of working it out, and this makes for unity.

It took only until 2:15 a.m. for the young people to become clear on essentials. There were, however, some white-haired young ones among them who could look back over a span of quite a few decades. It became clear, as Tuesday night changed into Wednesday morning, that the proposal would work.

Wednesday was devoted to discussing these plans. And Wednesday evening witnessed their adoption—I will give you just the résumé, and then add a few supplementary comments to this report.

So there we now have the old Anthroposophical Society with its Committee of Nine as described, and the other looser, freer Anthroposophical Society whose chief striving it is to get anthroposophy out into the world and to work for a deepening of man's inner life.

Tomorrow and the following day I will review the most important aspects of the two lectures I delivered in Stuttgart. They are intimately bound up with the life in the Anthroposophical Society, for the first lecture was on the subject of community building and the second on the reasons why societies based on brotherliness are so given to quarreling.

A provisional committee was formed for the loose association. It was made up of Herr Leinhas, Herr Lehrs, Dr. Röschl, Herr Maikowski, Dr. Büchenbacher, Herr Rath, Herr von Grone, Rector Bartsch from Breslau, and Herr Schröder. You notice that not all of them are extremely young; their number includes dignified patriarchs. So the radicalism of youth will not be the only standpoint represented, but it will certainly be able to make itself felt.

That is the way things came out. Now they need only be rightly managed. The loose association undertook specifically to form smaller, closer communities—to work for anthroposophy exoterically on a big scale, and to work esoterically on a small scale forming communities held together not so much by any set system of external organization as by inner, karmic ties.

These, then, were the two groupings we came out with. I will have something more to say about them tomorrow and the next day. It was a very necessary development! Anything that is alive refuses to let itself be preserved in old, preconceived forms; arrangements must change with and adapt themselves to the living.

You remember my saying as I left for Stuttgart that the Society's whole problem was really one of tailoring. Anthroposophy has grown, and its suit, the Anthroposophical Society—for the Society has gradually become that—has grown too small. The sleeves scarcely reach to the elbows, the trousers to the knees. Well, I won't labor the analogy. The suit looked grotesque, and this was apparent to any wholehearted person who has recently joined the Society.

Now we shall have to see whether this effort to make a new, more fitting garment rather than take the old one apart—for it would certainly get torn—will succeed. It definitely has the inner capacity to do so. We shall have to see whether people develop the strength essential to this way of working. Real life presents very different possibilities from those of theory, and that holds true in this case also. We will have to create something that can really stand the test of life.

Now there we have Herr von Grone, who is a member of both committees, the committee of the free and the committee of the more tightly organized; he will serve on both. Things will work out best if we let everybody function in his own way, either as a patriarch or as a young enthusiast, and if someone wants to be both at once, why should he not be a two-headed creature? It is absolutely vital that people's energies develop freely.

Certain things won't work, of course. I was told about one such situation, where the chairman of a group once had the startling experience of yielding the floor to someone who launched out on a flaming address only to have another person talk at the same time. The chairman said, “Friends, this is impossible!” “Why that?” was the answer. “We're trying to live a philosophy of freedom here! Why should one's freedom be limited by allowing only one person to speak? Why can't several talk at the same time?” You will agree that some things won't work, but fortunately they're not always specifically called for.

I, for my part, am thoroughly convinced that things will work again for awhile. Not for always, though; nothing can be set up for eternity. As time passes we will again find ourselves confronted with the necessity of devising new garments for the anthroposophical organism. But every human being shares that destiny; one can't keep on wearing the same old clothes. An organization is actually never anything more than a garment for some living element. Why, then, should one make a special case of social organisms and try to tailor them for eternity? Everything living has to undergo change, and only what changes is alive. In the case of something as particularly teeming with life as the Anthroposophical Movement we must therefore shape a life-adapted organization. Of course we can't attempt reorganization every single day, but we will certainly find it necessary to do so every other year or so. Otherwise the chairs occupied by the leading members will really become curule seats, and when some people make a specialty of resting on the curule seats, those not occupying them begin to itch. We must find a way to make sitters on curule seats itchy too. In other words, we're going to have to start jostling these chairs a little. But if we find the right way of arranging things, everything will go beautifully.

My dear friends, my intention was to give you a report. I certainly did not feel it to be a joking matter. But things of real life are sometimes just exactly those most suited to a slightly humoristic treatment.

It can be said with truth that what our schools are able to accomplish forms part of the whole culture and development of civilisation. It does so either in a more direct way, in which case it is easy to see how a civilisation comes to expression in its art of education, or it lies unnoticed within it. To be sure, civilisation is always an image of what is done in the schools, only very often this is not observed. We shall be able to characterise this by taking our own epoch as an example, but first we will begin with oriental culture.

We really have very little intimate knowledge about the older oriental culture and what still remains of it. Oriental culture has absolutely no intellectual element; it proceeds directly out of the whole human being, that is the human being in his Oriental form, and it seeks to unite man with man. Only with difficulty does it rise beyond the principle of authority. The forms it takes arise, more out of love, in the way of nature. In the whole nexus of the oriental world we cannot speak of a separated teacher and a separated pupil, as in our case. There you do not have the teacher and educator, but you have the Dada. The Dada shows the way: through his personality he represents what the growing human being should absorb. The Dada is the one who shows everything, who teaches absolutely nothing. In oriental culture to teach would have no sense. Herbart, a very famous European educationalist, whose views on educational questions were widely accepted in Central Europe, once expressed himself as follows: I cannot think of an education without teaching. With him everything centred on how one taught. The Oriental would have said: I cannot think of an education based on teaching, because in education, everything which should come to fruition in the pupil is contained in living demonstration and example. This holds good right up to the relationship between the Initiate, the Guru, and the Chela, the Disciple. The latter is not taught, he learns by example.

By entering more deeply into such things, what follows will be more easily understood. All Waldorf School education is directed towards the whole human being. Our purpose is not to separate spiritual and physical education, but when we educate the body—because we do this out of fundamental spiritual principles, which are nevertheless extremely practical—our education reaches even into illnesses with all their ramifications. Our aim is to let the spirit work actively in the body; so that in the Waldorf School physical education is not neglected, but is developed out of the knowledge that the human being is soul and spirit. In every way our education contains all that is required for the training of the body.

Further, one must learn to understand what was understood by the Greeks. Greek education was based on gymnastics. The teacher was a gymnast, that is to say, he knew the significance of human movement. In the earlier Greek epoch it would have been more or less incomprehensible to the Greek if one had spoken to him about the necessity of introducing children to logical thinking. For the Greek knew what was brought about when children were taught health-giving gymnastics—in a somewhat milder way in the case of the Athenians, in a harder, more arduous way in the case of the Spartans. For him it was perfectly clear: “If I know how to use my fingers when taking hold of something, so that I do it in a deft, and not in a clumsy way, the movement goes up into the whole organism and in the agile use of my limbs I learn to think clearly. I also learn to speak well when I carry out gymnastic movements rightly.” Everything belonging to the so-called training of spirit and soul in man, everything tending towards abstraction, is developed in a quite unnatural way if it is done by means of direct instruction. Schooling of this kind should grow out of the way in which one learns to move the body. This is why our civilisation has become so abstract. Today there are men who cannot sew on a torn-off trouser button. With us in the Waldorf School boys and girls sit together and the boys get thoroughly enthusiastic over knitting and crochet; and in doing this they learn how to manipulate their thoughts. It is not surprising that a man, however well trained in logical thinking is nevertheless unable to think clearly, if he does not know how to knit. In this connection we in our time may observe how much more mobile the thought world of women is. One has only to study what has followed the admittance of women to the university in order to see how much more mobile the soul-spiritual is in women than in men, who have become stiff and abstract through an activity which leads away from reality. This is to be observed in its worst form in the business world. When one observes how a business man conducts his affairs it is enough to drive one up the wall.

These are things which must once again be understood. I must know that however much I draw on the board, children will learn to distinguish the difference between acute and obtuse angles much better, they will learn to understand the world much better, if we let them practise holding a pencil between the big and next toe, making tolerable and well-formed angles and letters—in other words, when what is spiritual in man streams out of the whole body—than by any amount of intellectual, conceptual explanation. In Greek culture care was taken that a child should learn how to move, how to bear heat and cold, how to adapt himself to the physical world, because there was a feeling that the soul-spiritual develops rightly out of a rightly developed physical body. The Greek, educated as a gymnast, took hold of and mastered the whole man, and the outer faculties were allowed to develop out of this mastery. We today, with our abstract science, are aware of a very important truth, but we know it as an abstraction. When we have children who learn to write easily with the right hand we know today that in man this is connected with the centre of speech situated in the left half of the brain. We observe the connection between movements of the hand and speaking. If we go further we can in the same way learn through physiology to know the connection between movement and thinking. Today therefore we already know, albeit in a somewhat abstract way, how thinking and speaking arise out of man's faculty of movement; but the Greek knew this in a most comprehensive sense. So the gymnast said: Man will learn to think in a co-ordinated way if he learns to walk and jump well, if he learns to throw the discus skilfully. And when he learns to throw the discus beyond the mark he will also comprehend the underlying logic of the story of “Achilles and the Tortoise;” he will learn to grasp all the remarkable forms of logic, which the Greeks enumerated. In this way he will learn to stand firm in reality. Today we usually think somewhat as follows: Here we have a lawyer, there a client; the lawyer knows things which the client does not know. In Greece, however, because it was quite usual to throw the discus beyond the mark, the Greek understood the following: Assuming that a learned lawyer has a pupil whom he instructs in legal matters, and this pupil is so well taught that he must inevitably win every law-suit, what may ensue? In the event of a law-suit involving both pupil and teacher the position would be this: The pupil would inevitably win and inevitably lose! As you know, the case is then left hanging in the air! Thus thinking and speaking developed out of an education based on gymnastics: both were drawn out of the whole human being.

Now let us pass on to the Roman civilisation. There the whole man receded into the background, although something of him still remained in the pose of the Roman. Greek movement was still living, pristine and natural. A Roman in his toga looked very different from a Greek; he also moved differently, for with him movement had become pose. In the place of movement education was directed towards only a part of the human being; it was based on speech, on beautiful speaking. This was still a great deal, for in speech the whole upper part of the body is engaged right down into the diaphragm and the bowels. A very considerable part of man is engaged when he learns to speak beautifully. Every effort was made in education to approach the human being, to make something of the human being. This still remained when culture passed over into mediaeval times. In Greece the most important educator was the gymnast, who worked on the whole man; in the civilisation of Rome the most important educator was the rhetorician. In Greece all culture and world-perspective was based on the beautiful human being, conceived in his entirety. One cannot understand a Greek poem, or a Greek statue if one does not know that the Greek's whole world-perspective was centralised in the concept of man in movement. When one looks at a Greek statue and sees the movement of the mouth, one is led to ask: What is the relationship between this movement and the position of the foot, and so on? It is altogether different when we come to consider Roman Art and culture. There the rhetorician takes the place of the gymnast; there the entire cultural life is centred in oratory. The whole of education is directed towards the training of public speakers, the development of beautifully formed speech, the acquisition of eloquence, and this continues right on into the Middle Ages, when education still worked on man himself. You will see that this is so, if you ask yourselves the following: What was the substance of education in the Middle Ages, to what end and purpose were people educated? There were for instance the Seven Liberal Arts: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy or Astrology, and Music. To take one example: Arithmetic was not practised as it is today, but was taught in order to develop the faculty of working with and entering into the nature of forms and numbers. The study of music enabled the pupil to gain a deeper experience of the whole of life. And astronomy: this helped him to develop the capacity for cosmic thinking. In all these studies the approach was made to man himself. The so-called exact sciences of today played a negligible part in education. That the pupil should understand something of science was held to be of little value. It was considered much more important that he should move and speak well and be able to think and calculate. That he should acquire some sort of ready-made truth was of lesser importance. Hence all culture, the perspective of civilisation developed along lines which produced men able to play a part in public life and affairs and willing to devote themselves to this. Pride was felt in men able to hold their own as public orators, men who were thoroughly representative human beings.

The stream of culture which carried this into later times, in some measure, indeed, right into the present, is the Jesuitical schooling, which, from its first establishment and on into the 18th century, had as its main purpose the training, one might almost say the drilling of human beings, so that they became characters possessing great will-power and as such could be placed into life. From the beginning this was the aim of Jesuitical culture. And it was only in the course of the 19th century, in order not to remain too much behind others, that the Jesuits introduced the exact sciences into their teaching. By these methods the Jesuits developed strong, energetic characters so that today, even if one is an opponent of Jesuitism, one finds oneself obliged to say: If only human beings could be trained to work with such consciousness of purpose for the good, as the Jesuits have trained them to work for the decadence of mankind!

This trend in the development of man first makes its appearance in the Roman civilisation, when out of the gymnast there emerges the rhetorician. We see therefore, in a civilisation which has as its foundation a rhetorical education, what tremendous value is laid on everything in life which can assume world significance in the sphere of rhetoric. Now try to look back on the whole life of the Middle Ages. Everything reveals the fact that life is regarded from the point of view of speech, of rhetorical speech, and this enters into such things as how one should behave, how one man should greet another and so on. All this is not taken for granted, but practised according to a conception of beauty, just as in rhetoric a manner of speaking which conforms to a conception of beauty gives aesthetic pleasure. Here you see arising everywhere the world-significance of a rhetorical education; while the world-significance of the Greek education lies in that which comes to expression in human movement.

And now with the 16th century we come to more modern times, although in point of fact some preparation for it may already be seen in the 15th century. Once again something that still represented much in the human being, in this case the rhetorical, is pushed into the background. Just as the rhetorical had pushed back gymnastic training, so now there is a further step, the rhetorical is pushed back and there is a still greater limitation, an ever increasing striving after intellectuality. Just as the Roman educator was the rhetorician, so is our educator the doctor, the professor. If the gymnast was still a complete human being, if the rhetorician, when he appeared in public, wished at least to be a representative human being, so our professor has ceased to be a human being at all. He denies the human being and lives more and more in sheer abstractions; all he is now is a skeleton of civilisation. Therefore, in more modern times at any rate, the professor adopts the fashion of dressing like a man of the world; he no longer cares to wear cap and gown in the lecture room, but dresses in such a way that it is not apparent immediately that he is merely a skeleton of civilisation. Ever since the 16th century our entire education has been focused on the professor. And those who educate in the sense of this view of what is of importance in the world no longer take with them into the schools any understanding of human development and human training, but they impart knowledge to the child. The child is expected to absorb knowledge; his true development is ignored, but he is expected to know something; he is expected to acquire learning. Certainly those in favour of reform in education complain loudly about this academic attitude, but they cannot get away from it. Anyone who is fully aware of these things and has a clear picture in his mind of how a Greek child was educated; anyone who then turns his attention to what happens in a modern school where, even though gymnastics are taught, the development and training of the human being is completely overlooked and scraps of knowledge taken from the sciences are given to the youngest children, must perforce say: It is not only that teachers become skeletons of civilisation, are such already, or if not, regard it as their ideal to become so in one way or another, or at any rate to look upon it as an essential requirement—it is not only that the teachers are like this, but these little children look as if they were small professors. And should one wish to express what constitutes the difference between a Greek child and a modern child, one might well say: A Greek child was a human being, a modern child all too easily becomes a small professor.

This is the great change that has taken place in the world as far as the shaping and development of culture is concerned. We no longer look at the human being himself, but only at what can be presented to him in the way of knowledge, what he should know and bear as knowledge within him. Western civilisation has developed downwards to the point at which the gymnast has descended to the rhetorician and the rhetorician to the professor. The upward direction must be found again. The most important words for modern education at the present time are these: The professor must be superseded. We must turn our attention once more to the whole man. Now consider how this comes to expression in the world-wide significance of education. Not long ago, in Middle Europe, there was a university which had a professor of eloquence. If we go back to the first half of the 19th century we find such professors of eloquence, of rhetorical speech, in many places of learning; it was all that remained of the old rhetoric. Now at the university I have in mind there was a really significant personality who held the post of professor of eloquence. But he would never have had anyone to listen to him if he had been this only, for no one any longer felt the faintest inclination to listen to eloquence. He gave lectures only on Greek archaeology. In the University Register he was entered as “Professor of Eloquence,” but actually one could hear only his lectures on Greek archaeology. He had to teach something leading to the acquisition of knowledge, not to the acquiring of a capacity. And indeed this has become the ideal of modern teaching. It leads out into a life in which people know a tremendous amount. Already it hardly seems to be an earthly world any more, where people know so enormously much. They have so much knowledge and so little ability, for that function is lacking which leads from knowledge to ability. For instance, someone is studying for the medical profession, and the time comes for his final examinations. He is now told, quite officially, that as yet he can do nothing, but must now go through years of practical training. But it is absurd that students during their first years are not taught in such a way as to be able to do something from the very beginning. What is the purpose of a child knowing what an addition sum is—if he can only add? What is the purpose of a child knowing what a town is—if he only knows what the town looks like? Wherever we are, the whole point is that we enter into life. And the professor leads away from life, not into it.

The following example can also show us the world-wide significance of education. It was still very apparent in Greece when people came to the Olympic Games. There they could see what it was on which the Greeks laid such value; there they knew that only the gymnast could be a teacher in the schools. It was still similar in the time of the rhetorician. And with us? There are certain people who would like to resuscitate the Olympic Games. This is nothing but a whimsical idea, for in present-day humanity there is no longer any need for them. It is a mere piece of external imitation and nothing is to be gained by it. What penetrates right through the man of today is neither centred in his speech, nor in his studied bearing and gestures, but is something centred in his thoughts. And so it has come about that science now has a positively demonic significance for the world. The cause of this demonic world-wide significance lies in the fact that people believed that things thought out intellectually could further the development of culture. Life was to be shaped and moulded according to theories. This holds good, for instance, in modern Socialism, the whole tenor of which is to fashion life in accordance with such concepts. It was in this way that Marxism came into the world: a few, ready-made uncoordinated concepts, such as “surplus value” and so on—on these life was to be judged and ordered. Nobody then saw the connections and consequences. But a survey of the totality is absolutely necessary. Let us go to a place in the more westerly part of Middle Europe. Some decades ago a philosopher was teaching there who no longer had anything from life, for he had turned everything into the form of concepts. He believed that life could be formed conceptually. This belief he put forward in his lectures. He had a preference for Russian pupils, of whom he had many, and his philosophy found its practical realisation in Bolshevism. He himself remained an ordinary, upright, middle-class citizen; at that time he had not the faintest inkling of what he was doing in sowing the seed of his philosophy. There grew out of it, nevertheless, the remarkable plant that has blossomed in Bolshevism. The seed of Bolshevism was first sown in the universities of the West; it was sown in the thoughts, in the abstract, intellectualistic education given to the rising generation. Just as someone who knows nothing about plants has no idea what will sprout from a seed, so the people had no idea of what was to grow out of the seed they had planted. They only saw the consequences when the seed began to grow. This is because man no longer understands the great inter-relationship of life.

The world-significance of modern intellectualistic education is that it leads right away from life. We see this if we simply consider quite external things. Before the world war we had books. Well, as you know, one masters the content of these books for just so long as one is reading or making notes on them. Otherwise they remain in the library, which is the coffin of the spiritual life. And only when somebody is perhaps obliged to produce a thesis, does he have to take out the books. This happens in a quite external way, and the person concerned is glad when their content only enters into his head and does not penetrate any further into his being. This is the case everywhere.

But now let us look into life. We have the economic life, the life of rights, and the spiritual life. This all goes on, but we do not think any more about it. We do not think any more at all about inner realities, we think in terms of bank-books. What is still contained in banking of real concern to our economic life—or even to our spiritual life, when, for example, the accounts of schools are prepared? These contain the abstract figures on the balance sheet. And what have these figures brought about in life? They have brought it about that man is no longer personally bound up with what he does. Gradually a point is reached at which it is all one to him whether he is a corn merchant or an outfitter; for trousers mean as much to him as anything else. Now he only calculates what profits are brought in by the business; he only looks at the abstract figures, with an eye for what is likely to prove more lucrative. The bank has taken the place of a living economic life. One draws money from the bank, but apart from this, leaves banking to its economic abstractions. Everything has been changed into abstract externalities, with the result that one is no longer humanly involved in things. When the bank was founded, it was still closely bound up with human beings, because people were still accustomed to standing within the living work of existence, as was the case in earlier times. This was still so in the first half of the 19th century. Then the director of a bank still impressed into it a personal character; he was still actively engaged in it with his will, he still lived with it as a personality. In this connection I should like to relate a little story which describes how the banker Rothschild behaved when a representative of the king of France came to arrange for a State credit. At the time of the ambassador's arrival Rothschild was having a consultation with a dealer in leather. The ambassador, whose visit was concerned with making arrangements for this credit, was duly announced. Rothschild, whose business with the dealer in leather was not yet finished, sent a message, asking him to wait. The minister could not understand how an ambassador from the king of France could possibly be kept waiting and he desired to be announced once more. To this Rothschild said: I am now engaged in business concerning leather, not with state affairs. The minister was now so furious that he burst open the door into Rothschild's room, saying: “I am the ambassador of the king of France!” Rothschild replied: “Please, take a chair.” The ambassador, believing that he had not heard rightly, repeated: “I am the ambassador of the king of France.”—for he could not conceive that anyone in his position could be offered a chair. Whereupon Rothschild replied: “Take two chairs.”

So we see how the personality at that time still made itself felt, for it is there. Is it still there today? It is there in exceptional cases, when, for example, someone breaks through public officialdom. Otherwise, where once there was the personality, there is now the joint-stock company. Man no longer stands as a personality in the centre of things. If one asks: What is a joint-stock company?—the answer may well be: A Society consisting of people who are rich today and poor tomorrow. For things take quite another course today than they did formerly; today they pile up, tomorrow they are again dissolved; human beings are thrown hither and thither in this fluctuating state of affairs, and money does business on its own. So it happens today that a man is glad when he comes into a situation where he can amass a certain amount of money. He then buys a car; later on he buys a second one. Things proceed in this way until his situation changes and now money is scarce. He perforce sells one of the cars and soon after the other one also. This points to the fact that man is no longer himself in control of economic and business life. He has been thrown out of the objective course of business life. I put this forward for the first time in 1908 in Nuremberg, but people did not understand much about it. It was the same in the spring of 1914 in Vienna when I said: Everything is heading towards a great world catastrophe because human beings are now outside the real and concrete and are growing ever more and more into the abstract, and it is clear that the abstract must inevitably lead into chaos. Yet people would not understand it.

Now what must be borne in mind above all else, if one has a heart for education, is that we must free ourselves from the abstract and again work our way into the concrete, realising that everything turns on man himself. Hence emphasis should not be laid too strongly on the necessity for the teacher to have a thorough knowledge of Geography and History, of English or French, but rather that he should understand man, and should build up his teaching and education on the basis of a true knowledge of the human being. Then, if need be, let him sit down and look out in the encyclopaedia the material he requires for his teaching; for if a man does this, but as an educator stands firmly on the ground of a real understanding and knowledge of man, he will nevertheless be a better teacher than one who has an excellent degree, but is totally lacking in true knowledge of the human being.

Then we come to the world-significance of the art of education; then we know that what happens in the school is reflected in the culture of the outer world. This could easily be seen in the case of the Greeks. The gymnast was to be seen everywhere in public life. When the Greek, no matter what he was like in other respects, stood confronting the Agora, it was apparent that he had been educated as a gymnast. In the case of the Romans, what lived in a man's schooling came less into external form.

With us, however, what lives in the school finds its expression only through the fact that life escapes us more and more, that we grow out of life, no longer grow into it; that our account books have their own life to a degree of which we have scarcely an inkling, a life so remote that we no longer have any power over it. It takes its own course; it leads an abstract existence, based only on figures.

And let us look at human beings who are highly educated. At most we recognise them because they wear glasses (or perhaps they don't) on their attenuated little organ. Our present day education has world significance only through the fact that it is gradually undermining the significance of the world.

We must bring the world, the real world into the school once more. The teacher must stand within this world, he must have a living interest in everything existing in the world. Only when the teacher is a man or woman of the world, can the world be brought in a living way into the school. And the world must live in the school. Even if to begin with this happens playfully, then in an aesthetic way, thus finding its expression step by step, it is nevertheless imperative that the world lives in the school. Therefore today it is much more important to draw attention to this approach of mind and heart in our newer education than ever and again to be thinking out new methods. Many of the old methods still in use are good. And what I wanted to say to you is most certainly not intended to put the excellent exponents of education of the 19th century in the shade. I appreciate them fully; indeed I see in the teachers of the 19th-century men of genius and great capacity, but they were the children of the intellectualistic epoch; they used their capacity to work towards the intellectualising of our age. People today have no idea of the extent to which they are intellectualised. Here we touch precisely on the world significance of a new education. It lies in the fact that we free ourselves from this intellectuality. Then the different branches of human life will grow together again. Then people will understand what it once meant when education was looked upon as a means of healing, and this healing was connected with the world significance of the human being. There was a time when the idea, the picture of man was thus: when he was born into earthly existence he actually stood one stage below the human, and he had to be educated, had to be healed in order to rise and become a true man. Education was a healing, was of itself a part of medical practice and hygiene. Today everything is separated. The teacher is placed side by side with the school doctor, externally separated. But this doesn't work. To place the teacher side by side with the school doctor is much as if one looked for tailors who made the left side of a coat, and for others who made the right side, without having any idea who was to sew the two separated parts together. And in the same way, if one takes the measurements of the teacher who is quite unschooled in medicine—the right side of the coat—and then takes the measurements of the doctor, who is quite unschooled in education—the left side of the coat—who is going to sew them together nobody knows! Action must therefore be taken. We must rid ourselves of the “left” tailor and the “right” tailor and replace them once again with the tailor able to make the whole coat. Impossible situations often only become apparent when life has been narrowed down to its uttermost limit, not where life should be springing up and bubbling over.

This is why it is so difficult for us to gain an understanding of what is meant by the Waldorf School. A sectarian striving away from life is the reverse of what is intended. On the contrary, there is the most intensive striving to enter into life.

In such a short course of lectures it is clearly only possible to give a short survey of all that is involved. This I have attempted to do and I hope that it may have proved stimulating. In the final lecture I shall bring the whole course to a conclusion.

Rudolf Steiner: My dear friends! We have asked you to come here today because we, as the supervisory board of the “Kommende Tag”, have to introduce Mr. Benkendörfer as the general director of the “Kommende Tag” and introduce him to you.

The circumstances as they have developed, partly the circumstances in the “Coming Day” itself, but also, in particular, the circumstances between the “Coming Day” and the anthroposophical and the other outside world, have made it necessary to create the position of general director of the “Coming Day”, and the supervisory board had to look around for a suitable person. And I have often said that this task of finding suitable personalities for these or those posts today, which is connected with a very, very extensive sense of responsibility and a very extensive necessity for insight into the most diverse circumstances, that it is extremely difficult to find personalities for such posts. We consider ourselves fortunate to have been able to win Mr. Benkendörfer for this position, and we share this joy and satisfaction with you, believing that this satisfaction will also arise for you to the highest degree over time through Mr. Benkendörfer's work with all of you.

On this occasion, however, it is my duty, having discussed the most fundamental tasks of both the “Coming Day” and the movements from which the “Coming Day” emerged with Mr. Benkendörfer on the occasion of his integration into the “Coming Day”, örfer on the occasion of his integration into the “Coming Day”, it is incumbent upon me to tell you something about the content of these conversations and other things that need to be said today in connection with them.

A real, fruitful development of the “Day to Come”, as we had conceived it, is only possible if the “Day to Come” can truly be seen as growing out of, and continually growing out of, both the entire anthroposophical movement and the threefold social order movement. Now I ask you to consider one thing that has arisen almost by itself here in Stuttgart, although only partially: something of a model, but only a model, since in the present circumstances many exemplary aspects, perhaps even the most important ones, cannot be present. But even if it is not the desirable threefold social order, there is still the model of a threefold social order. We have the movement, which we have concentrated in the Waldorf school, and it in turn stands in connection with the entire anthroposophical movement. This is, so to speak, the spiritual part of a threefold organism. Then there is the Federation for the Tripartite Structure of the Social Organism, which today is essentially only there for the propaganda of the one after which it is named, which has only preparatory work to do for the future, but which we must nevertheless, in a certain sense, take as a model for what must be called the state-legal part of the tripartite social organism.

Now it has often been emphasized that it is precisely through the threefoldness of the social organism that true, concrete unity is achieved, not the abstract unity that the abstract state has to represent. And so, of course, a close bond had to develop first between all that is our spiritual limb and the political-state-legal limb in the weekly journal “Threefold Social Organism”, which must, as it were, stretch its arm out to both sides. But everything that has been developed here in the Waldorf School, in the Anthroposophical Society, in the Federation for Threefolding, in the connection [with] the Threefolding newspaper, must in turn move the current to the actual economic part of our local Stuttgart organism, to the “Kommenden Tag”. One cannot really exist without the other.

When our friend Kühne was introduced, I spoke about some of the immediate tasks of the threefolding movement today. We must not forget that we are living in a very special time, in a time in which the speed of events has increased significantly compared to previous years. And the most harmful thing for us under all circumstances is to get up in the morning and bring with us from yesterday's habits the thoughts of yesterday and then still want to have an effect from these thoughts of yesterday on the morning of the next day. We see that precisely the terrible misery of the times is increasing everywhere outside of our movement; we see that the attacks against the anthroposophical movement are made out of yesterday's thoughts. Those people, who are mostly the opponents, cannot think anything other than what has been done to date, in thoughts that they construct from this.

But these thoughts are outdated. And we must come to terms with the fact that we must stand on the ground of new thoughts, especially in our movement, and that our thoughts themselves must be renewed in a relatively short time. I will say a few more words about what I mean by the latter.

We have just come from a staff meeting at the company that was previously the company of Jos€ del Montes, whose partners were: Mr. del Monte himself, our supervisory board member, Mr. Emil Poch, a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and Mr. Benkendörfer, who will now be the managing director of the “Coming Day”. Two workers spoke after Mr. Benkendörfer and I spoke at the staff meeting today. But everything that these two workers said is, for those who can evaluate such things, again something extraordinarily weighty for the assessment of the present world situation. One does not really get anywhere today if one cannot evaluate such things with all sharpness. What is discussed in the 'Key Points of the Social Question' is that the bridge between the leading classes of today's humanity and [the working classes, the actual proletariat] has actually been broken, and indeed broken by the fault of the leading classes, that one will be able to note on such an occasion with an extraordinarily heavy heart. You speak to the people, the people speak to you, and basically, a very different language is spoken most of the time. And the task, which is already hinted at in the “key points”, the task of building this bridge, must be solved. Because there is no answer to the social question without building this bridge, without the possibility of an understanding between the former ruling classes and the proletariat. And building this bridge is one of the most difficult tasks. It is a task that we should not lose sight of for a single hour, or even a single minute. Of course, these people speak in the most ancient phrases of social phrases, but these phrases are natural to them, have become elementary to them, they are their whole being. They have become hollowed out, mere human shells, hollowed out and stuffed with Marxist and similar phrases, now also with Bolshevist ones. These people carry this with them, they are armored by what basically resembles a human being, and they bring it forward.

In the course of modern development, we have come to a point where nothing has been done, and indeed, when individuals have made an effort – my efforts, for example, while teaching at the Workers' Education School in Berlin – when individuals have made an effort, they have been completely abandoned, especially by the leading circles. They were concerned with theater, with newspaper articles, with everything that was only in their class, which spoke a completely different language than what was spoken in the proletariat every evening in meetings; which not only speaks a different language but also leads a different life. I believe that intellectually, it still exists today, even more so than before, and that it was once starkly and physically evident to me in Berlin when, in the early years, when these things still had little significance, there was talk of the possibility of a small revolution. In West Berlin, some families felt compelled to keep their shutters down and their houses locked for a whole day. The locked house is what the leading classes basically do in the social movement. It is still the same today. Today, in this small circle, we must have no illusions about this. Because we, we, as this particular movement, must regard building this bridge as our special task.

And we must entertain absolutely no illusions about our own path. Above all, we must not entertain the illusion – and I consider this to be the most serious of all – that we can take our time. We don't have much time! Because anyone who looks at things not in the abstract but in the concrete knows that we are in a great hurry for our movement. And in turn, a works meeting like this is extremely characteristic of that. What do you think: the more factories we incorporate for the “Coming Day”, the greater the number of workers we get in the wake of the “Coming Day”, and they ask from their point of view - whether the question is about an old shopkeeper or something else - they ask from their point of view: What does the “day to come” want? - If we just sit on our curule chairs here and take our time with the whole three-folding movement, then the proletariat grows into our own movement in such a way that we have no possibility of getting along with it, no possibility of coming to any kind of understanding. Rather, we will simply come to the point, as I will describe it to you bluntly, that people will say: No matter how much the “Kommende Tag” emphasizes that its supervisory board members do not receive any royalties or profits, it will not be better for the workers either. - If we take our time, if we do not understand today that we do not have time, but that we have to act as quickly as possible, our movement will be in vain. We must not lose sight of this. Through everything we do, especially in this way, we are placing a new obligation on ourselves in the most serious way to act quickly. Because the bridge will be built in no other way than by winning over as quickly as possible those people we need from all classes of the population for our ideas.

My dear friends! Learn to be uncompromising in every way. We have not had good experiences in the past with the compromises that were supposed to be spun; we would only lose time in the future through all the compromises. It is necessary that we represent what we have to say with the same rigor in the world as I did yesterday in relation to Count Keyserling in the public lecture. If we listened to those voices telling us that people like Count Hermann Keyserling, who judges anthroposophy favorably, could be won over, then that would mean that we would give up on ourselves today; today the matter has already reached the point that we would give up on ourselves. On the other hand, what we are experiencing in Stuttgart shows that our ideas have the potential to attract many people. We just have to really commit our whole selves to it, because we must not let those people who come together simply drift apart again, but we have to keep them together. And we cannot use other people in our society, all those who act so sympathetically and always say: There is such and such a person, we want to win him over. — That is the kind of politics that is often practiced in our country, which has already done us harm and should not really be continued. Now we are at an important point in time, and we must not compromise, but stand by the position that I have often expressed in our threefolding newspaper: simply to put our ideas into as many heads as possible, quite independently of who the people are; if they want to come, we take them in. We cannot compromise on any point. We simply reject everything that people want to bring in. When the Federation for Threefolding began here – I have often explained the context – we started by going among the proletariat, and at first we actually had quite noticeable success. We then tried to use these efforts to get the works council issue off the ground, and we had to let the works council issue peter out, so to speak.

Now I do not particularly want to criticize the course of these efforts, that would take us too far today. These things will perhaps have to be examined from various angles in the near future, but I just want to mention that it is eminently damaging for us for internal reasons if we take up a movement or an effort and then let it fizzle out. Circumstances may force us to do so at some point, but then we must be sure that the circumstances of the time have compelled us. But we ourselves must do everything to ensure that a movement that has been sparked by us does not fizzle out.

But as I said, I don't blame anyone, I don't criticize anything, I'm just pointing out that we started the cultural council movement and let it fizzle out. I would like to point out that we were forced to initiate a matter - regardless of how it turns out - to gather sympathy rallies - it has fizzled out. It has been emphasized with rather strong words that the Threefolding Newspaper should be transformed into a daily newspaper as quickly as possible - the movement as such has so far fizzled out.

As long as we do not have the feeling that when we do something, it is imperative that what we do has consequences, that it must be followed up, as long as we do not have the feeling that we cannot leave anything undone, that we have to move everything forward as quickly as possible, our whole movement will still come to nothing. We must keep this in mind with all clarity. Today, we are faced with the necessity of introducing a new initiative into the Federation for the Threefold Social Order. The Federation for the Threefold Social Order must achieve on its own initiative what the aforementioned bridge achieves. To do this, it must truly represent modern diplomacy, as I mentioned when introducing Mr. Kühne. Today it is rather fruitless to talk about all kinds of utopian ideas about how things should be in the future in this or that area, how associations should be organized and the like. Of course, these things can also be discussed, but they are not the most important thing. The most important thing today is to address the real issues of the day and to deal with these real issues of the day.

We are not concerned with setting up many such things as the “Kommende Tag” is. If we have to set up such a thing, we will know how to set it up based on the circumstances. But there is no time today to fuss about how a business should look, how the proletariat should be treated, and the like. Today we are dealing with the most diverse aspirations. They are real. We are dealing with the aspirations, for example, of those workers who are completely on the side that in Germany are called the majority socialists; we are dealing with all sorts of other shades. From these shades arise the present-day conditions of public life. On the other hand, there are the aspirations of public life and those currents that are characterized, for example, by the ideal of Stinnes. He has spoken out, and many have heard what he does, and they can follow Stinnes's activities in many fields. From his point of view, there is nothing complicated about this, but rather something that has been very clearly thought out and clearly defined by him. Stinnes wants to create conditions in which the entire working class of Germany will one day be forced to bow down at his gates and beg for work. He wants to trust the conditions. He wants to create such circumstances that the proletariat will be forced – be it through grandiose lockouts and the like that precede them – to push through the conditions that will force the proletariat to beg for work at any price. That is the ideal Stinnes has proclaimed, and that he consciously implements from day to day. Others are not as ingenious as Stinnes, but they accomplish similar things and they know what they want.

We have to move within the context of what is happening. We have to look at the circumstances. I will soon be providing a short article for the third issue of the threefolding newspaper, if not for the very next one, in which I will show how characteristic it is for international social conditions, what nature has taken on the First International, the Second International and the Third International. Studying these first, second and third internationals of the labor movement is highly significant for assessing the unrest in the proletariat today. These are the realities of the present. It is interesting, and I will demonstrate, that the First, Second and Third Internationals relate to one another as follows: the First International, in which the [followers of Bakunin] broke away from Marx, was still somewhat influenced by the spiritual essence; the Second was merely political and parliamentary work; and the Third is merely economic work, with the expulsion of all parliamentary and all spiritual aspects. So that one can almost study the progression from the spiritual to the parliamentary, to the mere economic thinking, by studying the First, the Second and the Third International.

But my dear friends, what I am describing is alive in what is happening today, and one cannot speak into the world as if into a wall, but one must speak in such a way that one knows what is actually alive there. You have to tell people what “strikes” them. You cannot talk about what you talked about ten or two years ago. For example, when talking about unreality, one must talk about something like the English miners' strike, and one must point out how the behavior there shows how, at the most prominent point, there was such an unreal way of thinking that they wanted to settle a huge strike by simply suppressing it for the time being and laying the seeds for prolonged, periodically recurring new strikes. This can already be seen today from the course of events since then.

Today, it is not about dreaming up utopias about what a fully developed, tripartite social organism should be like. The Key Points of the Social Question do not talk about that either, and where it does, it is only by way of example. Today, we must familiarize ourselves with the most concrete realities, and we must learn to speak to people in a way that resonates with them. But, my dear friends, we can only do this if we are not isolated. If we are limited to the framework in which I myself can still speak today – I can actually only speak in a few places – then when Mr. Kühne and Dr. Wachsmuth speak, it is not enough, not nearly enough! What is important is to develop our new initiative above all in such a way that we can put forward a whole corps of spokesmen to the world, because if we do not have a corps of spokesmen, the few will be swallowed up, that is, their activity is of no use. Today, the situation is such that the few speakers are devoured if there is no corps of speakers. We must use our speeches to ensure that in the event of a crisis, the minds of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, for example, are already filled with thoughts that simply suggest that one could get over something like , let us say, if we now have del Monte's business, have Unger's business, that one day it would be the case that the material improvements that are often the only thing the workers understand today could not be given to the people. We have to get to the point where the people who are with us say: what they have told us makes so much sense to us that we would rather go with them than with the proletarian leaders. If we cannot manage to communicate with each other to such an extent, to speak the [workers'] language to such an extent that we can communicate [with them], then our work is in vain for the time being. We have to be able to get there – there is no other way than to become a body of minds. Because it is of no use if we represent our affairs individually, sporadically. We have to work on a large scale. It is absolutely essential that a large following, a large number of followers, be won in a relatively short time. And we must also keep them. We must not let them drift apart again. For example, we must not forget to draw a lesson from the fact that many months ago our threefolding newspaper had exactly the same 3000 readers that it still has today. It is the task of the Threefolding Federation to ensure that such a fact does not exist at all. We must take this task seriously. To do so, however, we must be particularly careful to avoid getting caught up in things from yesterday. We must plunge into the whole of contemporary life and work directly from the present. We cannot afford the luxury of theorizing that seeks to be universally valid. We must be clear about the fact that what we say today with full value may no longer be true tomorrow if we do not work.

What must we do today? At a meeting like the one we just attended, of course we have to say something; we cannot speak in empty phrases if we want to see the truth. But it will not be possible to make it come true if we do not work in such a way that we present ourselves as a cohesive body. It is up to us not just to say something, because just because we speak a truth does not make it a truth. A truth, to be of the kind that is spoken in social life, only becomes a truth when one can subsequently do what is said. Truth demands action now. It is not a truth of the kind that underlies the sphere of the will, such as the truths of natural science. It can be a truth today and a lie in eight weeks if one is not able to make it a truth. If one does not consider the inner life of social events, something that must happen through the threefold social organism cannot happen.

Through the publishing house, spiritual life in turn extends directly into the economic organism of the “coming day”. And so everything is interwoven with us.

So it is actually necessary that what works here in Stuttgart and then goes out is basically seen as one big unit, and that we do not fragment in any way, but rather embrace everything in our interest.

Above all, I would like to draw attention to one thing: what was inaugurated here in Stuttgart with the best of intentions could not, from the outset, be driven in such a way that it could be understood in the same way out in the world. Instead of always guiding those proletarians out in the world to whom we had the opportunity to speak – which would have been absolutely necessary for us – the local groups [of the federation] often considered it their task to center such things, which led to our local groups being absorbed, more or less temporarily, into the proletarian bodies in a disorganized manner – it was later withdrawn. We have to get rid of that habit. We can only successfully shape a completely new movement if we are unable to compromise on anything. When we spoke to proletarians, it was only meant in the sense that we wanted to win proletarians over by speaking to them. I have indicated this by the fact that basically I have not made a single compromise among proletarians, not even at the time when they were joining us. And the mistakes that have been made have also arisen from the compromisery that has been practiced among us.

I have actually spoken to you most of what I always think needs to be done for threefolding in general. I have pointed out points that need to be taken up again in some form. The whole threefolding movement must be taken in hand so intensively that we can turn the newspaper into a daily newspaper in the shortest possible time. The threefold social order movement must be promoted so intensively that a number of agitators – I have often said fifty – are trained, and equipped with the knowledge needed today to avoid spreading party slogans or political phrases among the people, but to speak about reality. Then we can withstand the opposition if all this can be developed. Something that is saturated with reality will have an effect, even if it is misunderstood at first. For us, it is only important to know that something is effective. Success, immediate success, is not what matters. But we must do what is necessary.

And then it is necessary, above all, that we familiarize ourselves with the smallest concrete – because the smallest thing is sometimes the seed of the greatest – political or economic movement in every class today. We must familiarize ourselves with the goals that are working today. And the aims are effective today in an enormous number [of people]. You have to pay attention to our discussions everywhere, so that gradually a judgment is spread, radiated, from our movement, which leads to every communist or whoever says: Threefolding thinks about the matter in this way, and the people of Threefolding say this and that about it. But this must be effectively represented to the world so that it is heard. These are the basic conditions of our society, and we must actually be able to point to something that is in line with them, that makes visible what we want, for example, with something like the “coming day”.

We need scientific institutes as quickly as possible, and we have to make it clear how these scientific or artistic institutes are connected to the whole social movement. Without scientific and artistic institutes affiliated with our “Coming Day”, whose content we can make understandable to the broadest circles of humanity, we will not get anywhere. We have to put something into the minds of the proletarians, so that what is inside them prevents them from talking to us only as they do today. Of course, one can argue with them. Why did they set up the programs of the proletariat differently at the time of the First International? Because there were still common ideas that all classes of people had. These ideas have long since become empty phrases, just as the German constitution was an empty phrase. It had universal, equal, and secret suffrage; the reality in Germany was that the only person who had anything to say was Bismarck. That was how far removed from reality the idea was. And that is basically still the case today.

Try to study what the reality was that was cooked up when the revolution broke out in Germany. Try to compare that with the ideas that prevailed at the time, and you will see that it was no different in November 1918. And today it is even worse in terms of the general ideas that are supposed to be at work.

We must be clear about the fact that the old ideas have been exhausted and that we cannot compromise with the supporters of the old ideas before the people come to us. Of course, one must do one's duty when the opportunity arises; even when such a man as Foreign Minister Simons, who himself emphasizes that he only sits in his chair with reluctance, who always talks about wanting to be released as soon as possible, even with such a personality who misunderstands the task of the time, when something like what happened with Simons occurs, one must do one's duty. But you must not be under any illusions. It is more important to be able to say that you have done your duty than to have to say that you have given in to hope. There are many things you have to do where you can't give in to hope, because things turn out quite differently today than what you can do about them. You have to do your duty on such occasions.

For us, it is about opening our eyes, about waking up in the morning to what the day brings, not to what we thought yesterday.

And you won't hold it against me for speaking so freely and frankly, but it is what Mr. Benkendörfer and I have repeatedly discussed over the past few days. And it should only characterize something extraordinary that Mr. Benkendörfer needs it, since he is really – you can be assured of that – taking up his position with all goodwill, with great prudence, with extraordinary business acumen, with full devotion to the anthroposophical and other matters, but that he needs to be supported by everyone. The person who stands here with such responsibility, as Mr. Benkendörfer will stand here with such responsibility, must be supported by the Anthroposophical Society, by the Federation for Threefolding, by the Waldorf School, by everything that is relevant to us; otherwise he can work like an angel and achieve nothing. If we allow certain disharmonies, such as those that have existed up to now, to continue to have an effect, then Mr. Benkendörfer will not be able to work any miracles here either. Then that which is so often evident in our movement, but which must be eradicated, will take full hold of our movement, and it will continue to rot.

What is necessary at the present time is for each and every one of us to reflect on the fact that we support Mr. Benkendörfer in the most energetic way possible. Prudence and a sense of responsibility must prevail here. But combined with this, there must be a relationship of mutual understanding and cooperation. In today's difficult times, everyone must really do their best, especially when a person who has found it so difficult to make up his mind to take on this post under the current circumstances has finally taken on this post. I know how difficult it has been for him. He did it solely out of the realization that our cause is a necessary one. This realization that our cause is a necessary one towered above everything else for him, above the belief that it could succeed out of the circumstances. Because at first this belief was not very strong, that it could succeed out of the circumstances in Stuttgart and elsewhere. But in the end, the necessity was recognized, and that means a great deal. And it was out of this realization of the necessity of our entire cause for the present, out of this realization, that Mr. Benkendörfer overcame all his doubts and will, under the terms, head the general management of the “Kommenden Tages”, which I, above all, as the result of the initiative of Mr. Molt Mr. Benkendörfer to take over the post under the conditions that I immediately pronounced as absolutely necessary, and which I can summarize in the words: The General Director has assumed full and absolute responsibility for what happens in the “Coming Day”. It is the task of the supervisory board to represent to the outside world, first to the Anthroposophical Society and then to the rest of the outside world, what happens in the “Kommende Tag”. But as things stand, it is not possible for the official affairs of the “Day to Come” to be arranged differently, with a general director standing here who bears the full, heavy responsibility with his whole person because he wants to bear it, because he recognizes the necessity of this bearing. In this sense, I myself, as chairman of the supervisory board, will always be confronted with Mr. Benkendörfer. I will never fail to think up on my own initiative what is necessary for any branch of our movement, to seek out the opportunities that may arise to do this or that, but I will never really do anything without first discussing it in detail with Mr. Benkendörfer, insofar as it is to become an official matter of “Kommenden Tages”. In this way, I indicate to you the direction that each individual matter must take. Each individual initiative cannot be paralyzed, but can be developed all the more if we remain aware that the person who, as managing director, is fully responsible for the position can count on the fact that we also take this responsibility into account, that we do not cause him difficulties with partial or other actions, but in the most blatant way, we honestly unload what we find out on our own initiative, so to speak, onto his responsibility.

This must be the direction, because that is the modality under which I myself asked Mr. Benkendörfer to respond to the proposal made by our dear friend, the curator of the Bund für Dreigliederung, vice-president of the supervisory board of “Kommendes Tag”, protector of the Freie Waldorfschule, Mr. Emil Molt. Mr. Molt's initiative led to the proposal. Mr. Benkendörfer initially only agreed to discuss Mr. Molt's suggestion, so the first modality was this: But in the future, it must not be otherwise than that this general manager assumes full responsibility and that he can carry this responsibility through the special probation of everything that lies in the area of all our individual companies. I ask that the latter be given particular consideration, because without that, we will not be able to move forward.

I myself am personally most deeply grateful to Mr. Benkendörfer for promising to take on this responsibility in this spirit. And I hope that it is possible for him to carry this responsibility by ensuring that these special circumstances are properly understood in the broadest circles of our anthroposophical movement, the Threefolding Federation, the independent Waldorf school and all that follows from it, so that he can carry the responsibility.

That is what I wanted to say to you as Chairman of the Supervisory Board at this important hour of the introduction of the new General Director.

I welcome our dear friend Benkendörfer as General Director of “The Day to Come”!