The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[With the exception of the three lectures by Rudolf Steiner, which were recorded in shorthand, there are no minutes of the Stuttgart September Conference. Carl Unger gave the following full report in the public German weekly “Anthroposophie” (5th year, No. 13, September 27, 1923):

The Anthroposophical Society has existed for 10 years, but it looks back on a life of 21 years; it is coming of age. It was founded as a special society when it became clear that those members of the Theosophical Society who saw the fulfillment of their theosophical ideals in the spiritual science of Dr. Rudolf Steiner should no longer be tolerated in the Theosophical Society; but it already came into being at the time when Dr. Steiner was called upon to seek to spread his research within the framework of the Theosophical Society. Thus the Anthroposophical Society exists through the coming together of people who have found the fulfillment of their life's longing in the work of Rudolf Steiner. But its coming of age wants to mean more! The individual stands in the history of his time, and it is not so long ago that the work of outstanding personalities can have a history-forming effect. In our time, the individual means a great deal if he is a unified personality. The coming together of individuals into a mass in meetings, associations, parliaments usually has a devastating effect on the individual. However, the Anthroposophical Society as a society wants to mean more than any of its members could individually; it wants to have a serious impact on history by enhancing individuality. The conference held at the Gustav Siegle House in Stuttgart from September 13 to 17 marked the beginning of the Anthroposophical Society's awareness of its significance for the world and its historical task. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is directed to all people. If it is to form the spiritual content of a society, then this society must be founded from the outset as a world society. Anthroposophy as such and the works of Rudolf Steiner are spread throughout the world. But it is connected with the world catastrophe of recent years that the independent anthroposophical national societies are now rapidly forming in quick succession, which, in their spiritual center at Dornach in the re-emerging Goetheanum, the creative center of Dr. Steiner, are coming together to form a large world society, despite all the divisive forces that seek to tear man from man and people from people. In recent years, much has been undertaken within the anthroposophical movement to demonstrate the fertility of anthroposophy in all areas of life: university courses, congresses, scientific and economic justifications have reached wide circles; the free Waldorf school and the wonderful art of eurythmy have led to unexpected successes; the artistic impulses of the Goetheanum have truly not been lost, even if Rudolf Steiner's magnificent mystery poems must now wait even longer before they can reappear on the stage in the form appropriate to them. All this is needed by the Anthroposophical Society as a human and spiritual center; it is to be the gathering place for the true spiritual values of the present time. A strong and healthy society should give Anthroposophy a home in the hearts of its members. But it will have to build a strong house to stand against the onslaught of its opponents, a solid wall of living souls, for perhaps for a long time to come the spirit needs firm places in the land of men, which is being devastated by the un-spirit.

We do not want to give a protocol-like report of the conference here, but rather point to the central question that was at the heart of all the lectures and discussions: How will the Anthroposophical Society organize its work in order to fulfill its tasks in the midst of a disintegrating world? The question here is not one of final formulations or organizational measures. Certainly one must be able to express what one wants; certainly one needs forms of working together, but the life of such a society is formed in the real relationships between individuals and groups of people; what one must do is ultimately decided by the individual case.

“The Anthroposophical Society wants to be a community of people for the cultivation of genuine spiritual values in the present day; in the Anthroposophical Society, the paths to the spiritual world are sought and the dissemination of genuine spiritual science is served.”

The ¹ “Principles” of the Anthroposophical Society were discussed. But more important, the conference recognized that people today need supersensible knowledge and that the world needs a society that truly seeks the paths to the spiritual world. The obstacles that arise in the consciousness of the contemporary human being in the face of these needs must be overcome through the work of society itself. Anthroposophy appeals to the faculty of free judgment; it seeks to answer free questions. The Society now wishes to open its doors wide to all who seek the paths to the spiritual world. The days of the old secret societies, which sought to bind people with oaths, are past. The Anthroposophical Society welcomes people of the present age into its ranks on the basis of free trust and free responsibility. The Society should give people what they need; it must organize its work so that they find what they seek.

For its dealings with the world, the Society needs an organization of trust. Its guidelines have been negotiated, but the important thing is how it is handled in each individual case. For this, anthroposophy provides a sense of fact and knowledge of human nature. The admission of members is carried out by the trusted individuals directly into the society, which is precisely how it will keep itself free from the sectarian tendencies that are so widespread today. But the inner work takes place in working groups, which are formed in a wide variety of ways out of a real will to work. Larger associations should help to represent the society to the outside world. The Society's organs everywhere should safeguard the interests of the Society over and above all local and regional differences. These were the topics discussed, and the conference unanimously approved the points of view proposed by the Executive Council. Much attention was paid to recognizing the opponent and to the problem of combating the opponent, and we hope that the effects of this will soon be felt.

Dr. Steiner gave three evening lectures: “The Human Being in Past, Present and Future” [in GA 228]. They introduced the history of humanity as a development of consciousness in a new way, and their momentum gave the whole conference its spiritual support. The towering figure of this leader of humanity offers tremendous prospects for the future. Dr. Steiner personally intervened almost not at all in the negotiations, but what he spoke was of the most urgent admonition, and his presence meant for all the deeply felt need to profess him and his work. The rallying cry, which had been published in this newspaper shortly before the conference by the board and a circle of trusted individuals, touched everyone's heart, and when the motion was put forward that the conference should take up and carry this rallying cry forward on its own initiative, the entire assembly rose as one man and enthusiastically expressed its approval.

The breaks between the official negotiations, and even some hours at night, were amply filled with discussions in smaller groups. The Waldorf School Association gathered its members and guests. The Clinical Therapeutic Institute organized tours. The Institute for Scientific Research presented the latest results of research, especially the epoch-making work of L. Kolisko: “Physiological and Physical Proof of the Effectiveness of Smallest Entities”, the scope of which is incalculable. The most beautiful celebrations were offered by Marie Steiner with the circle of Dornach eurythmy artists. Two performances for the conference participants and four more for the public in the stage hall at Landhausstrasse 70 made a particularly strong impression through the eurythmic rendition of poems by Albert Steffen. The way in which poetry and eurythmy resonate spiritually with each other was rarely experienced so vividly. The art that Anthroposophy brings to revelation is one of its most powerful life effects. The large hall of the Gustav-Siegle-Haus, with seating for 1300, was always filled and overflowing when Dr. Steiner gave his powerful public lectures. This conference brought together only members of the Anthroposophical Societies, but again there were not enough seats in the hall. Those who could, came from the most distant parts of Germany, despite the great difficulties and the insecurity that one had to reckon with. And now, after the conference, we can say: They will all come again, even if the difficulties increase tremendously; they may have to come on foot, but they will be there when important matters of the Anthroposophical Society are again at issue.

Draft statutes for the German national society, presumably put up for discussion at the conference

Anthroposophical Society in Germany Honorary President since February 3, 1913 Dr. Rudolf Steiner

Statutes

1. Founding of the Anthroposophical Society.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded on December 28, 1912 in Cologne. The founding took place when a committee of three individuals took over the overall management. The members of the Society joined this committee in free consent to the founding act. The founding took place as an international overall society. It was intended that individual departments, associations and the like be formed within its framework. Subsequently, individual independent national societies were founded.

The original founding board has been expanded through co-option to a board of nine members. At the delegates' assembly in Stuttgart in February 1923, these members took over the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany. Thus the Anthroposophical Society in Germany was founded as a national society. At the same time, the Free Anthroposophical Society in Germany was also founded.

At the conference of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, held in Stuttgart in September 1923, the actions of the board, which had since been co-opted to include ten people, were confirmed and the decision was taken to affiliate with the global society to be founded, with its center in Dornach. Furthermore, the board was authorized to draw up the statutes of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany.

2. Aims and tasks.

The Anthroposophical Society was founded on the conviction that the results of modern scientific research, despite their great significance for human culture, can only work for the spiritual progress of humanity if a spiritual science, which already exists to a significant extent today, promotes healthy research directed towards the supersensible. The personalities united in the Anthroposophical Society therefore regard as the most important task of the Anthroposophical Society:

The cultivation of Anthroposophical spiritual science and the promotion of its effectiveness in the most diverse areas of life.

In the fields of education, medicine, natural science, art and religion, the Anthroposophical Society has achieved significant results.

Only by applying these principles to the individual areas of life can the work of the Anthroposophical Society lead to the goal of creating a new brotherhood as people work together across the earth. In this way, it can enable the individual to gain an independent world view through an understanding of the different world views and religions of all peoples and times, and in this way it will convey an understanding of the spiritual essence of the human being and the spiritual foundations of nature and the world.

The center of the Anthroposophical Society's endeavors is the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, and the work that emanates from it in the realms of science, art, and religion.

3. Membership.

Those who are interested in the stated aims and tasks can become members of the Anthroposophical Society. Membership is applied for by submitting an application for admission.

This application for admission will usually bear the signature of a trusted person (see below), but it can also be submitted directly to the board. Admission is granted by the board's recognition. The board determines the amount of the admission fees and the membership dues.

4. Board.

The Executive Board is responsible for the overall representation of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany, both internally and externally. It is composed in such a way that the institutions that have emerged from the anthroposophical movement can find their representation in it.

The members of the Executive Board hold office for an indefinite period; the term of office of the individual members of the Executive Board may end:

1) by resignation,
2) by a majority of the duly convened General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany no longer agreeing with the performance of their duties.

The extension or supplementation of the executive council occurs through cooption. The office of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany is currently located at Champignystr. 17, Stuttgart, where the executive council is also currently based. The executive council must determine the managing members from among its members. The official organ of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany is the “Mitteilungen” (announcements) published by the executive council.

5. The extended executive council.

The executive council has formed an extended executive council by appointing individuals from the various regions of Germany. The members of the extended executive council are responsible for representing the interests of the Society internally and externally in the immediate vicinity of their place of residence. The regional associations (see below) can make proposals to the executive council for the appointment of members of the extended executive council. The members of the extended board are also trusted personalities (see below). The members of the extended board hold office for an indefinite period; the execution of their office can come to an end: 1) through resignation, 2) through a resolution of the board.

6. Trusted personalities.

The board has appointed trusted individuals [see page 463] who are responsible for accepting members' registrations. They guarantee to the board the members they propose. The appointment of further trusted individuals will either be made by the board or by one member being designated by seven other members or individuals seeking admission as their representative and being recognized as such by the board. The trusted personalities, together with the members of the extended board, form a body that can be convened by the board for special meetings to discuss the affairs of the association. The board will also organize a meeting of this body if at least 12 trusted personalities request it. The trusted personalities have their character as such for an indefinite period. Their function can be terminated:

1) by resignation,
2) by decision of the executive council,
3) by decision of the majority of a properly convened assembly of the body of trusted individuals.

7. Working groups.

General membership must be acquired individually by each member and means that the Executive Council recognizes an individual as belonging to the Anthroposophical Society.

The work of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany is carried out in local working groups, which can be formed by individuals who have acquired general membership freely coming together in any locality. These working groups require recognition by the executive council.

At least 7 members belong to the formation of working groups; if there are fewer than 7 members in one place, they can join together to form a center. The working groups and centers can unite to form associations, depending on the needs of the area in which they are formed.¹

8. General Assembly.

The General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in Germany is convened and led by the board. It is considered duly convened if the invitation has been sent three weeks in advance.

The board will also call a general assembly if this is requested by at least 12 of the working groups recognized by the board. All members of the Anthroposophical Society have access to the General Assembly. The trusted representatives and the delegates of the working groups recognized by the Executive Council are entitled to vote. Each recognized working group can appoint one delegate for 7-50 members; two delegates for 51-100 members, and so on. The centers can each appoint one delegate. The General Assembly decides by a simple majority.

The General Assembly discusses the agenda to be sent by the Executive Committee with the invitation; it has the right to express its approval of the actions of the Executive Committee for the period since the previous General Assembly. Motions for the General Assembly are to be submitted to the Executive Committee no later than three days before the General Assembly.

9. Relationship to the General Anthroposophical Society.

To be decided in the course of the negotiations in Dornach.

[The following “Draft of the Basic Principles of the Anthroposophical Society”, published in “Mitteilungen...” No. 8, October 1923, and reproduced here in facsimile, is based on Rudolf Steiner's “Draft of the Basic Principles of an Anthroposophical Society” from 1912/13 (see under “References”). The German national society was thereby following the decision of the “International Assembly of Delegates” from July 20-23, 1923, that “any elaborations of statutes by the national societies, insofar as the current ‘draft’ had to be changed or supplemented” (see page 571) should be presented in Dornach at the founding meeting of the “International Anthroposophical Society” at Christmas 1923.]

• 1. See pages 635 ff.
• 1. Such associations (regional associations) currently exist for Central Germany, Hesse, Palatinate, the Lake Constance area, Southwest Germany, and Rhineland-Westphalia. For Northern Germany and Silesia, such associations are in the process of being formed.

Dr. Steiner: School has just begun, and we want to see how things go. This is likely to be a very important year. What do you have to report?

A teacher asks about purchasing a history textbook for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Well, it’s true the students must know something. In the last grade of high school, history class is mainly a kind of review. That is also the case here. Couldn’t you teach from your notes so that a textbook would not be necessary?

You see, what is really very important is that you summarize everything they need to know as efficiently as possible. I happily remember how, when I was in school, we did not have any geometry books. The teacher summarized the important things in dictations. A self-written book gives you reason to know what is in it. Of course, when the children first had to learn everything they need, we could not do it that way. If such things are to be fruitful, it must be possible to summarize what they need to know. Everything they will be asked about history in the final examination can be written down on fifty or sixty pages. It is clear that no one, not even an expert in history, remembers everything in Ploetz. Giving children such textbooks is illusory. They just have chapter titles, but you could summarize all of the material in fifty or sixty pages. It is possible that all the subject teachers would want textbooks, but we should try to avoid that.

In such questions, an efficient summarization is what is important. Other schools have the children underline the things they need to study. They also need to cover things in a given amount of time. You should dictate such history notebooks beginning in the tenth grade.

A middle-grades teacher asks about notebooks according to blocks.

Dr. Steiner: You should give a dictation at the end of the period about what was just covered. Create the dictation with the children. You can summarize the material in a written form during one period and review it in the next. Use key sentences rather than key words.

How are things going in twelfth-grade mathematics?

The mathematics teacher: Very well. We have covered nearly everything.

Dr. Steiner: I have no doubt that they can well understand these elementary concepts of higher mathematics. I would ask the twelfth grade if they can easily solve such examination questions as: Given an oblique circular cone with axis \(\alpha\) making an angle α to the base, with a radius \(\rho\), compute the height of the cone and the length of the longest and shortest slant heights.

\(9x^2 + 25y^2 = 225\). The coordinates are, \(x = 5\), \(y = 2\). Determine the equation of the tangent and its length. They may also need to solve construction problems: Construct the locus of all points equidistant from a given point and a given plane.

Another question might be: Construct the shadow of a surface of a plane bounded by a circle upon a cone. Or further: Draw a cycloid.

The children also need to become accustomed to writing German essays. You could use what you teach in class for such essays.

A teacher: I think we need to teach the children a little about the technique of writing such essays.

Dr. Steiner: You can show them that by correcting their errors. That is true of style also. I would not give any theoretical discussions about that, as they will be disappointed when their essays are poor. A teacher: They have poor punctuation.

Dr. Steiner: It will not be easy to find a reasonable way to teach punctuation to children. We need to look into this question further, including the reasons for punctuation. This is a question we need to examine pedagogically, and I will prepare that for our next meeting. There does not appear to be any natural way of justifying punctuation. Our German punctuation is based upon the Latin and is very pedantic. Latin has logical punctuation. It arose in Medieval Latin at the beginning of the Middle Ages. There was none in Classical Latin.

Morgenstern wrote a poem about that, “Im Reich der Interpunktionen” (In the realm of punctuation marks). Punctuation is something that cannot be understood before a certain age because it is very intellectual. Children can understand putting a comma before an and only after the age of fourteen, but then they understand it quite easily. A book from Herman Grimm shows that there is actually no higher law in regard to these things. You cannot say they are incorrect. You should read the beginning of Herman Grimm’s book about Raphael. He uses only periods. You should also read one of his essays about how a schoolmaster corrected his errors. Grimm gives an answer to that. He gives a very interesting picture in his volume of essays, in the last one. You can also learn a great deal by looking at a letter by Goethe. Goethe could not punctuate. A teacher asks about seating boys and girls together.

Dr. Steiner: It is better to take such dislikes into account when they exist.

A teacher of one of the middle grades asks about “round writing.”

Dr. Steiner: They can do that.

A class had been divided and the new class teacher thought that he had received almost all the poor students.

Dr. Steiner: I do not understand how this opinion could arise. Why didn’t we divide the class such that it would be impossible for such an opinion to arise? There is no reason for dividing in any way other than alphabetically. That is better than when all the good students are put in one class, and the other has only the poor students.

A gymnastics teacher: C.H. does not want to participate in gymnastics and does not want to do eurythmy because of his inner development.

Dr. Steiner: When little H. begins such things, he is starting along the path of becoming like his older brother. He needs to be moved to participate in all the classes. That is simply nonsense. If you give in, he will be just like his brother. None of the students can be allowed not to participate in all the classes without good reason.

A gymnastics teacher: The upper two grades do not want to take gymnastics. The way they come to class makes me really feel sorry for them.

Dr. Steiner: Part of the problem is that the children did not have gymnastics before. They do not understand why they should take it now. That is something we cannot overcome. It was an error when the Waldorf School was started, and something will always remain of it.

On the other hand, it is quite possible to do something we thought was important several years ago when Mr. Baumann was teaching deportment, namely, to have the children learn manners. That is completely lacking in the upper grades. However, if it is taught pedantically, though we do not need to do it that way, they will become uncomfortable, particularly the boys. We must teach them manners with manners, with a certain amount of humor. I still find that quite lacking. We need to bring in more humor. It is important that you bring more humor, not jokes of course, into the school and into your teaching. You are really too reserved in that regard.

The spirit of the Waldorf School is certainly here, but on the other hand, overcoming human weaknesses through anthroposophy—which itself is a human being—is not something general, but something unique for each person. You could become something very different through anthroposophy. A great deal could occur in that regard, so that it is not Mr. X. or Miss Y. who stands before the class, but Mr. X. or Miss Y. transformed through anthroposophy. I could, of course, just as well mention other people. We must continue to free ourselves from this heaviness. There is a feeling of heaviness in the classes, and we must remove it. Seriousness is correct, but not this lack of humor. People need to lose this humorless seriousness. We need to overcome ourselves through our higher I so that the children cannot come to us and justifiably complain about our behavior. The faculty needs to round off the rough edges of one another. You should, of course, not allow things to go so far that one person allows everything to slip by while another continually complains. With X., you could certainly put your hands in your pockets, but not with Z. That would not be appropriate. There must be a style in the school that acts to bring things together so that there is a real cooperation. This might be a topic for a meeting when I am not here.

A teacher reports about the behavior of one of the older girls.

Dr. Steiner: The girl will say, “Thank God.” She probably had an afternoon tea, and I could well imagine that she did not want to do gymnastics. That has nothing to do with gymnastics. You need to get past some of the children’s selfishness. X. would think it quite funny of the girls, whereas you think it is bad behavior. It has often happened that other teachers are not the least disturbed by such things, so the children do not understand the problem. We need to teach them social forms with some humor. Good social forms are something that influence moral attitudes and affect moral development later in life. They do not need to be carved in stone.

We must pay more attention to overcoming what is human through our higher self. That will become more possible as our workload decreases. In Norway, the teachers have thirty hours. This year, we will be in a position where some teachers have less than twenty hours. The fewer class hours we have, the better we can prepare, which also includes overcoming our individual idiosyncrasies. We do not need to overcome our individuality, only our idiosyncrasies. We may not let ourselves go. That is something that may not happen in any event.

The gymnastics teacher: Should P. I. do gymnastics?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, and he should also do some curative eurythmy. He should do all of the consonant exercises in moderate amounts. Do them all, but not for too long. He is inwardly crippled.

A teacher asks about a student in an upper grade who speaks very softly.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to have him memorize things. See to it that he learns things from memory, but says them poetically, or at least in well-formed language.

A teacher asks about gardening class for the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: We offer gardening class only until the tenth grade. We should leave gardening out of the upper grades. The children would like to learn grafting, if you can guide them into its mysteries.

The school doctor: One hundred seventy children have taken the remedies for malnutrition.5 I have examined one hundred twenty, and most of them look better. Eighty have gained two to five pounds.

Dr. Steiner: That is not bad for such a short time. The school doctor asks about tuberculosis of the lungs.

Dr. Steiner: Children who have tuberculosis of the lungs often have infected intestines as well. We should examine those who show the effects in their lungs for tuberculosis of the intestines, because intestinal tuberculosis does not often arise by itself at that young age. In that event, it would be best to try to heal the intestines first.

For cases of tuberculosis in the intestines and the pancreas, put the juice from half a lemon in a glass of water and use that in a compress to wrap their abdomen at night. Give them also the tuberculosis remedies one and two. As far as possible, they should eat only warm things without any animal fat, for instance, warm eggs, warm drinks, particularly warm lemonade, but, if possible, everything should be warm.

The school doctor: It is difficult to differentiate between large- and small-headed children.

Dr. Steiner: You will need to go more thoroughly into the reality of it. So many things are hidden. It sometimes happens that these things appear later with one child or another.

I would now like to hear about the first grade. Are the children taking it up? We need to follow the psychology of this first grade. Every class has its own individuality. These two first grade classes are very interesting groups.

A teacher: The little ones are quite individualistic. They are like sacks of flour, yet individualistic.

Dr. Steiner: You need to be clear that all their shouting is just superficial. You need to find out what excites them.

A teacher asks whether the tendency toward left-handedness should be broken.

Dr. Steiner: In general, yes. At the younger ages, approximately before the age of nine, you can accustom left-handed children to right-handedness at school. You should not do that only if it would have a damaging effect, which is very seldom the case Children are not a sum of things, but exponentially complicated. If you attempt to create symmetry between the right and left with the children, and you exercise both hands in balance, that can lead to weak-mindedness later in life.

The phenomenon of left-handedness is clearly karmic, and, in connection with karma, it is one of karmic weakness. I will give an example: People who overworked in their previous life, so that they did too much, not just physically or intellectually, but in general spiritually, within their soul or feeling, will enter the succeeding life with an intense weakness. That person will be unable to overcome the karmic weakness in the lower human being. (The part of the human being that results from the life between death and a new birth is particularly concentrated in the lower human being, whereas the part that comes from the previous earthly life is concentrated more in the head.) So, what would otherwise be strongly developed becomes weak, and the left leg and left hand are relied upon as a crutch. The preference for the left hand results in the right side of the brain, instead of the left, being used in speech. If you give in to that too much, then that weakness may perhaps remain for a later, a third, earthly life. If you do not give in, then the weakness is brought into balance.

If you make a child do everything equally well with the right and left hands, writing, drawing, work and so forth, the inner human being will be neutralized. Then the I and the astral body are so far removed that the person becomes quite lethargic later in life. Without any intervention, the etheric body is stronger toward the left than the right, and the astral body is more developed toward the right than the left. That is something you may not ignore; you should pay attention to it. However, we may not attempt a simple mechanical balance. The most naive thing you can do is to have as a goal that the children should work with both hands equally well. A desire for a balanced development of both hands arises from today’s complete misunderstanding of the nature of the human being.

They discuss a girl. She needs to be immunized since she just went through a bad case of flu.

Dr. Steiner: That lames the senses under the quadrigeminal plate. This is not an easy situation.

A school-age child needs to sleep eight to nine hours. We need to take care of these things individually. I wanted to show only that a child who sleeps too little will have insufficient musical feeling, and that a child who sleeps too much will be too weak for all the things that require a more flexible imagination.

That is how to tell whether the child sleeps too long or not enough. Those who sleep too much will have little capability with forms in geometry, for example. Those who sleep too little will have difficulty understanding music and history.

A teacher makes a comment.

Dr. Steiner: B.B. is periodically rude. He will have times when he is better and others when he is worse. Realistically, it will take many years for that to improve.

The first part of the performance took place in the Goetheanum, the second, more cheerful part in the carpentry workshop. There is no program for this performance. Among other things, the seventh scene from the first mystery drama “The Portal of Initiation” was performed.

Dear attendees!

The eurythmic art, of which we would like to show you a sample, is based on a visible language that expresses itself in the movements of the human limbs, especially the arms and hands, which make it possible to reveal the greatest amount of soul expression through them. Thus it is a visible language, but one that is not based on arbitrariness. It does not come about in the same way as mimicry, pantomime or dance. Rather, these eurythmic forms, this visible language, come about through observing, through sensuous and supersensuous vision, what lies at the basis of human speech and song as inner movement tendencies of the speech and everything that belongs to the speech organs. Just as phonetic language and song express nothing arbitrary, so this eurythmic, visible language represents nothing arbitrary either, but something that arises entirely lawfully from the nature of the human organism.

If we study speech, which then finds its other expression in song, I would say, we see that the laws of the world of thought, which in turn arise out of the life of the senses, flow into speech. Everything that flows into human speech from the world of ideas and thoughts is actually the inartistic element of speech. For art is actually killed by the conceptual, by the imaginative. But in addition, the will and the feeling flow into language from the whole human being. This will and feeling is now just as much an expression of the inner human being as the conceptual is a result of the human being observing his surroundings.

If you observe language as it develops into the whole of educated civilization, you will find that, as the conceptual predominates more and more in the actual language, that there are original sensations of the sound, of the tone, and that these original sensations are killed by what is poured into the language by the conceptual element. The mental element pours into language the grammatical and prosaic. The poet, in turn, seeks to overcome this when he shapes language artistically, and then, the true poetic artist seeks to approximate language to what it is as an expression of the whole human being, as an expression of sympathy and antipathy, as feelings, as an expression of joy, pain and suffering, of the intensification of feelings and so on. In this way, the poet works his way out of the abstractly prosaic-dramatic and works his way into that which is actually artistic in language, but which is basically a volitional act. The poet works his way into the euphony of the tone, of the sound; he works his way into that which is a kind of religious-grammatical /] summarizing of sounds; he works his way into the rhythm, meter and so on, alliteration and so on. These are all formations, revelations of language. And only with the fact that this element, this ungrammatical, one might say anti-grammatical and anti-conceptual element, comes into the formation of language, is language in turn led back to its actual artistic element.

In singing, we have the attempt of man to shape the tones in the same way: that one actually leaves the sound unconsidered, that that which makes language into language is completely taken out of language itself and that only the tone figures in it. So here we are dealing with a withdrawal of the human being from the actual sound. This is what makes singing a possible companion to music, which is precisely an outwardly unformed, an outwardly ideal-spiritual, spiritual formation, as is also the basis of singing.

Now one can say: Nevertheless, it can be clearly perceived, especially in the original languages, that a certain ability is present in man to inwardly experience the sound itself. By practicing in a musical and vocal way, one withdraws from the sound to the mere tone. And the question arises: how can we bring to external manifestation that which does not flow from the external world into language and kills the tone, the sound, pushing it into the grammatical?

There is no doubt that what the poet can only find halfway, namely this return to the artistic element with language, can also be made visible. And this is indeed achieved through what is attempted with eurythmy. What the musical element alone cannot achieve is indeed made possible: the revelation of the emotional and volitional experience of the human being in the tone itself, in the sound itself, the experience of that which has already been completely effaced and lost in the grammatically prosaic treatment of language; so that the truly poetic element of a poem can indeed visible language, as eurythmy is, can particularly express the actual poetry of a poem.

And so, by observing what lives in language as a volitional element, by being able to extract this from the human form in a completely lawful way, one can create a visible language that is as directly based on the outer human form as, I would like to say, the tongue, palate and lip movements are based on what flows from the head and heart in ordinary language. And this is precisely what happens in eurythmy. In eurythmy, we are dealing with a visible language that, by its very nature, can express what flows from the whole being of the human being in the poet.

I would like to say: in this eurythmy, the human form is transformed into soul-inspired movement, just as the harmonious proportions of the whole human being live in the resting human form. The human being thus makes himself the tool of what he experiences soulfully through the artfully eurythmically shaped movement. And just as he himself is an expression of his whole being in his resting form, so in eurythmy one has a means of presenting to the eye what is in the poem.

But one can just as easily sing with this visible language as one can sing with the larynx, with the chest. Therefore, on the one hand, you will see our eurythmic performances of the recitation or declamation of corresponding poems, which are to be brought to revelation through this visible language, and on the other hand, you will see the musical element, which is accompanied, so to speak, by a visible song, by a eurythmically visible song.

Only someone who has no interest in expanding the means of our artistic expression can actually rebel against such an attempt at a new language, a new artistic means of expression. Those who have an 'open heart and an appreciation for the expansion of the field of art can only greet it with joy if we can succeed in expanding the field of artistic means to include a wider area.

You will see, my dear audience, that it is also possible – we have tried this more and more in recent months, as our esteemed viewers will remember from our earlier, more primitive performances – to present it alone in eurythmy. And you will see this in the introductory formations and in the final sounds at the end of a poem or a piece of music, which are presented to you in eurythmy, how they introduce the mood of a poem – or you can also let this mood fade away, so that eurythmy can speak for itself in a certain sense. It then speaks in an outwardly visible form, in a moving sculpture, what is felt through the poem or through the piece of music.

In earlier times, in earlier weeks, we tried to bring those scenes from Goethe's “Faust” to dramatic stage representation that lead away from the ordinary life of the senses, into supersensible regions, where that which plays out of the spiritual world into the human soul is to be represented. I hope that we will also succeed in finding a real stage style for realistic scenes from eurythmy. So far, we have not yet succeeded in doing this. But everything in Goethe's “Faust” – and one often has the opportunity to observe such things – that stands out from the usual realism of the physical world, can be brought to the stage particularly through this silent language of eurythmy.

You will see that in the scene from one of my “Mysterienspiele” (mystery plays) that is being performed today, where a person's spiritual processes are described, that eurythmy can be used as a particularly dramatic means of expression on stage. This scene is one of those in my Mysteries where it is intended to show how, in the ordinary fullness of life and in ordinary cognition, not only abstract soul processes take place in the human being, but how soul processes take place in the human being that change his entire relationship to the outer world, change it in the way that growing conditions, that is, real processes of becoming, change it. The fact that one is compelled to present such things, which thus present something quite real spiritually in the human being, means that one must present the human being's relationship to the world in a more intimate way than is otherwise the case in realistic drama. After all, you can't explain a compass needle, for example, just by looking at it; you have to explain it by relating it to the whole of the earth's magnetism. In the same way, we have to relate the human being to the whole spiritual world. We cannot do this by means of abstract laws; we have to enter into the concrete and pictorial. We have to present natural processes in such a way that they also represent a moral development.

This is the case in the scene that is to be presented today and in which the eurythmic means of expression is used in particular. It shows how John undergoes such inner psychological processes. But it would only give a pale picture if, for example, John were to express them or if they were to be depicted symbolically. That is not real art, but one must see things in a concrete, pictorial way, one must go into the concrete and pictorial, so that what takes place between Mary and the soul forces - which appear as real spiritual powers, not merely as natural forces, but as real spiritual powers - is a revelation of that which is really present spiritually. Thus the presentation becomes something that really concerns people, something that plays into people from the spiritual world, just as earth magnetism plays into the magnetic needle.

It is then necessary to rise with this theatrical, dramatic aspect of art and gesture to what is given through eurythmy, where one can actually express the whole human interior more adequately through the shaping of human movements than is otherwise possible through ordinary everyday gestures. The stylized gesture, which is no longer a gesture but a continuation of what is present in the static form, moves into movement; one forms, one represents that which plays into the supersensible world.

One consequence of the fact that the truly poetic and artistic is challenged by eurythmy is that recitation or declamation must also depart from what is particularly valued in our inartistic age as the art of recitation. Today, in fact, everything recited or declaimed tends to emphasize the prosaic element, that is, the inartistic element in the poem. You find that on the outside [artistic?]. But here we must go back to the actual form that the poet gives according to rhythm, meter, rhyme, imagery, and so on.

It is strange: one could recently read in a particularly laudatory review about contemporary stage and recitation speaking that someone has recently succeeded, has succeeded with language, in presenting something in such a way that one no longer noticed the rhythm and rhyme and so on. So they particularly praised the fact that the person in question was especially successful at killing the poetry in the prose. Today, this is considered particularly outstanding. But this is something that is quite characteristic of an unartistic age. Something that is really looking for artistic means must be introduced. We have to go back to recitation and declamation in rhythm, we have to achieve more and more eurythmy even in speaking. And in many other ways, eurythmy will be able to lead us back to a truly artistic experience, which is often very far removed from our present time, more than most people actually realize. This is about the artistic element of eurythmy.

Eurythmy also has another side, which is already being cultivated here. Above all, it has a therapeutic-hygienic side, which can also be carried out through eurythmy, because through the eurythmy movements that follow from the healthy human organism, polar opposites are juxtaposed to healing processes in contrast to everything that enters the human organism through illness. In certain cases, therefore, what we may call eurythmy therapy can serve therapeutic and hygienic purposes. I only mention this because I believe it has a certain significance.

The third element of this eurythmy is what must be called the pedagogical-didactic element, which has already been introduced and tried out at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded by Emil Molt and directed by me. We have introduced eurythmy into the Waldorf School in Stuttgart as a compulsory subject, like a form of gymnastics that is imbued with soul and spirit. It has been shown that from the earliest childhood, the pupils experience this soul-inspired gymnastics as something in which their organic laws can truly be lived out as a matter of course. This is what eurythmy can do in terms of educational didactics. And one can say: it is also an extraordinary pedagogical tool. While ordinary gymnastics, which is based entirely on physiology, only trains the body, the soul-inspired gymnastics that comes to light in eurythmy involves training the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. And the child feels that very deeply.

But it also has a particularly strong effect on the will initiative, which is so urgently needed in our time, because it works deep within the human being. I would like to say that it is precisely in the child - it is less evident in the adult - that truthfulness is brought to bear. For one can lie in a language that has become conventional, especially at a civilized stage of human development, one can say empty phrases. But with what wells up out of the whole human being from a visible language of eurythmy, one cannot fall into phrase. The child therefore learns truthfulness, a sense of truth through this eurythmy.

All these things will one day be able to be viewed more impartially than today, when ingrained prejudices stand in the way on the one hand. In terms of art, this eurythmy really does something that can be characterized by a Goethean word that Goethe himself said about the visual arts: When man stands at the summit of nature, he sees himself as a whole nature that has to produce another summit within itself. To do this, he rises by permeating himself with all perfections and virtues, invoking choice, order, harmony and meaning, and finally rising to the production of the work of art.

He can rise all the more to the production of the work of art, the more he uses his own organism with the wonderful laws within it as a tool, if he does not use external instruments, but uses his own organism as a tool for artistic expression. Then it becomes apparent how, basically, a kind of small world, a microcosm, is also contained in the possibilities of movement of the human organism. There are tremendous secrets to be drawn from this human organism. And so, in such a development of eurythmy, one senses the truth of Goethe's words: “When nature begins to reveal her secrets to him who is open to them, he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.”

And art must come into being when the human being takes themselves as a means of expression for what they experience spiritually and intellectually. That, dear assembled guests, is what I wanted to say by way of introduction. I would just like to ask the honored audience for their forbearance, as I always do before these performances; for we know that what can be called eurythmy is still only a kind of ideal, that we are only at the beginning of what eurythmy should become. But we also know what possibilities for the development of eurythmy lie in this striving for a eurythmic art that can be further and further developed, to the extent that this presentation in visible language will one day be able to present itself as a worthy, younger art alongside the older, recognized and established art forms.

So that is what I have to say, as I said. I would now just like to add that we can only present the first part in this room. There will then be an intermission after the first part, and during this intermission, the honored audience is requested to go to the provisional hall of the Goetheanum.

by Hella Wiesberger

In order to properly determine the relationship between Rudolf Steiner's epistemological approach to work, as discussed in the documents presented in this volume, and his overall impact, it is necessary to consider not only the external history of this branch of his work, but also, first of all, his conception of the meaning and significance of the cultic as such.

According to the insights of anthroposophy, in ancient times humanity lived in the instinctive, clairvoyant awareness that all life in the world and in humanity is brought about, shaped and sustained by the creative forces of a divine spiritual world. This awareness grew weaker and weaker over time until it was completely lost in modern times as a result of intellectual thinking that was focused solely on the physical laws of the world. This was necessary because only in this way could the human being become independent of the creative spirituality of the universe in terms of consciousness and thus acquire a sense of freedom. The task of human development now consists in using the free intellect, which is not determined by world spirituality, to gain a new awareness of the connection with world spirituality.

This realization was what led to one of Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concerns: to pave a path for modern intellectual thinking to spiritual knowledge that was appropriate for it. This is how the first anthroposophical guiding principle begins: “Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge that seeks to lead the spiritual in man to the spiritual in the universe.”¹ The concrete means for walking this path are to be found in the complete works, paradigmatically in the fundamental works «The Philosophy of Freedom» and «How to Know Higher Worlds >».

While it was natural for ancient cultures to cultivate in their external life, through symbols and cultic acts, that which could be inwardly experienced from cosmic spirituality, and thereby to shape their social life, the fading of the consciousness of being existentially connected to the divine-spiritual world also meant that the sense of the cultic had to be lost. And so, for modern abstract thinking, which has become the dominant intellectual force in the course of the 20th century, the traditional cultic forms can only be regarded as incomprehensible relics of past times. Existing cultic needs do not come from the intellect, but from other layers of the human soul.

This raises the question of what reasons could have moved Rudolf Steiner, as a thoroughly modern thinker, to cultivate cultic forms in his Esoteric School and later to convey them to other contexts as well. To answer this question fully, the whole wide and deep range of his spiritual scientific representations of the nature and task of the cultic for the development of the human being, humanity and the earth would have to be shown. Since this is not possible here, only a few aspects essential to the present publication can be pointed out.

Understanding cults arises from spiritual vision.

We need harmony between knowledge, art, religion and morality for our complicated social life, which threatens to spread chaos across the earth.²

Rudolf Steiner's fundamental concept of the cultic is rooted in his spiritual vision, trained with modern means of knowledge, to which the spiritual world content reveals itself as “the source and principle of all being” ³ and whose nature evokes an equally cognitive, artistic-feeling and religious-worshipping experience. As long as humanity lived in an instinctive clairvoyance, cultures were sustained by such a unified scientific, artistic and religiously attuned spiritual vision: “What man recognized, he formed into matter; he made his wisdom into creative art. And in that the mystery student, in his liveliness, perceived what he learned as the Divine-Spiritual that permeates the world, he offered his act of worship to it, so to speak, the sacred art re-created for cult.“ ⁴

Human progress demanded that this unified experience be broken down into the three independent currents of religion, art and science. In the further course of development, the three have become more and more distant from each other and lost all connection to their common origin. This has led to cultural and social life becoming increasingly chaotic. In order for orienting, rising forces to become effective again, the three “age-old sacred ideals” – the religious, the artistic and the cognitive ideal – must be reshaped from a modern spiritual-cognitive perspective. Rudolf Steiner regarded this as the most important concern of anthroposophy, and he emphasized it in particular on important occasions in the anthroposophical movement, for example at the opening of the first event at the Goetheanum building.⁵

In the spirit of the words spoken on this occasion: “When nature begins to reveal her manifest secrets to him through spiritual vision, so that he must express them in ideas and shape them artistically, the innermost part of his soul is moved to worship what he has seen and captured in form with a religious sense. For him, religion becomes the consequence of science and art,” ⁶From the very beginning, he had been driven to shape the results of his spiritual vision not only according to science but also according to art: towards a pictorial quality that contains spiritual realities. For “images underlie everything around us; those who have spoken of spiritual sources have meant these images” (Berlin, July 6, 1915). Because it seemed necessary to him, especially with regard to social life, to shape the essence of the spiritual not only scientifically but also visually, everything that characterizes anthroposophy as a worldview should also be present in the image through its representative, the Goetheanum building (Dornach, January 23, 1920). After the fire on New Year's Eve 1922 destroyed this pictorial expression of the view, he expressed what he had wanted to present to the world with the Goetheanum in a somewhat succinct formula:

“The Goetheanum was felt to be a physical sign of the formation that the three main interests of humanity are striving for in the depths of the human soul. These main interests are the religious-moral, the artistic and the cognitive interest.” ⁷

The formulation of the cognitive and artistic interest is clear. But what about its religious interest? If this is not as clearly perceptible, this is partly due to the characterization of religion as the “mood” of the human soul for the spiritual that lies beyond the sensual (Mannheim, January 5, 1911), and partly due to the often-stated belief that the religious and moral essence of anthroposophy cannot could not be confessional in the sense of forming a religion, that spiritual scientific endeavors should not be a “substitute” for religious practice and religious life, that one should not make spiritual science “into a religion”, although it could be “to the highest degree” a “support” and “underpinning” of religious life (Berlin, February 20, 1917). Anthroposophy as a science of the supersensible and the Anthroposophical Society as its community carrier should not be tied to a particular religious confession, since Anthroposophy is by nature interreligious. Even its most central insight, the realization of the importance of the Christ-spirit for the development of humanity and the Earth, is not based on that of the Christian denominations, but on the science of initiation from which all religions once emerged. In this sense, he once characterized it as a “fundamental nerve” of spiritual scientific research tasks to work out the supersensible truth content common to all religions and thereby “bring mutual understanding to the individual religious currents emerging from the initiations religious movements over the earth“ (Berlin, April 23, 1912).⁸ From this it follows logically that, from the point of view of anthroposophy, practical religious observance within a confession must be a private matter for the individual. This has been expressed in the statutes of the Society from the very beginning.⁹

The ideal of the sacralization of one's whole life

Sacramentality is an expression of the fact that human action is aglow with holiness.⁹

What was done only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world.¹⁰

The ability to experience how spiritual beings are manifested in a cultic, sensory way had to fade away because it is a law of development that forces must be lost in order to be conquered anew at a different level. To this end, every development must proceed in a seven-fold rhythm: from the first to the fourth stage it is evolutionary, but from the fifth to the seventh stage it is involutionary, that is, retrogressive. This means that the third, second and first stages must be relived as the fifth, sixth and seventh, but now with what has been gained as new up to the fourth stage. For humanity on earth, the new thing to be attained consists in the special or 'I-ness', which in the phase of evolution develops physically out of birth and death and in the phase of involution is to spiritualize into freedom and love. The latter, however, requires sacrificing the egoism that was necessary for the development of specialness and the sense of freedom.

This fundamental law of micro-macrocosmic development is referred to many times in the complete works. It is expressed particularly vividly, because it is presented in diagrams and meditation, in the following notes:

Handwritten entry in a notebook from 1903 (archive number 427)

Stepping, you move through the power of thought on the floods of specialness and follow seven guiding forces under the truth: desire pulls you down, the guiding forces placing you in the power of disbelief; spirit pulls you up, raising the seven to the sounding sun.

1. In the special being, discover the law: for the law wove the first of the seven into the material.
2. In movement, discover life: for the second of the seven poured life into matter.
3. In desire, discover the person: for the person was imprinted by the third of the seven in the material.
4. In the thought, recognize yourself: for the I gave the fourth of the seven its self.
5. In your desire, discover renunciation: for through renunciation, the fifth of the seven sacrificed itself so that you may be yourself.
6. In your movement, discover blessed calm: for the sixth of the seven sacrificed blessed calm so that you may live moving as yourself.
7. In thy particularity discover thy eternal law: for as eternal law the seventh of the Seven has created thy self in particularity, and as eternal law will lead it out of particularity.

The power of regression was born in humanity when the Christ, the world spirit effecting the cosmic-human evolutionary-involutional process, historically appeared and through the great sacrifice at Golgotha became the leading spirit of the earth:

“... That man can develop back again to an awareness of his spiritual relationship [to the cosmos] is due to the Mystery of Golgotha. But that which one owes to the Mystery of Golgotha must be sought out of one's own free inner motivation. Christianity presupposes freedom.” (Dornach, February 11, 1920)

Now that this retrogression of consciousness has set in from our age, it is necessary that the Christian element of freedom should also be incorporated into the nature of the cult, into sacramentalism. This means that, increasingly, it is no longer the case that one person must make the sacrifice for all others, but that each person must experience, together with all others, becoming equal to the Christ, who descended to earth as a being of the sun (Dornach, December 23, 1922). For spiritual science, freedom and individualism in religion and in sacramentalism do not mean that every person should have their own religion. This would only lead to the complete fragmentation of humanity into separate individuals but that through the assimilation of spiritual-scientific knowledge, a time will come, “however far off it may be,” in which humanity will be increasingly seized by the realization of the inner world of truth. And through this, “in spite of all individuality, in spite of everyone finding the truth individually within themselves, there will be agreement”; while maintaining complete freedom and individuality, people will then join together in free connections (Berlin, June 1, 1908).

In this sense, it was repeatedly pointed out that what had previously been performed only on the church altar must take hold of the whole world, that all human activities should become an expression of the supersensible. Especially since the First World War, it has been emphasized more and more strongly how important it is for the whole of social life to find its way back into harmonious coexistence with the universe, since otherwise humanity is doomed to “develop more and more disharmony in social coexistence and to sow more and more war material across the world”. One will not come back to ascending cultural forces as long as one serves only human egoism, especially in science and technology, alongside a separate religion, as long as one does research and experiments at the laboratory and experimental table without the reverent awareness of the “great law of the world”. “The laboratory table must become an altar“ is a formula that one encounters again and again.¹¹

The fact that there is still a long way to go and that tolerance should therefore be exercised, both by those who have to continue to maintain the old forms and by those who should strive for the future, is clear from the following statements:

"Of course, just as it is true that a completely new era is dawning in relation to the spiritual life, it is also true that the path to the Christ, which was the right one for many centuries, will remain so for many centuries to come. Things are gradually merging. But what was right before will gradually change into something else as people mature for it.” (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911)

"Just as the one who, because he believes that he has so deeply grasped the spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ, within himself that he can immediately, one might say, ‘dialogue’ with this Christ, must look with understanding at those who need the positive statutes of a confession, who need the Christ-servant who again and again gives them consolation with the words: Your sins are forgiven. On the other hand, those who can see that there are people who are already dealing with themselves should be tolerant. This may all be an ideal in earthly existence, but at least the anthroposophist may look up to such an ideal.” (Norrköping, July 16, 1914)

But the importance of cults was not only emphasized for the individual, but also for the development of the whole of humanity and the Earth. In lectures given at the time when the religious renewal movement “The Christian Community” was founded and in which it was said that the mysteries are contained in the cults and that they will only reveal themselves in their full significance in the future , “the mysteries of the coming age,” it was explained that a time would come when the earth would no longer be; everything that today fills the material of the natural kingdoms and human bodies will have been atomized in the universe. All processes brought about by mechanical technology will also be a thing of the past. But through the fact that, through “right” acts of worship that arise out of a “right grasp of the spiritual world,” elemental spiritual beings that have to do with the further development of the earth can be called into these declining natural and cultural processes, the earth will arise anew out of its destruction (Dornach, September 29, 1922).

Another reason for the saying that the mysteries of the future lie in the cultic, which shines deeply into the overall development of humanity and the cosmos, arises from the spiritual-scientific research result that the divine-spiritual of the cosmos will reveal a different nature in the future than it has done so far through free humanity, which has become self-responsible out of I-consciousness: “Not the same entity that was once there as Cosmos will shine through humanity. In passing through humanity, the spiritual-divine will experience a being that it did not reveal before.“ ¹² For this new mode of revelation of the cosmic spiritual being will only be able to emerge in the future, since the essence of a genuine cult is that “it is the image of what is taking place in the spiritual world” (Dornach, June 27, 1924).

The prerequisite for all this is the spiritualization of thinking. Only on this basis will it be possible to gradually sacralize all life activities. Then, out of the knowledge of spiritual realities, the old ceremonies will also change, because where there are realities, symbols are no longer needed (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, and Workers' Lecture Dornach, September 11, 1923).

The change of ceremonies here refers to the Christian sacraments, which, in the traditional Christian view, contain the meaning of Christianity, but whose origin is to be found in the ancient mysteries. It was only in the 16th century, with the translation of the Bible as declared to be the only authentic one by the Council of Trent in 1546, the Vulgate, that the Latin “sacramentum” replaced the Greek “mysterion”. However, the term “sacrament” has been used in ecclesiastical language since the time of the church father Tertullian in the 2nd century. With regard to the number, meaning and effect, the view was, however, fluctuating until the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1439 set the number at seven (baptism, communion, penance, confirmation, marriage , ordination, extreme unction) and proclaimed as dogma that the sacraments are acts instituted by Christ, consisting of a visible element (materia) and ritual words (forma), through which the sanctifying grace is conferred.

If, on the other hand, the Protestant Church recognizes only two sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, this, according to Rudolf Steiner's presentation in the lecture Stuttgart, October 2, 1921, is due to the fact that at the time of the Reformation there was already no sense of the inner numerical constitution of the world. For the concept of the seven sacraments originally arose from the ancient insight that the overall development of the human being is brought about by processes of evolution and involution. The seven sacraments were therefore intended to add the corresponding counter-values to the seven stages through which the human being passes in life, including the social, and in which he or she develops values that are partly evolutionary and partly involutionary. The seven stages in human life are: birth, strength (maturity), nourishment, procreation, recovery, speech, transformation. They are characterized as follows. The involution inherent in the birth forces is the dying process that begins with the birth process; it should be sanctified by the sacrament of baptism. The entire maturation process, including sexual maturation, should be sanctified by the sacrament of confirmation. The process referred to as “nourishment” refers to the embodiment of the spiritual-soul in the physical-bodily, that is to say, the right rhythm must be established between the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily so that the soul-spiritual does not sink down into the animalistic, but also does not lose itself in a spirituality foreign to the world. The involution inherent in this process of evolution should be hallowed by the sacrament of Holy Communion. Linked with this rhythmic process of vibration between the soul-spiritual and the physical-corporal is the possibility, through the faculty of memory, of being able to swing back again and again in time. For complete development, it is necessary to remember previous experiences on earth. The involution inherent in the memory capacity evolving from the human being should be sanctified by the sacrament of penance, which includes examination of conscience, repentance and the resolution to correct the mistakes made and to accept appropriate retribution imposed by oneself or by the priest, so that the process of remembrance is Christianized and at the same time elevated to the moral level. These four processes exhaust the evolutionary processes that have taken place since the birth of man. The act of remembering already represents a strong internalization; evolution is already approaching involution. A natural involutionary process is death. The corresponding sacrament is extreme unction. Just as the physical body was stimulated by the corresponding natural processes of life, so now the soul-spiritual life is to be stimulated by the sacrament of extreme unction, which in the old knowledge of nature was seen as a process of ensoulment. “Expressed in rhythm, at death the physical body is to disappear again, while the soul-spiritual life is to take form.” This is what is called “transubstantiation”.

Since the individual life of a human being comes to an end with death, the two remaining stages and sacraments relate to something that is no longer individual in nature. On the one hand, there is the interrelationship between the human being and the heavenly-spiritual, which unconsciously exists in every human being. If this were not the case, one could never find one's way back. But there is an involutionary process hidden deep within the human being, “even more hidden than that which takes place within the human being when he passes through death with his organism,” a process that does not come to consciousness at all in the course of the individual's life. The evolutionary process corresponding to this involutionary process would have been seen in the sacrament of priestly ordination, which corresponds to what is called “speech”.

The seventh, he said, was the image of the spiritual and mental in the physical and bodily, as expressed in man and woman: “One should say that a certain boundary marks the descent into earthly life. Woman does not reach this boundary completely, but man crosses it. This is actually the physical-bodily contrast.” Because both carry a certain imperfection within them, there is a natural state of tension between them. ‘If the sacramental evolutionary value is sought, we have it in the sacrament of marriage.’

This fundamental idea of Christian esotericism in relation to sacramentalism – that man enters life as an imperfect being, develops partly evolutive and partly involutive values, and that in order to make him a fully developing being, the countervalues are to be added to them in a sacramental way – has no longer been understood since one began – “of course, again rightly” – to discuss the sacramental. Today, however, we urgently need to arrive at involutional values.

Spiritual thinking as spiritual communion, as the beginning of a cosmic cult appropriate for humanity in the present day.

That all that is our relationship to the world first recognizes itself as cosmic cultus in the human being is the first beginning of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfill its mission in the world.¹³

When Rudolf Steiner speaks of the spiritualization of the forms of the sacraments, this is in turn conditioned by the law of development in that the sacrament of communion contains the involutionary counterpart to the incorporation of the soul and spirit into the physical body. Since the last stage of the process of incarnation was the binding of thinking to the physical brain, the reverse development, the re-spiritualization, must also begin with this physical thinking, this intellectuality.

Already in his first book publication, in the writing “Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (1886), he started at this point by explained how pure, that is, unadulterated thinking unites with world spirituality. This is also referred to a year later with the sacramental term “communion”, when it is stated:

"He who grants thought its ability to perceive beyond the sense perception must also, of necessity, grant it objects that lie beyond mere sensory reality. But the objects of thought are those. By seizing the idea, thought fuses with the source of the world's existence; that which operates externally enters into the mind of man; he becomes one with objective reality at its highest potency. The realization of the idea in reality is man's true communion. Thinking has the same significance for ideas as the eye has for light and the ear for sound. It is an organ of perception.“ ¹⁴

Since the content of anthroposophy is nothing other than what can be researched in this way from the world of ideal, spiritual reality and what is, by its very nature, of a moral and religious character, it goes without saying that even in its early days was proclaimed that through their teachings it should be effected to sanctify and sacralize all of life, even into its most mundane activities, and that therein even lies one of the deeper reasons for their appearance (Berlin, July 8, 1904). It also becomes clear why it is said in the lectures on 'The Spiritual Communion of Humanity', which are so important for the context under consideration here, that the spiritual communion to be experienced in spiritual thinking is the 'first beginning' of what must happen if anthroposophy is to fulfil 'its mission in the world' (Dornach, December 31, 1922).

How this can become a reality through the spiritual communion performed in the symbol of the Lord's Supper is characterized in the lecture Kassel, 7 July 1909: Humanity is only at the beginning of Christian development. Its future lies in the fact that the earth is recognized as the body of Christ. For through the Mystery of Golgotha, a new center of light was created in the Earth; it was filled with new life down to its atoms. That is why Christ, at the Last Supper, when He broke the bread that comes from the grain of the Earth, could say, “This is my body,” and by giving the juice of the vine, which comes from the sap of plants, He could say, “This is my blood!” The literal translation continues: “Because he has become the soul of the earth, he was able to say to that which is solid: This is my flesh - and to the sap: This is my blood! Just as you say of your flesh: This is my flesh - and of your blood: This is my blood! And those people who are able to grasp the true meaning of these words of Christ, they visualize and attract the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine, and the Christ-Spirit within them. And they unite with the Christ-Spirit. Thus the symbol of the Lord's Supper becomes a reality.

However, it continues: “Without the thought of the Christ in the human heart, no power of attraction can be developed to the Christ-Spirit at the Lord's Supper. But through this form of thought such attraction is developed. And so for all those who need the outer symbol to perform a spiritual act, namely the union with Christ, Holy Communion will be the way, the way to the point where their inner strength is so strong, where they are so filled with Christ that they can unite with Christ without the outer physical mediation. The preliminary school for mystical union with Christ is the sacrament – the preliminary school. We must understand these things in this way. And just as everything develops from the physical to the spiritual under the Christian influence, so under the influence of Christ, those things that were there first as a bridge must first develop: the sacrament must develop from the physical to the spiritual in order to lead to real union with Christ. One can only speak of these things in the most general terms, for only when they are taken up in their full sacred dignity will they be understood in the right sense."

In the same sense, it is said in the lecture Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911, that when man, through becoming acquainted with the knowledge of the higher worlds, through concentration and meditation exercises in scinem, is able to penetrate completely with the element of spirit, the meditative thoughts living in him 'will be exactly the same, only from within, as the sign of the Lord's Supper - the consecrated bread - was from without'. In his memoir, 'My Life-long Encounter with Rudolf Steiner', Friedrich Rittelmeyer reports that when he asked, 'Is it not also possible to receive the body and blood of Christ without bread and wine, just in meditation?' he received the answer, 'That is possible. From the back of the tongue, it is the same.

In the lecture Dornach, December 31, 1922, it is indicated that spiritual knowledge can be further deepened by uniting with the world spirit, with the words that spiritual knowledge is “the beginning of a cosmic cultus appropriate for humanity today,” which “can then grow.” In other contexts, it is pointed out that this requires a certain sacrifice, through which one can go beyond the general experience of spiritual communion to truly concrete cosmic knowledge. What has to be sacrificed in this process is referred to by the technical term “sacrifice of the intellect”. This is not to be understood as renouncing thinking as such, but rather as renouncing egoism, the will of one's own mind in thinking, which consists in arbitrarily connecting thoughts. Two lectures from 1904 and two lectures from 1923 and 1924 contain explanations of this.

The two lectures from 1904 have only survived in an inadequate transcript and therefore remain unpublished to this day. Therefore, the relevant text is quoted here verbatim. The lecture of June 1, 1904 states that certain prerequisites are needed to be able to read the Akasha Chronicle, to explore cosmic evolution, one of which consists in

“that one makes one's own thoughts available to that principle, that power and those entities which, in the theosophical language, we call the Masters.”¹⁶ Ultimately, the Master must give us the necessary instructions to be able to read the Akashic Records. It is written in symbols and signs, not in words of any language that exists or has existed. As long as one only uses the power that man habitually uses when thinking – and every man, who has not expressly learned to do so, uses this power – one cannot read in the Akasha Chronicle.

If you ask yourself, “Who is thinking?” you will have to say to yourself, “I am thinking.” You connect object and predicate when you form a sentence. As long as it is you yourself who connects the individual concepts, you are not able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You are unable to read because you connect your thoughts with your own ego. But you have to eliminate your ego. You must renounce all your own sense. You must merely present the ideas in order to have the connection of the individual ideas established by forces outside of you, by the spirit.

So to read in the Akasha Chronicle, it is necessary to renounce not thinking, but to renounce connecting the individual thoughts on your own initiative. Then the Master can come and teach you to let the spirit from outside join your thoughts into what the universal world spirit is able to show you about what has taken place in history. Then you no longer judge the facts, but the universal world spirit itself speaks to you. And you provide it with your thought material.

Now I must say something that may perhaps give rise to some prejudice. I must say what is necessary today in preparation for eliminating the ego in order to be able to read in the Akasha Chronicle. You know how it is today a thing held in contempt, what the monks in the Middle Ages cultivated. They cultivated the “sacrifice of the intellect.” The monk did not think as today's researcher thinks. The monk had a certain sacred science, sacred theology. One did not have to decide on the content. Therefore, it was said that in the Middle Ages the theologian had to use his reason to explain and defend the given revelations.¹⁷ That was, however one may judge it today, a strict schooling in the sacrifice of the intellect to a given content. Whether this is something admirable or reprehensible in modern terms is not our concern.

This sacrifice of the intellect, which the medieval monk made, led to the elimination of judgment based on the personal ego; it led him to learn how to place the intellect at the service of something higher. In the process of reincarnation, the fruits of that sacrifice come to fruition and make him a genius of insight. When higher insight comes, he can apply his abilities to the facts that can be read in the Akashic Records.” (Berlin, June 1, 1904)

In the lecture held a few weeks later, it says:

”... The further one advances on the path of knowledge, the more one must cultivate devotion; one becomes ever more and more devoted. From this devotion flows the strength for the highest realizations. He who can refrain from connecting his thoughts attains to the reading of the writing in the Akasha-Chronicle. But one thing is necessary: the personal ego must be eliminated to such an extent that it makes no claim to connecting the thoughts itself.

It is not at all easy to understand this, because man claims the right to connect the predicate with the subject. But as long as he does this, it is impossible for him to really study occult history. When he allows thoughts to arise in selflessness, but also in awareness and clarity, an event occurs which, from a certain point of view, every occultist knows, namely the event that the ideas, the thoughts, which he previously formed into sentences and insights from his personal point of view, are now formed by the spiritual world itself, so that it is not he who judges, but is judged in him. It is then the case that he has sacrificed himself so that a higher self speaks spiritually through his ideas. This is - understood occultly - what was called in the Middle Ages the “sacrifice of the intellect”. It means giving up my own opinion, my own conviction. As long as I myself associate my thoughts, and do not make my thoughts available to higher powers, which then, as it were, write on the tablet of the intellect, I cannot study occult history.” (Berlin, July 25, 1904)

In the two lectures Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924, the term “victim of the intellect” occurs again, in connection with the research result of a lost epic-dramatic poetry from the first four Christian centuries. This poetry was created by the mystery teachers of that time because they foresaw that in the future people would develop their intellect more and more, which would indeed bring them freedom but also take away their clairvoyance, a grave crisis must overtake them because they will no longer be able to comprehend the regions from which the actual deeper foundations of the development of the earth and of humanity and the cosmic significance of Christianity can be understood. This foresight had caused the mystery teachers great concern as to whether humanity would really be able to mature for that which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha. And so they clothed the teaching that the sacrifice of the intellect is needed to understand the Christ in his cosmic significance cosmic significance in a “mystery drama”.¹⁸ In this lost epic drama, In a moving way, it is said to have depicted how a young hero acquired the clairvoyance for the cosmic significance of Christianity through his willingness to make the sacrifice of the intellect. And with this poetry - it is said to have been the greatest that the New Testament produced - those mystery teachers wanted to put before humanity, like a kind of testament, the challenge to make the “Sacrificium intellectus”. For if the connection with that which has entered into humanity through the mystery of Golgotha is to be found, then this Sacrificium should basically be practiced by all who strive for spiritual life, for erudition: “Every man who is taught and wants to become wise should have a cultic attitude, an attitude of sacrifice.” (Penmaenmawr, August 31, 1923, and Prague, April 5, 1924). For “sacrifice is the law of the spiritual world” (Berlin, February 16, 1905); “Sacrifice must be, without sacrifice there is no becoming, no progress,” it says in notes from an instruction session in Basel on June 1, 1914.

Artistically formulated, the “sacrifice of the intellect” is found in the third mystery drama, “The Guardian of the Threshold”. In a moment of spiritual drama, the spiritual student Maria, supported by her spiritual teacher Benediktus, who characteristically appears in this picture, set in the spiritual realm, makes a vow before Lucifer, the representative of the egoistic forces, to always keep her love for self away from all knowledge in the future:

Never again will I
let myself be found by that bliss
Which people feel when thoughts mature.
I will prepare my heart for the service of sacrifice,
That my spirit may always think, and, thinking,
to offer the fruits of knowledge to the gods.
Then knowledge becomes my sacred duty.

From the lectures from 1904, it is clear that the sacrifice that the spiritual disciple Maria vows to make is equivalent to what is characterized there as the “sacrifice of the intellect”.

In addition to the references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of communion in spiritualized thinking, there are also references to the spiritualization of the sacrament of baptism. In contrast to spiritual communion as an individual event within the human being, this points to the spiritualization of external work. The beginnings of this could already be made today in education and teaching, if each human child is seen from the point of view that it brings the power of the Christ-spirit into the world in its own personal way.¹⁹ In another context, we find the remark: “That which was formerly performed in the mysteries as the symbolum of the sacrament of baptism should today be introduced into external events, into external deeds. Spiritualization of human work, sacralization in external action, that is the true baptism.^{20In notes from an esoteric lecture, Hamburg, November 28, 1910.}

The Forms of Worship Created for Various Communities

Cult unites the people who come together in it.²¹

The question of how ritual can build community was discussed in detail in 1923, when a fundamental reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society had become necessary due to various subsidiary movements that had emerged since the end of the First World War and the fire at the Goetheanum. The problem of “community building” had become particularly pressing at that time, on the one hand due to the youth streaming into the Society, most of whom came from the youth movement (the “Wandervogel” movement) that was struggling with the ideal of community at the time, and on the other hand due to the religious renewal movement “The Community of Christ”, which was founded in the fall of 1922, shortly before the building burnt down. This movement had formed after young theologians, mostly still students, approached Rudolf Steiner around 1920/21 with the question of whether he could advise and help them in their need for a spiritual renewal of the religious profession. His answer was that he himself had spiritual science to offer and could not in any way found a religion; however, if they, together with a group of 30 to 40 like-minded people, carried out their plans, it would mean something very great for humanity.²² For he was convinced that for those people who want to seek the path to the spiritual through religious practice, the renewal of Christian religious life is a deep necessity. And so he provided the most energetic support for this young movement, admittedly not as its founder, but, as he said, as a “private individual”. He gave lectures on the foundations of “what a future theology needs” and, above all, he gave “a valid and spiritually powerful, spiritually fulfilling cultus”, because a recovery of religious life must come about through healthy community building, which in turn is only possible through a cultus (Dornach, December 31, 1922, and March 3, 1923).

After the establishment of the “Christian Community” in the Anthroposophical Society had created a certain uncertainty regarding the relationship between the two movements, he felt compelled to address the issue of community building and worship. Starting from the question of whether the community formed by the “Christian Community” is the only one possible in the present, or whether another possibility could be found within the Anthroposophical Society, he presented the two poles of community formation made possible by worship. While the well-known pole in religious worship lies in the fact that through word and action, entities of the supersensible worlds are brought down to the physical plane, the other pole is a “reverse” cultus, which can arise when one rises up to the supersensible worlds in anthroposophical working groups through a common effort of knowledge. When a group of people come together to experience what can be revealed from the supersensible world through anthroposophy, “then this experience in a group of people is something different from the lonely experience”. If this is experienced in the right spirit, it means a process of awakening in the other person's soul and a rising to spiritual community: “If this consciousness is present and such groups arise in the Anthroposophical Society, then in this, if I may may say, at the other pole of the cultus, there is something community-building in the most eminent sense present” and from this, this ‘specifically anthroposophical community-building’ could arise (Dornach, March 3, 1923).

This form of cultic experience, which is possible without external ceremony, obviously lies in the line of the cosmic cult that can be experienced through spiritual knowledge. Nevertheless, if he had been able to work for a longer period of time, Rudolf Steiner would also have created a cult that could be performed externally, so to speak, as an effective aid on the difficult path to the cosmic cult to be sought in the purely spiritual. For the experience of cosmic cult as a spiritual-mystical union of the human spirit with world spirituality should always be striven for, but, at least today, it can certainly only rarely be truly experienced. Rudolf Steiner once hinted at this when he said: “I recall that a great mystic of the Alexandrian school confessed in his old age that he had only experienced that great moment a few times in his life, when the soul feels ripe to immerse itself so that the spirit of the infinite awakens and that mystical moment occurs when the God in the breast is experienced by the human being himself. These are moments at midday, when the sun of life is at its highest, when something like this can be experienced, and for those who always want to be ready with their abstract ideas, who say: once you have the right thoughts, they must lead you to the highest - for them such midday hours of life, which must be seen as a grace of earthly life, are not time when they would willingly travel. ²⁴ For such abstract minds, the moment must always be there to solve the riddles of the world. (Heidelberg, January 21, 1909).

That Rudolf Steiner considered the possibility of creating a new form of anthroposophical worship in 1923, the year of the reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society, is clear from two of his statements in the spring of 1923. One of these was made in the context of describing the “reverse” cult as a specifically anthroposophical form of community building. In this context, he added the following remark to the statement that many people come to the Anthroposophical Society and not only seek anthroposophical knowledge in abstracto, but also, out of the urge of our consciousness soul age, corresponding community formations: “One could now say: the Anthroposophical Society could also cultivate a cult. Of course it could; but that belongs to a different sphere now” (Dornach, March 3, 1923). The other statement was the answer to a question posed in a personal conversation about a cult for the anthroposophical movement. The questioner, Rene Maikowski, recorded this conversation as follows and made it available for reproduction:

However, this new form of the anthroposophical cult of knowledge was never realized. After Steiner's death, Marie Steiner tried to create a kind of substitute by giving the celebrations held at the Goetheanum, especially the annual festivals, an artistic-cultic character.

In retrospect, it is clear that the needs of various walks of life, as expressed to Rudolf Steiner, have given rise to a wealth of ritual texts.

The first to be written were the texts for the rituals of the interreligious cult of knowledge, as it had been practised within the Esoteric School from 1906 until the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914.

Shortly before or immediately after the end of the war (end of 1918), he had been asked to redesign church rituals. This request came from a Swiss anthroposophical friend, Hugo Schuster, who had been so deeply moved by Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Christ that it had led him to become a priest. And after he had been ordained within the Old Catholic Church in the summer of 1918 – in which the rituals were already being read in German – he received a ritual for burials and, in the spring of 1919, a new translation of the “Mass”.²⁵

Other friends of anthroposophy who were or had been priests also received ritual texts upon request. Pastor Wilhelm Ruhtenberg, who had become a teacher at the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, founded in 1919, received a baptismal and a marriage ritual in 1921. The following account of how this came about was handed down:

"As early as 1921, Pastor Ruhtenberg was often asked by anthroposophical friends to marry them and baptize their children. He then asked Rudolf Steiner for a baptismal ritual. After he had received it, he no longer felt that the black robe with the white bib was appropriate and asked for a new robe. Rudolf Steiner drew what he wanted and indicated the colors. According to Ruhtenberg's report, the marriage ritual was as follows: “Once a bridegroom came to me and said that Dr. Steiner, whom he had asked to perform the wedding, had sent him to me. I didn't want to let the man go away empty-handed, so I married him. But after that I went to Dr. Steiner and said to him: “Doctor, if you send me someone to marry, then please give me a ritual for it.” A few weeks later, as I was sitting with my class in the eurythmy lesson, the door opened; Dr. Steiner came up to me, handed me some sheets of paper and said: “Here is the marriage ritual for you.” I sat down immediately to immerse myself in the ritual with burning curiosity. After the lesson, in the office, I asked about the garment for this act. I still had the sketch of the baptismal garment with me, and Dr. Steiner wrote the colors for the marriage ceremony next to it; the shape of the garment remained the same.” ²⁶

Before that, another teacher, Johannes Geyer, who had also been a pastor, had received a baptismal ritual for the baptism of a child for whom he had been asked by an anthroposophical friend.

Rituals were also designed for the free Christian religious education at the Waldorf School after Rudolf Steiner was asked whether a religious celebration could be arranged for the students of the free religious education on Sundays. The answer was that this would have to be a cult. So the first ritual, the “Sunday Act,” was created before New Year's Day 1920. In response to further questions, he developed the three other rituals: the “Christmas Ritual” during the Christmas season of 1920; the “Youth Ritual” in 1921, standing for church confirmation; and the “Sacrifice Ritual” in spring 1923 for the two upper classes, standing for the sacrifice of the Mass.

The “sacrifice ceremony” came about after Rudolf Steiner was told in a meeting with the religion teachers on December 9, 1922 that a student in the upper classes had asked if they could receive a Sunday act that would take them further than the youth celebration. He had taken this suggestion particularly thoughtfully and described it as having far-reaching significance; he wanted to consider it further. He did not want to include a mass in the activities associated with free religious education, but “something similar to a mass” could be done. A few months later, in March 1923, the text of the ceremony was handed over and on Palm Sunday, March 25, 1923, the “sacrificial ceremony” could be held for the first time for the teachers and the students of the eleventh grade.²⁷

However, he never returned to the request expressed at the teachers' conference on November 16, 1921 for a special Sunday event just for the teachers.

When the work of the “Christian Community”, founded in the fall of 1922, raised the question of whether free religious education and the “acts” were still justified, Rudolf Steiner spoke unequivocally to the effect that both types of religious education, the free Christian and the “Christian Community”, had their own character, their own goals and full justification for the future. If some parents wished their children to participate in both types of instruction, he also allowed this, provided it did not become a health burden. (At that time, religious education for the Christian Community was not taught in schools, but in their own rooms). The unchanging basic attitude of the greatest possible tolerance in religious matters is also evident from the way he characterized the difference in the objectives of the two types of religious education: “The inner meaning of our youth celebration is that the human being is placed in humanity in a very general way, not in a particular religious community; but the ‘Christengemeinschaft’ places him in a particular religious community.” But - and he emphasized this several times - “there can't really be a discrepancy between the two in terms of content”.²⁸ And when the “Christian Community”, to which the “Youth Celebration” ritual had also been made available for their area of responsibility (confirmation), asked him whether this ritual might not require some changes for their sacramental context he developed in a “spirited” way that it was precisely “instructive” to know that the same ritual was used “as the expression of different life contexts”.²⁹

He expressed similar views regarding the “sacrifice ceremony”. Maria Lehrs-Röschl reports, as quoted above, how, after the first performance of this act, teacher colleagues requested that the ceremony be repeated for the teachers alone. Since the people performing the act were inclined to the opinion that the act should only take place for students with the participation of teachers and parents, she was asked to ask Rudolf Steiner about it: “I asked him in a way that already showed that I thought it was unacceptable to consider the sacrifice ceremony differently than for students. But Rudolf Steiner looked at me with wide-open eyes (I knew this gesture as his expression of surprised, slightly disapproving astonishment) and said: “Why not? This act can be performed anywhere there are people who desire it!”

For the purposes of the “Christian Community”, the missing rituals were gradually created, in addition to the completely redesigned “Human Consecration” Mass and the rituals handed over to it that had been created earlier. The last ritual to be created was that for the appointment of the Chief Executive. It was created shortly before Rudolf Steiner's death.

The abundance of rituals that came into being in this way is all the more astonishing given that Rudolf Steiner himself once said that it is difficult to design a ritual: “You can see from the fact that for a long time everything ritual-like has been limited to taking over the traditional that it is difficult to design a ritual. ... All cultic forms that exist today are actually very old, only slightly transformed in one way or another.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921).

It follows that anyone who undertakes to shape cults, if they are to become a true reflection of processes in the spiritual world, must have a sovereign relationship with the spiritual world. However, they must also have artistic creativity at their disposal. For cult forms as reflections of spiritual processes are by no means to be equated with photographs, but are independent creations based on physical means. A supplementary explanation for this seems to be given in the following statement: “As man rises to the next level of existence, images arise for him, but we no longer apply them in the same way as our thoughts, so that we ask: how do these images correspond to reality? but things show themselves in images consisting of colors and shapes; and through imagination, man himself must unravel the entities that show themselves to him in such symbolic form.” (Berlin, October 26, 1908). This is illustrated in concrete terms by the example of the cult of the dead, and the comment concludes: “It could be even more complicated, but in its simplicity, as it is now, what is to be conquered through it can already be conquered for humanity.” (Dornach, June 27, 1924). The term “conquer” again suggests how difficult it must be to shape ritual.

He once justified simplicity – a striking feature of all his rituals – by saying that a complicated cult would not satisfy people today and that it would therefore have to be made “extremely simple” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). But it is precisely this simplicity that in turn testifies to a strong artistic ability to create. Now art and cultus are also closely related in their origin, since they both originated in the same spiritual region: “With the evolution of humanity, the rite, a living image of the spiritual world, develops into the spheres of artistic production. For art likewise emerges from the astral world - and the rite becomes beauty.” (Paris, June 6, 1906). An incident related by Emil Bock is of interest in this context: “When I received the Children's Burial Ritual from him in the spring of 1923, he himself beamed with delight at this special kind of creativity, which was at the same time the highest art of receiving. On that day, during a conference, he approached me twice with the words, “Isn't the text beautiful!” ²⁹

Another characteristic arises from the esoteric principle of continuity, one of his most important leitmotifs:

“The future rests on the past / the past endures the future / to the vigorous presence”.³⁰

Wherever possible, he linked the newly explored to the traditional old for the sake of the continuous progress of development. This was also the case with his ritual designs. The necessity of taking into account the stream of the past is formulated as follows: “In order to maintain the continuity of human development, it is still necessary today to take up ritual and symbolism, as it were” (Dornach, December 20, 1918). In this, something is something is preserved that can and will be resurrected once we have found the way to bring the power that emanates from the Mystery of Golgotha into all human activity (Dornach, September 29, 1922). And the words point to the future trend that is only now beginning to reveal itself in the present: “In our time it is only possible to arrive at symbols if one delves lovingly into the secrets of the world; and only out of anthroposophy can a cult or a symbolism arise today.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921). In the same sense, it is said in a lecture on various cults that today, in a cult, what can be perceived through modern spiritual scientific schooling in the laws of world spirituality must be brought in, and that one can “at most stand at the beginning again” with the construction of such a cult (Dornach, September 11, 1923, lecture for the workers on the Goetheanumbau).

The connection between elements of the past and the future in the formation of the “Human Consecration Ritual” for the “Christian Community” was once pointed out as follows: “This cult takes full account of the historical development of humanity, and therefore carries in many its details and also in much of what occurs in its totality, a continuation of the historical; but it also bears everywhere the impact of that which can only now reveal itself to the supersensible consciousness from the spiritual world. (Dornach, March 3, 1923).³² He expressed himself similarly regarding the translation of the mass text for Pastor Schuster, who had had asked him to “bring some of the viable Catholic rituals not in the strange translation in which one often enjoys it today, but to bring it into a form that was actually originally in it”; and then, although it was only a translation, it actually became “something new” from it. In the same context, he also said of the funeral ritual: “Of course one had to tie in with the usual funeral rituals. But by not translating the usual ritual lexicographically, but rather correctly, something different emerged.” (Stuttgart, June 14, 1921)

The following saying also points to a characteristic of rituals: “Only one cult at a time can be legitimately brought down from the spiritual world.” ³³ The question of how the various cult forms correspond to this one possible cult can be answered to the effect that the cults given for different walks of life – the cult of knowledge of the esoteric school, acts for the free religious education of the Waldorf school, ecclesiastical cult for the “Christian Community” – must be essentially the same in the depths with this “one” cult for the various walks of life. This seems to be confirmed by another statement handed down by Emil Bock, according to which the “sacrifice ceremony” was an attempt to give the “Act of Consecration of Man” of the “Christian Community” something corresponding to it, insofar as it could be performed by lay people, that is, by those not ordained as priests. Maria Lehrs-Röschl comments on this: “What arose again and again in the development of Christianity as a longing and striving for lay priesthood - albeit also repeatedly persecuted and ultimately made to disappear - has here [with the sacrifice celebration] experienced a new germination through Rudolf Steiner.” From all this it can be seen that for Rudolf Steiner there was no contradiction between esoteric cult of knowledge, free religious cult and church cult. On the one hand, because, as everywhere, the freedom of the individual was his highest commandment in religious matters and only that which makes “absolute religious freedom” possible (Zurich, October 9, 1918) is considered true Christianity. On the other hand, because only by extending the cultic into all branches of life can the path to the high ideal of sacralizing the whole of life be followed. The necessary prerequisite for this, however, is that spiritual thoughts and feelings “equally permeate and spiritualize the inner being with just as much consecration as in the best sense of inner Christian development, the sacrament spiritualizes and Christifies the human soul.” If this becomes possible, and according to Rudolf Steiner it will become possible, then we will have advanced another step in our development and “real proof will be provided” that Christianity is greater than its outer form (Karlsruhe, October 13, 1911).

• 1. See “Anthroposophical ic Leading Thoughts», GA 26
• 2. Ilkley, August 5, 1923
• 3. “The world of ideas is the source and principle of all being,” beginning of “Credo. The Individual and the Universe», printed in «Words of Truth», CW 40.
• 4. Berlin, 5 March 1922
• 5. Dornach, September 26, 1920
• 6. Autoreferat der Ansprache vom 26. September 1920 zur Eröffnung des ersten Hochschulkurses am Goetheanum, geschrieben für die «Waldorf-Nachrichten», IH. Vol. March 1921.
• 7. In a draft for an article about the burnt-down Goetheanum.
• 8. This was already one of the goals of the Theosophical Society. (Point 2 of the three principles reads: “to lead man to a higher knowledge by research into the kernel of truth of religions, sciences and world-views of all times and peoples.”)
• 9. Right from the start, the statutes of the Theosophical and then also of the Anthroposophical Society state that membership is not tied to a religious confession.
• 9. Cologne, December 27, 1907
• 10. Dornach, November 27, 1916
• 11. Heidenheim, April 29, 1918. See also ”The Spiritual Leadership of the Human Being and Mankind” (1911) GA 15; Dornach, November 27, 1916; Zurich, October 9, 1918; Dornach, December 30, 1922.
• 12. See ‘Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts’ (essay ”The Future of Humanity and the Activity of Michael), GA 26.
• 13. Dornach, December 31, 1922
• 14. See ‘Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Schriften’, edited and commented by Rudolf Steiner, preface to volume II, S.IV (1887), GA 1.
• 16. About the Masters, see the volume ” History and the Content of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904 to 1914», GA 264.
• 17. On the two types of truth - the truths of knowledge and the truths of revelation - in modern spiritual science, see the lecture Liestal, October 16, 1 916 in “Philosophy and Anthroposophy”, GA 35, as well as the study by Hans Erhard Lauer “Erkenntnis und Offenbarung in der Anthroposophie”, Basel 1958.
• 18. The term “mystery drama” was noted by Rudolf Steiner in his notebook for the lecture Prague, April 5, 1924. Notebook archive number 336.
• 19. Dornach, November 27, 1916.
• 21. Dornach, 3 March 1923.
• 22. Emil Bock in «Wir erlebten Rudolf Steiner. Erinnerungen seiner Schüler», herausgegeben von M.]. Krück von Porturzyn, 1. Auflage Stuttgart 1956.
• 24. Refers to a saying of the will-o'-the-wisps in Goethe's “Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily,” which was the subject of this lecture.
• 25. Schuster, Hugo (1876-1925)
  Swiss. As a young merchant in St. Gallen in 1903/04, he took an active part in the development of anthroposophical work in Switzerland, e.g. in the founding of branches in St. Gallen, Bern and Basel. He felt drawn to the priesthood by Rudolf Steiner's descriptions of Christ. He was ordained as a priest of the Old Catholic Church in 1918 and took up his first post in Basel. At the beginning of 1919, he received the burial ritual from Rudolf Steiner. Although Rudolf Steiner had often spoken words of remembrance at the funerals of members of the Anthroposophical Society, he had never performed a ritual, because, as Marie Steiner once put it, he wanted to practice the profession of priest no more than he wanted to practice that of a doctor. But when a member of the Society took on the role of a priest, a collaboration arose. On the occasion of such a death, Pastor Schuster performed the funeral ritual given by Rudolf Steiner for the first time on January 14, 1919 in Arlesheim, and Rudolf Steiner spoke the words of remembrance afterwards. From a handwritten telegram transcript of Rudolf Steiner in the archive of the Rudolf Steiner estate administration, it can be seen that when a member died in May 1920, he asked Pastor Schuster himself if he could perform the funeral ceremony. There is also evidence of such a jointly conducted ceremony in October 1920. According to a letter written by Marie Steiner, Rudolf Steiner spoke at the funerals and cremations of members “when the relatives asked him to. In the beginning, there were only a few isolated cases. Since they gradually became more numerous and the cult was given to the priests who had turned to him (the Christian Community), he wished the matter to be handled in this way, since he did not want to practice the profession of a priest any more than he did that of a doctor.” Since Schuster had to give up his job as a result of illness as early as 1921, the funeral ritual passed to the Christian Community. Rudolf Steiner had conferred the ritual of the Mass upon him in 1919. On April 20, 1919, immediately before leaving for Stuttgart, where the next day a meeting of the signatories of the Appeal to the German People and the Cultural World marked the beginning of the people's movement for a threefold social organism, Rudolf Steiner sent Schuster the first parts - the gospel and offertory of the mass. The accompanying letter reads: “Dornach, April 20, 1919. My dear Reverend Schuster! Please find enclosed everything from the Mass that is ready to be handed over. But I also want to take the matter with me on the journey, and it is my opinion that now that my book (“The Key Points of the Social Question...”) is finished, everything will soon be in your hands. Please do not be angry that you are receiving so little for the time being; the matter is progressing. Sincerely, Rudolf Steiner.” The other parts followed a little later. The exact date is not known.
• 26. From the biographical sketch “Wilhelm Ruhtenberg” in “Der Lehrerkreis um Rudolf Steiner in der ersten Waldorfschule”, Stuttgart 1977, p. 210f.
• 27. Maria Lehrs-Röschl in “On religious education. Rudolf Steiner's words for Waldorf teachers, Stuttgart 1985.
• 28. See “Conferences with the teachers of the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart 1919 to 1924”, Volume 1 (Introduction by Erich Gabert), GA 300, 5. 41.
• 29. In response to the question that was asked again later, he then made the desired changes. Emil Bock handed them down to the priests of the “Christian Community.
• 29. Emil Bock in “We experienced Rudolf Steiner. Memories of his students”, edited by M.J.Krück von Porturzyn, 1st edition Stuttgart 1956.
• 30. From “Twelve Moods” in “Truth Sayings”, GA 40.
• 32. This reference to historical development obviously refers to the four parts of the Christian mass sacrifice - gospel, sacrifice, consecration, communion - which “represent the path of the initiate from the old pagan mysteries” (Dornach, January 11, 1919; Munich, November 4, 1906).
• 33. Carl Unger, “On the Question of the Relationship between the Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society” in “Schriften II”, Stuttgart 1964.

Report in the “Mitteilungen des Zentralvorstandes der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft” No. 1/1921.

At four o'clock, Dr. Unger opens the discussion on the prerequisites, tasks and goals of an Anthroposophical Society and welcomes the numerous members of the Anthroposophical Society (about 1200) present. After a few procedural remarks that this is not a general assembly of the Anthroposophical Society, nor a founding assembly, but a gathering of the members present here, he hands over the chair to Mr. Uehli, who then gives Dr. Unger the floor as speaker.

Dr. Unger: We are in a difficult position with our movement in the midst of the decline of spiritual life, surrounded by organized opposition, behind which stand spiritual forces that we initially have to counter with only our free will to work. In order to arrive at a discussion of our main questions, some of the history of the anthroposophical movement should be presented, which is briefly outlined in my essay in the double issue of “Drei” appearing on the occasion of this congress, as it must be known to the public today. In future, no opponent must be allowed to claim ignorance of these facts. (What now follows is a reproduction of this essay, which may be read on the spot. The essay ends with the publication of the 'Draft of the Foundations of an Anthroposophical Society' written by Dr. Rudolf Steiner.) Unfortunately, there is reason to assume that even today this 'Draft of the Basic Principles' is not sufficiently known among the members of the Anthroposophical Society to fulfill its task. In the early days after the founding of the Society, it was my task to give lectures to the individual working groups that existed at the time and were forming rapidly about the tasks and goals of the Society. I had already indicated the Society's point of view in Number XIII (March 1912) of the “Mitteilungen” (Communications) for the members of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, and characterized it by the words “trust” and “responsibility”. The founding committee considered itself responsible for the spiritual current and wanted to call for people to come forward who were willing to share this responsibility. Working groups were to be formed and a kind of trust organization was to be created from trustworthy personalities, who in turn should be willing to take responsibility for what they achieve to the founding committee, just as each individual member should be willing to take their share of responsibility to the trustworthy personalities. Trust should be the prerequisite for responsibility: just as the task was entrusted to the anthroposophical movement, so should trust be expressed in people, that in their hearts the spiritual current that is to be served is at work, trust in the will and understanding of those who approached the task in order to take on the responsible task of building something that could last into the future within the increasingly collapsing world of the present.

A motto precedes the 'Draft of the Basic Principles': 'Wisdom is only in the truth'. (From Goethe's Prose Sayings.) This motto was placed in its position when the Theosophical Society fought against the truth in an organizational way, when untruthfulness, lies and defamation began to cloak themselves in the nimbus of wisdom. In a serious sense, this motto calls us to the starting points of our society. A simple overview of the content of the “Draft” shows that the prerequisites, tasks and goals of the Anthroposophical Society are set out here. It contains an obligation in that every member must know it before joining the Society. But this obligation does not lie in the external organizational structure; rather, the Society as such should mean something to its members in a human sense.

There are secret societies with which the Anthroposophical Society is often compared, albeit wrongly. But for the members of such secret societies, their society means something. Of course there are also disputes among their members, and there are also apostates, but it will certainly not happen that such people will carry anything to the outside world that could harm their society. The Society as such is respected above and beyond all differences of opinion. This is one of the prerequisites of the Anthroposophical Society, which cannot establish a connection between its members through external discipline, obedience and the like, but must achieve this connection out of a free understanding of genuine spiritual life.

The goal of “a satisfying and healthy way of life” is pursued by the Anthroposophical Society in accordance with the “Draft of the Basic Principles” “by promoting genuine and healthy research directed towards the supersensible and by cultivating its influence on the human way of life”; “true spiritual research and the attitude of mind that arises from it shall give the Society its character”; thus from the very beginning the main emphasis has been placed on the practical side of life, and what has since emerged as the effect of anthroposophy on the various areas of life is precisely part of the ‘cultivation of its influence on human conduct’. The three guiding principles, in which the character of the Society can be expressed, are based on true spiritual research. They are prerequisites or conditions for the work of the Society, which sets itself and is not intended to present an external commandment. In particular, the first guiding principle shows that brotherhood is not presented as a phrase or abstract demand, but that it can result from observing the spiritual that is common to all human souls. In order to gain influence on the way of life, the work of Dr. Steiner had to be given the widest possible distribution. It must be added here to the history of the Anthroposophical Society that the initial period after its founding had to be devoted to the inner attitude towards the goals. However, this work was abruptly cut short by the outbreak of war. An Anthroposophical Society only makes sense on an international basis. However, the way in which national matters were handled during the war did not allow for external work. In addition, of the three founders of the Society who served as the Central Board, Dr. Steiner (Miss von Sivers) resigned from her post at the beginning of 1916, so that an interim administration of the Society had to be set up. And in the following years, Mr. Bauer's state of health repeatedly led him to announce his decision to resign from the central board, so that this wish could not be ignored.

The fact that the inner work was able to continue to a certain extent is perhaps demonstrated by the fact that after the armistice was concluded, out of the necessity to make a serious effort to implement the life-promoting impulses of spiritual science in the midst of the collapse of the traditional way of life, many initiatives were taken, initially by individuals. Forms began to develop out of the anthroposophical movement that were increasingly isolated from the outside world: the threefolding movement, the artistic impulses of the Goetheanum, eurythmy, the Waldorf school, research institutes, university courses, etc. All of this worked to influence people's way of life. In the explanations of the “guiding principles”, the “draft principles” then speak of an ideal of life that can be a general human ideal of how to live. Reference is made to the exemplary nature that can flow from the living interaction of the members, but that can only be shaped if the members have the right attitude despite the “complete appreciation of the thinking and feeling of the individual”.

The draft contains much that prompts us to ask: has the Anthroposophical Society fulfilled its tasks, is it in a position to fulfill them in the future? This will be the subject of our discussion. It has become quite evident in the present time that “the human being needs to know and cultivate his own supersensible nature and that of the world around him,” as stated at the beginning of the “Draft of Fundamental Principles”. The souls of people today, especially the souls of young people, are attracted by all kinds of movements with lofty goals that are pursued in an abstract way that suits the times. Such movements seek to attract people who we know are valuable and who should work with us towards our goals. Such valuable people experience great disappointments in these movements. Why don't they come to us?

As a statistical comment, it may be said that the membership of our Society has increased from 3647 in 1914 to 8238 on August 1 of this year; a large increase in membership coincides with the time when strong opposition has become effective. Let us assume that all of the more than 8,000 members own the fundamental works of Dr. Steiner (although not all of them are subscribers to the Threefolding Journal or the “Drei”!). Most of these fundamental works have reached print runs of over 20,000, with the “Core Points of the Social Question” reaching 40,000. With print runs of 20,000, one can certainly expect a readership of 40,000, and these are truly interested readers, because Dr. Steiner's books do not appear in second-hand bookshops. This proves that spiritual science as such is effective; but the Anthroposophical Society is not effective. It must be said, without fear of contradiction, that it is a stumbling block in many quarters, especially for valuable people. Why is this so? That should be the subject of our discussion, for the cooperation of the members of our Society does not correspond to what is stated as a prerequisite in the “Draft of the Basic Principles”.

The Society as such means little in the consciousness of many of its members. One symptom of this is that hundreds of members present here have come to our congress as people interested in the lectures, but not as members of the Society as such. This is shown by the fact that hundreds came without a membership card; this is said without reproach for the individual. There is much that can be said about what happens among us that flies in the face of our principles. But it has consequences that are felt throughout the world. So, in an organization that wants to be based on freedom, giving advice is what can prove to be spiritually effective. In such a society, one must be able to give advice, and such advice should be properly appreciated. Dr. Steiner's position within society is particularly that of an advisor. Dr. Steiner often gave advice, and often the opposite of what he advised happened. But often enough, the effect is that Dr. Steiner is blamed for the opposite of what he advised. I have been able to mention only a few. But much can come from the impulses of this congress for the fulfillment of the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society, which must break away from the inheritance of the old Theosophical Society. I pointed out many things in a circular letter a year ago; the circular letter had no effect. At that time, the success of such a congress could not be assumed with certainty. Now we have ventured this undertaking. Whether it will have the desired effect as an action will depend on the members of the Anthroposophical Society. To do this, we must take a serious and honest look at the situation. What I have said should be the basis for discussion, and you will contribute the best to it.

Mr. Uehli opens the discussion on the presentation and asks for written contributions.

Rector Bartsch underscores Dr. Unger's comments about Dr. Steiner's almost superhuman work and would now like to see the relationships of the members to the only remaining member of the central Executive Council regulated. He continues: Much has come from Stuttgart, as this congress also proves, and much would be better if the members of the Anthroposophical Society had shown themselves equal to their task. A movement with such great tasks would need a daily newspaper, and if the well over 5,000 members in Germany were each to recruit two to three subscribers to the three-part newspaper by Christmas, that would be a great success.

Of course, differences of opinion will always arise, but they can be resolved in the way I have described. We can only become a cohesive society if we are based on mutual trust. We must work towards solidarity. Various prominent figures at the forefront of our movement have been moved by such thoughts and feel it necessary to express that we have confidence in the extension of the board through free election, so that such an active board has the opportunity to embody the thoughts that have flowed from anthroposophy. Mr. Graf von Polzer-Hoditz: It is one of the basic truths of our spiritual movement that everything we decide and do happens at the right time. It is part of the signature of our time that everything has been stirred up in the individual human being. Therefore, we must approach our tasks with the right attitude. On behalf of many anthroposophists in various working groups in Austria, and speaking from my experience of being involved in the movement, I would like to express our confidence that the Central Board, which now consists of only one member, will be able to act again. From our relations with our friends in Czechoslovakia, I can also speak on behalf of those anthroposophists who live in Czechoslovakia today.

Dr. Stein uses an example to show how important it is to consider not only what may bother individuals, but also how things appear to the outside world. This is not given enough thought in our circles. He continues: “From this point of view, I would like to say a few words about the opposition, which is little known by members. You can't let the opponents be dealt with by a few specialists, of whom I am one. We must also take care of the individual issues raised by our opponents, for example, against the new edition of “The Philosophy of Freedom”. We do not represent our spiritual heritage at all if we accept it authoritatively. Each individual has the duty to examine the issues that an opponent wants to cast doubt on, and then to stand up for them when they know that they themselves stand for the cause with their entire personality. We are facing an opposition that does not just want to fight us, but to destroy us. The opponents organize themselves by loving evil. If our members knew that evil is even enthusiastically loved, then the strength would also be mustered to defend what wants to flow out of the sources of anthroposophy into all of humanity.

Mr. Ch. von Morgenstierne: Many difficulties have already been pointed out, and much more could be mentioned, for example, the great danger that our movement is perceived as a sect from many sides. Many influential people are repelled by this. We can best avoid this if we try to present the matter as it is done in the two main centers in Central Europe, in Dornach and Stuttgart. This could be seen at the summer course in Dornach that has just ended and at the present congress. We want to try to follow this example in the different countries. This is also said on behalf of many Nordic friends. We want to stand by the leadership of our movement, and I would also like to express the wish that the connection between the leadership of the Society and the other countries, for example with us in the north, becomes a firm and vibrant one.

Mr. Paul Smit: A true coexistence between people, the interaction from one person to another, which is so necessary for today's world, is often prevented by ideas coming between people. But these perceptions must be overcome as such; they must die in order to be transformed into life. That is why it is so important for the Anthroposophical Society to have people who understand how to practise spiritual science by silencing their perceptions when they are in contact with another person.

Mr. Uehli: Dr. Steiner wishes to read a statement.

Dr. Steiner: In a letter addressed to Dr. Steiner and myself, Mr. Kurt Walther, who has admirably led the management of the Anthroposophical Society in recent years, has resigned his office into the hands of those from whom he received it, in view of the changed circumstances and because it might be necessary to make changes that would be beneficial for the further development of the Society. Mr. Walther has devotedly administered the office within the Central Executive Council during these years, which I resigned at the beginning of 1916 for no other reason than because I did not want to associate Dr. Steiner's name with the thousand small affairs of the Society. Mr. Walther has thus taken on many arduous duties. I would like to publicly express my gratitude to him, who has to be absent today for official reasons.

Mr. George Kaufmann: Conscious of the tasks that the Anthroposophical Society has to fulfill in the whole civilized world today, I would like to warmly welcome the impulses that arise from this assembly. As it is also written in the 'Draft of the Fundamental Principles', this is connected with the fact that a knowledge of the supersensible nature of the human being and the world outside the human being is flowing into the hearts of many people. Therefore, our work is always directed towards the ability to judge and the sense of truth. Much is being done from here and from Dornach in all fields, which is beginning to give the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge respect in the world. The Anthroposophical Society should form the spiritual center of this work. Therefore, the Society must not be a sect, but the serious representative of a deep spiritual impulse. This movement is international, and in our hearts, we who work in different countries, live Dornach and the Goetheanum as the actual center of the movement; but it must be said that what could realize the Goetheanum as the center of the spiritual movement has not yet been done. Something could go out from this assembly to all parts of the world that can realize the internationality of the movement with its spiritual center in the Goetheanum; if a new revival of society emanates from here, where the strongest work is being done, and leads to concrete solidarity, then it will be able to have an effect on the non-German countries.

Mr. J. van Leer: In his opening speech, Dr. Unger pointed out that we are openly expressing here what is on our minds. I would like to point out some of the things that are to blame for the fact that we have not realized what could and should have been realized. The Anthroposophical Society welcomes all people who want to work in our spirit, but when Dr. Steiner pointed in a certain direction, cliques easily formed. One cannot say that the artistic is the main thing, or the threefold social order, or the economic, the school, but one must also look at what has been worked on in the branches for ten to fifteen years. That is also necessary. Recently, for example, Dr. Steiner's work has been focused on science, but if we want to let all of anthroposophy flow into all human hearts, then we must not consider the other aspects as unimportant either, even if sectarianism in the branches is reprehensible. This is one of the serious mistakes in our movement: we do not have enough trust to appreciate all the work. Not everyone can do all the work, but everyone can do work in their own field. We also need people who are not scientifically educated. In our society, everything is represented. If we appreciate the work of all people, we have the basis for the proper leadership of the Anthroposophical Society. If everyone works together and places their trust in the board, then we are a cohesive body that has power in the world, and we will also be able to cope with our opponents.

Mr. Vegelahn: Why is it that spiritual science works but the Anthroposophical Society does not work? I fully agree when the confidence is expressed to the central board here. It is indeed nice when it is said that we must strive for community, but what is given as a knowledge of the supersensible world must be put into the right relationship to what can be experienced here in the physical world. The right foundation for spiritual science can be gained from the 'Philosophy of Freedom'. Dr. Unger has given figures about high print runs. The 'Philosophy of Freedom' was out of print for a long time, and one would have expected the new edition to sell quickly. However, it took quite a long time. If the anthroposophists can show that their powers of judgment have been developed, then other people will have to change their judgment of them over time. Many people come to the Society as if seeking refuge from the disappointments of life, but they must also be able to leave this refuge and return to the world. To do this, they need to have strengthened their powers of judgment through the Philosophy of Freedom.

Dr. Kolisko: It has already been pointed out from various sides how necessary it is for our Society to present a unified front to the outside world. However, it can clearly be observed that a large part of what is directed against our movement as opposition arises from the fact that such a unified approach by all members of the Society is not present, because in many cases a basis of trust is still lacking. For example, when certain things are done after careful consideration, one can be sure that one will encounter mistrust or a lack of understanding and that the actions of many members will be in opposition to this. One must remember a peculiar prejudice against the Threefolding Newspaper, which I often encountered when traveling: namely, that it is too polemical, and that this is the main obstacle to all members supporting it and ensuring its distribution. This is because people are not sufficiently interested in the opposition. It has not been realized that, after the opposition had opened the fight, one was forced to take such a tone, as for example with what we have called positive time criticism. It is the case in our society that before the emergence of the threefolding movement, there was never any possibility of forming a social judgment. One was taken by surprise by the emergence into the public. But this had always been pointed out in the anthroposophical movement. The newspaper has been made as well as it could be, and if it is not yet better, it is because there is not yet broad support.

But one could also notice that there was a certain mistrust when, say, something was undertaken from Dornach or Stuttgart. They do not have the confidence that the things that have been undertaken have emerged from a certain solidarity between groups. We will not be able to work externally if we do not try to let what is being done take effect. So many things are thwarted. For example, negotiations were held with opponents when it would have been better not to negotiate with them after taking the opposing view towards them. It is often the case that outsiders have the impression that there is no society in which things are done in such an unsolidaristic way as in the Anthroposophical Society. This comes from the extraordinarily strong individualization in our society, but we must create such a basis of trust that our actions in public are carried out out of an ever-growing understanding of the movement's overall tasks, following joint deliberation. We must be able to trust the people working in the public sphere, because we have the impression that they are acting out of common understanding. Then we can counteract the formation of cliques. Not everyone needs to be an expert in everything, but everyone can take an interest in what is going on in the anthroposophical movement. The fact that they are not properly integrated into society gives rise to a wide range of grievances. I would just like to mention the issue of Dr. Steiner's lecture cycles, which are intended only for members of the Anthroposophical Society. The Society has been unable to preserve this spiritual material. The situation is such that these cycles have been leaked to a very large extent. In many cases, publishers have been keen to get hold of them. There is a tendency in the Society not to take seriously the words that are written down in the cycles. The admission of members to the Society is also handled in a casual manner, so that people have been admitted who then, due to a certain necessity, had to be excluded again. It is clear that precisely those whom one was forced to exclude have become the worst enemies of the movement. Consider where the opponents get their ideas! From the writings of Seiling. Such people, who like Seiling become our opponents, always come from certain cliques, and what confronts us is a reflection of what is present in our own circles.

All those in society who are really active in their work – and there should be as many as possible – must have the opportunity to trust each other, so that one has the impression that things are happening under responsibility. The individual can only come to a correct judgment through intensive, real collaboration. The task we face today must be to create such a basis of trust in the Anthroposophical Society, so that collaboration takes place from the point of view of feeling that one is standing in the same thing and trusting one another.

Mr. Uehli: A motion has been made to take a break now. Before that, Dr. Unger would like to say a few words.

Dr. Unger: I support this motion and would like to see something happen that will serve to fulfill our tasks. But before that, I have to discharge the most important duty. Various speakers have been kind enough to express their trust in me for what I have done or can still do for society. I can only accept this on the condition that I am allowed to express this trust and our heartfelt thanks to those individuals who were particularly involved in the creation of our society. Above all, I would like to mention Dr. Steiner (applause), who from the very beginning did everything that could be done by human beings to bring about a movement. I have already mentioned that Dr. Steiner's works were not yet valued by people in the sense that a movement came about around the turn of the century. The credit for initiating the movement goes to Dr. Steiner. She combined within herself the knowledge and abilities needed, and especially the will to achieve. It is only thanks to her work that forces could develop within society that can now try to develop something for life based on the spiritual science given by Dr. Steiner.

Among our friends, Mr. Bauer is known precisely for always being a personal center for all living things that can work among us. His intimate experience of the spiritual world flows through invisible channels into the hearts of people. In the most sincere and profound sense, I would like to transfer to Mr. Bauer what has been expressed here in terms of approval.

I would also like to express my special thanks to Dr. Steiner for what she shared about our friend Mr. Walther. For it was precisely during the most difficult times that he had an extraordinary workload on his shoulders. Mr. Walther stepped into the breach when something needed to be done, which he took on in such a commendable way.

Since words of trust and thanks are too weak for what is in our hearts at this moment for Dr. Steiner, I would like to express it in the form of a request; because, of course, everything that I and others have said here is based on what Dr. Steiner himself has done. And since everything depends on our being able to listen to advice in the right way, I would like to ask Dr. Steiner to give us his advice on this extremely important matter, where everything can depend on what comes from here, when we meet here again.

It is decided to continue the discussion in the evening. Mr. Uehli opens the continuation at [9] p.m.

Mr. Mengen: I have given particular attention to the question of why our society is often a stumbling block, and have found that we have an individualism in which people come together, listen to a lecture and then drift apart again. It is not recognized that there is a connection between the different areas of life. A free spiritual life is just as necessary as a fraternal economic life. When people talk about fraternity today, it is a cliché. Fresh forces must be brought into economic life from the living forces that are among us. An associative economic collaboration is the necessary complement to spiritual individualism. Today it is necessary for each individual to feel responsible for everything that happens.

Mr. M. Grundig: If we want to get to the point where everyone can be responsible for everything, it is necessary that everyone not only be content to be a member of the Anthroposophical Society, but that if they want to bring something into the public sphere, they must be imbued with the idea of anthroposophy. It has been pointed out that not everyone can be in science. But anyone who is in the circles of the working class knows that it is precisely here that we have to approach the matter as scientifically as possible. In his 'Key Points of the Social Question', Dr. Steiner pointed out how strongly natural science ideas have affected the proletariat. These ideas can only be made fruitful through anthroposophy. One can, as Dr. Steiner once said, come to an appreciation of spiritual science through a healthy feeling, but especially in the face of what can arise from scientific ideas in the proletariat, one must be able to provide sufficient knowledge. And then anthroposophy must intervene in the daily life of the broad masses of the people. To do this, something must be created, such as the foundation stone for the “Waldorf School” and so on, as laid out in “The Coming Day”. In this way, the worker can also do something good for the Anthroposophical Society.

Mr. Heydenreich: As a young person who has asked for the floor, I would like to make an announcement in all modesty. We anthroposophists who emerged from the youth movement came together during the congress in a few special discussions and realized that we have special tasks in our intermediary position between the youth movement and anthroposophy. We have come to realize that it is not only our duty to bring anthroposophy to the youth movement, but also that it is our duty to place our young forces at the service of anthroposophy, so that a corresponding action can emerge from it.

Mr. Michael Bauer: I would just like to make a few brief remarks that the assembly is expecting. It concerns the new central committee. I wanted to make this announcement myself so that people can feel and know from this fact that the new members of the central committee have emerged from the continuity of our movement. The two new members were not chosen over the heads of the outgoing members of the Central Committee, but with their consent, after much deliberation. They are Ernst Uehli and Emil Leinhas. Although both are friends of Stuttgart, it should be noted that it was one of the weaknesses of the old Central Committee that its members lived in different places. There must be close and constant contact between the members of the Central Committee if healthy and fruitful work is to be done, and now that all three members of the Central Committee live in Stuttgart, this is guaranteed. I probably do not need to mention that it is precisely the best factual reasons that justify this election.

Allow me to touch on a thought that has already been widely expressed in today's speeches, particularly in Mr. Kaufmann's speech from London. There has been much talk of trust, and I would like to add that there can be no meaningful communication from person to person if there is no trust in the background of the soul. When I speak a word to any human being and he has the will to understand me, something of my soul plays into the other; and it plays, strictly speaking, on the basis of what is in the first of our guiding principles, on the basis of a common spiritual. That which connects one soul with another, by which one can communicate in words, is consciously the very basis of our society. I could go on to explain that this trust that speaks from person to person in words can intensify and blossom forth as love. I could also point out that what we feel when we listen carefully, as the heartbeat of our aspirations, is a being that may be called the good spirit – I could also say the holy spirit – of humanity. Our society is based on the good spirit of humanity, which must weave from person to person if something healthy is to come about. In recent weeks, I have often been preoccupied with Uehli's beautiful book 'A New Search for the Holy Grail'; it tells how the Knights Templar were obliged not to leave the battlefield as long as a flag was still flying. Do believe that we are in an equally hard fight as the Templars had to face many times! And we should enter the fight with the same loyalty and full consciousness. I want to point out such loyalty at this moment, when you are facing a new central committee that has been formed after the most loyal and conscientious deliberation. And I would like to add the request that you reflect on the common spiritual that is placed in the hearts of people at this moment, when a new start is being made to step into the future with all that this movement wants to bring into the world, in loyalty and in the awareness of our obligation. Then the advice we are now expecting will be fruitfully received.

Dr. Steiner: My dear friends! The occasion for our being together today is an extraordinarily important and significant one; I therefore want to meet Dr. Unger's request in any case. If this request implied that I should give advice, then that will only be possible if I too try to say something about some characteristics of our social life that seems to me to be particularly necessary today. In the Anthroposophical Society, if it is to have full legitimacy and a good inner reason for being, it is necessary to address each individual. Individualism is that which cannot be separated from the nature of such a society as the Anthroposophical Society must be, and therefore it is always difficult to say this or that in small circles if there is no possibility that what has been discussed or, for my sake, reported there will really find its way to the individual members as quickly as possible and then find a responsive heart in the individual members.

Today, however, it is possible to speak to a large number of my dear friends, and so mentioning one or other of them today can also have a very special significance. And so please allow me, even if I do not claim to do so even in outline, to go into some of the history of our anthroposophical movement, and then to come to certain current details. From the very beginning, significant obstacles have stood in the way of this Anthroposophical movement, to the extent that it should live in society. It has already been mentioned today that for certain reasons, what is being attempted within the Anthroposophical Society was first attempted within the framework of the Theosophical Society. Twenty years ago, the German Section of the Theosophical Society was formed in Berlin. During the formation of this German Section, I gave a lecture for a completely different audience that was part of a lecture cycle called “Anthroposophical Reflections on the History of Humanity”.

Even at the founding of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, the anthroposophical goal was the decisive one for me. I do not want to go into the details of the founding now, but just mention that everything that happened in this context led to a small scene, to an argument between two celebrities – at that time German celebrities of the Theosophical Society. They were so angry about everything that had happened back then that the day after the founding they made the following very harsh statement: “Yesterday we buried the Theosophical movement in Germany.” That was the prognosis that two Theosophical celebrities gave at the time to the movement that was to be inaugurated in the way described to them. What had to happen could not be done differently at that time than it was done. But it had the effect that the whole anthroposophical movement carried certain fetters. I would like to characterize these fetters, at least in a few pages. What gradually became the practice of the Theosophical Society was something that, I would say, was second nature to a large number of the members who joined together to form the German Section at that time. They simply had the idea that they could not do anything differently from the way it was done in the Theosophical Society; you will see later why I am emphasizing and mentioning these things.

But my dear friends, for me it was actually impossible at that time, despite my involvement in the German Section of the Theosophical Society, to understand anything of these practices. I will mention just one fact: at that time, a person working with the German Theosophical Society gave a lecture in which she presented an excerpt from Misses Besant's “Ancient Wisdom”. At that time I had not really concerned myself with the literature of the Theosophical Society, but in one excerpt I heard the main teachings being put forward – and with the retention of the whole style of thinking, of looking at things – that were being spread within the Theosophical movement. I found the whole thing terribly unappealing, and I actually rejected such dilettantish, lay talk out of an inner scientific conscientiousness. This led to my being compelled to write my book 'Theosophy' as a matter of course, so that there would be something to hold on to that could also stand up to science. To me, standing up to science was always something different from being recognized by conventional science.

Then I want to highlight one more thing from all these things: I went on a lecture tour in Holland. I presented what I had to say from my own point of view. It actually caused consternation among the members of the Dutch Theosophical Society, because in essence it was heretical in their opinion. This also led to the fact that these Dutch 'Theosophists were the first to turn with all their might against what was then expressed at the Munich Congress in 1907. What came close to the Theosophical Society, but was actually intended by Anthroposophy, was, my dear friends, in many respects a crowd of dreamers who took an extraordinary pleasure in their “dreams”. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not talking about any doctrine today, not about any occult facts or the like, but about human moods. Within the Theosophical Society, it was simply the custom to absorb the Theosophical attitude in the following way:

As an external person, one lived exactly the same way as one had lived before becoming a Theosophist; one was a civil servant, teacher, noblewoman or anything else in the same way. One continued to live in the same way as before, but one had, if I may say so, a new sensation, albeit of a better kind. One pleased oneself in knowing, or at least in pretending to know, something about the whole world from occult sources. Now, my dear friends, they particularly liked to say: “Yes, somewhere, in a place that is as inaccessible as possible, there live certain individuals who are called ‘masters’; they are the guides of humanity, who have been guiding the development of humanity for so long, we are all in their care, we have to serve them.” One took pleasure in these services, which were particularly enhanced by the fact that these masters lived in an inaccessible distance, so that one never knew anything about whom one served as an actor or the like. Perhaps by extinguishing the light or darkening the room and sitting down at a small table, head in hands, one imagined that one was serving the masters in such a way that one was involved in all the most important matters of the present. In particular, one liked to sit down and then send out thoughts; this sending out of thoughts was even practiced with great enthusiasm in circles, especially within theosophical circles.

With these things, I only want to hint at the moods that, out of a certain pleasure in reverie, actually substantiated what, as a kind of mystical coquetry, was one of the vital nerves of the Theosophical Society and of theosophers in general. You see, my dear friends, this kind of mood has become too entrenched within the movement that was now incumbent upon us. No one is to be reproached for this; some have worked devotedly and sacrificially out of this mood. But one cannot say that this mood has prepared well for what Dr. Unger emphasized today.

When 1919 came, the task was suddenly to throw oneself into the stream of world evolution, to show that one had grown with what one had prepared in order to work in the stream of human development. It was no longer a matter of sitting down with a dim lamp, resting one's head in one's hands and sending out thoughts, but of grasping reality with one's thinking, which had been worked through with anthroposophy and had become practical.

In principle, this attitude had always been in preparation, but as far as I was concerned, I perhaps encountered the most vehement opposition – even if it was not expressed – from those followers who, in a certain respect, rightly considered themselves the most loyal followers. For there was always a certain tendency towards nebulous mysticism, which had to be fought against in the most terrible way, especially among those who were most well-meaning and well-intentioned. It is the after-effects of this tendency towards nebulous mysticism that is causing us such great difficulties within the Anthroposophical Society today. Because, my dear friends, we do not want to live in abstractions; we want to see reality as it is everywhere, and it must be said that this mood of dreaming is what becomes the most dangerous seducer of untruthfulness and volatility in relation to real life. No one is more exposed to taking real life lightly than the one who blurs his soul in nebulous mysticism. But that, in turn, is what makes it so difficult for anthroposophists to look at things realistically with a healthy mind. If anthroposophy were taken as it is given, if sometimes, by flowing into the other soul, a completely different soul content did not flow out of it, then the ability to take things of external reality quickly, with presence of mind and simply, would flow out of this very anthroposophy, and from the simple one would then also find the basis for confronting the organized opposition, which is much more than you think.

Let me also say a few words about this, because if the Anthroposophical Society wants to continue to exist, it is necessary to be very clear about these things. It has been pointed out today that a large proportion of the opponents copy the judgments they release from a book by Max Seiling, who once behaved as one of the most loyal confessors of the anthroposophical view. He was cajoled in the most diverse cliques, and again out of a certain nebulous mysticism, he was given a great deal of importance in certain cliques. Now, this man has written a book. Why did he write this book? One can disregard all the filth that can be found in this book. But this is to be envisaged with a healthy sense of reality: this man, who at first threw himself with all his might at - forgive the trivial expression - our Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House, was allowed to publish a small booklet, for which I because this booklet was basically quite useful, I even wrote an afterword; but then this man wanted to have a book published by the same publishing house, half of which consisted of plagiarism from my lectures and half of his foolish spiritualist ramblings. This wish had to be rejected, and out of annoyance at this and out of his character, which simply lies when it hates, all kinds of lies were sent out into the world by Max Seiling. That is the reality, and any other judgment about it is nonsense; anyone with a clear mind sees through things.

I will give you another example, which may not be so easy to see through; but if one were to see that within the Anthroposophical Society there really is what has often been expressed today by the word “trust”, then one would only need to say something characteristically significant to illuminate a case on the basis of this trust. This would take hold within the Anthroposophical Society, a truthful judgment would be established. And that is what we need above all. I would like to mention the Goesch case as a small example. Goesch was also someone who, in every way, first of all threw himself at it, if I may use the trivial expression again. One day, Dr. Goesch's wife came to me with her children and introduced me to one of the children, of whom she seriously claimed that this child – I don't know how many days, but a sufficiently large number of days, as the woman believed, always knew in advance when – it was during the war – when the French would attack the Germans in some battle.

Well, my dear friends, you see, all that was needed was to set up a telephone line between the Goesch house in Dornach and the large headquarters, and then, according to the promptings of this little child, it would have been possible to communicate to the large headquarters in Germany every time the French would attack the Germans again. The fact that I was told something like that led me to say a few words about the somewhat inadequate education, and I had to point out in particular the man who was to blame for some of the failings in the education. From the next day onwards, Dr. Goesch was the opponent he has become. My dear friends, things are not that simple. But one must not look for something other than this simplicity, and to achieve this simplicity one must first acquire the ability to judge; this is acquired through healthy anthroposophy, not through that which still remains from the old practices of the Theosophical Society.

My first advice is to ensure that the remnants, not of Theosophy, but of the theosophical-social feeling, may finally be expelled from our Society.

Now, this also means that certain things that happen must be taken with the necessary weight. In my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul), I pointed out the whole corruption of Max Dessoir. If what is said in my book about Dessoir's character had been taken seriously – I am not talking, of course, about the powerless anthroposophists, but about those who had the obligation to take such things seriously – then it would be clear that This is not about defending anthroposophy, but about the character of a university lecturer, and my book shows that a person contaminated by such scientific immorality must never be allowed to remain a university lecturer for a moment. This is not really relevant here, but I still had to learn that, after the fact, I was told that our side had personally negotiated with that individual Max Dessoir, so it was considered important to somehow make this man more inclined towards our anthroposophical movement than he is.

And a man like Traub has been sufficiently characterized by the reference to the sentence that he, invoked as an authority, wrote in an important Württemberg newspaper: “In my ‘Theosophy’ I claim that in the devachan, spirits move like tables and chairs here in physical space!” My dear friends! Anyone who is capable of writing such things without thinking must be judged as a pest in the position he holds. And when one is constantly confronted with such things as the sentence: “Yes, the threefold order should deal with positive things, it should not deal with these things in a polemical way so much.” – then, my dear friends, it must be said: This is a complete misunderstanding of what reality demands of us. It is necessary that the truth be told in all its unvarnishedness, and I could multiply a hundredfold what I have given only in examples.

But if such an attitude, which is thoroughly compatible with what brotherhood and universal love are, if such an attitude were to penetrate our ranks, then we would be better off. But we are still very far from this attitude, because one cannot rise to find the way from a false judgment to a true judgment. The false judgment is: “Be loving towards such a Traub, who, as a weak human being, can make a mistake, perhaps out of the best of knowledge and belief!”

My dear friends, I call that a misjudgment. I call it a correct judgment: “Be loving towards all those who are corrupted by such a university educator!” That is what it is about, not throwing one's love in the wrong place, but understanding where to let it flow. Anyone who wants to be benevolent towards the corrupters of youth out of nebulous sentimentality lacks true human love. But this must be developed within humanity, although the first may be more comfortable.

Today, a question has also been touched upon that is indeed important for the existence of the Anthroposophical Society, namely the “cycle question”. In fact, every single member has undertaken to ensure that the cycles remain within the Society. For me personally, it was less important that these cycles should not be read outside the Society than that the form in which these cycles had to be printed, because I did not have time to correct the typesetting, should remain known only to those who are aware of the circumstances. Nevertheless, it has turned out that it is even possible that Count Keyserling can continually boast that he has read the cycles, the man who, when confronted with the objective untruths he has told about me, simply has the frivolous excuse: he has no time to do research on Steiner. - In other words, this Count Keyserling has no time to inquire about the truth, so he spreads untruth. The Cycles have been delivered to people with such an attitude; and if I wanted to go over to the other side, I could cite many other things. So it has come about that today, torn out of the cycles by the enemies everywhere, sentences can be quoted. Actually, I would have to say today: Now that this has happened through the membership, the cycles can be sold anywhere, because it would be better to hand over the cycles to the public than to hand them over to those who misuse them. No one should be criticized in a derogatory way, because what has happened has happened because of all the continuation of what I have referred to as nebulous sentimentality, nebulous mystification and the like.

But such grounds have led to something else, and it is really important to speak out in this regard. Today, too, it has often been said, and it has sounded to me like a shrill discordant note, that changes have occurred in our society, that in the past there was somehow a way of dealing with things by which even the non-scientifically educated could approach society as collaborators, and that it has now become fashionable to proceed scientifically. Now, my dear friends, in forming such judgments, they spread. They are false judgments. Compare the way I presented the beginning of the Anthroposophical Society with the way I present it today; compare how I spoke to the public then and how I speak to the public now, and you will find nothing that could seriously be called a change of direction in the Anthroposophical Society. It is a different matter that individual things have been added that the times have demanded. I would even say the opposite. Anyone who takes some of the public lectures from the beginning of the century will find a more scientific tone from me from a certain point of view than he can find today; but if one were to sense correctly from the depths of the soul in this regard , then one would not come to say, as no one has said today, but as has been said many times: “Now the scientists rule, now the scientists are in favor, now is the scientific era!” No, a healthy sense of reality would lead one to say: Well, it is quite good that people have finally come to the anthroposophical movement who are able to defend anthroposophy against all scientific criticism. In any case, people would be pleased about the active work of our scientists. But from there, my dear friends, it is only one step to a healthy judgment, which is extremely important in terms of cultural history. And for that I would like to present you with a small piece of evidence. In issue no. 48 of “Zukunft” you will find an open letter written by a man who is not particularly well-liked by me, but he is a university teacher among university teachers, and he apostrophizes the entirety of German university teachers in the following manner:

I must go public, because today the filthiest lout believes he can rub up against me where Harnack rubbed up against me.

In an open letter, an attempt is made to show that Harnack, Rubner, Eduard Meyer, the celebrities, simply lied about the scholar in question.

Even blackmailers have taken up the matter and pointed out to me that the slightest public scandal would be highly inconvenient for someone who has been denounced by his peers; therefore, I should rather pay. To stand alone in a world of such mentality and to know that only the law is on one's side is not exactly pleasant. That is why I asked Herm Harden to publish this cry for help. I am looking for that one righteous person (not even the ten for whose sake Sodom and Gomorrah were spared) who will restore German science to its Christian roots.

This is how university teachers talk to each other today.

If only one determined person belonging to the university were to insist on an investigation of this dark matter, then it would have to and would come. I expect especially the honest ones among my enemies to support my demand for objective clarification. They must be convinced that it will show that I have defamed Mr. Eduard Meyer. And since slanderers do not belong at a university, my enemies would then have achieved by fair means what they have so far vainly striven for by foul ones: to deprive me of my associate professorship at the University of Berlin. But if this one honest man cannot be found, then no university teacher should be surprised if our previously respected status is tarnished even more than Sodom and Gomorrah.

My dear friends! I do not want to pass judgment on who is right or wrong here; that would be far from my mind. But I am drawing your attention to the tone in which people speak to one another today, even among intellectual leaders. Is it not time to rejoice that on anthroposophical soil a number of scholars have come together who have what it takes to lead humanity out of what is not me, but one who belongs to the people, worse than a Sodom and Gomorrah calls? I believe that this joy could be greater than the characteristic that we have now entered the era of science. What we really need to do is to take things straight and simply and look for the most important and meaningful, never closing our eyes to what is.

And if the anthroposophical movement had to broaden its circles, so to speak, how did that happen? Please study the history of this movement and you will see that it was usually not out of an urge for further work. My dear friends! I have — I think — five or six uncorrected new editions of my books, and I have had them for months. There is truly no urge, and never has been, to keep on being busy. What looks like a change has come about under the pressure of the times, under the demands that have arisen. The Federation for Threefolding, Waldorf Schools, Kommender Tag magazine – none of this came out of anthroposophical initiative. Study history and you will see how it really lies. But this is something that every single anthroposophist should know.

And that is the second piece of advice I would like to give: that institutions take root in our society that are designed to foster not only ideal trust, which is to be valued in the highest degree, among our members, but also to enable a living exchange that is never and nowhere interrupted.

How often have I had to hear it in recent times: Yes, anthroposophy, that's very beautiful, threefold social order very beautiful, but you can't agree with what those people in Stuttgart are doing. And a certain opposition to Stuttgart is something you come across everywhere.

My dear friends! Among those prominent figures who are directing affairs here from Stuttgart, there are many who, if they could act according to personal sympathies and antipathies, would gladly lay down this burden. If one really takes into account all the things I have tried to point out, one must also come to some conclusion about how the circumstances, how the whole course of events in our anthroposophical movement, have brought those personalities into the leading positions who now hold them. Then we will criticize these leading personalities less for personal reasons and more for everything else. Then we will have active trust and then we will also make it possible for these personalities not to always have to deal with personal differences among the membership and to lose time with it , but then these personalities will be able to make the necessary arrangements to ensure that, with the help of the branches, everything that can be observed at the center as being important for the movement is passed on to each individual member.

My dear friends! It is like trying to open an open door when you point out that the branch work should be appreciated. Branch work has never been underestimated, and least of all by those who have found their way into the Society as scientists. This branch work should be organized in such a way that less judgment is heard: “Yes, we don't hear anything from headquarters.” You can also do something to make sure you hear something, and I have often found that the response “We're not hearing anything” is based on the fact that you're not listening. For example, it shouldn't have happened that Dr. Unger was able to say that he circulated a letter last year and that nothing of significance came of it. This, my dear friends, is what brings us to the central issue: it is necessary for each individual member to regard the Society as their very own concern, not just as a framework for individual cliques that then stick together very closely, but as something in which anthroposophy can live as a reality. If each person regards the society as their own business, then interests in the whole of this society will arise from it. And this interest, the most vital interest in the whole of this society, is what we need if we want to realize what should be realized through the anthroposophical movement. The situation at the Goetheanum in Dornach, at the Waldorf School, at the Kommende Tag, Futurum and so on would be quite different if this interest were present; because living deeds would flow from this interest. But as it is – I am pleased that I can now also mention something that is outside the borders of the Reich, which here is actually only of theoretical interest – but as it is, I had to experience it. Because of what I call the inner opposition, which, contrary to my intentions, is actually very strong, , that last fall in Dornach I pointed out in the sharpest terms the necessity for founding a World School Society and that during my lecture tour in Holland this winter I repeatedly pointed out the necessity for this World School Society.

My dear friends! This world school association has failed, despite my conviction that it was up to us to be able to finish building the Goetheanum in peace. So it is necessary, I would say from month to month, to face the heavy concern that we will not be able to finish building the Goetheanum at all because the funds are gradually drying up. As I said, I do not need to tell you that the countries of Central Europe cannot do anything for the construction of the Goetheanum at present. But it is an example of how little respect is shown for what is, so to speak, thrown into the Anthroposophical Society as a necessity. I would not say it has failed if I believed it was impossible to do this or that, if I had not seen that the words were not understood in the sense in which I had to understand them, that the seriousness and the earnestness needed for such a matter are not taking hold in people's hearts.

And that is the third piece of advice I would like to give: that we acquire the ability to take things seriously enough, not with the superficiality that exists in the world today.

We need this within the Anthroposophical Society, and if we translate what I have taken more out of the historical development into the practical, then today it would be a matter of each and every one of the dear friends who are here trying to do what is possible for them, where they are, so that the future central board society, with such trust that it makes it possible, at the moment when one disagrees with this or that, to also say to oneself, it does not depend on the individual case, it depends on having the necessary total trust in the people who are in their place, even if one cannot see in the individual case what has led them to one or the other. And again, this central board will have to co-opt a number of personalities who are out in the world, working either like the branch leaders or in some other way on the anthroposophical movement and on related matters.

This central board will have to choose these personalities from the available options and will have to do so as quickly as possible if the Anthroposophical Society is to continue to make sense.

This is an organization that cannot be made mechanically. It is an organization that must be done with heart and soul, whether it concerns spiritual matters or scientific ones. We will make progress in everything if we want to bring life into the Society in this way. This life will ignite many other things and extinguish many damages that have occurred because, in recent times, very little has been seen of such life. Then, when such a living organism emerges from society, those personal discrepancies will cease, which today rise up like terrible waves from society and actually disfigure everything, everything, impair all work, because in the face of the great interest in the great cause of society, all these pettinesses in one's own heart will be able to disappear. That is what we must work towards.

I would like to say that the first thing we would take from today's meeting would be unconditional trust in the central committee and the conviction that if this central committee now forms its extended trust committee, the right trust can also be placed in this extended committee. It will be hard work for the Central Board to bring this extended board into being in accordance with the wishes of the members, which cannot be expressed in a vote but must be expressed in quite a different way. But it must be done; and when it is done, my dear friends, the details will have been followed in accordance with the advice that I could have given right at the start in a few words if I had wanted to spare my voice today. I could have said: “The ‘Draft of the Principles of an Anthroposophical Society’ has been printed at the beginning of the Anthroposophical Society, which has now been reprinted in the ‘Three’. And I could have summarized my advice in the words: ‘Realize these principles, because everything is contained in these principles’. And if these principles are realized, then everything will be all right in the Anthroposophical Society and with everything connected with it.

But one must understand these principles in their totality; if one understands them in their totality, then one also knows how to develop a feeling for what is approaching this anthroposophical movement. A representative of the youth movement has spoken here! There are a whole number of student representatives here, my dear friends! The fact that members of such movements or such bodies have come to our Anthroposophical Society is something we must regard as epoch-making in the history of our Anthroposophical Movement. We must feel the need to do everything that can rightly be expected of the Anthroposophical Society from such quarters. The student movement that has emerged within our Anthroposophical Society bears a great deal of the hope for the success of our Society. And how did this student movement come about? Well, it comes from something that I have already mentioned from other points of view: it comes from the fact that young scholars, scientifically minded people, have found their way into our Society. It is because of this “fashion”, this alleged “change of course” in our society, that we have a guarantee for a fruitful future of our movement through the entry of the student body.

My dear friends! We must have an open, free eye for everything that occurs in our society. You cannot give advice in the form of telling someone to do this or that. The only advice that can be given is addressed to the heart and mind of each individual member. Such advice must not shy away from saying something that could be taken by some as unloving criticism. No, if you really care about someone, then out of love you must tell them the truth. And today it is necessary to express the truth in all areas in the most concise words possible. We must see what kind of contrast this truth must be given in order to provide our anthroposophical movement with the momentum it needs.

My dear friends! We must speak of certain necessary educational measures; if we are true anthroposophists, we regard what should be made general through the Waldorf School as something that must necessarily be brought to life for the benefit of our cultural and civilizational development in the present day, for there are remarkable principles precisely in relation to the present. When I mention such principles, you will say, “That is rare.” No, this attitude is very widespread, even if it is not expressed in such drastic words everywhere. The educational principles of an opponent who has recently made himself very badly known, and who, among other things, has also campaigned against the Waldorf School and its educational system, have come to light. And I would like to share with you one of his educational principles, which is: “Children are actually hardly more intelligent than dogs, so you have to educate them similarly.” We are already speaking into the strange perceptions and attitudes of the present, and we must not shrink from developing all the strength that is necessary to be able to work into what is being treated in this way from many sides in the present.

A clear understanding of the present, an interest in the present, and an open eye for what is must, like the recovery of humanity in general, also lead to the recovery of the Anthroposophical Society. Then a time will come when perhaps the possibility will arise to no longer have to negotiate such things as the scattering of the cycles and the like. But if the attitude that I sincerely desire and that I have characterized by speaking today the words that may be displeasing to some takes hold, then perhaps it will be avoided having to sell the cycles in any way, because there is no difference in attitude within the walls and outside of them with regard to this point. So I had to tell you, my dear friends, my advice, actually characterizing; but it cannot be any different within the Anthroposophical Society. It rests on the individuality of each individual, so one can only speak to each individual. And this society will only flourish if the heart and soul and spirit of each individual strive to unfold in full health.

Dr. Steiner: The negotiations on the current affairs have been going on for so long, and it is so urgent to deal with other matters, that it would almost be a catastrophe under any circumstances if the negotiations this evening were to be as inconsequential as those of last Monday. I have asked that these negotiations not be conducted before such a large body as before, because that only serves to make things go without result and to prevent us from emerging from the current crisis. I myself will say as little as possible; I want to hear what intentions there are for the future of the Anthroposophical Society.

I just want to say this so that there is no misunderstanding about the significance of our deliberations. Such deliberations, as we are now accustomed to, would not have been possible up to a certain, not very distant period. They have become possible and are now taken for granted because most of the people gathered here today have been able to gradually take on the affairs of the Anthroposophical Society in a leading position over the past four years or so. So the earlier situation in which many of those gathered here today found themselves, namely that they had joined the existing Anthroposophical Society and, so to speak, did not have the full measure of responsibility, no longer exists today.

They must be aware that a large number of personalities have, so to speak, taken the lead in anthroposophical affairs with their own full initiative. Therefore, it has become necessary today that the responsibility for a large part of anthroposophical affairs falls back on these personalities. And these personalities should be aware that the changes that have taken place cannot be erased.

After these changes occurred in the membership, it was therefore quite natural that I was obliged to turn to the leading personalities regarding the question that arose for me from the circumstances, before appealing to the individual members to possibly restore the former situation. These changes imposed duties on me that have withdrawn me from my previous duties. It is therefore natural that before I try to restore the previous conditions, I once again turn to the leading personalities – which of course has been done in vain – to get them to see what they want to do before I turn to the individual members. I do not want to participate materially in today's negotiations. Today I will first of all just listen to what comes out of the bosom of this meeting today, to see afterwards how we can move forward. So it depends on whether you conduct the negotiations in a fruitful way. Otherwise I will have to assume that you have no interest in it if the Anthroposophical Society is led into a catastrophe in the very near future.

I ask you, so that we do not part without result, to at least approach the matter with the utmost seriousness and a sense of responsibility today. I ask you to consider this as an introduction to today's negotiations. Much will depend on what you do today.

Dr. Stein and Dr. Kolisko speak. Dr. Unger: We have to look for ways to overcome the “Stuttgart system”. Dr. Maier, Dr. Palmer, Miss Toni Völker, Paul Baumann speak.

The question of an intended medical vade mecum is addressed.

Dr. Steiner: We should have learned to rethink the clinical pictures in general. We must not obstruct, that goes without saying. One can construct a building, although the difficulties are infinitely great; but they are not considered at all. Just as little as the method of deliberation was considered when the Waldorf School was founded. The question is what could have been done two years ago today. These omissions are the issue. If we beat about the bush and make excuses, then it is self-evident that the excuses are not suitable for writing a vade mecum. The description of heart disease must be thought of in a different way, quite apart from whether the individual remedies can already be used. We must think differently about heart disease. Presented in a different way, it will be able to appear before the world more plausibly than in the previous manuals. What is needed is the good will to rethink in the field of medicine, based on the principles of spiritual science. But because all the discussions are being led down dead tracks, I have to speak. I cannot imagine what should happen, but I can imagine that medicine can be rethought if the will to do so exists. Perhaps there is a much greater need to work from physiology and to rethink the disease patterns physiologically. This does not depend on whether or not the disease remedies have been tried out. This is something that applies “in itself”. However much we may not underestimate the difficulties, we must not beat about the bush about them, as has been done, otherwise we will get nowhere. It is not a matter of presenting the pathology in its entirety. The manuals are always being corrected. It is not about merely recommending remedies to the world. I consider the “remedies list” to be the most harmful thing that could have come about. The point is to advocate the method. I consider everything else to be something that has only harmed us. We do not have to wait for people to accept something like this today; then we can wait until the next incarnation. The point is that we advocate the matter before the world, just as others have advocated their methods; they throw no small amount of abuse at each other. It is not a matter of painting the thing into the mouth of every single professor of medicine, but of presenting it as it could have been presented six months after the inauguration of the matter. That is to say, we present the matter as natural healing methods were once presented. It is a question of medical thinking. The discussion should not be led down dead tracks. We should talk about what is at issue, not about what is self-evident. (Note from Dr. Heyer: “Before this vote, Dr. Steiner had already spoken twice during the negotiations. One time, in response to the description of the specific difficulties given by Dr. Noll, he said that one would end up in a ‘regressus ad infinitum’ if one made ‘methods’ out of the difficulties. The other time he said: When would we ever have been able to found the Waldorf School?"

Dr. Unger: I wanted to talk about active trust.

Dr. Steiner: I have described the methods in detail and in detail. The doctors have not been born out of a heavenly realm in which the task has been set for them. Generally speaking, it seems either plausible or implausible.

The doctors Dr. Husemann, Dr. Noll, Dr. Palmer, and also Eugen Benkendberfer speak to the matter.

Graf Polzer: Who will write the Vademecum?

Dr. Noll: It will definitely be written.

Emil Leinhas, Dr. Palmer, Dr. Kolisko speak to this.

Dr. Steiner: It would have a certain value if there were a discussion about why the Vademecum has not yet been created, and if it could then be seen that it can come about out of an understanding of the true reasons. If the reasons are really discussed, then one can count on it being produced in the future – I am convinced that one man can produce it in six months – but there are reasons that are not objective and that would have to be uncovered. Then one could see whether it will be produced in the future.

If we continue to conduct the further discussion as we have done so far, it will not be possible to see whether society can be led beyond this crisis! The crisis has been brought about by the fact that since 1919 a movement has come into being that has led to all kinds of foundations. The point is that personalities must feel responsible and that they take on this responsibility. That should become clear if we want a guarantee for the continued existence of society. Perhaps then it would be discussed what difficulties there are in bringing about a physical examination. We would learn something about why a lecture is announced to the public but then does not take place.¹ There are quite different difficulties behind that. We urgently need to discuss the things that are already related to anthroposophical life. If the discussion is not to be led into a fruitful field at all, by doing passive resistance, then I would like to draw attention to individual things that show that these are very central anthroposophical matters.

It was before the Vienna Congress [June 1-12, 1922]. Dr. Kolisko had intended to go to Vienna and give a lecture. I was not very pleased that he had the migraine topic in mind. But in the end it is not my business. For me, it was a matter of starting the conversation about it. During this conversation, the following words were uttered: “When I go to the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute, they refuse to give me the material.” — The thing is that such a word can be uttered! If it is really true that the migraine material has been refused for lectures, then we come to the conclusion that this is not an anthroposophical attitude in this matter. If we were to behave in an anthroposophical way, things would come about that are meant to come about. The external developments since 1919 have run into difficulties precisely because of the non-anthroposophical behavior of the individual personalities living in Stuttgart. When there is talk of inhibitions, the real inhibitions should be mentioned. It seems that people want to avoid these things.

I only wanted to point out this characteristic, but I would still like to bring the discussion back to a more fruitful track than the one we have been led to. If these attacks do not cease, then those who are supposed to work together anthroposophically will not work together, but will mutually prevent each other from writing the Vademecum. I have been confronted with this many times: it has been said that individuals prevent each other from writing it. These are the things that would have to be understood, and if they are understood, if the wounds are really pointed out, then there would be a guarantee that the things could be stopped in the future. From what has been said so far, there is no such guarantee. There is no other guarantee than that it is said why there is no cooperation between Gmünd and the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute [in Stuttgart]. Things are then related when asked why there is no collaboration! There is a kind of obstruction going on. This is what I ask you to consider. If there is no serious talk today, it will lead to a catastrophe for the Anthroposophical Society. We cannot continue to work on mere promises.

Dr. Kolisko: Regarding the migraine question, the material was sent to me later. It was not quite what I needed. Personal differences between the gentlemen prevent “the book” [Vademecum] from being written.

Dr. Steiner: In any case, the situation was such that it could be said: Those at the top do not publish their work. If I compare this case with the attitude of the [Clinical Therapeutic] Institute towards the work on the spleen,² I have to say that these things are not very promising.

Some members are speaking.

Dr. Steiner: It would have been better if two individuals had spoken. Again, I don't see where the method lies through which we will make progress.

Emil Leinhas: We must talk openly about things and their reasons.

Dr. Steiner: What has been said is the following: From the very beginning, when medical activities were to take place here, I said that it was not a matter of offering individual remedies, but of offering a medical method. I will only mention that once the method of homeopathy was taught, another time another method. It is important to advocate a medical methodology. In Landhausstrasse, quite a long time before this little book saw the light of day, I suggested to Dr. Noll that we sit down and write a vade mecum. I said that I did not expect much from a “college”; it had to be written by a single person. I made this comparison very early on, to show how homeopathy and naturopathy were represented. This comparison was made to show that agitating for a single remedy cannot be the right thing to help the world in this case, but that it is a matter of telling the world: Here is a certain medical way of thinking. This, what I from the beginning said to Dr. Peipers as a conviction before the doctors, what I from the beginning said to Dr. Noll, this then led once again to my saying in summary: This methodical approach can best be made clear to the world by a vade mecum.

When I say something like that in front of laymen, it is immediately understood that all of these things can only discredit us. The fact that van Leer has come forward is due to the fact that at the meeting that was held recently, it was necessary to discuss what the basis for the effectiveness of our remedies is, and that it was necessary to say again that the methodology must be disseminated first, just as the homeopathic methodology was disseminated at one point. The layman van Leer understood this and drew the conclusion from it; the layman understands this immediately. But our medical college has drawn the conclusion from it that a pedantic-methodological treatise must be written.

These are things that one would think one would only have to mention for people who are familiar with them in their practice of life to understand. One could cite a hundred examples to support this. Again, without judging their value or lack of it, I will cite this.

Schlegel of Tübingen once invited a circle of physicians. He spoke to this circle of physicians and took a stenographer with him. Apart from the value or worthlessness of the method, an extraordinarily stimulating little book was created. A kind of vade mecum was created. They had a case of how something like this arises in practice when you wall. This booklet has helped Schlegel a lot. Imagine, homeopathy is being discussed all over the world. If they had come up with something like this that would have meant something to people, they would have really had something. It is a medical methodology, like homeopathy or allopathy. That is what it is about.

Miss Rascher speaks.

Dr. Steiner: This depends only on the will. I would like to make the assertion that the vade mecum you are asking for should be in the mind of every doctor. Something that you naturally have in mind must be written down. I would like to know where we would be today if we had something like this vade mecum! I would like to know where we could be today! We are not getting far enough with the list of therapeutic products.

I just wanted to point out that the vade mecum could be written in a relatively short time and that the objections that have been raised today are not the ones we need to talk about. As long as we lack the will to speak the truth, we will not get the Anthroposophical Society back on its feet. Do you think that if we were to start talking at the teachers' conference as if there were uncertainty about the method!

Emil Leinhas: Unreserved discussion is necessary, otherwise things become chronic. The expression 'pigsty' has been used.

Dr. Palmer says he does not believe that Dr. Noll can write the thing.

Dr. Steiner: Are you convinced that Dr. Peipers or Dr. Husemann can do it? We must be clear about the fact that completion through joint work would at best turn out to be an acceleration, but that it is something that each of us can do alone.

Dr. Palmer: There is so much material in the lectures. But it is terribly difficult to rework it.

Dr. Steiner: That would only justify you making the claim that you cannot do it on your own. I did not make the unreasonable demand on you personally. I assumed it from others and was clear about the fact that I could assume it there; just as I was equally clear about the fact that I could not assume it with you. The case can be resolved. I was clearly aware from the antecedents what it would be about: namely, that the other gentlemen do the scientific work while you do the practical work — and then the scientific work failed. The only person I cannot reproach is you; that can be said just as sincerely as the other: whether it might not have been possible after all to advance the matter, as one says in popular language.

Dr. Palmer says there was an inhibition.

Dr. Steiner: What was this inhibition? You did not say what the inhibition was.

Dr. Palmer: One might have thought that there was a lack of goodwill and enthusiasm.

Dr. Steiner: I always maintained that goodwill was lacking. It is very important to me that you admit this today.

Dr. Peipers: We are hearing for the first time today that Dr. Noll had this assignment.

Dr. Noll: I did not take on the task as if I alone were capable of doing something like that.

Dr. Palmer: Just admit that the matter is up to you.

Dr. Kolisko: It had become clear to me that Dr. Noll cannot make up his mind about anything.

Dr. Steiner: I don't think we will be able to come to a decision on this question. It will be a matter of seeing how the other things stand in relation to this question. Whether or not we face a catastrophe depends on many individual things. So, first of all, we want to put Dr. Palmer's promise on record.

Then I would ask you to continue discussing the things that you also believe need to be discussed. It would be important to get information about such things. The question goes far beyond the scope of what concerns Stuttgart. It just radiates out from Stuttgart. Certain difficulties that we encounter in Dornach when the affairs of the local laboratory are discussed always lead to the fact that it cannot be done here with Gmünd. This relationship has also been discussed in my presence. I have always been convinced that more could be done in terms of cooperation than is being done in our circles. Because it is true that people are such that they also put obstacles and difficulties in your way! You have to deal with the difficulties. Now some of the difficulties may lie with Dr. Knauer. But they won't change him. I could never understand the situation regarding the relationship between the Clinical Therapeutic Institute and Dr. Knauer.

Emil Leinhas: It is Dr. Knauer's character.

Dr. Steiner: It is necessary in our movement, once a step has been taken, not to break off the commitment to the first step without further ado. I had no objection to the doctors bringing Dr. Knauer in. If he had not been drawn into the intimate details, it would have been possible to deal with him later. But now that he has been drawn into it, we must say B to A. That means: We must also deal with him further. These things must be taken into account. Not taking such things into account causes the greatest damage to our society. Something is always started in a certain careless way. I am only pointing out how careless we were with Sigismund von Gleich! This is how our anthroposophical troubles arise, from not having the will to say B after saying A. This is one of the things that must change for us.

Dr. Palmer and Emil Leinhas comment on this.

Dr. Steiner: It always seemed to me that the more intelligent person gives in. Dr. Knauer cannot be considered an authority. If he had only impressed the medical council, then it would have been fine. You gambled away the chance with him. We cannot have the principle that you first bring someone in and then throw them out when they are no longer convenient. You can see that a large part of what is inflicted on us from the outside [in the way of opposition] is based on a few expulsions that were carried out by the Anthroposophical Society against my will.

The discussion moves on to a different topic. (Note from Dr. Heyer: “At this point it was 1 a.m.”)

Dr. Kolisko speaks about the Research Institute and about Dr. Theberath.

Dr. Theberath speaks about his failure. Dr. Schmiedel put his name on the program without asking him.

Dr. Steiner: Don't you feel obliged to do something for the public interest of the Anthroposophical Society?

Dr. Theberath: I felt obliged to carry out the experiments. A delay in the experiments occurred because what was previously a minor matter became a major one.

Dr. Steiner: In this way we will never get anything out of our research institutes.

Dr. Kolisko: I should have rejected Dr. Theberath's article. There is an error in the editing.

Dr. Steiner: If we start from the principle that the one to whom something is reproached simply justifies himself, then I am convinced that everything that is discussed will end in a justification. If we think in this direction, we will not make any progress. You must remember that the ideas of these foundations have arisen from the bosom of society. Now you cannot necessarily assume that society will go bankrupt because nothing is achieved in this research institute. It is self-evident that a series of experiments can be made more precise and more precise, but it is necessary to show something to the world. The only valid objection to the spleen experiments is that the series of experiments could have been extended. Of course, scientifically it could be justified that a series of experiments never comes to a complete conclusion. I do think, however, that the question should be asked as to how the [research] institute can be made fruitful through work. If we take every question only personally — and Dr. Theberath's view of this question is a prime example of this, then one can only say that the Anthroposophical Society is proving incapable of continuing along the paths of 1919. Then the matter must be abandoned and it must be pushed back to the state it was in in 1918. If you absolutely do not want to deal with the question in such a way that the matter bears fruit and that the leading personalities reflect on it: How do we present the matter to the world so that it bears fruit? Then we will not make any progress.

Liberation in these four different directions – then I will be finished. And please make an effort not to come to every meeting unprepared, but to come prepared once in a while.

• 1. See note on page 68 and the program on page 851.
• 2. See note on page 70.
• 3. M. Steiner made the following comment in her edition: “They wanted to exclude Dr. Unger.”
• 4. There are no minutes available for this meeting of the Stiebener Circle.
• 5. Dr. Kolisko took the place of Ernst Uehli.
• 6. A member of the youth group. The meeting in question was the extended meeting of the 30s on January 22, 1923. What Miss Ruben said has not been recorded.
• 7. With the Circle of Seven, see page 221.
• 8. Bock's remarks must also have been made at the extended meeting of the Thirties on January 22 and rejected by Rudolf Steiner at the meeting on January 29, for which, however, there are no minutes.
• 9. Here, in Karl Schubert's transcription, it is noted: “gap”.

Dear attendees! Anthroposophy is currently regarded by many people who initially deal with it from the outside as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into areas of the world through knowledge that serious science should not concern itself with.

Now, anthroposophy does indeed want to penetrate into those regions that are usually, more or less justifiably, referred to as supersensible regions, and in which the human being is rooted with his or her own deeper, eternal being. There are, of course, already scientific researchers today who are to be taken very seriously and who turn to all kinds of abnormal human abilities that point to the fact that the human being is subject to other laws and is connected to the world in other ways than can be determined by the usual scientific studies.

However, precisely those who turn to such abnormal human abilities, which they then, quite justifiably, only register scientifically and research according to their laws, often see the path that anthroposophy takes as a fantastical, nebulous, mystical one, one that must even lead to all kinds of superstitious beliefs and enthusiasm. Now, my dear ladies and gentlemen, one cannot say that in the long run, enthusiastic mystical natures can be satisfied by what anthroposophy actually is in its essence. Such natures, who, indeed, there are many such today, run everywhere where there is talk of anything occult, as they call it, such natures very soon find that Anthroposophy wants to be based on strict thinking, on that which can be described as a conscientious scientific method. And that is not really suitable for enthusiastic, nebulous and mystical natures. Of course, on the other hand, this does not prevent those who want to reject what is unfamiliar to them with a slight wave of the hand from finding that neurasthenic or hysterical natures and the like come to anthroposophy.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, in the face of this caricature, which is still very often presented of anthroposophy, it is not easy to characterize the essence of this research and this world view in a short lecture. I will try to do so this evening by first characterizing the paths by which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate into those areas that are not accessible to ordinary science. And then I will try to say something, at least in outline, about the results that are obtained in such ways.

One should not think that anthroposophy, as it is meant here, wants to oppose in any way what the unique scientific methods have achieved for human progress in the course of the last few centuries and especially in the nineteenth century. It must be accepted as a prerequisite that anthroposophy claims to be in full agreement with the scientific results of modern times, and that anthroposophy wants nothing to do with any abnormal human abilities, but only with an appropriate continuation of the completely normal human capacity for knowledge and soul. It is often believed that nothing of significance can be achieved through such a normal continuation and further development. Anthroposophy first has to fight against this prejudice. But here it encounters two formidable obstacles. And by becoming clear about these two obstacles to knowledge in a completely unbiased way, it wants to find a way to avoid them.

On the one hand, as I have already mentioned, we have the tremendous scientific research results of recent times with their great practical effects on life. Anthroposophy looks squarely at the views of those 'cautious' natural thinkers who are at the forefront of their science and who speak of the necessary limits of this knowledge of nature.

Initially, human knowledge is presented with that which comes from sense impressions, which is accessible to observation and experimentation, and which the human intellect can find in terms of laws within this sensory realm. Now, there is often an effort to go beyond this sensory realm through mere, self-directed thinking to realms that lie beyond the sensory world. These are the attempts that, through philosophical thinking, as it were, philosophical speculation, seek to go beyond the sensory realm. But anyone who approaches these subjects not as a layman or dilettante, but as a connoisseur of scientific methods, can also know, through the special way of handling thinking in natural science, how the thinking that our scientific conscientiousness has produced, how it does not only arbitrarily binds itself to the external facts of the sense world, but how, in more recent times, it has developed to its greatness precisely by adapting to the laws of the external sense world, by conscientiously following the facts that can be observed in the external sense world. And once one has gone through this process of seeing how scientific thinking follows the facts, then one also knows the uncertainties and subjective arbitrariness one encounters when one leaves the safe territory of sensory facts, the territory of observation and experiment, and surrenders to self-abandoned thinking.

This is why those who are approached by a world view that has come about through such thinking feel unsatisfied. They have to say to themselves: Yes, what one or another thinker, going beyond the sensory world, combines in his thoughts could have turned out differently if he had been differently predisposed. And it does turn out differently. The philosophical systems argue with each other, and the dispute between the philosophical systems justifies the very dissatisfaction that must immediately arise for the unbiased human mind when natural science crosses its borders in the manner just indicated. Now, anthroposophy is not at all inclined to think about nature in a different way than the strict natural scientist himself. And what it attempts to fathom about the supersensible worlds is only meant to be a genuine continuation of the unified scientific world view, not the discovery, in a dualistic sense, of some second world to the one in which we live as human beings. But today there are many natures that are much more deeply laid who feel themselves unsatisfied by what science can give about external nature, in which man with his physical corporeality is also integrated. Such deeper natures then turn away from all research, from all conscientious knowledge in the sense of science, and they turn to a certain mystical direction. This is very common today: people say to themselves that external observation and external experiment provide great things for practical life, but they cannot give the human soul, with its hopes for eternity and its longing to fathom its own deeper being. Such natures then seek ways to delve down into the deeper shafts of the soul, and then believe that they will find in these deeper soul shafts, through mystical contemplation, that which cannot be found through external observation.

And this brings me to the second obstacle that anthroposophy must avoid. It cannot remain with a limited knowledge of nature, just as it cannot remain with some kind of nebulous mysticism. For precisely the person who, through unbiased observation of the soul – and one must indeed penetrate ever more deeply to such observation through anthroposophy – the person who, through unbiased observation of the soul, penetrates into the inner self, knows how impressions that we may have absorbed into our souls decades ago, perhaps half unconsciously at the time, resurface after a long time , they do not just emerge as they were received at the time, but in the depths of the human mind they combine with all kinds of feelings and sensations, they are often interspersed with volitional impulses in such a way that the person is not even aware of this subconscious soul activity. And then, after years, they emerge from the soul of the mystic who is absorbed in contemplation. They do not know that these are only transformed external impressions; they consider them to be divine inspirations and believe that, in what they are bringing up in the way of transformed external perceptions, they are approaching the very sources of the existence of the world, in which the human soul is immersed with its eternal essence.

Anthroposophy does not turn to this side of the supposed knowledge of the eternal either, but says to itself: In the external knowledge of nature, the external facts and their laws arise; in inner contemplation, only that which is a direct or transformed memory of the impressions of the external sense world arises. And precisely because anthroposophy deals with these things in such detail, it comes to the conclusion that it is impossible to transcend the limits of natural phenomena on the one hand and to penetrate more deeply into the nature of the human soul itself on the other with the cognitive abilities that a person initially has for normal life and also for ordinary science. It is precisely for this reason, because Anthroposophy looks at both directions impartially, it seeks the path of further developing human soul abilities.

Now, my dear listeners, if you want to embark on this path, you need something that is admittedly difficult for human beings to achieve, and which I would call intellectual humility. You have to be able to say the following to yourself at a certain moment in your life: As a very small child, I was not at all equipped with the abilities that I have today. I was disoriented in the world, and from the depths of my humanity the abilities have developed that make knowledge possible for me today, that make practical orientation in life possible for me today. In ordinary life and also in ordinary science, one now draws a line with what has been acquired through education and what has been appropriated through life. But anyone who wants to do research in the anthroposophical sense must not stop there, but must realize that, in addition to these abilities of ordinary life and ordinary science, there are abilities slumbering in the soul that can be awakened through certain soul exercises, intimate soul exercises, and that through their development one comes to the contemplation of a completely different world than the one that otherwise surrounds one. The development of these abilities does not take place through external measures, but through intimate soul exercises. And it should be noted that these soul exercises are carried out in such a way that they are thoroughly and scientifically conscientious, which can be acquired in the currently legitimate field of science. Initially, however, what can be achieved through anthroposophy is directed towards the soul, but it is done so rigorously that it can be accounted for by the methods of conscientious science.

Now, the aim of these intimate soul exercises is to strengthen the entire human soul, on the one hand by strengthening the life of the imagination.

My dear audience, just as you strengthen a muscle when you need its power for work, so you can also strengthen the power of the imagination in man by simply translating it, by implementing it in a soul work that does not otherwise occur in life. I will describe the principle of this soul work, but the details — for it takes many years of practice to strengthen the life of the imagination — can be found in my books, for example in 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in the second part of my 'Occult Science', or more briefly presented in the last chapter of my 'Riddles of Philosophy'. But, as I said, I would like to present the principles, the essentials of the matter this evening.

First of all, in order to strengthen the human faculty of imagination, easily comprehensible ideas or complexes of ideas are brought into the center of consciousness and then, turning away from everything else, the soul life is completely devoted to such a complex of ideas. It is good, indeed almost necessary, to either find such a complex of ideas by seeking it out – let us say – in a book that is completely unknown to you at first, or by simply turning to a page, taking some saying or sentence that you are quite certain that it has not yet passed through one's consciousness, through one's soul life, or one can also get some such content from someone who is experienced in these matters, on which one then concentrates one's soul life, to which one, as I have described in the books mentioned, devotes oneself in meditation. It is necessary to devote oneself to soul-content that was previously unknown in this way, because when one brings up any soul-content from the treasures of one's memories, it is bound up with all kinds of other areas of the soul life. One cannot know what one brings up from the subconscious depths of the soul and what then arises as reminiscences. You can only protect yourself from this if you have a readily comprehensible set of ideas that has been unknown to you until now. Then it is a matter of concentrating the soul on this set of ideas, while disregarding everything else, turning away from all the rest of life and the world, and concentrating it in such a way that the fully conscious will, the genuine reflection, never ceases, but rather the person surrenders to such concentration or meditation with complete inner arbitrariness, with the same inner arbitrariness with which one is also surrendered to an external, sensual perceptual content.

Because that, dear attendees, is the ideal of the anthroposophical method: not to plunge into all kinds of physical or other hidden human conditions, but to strive for the state of mind that one has when one is devoted to external sensory impressions. Anthroposophy is completely misunderstood when it is believed to strive for those areas that involve the visionary, hallucination, suggestion or the like. In all these things, the human being turns to a kind of soul activity that delves into depths that are only weakly active in relation to an external sense perception, an external sense impression. The anthroposophical method does not descend into this foggy darkness; it is the opposite of the visionary, the hallucinatory, the suggestive. This is the opposite of what the anthroposophical method strives for. It further develops the state of mind one has in relation to external sensory impressions, but it develops it in relation to a conceptual content that can be characterized in such a way as I have just described.

And then one must strive more and more to become as alive in one's consciousness when surrendering to such a content of thought as one is otherwise only when facing an external sense impression. You know, my dear audience, how much more alive a person is when they are devoted to an external sense impression than when pursuing ordinary thought life. It is indeed true that one speaks of pale thoughts in contrast to the intense, fully-lived outer sensory impressions. But the anthroposophical method must strive to achieve this liveliness and intensity in relation to the characterized thoughts, which otherwise can only be achieved in relation to outer sensory impressions. As I said, this requires a great deal of stamina and energy.

And the spiritual research we are talking about here is no easier than research in an observatory or in a physics or chemistry laboratory or in a clinic. A great deal of practice is needed in this direction. But when it does take place, then after some time the person does indeed feel an inner mobility of the imagination that he did not know before, and he finds himself in an experience that tells him through the experience: You become more and more free from physicality in your soul experience.

My dear audience, everything we have in our ordinary lives for knowledge, everything we have for the other expressions of the soul, is bound to the physical. The unbiased person knows how our memories are bound to bodily functions. He does not easily give in to the idea that one can be free of the body, that one — I want to use the quite unappealing word — that one can really live spiritually outside of one's body. But that is what one can achieve through a perpetual increase in such practice. One comes to be outside of one's body with one's soul life. But at the same time, one knows that in this kind of knowledge, which I have described as the first stage of higher knowledge in the books mentioned, the stage of imagination, one also knows that with this soul life, which lives in a living, intensified, strengthened thinking, only subjective, pictorial experiences can be had at first. This, in turn, distinguishes the anthroposophical researcher from the false mystic or even from the pathological nature. The one who, out of pathological states, devotes himself to a soul ability, never knows how to preserve what he has in his soul state in ordinary life. I would like to say: He slides with his whole consciousness into the visionary, into the hallucinatory. The person who, as an anthroposophical researcher, develops the soul abilities of which I have spoken, remains, even when developing these abilities, the level-headed person that he is in life, the person with strict self-criticism and world-criticism, who can control at every moment what is going on in the second personality to which he has risen as the imaginative-cognitive one. While for this reason the pathological person takes his hallucinations, his visions, as they are, for realities, the anthroposophical researcher knows that in the imaginations he has something pictorial, something subjective, but that the self-life is increased, that he has this self-life before him in a different way, spiritually, than is otherwise the case in the human soul.

One difference between this imaginative cognition and ordinary imagination is that it is not abstract, as are the concepts and ideas of ordinary cognition, but that it lives in fully saturated images. That is why I call it imaginative cognition. In this imaginative cognition, in which one's subjective awareness of one's own being has been heightened, in this imaginative cognition, the first result of anthroposophical research occurs at a certain stage in the development of these soul abilities. One comes to have before one, as in a large tableau, the inner soul forces that have been at work in one's own human being since birth. What else do we know about this inner human being? It is contained in the stream of memories, from which we can either arbitrarily select individual areas in images of what we have experienced, or images can arise freely. So it is not what you see now, but what you see first, is the sum of those forces that you now know have shaped your abilities, have given direction to your moral impulses. One sees how, in a unified tableau, one has become, and how one has shaped oneself from within through the years. That which otherwise has passed in time confronts one in a unified image, but one that has inner mobility.

This is the first new thing that one sees through such soul development. I have seen what one sees in this way and what one now knows directly: there is a second body, a spiritual body in man, which I have called the formative force body. Older, instinctive knowledge, which already knew something of these things, spoke of the etheric or life body. It is not something that can be drawn – at best in the way one paints a flash of lightning – one must know that one is dealing with something that is intrinsically mobile, that changes in every moment, that one can only capture just as it is in a moment. One is dealing with a – I would say – time body of the human being.

Now, my dear audience, through imaginative knowledge, one can first discover this inner, this inwardly mobile, this formative body of the human being, if I may express it in this way. But the soul developments that I have characterized so far must be continued. When one has first practiced concentrating on certain ideas, one is, in a certain way, nevertheless, one surrenders to these ideas with full inner willfulness, as only a mathematician surrenders to his combinations of thoughts. But in a certain way one is held fast by these ideas. But that should not really be the case. Therefore, from the very beginning – you will find a description in the books mentioned of the appropriate exercises that need to be done to achieve this – not only must this concentration on images be practiced from the very beginning, but a second thing must be practiced. Through the same free arbitrariness, the ideas to which one has just turned with the greatest strength, with increased soul strength, must be able to be suppressed again, completely suppressed, so that one learns to establish what one could call: empty consciousness, a consciousness that is empty, as otherwise only the consciousness is empty in sleep. But just as the soul's inner disposition sinks and is completely paralyzed in sleep, so it remains alert when meditation, as characterized by me, precedes it. One is then fully awake in the empty consciousness. And I will have to characterize to you how the possibility of living in such an empty consciousness is precisely what allows one to enter a spiritual world.

First of all, I would like to point out that anyone who has gained the ability not only to experience individual images that arise in the imagination devotedly, but also to remove them from consciousness so that they can live awake in an empty consciousness, gradually acquires the ability to suppress everything that I have now characterized as the formative forces body, as the great tableau of life that makes us inwardly comprehensible in the life of forces that has been shaping us since our birth. One arrives at this, this whole inner life, after first having fully looked at it, again from the consciousness. But when one arrives at creating an empty consciousness in relation to one's own inner life, then the second stage of human knowledge also arises with all clarity, which I have mentioned. I ask my dear audience not to be offended by expressions . They are only a way of expressing myself. I do not mean anything superstitious or traditional, but only what I myself characterize. I have mentioned the second stage in human knowledge: inspired knowledge. The first stage is imaginative knowledge, the second stage inspired knowledge.

By attaining this inspired knowledge through the empty consciousness, one is then able to expand consciousness beyond birth by suppressing the inner soul tableau of the body of formative forces. One now experiences the soul, the soul-spiritual of one's own being in the state in which it was before it united through birth - or let us say through conception - with the forces of inheritance, which are the forces of the body that man received from his ancestors, from his parents. One comes to understand the destinies that the soul and spirit, the eternal core of the human being, has gone through before uniting with a physical human body. You may ask, my dear audience, how does one know that what one sees really belongs to a soul experience before birth or before conception? Dear attendees, I would like to clarify what appears before the anthroposophical researcher by means of a comparison. When I have a memory of an experience from ten years ago, I know from the content of the memory itself that it is not something that arose in the consciousness at the time, but the content of the memory itself points me to the time ten years ago. Thus the content of what one experiences as spiritual-mental is that it indicates its own time in the relationship, that one knows these are experiences of the soul before it came into an earthly body.

However strange this may still seem to today's humanity, people will be convinced that soul abilities are developed with complete, convinced conscientiousness, not to speculate or to immerse themselves in mystic nebulae, but to come to a real insight into what the eternal-spiritual-soul core of the human being is. In this respect, Anthroposophy has a contribution to make to the further cultural development of humanity: it will show that experience itself must be further developed, that experiencing itself must be increased, so that in increased knowledge, man comes to the contemplation of that which is his eternal core of being. For this reason, Anthroposophy can proceed in the field of natural science in exactly the same way as the strictest natural scientist. It will not misuse the usual method of knowledge, it can, within the justified limits, be Haeckelian for the external physical field, profess Haeckel, because on the other hand it knows how to develop cognitive abilities that come close to an immediate insight into the eternal, spiritual-soul core of being in man. Then, my dear audience, when one has developed this spiritual-soul core, when one has attained inspired knowledge, one not only gets to know what the human soul itself is, but just as one gets to know the sensory environment through the human body, which the senses, one gets to know the sensual environment, in the same way one gets to know the spiritual environment through this knowledge of one's own soul-being when it was in a body-free state before it moved into the physical-earthly body through birth or conception.

But it is not enough to stop at this inspired knowledge. Only one aspect of the soul's abilities has been developed, namely the ability to imagine. The other aspect, the will, must also be developed in the human soul. Then, one might say, the life of feeling and emotion, which lies right in the middle between the life of imagination and the life of will, follows of its own accord. This life of feeling is the very own, most intimate element of the human soul life. It follows the inspired, imaginative knowledge and the one that I will now further characterize by showing how one can also lead the human will into the spiritual world, freeing it from the body.

From the wide range of exercises that I have outlined and explained in the books mentioned, I would like to highlight a few principles that show how this development of the will takes place.

First of all, I would like to point out a very simple exercise, but one that must be undertaken with perseverance and energy in order to achieve real positive results. It consists in starting from the realization that our ordinary thinking is already permeated by the will at all times. It is indeed the case that in abstract thinking we can distinguish the soul abilities according to imagining or thinking, according to feeling, according to willing. In reality, everything that is imagining, feeling and willing flows together in the soul. And even in the purest thinking, the will element is always present. Therefore, for the higher schooling of the spirit, the will element should first be developed in thinking. But ordinary thinking, and also the thinking that a person initially uses in his or her usual science, is in harmony with the external sequences of facts. The earlier is presented earlier, the later later. And even if we free thinking for ordinary life and ordinary science from external temporality and spatiality, we still need it in ordinary logic in such a way that we want to come to the conclusion that things are arranged in space and time. If we also detach thinking from reality, it is only a detour to get to the true reality through thinking. But what will training should be must tear this thinking away from the usual sequence of facts, and this can be done by presenting, if I may call it that, in reverse. Suppose we present a melody or a drama in reverse, a drama from the last events of the fifth act back to the first of the first act. When one presents in reverse in as small portions as possible, then one is forced to apply a stronger will to thinking than is otherwise the case. One can train one's thinking, or rather, the will that lives in thinking, in this direction particularly well by retracing one's own day experiences backwards every evening in as small portions as possible, starting from what one has experienced that evening, going to the afternoon, to the morning, and then really then into the most minute details — I would say —, into the atomization of the day's life, so that one imagines going up a staircase in such a way that, when one has reached the top, one then goes back in thought, going backwards from the last to the penultimate step and so on. You will see how this becomes more and more difficult the smaller the sections you take. But it is precisely through this that the will, which lives in thinking, is torn away from the external sequence of facts and you will gradually notice how you not only tear it away from the external sequence of facts, but how you tear it away from your own corporeality. You can support yourself with other exercises, for example, by developing a habit of observing yourself as a second personality alongside yourself in your own actions and in the expressions of your own life. If you practise such clear self-examination, if you, so to speak, observe every step, including every step of your soul life, as if from the outside, you will strengthen the will element.

When one then proceeds to go more into the depths of the soul, to say: You now have the intention of doing a very specific, concretely outlined action in some future time, you take self-observation so far that it becomes an activity, that you take your own inner life into your own hands, become master of your development, while otherwise you have left yourself to the stream of life. When one takes into one's own hands what the stream of life accomplishes for the soul's own development, one then also succeeds in tearing the will away from the ordinary physical body. Then one also comes with the will outside of one's body, and this willpower, which can be experienced outside of the body, unites with the power of imagination, which I have characterized.

But in this way one arrives at developing something in the human being that is rightly not regarded as an ability to perceive in ordinary life – and I know, esteemed attendees, how fully justified the reasons are for not regarding the soul abilities are not regarded as cognitive abilities — but when the soul nature of man is so elevated as I have characterized it, then the ability to love, devotion to something external, can indeed become an ability to cognize. And just as the body-free imagination, which is similar to memory but again quite different from it, presents us with pictures of a life that we cannot otherwise recognize, so too does this will, which has become body-free and now represents an increased ability to love, represent an increased living out into reality and, since it is body-free, into spiritual reality. We acquire the faculty which I have mentioned in the books referred to as intuitive knowledge; we acquire the faculty not only of allowing the revelations of a spiritual world to flow in, as in inspired knowledge, but we acquire the faculty of living over into the outer spiritual world with our own life. When I speak of intuitive knowledge, I naturally mean an intensification of that which is also called intuition in ordinary life, a knowledge that is not only based on abstract-logical thinking. What I mean, however, is an exact increase of what is otherwise called intuition, and represents a real cognitive survival of the human being into objective spirituality. And when a person has attained this intuition, then he also gets to know the other side of his being. Through what has been described so far, he reaches the moment of his birth, to that spiritual-soul that preceded the birth or conception. Now, by developing the will to intuitive knowledge, so that he can step out of himself with the will, now he also reaches the knowledge of that which steps out of the human body in reality when the human being passes through the gate of death. Only at that moment does man recognize the soul-spiritual that passes through the gate of death as something eternal, when, through a development of will, he has grasped this soul-spiritual in such a way that it can truly step out of itself, out of the ordinary human being, out of the bodily being, in intuitive knowledge. And now the human being beholds the nature of immortality on both sides, on the side of the unborn and on the side of what is usually called immortality. In this way, as I said before, the human being also gets to know the spiritual environment in which he lives before birth or conception and after death.

But once these two worlds have been grasped, once the sense world is really recognized in accordance with natural law, once the spiritual world is recognized through the cognitive faculties I have described, then there is still something within the human being that cannot be explained from either of these worlds. After becoming acquainted with the two worlds — I call them 'two worlds', although they only constitute a unified whole — we now stand before the mystery of the human soul. But we also acquire the ability to see through that in man which, through his development, unites both worlds in himself. And that is that in man which goes through repeated earth-lives, which thus goes through repeated earth-lives in such a way that it lives through the existence here in the physical body between birth and death, or let us say between conception and death, but then another existence between death and a new birth. And since one learns to recognize what the soul acquires through one life and the other, when one looks into what the results of development from both give, one arrives at the view of what underlies repeated earthly lives. And these repeated earthly lives themselves also become a view.

You see, my dear audience, that in speaking here in all seriousness about Anthroposophy, I cannot present these things of repeated earthly lives to you as fantastic creations. I must present to you everything that the human soul must do in order to cognitively arrive at these things. Today, I must of course briefly present this in an introductory lecture, and it could very easily be thought that only someone who has gone through everything I have described in principle in more detail in the books mentioned can see into these areas. Now these books are precisely there so that everyone can do the suggested exercises up to a certain level, and so that what the anthroposophical researcher says can be verified by actual observation. But the anthroposophical researcher uses ordinary common sense, ordinary thinking. And anyone who, uninfluenced by certain prejudices that are unfortunately so widespread today, simply asks themselves: “Is what is being presented reasonable or unreasonable?” does not need to become a researcher themselves, but can use their common sense to form an opinion about the value or lack of value of the anthroposophical results. Just as one does not need to be a painter to get a proper impression of a picture, one does not need to be an anthroposophical researcher to judge whether something that comes to light in anthroposophy is reasonable or unreasonable. Intuitive knowledge completes the stages of higher knowledge in a certain way.

Now, my dear audience, even in ordinary life, intuition points to a certain area. In my book, which was published a long time ago, I wrote it at the beginning of the nineties of the last century, in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, I pointed out how man's truly free actions are based on impulses of sensuality-free thinking, on moral ideals, which are created by the human being from a spiritual world quite free of the body, so that in this “Philosophy of Freedom” at the beginning of the nineties of the last century I spoke of the deepest impulses of the moral life of the human being as moral intuitions. And I tried to grasp the concept of freedom in a way that would guide today's natural science by showing that the question is completely wrong as to whether man is free or unfree, that the question must be formulated in such a way that one realizes that man is unfree for a large number of his actions, that they arise from his instincts, his drives, which are tied to the body. But the human being develops to the point of experiencing intuitive moral impulses, which are purely spiritual in nature and yet are impulsive for moral action. At this stage of development, in the way he grasps moral intuition, he is free. What I am characterizing today as the intuition of knowledge is only an expansion and deepening of what can actually be experienced by everyone who seeks out this moral world in its impulses through real self-knowledge.

What gives a person their true value and dignity here in this world, their moral nature, is what, when properly grasped, points to the end of all knowledge. And anthroposophy must then lead to the insertion of imagination and inspiration between intuition, which it expands into the cosmic and the human, and between this and ordinary knowledge, as I have characterized it today.

So, my dear audience, this is how one attains knowledge of one's own eternity in the human being. But if one develops the abilities of which I have spoken, then the world around us will also approach the human being in a different way. Man, so to speak, as a whole human being, becomes a sense organ for the outer world. And whereas before we only encountered the world, I would say, as a sensory tapestry, which the intellect then discerns its laws, the spiritual world enters human consciousness, imaginative, inspired and intuitive consciousness, in a new, metamorphosed form, but in such a way that the earlier, sensory one is fully preserved. And it enters in such a way that the contemplation of nature, which is otherwise present in the person who becomes an anthroposophist, is preserved. While the hallucinator, the visionary, turns away from nature and usually has no love for nature either, everything that is given by external natural science and ordinary love of nature remains fully intact for the one who becomes an anthroposophical researcher. It is only that the material world, which is the object of outer natural science, is permeated with the spiritual world, which is always around us, just as the physical is. Now the outer, physical world, if I may express myself comparatively, appears in a certain respect in sharp contours, in finished forms.

The spiritual view, which is gained in the way described, develops everything according to certain processes, according to an event, according to a becoming. This gives a completely new slant to natural and cosmic events. And I do not want to shrink from describing specific details as an example, despite the fact that such things are still not very well received today. We see the sun, for example, as a limited structure in the sky. We explore it with our science, with astronomy, astrophysics and so on. But what we encounter as the sun appears in a new form in the described supersensible knowledge. It now emerges not only tied to the place where it otherwise appears, but emerges as something solar, permeating and flowing through and permeating the whole cosmos. One learns to recognize the solar as permeating all spaces. And by relating it to the human, one learns to recognize the solar in its deeper meaning. I would like to express myself in the following way to make myself clear.

By having the outer world around us, which provides us with our experiences, we compare these experiences with what we form inside in our soul out of them in terms of ideas and feelings. And afterwards we still have the experiences in our memory, we can relive them. We can relive something that has long since passed and connect with the long-gone past. So there is a relationship between this — I would say — abstract soul-life and the outer concrete sense world. But there is also a relationship between the deeper part of one's own human existence and what is recognized through supersensible perception. We carry within us the effect of what is solar that the spiritual vision finds in us. This solar element enters into our human being, just as an external sensory experience enters into our memories, only it forms something deeper in the human being. This deeper aspect must first be recognized only through such a view as I have described. Then one learns to recognize that everything that is in us by virtue of growth, that is by virtue of youthfulness, that is even the force that converts our nutrients in our own human process, that this is the sunlike in us. We get to know the rising, sprouting, sprouting forces of the universe and the sprouting, sprouting forces, the rejuvenating forces in ourselves, in their interrelationships. We thus get to know a more intimate connection between the human inner being and the cosmos. Just as we learn to recognize the solar in this way, we learn to recognize the lunar.

In our sensory perception, we experience the moon as a closed, limited, contoured entity. For the spiritual perception that I have described, this moon-like quality becomes the dying forces in the cosmos that permeate all spaces and fill all of time. Everything that breaks down, everything that appears in the cosmos in a paralyzing way, everything that leads to death is moon power. And one would like to say: the solar and the lunar, as I am now describing them, are merely concentrated or consolidated in the bodies that we have given ourselves through external sensory perception. We get to know the world as processes, as becoming, and these processes, this becoming, continue within our own human inner being. We also get to know the outer natural kingdoms, how they are permeated by such cosmic forces. Just as we get to know the solar and lunar, we get to know other planetary or other forces of the universe without superstitious mysticism, through very exact observation that has been developed exactly. One gets to know the interplay of a cosmos that cannot be grasped merely mathematically or astrophysically, but spiritually and soulfully. One gets to know this interplay in human nature, and one recognizes the interplay of such cosmic forces in plant and animal nature. One learns to recognize the solar element that urges the plant towards flowering, and the lunar element that is revealed in the dying away of the plant world. One learns to recognize the forces right down to the mineral kingdom.

When one advances to this knowledge, the side of anthroposophical research also presents itself through which this anthroposophy has a fertilizing effect on all other areas of life. And that is the hope that the anthroposophical researcher devotes himself to, and which - at least in part - is already realized in its beginnings, that anthroposophy can become fruitful for the other sciences, for the practical areas of life.

We already have a medical-therapeutic institute in Dornach and Stuttgart that is based on anthroposophy. This medical-therapeutic institute is based on research that can be carried out on an anthroposophical basis into the relationship between humans and the surrounding universe. By appropriating the cosmic effects in this way — as I have only been able to hint at with the recognition of the solar and lunar — one does not merely gain the knowledge of human nature that ordinary physiology or biology gives us. You also get to know the whole human being, but in such a way that the sharply contoured merges — it remains, but at the same time merges, it shows itself from a different side as a process. While in ordinary biology, as one is accustomed to, one speaks of the lungs, heart, brain and so on, from the point of view of anthroposophy one must speak of the brain process, which is vividly there, not merely , or not merely shown in its parts by external physical experiments, but be observed; of the heart process, of the lung process, of all that makes up the human being, of processes, of a becoming. All this is, after all, only the inner continuation of the ascending solar becoming and the descending lunar becoming.

And if we pursue these things further, we not only get to know the healthy human being with his organs, but we also get to know the pathological [degenerative and] anabolic processes, the growths, the paralyses, the killing off of organs. One learns to recognize how processes can be held back in individual organs. One learns to recognize how processes can proliferate when one understands the connection between such internal anabolic and catabolic processes. With the anabolic and catabolic in the universe, with the solar and lunar, one can see how these forces are then present in the plant, mineral and animal kingdoms. And then the remedies for certain illnesses present themselves, in that we know: a catabolic process is taking place in this organ, so you have to counteract it with the catabolic process that is present outside in this plant or in that mineral. We learn to recognize the inner relationship between the human organism and the kingdoms of nature. One learns to recognize how medicine can advance from mere trial and error to a rational understanding of both the healthy and the diseased human condition, how pathology can become rational, how therapy can become rational, that the process of recovery and disease can be understood. This is what emerges as a development on an anthroposophical basis that is fruitful for medicine.

I am well aware, dear ladies and gentlemen, that to raise such matters is to stir up a hornet's nest. But the world has had to face many things that were unaccustomed in older times, and what was at first met with hostility has sometimes later become accepted practice. The anthroposophical researcher must console himself with such things. I will simply cite this example of the fertilization of medicine for the fertilization of the individual sciences. We also have a physiological, a physical, and a biological research institute in Stuttgart and are trying to introduce the anthroposophical method into the individual sciences in an anthroposophical way.

But anthroposophy can also have a fertilizing effect on other areas of life. We were – for anthroposophy has existed as a spiritual movement for quite some time now – we were faced with the task of building a home for the anthroposophical movement. Friends of the anthroposophical movement came together to create a home for this movement. This building, known as the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science, was erected in Dornach near Basel. What would have happened, dear ladies and gentlemen, if some other spiritual or cultural movement had had to erect such a building? They would have turned to an architect who would have given it a framework in the Renaissance, Rococo or antique style, and then they would have done in it what stands as a present.

Anthroposophy could not proceed in this way. It does not want to be something that expresses itself one-sidedly through ideas, that is spread only in theory, as it were, but something that takes hold of the whole human being directly, and therefore reaches into all areas of life. If I may use a trivial comparison, it would be this: When you look at a nut, you say to yourself: the nut is formed by certain forces that work within it, but the shell is formed in the direction of the same forces. Basically, you cannot separate the lawfulness of the nutshell from the lawfulness of the nut kernel itself. Both are one! This is how anthroposophy wants to be. Therefore, it must build its shell, its framework, its house out of the same impulse with a new architectural style, with the architectural style that corresponds to its innermost impulses, just as the nut shell is formed out of the same natural forces and their directions, like the nut kernel itself.

And when, from the pulpit in Dornach, the language of ideas is used to speak of what can be seen in the spirit about man and the universe, then this expression of ideas through the language of thoughts should contain exactly the same life that the columns, the paintings and the sculptures of this Dornach Goetheanum contain. Art forms, without being allegory, without being straw-like allegory or abstract symbolism — neither that nor the other is found — but everything has flowed into real art forms. Everything should speak out of the same life, out of which the content of spiritual vision can be spoken in thought. On anthroposophical ground, one believes that one is approaching an artistic view that is truly in line with Goethe's thinking. Perhaps one can see most deeply into what Goethe strove for in the artistic field if one recalls such sayings of Goethe as these: Art is a manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never become apparent without it. And Goethe also says: When nature begins to reveal its secret to someone, that person feels the deepest longing for its most worthy interpreter, art.

Yes, my dear audience, one can express one's ideas about the secrets of nature in art forms without becoming inartistic, without becoming allegorical or symbolic, and by proceeding in this way, an architectural style that is still unfamiliar today is created. Anthroposophy could not turn to something else, which would have been a foreign framework. Anthroposophy does not want to be theory, anthroposophy wants to be life. Therefore, it also had to flow into the forms of the architectural style itself, which constitutes the building, which has shaped the building, in which anthroposophy is to live first.

With that, I have indicated a second area that can be fertilized by anthroposophy: the field of art. Anthroposophy also wants to have a fertilizing effect in other fields of art. A eurythmy performance is to be given here in a few days. On this occasion, it will be possible to hint at how Anthroposophy can be fruitful in the sense of such an art of movement.

In Stuttgart, Emil Molt founded the Waldorf School, which I run. This Waldorf School seeks to make fruitful use of what comes from anthroposophical sources in the field of pedagogy and didactics. How does real human knowledge arise from these sources? We come to know the human being in terms of his or her full nature, body, soul and spirit, not just through some abstractions, but through concrete observation. We learn to follow the child as it gradually shapes the outer physical body out of the spiritual and soul. We learn to revere the divine spiritual being in the child, and we learn a complete unity, a mutual formation of the physical and the spiritual. Anthroposophy does not want to found schools in the usual sense in the pedagogical and didactic fields. We go so far as to leave what religious worldviews are, for example, to the representatives of the individual religious fields for the time being. Catholic priests teach Catholic children in the Waldorf School, Protestant priests teach Protestant children. However, since a large number of dissident children were enrolled at the Waldorf School after it opened, it was necessary for us to set up a free religious education for them; however, this is run in the same way as the others, as a worldview lesson. The school itself does not want to graft any anthroposophical theories into the children, but it wants to allow what can flow from anthroposophical knowledge to flow into the pedagogical-didactic skill, into the practice of education. Anthroposophy does not want to oppose the achievements that have been made through the great pedagogy of the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy is aware of the significant maxims that exist in this regard, but it also knows that the means must first be acquired in order to fulfill the justified pedagogical demand. These means can only lie in a penetrating knowledge of the human being, and Anthroposophy would like to provide these means through the knowledge of the human being that can be attained through spiritualized vision, as I have described it today. In this way, anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the field of education.

My dear attendees, just how little knowledge of human nature there actually is in the present day, knowledge of human nature suitable for education, was demonstrated in a lecture given at the Anthroposophical Congress held in Stuttgart last summer. The individual topics discussed at this anthroposophical congress would have flooded out into the world and been widely discussed if they had not originated on anthroposophical soil, which is still so unpopular today. From the rich field of what was discussed, I want to emphasize the lecture by Dr. von Heydebrand, a teacher at the Waldorf School. In an extremely vivid way, it shows how experimental pedagogy, which is repeatedly being worked towards today, must be complemented by a direct insight into the soul and spirit of the child, as it can flow from anthroposophy. Anthroposophy does not oppose the legitimacy of experimental pedagogy and psychology, but this legitimacy attains its practical value precisely by being permeated by the spirit. Anthroposophy is never opposed to the legitimate findings of natural science. It seeks to bring out what can be found in these natural-scientific findings, everywhere, wherever it is possible to do so, and to do so in complete harmony with the legitimate demands of modern times with regard to natural science.

Dear attendees,

In today's world, it is particularly necessary to arrive at a deeper understanding in a field that is infinitely close to people, and whose proximity must be particularly evident to them in the present, which has emerged from the great, terrible global catastrophe. It was believed that the social life of man could also be mastered by the laws of nature, which are one-sidedly scientific. The social laws were imitated, and gradually, quite automatically, from the unconscious, the social forces were imitated from the natural laws, from what was naturally effective. Today, anyone who looks at life impartially can see the results. Many other things could be pointed out, besides Marxism, that can be gained from purely natural forces in terms of social insights; one need only point to the way in which this view is already devastating and destructive in Eastern Europe, because it is being put into practice. What began in the East hangs threateningly over Europe. And Europe – indeed, modern civilization – will only escape this impending doom if we once again immerse ourselves in the spiritual and psychological. If we can develop a conception of the whole, of the complete human being in body, soul and spirit, then we will also gain insights and perspectives for our social life, insights into how the moral impulses from the free, from the complete human being, can flow into social life. The one-sided economic view, although it can remain an economic view, will lead to an insight into a social structure that takes into account the whole, the fully human being. There was also a beginning to this in the lecture given by Emil Leinhas at the Stuttgart congress mentioned above, which has already been printed. In this lecture, Emil Leinhas showed in an excellent way how present-day national economy has reached a kind of bankruptcy, and how no social impulses can be found from it that are fruitful for life. Anthroposophy has set itself the task of transferring what is cognitively experienced in man into life, into the social and moral life.

And to mention one last thing – which is only mentioned as a last thing, but is by no means of least importance – I would like to draw attention to the fact that, while anthroposophy can invigorate the impulses of the social, it can also deepen religious experience, even when it is not working externally in human society, but rather in the deepest inner being of the human being. Anthroposophy – oh, it is misunderstood when characterized in this way – Anthroposophy does not want to be a sect of any kind, it certainly does not want to found a new religion, it wants to deepen what people can experience in their religious minds by illuminating it with the clarity of an understanding of spiritual life. Those who believe that religion or even Christianity is endangered by anthroposophy are labouring under a serious misunderstanding; firstly, the misunderstanding that what they present as an ideal in a blind faith can hold its own in the face of the growing knowledge of nature; and then they succumb to the blind judgment that clarity, clear insight into the spiritual world, could somehow be disturbing to the most profound piety. And this most profound piety can be strengthened if it can be attained on the basis of a true knowledge of the spirit. Anthroposophy does not want to found a new religion or a new sect, but wants to serve life as a spiritual science, and also wants to serve the innermost, most intimate, religious life of human beings.

And so, in conclusion, I would like to summarize what the essence of anthroposophy is. From my discussions this evening, it should have become clear how anthroposophy is by no means in opposition to modern, progressive worldviews, but how it is entirely in line with them. But just as the human being presents us with the physical, the bodily, and we experience from this physical, this bodily, its mobility, its physiognomic, and other revelations of the spiritual-soul, so too, when we survey the natural realm in strict natural science, we should also recognize that within the realm of nature with which the human being is connected to his eternal core, where he originates with that which is immortal in him, is one with the divine-spiritual essence of the world. And just as we can only fully recognize a person when we see their soul and spirit in their physical body, so we will only fully recognize the world, the cosmos, when we want to juxtapose the external knowledge of natural science with the spiritual knowledge of anthroposophy. But anthroposophy strives to do just that. It seeks to be in touch with nature and the world by taking the human being as its model, in whose corporeality the soul and spiritual reveal themselves.

So, dear attendees, while Anthroposophy would like to look at the knowledge of external nature with full recognition, it would also like to add something that can be there, the inspiration, the spiritualization of this external natural science.

Dear attendees, Anthroposophy is regarded by many people who have only been superficially introduced to it as a more or less fantastic attempt to penetrate into a realm of the world by way of knowledge, a realm that a serious scientist should not concern with. For in fact, anthroposophy seeks to find the means to penetrate through real knowledge into those supersensible worlds in which the immortal germ of the human soul is rooted, and from which the human soul can learn its true nature. Now it is well known that even today quite serious scientists are already dealing with all kinds of abnormal soul abilities that occur in many personalities, which indicate that in the human being, indeed, quite different world connections are revealed than those that can be mastered with the recognized scientific methods.

But these personalities, who preferably turn to the abnormal human soul and bodily abilities, which then register what comes to light through observation in a completely scientific way, seek laws for this, which alone only truly give the anthroposophical spiritual paths. Since it seeks to lead the ordinary, normal human cognitive faculties beyond their ordinary measure, the anthroposophical path of the spirit often appears to them as something fanciful, as something fantastic, and sometimes they even categorize it as superstition. But it cannot be said that those of a visionary, nebulous and mystical nature could find particular satisfaction in what is considered anthroposophy today.

This anthroposophy certainly does not want to take its scientific attitude and conscientiousness any less seriously and methodically than the recognized sciences themselves. And even if it is true that there are a great many people today who, simply because of a certain dissatisfaction with life, run to everything that is somehow called occult, it must be said that very soon such natures in particular will not be able to find satisfaction in the strict, methodical thinking that is sought in anthroposophy as well as in other fields of science. This does not, of course, prevent some people from simply dismissing it with a slight wave of the hand because of something unusual in anthroposophy, since those who are interested in anthroposophy belonged to the neurasthenic or hysterical types! And so it is somewhat difficult to speak briefly about the actual essence of anthroposophy in an introductory lecture. I would like to do it by attempting to subject the research paths of anthroposophy to a consideration before you today and then hint at some of the essential results.

From these words alone, you will have gathered that, at least in spirit, anthroposophy seeks to emulate and live up to the ideal of the strict scientific method that has emerged in the last three to four centuries of scientific research. Anthroposophy does not want to be in opposition to the legitimate paths of scientific knowledge. It only wants to extend what science gives for the sense realm into those realms that can be described as the supersensible world, but in doing so, if it does not want to proceed in a dilettantish manner, it faces two very formidable obstacles that hinder human knowledge.

The first shows how strict scientific knowledge comes up against certain limits, how it can indeed lead to satisfactory results when it deals with facts, but how it immediately encounters unsatisfactory ones when it wants to go beyond the realm of facts that can be perceived or combined by the human mind. We know that the most serious natural scientists are very particular that these boundaries should not be crossed by all kinds of fantasies. It is precisely in this respect that Anthroposophy initially places itself squarely on the ground of scientific thinking. It is clear, however, that the thinking that humans apply in ordinary life and in science is by no means only suitable for the realm of external facts. Now, some try to move on to pure thinking in order to fathom what lies behind the world of sense perceptions. But human thinking does not dwell only on facts. Rather, having been educated through the social culture of the last few centuries, it has gained its own character from these facts, and by leaving philosophical speculation, it enters into unsatisfied areas, into a kind of emptiness. This is the source of the many disputes among the philosophical systems of worldview. And it is the source of the feeling that if one philosophizes into the world with thinking that has escaped from facts, one can subjectively guide the direction and current of thinking, and therefore what can be achieved must remain unsatisfied because it must carry an element of subjective arbitrariness of the human being. That is the one pitfall of philosophical world view speculation.

But there are people who, out of the deepest longings of the human soul, who strive for the knowledge of the eternal, feel unsatisfied with mere knowledge of nature, who understand the unsatisfactory nature of philosophical speculation left to its own devices, and therefore turn to a more or less unclear mysticism, in the belief that they can penetrate into the depths of the human soul through inner contemplation and, through this inner contemplation within human nature, recognize the eternal of the human soul beyond death and birth.

Those who look at these often sincerely meant mystical aspirations with an open mind will also be able to see through the deceptions into which man falls precisely through these mystical contemplations. After all, what man takes in for his ordinary consciousness are only external impressions and perceptions. These communicate with the soul, they are presented. They are felt and sensed, and the results of them ignite the impulses of the will. But after all, everything that is in the soul through ordinary consciousness is a result of external perceptions. And those who believe that they can already bring something eternal out of the depths of the soul with this ordinary consciousness cannot examine the inner life of a person in an unbiased way. Those who know how impressions that the human soul felt decades ago, impressions that it was not fully aware of, are processed internally, transformed in the realm of ideas and imbued with emotional content, how then these ideas can be brought out of the soul after many years, having undergone a complete transformation. If one is not conscientious, one might succumb to the illusion that one has brought something divine out of the depths of the soul, when in fact one has only drawn up something transformed that had been slumbering there for a long time.

I had to mention these two pitfalls at the outset because, in an introductory lecture, I can only create a sense of the strictness with which anthroposophy seeks to penetrate the supersensible world and how it seeks to avoid illusory paths in both directions. Thus, Anthroposophy recognizes that one can penetrate into supersensible worlds in a satisfactory way neither by the path of left-to-itself philosophical speculation nor by mysticism. By clearly recognizing this precondition for its own task, anthroposophy comes to say: Man, who is sometimes guided so surely by the practical tasks of life from birth to death and who is led by them into the triumphs of science, cannot, if he understands himself correctly, believe that he can penetrate into the supersensible worlds through all of this. Therefore, Anthroposophy does not appeal to these ordinary powers of knowledge, nor to abnormal ones either, but says to itself, there are dormant cognitive abilities in every human soul that can be brought up through conscientious, strictly regulated, methodical inner soul exercises. You have to have intellectual humility. You have to be able to say: I look back: what was I like when I was a very young child, when the world passed before my soul like a dream, how did I have to develop my abilities from week to week, from year to year, how did I have to bring them out of the depths of my human nature.

Now anthroposophy shows that it is possible to take all the soul abilities that have developed since childhood and, as a mature human being, to take their development into one's own hands and lead them to higher abilities. This is what distinguishes anthroposophy from the other fields of knowledge: the latter take the ordinary cognitive abilities into account, but anthroposophy begins where these sciences end, by developing these abilities into supersensible cognitive abilities.

This does not happen through some fantastic method, nor through external action, but rather in such a way that the same strict method prevails in its training, which is otherwise only known when one truly understands the essence of science. Developing anthroposophy is no easier than conducting research in an observatory or medical clinic. The exercises take years of soul-searching for the individual. I have described these in more detail in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds” and “Occult Science”. The main thing is to develop the human thought life of ordinary life, to strengthen it inwardly. Just as one can strengthen a muscle when it is used for work, so one can strengthen the imaginative life of the soul when it is directed in a certain direction. The strengthening of the human imaginative life should be brought to the center of your consciousness so that it occupies a manageable complex. It is necessary that the human being experiences this imagination as he otherwise only regards an external sensory perception. We must look at this external perception impartially, objectively, we must take it as it is. Exactly the same relationship must exist in the soul towards that which is practiced as meditative, concentrating thinking.

For this reason, it is good if the person does not bring any ideas from memory to these soul exercises, because these have become intertwined and transformed, but takes a completely new sentence or saying from some source. Then the content of the image is incorporated into the soul life, and all the soul activity seeks to concentrate on this single content. All the powers at work in the soul are directed towards this content, and this applies to all exercises. They must be subordinated to the human will; there must be nothing of suggestion or dream-like in the activity. As strictly as one is consciously devoted to a mathematical operation, so must one concentrate on a particular thought. This enables us to concentrate on a particular thought in a way that is otherwise only possible with external sensory impressions, so that the inner idea acquires exactly the same vividness and vividness as an external experience. Through these deliberate efforts of thought, one comes to face thought itself quite differently. Only now do we learn to recognize that our ordinary thought life, devoted to external facts or memories, is bound to the human organism. This new thinking is inwardly pictorial. One's soul life leads into a pictorial experience, into an experience that I have called imaginative, not because mere imaginings are to be achieved, but because the human soul can indeed enter into an inner plastic image life and because it feels in it how it becomes more and more free from the body and gains more and more disembodied soul life.

But one thing must be clear: at first everything that is attained is an inner subjective experience. Those who approach anthroposophy seriously will see the enormous difference between this new thinking and the morbid, hallucinatory. Those who have only a superficial knowledge of anthroposophy point out, in a misleading way, that the higher soul abilities that are praised can be nothing other than what predominates as dream-like soul experiences in visions and so on. In truth, anthroposophy is directed towards the opposite pole of what is pathological. There, the person loses their ordinary consciousness; the hallucinator lives in their hallucinations; the suggestible person lives solely in the experience of this dream-like, illusory state. Those who direct their soul life towards real imagination know that at first they only experience images, but they always have a second personality, a consciousness, alongside them, just as they do in ordinary life and in science. They have their human personality with everyday, healthy common sense, which can constantly control and subject to criticism what arises as a second, imaginative consciousness.

But what must go hand in hand with such exercises, so that not only the concentration of thoughts is practiced, the directing of the soul's abilities to some complex of ideas, so that one may gain an inner strength, is the same arbitrariness in the opposite activity. One will soon notice when concentrating in this way that these thoughts take up one's attention, that one can become absorbed in them. Now one must learn to use one's free will in such a way that one can bring such ideas out of one's consciousness again and suppress them just as arbitrarily as one has taken them in. On the one hand, we see the invigoration of the soul life in the absorbed complex of ideas, and on the other hand, the redirection of the same. This empty consciousness is not a state of sleep, but a full consciousness that has consciously eliminated a mental image.

Once you have done these exercises, you will be able to survey your life from birth onwards, but inwardly. We have a current flowing in the depths of our soul from which we can bring up one or the other memory, but usually only in fragments and temporal fragments. But by reaching into the imaginative life of the soul, we grasp the individual elements of it all at once in a tableau, we have before us the basic forces that form it and how they have been working in man since birth. It is as if the time during which we usually review our memories had become a single moment. This is the first supersensible experience we have. We see through the entire stream of our life on earth. Man feels within himself a second supersensible body that cannot be developed with the physical one, it can only be recognized through imagination. Furthermore, it is something that is not limited as a single form in space, but something that runs in time, although it can be seen in a single tableau. I would like to call this second supersensible corporeality of the human being the formative forces body, the etheric body. One comes to see oneself inwardly, how one inwardly guides one's abilities, how one comes to one's moral forces, and so on. One learns to recognize oneself as a whole human being in the course of time. One cannot paint this formative body other than as a flash of lightning that can only be captured in a moment, as everything in constant motion allows only a momentary reproduction, as one cannot philosophically speculate on what one directly perceives if one continues in the described manner.

Once the soul faculties have been strengthened, it becomes possible to suppress everything comprehended in its totality, as previously the individual pictorial components, so that one now produces an empty consciousness and becomes capable of exposing oneself to a world and waiting to see what now enters into this world. What enters the human soul is quite different from what is present in the world we are accustomed to in the senses. For what now enters the empty consciousness is the supersensible, the eternal spiritual of the human soul. One has received the power to survey the spiritual-soul realm! One experiences the moment of each individual memory, as it was before the soul had connected with a body through conception or birth. One experiences the spiritual-soul as it was when the human being was still rooted in the spiritual-soul. In this way, one gains an insight into what is given to the human being not only as a result of his physical body, but also in terms of the forces of heredity. One sees how these forces work their way into the physical body, but what was already there before it took possession of the body, before the first appearance of the body in a spiritual-soul world. We arrive at the creative aspect of the soul-spiritual by juxtaposing the mortal human body and that which works into the forces of inheritance. Then we will come ever closer to an understanding of the immortal part of the human being. This level of knowledge is the inspired one. Just as the breath is first in space and then processed in the body, so the spiritual-soul enters into the human mortal body, and by recognizing it, we speak of inspired knowledge.

In this way, the human being has gained the preparation not only to strengthen his world of thoughts, but also to advance his world of will through a spiritual training that goes beyond what is possible in ordinary life. On the one hand, it must be pointed out that one can only penetrate into the supersensible worlds by transforming the thinking of ordinary life, and so one recognizes that anthroposophy begins where ordinary science must end.

However, one only reaches one side of the supersensible existence. Just as the life of feeling is found between will and thinking in the complete human soul, so too must this life of feeling and will be further developed in a similar way. Again, it must be practiced with strict conscientiousness, just as one can also tear the will away from the human body. This then takes us to the other side, to the side of death, which leads beyond death to the human soul. The exercises of the will strive into the supersensible realm, and must therefore be linked to those parts that already fall from the supersensible into ordinary life. This, in turn, can be achieved in a wide variety of ways; I refer the reader to the books already mentioned. I would like to give only a few examples here, by means of which the liberation of the human will from its bondage to the body can be achieved.

In human life, the impulse of the will is permeated by our instinctual life. But we can arrive at exercises of the will precisely by considering how everything that is isolated in the intellect becomes a unified whole in the soul. When we think, the element of the will lives in our thinking. If we consider how our inherited thinking unfolds in ordinary life, we find that It adheres to the sequence, the course of events. We abandon ourselves to our thinking, more or less passively, to the course of events. Even if we free this thinking logically, it happens in such a way that we want to understand the course of events logically with our logic, but we do not move away from it! Only when we tear thought away from its usual mode of activity, when, for example, we imagine a drama piece by piece from the last scene to the first, or when we review the day in the evening backwards to the morning, going into as much detail as possible, so that we fully engage our soul life, or when, for example, when climbing several floors, we follow the staircase backwards to the first one, and thus gradually make a strong willpower a habit, you also tear the will away from ordinary life and achieve a transformation of the soul's will, until you learn to watch your own actions as you can watch a foreign personality. One must acquire a certain skill in walking alongside oneself and controlling oneself like a stranger, in exercising the will to undertake things that one then conscientiously carries out. In this way one comes to detach this will so completely from the physical that one knows: You now want outside of your body! The life of feeling then connects on both sides, it transforms like the life of thought and will.

But since it is the most intimate part of the human soul, it should not be artificially developed, but this life of feeling follows human development into the supersensible world.

We learn to develop the necessary enthusiasm for what we encounter in the spiritual worlds, seemingly for objective reasons. When the will is freed in the above way, one reaches the third stage of supersensible knowledge, which is called intuitive. There the word is applied when the soul is truly able to place itself in the spiritual world, free of the body. By ascending to this intuition, man becomes acquainted with that which continues to have an effect in him after it has come into the human body as his soul and spirit through conception and birth. He learns how the soul detaches itself from the human being, what is spiritual and soul-like, what is independent and immortal, what enters the gate of death when the body is left to decay – then what is intuitively seen enters the spiritual and soul world.

In the nineties, I tried to address the problem of freedom in my “Philosophy of Freedom” and to show that the question is not posed correctly. The truth is that man is dependent for a large number of actions, but that he stands out, develops into a free personality by learning to shape his will impulses, grasped in pure thinking. Only in these areas, in the impulses that underlie our truly free actions, do we have a presentiment of what also lives objectively in the human being and what enters the spiritual-soul world after death. In “Philosophy of Freedom” I called this the moral intuition. A higher stage of development is formed by cognitive intuition, in which we gain a complete overview of immortality, that the spiritual soul enters through the gate of death to further paths in the spiritual-soul world. After recognizing the eternal nature of the human soul in this way, one also gets to know the soul's environment before it enters the body and after it has left it. Not only does the outer world of the senses open up, but the developed powers of the senses can penetrate into the human soul. They are able not only to bring up what is nebulous and mystical, but also to see the truly eternal in the human soul. By having the spiritual and soul life of the human being concretely before us, we can distinguish the two worlds from each other, what belongs to the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. By getting to know these two worlds, one learns, precisely through the characterized intuition, to know something else in the human being, which connects with human feeling and is recognized as the essence of human feeling. Then the observation extends to the past, in that one not only beholds the soul before birth. Rather, one looks at the repeated earth lives, at what the spiritual world has gone through. One gains the confidence that worlds will continue to be experienced in the future, in repeated earth lives of progressive development. This becomes clear to him who beholds the affiliation of the human soul to the supersensible world.

And he recognizes that which rises to a higher existence of forces, which carries the acquisitions of both worlds from life to life. But he recognizes not only the human entity, but also the spiritual-soul entity, free of illusion, which lies within the sense world, but which is not recognizable to the ordinary faculty of perception.

By developing these abilities over time, one learns to look at this physical-sensory world, not as if one could no longer fully trust common sense, but by developing the second personality alongside it, which has spiritual-soul senses that can see what it sees physically-sensually, also in a soulful way. One also learns to look at the cosmos differently. However, I am coming to something here where anthroposophy is even more antipathetic!

For example, in our ordinary lives we face the sun as a limited spatial being, we describe it in science in the familiar way. If we now acquire the higher cognitive abilities, then the sun presents itself to us in a different way. We learn to speak of something that is not limited within its contours. We get to know the sun-like, which permeates everything, which belongs to the human environment, which fills and permeates the world, which penetrates into human life. We can also clearly recognize this transformed sun-like quality in ourselves. It proves to be as related to us as any external object of perception. We come to understand how much that is sunny enters into the human being, how it strengthens all growth forces, how it makes us young, keeps us young, accompanies us through life, makes our nourishment a process, permeates us in ascending development — that is the result of the spiritual-sunny.

In contrast to this, we recognize the lunar. It permeates everything that is already stored in us from birth as the forces of aging, withering, dying, as descending life. From the mid-thirties onwards, the disintegrating forces in the human being gain the upper hand, the degenerative, retrogressive, morbid — all this lies in the lunar. We learn to recognize how everything in the cosmos affects the human being. In this way, we can see what we recognize from the relationship between man and the cosmos, beyond the stars. We arrive at a spiritual-soul cosmos through direct observation, not through analogical conclusions! There are no illusions here. Life immediately distinguishes reality from fantasies. Just as one can philosophically distinguish the mere idea of the heat of steel from the concrete touch of the hot iron rod, so does experience in the spiritual realm distinguish the merely conceivable from that which really is. And just as one progresses from imagination to inspiration, so one knows that one is progressing to a real world.

Thus, in a systematic development of the human powers of knowledge, the spiritual-soul cosmos with its immortal beings enters the ordinary world of the cosmos of the senses. In this way, by beholding the deeper-lying forces of the world and of human nature, one also comes to recognize how that which is in human nature transforms. As supersensible knowledge is attained, what otherwise appears in sharp contours dissolves. The human heart, lungs and so on dissolve into processes. One can only speak of the brain-lung-heart process. What is otherwise sharply defined in space becomes mobile. In this we see the sun-like and moon-like forces at work, and here the potential of anthroposophy is extended to include the fertilization of the individual sciences.

By looking into the process of becoming and building up in the human organism, into the becoming and degenerating plant and animal beings, by discovering the forces of the supersensible in the realm of dead stone, we find the relationships of the inner human being to the inner forces of the cosmos. There is a way in which anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the medical element. This is why we were able to start therapy with pathology. In Stuttgart and Dornach, we have a therapeutic institute based on anthroposophical principles. And it is possible to gain insights into irregular degradation processes and to recognize how this disease can be healed by building up forces. Instead of a medicine that only tries things out, we have a healing art that, on the one hand, takes in both the healthy and the diseased and, on the other, the healing. Here we have an example of how anthroposophy can have a fruitful effect on the individual sciences. [There is also a physical and biological institute in Stuttgart.] On the basis of scientific research, the supernatural is incorporated into the results. These forces also have a significance for technology and for practical life in a new form.

Anthroposophy also has a fruitful effect on the artistic side. This is manifested at the Goetheanum, the School of Spiritual Science near Basel. When Anthroposophy draws on the deeper human soul forces, it has an effect on and from the whole person. Just as the nut is governed by the same forces within as it is in the shell, so the artistic framework that Anthroposophy needs must be like the shell around the kernel, arising out of the same impulses from which ideas flow when they are born of spiritual insight. This is how the new architectural style in architecture, sculpture and painting came about. In a further progression, it realizes what Goethe felt in his soul when he said: When nature begins to reveal its true secrets to us, we feel the deepest longing for its deepest interpreter, art. — Art is a secret manifestation of the deepest laws of nature. Not through allegories or abstract symbols, but through the creation of real art forms, it shows that anthroposophy is not a theory, but direct life that can have a fertilizing effect in all areas.

The Waldorf School in Stuttgart shows what can be achieved in the knowledge of the whole human being in body, soul and spirit. The great educators do not stand in opposition, but by grasping the full human being in the child, the highest pedagogical achievement in education is already achieved. The Waldorf School is not a school of world view, and religious education is also given in the various denominations. The Waldorf school is an institution in which the practical implementation of teaching from morning to evening is realized with pedagogical and didactic skill based on anthroposophical knowledge. Teachers know what is developing in each human being at each age, they can read the curriculum and teaching objectives from the human being, they do not graft anything into him, but they develop in the child what already resides in the human being.

Finally, I would like to point out how the scientific world view, due to its one-sidedness in social terms, has reached a kind of dead end. What is to take effect in social life cannot, as Marx says, work according to abstract laws; one must look at the whole human being, the fully developed human being. Today, the one-sidedness that comes from the man of sense and intellect has already become a fact, as we see in Eastern Europe. It is this that makes us long for an understanding of the whole human being, of body, soul and spirit. Only that which has a real effect on life in the social sphere can have a healing and salutary effect.

Anthroposophy will continue to develop in this direction. During the various presentations at the Anthroposophical Congress in Stuttgart in the summer of 1921, it was shown how experimental education must be supplemented by the results of spiritual anthroposophical research, and how a complete education can only be formed from this. The bankruptcy of national economics was demonstrated by Director Leinhas. He showed where the real life-giving forces for a healthy social organization must flow from. Anthroposophy does not want to lead to a mystical, nebulous cloud-cuckoo-land, to those who despise ordinary everyday life, but the spirit is so powerfully grasped that we can also work creatively in the physical-practical , because the spirit that created matter should not flee from it, it, which is life practice, can submerge everything in the physical-material existence, so that it becomes more and more perfect in its further development.

And so anthroposophy wants to offer the knowledge that a large part of our contemporaries yearns for, even if unconsciously. I would like to summarize everything that has been said so that I can characterize the essence of anthroposophy.

When we have the whole human being before us, we look at him through our senses themselves as a sensual being according to his outer form. But he does not stand before us in the one-sided revelation of a new being. In him lives a soul permeated by spirit. The human being needs a conception of life that permeates him from the spirit. In the last few centuries, we have achieved great things in the field of natural science. However, we are still far from realizing its ideals. While we fully recognize the achievements of science, anthroposophy recognizes that this science is concerned with the outer formations of the world. Just as the soul permeates and spiritualizes the human being, science also needs something that is inspired by the spirit. Anthroposophy further develops science. For it wants to be nothing other than the spiritual, blissful element for the body of natural science. And just as we encounter people in life with souls permeated by life and spirit, so anthroposophy strives for natural science to achieve knowledge that can gradually become a soul permeated by spirit.

The impressions I have gathered here in the school have prompted me to use the short time I can be with you to say something that emerges directly out of these impressions. After all, the fruitfulness of our activity in an institution like the Waldorf School depends, as does indeed the art of education as a whole, on the ability of the teachers to develop the attitude that will enable them to carry through their work with assurance and be active in the right way. On this occasion, therefore, I would like to speak in particular about the teachers themselves. I would like to preface what I have to say with some brief remarks I made recently in a course for teachers in England, [Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education, London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972 (14 lectures given in Ilkley, England, August 5-17, 1923).] though from a somewhat different point of view. I then shall add a few things that will enable you, if you let them work in the right way on your souls, to develop this right attitude increasingly. The question of attitude, or mood of soul, is very much connected with the art of education. You may possess an admirable mastery of the principles of teaching; you may be able to work them out with intelligence and feeling; but what we are trying to do will fall on fertile soil only if the general attitude that we take with us into the school can be made into a harmonious whole.

Man is a threefold being not only from the many points of view we often have discussed but also from those that lie a little closer to the earthly than do the higher, spiritual viewpoints. This threefoldness reveals itself quite specifically if we focus on the way in which the human being has developed his educational activity. We need not go back very far; indeed, if we went back to very ancient times our view would have to alter somewhat. We have only to go back to the Greek era in human evolution to a period that still stirs the minds of those in our Western civilization. At that period we find that the educator was really the gymnast, intent above all upon molding his pupil into maturity through his outer, physical, bodily nature. However, we shall not properly understand the Greek gymnasts, especially the earlier ones, unless we realize that they were quite as much concerned with the development of the soul and spirit as of the body. It is true that the Greeks laid stress on bodily exercises, which were all formed in an artistic sense, as the means of bringing their pupils to maturity. What is so little realized nowadays, however, is that these bodily exercises, whether dance movements or some other rhythmical or gymnastic movements, were devised in such a way that through the unfolding and expression of rhythm, measure, and the like, spiritual beings were able to draw near, beings who lived in the movements, in the rhythm and measure in which the pupil was trained. While the pupil was doing something with his arms and legs, a spiritual influence passed from the limb system, including the metabolic system, into the rhythmic and the nerve-sense systems; in this way the whole human being was developed. One therefore should not say that in Greece primary importance was attached to the cultivation of gymnastics, for this gives the impression that they were cultivated then as they are nowadays, that is, mostly in an entirely outward and physical way. In fact, with the Greeks gymnastics also included the education of soul and spirit. The Greek educator was a gymnast; he educated the body, and along with the body the soul and spirit, because he had the capacity, as if by magic, to draw down the world of soul and spirit into bodily movements. The more ancient Greek gymnasts were perfectly conscious of this. They had no desire to educate human beings in an abstract, intellectual way or to teach their pupils in the way we do today. We speak exclusively to the head, even if we do not intend to do so. The Greeks brought their pupils into movement; they brought them into movement that was in harmony with the dynamic of the spiritual and physical cosmos.

In following the course of human evolution, we find that among the Romans the art of cultivating the soul and the spirit by way of the bodily nature had been forgotten. They approached the soul directly, and education took place especially through the medium of speech, the faculty lying nearest to the soul element in ordinary life. Roman education did, in fact, draw forth from speech that which was to form their pupils; the educator thus ceased to be a gymnast and became a rhetorician. Beauty of speech was from Roman times onward the essential element in education and actually remained so throughout the Middle Ages. Beauty of speech—in the forming of words and in the consciousness that the word is being sculpturally and musically formed—has its effect on the whole human being. The most important principles of education were derived from this consciousness. The Greek had gone right back to the bodily foundation of the human being, from there drawing everything into the realm of soul and spirit. The Roman concerned himself with the middle part of man, with the sublimated expression of the rhythmic system, with the musical speech of poetry. He trusted that if speech were handled properly, this musical and sculptural-painterly speech would work downward to the bodily and upward to the spiritual. In this form of education also, intellectual training played no part, but rather special importance was attached to speaking.

Then, from the fifteenth century onward, the rhetorician as educator was gradually superseded by the professor [Doktor]. [The German Doktor does not in this context refer to a medical doctor but to a scholar with a doctoral degree.] Even teachers who have passed through only a training college nowadays are in this sense really “professors.” Hitherto, there was some justification for this; if indeed the ideal of the professor was not held in the way it once was by a teacher pf gymnastics whom I knew well. He felt extremely uncomfortable on any gymnastic apparatus but loved to get up on a platform and hold forth theoretically about gymnastics. His pupils sat crouched and bent on their benches and listened to the gymnastics lectures. This sort of thing could not have happened in any other institution, but in this training college he could get up and lecture like this once a week. He felt quite learned he felt, in fact, like a real professor. The principle that the basis of education lies not in the rhythmic system but in the head, in the nerve-sense system, became more and more prominent as humanity evolved from the fifteenth century into the modern age. Hence it is not so easy today for teachers in the Waldorf School to adhere to the principle that they should have no desire to realize this ideal of the learned professor. I do not mean this outwardly but inwardly. It is not easy, because it is a normal part of the consciousness of modern humanity to believe that something is gained by becoming “learned.” In our civilization, however, a healthy condition will be achieved only when we realize that to be “learned” in this sense is actually harmful and, far from adding anything to a human being, it takes something away from him. Though I am always delighted when someone nods intelligent assent to the sort of thing about which I have been speaking, I am also a little uncomfortable about the nodding, because people take the matter much too lightly. There is little inclination inwardly to lay aside the doctorate, even if one does not have it oneself, even if one only carries the attitude in one's general consciousness. Furthermore, the trend that has caused the earlier gymnast and rhetorician to be superseded by the professor is so much part and parcel of modern civilization that it cannot easily be eradicated. It is in education, of course, that we notice most clearly the unfortunate effects upon a person who has gone through a doctoral training; yet that which has put the professor into a leading position in education has been necessary for the entire development of intellectualism in modern culture.

We have reached a point at which we must cultivate the synthesis of these three elements of the human being, for this division into gymnast, rhetorician, and professor is yet another example of the threefoldness of human nature, and it is above all in the realm of education that this synthesis should be achieved. If we could manage things ideally, the teacher should cultivate gymnastics in the noblest sense, rhetoric in the noblest sense—with all that was associated with it in ancient times—and also the professorial element in the noblest sense. Then these three elements should be integrated into a whole. I almost shudder at having to describe so dryly what you must know in this regard and must receive in your hearts' minds [die Gesinnung], because I am afraid that it may again get distorted, as happens with so much that must be said. It must not be distorted. The teacher should simply realize that for his own art of education he needs a synthesis of the spiritualized gymnast, of the ensouled rhetorician, and thirdly of the living, evolving spiritual element [das Geistige], not the dead and abstract spiritual element.

The whole faculty of the school ought to work together to assimilate these things, to develop gymnastics in the noblest sense and also what we have in eurythmy. If you really succeed in penetrating eurythmy inwardly, you will experience for yourselves that there is an active element of soul and spirit in every eurythmic movement. Every eurythmic movement calls forth an element of soul from the deepest foundations of the human being, and every gymnastic movement, if rightly executed, calls forth in the human being a spiritual atmosphere into which the spiritual element can penetrate livingly and not in a dead, abstract way.

The rhetorical element, in the noblest sense of the word, still has a particular significance for the teacher today. No educator, in whatever sphere of education he may be engaged, should fail to do his utmost to have his own speaking approach as closely as possible the ideal of an artistic speaking. The need for cultivating speech as such should always be kept in mind. This is something that has vanished so completely from man's consciousness that in this age of intellectualism professors of rhetoric are appointed at universities mainly out of an old habit. Curtius was professor of rhetoric at Berlin University, but he was not allowed to lecture on the subject, because lectures on the art of speech were felt to be superfluous at a place of higher education. He therefore had to discharge his duty in other ways than by lecturing about rhetoric, though in his official appointment he still bore the title of professor of rhetoric. This shows how we have ceased to attach any real value to the art of speech; this is connected with our ever-increasing disregard for the artistic element as such. Today we usually think because we do not know what else to do, and that is why we have so few real thoughts. The thoughts produced in the style of our modern thinking are the worst possible. The best are those that rise up out of an individual's humanness while he is engaged in some kind of action. Those thoughts are good that evolve out of beautifully formulated speech, when, out of such beautifully formulated speaking, thoughts rebound in us. Then something from the archangel lives in our thinking through the speaking, and it is far more significant that we be able to listen to this speaking than that we develop prosaic human thinking, however cleverly we might do so. This can be achieved, however, only if we, especially those engaged in education, clearly realize how remote modern thinking is from reality, from the world. We have, of course, produced a splendid science, but the sad thing is that this science knows nothing really and that, as a result of its knowing nothing, it is driving the very life out of human culture and civilization. We need not turn into revolutionaries for this reason or go about shouting such things indiscriminately in the world; what we need is to work in the school out of this consciousness.

Not only has thinking gradually become more and more abstract, but so has everything relating to the content of the human soul. At most man is still aware that his highest soul faculties originate in sudden flashes [einfällen], and he is especially proud when something occurs to him [einfällt] in this way. Since man experiences what may be the most valuable element in his soul as severed from the universe, he becomes inwardly barren and lifeless, alienated from reality. Our musicians compose music, they write melodies and harmonies, because these happen to˃ occur to them. Certainly one might think it quite a good thing if such things occur to someone frequently ini the realm of music; but why do they occur to him? Why should some melody suddenly occur to him out of nothingness? There appears to be neither human nor cosmic reason that a melody should occur suddenly to an individual who was born in and lives in this or that time or place. Why? There is meaning in it only when one has a connection with the cosmos in experiencing a melody, when one experiences the connection with the cosmos in experiencing a melody. One need not sail away into symbolism, but the connection with the cosmos must be experienced. The melody must really be “spoken” into us by the spirit of the world; then it has meaning and does something to promote progress in the world.

A great deal of Ahrimanic influence can be found in the world today. Indeed, the evolution of the world would be impossible without it. One of the worst instances of the Ahrimanic, however, is the fact that in order to become a qualified professor a thesis has to be written; there is no real connection between writing a thesis and becoming a professor. The only connection is purely external, Ahrimanized. Such things are taken seriously in our civilization today, however, and force their way into education, because educational institutions exert their influence from above downward, and the whole mode of their organization is totally unsound. Merely to say this sort of thing gets us nowhere, except to make us unpopular and create enemies for ourselves. In working here, however, we should be fully awake to the fact that we are called to work out of different premises.

Nowadays, for example, in lectures on the physiology of nutrition, we would be told that potatoes—carbohydrates—contain so much carbon, so much oxygen, and so on; that protein contains so and so much carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen; fats so and so much nitrogen, and so on; that the various “salts” man consumes are composed of what nowadays are called the chemical elements; and finally that the amounts of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth, that man needs can be calculated. The modern theory of nutrition is arrived at in this way. It is exactly as though someone wanting to know how a watch comes into existence were first to ascertain how gold is produced up to the moment when it is delivered to the watchmaker or how the glass for the watch is produced, and so on, with other parts of the watch. Such a person insists on getting to know the parts but never on knowing what the watchmaker does with them. In all eternity he will never really know anything about the watch. He may be well informed about the glass, the hands, the materials of which the watch is made, but he knows nothing about the watch itself. The same sort of thing is true if, regarding human nutrition, a person limits himself to the knowledge that the fats are constituted of such and such chemical elements, the carbohydrates of others, and so forth. We begin to know something about nutrition only if we can enter in a living way into the fact that what we eat in a potato, for example, is related to the root. If we eat something related to the root it is quite different from consuming in flour something that is related to the seed as in rye, corn, or wheat. What really matters is not how much carbohydrate there is in a potato or a kernel of corn. Rather, if I prepare a foodstuff from seeds, from corn, this foodstuff has to be digested in the area of the human being that extends to the lymph vessels and reaches the nerve-sense system in a condition in which it can provide the foundation for thinking. When I eat a potato, which is related to the root, it is not the human digestive tract or the lymphatic system that reduces the potato to a state where it can be assimilated by the human body. No, here the midbrain is required, and when we eat potatoes the task of digestion is imposed upon the midbrain. When we eat a different kind of food this burden is not present. If we eat potatoes in excess, we impose upon the midbrain the task of the primary digestion; that is to say, we undermine the real function of the midbrain in relation to the nerve-sense system, which is to permeate thoughts with feeling [Gemüt]. We thus thrust our thinking into the forebrain, where it becomes intellectual and to some extent actually animal-like.

The essential point is not whether a potato, or cabbage, or corn, is composed of such and such a percentage of carbohydrates. For a true physiology of nutrition all that is irrelevant. What we really need to know is how these things actually work within the human being. If we wish to develop a living grasp of what man needs today, we have the task of freeing ourselves from all these things that can never give us a true knowledge of man. The way we talk about nature nowadays not only is misleading: it leads us straight into emptiness of thought, emptiness of feeling.

Now you are all aware that there is a well-known process in the human being by means of which carbon combines with oxygen so that carbon dioxide is produced, that is, the mixture of carbon and oxygen that we exhale. You will often hear this process talked about as if it were a sort of inner burning, the same sort of thing as when a candle burns. There, too, carbon combines with oxygen, but to talk in this way is about as intelligent as to ask why the human being needs two lungs; we might just as well put two stones into him, two inorganic objects. If we mentally transfer into the human being the outer process of burning, we think in the same way as we would if we viewed the lungs as two stones. The burning that takes place outwardly in connection with oxygen is a dead burning, an inorganic burning. What takes place in the human being is a living burning, permeated with soul. Any process that takes place outside in nature changes when it occurs in the human being; in the human being it is permeated with soul; it is spiritual. What carbon together with oxygen does within the human organism bears the same relation to what happens outside as the living lungs bear to two stones. It is more important to guide one's whole life of feeling in this direction than to ponder over these things; then in all realms of the life of soul one would come to a direct experience of nature that could truly guide one from nature to the human being. Nowadays people remain with nature outside and do not at all reach the human being.

You will discover that if you speak to children with this kind of feeling and attitude [Gesinnung], they will understand the most difficult things as they need to be understood in their particular age. If you rely on the accursed textbooks that are so popular, the children really understand nothing; you torment the children, bore them, call forth their scorn. What you must do is to create a relationship to the world in yourselves that is both living and true to reality. That, above all, is what the teacher needs. I would like to emphasize strongly at the beginning that the teacher should strive continually to bring to life in himself what in the course of civilization has become dead. One of the chief tasks in Waldorf education is to bring life to knowledge and to feel a kind of repugnance for the way in which things are presented nowadays in so-called scientific textbooks. After having conquered this stage of repugnance, we should be able to develop what in reality lives in ourselves and that passes over to the children in a living way. We must begin at this point with ourselves and then look at nature itself in this way. A good deal of courage is needed, because much of what is true is regarded nowadays as sheer madness. Everything possible should be done to develop this courage.

Think of a butterfly. It lays an egg, the caterpillar crawls out and spins its cocoon, becoming a chrysalis, and finally the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. These things are described in the textbooks, but how? Without any consciousness whatever of the wonderful mystery that really lies here. The butterfly lays an egg, but it is essential that this egg be laid at the proper time of year and that it be receptive to everything that works as the earthy, as the solid or solid-fluid quality in nature. The most essential thing for the development of the egg is the “salty” element. Then comes the time when in addition to the earthy element, the fluid, and with the fluid the etheric, takes over. The fluid element, which becomes permeated with the etheric, passes over into the development of the caterpillar that crawls out of the egg. When we have the egg, we think primarily of the earth with the physical element. When we have the caterpillar that crawls out of the egg we see its shape. What crawls out is a being actually permeated with the etheric, fluid-watery element, and that is what makes the caterpillar into a caterpillar.

Now the caterpillar must develop its being in the air; the most important thing now for the caterpillar is that it come in contact with the light, so that it actually lives in the light-permeated air but at the same time expresses an inner relationship to the astral and, with this relationship to astrality, absorbs light. It is essential for the caterpillar to be exposed through its sensory system to the rays of the sun, to the radiating sun with its light. Next you see in the caterpillar what can be perceived in its most extreme form when you lie in bed with the lights still burning, and moths fly toward the light. There you have the apparently inexplicable urge of the moth to sacrifice itself. We shall hear why. The moth dashes into the light and is burnt up. Caterpillars have the same urge regarding the radiating light, but they are organized in such a way that they cannot hurl themselves into the sun. The moth can hurl itself into the light. The caterpillar has the same urge to give itself up to the light but cannot do so, for the sun is a long way off. The caterpillar develops this urge, goes out of itself, passes into the radiating light, gives itself up, spinning physical material out of its own body into the rays of the sun. The caterpillar sacrifices itself to the rays of the sun; it desires to destroy itself, but all destruction is birth. It spins its sheath during the day in the direction of the sun's rays and, when it rests at night, what has been spun hardens, so that these threads are spun rhythmically, day and night. These threads that the caterpillar spins are materialized, spun light.

Out of the threads that the light has formed, that it has materialized, the caterpillar spins its chrysalis, it passes wholly into the light. The light itself is the cause of the spinning of the chrysalis. The caterpillar cannot hurl itself into the light but gives itself up to it, creating the chamber in which the light is enclosed. The chrysalis is created from above downward in accordance with the laws of form of the primal wisdom. The butterfly is formed after the caterpillar has prepared the secluded chamber for the light. There you have the whole process from the egg to the brilliantly colored butterfly, which is born out of the light, as all colors are born out of the light. The whole process is born out of the cosmos.

If the process that we see extended into a fourfoldness—egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, butterfly—is in any way condensed, then the whole is changed. When the process occurs inwardly within the animal element, what remains is a being created out of the light. You see, the only way in which we can really get to the essence of the matter is to picture [vorstellen] the process artistically. It is impossible to picture this process whereby the butterfly forms itself from the chrysalis and is born out of the light unless we picture it artistically. If you picture the process in accordance with reality, you will find yourselves in a world of wonderful artistry. Just try for yourselves, and see how you receive an entirely different consciousness if you know something in this way. It is a consciousness entirely different from what you experience if you know something in the modern, outer way, which really gives no knowledge at all. Every detail becomes interesting if you allow yourselves, with soul and body, to grow together with the cosmos in its work of artistic creation.

Again, look at a tadpole with its resemblance to a fish; it breathes with gills and has a fish-like tail to swim with. The creature lives wholly in the watery element, the watery-earthly element. Then the tadpole develops into a frog. What happens? The blood vessels leading into the gills wither away, and the whole blood system is rounded off inwardly. Through this rounding off, the lung arises. The veins leading to the fishlike tail also wither away, but others elongate into legs so that the frog can hop about on land. This wonderful transformation of a system of blood vessels that at first feeds the gills and tail, this extraordinarily artistic transformation into lungs and limbs, is a truly marvelous process. How is it brought about? The first system of blood vessels, which feeds the gills and tail, is produced by the earthly-watery element; the second is produced by the watery-airy element that is permeated glitteringly with light.

You can learn to understand how the elements work together, but work together in an artistic way. If you reach this sort of understanding of the world of nature, you simply cannot help feeling as if you possessed the creative powers within yourselves. You cannot possibly be like most people nowadays when they study modern science. They are really not fully human. They just sit with their heads unhappily in their hands and strain their brains; study exhausts them. This is all unnatural; it is really nonsensical. It is just as if eating were to make us tired—but that happens only when we eat too much. Surely it is impossible to be wearied by anything that is so intimately bound up with man as this living-together of nature, spirit, and soul. Yet I have known many people who have been keen students, have written books, but who suffered from anæmia of the brain. It is really the same sort of thing as when a person suffers from anæmia in some other part of the organism. No one can suffer from anæmia of the brain who sees things in the way I have described it, in their true relation to reality. This is something that brings us to life inwardly, which is what we need above all else in our work as teachers. We must relate ourselves directly to life, and anything we are going to introduce in our teaching in school should sustain and uphold us inwardly, should truly enliven us. It is for this reason that no true teaching can ever be boring. How could it be? One might as well expect children to find eating and drinking boring, which usually does not happen unless a child is ill. If our teaching is boring there must be something wrong with it, and we ought to ask ourselves in every case (unless we are dealing with a really psychopathic child) what it is that is lacking in us when our teaching bores the children.

These are things that really matter, and we must realize, my dear friends, that we should neglect no single opportunity of quickening the inner life of soul and spirit. Otherwise we cannot teach. However erudite we may be, we cannot be good teachers. This is connected with what I described as our task to bring about the synthesis of what in successive stages of world evolution was separate: the gymnast, the rhetorician, and the professor. It is especially necessary today that we not allow the last relics that still live in the genius of our language, which can have an effect upon our whole human nature, to vanish, but that we try to bring a musical, sculptural-painterly quality into speech, so that what comes to expression in speech may again work back upon us. We therefore should make it one of the primary demands on ourselves never to speak in a slovenly way in the school but really to form and mold our speech so that as teachers our speech has something artistic about it. This may require some exertion, but it is of enormous significance. If it is achieved, there may flow out from the school an impulse for a revival, a renewal of civilization through the synthesis of gymnast, rhetorician, and professor. We must overcome the professorial quality—the learned knowledge, intellectual knowledge—which at the present time is the most disastrous of the three in all education. We can achieve something with children only by being human beings, not merely by being able to think.

This is the introduction I wished to give you today. I will add something in later talks about matters that fundamentally concern the teacher himself, for the educational problem is in many ways a problem of those who are actually teachers.

I have shown you how between the change of teeth and the ninth or tenth year you should teach with descriptive, imaginative pictures, for what the children then receive from you will live on in their minds and souls as a natural development, right through their whole lives.

This is of course only possible if the feelings and ideas one awakens are not dead but living. To do this you must first of all yourselves acquire a feeling for the inward life of the soul. A teacher or educator must be patient with his own self-education, with the awakening of something in the soul which may indeed sprout and grow. You may then be able to make the most wonderful discoveries, but if this is to be so you must not lose courage in your first endeavours.

For you see, whenever a man undertakes an activity of a spiritual nature, he must always be able to bear being clumsy and awkward. A man who cannot endure being clumsy and doing things stupidly and imperfectly at first, will never really be able to do them perfectly in the end out of his own inner self. And especially in education we must first of all kindle in our own souls what we then have to work out for ourselves; but first it must be enkindled in the soul. If once or twice we have succeeded in thinking out a pictorial presentation of a lesson which we see impresses the children, then we shall make a remarkable discovery about ourselves. We shall see that it becomes more and more easy for us to invent such pictures, that by degrees we become inventive people in a way we had never dreamt of. But for this you must have the courage to be very far from perfect to begin with.

Perhaps you will say you ought never to be a teacher if you have to appear before the children in this awkward manner. But here indeed the Anthroposophical outlook must help you along. You must say to yourself: Something is leading me karmically to the children so that I can be with them as a teacher though I am still awkward and clumsy. And those before whom it behoves me not to appear clumsy and awkward—these children I shall only meet in later years, again through the workings of Karma.¹ The teacher or educator must thus take up his life courageously, for in fact the whole question of education is not a question of the teachers at all but of the children.

Let me therefore give you an example of something which can sink into the child's soul so that it grows with his growth, something which one can come back to in later years and make use of to arouse certain feelings within him. Nothing is more useful and fruitful in teaching than to give the children something in picture form between the seventh and eighth years, and later, perhaps in the fourteenth and fifteenth years, to come back to it again in some way or other. Just for this reason we try to let the children in the Waldorf School remain as long as possible with one teacher. When they come to school at seven years of age the children are given over to a teacher who then takes his class up the school as far as he can, for it is good that things which at one time were given to the child in germ can again and again furnish the content of the methods employed in his education.

Now suppose for instance that we tell an imaginative story to a child of seven or eight. He does not need to understand all at once the pictures which the story contains; why that is I will describe later. All that matters is that the child takes delight in the story because it is presented with a certain grace and charm. Suppose I were to tell the following story: Once upon a time in a wood where the sun peeped through the branches there lived a violet, a very modest violet under a tree with big leaves. And the violet was able to look through an opening at the top of the tree. As she looked through this broad opening in the tree top the violet saw the blue sky. The little violet saw the blue sky for the first time on this morning, because she had only just blossomed. Now the violet was frightened when she saw the blue sky—indeed she was overcome with fear, but she did not yet know why she felt such great fear. Then a dog ran by, not a good dog, a rather bad snappy dog. And the violet said to the dog: “Tell me, what is that up there, that is blue like me?” For the sky also was blue just as the violet was. And the dog in his wickedness said: “Oh, that is a great giant violet like you and this great violet has grown so big that it can crush you.” Then the violet was more frightened than ever, because she believed that the violet up in the sky had got so big so that it could crush her. And the violet folded her little petals together and did not want to look up to the great big violet any more, but hid herself under a big leaf which a puff of wind had just blown down from the tree. There she stayed all day long, hiding in her fear from the great big sky-violet.

When morning came the violet had not slept all night, for she had spent the night wondering what to think of the great blue sky-violet who was said to be coming to crush her. And every moment she was expecting the first blow to come. But it did not come. In the morning the little violet crept out, as she was not in the least tired, for all night long she had only been thinking, and she was fresh and not tired (violets are tired when they sleep, they are not tired when they don't sleep!) and the first thing that the little violet saw was the rising sun and the rosy dawn. And when the violet saw the rosy dawn she had no fear. It made her glad at heart and happy to see the dawn. As the dawn faded the pale blue sky gradually appeared again and became bluer and bluer all the time, and the little violet thought again of what the dog had said, that that was a great big violet which would come and crush her.

At that moment a lamb came by and the little violet again felt she must ask what that thing above her could be. “What is that up there?” asked the violet, and the lamb said, “That is a great big violet, blue like yourself.” Then the violet began to be afraid again and thought she would only hear from the lamb what the wicked dog had told her. But the lamb was good and gentle, and because he had such good gentle eyes, the violet asked again: “Dear lamb, do tell me, will the great big violet up there come and crush me?” “Oh no,” answered the lamb, “it will not crush you, that is a great big violet, and his love is much greater than your own love, even as he is much more blue than you are in your little blue form.” And the violet understood at once that there was a great big violet who would not crush her, but who was so blue in order that he might have more love, and that the big violet would protect the little violet from everything in the world which might hurt her. Then the little violet felt so happy, because what she saw as blue in the great sky-violet appeared to her as Divine Love, which was streaming towards her from all sides. And the little violet looked up all the time as if she wished to pray to the God of the violets.

Now if you tell the children a story of this kind they will most certainly listen, for they always listen to such things; but you must tell it in the right mood, so that when the children have heard the story they somehow feel the need to live with it and turn it over inwardly in their souls. This is very important, and it all depends on whether the teacher is able to keep discipline in the class through his own feeling.

That is why when we speak of such things as I have just mentioned, we must also consider this question of keeping discipline. We once had a teacher in the Waldorf School, for instance, who could tell the most wonderful stories, but he did not make such an impression upon the children that they looked up to him with unquestioned love. What was the result? When the first thrilling story had been told the children immediately wanted a second. The teacher yielded to this wish and prepared a second. Then they immediately wanted a third, and the teacher gave in again and prepared a third story for them. And at last it came about that after a time this teacher simply could not prepare enough stories. But we must not be continually pumping into the children like a steam pump; there must be a variation, as we shall hear in a moment, for now we must go further and let the children ask questions; we should be able to see from the face and gestures of a child that he wants to ask a question. We let him ask it, and then talk it over with him in connection with the story that has just been related.

Thus a little child will probably ask: “But why did the dog give such a horrid answer?” and then in a simple childlike way you will be able to show him that a dog is a creature whose task is to watch, who has to bring fear to people, who is accustomed to make people afraid of him, and you will be able to explain why the dog gave that answer.

You can also explain to the children why the lamb gave the answer that he did. After telling the above story you can go on talking to the children like this for some time. Then you will find that one question leads to another and eventually the children will bring up every imaginable kind of question. Your task in all this is really to bring into the class the unquestioned authority about which we have still much to say. Otherwise it will happen that whilst you are speaking to one child the others begin to play pranks and to be up to all sorts of mischief. And if you are then forced to turn round and give a reprimand, you are lost! Especially with the little children one must have the gift of letting a great many things pass unnoticed.

Once for example I greatly admired the way one of our teachers handled a situation. A few years ago he had in his class a regular rascal (who has now improved very much). And lo and behold, while the teacher was doing something with one of the children in the front row, the boy leapt out of his seat and gave him a punch from behind. Now if the teacher had made a great fuss the boy would have gone on being naughty, but he simply took no notice at all. On certain occasions it is best to take no notice, but to go on working with the child in a positive way. As a general rule it is very bad indeed to take notice of something that is negative.

If you cannot keep order in your class, if you have not this unquestioned authority (how this is to be acquired I shall speak of later), then the result will be just as it was in the other case, when the teacher in question would tell one story after another and the children were always in a state of tension. But the trouble was that it was a state of tension which could not be relaxed, for whenever the teacher wanted to pass on to something else and to relax the tension (which must be done if the children are not eventually to become bundles of nerves), then one child left his seat and began to play, the next also got up and began to sing, a third did some Eurythmy, a fourth hit his neighbour and another rushed out of the room, and so there was such confusion that it was impossible to bring them together again to hear the next thrilling story.

Your ability to deal with all that happens in the classroom, the good as well as the bad, will depend on your own mood of soul. You can experience the strangest things in this connection, and it is mainly a question of whether the teacher has sufficient confidence in himself or not.

The teacher must come into his class in a mood of mind and soul that can really find its way into the children's hearts. This can only be attained by knowing your children. You will find that you can acquire the capacity to do this in a comparatively short time, even if you have fifty or more children in the class; you can get to know them all and come to have a picture of them in your mind. You will know the temperament of each one, his special gifts, his outward appearance and so on.

In our teachers' meetings, which are the heart of the whole school life, the single individualities of the children are carefully discussed, and what the teachers themselves learn from their meetings, week by week, is derived first and foremost from this consideration of the children's individualities. This is the way in which the teachers may perfect themselves. The child presents a whole series of riddles, and out of the solving of these riddles there will grow the feelings which one must carry with one into the class. That is how it comes about that when, as is sometimes the case, a teacher is not himself inwardly permeated by what lives in the children, then they immediately get up to mischief and begin to fight when the lesson has hardly begun. (I know things are better here but I am talking of conditions in Central Europe.) This can easily happen, but it is then impossible to go on with a teacher like this and you have to get another in his place. With the new teacher the whole class is a model of perfection from the first day!

These things may easily come within your experience; it simply depends on whether the teacher's character is such that he is minded to let the whole group of his children with all their peculiarities pass before him in meditation every morning. You will say that this would take a whole hour; this is not so, for if it were to take an hour one could not do it, but if it takes ten minutes or a quarter of an hour it can be done. But the teacher must gradually develop an inward perception of the child's mind and soul, for it is this which will enable him to see at once what is going on in the class.

To get the right atmosphere for this pictorial story-telling you must above all have a good understanding of the temperaments of the children. This is why the treatment of children according to temperament has such an important place in teaching. And you will find that the best way is to begin by seating the children of the same temperament together. In the first place the teacher has a more comprehensive view if he knows that over there he has the cholerics, there the melancholics, and here the sanguines. This will give him a point of vantage from which he may get to know the whole class.

The very fact that you do this, that you study the child and seat him according to his temperament, means that you have done something to yourself that will help you to keep the necessary unquestioned authority in the class. These things usually come from sources one least expects. Every teacher and educator must work upon himself inwardly.

If you put the phlegmatics together they will mutually correct each other, for they will be so bored by one another that they will develop a certain antipathy to their own phlegma, and it will get better and better all the time. The cholerics hit and smack each other and finally they get tired of the blows they get from the other cholerics; and so the children of each temperament rub each other's corners off extraordinarily well when they sit together. But the teacher himself when he speaks to the children, for instance when he is talking over with them the story which has just been given, must develop within himself as a matter of course the instinctive gift of treating the child according to his temperament. Let us say that I have a phlegmatic child; if I wish to talk over with such a child a story like the one I have told, I must treat him with an even greater phlegma than he has himself. With a sanguine child who is always flitting from one impression to another and cannot hold on to any of them, I must try to pass from one impression to the next even more quickly than the child himself does.

With a choleric child you must try to teach him things in a quick emphatic way so that you yourself become choleric, and you will see how in face of the teacher's choler his own choleric propensities become repugnant to him. Like must be treated with like, so long as you do not make yourself ridiculous. Thus you will gradually be able to create an atmosphere in which a story like this is not merely related but can be spoken about afterwards.

But you must speak about it before you let the children retell the story. The very worst method is to tell a story and then to say: “Now Edith Miller, you come out and retell it.” There is no sense in this; it only has meaning if you talk about it first for a time, either cleverly or foolishly; (you need not always be clever in your classes; you can sometimes be quite foolish, and at first you will mostly be foolish). In this way the child makes the thing his own, and then if you like you can get him to tell the story again, but this is of less importance for it is not indeed so essential that the child should hold such a story in his memory; in fact, for the age of which I am speaking, namely between the change of teeth and the ninth or tenth year, this hardly comes in question at all. Let the child by all means remember what he can, but what he has forgotten is of no consequence. The training of memory can be accomplished in subjects other than story-telling, as I shall have to show.

But now let us consider the following question: Why did I choose a story with this particular content? It was because the thought-pictures which are given in this story can grow with the child. You have all kinds of things in the story which you can come back to later. The violet is afraid because she sees the great big violet above her in the sky. You need not yet explain this to the little child, but later when you are dealing with more complicated teaching matter, and the question of fear comes up, you can recall this story. Things small and great are contained in this story, for indeed things small and great are repeatedly coming up again and again in life and working upon each other. Later on then you can come back to this. The chief feature of the early part of the story is the snappish advice given by the dog, and later on the kind loving words of advice uttered by the lamb. And when the child has come to treasure these things in his heart and has grown older, how easily then you can lead on from the story you told him before to thoughts about good and evil, and about such contrasting feelings which are rooted in the human soul. And even with a much older pupil you can go back to this simple child's story; you can make it clear to him that we are often afraid of things simply because we misunderstand them and because they have been presented to us wrongly. This cleavage in the feeling life, which may be spoken of later in connection with this or that lesson, can be demonstrated in the most wonderful way if you come back to this story in the later school years.

In the Religion lessons too, which will only come later on, how well this story can be used to show how the child develops religious feelings through what is great, for the great is the protector of the small, and one must develop true religious feeling by finding in oneself those elements of greatness which have a protective impulse. The little violet is a little blue being. The sky is a great blue being, and therefore the sky is the great blue God of the violet.

This can be made use of at various different stages in the Religion lessons. What a beautiful analogy one can draw later on by showing how the human heart itself is of God. One can then say to the child: “Look, this great sky-violet, the god of the violets, is all blue and stretches out in all directions. Now think of a little bit cut out of it—that is the little violet. So God is as great as the world-ocean. Your soul is a drop in this ocean of God. But as the water of the sea, when it forms a drop, is the same water as the great sea, so your soul is the same as the great God is, only it is one little drop of it.”

If you find the right pictures you can work with the child in this way all through his early years, for you can come back to these pictures again when the child is more mature. But the teacher himself must find pleasure in this picture-making. And you will see that when, by your own powers of invention, you have worked out a dozen of these stories, then you simply cannot escape them; they come rushing in upon you wherever you may be. For the human soul is like an inexhaustible spring that can pour out its treasures unceasingly as soon as the first impulse has been called forth. But people are so indolent that they will not make the initial effort to bring forth what is there in their souls.

We will now consider another branch of this pictorial method of education. What we must bear in mind is that with the very little child the intellect, that in the adult has its own independent life, must not yet really be cultivated, but all thinking should be developed in a pictorial and imaginative way.

Now even with children of about eight years of age you can quite well do exercises of the following kind. It does not matter if they are clumsy at first. For instance you draw this figure for the child (see drawing a.) and you must try in all kinds of ways to get him to feel in himself that this is not complete, that something is lacking. How you do this will of course depend on the individuality of the child. You will for instance say to hi: “Look, this goes down to here (left half) but this only comes down to here (right half, incomplete). But this doesn't look nice, coming right down to here and the

other side only so far.” Thus you will gradually get the child to complete this figure; he will really get the feeling that the figure is not finished, and must be completed; he will finally add this line to the figure. I will draw it in red; the child could of course do it equally well in white, but I am simply indicating in another colour what has to be added. At first he will be extremely clumsy, but gradually through balancing out the forms he will develop in himself observation which is permeated with thought, and thinking which is permeated with imaginative observation. His thinking will all be imagery.

And when I have succeeded in getting a few children in the class to complete things in this simple way, I can then go further with them. I shall draw some such figure as the following (see drawing b. left), and after making the child feel that this complicated figure is unfinished I shall induce him to put in what will make it complete (right hand part of drawing). In this way I shall arouse in him a feeling for form which will help him to experience symmetry and harmony.

This can be continued still further. I can for instance awaken in the child a feeling for the inner laws governing this

figure (see drawing c.). He will see that in one place the lines come together, and in another they separate. This closing together and separating again is something that I can easily bring to a child's experience.

Then I pass over to the next figure (see drawing d.). I make the curved lines straight, with angles, and the child then has to make the inner line correspond. It will be a difficult task with children of eight, but, especially at this age, it is a wonderful achievement if one can get them to do this with all sorts of figures, even if one has shown it to them beforehand. You should get the children to work out the inner lines for themselves; they must bear the same character as the ones in the previous figure but consist only of straight lines and angles.

This is the way to inculcate in the child a real feeling for form, harmony, symmetry, correspondence of lines and so on. And from this you can pass over to a conception of how an object is reflected; if this, let us say, is the surface of the water (see drawing e.), and here is some object, you must arouse in the child's mind a picture of how it will be in the reflection. In this manner you can lead the children to perceive other examples of harmony to be found in the world.

You can also help the child himself to become skilful and mobile in this pictorial imaginative thinking by saying to him: “Touch your right eye with your left hand! Touch your right eye with your right hand! Touch your left eye with your right hand! Touch your left shoulder with your right hand

from behind! Touch your right shoulder with your left hand! Touch your left ear with your right hand! Touch your left ear with your left hand! Touch the big toe of your right foot with your right hand!” and so on. You can thus make the child do all kinds of curious exercises, for example, “Describe a circle with your right hand round the left! Describe a circle with your left hand round the right! Describe two circles cutting each other with both hands! Describe two circles with one hand in one direction and with the other hand in the other direction. Do it faster and faster. Now move the middle finger of your right hand very quickly. Now the thumb, now the little finger.”

So the child can learn to do all kinds of exercises in a quick alert manner. What is the result? If he does these exercises when he is about eight years old, they will teach him how to think—to think for his whole life. Learning to think directly through the head is not the kind of thinking that will last him his life. He will become “thought-tired” later on. But if, on the other hand, he has to do actions with his own body which need great alertness in carrying out, and which need to be thought over first, then later on he will be wise and prudent in the affairs of his life, and there will be a noticeable connection between the wisdom of such a man in his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year and the exercises he did as a child of six or seven. Thus it is that the different epochs of life are connected with each other.

It is out of such a knowledge of man that one must try to work out what one has to bring into one's teaching.

Similarly one can achieve certain harmonies in colour. Suppose we do an exercise with the child by first of all painting something in red •;see drawing a.). Now we show him, by

arousing his feeling for it, that next to this red surface a green surface would be very harmonious. This of course must be carried out with paints, then it is easier to see. Now you can try to explain to the child that you are going to reverse the process. “I am going to put the green in here inside (see drawing b.); what will you put round it?” Then he will put red round it. By doing such things you will gradually lead to a feeling for the harmony of colours. The child comes to see that first I have a red surface here in the middle and green round it (see former drawing), but if the red becomes green, then the green must become red. It is of enormous importance just at this age, towards the eighth year, to let this correspondence of colour and form work upon the children.

Thus our lessons must all be given a certain inner form, and if such a method of teaching is to thrive, the one thing necessary is—to express it negatively—to dispense with the usual timetable. In the Waldorf School we have so-called “period teaching” and not a fixed timetable. We take one subject for from four to six weeks; the same subject is continued during that time. We do not have from 8–9 Arithmetic; 9–10 Reading, 10–11 Writing, but we take one subject which we pursue continuously in the Main Lesson morning by morning for four weeks, and when the children have gone sufficiently far with that subject we pass on to another. So that we never alternate by having Arithmetic from 8–9 and Reading 9–10, but we have Arithmetic alone for several weeks, then another subject similarly, according to what it may happen to be. There are, however, certain subjects which I shall deal with later that require a regular weekly timetable. But, as a rule, in the so-called “Main Lessons” we keep very strictly to the method of teaching in periods. During each period we take only one subject but these lessons can include other topics related to it.

We thereby save the children from what can work such harm in their soul life, namely that in one lesson they have to absorb what is then blotted out in the lesson immediately following. The only way to save them from this is to introduce period teaching.

Many will no doubt object that in this kind of teaching the children will forget what they have learnt. This only applies to certain special subjects, e.g. Arithmetic, and can be corrected by frequent little recapitulations. This question of forgetting is of very little account in most of the subjects, at any rate in comparison to the enormous gain to the child if the concentration on one subject for a certain period of time is adhered to.

• 1. Dr. Steiner retained the ancient oriental word “Karma” in speaking of the working of human destiny in repeated lives on earth. See Rudolf Steiner:Theosophy,chap. II.