The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I would like to touch again today on some of the things I noted yesterday, which could no longer be properly discussed, with a few aphoristic remarks.

First, I would like to say a few words about the relationship between major and minor. If you want to get right into the intimacies of musical life, you have to be absolutely aware of how, in essence, musical life corresponds to a fine organization of our human nature. One could say that what appears in musical facts corresponds in a certain way to the finer inner constitution of the human being.

Yesterday I already hinted at a certain direction, how rhythm, which we experience musically, answers an inner rhythm in the rise and fall of the cerebral fluid and the connection that the cerebral fluid has on the one hand with the processes in the brain, and on the other hand with the processes in the metabolic system through the mediation of the blood system. But one can also point to, I would say, individually graded forms of the human constitution in this respect. Our most important rhythmic system is the respiratory system, and it is basically not difficult for most people, if they pay just a little attention, to experience how the course of thought, both the more logical course of thought and the more emotional, feeling-based course of thought, influence the breathing process. The breathing process is directly or indirectly connected with everything that a person experiences musically. Therefore, the particular breathing pattern of one or the other type of person sheds some light on the musical experience.

You see, there are people who are, so to speak, oxygen voluptuaries. They are constituted in such a way that they assimilate oxygen with a certain greed, absorb oxygen into themselves. Of course, all this takes place more or less in the subconscious, but one can certainly use the expressions borrowed from conscious life for the subconscious. People who absorb oxygen with a certain greed, who, if I may say so, enjoy absorbing oxygen, who are voluptuous in absorbing oxygen, have a very active, strongly vibrating astral life. Their astral body is inwardly active. And because their astral body is inwardly active, it also digs into the physical body with great desire, as it were. Such people live very much in their physical body.

Other people do not have this craving for oxygen. But they feel something, not like a lust now, but like a relief when they give up, exhale the carbonic acid. They are tuned to, as it were, removing the breathing air from themselves and finding a favor in the process that gives them a certain relief.

One can, by speaking the truth, say something that I would like to say, that makes a person feel a little uncomfortable. But that is one of the reasons why people reject the deeper truths, because they do not want to hear them. They then invent logical reasons for themselves. In reality, the reason is that people are subconsciously repulsed by certain truths. So they push these truths aside. And that is why they then find logical reasons for their evasion. It is certainly not so easy, for example, if you are a respected scholar and are opposed to this or that philosophical system because of an unhealthy gall-bladder, to simply say to your students: My gall-bladder does not tolerate this philosophical system! — So you then invent logical reasons, sometimes of an extraordinarily astute nature, and you console yourself with these logical reasons. For those who know life, for those who look deeper into the secrets of existence, sometimes logical reasons that come from this or that side are not quite so valuable. And so, for example, sometimes the melancholic temperament is based merely on the fact that the person concerned is a voluptuary of oxygen. And life more in the sanguine, life that is turned to the outer world, that likes to change with the impressions of the outer world, that is based on a certain love of exhaling, on a certain love of pushing the carbonic acid away from oneself.

However, these are only the external manifestations of the matter. For the rhythm, which we basically perceive only as the physical-secondary in the organism, is actually always a rhythm that takes place in the deeper sense between the astral body and the ether body. And ultimately one can say: we inhale with the astral body and with the etheric body we exhale again, so that in truth there is a rhythmic interaction between the astral body and the etheric body. And so now the individual types of people live, so to speak, in such a way that when one type of person's astral body strikes the ether body, a kind of lust occurs; when the ether body strikes back at the astral body, a kind of relief occurs in the other person, a kind of transition into the sanguine, experiencing the sanguine.

And you see, the origin of the major and minor scales is connected with this contrast between types of people, in that everything that can be experienced in minor keys belongs, or corresponds, to the constitution of the person who is based on the lustfulness of oxygen, which is based on the fact that the astral body, when it strikes the etheric body is felt with a certain voluptuousness, while conversely the major scales are based on the fact that there is a feeling of well-being when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body, or there is a certain feeling of elevation, a feeling of relief, a feeling of momentum when the aetheric body strikes back at the astral body.

It is interesting that in the outer world things are often designated in the opposite direction. For example, one says: the melancholic person is the deeper person. Seen from the other side, he is not the deeper person, but the greater voluptuary for oxygen.

Since the musical in its intimacies essentially draws on the subconscious, we can associate such things with the very subconscious, semi-conscious, and conscious aspects of the musical experience, without indulging in an inartistic, theoretical approach. You will notice in general that a truly spiritual-scientific consideration of art does not need to become inartistic itself, for one does not arrive at bloodless abstractions and a theoretical web of aestheticizing kind. If we want to understand things spiritually, we come to realities in a certain way, the mutual interaction of which is presented pictorially or even musically in such a way that we, with our description, are ourselves in it in a kind of musical experience.

And I believe that this will be precisely the significant aspect in the further development of spiritual science: that in seeking to comprehend art, it itself seeks to create an art of comprehension, that it seeks to imbue its work and activity in ideas with pictoriality, with reality, and that in so doing, what we have today as such a dry, abstract science will be able to approach the artistic. But if we take something that has been approached purely and simply from a scientific point of view, such as education, and make it relevant to the tasks of our time, as we do in the Waldorf school , then we are in any case leading what used to be scientific pedagogy to the level of pedagogical art and talking about pedagogy in the sense that we actually understand it as an art of educating.

If you read what I wrote in the last issue of “Social Future” about the art of education, you will see how there is an effort to transform the sober science of education into the art of education.

Another thing I noted refers to the interesting comments Mr. Baumann made in his lecture about the relationship between vowels and tones and colors. He described, as you recall, the dark vowels U, O, as those that have the clearest effect in terms of tone. In the middle stands A, and at the other pole, so to speak, stand E and I, the light vowels, which appear the least tonal, which carry something noisy in them.

But then the astonishment was expressed as to how it comes about that precisely the dark vowels also correspond to the dark colors, and the light vowels, I, E, correspond to light colors, but do not actually have the tonal in their characteristic, but rather the noisy. - If I understood correctly, that was the case, wasn't it?

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Now I would like to make the following comment. If we do not write down the color scale in the abstract linearity that we are accustomed to in today's physics, but if we write down the color scale in a circle, as it must also be done in accordance with Goethe's color theory, so that we say: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — if we proceed in this direction (see drawing), if we write down the color scale in this way, then we will naturally be compelled, by bringing to mind the experiential relationships between tone and color, to write U and O towards the blue side. But if we continue in Mr. Baumann's spirit, we will come to A and from this side enter the red and yellow, the light.

So when we move away from the blue in the sense of the accompanying colors of the individual tones, we are actually moving away from the color element and now touching it from behind. And therein lies the reason why we can no longer establish parallelism here in the same way as in the area where the tonal coincides with the color in a very evident way, because on the side of the color scale where the blue, the violet is, we are dealing, so to speak, with a going out of ourselves with the color. There is a sense of immersion in the external world. With sound, however, it is essentially also an outward movement. But when we come over here, we experience an onslaught of color: red and yellow colors rush at us. In this sense, behind this curtain, there is also painting here: it is the ability to paint from within the color. We live ourselves into the color. This is how we actually come out of the nature of the tones. This is the reason for the apparent incongruity that I pointed out to you yesterday.

Then I would also like to make a few comments about something that has been mentioned, that has been found – and it has not only been found by the one person mentioned yesterday, but similar things are being said and spread by a great many people – that one can feel the vowels, the tones, in the organism: I in the head, E more in the larynx, A in the chest, O in the abdomen, U very low down.

Now, these things are indeed correct, and you will no longer be surprised that these things have a certain correctness if you bear in mind that everything that exists in the outside world in the form of sound corresponds to very specific arrangements in our organism. But on the other hand, we must not forget: If such things are proclaimed without proper instruction – and proper in this case means only instruction that can speak from a certain spiritual-scientific experience – if such things are proclaimed without precise knowledge of the very interconnections that I have pointed out in a specific case today, that is, the interrelations between the astral body, the etheric body and so on, if they are trumpeted out into the world without reasonable guidance in the spiritual-scientific sense and people then do all kinds of exercises in this sense, then, indeed, quite embarrassing things can come about. If, for example, someone does breathing exercises of some kind and – as was hinted at yesterday – strongly visualizes the vowel when breathing and in doing so gets the feeling: the I sits in the head, the E in the larynx, and so on – this can certainly be right. But if he is not instructed in a sensible way, it can happen that the I remains in the head and sings continuously at the top of the head, and the E remains in the larynx and rumbles there. And if the A in the chest and abdomen also do their thing, then something similar to what Dr. Husemann has described in an excellent way for Staudenmaier in Munich, who also came up with very strange things because, as a person who has no experience at all in how to use such things, , he has actually gradually accumulated a whole legion of fools in his own organism, so many fools that these fools have simply suggested to him that this breeding of fools should now also be cultivated, that universities and schools should be founded so that all this folly can be taken even further. And you can really imagine that a naive mind has the answer for this: Now I'm supposed to pay taxes for him to live in his monkey cage with his magic, aren't I!

But today there are actually a great many things that simply boil down to the fact that the people who devote themselves to such things – and there is a certain greed even for such things – that these people are really driven crazy, you could say they are actually driven crazy. So such things are not entirely harmless, and it is good when attention is drawn to them.

You see, if you, as was the case with me before the war - now it is just no longer possible - if you had to travel, so to speak, through half of Europe more often, you really found a perpetual phenomenon throughout this half of Europe. I don't know how many people have noticed it, but those who live in spiritual science also acquire a certain talent for observation for external things, they simply see certain things. For example, they cannot simply stay in a hotel and not see all the letters in the porter's lodge for people who have arrived or who have not arrived. Letters are there from people who may have just skipped the city or this hotel due to the necessity of the trip and so on. Now, however, there was one recurring phenomenon in such porter's lodges, also in other places, again and again: these were the postings of a certain, as they were called, psychological-occult center. They sent such announcements to all possible addresses they could get hold of, about an “occult system” through which one could train oneself for all kinds of things. For example, one could train oneself to make a favorable impression on other people. In particular, one could train oneself as a commercial agent to easily persuade people to buy one's goods. Or one could also train oneself to do other interesting things, for example, to make the opposite sex fall in love with you easily and the like. Well, these things were sent out, and these things actually found a great deal of interest in the world. Then the war, didn't it, threw a bit of a wrench into these calculations for the simple reason that it had gradually become unpleasant that these things were being censored. And since censorship has not been abolished today either, at least in most areas, but on the contrary is still in effect in a very strange way, efforts to advocate occultism in this way have not yet been rewarded, and one notices less of these stories today. But I think they are being passed more and more from person to person, without using the postal system and similar things. So I just wanted to say that this vocal breathing game is not without significance and does have an embarrassing side.

Now yesterday various questions were asked that obviously relate to the statements I made in the first recitation lesson, which were only a few remarks for the time being, and that were linked to what Mr. Baumann said about the musical aspect. Well, with regard to the most important thing, of course, I must refer to the following lessons on declamation, but perhaps I can also make some aphoristic remarks there.

For example, the question was asked what changes in the way of speaking, in the art of acting, could be brought about by spiritual science. A term was used, if I understood it correctly – because it is possible that I did not understand it – that was supposed to replace physical eloquence. I think I remember this term, but I have absolutely no idea what is meant by “physical eloquence”!

Interjection: facial expressions are meant.

Oh, facial expressions as physical eloquence? Well, if that is meant, it is a rather occult expression. But perhaps we can also make a few comments on the matter by anticipating some of what still needs to be said in the lessons in context, and which perhaps can only be presented here in somewhat aphoristic form. I would like to say something about the way of speaking and acting in the art of acting, which has also undergone a rich history. One need only recall that Goethe also rehearsed his plays, for example, “Iphigenia,” with his actors in such a way that he had a baton, that he placed the greatest value on meter. And people in the second half of the 19th century would probably have described what Goethe called the beauty of his acting as a kind of chanting or something similar. There was indeed a great emphasis on meter. And one should not imagine that when Goethe himself played Orestes, for example, he went wild in the way that I have seen some Orestes actors go wild in on stages that are not even modern. When a certain Krastel played Orestes, yes, sometimes you felt the need to get a cage to contain his wildness. So one should not imagine that Goethe himself might have played the role of Orestes. On the contrary: he softened and smoothed out the very thing that was present in the content as strength and intense inner life by carefully observing the meter. So that there was moderation and balance in the manner of delivery that Goethe used for his Orestes.

As for facial expressions, it may be said that in earlier times – and these times are not so far back – these facial expressions were much more subject to the laws of theatrical art than they were in the last third of the 19th century. To a certain extent, stereotypical movements were used for certain types of feelings, and these were adhered to. So that it was less important, for example, to see in detail how some hand movement expresses some wild passion, but rather to see how some hand movement is, how it runs, how it has to connect to a previous hand movement, creating a beautiful form, and how it transitions to the next hand movement. So it was the inner shaping that was most important in facial expressions. And to the same extent that this artistry in both speech and facial expressions declined, to the same extent did the naturalistic immersion in the individual gesture and the individual word come about, and what then ultimately became the demand of naturalism for the entire drama was that which cannot actually be followed in the serious sense. Because, if it came down to only showing a front or back room in the stage set, where the same things happened that would naturally happen in a front or back room in three hours, , then one would actually have to say: the stage space would be designed in a completely naturalistic way if the side with the curtain were also closed – and the last naturalistic thing that one has striven for on the stage would actually have been achieved with something like that. It would have been quite interesting if, for example, the aesthetic wishes of Arno Holz had also led to the demand that the stage area be closed off at the front by a wall, so that it would now quite naturally depict a back room. One could have seen what impression such naturalism, such complete naturalism, would have made on the audience.

I know that when you take things to such grotesque extremes, it is very easy to find fault with them. But in the end, extreme naturalism really comes down to the fact that you can't really say anything other than that it is the last consequence.

And so it is with this pushing of the actor into the ordinary naturalistic way of speaking and into the naturalistic gesture. In more artistic times, the other tendency prevailed. There the gesture strove for the beautiful, plastic form, for the moving plastic form. And the spoken word strived more back to the musical. So that in fact the theatrical presentation was also lifted out of the ordinary naturalism, in that the actors moved as they did on stage for the older among us, with those tragedians and tragic actresses whom the younger ones no longer knew, like Klara Ziegler and others. There you could still see the last echoes of decadence. They couldn't do the things anymore, but they still did them with the last remnants of plastic stagecraft, and they still had in their manner of speaking what sound and even tone and even melos had in speaking.

It was interesting: those who, on the one hand, went wild, went wild naturalistically, like Krastel, on the other hand, did not want to become naturalistic – their temperament got the better of them – they did not want to become naturalistic. Therefore, however, they also took their path to the musical in speaking in such a way as the others did to the plastic in movement. I don't know if any of you still remember such things; but if you have seen and heard Krastel on the Viennese stage more than once, you may still have the sound of Krastel's singing in your ears.

So, by returning to earlier forms of acting and mime, we are dealing with a convergence of theatrical performance with the musical and the plastic. And basically, all art is based on the fact that certain archetypes of this art, I would say, split, that the individual forms, the differentiated forms of art emerged from what was a kind of singing art in prehistoric times. And when someone like Richard Wagner came along and directed his whole heart and soul back to the archetypes of artistry, then this striving for the Gesamtkunstwerk emerged from him. But the further we go back in the development of the human spirit, the more we find that what is separate today flows together. For example, at least for the older times of Greek civilization, we can assume that there was only a slight difference between recitation and song. Recitation was very much sung. And song approached recitation. What later became differentiated into recitation and song was thoroughly unified. And it was probably the same with the northern peoples. What the northern peoples had was not one-sided singing and one-sided saying, that is, declaiming; but it was the art of declamation that arose from the Nordic way— just as the art of recitation arose from the southern type. It was the art of declamation and the song of the north, which was based on quite different foundations than Greek song, which in turn were a kind of unity. So we are dealing with a differentiation of the arts. And it must be assumed that in the old form, singing, i.e. music, recitation or declamation and rhythmic movement, the art of dance, were connected in a unified way. They sounded together as a unified whole.

This art of dance was then the older form of eurythmy. And it is absolutely — although this can only be recognized with spiritual scientific research methods — it is absolutely, albeit in a somewhat different form, because everything is of course subject to development, as a eurythmic part in the Greek unity of singing and recitation art, this eurythmy. So that this eurythmy is definitely something that was part of musical life in older times. And basically we are not doing anything different today than going back to earlier forms of artistic expression in eurythmy. Except that we naturally have to take into account the fact that the arts have now advanced so much. So that the close connection between singing, recitation and eurythmy, as it certainly still existed in Greece in the time of Aeschylus, cannot exist. We have to take more account of the fact that we have come to a differentiation. Therefore, the forms of eurythmy today must be sought through real inspiration, intuition and imagination.

They are. I have always mentioned this in a certain way before eurythmic performances, in a kind of introduction: one must not imagine that something has simply been taken over from the old eurythmic forms; but what was previously done more instinctively has been raised into consciousness in the sense in which it must be done in our time. And this visible language of eurythmy is directly sensed and received from the spiritual world. For basically all human beings eurhythmy! All of you eurhythmy, namely your ether body. Then, when you speak, you eurhythmy. The secret of speaking consists in the fact that the entire ether body follows the impulses of the vowel and the consonant, the entire arrangement of the sentence formation. Everything that is presented in eurythmy is mirrored in the movements of the etheric body when people speak. And speaking is based only on the fact that what is spread throughout the entire etheric body in movements is concentrated in the physical through the larynx and its neighboring organs. So that he who can see the etheric body of the person speaking perceives speech twice: in the movements of the larynx and its neighboring organs and in the etheric body as a whole. And when we practise eurythmy, we do nothing other than cause the physical body to perform the movements that the etheric body performs when a person speaks. The only difference is that we naturally have to round off, shape and transform everything that the ordinary human etheric body does into art, into beauty and the like.

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If every person were to practise eurythmy continually, I can assure you that not everyone would be able to do so artistically! The results are not always beautiful, although the process itself can be extremely interesting. And I once saw an extremely interesting group doing eurythmy. It was in Hermannstadt in 1889, and I was traveling from Vienna to Hermannstadt on Christmas Eve. And I had the misfortune of missing the connecting train in Budapest. So I had to take a train that went via Szegedin instead of Debrecen, and I arrived at the Hungarian-Transylvanian border on that Christmas Eve. There, where I had to wait for twelve hours, I met a group of people playing cards. It was, as they say, a motley crew from all the different nationalities that can be found in this corner of the world. Well, I took up the position of an observer. It was not a pleasant position, because the table at which I was to eat my supper looked so tempting that one would have liked to take out one's pocket knife and scrape off the dirt. And similar things could be observed. But I watched. The first player dealt the cards. Now you should have seen the eurythmy that sprang from the eyes of the others! The second played the cards – there were already two of the company lying on the table. Then the third played the cards, and then two more were lying under the table. And when the other cards were played, there was a colorful jumble: a wonderful but not beautiful eurythmy performed by these etheric bodies!

But there is so much to be learned about the human being and human nature by observing such scenes, where the human being's astral body comes into such a terribly angry movement, expressing all passions and then dominating the etheric body. And then there is the screeching of the etheric body when it screams! You can imagine that they shouted in confusion. And it was precisely this shouting that was then expressed in eurythmy. A lot can be studied from this. But when it comes to beautiful eurythmy, these movements must first be rounded off a little, translated into beauty.

But I am drawing your attention to certain processes that must precede the establishment of eurythmy if this eurythmy is not to be something fantastically contrived, but if it is to be what I have always presented in the introductions to the eurythmic performances. And I say such things in particular because it is very often imagined that everything that is presented in spiritual science and the art that is built up out of it is just pulled out of a hat. It is not pulled out of a hat, but is based on very thorough work.

Now this is, at least in essence, what I noted yesterday in relation to these matters.

There is still something about the Chinese scale. What was mentioned yesterday about the Chinese scale is not uninteresting when considered in connection with what I have just spoken about today. I said: the musical fact that takes place in the outer world corresponds to something in the human constitution. And if it is said today that the human being consists of these and these limbs, which interact in this and that way – physical body, etheric body, astral body and so on – then one can say in a certain way: there is also inner music in it, and this inner music corresponds to our outer musical reality.

But things are constantly changing as humanity develops. And a Chinese person is a different kind of human being from a European. A Chinese still has many connections between the physical body and the etheric body, the etheric body and the sentient soul, the sentient soul and the mind or emotional soul, and so on, which have already completely disappeared in European man. This constitution of the Chinese person now corresponds to the Chinese scale. And if one studies music history in such a way, for example, by taking a sensible approach to the development of the scale system, and if one has an understanding of the connection between the inner human organization and the outer musical facts, one can look back from the scales and from many other musical facts to the constitution of the respective human group or race, and so on.

Now, just a moment ago, I was also made aware of a difference of opinion regarding what I meant by delving into the sound yesterday.

I did not mean that tones are still present in the sequence of time, which might resonate together and then be perceived as one tone. This is not meant. Rather, what is meant is that today, in relation to the evolution of humanity, one begins to speak of an organization within the tone, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and going beyond the tone above, in contrast to what was experienced by many people until our world time simply as one tone. to speak of a division, to split the tone within oneself, so that one is, as it were, heading towards going deeper into the tone, going down below the tone and, as it were, going beyond the tone above it to another tone. And then, I thought, when you have the actual tones that have been modified by the two neighboring tones that you have actually developed, when you have these three tones, you can express the varied main tone. It is then a slightly different tone. And you will notice that you have to shift one of the newly emerging tones downwards and the other upwards. But when you do that, you don't come across our usual tones, but tones that our current tone systems don't have. And in this way, I believe, an expansion of our tone system will indeed have to come about.

And it is also the case that, in a sense, an opposite process to our present-day tone system has led to it again. Our present-day tone system has also only come about through all kinds of superimpositions of tone sensations. Our tones would not have been immediately understood in certain ages.

I believe that a change is currently taking place in the way we experience sound, and that just as a very specific kind of music is emerging from the sometimes quite grotesque forms of experimentation, something is also announcing itself that wants to get out. For example, I have to say: either I don't understand Debussy at all, or I can only understand him in such a way that he foresaw something of this living into the sound. It is a completely different kind of musical feeling through Debussy than, for example, even in Wagner. Isn't it, you can say that.

So that is what I actually meant, that you find a kind of melody from the individual tone, which you then just spread out in time. But you only get this melody if you have a different tone system. That is what I meant.

There is still another question about Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone. This is, I would say, a somewhat complicated chapter, for Goethe's relationship to the theory of tone has not only one, but two sources, two starting points. From his correspondence with Zelter, we learn a great deal about the way in which Goethe, at his most mature point of view, thought about tone and music. But that actually had two sources. One source was that he had a certain naive musical understanding. He was not exactly diligent in music lessons. This may well be related to the fact that he was not exactly diligent in other subjects either, where the teachers were quite foolish. And, isn't it true that if we are familiar with Goethe's spelling at a certain age of his life, then we know that if someone were to get their hands on a Goethe manuscript from Goethe's archive today, say from around 1775 – so he was well into his twenties – a modern high school teacher would say of such a manuscript: “quite careless,” it would be full of red lines and “quite insufficient” would be written underneath. And so the one source actually shows more of his naive understanding of music than of what he had learned.

But then there is another source of Goethe's theory of sound: his attempt to gain a view, which could be called a general physical view, from his theory of colors. And, isn't it true, this theory of colors is very original and formed with enormous inner diligence and entirely from the matter at hand. But he could not conduct original research in all fields of physics. And so he formed many of his views on the theory of sound by creating analogies to the theory of colors. He sketched out – he only presented everything schematically – and provided schematics for the theory of sound in which he tried to bring the phenomena of music into an analogy with what he experienced in color, in the phenomena of light. That is the second source.

Now, as a third point — which is not a source but a way of looking at the matter — Goethe adds something else, namely that Goethe already had an instinctive feeling for those paths that we are uncovering today as spiritual-scientific paths. In many of Goethe's writings, one finds a remarkable experience that he then expresses in the most diverse ways, sometimes as theoretically as he did in his theory of colors, sometimes analogously theoretically as in his theory of sound, but also in poetry. What was instinctively present in Goethe's subconscious soul in this way lives its way into his works in a remarkable way. In this connection, those of his poems that remained unfinished, such as 'Pandora', are particularly interesting. Had this 'Pandora' been completed, it would have been something written entirely out of the spiritual world. It would have to be truly observed in the spiritual world.

Now, Goethe did not arrive at spiritual insight, but he was completely true inwardly. Therefore, he did not finish the matter, which remained stuck in this way, out of an inner weighing back and forth. And to study this, how Goethe always got stuck in such things, and because he was a true personality, a true nature, then left the matter alone, is one of the most interesting things in Goethe's poetry. It shows how Goethe had a feeling that, I would say, was of a spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical nature. And that was the third thing. So that in fact he saw more in the world of sounds in an ingenious way than would actually have corresponded to his learned understanding of music.

But it was precisely this that helped him to overcome his prejudices. Therefore, a certain spiritual-scientific trait also comes into the schematic representation of Goethe's theory of sound. And what is found in these sound theory schemas, for example, about the relationships, the polar relationships between major and minor, can of course be interpreted in the most diverse ways. There is only a scheme, and there is one parallelized with the other, the other parallelized with the one. So of course you have to know Goethe very well if you want to understand how he thought of it himself. But you can see from it that there are ways to be found to get very favorable results. And Goethe's theory of sound could also be inspiring for a physicist in spiritual scientific terms, just as it would be for a musician. For there is certainly an artistic element at work in Goethe's scientific work. And in his scheme for the theory of sound, there is really something that gives a kind of, I would even say score-like impression. There is something musical in it. Just as you can also find something truly musical in the way Goethe's theory of colors is presented.

Finally, read Goethe's theory of colors with regard to its composition, to the sequence of results, to the sequence in the description of the experiments! I recommend that you do so. And then read any standard physics book, that is, the optical chapter of a contemporary physics book, and you will perceive a huge difference. This difference also has a meaning, because the time will come when one will already feel towards the scientific presentation: That which considers, considers more the how. — It is actually only in the way something is presented that the way it is understood is expressed. And it is also one of the saddest achievements of modern times that, in a sense, the less artistically one can write, the worse the style, the better lecturer one becomes, and the more artistically one writes, the worse the lecturer one is. Of course, this is not stated, but the system is set up accordingly. And what has been achieved in terms of barbarisms in scientific stylization in recent times will no doubt be the subject of interesting cultural-historical chapters in the future, the likes of which present-day humanity can hardly imagine. “Scientific barbarism of style in the 19th and 20th centuries” will probably one day fill many pages of future literary works, if there are still oddballs around who write as much about things as the current oddballs write about some things.

But now I believe that I have essentially exhausted the questions. I don't know if this or that has been left out, but you see, not everything can be exhausted at once. These things are only intended to stimulate here. These lectures and exercises are only intended to provide suggestions! I hope that you will not leave here without the feeling of having received such suggestions, after what I hope will be quite some time.

Question: What is the concept of art that is not art at all, actually? What is the essence of art, and how does it differ from art history?

The question is posed in an extraordinarily abstract way and, in my opinion, in an extraordinarily inartistic way, for the simple reason that a statuary of a relationship to art and art science that boils down to a distinction cannot be properly felt in spiritual science.

You see, if you want to understand how the spiritual scientific stimulates artistic comprehension, then you have to have a sense for the difference between the way some aestheticians have written about architecture, sculpture, music and the like. After all, Moriz Carriere was regarded by many people, not only in Munich, as a great esthete, perhaps not for an art historian in your sense, but that does not matter, one could also bring examples from this region. But when Carriere, the esthete, lived in Munich, there also lived a painter. I met one of those, and on a particular occasion, when I had all sorts of things to show him, we also talked about Carriere. And he said: Oh yes, I still remember quite well how we, when we were young painters, young badgers, were completely absorbed in the artistic, talked about Carriere and called him the “aesthetic grunt of delight”.

Now, one may indeed have great respect for the abstract expression of one's thoughts on the artistic; but to demand - after speaking of an artistic conception of art that one must simply feel - that one should now in turn give a definition of the essence of art, I think that is something that does not go quite well. Of course it would be terribly easy to define the essence of art, because it has truly been defined many dozen times in the course of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century. And if necessary, one can still imagine what someone who does not think that the artistic can be grasped through the approach of the humanities means by art science. But the point is not to get stuck with certain prejudices that one has once adopted, but to be able to place oneself in the living movement of intellectual life and go along with what is really demanded today from the depths of humanity: a coming together of science, art and religion, not a furthering of the splitting of these three currents of human spiritual life.

Of course, you can still cause offence today if the way you look at art has to take a completely different form from the traditional, conventional approach of some art scholars. But today we are at the point where we have to move forward in the direction that has been indicated here. And that also means that questions such as What is the essence of art? What is the essence of man? - which, according to the definition, will eventually cease altogether. It is a matter of our having to understand more and more what people like Goethe meant when he says in his introduction to the theory of colors: One cannot really speak about the essence of light; colors are the acts of light. And anyone who gives a complete description of the color phenomena also says something about the essence of light. So anyone who addresses the facts of any field, any field of art, in a form that comes close to the experience of that field of art, gradually provides a kind of consideration of the essence of the field of art in question. But this will be overcome altogether, that definitions are placed at the top or somehow without context, that questions are raised: What is the essence of man, what is the essence of art and the like?

We had such a strange case here yesterday; someone said: Wagner - thesis, Bruckner - antithesis, and spiritual science should now be the synthesis. Yes, you see, something like that, placed in a certain place, if, for example, I said something sensible about Wagner, then said something sensible about Bruckner, and then knew how to say something sensible about something traditional, then, so to speak, summarizing the many, I could use the abstract, bloodless concepts: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, to summarize. Then it would make sense. But as a single dictum it is impossible. So you have to have a feeling for something when something is an organism,

I will give you an example from another area: Hegel's Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. The last chapter is about philosophy itself. Yes, what is said there about philosophy itself is said in addition to everything that has gone before. So that one has absorbed everything that has gone before. It is magnificent, a tremendous architectural conclusion. Please, take this last chapter away and take it for yourself, as something like a definition of philosophy – it is pure nonsense. It is pure nonsense! This is what draws attention to the fact that we must again enter into the experience of the whole from the understanding of the individual, how we must gradually rise from the stick we have been trained in, in terms of individual characteristics, to grasping the whole, to overlooking the whole.

And in this sense, I think that it does lead to a kind of understanding when one shows what is happening externally as a musical fact in its other pole in inner experience; and when one then empathizes with what is going on in the person, then I believe that this is indeed a more artistic conception than that of some musicology! And I would like to add that today, for easily understandable reasons, we cannot go far enough. If we had already progressed so far that we could take it all the way to the imaginations and the description of the imaginations, then we might also be able to create something similar to what the Greeks created when they spoke of Apollo's lyre, actually meaning this inner part of the human being as a living musical instrument that reproduces the harmonies and the melos in the cosmos. We are not even yet so far advanced that we can feel what the Greeks felt when they heard the word Cosmos. This word is not connected with some abstraction of a modern scientist, with a certain description of the universe, but with the beauty of the universe, with the harmony of that in the cosmos which is actually connected with the beauty of the universe.

Humanity once proceeded from a kind of interaction of that which is differentiated today. We must indeed be able to experience these differentiations, but we must in turn have the opportunity to see this differentiation together, to hear it resound together, to work ourselves into a living whole, so that what is the result of knowledge also becomes the content of an artistic work and the revelation of a religious experience.

That is what we must strive for again. That which is wisdom can certainly appear in the form of beauty and reveal itself in the form of a religious impulse. Then we will experience something that still belongs to a more distant future: that we ourselves find a synthesis between an altar and a laboratory bench. When we can stand with the reverence for nature with which we should actually stand before it, then science becomes a form of worship for us. And when we as human beings imbibe those skills, that manual dexterity that corresponds to such an understanding of nature and of the spirit and the soul, then all our dealings with science will also flow into beautiful forms.

Today this still seems like a fantasy. But it is a reality! For it is something that must be striven for and realized, lest humanity descend ever deeper into decadence.

A participant asks about the deeper meaning of the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians, and whether it has something to do with the context of the human constitutional elements. “But of course I am willing to go without the answer today if Dr. Steiner is too tired.”

That is not the reason, my dear Mr. Büttner, but I would like to say the following about it: I once said some things in Berlin and also gave some examples of the way in which spiritual science can be used to understand fairy tales, and I actually had to apply quite a lot of research effort to get to the bottom of fairy tales. Because, you see, I really don't want to be one of those people who live by the saying:

When interpreting, you are fresh and lively;
because if you don't interpret it, you just interpret it.

That was never my principle. Rather, it always took me a great deal of effort to get to the heart of a fairy tale, sometimes in all possible regions of research. And so I have to say: even if I were even more tired than I am today, it would give me the greatest pleasure to be able to make you happy with an interpretation, an explanation of the fairy tale of the Bremen Town Musicians. But I have never studied it and therefore have nothing to say about it. And so I ask you to wait until an opportunity presents itself in this or in a next life, after the matter has been researched.

Question: How does spiritual science view the phenomenon of instinctive so-called absolute hearing?

Dr. Steiner has made it very easy for us to experience the spirit of the living in her declamation. Inspired by this, I would like to ask what kind of singing a student should do? I can assure you that in the new way of practising art that has been entrusted to us, for the establishment of a new art of singing, for example, no teacher can really come into consideration as a helper for a male voice that is to be educated. I would therefore also like to ask whether a woman can also work as a trainer.

There doesn't seem to be much homeopathy in the question today! First, yes, that's right, after all, there is not much to be connected or connected to it, other than what is present in any other human ability. It is quite reasonable to assume, although I can only express this with caution here because it is a question that I have not yet dealt with in a truly research-based way, but it is reasonable to assume that this instinctive presence of an absolute sense of tone consciousness in a number of people – I believe in fewer people than one would usually think – is based on some peculiarity of the etheric or astral body, which is then somehow reflected in the physical body. But it would be necessary to conduct very specific research. It is only very likely to me that this absolute sound consciousness is based on the fact that a very specific configuration of the three semi-circular canals is also present in this case. So that is probable – but as I said, I would only like to express myself with caution here – this organ, which has many functions, including, among other things, an organ of equilibrium for certain equilibrium conditions, that this organ probably also has something to do with an absolute sense of tone.

Now to what was said in connection with Dr. Steiner's declamation. I can assure you, the question is indeed asked, but not actually asked in such a way that one finds out something that the questioner actually wants when he asks: What should be taught in singing, how should it be taught, so that what one has in mind in the spiritual-scientific sense by good vocal art can be achieved as quickly as possible? – Yes, I must say that, in my feeling, there is a great deal of philistinism mixed up in this question. Because it is true that one must seriously admit that spiritual science has a certain influence on people, that it has a certain effect on people and that people are not remodeled by spiritual science – they are not worked on from the outside — but that they come into a position to bring out of themselves certain forces that have so far remained latent in the development of humanity and to reveal a deeper human nature through them.

In this way the most diverse branches of human spiritual life will also be further developed. And among the many things that could be said about such a question, one thing can be said by pointing out that, above all, we should get away from talking about all the many methods of teaching singing. I do not like to say this at all, because the localities where these methods are hatched are so terribly populated that one does not know where to stop when expressing one's opinion about present-day methods of teaching singing! I do not want to dwell on this, but I would like to draw attention to one thing.

I believe that one must begin to understand what it means not to work according to a method, not to ask: How must this and that be placed, how must breathing be arranged, how must the many preparations be made before one even gets around to singing anything? Most of today's methods are actually preparation methods, methods of attitudes, methods of breathing and so on. One must disregard all of this, which actually amounts to regarding the human organism a bit like a machine and oiling it in the right way, bringing the wheels to the right axis height and the like. It is a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but you get what I mean. Instead of this, one should see that especially in art lessons an enormous amount depends on the personal, imponderable relationship between teacher and pupil, and one should come to associate with it an idea of what it means to actually lift one's consciousness out of the larynx and everything that produces the sound, and to be more consciously in touch with the surrounding air, to sing more with the environment of the larynx than with the larynx itself. I know that many people today cannot yet connect with what is said, but one must just gain these concepts. More emphasis must be placed on how one experiences, I might say, listening back, by singing but hearing, by learning to listen to oneself, but in such a way that one does not do something while listening, as if one were walking and constantly stepping on one's feet; that would, of course, disturb the singing. So when you come to live less in the physiological and more in the artistic as such, and when the teaching also proceeds more in the intervention of the artistic, then you will come upon the path to which the questioner may have been pointed.

However, I do believe that a pedagogy such as we cultivate through the Waldorf School will also gradually achieve success for art and singing lessons if we are given the external means to do so.

What Mr. Baumann meant yesterday with regard to the Waldorf School is also present in eurythmy and in singing, in the musical element. If it is not yet possible to do with the musical and the vocal as it should be according to his ideal, it is truly not due to our education, not at all to our education, at least not to the education of our teachers , but rather it is more a matter of the education of those who, from completely different backgrounds, could perhaps provide appropriately large rooms in which musical instruments can also be properly accommodated, and well-ventilated rooms for eurythmy and the like. I would like to make a point of mentioning this. And I believe that what could already be achieved in Waldorf schools today, including in the field of music and eurythmy teaching, could be quite different if we only had to deal with the pedagogy of our teachers and not with the pedagogy of other things that are necessary when a school is to be founded.

I was asked today – I don't know if the gentleman is here – whether he has a feeling that schools should also be founded in other places. I said that you just have to start at the beginning. If you have money, then we'll talk further!

Well, that is perhaps also something that hits the nail on the head. Or did you mean it differently? I don't want to ascribe to you, Mr. Baumann, that you couldn't have meant it differently.

Paul Baumann: Now the question about male voices,

Dr. Steiner: Perhaps it would be a disappointment if I left it out altogether: Can a woman also work as a creator for a male voice? Since I have already said that it essentially depends on the personal imponderable, I would naturally like to extend this to answering this question, and I do believe that under certain circumstances this could even be a very favorable relationship, that this man could even learn a great deal, much more than if he were to be taught by a man – especially if the woman is still beautiful or otherwise intact!

I could imagine that the editor of a wit-breathing could be tempted to take the floor at a sample fair event about the recovery of economic life, the builder of the Dornach Free University for Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum. For it is already generally recognized that nothing could be further apart than what people who know the matter superficially imagine by the nebulous mysticism of the Dornach Goetheanum and what can be seen as a living practice. And yet, it might seem even more paradoxical and amusing that precisely in recent times, in the last few weeks, in a place in southern Germany – and Switzerland will follow suit in the very near future – the founding is being undertaken, precisely by the current of thought and world view represented in Dornach, of a company for the promotion of economic and spiritual real values.

As I said, this could appear even more paradoxical. For one sees in such a spiritual movement, as it is, for which the Dornach building is to be the representative of the external expression, one sees in it something completely impractical, which only has to be discussed when one has to turn away from the real practical goals in life, more or less for Sunday rest.

Now, dear ladies and gentlemen, I do not want to keep you for long with introductory remarks about the tasks of the spiritual movement represented by the Goetheanum. But I would just like to say that this spiritual movement, precisely because of its special nature, wants to be the basis for the practice of life that we really need for the present, in order to get out of that which has driven us into that which has always been regarded as so practical and which has shown itself to be so particularly practical in the ruining of European civilization in the last five to six years!

Certainly, in the free school of spiritual science referred to here, people's attention should not only be directed to what confronts man in the external material world, but humanity should once again be made aware that everything material is based on the spiritual, and that one cannot understand the material if one does not understand the underlying spiritual. But how the spiritual world is to be opened up, which paths the individual person has to take to come to this real, actual spiritual world, that is not what I want to talk about today. That has been discussed in the various books that have been published on this subject. But what I would like to talk about is the fact that the particular kind of spiritual activity that must be cultivated in order to achieve something in man through this particular kind of spiritual activity and effort, something that is not impractical but practical, in that it opens up a healthy, illusion-free view of reality. However strange it may sound, the aim of the Dornach School is not to escape from reality, but quite the opposite. The aim of the Dornach School is to acquire a healthy view of reality, the acquisition of such a healthy view that can see what is going on in every reality, which must be directed by man himself, above all in economic reality.

And to express myself even more clearly, I would like to illustrate what I have to say with the following comparison.

You see, my dear audience, if a chemist were to claim to have invented a new way to bleach laundry, and then tried to use this method, and lo and behold, the laundry turned a dirty brown from this method, he would probably not be considered a good chemist, and it would be said that he actually understands nothing of real chemical science. This is certainly true today in the fields of technology and external life, insofar as these fields depend on scientific thinking. But it is not at all true when it comes to the technology that arises in economic life, in the management of economic life, and that is supposed to depend in some way on healthy economic thinking, on a real, let us say, national or social economy or the like. Let me give you an example of this. A long time ago, there was a lot of arguing in the international world among those people who thought about economic issues, about how best to give validity to the economic movement called the free trade movement. From a certain point of view, they examined the damage that international economic life suffers as a result of customs duties and the like being levied at national borders; customs duties that are based on the most diverse intentions. In short, there were once parliaments - now they are long gone, the times - in which the free trade movement was seen as an ideal, as an economic ideal. Then, in certain circles, they thought about a way to promote free trade, especially tariff-free trade. They argued so fiercely that they said: love and the protective tariff issue are the greatest cause of madness in the world. At that time the supporters of the gold standard and the supporters of metallism, the gold and silver standard, were at loggerheads. The supporters of the supposed gold standard were those people who said, based on their scientific economic insight: By promoting the gold standard, we promote free trade. That was an economic and scientific conviction.

What did reality show, then? It so happened that just after these scientific-economic declamations were let loose, significant gold finds were made in Africa, and those countries that had little of the areas where gold was found were able to mint the gold in particularly abundant amounts. But one would always have to expect such things, and above all the chemist would have to calculate with the analogy of what I have mentioned for clarification. But in reality, what happened? It turned out that the introduction of the gold standard led to the introduction of protective tariffs everywhere, that is, reality showed exactly the opposite of what was predicted theoretically from economic thinking.

It is exactly as if a chemist, with a product that is supposed to bleach the laundry, made the laundry a dirty brown color. As I said, there are many examples where economic thinking does not come close to reality, where reality takes an opposite course. There are many such examples.

Anyone who raises the question today: Is there an economic crisis, an international economic crisis? – they truly only need to look at the conditions. This economic crisis is everywhere on the doorstep. However, people have very different ideas about its specific nature and causes. But can we really hope that with such thinking, in the face of reality, such a complicated phenomenon, such a complicated fact as the international economic crisis, can be readily understood?

Surely that cannot be the case! Now you will say: Aha, there is someone who claims that the economic thinkers are all stupid, they all know nothing; the economy is running, and the economic thinkers are all stupid. No, I do not claim that they are all stupid, I claim rather that there are very clever people among economists, in some respects much cleverer than in all the other professions of life, but that what what the monometallists, the supporters of the gold standard, said and what happened was the opposite of what the very clever people advocated in very clever sentences and turns of phrase and theories. No, I am not saying that all economists are stupid. Rather, I want to start from the strange fact that modern civilization has brought about the peculiar phenomenon that one can be a brilliant economic thinker and think exactly the opposite of what is reality in economic life! This is a remarkable phenomenon, but one that is also evident from the fact that people are actually quite helpless in the face of today's European confusion, especially in the circles of those who have learned economic thinking best in the traditional way.

And here you see, I would just like to claim that what one has simply acquired as a thinking technique can be seen through by the healthy spiritual science that is practiced in the movement for which Dornach is the external representative , it is possible to see through things in their outer reality, of which one can easily prove by countless examples that they are not seen through by those who are regarded as experts.

You see, above all when economic crises are being discussed – people usually think of the things that lie in the constellations between consumption and between production – one talks about an economic crisis occurring when there is overproduction that cannot be used up by consumption. It can just as well be proved that the economic crisis does not come from overproduction but from underconsumption, simply from the fact that people, who perhaps do not have enough money to buy what has been produced, buy too little. And the strange thing is, you can prove one thing or the other. If you go back only as far as the economic crises of 1919, you will find that one was caused by overproduction, the other by underconsumption, and the third by entirely different causes, such as an imbalance between capitalism and labor, or, which also applies to individual cases, that economic crises are bound to occur when there is too much saving in a large community of people, and so on. Now, all these things do not take into account what is most important for the economic life of the present day.

Here I can really speak from a kind of personal experience. It was a long time ago, at the end of the nineties of the last century and the beginning of this century, that I got to know the Central European working class thoroughly. I was a teacher at a workers' educational school, but it was only through this that I was really able to get to know the labor movement from all sides. And I got to know it, firstly, because the various lectures I had to give were sometimes followed by very lively discussions that showed what was being thought in the broadest circles of the growing workforce. On the other hand, I was received with my own lectures and was able to see how one can take in what is not just economic and so on. And anyone who, I would say, has lived with a certain observant sense of human conditions and without prejudice in such a way knows how to say what the error is when one thinks today that mere economic categories, such as capital and wages and the like, or import and export, trade, finance, balance of payments, currency and other things, there is more than what is only on the surface. No, in these things there is really, for the present crisis, what is only on the surface. For everything that happens in economic life ultimately originates with people, with people's thoughts, and what people do, so that qualifications of capital and wage relationships arise, of import and export and so on, of currency fluctuations. Ultimately, this depends on what arises from people's thoughts.

You see, I can speak without prejudice, because I was a teacher among workers for five or six years and I managed to get a large following among the workers, but one fine day the leaders of the workers' movement realized that there is one who cannot be tolerated, that there is one who teaches not orthodox Marxism, that there is one who endeavors to instill into the hearts and minds something quite different from the orthodox teaching.

A meeting was held with my students. Hundreds of my students were present at the meeting at the time, along with labor leaders, second-string players, but sent by the first string, who said all sorts of things, including that I was an impossible personality in the labor movement. I said: Yes, but do you want to cultivate something in the future that is good for the future, and you do not understand the simplest thing, freedom of teaching? Then one of the leaders managed to utter the word: freedom of teaching? No, we only know reasonable compulsion! And yet, although the vote was unanimous against the four, against the four leaders, my activity was of course completely impossible.

That, you see, that entitles me, precisely on the basis of the facts, to speak with some impartiality about what is actually taking place today in economic life in the context of an increasingly international Europe.

But one must also really be able to study that which comes from within the human being himself, and which the categories I have mentioned, which are usually enumerated, actually bring about. One must first ask oneself: what peculiarities does the belief have that has gradually spread among the European proletariat?

You see, the most characteristic feature of the way millions of people think is that, first of all, they think of the spiritual life in such a way that everything that man produces spiritually, including what he produces out of his spirit as law, as custom, as religion, as science, that this is nothing more than something that the human brain gives birth to in an abstract way, which is a kind of ideological superstructure on the only reality, the substructure, the only reality: the economic life of production and consumption.

This has become established in the minds of millions upon millions of people. I do not want to examine now to what extent this can be traced back to the theory of Marx and Engels, but it has become established in millions upon millions of people: the whole of intellectual life is an ideology, something that has merely grown out of economic life.

Yes, perhaps in the circles of those who feel very clever about economics, people will think little of this belief of the proletariat with regard to the current economic crisis in international life. But that is precisely the great mistake: today people think little of the most important things. For one does not learn to recognize the source of the crisis, namely, what lives in the unconscious of men, and from which the economic disaster arises, if one does not turn one's gaze to the soul life of the masses. One must take into account the spiritual life of the masses; for it may be possible to believe that intellectual life is only an ideology, but it is impossible to live with that, and the human being becomes desolate, the human being loses his footing in life.

And this is the strange thing: with an unparalleled fanaticism the great masses cling to these doctrines. The masses, especially those who today set the tone in certain economic circles of laborers, cling with fanaticism to these doctrines; but in so doing they become more and more desolate.

How did this come about? Materialism did not arise from the working class itself; materialism arose in the leading circles over the last four centuries. Only, the leading circles have preserved the old traditions out of a certain half-heartedness. On the one hand, they have begun to think materialistically about the external life in which they are immersed, but on the other hand they have preserved the old traditions as their religion, as their morality and so on, and basically lead a double life.

The worker cannot do this, having been called away from what he used to stand by, what he had grown together with: from the trade, the products of which he loved, into which he put his life. He has been called to the abstract machine, placed in the abstract factory. He seeks his salvation in that which the others only take halfway. You can only judge it when you have stood in it. This has gradually emerged. And so that great lack of understanding arose in Europe.

This lack of understanding hangs over Europe like a terrible fate today. There are those at the top who have to manage the capital, there are those at the top who have to direct economic life, who could direct it if they only wanted to, who could also transform materialism into a healthy world view, who could also be practical. There are those who could do anything if they wanted to.

Then there are those at the bottom who have taken seriously the materialism that has developed in these leading circles, who can do nothing, who believe that by saying, “Capitalism must be fought,” they can achieve something with this phrase; who do not know that economic life in the modern sense of the word cannot be had at all without capitalism, that without capitalism one can only return to barbarism. The worker has become helpless in his thoughts, helpless in the face of reality, throughout Europe, the worker who has been forced into the machine, who seriously imagines those theories that, I might say, arise as by-products of life with the others, with which one cannot live and certainly not manage, as shown by such things as metallism and monometallism and the like.

This great misunderstanding, what has brought it about? Well, you can see what it has brought about in the development of European conditions. Look at Russia. In Russia, something has arisen in accordance with the peculiarities of the people that is difficult to study for someone who looks at these things impartially and without prejudice, without being an agitator. There were many differentiations of socialist and social ideals in Russia. What was there in this Russia until 1914? The broad masses of people, held down by Russian militarism and the hated tsarism, had something that could not be bridged to the other thing that existed in the ruling circles. They did not want to achieve what they should have achieved: to build the bridge, as leaders, as intellectuals, to build this bridge. We see the emergence of modern capitalism. We see the emergence of modern individualism with the calling in of a million-fold crowd into factories, to machines. What would have been necessary there was to resort to a new practical thinking, and it would have been necessary for the intellectuals to make themselves leaders, to gain trust, to make the masses understand that they understand, to actually carry out the airs and graces of economic life in earnest. They did none of that. They lived for themselves, an upper class. They let the others study. The proletariat, in particular, studied an extraordinary amount, simply devoted to what were the waste products of education, materialistic waste products of education.

Today the fruits of this are present in the economic crisis in Europe. It is a spiritually conditioned, tragic fate.

Then, out of what held it down, what one did not want to penetrate spiritually, what one did not want to penetrate spiritually with reasonable views, what one wanted to hold down through the external physical violence of militarism and that of the absolute monarchy or of any other powers, out of what was needed to neutralize that which one did not want to conquer spiritually, out of that came the European war catastrophes.

And what came about then? For Russia, Leninism and Trotskyism emerged. Not out of Russian socialism, oh no, Leninism and Trotskyism were born out of Russian socialism. Nothing like Leninism and Trotskyism could ever have been born out of Russian socialism. Something quite different would have emerged if the intellectuals had sought to reach an understanding with the broad masses of the population in a reasonable way. No, Lenin and Trotsky did not grow out of the revolution! Lenin and Trotsky grew out of the circles of those who were affected by the war, of those who were affected by the war as the ultimate consequence of militarism. The results of the war have taken root in Russia and have once again suppressed that which wanted to come from below, with which one should have come to an understanding. Lenin and Trotsky are not heroes of socialism; they are the sons of the European war catastrophe and only became possible because the misery of the war's aftermath spread across Russia. And what happened in the rest of Europe – read Keynes's very fine book (you can find it in a very good English translation), The Economic Consequences of the Peace. What happened in the rest of Europe – what was it? Is it the confession of economic thinking? Is it the economic striving up to 1914 that brought us into the terrible catastrophe? No, it is not that, but what we are experiencing, including all the exchange value worries of individual countries, is not a healthy return to healthy views that one believes can be obtained by the fact that the disease has been reduced to absurdity by the catastrophes. What we are experiencing is the result of the war. Out of a very, very short-sighted judgment, a German general coined the words that have been repeated many times during this war catastrophe: “War is only politics carried out by other means.

During the war, I repeatedly compared this dictum with the word: Divorce is just marriage continued by other means! But with a certain correct variant, one could still say: This peace is, especially in the field of economic life, just the continuation of the war by other means. This is not said by someone with an agitational or one-sided view of the current economic situation, but by even the most objective critics, from the side that would have the most reason to judge objectively today, from the side of the English, Keynes says this in his book “The Economic Consequences of the Peace Agreement”.

Now, if you really look at these things, you have to say: Oh, the causes of the current economic disasters run much, much deeper! And finally, you just have to look at today's economic life as it has developed to see that. There is no need to be captivated by the one-sided declamations about capitalism and anti-capitalism; instead, one only needs to surrender to the objective facts, which are certainly justified by modern conditions, that our economic life is intimately intertwined with what we have to call the money economy.

Now, of course, I am far from entertaining the foolish idea of wanting to fight the money economy. That is out of the question, because I would consider that a foolish idea, just as I would consider it a foolish idea to want to reform money in some way. No, but the issue is that, as a result of all the modern economic conditions, what money represents in economic life has become abstract.

An English economic journalist said quite rightly: the functions that money actually performs in our economic life are extremely complex and cannot really be teased out for examination.

You see, my dear audience, if someone is a thinker of a rather abstract nature, if he always goes from the particular to the general, if he sees all kinds of flowers out in the meadow with a specific name and then says: plants or flowers – and compares “flowers” with animals and so on, he thinks abstractly. He brings abstract thoughts that encompass many things and spreads them out like a carpet over the concrete parts.

This is how it is in real economic life with money. Money brings a completely abstract element into real economic life, into reality. Just think, if I am the owner of 50 francs, then I am the owner of these 50 francs, and it is initially irrelevant whether I have 50 francs in my wallet, whether I buy a rabbit for 50 francs tomorrow, or whether I buy flour or a silver watch, or whether I buy a skirt or something similar. The concreteness of economic life is lost to the abstractness of money. This comes to light in the moment when money is exchanged for money, when you buy with money. You can see best how, just as abstractions hide from the reality of thinking, the abstractness of money hides from reality. If you have followed the newspapers in Germany in the last few weeks, you could see that people were very pleased with the slight improvement in the value of the currency. But then it went down again. And anyone who knows the deeper connections will not be very impressed by a temporary improvement in this currency. Well, the blame was shifted to all sorts of causes, although in the background nothing else stood, than that German notes available in Spain were bought by Americans on the stock exchange through some special constellation, through some special intention, and that this caused the little bit of a surge in the German currency. This escaped notice for the simple reason that whenever money as such circulates in trade, when money as such is traded, it is far removed from the concrete economic life, and one no longer sees the connections. Just as when someone speaks in abstract terms, a mill wheel goes around in your head and you no longer have any idea what he actually means by his abstractness, so you no longer know with the money manipulations what is actually going on in economic life.

You see, in these matters it is essentially a matter of the medium of exchange becoming alienated in actual economic life; and that is the reason why we have entered into such a terrible economic crisis. For this economic crisis was actually already there before the war, and the war was only the expression of this economic crisis. [Gap.]

You see, someone in, say, 1865 could have had the greatest possible facilities for air travel, but he could not use them because there was no air travel yet! It does not help to be clever in just any area of life. When circumstances lead one away from the direct experience of that which is to be experienced, then every clever thought helps nothing. And the fact that one has been driven away from real life in the economic field, as in other fields, is what modern civilization has produced by welding the three main areas of life – spiritual life, political or legal life and economic life – more and more into a unified state.

The money economy was favorable for welding together in the unitary state. As I said, I beg you not to misunderstand me at all, that I might want to object to something about the money economy. I just want to point out how what has not been grasped by the money economy must lead precisely to the recovery of our economic life!

It has been repeatedly asserted in modern times that the centralized state is a panacea. This panacea has been held up as an ideal by the leading people so far, but also by the socialists; for what do the socialists want? Use the framework, the fully developed framework of the state, to build their socialist fallacies. Even Lenin and Trotsky did nothing other than to use the war to pour their socialist abstractions over what was left of the old Russian tsarist state. The idea of a unified state has only emerged in the last three or four decades (those who really know their history know that it was only a short time ago) among those who believe they want what is best for all public affairs and who, as a result, fail to to see what is maturing in the reality of humanity: that what is maturing in the reality of humanity is the urge towards spiritual life, the urge towards legal or state life and towards economic life to come to completely different constellations than we have had so far. I want to touch on one corner, I would like to say.

In many areas of European life, what we call inheritance law stands out from old institutions. Inheritance law is connected with the relationships of blood ties between people. If you follow the lines of inheritance law into the whole of public life, including the configuration of state and social contexts, you will see how much of economic life depends on this law. Inheritance law has an effect on certain people in these or those economic sectors; it brings people into it, they are in it, and individual things become out of their abilities. But ultimately, a large part of the economy as a whole is made up of these individual things. In short, we have inheritance law closely tied to blood ties, to that which is organized in humanity by nature.

What has happened in those states that have considered themselves the most exemplary in the last three to four centuries? They have learned to organize from nature. Organizing is attributed especially to the Germans. They were only so good at it that they distorted it to the point of mechanization. But it has been poured out over the whole civilized world. Organizing, which is inherent in humanity by nature, has also been carried into social life. And this organizing, which is connected with blood ties, this organizing, which has a very symptomatic one - there are many others - in inheritance law, this organizing, it comes out basically very clearly also in the organization of intellectual life. And finally, although the Catholic Church wants to be a democratic institution that also allows those at the bottom of the social ladder to rise to the highest positions of the church hierarchy under certain circumstances, in practice, what has welded together such things, such as the old organizations that depend on blood ties, has also crept into Catholic church organizations; because, after all, more high-ranking nobles had become archbishops than others, and so on. In short, we see in many respects how what comes from blood ties extends into the modern social order; and what is particularly evident in such things as inheritance law, but the human race, with its innermost consciousness, has actually outgrown. If someone says, “Man is man,” and points to a seven-year-old child and to a forty-year-old adult, you will laugh. You will not say that the forty-year-old person is only the consequence of the thirty-five-year-old, the thirty-year-old and so on, but you will look at the person as if what is in his being develops from his depths. It is only in history that the foolish view has arisen that the following is always only the effect of the preceding, whereas for a long time the human race has been such that the successive phases in its innermost being arise in the same way as, for example, the change of teeth or sexual maturity in the individual. Thus, during the last period, while the elements that arose from the old blood ties and the conditions caused by them have remained as inheritances in the spiritual, economic and legal life, while the old public rights have remained, the urge for a new order has unconsciously taken hold of people, for something different to occur.

So you see, if you want to try to find out what people really want, then something like in my “Key Points of the Social Question” appears. One only does not pay attention to how these things are overheard in true reality and true practice, in what life demands today. Inheritance rights have their origin in the old development of humanity. People want to keep them as if they wanted to keep their twelve or fourteen years of development, just as someone who is twelve or fourteen does not understand that at twenty one must be different than at twelve or fourteen. Of course, in detail, such follies will not be wanted. There we have the right of inheritance. It has become something that people's consciousness does not want to accept. Today, people think too highly of their individuality to cling to the conventional means of inheritance out of convention, even if it is only out of convention. If we are honest and listen to what humanity actually wants, we come to what you find set out in The Essential Points of the Social Question, where it is shown that humanity tends towards a social order in which the individual, who has certain abilities, is connected with the means of production, or, let us say, with capital. If he can no longer combine these abilities with it, then the sum of the means of production or the capital must pass from him to someone else who is qualified. This shows how the old age must grow into the new age. The old age made the economic configuration dependent on blood. The new age makes dependent - in the consciousness of man it already exists - wants to make dependent the configuration of economic life on what is consciously experienced. So that in the new order inheritance law is not spoken of in the usual sense. For this reason, for example, inheritance law is often doubted today; it is doubted that inheritance law can be spoken of at all. It is only to be said that if I have acquired a sum of means of production through my abilities, through which I can achieve something, have accumulated a capital, then I have the obligation, when I myself can no longer be the steward, to transfer it to another, who in turn, according to his abilities, must be connected with it. What was only dependent on blood must be replaced by reason and human individuality.

This may sound radical to some, but it is not spoken out of any radicalism, but only heard from what mankind unconsciously actually wants.

If we look at the development of humanity from this point of view, we see that people have reached such a point in the general science of the human race, in spiritual life, in legal and political life and in economic life through the standpoint they have adopted that they can no longer be compressed into the unified state.

This is where the impulse for the threefold social organism comes in, demanding that spiritual life be completely left to its own devices. This is perhaps the most controversial point today, because it is considered particularly clever to make the state the guardian of spiritual life. But this must be demanded by those who today recognize what humanity unconsciously wants: that spiritual life be completely left to its own devices.

Let us take one of the most important parts: the public school system. From the teacher of the lowest school class up to the highest teacher, everything must be self-governing.

You see, I was called upon to found the Waldorf School in Stuttgart because of the pedagogical and didactic principles that arise from such a way of thinking. Emil Molt, the local factory owner of the Waldorf-Astoria factory, set up this Waldorf School. It was my responsibility to give the Waldorf School its spiritual foundation, and to this day, although it is not always apparent from the outside, the actual management and leadership of the school has been entrusted to me. And so, for weeks, I gave a pedagogical course for the teachers, in order to point out the direction in which this school should work.

Yes, I was also obliged – you will still have the opportunity to see how far we have come so far – I was also obliged, you see, to recognize the slippery slope on which spiritual life finds itself in its most important area, the school system. Of course, I also had to develop curricula and, in order to orient myself, I had to see what was there in order to do justice to the current school teaching goals and curricula.

Now, esteemed attendees, I can still remember – though it was a long time ago when I was at school myself or interacted with teachers – that everything in the school program was something printed on one page; now it has become thick books and everything is specified down to the last detail. On the one hand, we have what the pedagogical artists and pedagogical scientists put into their books, what they convey to the teacher. On the other hand, there is what comes from expertise and specialized knowledge. Then there is the bureaucratic aspect, which comes from the state. This is much more important than one might think! There is no justification for anything other than the factually specialized to have a say in the administration of intellectual life. This is clearly evident, for example, in the field of education. How differently people would be educated and introduced to economic life if spiritual life were completely free to govern itself only on the basis of its own foundations! This can only be appreciated by someone who has really formed a sound judgment about the connection between free spiritual life, the development of human abilities out of free spiritual experience, and its significance for economic and state life. The question here is to finally realize: How does spiritual life fit into the whole process of human development?

Well, my dear audience, spiritual life is organized. And the more elementary a field is, the more organized is the spiritual life. Consider the example of the family. Look at how the individual grows out of the family, how a son grows into the artistic, out of what was similar to father or mother, not only outwardly physically, but spiritually and mentally. The further back you go in the years, the more you can see from what grows out of the family, how nature organizes spiritual life.

What exactly do we have to do for the spiritual life? With regard to the individual, we have to bring the individual out of the organization: we have to overcome the organization, the organization that is given by nature; we have to educate the individual into freedom. Freedom must first be acquired in earthly life. Then freedom can only be acquired if we, as teachers, educators or participants in intellectual life, are truly able to understand the human being, to work from the most individual abilities of the human being, and to place the human being in economic life according to the abilities with which he reveals himself to us in the context of nature.

That is the peculiar thing about intellectual life, that one has to say: The very person who thinks honestly about democracy thinks precisely in the way that comes over people in their fourteenth or sixteenth year, when they reach sexual maturity. And so, over the course of the last three to four centuries, humanity has been taken over by the tendency towards democracy. The very person who thinks honestly demands that all the matters that people develop when they come of age be treated in such a way that they, as equals among equals, have to organize things. This will be evident in the education of people in the field of intellectual life. It depends so much on the individual human ability and expertise that it must never be the subject of democratic administration or constitution, but must be left to the self-administration of this intellectual life.

And economic life? Economic life cannot be organized [gap]. Ideological, unworldly people, in all kinds of utopian ideals, indicate which forms economic life should be organized according to, whereby economic life should be brought into this or that structure. That would be the death of economic life! This nonsense began when the so-called German Republic first tried to get itself up and running. The way the planned economy thinks is just as nonsensical: economic life can be organized! But anyone who understands economic life knows that economic life cannot be organized! Economic life can only grow together into a whole in associations. That means: Economic life cannot be organized from above or from any direction, from any side, but economic life can only be successful in associations that grow out of the professions, out of those who belong together in a certain area of production and consumption.

That which has similar interests is linked in associations with that which has related interests. Related interests are linked together. However, a chain or a structure is not formed by organizing it from the outside, but rather by one link attaching itself to these associations through other links. It is a matter of a concatenation and interweaving of such people who stand in it in life, who grow out of life, who have expertise and ability in a certain area of economic life, who have grown into economic life in a certain way, who can also gain trust because they stand in it, because they are related to a branch in a certain sense. But it is necessary that this branch is associated with the next, so that one is not forced in a random way to come out of the abstractness of making money, but because one knows that by being involved in an associative economic work, one turns to the representative of another association for this purpose. He in turn knows how it is.

Yes, you see, my dear audience, that is what happens when you have an economic life built on association, that the cleverness of economic thinking helps you a little! What does cleverness help you when you are faced with an opaque economic life? You can see that in monometallism, in free trade. They have just resulted in protective tariffs. Today, we cannot see through economic life. First, living conditions must be created that allow us to see through connections. We will understand economic connections when, through an association, someone, for all I care, from a different crossroads, can communicate with someone who is part of a different association. If he can turn to this or any other association directly, then cleverness helps a little, as it is connected through the associations, and these connections, these measures must be grasped somehow, and even so far as reality allows through the chain of associations. That was the peculiarity of the previous economy, that there was no possibility of progressing in this way and letting things grow. That, ladies and gentlemen, has still not been understood today.

I am not saying this out of any kind of hubris, but because I believe that everyone can see this today. It has not been recognized that this threefold social order must stand for the independence of spiritual life, of that economic life that is built on associations and on nothing but associations, entirely on associations growing out of the economic underground itself, while the state must remain for what is in between, must have nothing to do with economic life, must have nothing to do with free spiritual life. Spiritual life must be based on the knowledge of the individual human being and on his or her abilities. The economic system must be built on the practical experiences and practices of economic life, which can be acquired in the lively interaction of association with association. The state has nothing to do with either of these. The state has something to do with the people who stand in this way in economic life, on the other hand stand in spiritual life, who will find themselves with all mature people in democratic state life, where public law is established, which then radiates on the one hand into spiritual life, on the other hand into economic life. There is no need to fear that the three members of the social organism will fall apart. They will connect through people. One person is in one circle, the other in the other. The three organizations are separate only for the good of humanity, because the more complicated circumstances of modern times demand this structure of the social organism.

This is what can really intervene to heal the economic life that has been shaken by crises. I said in my book The Core Problems of the Social Question: the threefold idea is not some utopian fantasy; the threefold idea can be linked to immediate reality everywhere. This immediate reality should be taken as it is; but it should in turn grow into a healthy state through state-free, associative life in the economic sphere. To separate economic life from the organization of the state and to base this economic life on its own laws, which can only arise from association to association, that is what is necessary. This looks abstract, but my dear attendees, it is not abstract, it is the most concrete thing.

The economists are there, it is only a matter of their striving for the appropriate association, regardless of political boundaries, according to the related relationships that prevail between production and consumption, between one branch of industry and another. And in the long run, a unified effort by people internationally involved in economic life should actually succeed in overcoming the efforts that are currently being made here or there to improve the value of currencies and so on. Just think how mere abstract economic activity in money can become detached from real conditions. Take Germany before 1914. In one year, about five to six billion capital was saved and earned. New issues, including mortgage bonds, land registry debts and everything that was spent on luxury buildings, new apartments and the like, together amounted to about 11 billion marks before 1914. A capital of 5 to 6 billion was earned or saved, new issues amounted to 1 billion, twice as much! What does that mean? It means that one is moving beyond the real economy, because the real economy has to be earned. Beyond the real economy is the capital value, double that of the real capital value. Because the earned capital value should only have appeared from new issues and mortgage bonds totaling 5 to 6 billion marks. That was actually there. Imagine where this leads when the abstract money economy emancipates itself in this way from the concrete economy of economic life!

The only way to cure this is for people to come into contact with the experiences of economic life itself, that is, for someone who is active in a particular area of economic life to associate with the system in which another person is involved, with the system in a different area. What the threefold social order shows is not a dilettantish thing, it is not utopian, it is something that directly affects practical life everywhere. And people today cannot come to terms with this idea of threefolding for a very specific reason: they do not yet want to reckon with the fact that we are in a state of great confusion. They always want to help with little mixtures and little remedies. That will not work, my dear attendees! When someone is seriously ill, they must also resort to strong medicines. We shall not manage with the social remedies that are otherwise recommended. It must be admitted that what is proposed under the idea of the threefold social organism wants to be a strong remedy. But the saying applies not only that a rough wedge belongs on a rough log, but also that a severe illness also requires a radical remedy. And I believe that anyone who can see through the ever-increasing confusion of international economic life in Europe, this slide into barbarism, will be serious enough to take a closer look at what he believes can lead out of this decline to a new ascent, what he believes can be achieved precisely by a real study of the conditions, not as the monometallists did, but from a real study of the conditions, so that one stands, as the one who treats the laundry with a chemical agent and then makes it black or brown - opposite reality -, I believe that when one realizes the magnitude of the European danger, one will then seriously approach the study of the remedy. That is what matters, and that is what I have wanted to draw attention to in a variety of ways for so long, and what I once again wanted to point out in the most serious way today, ladies and gentlemen. First of all, I was asked:

Will capital ownership be abolished in the threefold social organism?

You see, in reality it is about something different from capital ownership. The point is that it is possible to work on a capital basis in the first place. It is not possible to abolish capital as such in our complicated modern life, as so many incomprehensibly demand. Of course capital is needed, even if only in the form of the means of production. Capital is needed to set the modern economic apparatus in motion. So capital must be there.

I have explained this in more detail in my book “The Crux of the Social Question”. But the point is to find ways of managing capital that are indicated in my book ” The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life Today and in the Future” about this capital, that he administers this capital, or rather production, only as long as he himself can be present. Then, whether it is land or other means of production, it passes to someone else in the way that the person concerned can still manage it, who is now linked to it through his abilities. In this way, it will gradually become clear that the more capable people there are, the more fruitful economic life can become, because the management of capital can really pass to capable people.

You see, it is not a matter of being anything other than the steward of that which is to be understood as capital. People cannot yet imagine this. But just take something that, I would say, is already exemplary in a certain way, like the Dornach building, which I had to mention several times in the lecture.

The question may arise: Who does it belong to? It does not really belong to anyone in the old sense. It only makes sense if it passes to those who can manage it in the appropriate way. The means and ways must be found to manage it.

What can be achieved with a more or less ideal institute can also be achieved with every practical institution, with every factory, especially if it is done in a practical spirit. And you can easily imagine a social structure that replaces the old ownership based on blood ties with a new ownership based on the management of those who have capital based on skills.

I would like to link this directly to the question that was asked orally by a gentleman earlier:

To what extent will these institutions be able to eliminate so-called exploitation?

It is quite clear that this exploitation can only exist as long as personal power also exists in the economic sphere. In my book 'The Core of the Social Question', I explain how the social organism appears in three parts, and how economic life is shaped entirely from an economic point of view. Let us say, for example, that a company has a manager and employees, perhaps also hierarchically structured with a senior manager, middle managers and so on, right down to the manual workers. In economic life, no one has power over another. This is because the relationship between an adult and an adult is not regulated in economic life. In economic life, we are dealing with economics. But the position of the emancipated person in relation to the emancipated person is precisely the subject of the state or legal system; the measure, the duration of work, is somehow mutually ordered in the state, political or legal sphere. This threefold structure of the social organism, I have been told, is what Plato already advocated when he divided human society into the nourishing, defending and teaching classes. No, dear attendees, it is the exact opposite of what Plato said.

No, esteemed attendees. It is the very opposite of what Plato said when he said that human society is divided into the productive, the military, and the learned; there he divided people into these three groups, and the individual belonged to one of the three groups. Today, it is not a matter of dividing people up, but of the organization presenting itself as a three-part structure, with each person and their interests represented in all three organizations, in one way or another.

Imagine a person has children. Through the school system, he is part of the spiritual organization. From the outset, like every person who has come of age, he is part of the legal organization, like everyone else, regardless of what he is or whether he has any other profession or activity than anyone else. And he is part of the economic organization, because the teacher, in so far as he must eat and drink, belongs to the economic organism. That is what comes into consideration: it is not that human beings are divided into sections, but that the social organism is divided into sections.

But this makes impossible everything that leads to exploitation in the modern sense. Today, exploitation is caused, firstly, by external political power, including that of the human individual, that is, political power that is politically regulated. Secondly, by economic power. Economic power, for example in the wage relationship, that is impossible. Because in the future – I mean, if one could think of it, that a sufficient number of people would really come together and thereby the healthy conditions would be imprinted on the three-part social organism if it were given a place – there would be no real exploitation in this three-part social organism. But one thing would be recognized: You see, all social ideals are more or less, when they appear so comprehensively today, more or less quackery, for the simple reason that they do not happen taking into account the real conditions. People always think: How must the social organism be organized so that all people are well? Of course, everyone still has their own subjective views on this. The idea of the threefold social order does not ask that question at all! Because of course, if you look at a natural organism, the lion organism or something like that, you can ideally think of something much better organized than the lion organism. You just have to think about its possibilities based on its conditions. In the same way, the ideas of threefolding do not think of a thousand-year Reich, do not believe in a paradise on earth, but the idea of threefolding asks what social structure is possible if human beings are as they are. From this it deduces the social structure that lies in the threefold social organism. It is precisely from the associative organization of economic life that you can see how things are conceived entirely out of reality.

Yes, it is basically quite easy to draw up social programs, comprehensive programs! Oh, I still remember in the eighties of the 19th century: I was quite often in the so-called Café Griensteidl in Vienna, which was so famous because the old 48ers had already frequented it; during the revolution it became the café of the literati. Karl Kraus, who is well known in Switzerland, wrote his little book 'Die demolierte Literatur' (Demolished Literature) about this rather famous Café Griensteidl. It was indeed the case that everyone who went to Café Griensteidl fancied themselves to be a great man. So actually at every table in the afternoon, when you drank your coffee, at every table the social question was solved three times, between two and four o'clock, and by the same people at night, until after midnight, if you didn't exactly attach great importance to the “Sperr-Sechserl”!

So programmatic solutions to this social question can be found very easily!

You see, if you don't look at reality at all, but work from programs and abstract ideals, then organizations can be thought up in abundance.

Goethe satirized the abstract design of worldviews so beautifully in his poem: “The world is an anchovy salad!” You can just as well say that the world, instead of consisting of abstract atoms, as the monists, for example, do, you can just as well say that the world is an anchovy salad, and prove it; or you can go as far as Gustav Theodor Fechner, who proved quite exactly in a very nice little brochure, a small writing, that the moon consists of iodine. You will find very exact proof there. So basically, if you think abstractly, you can prove anything. That is precisely how people fall into so many errors, by pursuing the abstract instead of entering into reality. But it is not enough to be logical. You also have to be realistic. Real thinking must have two things: logic and conformity to reality. One is inconceivable without the other. But above all, conformity to reality is necessary.

And so it is also necessary not to imagine some arbitrary state of the world and then forge programs based on that, but rather to ask: What is possible? That is the fundamental question for the threefold social organism! And there is no possibility at all that exploitation in the modern sense will take place. You see, there are two sides to everything! From his point of view, even the capitalist can say that he is being exploited. Isn't that right? The point is to look at what is possible. Then there is another interesting question:

What has to be done to avert the danger of Bolshevism based on the ideas presented?

You see, it must be said again and again – and it is not for nothing that I repeat it again and again in the Stuttgart Dreigliederungszeitung, which appears every week and I have already expounded the idea in the newspaper dedicated to the threefold order of the social organism here in Switzerland : in the “Social Future”, which is edited by Dr. Boos here and is particularly adapted to Swiss conditions, and in which the threefold order is represented here in Switzerland, that it is necessary above all that the threefold idea take hold in a sufficiently large number of minds. It must first be understood. People must be there to understand it so that it can take root. For, my dear attendees, then this idea of threefolding, or rather what comes from it, is the only real way to avert present evil.

Introduction to Mystery Centers, Lecture 1

Dear friends, Last Sunday the Dutch Anthroposophical Society was founded in the Netherlands, and with that the last of the national societies has come into being, which are to be there as preparatory foundations when the International Anthroposophical Society is to emerge from these individual national societies here at Christmas. The task will be to take what is now happening on the basis of these individual national societies and make it into something real, so real that the Anthroposophical Movement can perhaps find in it an instrument for society. Today it is already the case that one can see from the most diverse individual phenomena, from the most diverse symptoms, how this anthroposophical movement is taken much, much more urgently elsewhere than it often is within the Anthroposophical Society. I do not mean by this – please do not misunderstand me, my dear friends – I do not mean that there is a lack of individuals within the Anthroposophical Society who are wholeheartedly committed to the movement and who constantly develop their feelings in the direction of the Society's thinking and feeling, as it must be one day. But what is missing within the Society, what underlies the words that I have to speak about this absence, is real activity in the direction given by the impulses of the Anthroposophical Movement.

I said that much more is happening in this direction in another place: namely, with the opponents. It is indeed the case that today, from a more or less opposing — or often, as it is often called, objective side, hardly any comprehensive presentation of the spiritual currents of the present day appears without the anthroposophical movement being forcefully taken into account – usually, of course, in a derogatory sense, or if not in a derogatory sense, then in such a way that the anthroposophical movement is harmed anew.

All these things cannot be taken into account unless active interest within the Anthroposophical Society can develop in the same way as it does among those outside, whether as opponents or as so-called objective observers. This is what you encounter everywhere. Especially the opponents take Anthroposophy very seriously.

I would ask you to consider just one thing. If you look at things from the outside and assess the importance of anthroposophy today based on the number of members of the Anthroposophical Society, it seems almost laughable, one might say, that the opposing side takes this anthroposophy so seriously. You only have to consider that, if you count the number of members of the Anthroposophical Society, it is truly a terribly small group in relation to any other society or spiritual context. And the great old spiritual movements should not care what is believed or not believed by such a small group of people. It is not because the opponents know full well what Anthroposophy is. They appreciate Anthroposophy, in their own sense, and they actively appreciate it.

Now, of course, it can be said that we simply do not have personalities within the Anthroposophical Society who are predisposed to activity. That is certainly a factor, because the vast majority of personalities have come precisely to absorb a world view, not to be active in some direction within the Society. But on the other hand, there is this necessity today: if the Anthroposophical Society is to continue to exist, it needs active work and activity. This must be said again and again. It may be a mishap that we need it, but we need it.

This is particularly evident when we see, and I want to say this quite positively, how necessary it is today to be able to count on the fact that a very strong international anthroposophical society will emerge from the individual national societies at Christmas; because we really cannot leave the whole anthroposophical movement as it is.

The necessity exists that, regardless of who it is, people must find each other within the Anthroposophical Society who are interested in what is happening in the world, who know how to deal with what is happening in the world! It is always actually a great astonishment to see when something of what is happening in the world is mentioned.

Of course, I know that many excellent people within the Anthroposophical Society actually take umbrage when the Society is asked to place itself in the spiritual evolution of contemporary humanity. I can also understand that many would prefer the Anthroposophical Society to be an association of people who sit quietly in their chairs and pursue their world view and do not need to worry about what is otherwise going on in the world. I can understand it, certainly; from the whole process that has taken place in the founding and development of the Anthroposophical Society, it is understandable. But on the other hand, the necessities of the world are also there. And there it is absolutely essential that we at least submit to these necessities in a certain sense.

Purely anthroposophical work goes well everywhere. One can only say: it goes well. There was an excellent atmosphere in The Hague with regard to this anthroposophical thinking and feeling together. The lectures that I gave as a branch on the connection between man and the supersensible world were given in an excellent atmosphere. The public anthroposophical lectures also created an excellent atmosphere. The lectures that were organized with a pedagogical focus also created an excellent atmosphere.

Furthermore, we were delighted to see a small Waldorf School established in The Hague with a first, fourth and eighth class, which makes an extraordinarily satisfying impression. We were able to take a step forward in what can be achieved in the field of anthroposophic medicine, just as we have already done in London and Vienna, by organizing lectures on anthroposophic medicine for doctors in The Hague. These were held at the invitation of Dr. Zeylmans, who has set up a clinic there along our lines, lectures on anthroposophic medicine were given by Dr. Wegman and myself. All this could be achieved. As I said, this is all without the slightest criticism. The practical things are going very well. But when it comes to holding things together through the Anthroposophical Society, then, of course, there are still problems as far as feelings and perceptions are concerned; but then the fact arises that the Anthroposophical Society would like to be a bit of an extended family that shuts itself off from the outside world. And that is also how it is in its practices. Isn't it, for my sake the statutes can be made as one wants; they are not the essential thing. The essential thing is how one behaves, even when admitting members. When admitting members, one can proceed in such a way that one closes the Society, or one can enlarge it as much as possible. And the way of thinking about admitting members is simply such in many respects that we cannot count on seeing the Anthroposophical Society grow in the direction in which it must grow if it is to bring into the world — I do not say wants to bring into the world: Today, one is no longer free to want to carry something into the world or not — what the Anthroposophical Society has become through its substance. Today, one is no longer free: certain things just have to be done! And enthusiasm is often lacking. One would so much like to see this enthusiasm develop in the Society!

I am not saying this just because it is an experience that was made in the last days in The Hague, but rather an experience that has now arisen from the establishment of the national societies and which must be stated before we proceed to establish the one for which the national societies exist: the International Anthroposophical Society, which should have its center in Dornach.

This is a report on what took place in The Hague that appears to be not entirely objective, but perhaps it is more objective internally than it initially appears externally, to be given.

[ 1 ] The Goetheanum in Dornach near Basel, Switzerland, is intended to be a school of spiritual science and a place for cultivating an artistic life in the spirit of this science. Its construction began in the spring of 1914. Work on it continued during the war. The enclosing walls with the double dome have been completed. Its architectural and sculptural forms, the paintings of the interior, the stained glass windows produced using new methods already show the visitor what kind of envelope is intended for the scientific and artistic work that is to be carried out in this place.

[ 2 ] Not a building in a historically traditional art form has been erected in Dornach; what can already be seen today shows that a new style and form of artistic realization is being attempted. The whole of the building and every detail have flowed from the same spirit that wishes to create a center of its activity in this place.

[ 3 ] And this spirit wants to serve the rebuilding of scientific, spiritual and social life. It has grown out of the conviction that the human constitution of the soul, which reached its peak at the beginning of the twentieth century, is internally interwoven with the destructive forces that have revealed their true form in the world catastrophe.

[ 4 ] Just as the building in its design aims to represent a unity with everything that is to be accomplished within it, so it is hoped that the spiritual work emanating from Dornach will develop the spiritual impetus that can be formative for a true moral, social and technical practice of life.

[ 5 ] For modern man there was an abyss between his spiritual experience and the practice of life. Through illusions he deceived himself about this abyss. He believed that he could draw science and art from the reality of life and permeate this reality with his spirit. These illusions are the true causes of the devastating world catastrophe and the social hardships of the present. Modern man did not find the spirit in science and art; therefore his life practice became a spiritless routine.

[ 6 ] The social practice of life, the mechanically oriented technology, the externalized legal life lack the impulses that can only arise when the souls within people experience the spirit.

[ 7 ] The spiritual science to be cultivated at the Goetheanum in Dornach has driven out of itself a social view of life, the impulse of the threefold organization of the social organism, which wants to gain genuine life practice from real spiritual knowledge. Who wants to avoid everything utopian by creating out of the reality of the spirit.

[ 8 ] What souls need in order to experience their full humanity is to be cultivated in Dornach just as much as the technical aspects of outer life. The school of thought that wants to form its center here wants to create a workshop for life-enhancing technology, for the social shaping of human work as well as for the development of the life of the soul. It needs the cooperation of all those who are impartial enough to see that modern life lacks what it wants to create.

[ 9 ] In order to complete the Dornach building, almost as much sacrifice is still necessary on the part of such unbiased people as has already been revealed in the possibility of bringing it to its present state. But even with the completion of this building, nothing has yet been achieved for the goals that are to be served with it. Parallel to this completion must go practical institutions of life that are designed in the direction of the spiritual work it represents. Very practical institutions of life, such as technical and social undertakings, must prove the life-promoting nature of its powers. It must come to the point where it no longer seems ridiculous when the spirit that wants to create a world view is also active in the founding of technical enterprises, financial institutes and scientific research institutes.

[ 10 ] The spiritual direction meant here is already at work in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. Even people who still tolerate it there, because it is active in the "spiritual" field, will still demand today that it "keep its hands off" institutions about which only the "practitioner" should be able to judge.

[ 11 ] In this area, one of the most powerful prejudices must be overcome. The personalities who have already been found today to contribute to this overcoming through practical work expose themselves to the accusation of unrealistic enthusiasm. They believe they know that humanity will only get out of some of its troubles when the enthusiasm of those who falsely accuse them of enthusiasm today has been seen through. But the number of such personalities who, despite such accusations, are currently putting their energies at the service of genuine life practice is still small. Institutions are in the making that want to lay the foundations for this practice of life. Whether it can succeed will depend on whether as many people as possible can be found who want to join forces with the few.

[ 12 ] Only on an international basis can something favorable be achieved in this direction. For the spirit meant here is, by its very nature, far removed from the narrow-minded erection of barriers to humanity. What is necessary for it, however, is the unified embracing of spiritual and practical-material life. It is on this basis that he would like to carry out his work on overcoming the "social question". He believes he can say in all modesty that he was already working in close circles on this basis before his opponent showed his true face in the outbreak of the world catastrophe. He understands that before this loudly speaking fact he could only be heard by a few. He believes that now, out of the needs of the times, he should be met with understanding. The growth of the new life will not be promoted by alliances of nations based on the old spirit; the League of Nations will grow out of the new spirit as something self-evident. The old constitutions of the soul will not support a new social life; from the renewal of the life of the soul the social structure will arise with inner necessity.

[ 13 ] Some people are already saying today: A revival of dead or dampened human forces from the spirit is necessary. But if we take a closer look, the question remains unanswered: What is the content of the new spirit? At the Goetheanum in Dornach, however, one would like to speak of this content, one would like to work for this content. For it is not the mere appeal to the spirit that can help at this time, but only the spirit that is recognized and incorporated into the work of life. But this spirit wants to be worked for itself. It wants to permeate all scientific research; it does not merely want to be tolerated as a side effect of a science that keeps its distance from itself. It does not want to be there so that those working in the factory can find it when they leave the factory; it wants to live in the work of the factory itself, in its economic and technical orientation. He does not want a practice of life that also "leaves time for spiritual interests"; he does not want to leave time in which he does not work. He does not want an art that embellishes "sober" life; he is aware that real life is naturally artistic.

[ 14 ] This is how Dornach and everything connected with it is conceived; it can become a full reality when it is recognized how this "thought" wants to work out of the roots of real life.

The Coming Day: Public Limited Company for the Promotion of Economic and Spiritual Values

[ 1 ] The shortest route to the wastepaper basket today is probably the one taken by mailings of this kind. There are so many of them, and we have experienced so often how little they deliver on their promises, that no one can be denied the right to choose this route in order to ward off superfluous literary intrusiveness. Should this announcement of a new publisher for some reason not happen, then - the senders hope - their readers will see that this justification is intended to bring about something that the events of the time really demand.

[ 2 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" was not founded out of the need to add to the many books that arise out of the confusion of contemporary intellectual life. Its founders are actually of the opinion, already expressed by Lichtenberg, that ninety-nine percent of the books with which the world is "blessed" are too many.

[ 3 ] But these founders see the declining intellectual life of the present. They see the other disasters of the present, the state and the economy, emerging from the decline of spiritual life. And they must imagine an ascending spiritual life from which the state and the economy must draw in order to recover.

[ 4 ] They want to serve this spiritual life.

[ 5 ] They want to deliver literary works to the world, which provide the ideas and the laws of the humanities for the recovery of the sick social life.

[ 6 ] Unfortunately, all too few people have an adequate idea of the unhealthy state of our intellectual life. They have no idea what devastating consequences for world civilization must result from this state. They therefore have no heart for efforts that are directed towards recovery out of conviction and unbiased observation of life.

[ 7 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" would like that.

[ 8 ] It will not serve a fragmenting academicism that only proliferates in books, alienated from life, and which is increasingly severing its ties to reality. He wants to serve a scientific attitude that warms the blood and sheds light on the meaning of human and world existence.

[ 9 ] He will not serve an attitude towards art that is alienated from life, parlor-smelling, or burdened with idleness. It will promote an artistic perception of the world that makes man a co-creator of the mysteries and development of the world through the true shaping of life.

[ 10 ] He will not serve a socially destructive view of life that preaches only moral laws and has no power to penetrate reality. He wants to contribute to the discovery of that moral basis of life that generates powerful will in ideas and gives birth to the impulses for the health of the soul and enthusiasm for action from the knowledge of life.

[ 11 ] He will not serve social fantasies which are beneficial to man if he can dream of their realization, or if he stages social orders which are devoid of human nature and the basis of nature, and which therefore awaken to social misfortune those who dream of them or act under their influence. He wants to allow social views and impulses to appear which are possible, universally human, worthy of existence, but which are drawn from the real human nature, observation of the world and living experience.

[ 12 ] So the "Kommende Tag Verlag" wants to serve social life, the moral shaping of life, the artistic revelation of existence, the scientific understanding of the world.

[ 13 ] It will endeavor not to lapse into one-sided promotion of this or that "point of view", but to deliver the spiritually valuable products of all directions to the judgment of the readers of its books. It is not opinions about this or that that should be favored according to the tastes of the leaders of the "Kommenden Tag Verlag", but those works which these leaders feel can serve the spiritual life demanded by the times. A materialistic book written with spirit will today - against the will of its author - do more to promote the development of spiritual life than a spiritless collection of amateurish slogans about a "spiritual world order". A will determined by these guidelines should permeate all the activities of the "Kommenden Tag Verlag". The many who still believe today that something can be achieved by merely "popularizing" the traditional spiritual life, by founding popular education centres in which what has been cultivated in places alien to the people is popularized: they will find this publishing house highly superfluous. For its justification is based on the conviction that what has led out of the narrow circles, through educational illusions, into the declining phenomena of the present cannot have a fruitful effect in the broad circles of the population.

[ 14 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" is a member of the overall enterprise "Der Kommende Tag, Aktiengesellschaft zur Förderung wirtschaftlicher und geistiger Werte, Stuttgart". The other members of this company have the task of developing economic activities that can provide the people with healthy economic forces. They are to participate in the reconstruction of economic life in the spirit of a national economy demanded by the times. They should also support free schools, scientific and medical institutes and the like through economically fruitful activities.

[ 15 ] The affiliation with such enterprises is what characterizes the "Kommender Tag Verlag". Spiritual creation has to be part of the whole circle of human life if it is not to run the risk of becoming a luxury of civilization. The spiritual and the material must support each other if the one is not to be alienated from the other to the detriment of humanity. Rudolf Steiner's book "Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage in den Lebensnotwendigkeiten der Gegenwart und Zukunft" ("The Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future") is to be one of the main pieces for the initial activities of the "Kommenden Tag Verlag". Over 40,000 copies of this book have already been sold in Germany and it has been translated into almost all cultural languages. From a practical observation of the spiritual, social and state conditions of human existence, it contains the justification of such a will as gives direction to the "Coming Day Publishing House" in a single area of life. In it, its author combines the anthroposophical direction he founded in spiritual science, in which he has published a large number of writings for 35 years, with the realistic observation of social life and will.

[ 16 ] The "Kommende Tag Verlag" thus places itself in the midst of the spiritual, ethical and economic tasks of the present; and it seeks to do justice to these tasks through its connection with the School of Spiritual Science, the Goetheanum in Dornach, in which the anthroposophically deepened way of research, newly fertilizing all branches of life, also erects an artistic building which, although still unfinished, already represents the nurturing place of this way of research and art. In another way, in the field of education, this way of research and life practice has a place of activity in the Stuttgart Waldorf School.

[ 17 ] Through this connection in the most diverse directions, the "Kommende Tag Verlag" presents itself as an enterprise that has its widely ramified roots in the circle of a spiritual, artistic and social movement, which, out of a firm will, makes the necessary reshaping of the collapsing civilization its most serious task.

In December 1920, Der Kommende Tag AG
Stuttgart, Champignystrasse 17, publishing house

The art of pedagogy ¹ can only be based on genuine knowledge of human nature. And this cannot be complete if it is limited to mere observation. One does not get to know the human being through passive knowledge. At least to a certain extent, what one knows about the human being must be experienced as sensed by the creative part of one's own being; one must sense it in one's own will as a knowing activity.

A passive knowledge of the human being can only lead to a lame educational and teaching practice. For the transition from such knowledge to practice must consist of external instructions for activity. Even if one gives oneself these instructions, they remain external.

Knowledge of the human being as the basis of pedagogy must begin to live by being absorbed. One must immediately experience every thought about the human being as one's own nature, just as one experiences proper breathing and proper blood circulation as one's own health.

When faced with the task of educating and teaching a child, knowledge of the human being must flow naturally into action. And love must live in this naturalness. There is no such thing as passive knowledge of the human being, and then the external consideration: because this or that is so and so in the child, therefore you must do this or that. There is only direct experience, which is what it recognizes in its own existence. And then the educational treatment of the child becomes an activity that arises in love and takes on its necessary character because it is experienced through the child. A knowledge of the human being that is woven into life takes up the child's essence like the eye takes up color.

Knowledge of nature can remain theory; for the healthy feeling person, knowledge of the human being as theory is like having to experience oneself as a skeleton. There is no sense in speaking of a difference between theory and practice in the knowledge of the human being. For a knowledge of the human being that cannot become active in life practice is a sum of ideas that hover shadow-like in the mind but do not reach people. A life practice that is not illuminated by knowledge of the human being gropes uncertainly in the dark.

If the teacher has the right attitude, then he has the prerequisite for developing his humanity in front of his pupils in a way that is full of life and invigorating, and for encouraging the emerging human being to reveal himself.

And the right educational attitude is the essential thing in all pedagogical work.

This attitude draws attention to the child's expressions of life, which appear as germinal states of the developing human being. The human being must be active in his work without losing himself in a mechanism of work. The child's nature demands that preparation for work be based on the revelation of the human being. The child wants to be active because activity is part of human nature. The harsh world demands that adults produce finished work. In the child, the developing human being demands activity, which, if guided correctly, develops the seed of work.

Those who, with genuine insight into the human being, can eavesdrop on the child's being on the way from play to life's work will overhear the nature of teaching and learning at this intermediate stage. For in childhood, play is the serious revelation of the inner urge to activity, in which the human being has his true existence. It is a careless way of putting it to say that children should “learn by playing”. A teacher who organized his work accordingly would only educate people for whom life is more or less a game. But the ideal of educational and teaching practice is to awaken in the child a sense of learning with the same seriousness with which it plays, as long as playing is the only emotional content of life.

An educational and teaching practice that sees this through will give art the right place and its cultivation the right extent.

Life is often a strict teacher for the educator as well. It makes its demands on the training of the mind. Therefore, one will do too much rather than too little in relation to this training. It is the moral that truly makes man human. An immoral person does not reveal the full human being within himself. Therefore, it would be a sin against human nature not to cultivate the moral development of the child to the fullest extent. Art is the fruit of man's free nature. One must love art if one is to recognize its necessity for the full human being. Life does not compel love. But it thrives only in love. It wants to be in the unconstrained element.

Schiller was the only one who sensed this; and this perception led him to write his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”. Schiller sees the most important element of all educational art in the penetration of man with the aesthetic state of mind. Man should permeate the cognitive drive with cognitive love in such a way that he behaves like the creative artist or the aesthetically receptive person in his activity. And he should experience duty as the expression of his innermost human nature, as he feels in aesthetic experience. (On this occasion, reference may be made to the excellent presentation of Schiller's intentions in Heinrich Deinhardt's writing “Beiträge zur Würdigung Schillers”, which was recently published by Kommenden Tag Verlag in Stuttgart).

It is a pity that Schiller's “Aesthetic Letters” have had such a limited effect on pedagogy. A stronger impact would have had a significant effect on the place of art in educational and teaching practice.

Art, both visual and poetic-musical, is required by children's nature. And there is an engagement with art that is appropriate even for children when they reach school age. As an educator, one should not talk too much about this or that art being 'useful' for the development of this or that human ability. Art is there for art's sake, after all. But as an educator, one should love art so much that one does not want to deprive the developing human being of the experience of it. And then you will see what the experience of art does for the developing human being – the child. It is only through art that the mind comes to true life. The sense of duty matures when the urge to be active artistically conquers matter in freedom. The artistic sense of the educator and teacher brings soul into the school. It allows one to be happy in earnest and full of character in joy. Nature is only understood through the intellect; it is only experienced through artistic perception. The child who is taught to understand matures into 'ability' when understanding is practised in a lively way; but the child who is introduced to art matures into 'creativity'. In 'ability', the human being expresses himself; in 'creativity', he grows with his ability. The child who models or paints, however clumsily, awakens the soul in himself through his activity. The child who is introduced to the musical and poetic senses the sense of being moved by an ideal soul. He receives a second one to his humanity.

All this will not be achieved if art is taught only on the side, if it is not organically integrated into the other forms of education and instruction. All instruction and education should be a unified whole. Knowledge, life training, and practice in practical skills should lead to the need for art; artistic experience should foster a desire for learning, observing, and acquiring skills.

• 1. Outline of a lecture for the “Artistic-pedagogical conference of the Waldorf School”, 25-29 March 1923.

• Dance of Peace and Energy
• Me and You
• Harmonic Eight
• Balling and Spreading
• “Säerspruch” by C. F. Meyer
• Saying from the Calendar of the Soul by Rudolf Steiner
• “Planetendanz” by Rudolf Steiner
• “Symbolum” by J. W. v. Goethe
• “Ganymed” by J. W. v. Goethe
• “Hallelujah”
• Musical prelude “Fateful Question” “Autumn” by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Musical prelude “Look around you, look within” “Morning Song” by C. F. Meyer
• Cheerful prelude by Leopold van der Pals
• “To the New Year” by J. W. v. Goethe
• “Rosen im Süden” (Roses in the South) by Friedrich Hebbel “Liederscelen” by C. F. Meyer
• Satirical prelude by Leopold van der Pals
• “Galgenlieder” (Gallows Songs) by Christian Morgenstern:
• a. Unter Zeiten b. The funnel c. The sigh
• d. The Two Bottles e. Bim, Bam, Bum

This performance at 12 noon took place exclusively for the employees and workers of the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in the domed hall of the art building in Stuttgart.

What we wish to present to you is a new art, but you must bear in mind that we are at the very beginning with this new art. What it is intended for will become more complete after some time, and it will be able to lead to certain very broad goals. But we can already see from the preliminary stages, which we have in a sense reached, what is meant by this particular art for the future life of humanity. This art, too, is meant to be part of that life of humanity that does not belong to narrowly defined circles, but is intended to serve the whole broad mass of humanity. This art, too, is meant to be part of this future life.

If I wanted to compare what you will see as eurythmy with anything that is currently being cultivated in the world, I could not. To some extent, what is otherwise practiced as a movement art is always only a piece, a part of what you will see here, and what is cultivated here is the attempt to bring together various details of the full human being to create invigorating, healing activity that also unfolds artistically. If I may draw a comparison, I would say that eurythmy strives for something in the soul and spirit, so that the human being really feels like a soul and spiritual being in the process, which has only been striven for in an unspiritual, un-soulful way through gymnastics. Gymnastics moves the human body in accordance with physical laws, and we should have no illusions about it: gymnastics is an art of movement without any actual soul or spiritual element. Here you have an art of movement that also allows the soul and spiritual to shine through in the human movements of the limbs. If I may draw a comparison on the other side, what is offered here could indeed be compared with the art of stage dance. But what is offered in the art of stage dance is also only a one-sided expression of true humanity and artistry, because it starts from external appearances and then translates external appearances into human dance movements.

We are not starting from something superficial here. What you, dear attendees, will see presented here by these people individually and in the relationships between the positions and movements of groups of people – you are essentially doing it yourself all day long. You just don't do it with your externally visible limbs, with arms and legs, but you do it continuously by speaking with the externally invisible organs of your larynx, and you do it with the air that you move through your larynx. One is just not attentive to the way the organs of the larynx and the neighboring organs vibrate, how the palate and lungs are in motion, because one listens while speaking, because one listens to the conversion of the movements into sound. But if you can immerse yourself in what the larynx, lungs, tongue, palate and lips actually do, what the air does when you speak, say: the most artistic movements are carried out by each person when speaking, but especially in artistic speaking, in declamation, and these movements, these artistic movements are similar in their effect to music. So that one can say, however strange it may sound: what we bring as eurythmy is something we have overheard in the mysterious artistic creations that human nature performs in speech. If you see any eurythmist perform, everything you see is laryngeal movement translated into human movement in the group's positions and movements. The whole person and the whole group are simply larynxes; everything becomes a speech organ.

Therefore, on the one hand, we can express musicality, and on the other hand, what is inherent in musicality through the movements of groups of people, rather than through larynx movements as in singing. Therefore, we can also present poetry, artfully formed language, in the movement of individuals and in the movements and positions of groups of people. In eurythmy, each person always expresses what is contained in the individual word or sound. And the warmth of feeling and the content of the soul that permeates our language, especially our poetic language, is expressed by the movements and postures of the groups. And all in pure rhythm. We can express everything through what you will see here. So we transfer to the whole human being that which is most ensouled in the human being, that through which the human being's innermost emotions express themselves outwardly, the human speech organ. In this way we ensoul and spiritualize the human being, bring what is formed in the body into the spirit, so that the human being in eurythmy can feel as a soul, as a spirit in reality.

In recent times, people have forgotten how to relate to true poetic art. You really can't recite or declaim at all today because you always read prose. Here the human being is compelled to know that poetry is more than mere prose, that poetry is formed, shaped language. Therefore, when it is recited – which means you will also hear what you are giving in the movements – it will be rendered through artful speaking, not through prosaic declamation, as you can see everywhere where art is lost in this field. A genuine art must be found again for declamation. This art is being learned right now, when one is compelled to adapt declamation to what man, when he is completely larynx, must express.

So you see, soulless gymnastics is combined with dance, which is only externally animated, to form a single unit. This creates something that is not just for looking at like stage dance, nor mere body movement like gymnastics, but is both, is something new as an art that one can perform as a human being by making oneself healthy and strong from the spiritual-soul, which gymnastics cannot do because it does not take hold of the whole person.

But you must bear in mind that this is a great work. It wants to serve the life of the future, the future of which I spoke to you recently from a social point of view in your workshop over at your factory. It also wants to serve the liberated human being when it can live sympathetically with him. It will perfect itself, either through us or through others, because it is a right beginning for the ideal of humanity seeking its development in the future.

I would have liked to follow my usual procedure in lecturing to the kind members of the Anthroposophical Society and to have addressed this gathering on purely anthroposophical matters. The whole course the meetings have taken, however, and the things that have been happening in the past few days have made me decide to confine my comment to questions of immediate interest to this assemblage. I hope there will be other opportunities to speak on more specifically anthroposophical subjects, if not to all of you at once, then at least on several occasions to smaller groups.

The goal of this pair of lectures is to show how anthroposophy can really become wisdom to live by, how it can influence our day-to-day intentions and attitudes. I shall, therefore, devote myself to laying an anthroposophical foundation on which to approach the problems we shall be dealing with here. Yesterday I spoke from that angle about community building in the Anthroposophical Society; today I want to continue and to add something on the subject of the contribution that an anthroposophical view of the world makes to living life in a more adequate way than one could do without it.

In order to show you the opposite side of the matters discussed yesterday, I am taking as my starting point something well-known to everybody familiar with the history of societies built on foundations similar to those on which our own sciety is based. A little later on I will also characterize some of the differences that distinguish the Anthroposophical Society from every other. But for the moment I want to point out that there have been a great many societies that have based their existence on one or another method of attaining insight into the spiritual world, though the level reached was influenced considerably by various historical settings and the particular characteristics and capacities of the groups of people who participated. One finds every shading and level in the wide variety of societies, which covers the whole range from a really serious and significant level down to that of charlatanism.

But one thing is well-known to anyone acquainted with the history of such socities. That is, that a certain moral atmosphere is always created—and indeed, necessarily so—when certain conditions exist. One could describe this atmosphere as being that of a real, genuine striving for brotherliness among the members of such a society. This goal is usually listed among the precepts or in the statutes of these societies, and—as I said—necessarily so, brotherliness being one goal and insight into the spiritual world the other.

Now the thing that people familiar with the history of such societies know is that these societies built on brotherliness and spiritual insight are the worst beset with conflicts. They present the widest opportunities for fighting, for partings-of-the-way, for splitting up into separate factions within the larger group, for group resignations, for sharp attacks on those who stay and those who leave, and so on. In short, human strife is at its most rampant in groups dedicated to brotherhood.

This is a strange phenomenon. But anthroposophical insight enables us to understand it. What I am presenting in these two lectures is also part of the system of anthroposophy, if you will forgive me the pedantic term. So, though this lecture will not be a general discussion, it will still be an anthroposophical one, shaped with special reference to our meetings.

If we return to the matters brought up yesterday, we find three levels of experience among the phenomena of human consciousness. We find people either asleep or dreaming, who, in a state of lowered consciousness, experience a certain world of pictures that they take to be real while they are sleeping. We know that these people are isolated from others inhabiting the physical world in common with them; they are not sharing common experiences. No means exist of conveying what they are experiencing. We know further that a person can go from this state of consciousness to that of everyday awareness, can be awakened to it by external nature, and this includes the natural exterior of other people, as I described yesterday. A certain degree of community feeling is awakened simply as a result of natural drives and the ordinary needs of life, and languages come into being in response to it.

But now let us see what happens when these two states of consciousness get mixed up together. So long as a person continues in completely normal circumstances and is able, by reason of a normal psychic and bodily condition, to keep his isolated dream experience separated from his shared experience with others, he will be living acceptably in his dream world and in the world of reality. But let us assume that, due to some psychological quirk, and it would have to be considered such, a person finds himself in a situation where, though he is in a day-waking state of consciousness involved in a common life with others, he is not having the same feelings and ideas as his companions. Let us assume that the pathological condition he is in causes him to project into his waking consciousness a world of feelings and ideas similar to those of dream life. Instead of developing logically ordered thoughts, he produces a pictorial world like the picture world of dreams. We call such a person mentally ill. But for the moment the thing of chief interest to us is that this person does not understand the others, and unless they are looking at him from a medical pathological angle they cannot understand him either. At the moment when the state of mind prevailing at this lower level of consciousness is carried over to a higher level, a person becomes a crass egotist in his relations with his fellow men. You need only think this over to see that a person of this kind goes entirely by his imaginings. He comes to blows with the others because they cannot follow his reasoning. He can commit the wildest excesses because he does not share a common soul world with other human beings.

Now let us move on from these two states of consciousness to the two others. Let us contrast the everyday state of consciousness, to which we are guided by the natural course of external events, with that higher one that can, as I showed yesterday, awaken through the fact that a person wakes not just in the encounter with the natural aspect of his surrounding but also in the encounter with the inner being of the other person. Though one may not ordinarily be fully and immediately aware of it, one does waken to such a higher level of consciousness. Of course, there are many other ways of entering the higher worlds, as you know from my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But for the period of time one is privileged to spend with others in that way, one can find oneself in a position to understand and witness things one would otherwise not understand or witness. One is presented with the possibility of living in the element that those who know the spiritual world describe in terms applicable to that world—the possibility of speaking of the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the ego, of repeated earth lives and their karmic aspects.

Now at this point there is a possibility of the whole state of mind of ordinary consciousness being carried over into the spiritual world one thus enters and applied to it. This is the same thing that happens on another level when the state of soul of a person absorbed in dream pictures is projected into ordinary life: one turns into an egotist in the most natural way. This occurs if one fails to realize that everything in the higher worlds of the spirit has to be looked at in an entirely different way than one looks at the sense world. One must learn to think and feel differently. Just as dreamers have to switch over into a totally different state of consciousness if they want to share a life with others in an ordinary state of waking, so must there be similar awareness of the fact that the content of anthroposophy cannot be approached with the attitude of soul one has toward the things of ordinary experience.

That is the root of the problem of reaching any understanding and agreement between the everyday consciousness, which is also that of ordinary science, and the consciousness anthroposophy makes possible. When people come together and talk back and forth, one with the ordinary consciousness exemplified in the usual scientific approach and the other with a consciousness equal to forming judgments that accord with spiritual reality, then it is exactly as though a person recounting his dreams were trying to reach an understanding with someone telling him about external facts. When a number of people meet in an ordinary state of consciousness and fail to lift themselves and their full life of feeling to the super-sensible level, when they meet to listen in a merely ordinary state of mind to what the spiritual world is saying, there is a great—an immeasurably great—chance of their coming to blows, because all such people become egotists as a natural consequence.

There is, to be sure, a powerful remedy for this, but it is available only if the human soul develops it. I am referring to tolerance of a truly heartfelt kind. But we have to educate ourselves to it. In a state of everyday consciousness a little tolerance suffices most people's needs, and social circumstances put many a situation right again. But where the ordinary everyday state of mind prevails, it often happens that people talking together are not even concerned to hear what the other is saying. We all know this from our own personal experience. It has become a habit nowadays to give only scant attention to somebody else's words. When a person is part way through a sentence, someone else starts talking, because he is not the least interested in what is being said. He is interested only in his own opinion. One may be able, after a fashion, to get by with this in the physical world, but it simply cannot be done in the spiritual realm. There, the soul must be imbued with the most perfect tolerance; one must educate oneself to listen with profound inner calm even to things one cannot in the least agree with, listen not in a spirit of supercilious endurance, but with the most positive inner tolerance as one would to well-founded utterances on the other person's part. In the higher worlds there is little sense in making objections to anything. A person with experience in that realm knows that the most opposite views about the same fact can be expressed there by, let us say, oneself and someone else. When he has made himself capable of listening to the other's opposite view with exactly the same tolerance he feels toward his own—and please notice this !—then and then only does he have the social attitude required for experiencing what was formerly merely theoretical knowledge of the higher worlds.

This moral basis is vital to a right relationship to the higher realms. The strife that I have described as so characteristic of the societies we are discussing has its root in the fact that when people hear sensational things, such as that man has an etheric and astral body and an ego as well as a physical body, and so on, they listen for sensation's sake but do not undertake to transform their souls as these must be transformed if they are to experience spiritual reality differently than they would a chair or a table in the physical world, and one experiences even these objects differently in the physical world than one does in dreams. When people apply their ordinary soul habits to what they think they are understanding of teachings about the higher worlds, then this inevitably develops strife and egotism.

Thus it is just by grasping the true nature of the higher worlds that one is led to understand how easily societies with a spiritual content can become involved in conflicts and quarreling, and how necessary it is to educate oneself to participation in such groups by learning to tolerate the other person to an immeasurably greater degree than one is used to doing in situations of the physical world. To become an anthroposophist it is not enough to know anthroposophy from the theoretical side: one's whole approach has to be transformed in certain ways. Some people are unwilling to do this. That resulted in my never being understood when I said that there were two ways of occupying oneself with my book, Theosophy, for example. One way is to read or even study it, but with the usual approach and making the judgments that approach engenders. One might just as well be reading a cookbook as Theosophy for all the qualitative difference there is. The value of the experience is identical in both cases, except that reading Theosophy that way means dreaming rather than living on a higher level. When one thus dreams of higher worlds, the impulses one receives from them do not make for the highest degree of unity or the greatest tolerance. Strife and quarreling take the place of the unity that can be the reward of study of the higher worlds, and they keep on spreading. Here you find the cause of the wrangling in societies based on one or another method of gaining insight into the spiritual world.

I said that the various paths described in part in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds lead into the spiritual world. Now when a person has to concern himself intensively with seeking knowledge of those higher worlds, this requires his developing a certain attitude of soul, as you will understand from what I have been explaining in this pair of lectures, though in quite another connection. A true spiritual investigator has to have a certain attitude of soul. One cannot find one's way to truth in the spiritual realm if one is constantly having to give one's attention to what is going on in the physical world in ways quite proper to that sphere, if one has to occupy oneself with matters requring the kind of thinking suited to the physical realm.

Now you will agree that a person who gives his fellowmen a reliable account of things in the spiritual world, a person justified in calling himself a spiritual investigator in the sense in which the other sciences use that term, needs a lot of time for his research. You will therefore find it natural that I, too, need time to do the research that enables me little by little to present anthroposophy or spiritual science in an ever widening perspective in my lectures.

Now if one goes one's way alone, one can of course make time for this within the framework of one's destiny. For a person who is a genuine spiritual investigator and wants to give his fellowmen a trustworthy account of what he discovers in the spiritual world will, as is natural, form the habit of ignoring his opponents. He knows that he has to have opponents, but he is not bothered by their objections to his statements; he could think up the objections himself. So it is natural for him to take the attitude that he is simply going to go his own positive way without paying much attention to anyone's objections, unless there is some special reason to do so.

But this attitude is no longer tenable when one has joined forces with the Anthroposophical Society. For in addition to the responsibility one feels toward the truth, one has a further responsibility in relation to what the Society, of which it is often said that it makes itself an instrument of that truth, is doing. So one has to help carry the Society's responsibilities. This can be combined to a certain extent with the proper attitude toward opponents. Until 1918 that situation obtained with the Society and myself. I paid as little attention as possible to objections, and did so, paradoxical though this may seem, as a consequence of maintaining the tolerance I have been describing. Why, indeed, should I be so intolerant as to be constantly refuting my opponents? In the natural course of human evolution everything eventually gets back on the right track anyhow. So I can say that up until 1918 this question was justified, to some extent at least.

But when the Society proceeds to take on the activities it has included since 1919, it also takes on the responsibility for them. Their destiny becomes involved with that of the Society, and the Society's destiny becomes involved with that of the spiritual investigator. The spiritual investigator must either assume the burden of defending himself against his opponents—in other words, of occupying himself largely with matters that keep him from his spiritual research, since they cannot be combined with it—or else, to get time for his research, turn over the handling of opponents to those who have accepted a certain responsibility for the peripheral institutions. Thus the situation in our Society has undergone fundamental changes since 1919, and this for deeply anthroposophical reasons. Since the Society, as represented by certain of its members, decided to launch these institutions, and since the foundation on which they are all based is anthroposophy, that foundation must now be defended by people who do not have to carry full responsibility for the inner correctness of the material that genuine research has to keep on adding, day by day, to the previous findings of spiritual investigation.

A large proportion of our opponents consists of people in well-defined callings. They may, for example, have studied in certain professional fields where it is customary to think about things in some particular way. Thinking the way he does, such a person simply has to oppose anthroposophy. He doesn't know why, but he has to be an opponent because he is unconsciously on the leash of the profession in which he has had his training and experience.

That is the situation in its inner aspect. From the external standpoint, the question whether what has been established as the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish or decline requires that these opponents be dealt with.

But the real leaders of the opposition know full well what they are about. For there are some among them who are perfectly familiar with the laws that govern spiritual research, even though their view of those laws and that of anthroposophy may differ. They know that their best means of keeping a person who needs peace to pursue his spiritual research from doing his work is constantly to bombard him with hostile writings and objections. They know very well that he cannot give his attention to both refuting them and carrying on his research. They try to put obstacles in his path with their opposition. The mere fact of their putting these attacks in writing is the hostile act. The people who know what they are doing are not so much concerned with the contents of such books as they are with using them as weapons to hurl at the spiritual investigator, and they are particularly intent on tricking and otherwise forcing him into the necessity of defending himself.

These facts must be looked at completely objectively, and everyone who really wants to be a full member of the Anthroposophical Society ought to know them. A good many people are, of course, already familiar with what I have just been saying. The trouble is that some informed members habitually refrain from mentioning any such matters outside their circle.

Experience has long shown that such a course cannot be maintained in the Society. The Society used to publish lecture cycles labeled, “For members only.” Here in Germany, and probably elsewhere too, one can go to public libraries and borrow these same cycles. All the cycles are available to non-members. One can tell from writings of our opponents that they too have them, though it may sometimes have been difficult to get hold of them. But people of this sort are far less apt to shy away from difficulties than is sometimes the case with anthroposophists.

The secrecy that many societies still find it possible to maintain is simply out of the question in the Anthroposophical Society, due to its special character as an institution based on the most modern concept imaginable. For its members are meant to remain free individuals. They are not bound by any promises; they can simply join the Society as honest searchers after knowledge. I have no desire to make secrecy an aim. If that interested me, I would never suggest setting up a loose confederation of groups alongside the old Anthroposophical Society. For I predict, though without implying condemnation, that a great many more escape channels will be opened to the world at large by such a confederation, allowing egress to material that older members believe should be kept in their own cupboards. But the innermost impulse of anthroposophy cannot be grasped by people unwilling to see it put to work in complete accord with the most modern human thinking and feeling. It is, therefore, the more essential to understand what the prerequisites of such a society are.

Now I want to bring up something that I will illustrate with an example taken from my own experience, though not in a spirit of foolish conceit. Last summer I gave a course of lectures at Oxford on the educational methods of the Waldorf School.¹ An article appeared in an English journal that, though I cannot quote it verbatim, made the following point. It began by saying that a person who attended the lectures at the Oxford educational meetings without prior awareness of who Dr. Steiner was and that he had some connection with anthroposophy would not have noticed that a representative of anthroposophy was speaking. Such a person would simply have thought him to be a man speaking about pedagogy from a different angle than the listener's own.

I was exceedingly delighted by this characterization because it showed that there are people who notice something that is always my goal, namely, to speak in a way that is not instantly recognized as anthroposophical. Of course, the content is anthroposophical, but it cannot be properly absorbed unless it is objective. The anthroposophical standpoint should lead, not to onesidedness, but, on the contrary, to presenting things in such a way that each least detail can be judged on its own merits and its truth be freely recognized.

Once, before the Oxford lecture cycle was delivered and the article about it written, I made an experiment that may not seem to you at all significant. In June of this year I attended the Vienna Congress and gave two cycles comprising twelve lectures.² I undertook to keep the word anthroposophy out of all of them, and it is not to be found there. You will also not find any such phrase as “the anthroposophical world view shows us this or that.” Of course, despite this—and indeed, especially because of it—what was presented was pure anthroposophy.

Now I am not making the philistine, pedantic recommendation that anthroposophists should always avoid using the word “anthroposophy.” That is far from my intention. But the spirit that must inspire us in establishing right relations with the rest of the world can be found by looking in that general direction. That spirit should work freely in leaders active in the Society; otherwise I will again be held responsible for unanthroposophical things that are done in its name. Then the world would have some justification for confusing the one agent with the other.

Here too the objective spirit of anthroposophy needs to be properly grasped and, above all, manifested in what is done. We will first have to undertake some degree of self-education to that end. But self-education is needed in anthroposophical circles; countless mistakes have been made in the past few years for want of it, with the launching of the peripheral institutions contributing to the problem. I state this simply as an objective fact, without meaning to accuse anyone personally.

If the Anthroposophical Society is to flourish, every single one of its members is going to have to become fully aware of these facts. But this cannot happen under present day social conditions unless an effort is made to set up a lively exchange, even if only in the form of some such medium as a news sheet conceived as a link between the Society's various centers of activity. But again, that would require every such circle, even if not every individual member, to develop a living interest in the concerns of the whole Society, and particularly in its ongoing evolution. There has been too little of this. If the Anthroposophical Society did not exist, there would presumably still be a certain number of books on anthroposophy. But one would not have to be concerned, as a society is, with the people who read them. These people would be scattered all over the world, singly or in groups, according to their karma, but one would not have to have any external contact with them. The spiritual investigator is not in any fundamentally different situation, even in a society such as ours was up to 1918. But the situation changed at the moment when the Anthroposophical Society assumed responsibility for things that existed on the physical plane.

I am putting all this in a much more plain spoken way than I have on other occasions. But say them I did, in one form or another, when the peripheral institutions were being launched. I couldn't, of course, whisper them in every member's ear, and I don't know whether it would have helped if I had done that. But the Society existed and had leaders. They should have seen to it that conditions in the Society were such that it could include the various institutions without jeopardizing spiritual research.

I will call this the negative aspect of community building in contrast to the positive aspect I presented yesterday. I would like to add that everyone interested in creating community of the positive kind that I described from the standpoint of the prerequisites of its existence must be aware of the matters discussed today in relation to the Anthroposophical Society's life and progress. They must all be taken into consideration as affecting the various areas of anthroposophical life.

In this connection let me cite the following instructive example. I come back again to the tragic subject of the ruined Goetheanum. In September and October 1920 we held a three week course there, the first of the so-called High School courses. Yesterday, I described how the Goetheanum was built in a definite artistic style that was the product of an anthroposophical approach. How did this style originate? It came into being as a result of the fact that persons to whom we cannot be grateful enough undertook, in 1913, to build a home base for what existed at that time in the way of anthroposophical works in a narrower sense, and what, again in that narrower sense, was still to issue from anthroposophy. They wanted to create a home for the staging of mystery plays, for the still germinal but nevertheless promising art of eurythmy, and, above all, for presentations of anthroposophy itself as these projected cosmic pictures derived from spiritual-scientific research. That was my intention when these persons asked me to take initiatives in this connection. I saw it as my task to erect a building designed in a style artistically consonant with the work that was to go on in it. The Goetheanum was the outcome.

At that time there were no scholars or scientists in our midst. Anthroposophy had indeed taken some steps in a scientific direction. But the development that was to include activity in the various professional fields among the Society's functions had not yet begun. What developed later came into being as a direct outgrowth of anthroposophy, exactly as did the Waldorf School pedagogy, the prime example of such a process.

Now an artistic style had to be found to suit each such development. It was found, as I believe, in the Goetheanum. The war caused some delay in building. Then, in 1920, I gave the course of lectures just referred to. It was given at the behest of the professionals who had meanwhile joined the Society and were such a welcome addition to it. They arranged a program and submitted it to me.

In my belief, complete freedom reigns in the Anthroposophical Society. Many outsiders think that Steiner is the one who decides what is to go on in it. The things that go on most of the time, however, are such as Steiner would never have thought up. But the Society does not exist for my sake; it exists for the members.

Well, I sat there, all attentiveness, at this lecture series of September and October 1920—this is just an aperçu, not a criticism—and let my eyes range over the interior of the Goetheanum. In the Goetheanum Weekly I described how, in eurythmy for example, the lines of the Goetheanum continued over into the eurythmists' motions. But according to the original intention, this should have been the case with everything done there. So I let my inner eye test whether the interior decoration, the architecture, the sculptured forms, the painting, harmonized with what the speakers were saying from the podium. I discovered something that people did not at that time have to be faced with, namely, that everything I may call in the best sense a projection of the anthroposophical outlook, everything that had its origin in pure anthroposophy, harmonized marvellously with the Goetheanum. But in the case of a whole series of lectures, one felt that they should have been delivered only when the Goetheanum reached the point of adding a number of further buildings, each so designed that its style would harmonize with the special studies and activities being carried on inside it. In its destiny of almost ten years, the Goetheanum really shared the destiny of the Anthroposophical Society, and one could readily become aware, by feeling out the way the architectural style harmonized or failed to harmonize with what went on in the building, that an inorganic element had indeed insinuated itself into the pure ongoing stream of the anthroposophical spiritual movement.

Now this is not said to blame anybody or to suggest that things should have been done differently; everything had to happen as it did, naturally. But that brought another necessity with it: The necessity of bringing about a complete rebirth of chemistry, physics, mathematics, and so on, through anthroposophy, to give consciousness the quick forward thrust I described it as needing. For the ordinary way of looking at things simply does not provide a basis for anthroposophical presentations. But that forward thrust was not always in evidence. Its lack could be felt in the testing that the artistic style of the Goetheanum gave it; in the Anthroposophical Society it manifests itself in the phenomenon of the clouds that have gathered and hung over us these past days. Now that a most welcome destiny has brought science into the anthroposophical stream, we face the immediate and future task of bringing it to rebirth through anthroposophy. No purpose is served by losing ourselves in all kinds of meaningless polemics; the urgent task is rather to see to it that the various disciplines are reborn out of anthroposophy.

We had to make do somehow during the period when substitutes were the order of the day. I was often called upon, in response to a need somewhere, to deliver cycles of lectures to this or that group on subjects which, had anthroposophical life been progressing at a normal tempo, might better have waited for future developing. Then these cycles became available. They should have been put to use in the first place as a means of helping the various sciences to rebirth through anthroposophy. That lay in the real interests of anthroposophy, and its interests would have coincided fruitfully indeed with those of the Anthroposophical Society.

People have to know all these facts. You see, my dear friends, in the course of the various seminars held here and there under the auspices of the High School, I repeatedly assigned problems that needed solving. At the last address I gave in the Small Auditorium of the Goetheanum during the scientific course, which was held at the end of 1922 and was to have continued there into 1923, I gave the mathematical physicists an assignment. I discussed how necessary it was to solve the problem of finding a mathematical formula to express the difference between tactual and visual space. There were many other occasions when similar matters were brought up. We were confronted with many urgent problems of the time, but they all needed to be worked out in such a thoroughly anthroposophical way as to have value for every single group of anthroposophists, regardless of whether tactual and visual space and the like meant anything to them. For there are ways in which something that perhaps only one person can actually do can be made fruitful for a great many others when it is clothed in some quite different form.

Thus, the difficulties that have proliferated are a consequence of what I must call the exceedingly premature steps taken since 1919, and, in particular, of the circumstance that people founded all sorts of institutions and then didn't continue sharing responsibility for them—a fact that must be stressed again and again. These difficulties have given rise to the problematical situation now confronting us.

But none of them can be laid at the door of anthroposophy itself. What my kind listeners should be aware of is that it is possible to be quite specific as to how each such difficulty originated. And it must be emphasized that it is most unjust to dismiss anthroposophy on account of the troubles that have arisen.

I would, therefore, like to append to the discussion of just such deeper matters as these a correction of something that was said from this platform yesterday; it disturbed me because of my awareness of the things we have been talking about here. It was stated that people were not aware that the Anthroposophical Movement could be destroyed by our opponents. It cannot be. Our opponents could come to present the gravest danger to the Anthroposophical Society or to me personally, and so on. But the Anthroposophical Movement cannot be harmed; the worst that could happen is that its opponents might slow its progress. I have often pointed out in this and similar connections that we must distinguish between the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society. My reason for saying this was not that the Society no longer needed to be taken into account, but that the Society is the vessel and the Movement its content. This holds true for the single member as well as for the Society. Here too, full clarity and awareness should reign. Anthroposophy is not to be confused with the Anthroposophical Society. Nor should the fact go unrecognized that developments of the past three or four years have meant, for members, a close interweaving of the unfolding destiny of anthroposophy with the Society's destiny. The two have come to seem almost identical, but they must nevertheless be sharply differentiated.

There could, theoretically, have been a Waldorf School even if the Society had not existed. But that could not have happened in reality, for there would have been no one to found and steer and look after the school. Real logic, the logic of reality, is quite a different thing than abstract logical reasoning. It is important that members of the Society understand this. A member ought to have some rudimentary realization, even if only on the feeling level, that insight into higher worlds has to be built on an awareness that super-sensible experience differs greatly from experience of the ordinary physical world. Something in the physical world can seem just as right as a dream content does to the dreaming person. But the carrying over of things of one's dream life into situations of everyday waking consciousness nevertheless remains an abnormal and harmful phenomenon. It is similarly harmful to carry over into the consciousness needed for understanding the spiritual world convictions and attitudes quite properly adopted in ordinary waking consciousness.

I can give you an instructive example. As a result of the way modern man has become so terribly caught up in intellectuality and a wholly external empiricism, even those people who are not especially at home in the sciences have taken up the slogan: Prove what you are saying! What they are stressing is a certain special way of using thought as a mediator. They know nothing of the immediate relationship the soul of man can have to truth, wherein truth is immediately apprehended in just the way the eye perceives the color red, that is, seeing it, not proving it. But in the realm of reason and intellect, each further conceptual step is developed out of the preceding one. Where the physical plane is concerned, one is well advised to become a bright fellow who can prove everything, and to develop such a good technique in this that it works like greased lightning. That is a good thing where the physical plane is concerned, and a good thing for the sciences that deal with it. It is good for the spiritual investigator to have developed a certain facility in proving matters of the physical world. Those who acquaint themselves closely with the intentions underlying the work of our Research Institute will see that wherever this technique is applicable, we, too, apply it. But if you will permit me the grotesque expression, one becomes stupid in relation to the spiritual world if one approaches it in a proof-oriented state of mind, just as one becomes stupid when one projects a dreamer's orientation into ordinary waking consciousness. For the proving method is as out of place in the spiritual world as is an intrusion of the dream state into the reality of waking consciousness. But in modern times things have reached the point where proving everything is taken as a matter of course. The paralyzing effect this trend has had in some areas is really terrifying.

Religion, which grew out of direct vision, and in neither its modern nor its older forms was founded on anything susceptible of intellectual-rational proof, has now become proof-addicted rationalistic theory, and it is proving, in the persons of its extremer exponents, that everything about it is false. For just as it is inevitable that a person become abnormal when he introduces dream concerns into his waking consciousness, so does a person necessarily become abnormal in his relationship to higher worlds if he approaches them in a way suited to the physical plane. Theology has become either an applied science that just deals practically with whatever confronts it or a proof-minded discipline, better adapted to destroying religion than to establishing it.

These, my dear friends, are the things that must become matters of clear and conscious experience in the Anthroposophical Society. If that is not the case, one takes one's place in life and in human society simply as a person of many-sided interests who functions sensibly at all the various levels, whereas from the moment one concerns oneself with the material contained in innumerable cycles, one cannot exist as a human being without spiritual development.

The spiritual investigator does not need to rely on proof in meeting his opponents. Every objection that they might make to something I have said can be taken from my own writings, for wherever it is indicated I call attention to how things stand with physical proof as applied to super-sensible fact. Somewhere in my books one can always find an approximation of the opponents' comments in my own statements, so that, for the most part, all an opponent need do to refute me is to copy passages out of my writings. But the point is that all these details should become part of the awareness of the members. Then they will find firm footing in the Society. To occupy oneself with the anthroposophical outlook will mean finding firm footing, not only in the physical world but in all the worlds there are.

Then anthroposophical impulses will also be a fountainhead of the capacity to love one's fellowmen and of everything else that leads to social harmony and a truly social way of life. There will no longer be conflict and quarreling, divisions and secedings among anthroposophists; true human unity will reign and overcome all external isolation. Though one accept observations made in higher worlds as truth, one will not wander about like a dreamer in the physical world; one will relate to it as a person with both feet set firmly on the ground. For one will have trained oneself to keep the two things separate, just as dream experience and physical reality must be kept separate in ordinary life.

The key need is for everyone who intends to join with others in really full, genuine participation in the Anthroposophical Movement within the Society to develop a certain attitude of soul, a certain state of consciousness. If we really permeate ourselves with that attitude and that consciousness, we will establish true anthroposophical community. Then the Anthroposophical Society, too, will flourish and bear fruit and live up to its promise.

• 1. Spiritual Ground of Education Oxford, August 16-25, 1922. Rudolf Steiner Press, London.
• 2. The Tension Between East and West, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1963.

Our last discussions here were about the possibility, on the one hand, of seeing in the natural realm that which is connected in a certain way with the moral, with the soul, and on the other hand, of seeing in the soul again what is present in the natural. In this very area, humanity today is confronted with a, one might say, disturbing puzzle. Not only that, as I have often mentioned in public lectures, when man applies the laws of nature to the universe and looks at the past, he must say to himself: Everything around us has emerged from some primeval nebulous state, that is, from something purely material, which then differentiated and transformed itself in some way, and from which the beings of the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms emerged, and from which man also emerged. This will be there again in a certain way, albeit in a different form than at the beginning, as a purely physical thing, even at the end of the universe. But then what is born in us as morality, our ideals, will have basically faded away and been forgotten, and there will be the great churchyard of the physical, and nothing will have any meaning within this final physical state, which has arisen as a spiritual development in man, because it was just a kind of bubble. The only reality would be that which develops physically out of the primeval mist to the strongest differentiation of the various beings, only to return again to the general slag-like state of the world.

Such a view, which must be arrived at by anyone who honestly – that is, honestly to himself – professes the natural philosophy of the present day, can never build a bridge between the physical and the moral-spiritual. Therefore, such a view always needs, if it does not want to be completely materialistic and actually see the only thing in the world in material processes, always needs a kind of second world, so to speak, brought out of abstraction, which, if only the first world is recognized as given for science, would then be given to faith alone. And this belief, which is expressed in the fact that it in turn thinks: That which arises in the human soul as good cannot remain without compensation in the world; there must be certain powers which - however one thinks of it philosophically, it comes out the same - reward good and punish evil and so on. In our time there are people who profess both views, although they are incompatible. There are people who, on the one hand, accept everything that the purely scientific world view has to offer, who go along with the Kant-Laplacean theory of the primeval nebula, who go along with all that is put forward for a slag-like final state of our development, and who then also profess some religious world view: that good works somehow find their reward, evil sinners are punished and the like. The fact that there are numerous people in our time who allow both the one and the other to be presented to their soul stems from the fact that there is so little real activity of the soul in our time, because if there were this inner activity of the soul, then one could not simply assume, out of the same soul, on the one hand, a world order that excludes the reality of morality, and yet, on the other hand, assume some powers that reward good and punish evil.

Contrast the moral and physical worldviews, which arise from the intellectual and emotional laziness of many people today, with something like what I explained here last time as a result of spiritual science. I was able to point out that we see the world of light phenomena around us first, that we look at everything in the outer nature that appears to us through that which we call light. I was able to point out to you how one has to see in all that exists around us as light, what dying world thoughts are, that is, world thoughts that were once, in the distant past, the thought worlds of certain entities, thought worlds from which world entities of long ago recognized their world secrets. What were thoughts in the beginning now shine out to us, in that they are, so to speak, the corpse of a thought, a world thought that has died. They need only open my “Occult Science” and read the relevant pages to know that when we look back into the distant past, the human being as we understand him today did not yet exist. He was only a kind of sensory automaton, for example, during the Saturn period. But you also know that the universe was inhabited in those days, as it is now. But in those days, other beings that inhabited this universe took the place within this universe that man occupies today. We know, of course, that those spirits whom we call archai or primal beginnings, that these entities were at the human stage during the old Saturn time. They were not human as humans are today, but they were at the human stage. With a completely different constitution, they were at the human stage. Archangels were at the human stage during the old sun time and so on.

We are looking back into the distant past and saying to ourselves: Just as we now go through the world as thinking beings, so these entities went through the world as thinking beings with the character of humanity. But what lived in them then has become an external world thought. And that which lived in them then in thought, so that it could only be seen from the outside as their aura of light, is then seen in the universe, appearing in the facts of light, so that we have to see dying worlds of thought in the facts of light. And now darkness plays a role in these light facts, and in contrast to the light, that which can be called the will in a soul-spiritual sense lives out in the darkness, which can also be called love with a more oriental turn of phrase. So that when we look out into the world, we see, on the one hand, the world of light, if I may say so; but we would not see this world of light, which would always be transparent to the senses, if darkness did not make itself perceptible in it. And in what now permeates the world as darkness, we have to look for what lives in us as will in the first stage of the soul. Just as the world outside can be seen as a harmony of darkness and light, so too can our own inner being, insofar as it initially spreads out in space, be seen as light and darkness. Only for our own consciousness is the light thought, imagination, the darkness in us will, goodness, love, and so on.

You see, we get a world view in which what is in the soul is only soul and what is outside in nature is only natural; we get a world view in which what is outside in nature is the result of earlier moral processes, where the light is dying worlds of thought. But this also means for us: When we carry our thoughts within us, they are initially, in that they live in us as thoughts, released from our past by virtue of their power. But we continually permeate our thoughts with the will from the rest of our organism. For precisely what we call purest thoughts are remnants from the distant past, permeated by the will. So that even pure thinking - I have stated this very energetically in the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” - is permeated by the will. But what we carry within us goes back to distant futures, and in distant futures what is now in us as the first germ will shine in the outer phenomena. There will then be beings who look out into the world as we now look out from the earth into the world, and these beings will say: “Nature shines around us.” Why does it shine for us as it does? Because deeds have been accomplished by people on earth in a certain way, because what we now see around us is the result of what people on earth have carried within themselves as a seed. — We now stand there, looking out into the natural world around us. We can stand there like dry, sober abstractors, we can analyze light and its phenomena as physicists do: we will analyze these phenomena coldly, as laboratory people; this will produce some very beautiful and ingenious results, but we do not then stand as full human beings in relation to the outer world. We can only face the outer world as fully human beings if we can feel what appears to us in the dawn, what appears to us in the blue firmament, what appears to us in the green plant, if we can feel what we perceive in the rippling wave – for light does not only refer to the light that can be perceived through the eye, but I use the term light here for all sensory perceptions. What do we see when we perceive what is around us? We see a world that can indeed uplift our soul, that reveals itself in a certain way for our soul as something we must have in order to be able to look meaningfully out into a meaningful world. We do not stand there as fully human beings when we merely face this world by analyzing it dryly as physicists. We only face this world as a whole human being when we say to ourselves: What glows there, what sounds there, is ultimately the result of what beings developed in their souls long ago in the distant past; we must be grateful to them. We do not look out into the world like dry physicists, we look out with feelings of gratitude towards those beings who, let us say, during the ancient Saturn time, lived as humans for so many millions of years, as we live today as humans, and who thought and felt in such a way that we have the wonderful world around us today. That is a significant result of a world view saturated with reality, in that it leads us to look out into the world not just as a dry, sober person, but full of gratitude for those beings in the most distant past who, through their thinking and their deeds, have brought about the world around us that lifts us up. Imagine this only with the necessary intensity, let yourself be filled with this idea of being obliged to thank the distant prehistoric men, because they have made our environment. Let yourself be filled with this thought, and then bring yourself to say to your soul: We must arrange our thoughts and feelings in the appropriate way, in a way that we have in mind as a moral ideal, so that those beings who come after us can look at an environment for which they must be just as grateful to us as we can be grateful to our distant ancestors, who now literally surround us in terms of their effects as guiding spirits. We see a luminous world today; millions of years ago it was a moral world. We carry a moral world within us; after millions of years it will be a world of light.

You see, a complete world view leads to this world-sensation. An incomplete world view, admittedly, leads to all kinds of ideas and concepts, to all kinds of theories about the world, but it does not fulfill the full human being, because it leaves his sensation empty. This has a very practical side, although today's man hardly yet realizes its practical side. But anyone who is honest about the world today knows that he must not let it go into decline; he wants to look to a school and college of the future where people do not go in at eight in the morning with a certain casual, indifferent feeling, and come out at eleven or twelve or one o'clock with the same casual, indifferent feeling, at most with a little pride that they have once again become so and so much smarter - let's assume they have become. No, one can direct one's gaze into a future perspective in which those who leave at eleven or twelve or one o'clock leave the places of learning with feelings towards the world that go out into the universe, in that, in addition to cleverness, the feeling toward the emerging world, the feeling of gratitude toward the very distant past, in which beings worked who shaped our surrounding nature as it is, and the feeling of great responsibility that we have because our moral impulses in us become later appearing worlds. It remains a belief, of course, when one wants to tell people: the primeval fog is real, the future slag is real, in between beings create moral illusions that rise up in them as foam. Belief does not say the latter; it would have to say it if it were honest. Is it not something essentially different when man says to himself: Yes, that which is retribution, that exists, because nature itself is so constituted that this retribution occurs: your thoughts become shining light. The moral world order reveals itself. What is the moral world order at one time is the physical world order at another time, and what is the physical world order at any one time was the moral world order at another time. Everything moral is destined to emerge into the physical. Does the person who views nature spiritually still need proof of a moral world order? No, in the spiritually comprehended nature itself lies the justification of the moral world order. One rises to this image when one regards man, I would like to say, in his full humanity.

Let us start with an occurrence that we all go through every day. We know that falling asleep and waking up are based on the human being in his I and his astral body detaching from the physical body and the etheric body. What does this actually mean in relation to the cosmos? Let us imagine that the physical body, etheric body, astral body and I are connected with each other for waking. Now let us imagine them separated for sleeping: What is the, I would say, cosmic difference between the two? You see, when you look at the state of sleep, you experience the light in this state of sleep. By experiencing the light, you experience the dying world of thoughts of the past. And by experiencing the dying world of thoughts of the past, you are inclined to have a receptivity to perceive the spiritual as it extends into the future. The fact that man today has only a dull perception of it does not change the matter. What is essential to us now is that we are receptive to the light in this state.

When we now submerge ourselves in the body, we become inwardly soulful – when I say inwardly soulful, it means that we are souls and not scales – we become soulful receptive by immersing ourselves in the body, in contrast to the light, for the darkness. But this is not a mere negative, but we become receptive to something else. Just as we were receptive to light when we slept, we become receptive to heaviness when we wake up. I said we are not scales; we do not become receptive to heaviness by weighing our bodies, but by immersing ourselves in our bodies, we become inwardly receptive to heaviness. Do not be surprised that this is somewhat vague at first when it is expressed. For the actual soul experience, ordinary consciousness is just as dormant when awake as it is when asleep. In sleep, a person in today's normal consciousness does not perceive how he lives in the light. When awake, he does not perceive how he lives in heaviness. But that is how it is: the basic experience of the sleeping human being is life in the light. In sleep, the soul is not receptive to heaviness, to the fact of heaviness. Heaviness is, as it were, taken from him. He lives in the light. He knows nothing of heaviness. He first learns to recognize heaviness inwardly, then subconsciously. But the imagination immediately picks up on this: he learns to recognize heaviness by immersing himself in his body.

This can be seen in spiritual scientific research in the following way. If you have raised yourself to the level of knowledge of imagination, then you can observe the etheric body of a plant. When you observe the etheric body of a plant, you will have the inner experience: This etheric body of the plant, it continually draws you upwards, it is weightless. If, on the other hand, you look at the etheric body of a human being, it has weight, even for the imaginative presentation. You simply have the feeling: it is heavy. And from there one then comes to recognize that, for example, the etheric body of the human being is something that, when the soul is in it, gives the soul heaviness. But it is a supersensible archetypal phenomenon. When asleep, the soul lives in the light and therefore in lightness. When awake, the soul lives in heaviness. The body is heavy. This force is transferred to the soul. The soul lives in heaviness. This means something that is now transferred to consciousness. Think of the moment you wake up, what does it consist of? When you are asleep, you are lying in bed, you do not move, the will is paralyzed. However, the images are also paralyzed, but the images are only paralyzed because the will is paralyzed, because the will does not shoot into your own body, does not make use of the senses, and therefore the images are paralyzed. The basic fact is the lameness of the will. What makes the will active? The fact that the soul feels heaviness through the body. This coexistence with the soul [heaviness] gives the earthly human being the fact of the will. And the cessation of the will of the human being himself occurs when the human being is in the light.

So you have presented the two cosmic forces, light and gravity, as the great contradictions in the cosmos. Indeed, light and gravity are cosmic contradictions. If you imagine the planet: gravity pulls towards the center, the light points away from the center into the universe (arrows). One thinks of the light only as being at rest. In truth, it points out from the planet. Anyone who thinks of gravity as a force of attraction, in other words in Newtonian terms, is actually thinking in a rather materialistic way, because they are thinking that there is actually something like a demon or something sitting inside the earth, with a rope that you can't see, and it is pulling the stone towards it. People talk about a force of attraction, which no one can ever prove anywhere other than in their imagination. But people talk about this force of attraction. Now, people may not want to sensualize this thing, but they may talk about the force of attraction in Newtonian terms. In Western culture, it will always be the case that whatever is there must be presented in some way that can be sensed by the senses. So someone could say to people: Well, you can imagine the force of attraction as an invisible cord; but then you must at least imagine light as a kind of swinging down, as a kind of flinging off. You would then have to imagine light as a flinging-off force. For those who prefer to remain in reality, it is enough if they can simply understand the cosmic contrast between light and gravity.

And now, you see, what I am about to say concerns many things related to the human being. When we look at the everyday event of falling asleep and waking up, we say: when we fall asleep, we leave the field of heaviness and enter the field of light. By living in the field of light, he gets, if he has lived long enough without gravity, again a vivid desire to be embraced by the gravity, and he returns to the gravity again, he wakes up. It is a continuous oscillation between life in the light and life in the gravity, waking up and falling asleep. If someone develops their sensory abilities to a higher degree, they will be able to directly perceive this as a personal experience, this sense of rising from heaviness into the light, and then being taken up by heaviness when waking up.

But now imagine something else, now imagine that the human being is bound to the earth as a being between birth and death. He is bound to the earth by the fact that in this state between birth and death, when his soul has lived in the light for a while, it will always hunger for heaviness again and return to a state of heaviness. When we talk about this in more detail, a state has been reached in which this hunger for heaviness no longer exists, then man will follow the light more and more. He does this up to a certain limit (see red line in the illustration). He follows the light up to a certain limit, and when he has reached the outermost periphery of the universe, he has used up what gravity gave him between birth and death. Then a new longing for gravity begins, and he returns to his path (see white line in the illustration) to a new incarnation. So that also in that interim between death and a new birth, around the midnight hour of existence, a kind of hunger for heaviness arises. This is initially the most general concept for what man experiences as a longing to return to a new earth life. But now, while man returns to a new earth life, he will have to go through the sphere of neighboring, of the other celestial bodies. These have the most diverse effects on him, and the result of these effects he then brings with him into this physical life by entering it through conception. From this you can see that it is important to ask: what position do the stars occupy in the spheres through which the person passes? For, depending on the sphere through which the person passes, his longing for the heaviness of the earth takes on different forms. Not only the earth, so to speak, radiates a certain heaviness, which the person longs for again, but also the other heavenly bodies, whose spheres he passes through as he moves towards a new life, have an effect on him with their gravity. So that man, by returning, can indeed come into different situations, which justify saying, for example, that man returning to earth longs to live in the gravity of the earth again. But he first passes through the sphere of Jupiter. Jupiter also radiates a heaviness, but one that is suitable for adding a certain joyful note to the longing for the heaviness of the earth. So not only will the longing for the heaviness of the earth live in the soul, but this longing will also receive a joyful nuance. The person passes through the sphere of Mars. He longs for the heaviness of the earth. A joyful mood is already in him. Mars also has an effect on him with its heaviness, planting, as it were, the activity in the soul that joyfully longs for earthly heaviness, to enter into this earthly heaviness in order to make powerful use of the next physical life between birth and death. Now the soul has already progressed so far that in its subconscious depths it has the impulse to long clearly for the heaviness of the earth and to make powerful use of the earthly incarnation, so that the longing joy, the joyful yearning, is expressed with intensity. Man still passes through the sphere of Venus. A loving grasp of the tasks of life is added to this joyful longing, which tends towards strength.

You see, we are talking about different types of gravity emanating from celestial bodies and relating them to what can live in the soul. Again, by looking out into space, we seek to address the spatial-physical at the same time as the moral. If we know that the will lives in the forces of gravity and if we know on the other hand that the light is opposed to the will, we may say: From Mars light is reflected, from Jupiter light is reflected, from Venus light is reflected; in the forces of gravity the modification through the light lives at the same time. We know that dying world thoughts live in the light, and that nascent worlds live in the forces of gravity through will-germs. All this radiates through the souls as they move through space. We consider the world physically, and at the same time we consider it morally. A physical and a moral aspect do not coexist. Man is only inclined to say this in his limitedness: on the one hand is the physical, on the other the moral. No, these are only different aspects, they are unified in themselves. The world, which develops towards the light, develops at the same time towards retribution, towards revealing retribution. A meaningful cosmic order reveals itself out of the natural cosmic order.

One must be clear about the fact that one does not arrive at such a world view through a philosophical interpretation, but that one grows into it by gradually learning to spiritualize physical concepts through spiritual science; in this way it moralizes itself. And when one learns to see through the world of the physical into the world in which the physical has ceased to exist and the spiritual is present, one recognizes: morality is present there.

You see, people today could really come to this conclusion from certain ideas. I just want to show this to you at the end, although it is outside the way of thinking of most of you. I would like to say that it takes a great deal of study to understand what I have just said. So you have this line, which is not an ellipse, but which differs from the ellipse in that it is more curved here (drawing on the left) – you often see this line on buildings – the ellipse would be something like this (dotted line). But this is only one special form of this line; this line can also, if you change the mathematical equation, take on this shape (lemniscate). It is the same line as the other one. Sometimes I go around like this and close here; but under certain conditions I don't go up to the top like that, but go around like this and then return again and close at the bottom. But the same line has another form. If I start here, I only appear to close here; now I have to get out of the plane, out of the room, have to go over here, come back here. Now I have to go out of the room again, have to continue the line here and close it at the bottom. Only the line is somewhat modified. These are not two lines, it is only one line, and it also has only one mathematical equation; it is a single line, only that I go out of the room. If you continue this idea, then the other is also possible: I can simply take this line (lemniscate), but I can also imagine this line in such a way that its half lies within the space; by getting around here, I have to go out of the space. I have to go out of the room, then I finish it like this: here is the other half, but it is only outside the usual room, it is not inside the usual room. It is also there. And if one were to develop this way of thinking, which mathematicians, for example, could have today if they wanted, if one were to develop this way of thinking, one would come to a different conception of going out of space and coming back into space. This is something that corresponds to reality. For every time you set out to do something, you think the thing you have set out to do; before you want to, you go out of the room, and when you move your hand, you go back into the room. In between, you are out of the room, and you are on the other side of the room.

This idea must be developed thoroughly — from the other side of the room. Then one comes to the idea of the truly supersensible, but above all, one comes to the idea of the moral in its reality. The reality of the moral can be so difficult to imagine from today's world view because people want to imagine everything they want to imagine in space, to determine it in terms of mass, weight and number, whereas in fact reality at every point, I might say, in space transcends space and returns to space. There are people who imagine a solar system, comets in the solar system, and they say: The comet appears, then it goes through a huge long ellipse and then it comes back after a long time. — That is not true for many comets. It is the case that comets appear, they go out, scatter here, stop, but form again from the other side, form again from here and come back from there, describe lines that do not return at all. Why? Because comets leave space and return from a completely different place. It is entirely possible in the cosmos for comets to disperse from space and return from a different place in space.

In tomorrow's continuation of these considerations, I will not torment you with the ideas that I presented to you in the last ten minutes, because I know that they would be far removed from the range of ideas of a large number of you. But I must sometimes point out that this spiritual science, as it is cultivated here, could count on the most highly developed scientific ideas if the opportunity were available, if in other words there were the possibility of really permeating with spirit what is being done today in a spiritless way, especially in the so-called exact sciences. Unfortunately, this possibility does not exist; in particular, things like mathematics and so on are mostly done in the most spiritless way today. And that is why, as I emphasized during my recent public lecture in Basel, spiritual science is for the time being dependent on making itself felt to educated laymen — which many people who now want to be considered learned reproach it for. If scholars were not so lazy when it came to spiritual contemplation, spiritual science would not need to assert itself only before educated laymen, because it can count on the highest scientific ideas and, up to these highest scientific ideas, also counts on complete accuracy because it is aware of its responsibility.

Of course, the scientists behave in a very peculiar way in the face of these things. You see, there is a learned gentleman - I already pointed him out in a public lecture recently - who has obviously heard that university courses have been held here in Dornach. He had heard something about the Waldorf School and had apparently read my inaugural address for the Waldorf School and another essay in the “Waldorf-Nachrichten”. In the inaugural address, I mentioned a pedagogue out of context who is a kindred spirit of that scholar in many ways. On such occasions, the gentlemen who so often accuse anthroposophy of leading to suggestion or autosuggestion are immediately hypnotized because they hear: “Someone was mentioned who is a scientific comrade of mine.” The gentleman then became very attentive. Now it became obviously clear to him from all that has been achieved at the Dornach School of Spiritual Science. Nevertheless, he could not refrain from writing the following: “At the anthroposophical college courses in Dornach near Basel, which took place in the fall of this year, it was hoped that great and powerful ideas would be introduced from here to initiate a new development of our nation and breathe new life into it. Anyone who examines the ethical foundations of this movement at its true value cannot share this hope unless these foundations are subjected to critical examination, which is what the above lines are intended to encourage.

Now, why were these “above lines” actually written? So the university courses, their ethical basis must be examined, subjected to criticism, because they must have something to do with what such a gentleman now has to declaim, what he calls the moral low, because he begins his essay, which he has titled “Ethical Mis »: «In times of a moral low such as the German people have probably never experienced, it is doubly important to defend the great landmarks of morality, as established by Kant and Herbart, and not to let them be shifted in favor of relativistic inclinations. The words of Baron von Stein, that a people can only remain strong through the virtues by which it has become great, must be considered one of the most important tasks in the midst of the dissolution of all moral concepts today.

Now the man dates the dissolution of moral concepts since the war and finds one very remarkable: “That a writing of the leader of the anthroposophists in Germany, Dr. Rudolf Steiner, is involved in this dissolution, must be particularly regretted, since one the idealistic basic feature of this movement, which aims at a strong internalization of the individual human being“ - that is what he has taken from a few essays in the ‘Waldorfnachrichten’ - ‘cannot be denied, and in his plan of the threefold social order, which was discussed in No. 222 of the ’Tags”, one can find healthy ideas that promote the welfare of the people. But in the book “The Philosophy of Freedom” (Berlin 1918), he takes his individualistic approach to such an extreme that it leads to the dissolution of the social community and must therefore be fought."

So you will see: in 1918, the “Philosophy of Freedom” was written out of the moral low that resulted from the war! Of course, the good man did not care about the “Philosophy of Freedom” for decades, when it was around, only read the last edition, namely 1918, so carefully that he did not notice how old this book is, that it certainly dates from the time when he talked about how wonderfully far we have come, to what clarification, where he has not yet spoken of a moral low for a long time: Well, so! Such is the conscientiousness of these youth educators. The man is not only a professor of philosophy, but above all an educator. So he not only has to teach at universities, but also educate children pedagogically. And he is so well educated himself that he perceives the writing as having been written in 1918, the “Philosophy of Freedom.” Therefore, it is also easy for him to report on the purpose of this writing. Consider the situation: in 1893, the “Philosophy of Freedom” appears. So the ideas arise at that time. If one assumes that the “Philosophy of Freedom” was published at that time, what sense do the following words make, which are almost the culmination of the whole essay: “But these free people of Dr. Steiner are no longer human. They have already entered the world of angels on earth. Anthroposophy has helped them to do so.”

Now, I ask you: in 1893, the “Philosophy of Freedom” was published with the intention of providing people with the ethics that anthroposophy helps them to achieve: “Would it not be an unspeakable blessing in the midst of the manifold confusions of earthly life to be able to place oneself in such surroundings? Assuming that a small group succeeds in stripping away all that is human and entering into a purer existence in which the truly free are allowed to live fully beyond good and evil, what remains for the broad masses of the people who are most closely intertwined with the material needs and worries of life?

So you see, the matter is presented as if the “Philosophy of Freedom” had been published in Berlin in 1918, and anthroposophy was there to educate the people described in the “Philosophy of Freedom”!

With this conscientiousness our scholars write about things today. It is the same conscientiousness with which a doctor of theology writes that a nine-meter-high statue of Christ has been fabricated, with Luciferian features at the top and animalistic features at the bottom, despite the fact that the statue of Christ has a purely human ideal face at the top and is still a wooden block at the bottom, in other words, is not there at all yet. He does not just describe it as if someone had told him, this doctor of theology, but he writes as if he had established this fact, as if he had been there himself. This reminds me of the anecdote I mentioned in Basel in public, about how someone determines whether he is sober or drunk when he comes home in the evening: he lies down in bed and places a cylinder in front of him on the bedspread; if he can see it clearly, he is sober; if he sees it double, he is drunk. You have to be at least in that state if you see what is being made here as a statue of Christ as that doctor of theology saw it.

But, leaving these attacks aside, in this case one can still ask the question: What kind of theologians are they? What kind of Christians are they? What kind of educators are they for young people, who have such a relationship to truth and truthfulness, and what must a science look like that is endowed with such a feeling for truth and truthfulness? But such a science is actually represented today by most people in lecterns and in books; humanity lives from such science. Among all the other tasks it has, spiritual science also has the task of purifying our spiritual atmosphere from those vapors of untruthfulness, of mendacity, which does not just prevail in the outer life, which can be proven today down to the depths of the individual sciences. And it is from these depths that what has such a devastating effect on social life emanates. The courage must be mustered to shine the right light on these things. But for that, it is necessary first to warm to a world view that really bridges the moral world order and the physical world order, in that the shining sun can be seen both as the concentration of descending of thought worlds, and that which bubbles up from the depths of the earth can be seen at the same time as the preparation of that which lives on into the future, in the form of germs, volitional forces that permeate the world volitionally. We will continue this discussion tomorrow.