The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Teaching Writing before Reading

This morning I attempted to describe the way knowledge itself must be transformed inwardly from mere knowledge about nature into higher forms of cognition. This allows our understanding of the whole human being and the growing child to be translated into an artistic approach to education and instruction. I can imagine that a certain question may arise: Assuming that a teacher thoroughly understands the physical body through pure observation and intellect, the etheric body through shaping activity, the astral body through the concept of music, and the I-being through insight into the true nature of speech, what practical application does this have?

Certainly, if we must describe education and instruction as a whole—as we have for Waldorf methods in these lectures—then we would have to say that the most important aspect of a teacher’s perspective on life and the world is not what we generally understand as a “worldview”—that would be completely theoretical. Instead, it is an aspect that, as a soul force, can enter the whole activity of the human being. Any teacher who tries to acquire the principles of education from today’s recognized knowledge of the human being would have to look elsewhere for the necessary inspiration. Hence the continual references to educational ideals that, however convincing they appear, always remain ineffective, because they are rooted in abstractions.

Nevertheless, true insight that penetrates the nature of the world and the human being will, by its very nature, enkindle inspiration in the human heart. While practicing their profession, teachers can always draw inspiration from the feeling of their relationship to the world and to their own being—like artists, whose work seems to live in their very marrow. The artist doesn’t need to go anywhere else for inspiration—it comes from the thing itself. Similarly, the inspiration found by teachers in their worldview, experienced internally and constantly renewed, is carried into the soul constitution of the children entrusted to them. Such inspiration lives in everything the teacher does at school.

Those who have insight into the human being have the ability to perceive that a musical element flows into harmony with the formative processes in the inner being of the child during the elementary years, between the change of teeth and puberty. Such a person will never be likely to stray from the right way of teaching, writing, and reading to children. They have a living understanding that writing—particularly as described here—mobilizes the whole being; it uses the arms and hands and permeates them with spirit that exercises the whole person.

These are the very aspects of the human being that will be perceived in a living way if we begin with a view of the world such as I described this morning. It also helps to become clear that reading is merely a pursuit of the head, an unbalanced activity for the human being. The teacher will sense that such onesidedness is suitable only for children whose whole being has become active. Thus, teachers who take hold of this insight into the human being will be careful to develop writing from painting and drawing (as I described) until children can write what they experience in their deepest being in words or sentences.

When children have reached a certain level of development, they can speak and then write what they have said. This is when it becomes appropriate to teach reading. Reading is easy to teach once writing has been somewhat developed. After children have begun work within their own being—in the nervous system and limbs, in the substance of their writing and reading, and in their inner participation in producing reading material—only then are they ready for one-sided activity. Then, without any danger to their development as human beings, the head can become active, and what they first learned by writing is turned into reading.

It really comes down to this: week after week and month after month, the germinating human being must be promoted to activity that suits the developing forces of the human organization. It is important to decide what should be done at each stage by reading the particular way each human being tries to evolve. It doesn’t work to use schedules that limit some activity to an hour or forty-five minutes, then jump to something else, and again to a third lesson, and so on. Consequently, we have introduced a system of instruction into the Waldorf school where the same subject is taught during the early morning hours for several weeks at a time. In this approach to teaching—so-called “block” teaching, which is characteristic of Waldorf education—students immerse themselves in the subject; they are not torn away as soon as they meet it.

In everything that must be presented to children between the change of teeth and puberty we have to discover ways of reading what is needed through the demands of human nature itself. When it is a matter of gradually leading children into a real relationship to their own being and the world, it is most important that the teachers themselves have a real relationship to the world. In contemporary culture, of course, no matter how educated people may be, they cannot really acquire an inwardly alive and rich relationship to the world and their own being. This is yet another radical statement, but we must not be afraid of real insight into what must be gradually introduced into our civilization.

Understanding Cosmic Forces

Above all, it is necessary that the teachers themselves should not, in their own development, fall into what might be called a “cosmic parochialism,” but rather look beyond what is strictly earthly and realize that, as human beings, they depend on nourishment not only from their immediate environment, but from the whole cosmos. Naturally, it is very difficult to speak of these things today in an unbiased way, since our culture offers little support for people’s attempts to look beyond their dependence on the earthly elements. Consequently, old teachings emanating from earlier instinctive concepts are often carried into the present without any understanding, which leads to superstition. In reality, all that the modern mainstream culture can offer is no more than a kind of “cosmic parochialism,” because this culture has not as yet produced ideas that would extend from Earth into the cosmos. We have calculations, or at least spectrum analysis, to teach us (or purport to teach us) about the course and position of the stars, their substance, and so on. Nevertheless, the intimate knowledge that comes from entering into a close relationship with the essential nature of the Earth cannot be acquired—in terms of the extraterrestrial cosmos—from the mainstream culture of today. The concepts that human beings formulate about such things as cabbage, spinach, venison, and so on, are completely different from those acquired through abstract, intellectual science. We eat those things, and abstract thought has nothing to do with eating! We do not eat to gain practical experience in what modern science tells us about the hare, for example; we get a much more concrete and intimate experience of it through taste and digestion.

In terms of the surrounding cosmos beyond Earth, our knowledge is such that we have no intimate relationships at all. If everything we knew about the hare were equivalent to what astronomy and spectrum analysis know about the extraterrestrial universe, and if we only knew the results of calculations of the relative positions of the bones and relative proportions of various substances within the hare, our relationship to it would be merely scientific; we would never find our way into any human relationship. It could never give us what the experienced human relationship to the hare can provide. People do not realize these days that in a more ancient, instinctive wisdom, people had an equally intimate relationship with the cosmos. If only they could acquire a true concept of that ancient wisdom, they would, at this more advanced stage of their soul’s growth, again receive the impulse to look for a new wisdom in this area, a wisdom that can be as intimate in the human sense as the science of the natural objects in the earthly realm.

I would like to illustrate this with an example to show how important it is that teachers acquire a living relationship to the world. Teachers derive from that relationship the necessary enthusiasm to translate what should exist in the teacher’s own soul into simple, visual pictures for the child. A teacher needs a truly consecrated relationship to the world. In the presence of the active child, this becomes the world of imagery that a child needs for help in progressing properly in harmony with the demands of human evolution. For example, we are surrounded by the world of plants; to ordinary sense-perception it presents many enigmas.

Goethe encountered many of these questions. He followed the growing plant forms in their various metamorphoses, and through observing the plants’ growth he was led to a remarkable principle that pours new life into all our knowledge of the plant world. His principle may be described in this way: Let’s begin by observing the seed, which we place in the ground and from which the plant grows. Seen from the outside, the life of the plant is comprEssentialEd to a point in the seed. We then see the seed unfold, and life spreads out farther and farther, until it has fully unfolded in the first budding leaves. Then it contracts into the narrow channel of the stem, continues to the next leaf connection, and there it spreads out again, only to contract again into the stem toward the next leaf cluster, and so on. Eventually there is a final contraction when a new germ, or seed, is formed, and within that, the whole life of the plant again contracts to a single physical point. This is Goethe’s contribution—how the growing plant shows an alternation: expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction.

Goethe looked deep into plant formation as an effluence of the plant’s own life. However, the time was not ripe for him to relate to the world as a whole the formula he found for plant life, since the whole world and its forces are always involved in the ways any being lives and has its own being. With the help of contemporary spiritual science, or anthroposophic science, however, we now can extend Goethe’s formula, as you can see for yourself in the spiritual scientific literature (and here I will only touch on this).

One will find there that what lives in the expansion of the plant’s being is what comes from the Sun. The Sun is not merely what is described by astronomy and spectrum analysis; with the Sun’s rays, spiritual forces stream and interweave down to the Earth. In this ensoulment of sunlight we have the element that, for example, determines expansion in the growth of the plant. It is not just that the Sun shines on the plant and causes it to expand; rather, the forces of growth in the plant itself have a sun-like quality that plants reflect back. On the other hand, whenever we witness contraction—whenever plant growth contracts back to a point in the passage from one leaf bud to the next, or in the formation of the seed—these are being influenced by the Moon’s forces. Just as we see a rhythmic interchange of sunlight and moonlight in the cosmos, so we also see it reflected in the budding plant that responds to the activity of the Sun in the expansion of the leaves, and the Moon activity in the phenomena of contraction. Expansion and contraction in the plant are the reflected image of what pours down to Earth from cosmic, etheric space in an interchange of forces coming from Sun and Moon.

Here we have expanded our gaze from the Earth to etheric, cosmic spaces, and we get an impression of how the Earth, in a certain sense, nourishes her forces of fruitfulness and growth from what flows to her from the cosmos. We come to feel how, by making a detour through the plants, we grow together with the spirit of Sun and Moon. Here we are brought into contact with things that are usually left to the domain of calculation or spectrum analysis. The inspiration necessary for teaching growing children anything about humankind’s relationship to the universe cannot be gotten from mere abstract observation—that a leaf is or isn’t indented at its edges, or has this or that appearance. No inspiration will flow from this. Such inspiration does come, however, when the rhythmic reflection of Sun and Moon is revealed to us in the growth of various plants.

How wonderful the perception of surrounding nature becomes when we observe a plant that has a regular growth—for example, the buttercup. Here we find something sent up by the Earth as it surrenders itself lovingly to cosmic Sun and Moon forces, paying homage equally to both. Or look at a plant, such as the cactus, with its stalk portion widened out. What does this reveal? In the contraction manifested elsewhere by the stalk, we perceive Moon forces. When the stalk itself wants to expand, we see a struggle between Sun and Moon influences. The form of each plant reveals how Sun and Moon act together within it. Each individual plant is a “miniature world,” a reflection of the greater world. Just as we see our own image in a mirror, in the mirror of growth on Earth, we see what is happening beyond in the cosmos.

Ancient, instinctive wisdom was conscious of such things, and what follows offers proof of this. In the plant life that buds from the Earth in spring, people saw a cosmic reflection of the relationship between Sun forces and Moon forces. Thus, spring was celebrated with the Easter festival, whose date was determined by the relationship between Sun and Moon. The Easter festival occurs on the first Sunday after the spring full moon. The time of the Easter festival is therefore determined in reference to the cosmos—the relationship between Sun and Moon. What people of those ancient times might have implied was this: When we see plants budding in spring, we are faced with the enigma of why they appear sometimes earlier and sometimes later. The fact that the time of the spring full moon plays an essential role in all these processes of budding and sprouting allows us to get to the heart of this riddle.

There are other factors, of course, but it is generally apparent that the interplay between Sun and Moon is exprEssentialEd in what happens in spring, when one year the plants appear earlier and another, later. What might people say, however, if they acknowledge only parochial, scientific thinking about the Earth’s dependence on the cosmos? They will say: The reason plants appear earlier in a particular year is due to less snow or because the snow melted more quickly; or that the delayed appearance of plants means that there was more snow. This is, of course, an easy explanation, but in fact it is not an explanation at all. Real insight comes only when we perceive that plant growth depends on the activity of Sun and Moon forces, and then go on to recognize that a shorter or longer duration of snow also depends on the Sun and Moon. The timing of the plants’ appearance is determined by the same thing that determines the duration of the snow; the climatic and meteorological conditions in any given year are themselves subject to cosmic influences.

By continuing to develop these matters, we gain insights into the life of the Earth on her journey through the cosmos. We say that human beings thrive when there are plenty of cows, and they get a lot of milk, because we can point to the obvious human dependence on the immediate earthly environment. When we consider this connection, we are looking at human life from a nutritional perspective. Things come alive for us only when we perceive their relationship to their surroundings and how they transform what they receive from their environment.

When we behold the Earth wandering through cosmic space and taking into herself elements flowing from the Sun, Moon, and stars, we see the Earth as alive in the cosmos. We do not evolve a dead geology or geography but raise what these dead sciences have to offer into a description of the Earth’s life in the cosmos; the Earth becomes a living being before our spiritual vision. In the plants springing from the Earth, we see the Earth reproducing what she received from the cosmos. The Earth and her plant growth become a unity; we realize what nonsense it is to tear a plant out of the Earth and then examine it from root to blossom, imagining that we are viewing reality. It is no more reality than a hair torn from a human head. The hair belongs to the whole organism, and it can be understood only as a part of the whole organism. To tear out a hair and study it in isolation is just as absurd as uprooting a plant to study it in isolation. The hair must be studied in connection with the human organism and the plant in connection with the whole living Earth.

In this way a person’s own being is woven with the living Earth; an individual no longer goes around feeling subjected only to the Earth’s forces, but also perceives in the environment what is working in from etheric distances. We have a living perception of the way forces from the cosmos are active everywhere—drawing the etheric body to themselves just as the physical body is drawn to the Earth. We then acquire a natural perception of the etheric body’s tendency to pass into cosmic space, just as we sense gravity drawing our physical body down to Earth. Our vision continues to expand so that knowledge becomes inner life and can become truly effective. Having believed the Earth to be a lifeless body in the cosmos, such knowledge now gives life to her. We must return again to a living cognition, just as we still see the after-effects in such things as the determination of Easter time. But such insight into the cosmos must result from consciously developed knowledge—not from the instinctive knowledge of earlier ages.

The Child’s Need for Imagery in the Tenth Year

This cosmic insight lives in us in such a way that we can artistically shape it into the pictures we need. Someone who, when confronting the cosmos, sees the Sun and Moon determining all plant growth, feels the inspiration that can arise from these living intuitions; and that person’s story of the plants is very different from the story of someone else who absorbs and elaborates the abstract concepts of modern texts on botany. The concept can grow rich in feeling and be communicated artistically to the child.

At around the tenth year, children are ready for what the teacher can make of this far-reaching vision. If one shows in living pictures how the Earth as a whole is a living being—how it has plants the way a person has hair, though in greater complexity—and if one builds a living unity between the living being Earth and the plants growing here or there, a kind of expansion occurs in the child’s soul. Whenever we communicate something about the nature of the plants in this way, it is like bringing fresh air to someone who had been living until now in a stifling atmosphere—one can breathe freely in this fresh air. This expansion of the soul is the real result of this kind of knowledge—a knowledge that is truly equal to the task of understanding the mysteries of the universe.

Do not say that children are too immature for ideas such as this. Any teacher in whom these ideas are alive, and who is backed by this worldview, will know how to express them in ways children are prepared for, in ways that their whole being can agree with. Once such things are internalized by the teacher, the capacity to simplify them pictorially is also present, Whatever a teacher gives to the child must flow from this background, and thus a relationship between the child and the world is truly established. This leads the teacher to transform everything naturally into living pictures, since it simply becomes impossible to explain abstractly what I have said about the plant realm. The only way to convey this to children is to unfold it in vivid pictures, which appeal to the whole human being and not merely to the intellect.

You will quickly see the animation in children as they grasp something presented to them pictorially. They will not answer with a concept that merely comes from the lips—one that cannot be really formed yet—but they will tell a story using their arms and hands and all kinds of body language. Children will act in a way that uses the whole being; above all, these actions and signals will reveal the children’s inner experience and their difficulty in understanding a subject. The best and most noble thing in acquiring knowledge is the feeling that it is difficult, that it costs effort to get hold of things. Those who imagine they can get to the heart of something—insofar as it is necessary—merely through clever words have no reverence for the things of the world, and such reverence is a part of what makes a whole and perfect human being—to the degree that perfection is possible in earthly existence.

The only way human beings can build a right relationship to the world is by feeling how helpless they are when they want to arrive at the real essence of things, and how the whole being must be brought into play. Only when the teacher has a proper relationship to the world can the child also establish one. Pedagogy must be alive. It involves more than just applying oneself; it must come to flower from the very life situations of education. And it can do this when it grows from the teachers’ living experience of their own being in the cosmos.

The Human Being as a Symphony of the Tones in Animals

If musical understanding—which I mentioned this morning—has truly taught the teacher about the reality of the human astral body, providing a concept of the human being itself as a wonderful, inwardly organized musical instrument, such an understanding of the astral body will open an even broader understanding of the whole relation between the human being and the world. Naturally, this cannot be conveyed to children in the way I am going to express it, but it can be presented in pictures.

Teachers who have a knowledge of their own astral body, sounding inwardly in musical forms, should view the human being and the various animal forms that exist in the world. They can then understand the deep meaning contained in an old instinctual wisdom, which represented the human being as a coalescence of four beings—three lower and one higher: lion, bull, eagle, and angel. The bull represents an unbalanced development of the lowest forces of human nature. Picture the forces in the human metabolic-limb system without any balancing forces in the head and rhythmic systems; in other words, imagine an unbalanced and prevailing development of the metabolic-limb system. Here we have a one-sided formation that presents itself to us as the bull. We can thus imagine that if this bull nature were toned down by the human head organization, it would develop into something like the human being. If the central rhythmic system is developed in an unbalanced way—for example, through a contraction of the abdominal system or a stunting of the head system—we can picture it as lion nature.

If, however, there is one-sided development of the head organism in such a way that the forces otherwise existing in the inner part of the head push out into “feathers,” we get a bird, or eagle nature. If we imagine forces that enable these three qualities to harmonize as a unity that can manifest by adding the angelic fourth, we get a synthesis of the three—the human being. This is a schematic way of presenting these things, but it shows our human relationship to the surrounding animal world. In this sense; human beings are not related just to the bull, eagle, and lion, but to all earthly animal forms. In each animal form we can find an unbalanced development of one of the organic systems of the human being. These things were alive in the instinctive wisdom of ancient times.

There was still a tradition in later times that was exprEssentialEd paradoxically, because people themselves no longer had such vision but created intellectual elaborations of the old perceptions. In an odd passage, Oken asks us to suppose that the human tongue were developed in a one-sided way. Actually, it is toned down, or moderated, by the forces of the head, because the tongue serves the stomach (regardless of its spatial distance from it), and so on. Suppose, however, that it were developed one-sidedly. If a being were only tongue and all the rest only appendage, what would the tongue be then—a cuttlefish; the tongue is a cuttlefish! Now, of course, this is an exaggeration, but it retains something of the ancient perception translated into modern intellectualism. It is nonsense, but it originated with something that once had deep meaning. The soul attitude that underlies ancient knowledge can be rediscovered; we can rediscover how to conceive of the human being as divided, as it were, into all the various animal forms that exist on Earth. And if we bring them all together—so that each is harmonized by the others—we get the human being.

Thus, when we determine humankind’s relationship to the animal kingdom through observation, we find the relationship between the astral body and the outer world. We must apply a musical understanding to the astral body. I gaze into the human being, and out toward the myriad animal forms. It’s as if we were to take a symphony where all the tones sound together in a wonderful, harmonious, and melodious whole and, over the course of time, separated each tone from the others and juxtaposed them.

As we look out into the animal world, we have the single tones. As we look into the human astral body and what it builds in the physical and etheric bodies, we have the symphony. If we go beyond an intellectual view of the world and have enough cognitive freedom to rise to artistic knowledge, we develop an inner reverence, permeated with religious fervor, for the invisible being—the marvelous world composer—who first arranged the tones in the various animal forms, and then created the human being as a symphony of the phenomena of animal nature. This is what we must carry in our souls as teachers. If I understand my relationship to the world in this way, a true enthusiasm in the presence of world creation and world formation will flow into my descriptions of the animal forms. Every word and gesture in my teaching as a whole will be permeated by religious fervor—not just abstract concepts and natural laws.

Such things show us that instruction and education must not come from accumulated knowledge, which is then applied, but from a living abundance. A teacher comes into the class with the fullness of this abundance, and when dealing with children, it’s as though they found before them a voice for the world mysteries pulsating and streaming through the teacher, as though merely an instrument through which the world speaks to the child. There is then a real inner, enlivening quality in the method of instruction, not just superficial pedantry. Enthusiasm must not be artificially produced, but blossom like a flower from the teacher’s relationship to the world; this is the important thing.

In our discussion of a genuine method for teaching and the living foundations of education, we must speak of enthusiasm stimulated not by theoretical, abstract insight, but by true insight into the world. When we approach children who are between the change of teeth and puberty in this way, we can guide them in the right way toward puberty. As soon as puberty arrives, the astral body begins to unfold its independence. What was previously absorbed as the “music of the world” continues to develop within them. It is remarkable that the intellect now comprehends what has been developed in pictures and what was appropriated by the soul in an inwardly musical, sculptural sense and in living pictures during the period between the change of teeth and puberty. The human intellect does not absorb anything of what we force on it intellectually from outside; before the intellect can receive anything, it must first develop within the individual in a different way.

An important fact then comes into play. Something that one had all along is understood in an inwardly directed way—something that was prepared and supports puberty in the person who developed in a healthy way. All that was understood through images now arises from the inner wellspring. Proceeding to intellectual activity involves the human being looking into the self. I now take hold of my own being within myself and through myself. The astral body with its musical activity beats in rhythm with the etheric body with its shaping activity. In a healthy person, after puberty, a chord is sounded within the human being; it results in an awareness of one’s self. And when there is this concordance between the two sides of an individual’s nature, after puberty the person truly experiences inner freedom as a result of understanding for the first time what was merely perceived earlier.

The most important thing for which we can prepare a child is the experience of freedom, at the right moment in life, through the understanding of one’s own being. True freedom is an inward experience and is developed only when the human being is viewed in this way. As a teacher, I must say that I cannot pass on freedom to another human being—each must experience it individually. Nevertheless, I must plant something within the person—something intact because I have left it untouched—to which that person’s own intact being feels attracted and into which it may become immersed. This is the wonderful thing I have accomplished. I have educated within the human being what must be educated. In reverence to the Godhead in every individual human being, I have left untouched those things that may only be taken hold of by the self. I educate everything in the human being except what belongs to the self, and then I wait for it to take hold of what I have invoked. I do not coarsely handle the development of the human I, but prepare the soil for its development, which takes hold after puberty.

If I educate intellectually before puberty—if I offer abstract concepts or ready-made, sharply outlined observations instead of growing, living pictures—I am violating the human being and crudely handling the I within. I truly educate only when I leave the I untouched and wait until it can grasp what I have prepared through education. In this way, together with the child, I look forward to a time when I can say, “Here the I is being born in freedom; I have only prepared the ground so that the I may become conscious of its own being.

If I have educated the child this way until puberty, I find before me a human being who may say, “When I was not yet fully human, you gave me something that, now that it is possible, enables me to become fully human myself.” In other words, I have educated so that, with every look, every movement, the human being says to me, “You have accomplished something with me; and my freedom has been left whole. You have made it possible for me to grant myself my own freedom at the right moment in life. You have done something that enables me to stand before you now, shaping myself as a human being from my individuality, which you left reverently untouched.”

This may never be said in so many words, but it lives, nonetheless, in the human being who has received the right kind of education during the elementary school years.

The next lecture will show that there is much more to be done so that education and teaching may accommodate what the human being encounters after puberty.

Roman Boos: The aim of this evening is to strengthen the awareness of those present and to clarify the idea of what concrete effects of what is intended at the Goetheanum can be expected in the near or distant future. The task should be such that the course should give the participants something to take away, so that everyone has the opportunity to say or know where they can help, where they can actively participate in the work.

The first thing to be discussed is the idea that in the very near future, the spiritual life must be detached with the greatest intensity from the entanglement in the powers of the state. The political states, in the West as well as in the East, are no longer even able to economically maintain the usurped school supervision rights. Schools are to be established over those areas that were not involved in the economic collapse and want to emerge from the spiritual collapse. The idea of a world school association on an international basis was indeed expressed and carried out in a large number of meetings in Holland a few weeks ago. And so today, Dutch friends have promised to share more information about this World School Association. And I would also like to point out in this regard that those gathered here can be trusted to help the World School Association become a reality.

The enterprises founded under Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG were also set up to grow into what are currently unlimited expanses. What grew up as a Stinnes group, for example, has joined forces with the worst of existences; if such a monster were to receive international credit, it would be to the detriment of healthy development. It is therefore necessary to gain a foothold in economic life, to bring into being economic associations that do justice to the international dimension; it is necessary to seek the way forward in international discussions. In order to say something internationally significant, it will be necessary to speak across the divides created by the currency situation, of the future and of the day to come.

We are being accosted from all sides. And so it is an absolute necessity for the continuation of our work in Switzerland and beyond that we are given the opportunity to regularly publish a journal here at the Goetheanum, at least a weekly publication, in which we do not have to continually polemicize and discussions — although this will sometimes be necessary — but in which brief sketches and suggestions could be used to outline what is actually at stake here, and in which the international idea of a world school association or a world economic association, in particular, would have to be expressed again and again. In a sense, here in Switzerland we still have a foundation that we can speak of more clearly and impressively than anywhere else. Otherwise the Goetheanum would have to remain silent if it cannot make itself known in this way. Actually, very few people have come to this course. The Goetheanum itself, as a work of art, as a building, as a physical reality, has not yet been permeated with sufficient intensity. It is becoming necessary to carry out what is to be achieved for the whole world from the Goetheanum.

All those who have the opportunity to help us find the economic basis for such a newspaper are warmly invited to do so. We have to calculate 50,000 francs for one year; we cannot start before then. The reason we cannot start before then is that otherwise we might have to stop the project again after a while. If any of you could help to ensure that the newspaper can be published, you would be doing a great service that could hardly be achieved in any other way under the present circumstances.

Elisabeth Vreede: I would like to say a few words about the 'World School Association'. It is actually more of an appeal than a concrete foundation. The first steps towards the founding of a World School Association have been taken in the Netherlands, in order to get a world-wide response to what would now have to be done, and that is to liberate spiritual life, especially education, and make it independent. The hope has been expressed that this can be done in Holland. On February 27, Dr. Steiner gave a captivating lecture in The Hague on “Educational, Teaching and Practical Life Issues from the Perspective of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science” and drew attention to the necessity of a free spiritual life and of the school's detachment from state authority, which was met with strong applause from the audience. Afterwards, our member, Mr. de Haan, addressed an appeal to those present. As a result, a number of things have happened; people with good reputations have become interested in working for independent schools. Representatives from Switzerland, Germany and England expressed their conviction of the necessity of a world school association and promised to work for the cause in their own countries. A similar thing happened the next day in Amsterdam. But the World School Association was not yet founded, because such a foundation is only of value if it arises from within, so to speak. But we must not draw the conclusion that nothing should be done; rather, the most intensive work is needed to bring about a concrete foundation.

The first thing to be done now is to approach all educated people with a kind of prospectus - they are, after all, fundamentally interested in a free spiritual life; Dr. Steiner has given the guidelines for this. An appeal is to be made to all educated people to join us in providing our movement with the breeding ground and the air it needs to thrive. Since the whole thing started in Holland, I would like to draw attention to the address of Mr. de Haan, Utrecht; he is willing to provide information. From the events of the past few years, enough has emerged to show how important and significant it is, but also how much work will be needed if something like this is to be undertaken. So let us make an appeal that will find an echo throughout the educated world, so to speak.

(Applause)

Josef van Leer: Dear attendees, a few weeks ago the World School Association was discussed for the first time in The Hague and in Amsterdam. However, nothing will come of it if we do not take action immediately. We did have about 150 names that evening in The Hague, but you can't do anything with just names. Our friends in the Netherlands have the good will, but they are too weak.

A little less than ten years ago, similar discussions were held in Berlin, when Baron von Walleen spoke about his experiences on lecture tours in Scandinavia and England and said that it was so difficult to present Dr. Steiner's ideas there; what is today the Anthroposophical Society emerged from these discussions.

If you talk about an independent spiritual life in England today, everyone will say: We don't need one, we have one. That is an abstraction, of course, but that is how it is; as far as the people in England belong to the bourgeoisie, they can educate their children as they wish, they do not need certified teachers. If you have to propagate the World School Association in England, you are dealing with something quite different than in Germany or in Holland or in Switzerland. I believe that Scandinavia, Holland, England — even if it is not neutral, but it does not matter — all the countries that do not belong to the medium-sized states, should join together. In Holland, one has gained plenty of confidence, but the 25 sounding names do not help much. Dr. Steiner gave about ten lectures in Holland, but of the thousands who were there, not three voted in favor of it. It will be difficult to get only these three.

The question was raised: How do we propagate? — It is necessary to work differently for each country. Our friends in Stuttgart know best what to do because they are in the work. I would therefore like to suggest that we people from different countries — America, England, France, Switzerland, Italy — that we sit down together and say this evening: we will do it this way! I would like to propose this right now. Who from all the countries represented here is willing to participate? Let's start with America: Mr. Monges? Mr. Wheeler from England? Miss Wilson from England? Norway, Sweden: Mrs. Ljungquist? Denmark: Mr. Hohlenberg? Finland: Mr. Donner? Russia? From the Netherlands: Mr. Ledebour, Mr. Zagwijn, Mr. Deventer? From France: Mademoiselle Rihouet? Italy: Miss Schwarz? Czechoslovakia and Poland? I would therefore like to suggest that the various people sit down together and consider what is right for their countries, how it should be done, which people should be approached, which people can be given which material. It is possible that the representatives of a particular country are not in a position to make the right decision, but then perhaps together we will be able to find something better.

I would like to put up for discussion whether what I have suggested would be the right starting point.

Roman Boos: It could be very valuable to speak in smaller groups for each area this evening. But I would just like to ask very sincerely that when personalities are chosen, the matter should not be considered in the same way as parliaments or other associations: as a mandate to work like a commission. We should not put off until the evening what should be done during the day: to promote the idea of the World School Association in each individual group. We just have to try to see how what we have to say can be expressed in the other countries.

Johannes Hohlenberg: I would like to report on the work in Denmark regarding the World School Association. Unfortunately, in terms of results, it is not very much, but it may serve as an example for others. In the last fall course, particular emphasis was placed on the fact that everyone who goes back to their country should talk to as many people as possible and spread the idea of the World School Association. All those who were here have probably done what they could.

Now, to my personal experiences: I gave various lectures in Copenhagen, but unfortunately the timing was bad, because a few years ago the state took over almost all schools from the communities. This is a new fact, two or three years old, not yet fully implemented everywhere. Teachers are generally satisfied because their economic and financial situation has improved a lot and, as civil servants, they have the prospect of a pension. The teaching staff is therefore very reluctant to make any changes to these conditions. But on the other hand, there is a great deal of dissatisfaction among parents with the school system that exists in Denmark today; parents would be willing to try something new. The main difficulty, however, is financial. It should not be forgotten that state schools are completely free of charge; school lessons, materials and books are free.

The only possible way to establish independent schools would be as in Stuttgart, namely a large factory that takes it all in hand. In Denmark, it is just mainly a financial issue, quite simply! If a way could be found to establish such schools that would not cost more than the state schools, then the children would come and the parents would be very satisfied. I have collected a list of names – there are perhaps no more than 200 of them, so it is still nothing – and I am convinced that if you really do the propaganda, you can find real understanding.

Elisabeth Vreede: You have to do the right thing. As Dr. Steiner explained in Holland, it is not primarily a matter of founding individual schools that can only exist on the side and that can only gain their right to exist by stealth; it is about something much bigger: to really implement a free spiritual life! Today, we have a spiritual life that needs fresh air above all and that will wither without it. In this mood, the demand must arise in public: spiritual life must be liberated!

This does not mean that individual schools, such as the Waldorf School, cannot be founded. But it is not enough to found a school or institute here and there. Legally, they all have a meager existence. They always have a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, whether they are legal or not. Schools that depend on the mercy of the state should not be established.

Our Goetheanum is also a school, a free university. First and foremost, a world school association should be created that would feel the need to support or maintain such institutions as the Waldorf School and the Goetheanum. It is necessary that something concrete is already there. There are also teachers' associations, artists' associations; for them it would be a positive goal to work towards the need for a free spiritual life. The goal must be set higher than just setting up individual schools; everything must be seen on a larger scale so that the larger context is also recognized.

We have heard that in Denmark the teachers are very satisfied because they have become “state teachers” and are better paid. We cannot turn to the teaching profession in general; those who are involved in the matter are often the most dried up and do not have the broad view. This public opinion and mood must arise from a broader base than the teaching profession is or can be. Then the national differences will not carry as much weight as they would otherwise, because that would act as a unifying force. The points of view must be taken from the big picture, so that one encompasses everything that one can experience as a human being in our intellectual life, and elevates it to a different level; otherwise we get stuck in the details too much.

Roman Boos: It would be good if, in the discussion, a position could be taken on the recently asserted claim that Switzerland is a country in which a free

spiritual life can develop fully. Mademoiselle Rihouet has the floor first.

Simone Rihouet: I would just like to express a wish for France, that here at the Goetheanum this international purpose may be fully expressed and that the national may not again triumph over the international. It is striking to see that in France we have exactly the same situation as in Germany regarding the schools. But Swiss teachers, for example, who feel so little compulsion from the state, are not in the same situation as teachers in France and Germany, where the state's influence is so strong that there is already a great need among teachers for liberation and independence in their profession. In France, it will be particularly the student body that will show an understanding for the free spiritual impulses that have been given here. And so, as far as France is concerned – I cannot speak for Germany – I would like to express the wish that a student body should emerge from France that could create an alliance with its colleagues from other countries, an alliance of brotherhood.

Roman Boos: These words from France are all the more warmly welcomed to us because a certain kind of intense fraternization has already arisen on the opposing side. At about the same time that in Germany there was talk of “treason of the fatherland” by Rudolf Steiner and the Anthroposophists, a similar claim was circulating in the French newspapers, namely that Dr. Steiner's circles were working towards a war of revenge that would last for three years. And in the face of this “League of Nations” of the opposing clans, it will be necessary for an association of people from different nations to form here and work from the Goetheanum.

A German student talks about the attitudes of young people at the universities and the possibility of winning them over to the anthroposophical cause.

Fritz Wullschleger: I would like to speak briefly as a Swiss citizen. It is indeed the case in our country that teachers themselves can exercise a great deal of freedom, for example, in relation to the cantonal government; but they can also exert a great deal of influence on the authorities. If you want to introduce changes in your school, you can request them and they will usually be granted.

Now, I believe that these college courses have a tremendous impact on us. And under this tremendous impact, we can now try to approach our colleagues in conferences and so on and try to create an understanding for the fertilization of the school, at least to make a start in shaping the spiritual life freely. I heard Dr. Steiner's lectures in Basel this spring and – I speak as a teacher – I have so far had the impression that our task is to reshape our teaching as much as possible in the way that anthroposophy demands. Does that mean that we should transfer all our manpower into our schools? No, we should also direct our time and energy and work outwards. We must try to inform the Swiss, perhaps with lectures; we must try to win over the Swiss teacher magazine and, above all, the cantonal teacher magazine. This could perhaps be a start in making a difference in this direction.

Roman Boos: We thank Mr. Wullsch and I would like to take the liberty of adding just a few words to what has been said. In recent years, teacher newspapers in Switzerland have reprinted various articles and reports from our circles, including the excellent essays in the education booklet. But since then, there has not been much interest in the work; there are not many Swiss teachers present at these courses. Imagine if it said in the invitation: “Cantonal Department of Education” – don't you think the hall would be full? These are the small criteria by which one can see whether intellectual life among teachers in Switzerland is truly freely developed.

About a year and a half ago, the teachers of Basel-Stadt were invited by the cantonal education department, and the lectures on educational issues were received with great enthusiasm; a number of school people spoke very enthusiastically about them. Subsequently, a course was set up by the Goetheanum – not by the education department – but there were considerably fewer people there than at the course organized by the education department. And what has grown out of these courses today is, so to speak, nothing. Individual teachers may have taken very great and valuable things from the course, but in social terms, virtually nothing has happened. Why? Because nothing can happen! Because people everywhere are bound by the state. As the student says: we can win every ground, but not the state ground. This can be seen more or less clearly in Switzerland too; because if it were not the case here, we would be making more intensive progress. A long time ago there was a lecture in St. Gallen; and a Swiss teacher came who said: It is quite different for us in Switzerland; we do not have this subservience towards the authorities. We have not been accustomed to censorship and official decrees and so on. And when it was pointed out to him that this was not entirely true, the man replied: Yes, there is a big difference, because we did it voluntarily!

Friedrich Husemann talks about medical education in Germany.

Roman Boos: In order to provide the necessary economic basis for the entire spiritual movement, the two joint-stock companies Futurum AG and Der Kommende Tag AG have been founded in Dornach and Stuttgart. It was intended to say more about these two companies this evening and to give the opportunity to ask questions. But I think it will now be too late to go into it.

Futurum brochures are available in German, French and English, so that everyone has the opportunity to support the cause by subscribing to shares in the manner indicated. You can also contact Mr. Ith at Futurum A. G., who can personally provide you with all the necessary information. It is absolutely necessary in this day and age that we support these economic enterprises with all the strength at our disposal to help them move forward.

Time is getting very late, so that not much more can be debated on the other questions that may still be outstanding. Perhaps someone has something significant to contribute? I would now like to give Dr. Steiner the floor for the final remarks.

Rudolf Steiner: I do not wish to keep you much longer, but I would like to make a few comments, first in connection with what our friend van Leer has proposed here, which is certainly quite commendable and will be, if it leads to the promised goal. I would just like to note that it would be a questionable basis if the matter were to be built on the same foundation as the “covenant” to which [Mr. van Leer] has referred. At that time, work was indeed carried out with a certain zeal in the way Mr. van Leer has roughly outlined today: people sat together in small committees, discussed all sorts of things, what should be done and so on – but then Mr. van Leer made a statement, which is of course a small mistake at first, but which, if it were to continue to have an effect, could lead to a big mistake. It was said, in fact, that the Anthroposophical Society emerged from the work that was so tirelessly carried out that night. No, that is not the case at all: nothing emerged from that night and from that founding of the society! I would like to protect the “restless work of this night” that is intended today from this fate. There was a lot of talk back then about what needed to be done, but nothing came of it. And the mistake that could arise is based on the fact that one might think that something must now be done in the direction indicated by that “covenant”. What was done at that time was that those who were already involved in our anthroposophical work, who were already with us, founded the Anthroposophical Society, quite separately from this covenant. This then developed further, while the “covenant” gradually passed from a gentle sleep into social death, let us say. So, it would be a small mistake! And this must be emphasized, so that the mistakes of that night committee are not repeated in its second edition. That is one thing.

The other point I would like to make, and which Miss Vreede has already mentioned, is that what should be aimed at with the world school association should now really be put on a broad footing and tackled from the outset with a certain courage and a comprehensive view. Our friend Mr. van Leer quite rightly emphasized that the approach to be taken to the free life of the spirit in connection with the threefold social order must be different for the most diverse fields. But this must really be done in such a way that the approach is appropriate for the territories concerned. I myself will always point out that, for example, in England it will be necessary to present things in a way that is appropriate to the English civilization. But one must not overlook the fact that one must thoroughly understand what is imagination in relation to the great human questions of the present and what is reality. One must not, therefore, put the case in such a way as to create the belief that English intellectual life is freer than other countries. And you will see, if you really go through the “key points”, that there is less emphasis on the negative aspect – the liberation of intellectual life from the state – and much less emphasis on it than on the establishment of a free intellectual life in general. And here it will always remain a good word: that it depends on the human being, that it really depends on the spiritual foundations from which the human being emerges, which spiritual foundations are created for his education. It is not so much a matter of emphasizing the negative, but rather of emphasizing the positive. And I need only say this: if intellectual life were formally freed from state control, but everything else remained the same, then this liberation from the state would not be of much use.

The point is that positive spirit, as it has been advocated here this week, as it has been tried to advocate it, that this free spirit be introduced into intellectual life internationally. And then things will happen as they are meant to happen. For example, it is not just the case that a Waldorf school is a truly independent school, that it does not even have a head teacher, but that the teaching body is truly a representative community. The point is not that all measures are taken in such a way that “nothing else” speaks except what comes from the teaching staff itself, that one really has “an independent spiritual community” here, but the point is also that in all countries the spiritual life that has been talked about here all week is missing. And when one hears it emphasized somewhere that “the spiritual life is free in this country” – I am not talking about Switzerland now, I am talking about England – that is another matter. And it is this positive aspect, above all, that is important. It must then be emphasized that this will only exist, of course, if one tries to actually respond to the specific circumstances in the individual countries and territories.

But one must have a heart and mind for what unfree intellectual life has ultimately done in our time. Not in order to respond to what was said here yesterday, but to show the blossoms of human thinking in our present intellectual, moral, and cozy life, I would like to read you a sentence. I do not wish to detain you for long, and I do not wish to speak from the standpoint from which there was such virulent opposition to anthroposophy and the threefold social order here yesterday; but I would like to read a sentence from the brochure that had to be discussed here yesterday. General von Gleich writes about me: “Around the turn of the century, which also marks a turning point in the supersensible world of Anthroposophy, Mr. Steiner, then almost forty years old, was gradually led to Theosophy through Winter's lectures on mysticism.” Now you may ask who this “Herr Winter” is, whom Herr von Gleich cites here as the person through whose lectures I was “converted” to Anthroposophy in Berlin. One can only put forward the following hypothesis: in the preface to those lectures that I gave in Berlin in the winter of 1900/1901, there is a sentence in which I say: “What I present in this writing previously formed the content of lectures that I gave last winter at the Theosophical Library in Berlin.” That 'Mr. Winter' who converted me to Theosophy in 1901/1902 became the 'winter' during which I gave my lectures. You see, I do not want to use the expression that applies to the intellectual disposition of a person who is now called upon to lead the opponents of the anthroposophical movement with it; I do not want to use the expression; but you will certainly be able to use it sufficiently. Today, spiritual life leads to such blossoms of human intellectual activity, through which one could pass in the present day up to the point where one could become a major general.

So one must look at the matter from a somewhat greater depth. Only then will one develop a heart and a mind for what is necessary. And just because the spiritual life must be tackled first of all from the school system, it would be so desirable to found this World School Association, which would not be so difficult to found if the will for it exists. But it must not be a smaller or larger committee, but it must be founded in such a way that its membership is unmanageable. Only then will it have value. It must not – I do not want to give any advice on this, because I have said enough on the subject – it must not, of course, impose any special sacrifices on any individual. It must be there to create the mood for what urgently needs a mood today! – That is something of what I still had to tie in with what has come to light today.

Finally, I must say something that I would rather not say, but which I must say, since otherwise it would not have been touched upon this evening and it might be too late for the next few days, when the pain of departure will probably already be setting in. I must point this out myself. The point is that it is a matter of course that everything that has been said today should be put into practice. But this work only makes sense if we can maintain the Goetheanum as it stands and, above all, can complete it.

Even if things go well with 'Futurum AG' and even if things go well with 'Kommenden Tag' – they will certainly not be any economic support for this Goetheanum for a long time to come, they certainly will not. And the greatest concern — despite all the other concerns that weigh on me today, allow me to speak personally for once — the greatest concern is this: that in the not too distant future it could be the case that we have no economic inflows for this Goetheanum. And that is why it is above all necessary to emphasize that everyone should work towards this, that everyone who can contribute something should do so, so that this building can be completed! That is what is needed above all: that we may be put in a position, through the friends of our cause, to be able to maintain this Goetheanum, to be able above all to finish building this Goetheanum. And that, as I said, is my great concern. I must say so here, because after all, what would it help if we could do as much propaganda as we like and we might have to close this Goetheanum in three months from now? This, too, is one of the social concerns that, in my opinion, are connected with the general social life of the present day. And I had to emphasize this concern because the facts on which it is based should not be forgotten; only this makes it possible to strengthen the movement that emanates from this Goetheanum.

We can see the intellectual foundations on which those who are now taking up their posts against us are fighting. That will be a beginning. We must be vigilant, very vigilant, because these people are clever. They know how to organize themselves. What happened in Stuttgart is a beginning, it is intended as a beginning. And only then will we be able to stand up to them if we spark such idealism – I would like to say it again this time – that does not say: Oh, ideals are so terribly high, they are so lofty, and my pocket is something so small that I do not reach into it when it comes to lofty ideals. – It must be said: Only idealism is true that also digs into its pockets for the ideals!

[For the following meeting, Rudolf Steiner was handed a series of written questions. This “questionnaire” is available in Emil Bock's handwriting and has the following wording:]

1. The change of cult colors (especially in the non-festive half of the year) and their meaning in relation to the course of the year in its psychological relationship (cultic optics)? The colors of the altar servers' vestments, the altar cloths, the chasuble, the figures and borders of the chasuble in relation to the primary colors of the chasuble itself? Colors used in the baptismal ceremony (red and blue)?

2. The spiritual meaning of the vestments, insofar as this has not yet been hinted at. Is it possible to derive an understanding of the cult vestments from the history of human clothing in general within the history of customs (the cultic origin of all clothing in general, the difference between men's and women's clothing)? What is the meaning of the vestments worn by altar servers? In what vestment does the priest serve? When is the beret worn and why only in these cases? Form of the stole, its spiritual justification? Vestments for casualities (baptism, burial, etc.)?

3. What else can be said about the substances used in worship? Incense, oil, wine, bread, salt, ash, water, mercury, sulfur, salt (cultic alchemy)? Which substances and objects are consecrated before cultic use, on what occasion and by what words? Water, salt, ashes in the baptismal ritual in relation to the Trinity. Water is associated with the Father God, salt with the Son God, whereas we expect the opposite. Connection between the four parts of the mass and the four elements? Holy water and incense at the grave?

4. Details about cultic forms, devices and gestures. Use of a monstrance and what use? Use of wooden goblets possible (social reasons)? Why turn the left cheek in the case of a community communion? Why signs on the forehead, chin, chest of the infant? Is it possible to use incense in bowls instead of the usual censer, or can a simplified form of this be considered at least? The right and left sides of the altar in their alternation during the consecration. Which direction should the altar

face and why? 5. What is the more precise distribution of the pericopes for the gospel reading over the course of the year? Use of the Pauline letters, the Apocalypse, etc.? Can we hope for translations of individual pericopes by Dr. Steiner?

6. Parish regulations and pastoral care: What conditions must be met for the first performance of the rites in the individual cities? In front of which audience should the cult be introduced?, in public or in invited circles? Who can communicate? Only community members? Is it the duty of community members to communicate? Is it possible to exclude members of the community from communion? Is it advisable to make the ritual texts accessible to the community members? (The Credo?)

Questions about the Bible:

What can be said about textual corruption in the New Testament? How did it come about and with what intention? How can it be eliminated as a source of error? The synoptic question: literal agreement of the first three Gospels down to the smallest details and contradictions in statements about facts (the date of Jesus' death, etc.)?

Historical questions:

We would like to hear as much as possible about church history, because current research leaves us in the lurch there. In particular: How and where can the origin of the Mass from the mysteries be studied and shown exoterically in order to refute the accusation of theft? The ages of Peter, Paul and John in Schelling, etc., and Dr. Steiner's suggestion of the periods of church history after the twelve apostles (the time of Judas, etc.)? Esotericism in the Catholic Church?

Individual aspects:

Music and chorales in worship. Training of priests and important books (study plan).

Practical aspects:

Our proposal for admission requirements and disciplinary regulations. Financing. Guidelines for differentiating pastoral care according to profession, temperament and age, especially in religious education, about which we would still like to hear a lot, apart from what we can learn from Waldorf teachers. Preparation for the youth celebration for those children who have already reached the appropriate age and have so far only received confessional religious education? How long will a child participate in the youth celebration? Guidelines for pastoral psychology and pathology?

What illnesses are particularly to be expected? How can meditation be used as a remedy? The sexual question in a pastoral relationship: What is the karmic and physiological basis of homosexuality, and how can we help to overcome it?

Can special prayers be given for our pastoral care work (morning, evening, table, children's prayers)?

7. Questions about the sacraments:

Why no adult baptism (conversions of Jews)? The sacrament of marriage. Solubility of marriage, divorce? Sense of the Bible passages dealing with this topic: Genesis II, 1 Cor. 6 and 7, Romans 7, Matthew 19, 1-12?

8. Questions about the texts:

In the Credo: “To spiritually heal the sin-sickness of the body of humanity” or “to spiritually heal the body of humanity from the sin-sickness”? Breviary: Why monthly sayings as weekly sayings?

Report in the “News Sheet” (Nachrichtenblatt)

From June 24th—July 12th a course of lectures on speech eurythmy was held at the Goetheanum. It had as content a further presentation of much which had already been given in this domain and at the same time a deepening and widening of what was already known. The eurythmy artists, who both at the Goetheanum and going out from there to many places, are practicing eurythmy as an art, the eurythmy teachers, the teaching staff of the Stuttgart eurythmy school founded and directed by Marie Steiner, the eurythmy teachers of the Waldorf School and the Fortbildungsschule at the Goetheanum, the curative eurythmists, and a number of personalities who through their profession as artists or scientists in other spheres are interested in eurythmy, attended the course.

Eurythmy makes it possible to bring the artistic as such, in its essence and its sources, to visible beholding. This was specially borne in mind during the presentation of this course. He only can work as eurythmy artist who creatively unfolds a sense for art from an inner call, an inner enthusiasm.

In order to bring to manifestation the possibilities of form and movement inherent in the human organisation it is necessary that the soul be completely enfilled with art. This universal character of eurythmy underlay all that was presented.

Whoever wishes to do eurythmy must have penetrated into the being of speech-formation. He must, before all, have approached the mysteries of sound-creation. In every sound an expression for a soul experience is given; in the vowel-sounds for a thinking, feeling, willing self-revelation of the soul, in the consonant sounds for the way in which the soul represents an outer thing or a process. This expression of language remains for the most part quite subconscious in the case of ordinary speech; the eurythmist must learn to know it quite exactly, for he has to transform what becomes audible in speech into gestures which are quiescent or in movement. In this course, therefore, the inner structure of language was revealed. The sound-significance of the word, which everywhere underlies the meaning-significance, was made visible. By the eurythmy gestures themselves, some aspects of the inner laws of language—little recognised at the present time, when speaking is the expression of a strongly abstract attitude of soul—can be visibly manifested. That is what happened in this course. Thereby, it may be hoped, it will also have given to eurythmy teachers the guiding lines necessary for them.

The eurythmist must devote himself to the gesture down to its smallest detail, so that his performance really becomes the self-understood expression of the life of soul. He can only give form to the gesture in its fullness when the smallest detail comes first to consciousness, that it may later become the habitual expression of the soul-being.

A study was made of how the gesture as such reveals soul-experience and spirit-content, and also of how this revelation relates itself to the soul-expression which is manifested audibly in the language of sound. From eurythmy one can learn to value the technique of art; but from eurythmy one can indeed also become deeply imbued with the way in which the technical must put aside everything external and be completely taken hold of by the soul, if the truly artistic is to come to life. People who are active in any sphere of art often speak of how the soul must work behind the technique; the truth is that it is in the technique that the soul must work.

A special value was laid in these lectures upon showing that in the truly formed gestures the aesthetically sensitive human being perceives the soul-element directly in a quite unequivocal way. Examples were shown which demonstrated how a content in the soul-configuration can be made obvious in a certain gesture-formation.

It was also shown how the whole structure of language, which reveals itself in grammar, syntax, rhythm, in poetical figures of speech, in rhyme and verse-formation, also finds its corresponding realisation in eurythmy.

The audience attending this course was not only to be led into the knowledge of eurythmy but they should be brought to the experience of how all art must be sustained by love and enthusiasm. The eurythmist cannot separate himself from his artistic creation and objectively put it forward for aesthetic enjoyment as can the painter or sculptor, but he remains personally within his performance; one sees from him himself whether or no art lives within him as a divine world-content. In the immediate artistic present, art in its visible essence must be made manifest by the actual human being of the eurythmist. This demands a particularly inward and intimate relationship to art. To help the partakers towards this understanding was the aim of this course. It wished to show how, when beholding the gestures feeling, inner perception are enkindled in the soul, and how this inner perception then leads to the experience of the visible word. Much which can only be partially expressed in the audible word can be completely revealed through the movements of eurythmy. The audible word in recitation and declamation, in conjunction with the visible word, produces a total expression which can result in the most intensive artistic unity.

I would like to say that modern natural science has actually only brought to light the full significance of what we call our sensory knowledge. And anyone who wants to speak — as is to be done this evening — of supersensible knowledge must, above all, be completely clear about the nature of sensory knowledge, without any dilettantism. By systematically applying the methods of observation, by developing the way experiments are conducted, and by mathematically and otherwise rationally treating observations and experiments, modern natural science has gradually raised itself to the ideal of arriving at something through the contemplation of the sensory world that something that approximates more and more to an objective reality, an objective reality into which nothing may be mixed from the subjective, personal arbitrariness of man, nothing from any phantasms or illusions. In this respect, supersensible knowledge must also emulate natural science.

If we use the human mind merely – and as mathematicians we do this particularly – to order and systematize the phenomena of the senses and thereby to divine their laws, then we gradually come to realize that the senses and their explanations are basically the great educators of the human mind, that mind which is nevertheless dependent in a certain respect on the inner organic constitution of the human being. We know how dependent we are — and modern science, physiology and pathology, can still substantiate this — in our judgments and in forming our ideas of what our physical and mental constitution is. But by devoting ourselves to sense perception in a scientific way, we are constantly compelled to rectify in an objective sense that which wants to leave us as illusions, as phantasms. This – I say this again – must absolutely be emulated by supersensible knowledge.

However, the modern scientific method comes up against a certain limit in its efforts to understand the external world, and important naturalists have clearly spoken about these “limits of natural knowledge” based on the nature of scientific knowledge. We cannot get beyond the order of sense phenomena. At the moment we want to go further, to go beyond the sensory tapestry that spreads around us through intellectual speculation, we must either state the limits of knowledge of nature, or we must, as it were, let go of the intellect and extend the concepts, speculate, build hypotheses into the void, into the indefinite. And there have been enough of these hypotheses. Many a person has cautiously tried to venture beyond the realm of sense perception with concepts and ideas. But in the end, all such efforts leave the person unsatisfied, for he can never give himself an explanation as to what justification there can be for extending the ideas gained from the sense world into the realm beyond the senses.

And so all philosophies and speculations that want to go beyond the sensory world are completely unsatisfactory for the serious thinker, especially for the thinker accustomed to scientific concepts, and we see the consequences of this in the various world view endeavors of the present. The human heart and soul cannot remain with what the external senses can tell it. The human soul knows that the merely temporary fate, which is bound to this sensory world from it, cannot affect its ultimate nature, and so deeper natures, more serious souls, often take refuge in all kinds of mystical endeavors.

These mystical endeavors are directed towards turning one's attention away from the external sense world, and also more or less away from the intellectualistic penetration of this sense world, and instead to look into the inner being of the human being. Just as it is impossible to arrive at a truly satisfactory understanding of the nature of the human soul through external natural science or through speculation based on it, so it is equally impossible to arrive at a satisfactory knowledge of the human soul through ordinary “mystical immersion”. For what does it profit us, no matter how much we develop this mystical absorption? What comes to the surface of our consciousness from the depths of the human soul? Some people may believe that they can exclude all subjective arbitrariness by quietly and meditatively devoting themselves to what an objective inner upwelling from the soul can tell us about our own human nature.

But anyone who can truly dissect the human soul, who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, and who can examine how, in this human soul life, there is nothing but the external impressions that we have taken into our soul from the external world since our birth, will ultimately always discover that the mystic, who often believes he has found his divine origin, something eternal, in his own soul, is ultimately dealing with nothing other than reminiscences of experiences to which the human being was exposed, especially in those times of childhood when one is not yet fully aware of the relationship between the human being and the outside world. And if, in addition, one is able, through a sound knowledge of the human soul, to see how the inner state of mind, what one might call a certain inner pleasure, or also all kinds of inner fears, can cloud one's judgment of the mystical content and make it appear as something quite different from what it is, then one becomes particularly cautious in this area. An everyday experience over many years can metamorphose in the soul so that a trivial experience can emerge from the soul decades later as something connected with the ground of the world. He who knows how not only the soul-condition, which is after all more easily observed, affects man's general feeling, but even the human organism, he alone can see clearly in this field, and he will come to reject much mystical striving, which is taken seriously from this or that side. Whoever can analyze the human soul will see the reasons for some doubtfulness, for some skepticism, which appear as a world view, but in a disturbed digestion, and will have to look for the reasons for some mystical ecstasy in organic excitement, sometimes of a very questionable nature.

In short, anyone seeking serious anthroposophical spiritual science must avoid the two pitfalls: the limited natural science on the one hand and the mysticism that lives so richly in illusions on the other. He must seek a sure method, one that is modeled on the certainty of natural science, imbued with the same attitude with which one lives as a scientist when experimenting in the laboratory or studying physiology or pathology at the dissecting table. Not only must anthroposophy arrive at different results from those of recognized science, but it must also develop its own method.

Now you will understand that in this short lecture one evening, I can only give you guidelines, just a few suggestions, regarding the results of this anthroposophical spiritual science, as well as its method and evidence. I will be able to show how the evidence is found. But what I am thinking of giving a brief outline of here is already the subject of a great deal of literature, and so in the context of a lecture I can only make suggestions, not present anything conclusive.

Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must go beyond the ordinary scientific method! Why is science limited? Why does mysticism not lead to the real core of human nature? Because both natural science and mysticism are limited to those cognitive abilities that a person develops in normal life, whether through natural growth, organic development, or the education that is common today. Thus we only develop the scientific method. Anthroposophy must now draw attention to the fact that the human being can become aware of other abilities that lie deeper in his soul, that lie dormant in this soul for ordinary life and for ordinary science, and that he can also consciously apply such abilities to genuine scientific knowledge. In order to develop these abilities, however, we should not resort to some kind of mystic darkness, but we should start from what is available in ordinary science and in ordinary human life.

Here we have what mysticism presents to us with so many illusions: the human capacity for memory at the one limit of our ordinary pole. This capacity for memory is, of course, entirely dependent on the organic constitution of the human being. Yet it is this capacity for memory that gives us, as human beings, our coherent consciousness, our coherent self. One need only think of the terrible mental state of those people in whom the continuous memory into childhood is clouded. There are conditions in which long periods of time are missing from the memory. Such people have, so to speak, pushed a part of their own soul life out of themselves. They no longer feel and experience their whole being. They show us how important coherent memory is for a healthy soul life. What is the nature of this memory? It consists in our being able to conjure up images in our consciousness of experiences we have had in our ordinary life between birth and the present moment. We carry images within us that we can conjure up before our soul in our ordinary life, more or less faithfully. The anthroposophical method initially ties in with this soul ability and, by transforming this ability to remember, trains so-called imaginative knowledge. This is not a sum of imaginations, of illusions, but something that can be gained through strict inner self-education alone and that corresponds to an objectivity, albeit a spiritual objectivity, just as the memory corresponds to an objectivity, not to mere fantasy. I will briefly indicate the principle of how to arrive at this first step of supersensible knowledge, at imaginative knowledge.

The point is to allow representations to be present in one's consciousness in a manner similar to that which otherwise obtains in memory. However, since we are not dealing with training but with a transformation of the ability to remember, these must not be images that one simply retrieves from the treasure trove of one's memories. Such images are, after all, modified by the emotional life and even by the organic constitution of the person, and a person can never know what is being conjured up when he simply allows memories to be present in his consciousness.

In order to bring about what I would call meditation — I have called it that in my writings — either you have to have some kind of idea of an experienced anthroposophist , or one must try to form an idea or a complex of ideas oneself that is easily comprehensible, that one can survey, as for example a triangle in geometry can be surveyed, where one can be quite certain: what is present in consciousness is all that is present. Nothing from the world of the emotions, from the constitution of the organs, comes up; you really have everything in view.

But it is not the content that is important, but rather that the soul now draws together all its powers to allow this content to be present in its consciousness for a shorter or longer while – some need a longer time for this, others a shorter time, it depends on the disposition of the person –. For what matters is the development of these forces slumbering in the soul, not what we bring into our consciousness in the form of thoughts, but what we do with what we have thought about. If, by way of comparison, we exert our arm muscles particularly through some kind of work, they become stronger and stronger, developing more and more strength. This physical strength develops through work and practice. It is exactly the same when, after years of practice, we make ideas present in our consciousness in the way indicated and then hold them in our consciousness for some time. What the soul has to do here strengthens the soul forces that one does not have in ordinary life.

I would like to make it very clear that what I have described here is easy to explain but difficult to carry out. It is no easier to make progress in the methods of spiritual science than in the methods of a laboratory or an observatory. Of course, there are people who are particularly predisposed to developing such inner soul powers; they may make very rapid progress. But in general, without needing a lot of time every day (each individual exercise can be short; its effect depends on the power of the exercise, not on the length of time, which only puts one to sleep), one needs repetition , repetitive practice, to finally get to the point of noticing something very specific in oneself; namely, that one has brought something out of the depths of one's soul that one previously did not use either for ordinary life or for ordinary science. To make ourselves understood, I would like to use a comparison.

We remember ourselves as human beings with an ordinary consciousness up to a certain point in our childhood. What lies before this point eludes ordinary memory. Why is that? Well, during this time, what the child experiences psychically works through impressions of the outside world, through combinations of the outside world and through the penetration of the emotional side of his soul with will impulses. This is not yet working with the ideas that only emerge with the development of speech. Rather, what the child ignites in the outside world is imprinted in the still plastic, malleable brain, and it is an interesting study to see how malleable a child's physical brain is, how resiliently it develops according to what the child experiences in the outside world. But it can also be said that this physical human brain stiffens, and precisely at the moment when it has stiffened particularly, the formation of the brain stops, and those forces are released that used to work on the brain. They now provide the child's imaginative life. This is mainly sparked by language. The human being continues to develop this, and through careful education he or she continues to develop what he or she is able to produce through the formation of his or her brain in the first years of life.

In a wonderful intuition, a man like Jean Paul spoke of education in such a way that he said: Man learns more in the first three years of life than later in three academic years. Actually, this is absolutely true, because in the first three years of life our organism is formed, and we can basically shape and be shaped in our whole later education only in the sense that our physical brain is formed in the very first years of life.

With these abilities, which develop in this way, the human being today stops both in accepted science and in ordinary life. The anthroposophical method would now like to take up in a higher sense — which again is not for physical education, but for soul education — what has been achieved for the human organization in the first years of childhood. If we carry out such meditations as I have suggested, and allow the images to be present in our consciousness for a sufficiently long time, depending on our individual abilities, we will notice that something similar to what happened in early childhood now occurs, and this occurs in the full consciousness something similar to what happened in early childhood, only that in a properly guided meditation one does not intervene in the physical organization, but in the finer organization that underlies the physical organism and that is only now being discovered.

In the course of meditation, one must absolutely come to it, after first honestly admitting to one's imagination: there you have the limits of your knowledge. So you have to be able to stand there quite honestly on the ground of scientific research and say to yourself, in the sense of a du Bois-Reymond, who in the early seventies of the nineteenth century gave his famous lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” in Leipzig. For ordinary thinking, there are limits to knowledge that cannot be transcended. But if you live this meditative life, you will find that, just as a child, through development, weaves itself deeper and deeper into the outer secrets of the world, certain limits are now practically overcome. You can then honestly admit to yourself: Before, you had these limits because you did not use certain abilities. Now you have developed these abilities and can cross these boundaries. In this way, anthroposophy transforms knowledge, which is otherwise only an intellectual-formal one, into a practical one. Before certain boundaries of knowledge are crossed, the ability to cross them and, above all, the consciousness that can understand inwardly is first developed: Now you are capable of something different than you were before.

And it is particularly the one inner experience that one has: as one advances in meditation, one comes to realize that, without perceiving with the senses, one enters into an inner activity that proceeds with the same vividness with which a sensory perception proceeds. What one experiences inwardly in meditation are images, such images that are more vivid than the memories, as vivid as the sensory perceptions, but do not have the same content as the sensory perceptions. Just as one otherwise experiences only when one sees colors with one's eyes and hears sounds with one's ears, whereas mere imagining, even remembering, is something pale, so one experiences something new with the same input through the whole person, as one also otherwise experiences with the whole person in sensory perception: a world of imaginations that is there for consciousness, that was not there before, a thoroughly new world. And we have conquered the objectivity of this world by making the efforts I have mentioned.

I could not go into this in detail, only hint at the principle. In some of my writings — for example, in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and also in the second part of “Occult Science, an Outline of Its Methods” — you will find the details of this meditative practice described. Here it is sufficient to have hinted at the principle by which one comes to imaginative knowledge.

When speaking of this imaginative knowledge to those who today often believe that they are fully grounded in a scientific attitude, they say: It may seem to be laboriously acquired, but it is nothing more than something acquired through autosuggestion, something that, just like any visions or hallucinations, is brought up from repressed nervous strength to the surface of consciousness. Therefore, it must be emphasized again and again that what anthroposophy develops in this way is quite the opposite of the pathological experiences of the soul, of illusion, hallucination or mediumship. One need only be reminded of one thing: anyone who, for example, examines what I have written about meditation exercises in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' will see that particular care is taken to maintain the soul life of the human being completely healthy and intact alongside the development of this higher knowledge, that is, let us say, of the imaginative life. In the case of a diseased soul life, the diseased soul life drowns out the healthy one, as it were extinguishing it. In the case of the soul life that is sought for the purpose of higher knowledge of anthroposophy, the healthy soul life remains completely intact alongside what is now also sought as imagination. Imagination appears as something quite different from ordinary mental life, but at no moment is the person who has attained it in a different inner state of mind, so that all his other memories and insights remain healthy alongside the imagination.

Imagination, as I said, is transformed memory. This is also expressed in its very essence. Some beginners on this path develop this imagination. They are then delighted when they have arrived at the first elementary results, that they can develop a pictorial, objectively given life of ideas that now already, at least suggestively, points them to a supersensible world. But they lose it again. This is due to the essential nature of imaginative cognition, as well as that of all higher knowledge. The knowledge that we otherwise acquire in the external world through ordinary consciousness leads to memory; we can bring it forth again from memory. What arises in the imaginative life is there, alive, like a sense experience, like sounds or colors. But it does not imprint itself on memory. This is precisely what surprises the beginner the most. He believes that he can have a supersensible insight and that he can carry it with him through life like an ordinary memory. Just as we, when we have looked at a color, then turn away from it and no longer have it, so we no longer have the supersensible experience if we have forgotten it in our soul. All this must be taken into account. Anyone who speaks about this supersensible world never speaks from memory; he speaks from an immediate experience of the supersensible world.

Let me make a brief personal comment. Even when one gives a lecture such as today's, in which one speaks about the supersensible world in an orienting way, one does not prepare for it in the same way as for other lectures on knowledge. Rather, one has to direct one's preparation in such a way that one's organism and soul life are enabled to let the supersensible knowledge approach them.

For if I have a supersensible insight today, as soon as I have had it I forget it, and if I want to have it again, I have to bring it about again. I cannot simply remember it; I can only bring about what I did in meditation and concentration to bring about that supersensible experience at the time.

So already in the imagination, the supersensible worlds are such that they do not imprint themselves on memory. Why is that? The reason for this is that supersensible knowledge, as it is meant here, is not something formal at all, but, in contrast, really brings about the supersensible world for us. We can recall knowledge that merely gives us images of the external material world over and over again. Once we have acquired them, it is good to be able to recall them from memory. This kind of knowledge is based only on pictorial processes, on mirroring processes in relation to the external world. It is basically not a sum of real processes. Real processes take place in such a way that they are subject to repetition, to rhythmic repetition, not to memory.

It is a very trivial but accurate statement when I say that our organism needs food. What we take in as food is processed by it in some way that does not need to be explained further here. But once it has been processed, the corresponding process is over, so to speak. But the next day we must eat again, and no one can claim that he ate yesterday; nor will he. We are not dealing with a formal process of reflection, but with a real process. Such real processes are those that occur in the supersensible knowledge meant here. What has once been brought about as the content of the soul must be brought about again and again by taking the same measures again. One can remember the measures that formed the preparation for certain supersensible experiences at the time. But only by taking the same measures can one arrive at the same results.

Once you have entered this imaginative world, however, you are fully aware that you once had a world of imaginations. The way you experience these imaginations is an inner grasping of the whole human being. But you also know that you have not grasped an external world with consciousness, but that you have actually only brought up from your own inner being everything that you have brought out of consciousness. A hallucinator who surrenders to some kind of vision mistakes the images that arise in his mind for reality. Someone who lives in the imagination and is trained in anthroposophy knows that at first he has only himself in the imagination. There is already a certain development of strength in this awareness of having only oneself, because everything that arises in the form of vivid images, as vivid as any external sensory perception, tempts one to mistake it for an external world. It is also objective, but our own objective inner world. One must apply a certain inner power of consciousness in order to become fully aware that you are dealing with your own inner being.

But this imagination can progress to the point where you really only get this own inner being in front of you, and in such a way that you now, with the help of this imaginative knowledge, have the first, albeit now — I would like to say — subjective-objective supersensible experience. That one has something like a tableau of one's life — I cannot say spatial, nor temporal, it is something temporal-spatial, something where one has something temporal before one, but as if quite side by side — that one has such a tableau of one's life before one, one that extends back to the vicinity of one's birth, that one has gone through oneself in this earthly life up to the moment of one's birth. (This is what appears before the soul in such a temporal-spatial image.) At the same time, one can see what has happened to us over the course of a long time. Otherwise, memory is such that one or the other emerges from the stream of experiences. But now, not as a memory, but as an image, and indeed as an inner, thoroughly worked through image, one has one's entire life before one, as it is described by people who study nature and who are conscientious enough in such matters that one can recognize it as truth. Just as someone who is about to drown sees his life before him in a clear way, so the person who has advanced to imaginative knowledge in this way has his life before him in a clear tableau.

This is the first experience one has. It is the kind of experience that can already lead one to see that The person who presents himself as a spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense must also get to know all the inner experiences that accompany such supersensible experiences. What he shares serves to strengthen and calm life. It gives life security and shows the eternal essence of the human being, as we shall see. But the research and the experience itself is something that not every person would desire from the outset. One must already have developed a full and healthy soul life, for which the books mentioned above give comprehensive instructions, in order to be able to face what is necessary to understand and receive messages about the supersensible world, but is also necessary for research in these areas, with an open mind and strength.

The vision of this tableau of life gives rise to an inner experience that I would call “oppressive”; something like an anxiety attack settles over life. And herein lies progress: that the anthroposophical researcher confronts and overcomes these things with strong soul power, that he has first developed a healthy soul life to such an extent that he can endure in a healthy way what he encounters as side effects of knowing the supersensible worlds. Further progress lies in the development of such powers. For this must indeed go so far that the human being not only transforms the faculty of memory, as I have described, in order to attain imaginative knowledge. Rather, further progress consists in developing the art of forgetting, the suppression of perceptions, and in this suppression of perceptions, to the point where one can now suppress the entire life tableau, removing it from consciousness. One develops this artful forgetting by repeatedly and completely arbitrarily removing the manageable ideas described, after having allowed them to be present in one's consciousness, while they actually want to occupy our consciousness. While a person who merely surrenders to his nature develops the tendency to hold on to these images, someone who wants to become a true spiritual researcher in the anthroposophical sense must develop the ability to suppress these images with full awareness of will and to make the consciousness completely empty without — allow me this remark — falling asleep in the process. Most people, when they want to empty their consciousness, are only able to doze off gently. But that is what the spiritual scientific researcher must develop with all his strength, indeed with increased strength: to bring ideas into his consciousness and then to bring them out again, so that he is able to remain with an empty consciousness, for a shorter or longer period of time.

The significance of the anthroposophical method is that one must bring the will into the whole life of imagination, that one lets ideas be present in consciousness in a completely manageable way, conjures them out of consciousness again, and thus pushes the will into imagining, into forming thoughts. While otherwise one develops one's thoughts only in the continuous outer life, passively devoted to it, one has now, for some time, gained an inner strength from suppressing perceptions. When one has transformed one's forgetting in this way, one is then able to extinguish the entire life tableau, so that one no longer merely removes a single image from one's consciousness, but the entire inner life that has arisen before the soul from birth to this moment like a tableau. One feels oppressed when faced with this tableau because now one is not just confronted with pictorial representations as usual, but with forces that are themselves inner pictorial representations. One experiences that by grasping this tableau of life, one has grasped not just something intellectual and formal, but the same forces that are our inner forces of growth. One beholds what has shaped the organism since childhood as formative forces or, if I may say so, as purely etheric forces. What has shaped us is what one first calls into consciousness and what one now brings out of consciousness again.

Once this has been achieved, the next step is the other stage of supersensible knowledge, which I have called inspired knowledge in my books. This is not meant in any old superstitious way, but only in the sense in which I describe it. This inspiration consists in clearing away what has arisen in the previous way, in bringing about the conditions that empty the consciousness. But consciousness does not remain empty. Because we have had the formative forces of the human being in consciousness – the forces that develop the liver, lungs, heart and so on, we perceive this in them – and by now removing these forces from consciousness, it does not remain empty. Rather, what now arises in consciousness is a real spiritual life, a real supersensible world. For in that we remove these formative forces from our consciousness, we take leave, as it were, as we otherwise take leave of an experience, initially for the moment of realization, so to speak, of the outer sense world with which the life experiences are connected that are reflected in the life tableau. We are in a different world at this moment. We are in the world in which not only the forces that have been forming us since birth lie, but which have formed us before birth or conception.

We now become aware, through developed knowledge, that before we, as spiritual beings, incorporated what the inheritance of the physical-material world can give us, were in another, spiritual world from which we descended and incorporated ourselves into what, materially, surrounds us like an outer covering, like an outer instrument during physical life on earth. In this way, through a real practice of knowledge, we come to perceive what cannot be perceived by the ordinary powers of knowledge. We come to perceive a world even when we have taken leave of the sensory world in the way described. We perceive a human power of being when we have not only extinguished the view for the sensory world, but have also extinguished our experiences with the life tableau just described. But for one who has thus attained knowledge, a healthy soul condition always remains. He who ascends to inspired knowledge in this way is never in a position to have something within him, as in the case of the hallucinator or the psychopath, that extinguishes his healthy soul life and takes its place. And just as in the imagination, the healthy soul life stands alongside the imagination, so it is now that there is a rhythmic alternation: prenatal life, life in the spiritual-soul, then the human being who stands here on earth on his two legs and thinks with us. And we swing back and forth in rhythm, in rhythm between the supersensible and the sensual world. We breathe in, we breathe out. It is almost experienced: what we were before we integrated ourselves into the earthly world, and we live back to what we are as earthly human beings. We experience a rhythm like the rhythm of breathing. And if all rhythms in the world are related, one rhythm is always the image of the other, then at least in the breathing rhythm something can be seen that forms an analogy to what I have just described as a rhythm. Therefore, there is a method that is no longer useful for Westerners today: the ancient Indian yoga method, which also speaks of these things. But it is no longer useful for today's people because they cannot do ordinary yoga exercises like the ancient Indian or the modern Indian, but the Westerner needs exercises today as I described them.

But how are the yoga exercises performed? It is briefly stated here for clarification. The yogi devotes himself not to unconscious breathing, but to a regulated, conscious breathing process. He consciously experiences what otherwise occurs unconsciously. In this way, he lives into the rhythm of the world through an altered, regulated breathing process and in a corresponding inhalation and exhalation. And in fact, through his special constitution, he is able to see the supersensible life before birth when he performs his exercises for a long time, where it sometimes appears as a spiritual soul, the other time here in earthly life. One sees that there is already an authorization through the analogy to speak of “breathing” here. For just as we draw in our breath and then push it out again, so the physical part of man, given by the material current of heredity, unites with the spiritual-soul, breathing into it, as it were. The breath lasts only as long as one earth-life. And in the same way, at death, the spiritual-soul is breathed out again.

This process of birth and death is what is now, in the process of realization, being recreated by the inspired realization. However strange and paradoxical it may sound, what is otherwise only experienced once in the process of being born and dying, this uniting of the physical body with the spiritual-soul, and then the emergence of the spiritual-soul, is what is formed in the imitation of knowledge, which is anthroposophical knowledge. In this way, not through speculation, not through philosophy, nor through some kind of mysticism, which can only be based on illusions, but through a real practice of knowledge, one enters into the experience of the world in which man was before birth and in which he will be when he has crossed the threshold of death. It is certainly still strange for modern man when, as for example in “Occult Science: An Outline”, the worlds that man experiences before birth and after death are described in such detail, as are otherwise described by the naturalist, the botanist, mineralogist or geologist, the details of plant life or other things in our sensual world. But humanity will have to get used to the idea that it is possible to make people aware of their inner powers, their formative powers, which are soul-imbuing powers, but which are already supersensible sense powers — let me use the paradoxical word — and which therefore bring the human being as a spiritual-soul being into a reciprocal relationship with the spiritual-soul worlds, by which he is surrounded before birth and after death.

It is not logical reasoning that underlies the anthroposophical spiritual science referred to here when speaking of supersensible worlds, when speaking of the eternal nature of man, but a leading of practical knowledge to the of that in the human being which is truly of a spiritual-soul nature, which is creative, not created by the organism, which transforms the organism of its own accord and thus has the guarantee of eternity, of passing through birth and death. It is only the unusual nature of such a method of knowledge that still gives rise to the many misunderstandings surrounding anthroposophical spiritual science today. And it is perfectly understandable that even well-meaning scientists, when they set out to study what anthroposophy offers and what is so rigorously described as a genuine method of knowledge, as is usually the case with mathematics, for example, first create a and then, when they do not understand it, they say: This is nothing more than a sum of illusions, hallucinations and fantasies, when they first present their distorted image and then criticize their own construct. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, if anthroposophy were what some of today's scholars make of it, then I would criticize it much more severely and much more disparagingly than some scholars do. But anthroposophy is developing the healthy paths in the face of all the pathological paths attributed to it by those who misunderstand its methods. But I don't want to dwell on the many misunderstandings, I just want to draw attention to one more.

It is indeed the case that the practical powers of knowledge that I have described are strengthened by everything one goes through. At first, one has gained strength by letting one's life tableau sink, but then it is filled with a spiritual power. Now the researcher is faced with a new experience, which many are unconsciously afraid of and for which reason they would not even want to approach this spiritual knowledge if they were to become acquainted with it. Anyone who views the spiritual world in this way, as I have described it, actually feels something like a painful deprivation in his soul throughout the time that he has exposed his consciousness to this spiritual world. If it is not experienced with a fully healthy soul, it can give rise to a very pessimistic view of life. However, since all preparation in anthroposophy must be undertaken in such a way that the human being is thoroughly healthy in his soul, he knows that he would say of this pessimism, which lies before his soul if he were to surrender to it, The whole world is permeated with pain and sighs in pain. But this pessimism arises as something that belongs to the necessities of the world. One experiences it, one experiences something quite painful, while one is devoted to the supersensible world in inspiration.

But why do we experience this pain? One realizes that this pain is only the repetition of that painful longing which forms the power of the soul, through which the soul feels drawn from spiritual-soul worlds into material physical embodiment. This longing of the soul must be relived in knowledge at precisely this stage. And what appears in the pessimists as world-weariness is a ray of this feeling that reaches only into the consciousness of imagination. It is felt in a very different way by those who want to attain supersensible knowledge, and who, when they have reached the highest degree of supersensible knowledge, experience it as a kind of life-weariness. We must indeed be clear about the fact that the seeking of knowledge cannot always be a pleasurable matter. Anyone who has attained a few, perhaps modest, extrasensory insights or even real, true insights into life will always say: “I gratefully accept from the Powers that Be the good fortune I have experienced. But the painful experiences and bitterness I have gone through have been a good preparation for me to reach the state of mind that really leads to a deeper understanding of the secrets of life. Therefore, even the most ordinary painful experiences are a good preparation, if they are lived through in good health and one does not allow oneself to be completely depressed by them, also physically, for what one has to experience as a side effect of inspired knowledge. But through everything one goes through, one now comes to carry that imagination, which is immediately lost to man when he descends into the emotional life or into his own will, into all that I have described as being above the sensual world.

That is the essential thing, that one does not surrender to nebulous soul content, but that one takes with one on the entire further path what one has first developed in the imagination as a strong pictorial image. Our emotional life rises, like dreams, from dark depths of the soul. We become aware of our feelings in our imagination. As people of the present day, we can only truly live in our imagination when we are actually awake. Our emotional life always has something dream-like about it in comparison to our imaginative life. And our life of will is usually dormant even during the day. We do perceive that we move our arms through our will, for example. But what lives in him as volitional forces is actually just as hidden from him as what he experiences in his soul from falling asleep to waking up. Thus, for the ordinary state of mind with the emotional life, we get a dreamy element into life, but with our life of will, we even get a sleeping one.

It is interesting to see how psychologists such as Theodor Ziehen struggle with the fact that in ordinary life, experiences of the will are only present in the imagination. But with the soul life that I have just described, the human being takes his life of ideas everywhere with him and permeates it with fully conscious will. Just as he otherwise combines the individual ideas in fully conscious judgment, willfully, so he pursues everything I have just described — although it may seem paradoxical to some — through anthroposophical knowledge with a fully conscious, alert life of ideas. As a result, he ultimately develops an inner strength that does not cause him to lose his self within the enriched inner life, but on the contrary, allows him to see his self in a form that is never presented in ordinary consciousness. This is because our ordinary consciousness is guided inwardly in such a way that we look at the same thing and designate it with the word “I”. But if we can see what is expressed in this little word “I”, we are aware that it is based on a reality, but in our ordinary consciousness we do not have this reality.

When we say “I am”, we are actually pointing to something that we only have as an image, just as we only have our impulses of will as images. For this I points deep down into the sleeping depths of the soul and of organic life in general, where the sleeping will is also rooted. Only an image rises up. But now we have descended down there ourselves, now we have carried our consciousness down to the reality of consciousness through supersensible knowledge of imagination and inspiration, now our true being has been given to us in a third stage of supersensible knowledge: In intuition — whereby this word is not used in its usual sense, but rather to refer to that which can be based on the two other preliminary stages — in this intuitive consciousness, the idea of repeated earthly lives takes on meaning. Through inspired realization, one looks back at the spiritual and soul life before birth. In this self-knowledge, which appears as intuition, one sees one's self in that enriched form in which it is not exhausted in one earth life, but in which it brings the results of earlier earth lives over into the present one, and in which it shows the results of this life as the foundations for later earth lives.

I just wanted to briefly explain that when the anthroposophical spiritual researcher speaks of repeated earthly lives, it is not a hypothetical way of talking, but rather a very systematic search for those powers of knowledge that lead people beyond the ordinary sense world. This systematic search now also leads them to recognize repeated earthly lives. But with that, he also sees through how what appears as a necessary fate and places us in a certain way in life is connected with these repeated earth lives, while everything that develops as our ordinary, conscious thinking between birth and death is precisely the basis of the human freedom developed in this earth life. At this level of knowledge, one gains an understanding of how that which is necessary in us, which constitutes our destiny, is connected with our repeated lives on earth. In contrast, in the individual life on earth, through his fully developed individual, personal thinking, which breaks away from repeated lives on earth and develops personally in the individual life, the human being places himself as a free being precisely in that life on earth. That is why the person speaking to you today not only developed anthroposophy, but also wrote his “Philosophy of Freedom” as early as the beginning of the 1890s, in which he examines the real foundations of human freedom. The necessity in which man is placed through repeated earthly lives is built on what lies below the threshold of what flows from our free thoughts. A “philosophy of freedom” is entirely compatible with anthroposophical spiritual science.

In this lecture, I have only been able to sketch out the guidelines needed to gain an orientation in anthroposophical spiritual science. Anything beyond the scope of this lecture must be sought in the relevant literature. In conclusion, I would just like to hint at a few points concerning the impact of anthroposophy on the individual sciences.

Through the kind of insight that is gained through imaginative knowledge, one gets to know the whole of the human formative forces. One is then able to get to know not only what human formation is on the dissection table through autopsy, and thereby establish physiology, therapy and pathology, but also how one learns through ordinary knowledge how the mathematical dominates the outer world. In this way, one comes to know the qualitative aspect of external beings through an inner realization, through a realization that is inspired like mathematics, only that it is qualitative, not only quantitative and formal like mathematics, but immersed in the reality of beings. In this way, one comes to know the human being inwardly. And in the moment when one comes to the inner formative forces of the human being — in that tableau as I have described it — one also gets to know the inner formative forces of mineral, plant and animal beings and the formative forces of the world. This then opens our eyes to the sense of belonging that is found in everything that is spread out in nature, in the inner formative forces of the human being and in their consequences in the human organs.

One gets to know the organs of the human being in both a healthy and diseased state. Anyone who, with this knowledge, observes the human heart, for example, knows that a heart is not just a form that can be grasped in an external view, but that the heart process is one that can only be understood from the knowledge of the whole human being, because otherwise one would only view it one-sidedly. It is similar to the magnetic needle, which one also looks at one-sidedly if one were to say of it: It points its one tip to the north, the other to the south. No, to explain the magnet needle, we use the whole Earth and say: the Earth's North Pole attracts one half of the magnet needle through its forces, the South Pole the other. But especially with humans, we only want to look at what lies within the skin, individually. But even with humans, we have to go beyond what lies within the skin, just as we go beyond the magnet needle itself. You have to know the whole person if you want to study both the healthy and the sick person. Spiritual science opens up the possibility of this, and we have been able to develop a medicine based on anthroposophical spiritual science. In Stuttgart, there is also a medical-therapeutic institute among the “Kommenden Tages” institutions, with doctors who work with the whole of anthroposophy. I myself was able to hold two medical courses for doctors and show what anthroposophy is capable of achieving by adding what underlies the spiritual entity of the sensory world to the other, and how it can thus enrich a science that is merely regarded as empirical, such as medicine. Contemporary humanity will have to become accustomed to the idea that reality is not only material but also imbued with spirituality.

Just as medicine can be enriched by anthroposophy, so can, for example, external social life, as can other sciences. We have already tried to provide practical proof of this in one area in particular, namely in the Waldorf School founded by Emil Molt in Stuttgart, which is intended to be a comprehensive school in the best sense of the word and is headed by me. This Waldorf School does not practice any kind of worldview in the anthroposophical sense; only those who want to create all kinds of misunderstandings about anthroposophy say that. In this Waldorf school, the human being is educated and taught on the basis of real knowledge of the human being, including the child, which not only looks at the human being's exterior and puts it into pedagogical, didactic and so on formulas; but on the basis of real knowledge of the child, so that the person who is a teacher at this school must above all observe what is working its way to the surface in the child's body, soul and spiritually, and what is working its way through the features and speech, through thinking, feeling and will, so that with an eye trained by anthroposophy in this respect, the teacher can educate the person in such a way that the education itself is an organic one, through what he encounters from week to week, even from day to day, in the developing human being. Nowadays, education in most cases proceeds in such a way that we are taught certain things in childhood, some of them quite well. This is not to decry the existing education system, but it must be said that in the developing human being, some things are brought up that are introduced to the child with far too sharply defined contours, and then later do not develop further with the human being, but simply remain in him. In contrast to this, the method of the Waldorf school is to give the child ideas, feelings and impulses of will, without claiming that they will remain by definition as the child receives them, but that they are transmitted to him in an entirely organic way, that is, in moving contours, so that what the child receives as instruction is itself something that grows, just as the child's limbs themselves grow.

In this way, the various areas of social life can be modeled on the processes of the world, those world processes that are not only permeated by matter but also by spirit. And it seemed to me a significant achievement that at the last congress of the Anthroposophical Movement in Stuttgart (from August 28 to September 7, 1921), Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand, a Waldorf school teacher, was able to give a lecture on the topic “Against Experimental Psychology and Experimental Pedagogy”. I do not wish to say anything here against the great merits of experimental psychology and pedagogy. But precisely when one recognizes such merits, one cannot ignore how, in the fields of pedagogy and psychology, the human being has actually become inwardly alien to the human being, and thus also to the child. One must first experiment externally, how the human being perceives, how he retains things, because one is not inwardly connected to the child. An important lecture was delivered by Dr. Caroline von Heydebrand at the Stuttgart Congress, and deserves to be known everywhere. Emil Leinhas gave another lecture that should also be made known. In it he characterized present-day political economy with all its contradictions. This lecture could be a real breakthrough for a renewal of the scientific and practical treatment of the social question, to be drawn from spiritual science, as I have tried to present it myself in my “Key Points of the Social Question” from the necessities of life in the present and the near future.

Thus, through what it attains in direct spiritual vision, spiritual science can not only give man certainty about his eternal essence and thus give him an inner center that he needs if he is not to become unfit for life through perceiving, for example, his supposed nothingness, but anthroposophy can generally fertilize life very much, just as it can penetrate art. Goethe said, in that he sensed such things from his comprehensive world view — I tried to show this in the 1880s in my Goethe writings, from which it can be seen how anthroposophy can also emerge from Goethe's world view, you just have to take it further. At one point, Goethe said that art is based on a certain manifestation of secret laws of nature that would never become apparent without it. Or at another point he once said: He to whom nature reveals its secret is longing for its most worthy interpreter, art. And when he traveled in Italy, he wrote to his friends in Weimar after seeing artistic creations that particularly interested him: “The great works of art, as the greatest works of nature, are produced by people according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.

And: “I have the suspicion that the Greeks proceeded according to the laws by which nature itself proceeds, and which I am on the trail of.

But we can only see this creative power of nature if we behold the spiritual that lies behind the sensual facts and natural essences through anthroposophical knowledge. Therefore, what confronts us sensually in art, but in such a way that the sensual always speaks to our spirit and soul, can be thoroughly fertilized through imaginative and inspired beholding. Only those who have no inkling of spiritual science as it is meant here, but have only ordinary intellectual knowledge in mind, talk about the fact that one can only come to a straw-like allegorical art through creation from the spirit. But you will find nothing allegorical or symbolic, for example, in the School of Spiritual Science building in Dornach, which was built there for anthroposophical spiritual science and which was created in all its forms from the vision of the spiritual world, from the vision of of forms and color harmonies that can be so secretly interwoven into the outer material that what is fulfilled is what Goethe expressed with the words: Art is a manifestation of secret natural laws that would never be revealed without it. — So art too can be fertilized by anthroposophy.

And in eurythmy, we are now bringing an art of human movement to the world that has already been widely studied, in which what is inside the human being in terms of measure, harmony, meaning and inner stylization is brought out and expressed in the movement of individuals or groups of people, so that not just mimic dances are created, but something completely different, something that is a real visible language and therefore expresses the inner soul life as necessarily as audible language or singing.

And religious life must also be enriched by leading man up into those supersensible worlds in which he must have the home of his spirit and soul, especially for religious feeling. It is therefore actually grotesque when, in a recent publication dealing with religious experiments in the present day, and including a section on anthroposophy, which does not in any way seek to found a religion but, as I have described today, — as I have described it today — scientific knowledge, when it is judged in such a way that one says: the truly religious person could not actually tolerate it, because it is a rival to religion, it could perhaps even become a substitute for religion. A substitute for religion — the most terrible of horrors! The person appointed to officially care for religious life today already thinks about anthroposophy in a very economic and commercial way. A competitor is emerging for him, and he continues to speak from the feeling of the competitor: “The creation of anthroposophy means the death of religion.”

Now, dear audience, one should indeed believe with a sound mind and a straight mind that precisely religious life could feel encouraged by the fact that a science that takes it as strictly as any other scientific knowledge opens up the supersensible worlds to human observation in such a way that the presentation given by a spiritual researcher can also be understood by the non-researcher. For this can be the case with spiritual science, which, in addition to material knowledge, simply brings the knowledge of the spiritual life that permeates the material processes of the world. But today there is already some fear of this knowledge. A philosopher who is highly regarded today once said a few years ago: He wanted to talk about the relationship between the spirit and the body of man. One could do that, because one need not know the spirit or the body, but only study the relationship between the two. To illustrate this, he then told a parable, saying, speaking to his audience, I do not need to know each and every one of you and be introduced to each one individually, but there is a certain relationship between us even without us knowing each other. Just by being in the same room, there is a certain relationship between you and me.

So, today in the circles where one talks about world view, one is afraid of a real spiritual knowledge, but one needs this knowledge if one wants to talk about spirit and body, because one has talked oneself so much into an agnostic way of knowing that only wants to see limits everywhere, and one does not want to develop the practice of knowledge that goes beyond the limits of knowledge.

Of course, spiritual science has to be slowly developed, like any other science. But the practice is such that, like the other sciences, it leads into the existence of nature. And spiritual science does not lead people into a dreamed-up cloud-cuckoo-land, but into the real spiritual world. Therefore, it permeates the material world with spiritual impulses that can enable people to intervene in all material circumstances, so that they do not become brooders about the spiritual life, but rather people who are imbued with real spiritual activity and can thus recognize and work in the great world. For only he is truly cognizant who does not dream himself away into a cloud-cuckoo-land, but who is aware that the spirit must intervene practically and creatively in material life through man. In this sense, anthroposophy does not make people impractical, but rather practical for ordinary life on earth, placing them in their duties and in the ordinary tasks of life. It prepares them for eternity, but it prepares them in such a way that they can carry the eternal into the temporal. It does not reject the honest study of material phenomena and material entities, but seeks the spirit that permeates matter everywhere. It seeks the spiritual above all in human knowledge itself, thereby freeing knowledge, which otherwise can only slavishly attach itself to the material world, and thereby creating such impulses for action that the human being can practically intervene in life. Therefore, it can be said of anthroposophy that it at least strives to spiritualize matter through the human being itself, but that the human being does not lose himself in the context of material processes, but that he can find himself through free knowledge as a free human being in the whole scope of life.

Dear attendees! First of all, I would like to express my sincere thanks to the esteemed board for their kind invitation, and in particular to Professor Hallo for the kind words he has just spoken. I have all the more reason to do so because it may seem understandable that everything one is able to say today about a question that touches humanity so deeply, as is the case with my topic today, can only be an attempt, perhaps even just the beginning of an attempt. And the appeal is necessary to understanding and sympathetic humanity.

This brings me immediately to the point where the remarks I have to make to you today differ in principle from all similar discussions that have taken place so frequently in recent times on economic issues in the narrower sense, and on social issues in the broader sense. We have had enough of utopias and utopian constructs. They have emerged from the legitimate foundations of modern human endeavor.

Modern technology has complicated economic life and has brought the whole of social life into extraordinarily diverse new circumstances compared to those to which humanity was accustomed in the past. And so the opinion arose in a great many minds that one could say dogmatically in some way how this more complicated modern social life should be shaped so that every human being, including the broad masses, would be able to lead a dignified existence. But it must be said that anyone who today believes that they can make an impression on their fellow human beings with utopian, dogmatic definitions of social conditions does not understand the basic nature of today's civilization, of today's human life.

Let us assume, dear attendees, that someone could ingeniously devise some economic or social system, or even construct one dogmatically from a broad life experience, if he were to hold it up to humanity, he would not be able to make any impression with the most ingenious arguments, which would be held in this sense. Because we live in a time when the prophets should actually be extinct. We live in a time when people are not inclined to accept anything on authority or on the basis of prophecy. Anyone who takes something seriously and honestly, such as the social question or the reorganization of the present and future economic life, must take this into account.

People today are of the opinion that they themselves must find the guidelines for life. They are of the opinion that they must shape what they determine to be the goals of life out of their own elementary soul and organic powers. In this, I would say most universally democratic point of view, stands what I call the impulse for the threefold social order. This impulse is not intended to say that economic or other social conditions should be shaped in this or that way; it is only intended to point out how people can be brought into a position where they want to shape their lives according to the demands of the present, the demands of their own soul, regardless of whether they consciously or unconsciously strive for them.

The impulse for the threefold social order appeals to the human being, not to a description of any institutions or conditions. It wants to call upon the human being and first hear from the human being what this human being considers appropriate. But this impulse will say how the situation can be brought about in which people are given the opportunity to actively shape their own destiny. Thus, the impulse for the threefold social order wants to work entirely from the habits and aspirations of present-day life, without any utopian nuances, purely from practical life. It does, however, start from two premises. The first, which probably few people would admit to at first, but which emerges from what I will be obliged to characterize at least to some extent in a moment, it emerges from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

It is the conviction that human development goes through meaningful epochs, so that one can look back, for the time being, only at historical times. One sees that there have been different epochs of human development, and in each such epoch, humanity goes through a phase of its being, a phase of its soul and spiritual constitution. What has occurred in one epoch can no longer be repeated in a later one. What earthly humanity has to go through in the course of time through its development thus arises in the course of successive epochs as various missions.

In our epoch, which in this respect has lasted three to four centuries – what has now slowly been preparing has reached a certain culmination – in our epoch we see, welling up from the depths of the human soul, what I would call the democratic urge that runs through the entire modern, civilized world. But I do not mean the triviality that is very often associated with this term; I mean, when I say “democratic urge”, the form of human self-awareness that is developing in our era, through which every human being wants to find within themselves the source for a convincing spiritual life — life of knowledge, life of faith, life of art — welling up from within himself, and in which every human being wants to develop out of himself those feelings through which he relates to his fellow human beings, without this relationship being firmly determined by authority. The human being wants to find their relationship to their fellow human beings from their own free will. And in relation to economic life, the human being wants to come to conditions that enable them to have these foundations of soul and spiritual life in such a way that the democratic impulse can be lived out in the highest sense of the word. In earlier epochs, such a democratic impulse was not present universally within human development. Principles of authority dominated social organisms. And only around the middle of the fifteenth century did the ground slowly begin to prepare for what then came, so to speak, to a grandiose outburst at the end of the eighteenth century and to a culmination in our time, where it wriggles out from civilized humanity through convulsions, through severe trials, through misery and hardship, even through something like the terrible catastrophe we went through in the second decade of the 20th century.

This is one of the things that the person who comes to the impulse of the threefold social organism looks at. He asks himself: What is the most important historical characteristic in the present human being? And the other thing that serves as a starting point for the threefold social organism, I can only characterize it by becoming personal in a certain respect.

I can say that for decades I have observed European economic life, European state life and European intellectual life from different perspectives. For thirty years I have lived in Austria, the experimental country for such observations; in that Austria, where it was shown, especially in its downfall, how the external circumstances were not suitable for solving the great questions of contemporary existence in any way. These and many other conditions of the entire civilization of Europe show that, everywhere in the depths of human souls (one cannot always speak of consciousness, because much still lives in the unconscious or subconscious of most souls today), there is an instinct that a new order must come about. And what I am presenting as the threefold social order is not something I have thought up, least of all fantasized. It is, in a sense, a reading of what could be observed by acquiring an unbiased sense of the economic, constitutional and spiritual development of the present and the last decades. And so what I have to present is the result of observation and experience.

If you take what has been brought into the world in the direction of social and economic issues, up to Karl Marx and those who came later, you will find everywhere that these are logically linked systems. A great deal of ingenuity has been expended. But what humanity needs today is not a logically constructed social system, it is rather something that is as manifold as reality itself. Reality presents itself to us in such a way that what is formed in it could also be different. And if it were different, one would not even be able to say that it is more imperfect. Reality is not unambiguous. Therefore, anyone who speaks about social conditions based on reality cannot speak with the same unambiguousness that is often demanded based on certain dogmatic prejudices. Therefore, my dear attendees, some of what I have to say will give rise to one objection or another, just as one or the other can be objected to in reality itself. But such objections are not important. What is important is whether what one proposes in social terms has the power to sustain life, whether it has the strength to carry us through the present and into the near future.

Today I am speaking to you about economic life in the narrower sense, from the point of view of the threefold social order. But I would not be able to do that if I did not also present you with at least a rough sketch of the nature of this threefold social organism and also of the nature of the starting point of that which underlies what I would like to give as a certain characteristic of economic life, namely anthroposophically oriented spiritual science.

When anthroposophy is mentioned, it is easy to imagine something mystical, vague, distant and unworldly. People are accustomed to identifying anthroposophy with such movements when they consider all kinds of sectarian, mystical-theosophical and similar movements. If you identify anthroposophy with such movements, you will misunderstand it completely. Anthroposophy is based on the same starting points as the modern scientific way of thinking, this scientific way of thinking that has brought us such tremendous insights into the external world, that has basically created all modern technology, and that has transformed our social life to such an extent. But just as it is true that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science fully recognizes the great significance of science and modern technology, so it cannot, for that very reason, stop at the methods that science has developed. Starting from these methods, it must develop spiritual scientific methods in order to penetrate from the physical world into a superphysical world. For everything that surrounds us in the physical world is rooted in the superphysical world. A person only becomes aware of this when he develops other cognitive powers, in addition to those he has through ordinary inheritance, through ordinary child and school education, and through academic life and so on, which, so to speak, do not come into play in ordinary life and ordinary science, and which initially remain latent in the human soul life.

Certain higher powers of knowledge are brought out of the human soul through very specific methods, methods of a proper meditation and concentration permeated by a spirit of mathematization, through methods of a proper schooling, which I have described in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science”, “A Path to Self-Knowledge”. In my books “The Riddle of Man” and “The Riddle of Souls” I have called these higher powers of knowledge “eyes of the spirit” and “ears of the spirit” in the sense of Goethe's world view. Just as our physical organization develops physical eyes and physical ears in us, we can indeed develop spiritual organs that do not sit partially somewhere, but engage the whole person, working from within the fullness of humanity. We can train such spiritual organs and become aware of a supersensible world around us, just as we perceive the physical world around us through our physical organs and through the mind, which is connected to our brain and which combines physical phenomena. And just as we follow the development of the universe through ordinary natural science by looking back to the first physical states and trying to understand how individual beings have developed up to the point of man, so through spiritual science we arrive at the spiritual foundations and starting points of the universe and the spiritual goals of this universe. In this way, two parts of our spiritual life are joined together into a unity, which modern spiritual life has tragically torn apart for man.

My dear attendees, anyone who, like me, has met those individuals who not only live in the theoretical sense in the knowledge of modern times, but with their whole being, their whole mind, knows what tragedy can play out in the soul of those who take the achievements of modern knowledge, which are to be fully recognized, seriously and honestly. You see, I have met people who said to themselves: 'There I look out into a world of mere natural necessities. Man also comes from this world of mere natural necessities. But something sprouts up in this human interior through which man can truly find himself valuable in life. These are the moral ideals, these are the religious feelings, these are the artistic perceptions of the universe, these are all the things we call right, custom and so on. But then such honest people say to themselves: All this arises from a powerful illusion, from a great deception, like smoke and mist from the depths of the human soul. For in reality, man is an external physical organism that has emerged from the universe only through natural necessity. One must look at how this universe will one day arrive in a state of heat death or the like, and how the great cemetery of all ideals, all moral life, all that appears to man as if it were only giving him a dignified existence, will have disappeared and been extinguished.

But anyone who has seen human beings suffer under this effect of the modern world view on the human mind knows what it means for spiritual science to make a unity out of what lives in the human soul as moral ideals, as religious impulses, as artistic perceptions, and what is out there in nature. Today I can only sketch this out; in my books, which I just mentioned, you will find the above substantiated and proven. But I would like to make myself clear with a comparison: we see a plant, it grows out of the ground. As it grows out of the ground, it unfolds leaves and flowers; but then it also unfolds the germ in the flower, which is already the plant for a new plant next year. The germ is inconspicuous, but it is the germ for an entire plant next year, while the leaves and flowers wither and fall off. This is the case in the universe before the knowledge of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. There we see the outer universe with the natural laws that govern it, right down to the law of the conservation of energy and matter. We see it in the sense of this spiritual science as that which withers, dies, and perishes in death. And we see in the human being the moral ideals, the religious impulses, and the artistic perceptions, and we know that these are the seeds for future worlds. That which we see around us today as nature is the result of the moral experiences of beings from a very distant past. What we carry within us as spiritual worlds is the germ for physical worlds of a distant future.

As I said, I can only sketch this out now. I do this for the reason that I can point to what spiritual science, by developing the spirit of natural science, can provide for humanity as a worldview. There we learn to recognize the living spirit again. There one learns to recognize the difference between the conviction that says: I approach the real, actual spirit of the world through spiritual science; I learn to recognize: not only thoughts and ideas live in me, but living spiritual beings live in my thoughts and ideas. One learns to recognize the living spirit again. The old religions, by merely continuing to live traditionally, have lost the great meaning they once had. We need creativity in the human soul in order to gain access to a spiritual life that works in such elementary ways. In contrast to this, the spiritual life that has developed over the last few centuries is an abstract, theoretical one. We experiment, we observe, we use wonderfully ingenious tools and instruments to explore the physical environment and its laws. But all that we explore is only something that gives us abstract concepts and theories, which we may then apply, but which does not fill us inwardly with a living spirit. So that we can say: we do not merely think in thoughts, we do not merely live in images, but as human beings walk around here on earth, supersensible worlds live in us through their spiritual beings, just as the three kingdoms of nature live in our physical organism.

What the threefold social order has to say about the various areas of social life also stems from this real grasp of the spiritual world. For it is the economic questions that are at the root of the social question today. And if one has come to know this social question not from the outside but from the inside, then one must think about it somewhat differently than is generally the case today. For many years I taught at a workers' education school, where I taught a wide range of subjects to proletarians, people who wanted to satisfy their strong urge for education. But it was also possible for me to get to know the proletarian soul, and at the bottom of the proletarian soul to recognize what wells up from the broad masses of the people as the actual foundations and fundamental difficulties of today's economic problem. Time and again, when talking to thousands upon thousands of people – and these days there are millions of people who have not come to know the proletariat and therefore have no idea of the real issues – one hears the same word over and over again: the word 'ideology'.

The word 'ideology' has become popular among the broad masses today. What does it mean? It means that today these broad masses, who have stood at the modern machine, who have been woven into the fabric of modern technology, have been alienated from the joy of the immediate products of labor , that these broad masses have adopted a deeply internal conviction that only the external, material, economic processes, as people express themselves, the production processes, the modes and types of production, actually have a reality. What man stands in as in material production, that is the actual reality, and what he develops as custom, as law, as religion, as science, as art, is only what people call a superstructure, that is, something that arises as an ideology, as smoke and fog, from the only reality, which is material reality.

Those who belong to the educated classes still have old traditions or at least live in a life that is still dominated by old traditions, by religious traditions, artistic traditions and so on. The broad masses of the people have said goodbye to these traditions. The broad masses have taken on board as their innermost conviction what is a theory of the other classes. One can have such a thing as a conviction, one can even defend it, one can cite all sorts of logical reasons for it, but one cannot live with it. And that one cannot live with it in the deepest part of one's soul can be seen by anyone who has been in contact with these people for years, especially as their teacher. It deserts the soul, it empties the soul when it regards spiritual life as an ideology.

Truly, the leading circles, by having also alienated themselves from the living spiritual life, have made what can become spiritual experience into mere theory, mere abstraction, mere head culture. The modern worker wants to fill the whole person with it, and as a result he remains afflicted with a barrenness of soul. The origin of modern economic difficulties must be sought in this state of mind, which the modern proletarian has inherited from the intellectual life of the ruling classes, in this spiritual barrenness. These economic difficulties do not lie in external institutions, they lie in the mental state of the broadest sections of modern humanity, sections numbering millions, as just outlined and characterized: ideology instead of a living intellectual life.

We must then look for the causes of how it actually came about that ideology could take the place of a living spiritual life in social life as well. And here we come to something that may still be perceived as a paradox today, because people do not realize that what is fully justified for one epoch of humanity cannot also be for all epochs of humanity.

When this modern life emerged, from the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth century, there were already individual states, state structures, that had formed from different prerequisites within modern civilization. These state structures gradually took over all tasks of human development. We know, of course, how educational life was dependent on the denominations in ancient times. The state structures rightly took over the schooling, the educating, the educational life from the denominations. They could not remain with the denominations. For this it was necessary that what school and educational life is was incorporated into the framework of the state. And another urge developed; because one actually only had this social framework of the modern state, the urge also developed, as modern economic conditions became more and more complicated under the influence of triumphant technology, to gradually have economic life also more and more encompassed by state principles and state forces.

And so the three areas of human development were made into an external, abstract unity. In a certain way, it was beneficial that this unity came about, but on the other hand, we are now at the historical point in time where the three different areas of human social life are breaking away from this unity, demanding that they receive their own administration that follows from their essence.

Let us first take spiritual life, as I have characterized it, as it wants to emerge anew from the creative sources of the human soul through anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This spiritual life can only develop if it can independently administer itself on its own ground, if it does not receive its guidelines from any state measures, from any state administration. These matters, ladies and gentlemen, can easily be challenged on logical grounds. But for anyone who can immerse themselves in the particular structure of intellectual life, it is clear that intellectual life, that which is creative in it, that which brings its own character to the surface, can only develop if the educational life is educational and school system is put on a firm footing; if this spiritual life, namely the most important link in this spiritual life, the public education and school system, is designed in such a way that those who are teaching, instructing and educating in it are also the administrators. They should devote only as much time to education and teaching as is necessary to enable them to administer the education and teaching system itself, in accordance with the same principles as those they teach by the hour. Intellectual life, education and teaching must not be dependent on any external norm. For the interference of an external norm kills that which must be in every educator and teacher: direct responsibility not to a state, not to an economic power, but to the supersensible spiritual life itself.

If each person feels responsible as an individual of humanity towards spiritual life in its essence, then we have a living spiritual life. To shape this living spiritual life, it is necessary that this spiritual life receives its own administration. It will be able to establish its own validity. One only has to emancipate this spiritual life from state and economic life, give it its own administration, and one will see that, because one needs the abilities of capable people, one will also recognize these abilities. And in the same moment in which a person's position in the spiritual life is not determined by external laws and administrative measures, but rather by the fact that a person works out of his or her individuality according to his or her abilities in the free spiritual life, in that same moment there will also be the free recognition of human abilities with regard to the spiritual life.

And basically, one can only get an idea of such a spiritual life from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Abstract spiritual life is alienated from the world. The spiritual life that we cultivate at the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum is a spiritual knowledge that approaches the whole human being, that is not a cerebral culture, but that can be said to develop the human being right down to their manual dexterity. I would just like to mention briefly that last fall, at the Goetheanum, we held courses for the School for Spiritual Science, in which thirty personalities participated: scholars, artists, business people, and industrialists who wanted to show how anthroposophical spiritual science can be applied to the whole human being and to all of life. Theoretical and abstract spiritual life does not reach into the muscles and dexterity; it must first acquire routine. A living spiritual life reaches into manual dexterity, into the muscles and nerve formations.

Therefore, a free spiritual life, which from this perspective is the basis of the rest of the social order, will be able to embrace not those unworldly teacher-natures who are often to be blamed for this, because they are, after all, the result of human conditions in the present, but rather people of life. And it is precisely out of this attitude that practical insights into life, everything that is directly related to everyday life, will be recognized and developed from the spiritual life in the same way that philosophy or basic religious conviction is developed. For in such a spiritual life all material and all spiritual is one, and the spirit has the right power in man only when it does not close man off from material life, but when it gives man the ability to intervene in material life in practically every field. We must not withdraw into a nebulous, mystical spiritual life, but let the spirit permeate us, so that precisely the external, physical reality can be spiritualized.

We need this spiritual life as the basis of a healthy economic life. For this spiritual life will in turn embrace man. It will not, as the so-called spiritual life of the last three to four centuries has done, bring the broad masses what is only a dull, deadening ideology, but it will give them a sense of their human dignity. Then it will be possible to work with them. For the social and economic question can only be solved from the human soul, from human knowledge, human feelings and convictions and will impulses. We must find access to the souls of working people. We will not find this access if we continue to talk to them about our sciences as we have talked to them so far, and if we talk about social conditions in the way that these sciences have taught us to talk about them so far.

Thus I have described the first link in the threefold social organism: the independent spiritual life, which is placed in the administration of those who are spiritually creative, namely those who educate and teach. This is, so to speak, on one wing of the modern social organism. On the other wing is economic life. This economic life is fundamentally different from the spiritual life. What does a person in the spiritual life strive for? He strives to come out of his soul to an understanding of the harmony of life. Even the simplest person must have a certain totality of life in relation to the spiritual life. In relation to the economic life, we can never have that. Here, if a person really observes life and has a sense of life, he must make a confession to himself: in economic life there is no total judgment of the individual. What does that mean? I will first make myself clear through an historical fact. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the gold standard was discussed in many states, and in many areas of public social life in general. In some states, the gold standard was introduced. What was said about the gold standard at that time by parliamentarians, by practical economists, by other practitioners of life – I do not mean this ironically, but quite seriously and honestly – was indeed very astute and clever. One still has great respect for those people who spoke about economic life at that time.

But all that was explained, and with excellent reasons at that, was the prognosis: Free trade would flourish under the influence of the gold standard, the individual states would open their borders, and the appropriate global economic life would be able to develop freely, unimpeded by the borders of the individual states. These state frameworks have, after all, arisen from completely different conditions than modern economic life, which has gradually become a unit through the world economy and which needs completely different connections than those that states can create. Free trade will flourish. So very clever people have said. And what has actually happened? Customs barriers have sprung up everywhere; the superiority of protective tariffs has been much discussed since then, less wisely but with more prospect of achieving things.

What is actually at hand here? What is at hand, ladies and gentlemen, is that in the field of economic life, the cleverness with which one progresses in intellectual life as an individual is of no use in economic life. It is a profound and significant truth that no matter how clever an individual may be, if his economic judgment is to have any weight in economic life, then no matter how clever a judgment based on individual abilities may be, it counts for nothing; in economic life, the only thing that matters is what we acquire through expertise and skill in the individual subjects of economic life. But this cannot develop directly in economic life; rather, it relies on being complemented by what others in other industries, in other fields, can develop as decisive judgment, as judgment that is viable for reality. In economic life, only collective judgment can be decisive, that is, what a particular group of people, uniting the most diverse economic sectors, presents in such a way that one is not dealing with mutual advice; in the case of advice, not much comes of it, only a formless parliamentarization; but rather, you are dealing with mutual interests coming into relation with each other; that you are dealing with working life itself; that one person has this to realize, the other that; that one person has something to assert, a skill in a particular field, the other something in the field of [production] and so on. And it is entirely possible that associations will be formed that must have a certain size, associations in which people from the most diverse economic walks of life unite. Things start from needs. Then it is a matter of uniting with those people who, based on their life experiences, can talk about the needs of certain circles, with other people who are involved in certain branches of production that meet these needs.

And, esteemed attendees, something else is possible than what appears in the modern social democracy when the slogan, which is correct as a slogan, is repeated over and over again: one should not produce to profit, but to consume. What could be more correct than this! But what could be easier than to utter such an abstract sentence? It is always a question of how to do something like that. Because the matter is actually self-evident.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, until now it has only been possible to implement such things in a limited number of areas. And I would like to start by presenting an area to you that you may not recognize because it belongs more to the spiritual realm. However, I will characterize it now only in economic terms – the area of anthroposophical book trade. Many years ago we founded the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Publishing House in Berlin. Consider how a publishing house is usually run today. I am citing something from the spiritual life, but you will soon see that it can be applied to the whole material life. How is a publishing house run today? The publisher takes the manuscript from the author. The manuscript is typeset. Books are produced and sent to the booksellers, but are they all sold? Well, anyone who knows the book trade also knows what the term 'crabs' means. These are the books that are returned by the booksellers. There are many such cancers, not only among poets, where almost everything that is printed takes on the nature of cancer. But let's look at what is actually happening. So and so many people are employed to produce the paper, so and so many people to set the books, print them, then ship these books and so on. Do you realize how many people are kept busy with books that are not at all necessary for the life of the general public? Most of them are not necessary, life would go on just as well without them, especially in a field where everything hinges on production. So how did we do it at the Philosophical-Anthroposophical Press?

We have not printed a single book that was not certain from the outset to sell. Because we started from spiritual consumption. First there was the Anthroposophical Society. However critical you may think of it, I am only talking about economic matters now. This society developed a need, we knew this need, we lived in association with the Anthroposophical Society, we got to know its needs in a living way, and we took these needs into account in our spiritual production. And the publishing house was never in a position to employ people unnecessarily. It would be much more important than the empty phrases we hear in many programs and the like today to think about how to do things, how to fight worthless production and the worthless employment of people in social life. This can only be done through the principle of association. However imperfect this association I have described is, it is an association.

Later, I tried something that was then interrupted by the war. We had a member in the Anthroposophical Society who was a master baker. I said: Why shouldn't the Anthroposophical Society also be seen as a sum of consumers for bread, which it certainly is as well. So I get them so many consumers that they can pursue their production, I said to the person concerned. It did not succeed, partly because of the individuality of the person concerned, but it could have succeeded; but the war came into the picture as well. Again, starting from demand, an attempt was made to associate demand with production.

You see, what I am describing to you as the associative principle in economic life also shows itself as something that wells up from the subconscious of human society today, so to speak. On the one hand we see the formation of cartels, on the other the formation of trusts, but always only among mere producers, while the connection between producers and consumers is provided by the agencies, and this is also one-sided. By eliminating the agencies and creating associations that stand between consumption and production with their living interests and mediate between them, a fruitful future for economic life is ensured. Cartels allot profits, allot consumption, allot various things. One sees that, under the influence of the world economy, unification is necessary, but the matter is initially approached from the wrong end. Instead of encompassing the entire economy in associations, they initially associate only producers. This exacerbates the very thing that has brought chaos to our economic life. It does not reduce and mitigate it.

Now, my dear attendees, what is it exactly that suggests, when we look at our economic life with open minds, that economic life, as a special link in the three-part social organism, must also be distinguished from the other two, as I have already characterized for the spiritual link and will still characterize for the other link.

I will characterize a very specific fact of today's economic life, which, for those who are now routine in economic life, is felt as an economic difficulty, but about which it is not easy to gain clarity. It is the fact that in our complicated social entity, in which the division of labor prevails, in which people work for each other, we pay for goods as a product of labor; we pay for human labor in the same way as we pay for goods as a product of labor. We pay for both with the same money, so to speak. Sometimes money can represent a certain amount of coal, and at other times it can represent a certain amount of labor. Now imagine if someone wanted to measure with a common measure, lambs and apples, things that simply do not have a common measure, things that have nothing in common. Human labor power as such is not comparable with a commodity in an agitative way, in a very wrong way this thing lives in Karl Marx's agitation.

But in every unbiased sense of humanity, it lives as the source of an explanation of how we have pushed two things together in our economic life that really cannot be measured by any common measure. And here, too, modern life is already working in such a way that it unconsciously wants to help itself, so to speak, in the right direction. Individual states have tried to regulate working hours, set up work insurance, pension insurance and so on, in short, to regulate work through a special legal system, independently of what is contained in economic life itself. Because economic life only includes the production, circulation and consumption of goods. In economic life, work is only indirectly included.

Basically, the situation is as follows: on the one hand, we have nature in the economy. We cannot possibly dictate from mere economic motives – because we as a consortium may need to sell wheat at such and such a price next year if we are to achieve this or that – that there will be so and so much rain or sunshine next year. Nature is taken for granted. We have to accept it. We want to bring human labor directly under the economic point of view. We want to regulate human labor from the economic basis. Social democracy wants it itself, wants it precisely from the economic basis. It represents nothing other than the terribly one-sided continuation of that which led into chaos.

It is important to recognize that goods and human labor are not comparable values, that they must be managed from two different perspectives. We do not need to manage nature; it cannot be managed; it underlies our economic life just as it underlies the economic life of birds and the like. Within the actual economic life, we manage the production of goods, the circulation of goods, and the consumption of goods. However, modern conditions have led to a confusion between the comparative value or price of the goods and that which labor quite remunerates in the same way as one pays for goods – while labor must be regulated according to completely different aspects.

Just think about what has emerged from the unnaturalness of modern conditions; for example, within modern proletarian theory. People say: the manual laborer works this or that, and in doing so consumes organic power that must be replaced; for this he must be remunerated. A great contrast has even been constructed between manual labor and mental labor. Mental labor consumes less because it provides ideas that are then always imitated. It does not provide something that works in this way towards consumption. All these theories have arisen because work has been put into the process of commodity consumption, commodity circulation and commodity production, because the line has not been drawn between the actual economic life and the state or legal or political life. Thus we have the three limbs of the social organism, the spiritual limb, namely, the most important, public spiritual life: the teaching and education system; the state-political limb, in which, for example, labor is to be regulated.

How does someone who takes what I said at the beginning of my lecture very seriously and honestly – the awareness that modern humanity must move towards democracy – cope? Only those who leave out what cannot be democratized from the democratic can take democracy seriously and honestly.

There is a broad and comprehensive area of human affairs in which every person who has come of age is competent; that is the area in which majorities rightly prevail. This is the area where something can be achieved by parliamentarization. Parliamentarization cannot achieve anything in the field of intellectual life, where only the development of the individuality of the individual can be fruitful. Parliamentarization, majority decisions, cannot achieve anything in the field of economic life. There associations must come into being in the way I have described, out of the most diverse branches of life. And these associations will develop to a certain size. There is no need for statistics; they are of no help, they only refer to the past, but it is life that matters. And it is life that should be grasped by people who are members of associations, and that the associations should grasp the needs, not regulate them. Economic life has nothing to do with ethics, with a critique of needs, but only with the observation that the needs are there. The free spiritual life has to do with critique, with the regulation of needs. Political life has to do with what I have just spoken of and what I will speak of yet. In economic life, associations only have to do with what is alive in the production, circulation and consumption of goods.

Once the need has been determined, it is known how many people have to be involved in the production of certain articles. If too many people are involved, the products become too cheap for the need; if too few people are involved, the products become too expensive. We arrive at what I would call the shaping of the price out of the life of the associations. Of course, we can only take something as a kind of calculation, as a kind of general formula. But it is possible to arrive at something fruitful out of such associations by concluding contracts to the effect that as many people as are necessary can work on an article in a certain field. We can arrive at a situation in which what I would call the 'primordial cell of economic life' is fulfilled more and more. It will seem paradoxical to you. And yet, in its subconscious depths, humanity strives for economic satisfaction in the sense of this economic primordial cell: every person should receive for his product of labor — not for his labor, labor does not belong in economic life — he needs for himself, his family and everything else for which he has to provide, in order to fabricate an equal product in turn; thus, he needs as much for the satisfaction of his needs as it takes to produce an equal product. Roughly speaking: If I make a pair of boots, I must receive so much for this pair of boots through the regulation of economic life that I can make a new pair of boots, and while I am making this new pair of boots, I have everything I need for myself, my family and other expenses.

I am not saying that this should be determined by some kind of socialist dogma, but that the associative principle is the necessary one. There is no need to fear that this will lead to a terrible bureaucracy. After all, bureaucracy is already sufficiently taken care of in all countries of the world precisely because of other circumstances. What I mean here by economic association will establish itself alongside work and through work. And since economic areas and economic associations become confusing when they are too large and uneconomical when they are too small, economic organization has a certain size depending on climatic and other conditions, as well as on the characters of the people and so on.

The associations continue to associate. This then provides the basis for a large world association, for the great world economic federation, which can only be created out of economic life, out of an economic life independent of intellectual and political life. Of course, work plays a role in this economic life, but on the other hand, work must be left to the realm of the political and legal state. Every person who has come of age is competent to speak about the extent of work, in association with other people.

My esteemed audience, I spoke earlier about the ill-fated experimental country of Austria, where I spent thirty years. There one could see how modern parliamentary life has emerged. You could see what it means to carry economic interests into political life. When parliamentary life was to be created in Austria in the 1860s, the parliament was composed of four curiae: the curia of the large landowners, the curia of the chamber of commerce, the curia of the cities, markets and industrial towns, and the curia of the rural communities – purely economic points of view! Four curiae, put together purely on the basis of economic interests. They were now supposed to decide on the legal and political situation. Not only the intellectual and national life, no, the internal impossibility has already created destructive forces in a country as difficult to construct and as difficult to put together as Austria, which could already be seen in the 1870s and 1880s by anyone living in Austria with an unbiased mind. There one could study how necessary it is to keep economic life separate, with its own administrative instances, rooted in the associations of the various professional and industrial guilds and of the various branches of economic life in general, and to have, in addition, the free spiritual life, which certainly plays a part in economic life. How it plays a part, I have described in detail in my 'Key Points of the Social Question'. You will also find details in our newspaper on threefolding, which appears in Stuttgart, and also in a Dutch newspaper on the threefolding of the social organism.

Just as you can educate yourself about the fertility of the free spiritual life in the Free Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which we have established and which Emil Molt has set up and which I run, so you can principles, which are, however, only in their infancy, by acquainting yourself with our writings and with what is being attempted, for instance, in the economic institutions of Futurum in Switzerland and Kommenden Tag in Germany. Of course, it is not yet possible to found many associative life; the facts of external life, of today's social order, are too much opposed to this associative life, but the beginnings should still be created for it. The impulse given for the threefold social organism should definitely work its way into practical life. And so, in my aforementioned book 'The Core of the Social Question', I also showed how capital basically also has its origin in spiritual life, and must therefore also pass into the individual administration of the human being in connection with spiritual life, with the spiritual element of the social organism.

There have been critics of the threefold social order who said: Yes, this threefold order tears apart into three parts what is a unity. No, it is only through the fact that these three parts are administered in the sense of their own essence that true unity is created. Through the spiritual life and through human individuality, the circulation of capital will gradually come about. I can only mention this briefly here, but you can read more about it in my book “The Essentials of the Social Question”. The regulation of labor will be subject to the rule of law. In this legal or political state, all matters for which every adult is competent will be regulated. And anyone who is sincere about democracy must, on the one hand, exclude intellectual life and, on the other, economic life, in which nothing can be regulated purely democratically; then there remains for the actual state a broad area that encompasses all human affairs; that is, those matters in which one person is equal to another, those matters in which all people are truly equal.

This impulse for the threefold social order is truly drawn from the depths of human nature. Because of the diversity of spiritual, state and economic life, a separate administration is required for all three areas, and because the human being is involved in all three, the right unity and the right interaction will only arise. From the spiritual life into the economic life, capital administered by the spirit is at work. From the state into the economic life, the way in which each human being, as an equal, regulates his work, the measure and so forth, is at work. This work will have to be accepted in the economic life, as nature is accepted. We will say to ourselves: Rain or shine, I cannot control it. I must accept economic life as it unfolds under these conditions. Likewise, in the field of economic administration, I must accept what is regulated as work. And when the associations set prices, the only thing that will be considered is the product of labor, not labor as such.

But this brings us to the intimate interpenetration of the three members of the social organism. And an economic life that does not somehow deal with all kinds of spiritual matters, a state life that does not deal with all kinds of spiritual programs and the like, but only deals with those matters in which all people as equals are competent, such an economic life and such a state life will receive the most beautiful fertilization from the free spiritual life. There will be a vigorous interaction between the three elements, if each is administered in its own way.

I have also been told that I want to resurrect an old Platonic idea of the teaching, military and nutritional classes. No, it is not the various classes that are to be constituted, but rather the external administration is to be constituted by leading people to a free judgment in these three areas. No utopia is to be presented dogmatically. No fantasies are to be used to describe how the institutions should be. Rather, attention should be drawn to how people must organize themselves in the social organism so that, through their cooperation, they can find the solution to the social question, and so that the organization of economic life, which must basically take place with the constant active participation of the competent associations, can also be found. Just as the human organism must be nourished every day.

And so we can say: Three areas confront us in the entire social organism; three areas that each demand their own administration based on their own nature. Freedom should prevail in spiritual life; equality should prevail in democratic state life, where only those things are administered from the majority that can really be decided by the majority, because every person is competent for them. And fraternity can develop precisely in an economic life that is built on the associative principle in the way described. These three great maxims of human development resound across to us from the eighteenth century. And what human heart would not beat faster when it allows these three maxims of human development to take effect on it with deep understanding. But clever people in the nineteenth century repeatedly emphasized that in the unitary state these three lofty ideals contradict each other. And they were right. The solution to this riddle is that although people have asserted the three greatest ideals of social life, freedom, equality and fraternity, out of an inner intuition, they have so far been under the suggestion of the unitary state that only the threefold social organism can realize these three ideals, namely, freedom in the spiritual realm, equality in the state-political realm, and fraternity in the associatively shaped economic realm.

And in characterizing economic life today, I had to show how it can be built as a foundation for a free spiritual life and for the true, state-based democracy that modern humanity strives for. But these two areas are in intimate harmony with economic life. For it is an economic life that alone can give all people a dignified existence; one that is built on the basis of the laws that shape the economy itself, that draws its fertilizing forces from an independent, real state-based life and its administrative roots from a free spiritual life. Therefore, we can say that an economic life of the future is only conceivable as being associated with an independent legal life and a creative, free spiritual life that works out of human souls.

Answering questions

Question: You have not told us how the associations are to come into being. Do these associations float in the air? Where do they come from? Do you think that today's workers' organizations or the existing consumer cooperatives can become associations through their training and development, or are associations only utopian? Are they based on something that has emerged historically or do you want to build something, do something, create something? You have talked about utopias so often.

Rudolf Steiner: When I speak of utopias, I mean something that has come to light, for example, in Proudhon, Blanc, Saint Simon, [Bakunin], and to some extent also in Karl Marx. There you will find utopias, thought structures about a social order of the future. The only thing that sets Marxist utopia apart from the others is that it appeals to a particular class, appeals to the instincts of a particular class, and has therefore become a very real force in the world of agitation. But it is precisely in the present day, when this utopia is producing the most terrible results by claiming to be realized in reality, that we see the utopian aspect of the matter. This utopianism can be seen to the highest degree in those who believe that they are standing firmly on the ground of reality. One does not need to go to Russia to study the details of how Leninism kills culture and civilization. One only needs to familiarize oneself with what lives in the mind of Lenin. All sorts of social conditions are described that this new tsar wants to realize. But then Lenin says: with all this, what is actually humanly dignified is not achieved after all, but something is achieved that destroys the present. Then the present perishes, and with it people go into decadence; and then a new human race will arise, which will establish the humanly dignified existence. — There we have posited something utopian to the point of blood. This utopianism basically dominates more than one might think the minds and souls of contemporary people. What I have presented to you is not at all conceived utopianistically, but is conceived in such a way that, basically, it can be started every day with the appropriate things.

If I immediately tie in with what the previous speaker said: we have consumer cooperatives. The consumer cooperatives do not work in the sense that today the incommensurability between labor and labor product and commodities could somehow be eliminated, but they work in the midst of these conditions. If they are not production-consumption cooperatives, they ultimately only aim at regulating consumption, not at an interaction between producers and consumers, as the associations do. But it can be developed. It is not utopian to build on what already exists. Of course, you must not have the idea that it is already utopian if you just don't leave what is there as it is. So what is there are, so to speak, the elements that associate. I'm not talking about organization.

Dear attendees, I am actually Austrian, but I have spent half of my life in Germany, then in Switzerland, but I come from Germany. Nevertheless, although I come from Germany, the word “organization” really seems like something burning to me. I expect nothing from an organization, because an organization emanates from a center. The organization is regulated from above. In reality, it is the special love for the organization that has prepared Germany for what is happening now. And if you come to Germany today, you will find that the addiction to organization is still flourishing terribly, even if you believe that you have outgrown these organizations. What is called organization in Germany has the same effect on me as a red cloth on a bull (not that I claim to be a bull). Association is different from organization. The best and the most capable join together, not those who are at the center of things and want to organize.

Particularly with regard to this organization, an example can be given in Germany. A German professor has now written a book about price formation during the First World War. On the basis of extremely thoroughly compiled material, he has determined what happened as a result of the state intervening in economic life through the organization of prices. He presents four sentences with the right consistency, which are worthy of being in a scientific book in terms of methodology: Firstly, the price-setting authorities had no idea what was important. Secondly, prices were regulated everywhere in such a way that the opposite of what was actually believed to be achieved was achieved. Thirdly, by regulating prices, large sections of the population have been affected in the most terrible way. Fourthly, profiteering has been encouraged at the expense of honest industry and honest trade. These are the scientific conclusions that the economist in question has reached. Then he adds: Yes, science says that about economic life, but in social life there are other interests; there the state must intervene, and what is recognized as economically right by the economist no longer applies before the state.

Now, what is more sensible: for the economist to stand and lament that the state is thwarting his correct scientific conclusions, or for him to say: economic life must be organized in such a way that there is no need to point out what disturbs correct price formation. Everywhere, the impulse of the threefold social organism ties in with natural conditions. What is the production of goods, the circulation of goods, the consumption of goods, must arise out of the individual human being, out of the individual human being, the individual human groups. And this efficiency in the individual associates itself. At the beginning, one does not know what is associating, not organizing; only in accordance with one's own efficiency does what is to come about arise.

This is also the case in the spiritual life, for example, if you look at the Waldorf School, which leads a completely free spiritual life. I run the school, but I have never done anything other than advise individuals. I go into the classes, study the children's development from a psychological point of view, and discuss my psychological studies with the teachers in an advisory capacity, who then try to take things further. In fact, we have even come up with completely new laws for childhood development at different ages, for example, for how children live together and so on. But how does this Waldorf school work? Yes, you see, you would have felt at the beginning like a civil servant or a member of parliament, then you would have sat down with others who also feel like civil servants or members of parliament and made programs. The programs are made very cleverly, because in terms of the intellectual, people are terribly clever. You can set up the most perfect programs, but can they be carried out? We have not done that. What matters for the Waldorf School is that we have our twenty-two teachers, and the Waldorf School will be as good as these teachers are able to make it. There is nothing more dishonest than to set out a program that cannot be followed because the teachers can only work according to their abilities and not according to programs. They try to work out of their abilities. And so it is in economic life. The associations are not formed utopian, but rather by continuing to work on what is already there. I only believe that when the associations are formed, the individualities will also become more efficient. But today we are building on what is there.

Chairman of the students: This evening you have given us an insight into your view of economic life. It is of course impossible to have an overview of the whole problem, but your lecture will certainly be a stimulus for many of us to take a closer look at the threefold social organism. And in this you have achieved an important goal. You came to us despite the fact that you are almost overburdened with work. I would like to thank you for this on behalf of the assembly. It was a very interesting evening.

Rudolf Steiner: Dear Mr. Chairman and all those who helped to organize today's invitation. I can only say that this invitation gave me a very special satisfaction. It came from the student body. And who should be more aware than those who are faced with such problems as those I have mentioned, that today, for the solution of these questions, which will take up the next decades - initially, of course, the preliminary solution - we need above all those who are within the student body today.

I am long past that, but today I often think back to the times when we lived through things differently than you do today. At that time, we had a lot of intellectual, national and, in particular, economic hopes, and many of these economic hopes have indeed proved to be illusions – and not just here or there, but in the whole of international life. This has deterred many from seriously pursuing the deepest human issues. Those who are in a position to go through their student days today can hardly indulge in illusions in the same way. They learn from the great hardship, from the crisis-prone nature of today's life, that deepening is necessary. That is why it fills one with a deep sense of satisfaction to find interest in suggestions of this kind among the student body. Because I didn't want to give more than suggestions. From this point of view, that perhaps, even if I am no longer there, work will continue on the basis of these suggestions, especially by those who are young today, that at least, even if only a very small, tiny drop could be added today through this invitation, from this point of view, I thank you and the whole committee warmly for your kind invitation.

Herman Sijbrand: Hello, Dr. Steiner, you have expressed your thanks for the invitation. Let me now bring up an issue, let me express what has just come to me. The matter is quite the opposite, the feeling of gratitude is entirely on my side. Because you are the one who has succeeded in showing me the synthesis of art, science and religion again. You are the one who, to me, who is and wants to be in the strict service of science and technology, you are the one who has shown me the true path to the ideal of humanity, to the ideal of humanity, to Christ, to the true understanding of Christianity, to the true understanding of Christ and his teaching, I owe it to you. I would still like to have said that.

There followed an untranscribed closing speech by Herman Sijbrand Hello to those gathered in Dutch.

Dr. Steiner: Today I want you to summarize all your experiences of the last ten days and then we will discuss what is necessary.

Stockmeyer (the school administrator) reports: We began instruction on September 16, and Mr. Molt gave a short speech to the students. We had to somewhat change the class schedule we had discussed because the Lutheran and Catholic religion teachers were not available at the times we had set. We also had to combine some classes. In addition, we needed to include a short recess of five minutes in the period from 8-10 a.m.

Dr. Steiner: Of course, we can do that, but what happens during that period must remain the free decision of the teacher.

A teacher: During the language classes in the upper grades, it became apparent that some children had absolutely no knowledge of foreign languages. For that reason, at least for now, we must give three hours of English and three hours of French instead of the 1½ hours of each that we had planned. We also had to create a beginners’ class as well as one for more advanced students.

Dr. Steiner: What are you teaching in the eighth grade?

A teacher: The computation of interest. I plan to go on to the computation of discounts and exchanges.

Dr. Steiner: The two seventh- and eighth-grade teachers must remain in constant contact so that when one teacher leaves the class, he brings things to a kind of conclusion. When he returns, he then leads the class through a repetition. In the past few days, have you been able to determine how much the students already know?

A teacher: I was able to make an approximation.

Dr. Steiner: With your small class that certainly would have been possible, but hardly for the other teachers. Certainly, we can try to make it possible for you to change classes an average of once a week, but we must be careful that the exchange takes place only when you finish a topic.

A teacher: The seventh grade knows very little history.

Dr. Steiner: You will probably need to begin something like history from the very beginning in each class, since none of the students will have a proper knowledge of history. The children have probably learned what is common knowledge, but, as I have mentioned in the past, it is unlikely that any of them have a genuine understanding of history. Therefore, you must begin from the beginning in each class.

A teacher: Many parents have been unable to decide whether they should send their children to the independent religious instruction or the Lutheran or Catholic. Many of them wrote both in the questionnaire, since they want their children confirmed for family reasons.

Dr. Steiner: Here we must be firm. It’s either the one or the other. We will need to speak about this question more at a later time. A teacher: An economic question has arisen: Should those students who are paying tuition also purchase their own books? The factory takes care of all of these things for its children, but it could happen that children sit next to one another and one has a book he or she must return and the other a book he or she can keep. This would emphasize class differences.

Dr. Steiner: Clearly we can’t do things in that way, that some children buy their books and then keep them. The only thing we can do is raise the tuition by the amount of the cost of books and supplies, but, in general, we should keep things as they are with the other children. Therefore, all children should return their books.

A teacher: Should we extend that to such things as notebooks? That is common practice here in Stuttgart. Also, how should we handle the question of atlases and compasses?

Dr. Steiner: Of course, the best thing would be to purchase a supply of notebooks and such for each class. The children would then need to go to the teacher when they fill one notebook in order to obtain a new one. We could thus keep track of the fact that one child uses more notebooks than others. We should therefore see that there is a supply of notebooks and that the teacher gives them to the children as needed.

For compasses and other such items, problems arise if we simply allow the children to decide what to buy. Those children with more money will, of course, buy better things, and that is a real calamity. It might be a good idea if all such tools, including things for handwork, belong to the school and the children only use them.

As for atlases, I would suggest the following. We should start a fund for such things and handle the atlases used during the year in much the same way as the other supplies. However, each child should receive an atlas upon graduation. It would certainly be very nice if the children received something at graduation. Perhaps we could even do these things as awards for good work. A larger more beautiful book for those who have done well, something smaller for those who have done less, and for those who were lazy, perhaps only a map. That is certainly something we could do; however, we shouldn’t let it get out of hand.

A teacher: How should we handle the question of books for religious instruction? Until now, instructional materials were provided, but according to the new Constitution, that will probably no longer be so. We thought the children would purchase those books themselves and would pay the ministers directly for their teaching.

Dr. Steiner: I have nothing against doing it that way. However, I think that we should investigate how other schools are handling that, so that everything can move smoothly, at least this year. In the future, we must find our own way of working, but at least for this year, we should do it like the other schools. We need to act in accordance with the public schools. If they do not require the purchase of religion books and separate payment for instruction, we must wait until they do. It would certainly be helpful if we could say we are doing what the public schools are doing.

A teacher: Should we use the secondary schools as our model? Dr. Steiner: No, we should pay more attention to the elementary schools.

A teacher: Nothing is settled there yet.

Dr. Steiner: True. However, I would do what is common in the elementary schools, since the socialist government will not change much at first, but will just leave everything the way it has been. The government will make laws, but allow everything to stay the same.

A teacher: It seems advisable to keep track of what we teach in each class. But, of course, we should not do it the normal way. We should make the entries so that each teacher can orient him- or herself with the work of the other teachers.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, but if we do that in an orderly manner, we will need time, and that will leave time for the children to simply play around. When you are with the children as a teacher, you should not be doing anything else. What I mean is that you are not really in the classroom if you are doing something not directly connected with the children. When you enter the classroom, you should be with the children until you leave, and you should not give the children any opportunity to chatter or misbehave by not being present, for instance, by making entries in a record book or such things.

It would be much better to take care of these things among ourselves. Of course, I am assuming that the class teachers do not get into arguments about that, but respect one another and discuss the subject. If a teacher works with one class, then that teacher will also discuss matters with the others who teach that class. Each teacher will make his or her entries outside of the instructional period. Nothing, absolutely nothing that does not directly interact with the children can occur during class time.

A teacher: Perhaps we could do that during the recesses. Dr. Steiner: Why do we actually need to enter things? First, we must enter them, then someone else must read them. That is time lost for interacting with the students.

A teacher: Shouldn’t we also record when a student is absent?

Dr. Steiner: No, that is actually something we also do not need.

A teacher: If a child is absent for a longer time, we will have to inquire as to what the problem is.

Dr. Steiner: In the context of our not very large classes, we can do that orally with the children. We can ask who is absent and simply take note of it in our journals. That is something that we can do. We will enter that into the children’s reports, namely, how many times a child was absent, but we certainly do not need a class journal for that.

A teacher: I had to stop the children from climbing the chestnut trees, but we want to have as few rules as possible.

Dr. Steiner: Well, we certainly need to be clear that we do not have a bunch of angels at this school, but that should not stop us from pursuing our ideas and ideals. Such things should not lead us to think that we cannot reach what we have set as our goals. We must always be clear that we are pursuing the intentions set forth in the seminar. Of course, how much we cannot achieve is another question that we must particularly address from time to time. Today, we have only just begun, and all we can do is take note of how strongly social climbing has broken out.

However, there is something else that I would ask you to be aware of. That is, that we, as the faculty—what others do with the children is a separate thing—do not attempt to bring out into the public things that really concern only our school. I have been back only a few hours, and I have heard so much gossip about who got a slap and so forth. All of that gossip is going beyond all bounds, and I really found it very disturbing. We do not really need to concern ourselves when things seep out the cracks. We certainly have thick enough skins for that. But on the other hand, we clearly do not need to help it along. We should be quiet about how we handle things in the school, that is, we should maintain a kind of school confidentiality. We should not speak to people outside the school, except for the parents who come to us with questions, and in that case, only about their children, so that gossip has no opportunity to arise. There are people who like to talk about such things because of their own desire for sensationalism. However, it poisons our entire undertaking for things to become mere gossip. This is something that is particularly true here in Stuttgart since there is so much gossip within anthroposophical circles. That gossip causes great harm, and I encounter it in the most disgusting forms. Those of us on the faculty should in no way support it.

A teacher: In some cases, we may need to put less capable children back a grade. Or should we recommend tutoring for these children? Dr. Steiner: Putting children back a grade is difficult in the lower grades. However, it is easier in the upper grades. If it is at all possible, we should not put children back at all in the first two grades.

Specific cases are discussed.

Dr. Steiner: We should actually never recommend tutoring. We can recommend tutoring only when the parents approach us when they have heard of bad results. As teachers, we will not offer tutoring. That is something we do not do. It would be better to place a child in a lower grade.

Dr. Steiner: You should place these children at the front of the class, close to the teacher, without concern for their temperaments, so that the teacher can keep an eye on them. You can keep disruptive children under control only if you put them in a corner, or right up at the front, or way in the back of the class, so that they have few neighboring children, that is, no one in front or behind them.

A teacher: Sometimes children do not see well. I know of some children who are falling behind only because they are farsighted and no one has taken that into account.

Dr. Steiner: An attentive teacher will observe organic problems in children such as short-sightedness or deafness. It is difficult to have a medical examination for everything. Such examinations should occur only when the teachers recommend them.

When conventional school physicians perform the examinations, we easily come into problems of understanding. For now we want to avoid the visits of a school physician, since Dr. Noll is not presently here. It would be different if he were. Physicians unknown to the school would only cause us difficulties. The physician should, of course, act as an advisor to the teacher, and the teacher should be able to turn to the physician with trust when he or she notices something with the children.

With children who have learning difficulties, it often happens that suddenly something changes in them, and they show quite sudden improvement. I will visit the school tomorrow morning and will look at some of the children then, particularly those who are having difficulty.

A teacher: My fifth-grade class is very large, and the children are quite different from one another. It is very difficult to teach them all together and particularly difficult to keep them quiet.

Dr. Steiner: With a class as large as that, you must gradually attempt to treat the class as a choir and not allow anyone to be unoccupied. Thus, try to teach the class as a whole. That is why we did that whole long thing with the temperaments.

That children are more or less gifted often results from purely physical differences. Children often express only what they have within themselves, and it would be unjust not to allow the children who are at the proper age for that class (ten to eleven years old) to come along. There will always be some who are weak in one subject or another. That problem often stops suddenly. Children drag such problems along through childhood until a certain grade, and when the light goes on, they suddenly shed the problem. For that reason, we cannot simply leave children behind. We must certainly overcome particularly the difficulties with gifted and slow children.

Of course, if we become convinced that they have not achieved the goal of the previous grade, we must put them back. However, I certainly want you to take note that we should not treat such children as slow learners. If you have children who did not really achieve the goals set for the previous grade, then you need to put them back. However, you must do that very soon.

You can never see from one subject whether the child has reached the teaching goals or not. You may never judge the children according to one subject alone. Putting children back a grade must occur within the first quarter of the school year. The teachers must, of course, have seen the students’ earlier school reports. However, I would ask you to recognize that we may not return to the common teaching schedule simply in order to judge a student more quickly. We should always complete a block, even though it may take somewhat longer, before a judgment is possible.

In deciding to put a child back, we should always examine each individual case carefully. We dare not do something rash. We should certainly not do anything of that nature unthinkingly, but only after a thorough examination and, then, do only what we can justify.

Concerning the question of putting back a child who did not accomplish the goals of the previous school, I should also add that you should, of course, speak with the parents. The parents need to be in agreement. Naturally, you may not tell the parents that their child is stupid. You will need to be able to show them that their child did not achieve what he or she needed at the previous school, in spite of what the school report says. You must be able to prove that. You must show that it was a defect of the previous school, and not of the child.

A teacher: Can we also put children ahead a class? In the seventh grade I have two children who apparently would fit well in the eighth grade.

Dr. Steiner: I would look at their report cards. If you think it is responsible to do so, you can certainly do it. I have nothing against putting children ahead a grade. That can even have a positive effect upon the class into which the children come.

A teacher: That would certainly not be desirable in the seventh grade. Now we can educate them for two years, but if we put them ahead a grade, for only one.

Dr. Steiner: Just because we put the children ahead does not mean that we cannot educate them for two years. We will simply not graduate them, but instead keep them here and allow them to do the eighth grade again. When children reach the age of graduation in the seventh grade, the parents simply take them away. However, the education here is not as pedantic, so each year there is a considerable difference. Next year, we will have just as many bright children as this year, so it would actually be quite good if we were to have children who are in the last grade now, in next year’s last grade, also.

It is certainly clear that this first year will be difficult, especially for the faculty. That certainly weighs upon my soul. Everything depends upon the faculty. Whether we can realize our ideals depends upon you. It is really important that we learn.

A teacher: In the sixth grade I have a very untalented child. He does not disturb my teaching, and I have even seen that his presence in the class is advantageous for the other children. I would like to try to keep the him in the class.

Dr. Steiner: If the child does not disturb the others, and if you believe you can achieve something with him, then I certainly think you should keep him in your class. There is always a disturbance when we move children around, so it is better to keep them where they are. We can even make use of certain differences, as we discussed in detail.

A teacher: In the eighth grade, I have a boy who is melancholic and somewhat behind. I would like to put him in the seventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: You need to do that by working with the child so that he wants to be put back. You should speak with him so that you direct his will in that direction and he asks for it himself. Don’t simply put him back abruptly.

A teacher: There are large differences in the children in seventh grade.

Dr. Steiner: In the seventh and eighth grades, it will be very good if you can keep the children from losing their feeling for authority. That is what they need most. You can best achieve that by going into things with the children very cautiously, but under no circumstances giving in. Thus, you should not appear pedantic to the children, you should not appear as one who presents your own pet ideas. You must appear to give in to the children, but in reality don’t do that under any circumstance. The way you treat the children is particularly important in the seventh and eighth grades. You may never give in for even one minute, for the children can then go out and laugh at you. The children should, in a sense, be jealous (if I may use that expression, but I don’t mean that in the normal sense of jealousy), so that they defend their teacher and are happy they have that teacher. You can cultivate that even in the rowdiest children. You can slowly develop the children’s desire to defend their teacher simply because he or she is their teacher.

A teacher: Is it correct that we should refrain from presenting the written language in the foreign language classes, even when the children can already write, so that they first become accustomed to the pronunciation?

Dr. Steiner: In foreign languages, you should certainly put off writing as long as possible. That is quite important.

A teacher: We have only just begun and the children are already losing their desire for spoken exercises. Can we enliven our teaching through stories in the mother tongue [German]?

Dr. Steiner: That would certainly be good. However, if you need to use something from the mother tongue, then you certainly need to try to connect it to something in the foreign language, to bring the foreign language into it in some way. You can create material for teaching when you do something like that. That would be the proper thing to do. You could also bring short poems or songs in the foreign language, and little stories. In the language classes we need to pay less attention to the grades as such, but rather group the children more according to their ability.

A teacher: I think that an hour and a half of music and an hour and a half of eurythmy per week is too little.

Dr. Steiner: That is really a question of available space. Later, we will be able to do what is needed.

A teacher: The children in my sixth-grade class need to sing more, but I cannot sing with them because I am so unmusical. Could I select some of the more musical children to sing a song?

Dr. Steiner: That’s just what we should do. You can do that most easily if you give the children something they can handle independently. You certainly do not need to be very musical in order to allow children to sing. The children could learn the songs during singing class and then practice them by singing at the beginning or end of the period.

A teacher: I let the children sing, but they are quite awkward. I would like to gather the more musically gifted children into a special singing class where they can do more difficult things.

Dr. Steiner: It would certainly not violate the Constitution if we eventually formed choirs out of the four upper classes and the four lower classes, perhaps as Sunday choirs. Through something like that, we can bring the children together more than through other things. However, we should not promote any false ambitions. We want to keep that out of our teaching. Ambition may be connected only with the subject, not with the person. Taking the four upper classes together and the four lower classes would be good because the children’s voices are somewhat different. Otherwise, this is not a question of the classes themselves. When you teach them, you must treat them as one class. In teaching music, we must also strictly adhere to what we already know about the periods of life. We must strictly take into consideration the inner structure of the period that begins about age nine, and the one that begins at about age twelve. However, for the choirs we could eventually use for Sunday services, we can certainly combine the four younger classes and the four older classes.

A teacher: We have seen that eurythmy is moving forward only very slowly.

Dr. Steiner: At first, you should strongly connect everything with music. You should take care to develop the very first exercises out of music. Of course, you should not neglect the other part, either, particularly in the higher grades.

We now need to speak a little bit about the independent religious instruction. You need to tell the children that if they want the independent religious instruction, they must choose it. Thus, the independent religious instruction will simply be a third class alongside the other two. In any case, we may not have any unclear mixing of things. Those who are to have the independent religious instruction can certainly be put together according to grades, for instance, the lower four and the upper four grades. Any one of us could give that instruction. How many children want that instruction?

A teacher: Up to now, there are sixty, fifty-six of whom are children of anthroposophists. The numbers will certainly change since many people wanted to have both.

Dr. Steiner: We will not mix things together. We are not advocating that instruction, but only attempting to meet the desires. My advice would be for the child to take instruction in the family religion. We can leave those children who are not taking any religious instruction alone, but we can certainly inquire as to why they should not have any. We should attempt to determine that in each case. In doing so, we may be able to bring one or another to take instruction in the family religion or possibly to come to the anthroposophic instruction. We should certainly do something there, since we do not want to just allow children to grow up without any religious instruction at all.

A teacher: Should the class teacher give the independent religious instruction?

Dr. Steiner: Certainly, one of us can take it over, but it does not need to be the children’s own class teacher. We would not want someone unknown to us to do it. We should remain within the circle of our faculty.

With sixty children altogether, we would have approximately thirty children in each group if we take the four upper and four lower classes together. I will give you a lesson plan later. We need to do this instruction very carefully.

In the younger group, we must omit everything related to reincarnation and karma. We can deal with that only in the second group, but there we must address it. From ten years of age on, we should go through those things. It is particularly important in this instruction that we pay attention to the student’s own activity from the very beginning. We should not just speak of reincarnation and karma theoretically, but practically.

As the children approach age seven, they undergo a kind of retrospection of all the events that took place before their birth. They often tell of the most curious things, things that are quite pictorial, about that earlier state. For example, and this is something that is not unusual but rather is typical, the children come and say, “I came into the world through a funnel that expanded.” They describe how they came into the world. You can allow them to describe these things as you work with them and take care of them so that they can bring them into consciousness. That is very good, but we must avoid convincing the children of things. We need to bring out only what they say themselves, and we should do that. That is part of the instruction.

In the sense of yesterday’s public lecture, we can also enliven this instruction. It would certainly be very beautiful if we did not turn this into a school for a particular viewpoint, if we took the pure understanding of the human being as a basis and through it, enlivened our pedagogy at every moment. My essay that will appear in the next “Waldorf News” goes just in that direction. It is called “The Pedagogical Basis of the Waldorf School.” What I have written is, in general, a summary for the public of everything we learned in the seminar. I ask that you consider it an ideal.

For each group, an hour and a half of religious instruction per week, that is, two three-quarter hour classes, is sufficient. It would be particularly nice if we could do that on Sundays, but it is hardly possible. We could also make the children familiar with the weekly verses in this instruction.

A teacher: Aren’t they too difficult?

Dr. Steiner: We must never see anything as too difficult for children. Their importance lies not in understanding the thoughts, but in how the thoughts follow one another. I would certainly like to know what could be more difficult for children than the Lord’s Prayer. People only think it is easier than the verses in the Calendar of the Soul. Then there’s the Apostles’ Creed! The reason people are so against the Apostles’ Creed is only because no one really understands it, otherwise they would not oppose it. It contains only things that are obvious, but human beings are not so far developed before age twenty-seven that they can understand it, and afterward, they no longer learn anything from life. The discussions about the creed are childish. It contains nothing that people could not decide for themselves. You can take up the weekly verses with the children before class.

A teacher: Wouldn’t it be good if we had the children do a morning prayer?

Dr. Steiner: That is something we could do. I have already looked into it, and will have something to say about it tomorrow. We also need to speak about a prayer. I ask only one thing of you. You see, in such things everything depends upon the external appearances. Never call a verse a prayer, call it an opening verse before school. Avoid allowing anyone to hear you, as a faculty member, using the word “prayer.” In doing that, you will have overcome a good part of the prejudice that this is an anthroposophical thing. Most of our sins we bring about through words. People do not stop using words that damage us. You would not believe everything I had to endure to stop people from calling Towards Social Renewal, a pamphlet. It absolutely is a book, it only looks like a pamphlet. It is a book! I simply can’t get people to say, “the book.” They say, “the pamphlet,” and that has a certain meaning. The word is not unnecessary. Those are the things that are really important. Anthroposophists are, however, precisely the people who least allow themselves to be contained. You simply can’t get through to them. Other people simply believe in authority. That is what I meant when I said that the anthroposophists are obstinate, and you can’t get through to them, even when it is justified!

A teacher: My fifth-grade class is noisy and uncontrolled, particularly during the foreign language period. They think French sentences are jokes.

Dr. Steiner: The proper thing to do would be to look at the joke and learn from it. You should always take jokes into account, but with humor. However, the children must behave. They must be quiet at your command. You must be able to get them quiet with a look. You must seek to maintain contact from the beginning to the end of the period. Even though it is tiring, you must maintain the contact between the teacher and the student under all circumstances. We gain nothing through external discipline. All you can do is accept the problem and then work from that.

Your greatest difficulty is your thin voice. You need to train your voice a little and learn to speak in a lower tone and not squeal and shriek. It would be a shame if you were not to train your voice so that some bass also came into it. You need some deeper tones.

A teacher: Who should teach Latin?

Dr. Steiner: That is a question for the faculty. For the time, I would suggest that Pastor Geyer and Dr. Stein teach Latin. It is too much for one person.

A teacher: How should we begin history?

Dr. Steiner: In almost every class, you will need to begin history from the beginning. You should limit yourself to teaching only what is necessary. If, for example, in the eighth grade, you find it necessary to begin from the very beginning, then attempt to create a picture of the entire human development with only a few, short examples. In the eighth grade, you would need to go through the entire history of the world as we understand it.

That is also true for physics. In natural history, it is very much easier to allow the children to use what they have already learned and enliven it. This is one of those subjects affected by the deficiencies we discussed. These subjects are introduced after the age of twelve when the capacity for judgment begins. In the subjects just described, we can use much of what the children have learned, even if it is a nuisance.

A teacher: In Greek history, we could emphasize cultural history and the sagas and leave out the political portion, for instance, the Persian Wars.

Dr. Steiner: You can handle the Persian Wars by including them within the cultural history. In general, you can handle wars as a part of cultural history for the older periods, though they have become steadily more unpleasant. You can consider the Persian Wars a symptom of cultural history.

A teacher: What occurred nationally is less important?

Dr. Steiner: No, for example, the way money arose.

A teacher: Can we study the Constitution briefly?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, but you will need to explain the spirit of the Lycurgian Constitution, for example, and also the difference between the Athenians and the Spartans.

A teacher: Standard textbooks present Roman constitutionalism.

Dr. Steiner: Textbooks treat that in detail, but often incorrectly. The Romans did not have a constitution, but they knew not only the Twelve Laws by heart, but also a large number of books of law. The children will get an incorrect picture if you do not describe the Romans as a people of law who were aware of themselves as such. That is something textbooks present in a boring way, but we must awaken in the children the picture that in Rome all Romans were experts in law and could count the laws on their fingers. The Twelve Laws were taught at that time like multiplication is now.

A teacher: We would like to meet every week to discuss pedagogical questions so that what each of us achieves, the others can take advantage of.

Dr. Steiner: That would be very good and is something that I would joyfully greet, only you need to hold your meeting in a republican form.

A teacher: How far may we go with disciplining the children?

Dr. Steiner: That is something that is, of course, very individual. It would certainly be best if you had little need to discipline the children. You can avoid discipline. Under certain circumstances it may be necessary to spank a child, but you can certainly attempt to achieve the ideal of avoiding that. You should have the perspective that as the teacher, you are in control, not the child. In spite of that, I have to admit that there are rowdies, but also that punishment will not improve misbehavior. That will become better only when you slowly create a different tone in the classroom. The children who misbehave will slowly change if the tone in the classroom is good. In any event, you should try not to go too far with punishment.

A teacher: To alleviate the lack of educational material, would it be possible to form an organization and ask the anthroposophists to provide us with books and so forth that they have? We really should have everything available on the subject of anthroposophy.

Dr. Steiner: We are planning to do something in that direction by organizing the teachers who are members of the Society. We are planning to take everything available in anthroposophy and make it in some way available for public education and for education in general. Perhaps it would be possible to connect with the organization of teachers already within the Anthroposophical Society.

A teacher: We also need a living understanding about the various areas of economics. I thought that perhaps within the Waldorf School, we could lay a foundation for a future economic science.

Dr. Steiner: In that case, we would need to determine who would oversee the different areas. There are people who have a sense for such things and who are also really practical experts. That is, we would need to find people who do not simply lecture about it, but who are really practical and have a sense for what we want to do. Such people must exist, and they must bring the individual branches of social science together. I think we could achieve a great deal in that direction if we undertook it properly. However, you have a great deal to do during this first year, and you cannot spread yourselves too thin. That is something you will have to allow others to take care of, and we must create an organization for that. It must exclude all fanaticism and monkeying around and must be down to Earth. We need people who live in the practicalities of life.

A teacher: Mr. van Leer has already written that he is ready to undertake this.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, he could certainly help. A plan could be worked out about how to do this in general. People such as Mr. van Leer and Mr. Molt and also others who live in the practicalities of economic life know how to focus on such questions and how to work with them. The faculty would perhaps not be able to achieve as much as when we turn directly to experts. This is something that might be possible in connection with the efforts of the cultural committee. Yes, we should certainly discuss all of this.

A teacher: In geology class, how can we create a connection between geology and the Akasha Chronicle?

Dr. Steiner: Well, it would be good to teach the children about the formation of the geological strata by first giving them an understanding of how the Alps arose. You could then begin with the Alps and extend your instruction to the entire complex—the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Altai Mountains, and so forth—all of which are a wave. You should make the entirety of the wave clear to the children. Then there is another wave that goes from North to South America. Thus you would have one wave to the Altai Mountains, to the Asian mountains running from west to east and another in the western part of the Americas going from North to South America, that is, another wave from north to south. That second wave is perpendicular to the first.

We can begin with these elements and then add the vegetation and animals to them. We would then study only the western part of Europe and the American East Coast, the flora and fauna, and the strata there. From that we can go on to develop an idea about the connections between the eastern part of America and the western part of Europe, and that the basin of the Atlantic Ocean and the west coast of Europe are simply sunken land. From there, we can attempt to show the children in a natural way how that land rhythmically moves up and down, that is, we can begin with the idea of a rhythm. We can show that the British Isles have risen and sunk four times and thus follow the path of geology back to the concept of ancient Atlantis.

We can then continue by trying to have the children imagine how different it was when the one was below and the other above. We can begin with the idea that the British Isles rose and sank four times. That is something that is simple to determine from the geological strata. Thus, we attempt to connect all of these things, but we should not be afraid to speak about the Atlantean land with the children. We should not skip that. We can also connect all this to history. The only thing is, you will need to disavow normal geology since the Atlantean catastrophe occurred in the seventh or eighth millennium.

The Ice Age is the Atlantean catastrophe. The Early, Middle and Late Ice Ages are nothing more than what occurred in Europe while Atlantis sank. That all occurred at the same time, that is, in the seventh or eighth millennium.

A teacher: I found some articles about geology in Pierer’s Encyclopedia. We would like to know which articles are actually from you.

Dr. Steiner: I wrote these articles, but in putting together the encyclopedia there were actually two editors. It is possible that something else was stuck in, so I cannot guarantee anything specifically. The articles about basalt, alluvium, geological formations, and the Ice Age are all from me. I did not write the article about Darwinism, nor the one about alchemy. I only wrote about geology and mineralogy and that only to a particular letter. The entries up to and including ‘G’ are from me, but beginning with ‘H,’ I no longer had the time.

A teacher: It is difficult to find the connections before the Ice Age. How are we to bring what conventional science says into alignment with what spiritual science says?

Dr. Steiner: You can find points of connection in the cycles. In the Quaternary Period you will find the first and second mammals, and you simply need to add to that what is valid concerning human beings. You can certainly bring that into alignment. You can create a parallel between the Quaternary Period and Atlantis, and easily bring the Tertiary Period into parallel, but not pedantically, with what I have described as the Lemurian Period. That is how you can bring in the Tertiary Period. There, you have the older amphibians and reptiles. The human being was at that time only jelly-like in external form. Humans had an amphibian-like form.

A teacher: But there are still the fire breathers.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, those beasts, they did breathe fire, the Archaeopteryx, for example.

A teacher: You mean that animals whose bones we see today in museums still breathed fire?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, all of the dinosaurs belong to the end of the Tertiary Period. Those found in the Jura are actually their descendants. What I am referring to are the dinosaurs from the beginning of the Tertiary Period. The Jurassic formations are later, and everything is all mixed together. We should treat nothing pedantically. The Secondary Period lies before the Tertiary and the Jurassic belongs there as does the Archaeopteryx. However, that would actually be the Secondary Period. We may not pedantically connect one with the other.

[Remarks by the German editor: In the previous paragraphs, there appear to be stenographic errors. The text is in itself contradictory, and it is not consistent with the articles mentioned and the table in Pierer’s Encyclopedia nor with Dr. Steiner’s remarks made in the following faculty meeting (Sept. 26, 1919). The error appears explainable by the fact that Dr. Steiner referred to a table that the stenographer did not have. Therefore, the editor suggests the following changes in the text. The changes are underlined:

You can find points of connection in the cycles. In the Tertiary Period you will find the first and second mammals, and you simply need to add to that what is valid concerning human beings. You can certainly bring that into alignment. You can create a parallel between the Tertiary Period and Atlantis, and easily bring the Secondary Period into parallel, but not pedantically, with what I have described as the Lemurian Period. That is how you can bring in the Secondary Period. There, you have the older amphibians and reptiles. The human being was at that time only jelly-like in external form. Humans had an amphibian-like form.

Yes, all of the dinosaurs belong to the end of the Secondary Period. Those found in the Jura are actually their descendants. What I am referring to are the dinosaurs from the beginning of the Secondary Period. The Jurassic formations are later, and everything is all mixed together. We should treat nothing pedantically. The Secondary Period lies before the Tertiary and the Jurassic belongs there as does the Archaeopteryx. However, that would be actually the Secondary Period. We may not pedantically connect one with the other.]

A teacher: How do we take into account what we have learned about what occurred within the Earth? We can find almost nothing about that in conventional science.

Dr. Steiner: Conventional geology really concerns only the uppermost strata. Those strata that go to the center of the Earth have nothing to do with geology.

A teacher: Can we teach the children about those strata? We certainly need to mention the uppermost strata.

Dr. Steiner: Yes, focus upon those strata. You can do that with a chart of the strata, but certainly never without the children knowing something about the types of rocks. The children need to know about what kinds of rocks there are. In explaining that, you should begin from above and then go deeper, because then you can more easily explain what breaks through.

A teacher: I am having trouble with the law of conservation of energy in thermodynamics.

Dr. Steiner: Why are you having difficulties? You must endeavor to gradually bring these things into what Goethe called “archetypal phenomena.” That is, to treat them only as phenomena. You can certainly not treat the law of conservation of energy as was done previously: It is only a hypothesis, not a law. And there is another thing. You can teach about the spectrum. That is a phenomenon. But people treat the law of conservation of energy as a philosophical law. We should treat the mechanical equivalent of heat in a different way. It is a phenomenon. Now, why shouldn’t we remain strictly within phenomenology? Today, people create such laws about things that are actually phenomena. It is simply nonsense that people call something like the law of gravity, a law. Such things are phenomena, not laws. You will find that you can keep such so-called laws entirely out of physics by transforming them into phenomena and grouping them as primary and secondary phenomena. If you described the so-called laws of Atwood’s gravitational machine when you teach about gravity, they are actually phenomena and not laws.

A teacher: Then we would have to approach the subject without basing it upon the law of gravity. For example, we could begin from the constant of acceleration and then develop the law of gravity, but treat it as a fact, not a law.

Dr. Steiner: Simply draw it since you have no gravitational machine. In the first second, it drops so much, in the second, so much, in the third, and so on. From that you will find a numerical series and out of that you can develop what people call a law, but is actually only a phenomenon.

A teacher: Then we shouldn’t speak about gravity at all?

Dr. Steiner: It would be wonderful if you could stop speaking about gravity. You can certainly achieve speaking of it only as a phenomenon. The best would be if you considered gravity only as a word.

A teacher: Is that true also for electrical forces?

Dr. Steiner: Today, you can certainly speak about electricity without speaking about forces. You can remain strictly within the realm of phenomena. You can come as far as the theory of ions and electrons without speaking of anything other than phenomena. Pedagogically, that would be very important to do.

A teacher: It is very difficult to get along without forces when we discuss the systems of measurement, the CGS system (centimeter, gram, second), which we have to teach in the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: What does that have to do with forces? If you compute the exchange of one for the other, you can do it.

A teacher: Then, perhaps, we would have to replace the word “force” with something else.

Dr. Steiner: As soon as it is clear to the students that force is nothing more than the product of mass and acceleration, that is, when they understand that it is not a metaphysical concept, and that we should always treat it phenomenologically, then you can speak of forces.

A teacher: Would you say something more about the planetary movements? You have often mentioned it, but we don’t really have a clear understanding about the true movement of the planets and the Sun.

Dr. Steiner: In reality, it is like this [Dr. Steiner demonstrates with a drawing]. Now you simply need to imagine how that continues in a helix. Everything else is only apparent movement. The helical line continues into cosmic space. Therefore, it is not that the planets move around the Sun, but that these three, Mercury, Venus, and the Earth, follow the Sun, and these three, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, precede it. Thus, when the Earth is here and this is the Sun, the Earth follows along. But we look at the Sun from here, and so it appears as though the Earth goes around it, whereas it is actually only following. The Earth follows the Sun. The incline is the same as what we normally call the angle of declination. If you take the angle you obtain when you measure the ecliptic angle, then you will see that. So it is not a spiral, but a helix. It does not exist in a plane, but in space.

A teacher: How does the axis of the Earth relate to this movement?

Dr. Steiner: If the Earth were here, the axis of the Earth would be a tangent. The angle is 23.5×. The angle that encloses the helix is the same as when you take the North Pole and make this lemniscate as the path of a star near the North Pole. That is something I had to assume, since you apparently obtain a lemniscate if you extend this line. It is actually not present because the North Pole remains fixed, that is the celestial North Pole.

A teacher: Wasn’t there a special configuration in 1413?

Dr. Steiner: I already mentioned that today. Namely, if you begin about seven thousand years before 1413, you will see that the angle of the Earth’s axis has shrunk, that is, it is the smallest angle. It then becomes larger, then again smaller. In this way, a lemniscate is formed, and thus the angle of the Earth was null for a time. That was the Atlantean catastrophe. At that time, there were no differences in the length of the day relative to the time of year.

A teacher: Why should the celestial pole, which is in reality nothing other than the point toward which the Earth’s axis is directed, remain constant? It should certainly change over the course of years.

Dr. Steiner: That happens because the movement of the Earth’s axis describes a cone, a double cone whose movement is continuously balanced by the movement of the Earth’s axis. If you always had the axis of the Earth parallel to you, then the celestial pole would describe a lemniscate, but it remains stationary. That is because the movement of the Earth’s axis in a double cone is balanced by the movement of the celestial pole in a lemniscate. Thus, it is balanced.

A teacher: I had changed my perspective to the one you described regarding the movement of the Earth’s axis. I said to myself, The point in the heavens that remains fixed must seem to move over the course of the centuries. It would be, I thought, a movement like a lemniscate, and, therefore, not simply a circle in the heavens during a Platonic year.

Dr. Steiner: It is modified because this line, the axis of the helix, is not really a straight line, but a curve. It only approximates a straight line. In reality, a circle is also described here. We are concerned with a helix that is connected with a circle.

A teacher: How is it possible to relate all this to the Galilean principle of relativity? That is, to the fact that we cannot determine any movement in space absolutely.

Dr. Steiner: What does that mean?

A teacher: That means that we cannot speak of any absolute movement in space. We cannot say that one body remains still in space, but instead must say that it moves. It is all only relative, so we can only know that one body changes its relationship to another.

Dr. Steiner: Actually, that is true only so long as we do not extend our observations into what occurs within the respective body. It’s true, isn’t it, that when you have two people moving relative to one another, and you observe things spatially from a perspective outside of the people (it is unimportant what occurs in an absolute sense), you will have only the relationships of the movement.

A teacher: It is certainly curious in connection with light that at the speed of light you cannot determine your movement relative to the source of light.

Dr. Steiner: One of Lorentz’s experiments. Read about it; what Lorentz concludes is interesting, but theoretical. You do not have to accept that there are only relative differences. You can use absolute mechanics. Probably you did not take all of those compulsive ideas into account. The difference is simply nothing else than what occurs if you take a tube with very thin and elastic walls. If you had fluid within it at the top and the bottom and also in between, then there would exist between these two fluids the same relationship that Lorentz derives for light. You need to have those compulsive interpretations if you want to accept these things.

You certainly know the prime example: You are moving in a train faster than the speed of sound and shoot a cannon as the train moves. You hear the shot once in Freiburg, twice in Karlsruhe, and three times in Frankfurt. If you then move faster than the speed of sound, you would first hear the three shots in Frankfurt, then afterward, the two in Karlsruhe, then after that, one shot in Freiburg. You can speculate about such things, but they have no reality because you cannot move faster than the speed of sound.

A teacher: Could we demonstrate what you said about astronomy through the spiral movements of plants? Is there some means of proving that through plants?

Dr. Steiner: What means would you need? Plants themselves are that means. You need only connect the pistil to the movements of the Moon and the stigma to those of the Sun. As soon as you relate the pistil to the Moon’s movements and the stigma to those of the Sun, you will get the rest. You will find in the spiral movements of the plant an imitation of the relative relationship between the movements of the Sun and the movements of the Moon. You can then continue. It is complicated and you will need to construct it. At first, the pistil appears not to move. It moves inwardly in the spiral. You must turn these around, since that is relative. The pistil belongs to the line of the stem, and the stigma to the spiral movement. However, because it is so difficult to describe further, I think it is something you could not use in school. This is a question of further development of understanding.

A teacher: Can we derive the spiral movements of the Sun and the Earth from astronomically known facts?

Dr. Steiner: Why not? Just as you can teach people today about the Copernican theory. The whole thing is based upon the joke made concerning the three Copernican laws, when they teach only the first two and leave out the third. If you bring into consideration the third, then you will come to what I have spoken of, namely, that you will have a simple spiral around the Sun. Copernicus did that. You need only look at his third law. You need only take his book, De Revolutionibus Corporum Coelestium (On the orbits of heavenly bodies) and actually look at the three laws instead of only the first two. People take only the first two, but they do not coincide with the movements we actually see. Then people add to it Bessel’s so-called corrective functions. People don’t see the stars as Copernicus described them. You need to turn the telescope, but people turn it according to Bessel’s functions. If you exclude those functions, you will get what is right.

Today, you can’t do that, though, because you would be called crazy. It is really child’s play to learn it and to call what is taught today nonsense. You need only to throw out Bessel’s functions and take Copernicus’s third law into account.

A teacher: Couldn’t that be published?

Dr. Steiner: Johannes Schlaf began that by taking a point on Jupiter that did not coincide with the course of the Copernican system. People attacked him and said he was crazy.

There is nothing anyone can do against such brute force. If we can achieve the goals of the Cultural Commission, then we will have some free room. Things are worse than people think when a professor in Tübingen can make “true character” out of “commodity character.” The public simply refuses to recognize that our entire school system is corrupt. That recognition is something that must become common, that we must do away with our universities and the higher schools must go. We now must replace them with something very different. That is a real foundation.

It is impossible to do anything with those people. I spoke in Dresden at the college. I also spoke at the Dresden Schopenhauer Society. Afterward, the professors there just talked nonsense. They could not understand one single idea. One stood up and said that he had to state what the differences were between Schopenhauer’s philosophy and anthroposophy. I said I found that unnecessary. Anthroposophy has the same relationship to philosophy as the crown of a tree to its roots, and the difference between the root and the crown of a tree is obvious. Someone can come along and say he finds it necessary to state that there is a difference between the root and the crown, and I have nothing to say other than that. These people can’t keep any thoughts straight. Modern philosophy is all nonsense. In much of what it brings, there is some truth, but there is so much nonsense connected with it that, in the end, only nonsense results. You know of Richert’s “Theory of Value,” don’t you? The small amount that exists as the good core of philosophy at a university, you can find discussed in my book Riddles of Philosophy.

The thing with the “true character” reminds me of something else. I have found people in the Society who don’t know what a union is. As I have often said, such things occur. If we can work objectively in the Cultural Commission, then we could replace all of these terrible goings on with reason, and everything would be better. Then we could also teach astronomy reasonably. But now we are unable to do anything against that brute force. In the Cultural Commission, we can do what should have been done from the beginning, namely, undertake the cultural program and work toward bringing the whole school system under control. We created the Waldorf School as an example, but it can do nothing to counteract brute force. The Cultural Commission would have the task of reforming the entire system of education. If we only had ten million marks, we could extend the Waldorf School. That these ten million marks are missing is only a “small hindrance.”

It is very important to me that you do not allow the children’s behavior and such to upset you. You should not imagine that you will have angels in the school. You will be unable to do many things because you lack the school supplies you need. In spite of that, we want to strictly adhere to what we have set out to do and not allow ourselves to be deterred from doing it as well as possible in order to achieve our goals.

It is, therefore, very important that in practice you separate what is possible to do under the current circumstances from what will give you the strength to prevail. We must hold to our belief that we can achieve our ideals. You can do it, only it will not be immediately visible.

Dear attendees,

When I was able to visit our Waldorf School again, at least for a few hours, the day before yesterday after a long absence from here, I was able to attend a lesson in the eighth grade, in which world history was being taught. And I can say it openly: I have the impression that if we really succeed in continuing in this way with regard to education and teaching, at least the main part of it, then we can hope to educate people in our school who will be able to cope with the increasingly difficult life issues of the near future and who will stand their ground in life. There was undoubtedly something in this that was aimed at, and it seems to me that, to a certain extent, what I would like to call the following was achieved through what was accomplished: history as an expression of human development. For the children here, who are 13, 14, or 15 years old, history has become so vivid that what they will take from it in terms of thoughts that are full of strength will be something that can provide strength for their whole subsequent life, not just for an understanding of history, but for an understanding of life situations and living conditions in general.

And when I ask myself: How could – after I had been dealing with it for almost a year now, pedagogically and didactically, in order to pave the way for the Waldorf school of our friend Molt, who has just spoken here , how could the interest that I now had to take in the way the impulses given at the time would turn out in reality, how could this interest be satisfied in such a way as I have just indicated? And then I could see: the liveliness that had entered into the story was due to the fact that the teacher, Dr. Stein, had found the inner courage to incorporate into his historical perspective the power of the spiritual science that I have taken the liberty of presenting here in Stuttgart for many years now. This spiritual science is not meant to be a mere inner comfort for souls turned away from the world, but something that can actually permeate and fertilize all human knowledge and all human activity, including all human creativity. It should be something that not only makes people cognizant, but also provides ideas that, I would say, pour into the human limbs like a spiritual heart blood, into the spiritual and physical limbs, to make people more skillful, more capable, more adept at life in every respect.

However, in order to overcome the prejudices of the broad masses of people that still stand in the way of such a permeation of the branches of education, teaching and life with the impulses of spiritual science, one must have the inner courage - the courage that can only flow from being inwardly united in one's soul with the convincing power that springs from the knowledge of reality that comes from the contemplation of spiritual life, as I have often hinted at here. From what I have taken the liberty of speaking so directly about, thoughts are then easily directed to an appearance that is all too well-founded in today's general world situation and all too understandable in view of it.

We live – and I already hinted at this from a different point of view in my lecture the day before yesterday – we live today in a time in which the social question can no longer be a question of institutions and facilities, but in which it is a great question of human value, human dignity, a question of humanity in general. The question today is not how to devise the best institutions based on these or those ideas about social life, but rather: how can we win over the broad masses of the people who have appeared on the scene of life to work together with those who, in a certain way, through their intelligence, their intellectual direction, and what they have absorbed, must nevertheless be leading in all that is incorporated into the social life of the present as forces. It is indeed extremely difficult to express certain truths that may no longer sound quite so paradoxical today, but still sound somewhat cruel. But again and again, reference must be made to a truth that is all too clearly taught by what has happened in recent years. It must be pointed out that in the last few centuries, but especially in the last few decades, the bearers of present-day education, the bearers of what is actually civilizational life – apart from the survival of traditions – have lapsed into a certain materialistic view of life and that they have not found their way out of it to what has since emerged among the broad masses as theories, as views of life.

What had developed among the ruling classes as religion, as science, as art, did not have the inner strength to take hold of the broad masses of humanity. In particular, it lacked the power to educate the broad masses of humanity, who, as a result of the upsurge of our industrial life, had to be put to work at the machines, in the factories, and so on, to what was now the content of the education, religion, science, and art of the leading classes. The broad masses of the proletariat were left to their own devices, as it were. The members of the proletariat were left to what they could see of what was merely a mechanical institution, what was merely a lifeless, heartless, soulless machine and machinery. And from the sight of such a life connected with the mechanical, with the machine, an outlook could develop within the broad masses, which today expresses itself as more or less radical Marxism and now unfortunately wants to appear as a reality-shaping force, as I also hinted at the day before yesterday. But today there is no bridge between what the educated classes recognize as their civilization, based on old traditions, and what has entered the sphere of newer human life in the broad masses. And uncertain, very uncertain, we now face the great problems of life: how to build a bridge between those who, from their knowledge of human nature, can form ideas about how our social life should proceed, and those who, understandably, can only make demands on life from a sphere of life that actually only has to do with the inanimate, and who therefore believe that all life, all religion, all science, all art could develop, as it were, like a superstructure from these production conditions, which themselves are far removed from all spiritual life?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the terrible riddle of the present day: how can we manage to bring these two sections of humanity together – which, despite everything that has been said, must come together – how can we manage to fulfill this requirement? This weighs more or less unconsciously, of course, on many people. And out of this burden, many well-intentioned endeavors have emerged in the present. And here it becomes difficult again to express something that I must now express in the face of these, as I am quite willing to acknowledge, well-intentioned endeavors. But, ladies and gentlemen, today it is of no use just not to offend people, just not to offend people, to hold back what must be said out of a deeper insight into the laws of human development so that we can move forward to a new structure of our social life. Many people feel that we have neglected to establish something of spiritual content for humanity and to allow this to flow into science, religion and art as spiritual content, something that could have the power to convince the masses - for those masses who so far only want to accept what speaks to them from their own sphere of life, from their coexistence with the machine and with the mechanistic, and so on. And so many have already come to the conclusion that it is necessary to bring a certain education to the masses, because after all, our social question is basically an educational question. Education that is able to spread ideas about the possibilities of human coexistence, about the possibilities of social reciprocity – that is the well-intentioned endeavor of many. And so, in many circles, one thinks first of all, and with the very best of intentions, of adult education centers and all kinds of other similarly oriented educational institutions.

You see, that is precisely the difficulty, that one must speak of well-intentioned things in the way that I must now. The point is that those who today speak out of honest desire to spread education and science take it for granted that science as it exists today, as it has been learned and is taught in our schools and colleges, will simply be carried into the adult education centers and similar institutions in an appropriately prepared way. This is taken for granted by many today. Why? Because many people are not yet willing to ask the questions about the present situation of humanity with sufficient consistency. Today we see how much destructive power there is in our public life. We see the dimensions that the effects of decline have taken on, but we have become accustomed to them over the last three to four centuries, to what has emerged as popular science and popular art, to an unconditional, absolute sense of authority. And so people say to themselves: Yes, if we can now bring that which is absolutely right and absolutely appropriate to the truth to the masses, then it must be a blessing. What would be more natural than for such an opinion to arise where the vital questions of the present are not yet being raised consistently enough? But might not the other question also be raised, my dear audience, namely the question: Yes, were it not the hitherto leading classes of humanity, were it not the owners of this science and spirit that one now wants to throw into the universities and similar institutions - were it not those who had the leadership of humanity in their hands, who rode this humanity into today's conditions? Did this science, which one wants to give to the broad masses of the people today, perhaps prevent the leading classes from leading humanity into the absurdity of life? No, it has not! Can we now hope that something other than phenomena of decline will emerge when the leading classes, despite being saturated with this science, with this art and so on, rush into the present absurdity of life and are not protected by this science from this rush? Do we want to popularize something that is obviously part of the phenomena of decline? Is it to be spread to the broad masses, so that these broad masses are now led in an even more forceful way to the same absurdities to which the leading circles have been drawn by this science?

This question is a cruel one in the present day. But it is a question that must be raised, even if one suffers from raising it, because one knows from the outset how little one can be understood for raising such a question. The reason why one is so little understood is that most people today still believe: Well, something solid like the science of the last centuries does exist, we can build on it, it has just not yet sufficiently entered the masses; if it enters the masses, then it will be a solid ground for these masses. It is understandable that people want something they can call solid ground under their feet. But today the seriousness of our present world situation is so great that it is impossible to continue to keep silent about certain things that one believes one recognizes from the course of human development simply because they radically contradict, in a certain sense, what the prejudices of the broadest circles are. But what is basically an answer to the fateful question just posed was always in the forefront of the spiritual science that I have been speaking about for years in Stuttgart, and this spiritual science always wanted something quite different from what was wanted in the broadest circles [ was wanted] by prejudice; it always wanted not only that which it believed could broaden ordinary scientific education, but it always wanted a thorough fertilization of the whole of civilization with a new spiritual knowledge. And it was only from a new spiritual perspective that it could promise anything for this fertilization of the whole of civilized life. And so we are not thinking of directing our efforts towards placing popular science on as broad a basis as possible, but rather we are thinking of a renewal of the whole scientific and ideological spirit of the present into the near future.

You see, it is out of such a basic attitude that what flows through the Waldorf School here as pedagogy and didactics, as the basis of education and teaching, has arisen. And it is out of such a basic attitude that what has been said in the time between my previous and my present stay in Stuttgart, over in Switzerland, in Dornach, to a number of doctors and medical students, has also arisen. The aim was to go through the current form of medicine, particularly in a therapeutic context, and to show how everything that can be the basis of this medicine and what can then be further developed can actually be examined from a spiritual scientific point of view. The starting point was not to look at what is available as science in order to pass it on to adult education centres, but to gain a new basis of knowledge in order to enrich science and only then to pass it on to these institutions, because one should not take from the old science what is to become folk knowledge. A science of man, of the healthy and sick human being, has been attempted [through spiritual science]. It is still in its early days. Naturally, when one is immersed in the subject, one is very modest in one's thinking about everything related to these great problems of the present. But this knowledge of the healthy and sick human being has been attempted because there is a belief that only a spiritual-scientific science will be able to work in the broadest circles of humanity, to work with such a vitality that it can arise out of what the masses have gained from the view of the merely mechanical. This can never be achieved by the science that has so misled the ruling classes; only a world view that actually penetrates to completely different sources of knowledge than the sources that the intellectual and artistic conscience of humanity was inclined to penetrate to in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades.

I must take the liberty, esteemed attendees, despite the presence of such a large gathering here today, to speak first in a seemingly unpopular way and to point out some things in particular that most people today still say: Oh, we don't need that at all when we speak of the reorganization of the life situation of present-day humanity. That is much too high for certain spiritual heights, the broad masses cannot yet understand that. Yes, my dear audience, I am nevertheless speaking from such points of view, as I have just indicated. When I am often told today that what comes from here is not understood at all by the majority of people, I am reminded again and again of what I have often heard from theater directors, whose only concern has always been to present as many trashy plays as possible to the audience; they have always excused themselves by saying that the audience wants this because it does not understand better things. It was always clear to me that the theater directors concerned, who judge in this way, simply do not understand the value of better plays. And so I do not pay any attention when one or the other complains about incomprehensibility today, but I believe that we, perhaps influenced by the hardship of the times, are very much ready to take in many things that the last decades, swimming in philistinism, have called incomprehensible out of convenience. Many things have happened to me that I can cite as proof of this incomprehensibility. For example, about twenty years ago I was invited to give a series of lectures on Goethe's “Faust” to a circle of educated people in a German city. There were, however, a number of people who did not even think to say that what I was saying was incomprehensible. But there were also enthusiastic representatives of Oskar Blumenthal's muse, and they said: Yes, “Faust” is not a play, it is a science. - It has gradually emerged from certain backgrounds, which I do not want to characterize here, an educational ideal that was always at hand: you have to speak more popularly and more generally. But it is precisely this complacency that has led us to the situation we now find ourselves in. And we will not get out of it any sooner, ladies and gentlemen, until a sufficiently large number of people decide to have the conscience to understand that which simply cannot be conveyed in the most general terms, which are as clear as day, and which one can also sleep with.

When we speak today about the significance of education and teaching in the face of the current world situation, it is above all about the fact that it must be recognized: The teacher, the educator of today, can only fulfill his role in a fruitful way if he has a real understanding of the developing human being, if he has the real gift of looking into the human being and seeing the riddle that is revealed from the first day the child is born to the days when he is an adult. But we have no general world view that could lead us to truly look into a person, especially into the person becoming, in an intimate way. Our world view of recent years, of recent decades and centuries, has not actually led us to the human being, but has led us away from the human being. It has shown us a very astute way to recognize how man stands at the top of the animal series, how he has developed from lower animal forms, and today we believe we recognize what man's relationship to the non-human actually is. By raising the big questions of humanity in the popular sense, we do not actually ask: What is man? What is man's inner being? — Instead, we ask: What is the inner nature of the animal, of animality? — We study the development of animality, and when we have studied how animality develops up to its highest stage, we stop there, so that we then come to an understanding of man only from the development of animality.

It was certainly a long and meaningful path that was taken from a certain point of view, but it is characteristic of the foundations of the development of world views in recent times. For man does not stand before himself as man in terms of his actual essence, but he only stands before himself in so far as he is the pinnacle of animality, in so far as he is something other than the actual human essence. To what extent is man an animal? — We ask this today in all forms. And as a result, we have lost sight of the question: To what extent is man human in the true sense of the word? And so it becomes almost a fact that people, I would say, bite their logical teeth out on the question: What is the relationship between what we call the soul, what we call the spirit of man, and what we call the body, what we call the body of man? - In all forms, this is raised within today's philosophy, but people only bite their logical teeth out in the process. And it is strange how sometimes, when a lone raven is placed among the number of those observers who, out of the world view of the present day, are really dealing with such questions, how then, out of a certain common sense, they speak. Here is an example. Such an example illustrates many things.

For a long time, the brilliant philologist Rudolf Hildebrand worked at the University of Leipzig. He was a student of Jacob Grimm's linguistic research and also edited the famous dictionary for the most part in the parts that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had left to edit. Rudolf Hildebrand also wrote a number of diary pages that were published by Diederichs in 1910. In them, he expresses himself as a person who is immersed in the life, teaching and education of the present day with an attitude that, I would say, suddenly stops and wants to assert common sense in all that he has around him, especially in the people around him who talk about world view issues in today's school and teaching manner. An interesting sentence sequence can be found in Rudolf Hildebrand's diary pages “Thoughts about God, the World and the Self,” which were published after his death, in the chapter where he talks about education and teaching. There he says: “When I visualize how my colleagues at the university talk about the actual questions of world view, then I often want the lecturer to talk upstairs and the audience to sit downstairs in the sense of duty or perhaps also in something else and listen to him, I want a man from the people to come and tug the lecturer's ear a little, but not not too weakly, but so strongly that it hurts, and said to him: You, look me in the face, and look your students in the face, from person to person, and try to accept this empirical fact, and then ask yourself whether you do not speak all that you say only because you are self-absorbed and are not at all aware that you are facing another human being in the social life. Rudolf Hildebrand thinks it would be particularly interesting if the lecturer's wife went along with him and drew his attention to it by also pulling his ear lobe, not too weakly but so hard that it hurt and said: “You, would you really dare to say what you say under the influence of your authority at home in private, and do you think that I would attach any value to it?”

Now, esteemed attendees, I have expressed this not only to convey to you my own judgment, but also the judgment of a person who has worked for decades at a representative university, who has observed and to whom the question at hand has become a real matter of conscience. But what is at stake today, in the present world situation, if we want to educate and have an effect through teaching, is a true knowledge of the human being – a knowledge of the human being that we must demand should inspire us in our treatment of people, and a treatment of people that is thoroughly imbued with love for humanity. For only such knowledge of human nature, permeated by skill in human treatment and permeated by love of humanity, can lead teaching and education in such a way that the coming generations are introduced to the social context of life in the right way.

But, esteemed attendees, that is precisely the difficulty: our present science oscillates at abstract heights, believing that it can grasp reality with its atoms and atomic groupings, while it only rambles about in abstract heights of thought, in abstract concepts. If, therefore, one first forms a concept of soul and then forms a concept of body, without carefully considering the real configuration of the human body and the real essence of the human soul through direct spiritual observation, then one can come to nothing but a logical struggle with this great riddle of life, which must underlie all human knowledge. This is where the subject of spiritual science comes in, not in the sense of the abstract philosophical formulas that are almost the only ones being sought after today, but by to really look at the soul activity of the human being as self-education and self-discipline in the sense of spiritual research, which I have often described here, and likewise the attempt is made to look at the physical, the bodily, in the sense of this spiritual research.

And then, of course, we arrive at concepts, a few of which I would like to characterize today. But from these few I will be able to show how a living knowledge of the human being wells up from such a renewal, from such a refreshing of the human being's life of world-view. We see the human being growing up from birth, when he enters the physical world from the spiritual world. We see something emerging that works its way out of the deepest core of the human being, from week to week, from month to month, from year to year, becoming more and more enigmatic and yet more and more magnificent and meaningful in the outer structure, in the outward physical body of the human being. And we see how significant life events impact this human existence as the person grows up. These life events are usually not sufficiently taken into account by what is now commonly accepted science. I will mention two of these life events first; from a different point of view, I have already characterized them from this point several times.

I would like to mention that around the age of seven, the child's original milk teeth are replaced by permanent teeth. I have already pointed out here that the entire mental constitution of the human being changes at this age. At the same time, it is the age at which we get the child out of the parental home and into primary school. It is the age we have to look at if we want to gain the methodological, didactic and pedagogical starting point for primary school teaching and education. I have pointed out how, in the years up to the change of teeth, the human being is primarily an imitator, how his soul is shaped in such a way that he experiences, out of his instinct, what is going on in his immediate surroundings, how he does not, so to speak, detach himself from his surroundings. The hand movements that the father and mother make, the sounds that the father and mother utter, are imitated by the child because, in a sense, albeit not so visibly, the child is connected to the father and mother and the whole environment in the same way that the mother's arm and father's arm are connected to the body of the mother and father, only to a higher degree. But I do not wish to draw attention to what I have already pointed out here today, but to something else, which in turn is intimately connected with it. What appears to be a change of teeth is, in a sense, the conclusion of a whole organic process; what culminates, so to speak, in the eruption of the second teeth, these are the results of forces that flood the entire human organism in the preceding age. At first we do not need to distinguish between what is spiritual-soul and what is bodily-physical. We see, when we observe the child's facial expressions, when we see the changes in his face from year to year, how the soul works on the body. And we see, so to speak, only deeper into this soul-spiritual work when we see how this soul-spiritual work in the child works organically, how it penetrates the outside world, finally finding a conclusion in the appearance of the second teeth. What exactly is it that is at work here? I can only sketch the matter out, but what I sketch out can be established with all scientific exactitude, down to the smallest details. What exactly is going on in the human being? Observe what happens to the human being in soul and spirit when he undergoes the change of teeth. At the same time, those human perceptions that fluctuate so much that they are no longer remembered in later life become [sharply defined concepts]. Think about how far back you have to go if you want to remember the first clearly defined concepts that you formed in your childhood; at this age, up to the change of teeth, the concepts are still unclear , fluctuating, not sharply defined, not yet so firmly established that they can be woven into the soul-spiritual life in such a way that they can then be retained, that all these memories shape the whole life. This interconnection of the soul-spiritual with sharply defined concepts and ideas, which can be incorporated into memory, begins at the same age at which the teeth change. And if we now investigate what is actually present, it turns out that the same forces that then come to light in our memory, in what we carry within us as the power of thought, the power of our remembering thought, that these forces, which around the seventh year have, as it were, emancipated themselves from the corporeal-physical, have worked in the corporeal-physical until the change of teeth: they were the same forces that drove out the teeth. Thus, until the change of teeth, we are intimately connected with the physicality of the human being with the same forces that then become powers of thought; they work on the formation of the bones that finds its conclusion in the change of teeth.

Dear attendees, we are looking at a very real relationship between soul and body. For in later life we have our sharply contoured concepts of memory, we know what our thinking power is, we look inside ourselves and observe this thinking power, and we say to ourselves: this thinking power has only been working as a free thinking power in us since the seventh year. Before that, it was submerged in our organism and directed the forces that pushed out the second teeth. We have an intimate relationship between the soul and the body; we look concretely at this relationship. We do not speculate about it: what is the relationship between body and soul? We look at the soul and see where we can observe, so to speak, the emergence of free memory images. And we see how these forces have worked in the organism before they were released into memory, how they were organically formative.

You see, this is the progression of the spiritual scientific worldview from the abstract to the concrete, from the merely conceptual, which imagines that it is penetrating into reality, to the truly realistic. This is the advance to the true essence of the human being, for now we know how to answer the question: What takes place in the body of a human being before the age of seven? One cannot describe this in the abstract; one must point to something factual, one must show something that is working in the human being. The same thing is at work that is our remembering thinking power. This is the one example that is intended to characterize the radical change that must come into our scientific way of thinking, into our world view. You can imagine, my dear audience, Because something like this is completely outside the consciousness of so-called educated humanity today, because no one – least of all science – wants to know anything about the concrete state of the soul and spirit and body of the human being, that is why the human being is a stranger to himself, that is why one cannot see into the human being. But how can one found a teaching method, an art of teaching, if one cannot see into the human being?

A second life event to which I would like to draw attention is sexual maturation. And just as much happens from birth to the change of teeth as from the change of teeth to sexual maturation. And if we now look again from the same spiritual-scientific point of view at what works towards sexual maturity and reaches its culmination in sexual maturity, we have to ask ourselves: what exactly is it? Just as the power of thought works in the body and the teeth, if I may express myself trivially, push out, so - as spiritual science shows, I can only sketch it out here - so the will works in man up to the age of fifteen. The will has an organic formative effect. It works in such a way that it governs the conditions of growth, the inner organic conditions. Then this inner organic working of the will comes to a certain conclusion, just as the working of the thoughts does when the teeth change. And that which comes to a conclusion here appears in the outer formation of the human being at sexual maturity. The forces of the will are rooted not in the human being's head but in his entire being. These forces of the will regulate the human being's growth forces up to sexual maturity. Then they accumulate. They have a tendency, as it were, to permeate the formation of the head. These forces of the will also shot in before sexual maturity; they were inwardly and organically active in the whole human being; with sexual maturity they accumulate. They accumulate and find their conclusion in the human vocal organ, which is the most intimate expression of the human will, just as the other forces accumulate in the formation of the teeth. They accumulate below the head – the head, the organ of the actual intellectual human being, is excepted. The forces of will accumulate, and in the male nature this accumulation is even expressed in the transformation of the voice through the larynx, in the female nature somewhat differently. In this lies a release of those forces of will, which are now to engage with the outside world in experience and in life – those forces of will that until then have worked inwardly in the human body as soul and spirit. It is exactly the same as with the powers of thought, which finally brought about the change of teeth and then appeared in their actual form as emancipated powers of thought.

Thus, as spiritual scientists, we look on the one hand at the thinking human being, at the human being with the power of thought, and on the other hand at the human being with the power of will. We are not talking in the abstract about some kind of soul, but we are talking about the soul that we observe. We follow its activity as a thinking soul until the second dentition changes, and then we follow its liberation, its becoming independent of certain internal aspects of the organic process. And we follow the will in the same way. That is to say, we no longer construct theories about the relationship of soul and spirit to the body, but we observe, we approach reality. You see, here a path is taken which, I believe, is suitable for flowing into general human education in a completely different way than the path that once occurred to an honest mind, namely to pluck the lecturer by the ear lobe, but not too weakly.

But now we are dealing with something quite different. It is a matter of not only attaching importance to the results, to the knowledge that is gained in this way, but also to how one should attach importance to how, through spiritual scientific methods, as I have described them in my “Occult Science”, in “How to Know Higher Worlds » or in «A Way to Know Thyself», how by such paths of thinking one comes to know something and truly much more about the healthy and the sick human being, which is simply closed in its depths to science, which today can be called an authoritative one. In a sense, one must train the mind, one must orient the mind in a certain way. The mind must take a different direction than one is accustomed to today. And much more depends on this. After all, the results are just results; they can be more or less important or unimportant, interesting or uninteresting. But what we do by taking the path to such knowledge, what we make of ourselves by educating ourselves in our essence, what we make of ourselves as human beings by preparing the way for such knowledge - that is the essential thing, that is what matters. It always depends on what we make of ourselves as human beings by developing a very specific way of looking at the world from within, in a very specific state of mind. This also enables us to look at life free of all illusions and yet in all its wonderful grandeur.

For example, we see that children are obliged to play in their early years and even in later years. The direction and guidance of play is essentially one of the tasks of a sensible, humane art of education and teaching. The child plays. The person who has now sharpened his view of the world and of human life in such a way as I have just characterized it, notices a great difference between the way one child plays and the way another child plays. To the superficial observer, almost all children play the same. For those who have sharpened their gaze, all children play differently from each other. Each has its own unique way of playing. It is now very strange when one focuses on what play means for a child's age: an activity for the human being in the soul-spiritual, as it is present when the actual thinking is still working within the organic until the teeth change. It is very strange how the child's soul-spiritual, which has not yet taken in the conceptual, moves in free play - in that play whose design is separate from the use and purpose of life, that play where the child follows only what flows from his own soul. On the surface, this appears to be a departure from the principle of imitation, for the way the child engages with the game is something that comes from the freedom of the child's soul – but only on the surface. For the one who watches more closely will see how the child incorporates into the game what he experiences through his environment, through everything that is going on around him. But if you have sharpened your gaze, then you look at this game not just as something interesting that happens in the individual life of a child at a certain time, but you place this game with all its character in the whole human life.

And by observing this, one learns to compare what happens at different ages of human life. Just as one can compare zinc and copper in the inanimate, as one can compare a cockchafer with a sun chafer in the animate, and so on, one can also compare the different ages of human life with each other. And here something most remarkable presents itself. When, with the sharpened eye that characterizes us today, we have gained a real conception of child play, then we must seek, in the various human ages, for something into which the special character of this child play flows. And there, through a very experiential search, we find that, when a person reaches the approximate age of 20 to 28 or 29, he really has to find his place in the world, really has to deal with what the world should give him as experience and guidance for an independent life, and when you look at how the human being engages with life and allows himself to be touched by life, you really do find a metamorphosis at a certain stage, a transformation of the particular character of child's play. Before the change of teeth, the child used to create freely from its soul activity with what did not belong to life, with the doll, with other play materials; it was active in a certain configuration, in a certain structure. If we learn to recognize and understand this and then observe people in their twenties as they engage with the serious side of life, with what is useful and purposeful in life, with what they have to find their way into through experience, you find that now the human being places himself in the usefulness, in the purpose of the world, in what is required by life, with such a character as he first freely showed in the childlike years of life in childlike play. Consider what this means. You want to influence education, and you know: what you observe as a special character trait in a child's play, what you then understand and how you guide the child's play, you do so that it will bear fruit when the person has dealt with the world that should be useful and appropriate for them in their twenties. Imagine the feelings that arise in the soul of the educator when he knows that what he is doing with the child, he is doing for the adult in his twenties. What matters is not what we know as educational principles in abstract forms, what we can muster from intellectual backgrounds in didactic-methodical rules, but what matters is that through such insights, when we see through life in this way, we develop a deep sense of responsibility in our hearts. A true insight into human nature does not only speak to our intellect; it speaks to our feelings, it speaks to our perceptions, it speaks to our whole conception of life. It permeates and interweaves us with a sense of responsibility at the post where we stand. We are not looking for an educational theory that merely says, out of a crazy or a justified cleverness, that one should educate in this or that way, but we are looking for such an educational theory in view of the present situation of man, which - out of knowledge of the human being - puts a sense of responsibility into the educator, a sense of social responsibility towards all of humanity. The art of education arises out of a sense of responsibility, which can only arise in us out of a right foundation of world view.

I am not speaking to you here about a renewal of science for the reason that it particularly interests me or tempts me to tell you that there will be different scientific results and that these different results would form a different world-view basis than the one commonly held today. No, I am speaking to you in this way because I believe that the whole trend, the whole character of world-view and scientific life will change. I say this because I believe that there will be a science, a life of world view, which will penetrate the whole human being, which will permeate the human being through body, soul and spirit, and which is particularly important for all the art of educating, for all the art of teaching, in view of the human being's present situation.

But something else is connected with what stands on the basis of such a new view of the human being. What do we strive for today when we speak of science, of a scientifically based foundation of a world view? We speak of what presents itself to us, for the most part in abstract concepts, and we are satisfied when we can say to ourselves: we must demand what only sharply defined concepts can give us; we must demand such concepts out of our prejudice. — Yes, but what if nature, the world is not such that it can be fitted into the concepts we demand, what if the world forms itself according to completely different forms, what if nature, for example, does not form itself according to what our natural laws are, what if these natural laws of nature only comprise a small part of reality and that the essential aspects of nature are not formed according to abstract laws of nature and ideas, but according to images - then we can discuss the logical justification of sharply defined laws of nature for as long as we like, we will not penetrate into nature, because nature does not lend itself to such laws, because it demands to be grasped in images. In particular, human nature demands that it be grasped in images. And one is led to all that I have outlined today only through a pictorial, through an imaginative way of thinking.

I would like to say: When you look at the human being in such a way that you see how the power of thought rules in his organism until the teeth come out, how willpower rules, how it draws into the larynx and transforms the voice. When one looks at all this, one cannot stop at formulating those abstract laws of nature that are so popular today, but one comes to make the soul active, plastic, by wanting to understand the human being. One comes to not stop at abstract concepts, at abstract ideas, but one comes to images. In other words, one arrives at a point where one can derive the abstract-logical scientific concepts from an artistic understanding of the world, from an aesthetic understanding of the world. One arrives at an understanding of what Goethe spoke so deeply from the foundations of his world view: Art is based on a perception of deeper natural laws that would never be revealed to man without art. Goethe believes that they would never reveal themselves through the abstract laws of nature, but only through the contemplation of nature in pictorial forms. In this way, one moves from a logical-abstract contemplation, from a mechanistic contemplation of external nature to an artistic comprehension, and such artistic comprehension gives our whole personality a different spiritual suppleness than abstract concepts.

And now let us imagine the person who has risen from scientific knowledge of man to an artistic understanding of the world and man; let us imagine this person flooded, permeated with this artistic-pictorial view of man and then practicing the art of education and teaching. In this way, life passes directly from the teacher to the life of the developing human being; it is not a philistine-abstract educational science that is at work here, but a living art of education, that which can take place in the most beautiful way as a social element between human being and human being. Finally, from a deeper basis of knowledge, what Schiller tried to express in his letters 'On the Aesthetic Education of Man' is fulfilled, based on more humanistic feelings. There it is actually made clear that man, in true knowledge, also maintains a state of equilibrium between the merely abstract necessity of reason and the merely sensual natural instinct; it is made clear that man stands between these instincts and that he works out of an attitude that asserts itself in the same way as the attitude in artistic creation or in artistic contemplation. It asserts itself in such a way that it presents that which we pursue as spirit, at the same time as something sensual; it brings about that which presents itself as something sensual, at the same time as something spiritual.

It is with this in mind that we begin to educate and teach at the Waldorf school. We no longer give the developing human being something that is prescribed to us; as educators and teachers, we devote ourselves entirely to the developing human being, and we educate people who can then engage fully in life. I have only mentioned a few examples. Just as we can give the child the best possible start in finding his way into life in his twenties by directing the game, we can observe other things in the developing human being on which we can base our education in order to give him the best for his later life. We can establish a form of teaching and education that takes into account the whole human being and the whole of human life. It may be said that the gravity of the present world situation demands that we take a look into the depths of that from which things can improve, from which the suffering and hardship of the present can be overcome. But this cannot be done with superficial means, it can only be done with deeper means. Only in this way will we educate people who will have what they need in the most eminent sense, because that is precisely what people lack in the current world situation.

If we look at people as they are today, if we look at what is coming to the surface of life, what even wants to direct life, at what is being lived out in public life, as it has have taken shape again — we see everywhere that two things are lacking in people today, which one would only wish for them in the most intense degree: what is lacking to a great extent in people today is what might be called self-confidence, but also what might be called trust in humanity. Consider, honored attendees, why people today so rarely turn inward to energetically place themselves in that social life of the present that so urgently needs energy. We find: People lack self-confidence. But self-confidence is only justified and can only exist when it is supported by trust in others. Just as the north and south poles belong together and cannot exist without each other, so self-confidence cannot exist without trust in other people. No educational science, no teaching science, will ever bring into people what self-confidence, what trust in humanity is, if it is not born out of such love for humanity, which comes from the knowledge of humanity, as I have characterized it today. For that is what one experiences, ladies and gentlemen.

When one gets to know the human being, as I have characterized it, when one learns to recognize how the soul and spiritual aspects work in the human organism, how the different ages of the human being interact - as I have illustrated with the example of the effect of a child's play on the age of twenty - when one gets to know the spiritual, soul and physical being of the human being so intimately Then one cannot but educate one's self in true human love at the same time, for one power of the soul is connected with another power of the soul, just as in the blossom of a plant the stamens are connected with the pistil; if the stamens are perfect, they require a perfect pistil. Thus true knowledge, arising out of love for one's fellow-men, does not develop into that abstractness which is so often and justly despised today, but into that which, on the other hand, also draws forth true love for one's fellow-men.

And what prevails in education, in teaching, out of such knowledge of the human being, out of such love for the human being, what pedagogy and didactics can create as a curriculum and timetable out of such knowledge of the human being, we have tried to do here in the Waldorf School, as far as this is already possible today. The effect of this, ladies and gentlemen, is that love for other people dawns in the child. The trust in humanity that is kindled in the child through the power that is born in us from real knowledge of the human being, which comes from the artistic understanding of the natural human being, that is what forms in us the power to ignite in the child lasting, inexhaustible self-confidence. And two other qualities that humanity so sorely lacks today and that can only be handed down to the human spirit through such an art of education are, on the one hand, composure and, on the other, a willingness and eagerness to act. These things are not clearly thought about today, quite, quite unclear, because one does not think from reality, namely from social reality.

I have already mentioned the amiable scholar Rudolf Hildebrand in very laudatory terms. So you will not believe that I want to misjudge this man. But he too was a person who – although he was sometimes driven by his instincts to make the kind of observations I have mentioned – was a person who was steeped in all the prejudices that have brought us the present misfortune. And so he also wrote a remarkable sentence in his diary pages, the sentence: “Compare a gawker who stands in front of a target to be shot at with a marksman who aims at the target. The gawker can hit the target with his gaze; he hits it every time. The marksman must first learn to hit the target; only then does he actually hit it.” Thus, according to Hildebrand, there is a difference between someone who is a mere onlooker of life, that is, someone who looks at life philosophically or scientifically or mystically or theosophically or in some other way, and someone who actively participates in life.

There is much that is correct in such a sentence, but nevertheless, there is also much that is one-sided. For let us not think of the example of Hildebrand, but of a “life gawker”, of someone who has only looked at life, for example, of Leibniz, who discovered differential and integral calculus. Let us imagine how this “gazer at life”, who discovered differential and integral calculus, has now become the cause of everything that is done in technology today through differential and integral calculus, of everything that is done in life today by the “shooter”, by the person who shoots. If you look at the person in such an unsocial isolation, you can aptly see the parallel between the onlooker and the marksman, each aiming at the target. But if one regards life in its social breadth, then one must say to oneself: If the one who is the life-gazer, out of his life-gazing, has a fruitful thought that leads to countless deeds, then, with regard to the interaction of people, with regard to social life, perhaps the life-gazer is the more active than the one compared to the archer.

The point is that we have gradually come to observe life one isolated act at a time, and now lack the ability to see the big social picture. To point this out, we need to be level-headed and reflect. Today, it is often the case that people avoid this reflection, this introspection, this “gazing” at life because they are too lazy to turn their thoughts and ideas into action, because they do not want to engage with the real conditions of life, because even when adversity comes knocking at the door, when it extends to the mouth, when the adversity is infinitely great, they are fatalists and say: tomorrow it will get better from some corner or another. We need prudence, life in action-thoughts. And on the other hand, we need a new willingness to act; this will follow from such thoughts in people, in whom we can ignite the human element from the love that we gain from true knowledge of spirit, soul and body - as the basis of a future world view, as we have described it today. And what is best, what education and training can give us in the face of the current world situation, is that we gain an open and free sense of life when the human is unlocked by such knowledge of the human being as is meant here. We are experiencing in our time that people misunderstand life in a strange way. They imagine themselves to be spirits of reality, but when it comes to reality, they are truly quite, quite far from this reality. Here is an example.

You see, a certain judgment was once passed in the course of the 19th century. Please read the parliamentary reports, read the best speeches of the best minds, read from newspaper reports what the most esteemed practitioners have said. You can always find in the parliamentary reports, in the speeches of the best economists, of the best practitioners, how they have passed a certain judgment that has become of the utmost importance for the development of modern times in political, governmental and economic terms. For example, there was a time when certain states introduced the gold standard. Read what was said about it. The best practitioners, the most experienced economists, predicted that the gold standard would lead to the abolition of customs barriers; that the gold standard would bring about free world trade. And if we look at what these practitioners of life, these businessmen, these industrialists, these parliamentarians said, who had emerged from an understanding that was typical of the 19th century, we find – I do not want to mock, I just want to speak the truth – we find that they said something very clever; but reality turned out quite differently. They said: tariff borders, protective tariffs, all of this will be done away with when the gold standard is introduced. The opposite has happened. After the introduction of the gold standard, tariff borders and protective tariffs have been erected everywhere. So, the opposite of what the cleverest people said has happened. I say explicitly the cleverest people; I am far from saying that the people who so radically failed to grasp reality were fools; they were the opposite of fools. They said the smartest things based on their education, but no one can arrive at the truth when the truth is not predetermined by anything, when the circumstances around us are such that one cannot see through reality even with the sharpest mind. That is why the smartest people talk nonsense in such a field. This is because the economic conditions, in their interconnection with the state and political conditions, were so tangled up that no matter how clever one was, one could not see through them; one said nonsense as a matter of course because one could not learn anything from reality. One could not shape reality in advance so that one could learn from it.

What we call the idea of the threefold social order is that economic life, spiritual life and political life should each stand on their own ground, and that these three spheres of life should stand as three interlocking and interacting parts of the whole social organism. It is demanded that the individual economic spheres, whether they be spheres of production or consumption or professions or the like, develop in the way that they must, uninfluenced by state or other organizations, from the foundations of the economy itself. It is required that they develop so independently from the expertise and knowledge of those working in them that one organization, which under such conditions can only have a certain size, then joins another, a third, a fourth, in a certain way; depending on how such associations develop, they will associate with each other again. In this way a network of economic associations will arise. Those who are part of one association will know: in the other association, with which I am involved in trade, in the exchange of goods, the other person whom I know is part of it; one can see the relationships of the two associations. The mutual relationship is regulated by contract. In this way one can concretely see into what the economic realm is. Through the associative principle, overall relationships are created; life is shaped in such a way that we can learn from it. The present situation demands that the unmanageable nature of economic life be replaced by the associative principle, by something transparent, the essence of which you can read about in my book 'The Core of the Social Question' and especially in our newspaper 'Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus', which has now appeared in fifty numbers.

You cannot learn from that which is opaque. Life should be shaped in such a way that, when we are placed in life in the right way, we can learn from that life. People who have been educated in such a way that this education is based on genuine, true knowledge of the human being, from which, as if according to natural law, love for humanity will follow — such people will feel how economic life, in its independence, wants to shape itself associatively. For such people will have learned in their childhood in such a way that this learning was such a school for them that they can now learn from life all the time. But that is the greatest experiential science of the school, that we emerge from it in such a way that life always remains a great continuing school for us. In this way, we are guaranteed throughout our lives: we continue to develop, we do not stand still, we carry the world forward. Until the end of our lives, until we pass through the gate of death into the spiritual world, we can live here in such a way that we expand our soul-spiritual, that we make our physical life more skillful, that we can regard all of life as a school. The present situation in life demands this. And what it demands here can best be expressed by saying: Everything that must come out of such a renewal of the foundations of world view, as it is meant here from spiritual-scientific foundations, must lead to the emergence of an art of education, a teaching art which, out of true, genuine knowledge of the human being, gives birth to that love of humanity which educates such human beings that are released from the school of childhood into the school of life in the right way, for it is only through this learning in the school of life that the right work on the social plane will be possible.

I will then talk about this in the next week's lecture on “Questions of the Soul and Questions of Life”, a lecture for our time. Today I just wanted to show that, when it comes to education and teaching in the present day, we are indeed obliged to say, in view of all the pressing issues of the day, that we must adhere to the principle: base education and teaching on that which, based on a deeper world view, is the foundation of education and teaching. For in this way you create the true, the genuine, the firm foundation for a solution to those social and human questions that have now become so pressing in all of human life.

A week ago I commented here on the grievous event of the Goetheanum fire and other current concerns of the Anthroposophical Society. Today I planned to speak about purely anthroposophical matters, but I find it necessary to say a few introductory words about Society problems. I was able to attend at least the second part of yesterday's meeting, and saw how easy it is to misunderstand matters involving the nature of the Society such as were brought up by me last week. It is not a moment too soon to correct these misconceptions. My introductory remarks tonight will nevertheless still have to do with an anthroposophical view of life and perhaps on that account prove worthwhile to this or that listener.

I am mainly interested in going on with yesterday's discussion about judgment-forming in the Society. A challenge was issued, quite independently of anything I said, to the effect that every member should form his own independent judgments about matters affecting the Society. Now of course nothing could be truer. But we need to concern ourselves with the fact that when a challenge of this kind is presented one has to consider the whole context of what is under discussion, no matter how right the isolated statement may be in itself nor how fully I agree with it in principle. Something can be perfectly true but it may not necessarily apply in a given instance. Every truth can be presented as true in itself, but it is colored by the context in which it is brought up, and in the wrong place it can lead to the gravest misconceptions.

Now the point of view on judgment-forming was expressed in connection with my lecture of December 30th last in Dornach, in which I discussed the relationship of the Anthroposophical Society to the Movement for Religious Renewal. The comment was made that members should make their own judgments and not be influenced by mine. Of course they should! But in the form in which this advice was presented, it was and is profoundly at odds with the state of mind that comes from a real grasp of anthroposophy. For the anthroposophical world conception is not based on merely exchanging the view of things prevailing today for a different view similarly arrived at. As becomes evident in the whole posture of anthroposophy, it is not enough to think differently about all sorts of things, but—far more importantly—to think these different thoughts in a different way, to feel them with a different attitude of soul. Anthroposophy requires that thinking and feeling be utterly transformed, not just changed as to content.

Anyone inclined to test the great majority of my lectures in this respect will find that I keep strictly to what I have just expressed, and that it lies in the very nature of an anthroposophical view of the world to present things in such a way that hearers are left wholly free to form their own judgments. If you go through most of my lectures, including those on subjects such as that treated in the lecture of December 30, 1922, you will find their chief content to be simply facts, that they present facts, either those of super-sensible realms, of the world of the senses, or of history, and that their presentation is such that the reader can always draw his own conclusions about them, completely uninfluenced by me. Indeed, one of the lecture cycles held in Dornach even carries the sub-title, “Presentation of Facts on which to base Conclusions,” or the like. Since this is the case, the results are such as to remove any justification for saying that people were told what to think. For one person will draw one conclusion from my lectures, another a quite different one, and each thinks his is the right view of the matter. Each could be right from where he stands, because I never try to pre-determine the outcome, but simply to provide facts on which conclusions can be based. I thus deliberately expose myself to the danger that a series of facts I am presenting can be quite variously interpreted. For my interest is solely in communicating facts, and anybody who wants to look into the matter will find that the only time I express a judgment is when something needs to be corrected or refuted.

This has to be the case. A world view such as that based on anthroposophy must always be keenly conscious of the time context to which it belongs. We are now living in the age of consciousness soul development, a condition of soul wherein the all-important thing is for individuals to draw their own conclusions and learn to give facts an unprejudiced hearing, so that they can then make fully conscious judgments. The style of my presentations springs from an awareness that man has entered upon the development of the conscious soul. This accounts, as I said, for the varying conclusions that can be drawn from my words. I try to present the facts as clearly as possible. But there is never any question of “should” or “shouldn't.” Anthroposophy is there to communicate truth, not to propagandize. This has often been emphasized as, for example, in my refusal to take sides about vegetarianism. When I describe what effects a vegetarian diet has on people and what the effects of meat-eating are, I do so merely to present the facts, to make the truth known. In the age of the consciousness soul, anyone really acquainted with the facts of any case can confidently be left free to form his own judgments. It is essential to an anthroposophical view of things to be really clear on this point.

So, taking my style from the Anthroposophical Society rather than from the Movement for Religious Renewal, I tried in my lecture at Dornach on December 30, 1922, to show what the relationship between the two groups is. On that occasion I followed my general rule of merely presenting facts, and anyone who reads the lecture of that date will see this to be true. What action to take was a matter left to everyone's free weighing. The lecture makes this clear, and I expressed myself on the subject here a week ago as plainly as could be.

The matter of context has to be taken into consideration if one is to make really responsible assertions of an anthroposophical nature. One cannot make the remark that people should form their judgments independently of Steiner at utterances based in the strictest sense on anthroposophy. For except when Steiner is refuting or having to correct a statement, his hearers are even being forced by the way he puts things to form their own judgments; they are given no chance to adopt his.

An overall view of things anthroposophical is far better served by emphasizing this than by what some were emphasizing here yesterday, and the inappropriateness of what was said could encourage many seeds of misunderstanding. It is exceedingly important that I state this here, because it is a matter of anthroposophical principle.

There is a further matter to consider. In forming independent judgments it is not enough to be sure they are one's own. One must be equally sure, before expressing them, that one has taken all the pertinent facts into consideration. Anybody can draw his own conclusions. The point is to arrive at the correct ones when a sufficient overview of the facts of the case permits it or when facts that obviously do not apply have been discarded. I must therefore emphasize—and I bring up these introductory problems in duty bound, not because I have the least desire to do so—that what was said yesterday about all kinds of reports about the Movement for Religious Renewal having been carried to Dornach, so that my words could have been influenced and my opinions shaped thereby, is simply incorrect. The lecture in question was completely unrelated to any such reports, as fair-minded reviewers will see for themselves.

A third item was brought up in connection with my lecture, namely, that one faction was having chances to be heard while the other had none. If I am not mistaken, the Waldorf School faculty was named as a case in point, because I meet regularly with it. The truth is, however, that the matter had never even been discussed with the Waldorf faculty up to the time of giving the lecture. Here again is an example of a judgment made in ignorance of the facts. It might easily be thought that, since I meet frequently with the Waldorf faculty, there had been frequent discussions of the matter. But pedagogical matters naturally form the agenda of such meetings; anthroposophical gossip definitely has no share in them.

As I said, I stress these things in duty bound because they have to do with the nature of anthroposophical work, and we are at the point of at least trying to put that work on a healthy basis in the Society. Of course I was able, right after the founding of the Movement for Religious Renewal, to hand over to appropriate persons the task of giving the Society all the necessary information about it; I didn't have to do this myself. That was apparent to anyone who heard the closing words I spoke on the occasion of launching the Movement for Religious Renewal. It is always a terrible thing for me to be forced to break off communicating facts in order to say the kind of things that I was compelled to say yesterday. But as things are now, the whole weight of everything connected with anthroposophical activities is burdening my soul, and unless something really adequate is done to clear up just those misunderstandings that are escaping notice because they are not as crassly evident as others, our anthroposophical work cannot progress. But the work must progress; otherwise, we would obviously have to leave the situation of the Goetheanum as it is. Resuming work on it depends entirely on strengthening the Society and freeing it of misunderstandings that sap its very lifeblood.

That lifeblood is sapped when, for example, no attention is paid to the principle involved in speaking of ethics in the sense required by the Spirit of the Time for the age of the developing consciousness soul and delineated by me in the Philosophy of Freedom. At the time I wrote it, I did not exactly relish exposing myself to the reproaches certain to issue from narrow-minded quarters because of my repudiation of authoritarian ethics. But every sentence I set down was formulated in the way I am always at pains to do, taking the greatest care to leave the reader free, even in relation to the development of thought and feeling under discussion in the book mentioned. So I must point out how out of place it is to bring up the question of a lecture like that of December 30, 1922, influencing the conclusions drawn by members of the Anthroposophical Society. There might be many other occasions where such a question could be raised. But it creates misunderstandings to raise it in connection with the lecture referred to, and to do so disregards the fact of my sacred concern to avoid influencing people's judgment by what I say on the subject of vitally important aspects of activities within the Society.

So I have again expressed my intention of formulating what I have to say in such a way that nobody's judgment can be influenced. It is therefore unnecessary to warn those who attend my lectures to preserve their freedom of judgment.

Now let me continue in the spirit of my previous comments and go on to consider how a spiritual-scientific judgment is arrived at. I am speaking now of judgments that express spiritual-scientific truths.

It can give one a strange feeling to observe how little aware people are of the seriousness with which the communication of spiritual truths is weighted. All one has to do to form and express judgments about things of the everyday world of the senses is to practice observation or logic at a given moment. Observation and logic are perfectly adequate bases for forming judgments about sense-derived and historical data. In the realm of spiritual science, however, they are not adequate. There, it is not enough to deal just once with forming a particular judgment. What is required is something quite different, something I shall call here a twofold re-casting of a judgment. This re-casting usually takes more than a short period of time; indeed, the period tends to be quite a long one. Let us say that one forms some judgment or other on the basis of methods you are familiar with from descriptions given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment and in the second part of An Outline Of Occult Science. Following these procedures, one arrives at this or that conclusion about spiritual beings or processes. At this point one is obligated to keep this conclusion to oneself and not to express it. Indeed, one is even obligated to regard it simply as a neutral fact which, for the time being, one neither accepts nor rejects. Then, perhaps even years later, one comes to the point of undertaking the first re-casting of this judgment in one's own soul life; one deepens and in many respects even transforms it. Even though the content of the judgment may remain the same after its re-casting, it will have taken on a different nuance, a nuance of inner participation, perhaps, or of the warmth one has spent on it. In any case, it will incorporate itself in the life of the soul quite differently after this first re-casting than on the previous occasion, and one will then have the feeling of having separated oneself in some way from the judgment. If it has taken a matter of years to accomplish the first re-casting, one cannot, of course, have been turning the judgment over in one's mind every minute of the time. The judgment naturally disappears into the unconscious, where it carries on a life of its own quite independently of the ego. It has to have this independent life. One must stay away from it and let it live all to itself. Thus the ego element is eliminated from the judgment, which is then turned over to an objective faculty in oneself. When one first makes an observation and draws a logical conclusion from it, the ego is invariably involved. But when—possibly after a lapse of several years—a judgment is re-cast for the first time, one has the distinct experience of its emerging from the soul's depths to confront one like any other fact of the surrounding world. All this time it was out of sight. Now one comes across it again, one re-discovers it, and it seems to be saying, “The first time you formed me imperfectly, or even incorrectly, but now I have corrected myself.”

This is the judgment the true spiritual scientist seeks, the kind that develops its own life in the human soul. It takes a lot of patience to re-cast it because, as I have said, the process of re-casting can take years, and the conscientiousness that spiritual science demands means keeping silent while letting things speak.

But now, my dear friends, after re-casting a judgment in this way and experiencing its emergence out of an objective realm, one has the strong feeling that it occupies a place somewhere in oneself despite its objective recovery. So one can still feel that, in view of the responsibility one has to let the thing speak while remaining silent oneself, one should not express this kind of judgment on a spiritual-scientific matter. One therefore waits again, and perhaps again for years, for the second re-casting. As a result, one arrives at a third form of the judgment, and one will find a significant difference between the process that went on in the period between the first forming of the judgment and its first re-casting and the process it underwent between the first and second re-casting. One notices that it was comparatively easy to recall the judgment in the first time-interval described, while in the second it is extremely difficult to summon it up again, into such soul-depths has it descended, depths into which the easy judgments gleaned from the outer world never descend. Re-cast judgments of the kind I mean sink to the deepest levels of the soul, and one finds out what a struggle it costs to recall such a re-cast judgment between its first and second re-casting. By judgment I mean here an overview of the whole area covered by the fact in cases where the facts are of a spiritual-scientific nature. When one then arrives at the third form of the judgment, one knows that the judgment has been in the realm of the thing or process under study. In the period between its first forming and first re-casting it remained within one's own being, but in the second such interval it plunged into the realm of the objective spiritual fact or being. One sees that in its third shape the thing or being itself gives back the judgment in the form of a certain outlook one now has. Only now does one feel equal to communicating this view or judgment of a spiritual-scientific fact. The communication is made only after completing this twofold re-casting and thus arriving at the certainty that one's first view of the matter has pursued a path directly to the facts of the case and returned again. Indeed, a judgment of super-sensible things that is to find valid expression must be sent to the realm where the relevant facts or beings dwell.

No one with a right approach to presentations of basic and significant spiritual-scientific facts will find this hard to understand. Of course, a person who reads lecture cycles just as he would a modern novel will not notice from the way it is presented that the all-important thing, the real proof, lies in this twofold re-casting of a judgment. He will then call such a statement a mere assertion, not a proof at all. But the only proof of spiritual facts is experience, experience conscientiously come by and based on a twofold re-casting of judgments. Spiritual things can be proved only by experiencing them. This does not hold true of understanding them, however. Anyone with a healthy mind can understand any adequate presentation. But to be adequate, it has to have supplied that healthy mind with all the pertinent data, so pertinently arranged that the very manner of the presentation convinces of the truth of a given conclusion.

It makes a strange impression to have people come and say that spiritual-scientific truths ought to be as susceptible of proof as assertions about facts observed in the sense world. A person who makes such a demand shows that he is unfamiliar with the difference between perception of things spiritual and ordinary experience on the physical or historical level. Individuals who acquaint themselves with anthroposophy will notice that the single truths it presents fit into the picture of anthroposophy as a whole, and that this whole in turn supports the further single truths they hear. These further truths then illuminate things heard in the past. An increasing familiarity with anthroposophy is thus constant growth in experiencing its truth. The truth of a mathematical statement can be discerned in a flash, but it is correspondingly lifeless. Anthroposophical truth is a living thing. Conviction cannot be arrived at in a single moment; it is alive, and goes on growing. Conviction about anthroposophy might be compared to a baby just starting out in life, uncertain at first, scarcely more than a belief. But the more one learns, the more certain one's conviction becomes. This growing-up of anthroposophical conviction is actually proof of its inner aliveness.

We see here, furthermore, that what one thinks and feels about the concerns of anthroposophy is not only different from what one thinks and feels in other areas today, but that one must think differently, feel differently, take a different approach than is usual elsewhere. This different approach or attitude is basic to an understanding of anthroposophy, and it forms the basis for an anthroposophical fructification of all the various fields of life and learning.

This fact will have to be kept particularly clearly in mind by scientists coming into the movement. They should not only make it their goal as scientists to develop a different picture of the world than that striven for by external science, but should also be aware that their chief responsibility consists in bringing an anthroposophical frame of mind and an inner aliveness to bear on the various scientific fields they enter. This would keep them from resorting to polemics against other types of science, and instead help them to proceed in the direction of developing aspects of those sciences that would remain undeveloped without anthroposophy. I must stress this in a time of crisis for our Society, a crisis due in no small measure to the way scientists have been conducting themselves in it.

I must add here that the battle over atomism that the journal Die Drei [DIE DREI: an anthroposophical journal.] has been waging can only mean the death of fruitful scientific exchange. This debate should not be carried on with resort to the same kind of thinking practiced by opponents and with a failure to see that in certain vital points their assertions are correct. The all-important thing is to realize that physics is just that field of science that has brought out facts quite ideally suited to serving as the foundation of an anthroposophical outlook, provided one takes physics just as it is, without polemics. As we have seen in the polemical debate in “Die Drei,” polemics unrelieved by an anthroposophical approach can only lead to unfruitfulness.

I had a further reason for stressing this: I want to make it fully clear as a matter of principle that everything that is done in the name of anthroposophy cannot be laid at my door! I respect people's freedom. But when harmful things happen I must be allowed to exercise my own judgment about bringing them up. Complete independence must be the rule in anthroposophical concerns, not opportunism. Least desirable of all is the comradely spirit so frequently met with in discussions about scientific questions.

Now, my dear friends, as I often point out, we have to be clear when we are presenting anthroposophy that we are now living in the age of consciousness soul development. In other words, rational and intellectual capacities have become the most outstanding aspects of man's present state of soul. Ever since the time of Anaxagoras, a philosopher of ancient Greece, we have been sifting every judgment, even those based on external observation, through our intellectuality. If you examine the rationalistic science of today, particularly mathematics, which is the most rationalistic of all, and consider the rationalistic working over of empirical data by the other sciences, you will form some idea of the actual thought-content of our time. This thought-content, to which even the youngest children are exposed in modern schools, made its appearance at a fairly definite point in human evolution. We can pinpoint it in the first third of the fifteenth century, for it was then that this intellectuality appeared on the scene in unmistakable form. In earlier times people thought more in pictures even when they were dealing with scientific subject matter, and these pictures expressed the growth forces inherent in the things they thought about. They did not think in abstractions such as come so naturally to us today.

But these abstract concepts educate our souls to the pure thinking described in my The Philosophy of Freedom. It is they that enable us to become free beings. Before people were able to think in abstractions they were not free, self-determined souls. One can develop into a free being only by keeping the inner man free of influences from outside, by developing a capacity to lay hold on moral impulses with the aid of pure thinking, as described in the The Philosophy of Freedom. Pure thoughts are not reality, they are pictures, and pictures exercise no sort of compulsion on us. They leave us free to determine our own actions.

So, on the one hand, mankind evolved to the level of abstract thinking, on the other to freedom. This has often been discussed here from several other angles.

Let us now consider how things stood with man before earthly evolution brought him to a capacity for abstract thoughts, and so to freedom. The humanity incarnated on the earth in earlier periods was incapable of abstract thinking. This was true of ancient Greece, not to mention still earlier periods. The people living in those early days thought entirely in pictures, and were therefore not as yet endowed with the inner sense of freedom that became theirs when they attained the capacity for pure (that is, abstract) thinking. Abstract thoughts leave us cold. But the moral capacity given us by abstract thought makes us intensely warm, for it represents the very peak of human dignity.

What was the situation before abstract thought with its accompaniment of freedom was conferred on man? Well, you know that when man passes through the gates of death and casts off his physical body, he still retains his etheric body for a few days thereafter and sees his whole life, all the way back to the moment of his first memory, spread out before him in mighty pictures, in an undetailed, comprehensive and harmonious panorama. This tableau of his life confronts a person for several days after he has died.

That is the way it is today, my dear friends. But in the time when people living on earth still possessed a picture consciousness, their experience immediately after death was that of a rational, logical view of the world such as human beings have today, but which those who lived in earlier times did not have in the period between birth and death.

This is a fact that proves a signal aid in understanding human nature. An experience that people of ancient as well as somewhat later periods of history had only after death, that is, a short looking back in abstract thoughts and an impulse to freedom, which then remained with them during their lives between death and rebirth, came, in the course of evolution, to be instead an experience that they had during life on earth. This constant pressing through of super-sensible experience into earthly experience is one of the great secrets of existence. The capacity for abstraction and freedom that presently extends into earthly life was something that came into an earlier humanity's possession only after death in the form of the looking back I have described; whereas nowadays, human beings living on the earth possess rationality, intellectuality and freedom, exchanging these after death for a mere picture consciousness in their reviewing of their lives. There is a constant passing over of this kind going on, with the concretely super-sensible thrusting itself into sense experience.

You can see from this example how anthroposophy obtains the facts it speaks of from observation of the spiritual, and how subjectivity has no chance to color its treatment of a fact. But once we arrive at these facts, do they not affect our feelings and work on our will impulses? Could it ever be said of anthroposophy that it is merely theory? How theoretical it would sound to say merely that modern man is ruled by freedom and abstraction! But how richly saturated with artistic feeling and religious content such a statement becomes when we realize that what gives us modern human beings freedom in our earthly experience and a capacity for abstraction is something that comes to us here on earth from the heavenly worlds we enter after death, but that makes its way to us in a direction exactly counter to the one we take to enter them! We go out through the gates of death into spiritual realms. Our freedom and capacity for abstraction come to us as a divine gift, given to the earth world by the spiritual. This imbues us with a feeling for what we are as human beings, making us warmly aware not only of the fact that we are bearers of a spiritual element, but of the source whence that element derives. We look on death with the realization that what lies beyond it was experienced by people of an earlier time in a way that has now been carried over into the modern experiencing of people here on earth.

The fact that this heavenly element, intellectuality and freedom, has been thus translated into earthly capacity makes it necessary to look up to the divine in a different way from that of earlier ages. The Mystery of Golgotha made it possible to look up in this new way. The fact that Christ came to live on earth enables him to hallow elements of heavenly origin that might otherwise tempt man to arrogance and similar attitudes. We are living in a period that calls on us to recognize that our loftiest modern capacities, the capacity for freedom and pure concepts, must be permeated by the Christ impulse. Christianity has not reached its ultimate perfection. It is great just because the various evolutionary impulses of the human race must gradually be saturated by the Christ impulse. Man must learn to think pure thoughts with Christ, to achieve freedom with Christ, because he will otherwise not have that relationship to the super-sensible world that enables him to perceive correctly what it gives him. Studying ourselves as modern human beings, we realize that the super-sensible penetrates into earthly life through the gates of death in a direction directly counter to that that we take on dying. We go one way as human beings. The world goes the opposite way. With the descent of Christ, the spiritual sun enters from spiritual heights into the earth realm, in order that the human element that has made its way from the super-sensible to the sense world come together with the cosmic element that has taken the same path, in order that man find his way to the spirit of the cosmos. He can orient himself rightly in the world only if the spirit within him finds the spirit outside him. The spirit that an older humanity found living in the world beyond death can be rightly laid hold upon by people living on the earth today only if they are irradiated by the Christ, who descended to earth from that same world whence rationality and intellectuality and freedom made their way into the experience of incarnated human beings.

So we may say that anthroposophy begins in every case at the scientific level, calls art to the enlivening of its concepts, and ends in a religious deepening. It begins with what the head can grasp, takes on all the life and color of which words are capable, and ends in warmth that suffuses and reassures the heart, so that man's soul can at all times feel itself in the spirit, its true home. We must learn, on the anthroposophical path, to start with knowledge, then to lift ourselves to the level of artistry, and to end in the warmth of religious feeling.

The present rejects this way of doing things, and that is why anthroposophy has enemies. These enemies have many strange qualities. I have been talking of such serious matters today that I don't want to end on a serious note, although these matters are a good deal more serious than is generally realized. But we should often consider what a contrast exists between the seriousness of genuine anthroposophical striving and the ideas about it entertained by a good many of our fellow men. Some of them are absolutely grotesque, though others would strike us as simply droll were it not for the fact that we have to put up a defense against them. Sometimes I also find it necessary to turn my own spotlight on the outer world, with everyone free to make of it what he will. So I am going to close today's weighty discussion with a comment that is not to be taken too weightily.

A little while ago, our friend Dr. Wachsmuth brought me in Dornach a rude pamphlet not only attacking anthroposophy, but making me and those close to me its special targets. He said at the time that he wasn't leaving the book with me because it would be insulting even to assume that I would read such a particularly crude piece of invention. I didn't see the book again. Dr. Wachsmuth took it away with him, and I gave it no further thought.

Yesterday I traveled through Freiburg, accompanied by Frau Dr. Steiner and Herr Leinhas. We stopped off for refreshments and were sitting at a restaurant table. Two men were seated at the adjoining one. One of them had a rather bulging briefcase and other such accoutrements. We took no special notice of these people, and they left shortly before we did. After their departure the waiter brought me a book, saying that one of the gentlemen had asked him to give it to me. Herr Leinhas asked who the men were, and was told that one of them was Werner von der Schulenburg. On the book's flyleaf stood the words, “With the author's compliments.”

You see, my dear friends, what can happen. Perhaps this will give you some idea what a conception of tact—not to mention other qualities—exists nowadays among those who parade their enmity.

I have found it quite impossible lately to pay much attention to my enemies. Anyone who has been following my recent activities will have seen how occupied I have been presenting new truths to add to the old. This takes time, which one cannot afford to let anyone interrupt and waste, no matter how savage the attacks become.

I have described to you today how much is involved in arriving at anthroposophical truths. If the Society becomes fully conscious of this, it will find some of the strength it needs for its current reorganization. That, my dear friends, is a vital need. Please do not take it amiss that I have harped on this theme so insistently today.