The Rudolf Steiner Archive

From the observations we made here the day before yesterday, and perhaps also in a broader sense from the public observations of these days, it will be seen that there is a certain necessity for humanity to develop spiritual-scientific interests, especially in the present day. For this spiritual science, in addition to its other tasks in the narrower sense for the individual human being, for his mind, his needs in life, his soul matters, is in a position to create clarity about certain things that man in the present must absolutely consider. And it is from this point of view that I have emphasized the necessity of regarding the seriousness with which spiritual science must be taken by those who approach it today, and of allowing it to appeal above all to the soul. We must try to explore in the most diverse directions how humanity could end up in such a catastrophic situation. For what this catastrophic situation means is still not considered by many people today in its full depth and with full seriousness. But the time will come when the events themselves, the facts themselves, will reveal this seriousness in a completely different way than is already the case today. But precisely on the basis of spiritual science, one should realize that it is not enough to wait until the very last moment, so to speak, to understand what one needs to understand in the face of the deeply dormant demands of the time. Above all, it is necessary to be prepared to face the fact that certain truths, which are necessary for humanity in the present and in the near future, are uncomfortable, that it is much more comfortable to sing the praises of how we have come so gloriously far in this or that respect, through the great achievements of cultural studies achievements, than to point out what is effective and alive in the relationships of human beings themselves, and what is effective and alive in particular in order to condition the character of contemporary humanity, so to speak. Contemporary humanity is challenged in many ways, it is necessarily led to understand this and that; but some things that are to be understood are just uncomfortable to understand, and require a certain unreserved, unprejudiced assessment of one's own human nature.

Certain tendencies exist in the development of time. Hypothetically, one can say that it would indeed be possible to continue to regard such things as something great, such as the so-called examination of aptitude mentioned the day before yesterday. Certain contemporary educators, namely, propagate these things, regard them as something tremendously great, and the rest of humanity disdains to form an opinion about these things, finds it inconvenient not to sleep in the face of such Ahrimanic tendencies, as they are introduced by something like the aptitude test and many other things. If such endeavors, such ideals – and of course they are ideals too – are to continue to exist, then this will have a profound influence on the whole development of the human soul, and above all a very specifically configured influence on the basic powers of the human soul: thinking, feeling and willing. One may hypothetically ask oneself, for it is not to take place, it is to be remedied by the efforts of those who profess the anthroposophical world view, but hypothetically one may ask oneself in order to know what one has to do: What configuration must the three main soul forces of man take on if such tendencies, as they are currently prevailing from the materialistic attitude, from the Ahrimanic, were to take hold alone, if they were not countered by spiritual striving, spiritual will? However great and powerful the influence of technical progress, which is fed by natural science, and of progress in other fields of natural science, may be, this very progress in natural science, this very structure of present-day thinking, will gradually impress more and more the character of narrow-mindedness, of limitation, on human imagination, on human thinking. There is no other way to characterize it, because in the broadest sense, I would say, the beginning of this narrow-mindedness, this limitation, is already apparent today, and it will consist in the fact that one will sin more and more

against something that was asserted in a public lecture yesterday: one will sin against opening up the whole soul to the world. More and more, people will limit themselves to listening theoretically and intellectually to what the concepts and ideas say. I also wanted to publicly point out that two people can say exactly the same thing with words, and one is by no means justified in thinking that what comes from both people is the same.

Today we live in the age of programs. The age of programs is precisely the age of intellectualism. What is it that people most like to do today when they devote themselves to the good of humanity? They found associations for all kinds of causes and set up programs and ideals. These can, of course, be very ingenious, very benevolent, very plausible; for the development of humanity they need not be worth a shot of powder. But one goes out of one's way to ask oneself: What does the person in question want? And if the person in question says – now, let's take something abstract, today one loves abstractions –: I want to cultivate universal philanthropy, then one thinks: What better thing could one do? Of course, one must join such an association! But we live in a time when, due to a certain oversaturation that culture has attained, it is extremely easy to come up with the most beautiful programs and the most beautiful ideas. In this regard, one can be a very limited person in terms of one's sense of and interest in the overall well-being of humanity and its true concerns. I might add that today, in the more delicate matters of culture, one can sometimes be right in the higher sense about things in which, according to the opinion of very many people, one is perhaps completely wrong. Thus, for example, today one may be led to set a higher value on poetic stammering which really and truly heralds the power of the inner soul than on perfect verses which are recognized as such simply because, as regards the outward configuration of poetry, language itself, the spirit of language, writes verses today and only employs the human soul to do so. Today, anyone can make brilliant verses in terms of the old verse style, even if they have no strong soul power. Such things must be taken into account in a time when great, eminently great questions arise for the development of mankind, as in this present time.

So it must be said: People must learn to open their whole soul to whole souls; people must learn to hold less and less to the content of what is said, and they must learn to gain more and more insight into the knowledge and power of what is brought into the world by this or that personality. We are, after all, experiencing the most terrible world-historical drama, that people all over the world worship principles such as those emanating from Woodrow Wilson, because these principles are plausible, because these principles cannot be refuted. Of course they are plausible, and of course they cannot be refuted, but they are as old as human thought; they have always been said that way. In all these things, there is nothing that is connected with the real, concrete, immediately present tasks. But people find it uncomfortable to put themselves in the position of the real, concrete, immediately present tasks, to develop the flexibility of thought. For this flexibility of thinking is part of the process of entering into the immediately concrete. Of course, it sometimes takes a long time to find one's way into this concrete; but today it is necessary to understand such things, to enter a little into the soul of the development of humanity.

There is a city in which a southern German population lives. In this city, a very important personality arose in the 18th century: Johann Heinrich Lambert. Kant, who was a contemporary of Johann Heinrich Lambert, called Lambert the greatest genius of his century; for if only Lambert's ideas had taken the place of the so-called Kant-La Place theory, something very significant would have emerged. This Lambert grew up in a city, which is now a southern German city, as the son of a tailor, and showed special talent at the age of fourteen. His father petitioned the city's council for support. After much effort, the council finally agreed to donate forty francs for the talented boy, on the condition that he never again request support. A hundred years had to pass before the city erected a monument to this man in the 1840s, the same city that had chased him out when he was fourteen. He was forced to leave the city and achieved greatness through special circumstances in Berlin. Now there is a beautiful monument, with a globe at the top to suggest that this genius was born out of this great, powerful city, which was able to harbor such geniuses, that the genius who knew how to embrace the world comes from this very soil!

Sometimes it takes even longer than a hundred years to realize what is teeming with talent. That may be, it may have been until our time. But how often has it been emphasized among us that the time has come when people must awaken to a free, self-reliant consciousness, in which people can no longer afford to be unaware of what is going on around them. This time is approaching with giant strides. People must learn to unlock their souls in order to see what is really there. Because, as I said, thinking is threatened by the peculiar configuration of materialistic culture, imagination is limited and becomes narrow-minded. Spiritual science provides concepts and ideas that do not allow one to become narrow-minded in one's thinking. One is constantly being asked, precisely through spiritual scientific concepts, to look at a thing from the most diverse sides. That is why even today many people in the spiritual science ranks are annoyed when they hear: Now a new cycle is coming, the matter will be approached from a completely different angle. — But it is inevitable that things are approached from the most diverse angles, and that we finally get beyond what I would call the absolutization of judgment. The truth, grasped in the spirit, cannot be well expressed in sharp contours because the spirit is a moving thing. So spiritual science works against narrow-mindedness in relation to thinking. Of course, it is difficult to say this to the present, but it is necessary.

The second faculty observed in the soul is feeling. Regarding feeling, regarding the world of feeling, what tendency does humanity strive towards from its materialistic culture? One can say that it has come a long way precisely in this area. In the realm of feeling, materialistic “culture” produces narrow-mindedness, philistinism. Our materialistic culture is particularly inclined to grow into the gigantic. Narrow-mindedness of interests! In the narrowest circle, people want to close themselves more and more. But today man is no longer called to close himself in the narrowest circle, today he is called to recognize how he is a tone in the great cosmic symphony.

Let us once again consider something, in order to immediately look at what is meant here from a comprehensive point of view, something that has already been mentioned here. I would like to say: you can calculate – and today people believe a lot in calculation – in what a wonderful way man fits into the cosmos. In one minute, we take about eighteen breaths. If you multiply that by twenty-four hours in a day, you get 25,920 breaths. Twenty-four hours, 25,920 breaths! Now try to calculate the following: You know that every year the vernal point, the rising point of the sun in spring, moves a little further along the vault of heaven. Let's go back to very distant times. The sun rose in Taurus in spring, then a little further in Taurus and again a little further until it entered Aries, and then again further, and so the sun goes around, apparently of course. How many years does it take for the Sun to move forward a little bit at a time in this jerky manner so that it arrives back at the same point? The Sun makes many such jerks: it takes 25,920 years to move forward in this way, which means that the Sun completes one revolution in the great cosmos in 25,920 years, in as many years as we take breaths in one day. Imagine what a wonderful coincidence that is! We breathe 25,920 times in a day, the sun advances, and when it has made the jerk 25,920 times, like our inner jerk, a breath, then it has come around the cosmos once. So we are a reflection of the macrocosm with our breathing.

It goes further: the average lifespan – this can of course go much further, but some people die earlier – the lifespan is on average seventy, seventy-one years. What is this actually, this human life? It is also a sum of breaths. Only they are different breaths. In ordinary physical breathing, we suck in the air and expel it. In a twenty-four-hour day, if we are ordinary, righteous people and do not go out at night in rags, we take a deep inhalation of our ego and the astral body when we wake up, and exhale our ego and astral body again when we fall asleep: that is also a breath. Every day is a breath of our physical and etheric body in relation to the I and the astral body. How often do we do that in a lifetime that lasts about seventy, seventy-one years? Calculate how many days a person actually lives: 25,920 days! That means that not only in one day do we imitate the course of the sun in the world by developing as many breaths as the sun makes jolts until it returns to the same point in the cosmos, but we also perform the great breath, the inhalation of the I and the astral body into the physical and etheric bodies, and the exhalation of the I and the astral body into the seventy-one years just as often as we breathe in one day: 25,920 times, which is the number of times the sun moves before it returns to the same point. We could cite many such things that show us how we, with our human lives, stand in the great harmony of the universe in terms of numbers and otherwise, and they would be no less surprising, no less magnificent, than if we feel what I have just explained. Much is hidden in the circumstances in which man stands in the world, but this hiddenness has its profound effect because it is actually the same as what was understood in ancient times as the harmony of the spheres.

This, indeed, calls forth our interest in the whole world. We are gradually learning to understand that we know nothing about ourselves as human beings if we restrict our interest in a philistine way to our immediate surroundings. But this has become more and more the characteristic of modern times, philistinism! Indeed, philistinism has become the basic tenor of the religious world view; and from there this basic tenor of philistinism radiated into many minds. Go back to the first centuries of Christianity: there was a doctrine that was grandiose. It was for that time. Today it must be replaced by our spiritual-scientific view, because different times make different demands on humanity, but at that time it was a grandiose doctrine, Gnosticism. Consider the magnificent way in which these Gnostics thought, in the research of the eons, in the research of the various spiritual hierarchies, how this small earth is aligned with the great cosmic world evolution with its many, many entities, but in whose ranks man is placed after all. It took flexibility of thought, a certain goodwill to develop one's concepts, not to let them calcify, become slimy, as one does now, in order to rise to Gnosis. Then came — not Christianity, but Christian confessionality. And ask around today what most official representatives of Christianity hate most of all: Gnosis. And they blacken anthroposophy most of all for that reason; they do not concern themselves with anthroposophy itself, they are too lazy for that, but when they glance into some book they have a dark suspicion, a dark notion: it could be some kind of gnosis too, for heaven's sake! We must take in new ideas, we must make the mind agile! We have finally brought people to simplicity of thought, especially in the religious sphere. It is said that one cannot gauge what will come of it when one soars to such lofty heights! – It is said: Man can indeed come to reach the highest divine in the simplest mind; there is no need to make an effort, but the simplest, childlike mind can reach the highest divine at every moment.

Yes, we must see through these things! It is important to really look at these things, because the prevailing mood of modern times, the philistinism, emanates from these things. That is why the religious sentiment in the various denominations has become so philistine, because what I have just described underlies it. Today it flatters people who pretend to be modest, but who are actually terribly immodest at heart, because immodesty, megalomania, is a fundamental characteristic of our time. Everything is judged, no matter how difficult it is experienced, no matter how much difficulty it bears on the forehead: it is judged, even by the one who can well know that he has not particularly endeavored to much experience, who only endeavored to arrive at the self-evident: that no effort must be made to recognize God, but that God must surrender Himself at all times to the simplest, most childlike mind if it wants Him. So one must see that philistinism must be pushed back by spiritual science before all else. But philistinism is rooted quite differently than is often assumed today, and many of those who believe that they have truly escaped philistinism are in fact mired in it up to their necks. Many “isms” and many modernisms that make it their program not to be like the philistines are actually nothing more than the most masked philistinism. That is the second point. In the realm of thinking and imagination, the encroaching narrow-mindedness must be pushed back; in the realm of feeling, the advancing philistinism. Broad-mindedness of interest must take its place, the will to really look at what is going on in the great tableau of earthly development.

The day before yesterday, we tried to characterize the effect of the folk spirits in concrete terms. These are archangels. From this you could already see that these folk spirits are connected with the places where certain people develop on earth. The folk spirit in Italy works through the air, and it works through everything liquid in the areas of present-day France and so on, as I have characterized it. But naturally these things intersect with many others, and one must be clear about the fact that people live side by side on earth, that certain phases of development are left behind in certain areas. In some cases, people advance them, in others they even cause them to decline. Now there is something tremendously significant to observe. If we regard the whole earth as an organism and ask ourselves: What is happening all over the earth? we can begin by looking at various areas of Asia, the Asian East, as it is called. In this Asian East, there are many souls incarnating today that, due to their karma, due to what they have brought with them from previous lives on earth, are still stuck in earlier peculiarities of human development. These are souls seeking bodies in which they can still be dependent on physical development up to a certain advanced age. The normal thing is that today one is only dependent up to the twenty-seventh year. This is what represents the fundamental character of our time: that one is dependent on physical development until the age of twenty-seven. This is very significant in our time. One understands much in our time when one considers these things. I have already pointed this out here.

I once asked myself: What would a person be like who was supposed to be the very type of our time, how would he have to enter this time with all his work, with all his activity? — He would have to, so to speak, exclude from himself everything that is otherwise brought to people from outside and affects them, leaving them to their own devices until the age of twenty-seven. He would have to be what is called a self-made man, a self-made person. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should be little affected by what the normal, the representative in our time, should be. Until the age of twenty-seven, he should develop entirely on his own. Then, just after he has made of himself what a modern man can make of himself, then, for example, he would have to be elected to parliament. Isn't it true that being elected to parliament is what it means to be in touch with the times today? Then, when he has been elected to parliament and after a few years has even become a minister, then he is in a sense stigmatized, then people notice later when one falls over in one direction or another and has this or that mishap. And then? How must it continue? One can no longer develop, one remains the type of one's time, one is the right representative of one's time. There are people like that today, as I said here some time ago: Lloyd George, for example. There is no one who expresses more characteristically and typically what is present in our time than Lloyd George, who by the age of twenty-seven had brought forth everything that a person can draw from the physical body. He was an autodidact, he came into life early, into socialism, and learned early on that at twenty-seven, you belong in Parliament. He was elected to Parliament and very soon became one of the most feared speakers there, even one of the most feared squinters – that's what they say: squinters – he always sat there and lurked when others were talking. There was something special about the way he looked up, that was well known to Lloyd George. Then the Campbell-Bannerman ministry came. Then they said: What do we do about Lloyd George? He's dangerous. It's best to make him a minister. And so they took him into the ministry. Yes, but to which ministerial post do we transfer him? He is a very talented person! Well, we transfer him to a position where he understands nothing. There he will be most useful, there he will be the least trouble! - He was made Minister of Railways and Shipbuilding. In a few months he acquired what he needed. He made the greatest reforms, the greatest things.

Surely, the type of man of the present cannot be better described than by portraying Lloyd George. It is as if it is concentrated, as if it is the essence of the materialism of the present, and one can understand much of the present if one is able to go into something like this. That is how it is in the middle of the world, I would like to say, between the Asian East and the American West. It is particularly the case in European culture that up to the age of twenty-seven one can extract from the bodily-physical what can also be significant for the soul-spiritual. Then a spiritual impulse must be aroused in the soul if one wants to progress, for the physical body has nothing more to give. Therefore, in a person like Lloyd George, everything that the present gives by itself is there, but he also has nothing of what is to be freely achieved. The present naturally gives much genius, many talents, but it gives nothing spiritual by itself. That must be conquered through freedom. But in Asia there is still ample opportunity to find bodies that allow the soul-spiritual development to continue beyond the twenty-seventh or twenty-eighth year. Therefore, souls incarnate there that still want to gain something from the physical body beyond this time. That is why there is still a spiritual culture, a culture that insists that the things around us be looked at spiritually, that the spiritual be recognized in the world. Of course, there is also a great deal of decadence in the East because materialism has spread, and since it is least suitable for the East, decadence has the greatest effect there. But among those who are the leading people, you can see how a natural spirituality is still present. They inwardly despise European materialistic culture in the most comprehensive sense. People like Rabindranath Tagore, who recently gave a speech about the spirit of Japan, who says: We Orientals naturally adopt European achievements for our external technical cultural conditions; but we put them in our sheds, in our stables, and certainly don't let them enter our living rooms, this European culture - because the spiritual is a matter of course for him. Today, we need to know such things, for these things are the basic forces of what is happening in the world, and on which world events depend today.

You will say: Yes, but we do have, for example, in our Central European culture, a firm foundation for a spirituality that is even based on clear, bright ideas! — We do have that too, and we can speak of this spirituality in the same way that I tried to speak of a forgotten current in German intellectual life in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man). In order to be imbued with a spirituality that would truly go beyond what Oriental spirituality has achieved in the development of humanity, we need only imbibe the wonderful imaginations that we find, for example, in Herder or Goethe. Oriental culture has not produced anything as great as Herder, who sees a picture of the new creation of the world in every new sunrise and describes it in a magnificent way. Those who do not want to be philistines today are still such philistines that they say: You no longer care about something that is so ancient – and if you ask people about Herder, it has long been forgotten. And the Oriental, when he judges the circumstances, naturally judges that which lives in the outer real current of Central European culture.

Read the perceptive Chinese scholar Xu Hung-Ming, who has sympathetically described Central European culture, or read the lecture that Rabindranath Tagore recently gave. Then you will see that people are asking themselves: What is the position of this Europe in the overall progress of humanity? — They have an inkling that this Central Europe would be called upon to lead people beyond what spiritualism has given them itself. But then they look to see whether this Central Europe has not failed to develop the great talents, the great seeds that are there, that it contains. People say that they had a Goethe; yes, but these honest, materialistic Germans do not know how to make use of him! When his last grandchild died, there was another opportunity to introduce Goetheanism into German spiritual life. Under the truly incomparably magnificent aegis of a German princess, the Goethe-Schiller Archive was founded. A great impulse was given in the 1880s. The Goethe Society was also founded, but they were constantly embarrassed to appoint someone to the top who would really have dealt with the spirituality of Goethe. They did not find that worthy, and in the last election they did not put a person at the head of the Goethe Society who would be steeped in the spirituality inspired by Goethe, but they appointed a former finance minister. Yes, but after such things the world must judge what is happening in Central Europe! Today, Goethe's heritage is administered by a former finance minister who, admittedly, has the symptomatic first name “Kreuzwendedich” (which means “Turn Yourself Around”). But I don't know if, if the symbolism of this first name were to be fulfilled, something better would take its place.

These things could only change if the place of narrow-minded interests were taken by great interests, if people really looked at how the impulses work across the earth, how the bodies in the east, I would like to say, make a somewhat spirituality for the souls who want to incarnate in such bodies today with a retarded spirituality, which still gives something of the physical body for the souls beyond the twenty-seventh year. In the East, people remain at an earlier stage of human development, they stop at what humanity has already gone through. Here in the middle, people have reached the point where a change must take place, where they can draw what is necessary from the physical body up to the age of twenty-seven. But for the further development of the human soul, if one does not want to grow old early and does not want to have nothing of one's youth, one must have a spiritual-soul impulse, a free spiritual impulse, not, like the Oriental, an unfree spiritual impulse.

If we go further west, to America, humanity is so constituted that it lags behind, that it does not reach this level. In the Orient, humanity has, in a sense, regressed to earlier stages; in the middle, you have the normal age; in the West, in America – I characterized it the day before yesterday – the subterranean of the earth is at work. Even on such minds as Woodrow Wilson, it has the effect of being obsessed by their own words, their own principles. They are like prematurely aged children, but the word has a slightly different connotation. They cannot achieve the full impact of what can be achieved up to the age of twenty-seven. Once we understand what makes such a strong impression on many people in the present day, we will ask ourselves, for example: How could it be that a mind like Woodrow Wilson's, which with its age never absorbed more than one absorbs up to the age of twenty-seven, could become the great world schoolmaster? — The breadth of interest to really bring such things to mind in a genuine way, you just don't have that. You don't want to get out of philistinism!

That remarkable trend in the evolution of humanity, which is characterized by the following: from the East to the West, from the preservation of an earlier time through the normal middle to the decadence of the West - this is to be found in the development of nations and the earth, not in the individual human being. Interest in it must be developed so that one knows what impulses are at work across the earth and so that one can evaluate them. And for a long time, the main influence here in the center of Europe came from the south, with the culture of Central Europe being permeated by Greco-Roman influences. The conservative nature of the south was adopted. Today we stand at a turning point. A particularly progressive element of the north must permeate the population of central Europe. And this special, I would say, favorable impulse of the Hyperborean time for today must pass through our soul. This is what must be taken into account. Otherwise, if man does not open his eyes and soul to these great impulses of human evolution, the earth will take a wrong direction of development, will not become humus for the cosmic world structure, and that which the last epoch of evolution of the earth should mean must be taken up by another planet.

There are great interests at stake. It is necessary to work one's way out of philistinism and develop towards great interests. Only by acquiring such interests can one come to evaluate certain phenomena of our present time in the right way. It can be clearly seen that human natures are bifurcating in our time. This is only the beginning today; but people are bifurcating. Some are natures that, so to speak, harden the physical body within themselves. They develop it in a certain hardening up to the age of twenty-seven, then they stop, they reject the spiritual-soul. If they do not have constant stimulation to stir up humanity, to lead humanity to disaster, like Lloyd George, then they become dull, stale, and turn into right-wing philistinism, becoming dull. In one direction lies the dulling of humanity. The others abandon themselves to all the driving, pulsating forces of the physical body until they are twenty-seven years old, drawing all spirituality out of the physical body. There is much in the physical. Do not forget, we all come into the world with tremendous wisdom; we only have to transform this wisdom into consciousness, to transform what is full of wisdom in our entire physical being. Spiritual science attempts to bring everything in the nerves, blood and muscles into consciousness in a harmonious, spiritualized way. Spiritual science rejects not only the dull-witted, but also, in many cases, those - and there are more and more of them - who, pulsating with life, feel until they reach sexual maturity and until the age of twenty-seven that which boils and seethes as genius in the nerves, blood and muscles. These overheated natures, which, so to speak, burn up human life, are becoming more and more common. They already occur extremely frequently today. They fill the lunatic asylums and so on. But it is not recognized that the real healing lies in anthroposophically 'oriented spiritual science.

A fine typical nature has indeed become a world celebrity in recent times. That is the philosopher Otto Weininger. Right, Otto Weininger was a person who, in the most chaotic way, unrefined, disharmonized, brought out what lies in the nerve, muscle, blood, and then wrote the book 'Sex and Character', which has become world-famous, and which people who fall for anything have also fallen for here. So that the Philistines were also taken in, who did not understand that, despite all the nonsense and repulsiveness, it was an idea, a revelation of an elementary fact about nerve, blood and muscle. The elemental approaches such people, out of their humanity itself, that which spiritual science would like to develop — only in an orderly, harmonious way. Such people, because they have not learned it from spiritual science — there they would learn it properly — but because their nerves, their blood, their muscles demand it, must ask a question that humanity must necessarily ask itself today. Without this question, humanity will not advance. It is: How can I, having entered the physical world through birth or conception, continue the development of my spiritual and soul existence from the last death to this birth? Such and similar questions, as we raise them in spiritual science, as we regard them as fundamental questions of progressive spiritual culture, must be raised and will be raised by those who boil up what is in nerve, blood and muscle.

You see, there is a chapter in Otto Weininger's work that is extraordinarily interesting. He asked himself: Why did I actually come into this world? — And he answered this question in his own way, out of what I have just characterized, out of the wisdom that lies in muscle, blood and nerve, but in a way that consumes and burns the human being. He asked himself: Why am I drawn out of the spiritual world, where I used to be, into earthly life? He found no answer except this: Because I was a coward, because I did not want to remain alone in the spiritual world and therefore sought the connection with other people. I did not have the courage to be alone, I sought the protection of the mother's womb. These were perfectly honest answers that he gave himself. Why do we have no memory, he asked, of what happened before birth? Because we have become that way through birth! — Literally he says: Because we have sunk so low that we have lost consciousness. If man had not lost himself at birth, he would not have to search for and find himself.

These are typical phenomena; today they still occur sporadically. They are those who, in their youth, extract from blood, nerve and muscle that which can only flourish in the whole human process if it is clarified and harmonized by that which spiritual science is to give. For this, however, the interests of general human life must be broadened. Philistinism must recede. The fact that people are locked in a narrow circle of interests must be systematically combated. Certain questions must take on a completely different form than they have done up to now. How has the religious development of the last few millennia itself structured the question that still binds people to the spiritual to some extent? A materialistically educated, witty person of the present day, who has taken a high position in a certain circle, once said to me: If you compare the state with the church, you get the opinion that the church still has it easier than the state. Well, I will not say anything about the value of this judgment, but that man thought that the church had an easier time than the state, because the state administers life, the church death, and people are more afraid of death than of life; therefore the church has an easier time. He considered this nonsense, of course, because he was a materialist.

But this chapter too has actually been brought into a rather selfish channel. Basically, people today ask: What happens to my soul and spiritual life when I have passed through the gate of death? — And there are many selfish impulses in this. Under the influence of spiritual science, the question of immortality in particular would take on a completely different form. In the future, people will not only ask: To what extent is the spiritual and mental life after death a continuation of life here on earth? But rather: To what extent is life on earth a continuation of the life I used to live in the spiritual and mental world? - Then one will be able to look at something like the following.

When a person passes through the gate of death, the imaginative presentation is very strong at first; a comprehensive world of images unfolds imaginatively. I would call this an unrolling of the world of images. The second third of the life between death and a new birth is filled mainly with inspirations. Inspirations occur in the human life in the second third of this life between death and a new birth. And intuitions in the last third. Now intuitions consist in the human being transferring himself with his self, his soul, into other beings, and the end of these intuitions consists in his transferring himself into the physical body. This transfer into the physical body through birth is merely the continuation of the mainly intuitive life of the last third between death and a new birth. And this must actually occur when the human being enters the physical plane; it must be a particularly characteristic trait in children: the ability to place themselves in the other life. They must do what others do, not what comes naturally to them, but imitate what the other does.

Why did I have to describe, when I was talking about “The education of the child from the point of view of spiritual science”, that children in the first seven years are mainly imitators? Because imitation, because putting oneself in the place of others, is the continuation of the intuitive world that exists in the last third of life between death and a new birth. If one looks at the life of the child here in a truly meaningful way, one can still see the life between death and a new birth streaming in and shining. The question of immortality will have to be posed on this basis: to what extent is life here on earth a continuation of the soul-spiritual life? But then people will also learn to take this life on earth very seriously, but not in an egotistical sense. Above all, they will adhere to a sense of responsibility, which is based on the realization that they are continuing here what is imposed on them by the fact that they have brought something with them as an inheritance from the soul-spiritual. It will mean an enormous change in the way people think when they speak from the other point of view. For that which the soul experiences between death and a new birth, this great spiritual realm, which is experienced in imaginations, inspirations, intuitions, that is the here and now for there; and what we experience here is the beyond for there. And the desire to understand and honor this Hereafter will become part of the newly formulated question of immortality, which will intervene in the spiritual development of humanity in a less egotistical way than the question of immortality has often done in the religious development of the past millennia.

I wanted to describe such things in order to show how humanity should emerge from philistinism, in order to show how one is not a philistine. You are not a philistine if you can go beyond your narrowest interest, and if you also have an interest in the fact that here on earth you take 25,920 breaths in one day, which corresponds to the number of days in an earthly life and also to the 'jerk' of the sun as it orbits in the cosmic ellipse. Our interest expands beyond what has led to the fact that there is a forgotten stream in German intellectual life; our interest expands beyond what is configured in the spirit all over the earth, what the keynote of oriental, middle, Western spiritual development: how the Asian spiritual development is dependent, so to speak, on an eastern current, which entered the West in a state of decadence, how the middle current, initially dependent on the South, will become dependent on the North in the future. These things lead us to the great plan of human development, overcome philistinism, correctly adjust our feelings in relation to human development and teach us to really feel for what lives in humanity as impulses.

And the will: the will also develops in a very specific way in the material impulses. It develops in such a way that people become more and more unskillful, and in the great classical sense, more and more unskillful. What can a person do today? The narrowest thing he is trained for puts him in a small circle. What develops in spiritual science in terms of concepts, feelings, and impulses extends to the limbs. When someone really immerses themselves in spiritual science, they become adept, adapt to their environment, and sometimes learn things in the course of their lives that, when they are still very young, show no aptitude for. If properly grasped, spiritual science will also make people adept. Today, people are not adept at even the smallest things. You meet people who do not know the simplest tasks, you meet gentlemen who cannot even sew on a button if it has come off, much less anything else. But it is important that people can become versatile again, that they can adapt to their surroundings, that this confinement to the narrowest circle and thus the becoming clumsy for the world be overcome.

However strange it may sound, humanity has this threefold task for the present and the near future with regard to thinking, feeling and willing: that narrow-mindedness be overcome and a flexible way of finding one's way into the circumstances of the world take hold, that philistinism be overcome and generous interests take hold of human hearts, that clumsiness be overcome and people become skillful and are also educated in skill in the most diverse areas of life. Learn to understand the world in the most diverse areas of life! Today, of course, we are doing the opposite of all this. We are heading towards clumsiness, philistinism, and narrow-mindedness, and these are the necessary consequences of the materialistic way of thinking. Of course, not everyone can learn to set a broken leg themselves, but there is no need to cultivate clumsiness to the point where someone no longer has any sense of how to help themselves in the simplest of cases of illness and the like. What matters is skillful understanding in order to cope with life in the most diverse situations.

With the advent of this newer time, have we not seen clearly how things have actually developed? Anyone who has asked around with discerning eyes about the phenomena of the present in the last decades has clearly seen that the sense of developing a worldview, of making impulses for a worldview the subject of consideration, was only present in those who at the same time had the will to develop purely materialistic worldview interests, namely in the field of socialism. Basically, consideration of ideological issues only occurred where people wanted to reform the world in a socialist sense. If one came up above the socialist flood, there was disinterest; at most narrow clique interests, clinging to the old, or if one thought one was grasping at something new, it was abstract words, the forerunners of Wilsonianism, as it raged particularly badly in the so-called liberal parties in the second half of the 19th century. There was no will to penetrate into the intellectual and spiritual impulses of the world, as socialism wanted to penetrate into the material; there was dullness where the bourgeoisie began – on the whole, of course; exceptions are disregarded. Those present are always excepted, that is a matter of politeness.

Now, to confront these phenomena and to answer such questions as have been raised today, also in the sense in which we have tried to answer them today, is basically one and the same thing. For great things are connected with these matters. In the East of Europe, we see something being prepared, I would say in the extract, for which Europe today has terribly little understanding. We have often pointed out the developmental germs of this European East in our field. This European East wants to learn to understand that all human life has meaning! And when the sixth post-Atlantic cultural epoch approaches, the European East is to show in the evolution of the earth that all human life has a meaning, and not just believe as true what is taught in school in one's youth. The East should show that man is in a process of development until death, that every year brings something new, and that when one passes through the gate of death, one is still connected with the earthly and brings wisdom with one even after death. What does the soul element want, which until recently could be called Russian, and which is now provisionally entering a state of chaos, but will find its way into the development of European culture and thus into the cultural development of all humanity? What does this element of the East want?

It wants to see the dawn of an understanding that all human life is in a state of development, and that the moment of death is only an especially important moment in this development. This principle must indeed find followers and confessors in Central Europe, and from such prerequisites as we have mentioned, it will find them. But until this principle is recognized, people will always believe that the younger you are, the more you can have a point of view. The youngest badgers and badger females today have their own fixed point of view, and basically have nothing of the great expectation and hope that every year new secrets will be revealed, that the moment of death will reveal new secrets. The European East is developing souls that today are still developing an understanding in the subconscious that man is wisest and can judge best about earthly, human conditions precisely when he dies. And from these souls living in the East today, there will arise those who do not merely seek advice from the young badgers, from the parliaments, on how to decide on human affairs, but who also seek advice from the dead, who will learn to establish contact with the dead and to make fruitful the contact with the dead here for earthly development. In the future people will ask: What do the dead say about it? And they will find spiritual paths if they delve so deeply in spiritual science that they ask the dead, not just the living, when it comes to deciding the great matters of people here on earth. That is what the East wants. And never has anything clashed more badly than it is happening today in the European East. For that which is the soul of this European East is the exact opposite of what, in the form of Trotskyism or Leninism, has been superimposed on it today from the purest, albeit self-misunderstanding, materialism of the present. Never before in the development of mankind have two things that are so incongruous collided as the spiritual germ of the East and materialistic Leninism, this caricature, this most grotesque caricature of human cultural progress, which has no sense or understanding of anything truly spiritual but which is so understandable in terms of the fundamental nerve of the present day. The future will learn to recognize this.

That, my dear friends, is what I just wanted to tell you in summary with regard to such things that should ignite interest in our hearts. One must have understanding for such things; one must not remain dull to what is going on in the deeper sense in the souls. That is what I wanted to put into your souls and hearts during our meeting today.

Ladies and gentlemen! What I would like to do on this occasion is not actually to give a lecture, but rather to encourage as widespread an understanding as possible between those who are involved in the leadership and work of the Waldorf School and the parent body. The reason for this is that I really believe that this understanding, this working together of the parents with the teachers and others involved in the leadership of the school is something extraordinarily necessary and significant. Allow me to begin by describing an experience I had not long ago, an experience that will illustrate the importance of the issue I have just pointed out. Several weeks ago it was my task to take part in the festival in Stratford-on-Avon in England, a festival organized to celebrate the birthday of Shakespeare.¹ This Shakespeare festival was one that took place wholly under the influence of education issues. It was organized by people who are deeply interested in the education of children and adults. It can also be said that during this entire festival the world of Shakespearean art merely provided a background, since the actual issues that were being dealt with were contemporary issues in education. On this occasion one of the small effects, or perhaps even one of the large effects, of the pedagogical course that I held at Christmas at our Goetheanum in Dornach became evident.² Some of the people involved in this Shakespeare festival had taken part in this course.

Now, not far from London there is a boarding school which is not very large yet, but which is headed by a person who was present at the Dornach course and who took from there the impulse to introduce what we can now call Waldorf pedagogy, the Waldorf system of education, into this boarding school and perhaps also to apply it in expanding the school.³ We were invited to see this educational establishment, and in the course of the visit various questions were raised regarding how the school is being run at present and what could be done to transplant the spirit of the system of education that is fostered here in the Waldorf School to their situation.

One question in particular came up for discussion. The people in charge said that they were doing well with the children; each year they accept as many children as the small size of the establishment permits. The most difficult thing for them, however, was working together with the parents, and the reason for the difficulty—and this is certainly an international concern—was that nowadays the older generation everywhere has certain very specific views on how education is supposed to proceed. There are many reasons why parents send their children to one boarding school rather than another. But when there actually is a slight deviation from what they are accustomed to, it is very easy for disagreements to arise between the school and the parents. And this is something that really cannot be tolerated in an independent system of education.

The boarding school in question was experiencing especially great difficulties in this regard. What I am attempting to do now is neither to criticize nor to make recommendations, but simply to state the facts. In this school, in spite of the fact that it is a residential facility, there are no domestic employees at all. All the work of maintaining the school is done by the children and teachers. Cleaning the hallways, washing the dishes, planting the vegetables, taking care of the chickens so that they provide eggs—the list could go on and on. The children are involved in all kinds of work, and you certainly get the impression that things are run very differently there than in most other boarding schools. The children also have to cook and do everything else, and this goes on from first thing in the morning until late in the evening. It is also evident that the teachers and residential staff put a lot of energy into doing these things with the children. As I said, my intention is neither to criticize nor to advocate what they are doing; I only want to present it to you. Now it can happen that when the children go home on vacation and tell their parents about everything they have to do, the parents realize that they had not imagined it like that, and they cannot understand it. That is why it is so difficult to sustain harmony with the parents in this case. I describe this case only in order to point out how necessary we feel it to be, if we take a system of education seriously, to work together in complete harmony with the children’s parents.

Now of course our situation in the Waldorf School is different. We have no residential facility, we simply have a school where we naturally have to keep the principles of child-rearing in mind while providing academic instruction. Nevertheless, you can rest assured that working together with the parent body is a fundamental element in what we in the Waldorf School regard as our task. In running the school, an infinite number of questions constantly arise with regard to the weal and woe of the children, their progress, their physical and mental health—questions that can be solved only in partnership with the parents. This is why it will actually become more and more necessary for these parents’ evenings to evolve—and all the circumstances will have to be taken into account—and to become a more frequent event in the running of our school.

Our Waldorf School is meant to be a truly independent school, not only in name but in its very essence, and simply because it is meant to be an independent school of this sort, we are dependent on help from the parent body to an extraordinary extent. It is my conviction that if we have the desire to work together with the parents, this will call forth nothing but the deepest satisfaction on the part of all the parents.

The Waldorf School is an independent school. You see, ladies and gentlemen, what it actually means to be an independent school must be stated over and over again, and it cannot be stated strongly enough for the simple reason that in broader circles today it is scarcely possible to realize the extent of our need for independent schools of this sort. The prejudice of thousands of years is working against us, and this is how it works.

We do not need to look back very far in humanity’s evolution to find a school system, especially a primary school system, that was independent to a very great extent. But at that time independence caused a lot of illiteracy because few people sought out formal education. Then, in the course of humanity’s evolution in civilized areas, the desire began to grow in people to promote a certain educational basis for our interactions in society. At this point I cannot go into how this desire arose, but it came about at a time when people had renounced their allegiance to the old gods and now expected to receive all the blessings of humanity’s evolution and everything needed to advance it from a new god, the god of the State. Central Europe in particular was an area where people were especially intent on seeing the god of the State as a universal remedy, especially in the education of children.

In those times, the principle that was applied as a matter of course was that parliaments and large advisory bodies and so on were gatherings in which geniality could flourish, even if the individuals involved in these representative gatherings were not impressive in their degree of enlightenment. The opinion prevailed that by gathering together, people would become smart and would then be able to determine the right thing to do in all circumstances.

However, some individuals with a very good and profound understanding of these matters, such as the poet Rosegger,⁴ for example, were of a different opinion. Rosegger coined the expression—forgive me for mentioning it—"“One person is a human being; several are people; many are beasts.” Although this puts it a bit radically, it does contradict the opinion that has developed in the last few centuries, namely that all things state-related will enable us to determine what is right with regard to educating children. And so our school system simply continued to develop in the belief that there was no alternative to having everything spelled out for the school system by the political community.

Now, an independent school is one that makes it possible for the teachers to introduce into the educational system what they consider essential on the immediate basis of their knowledge of the human being and of the world and of their love for children. A non-independent school is one in which the teacher has to ask, “What is prescribed for the first grade? What is prescribed for the second grade? How must the lesson be organized according to law?”

A free school is one in which the teachers’ actions are underlain by a very specific knowledge of how children grow up, of which forces of body and soul are present in them and of which ones must be developed. It is a school in which the teachers can organize what they have to do each day and in each lesson on the basis of this knowledge and of their love for children. People do not have a very strong feeling for how fundamentally different a non-independent school is from an independent school. The real educational abilities of the teachers can develop only in an independent school.

That people actually do not have any real feeling for these things at present is the reason why it is so difficult to continue to make progress with an independent school system. We must not succumb to any illusions in this regard. Just a few hours before leaving to come here, I received a letter informing me that after a long time had been spent working to open a school similar to the Waldorf School in another German city, the request for permission had been turned down. This is a clear sign that the further evolution of our times will not favor an independent school system. This is something I want to ask the parents of our dear schoolchildren to take to heart especially: We must lavish care and attention on this Waldorf School we have fought for, this school in which the independent strength of the faculty will really make the children grow up to be allaround capable and healthy human beings. We must be aware that, given the contemporary prejudices we confront, it will not be easy to get something like a second Waldorf School. At the same time, it should be pointed out that this Waldorf School, which has not yet been in existence for three years, is something that is presently being talked about all over the civilized world. You see that it is nonetheless of significance—think about what I said about the school near London—that a group of people have gotten together to bring a Waldorf School into existence there.

We can also look at this issue from the much broader perspective of the need to do something to restore the position of the essential German character in the world. You can be sure, however, that the significance of this German essence will be recognized only when its spiritual content, above all else, is given its due in the world. This is what people will ask for if they meet the world in the right way. They will become aware of needing it.

For this to happen, we really need to penetrate fully into the depths of this German essence and to become creative on the basis of it. This is evident from something such as the vehement, sometimes tumultuous educational movement that could be experienced at the Shakespeare festival, which showed that there is a need all over the world for new impulses to be made available to the educational system. The impossibility of continuing with the old forms is a concern for all of civilized humanity.

The fact of the matter is, the things that are being fostered in the Waldorf School give us something to say about educational issues that are being brought up all over the world. But we also have almost all of the world’s prejudices against us, and we are increasingly faced with the prospect of having our independence taken away, at least with regard to the lower primary school classes. It is extraordinarily difficult to combat these prejudices, and the Waldorf School can do so only by making its children grow up to be what they can beonly as a result of the independent strength of the faculty.

For this, however, we need an intimate and harmonious collaboration with the parent body. At an earlier parents’ meeting I was able to attend, I pointed out that simply because we are striving for an independent school system, we are dependent on being met with understanding, profound understanding, on the part of the parents. If we have this understanding, we will be able to work properly, and perhaps we will also be able after all to show the true value of what is intended with the Waldorf School.

At that time I emphasized that we must strive to really derive our educational content from an understanding of the being of the child and the child’s bodily nature. Since to observe the child is to observe the human being, it is possible to observe children in this way only if we are striving for an understanding of the human being as a whole, as anthroposophy does. We must say again and again that it is not our intention to introduce anthroposophy into the school. The parents will have no grounds for complaining that we are trying to introduce anthroposophy as a world-view. But although we are avoiding introducing anthroposophy into the school as a world-view, we are striving to apply the pedagogical skill that can come only from anthroposophical training as to how we handle the lessons and treat the children. We have placed the Catholic children at the disposal of the Catholic priest and the Protestant children at the disposal of the Protestant pastor. We have independent religious instruction only for those whose parents are looking for that, and it too is completely voluntary; it is set up only for those children who would otherwise probably not take part in any religious instruction at all. So you see this is not something we stress heavily. Whatever we have to say with respect to our world-view is strictly for adults.

But I would like to say that what anthroposophy can make of people, right down to the skill in their fingertips, applies especially to teachers and educators. In dealing with children and with instructional content, what we should strive for is to have the children find their way quite naturally into everything that is presented to them in school, as a matter of course. We should assess carefully in each instance what is right at a particular stage of childhood.

You know that we do not introduce learning to read and write in the same way that is often used today. When the children begin to learn to write, we develop the shapes of the letters, which are otherwise something foreign to them, out of something the children turn to with inner contentment as a result of some form of artistic activity, of their artistic sense of form. The reason why our children learn to write and read somewhat later is that if we take the nature of the child into account, reading must come after writing.

Those who are accustomed to the old ways of looking at things will object to this, saying that the children here learn to read and write much later than in other schools. But why do children in other schools learn to read and write earlier? Because people do not know what age is good for learning to read and write. We should first ask ourselves whether it is altogether justified to require children to read and write with any degree of fluency by the age of eight.

If we expand on these ways of looking at things, more comprehensive views develop, as we can experience in a strange way: Anyone who knows a lot about Goethe knows that if we had approached him with what is demanded academically of twelve-year-olds today, he would not have been able to do it at that age. He would not have been able to do it even at age sixteen, and yet he still grew up to be the Goethe we know of.

Austria had an important poet, Robert Hamerling.⁵ As a young man, he did not set out to become a poet—that was something his genius did for him. He wanted to be a high school teacher, and he took the teacher certification exam. It is written in his certificate that he demonstrated an extremely good knowledge of Latin and Greek, but that he was not capable of handling the German language well and was thus only fit to teach the lowest class. But he went on to become the most important modern poet of Austria. And he wrote in the German language, not in Slovakian.

Our educational impulses must take their standard from actual life. The essential thing about our method of education is that we keep the child’s whole life in mind; we know that if we present the child with something at age seven or eight, this must be done in such a way that it will grow with the child, so that it will still stay with the person in question at age thirty or forty, and even for the rest of his or her life. You see, the fact of the matter is that the children who can read and write perfectly at age eight are stunted with regard to certain inner emotional impulses that lead to health. They really are stunted. It is a great good fortune for a child to not yet be able to read and write as well at age eight as is expected today. It is a blessing for that child’s bodily and emotional health.

What we need to foster must be derived from the needs of human nature. We must have a subtle understanding of this, and not merely know the right answer. It is easy to stand in front of a class of children and to figure out that this one said something right, but that one said something wrong, and then to correct the wrong thing and make it right. However, there is no real educational activity being practiced in that. There is nothing essential to the human development of a child in having the child do compositions and assignments and then correcting them so the child is convinced that he or she has made mistakes. What is essential is to develop a fine sense for the mistakes the children make. Children make mistakes in hundreds of different ways. Each child makes different mistakes, and if we have a fine sense of how different the children are with regard to the mistakes they make, then we will discover what to do to help them make progress.

Isn't it true that our perspectives on life are all different? A doctor does not have the same perspectives on an illness that a patient has. We cannot ask a patient to fall in love with a particular illness, and yet we can say that a doctor is a good doctor if he or she loves the illness. In our case, it is a question of falling in love, in a certain respect, with the interesting mistakes the children make. We get to know human nature through these mistakes. Excuse me for expressing myself radically, but these radical statements are really necessary. For a teacher, keeping track of mistakes is more interesting than keeping track of what the children do right. Teachers learn a lot from the children’s mistakes.

But what do we need in addition to all this? We also need a strong and active inner love for human beings, for children. This is indispensable for teachers. At this point innumerable questions arise. We are concerned about a particular child’s health of body and soul. We see this child for a few hours a day; for the rest of the time we must have confidence, complete confidence, in the child’s parents. This is why the teachers and educators of our Waldorf School always appeal to this confidence, and why they are so eager to work in harmony with the parents for the well-being of the children. As a rule, this is not something that is aspired to in a non-independent school to anywhere near the same extent; there people stick to observing the rules. That is why the very idea of independence in education often meets with very little understanding today.

In some countries, if you talk about independent schools, people will tell you that while things may be like that in Germany, they do not need to found independent schools because their teachers are already free. Teachers themselves will tell you that. It is astonishing that they respond like that, because we can tell that the people who are answering no longer have any idea that they could feel unfree. They do what they are ordered to do. It does not occur to them that it could happen differently, so they do not even feel that things could be different.

Just think of how different your situation is from other people’s with regard to understanding the Waldorf system of education. Other people have to make an effort to understand when we tell them we want to do things in a certain way because we believe it is the only right way. I believe that as parents of Waldorf School children you can see directly, in the beings that are dear to you, what is being done in the Waldorf School and how the relationship of the entire school to the child is conceived. It would be nice if there would come a time when it would be enough for parents simply to be content with what is being accomplished in an independent system of education. Today, however, all of you, who can see results in your own flesh and blood of how this Waldorf School is trying to work, must become strong and active defenders and promoters of the Waldorf system of education.

We have many other difficulties in addition to this. You see, if we really could live up to our ideals, we would be able to say that according to our insight, we should do this particular thing when the children are six, seven and eight, and this other thing when they are nine, ten, eleven and twelve, and so on. The results would be the best if we were able to do that, but we cannot; in some respects we must accept a compromise, because we cannot deny these children, these human beings who are growing up, the possibility to take their place in life.

So we have decided to educate the children from the time when they first enter primary school up to age nine in a way that is free of outer constraints, but while we are doing what human nature requires, at the same time we will support the children in a way that will enable them to transfer to another school [at the end of that time]. The same applies to age twelve and to age fourteen or fifteen. And if we have the good fortune to be able to continue adding grades, we must also make it possible for the young ladies and gentlemen who complete these grades to enter universities and technical colleges. We must make sure that the children will be able to enter these institutions of higher learning. I think it will be a long time before we are given the possibility of granting graduate or undergraduate degrees. We would accomplish much more if we were able to do that, but for the time being all we can do is to enable first the children and then the young men and women to learn what is required in public life in a way that does not inflict great damage upon them.

We find ourselves in very serious difficulties in this regard. You see, if you assess the situation according to human nature, according to what is good for human beings, then you would say that it is simply terrible for young men and women to be in modern college-preparatory and vocational high schools at the age of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. It estranges them from all of life. We must do what is necessary, whatever we can do, to make sure at least that the body also achieves a degree of skill that makes it fit for life. I often mention that you meet grown men nowadays who are incapable of sewing on a button for themselves if one gets torn off. I say this only by way of example. There are other similar things that people also cannot do, and above all they do not understand anything about the world. Individuals need to stand there in the world with their eyes open so that their hands are free to do whatever is needed. You see, this is why at a certain age we need to introduce the elementary aspects of things like spinning and weaving. Now, however, when students graduate from ordinary schools, they are not tested in weaving and spinning or in other arts that are useful in life, and so we must do these things in addition to all kinds of things that are required for the exam. This means that we must arrange our lessons as economically as possible. There is a special art to this in teaching.

Perhaps I may be permitted to introduce an example that happened to me personally. It was a long time ago. A family had entrusted their children to me for tutoring, and among them was an eleven-year-old boy who had been given up on as far as education was concerned. He was eleven years old, and for my information they showed me a sketchbook in which he had demonstrated his drawing ability. This sketchbook had a gigantic hole in the middle of the first page. He had done nothing but erase; that was all he could do. He had also once taken the test for entry into the first grade, and could do nothing at all. With regard to his other behavior, he often did not eat at the table but went into the kitchen and ate the potato peels, and there were difficulties in many other respects as well. It was a question of accomplishing as much as possible in the shortest possible time. I often had to work for three hours to get the materials together for what I would present to the boy in fifteen minutes. After two years he had progressed to the point where he could enter the Gymnasium. He was a hydrocephalic, with a huge head that steadily became smaller.

I mention this case because it shows what I mean by economy of instruction. Economy of instruction means never spending more time on something with the children than is necessary according to the requirements of physical and mental health. Nowadays it is especially important to practice this economy of instruction because life demands so much. Our Latin and Greek teachers, for example, are in a difficult situation because we have much less time to spend on these things, and yet they still have to be fostered in a way that meets the legitimate demands of cultural life. In all subjects, we must seek the art of never overburdening the children. And I must say that in all these things, we need to be met with understanding on the part of the parents; we need to work together in harmony with the parent body.

Really, the genuine successes that are of the greatest significance for life do not lie in accomplishing something amazing on behalf of one or the other gifted student. Genuine successes lie in strength for life. Thus it is always deeply satisfying to me when it happens that someone says that a certain child should be moved from one class to another so that this or that can be accomplished. The teacher fights for each and every child from time to time. These are real successes that take place within the loving interaction between the faculty and the children. Something can come of this, and things on which such great value is placed, such as whether the children are a little ahead or a little behind, fade into the background in comparison.

We are already being confronted with the fact—again, I would like to put it radically—that we cannot possibly be praised by those who hold the usual opinions about today’s school system, who are coming from these opinions. There is always something wrong in believing that something would be accomplished if people who think like this were to praise us. If that was how things were, if we were praised by today’s school authorities or by people who believe that these authorities are doing the right thing, then we would not have needed to start the Waldorf School at all.

Thus it is a matter of course for us to depend on the parents being in harmony with us and giving their time and attention to a method of education that derives from what is purely human. This is what we need today, and in a social sense, too.

Social issues are not resolved in the way we often imagine today. They are resolved by putting the right people into public life, and this will happen only if people are able to grow up really healthy in body and soul. We can do very little to influence what is specific to an individual, what an individual is capable of learning on the basis of his or her particular abilities, because in order to be of service at all in educating a person to become the best he or she can be—if we had to teach a Goethe, for example—we as teachers would have to be at least the equal of the person we are teaching. We can do nothing about what an individual becomes through his or her own nature; there are other factors determining that. What we can do is to remove obstacles so that individuals find the strength within themselves to live up to their potentials. This is what we can do if we become real educators and if we are supported by our contemporaries.

First and foremost, we can be supported by the parent body. We have found an understanding body of parents. Certainly, what I have to say tonight is filled with a feeling of gratitude. That so many of you have appeared tonight gives me great satisfaction. I hope we will be able to talk about details in the discussion period to follow; our teachers are prepared to answer any questions you may ask. Before that, however, I would still like to point out certain characteristic traits.

Recently the Waldorf faculty and I held a college-level course in Holland.⁶ The afternoon session in which pedagogical issues were discussed was led by Fraulein von Heydebrandt of the Waldorf School.⁷ This was one of the most interesting afternoons because we saw that today’s educational questions are of concern all over the world. Of course we know that we have no right to harp on how wonderful it is that we have come so far; we are not trying to emphasize our accomplishments.

The way things are today, many people recognize the impulse behind our school. What is still lacking, however, is for them to stand energetically behind us so that this cause can win additional support and become more widespread. Of course we realize that the first concern of parents is to have the best for their children. But with things as they are today, the parents should also help us. Going through with this is difficult for us. We need help in every respect; we need the support of an ever growing circle so that we can overcome the prejudice against our method of education. I say the following with a certain reserve; I certainly want to remain convinced that those who are sitting here have done everything they can financially. I am speaking under this assumption so that none of you will think that I want to step on your toes. Nonetheless, the fact remains that if we want to go forward, we need money.

Yes, we need money! Now people are saying, “Where is the idealism in that? What are you anthroposophists doing, telling us you need money and pretending to be idealists?”

Ladies and gentlemen! Idealism does not stand on firm ground if it makes grandiose statements but says, “I am an idealist, and since I am an idealist, I despise my wallet. I do not want to get my fingers dirty; I am much too great an idealist for that!”

It will scarcely be possible to make ideals into reality if people are such great idealists that they are unwilling to get their fingers dirty when it comes to making financial sacrifices. We must also learn to strike the right note in public in suggesting to people that they give us some support in this matter, which is still a great and terrible cause of concern for us.

After all, the Waldorf School is big for a single school; it has enough students. It is almost not possible to maintain an overview any more. This is a concern that has to be taken very seriously. We certainly do not want the school to grow larger in its present circumstances; we are going to give in to the need for physical expansion. But then the number of students will increase, as will the number of teachers. And since teachers cannot live on air, this requires the means to support them.

I am assuming, ladies and gentlemen, that each of you has already done whatever you can. It is now a question of spreading the idea further in order to find the idealists out there. There must be a decision on the part of the parent body to help the Waldorf School with regard to its material basis, or I am afraid that in the near future, if we want to continue to take care of things properly, our worries will become so great that they prevent us from sleeping, and I am not sure that the teachers in the school will be the kind you want to have there if they are no longer able to sleep at night!

Some people may have the feeling that I have been too radical in my choice of some of the things I have pointed out today, but I hope to have been understood on some of these points. I especially hope that I have not been understood merely on details. I would like to be understood on the farreaching issue of our need to be in cordial harmony with the parent body if we are to function effectively in the Waldorf School. T particularly wanted to point out the need for this because it actually already exists to such a great extent, and we will be best able to find possibilities for progress in this area if the groundwork has already been laid.

Out of the details of our aspirations, which can be addressed in the discussion to follow, out of all the details that come up in these parents’ meetings, let us take with us the impulse for cordial harmony among teachers and educators and the parent body. You parents certainly have a profound vested interest in this harmony because you have entrusted the most precious thing you have to the faculty.

Out of this awareness, out of our awareness of the faculty’s responsibility toward what is most precious to the parents who are associated with us, out of this collaboration may the spirit which has showed itself in the Waldorf School to such a satisfying degree continue to flourish. The more this unity thrives, the more this spirit will also grow and thrive. And the more this is the case, the more we will also achieve that other thing, that best of all possible human goals: to educate the young people entrusted to the Waldorf School for their life in human society. These people will need to stand up to the storms of life. If they are capable of finding the right ways of working together with other people, then it will be possible to resolve the individual human and social issues.

From the discussion

A question Is asked about the Abitur:

Dr. Steiner: I myself have only this to say: On the whole, the principle I have already presented applies. Through economy of instruction, we must get to the point where what we can achieve for the children at the most important stages in life will enable them to fit into what is demanded today. We cannot set these standards or decide whether or not we think they are right; we must submit to them. We are not being asked the question of whether or not what the Abiturrequires is justified. This will have to be accomplished through economy, and as of now we are not yet in a position to do this, but I fully believe that it will be possible to achieve this goal, even though it does not yet look like it in the case of the people in question. Our principle, however, is to make the children able to take the exam at the appropriate age. But there are also external difficulties to be overcome; the school must be approached without bias. Naturally, I know that it would be possible for someone to flunk boys or girls even though we had brought them to the point of being able to take the exam. I gave you the example of how it would be easy for me to flunk the commissioners themselves. We are striving to have our students be able to take the exam, regardless of what we think of it. We want our teaching to be in line with real life and not with some eccentric idea. As much as possible, we must try to introduce our students to life in the right way.

Something along these lines is still possible in Central Europe, while in Russia that is no longer the case. We must be glad for what we have. If we introduce it to the children now, more will be possible in the next generation.

I am emphasizing explicitly that we are not crazy characters who say that our children are only allowed to do this thing or that. We will go along with what is asked for in the exams, even if we are not always in agreement with it. Meanwhile, we are still taking everything into account that we deem necessary for the sake of humanity’s salvation.

Question: Would it not be possible to have school only in the mornings?

Dr. Steiner: There is always more than one viewpoint to consider in questions like this, isn't there? It has been said that instruction should take place between seven o'clock and one o'clock. Now let me point out some of the principles involved. In the question-and-answer sessions during my course of lectures at Christmas, the question of fatigue was raised, and I mentioned that the intent of our educational method was to refrain from fragmenting and dissipating the children’s attention by having an hour of religion followed by an hour of zoology and so on. The point is to teach in such a way that the children’s attentiveness can be concentrated. That is why a particular subject is taught for a longer part of the school day and over several weeks on end. This view is derived from specific knowledge of the nature of the child.

It was asked if the children do not get tired. I must draw your attention to the fact that in principle in our way of teaching we do not count on head work at all when dealing with children between seven and twelve years of age. That would be wrong. Instead, we count on the involvement of the rhythmic system and of the emotions connected to the rhythmical system of breathing and circulation. If you think about it, you will realize that people get tired, not through their rhythmic system, but through their head and limb systems. If the heart and lungs were to get tired, they would not be able to be active throughout an entire lifetime. The other systems are the ones that get tired. By counting on the rhythmic system during these years, we do not make the children as tired as they would get otherwise.

Thus, when experimental psychology investigates fatigue and states as a result of its experiments that children are so tired after three quarters of an hour that they need a change, this only proves that the teaching was done in the wrong way, tiring the children unjustifiably. Otherwise, the time limit arrived at would be different. The point is to conduct the lesson in such an artistic way that this kind of fatigue does not set in. We can achieve this only slowly and gradually, because new educational practices along these lines can be developed only gradually.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, it is possible to prevent the children from tiring to a very great extent by teaching in the right way. This is not the case with the teachers, however, because they have to work with their heads. And if we want to do the pedagogically correct thing and keep the instruction in the hands of one person, I would like to know what the teacher would look like who is supposed to teach from seven o'clock in the morning straight through until one in the afternoon. This is the main thing we have to consider. These teachers would be exhausted by ten o’clock if they had been teaching since seven, and it is not a matter of indifference whether or not we would continue to wear them out. That is not desirable, regardless of how much I might wish that the children from out of town would not have to make a two hour trip for one lesson in school. But that is the exception; it is exaggerated. Secondly, there are some things that must simply be accepted for the sake of achieving anything at all. Of course we cannot arrange the lessons for all the children in the way that would be desirable for the ones who live so far out of town. Of course that cannot happen. In such things, therefore, we have to deal with the actual circumstances.

In any case, we have arranged things so that the lessons that address the children in spirit and soul are given in the morning, to the extent that this is feasible. The afternoon is for eurythmy and artistic lessons. Instruction has been integrated into the times of day in a way that corresponds to the children’s age and nature. It would be a mistake to hold school from seven o’clock in the early morning until one in the afternoon, and this mistake would arouse a great deal of discontentment. It would require a complicated and completely different system [of scheduling]. Then, too, I would like to see what would happen if we had the children in the Waldorf School from seven to one and they were left to their own devices for the rest of the day. I would like to see what kind of notes and complaints would come from home because the children were coming back from their afternoons with all kinds of bad behavior. We would have to deal with both sleepiness and bad manners on the part of the children. Add that to the sleepiness of the teachers, and those notes would be full of bad things.

There are several points of view to be considered. I appeal to you to consider as a matter of course that since we could not avoid having school in session in the afternoon, the reasons we took into account took precedence.

A father asks that the students taking the Abitur be tested by a committee of Waldorf teachers.

Dr. Steiner: This is actually not an issue of education, and our work is with educational impulses. The point for us is doing what I mentioned—taking into account what is in accordance with the nature of the human being and making sure that the children are not forcibly excluded from actual life. Given the way things are, there may be certain possibilities for us in the first years. But I ask you to consider that we are exposed to certain risks in assessing whether or not a child will be able to pass the exam.

What do you think would happen if we were to guarantee that no boy or girl who graduates from this school would flunk the exam? In some cases, the parents have anticipated that the child would have difficulties with the exam and sent him or her to us for that very reason.

As teachers attempting what I have indicated, we will continue to make progress toward the possibility of the children passing the exam. Those who do not wish us well, however, would be able to prove systematically that this is not the case.

It is not up to us to make sure that an officially certified commissioner is present at the exam. If the parents want the exam to be administered by Waldorf teachers, then the parents would have to take the initiative to bring this about. It is not something that is inherent in Waldorf education. This is an issue of opportunity that would also have to be resolved as the opportunity presents itself, and perhaps by the parents. It is not that we want to be excluded from issuing valid diplomas, it is only that we will have to look at the matter from the educational point of view. I would like someone to prove to me that it makes sense from an educational point of view to subject the students to a school-leaving exam when you have been together with them for years. I would like someone to prove that it makes sense. We know what we have to say about each of our students when they have reached school-leaving age. If this needs to be officially documented for other reasons, then that can happen, but it is not actually an educational issue. Those who have experience in this field know that we can tell what a student is fit for better without exams than with them. We have no reason to work toward the goal of being allowed to administer the exams because this does not follow naturally from what underlies our educational methods.

A question is asked about discipline and the attitude of respect toward the teachers.

Dr. Steiner: If you ask whether respect exists wherever Waldorf pedagogy is notbeing applied... It is extremely important to have devotion or respect or love for the teachers come about in a natural way. Otherwise it is worth nothing. Enforced respect, respect that is laid down in the school’s regulations, so to speak, is of no value in the development of an individual. It is our experience that when children are brought up in a way that allows their own being to set the standards, they are most likely to respect their teachers. This is no grounds for complaint. Of course it cannot be denied that some individual instances do not exactly give evidence of respect. It all depends on how much the respect that grows out of love is worth, and how much more the other kind is worth if it is only demonstrated to the teachers’ face and not so much when they turn their backs. You must not imagine this as a situation in which each child does what he or she wants. It is a case of the children developing ever greater confidence in the faculty.

The progress in this particular respect is quite extraordinary. Anyone who is in a position to make the comparison will find that our progress with regard to discipline has been extraordinarily great in the past two years. The fact of the matter is that when we first got the children here, we had to think about how we would maintain discipline and so on. Now we have arrived at quite a different standpoint, actually. We have accomplished the most by having the relationship between teacher and child be a natural one. There is a great difference between how discipline is maintained at present and the situation a year and a half ago.

These things cannot be judged from a point of view that is brought in from outside; you must consider the Waldorf School itself. Respect cannot be beaten into someone—by which I do not mean to say that anything else can be. Respect must be won in a different way. In this regard, your apprehensions are understandable, but it is also necessary to break the habit of apprehension and look more closely at the results that are becoming evident in the Waldorf School.

If our school is still in existence after another couple of years, we will talk again about whether we have reached the point where our graduates can take the exams. Let us discuss it then. We are convinced that in principle this should be possible. By then we will also be convinced that there was no reason to fear that our method of education would bring about what is so very evident in the schools where compulsion is strongest, where I have seen in both the lowest and highest grades that things are in a bad way when it comes to respect. I do not think that we can take it as gospel that respect only thrives where there is compulsion in education, and that meanwhile our children are thumbing their noses behind their teachers” backs. If you deal with a child in the right way with a friendly warning, that is better than a box on the ear.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner was invited to address the conference of the “Organization for New Ideals in Education” in Stratford-on-Avon, England, April 1922. He spoke on “Drama and its Relationship to Education” and “Shakespeare and the New Ideals.” Included in Waldorf Education and Anthroposophy 1, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 [Erziehungs- und Unferrichtsmethoden auf anthroposophischer Grundlage, GA 304, Dornach, 1979.]
• 2. Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986 [Die gesunde Entwickelung des Menschenwesens],16 lectures given in Dornach, 1921-22, GA 303, Dornach, 1978.
• 3. Known at that time as the Priory School, this is now the New School in Kings Langley.
• 4. Peter Rosegger, 1843-1918, Austrian teller of folk tales.
• 5. Robert Hamerling, 1830-1889.
• 6. Six lectures in The Hague, April 7-12, 1922. See Die Bedeutung der Anthroposophie im Geistesleben der Gegenwart, Dornach 1957.
• 7. Caroline von Heydebrandt, 1886-1938.

In what we have here been considering I have shown how in the course of man's evolution something very different may be going on in the unconscious depths of his soul from what appears more on the surface. A man may think he is striving for this or that, whereas in reality in his innermost soul there hold sway impulses directed to quite different aims. This truth is particularly significant in our time. We see today a whole class of men setting their wills in a certain direction. But just here we may have the experience how in this age of the development of consciousness something different is coming to expression on the surface of the soul from what is living in its depths, where impulses not present in consciousness today are striving for expression, for realisation.

The consciousness of the proletariat is today filled with three things. First, the materialistic interpretation of history; secondly, the view that up to now, in reality, class struggles have been at the basis of what has gone on in the world, what is now happening being thought to be a reflection of these class struggles. The third thing is the theory of surplus value, that is, the theory that surplus value arises through the unpaid labour of the worker, which makes a profit that is than taken by the employer from the worker without the latter receiving compensation.

What makes the impulses arise in the consciousness of the proletariat, from which are drawn the forces active in the modern social movement, is derived from the combination of these three factors. This, however, refers only to what lies in the consciousness of the proletariat. In the depths of the souls of all present-day mankind, in the deeper layers of the souls of the proletariat too, three other things are living, of which the world as yet knows very little. The world does not make such effort towards self-knowledge, and therefore knows nothing of what, in the depths of the soul, is actually striving for historical realisation.

These three other things are, first, a penetration of the spiritual life, a penetration fitted for the present age, what may be called Spiritual Science. The second is freedom in the life
of thought, freedom of thought. The third is socialism in its right and true sense. Without knowing it the proletariat are striving for these three things. Their instincts follow the other three things that I referred to as being active on the surface of their soul-life, in their actual consciousness.

In this very difference between the proletariat's conscious efforts and their unconscious impulses we see particularly clearly what a complete contrast they make. Take the materialistic interpretation of history. This is due to the modern materialism which has arisen during the last four centuries. This materialism first made itself felt among the leading classes of men in the field of natural science, and later took its hold on all science. It then turned to the material interpretation of history among the members of the modern proletariat, who in reality have simply taken over as heritage the kind of conceptions concerning science holding good for the bourgeoisie. This material conception of history is due to all spiritual life being, as it were, merely the smoke arising from the proceedings in the economic life, from all that is working in the sphere of man's economic life. In the historical course of man's life there is actually only what is going on in the different spheres concerned with the creation of goods—production, trade, consumption; and according to how men have carried on their economy at different times, has depended on their religious belief, what kind of art they have cultivated, what attitude they have taken to rights and morality. The spiritual life is, finally, an ideology, that is, it has no independent reality, being a reflection of the eternal economic struggle. Certainly all the ideas required by men, what they feel aesthetically, on what they bring to expression through their moral will can work back again on the economic struggle. But ultimately all spiritual life is a mirrored image of the external economic life. This is what is called the materialistic interpretation of history. If human life be a mere reflection of purely external, material, economic forces, if it be true that the world is only a world of the senses and that men's thoughts reflect only what is of the senses, if men live entirely in such ideas, wanting to see as reality only what the sense world reveals, then this is a turning away from all true life of the spirit, and signifies man's refusal to recognise an independent spirit resting on itself.

Thus in modern times efforts are directed towards marshalling more and more proofs to justify the assertion that no such thing exists as an independent spirit living in the supersensible, that there is no such thing as spirit at all. This plays upon the surface of men's life of soul, and has constituted. the essential content of modern consciousness since mankind entered the age of the consciousness soul. But in the very depths of their life of soul men today are striving for the spirit; they have, one might say, a most deep and inward need of the spirit. This may be confirmed if we look at the evolution of human history.

We have often looked back on the special kind of spirituality in the first post-Atlantian period of culture, the Indian, and described its character from the most varied standpoints. What we have learnt about it enables those who can look on the things without prejudice to say that the life of spirit, as it existed in the old Indian culture-epoch—to be discovered only by means of Spiritual Science—rests upon unconscious intuition. Mark well, unconscious, for it was then a matter of an atavistic life of spirit.

If we then pass on to the ancient Persian life of spirit and seek its sources, we find them flowing from an unconscious inspiration. The Egypto-Chaldean life of spirit is still prevalent in so-called historic Egyptian times, and if we study history without prejudice we shall be able to see that in the old Egyptian and Chaldaea knowledge we have to do with what is in the soul as unconscious though living imagination.

There then followed the Graeco-Latin life of spirit. In this the ancient imaginations remained, permeated, however, with concepts, ideas. The essential thing expressed by Greek life was that, in human evolution, the Greeks were the first to possess this element that, as an impulse of the soul, was previously non-existent. The Greeks already had ideas, concepts, as I have shown more fully in my Riddles of Philosophy. But through all their ideas and concepts there were weaving the figurative, the imaginative. This is unnoticed today, particularly when it is a question of that unaccountable Greece of which our schools and universities speak. When the Greeks uttered the word ‘idea’ for example, they had in mind nothing so abstract as the concept called up by our word. With than the word conjured up a kind of vision, which was nevertheless to be grasped clearly in the form of concept. It was something perceptible; idea was at the same time vision. In Greek one would never have been able to speak of ideology, though the word comes from the Greek. In any case a Greek would not have spoken so that the same feelings would have been aroused that are aroused today by the word ‘ideology’. For to the Greek ideas were full of being, something permeated by pictures.

Now it is characteristic of our fifth post-Atlantian epoch that imaginations have vanished from the consciousness soul, and it is the concept above all that remains.

Our modern life of spirit, with so little power of picturing things that only abstractions remain, is particularly prized by the cultured for its very dryness and dullness. These times live, so to speak, on abstractions and would reduce everything to some kind of abstract concept. It is just in what is called middle class practical life that, in the most extensive sense, this abstract concept holds sway. It is, however, already making itself felt that in the depths of men's souls slumbering, unconscious impulses are striving after renewed imagination. (This is true of the present and will continue to be so in the near future.) Thus, of the fifth epoch we may say: Concepts striving for imaginations.

1. Old Indian Culture-epoch: Unconscious intuitions as the source of the life of spirit.

2. Old Persian Culture-epoch: Unconscious inspirations as the source of the life of spirit.

3. Egypto-Chaldean Culture-epoch: Unconscious imaginations as the source of the life of spirit.

4. Graeco-Latin Culture-epoch: Unconscious imaginations with concepts.

5. Modern Culture-epoch: Concepts striving for imaginations.

Our Spiritual Science goes to meet this striving for imaginations. The overwhelmingly greater part of mankind knows as yet nothing of what goes on in the soul, and thus see all life of the spirit in mere ideas and concepts before which men feel themselves helpless. For concepts as such have in themselves no content. Till now it has been the destiny among leading circles to develop a certain predilection for purely abstract thinking. This love of abstract thinking, however, has produced something else. This thinking in pure concepts is helpless! It produces an endeavour to rely upon the reality that cannot be relied on because it is only suited to the senses, namely, external physical reality. This belief in external physical reality has, in truth, arisen from the ineffectiveness of the concepts of modern mankind.

The ineffectiveness, the helplessness, of the conceptual life is expressed in every sphere of the spiritual life. In science the great desire is to experiment, so as to discover something not otherwise given to the world of the senses. Pondering on the world of the senses with ideas alone we do not got beyond it, for concepts themselves contain no reality. In art we are getting ever more accustomed to the copying of a model and keeping to the external object alone. Up to now, in art, it has been the destiny of the leading circles of mankind to be absorbed more and more in the mere study of external sense reality. The capacity to create out of the spirit and to represent the spiritual by artistic means is being increasingly lost naturalism alone is striven for, imitation of what nature, as such, represents in the external world, because from the abstract life of the spirit nothing wells up which in itself van be given independent form.

If you consider the development of art in recent times, you will find this everywhere confirmed—this continual striving after more naturalism, after a representation of what externally is seen and perceived. This has finally reached its peak in what is called Impressionism. Before Impressionism artistic endeavour was directed to the reproduction of some external object. Then came those who carried this to its logical conclusion end said: When I have before me a human being or a wood, and I paint this men or this wood, I am not giving my impression, for while I am standing before the wood the sun illumines it in a particular way, but after a few moments the light effect may be suite different. In my desire to be naturalistic what am I to perpetuate? I cannot hold to what the external world shows me for that changes each moment. I try to paint a man who is smiling, but the next instant his expression may be grim! Am I to turn the grim face into the smiling one? What am I to paint? If I wish to paint the external object in its temporary state I shall have to use force on the object. Objects of nature do not allow of this, but with the human object as model force has to be used for the pose and expression to be held as long as possible. But then, when one tries to imitate nature, the model takes on an expression as if he had catalepsy. So that is no good.—For this reason they became Impressionists; they waited to catch and hold the fleeting impression. Then, however, it is no longer possible to be altogether naturalistic, but all means must be used, not to irritate nature, but to reproduce how it appears and reveals itself to anyone in a certain moment. The trouble is that in an effort to be naturalistic one becomes impressionist, and then, alas, as impressionist it is impossible to remain naturalistic: So the whole thing is changed round. Some no longer aimed at giving the impression, at fixing the outward impression, and tried to express what, however primitive, arose within themselves—they tried to hold fast what happens within. These became Expressionists.

In the moral sphere, even in the life of rights, the same course can be shown; everywhere there arises this striving after the abstract life of spirit preferred by men. We have only to look at modern human evolution correctly, and we shall find everywhere this urge towards abstraction. And what effect has this had on the modern proletariat? Since they have been tied to machines, caught up in the present soulless capitalism, their whole destiny has become bound up in the economic life. The same trend of ideas that brought members of the middle-class circles to naturalism in art has now brought the proletariat to the theories expressed in the materialistic interpretation of history. The proletariat everywhere has drawn upon the logical consequences of bourgeois culture—consequences before which the bourgeoisie now stand aghast.

Now, within these bourgeois circles what has been the attitude towards religion? In earlier times there was at least a dim atavistic conception of the Christ-Mystery; there was a feeling that abstract spiritual life offered no possibility of conceiving how the Christ had lived in Jesus. Thus men's ideas became limited to what, in the early days of Christianity, had happened in the world of the senses; they became limited to what merely concerned Jesus. The Christ was looked upon more and more as mere man, whereas the Christ belonging to the supersensible world vanished ever further from the field of human vision. The abstract life of the soul, finding no way to the Christ, contented itself with Jesus. What did the proletariat make of this? They asked themselves: Why do we need any specially religious outlook regarding Jesus? The bourgeoisie have already made of Him the simple man of Nazareth. If Jesus is this simple man of Nazareth, He will naturally be just like us. We are dependent on the economic life and why should Jesus not have been so too? Have we still any justification in ascribing to Him a special mission, or in calling Him the founder of a new human age if He is just the simple man of Nazareth who, for His part, drew His teachings from the economic processes into which He Himself was placed? We must study the economic processes at the time of the founding of Christianity, and the way in which a simple worker deserted his work to spread ideas around concerning the contemporary economic ordering in Palestine. From that we shall see why Jesus made the statements like he did. This Jesus-theory is the final result of modern protestant theology, which no longer has any power over modern men, the modern proletariat.—

But now, in the subconscious depths of their souls, modern men are once more striving for freedom of thought, for inward initiative in thought. On the conscious surface of their soul-life it appears that the opposite is to be the aim, and this opposite is the object of their striving. Hence the deep protesting opposition in the subconscious which comes to expression in the present terrible struggle. The leading bourgeois circles want to be free of any authority; but they are up to the neck in every kind of belief in authority. They have a blind belief in authority above all where the sphere of the State is concerned—now regarded by them as the highest authority. For whose judgment stands higher for the modern middle-class than that of the ‘expert’? The expert is consulted in everything, even in matters of external life. Whoever enters life having left the University with a degree, must know everything. Be he a theologian, he is consulted about God's intentions towards man; if a lawyer he is asked what rights a man has in life; if a doctor of medicine, he is asked for a universal cure, and if any kind of philosopher at all, he is questioned about every possible thing in the world. Modern philosophers always smile when their glance falls on the book of a venerable philosopher of pre-Kantian days—Christian Wolf. This book is called Rational Thoughts on God, the World, the Soul of Man, and all other things; people smile at such a book. But modern leading classes most firmly believe in the spiritual laboratories the State has set up for its citizens, where the whole content of human intelligence is brewed. The concern of these circles is not to give everyone a consciousness of his own, but to create a uniform consciousness, and to manage that in the widest sense it should be a State-consciousness. Modern consciousness is much more a consciousness of the State than is commonly believed. People think of the State as their God who Gives them all they need. They no longer have to bother themselves about things, for the State sees to it that there should be provision for all reasonable departments of life. The proletariat have been excluded from the life of the State except in a few spheres allowed them by its democratic form. With their labour-power that engages the whole man, the proletariat were yoked to the economic life. For this reason it now drew upon itself, for its own life alone, the final consequence. The modern middle-class citizen has a State-consciousness, and though he may not always admit it he is quite willing to boast about this State-consciousness. It is really not necessary to have “Reserve-Lieutenant” and “Professor” printed on your card, just to make a parade of your State-consciousness. It can be done in a quite different way. But the proletariat had no interest in the State. They were harnessed to the economic life, and their feelings were again, though in accordance with their own lives, the final consequence of middle-class feelings. The proletarian consciousness became class-consciousness, and thus we see that since they had nothing to do with the State their class-consciousness was built on internationalism. The middle-class were able to have leanings towards the State only because this modern State looked after them, and the middle-class wish to be looked after. The State, however, did not look after the proletarian, and he felt himself as part of the world only in so far as he belonged to his class. The arising of the proletarian class has been brought about in the same way throughout all States. Hence came the formation of an international proletariat, feeling consciously opposed to the bourgeoisie and all that tended, with the same force of consciousness, towards the State and the agents of the State. Thus, within recent times there has arisen an extraordinarily powerful form of class-consciousness among the proletariat. I do not know how many of you have been to proletarian meetings. But how do they always close They close by copying as a proletarian consequence what has come from so many bourgeois organisations and interests! For example, with what did bourgeois meetings in middle Europe begin and and? With “Hail to the Emperor:” And every proletarian meeting has ended with “Long live the international revolutionary social democracy!” We have only to reflect on what enormous suggestive power lies in these words heard by the proletariat week after week, and how these words induce a uniform consciousness throughout the masses so that all freedom of thought has naturally been driven out. All this has taken firm hold of the soul. Formerly there were meetings, that have now become less frequent, called by the bourgeoisie, to which social democrats also were invited. The Chairman on closing would say: “I shall first beg the social democrats to leave, and then ask the audience to rise and give a salute to the Emperor.” There were also proletarian meetings at the discussions of which the bourgeoisie were allowed to contribute. And at the end the Chairman would ask middle-class members to retire, so that the “Long live the international revolutionary social democracy” could be proposed. Thus was welded what passed through the soul as a uniform class-consciousness—the opposite of what was in the depths of their souls, the opposite of the longing for individual freedom of thought, for an individual form of consciousness!—That is the second thing.

And the third thing pressing for realisation in the depths of the modern soul is Socialism, which can be briefly described as the effort of the modern soul, in the time of the consciousness soul, to be able to feel itself an individual within the social organism. This is how man wants the social organism to be founded; he wants to feel himself member of this social organism. This means that he wishes a consciousness to permeate him that gives him the feeling: What I do is done so that I know in what way the social organism has a part in me and how I have a share in the social organism. Man lives within the social organism. But nowadays, as I have said, the feeling for the social organism is present only in the subconscious.

Today when a painter points a picture he is right in saying: This picture must be paid for; I have put my art into it.—What is his art? It is something only made possible for him by the community, by the social organism. His artistic ability, it is true, depends upon his karma, his earlier earth lives; but people today do not believe that, and by not believing it deceive themselves. If however we ignore the share of ability brought down by our individuality from higher regions through birth, then we are entirely dependent upon the social organism. But modern man pays no conscious heed to this, so instead of a social feeling in his consciousness there has arisen during the last four centuries, above all, on increasingly egoistic, anti-social trend of thought. This anti-social thought expresses itself particularly by everyone thinking first of himself and trying to get as much as possible out of the social organism. The feeling that one should return to the social organism what one has received, is harboured indeed by very few. In leading bourgeois circles there has gradually arisen in regard to the spiritual life the greatest imaginable egoism, egoism that looks upon sheer spiritual enjoyment, sheer intellectual enjoyment, as something man is specially justified in procuring for himself. We have, however, no claim to spiritual enjoyment prepared for us by the social organism if we are not in the position to return to the social organism an appropriate equivalent.

Now the proletariat, not being able to share in the spiritual part of the social organism, and being yoked to the economic life and to soulless capitalism, are again driven to the final consequence of middle-class egoism shown in the theory of surplus value. The worker recognises that it is he who actually produces what comes from machines at the factories, and wants to have the proceeds. He does not wish a part to be withdrawn and to go elsewhere. Seeing nothing but the capitalist who places him at the machine, he naturally thinks that all the surplus value goes to the capitalists and that he must above all turn against them. Considered objectively, there is of course something else, quite different hidden in this so-called surplus value. For what is surplus value? It is everything produced by manual labour for which this labour receives no compensation. Suppose there were no surplus value, that everything went to the worker for his immediate needs. Then it would go without saying that there would be no spiritual culture, no further culture at all! There would be only the economic life, only what can be brought into existence through manual labour. It cannot be a question therefore of the surplus value going to the manual worker, but only of its application in a way that can bring surplus value and manual work into agreement. This will happen only when conditions are created in which the manual worker can have some understanding of where the surplus value goes.

Here one touches on the point where most of the offences of the modern middle-class order have been committed. Machines and factories have been set up, trade has been carried on, capital put into circulation, the worker placed at the machine and thus harnessed to the capitalistic economic order. There he is meant to work. But no one has had the idea that the worker has need of anything beyond his labour power. It is not his labour power alone but also his leisure, the force he has left when his work is done, that must be used in a healthy social order. Only those capitalists are justified who have as great an interest in the Proletariat's labour power that is left over, as they have in the economic application of their forces. Those capitalists alone have justification who take care that the worker, at the end of a definite period of work, can have access to what is good from a universal human point of view spiritually and otherwise educationally.

For this, he must first have the fruits of education. In Middle-class society these fruits of education have been developed, therefore it has been possible for all kinds of popular cultural institutions to be set up. What people's kitchens of the spiritual life! What has not been founded in this sphere! But what feelings must have been awakened by all this in the proletariat? The feeling indeed that the middle-class is giving him something they are cooking there among themselves. Naturally he distrusts it and thinks: Aha, they would make me middle-class too by feeding me with the milk of the pious way of thinking in these people's kitchens!—These welfare movements of the bourgeoisie are largely responsible for the facts arising today in such a shocking way on the horizon of social life. What is appearing flows from much deeper sources than is generally thought. I want the surplus value. That is the egoistic principle that appears as the final consequence of the egoism of the middle-class who also wanted the surplus value. Once again the proletariat takes on the final consequence. And instead of the real, true socialism, slumbering in the depths of the soul, there appears on the surface of the life of the soul, in the consciousness, the theory of surplus value which is eminently anti-social. For everyone who takes surplus value to his heart is doing so for the satisfaction of his own egoism.

Thus today we have an anti-social socialism, just as we have a striving for a content of consciousness that is nothing of the sort. It is simply the result of the economic connection of one class of human beings expressing itself in the class-consciousness of the proletariat. Thus today we have a spiritual endeavour that denies the spirit and has found its logical conclusion in the materialistic interpretation of history.

We must look deeply into these things otherwise we shall not understood the present times. H0w little, in this direction, have the middle-class circles been inclined to cultivate insight into these connections, how little are they still prone to become conscious of them though the facts have spoken so clearly and with such urgency. In no other way will it be possible to bring about a striving among the proletariat that is truly social, in place of the present anti-social striving, than by trying to establish the economic life on a healthy, independent basis as a member of the social organism, which without State interference will have its own laws and its own governing body. In other words, we must make every effort to prevent the State being its own economist in any sphere. Then could be developed real socialism in the economic life, for which there is a deep yearning in the human soul. And there must also be an endeavour to separate from the economic life that of the actual political State, which for its part has no claim either to the economic life nor to the spiritual, cultural, educational life, and so on. If the life of the State makes no demands in either direction, but simply embodies the life of rights, than it bring to expression what here in the physical world is the basis of the relation between man and man—the relation that makes all men equal in the sight of the law. It is only when the life of the State is thus that true freedom of thought can be developed.

As third member of the sound social organism the life of spirit must be formed on its own basis, which can be drawn from the reality of the spirit and must press onward to true Spiritual Science. What in the depths of their souls men are striving for today is indeed the healthy social order, which must, however, be threefold.

Thus can things be regarded, as they have been considered by us today, and Spiritual Science should be taken also in this sense both deeply and earnestly, not as something that is listened to like a Sunday sermon, for that is middle-class.

It is middle-class that in its economic life only a small circle should, at a pinch, be cared for—at least, think they are caring for themselves. It is middle-class in the life of the State to let the State do the caring, and when, to pay a little attention to the life of the spirit, people visit a person, or take up theosophy or anything of the kind. It is really respectably bourgeois: And the Theosophical Movement today has indeed established a life of the spirit very characteristic of middle-class life. One can think of nothing more bourgeois in character than this modern Theosophical Movement. It has grown up as a sectarian spiritual movement right out of the needs of this class. Hence came the struggle when we tried to work out from the Theosophical Movement something that should be permeated by modern human consciousness, and established as a movement for mankind. But from this sectarian bourgeois element, that found an anchorage in the superficiality of human souls, there was always opposition. We must get beyond this; anthroposophical striving must be understood as something demanded by the times, giving us wide instead of narrow interests, and not merely leading us into little groups for the reading of lecture cycles. It is good to reed lecture cycles; I beg you not to jump to the conclusion that no one in future should read them. We should, however, not stop there. What is read must be put into practice by seeking above all to find the relation with modern consciousness. Let us therefore thoroughly read the cycles, and we shall soon see that what is in them actually passes over into our life forces! Then it is the best social nourishment today for striving souls. For everything is thought out there, as indeed it is ultimately in our building, especially in what is there striven for artistically. It is thought out in the sense of modern times, and in these times it can be thought out in no other way. I do not know if you have considered how this building tries to be, even in social respects, a most modern product, and how in this modern sense it aids man in his striving. Just imagine a building the inside of which, or the greater part of which, had no purpose—if it just stood there! It ought to stand in a connection with the whole of the rest of the world order, to have any sense at all. Overhead in the cupola even by day it would be pitch dark, dark as night, were electric light not to come in from outside! This building points to all that is going on outside, so thoroughly is it born of all that is most modern. It must therefore develop in connection not with what is on the surface of the soul but with the inner spiritual aspirations of the time.

Thus, you might reflect upon much that is connected with this building. It is indeed a representative of the most modern spiritual life, and is only to be rightly understood if we grasp the idea of it being a kind of comet, a comet with a tail. The tail consists in there living in the human soul what is really raying forth in feeling from Anthroposophy. But it might easily happen that many people would take up the attitude towards this building that some Catholics, and indeed leading Catholics, have taken towards modern astronomy. In modern astronomy comets are looked upon as ordinary bodies in the firmament, whereas in olden days they were thought to be rods of correction wielded by some materially conceived spirit from a heavenly window. When the time came that leaders of Catholicism could no longer deny that comets should be ranked with other heavenly bodies, they invented en expedient. Some of them who were clever said: The comet consists of a core and a tail; we cannot deny that the core is a heavenly body like the rest, but the tail is not so; the tail has the origin formerly ascribed to it!—So it may also happen that people come to think: We approve of the building, but we will have nothing to do with all the odd experiences issuing from it like a comet's tail!—

But the building, like the comet, belongs to its tail, and it will be necessary that everything in relation to it should be felt in its true connection.

In the course of these lectures we have seen that the middle of the nineteenth century is an important time in the development of Western humanity. Attention was called to the fact that in a sense the culmination of the materialistic way of thinking and the materialistic world view occurred during this time. Yet it also had to be pointed out that this trend that has emerged in the human being since the fifteenth century was really something spiritual. Thus, it can be said that the characteristic of this developmental phase of recent human evolution was that simultaneously with becoming the most spiritual, the human being could not take hold of this spirituality. Instead, human beings filled themselves only with materialistic thinking, feeling, and even with materialistic will and activity. Our present age is still dominated by the aftereffects of what occurred in so many people without their being aware of it, and then reached its climax in mankind's development. What was the purpose of this climax? It occurred because something decisive was meant to take place in regard to contemporary humanity's attainment of the consciousness soul stage.

In focusing on the evolution of humanity from the third post-Atlantean epoch until approximately the year 747 (see sketch) before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that a process runs its course that can be called the development of the sentient soul in humanity. Then the age of the rational or mind soul begins and lasts roughly until the year 1413. It reaches its high point in that era of which external history has little to report. It must be taken into consideration, however, if European development is to be comprehended at all. This culmination point occurs approximately in the year 333 after Christ. Since the year 1413, we are faced with the development of the consciousness soul, a development we are still involved in and that saw a decisive event around the year 1850, or better, 1840.

A.D. 333

 ----------747-----------/-------------1413----------1840 Sentient Soul........Rational Soul....Consciousness Soul 

For mankind as a whole, matters had reached a point around 1840 where, insofar as the representative personalities of the various nations are concerned, we can say that they were faced with an intellect that had already assumed its most shadowy form. (Following this, we shall have to consider the reaction of the individual nations.) The intellect had assumed its shadowlike character. I tried yesterday to characterize this shadow nature of the intellect. People in the civilized world had evolved to the extent that, from then on it was possible on the basis of the general culture and without initiation to acquire the feeling: We possess intellect. The intellect has matured, but insofar as its own nature is concerned, it no longer has a content. We have concepts but these concepts are empty. We must fill them with something.

This, in a sense, is the call passing through humanity, though dimly and inaudibly. But in the deep, underlying, subconscious longings of human beings lives the call, the wish to receive a content, substance, for the shadow nature of rational thinking. Indeed, it is the call for spiritual science.

This call can also be comprehended concretely. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the human organization, in the physical part of which this shadowy intellect is trained, had simply progressed to the point where it could cultivate this empty shadowy intellect particularly well. Now, something was required for this shadowy intellect; it had to be filled with something. This could only happen if the human being realized: I have to assimilate something of what is not offered to me on the earth itself and does not dwell there, something I cannot learn about in the life between birth and death. I actually have to absorb something into my intellect that, although it was extinguished and became obscured when I descended with the results of my former earth lives out of spiritual soul worlds into a physical corporeality, nevertheless rests in the depths of my soul. From there, I have to bring it up once again, I have to call to mind something that rests within me simply by virtue of the fact that I am a human being of the nineteenth century.

Earlier, it would not have been possible for human beings to have practiced self-awareness in the same manner. This is why they first had to advance in their human condition to the point where the physical body increasingly acquired the maturity to perfect and utilize the shadowy intellect completely. Now, at least among the most advanced human beings, the physical bodies had reached the point where one could have said, or rather, since then it is possible to say: I wish to call to mind what it is that I am seeking to bring up from the depths of my soul life in order to pour a content into this shadowy intellect. This shadowy intellect would have been filled with something and in this way the consciousness soul age would have dawned. Therefore, at this point in time, the occasion arose where the consciousness soul could have unfolded.

Now you will say: Yes, but the whole era prior to that, beginning with the year 1413, was the age of the consciousness soul. Yes, certainly, but at first it has been a preparatory development. You need only consider what basic conditions existed for such a preparation particularly in this period as compared to all earlier times. Into this period falls, for example, the invention of the printing press; the dissemination of the written word. Since the fifteenth century, people by and by have received a great amount of spiritual content by means of the art of printing and through writing. But they absorb this content only outwardly; it is the main feature of this period that an overwhelming sum of spiritual content has been assimilated superficially. The nations of the civilized world have absorbed something outwardly which the great masses of people could receive only by means of audible speech in earlier times. It was true of the period of rational development, and in the age of the sentient soul it was all the more true that, fundamentally speaking, all dissemination of learning was based on oral teaching. Something of the psycho-spiritual element still resounds through speech. Especially in former days, what could be termed “the genius of language” definitely still lived in words. This ceased to be when the content of human learning began to be assimilated in abstract forms, through writing and printed works. Printed and written words have the peculiarity of in a sense extinguishing what the human being brings with him at birth from his pre-earthly, heavenly existence.

It goes without saying that this does not mean that you should forthwith cease to read or write. It does mean that today a more powerful force is needed in order to raise up what lies deep within the human being. But it is necessary that this stronger force be acquired. We have to arrive at self-awareness despite the fact that we read and write; we have to develop this stronger faculty, stronger in comparison to what was needed in earlier times. This is the task in the age of the development of the consciousness soul.

Before taking a look at how the influences of the spiritual world have now started to flow down in a certain way into the physical, sensory world, let us pose the question today, How did the nations of modern civilization actually meet this point of time in 1840?

From earlier lectures we know that the representative people for the development of the consciousness soul, hence for what matters particularly in our age, is the Anglo-Saxon nation. The Anglo-Saxon people are those who through their whole organization are predisposed to develop the consciousness soul to a special degree. The prominent position occupied by the Anglo-Saxon nation in our time is indeed due to the fact that this nation is especially suited for the development of the consciousness soul. But now let us ask ourselves from a purely external viewpoint, How did this Anglo-Saxon nation arrive at this point in time that is the most significant one in modern cultural development?

It can be said that the Anglo-Saxon nation in particular has survived for a long time in a condition—naturally with the corresponding variations and metamorphoses—that could perhaps be described best by saying, Those inner impulses, which had already made way for other forms in Greek culture, were preserved in regard to the inner soul condition of the Anglo-Saxon people. The strange thing in the eleventh and tenth centuries B.C. is that the nations experienced what is undergone at different periods, that the various ages move, as it were, one on top of the other. The problem is that such matters are extraordinarily difficult to notice because in the nineteenth century all sorts of things already existed—reading, writing—and because the living conditions prevailing in Scotland and England were different from those in Homeric times.

And yet, if the soul condition of the people as a nation is taken into consideration, the fact is that this soul condition of the Homeric era, which in Greece was outgrown in the tragic age and changed into Sophoclism, has remained. This age, a kind of patriarchal conception of life and existence, was preserved in the Anglo-Saxon world up until the nineteenth century. In particular, this patriarchal life spread out from the soul condition in Scotland. This is the reason why the influence proceeding from the initiation centers in Ireland did not have an effect on the Anglo-Saxon nation. As was mentioned on other occasions, that influence predominantly affected continental Europe. On the British isle itself, the predominant influence originated from initiation truths that came down from the north, from Scotland. These initiation truths then permeated everything else. But there is an element in the whole conception of the human personality that, in a sense, has remained from primordial times. This still has aftereffects; it lingers on even in the way, say, the relationship between Whigs and Tories develops in the British Parliament. The fact is that fundamentally we are not dealing with the difference between liberal and conservative views. Instead, we have to do with two political persuasions for which people today really have no longer any perception at all.

Essentially, the Whigs are the continuation of what could be called a segment of mankind imbued with a general love of humanity and originating in Scotland. According to a fable, which does have a certain historical background, the Tories were originally Catholicizing horse thieves from Ireland. This contrast, which then expressed itself in their particular political strivings, reflects a certain patriarchal existence. This patriarchal existence retained certain primitive forces, which can be observed in the kind of attitude exhibited by the owners of large properties toward those people who had settled on these lands as their vassals.

This relationship of subservience actually lasted until the nineteenth century; nobody was elected to Parliament who did not possess a certain power by virtue of being a landowner. We only have to consider what this implies. Such matters are not weighed in the right manner. Just think what it signifies, for example, that it was not until the year 1820 that English Parliament repealed the law according to which a person was given the death penalty for having stolen a pocket watch or having been a poacher. Until then, the law decreed that such misdeeds were capital offenses. This certainly demonstrates the way in which particular, ancient, and elementary conditions had remained. Today, people observe life in their immediate surroundings and then extend the fundamental aspects of present-day civilization backwards, so to speak. In regard to the most important regions of Europe, they are unaware of how recently these things have developed from quite primitive conditions.

Thus, it is possible to say that these patriarchal conditions survived as the foundation and basis of a society that was subsequently infused with the most modern impulse, unimaginable in the social structure without the development of the consciousness soul. Just consider all the changes in the social structure of the eighteenth century due to the technological metamorphosis in the textile industry and the like. Note how the mechanical, technological element moved into this patriarchal element. Try to form a clear idea of how, owing to the transformation of the textile industry, the nascent modern Proletariat pushes into the social structure that is based on this patriarchal element, this relationship of landowner to subjects. Just think of this chaotic intermingling, think how the cities develop in the ancient countryside and how the patriarchal attitude takes a daring plunge, so to say, into modern, socialistic, proletarian life.

To picture it graphically, we can actually say that this form of life develops in the way it existed in Greece approximately until the year 1000 B.C. (see drawing). Then it makes a daring jump and we suddenly find ourselves in the year A.D. 1820. Inwardly, the life of the year 1000 B.C. has been retained, but outwardly, we are in the eighteenth century, say 1770 (see arrows). Now everything that then existed in modern life, indeed, even in our present time, pours in. But it is not until 1820 that this English life makes the connection, finds it necessary to do so (see drawing); it is not until then that these matters even became issues, such as the abolition of the death penalty for a minor theft. Thus we can say that, here, something very old has definitely flown together with the most modern element. Thus, the further development then continues on to the year 1840.

Now, what had to occur specifically among the Anglo-American people during this time period, the first half of the nineteenth century? We have to recall that only after the year 1820, actually not until after 1830, it became necessary to pass laws in England according to which children under twelve years of age were not allowed to be kept working in factories for more than eight hours a day, no more than twelve hours a day in the case of children between thirteen and eighteen years of age. Please, compare that with today's conditions! Just think what the broad masses of working people demand today as the eight-hour day! As yet, in the year 1820, boys were put to work in mines and factories in England for more than eight hours; only in that year was the eight-hour day established for them. The twelve-hour day still prevailed, however, in regard to children between twelve and eighteen.

These things must certainly be considered in the attempt to figure out the nature of the elements colliding with each other at that time. Basically, it could be said that England eased its way out of the patriarchal conditions only in the second third of the nineteenth century and found it necessary to reckon with what had slowly invaded the old established traditions due to technology and the machine. It was in this way that this nation, which is preeminently called upon to develop the consciousness soul, confronted the year 1840.

Now take other nations of modern civilization. Take what has remained of the Latin-Roman element; take what has carried over the Latin-Roman element from the fourth post-Atlantean cultural period, what has brought over the ancient culture of the intellectual soul as a kind of legacy into the epoch of the consciousness soul. Indeed, what had remained of this life of the intellectual soul reached its highest point, its culmination, in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. We note that the ideals, freedom, equality, and brotherhood appear all at once in the most extreme abstraction. We see them taken up by skeptics such as Voltaire,¹ by enthusiasts such as Rousseau;² we see them emerge generally in the broad masses of the people. We see how the abstraction, which is fully justified in this sphere, affects the social structure

It is a completely different course of events from the one over in England. In England, the vestiges of the old Germanic patriarchal life are permeated by what the element of modern technology and modern materialistic, scientific life could incorporate into the social structure. In France, we have tradition everywhere. We could say that the French Revolution has been enacted in the same manner in which a Brutus or a Caesar once acted in the most diverse ways in ancient Rome. Thus, here also, freedom, equality and brotherhood surfaced in abstract forms. Unlike in England, the old existing patriarchal element was not destroyed from the outside. Instead, the Roman juridical tradition, the adherence to the ancient concept of property and ownership of land, inheritance laws, and so on, what had been established in the Roman-juristic tradition was corroded by abstraction, driven asunder by abstraction.

We need only consider the tremendous change the French Revolution brought to all of European life. We only need remind ourselves that prior to the French Revolution those who, in a sense, distinguished themselves from the masses of the nation also had legal privileges. Only certain people could aspire to particular positions in government. What the French Revolution demanded based on abstraction and the shadowlike intellect was to make breaches into that system to undermine it. But it did bear the stamp of the shadowy intellect, the abstraction. Therefore, the demands that were being made fundamentally remained a kind of ideology. For this reason, we can say that anything that is of the shadowy intellect immediately turns into its opposite.

Then we observe Napoleonism; we watch the experimentation in the public and social realm during the course of the nineteenth century. The first half of the nineteenth century was certainly experimentation without a goal in France. What is the nature of the events through which somebody like Louis-Philippe, for example, becomes king of France, and so on—what sort of experimenting is carried out? It is done in such a way that one can recognize that the shadowy intellect is incapable of truly intervening in the actual conditions. Everything basically remains undone and incomplete; it all remains as legacy of ancient Romanism. We are justified in saying that even today the relationship to, say, the Catholic Church, which the French Revolution had quite clearly defined in abstraction, has not been clarified in France in external, concrete reality. And how unclear was it time and again in the course of the nineteenth century! Abstract reasoning had struggled up to a certain level during the Revolution; then came experimentation and the inability to cope with external conditions. In this way, this nation encountered the year 1840.

We can also consider other nations. Let us look at Italy, for instance, which, in a manner of speaking, still retained a bit of the sentient soul in its passage through the culture of the intellect. It brought this bit of the sentient soul into modern times and therefore did not advance as far as the abstract concepts of freedom, equality, and brotherhood attained in the French Revolution. It did, however, seek the transition from a certain ancient group consciousness to individual consciousness in the human being. Italy faced the year 1840 in a manner that allows us to say, The individual human consciousness trying to struggle to the fore in Italy was in fact constantly held down by what the rest of Europe now represented. We can observe how the tyranny of Habsburg weighed terribly on the individual human consciousness that tried to develop in Italy. We see in the 1820's the strange Congress of Verona³ that tried to determine how one could rise up against the whole substance of modern civilization. We note that there proceeded from Russia and Austria a sort of conspiracy against what the modern consciousness in humanity was meant to bring. There is hardly anything as interesting as the Congress of Verona, which basically wished to answer the question: How does one go about exterminating everything that is trying to emerge as modern consciousness in mankind?

Then we see how the people in the rest of Europe struggled in certain ways. Particularly in Central Europe, only a small percentage of the population was able to attain to a certain consciousness, experiencing in a certain manner that the ego is now supposed to enter into the consciousness soul. We notice attempts to achieve this at a certain high mental level. We can see it in the peculiar high cultural level of Goethe's age in which a man like Fichte was active;⁴ we see how the ego tried to push forward into the consciousness soul. Yet we also realize that the whole era of Goethe actually was something that lived only in few individuals. I believe people study far too little what even the most recent past was like. They simply think, for example the Goethe lived from 1749 until 1832; he wrote Faust and a number of other works. That is what is known of Goethe and that knowledge has existed ever since.

Until the year 1862, until thirty years after Goethe's death, with few exceptions, it was impossible for people to acquire a copy of Goethe's works. They were restricted; only a handful of people somehow owned a copy of his writings. Hence, Goetheanism had become familiar only to a select few. It was not until the 1860's that a larger number of people could even find out about the particular element that lived in Goethe. By that time, the faculty of comprehension for it had disappeared again. An actual understanding of Goethe never really came about, and the last third of the nineteenth century was not suited at all for such comprehension.

I have often mentioned that in the 1870's Hermann Grimm gave his “Lectures on Goethe” at the University of Berlin.⁵ That was a special event and the book that exists as Hermann Grimm's Goethe is a significant publication in the context of central European literature. Yet, if you now take a look at this book, what is its substance? Well, all the figures who had any connection with Goethe are listed in it but they are like shadow images having only two dimensions. All these portrayals are shadow figures, even Goethe is a two-dimensional being in Hermann Grimm's depiction. It is not Goethe himself. I won't even mention the Goethe whom people at the afternoon coffee parties of Weimar called “the fat Privy Councillor with the double chin.” In Hermann Grimm's Goethe, Goethe has no weight at all. He is merely a two-dimensional being, a shadow cast on the wall. It is the same with all the others who appear in the book; Herder—a shadow painted on a wall. We encounter something a little more tangible in Hermann Grimm's description of those persons coming from among the ordinary people who are close to Goethe, for example, Friederike von Sesenheim who is portrayed there so beautifully, or Lilli Schoenemann from Frankfurt—hence those who emerge from a mental atmosphere other than the one in which Goethe lived. Those are described with a certain “substance.” But figures like Jacobi and Lavater are but shadow images on a wall. The reader does not penetrate into the actual substance of things; here, we can observe in an almost tangible way the effects of abstraction. Such abstraction can certainly be charming, as is definitely the case with Hermann Grimm's book, but the whole thing is shadowy. Silhouettes, two-dimensional beings, confront us in it.

Indeed, it could not be otherwise. For it is a fact that a German could not call himself a German in Germany at the time when Hermann Grimm, for example was young. The way one spoke of Germans during the first half of the nineteenth century is misunderstood, particularly at present. How “creepy” it seems to people in the West, those of the Entente, when they start reading Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation today and find him saying: “I speak simply to Germans, to Germans as such.” In the same way, the harmless song “Germany, Germany above all else”^T1 is interpreted foolishly, for this song means nothing more than the desire to be a German, not a Swabian, a Bavarian, an Austrian, a Franconian, or Thuringian. Just as this song referred only to Germans as such, so Fichte wished simply to address himself to Germans, not to Austrians, Bavarians, those from the province of Baden, Wuerttemberg, Franconia, or Prussia; he wanted to speak “to Germans.” This is naturally impossible to understand, for instance, in a country where it has long since become a matter of course to call oneself a Frenchman. However, in certain periods in Germany, you were imprisoned if you called yourself German. You could call yourself an Austrian, a Swabian, a Bavarian, but it amounted to high treason to call yourself a German. Those who called themselves Germans in Bavaria expressed the sentiment that they did not wish to look up merely to the Bavarian throne and its reign within Bavaria's clearly defined borders, but implied that they also wished to look beyond the borders of Bavaria. But that was high treason! People were not permitted to call themselves Germans.

It is not understood at all today that these things that are said about Germans and Germany, refer to this unification of everything German. Instead, the absurd nonsense is spread that, for example, Hoffmann's song refers to the notion that Germany should rule over all the nations of the world although it means nothing else but: Not Swabia, not Austria, not Bavaria above all else in the world, but Germany above all else in the world, just as the Frenchman says: France above all else in the world. It was, however, the peculiar nature of Central Europe that basically a tribal civilization existed there. Even today, you can see this tribal culture everywhere in Germany. A Wuerttembergian is different from a Franconian. He differs from him even in the formulation of concepts and words, indeed, even in the thought forms disseminated in literature. There really is a marked difference, if you compare, say, a Franconian, such as cloddy Michael Conrad—using modern literature as an example—with something that has been written at the same time by a Wuerttembergian, hence in the neighboring province.

Something like this plays into the whole configuration of thoughts right into the present time. But everything that persists in this way and lives in the tribal peculiarities remains untouched by what is now achieved by the representatives of the nations. After all, in the realm commonly called Germany something has been attained such as Goetheanism with all that belongs to it. But it has been attained by only a few intellectuals; the great masses of people remain untouched by it. The majority of the population has more or less maintained the level of central Europe around the year A.D. 300 or 400. Just as the Anglo-Saxon people have stayed on the level of around the year 1000 B.C., people in Central Europe have remained on the level of the year A.D. 400. Please do not take this in the sense that a terrible arrogance might arise with the thought that the Anglo-Saxons have remained behind in the Homeric age, and we were already in the year A.D. 400. This is not the way to evaluate these matters. I am only indicating certain peculiarities.

In turn, the geographic conditions reveal that this level of general soul development in Germany lasted much longer than in England. England's old patriarchal life had to be permeated quickly with what formed the social structure out of the modern materialistic, scientific, and technological life first in the area of the textile industry, and later also in the area of other technologies. The German realm and Central Europe in general opposed this development initially, retaining the ancient peculiarities much longer. I might say, they retained them until a point in time when the results of modern technology already prevailed fully all over the world. To a certain extent, England caught up in the transformation of the social structure in the first half of the nineteenth century. Everything that was achieved there definitely bypassed central Europe.

Now, Central Europe did absorb something of abstract revolutionary ideas. They came to expression through various movements and stirrings in the 1840's in the middle of the nineteenth century. But this region sat back and waited, as it were, until technology had infused the whole world. Then, a strange thing happened. An individual—we could also take other representatives—who in Germany had acquired his thinking from Hegelianism, namely, Karl Marx, went over to England, studied the social structure there and then formulated his socialist doctrines. At the end of the nineteenth century, Central Europe was then ready for these social doctrines, and they were accepted there. Thus, if we tried to outline in a similar manner what developed in this region, we would have to say: The development progressed in a more elementary way even though a great variety of ideas were absorbed from outside through books and printed matter.

The conditions of A.D. 400 in central Europe continued on, then made a jump and basically found the connection only in the last third of the nineteenth century, around the year 1875. Whereas the Anglo-Saxon nation met already the year 1840 with a transformation of conditions, with the necessity of receiving the consciousness soul, the German people continued to dream. They still experienced the year 1840 as though in a dream. Then they slept through the grace period when a bridge could have been built between leading personalities and what arose out of the masses of the people in the form of the proletariat. The latter then took hold of the socialist doctrine and thereby, beginning about the year 1875, exerted forcible, radical pressure in the direction of the consciousness soul. Yet even this was in fact not noticed; in any case it was not channeled in any direction, and even today it is basically still evaluated in the most distorted way.

In order to arrive at the anomalies at the bottom of this, we need only call to mind that Oswald Spengler, who wrote the significant book The Decline of the West, also wrote a booklet concerning socialism of which, I believe, 60,000 copies or perhaps more have been printed. Roughly, it is Spengler's view that this European, this Western civilization, is digging its own grave. According to Spengler, by the year 2200, we will be living on the level of barbarism. We have to agree with Spengler concerning certain aspects of his observations; for if the European world maintains the course of development it is pursuing now, then everything will be barbarized by the time the third millennium arrives. In this respect Spengler is absolutely correct. The only thing Spengler does not see and does not want to see is that the shadowy intellect can be raised to Imaginations out of man's inner being and that hence the whole of Western humanity can be elevated to a new civilization.

This enlivening of culture through the intentions of anthroposophical spiritual science is something a person like Oswald Spengler does not see. Rather, he believes that socialism—the real socialism, as he thinks, a socialism that truly brings about social living—has to come into being prior to this decline. The people of the Occident, according to him, have the mission of realizing socialism. But, says Oswald Spengler, the only people called upon to realize socialism are the Prussians. This is why he wrote the booklet Prussianism and Socialism. Any other form of socialism is wrong, according to Spengler. Only the form that revealed its first rosy dawn in the Wilhelminian age, only this form of socialism is to capture the world. Then the world will experience true, proper socialism.

Thus speaks a person today whom I must count among the most brilliant people of our time. The point is not to judge people by the content of what they say but by their mental capacities. This Oswald Spengler, who is master of fifteen different scientific disciplines, is naturally “more intelligent than all the writers, doctors, teachers, and ministers” and so on. We can truly say that with his book about the decline of the West he has presented something that deserves consideration, and that, by the way, is making a most profound impression on the young people in Central Europe. But next to it stands this other idea that I have referred to above, and you see precisely how the most brilliant people can arrive today at the strangest notions. People take hold of the intellect prevalent today and this intellect is shadowy. The shadows flit to and fro, one is caught up in one shadow, then one tries to catch up with another—nothing is alive. After all, in a silhouette, in a woman's shadow image cast on the wall, her beauty is not at all recognizable. So it is also with all other matters when they are viewed as shadow images. The shadow image of Prussianism can certainly be confused with socialism. If a woman turns her back to the wall and her shadow falls on it, even the ugliest woman might be considered beautiful. Likewise, Prussianism can be mistaken for socialism if the shadowlike intellect inwardly pervades the mind of a genius.

This is how we must look at things today. We must not look at the contents, we must aim for the capacities; that is what counts. Thus, it has to be acknowledged that Spengler is a brilliant human being, even though a great number of his ideas have to be considered nonsense. We live in an age when original, elementary judgments and reasons must surface. For it is out of certain elementary depths that one has to arrive at a comprehension of the present age and thus at impulses for the realities of the future.

Naturally, the European East has completely slept through the results of the year 1840. Just think of the handful of intellectuals as opposed to the great masses of the Russian people who, because of the Orthodox religion, particularly the Orthodox ritual, are still deeply immersed in Orientalism. Then think of the somnolent effect of men like Alexander I, Nicholas I, and all the other “I's” who followed them! What has come about today was therefore the element that aimed for this point in which the consciousness soul was to have its impact on European life.

We shall say more tomorrow.

• 1. Francois de Voltaire (actually d'Arouet), 1694–1778, French philosopher of the Enlightenment.
• 2. Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778, French philosopher and pedagogue.
• 3. Congress of Verona: Congress of the “Holy Alliance” (1822) to which all the European powers belonged with the exception of England and the Vatican. Under Metternich, it pursued a clearly reactionary course.
• 4. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762–1814, German philosopher.
• 5. Hermann Grimm, 1828–1901, German art historian and literary critic.
• T1. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” the German national anthem.

I said yesterday that although it is a somewhat hazardous venture to speak of individual karmic connections, I intended to do so, and that I would take as examples the personalities of whom I gave you certain biographical details. Later on we shall also be able to study the karma of less representative personalities, but I have chosen, in the first place, examples which show clearly how in the karmic course of repeated phases of existence, the evolution of mankind as a whole goes forward. In modern civilisation we speak of history as if it were one continuous stream of happenings: events of the 20th century are related to events of the 19th century, these again to events of the 18th century, and so on. That it is men themselves who carry over things from one epoch of history to another, that the men now living have themselves carried over from earlier epochs what is to be found in the world and in life at the present time—this knowledge alone brings reality to light and reveals the true, inner connections in the historical life of mankind.

If we speak merely of “cause” and “effect,” no real connection comes to light. The connecting threads running through the evolution of humanity are woven as human souls pass over from epochs in the remote past to more recent times, entering again and again into new incarnations on the earth.

These connecting threads can be perceived in all their significance when we study really representative personalities.

In the lecture yesterday I spoke, firstly, of the aestheticist Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the “Swabian Vischer” as he is called, telling you something of his character. I said that I shall choose only examples that I have actually investigated. These investigations are a matter of vision, and are pursued by means of the spiritual faculties of which I have spoken so often and about which you can read in anthroposophical literature. Accordingly the only possible way of describing these things is that of narrative, for in this domain it is only what presents itself to direct vision that can be communicated. The moment we turn from one earthly life to an earlier life in the past, all intellectual reasoning comes to a standstill. Vision alone is the criterion here. A last vestige of intellectual understanding is possible when it is a matter of relating earthly life to the last phase of existence between death and rebirth from which it has directly proceeded—that is, to the life of soul-and-spirit just before the descent to earth. Here, up to a point, an intellectual approach is possible. When, however, it is a matter of showing the relation between one earthly life and a preceding incarnation, this can be done only in the form of narrative, for vision is the sole criterion. And if in contemplating a personality like Friedrich Theodor Vischer one is able to apprehend what is eternal in him—what passes over from one earthly life to another—then such a personality as he was in an earlier incarnation will emerge into one's field of vision, provided always that the right currents can be found in the whole series of earthly lives. Investigation leads back, first of all, of course, to the pre-earthly experiences. But in speaking now I shall give second place to these pre-earthly experiences and indicate how, behind the earthly lives of the three personalities in question, their previous incarnations can be perceived.

In undertaking such investigations it is absolutely essential to get rid of all preconceived notions. If, because of some opinion or view we may hold concerning the present or the last earthly life of a human being, we imagine that it is justifiable to argue intellectually that because of what he is now, he must have been this or that in an earlier incarnation—if we make judgments of this kind, we shall go astray, or at any rate it will be very easy to go astray. To base an intellectual judgment of one incarnation upon another in this way would be just as if we were to go into a house for the first time, look out of the windows facing north, and seeing trees outside were to conclude from these trees what the trees look like from the windows facing south. What must be done is to go to the south windows, see the trees there and look at them with entirely unbiased eyes.

In the same way, all intellectual reasoning must cease when it is a matter of apprehending the Imaginations which correspond to the earlier earthly lives of the personalities in question.

In the case of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, one is led back to the last incarnation of importance—in the intervening time there may have been one or another unimportant or possibly brief earthly life, but for the moment that is of no consequence—one is led back to the incarnation in which the karma of his present life was prepared—I mean “present” in the wider sense, for as you know, Vischer died at the end of the eighties of the 19th century. The incarnation in which the karma of his latest earthly life was prepared lies somewhere about the 8th century A.D. We see him among the Moorish-Arabian peoples who crossed over at this time from Africa to Sicily and there came into conflict with the peoples who were making their way down to Sicily from the north.

The essential point is that in this previous incarnation of importance, the individuality of whom I am speaking had received a thoroughly Arabian education, Arabian in every detail, containing all the artistic, perhaps also the inartistic elements in Arabism; it was characterised, too, by the vital energy with which in those days Arabism forced its way to Europe; and, above all, it brought this individuality into close human relationship with a large number of other men belonging to the same race.

This individuality, who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Friedrich Theodor Vischer, tried in the 8th century to establish close comradeship with many men belonging to the same Arabian stock and the same Arabian culture, who had already made strong contacts with Europe, were endeavouring to establish themselves in Sicily, and had to face heavy fighting; or rather it was really more the Europeans who had to face the fighting. The individuality we are considering took a full share in these conflicts. One may say that he was a person of genius—in the sense in which genius was conceived in those times. This individuality then, is to be found in the 8th century A.D.

Then he passes through the gate of death into the life between death and rebirth, during which there is naturally intimate fellowship with the souls with whom one has been together on earth. Here, in the spiritual world, were the souls with whom this individuality had tried, as I have just told you, to establish close relationship.

Now between these human beings—in language that has been coined for earthly relationships it is difficult to find expressions for describing super-sensible conditions—between the human souls with whom this individuality was now together, after he and they had passed through the gate of death, there existed through all the following centuries, right into the 19th century, a spirit-bond, a spiritual tie.

You will have understood from the lecture I gave here a week ago that what takes place on earth is lived through in advance by the Beings of the highest Hierarchies, by the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones, and that a human being who is passing through the life between death and a new birth looks down to a heaven of soul and spirit as we look up to the heavens. There, in that heaven of soul and spirit, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones live through what subsequently becomes our destiny, what is brought to realisation as our destiny when we descend again to the earth.

Now, in the conditions obtaining in the spiritual world, it was foreseen by the souls belonging to the community into which the individuality we are studying had been drawn, that through the coming centuries it would be their destiny to preserve a line of progress that would be quite uninfluenced by Christianity. What I am now saying will seem very strange, for the idea often prevails that the ordering of the world is as simple as we humans like to have it in everything we arrange ourselves. But the ordering of the world is by no means so simple. While on the one hand the mightiest of all impulses poured from the Mystery of Golgotha into the whole of Earth evolution, on the other hand it was necessary that what had been contained in earthly evolution before the Mystery of Golgotha should not be allowed at once to perish; it was necessary that what was, I will not say “anti-Christian” but “non-Christian,” should be allowed to stream on through the centuries.

And the task of sustaining this stream of culture for Europe—as it were of enabling a phase of culture not yet Christian to continue on into the Christian centuries—fell to a number of individuals who were born into Arabism in the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. Arabism was not, of course, directly Christian, but neither had it remained as backward as the old heathen religions. In a certain direction it had made steady progress through the centuries. A number of souls born into this stream were to carry forward in the spiritual world, untouched by the conditions prevailing on earth, that which the spirit of man, separated from Christianity, can know, feel and experience. They were to encounter Christianity only later, in later epochs of earthly evolution. And it is in truth an experience of shattering grandeur, full of deep significance, to see how a large community lived on in the spiritual world removed from the development of Christianity, until in the 19th century the majority of these souls came down to incarnation on earth. As you may suppose, they were very different individualities, with every variety of talent and disposition.

Friedrich Theodor Vischer was one of the first souls from this community to descend in the 19th century. [Vischer was born in 1807 and died in 1887] And he was as remote as can be from any possibility of direct experience of Christianity.

On the other hand, while still in his pre-earthly existence, he was able to receive impulses from those leading spirits who had been more or less near to Christianity but whose views of the world and conceptual life had developed in a direction not primarily and intrinsically Christian.

For a soul such as the one we now have in mind, the incarnation in the 7th/8th century was an especially good preparation—(it is of course paradoxical to speak of these things as one speaks of earthly affairs, but as I said, I intend to make the venture)—for coming together in the spiritual world with souls like that of Spinoza and others of a similar type, and with a large number of bearers of non-Christian culture, particularly, too, of Cabbalistic culture, who died during those centuries and came up into the spiritual world.

Thus prepared, this particular soul came into earthly existence in the 19th century, rather earlier than the others. All the others, for the reason that they descended somewhat later, became bearers of the natural-scientific outlook prevailing in the second half of the 19th century. For in point of fact the secret of the peculiar evolution of natural-scientific thinking in the second half of the 19th century is that well-nigh all the bearers of this stream at that time had been Arabians in their previous incarnations of importance; they were companions of the individuality who then came down as Friedrich Theodor Vischer. But Vischer came down earlier than they—it was like a premature birth in the sense of soul-and-spirit.

This, moreover, was grounded deeply in his karma, owing to his association, before his descent to earthly life, with the souls with whom Hegel was connected. With these souls, too, Friedrich Theodor Vischer had been associated in the spiritual world. This expressed itself in a strong personal bent for what Hegelianism became on earth, and protected him from growing into a purely materialistic-mechanistic conception of the world. If he had been born somewhat later, as were his companions in the spiritual life, he too, as an aestheticist, would in the natural course of things have headed straight for materialism. He was protected from this by his experiences in pre-earthly life and by his earlier descent to earth. But he could not adhere permanently to this Hegelian influence. And that is why he came to write the destructive critique of his own aesthetics—because here was something that was not quite in the line of his karma but was the result of a deflection of his karma. It would have been entirely in line with his karma to have been born at the same time as men who were steeped in the natural-scientific thinking of the second half of the 19th century, men who had been his associates in the earlier incarnation, belonging, as he did, to Arabism. His karma would have led him naturally to the same orientation of thinking.

The strange fact is that through a deflection of karma—which will be adjusted in later earthly lives—Friedrich Theodor Vischer was torn away from the straightforward line of his karma. This deflection was determined by his pre-earthly existence, not by his earthly karma. But when he reached a certain age he could no longer sustain it; he was impelled to enter right into his karma. And so he rejects his five-volume work on aesthetics and succumbs to the temptation of approaching the subject in the way of which the natural scientists would approve. In his first work on aesthetics he looks down from above, starting from principles and then passing to sense-phenomena. This he now criticises root and branch. He wants now to build from below upwards, starting from material facts and gradually rising to principles. And we witness a tremendous struggle: Vischer working at the destruction of his own aesthetics! We see how karma had been deflected and how he is hurled back into it, led to those whose companion he had been in a previous earthly life.

It is shattering in its significance to see how Vischer never really makes progress with this second work on aesthetics, how a kind of chaos seems to creep into the whole of his spiritual life. I told you yesterday about his curiously philistine attitude even towards Goethe's Faust. It is all due to the fact that he feels unsure of himself and is striving to get back to his old companions. But we must remember how strongly the unconscious works in karma. At a higher stage, of course, it becomes conscious. We must also remember how deeply certain philistine scientists hated Goethe's Faust! I told you yesterday what du Bois-Reymond said on the subject: that it would have been much more sensible of Goethe to let Faust make some real discovery rather than call up spirits, evoke the Earth-Spirit, associate with Mephistopheles or seduce young girls and not marry them afterwards. du Bois-Reymond regards all this as tomfoolery. According to him, Goethe should have presented a hero who invents an electrical machine or an air pump! Then there would have been social propriety about it all and the hero would have become Mayor of Magdeburg. Above all, there ought to have been no Gretchen-tragedy, and instead of the Prison Scene a correct and proper civic wedding! Well ... it is a point of view that is not without justification; but it was certainly not what Goethe had in mind!

Friedrich Theodor Vischer, as I said, was not completely sure of himself after his karma had been deflected in this way. But something was always pulling him back, and unconsciously, although he was a really free spirit, he was always delighted when he heard the philistines running down Goethe's Faust. He was witty, of course, and clever, and it was like snowballing going on between them. It is precisely when one observes things about a human being that are more a matter of vision, that one lights upon the Imaginations which lead behind the scenes of material existence.

Truly it is a grand spectacle! There, on the one side, stand the philistines of the first order, like du Bois-Reymond and the others, saying that Goethe ought to have represented Faust as Mayor of Magdeburg, inventing the electrical machine and the air-pump, and marrying Gretchen—verily these are philistines of the first order! Something is at work in the subconscious, because a karmic connection is in operation here. All these men had been Moors, associated with Vischer in Arabism. He was attracted by it all, he felt related to it ... and yet in another respect he was not. In the intervening time he had come into contact with other streams which had brought about a deflection of his karma. And now when the philistines of the first order threw their snowballs, he threw back his, saying that someone ought to write a thesis on a subject like the relation of Frau Christine von Goethe's chilblains to the symbolic-allegorical figures in the second part of Faust! That, you will agree, is philistinism with a touch of real wit in it, it is philistinism of the second order!

To assess these things at their true value is a matter of vision, not of merely intellectual apprehension.

In what I have told you of Vischer, my aim, to begin with, was to give you some indication—I shall return to these things again—of how the one earthly life can be understood from foregoing earthly lives.

There was something extraordinarily significant about the figure of Vischer going about in Stuttgart. I mentioned to you yesterday the wonderful blue eyes, the reddish-brown beard, the arms held out in the way I described. The Imagination of him, however, did not tally with the physical stature of the Swabian Vischer as he went about Stuttgart, for even to occult sight he did not look like a reincarnated Arabian. Again and again I left the matter alone, because one becomes—I cannot say “sceptical” in regard to one's visions, but one does become distrustful, one wants to have definite confirmation. Again and again I let the matter drop, until the riddle was solved in the following way.

In the 7th/8th century—that was also a male incarnation—this individuality regarded the men from the North, especially those he encountered in Sicily, as his ideal. In those days, as you may imagine, it was very easy to be carried away by people one greatly admired. And so he “caught” as it were, his bodily characteristics in the later incarnation from those against whom he had once waged war. Here is the solution of the riddle in regard to his physical stature.

In the last lecture we considered a second personality, namely, Franz Schubert, in connection with his friend Spaun, and with his own volcanic nature which on rare occasions, such as the one I related to you, could flare up in rage, making him into a thorough brawler; on the other hand he was extraordinarily tender and sensitive; he was like a sleep-walker, writing down his lovely melodies directly after waking in the morning. It was extremely difficult to get a picture of this personality, but the connection with Spaun gave the clue. For in the case of Schubert himself, when one looks back in the occult field and tries to find something definite, one has the feeling that he gives one the slip—if I may use this colloquialism. It is not easy to go back to his former incarnation; he eludes one all the time.

There is in truth something of a contrast here with the destiny of Schubert's works after his death. At the time of Schubert's death his compositions were very little known; only a few people had heard of him. After the lapse of some years, however, he became more and more renowned, until in the seventies and eighties of last century, fresh works of his were published every year. It was very interesting: suddenly, long after his death, Schubert turned out to be a most prolific composer. New works of his were constantly appearing.

When, however, we look back spiritually from Schubert's life in the 19th century into his earlier earthly life, the tracks disappear; it is not easy to find him.

On the other hand it is comparatively easy to find the tracks in the case of Baron von Spaun. And this line also led back to the 8th or 9th century A.D., to Spain. He was a Prince of Castile who had a name for being extraordinarily wise. He busied himself with astrology and with astronomy in the form current in those days, amending and drawing up astronomical tables. At a certain time in his life this Prince was forced to flee from his home, and he found refuge among those who were actually the bitterest enemies of the Castilian population at that time, namely the Moors.

He was obliged to stay here for a considerable time, and he formed a relationship of great tenderness and intimacy with a Moorish personality in whom the individuality of the later Franz Schubert was then incarnated. And this Prince of Castile would certainly have met with his end had it not been for the tender-spirited personality among the Moors who cared for him with every kindness. His earthly life was thus safeguarded for many years, to the great joy of them both.

What I am now relating to you is utterly remote from intellectual deduction in any shape or form. I have indicated the roundabout way which the research had to take. But along this roundabout way one is led to the fact that in Franz Schubert we have a reincarnated Moorish personality, one who had little opportunity of cultivating musical talent in his life among the Moors, but who, on the other hand, steeped himself with impassioned longing in whatever was to be found in the way of art and, I will not say of subtle “thinking” but rather of subtle “reasoning,” which in the train of Arabic culture had come from Asia, passed across Africa and finally reached Spain.

During that incarnation this personality developed the gentle, unassuming and yet vital flexibility of soul which quickened to life the poetic, dreamlike phantasy in the later incarnation as Franz Schubert. On the other hand this personality was obliged to take part in the fierce conflicts now again taking place between the Moors and the non-Moorish inhabitants of Castile, Aragon, and so forth. And this accounted for the suppressed emotion which like a pent-up stream burst forth—but only in unusual circumstances—during the Schubert-existence.

It seems to me that just as the earlier life of Friedrich Theodor Vischer can be understood only when one can view it against the background of Arabism, so the essence of Schubert's music, especially the undertone of many of his songs, can be discerned only when one perceives (I have not constructed anything, it arises from the facts themselves) that there is something spiritual in this music, something Asiatic which was shone upon for a time by the desert sun, took on greater definition in Europe, was carried through the spiritual world between death and rebirth and as something essentially human, removed from all the artificialities of society, came to birth again in a penniless schoolteacher.

The third personality of whom I spoke yesterday was Eugen Dühring. [Born 1833, died 1901.] I shall give brief indications only, for we can always return to these subjects again. Eugen Dühring was of particular interest to me because as a young man I was deeply engrossed in the study of his writings. I was fascinated by his works on physics and mathematics, especially by the treatise Neue Grundmittel und Erfindungen Zur Analysis, Algebra, Funktionsrechnung, and by his treatment of the law of corresponding boiling points. I was irritated to distraction by a book such as Sache, Leben und Feinde which is a sort of autobiography. There is something terribly self-complacent about it, self-complacent to the point of genius; not to mention traits which came out in utterly malicious pamphlets such as Die Ueberschätzung Lessings und dessen Anwaltschaft für die Juden. On the other hand I could admire Dühring's History of Mechanics as long as the lion was not in evidence, but only the lion's claws. There was, however, one unpleasant impression: for a history of mechanics, too much is said about all the gossip associated with Frau Helmholtz; abuse is hurled at Hermann Helmholtz, but the emphasis is upon the gossip that went on in the circle around Frau Helmholtz. Well ... such things do happen; gossip goes on in all kinds of circles! ... As I have said, I experienced every shade of feeling in regard to Dühring and his writings: respect, deep appreciation, criticism, irritation. And you will understand the desire to see how these traits had developed against the background of at any rate the immediately preceding earthly life.

But here again it was not easy, and at first—I have no wish to keep back these things—at first, the pictures were deceptive. Deceptive pictures arise very easily, because everything often depends upon starting from what is actually the most significant feature in some particular life of a human being in order to be led back along the right path. And in the case of Dühring it was a long time before I succeeded in finding any really significant feature.

The procedure I adopted was as follows.—I pictured to myself everything about him that appealed to me most, namely his materialistic-mechanistic conception of the world—materialistic, but yet, in a certain respect, spiritual, intellectually spiritual. I turned over in my mind how it all has to do with a finite world of space, a finite world of time; I constructed Dühring's whole conception of the world again for myself. That is not difficult. But when one has done it and looks back to earlier incarnations, numbers and numbers come into view and again there is delusion. One finds nothing essential; countless incarnations appear, but there cannot, of course, possibly have been so many: they are nothing but reflections of the present incarnation. It is just as if you were to have mirrors in a room, one here and another there: you would see numberless reflections. Then I went on to ponder with all intensity: What is Dühring's world-conception in reality, expressed in terms of clear thought? For the time being I left aside all the spiteful criticism, the abuse and other such non-essentials. I left all that aside and concentrated upon what is really grand and impressive in a world-conception which, as such, has always been antipathetic to me, but which, on account of the way in which Dühring presented it, attracted me. I pictured all this vividly to myself and then tried to get a clear grasp of the reality. From a certain age onwards he was totally blind. A blind man does not see the world, and his mental image of it is quite different from that of a man with sight. In point of fact, ordinary materialists, ordinary mechanistic thinkers, are on a different level altogether from Dühring. In comparison with them, Dühring has genius. All these men who have evolved conceptions of the world, Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, Spiller, Wiessner and the rest—“twelve to the dozen” as the saying goes—with them it is a very different matter. The way in which Dühring builds up his world-conception is utterly different. We can perceive, too, that the urge to give a certain shape to this view of the world was in him even before he became blind, and it really tallied with the fundamental trend of his mind only when he had lost his sight and space was dark around him. For the principles according to which Dühring builds up his world-conception belong essentially to dark space. It is a fallacy to imagine that this was the work of a man with sight.

But just think of it. In Dühring this is intrinsic truth. Other men—twelve dozen of them if you like—have evolved such conceptions of the world, but with Dühring there is a difference: with Dühring it is true. The others have sight and construct pictures of the world as if they were blind; Dühring is blind and evolves his world-conception as one who is blind. And that is an astonishing thing! If one realises what it means, if one observes this man and knows: here is someone who in his soul-evolution was like a blind man, whose outlook becomes mechanistic because of his blindness—then one finds him again. Two incarnations come into consideration here. We find him associated with the movement in the Eastern Church, about the 8th or 9th century A.D., which at one period was iconoclastic, bent upon the destruction of all images, and then, later on, reinstated them. In Constantinople, particularly, this conflict developed between religion employing pictures and images, and religion in which none were permitted. And there we find the individuality who was born in a later age as Eugen Dühring battling ardently, good fighter as he was, for a cultural life devoid of pictures and images. Here, manifesting in purely physical conflict, one can see all that later comes to expression in words.

One point was extraordinarily interesting to me. A strange word occurs in the second volume of the work on Julius Robert Mayer. One actually sees the whole thing! In the earlier incarnation, when Dühring was engaged in destroying images, he had a special way of brandishing his scimitar, the hooked scimitar which already then was being tried out and developed. In the book on Mayer—these things, you know, often turn on pictorial details—I found a word that seemed to ring in unison with the scimitar. There is a chapter in this book entitled Schlichologisches (“trick-ology”). “Trickology” in German University life and so forth—getting in from the side by a cunning manoeuvre.

Dühring coins the word “Schlichologisches,” as well as the amusing expression “Intellectuaille,” connected with canaille. He invents all kinds of words. As I said, details that seem quite unimportant may be very revealing. And paradoxical as it may appear, one does not really arrive at the connecting links between different earthly lives unless one has an eye and a feeling for symptoms of this kind. Anyone who cannot discern a man's character from the way he walks, how he steps on the soles of his feet, will not easily make progress in such matters as those dealt with in the present lectures. One must be able to see the very swing of the scimitar transferred into words that were coined by this individuality in his subsequent life.

Dühring was always heaping abuse on the savants—“men of unlearning,” as he calls them. He said he would be thankful if there were no more names to remind him of ancient erudition. He wants no logic, he wants anti-logic; no Sophia, but anti-Sophia; no science, but anti-science. He says explicitly that he would like best of all to make everything “anti.” Now in the incarnation before the one when he was a rabid iconoclast, this man who so fiercely abused everything in the way of erudition had belonged to the School of the Greek Stoics, was himself a Stoic philosopher. In days of antiquity Dühring was himself one of the kind of men he now abused so vehemently; in the third incarnation back he was a professed philosopher, a Stoic philosopher at that, therefore one who in a certain sense withdrew from earthly life.

What dawned upon me first of all was that very many of Dühring's thoughts, or rather the forms in which his thoughts are expressed, are to be found in the Stoics! The matter is not, of course, as simple as all that. Indeed a whole course of lectures might be given on the forms of thought in Dühring and in the Stoics.

Thus we are led back, first, to the age of iconoclasm in the east of Europe about the 9th century A.D., when Dühring was a rabid iconoclast; then to the 3rd century B.C., the period of Stoic philosophy in ancient Greece.

And now again it is astounding: this Stoic, who makes no demands upon life, who holds back from everything that is not absolutely essential to life, renounces earthly sight in the second of the subsequent incarnations. And in this he brings truth to expression, for he illustrates in a magnificent way the blindness of the modern conception of the world.

Whatever may be one's attitude to Dühring's conception of the world, the moving tragedy of it is that Dühring personifies what the world-conception prevailing in the 19th century truly is; he expresses it through his very make-up as a man. The Stoic, who would not face the world as it is, becomes blind; the iconoclast, the destroyer of images, who will not tolerate imagery, makes the history of literature and poetry into what it became in Dühring's two volumes on Great Men of Letters, where not only are Goethe and Schiller put aside but where at most a man like Bürger plays any definite rôle. Here we have the truth of what is presented elsewhere in a false light. For men assert that the mechanistic thought, the materialism of the second half of the 19th century, sees. There lies the untruth, for materialism does not see; materialism is blind. And Dühring presents it as it truly is.

And so a representative personality, viewed in the right light, is an illustration of world-historic karma, the karma of civilisation as represented by its conception of the world in the second half of the 19th century.

In the next lecture we will speak further of these matters.

It is to be hoped that my discussions of the boundaries of natural science have been able to furnish at least some indications of the difference between what spiritual science calls knowledge of the higher worlds and the mode of knowledge proceeding from everyday consciousness or ordinary science. In everyday life and in ordinary science our powers of cognition are those we have acquired through the conventional education that carries us up to a certain stage in life and whatever this education has enabled us to make of inherited and universally human qualities. The mode of cognition that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science terms knowledge of the higher worlds has its basis in a further self-cultivation, a further self-development; one must become aware that in the later stages of life one can advance through self-education to a higher consciousness, just as a child can advance to the stage of ordinary consciousness. The things we sought in vain at the two boundaries of natural science, the boundaries of matter and of ordinary consciousness, reveal themselves only when one attains this higher consciousness. In ancient times the Eastern sages spoke of such an enhanced consciousness that renders accessible to man a level of reality higher than that of everyday life; they strove to achieve a higher development, similar to the one we have described, by means of an inner self-cultivation that corresponded to their racial characteristics and evolutionary stage. The meaning of what radiates forth from the ancient Eastern wisdom-literature becomes fully apparent only when one realizes what such a higher level of development reveals to man. If one were to characterize the path of development these sages followed, one would have to describe it as a path of Inspiration. For in that epoch humanity had a kind of natural propensity to Inspiration, and in order to understand these paths into the higher realms of cognition, it will be useful if First we can gain clarity concerning the path of development followed by these ancient Eastern sages. I want to make it clear from the start, however, that this path can no longer be that of our Western civilization, for humanity is in a process of constant evolution, ever moving forward. And whoever desires—as many have—to return to the instructions given in the ancient Eastern wisdom-literature in order to enter upon the paths of higher development actually desires to turn back the tide of human evolution or shows that he has no real understanding of human progress. In ordinary consciousness we reside within our thought life, our life of feeling, and our life of will, and we initially substantiate what surges within the soul as thought, feeling, and will in the act of cognition. And it is in the interaction with percepts of the external world, with physical-sensory perceptions, that our consciousness First fully awakens.

It is necessary to realize that the Eastern sages, the so-called initiates of the East, cultivated perception, thinking, feeling, and willing in a way different from their cultivation in everyday life. We can attain an understanding of this path of development leading into the higher worlds when we consider the following. In certain ages of life we develop what we call the soul-spirit toward a greater freedom, a greater independence. We have been able to show how the soul-spirit, which functions in the earliest years of childhood to organize the physical body, emancipates itself, becomes free in a sense with the change of teeth. We have shown how man then lives freely with his ego in this soul-spirit, which now places itself at his disposal, while formerly it occupied itself—if I may express myself thus—with the organization of the physical body. As we enter into ever-greater participation in everyday life, however, there arises something that initially prevents this emancipated soul-spirit from growing into the spiritual world in normal consciousness. As human beings, we must traverse the path that leads us into the external world with the requisite faculties during our life between birth and death. We must acquire such faculties as allow us to orient ourselves within the external, physical-sensory world. We must also develop such faculties as allow us to become useful members of the social community we form with other human beings.

What arises is threefold. These three things bring us into a proper relationship with other human beings in our environment and govern our interaction with them. These are: language, the ability to understand the thoughts of our fellow men, and the acquisition of an understanding, or even a kind of perception, of another's ego. At first glance these three things—perception of language, perception of thoughts, and perception of the ego—appear simple, but for one who seeks knowledge earnestly and conscientiously these things are not so simple at all. Normally we speak of five senses only, to which recent physiological research adds a few inner senses. Within conventional science it is thus impossible to find a complete, systematic account of the senses. I will want to speak to you an this subject at some later time. Today I want only to say that it is an illusion to believe that linguistic comprehension is implicit in the sense of hearing, of that which contemporary physiology dreams to be the organization of the sense of hearing. just as we have a sense of hearing, so also do we have a sense of language. By this I do not mean the sense that guides us in speaking—for this is also called a sense—but that which enables us to comprehend the perception of speech-sounds, just as the auditory senses enable us to perceive tones as such. And when we have a comprehensive physiology, it will be known that this sense of speech is analogous to the other and can rightfully be called a sense in and of itself. It is only that this sense extends over a larger part of the human constitution than the other, more localized senses. Yet it is a sense that nevertheless can be sharply delineated. And we have, in fact, a further sense that extends throughout virtually all of our body—the sense that perceives the thoughts of others. For what we perceive as word is not yet thought. We require other organs, a sensory organization different from that which perceives only words as such, if we want to understand within the word the thought that another wishes to communicate.

In addition, we are equipped with an analogous sense extending throughout our entire bodily organization, which we can call the sense for the perception of another person's ego. In this regard even philosophy has reverted to childishness in recent times, for one can often hear it argued: we encounter another man; we know that a human has such and such a form. Since the being that we encounter is formed in the way we know ourselves to be formed, and sine we know ourselves to be ego-bearers, we conclude through a kind of unconscious inference: aha, he bears an ego within as well. This directly contradicts the psychological reality. Every acute observer knows that it is not an inference by analogy but rather a direct perception that brings us awareness of another's ego. I think that a friend or associate of Husserl's school in Göttingen, Max Scheler, is the only philosopher actually to hit upon this direct perception of the ego. Thus we must differentiate three higher senses, so to speak, above and beyond the ordinary human senses: the sense that perceives language, the sense that perceives thoughts, and the sense that perceives another's ego. These senses arise within the course of human development to the same extent that the soul-spirit gradually emancipates itself between birth and the change of teeth in the way I have described.

These three senses lead initially to interaction with the rest of humanity. In a certain way we are introduced into social life among other human beings by the possession of these three senses. The path one thus follows via these three senses, however, was followed in a different way by the ancients—especially the Indian sages—in order to attain higher knowledge. In striving for this goal of higher knowledge, the soul was not moved toward the words in such a way that one sought to arrive at an understanding of what the other was saying. The powers of the soul were not directed toward the thoughts of another person in such a way as to perceive them, nor toward the ego of another in such a way as to perceive it sympathetically. Such matters were left to everyday life. When the sage returned from his striving for higher cognition, from his sojourn in spiritual worlds to everyday life, he employed these three senses in the ordinary manner. When he wanted to exercise the method of higher cognition, however, he needed these senses in a different way. He did not allow the soul's forces to penetrate through the word while perceiving speech, in order to comprehend the other through his language; rather, he stopped short at the word itself. Nothing was sought behind the word; rather, the streaming life of the soul was sent out only as far as the word. He thereby achieved an intensified perception of the word, renouncing all attempts to understand anything more by means of it. He permeated the word with his entire life of soul, using the word or succession of words in such a way that he could enter completely into the inner life of the word. He formulated certain aphorisms, simple, dense aphorisms, and then strove to live within the sounds, the tones of the words. And he followed with his entire soul life the sound of the word that he vocalized. This practice then led to a cultivation of living within aphorisms, within the so-called “mantras.” It is characteristic of mantric art, this living within aphorisms, that one does not comprehend the content of the words but rather experiences the aphorisms as something musical. One unites one's own soul forces with the aphorisms, so that one remains within the aphorisms and so that one strengthens through continual repetition and vocalization one's own power of soul living within the aphorisms. This art was gradually brought to a high state of development and transformed the soul faculty that we use to understand others through language into another. Through vocalization and repetition of the mantras there arose within the soul a power that led not to other human beings but into the spiritual world. And if, through these mantras, the soul has been schooled in such a way and to such an extent that one feels inwardly the weaving and streaming of this power of soul, which otherwise remains unconscious because all one's attention is directed toward understanding another through the word; if one has come so far as to feel such a power to be an actual force in the soul in the same way that muscular tension is experienced when one wishes to do something with one's arm, one has made oneself sufficiently mature to grasp what lies within the higher power of thought. In everyday life a man seeks to find his way to another via thought. With this power, however, he grasps the thought in an entirely different way. He grasps the weaving of thought in external reality, penetrates into the life of external reality, and lives into the higher realm that I have described to you as Inspiration.

Following this path, then, we approach not the ego of the other person but the egos of individual spiritual beings who surround us, just as we are surrounded by the entities of the sense world. What I depict here was self-evident to the ancient Eastern sage. In this way he wandered with his soul, as it were, upward toward the perception of a realm of spirit. He attained in the highest degree what can be called Inspiration, and his constitution was suited to this. He had no need to fear, as the Westerner might, that his ego might somehow become lost in this wandering out of the body. In later times, when, owing to the evolutionary advances made by humanity, a man might very easily pass out of his body into the outer world without his ego, precautionary measures were taken. Care was taken to ensure that whoever was to undergo this schooling leading to higher knowledge did not pass unaccompanied into the spiritual world and fall prey to the pathological skepticism of which I have spoken in these lectures. In the ancient East the racial constitution was such that this was nothing to fear. As humanity evolved further, however, this became a legitimate concern. Hence the precautionary measure strictly applied within the Eastern schools of wisdom: the neophyte was placed under an authority, but not any outward authority—fundamentally speaking, what we understand by “authority” First appeared in Western civilization. There was cultivated within the neophytes, through a process of natural adaptation to prevailing conditions, a dependence on a leader or guru. The neophyte simply perceived what the leader demonstrated, how the leader stood firmly within the spiritual world without falling prey to pathological skepticism or even inclining toward it. This perception fortified him to such an extent on his own entry into Inspiration that pathological skepticism could never assail him.

Even when the soul-spirit is consciously withdrawn from the physical body, however, something else enters into consideration: one must re-establish the connection with the physical body in a more conscious manner. I said this morning that the pathological state must be avoided in which one descends only egotistically, and not lovingly, into the physical body, for this is to lay hold of the physical body in the wrong way. I described the natural process of laying hold of the physical body between the seventh and fourteenth years, which is through the love-instinct being impressed upon it. Yet even this natural process can take a pathological turn: in such cases there arise the harmful afflictions I described this morning as pathological states. Of course, this could have happened to the pupils of the ancient Eastern sages as well: when they were out of the body they might not have been able to bind the soul-spirit to the physical body again in the appropriate manner. One further precautionary measure thus was employed, one to which psychiatrists—some at any rate—have had recourse when seeking cures for patients suffering from agoraphobia or the like. They employed ablutions, cold baths. Expedients of an entirely physical nature have to be employed in such cases. And when you hear on the one hand that in the mysteries of the East—that is, the schools of initiation, the schools that led to Inspiration—the precautionary measure was taken of ensuring dependence on the guru, you hear on the other hand of the employment of all kinds of devices, of ablutions with cold water and the like. When human nature is understood in the way made possible by spiritual science, customs that otherwise remain rather enigmatic in these ancient mysteries become intelligible. One was protected against developing a false sense of spatiality resulting from an insufficient connection between the soul-spirit and the physical body. This could drive one into agoraphobia and the like or to seek social intercourse with one's fellow men in an inappropriate way. This represents a danger, but one which can and should—indeed must—be avoided in any training that leads to higher cognition. It is a danger, because in following the path I have described leading to Inspiration one bypasses in a certain sense the path via language and thought to the ego of one's fellow man. If one then quits the physical body in a pathological manner—even if one is not attempting to attain higher cognition but is lifted out of the body by a pathological condition—one can become unable to interact socially with one's fellow men in the right way. Then precisely that which arises in the usual, intended manner through properly regulated spiritual study can develop pathologically. Such a person establishes a connection between his soul-spirit and his physical body: by delving too deeply into it he experiences his body so egotistically that he learns to hate interaction with his fellow men and becomes antisocial. One can often see the results of such a pathological condition manifest themselves in the world in quite a frightening manner. I once met a man who was a remarkable example of such a type: he came from a family that inclined by nature toward a freeing of the soul-spirit from the physical body and also contained certain personalities—I came to know one of them extremely well—who sought a path into the spiritual worlds. One rather degenerate individual, however, developed this tendency in an abnormal, pathological way and finally arrived at the point where he would allow nothing whatever from the external world to contact his own body. Naturally he had to eat, but—we are speaking here among adults—he washed himself with his own urine, because he feared any water that came from the outside world. But then again I would rather not describe all the things he would do in order to isolate his body totally from the external world and shun all society. He did these things because his soul-spirit was too deeply incarnated, too closely bound to the physical body.

It is entirely in keeping with the spirit of Goetheanism to bring together that which leads to the highest goal attainable by earthly man and that which leads to pathological depths. One needs only slight acquaintance with Goethe's theory of metamorphosis to realize this. Goethe seeks to understand how the individual organs, for example of the plant, develop out of each other, and in order to understand their metamorphosis he is particularly interested in observing the conditions that arise through the abnormal development of a leaf, a blossom, or the stamen. Goethe realizes that precisely by contemplating the pathological the essence of the healthy can be revealed to the perceptive observer. And one can follow the right path into the spiritual world only when one knows wherein the essence of human nature actually lies and in what diverse ways this complicated inner being can come to expression.

We see from something else as well that even in the later period the men of the East were predisposed by nature to come to a halt at the word. They did not penetrate the word with the forces of the soul but lived within the word. We see this, for example, in the teachings of the Buddha. One need only read these teachings with their many repetitions. I have known Westerners who treasured editions of the Buddha's teachings in which the numerous repetitions had been eliminated and the words of a sentence left to occur only once. Such people believed that through such a condensed version, in which everything occurs only once, they would gain a true understanding of what the Buddha had actually intended. From this it is clear that Western civilization has gradually lost all understanding of Eastern man. If we simply take the Buddha's teachings word for word; if we take the content of these teachings, the content that we, as human beings of the West, chiefly value, then we do not assimilate the essence of these teachings: that is possible only when we are carried along with the repetitions, when we live in the flow of the words, when we experience the strengthening of the soul's forces that is induced by the repetitions. Unless we acquire a faculty for experiencing something from the constant repetitions and the rhythmical recurrence of certain passages, we do not get to the heart of Buddhism's actual significance.

It is in this way that one must gain knowledge of the inner nature of Eastern culture. Without this acquaintance with the inner nature of Eastern culture one can never arrive at a real understanding of our Western religious creeds, for in the final analysis these Western religious creeds stem from Eastern wisdom. The Christ event is a different matter. For that is an actual event. It stands as a fact within the evolution of the earth. Yet the ways and means of understanding what came to pass through the Mystery of Golgotha were drawn during the first Christian centuries entirely from Eastern wisdom. It was through this wisdom that the fundamental event of Christianity was originally understood. Everything progresses, however. What had once been present in Eastern primeval wisdom—attained through Inspiration—spread from the East to Greece and is still recognizable as art. For Greek art was, to be sure, bound up with experiences different from those usually connected with art today. In Greek art one could still experience what Goethe strove to regain when he spoke of the deepest urge within him: he to whom nature begins to unveil her manifest secrets longs for her worthiest interpreter—art. For the Greeks, art was a way to slip into the secrets of world existence, a manifestation not merely of human fantasy but of what arises in the interaction between this faculty and the revelations of the spiritual world revealed through Inspiration. That which still flowed through Greek art, however, became more and more diluted, until finally it became the content of the Western religious creeds. We thus must conceive the source of the primeval wisdom as fully substantial spiritual life that becomes impoverished as evolution proceeds and provides the content of religious creeds when it finally reaches the Western world. Human beings who are constitutionally suited for a later epoch therefore can find in this diluted form of spiritual life only something to be viewed with skepticism. And in the final analysis it is nothing other than the reaction of the Western temperament [Gemüt] to the now decadent Eastern wisdom that gradually produces atheistic skepticism in the West. This skepticism is bound to become more and more widespread unless it is countered with a different stream of spiritual life.

Just as little as a creature that has reached a certain stage of development—let us say has undergone a certain aging process—can be made young again in every respect, so little can a form of spiritual life be made young again when it has reached old age. The religious creeds of the West, which are descendants of the primeval wisdom of the East, can yield nothing that would fully satisfy Western humanity again when it advances beyond the knowledge provided during the past three or four centuries by science and observation of nature. An ever-more profound skepticism is bound to arise, and anyone who has insight into the processes of world evolution can say with assurance that a trend of development from East to West must necessarily lead to an increasingly pronounced skepticism when it is taken up by souls who are becoming more and more deeply imbued with the fruits of Western civilization. Skepticism is merely the march of the spiritual life from East to West, and it must be countered with a different spiritual stream flowing henceforth from West to East. We ourselves are living at the crossing-point of these spiritual streams, and in the further course of these considerations we will want to see how this is so.

But first it must be emphasized that the Western temperament is constitutionally predisposed to follow a path of development leading to the higher worlds different from that of the Eastern temperament. Just as the Eastern temperament strives initially for Inspiration and possesses the racial qualities suitable for this, the Western temperament, because of its peculiar qualities (they are at present not so much racial qualities as qualities of soul) strives for Imagination. It is no longer the experience of the musical element in mantric aphorisms to which we as Westerners should aspire but something else. As Westerners we should strive in such a way that we do not pursue with particular vigour the path that opens out when the soul-spirit emerges from the physical body but rather the path that presents itself later, when the soul-spirit must again unite with the physical organism by consciously grasping the physical body. We see the natural manifestation of this in the emergence of the bodily instinct: whereas Eastern man sought his wisdom more by sublimating the forces at work between birth and the seventh year, Western man is better fitted to develop the forces at work between the time of the change of teeth and puberty, in that there is lifted up into the soul-spirit that which is natural for this epoch of humanity. We come to this when, just as in emerging from the body we carry the ego with us into the realm of Inspiration, we now leave the ego outside when we delve again into the body. We leave it outside, but not in idleness, not forgetting or surrendering it, not suppressing it into unconsciousness, but rather conjoining it with pure thinking, with clear, keen thinking, so that finally one has this inner experience: my ego is totally suffused with all the clear thinking of which I have become capable. One can experience just this delving down into the body in a very clear and distinct manner. And at this point you will perhaps allow me to relate a personal experience, because it will help you to understand what I really mean.

I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my book, Philosophy of Freedom. This book is actually a modest attempt to win through to pure thinking, the pure thinking in which the ego can live and maintain a firm footing. Then, when pure thinking has been grasped in this way, one can strive for something else. This thinking, left in the power of an ego that now feels itself to be liberated within free spirituality [frei und unabhängig in freier Geistigkeit], can then be excluded from the process of perception. Whereas in ordinary life one sees color, let us say, and at the same time imbues the color with conceptual activity, one can now extract the concepts from the entire process of elaborating percepts and draw the percept itself directly into ones bodily constitution.

Goethe undertook to do this and has already taken the First steps in this direction. Read the last chapter of his Theory of Colors, entitled “The Sensory-Moral Effect of Color”: in every color-effect he experiences something that unites itself profoundly not only with the faculty of perception but with the whole man. He experiences yellow and scarlet as “attacking” colors, penetrating him, as it were, through and through, filling him with warmth, while he regards blue and violet as colors that draw one out of oneself, as cold colors. The whole man experiences something in the act of sense perception. Sense perception, together with its content, passes down into the organism, and the ego with its pure thought content remains, so to speak, hovering above. We exclude thinking inasmuch as we take into and fill ourselves with the whole content of the perception, instead of weakening it with concepts, as we usually do. We train ourselves specially to achieve this by systematically pursuing what came to be practiced in a decadent form by the men of the East. Instead of grasping the content of the perception in pure, strictly logical thought, we grasp it symbolically, in pictures, allowing it to stream into us as a result of a kind of detour around thinking. We steep ourselves in the richness of the colors, the richness of the tone, by learning to experience the images inwardly, not in terms of thought but as pictures, as symbols. Because we do not suffuse our inner life with the thought content, as the psychology of association would have it, but with the content of perception indicated through symbols and pictures, the living inner forces of the etheric and astral bodies stream toward us from within, and we come to know the depths of consciousness and of the soul. It is in this way that genuine knowledge of the inner nature of man is acquired, and not by means of the blathering mysticism that nebulous minds often claim to be a way to the God within. This mysticism leads to nothing but abstraction and cannot satisfy anyone who wishes to become a man in the full sense of the ward.

If one desires to do real research concerning human physiology, thinking must be excluded and the picture-forming activity sent inward, so that the physical organism reacts by creating Imaginations. This is a path that is only just beginning in the development of Western culture, but it is the path that must be trodden if the influence that streams over from the East, and would lead to decadence if it atone were to prevail, is to be confronted with something capable of opposing it, so that our civilization may take a path of ascent and not of decline. Generally speaking, however, it can be said that human language itself is not yet sufficiently developed to be able to give full expression to the experiences that one undergoes in the inner recesses of the soul. And it is at this point that I would like to relate a personal experience to you.

Many years ago, in a different context, I made an attempt to give expression to what might be called a science of the human senses. In spoken lectures I succeeded to some extent in putting this science of the twelve senses into words, because in speaking it is more possible to turn language this way and that and ensure understanding by means of repetitions, so that the deficiencies of our language, which is not yet capable of expressing these super-sensible things, is not so strongly felt. Strangely enough, however, when I wanted many years ago to write down what I had given as actual anthroposophy in order to put it into a form suitable for a book, the outer experiences an being interiorized became so sensitive that language simply failed to provide the words, and I believe that the beginning of the text—several sheets of print—lay for some five or six years at the printer's. It was because I wanted to write the whole book in the style in which it began that I could not continue writing, for the simple reason that at the stage of development I had then reached, language refused to furnish the means for what I wished to achieve. Afterward I became overloaded with work, and I still have not been able to finish the book. Anyone who is less conscientious about what he communicates to his fellow men out of the spiritual world might perhaps smile at the idea of being held up in this way by a temporarily insurmountable difficulty. But whoever really experiences and can permeate with a full sense of responsibility what occurs when one attempts to describe the path that Western humanity must follow to attain Imagination knows that to find the right words entails a great deal of effort. As a meditative schooling it is relatively easy to describe, and this has been done in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. If one's aim, however, is to achieve definite results such as that of describing the essential nature of man's senses—a part, therefore, of the inner makeup and constitution of humanity—it is then that one encounters the difficulty of grasping Imaginations and presenting them in sharp contours by means of words.

Nevertheless, this is the path that Western humanity must follow. And just as the man of the East was able to experience through his mantras the entry into the spiritual nature of the external world, so must the Westerner, leaving aside the entire psychology of association, learn to enter into his own being by attaining the realm of Imagination. Only by penetrating into the realm of Imagination will he acquire the true knowledge of humanity that is necessary in order for humanity to progress. And because we in the West must live much more consciously than the men of the East, we cannot simply say: whether or not humanity will gradually attain this realm of Imagination is something that can be left to the future. No—this world of Imagination, because we have passed into the stage of conscious human evolution, must be striven for consciously; there can be no halting at certain stages. For what happens if one halts at a certain stage? Then one does not meet the ever-increasing spread of skepticism from East to West with the right countermeasures but with measures that result from the soul-spirit uniting too radically, too deeply and unconsciously, with the physical body, so that too strong a connection is formed between the soul-spirit and the physical body.

Yes, it is indeed possible for a human being not only to think materialistically but to be a materialist, because the soul-spirit is too strongly linked with the physical body. In such a man the ego does not live freely in the concepts of pure thinking he has attained. If one descends into the body with pictorial perception, one delves with the ego and the concepts into the body. And if one then spreads this around and suffuses it throughout humanity, it gives rise to a spiritual phenomenon well known to us—dogmatism of all kinds. Dogmatism is nothing other than the translation into the realm of the soul-spirit of a condition that at a lower stage manifests itself pathologically as agoraphobia and the like, and that—because these things are related—also shows itself in something else, which is a metamorphosis of fear, in superstition of every variety. An unconscious urge toward Imagination is held back through powerful agencies, and this gives rise to dogmatism of all types. These types of dogmatism must gradually be replaced by what is achieved when the world of ideas is kept within the sphere of the ego; when progress is made toward Imagination, the true nature of man is experienced inwardly, and this Western path into the spiritual world is followed in a different way. It is this other path through Imagination that must establish the stream of spiritual science, the process of spiritual evolution that muss make its way from West to East if humanity is to progress. It is supremely important at the present time, however, for humanity to recognize what the true path of Imagination should be, what path must be taken by Western spiritual science if it is to be a match for the Inspiration and its fruits that were attained by ancient Eastern wisdom in a form suited to the racial characteristics of those peoples. Only if we are able to confront the now decadent Inspiration of the East with Imaginations which, sustained by the spirit and saturated with reality, have arisen along the path leading to a higher spiritual culture; only if we can call this culture into existence as a stream of spiritual life flowing from West to East, are we bringing to fulfillment what is actually living deep within the impulses for which humanity is striving. It is these impulses that are now exploding in social cataclysms because they cannot find other expression.

In tomorrow's lecture we will speak further of the path of Imagination and of how the way to the higher worlds is envisaged by anthroposophical spiritual science.

Many of the lectures I have given over the years in anthroposophical groups to friends—some of whom are sitting here today—have dealt with the gospels of John, Luke, and Matthew.¹ In those lectures, we have tried to recreate in our minds the great event in Palestine, the Mystery of Golgotha, from three different angles—in three different ways, so to speak. We hope these lectures could establish an ever-increasing appreciation of this unique event in our souls. I have already pointed out that we have four gospels because their authors were inspired occultists and each wanted to represent this great event from one perspective only, just as we take pictures or photograph external objects from only one point of view. When we then take the pictures from various angles and combine them, looking at all of them together, we can have the actual reality before our souls. Thus, each of the evangelists gives us the opportunity to consider the great event of Palestine from one particular standpoint.

The Gospel of Saint John gives us an insight into these events from a perspective we may call a revelation of the highest human and occult aims, as well as of the highest world principle. In Saint Luke's Gospel, on the other hand, we are given an insight into the secrets surrounding the personality of Jesus of Nazareth—the Solomon and Nathan Jesuses—up to the moment when his inspiration through the Christ took place. As you know from my lecture cycle on the Gospel of Saint Matthew—if you missed the lectures you can read them later—this gospel shows how the physical body in which Christ was to be incarnated for three years was prepared in the Hebrew people.

In a certain way, the Gospel of Saint Mark leads us to the highest summits of the spiritual-scientific, Christian world view. It gives us the opportunity to look into many things that are imparted to us through the gospels but are not touched upon in the same way by the other evangelists. Today, therefore, I have set myself the task to speak about this gospel.

We must be aware that it is necessary to consider many things that the superficial world of our time does not really want to look at. If we want to understand Saint Mark's Gospel in all its depth, we must familiarize ourselves with the different way of expressing things that prevailed at the time when Christ Jesus walked the earth. Do not take it amiss, then, if in order to convey what I have to tell you, I paint it in strong colors.

We express what we want to say in language, which is to bring out what lives in our souls. The expression of soul content in language differs from one epoch of human development to another. In the Hebraic epoch, the ancient Hebrew sacred language provided a wonderful way of expressing things. It was very different from our way of clothing the secrets of the soul into words. When a word was spoken in old Hebrew, it contained not merely an abstract idea, as it does today, but a whole world. The vowels were not written because the speaker expressed his innermost being through his way of vocalizing, whereas the consonants contained the description—the picture, so to speak—of what was outside. We can say that when the Hebrews wrote, for example, what corresponds to our B, they always felt something like a picture of outer conditions, something that formed a warm, hut-like enclosure. The letter B always evoked the image of something that can enclose a being like a house; the letter could not be pronounced without this image living in the speaker's soul. When A was vocalized, there was always something of strength and force, even of radiating power, living within it. That is how the soul lived on; the spiritual-psychological content flowed out with the words, soared into space, and touched other souls. Obviously, language was then a far more living affair and entered more fully into the secrets of existence than our contemporary language.

That is the light in the picture I mentioned. The shadows are in our having become, to a great extent, philistines. Our language expresses only abstractions and generalities, and we no longer even notice this—so our language at bottom expresses only the philistine. It could not be otherwise in an age when people begin to write literature long before they have any spiritual content to express, when an infinite amount of printed material goes to the general public, when everyone thinks he must write something, and when everything can be a subject to write about. I have even seen authors turning up at the founding of our society out of curiosity, hoping to find material for a novel in it and looking for protagonists that can be dished up in the popular style.

We must be aware, then, that our language has become abstract, empty, and philistine, in contrast to the way it was when people still thought of language as something holy, something that must be handled responsibly, and through which God would speak. That is why it is so infinitely difficult to squeeze the tremendous facts imparted to us by, and resounding in, the gospels into modern words. Why shouldn't people these days believe that everything can be expressed in contemporary language? They cannot understand that this language is empty of what even the Greeks expressed with one word. Furthermore, reading the Bible today, we find something that, compared to its original content, has been sifted once, twice, even thrice, but in such a way that not the best but only the worst remains. It is therefore rather cheap to refer to the modern wording of the Bible. We go most astray, however, when we turn to the Gospel of Mark as we have it in the Bible today.

In the translation by Weizsäcker, which is generally considered excellent—and because it is considered so excellent nowadays, we can assume that it is not all that good—the first lines of the Gospel of St. Mark are rendered as follows:

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, behold, I send my messenger before thee, who shall prepare the way for thee; listen how it calls in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.

Honest people must really admit that if Weizsäcker begins the Gospel of Saint Mark like this, they do not understand a single word of it; those who claim to understand this are fooling themselves. People who work honestly will not be able to understand the lines, “Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, who shall prepare thy way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” For they express either a triviality or something that cannot be understood. The concepts that make it possible to understand what Isaiah says here must first be acquired. For Isaiah pointed to the great, tremendous event that was to be the most significant event in human evolution. What was he really referring to?

Based upon what we already know, we can say what Isaiah prophesied. We can say that in ancient times humanity had a kind of clairvoyance that allowed people to grow into the divine-spiritual world with their soul forces. But what really happened when people grew thus into the spiritual world? They ceased to make use of the I, insofar as they had developed it at that time. Instead, they used their astral body, with its forces of vision and seership—whereas the forces rooted in the I were gradually awakened in the process of perceiving the physical world. It is the I that uses the senses as instruments. When the ancients sought enlightenment about the world, they employed their astral bodies. They saw and perceived in their astral bodies. Further evolution consisted in the transition from the use of the astral body to the use of the I. In regard to the I, the Christ impulse was the most intense impulse. If Christ is taken into the I in the sense of St. Paul's words, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” then the I will have the power to grow into the spiritual world through its own efforts. Formerly, only the astral body could do this.

Thus, we can say of human evolution that human beings formerly used their astral body as an organ of perception, but gradually lost the ability to develop organs of perception in the astral body. As humanity approached the time of the Christ event, it entered an evolutionary stage in which people had to realize that their astral body was less and less able to see into the spiritual world. The astral body's connection to the spiritual world came to nothing, and the I was not yet forceful enough to get any enlightenment from the outer world. That was the time when Christ drew near.

Now in the evolution of humanity, certain great steps forward are gradually prepared before they actually take place. This was the case with the Christ impulse, but there had to be a transition. The development I just described could not have gone so far that human beings would have seen their astral body gradually becoming dulled toward the spiritual world and would have felt an utter desolation and dreariness in themselves until the I would have been kindled later through the Christ impulse. Things were not to turn out that way. Rather, a few individuals developed so far that through a particular influence from the spiritual world they saw with the astral body something similar to what people were to see and know later through the I. In other words, the I was prepared in the astral body.

Indeed, it is through the I and its development that human beings have become earthly beings. The astral body really belonged to the ancient moon when the angels, the Angeloi, were at the human stage. The angels were human on the old moon; we are human beings on the earth. On the old moon, human beings appropriately used their astral body, and everything else was just preparation for the evolution of the I. The beginning of our earth evolution was a repetition of our moon evolution on a higher level. After all, had we remained limited to the astral body, we could never have become fully human. Only angels on the moon could become human in the astral body. Therefore, just as Christ lived in earthly human beings in order to inspire the I in them, so for the preparation of the I there had to be prophets from the angels of the moon, the moon-humans, to inspire the astral body so that the I-hood of human beings could be prepared. A prophet could have characterized it in the following way. “There will come a time in human evolution when humanity will be ripe for the development of the I. Only the angels of the moon were raised to the highest in their astral bodies, but for human beings to be prepared for this I-hood, certain people on earth had to be so inspired through grace and under exceptional conditions that they could work as angels even though they were humans. They were angels in human form.”

Here we arrive at an important occult concept that is indispensable to the occult understanding of human evolution. It is naturally easy to say that all is Maya, but that is an abstraction. We must really take it seriously and be able to say, “A human being stands before me, but he or she is Maya. Who knows, he or she may not really be human. Perhaps the humanness is only an outer veil employed by quite another being, not a human one, to bring about something that cannot yet be effected by humanity.” I have indicated something of this in my The Portal of Initiation.²

Such an event occurred when the individuality who lived in Elijah was reborn in John the Baptist. An angel entered his soul and used his body and soul to do what would have been impossible for a human being to accomplish. An angel lived in John who had to announce the true I that was to live in Jesus of Nazareth. It is extremely important to know that John the Baptist is only Maya and that an angelic messenger lived in him. This is found also in the Greek version of the Bible: “Behold, I send my messenger [i.e., Angeloi or angel].” Thus, a profound cosmic mystery connected with John the Baptist was prophesied by Isaiah. As we have seen, Isaiah characterized John as Maya or illusion, but in truth John encompassed the angel who had to announce what humanity really was to become through receiving the Christ impulse. Angels proclaim beforehand what humanity is to become later. So, this passage in the Bible should really read, “Behold, what gives I-hood to the world sends the angel before thee to whom I-hood will be given.”

Now we go on to the third sentence. What does it mean? Here we must call to mind the whole historical world situation. What happened after the astral body gradually lost the ability to extend its forces like tentacles to look clairvoyantly into the spiritual world? Formerly, when the astral body became active, it could see into the spiritual world. This possibility gradually disappeared, and it became dark within human beings. While they could spread their astral body over all the beings of the spiritual world in former times, now they were alone in themselves. Their souls now lived in solitude. That also is in the Greek text. “Behold, what speaks in the solitude—or, if you like, wilderness—of the soul when the astral body could no longer extend out to the divine spiritual world. Listen to what calls in the wilderness and loneliness of the soul.”

What is it that announces itself? Here, we must be clear about the meaning of one particular word when it is used in reference to spiritual or soul phenomena. This was true, above all, in Hebrew, but also in Greek. The word is Kyrios. To translate it as “the Lord,” as is usually done, produces absolute nonsense. What does this word mean? In ancient times everyone who spoke this word knew it meant something that was connected with the progress of the human soul. People knew that the word Kyrios referred to secrets of the soul.

Looking at the astral body, we see that our soul has three distinct forces we call thinking, feeling, and willing. The soul thinks, feels, and wills. These are the three forces working in the soul. They are the serving forces in the soul. Formerly, they had been the lords of humanity, and human beings had been subject to them and had to wait for their thinking, feeling, or willing to be called into action. As human beings evolved, however, these soul forces became subject to the Kyrios, the Lord of the soul forces, the I. When the term Kyrios referred to the soul, nothing else was understood by it than the I. This I no longer believed that the divine spiritual thinks, feels, and wills in it, but “I think, I feel, I will.” The Lord makes himself felt in the forces of the soul. “Prepare yourselves, you human souls, to follow paths that lead you to let the strong I—Kyrios, the Lord—awaken in your souls. Listen to the call in the solitude of the soul. Prepare the force or direction of the Lord of the soul—the I. Make open his forces!” That is roughly how this passage should be translated. “Open up, so that the I can enter and does not become the slave of thinking, feeling, and willing. Open up its forces!” When you translate these words, “Behold, the I sends its angel before you that is to give you the possibility of understanding the calls in the solitude of the astral soul: Prepare the directions of the I, and open the forces for it,” you then have a meaning in these significant words of the prophet Isaiah and a reference to the greatest event in human evolution. You then understand that Isaiah speaks of John the Baptist, that he points out that our soul solitude longs for the approach of the Lord in the soul, the approach of the I. The words have force and weight only when we understand them this way.

Why was John the Baptist able to be the bearer of the Angeloi? He could do this because he had had a certain initiation. Each initiation is specialized. Initiations are not just general, but specialized. Individuals who have a very special task need a particular kind of initiation. Now for everything that occurs in the spiritual world precautions have been taken so that the starry script in the heavens reveals spiritual facts. For example, people could have a sun-initiation and enter into the secrets of the spiritual world that is the realm of Ahura Mazdao, the world for which the sun is the external expression. There are, however, twelve different ways to be initiated into the secrets of the sun; each of these initiations was a “solar initiation,” yet different from the other eleven. Depending upon what a person has to accomplish for humanity, he or she receives an initiation that can be described as a solar initiation but, for example, one where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Cancer. This differs from the initiation where the forces flow in as though the sun were standing in Libra. This is how different specialized initiations were designated.

Individuals who have as important a mission as John the Baptist must be initiated in a very special way. Only then will they have the necessary strength to accomplish their mission in the world even in a rather single-minded way if circumstances require that. So, in order for John the Baptist to become the bearer of the Angeloi, he had to undergo the sun-initiation that can be called the initiation in the sign of Aquarius. The sun in Aquarius is a symbol for the initiation John the Baptist received to become the bearer of the angel. He received the force of the sun as it streams down when its relation to the other stars is characterized with the words, “The sun stands in the constellation of Aquarius.” That was the symbol. John had undergone the Aquarius initiation.

The constellation was given the name Aquarius because those who underwent this initiation had the power to do with human beings what John did as the Aquarian, the Baptist. Through immersion in water, he brought people to the point where their etheric bodies were freed sufficiently for them to gain the self-knowledge that allowed them to realize what was most important in their time. People were immersed and their etheric bodies were freed for a moment. Through baptism in the Jordan, people could feel the special importance of this epoch in the history of the world. Therefore, John underwent the baptism initiation. To express symbolically the flowing in of the rays from the constellation in which the sun stood, this sign was called Aquarius. In this way the name of the human capacity is carried over to the heavens.

Today many learned ignoramuses try to interpret spiritual events by bringing the heavens down to earth. They say, “Now, that indicates a forward movement of the sun.” These learned people, who really do not know anything, interpret human events from the heavens. However, it was the other way around. What lives in humanity spiritually was transferred to the heavens; the heavens were used as a means of expression. Thus, John the Baptist could say, “I have baptized you with water,” which was the same as saying, “I baptize you with water: I am endowed with the initiation of Aquarius.” That is what John could have said to his closest disciples. With our senses we see the constellation of Virgo opposite Aquarius, and from there the sun moves to Libra. However, in terms of initiation, the sun proceeds in the opposite direction, not as it appears to our senses. Thus, we have to look at the sun's path from Aquarius to Pisces. John could say, “Something will come that will no longer work in the way that corresponds to the sun's influence in Aquarius; instead, it will work in a way corresponding to the sun's effect in Pisces. One will come who will bring a higher baptism.”

When the spiritual sun rises higher, then the Aquarian baptism becomes a baptism with spiritual water. The sun ascends in the spiritual realm from Aquarius to Pisces, hence the well-known ancient fish symbol for the bearer of Christ. Through special spiritual influences, John had an Aquarian initiation. But the initiation that came about mysteriously through the Mysteries around Jesus, of which I have spoken several times, was a Pisces initiation. It resulted from the sun advancing to the next constellation, and Jesus of Nazareth was integrated into his time through being subjected first to a Pisces initiation.

This is sufficiently indicated in the Gospel of Saint Mark, but such things can only be shown in images. Christ Jesus draws together all those who are fishing, so his first apostles are all fishermen. The advancing of the sun from Aquarius to Pisces is obvious when John tells us, “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” When Christ walked along the Sea of Galilee—which means, when the sun was so far advanced that one could see its counterpart coming up from Pisces—the fishermen Simon, Simon's brother, James, and James's brother, were inspired. This can be understood only when we look more closely at the way people expressed things at that time.

Our modern way of expressing ourselves is pedantic. If a person stands before us, we say there is a human being. If a second person stands before us, we again say there is a human being. A third, another, and so on, but we have merely Maya before us. If a being has two legs and a human countenance, then in our pedantic way of expressing ourselves we have only one term, “human being.” However, what is a human being to occultism? Nothing but Maya! He or she is about the same as a rainbow, which lasts only so long as the necessary relationships between rain and sunshine exist. When these relationships change, the rainbow disappears.

It is the same with human beings. A human being is only the streaming together of forces of the macrocosm, forces we find in the heavens, here or there in the macrocosm. Where we usually assume a human being somewhere on earth, there is nothing for the occultist. In fact, forces stream down from above and up from below and intersect. Then, just as the peculiar relationship of rain and sunshine produces the rainbow, so forces streaming out of the macrocosm from above and below result in the phenomenon that looks like a human being. People are nothing as they stand before us. In truth, they are a phantom, Maya, an illusion. It is the cosmic forces, intersecting where our eyes think they see a human being, that are real. Try to take the statement seriously that a human being is nothing as he or she stands before us. A human being is but the shadow of many forces. The being who reveals himself in a person can easily be elsewhere than at that point where the individual in question is walking around on two legs.

For example, consider three men, first, an ancient Persian whose work was plowing. He looked like an ordinary man but actually was one of the souls whose forces were nourished from this or that world, above or below. The second man was an ancient Persian official. He was formed by forces from another world that intersected in him. To know him, we must look at these forces. All of you sitting here are in your reality somewhere else, and only the forces of your real being radiate into this room. Our third example is a Persian of whom we have to say he was really a complete illusion, a phantom. What was there in reality? We must go all the way up to the sun to find the forces that nourished this phantom. There, among the mysteries of the sun, we find what can be called the Golden Star, Zarathustra. It radiates down, and here below stands a figure called Zarathustra. In truth, however, his being is not there at all. This is our third example.

Now, it is important to realize that in ancient times people were aware of the meaning of such designations. Names were not given as they are today. People were named according to what lived in them rather than on the basis of their external, illusory appearance. We must be quite clear about this. We can say that at the time of Christ people would have easily understood what was meant when John the Baptist was referred to as the angel of God. Such a statement would have taken account of what really happened there; it would have focused on the main thing and disregarded secondary considerations.

Let us assume people had spoken about Christ Jesus in the same way. How would they have had to speak of him if they had understood such things? They would not have dreamt of naming the physical body walking around among them Christ Jesus. Rather, the name was the sign that what was streaming down spiritually from the sun was received in a very special way at the point where this physical body was. As this body of Jesus wandered from one place to another, it made visible the sun force as it moves from place to place. This force could also move around alone, and at times it was said that Christ Jesus was in his “home,” that is, in his physical body, but what was in him moved on without his body. Particularly in Saint John's Gospel this expression is used in such a way that, at times, the writer speaks of this being moving purely spiritually exactly as though he were describing this sun force dwelling in a physical body.

It is therefore important that the deeds of Christ Jesus are always seen in relation to the physical sun, which is the external expression of the spiritual world that is received at the point where Christ's physical body is walking around. When Christ Jesus heals, for instance, it is the sun force that heals. However, the sun must be at the right place in the heavens: “That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.” It is important to indicate that this healing power can flow down only when the external sun has set but still works spiritually. And when Christ again needed a certain force for his work, he had to take it from the spiritual rather than from the physical, visible sun. “And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.” Here, the path of the sun and the solar force is expressly indicated. It is this solar force that is at work here, and fundamentally Jesus is only the external sign, making the path of the sun forces visible to the physical eye.

Whenever Christ is mentioned in Saint Mark's Gospel, the sun force is meant, which, in that epoch of human evolution, was especially active in Palestine. The sun force could be seen as Christ went from one place to another. We could just as well say that at that time, the spiritual force of the sun, as though focused in one point, went from one place to another. The body of Jesus was the external sign that made the movements of the sun force visible. The paths Jesus took in Palestine were those of the sun force come down to earth. If you trace his steps on a map, you have a diagram of a cosmic event: the influence of the sun force from the macrocosm on the land of Palestine. That macrocosmic aspect is what matters here. The writer of Saint Mark's Gospel points out this macrocosmic connection. He knew that the body serving as the vehicle of a principle such as that of Christ had to be overcome by its principle in a special way. Thus, this gospel points to the world whose existence behind the world of the senses Zarathustra had so powerfully announced; it points to that world as it works on our human world. Through Christ Jesus it was indicated how these forces now work on the earth. Therefore, a kind of repetition of the Zarathustra events had to occur in the body of the Nathan Jesus because it was in a certain way influenced by the individuality of Zarathustra.

Let us recall the beautiful legend about Zarathustra. At his birth, Zarathustra accomplished his first miracle when he showed his famous smile. Later, Duransarun, the king of the district where Zarathustra was born, resolved to murder him because of what some retrograde Magi had told him about the child. However, when the king attempted to stab the child, his arm was paralyzed. That was a second miracle. Then, because the king could not stab him, Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts of the desert. Thus, in earliest childhood Zarathustra experienced what we see when we look out into the world through our impurities. Instead of noble group-soul and higher spiritual beings, we see emanations of our wild fantasy. That is what is meant when we are told that Zarathustra was left among the wild beasts, but remained unharmed. That is the third miracle. The fourth occurred also among the wild animals, and so on. It was always the good spirit of Ahura Mazdao who served Zarathustra and ministered to him.

We find these miracles repeated in the Gospel of Saint Mark. “The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness [Actually the word is solitude]. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered to him.” This shows us that the body was prepared that was to be the focal point to receive what transpired in the macrocosm. What had happened to Zarathustra had to be repeated, among other things, the time he spent among the wild beasts. This body took in what came from the macrocosm.

Even the first lines of Saint Mark's Gospel take us into the greatest cosmic context. I wanted to show you that if we understand the words in the right sense—not in the sense of our modern philistine language but in that of the ancient languages where living worlds were behind each word—then the Gospel of Saint Mark comes alive again and receives new force. With our modern language, however, it takes many circumlocutions to find again what was simply present in the words in ancient languages. When we say that human beings live on the earth and develop their I, and that they formerly lived on the moon where the angels went through the human stage, we are expressing what lies behind the words, “Behold, I send my angel before human beings.” These words cannot be understood without prior knowledge of what spiritual science offers. People in our time should be honest and admit that the words at the beginning of Saint Mark's Gospel are incomprehensible. Instead, in petty pride they declare spiritual science a fantasy that reads all kinds of things into what they supposedly just know. However, they do not really know it.

Today the principle of rewriting sacred documents for each epoch, as was done in ancient Persia, is no longer practiced. Thus, the divine spiritual word, as presented in the Zend-Avesta, was transformed again and again. The Persian bible was rewritten seven times and what exists today is the last form. Anthroposophy has to teach people how necessary it is to rewrite the books containing the holy secrets in each epoch. For especially if we want to preserve the grand old style, we should not try to stay as close as possible to the ancient wording. That can't be done; the old words are no longer understood. Instead, we must try to translate the ancient wording into the immediate understanding of our time. That is what we have tried to do this summer with the Book of Genesis. You saw that many of the words had to be changed. Perhaps today you have got an idea of how the words must also be changed in the Gospel of Saint Mark.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, The Gospel of St. John, vol. 103 in the Collected Works, repr. (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1988), The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, The Gospel of St. John and Its Relation to the Other Gospels, vol. 112 in the Collected Works (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1982), The Gospel of St. Luke, vol. 114 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1988), and The Gospel of St. Matthew, vol. 123 in the Collected Works, repr. (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1985).
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, The Portal of Initiation: A Rosicrucian Mystery Drama (Blauvelt, NY: Steinerbooks, 1981).

“Ladies and Gentlemen, it is no longer necessary to introduce to you the lecturer of this evening: Dr. Rudolf Steiner! He has been in our town for a whole week and has expounded with singular energy and great oratory skill his views on important areas of human life in a number of public lectures.

Today, following the invitation of our State Economic Society, he wants to present to us the social views which he already developed in l9l9. He developed them, as you know, in the well-known book `The Essentials of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and the Future'.

I have the honour to welcome Dr. Steiner in our midst, and I thank you for coming here to introduce us to the thoughts of your social views. I can assure you, that here in Norwaytoo there are many who are following your social strivings with great interest in a time when such dark threatening clouds are on the social horizon.

And perhaps more than in an earlier time of world history it is now necessary that all good forces unite to solve the ever more appearing social questions. And every serious proposal, every plan, every spiritual effort which is put before us in this direction, deserves an unprejudiced and thorough investigation. We look forward to hearing how you yourself will develop your own views about the three-folding of the economic life, about that which you regard as the cardinal economic question of our time. I now have the honour of giving you the floor.”

First of all I wish to thank the honourable chairman for his warm words and ask you above all to note what I assure you with equal warmth, that it gives me deep satisfaction to be allowed to expound here some aspects of the social endeavours to which I have devoted a great deal of my time. But of course I have to apologize immediately, because to speak about the social question to-day is extremely difficult. In a short lecture one can actually only give a few aspects and perhaps indications, and I ask you to make allowance for this. Perhaps there could be the assumption that someone who in the main devotes himself to the popularisation and spreading of anthroposophical spiritual science could only talk of otherworldliness, maybe of phantasies or even utopia when he treads on social ground. But just what I have learnt from anthroposophical thinking in regard to the social question differs from much which at present is talked of in this direction, in that it wants to engage with practical life and actually doesn't just want to discuss social theories.

I myself have during a number of decades gained from various sources the view about the social question of which I would like to share some aspects, by direct observation of social life. From this I have gained the view that our social question and in particular the economic question is to-day actually a general human one. It announces itself when one studies it in real life, not in theory, as a question which throughout doesn't actually consist of economic aspects, but erupts in such a volcanic way in the present from purely human causes. And it will only be possible to tackle this question in a practical way when one seeks the solution—and of course there can only be the question of an attempt at a partial solution—from a purely human aspect. And here I must characterize something quite different as the central economic question from what one would normally expect. Indeed, I shall not even be able - as life is richer than theories and ideas—somehow to answer this central economic question in a short sentence, but I shall be able to let it appear as something that goes like a thread through my observations of to-day. But if I were after all to mention in the beginning a very abstract view, it is this, that we live in a time when man to a great extent alienates himself from life and from economic life in particular by what he thinks and what he makes his principles. This view has proved itself especially by working amongst the proletarian workers as teacher in the most varied fields of knowledge and instruction in the field of history and the field of economic questions. I could especially get to know the modern proletariat in their lives through the fact that I was privileged to conduct the teaching and exercises with the workers in free conversation throughout many years. There one gets to know how the people think, how they feel. And when one knows that especially the economic question depends on introducing the proletariat again to the work in a way relating to the economic needs of humanity, then one will initially be obliged to look at the economic questions from the point of view of this human side. And there it became clear to me that if one tries to create an interest within the proletariat to-day for this or that, then the actual concrete economic questions, the comprehension of really practical economic life, actually awakens no interest in them. The people have no interest in concrete individual economic questions. To-day there lives in the proletariat—and in international life millions of human beings belong to this proletariat of which I speak—only an economic abstract theory, an abstract theory however which itself constitutes the content of life in this proletariat. The proletarian worker is in his heart actually very aloof towards his work, towards the actual content of his work. He does not care about what work he does. He is only interested in how he is treated in his firm, and when he speaks about this treatment it is still from quite general abstract points of view. He is interested in the relation of his wages to the value of the product in the production of which he partakes, while the quality of his products is absolutely beyond the scope of his interests. I have tried, especially in the teaching of workers, to create an interest in concrete branches of manufacture and industries by introducing history and natural science. But all this is something which does not interest the worker as such. He is interested in the situation of the classes, the class struggle, he is interested in that—which I don't need to characterize for you here—which he calls the added value. He is interested in the development of the economic life in as much as he ascribes to it the reason for all human historic life, and he actually speaks of a theoretical region which exists totally above that in which he is involved from morning till evening and wants to form the reality from this. And one may say: What he accepts as his theory about the economic life again results from a theoretical way of looking at things. Most proletarians to-day are, as you will know, more or less modified of original Marxists, that means followers of a theory which actually doesn't concern itself with the conditions of economic life as such, but works towards the direction which I have just described.

This one gets to know within wide circles of the proletariat through the practical association with this proletariat, by working amongst the proletariat. But that is in a certain sense only the reflection of an ever increasing distancing of the purely human interests from the interests of practical life during the last centuries. One would like to say: The fact that our economic life has become more complicated has caused a kind of stupor, so that one can no longer dive down into the single complicated areas of economic life with that which one ethically accepts as the good and with that which one accepts as the just. But if one does not speak out of practical life but out of general abstract principles, one hardly touches on that which comprises the work of the day, the tasks of the day, with that which one always asserts as demands, as principles.

Just as I could share this with you out of my own life experience, so it can also be demonstrated by various examples from historical life. I would like to tell you a grotesque example for that which I want to say. It was 1884 when Bismarck said in the German parliament (Deutsche Reichstag) wanting to establish a foundation for his further handling of the core economic question, that he acknowledges the right to work of every human being. Then he instructed the delegates thus: Let the community give to every healthy human being the work which sustains him, make sure that those who are sick or weak are cared for by the community, that the aged are cared for, and you can be sure that the proletariat will leave its proletarian leaders, that the social democratic theories which are being promulgated will find no followers.—Now, that was spoken by Bismarck, who though he admitted in his memoirs that he had had republican sympathies in his youth, but whom you will surely acknowledge as a monarchist, whom you would surely not expect to have applauded it, if at a proletarian meeting the international social democracy had been cheered.

I would like to draw your attention to another personality who stated the same with almost the identical words, who however stood with his whole disposition, his whole human feeling on another general human standpoint. That is Robespierre. Robespierre said when he wrote his “human rights” in1793 almost the same, no, I want to say exactly the same as what Bismarck said in the German Reichstag in 1884: It is the obligation of the community to provide work for every healthy human being, to look after the sick and feeble, to care for the aged when they can no longer work.

The same sentences from Robespierre, from Bismarck, definitely from quite different human perspectives. And now comes the third thing which is also very interesting: Bismarck, when voicing his “Robespierre words”, which he definitely hadn't learnt from Robespierre, argued that these demands were already part of the Prussian state rights since 1794. Now, one may surely not conclude from this that the Prussian state legislation one year after Robespierre had written his “human rights” adopted these human rights in its code of law. And surely the world will not think that the Prussian state had wanted to realize Robespierre's ideas according to its state laws for almost a hundred years when Bismarck in 1884 again stated these demands. There the question arises in view of the historical facts: How is it that two such different people as Robespierre and Bismarck can say the exact same words and that without a doubt both imagine that the social milieu which they want to create with this is a totally different one?

I cannot see this in any other way than that we to-day, when we speak in such strong abstractions about the concrete questions of life which during the recent centuries has become more complicated, actually all—Bismarck from the right, from the extreme right, Robespierre from the extreme left—harmonize in relation to the general principles. In the general principles we all agree. But in life we immediately fall into extreme disharmony, just because our general principles are far removed from that which we have to do in particular all day long. Today we have no possibility, just when it comes to practical life, to really accomplish in particular what we think in general. And the most abstract is that, which in the proletarian theory is contained to-day as economic demand, for the reasons which I have tried to characterize.

This is how things are to-day. And one has to say: Through the whole development of recent times this state of affairs has come about. We see how the section of economic life which we can call the production process has become more and more manifold through the complexity of technical life. And when I want to characterize it with a word which has already become a cliché—but one has to use such words—we see that the production life has become ever more collective.

After all, what can an individual accomplish within our social organism in the life of production? He is connected everywhere with that which has to be done in community with others. Our way of production has become so complicated that the individual is caught up as in a big production mechanism. The production life has become collective. That is just what appeals to the proletarian and he imagines in his fatalistic economic view that the collectivism will become still stronger and stronger, that the branches of production will amalgamate and that the time will come when the international proletariat will be able to take over the production themselves. That is what the proletarian is waiting for. So he gives himself over to the great delusion that the collectivism of production is a natural necessity—for he experiences the economic necessity almost as a natural necessity—and that this collectivism must be further established. Above all, that the proletarian is ordained to then occupy the chairs on which to-day's producers are sitting and that that, which will have become collective, will now be administered collectively. How strongly the proletariat believe in such an idea out of their economic interest, we can see from the sad results of the economic experiment in the East, for there, so to say, it was tried to organize the economic life in this way, albeit not as the proletarian theorists had dreamed but out of the military circumstances. One can already see to-day and one will see it more and more: The experiment will—quite apart from its ethical or other values, or from the sympathies or antipathies that one can have for it—by its own inner destruction forces miserably fail and bring unimaginable disaster to humanity.

Over against the life of production stands the life of consumption. But the life of consumption can never become collective by itself. In consumption the individual actually by natural necessity stands as an individuality. From the personality of the human being, from the human individual, the needs of the total consumption arise. Therefore beside the collectivism of the production the individualism of consumption remained. And starker and starker became the abyss, deeper and deeper became this abyss between the production aiming for collectivism and the ever more demanding just by contrast ever more demanding interest of consumption. For one who can look through to-day's life with unprejudiced eyes it is now no abstraction, but for him the terrible disharmonies into which we are placed are founded on the wrong relationship which has been established to-day between the impulses of production and the needs of consumption by what has been characterized.

To be sure, one can only have an idea of the whole misery which in this regard troubles the deepest feelings of people, if one has for decades observed, not through study but through practical life, that which has caused this disharmony in the various areas of life. And now truly not through any principles, not by theoretical considerations, but out of these life experiences, that has emerged which I put down in my book “Essentials of the social question”. Nothing was further from my intention than trying to somehow find an utopian solution for the social question from this life experience. However I had to experience that contemporary thinking of people spontaneously leans towards the utopian side. Of course I had to condense that which I had come to out of the great manifoldness of life, which I would have preferred to discuss by giving single concrete examples. I had to condense it into general sentences which in turn are condensed in the term “Threefolding of the social organism”. But what these words signify, that had at least to be explained by some indications. One had to say how one imagines that these things should be handled. That is why I have given some examples how the development of capitalism should proceed, how for instance the labour question could be regulated and so on. There I have tried to give concrete particular indications. Well, I have attended many discussions about these “Essentials of the social question” and I have always found that people in their utopian opinion of to-day ask: Now how will this or that be then in future? They referred to the indications which I have given about specific things but which I never meant to be anything but examples. In real life one can demonstrate something that one is doing, that one arranges to the best of one's knowledge, but which obviously one could also do differently. Reality is not like this that a single theory fits it. Of course one could also do everything differently. But the utopian wants everything characterized to the last detail. And in this way the “Essentials of the social question” have often been understood by others in an utopian sense. They have often been transformed into utopia, whereas they were not meant in the least as utopia but have resulted from the observation of that which emerged from the process of production as collectivism, from the observation of how for the production there is a certain necessity to flow into this collectivism, but how on the other hand all strength of production depends on the abilities of the human individual.

In this way by observing modern production, the eye of the soul could see with terrible intensity that actually the basic impulse of all production, the personal ability, was being absorbed by the collectivism which had been caused by the economic forces themselves and which continued to be caused by them. One realized on the one hand the tendency of the economic life and on the other hand the equally valid demand to let the individual strength of the single human being assert itself particularly just within the economic life. And one has to ponder about the social organism on how this basic demand of economic progress—the nurturing of individual abilities—can be safeguarded in the purely through technical circumstances ever more complicated processes of production. It is this which on the one hand stands so vividly before one's soul: The real economic process and the necessary demands on the economic life so that it may prosper.

On the other hand that which we call the present social question doesn't actually arise out of the interests of production. When collectivism is sought for in the realm of production, then one finds this actually in the technical possibilities of economic life, in the technical necessities, as well. What one usually calls the social question is actually asked totally by interests of consumption, which again are based totally on the human individuality. And the strange fact emerges that although seemingly something else is taking place—the call for social reform resounds through the world purely from interests of consumption. One can also see this when one practically follows up the discussions and life. I have seen this during the lectures I started giving in April 1919 and which were given again and again, and in the discussions following them, how unsympathetic those who are active as producers or entrepreneurs in practical economic life are towards the discussion of that which one calls the social question in the sense of how it is preached out of the interests of consumption.

On the other hand one sees how actually everywhere where the call for socialism appears, only the interest of consumption is focused on. So that here just in the ideals of socialism the will impulse of individualism is active. In actual fact, all those who are socialist strive towards socialism out of purely individual emotions. And the striving for socialism is actually only a theory which floats above that which are the individual emotions. But on the other hand, by a serious observation of that which has developed more and more in our economic life, again for centuries, the whole full meaning of that emerges which is popularly called `sharing of work' in national economy, in the teaching of economy.

I am convinced that many clever things have been written and said about this sharing of work, but I don't believe that it has already been thought through to its final consequence in its full significance for the practical economic life. The reason why I don't believe this is because one would then have to realize that actually it follows from the principle of labour sharing that nobody can produce anything for himself in a social organism in which there is full sharing of work—and I am purposely saying “can produce”. Even to-day we still see the last remnants of subsistence farming, especially looking at the small farms. There we see how he who produces retains what he and his family need. And what does it bring about that he can still be a supplier of his own needs? It brings about that he produces in quite a wrong way within the social organism which for the rest is based on labour sharing. Everyone who to-day makes a coat for himself or who supplies himself with his own food grown on his own land, actually sustains himself too expensively, because as there is labour sharing, every product will be cheaper than it can be when one produces it for oneself. One only has to ponder on this fact and one will have to realize as its final consequence that to-day nobody can produce in a way that his work can flow into the production product, into the product. And yet there is the strange fact that Karl Marx for instance treats the product as a crystallized piece of labour. But to-day this is not in the least the case. The product to-day is in relation to its value—and that is all that matters in economic life—least of all determined by labour. It is determined by its usefulness that is its consumption interests, by the usefulness with which it exists within the social organism that depends on labour sharing.

All this asks of us the great questions of the present time in the economic realm. And from these questions it became clear to me that at to-days' time of human development we stand before the necessity to form the social organism in such a way that it more and more shows its three inherent parts. And as one of these three parts I have initially to recognize the spiritual life, which mainly rests upon the human abilities. When speaking of the three-folding of the social organism I do not only include the more or less abstract life of thought or the religious life in the spiritual realm, but I include everything which depends on human spiritual or physical abilities. I have to say this explicitly, otherwise one could completely misunderstand the demarcation of the spiritual realm within the three-fold social organism. The one also who only works with his hands needs a certain skill for this work, he needs various other things as well, which in this regard does not let the individual appear as a member of pure economic life but as a member of the spiritual realm.

The other realm of the social organism is that of pure economics. In pure economics one is only concerned with production, consumption and circulation between production and consumption. But this means nothing else than that in pure economic life one is only concerned with the circulation of the produced goods which, as they are circulating, become merchandise. One is concerned with the circulation of merchandise. An item which within the social organism, because it is needed, becomes of a certain value which is reflected in its price, such an item becomes, in the sense I must regard it, merchandise.

But now the following transpires: Of course I can only make indications of the things which I want to assign to certain realms, otherwise this lecture would become far too long. It now appears that all that which is merchandise can have a real objective value not only in connection with the economic life but with the whole of social life. Simply by that which a product means within the life of consumption it attains a certain value which definitely has an objective significance. I now must explain what I mean by “objective significance”. By “objective significance” I don't mean that one could immediately determine the value of a product of which I am now speaking through statistics or such like. For the circumstances by which a product gets its value are much too complicated, too manifold. But apart from that which one can immediately know about it, apart from our perception, every product has a specific value. When a product has a certain price in the market place, this price can be too high or too low in relation to its real objective value or it can coincide with it. But as irrelevant as the price is which appears to us outwardly because it can be falsified by some other circumstances, so true it is on the other hand that one could ascertain the objective value of a product if one could ascertain all the thousands of single conditions by which it is produced and consumed. From this it is clear that that which is merchandise has a very special relationship to economic life. For what I now call the objective economic value can only be applied to merchandise. It cannot be applied to anything else which to-day has a similar relationship to our economic life as merchandise has. For one cannot apply it to land or to capital.

I don't want to be misunderstood. For instance you will never hear characterizations of capitalism from me as one nowadays hears them so often and which come from all sorts of clichés. It is obvious that one does not have to elaborate on the fact that in to-day's economic life nothing can be achieved without capital and that polemics against capitalism is economically amateurish. So it is not that which one can nowadays hear so often which I now have to say about capital and about land, but yet something else. If one can state for every product that its price is above or below a mean which admittedly cannot be immediately determined but which is objectively present and which alone is healthy, one cannot apply it to that which is nowadays treated like merchandise: land. The price of land, the value of land today is subject to what one can call human speculation, what one can call anything but social impulses. There is no objectivity in the determination of the price or value of land in an economic sense. That is so because a product once it exists—never mind whether it is good or bad, if it is good it is useful, if it is bad then it is not useful—can by itself determine its objective value by the manner and intensity in which it is needed.

That cannot be said of land and cannot be said of capital. In the case of land and capital the manner how it is productive, how it is positioned within the whole social and economic structure is absolutely determined by human capabilities. They are never something finite. If I have to manage land I can only manage it according to my capabilities and because of this its value is variable. The same goes for capital that I have to administer. Someone who practically studies this fact in its full significance will have to say: This radical difference between merchandise on the one hand and land and capital on the other hand definitely exists. And from this can be deduced that certain symptoms which appear in our economic life and which clearly seem to us unhealthy symptoms of the social organism, must be thought of in some connection with that which is caused in economic life by the fact that in practice one treats with the same money, that is with the same appreciation of value that which in actual fact cannot be compared. In other words one throws together and indirectly through money exchanges with one another, brings to economic interaction what is quite different in its intrinsic nature and therefore would have to be treated differently in economic life.

And when one further studies practically how the same treatment, that is the payment with the same money for merchandise, for consumables, as for land and capital—which has actually also become an item of commerce as anyone knows who is familiar with economic life—has entered our social organism, and when one studies the historical development of humanity, one can see that to-day three realms of life which come from totally different origins and only have a connection in social life through the individual human being, are working together in our social organism in a way which is not organic. That is first of all the spiritual realm, the realm of human capabilities which man brings with him to the earth from spiritual realms, which comprise his talents, which comprises that which with his talents he can learn, which are very much something individual and which are developed more intensely the more the single human individuality can assert himself in social life. One may be a materialist or whatever, one will have to admit: What is achieved in this realm the human being brings into this world through his birth. It is something which depends on the single individuality of the human being if it is to prosper, from the physical skill of the craftsman to the highest expressions and revelations of the faculty of invention.

Something else holds good in the realm of economic life. I want to explain what I want to say about this by a fact. You all know that at a certain time during the 19^th century here and there the ideal of a universal gold currency arose. If one follows up on what was said by practical economists, by economic theorists, by parliamentarians during the time when here and there, there was a striving for the gold currency—and I say this definitely without irony—it is very clever. One is often very taken by the sense that was spoken and written in parliaments, chambers of commerce and other associations about the gold currency and its blessings for economic life. One of the things which was said and what especially the most prominent people, at least many of the most prominent people emphasized, was that the gold currency would result in the blossoming of the economically beneficial free trade everywhere., that the economically harmful political boundaries would lose their economic significance. And the reasons, the arguments which were quoted for such assertions were very clever. And what has happened in reality? In reality it has happened that just in the areas where one had expected that the economic boundaries would fall because of the gold currency, they were after all to be found necessary or at least have been declared necessary by many. From economic life the opposite emerged from that which from theoretical considerations was predicted precisely by the cleverest people.

This is a very important historical fact which happened not so long ago and from which one should draw the necessary consequences. And what are these necessary consequences? It is these which one always finds when one looks at the real practical economic life: that in the realm of actual economic life, which consists of production, circulation and consumption of goods—let me say this paradox, I believe it to be the truth which really is revealed to the unprejudiced observer—the cleverness of the individual can be of no use to him. One can be ever so clever, one can have ever such clever thoughts about economic life, the evidence can be absolutely sound, but it will not be realized in economic life. Why? Because economic life can in no way be circumscribed by the consideration of the individual, because economic experience, economic perception can only come to valid judgement by he agreement between persons interested in economic life in various ways. The individual can never gain a valid judgement, also not through statistics, how economy should be conducted, but only by agreement say of consumers and producers who form associations, where the one tells the other what the needs are and vice versa the other tells the one what possibilities there are for the production. Only when a collective decision comes about by the agreement within the associations of economic life, a valid decision for the economic life can be found.

To be sure, we here touch on something where outer economic perception borders on let me say economic psychology. But life is a unity and one cannot omit human souls when one really wishes to speak of practical life. What this means is that a real economic judgement can only result from the agreement of those who participate in the economic life from the knowledge which individuals gather as partial knowledge and which only becomes valid judgement when the individual knowledge of the one is modified by the individual knowledge of the other. Only discussion can lead to a valid judgement in economic life. But with this we talk of two radically different realms of human life. And the more practically one regards life, the more one finds that the two realms differ from one another, and that for instance production, which requires knowledge about how to produce, how one works out of human capabilities, needs the human individual, but that everything to do with merchandise, with the goods when they have been produced, is subject to the collective judgement. Between these two realms there is a third where the individual is not there to unfold his capabilities which he has brought into life by his birth, nor is the individual able to associate with others in order to modify his economic judgement and bring about a collective judgement which holds good for the practical economic life, but where the individual faces the other human being in such a way that this encounter is a purely human one, a relationship from man to man. And this realm includes all relationships in which the individual human being directly encounters the individual human being, not as an economically active being but as man, where he also has nothing to do with the capabilities with which one was born or which one has learnt, but where he is concerned with what he is allowed to do within the social organism or what his duties are, what his rights are, with that which he signifies within the social organism by his pure human relationship with the other man despite his capacities, despite his economic position. This is the third realm of the social organism.

It might seem that these three realms were cleverly thought out. But that is not the case. It seems as though they were not taken from practical life. But that is just what they are. Because that which is specific to them is just what is working in practical life. And when these three realms of the social organism work together in a wrong way, then damage to the social organism occurs. In my “Essentials of the social question” I have used the example of the human organism—not in order to prove something, I know very well that one can never prove anything by analogies, but in order to explain what I had to say—which is definitely a unity but which, if one analyses it with true physiology, all the same consists of three realms. We distinguish clearly in the human organism the nerve-sense organism which, though working within the whole human being, is mainly situated in the head. Furthermore there is in the human being the breathing and circulation rhythm, the rhythm organism as a relatively independent organism. And as a third organism there is the metabolism-limbs organism, all that depends either on the inner functions of metabolism or the consumption of the products of metabolism by the outer human activity, which starts with the movement of the human limbs by which metabolism is used.

Indeed, man is a unity, but just because of the fact that these relatively independent members are working together harmoniously. And if one were to wish that instead of this organic working together man should be an abstract unity, then one would be wishing for something foolish. Each of these members has its own openings towards the outside world, the senses, the openings of breathing, the opening of nutrition: relative independence. And just because of this relative independence these members work organically harmoniously together in the right way, in that each member unfolds its own specific strength and thereby something unified comes about. As I was saying, I know that one cannot prove anything by an analogy. And I don't want to prove anything but just to illustrate something. Because he who observes the social organism as objectively as in this physiology the threefoldness of man is observed, will find that by its very own qualities the social organism demands an independent, a relatively independent working of the economic organism, the state-political or rights organism and the spiritual organism within the boundaries which I have indicated.

Through a misunderstanding of the three-folding of the social organism it has often been asserted that in the last resort this separation cannot take place, that for instance the rights relationships constantly play into the economic life, that the spiritual relationships play into it too and that it would therefore be nonsense to wish for a threefoldness of the social organism.

In the natural human organism the three members work together as unity just because each one of them can work in its specific way, and it is definitely so that the nerve-sense organism is fed, that it has is specific nutritional needs and that the nerve-sense organism has also got its importance for the metabolism. That the three members are still relatively independent is shown by a healthy physiology.

A healthy social physiology will also show that the three realms, the realm of the spirit, the realm where man simply relates to man, that is to say the legal-state-political realm, and the economic realm where man has to become a member of associations, of communities in the indicated way, that these realms can work together in the right way if they are allowed to develop their intrinsic qualities relatively independently. This is by no means an adaptation of for instance the old platonic threefoldness: teaching, military, economics, for there people are divided into three classes. In our time there can be no question of such a structure, but only of a structuring of the administration, of the external formation of the three realms of life when we talk of the three-folding of the social organism.

The spiritual realm should only be administered out of its intrinsic principles. For instance those who are teachers should also be the administrators of the education system, so that there is no division between pædagogical science on the one hand and the prescriptions of the political organism on the other hand for education. All administration in the area of the spiritual realm must come directly from the spiritual realm, from that which is pædagogical-didactic science. In the political-state area everything can be regulated from man to man in the relevant administrative and constitutional bodies. In the economic realm associations will have to be formed in which people will partake as economic entities for reasons which I explained today. What must these associations in the economic realm see as their main task? Well, in the structuring of this task the specific thing which I have tried to explain in my “Essentials of the Social Question” can be shown. In these “Essentials of the Social Question” it was nowhere stated that in this way or that social structures should come about, this or that would be the very best. For me that would already signify something utopian. For whosoever knows today's human life knows that even when one thinks up the best theories, practical life benefits very little from these theories. I am even convinced that if one were to convene twelve or more, or less, not even particularly clever people, one could get wonderful programs about everything, for instance for the organisation of the primary school, programs against which nothing could be said: point 1, point 2, point 3,—when all that were to become reality what is asked in point1, point2, point 3, there would be an ideal school. But it cannot become reality because although man can think up the most ideal situation, what can be achieved in reality depends on quite different conditions.

We have tried to found something as far as is possible in our time in the Waldorf School in Stuttgart which is not built on programs but only flows out of pædagogy and didactics. The Free Waldorf School has a number of teachers. They would, if they meet together, be able to think up ideal programs for the school, for which I would not particularly praise them. But that we don't need. The people, the living human beings constitute the staff. And what they are able to do, the best that can be elicited from them, that should be developed. All ideal programs are dismissed, all prescriptions are dismissed, everything is placed into the immediate impulse of the individual ability. No prescription disturbs him who is to act—and that is just the task of the individual human being—out of pædagogy and didactic in a certain area of spiritual life.

Of course to-day one can only realize such things up to a certain point. In practical life one can nowhere realize an ideal, but one must do what is possible in the circumstances of life. In the same way everything else from my “Essentials of the Social Question” must be treated. Nowhere has it been attempted to show how the different institutions should be. Not as a demand, not as an ideal, but as an observation of that which the human being in his present historical becoming wants, it is pointed out that human beings—although they are just as they happen to be—would be able to act differently from how they are acting today, if they were situated in their right place. Therefore I do not give actual proposals how this or that institution should be but turn directly to the human beings and say: When human beings work together in the right way and in the right way find the aspects from which they have to view the social question, then the best which can come about will come about.—And I just believe that the best structuring of the social organism out of the human being is this that every single person, I should say, in a separate association thinks and works in the spiritual realm, in the rights-state or political realm and in the economic realm. Every person can for instance be active in all three realms if he has the strength for it—the social organism is not divided into classes. The point is not that this or that person is active in this or that realm, but that objectively, apart from man, these three realms are administered independently out of their intrinsic conditions, so that a person can belong to all three or to two or to one, but administers it out of the principles of that realm. If one considers how through this the harmony of the three realms comes about, one will see that in this threefolding it is the unity with matters, not the separation, as misunderstood criticism and discussions assert.

And so it is especially important in the economic realm that solutions should not be found by some prescriptions let us say from the study of statistics or the like, but from immediate life. I will give an example. As everyone knows, an item of merchandize in the economic circulation becomes too cheap if a great number of people produce the same thing, when there is overproduction. And everyone knows, that an item of merchandize becomes too expensive when it is produced by too few people. Through this we have a measure where the objective mean is of which I have spoken. This mean, the objective value, this objective price cannot be fixed as such. But when associations come into being which see their activity in practically getting to know economic life, to study it in every moment, in every present time, then the main observation can be how prices rise, how prices fall. And because associations occupy themselves with this rising and falling of prices, it can be accomplished by negotiations that a large enough number of people can be formed for an economic entity, a large enough number of people is active in a branch of production, that through negotiation one can bring the right number of people into a branch of production. This cannot be worked out theoretically, this can only be determined by people being in their appropriate place, so that these things are determined by human experience. Therefore one cannot say: this or that is the objective value. But when associations work in economic life in such a way that they make it one of their tasks gradually to eliminate businesses which make the prices too cheap as is customary, and to inaugurate others in their place which produce something else, then enough people will take part in the various branches of production. This can only be accomplished by a truly associative life. And then the price for a certain product will become closer to the objective price. So that we can never say: Because of such and such conditions the objective price must be this or that, but we can only say: When the right human association comes about, then by its work in the immediate life of the social organism the correct price can gradually emerge. The point is not to state how institutions should be that the socially right thing happens, but to bring people into such a social connection that from the collaboration of the people the social question can gradually be solved. For whoever understands the social question rightly cannot see it as one that has come up once and could be solved by some utopia, but the social question is a result of modern working together and will in future be present more and more. But what is needed is that people observe the social currents from their economic viewpoint and through associations, in which alone an economic judgement can be formed, bring the economic life into the right streams, not by laws but out of immediate life by direct human negotiation. The social life must be based practically on the human condition.

Therefore the “Essentials of the Social Question” are not concerned with describing some social structure, but to indicate how people can be brought into a relationship in which they can by their working together do from time to time what is needed for the social question, not in the way which is sometimes dreamt about. As one can see from this, these associations will primarily be concerned with the actual economic life. In actual economic life merchandize is circulating. Therefore the associations will primarily have to further the tendency towards the correct price out of immediate life, so that everyone actually can purchase what he needs for his maintenance out of his own producing. I have once tried to bring into a formula what such a just price would look like. That does not mean of course that it should be determined abstractly. It is determined out of real life as I have indicated. But I have said: Such a price for any product in social life—that is, for merchandize—is this, that it makes it possible for a person to provide his keep and all his needs for himself and his family until he has produced the same product again.

I don't state this as a dogma. I don't say this must be so, because one would never be able to implement this, as one cannot implant such theories into reality, I only say that that which will appear as the correct price through the associative working together will tend towards this direction. So I just want to state a result. I don't want to draw up a dogma, some economic dogma. And in my view this is just what is essential for today's economic thinking, that one bases it everywhere on human foundations, that one recognizes again in what way the human being must everywhere be the driving force of economic life, that one does not think of organizing a social organism somehow out of institutions that come out of theoretical thinking, but that one tries to discover how human co-existence should be so that the right way comes about. I want to illustrate this still by the following analogy. In the realm of nature there exists this: that in the conditions which are created by people there is something which comes out of a basic human sensing but which doesn't intend to fix something which comes into being in outer social life. For in recent times there has been talk of how the human embryonic development could be influenced so that one could in a certain sense have a choice of whether to bring boys or girls into the world. Of course I don't want to discuss this question today in theory, but I consider it fortunate if this question cannot be practically solved. For even though human beings cannot determine abstractly what would be the best distribution of male and female gender in the world, this does happen more or less without people being able to influence it. There are objective laws which take effect when man out of quite different conditions simply follows his basic impulses. And in this way, when the associations work in the right way and out of the experiences of life without dogmatically saying such or such the just price has to be, this price will appear through the associative working. I call it associative working, because the human individuality should be present in associating, that is, in the combining of the strengths of the one with the strength of the other the individuality is preserved. In the coalition, in the unions, the individuality disappears. This is what in my view can lead to the realistic, not the dogmatic, economic thinking.

And one can think of further tasks for these associations. If we look again at the analogy with the human organism we can say: by this or that symptom we can notice that the human organism is sick. Out of a combination of symptoms we can gain knowledge about the illness, about the process of the illness. It is quite similar with the social organism. Today we see obvious symptoms of disease in the social organism. Associations are the health bearers. Associations work towards the harmonizing of interests, so that the interests of the producers and the consumers are harmonized by the working together in the association, that other interests are harmonized, that above all the interests between employers and workers are harmonized. Today we see how out of a diseased economic body the opposite of associative life is created, we see how passive resistance, locking out, sabotage and even revolutions come about. No-one with a healthy mind can deny that all this works in the opposite direction of the associative principle and that all this: sabotage, lock-outs, revolution and so on are symptoms of disease of the social organism that must be overcome through that which works in a harmonizing way. But for this one needs a truly meaningful form of the social organism, just as the human natural threefold organism has a meaningful form.

And now I come back to what I said, that land and capital cannot be considered as merchandize, for their value is dependent on human capability. If we have something abstractly uniform as it has more and more come to the fore in recent times, but also bearing within it the described symptoms of disease and others as well, then it tends to result through this abstract uniform treatment that land, capital and lastly also labour are treated as merchandize.

When there is a threefold organism, the forces of the individuality work in the realm of the spiritual life. Therefore all that has to do with the unfolding of the individuality in economic life that is that which is connected with land and with capital, is actually part of the spiritual realm of the social organism. That is why I have described how the management of the capital, the management of the land, have to be dealt with in the spiritual realm of the social organism.

He who criticizes me for tearing the three realms apart is not aware that—as I described it myself—the spiritual organism, which is built on the individual strength, takes on the management of the capital, the management of the land as a matter of course when people are put at the right place. But that which is labour in the social organism is a service which man performs for man. That is something which can never thrive if it is grounded in economic life alone. That is why regulation of labour belongs to the realm of rights, to the political realm. And just because of from a totally different premise from today, time and measure of work can be regulated by relationships between man and man—quite apart from economic agreements which are determined in economic life through the associations—something will come about which will be of the utmost importance: The economic life will be placed on a healthy basis by having nature with its conditions on the one side and on the other side man with his conditions.

It would be strange indeed if today we would sit together with a small committee to determine how many rainy days there must be in 1922 in order for the economic matters to proceed according to our wishes. One has to take nature as it is and only on the basis of accepted nature the economic life can be structured. That is the one side. In the threefold social organism man stands in relationship to man, not as economic object, over against the independent, relatively autonomous associations, autonomous even to the structuring of the money side. And as man he develops the labour laws. And now one will not determine human labour out of economic conditions, from which only the prices of the merchandize, the relative values of the merchandize, i.e. something purely economic must be determined, just as one cannot determine the productivity of nature out of economic conditions. But only then one will have based economic life on purely human as well as on purely natural conditions.

It will then however not be possible for Utopia to come about. But what good would it be to think about how man could be better constituted than he is? One can only study him as he is. Therefore it can be said that it would be very nice to talk of some future worlds in which man would be as well as one could wish for, but it would be fruitless; for one could think up all sorts of ideas of how the social organism should be structured. But that can never be the question. The question can only be this: How is it possible to structure it? How must its members work together, not that it is the best, but the one which through its own strengths is the possible one, which will have the least of the indicated disease symptoms and can develop in the most healthy way possible? I think that maybe as time goes by one will come to an understanding about this cardinal question of economic life which I have indicated, when one wants to understand this through a true realization of the social conditions of life. This cardinal economic question which has lived in all my deliberations and which I don't want to lay down in an abstract dogmatic formal way. But to-day our most terrible battles which assail the economic life lastly come from the fact that one does not study economic life with the same good will, does not follow up its conditions within the social organism as one does for instance in regard to the natural organism. And only when one will learn to proceed with regard to the social organism as one does with biology, physiology and their therapy, one will discover what possibilities there are, and then it will be possible to ask the questions which to-day one calls the social questions in the right way. With this they will be able to be brought back to the human level. That is why it seems to me to be of the greatest importance that as many heads and hearts can be won for an appropriate understanding of the social organism as possible, for an understanding which can look at the social organism in respect of health and disease just as natural science attempts to do with regard to the human organism. And I believe that today one can realize that indeed it must also be said with regard to the cardinal question of economic life, that the three-folding of the social organism can throw light into the realms of purely economic life, the rights, state or political life and the spiritual life. For these three realms should not be separated, but each one should be able to work harmoniously together with the others by virtue of being able to develop its strong powers in relative autonomy. And the core question of economic life is this: How must the political life and the spiritual life work independently into the purely economic life in relation to capital, land and measuring and valuation of human labour, so that in the economic life by the structuring of the associations not indeed an earthly paradise, but a possible social organism can be created?

And one can believe that when one thinks in such a true to nature way about the question, then such a question which one must call the core question of the economic life, can be asked in the right, close to life, practical way. And it often happens in life that the greatest mistakes are made not because one strives for wrong solutions—usually they are utopian solutions—but already by asking the wrong question, that the questions are not asked out of real observation of life and real knowledge of life. But this seems to me today the most significant question particularly in regard to the economic life, that the questions are asked correctly and that life be structured in such a way that not theoretical answers are given but that life, the total human and historical reality itself, gives the answer to the correctly put questions. The questions will be put out of the historical background, life must directly truly give answer. No theory can give this answer, but only the full practical reality of life.

It will be more in keeping with the character of a study-evening, such as this, if I do not deliver a regular lecture, but begin simply by offering a few remarks, which may lead on to as wide a discussion as possible of the particular subjects which the different members of the audience may have more especially at heart, and which may seem needful for the further work of propagating the Threefold Social Order.

It has been intimated to me, that an important question at this moment is that of propaganda; a how and through what means the idea of the Threefold Order can best be propagated during the coming months.

Since I was not present at the last study-evenings, it is possible that what I say to-day may be apart from the general context; but this question of propaganda was represented to me as being of particular importance.

Well, it is hardly very profitable, to-day, to discuss the ways and means in which the propaganda of the Threefold Order should be carried on, unless one is prepared to base anything one may propose to do upon the experiences we have actually had up till now. In discussing a subject of this kind, I must really point out once more, that, in face of the general situation throughout the world to-day, it can really not be a question of how one thinks of arranging every detail in one particular concern,—especially not in the economic field. From any measures on a small scale, one can truly no longer hope for much to-day. To-day we should after all be learning to see, that at bottom nothing is to be accomplished except by treating things on a big scale, as I might say. As regards our propaganda,—I spoke of it last time at one of these very study-evenings, and called attention to the fact, that with our propaganda we have met with very interesting experiences. And the dominant note of our repeated experiences was always this: how very difficult it is really today, even in these times of need, to approach men's souls at all with the very thing which in all respects,—spiritual, political, economical,—one must feel to be absolutely needful.

I pointed out last time, how certain proposed plans had failed, and how we were therefore obliged to fall back upon more or less individual enterprises, which, as you know finally concentrated in our business-undertaking, the Kommender Tag. We are quite well aware, that if our propaganda for the Threefold idea does not succeed in making its way through as a whole, this single undertaking can at best be but a very unsatisfying substitute in every respect. For the thing, above all, which is of importance to-day,—and it cannot be too often repeated,—is, that an understanding of the threefold idea, as an active onward-bearing force, should make its way into as many heads as possible. Unless we have a sufficiently large number of people who really understand this Threefold idea, there is no getting on. This understanding applies to many things, let me say. And here I should like to point to a concrete instance.

When we first started our propaganda here, we began, as you know, by working in the way I have just indicated: by trying to win over as large a number as possible of souls with understanding. And the actual questions of economic life too were practically discussed. There is one very definite question of economic life for instance, which was discussed by me not once but many times: and that was the question of price-adjustment. I have often pointed out, that this question of price-adjustment is a cardinal one; that the fact of the matter is simply, that in the economic process there are of course other questions, but that even such questions as wages, and the like, are not the primary ones to be settled; but that these also must be settled on the basis of the price-question; that a quite definite price for any particular article is the only state of things which can be regarded as a healthy one in economic life. In other words: a definite article must be obtainable for a definite price within any particular set of economic combinations; and this must be the standard to which economic relations are adjusted. There can be nothing more unsound that to look upon prices as something that can be put up and down at convenience; and then begins the endless screw, of adjusting the rate of wages to suit the prices, and then putting up the prices again at convenience to suit the wages; if prices rise, then wages rise, and so on ad infinitum. This is laying hold of the whole matter by the wrong end.

In those days I used to take for discussion a concrete question of this kind from the bed-rock of general economics. What was the result? In those days we used to have meetings which were attended for the greater part by working men only. The middle-class circles held aloof, for they thought that we arranged things only to suit the working classes. Well, in short, we met with some understanding amongst the particular circles who, in those days, listened to us. But this understanding completely dried up. The people gradually left off coming. They produced all their old stock-in-trade of questions from the regulation party shibboleths; and then they gradually stayed away; and one of the cardinal questions simply dried up in this way. I am just picking out one example; there are many others that might be quoted. And I cannot help thinking, in comparison, of an occasion I had, not long ago, to talk with a thoroughly practical business man, who is in the thick of business-life under a state-system which is not the German one; and in the course of our conversation it came out, that, simply from his own experience as a practical businessman, he had arrived at the view, that the most important thing to be dealt with is the problem of price-adjustment. Yes! of this—let me say—I am convinced: with people, who are business people, and at the same time can think, one finds no difficulty. I must confess that, so far, I have met with remarkably few people of this description. I have met with business-people who did not think, but who are under the habit of thought, even today, of regarding it as the all-important matter that one is ‘a practical man,’ and that one is ‘a practical man’ when one takes care that the State—or some other institution—thinks for one: one can leave it to them.—This was the way things were done too in Germany during the war; It must be left to the people above, at headquarters; they must know all about it!—And so, as I was saying, I have not met with many as yet, but when one does meet with such people to-day, who are business-men and at the same time can think, they arrive quite infallibly, through their own practical thinking on business matters, to the same results as you find in my Roots of the Social Question.¹ You must not compare my Roots of the Social Question, and test what you find there, with the crazy things in the party-programmes. The party-programmes of the fourteen parties just elected to this impossible Reichstag (it will be a quite impossible conglomeration!) are all alike equally impracticable and impossible. The point about what you find in the Roots of the Social Question is, that it must be compared with a real practice of life, with what the actual facts of life require,—that is to say if one really thinks about actual life, and does not merely go crying the old stock-in-trade and the regulation shibboleths.

But this method of propaganda, as we have seen, makes no headway: the method of really examining what, of course, had to be said on a limited number of pages. For one can't write a whole library off-hand; and it would be only less read than The Roots of the Social Question! But instead of people comparing what is said in The Roots of Social Question with the things one can learn in the factory as a business-man or a practical technician, they go hawking about the old, old party shibboleths and party-programmes; and the real practical thing of which the book is talking, instead of being compared with real practice, is compared with some bee or other, that is buzzing in some particular bonnet, and is supposed to be ‘the practical thing.’

This, then, is the first thing we have to achieve. We must decide to direct our efforts to making people see, that it is really not so easy to settle public affairs. I must say that for me it is a bitter pill, a bitter experience in this respect, that after I tried to write this book at that time from the actual needs of the time, people should now come and demand, that what is written in The Roots of the Social Question should be boiled down into a general mess, and drained off onto a page or two. That is what these people want! They want to have everything laid before them in a couple of pages,—which already in the book is stated as shortly as ever is possible! Or perhaps they would like to have it on a single leaflet for distribution! If you ask me to-day: In what does the trouble lie in our present age? I can only answer: The trouble lies just in this fact, that people can still to-day make such a demand as this; and that they are not willing, even now, to go to the bottom of things. Things that require careful study, they want to have crammed together anyhow on a couple of printed sheets,—such as already have appeared as an abstract of the Roots of the Social Question. So long as this is people's attitude of mind, nothing will be accomplished in the only way in which anything can be accomplished to-day. It is true that I propose very soon to issue a new edition of the Roots of the Social Question, with a special introduction, in which I shall shortly summarise in a couple of pages the contents discussed in the book.² But this is only intended to be used as a sort of preparatory introduction, printed as the beginning, by way of preparation for reading the book in full. But if anyone imagines that he can learn from still fewer pages what it is necessary to understand to-day, it simply means that he has no feeling for the things that have actually to be done to-day. This is the very first thing we have to consider, if we are really in earnest about what we may term the propaganda-question.

Just take this concrete fact, that our weekly paper, the Threefold Social Order,³ has already brought out 49 numbers:—49 numbers. Take these 49 numbers, read them through in succession, and you will see what an amount we have collected together in them of practically all the things which it is more immediately necessary for mankind to know about the Threefold question. We have already issued 49 numbers; and really there is to be found in them all that is more immediately necessary to know. Yet what can we only tell ourselves to-day? People still come to us, asking for information about some point or other. They are always asking for information about this point or that. As a matter of fact we have written these 49 numbers of the Threefold Order, and the whole of the material is for the time being flung away. Doesn't it look as though we should be almost obliged to begin over again from the beginning; to give out No. 1 again just as before, and then all the following numbers, just as they appeared before! Having said really a great deal here, which was thrown to the winds, which never made its way into people's heads at all, are we always expected to find something new to say! Well, they can't after all expect too much—the people outside;—they can't expect us always to be finding something new. What is wanted now, would be to set to work and actually propagate the Threefold idea, as it is. Of course there are any number of things in the way of this; but they all reside entirely in the human will. They reside in the fact, that it is necessary that people's souls to-day should wake up; and that they should take the things seriously which are really in question.

There is one question, for instance, which people to-day invariably seek to evade. But it is the one from which the Roots of the Social Question sets out from the very first, and upon which, practically speaking, the whole of the Threefold propaganda must be based, not in substance, but as regards the way of propaganda: namely, the recognition, that in the so-called ‘social question’ to-day, we most certainly are not dealing with what most people talk about under that name. Most people, in talking about the social question, talk about what should be done with this or that institution, about the systems to be adopted in one or other department. Anyone who talks in this way has absolutely no understanding of what is going on in our present age; for the simple reason, that he does not see, that to-day you might make the most splendid institutions—if that were possible!—and that afterwards, when you have made them, you will soon have exactly the same agitation going on as before. As mankind is constituted at the present day, you may have a party, which for a long while has been in opposition;—take for example the Majority Socialists at the present time: the moment these Majority Socialists come into power, another party forms, of the socalled Independent Socialists. If these were to come into power, a new party again would form in opposition,—the Communists. And if these were to come into power, another new opposition party would soon be in the field. The fact we have to recognise is, that we are not dealing to-day with anything that can be touched by any sort of projects for particular institutions, but that the social question to-day is a human question, a question strictly of human worth and human consciousness. And one sees, what the social question really is, if one looks about one in countries, where everything has not yet crashed, but where the crash is still to come. There one may see, on the one side, the classes who formerly held the reins. These people see so far as that all business is coming to a stand-still: that enormous stocks of goods are piling up in the business-houses; that they have difficulty in making enough to pay their workmen, and are beginning to think, that if things go on in the same way, they soon won't be able to pay them at all; that they also won't be able to get rid of the stock in the warehouses. All this they see so far quite well; but they fancy, that some miracle will come about, and then, in a little while, things will be different. And so they sit waiting for the miracle, in order not to have to use their own brains, and think what ought really to be done. And, standing over on the other side, one sees those people who talk a very different language: namely the broad masses of the working class throughout the civilised world. Of what is going on amongst these broad masses, the first description of people have, nevertheless, not the faintest notion. But in these working-classes there exists a will: a will, that clothes its problems in conceptions, in ideas, which, the moment they are actually realised, will mean the destruction of everything we possess in the form of human civilisation:—ideas that destroy everything, everything,—that sweep everything away. And the leading classes imagine, that in a little while maybe things will have gone back again to the year 1913, or the Spring of 1914, and they will begin again whore they left off at that time;—and that then, amongst these broad masses, they will still find people to come quite willingly, and work again as they used to work in those days.

No! to-day it is no question of institutions with which we have to deal, but a question of human beings. And we have to recognise, that amongst the leading classes for a very long time past there has not been the faintest sign of understanding for the task they had to perform. And do you think, then, that from the masses anything could possibly come, except what we experienced to our horror here in Stuttgart, when we started with our Threefold propaganda?

You must consider, that there were two conditions under which the beginning we made, in April last year, might quite well have been carried further. Under two conditions:—the one would have been, that we should have succeeded, regardless of their leaders, in winning over the broad masses of the working classes to a really understanding conception of life. That was on a very fair road to success. And the next thing would have been, on the other side, if the people with some influence amongst the middle-classes—the bourgeoisie—would have held out a hand, would have shown us some confidence; if they had said to themselves: ‘Here is at least an attempt being made to construct a bridge between the working classes and the others.’—And what actually happened? As you can think, the matter is no easy one to-day; for as to the sort of thing which Stresemann talks, and the like,—or which bears the least odour of any leanings in that direction,—in nothing of this sort will the working classes ever, under any circumstances, place the slightest confidence. But, for all that, we were really in a fair way to appeal to the working classes simply on common-sense grounds; and all that was needed, would have been, that the bourgeoisie on their side should have met us with so much understanding as to say: ‘Alright: we will do our best, and wait and see what you can do. We will admit that amongst ourselves, there are a large number of people who cannot hope to win the necessary confidence, for they have trifled this confidence away; but, by this line of proceeding, it will be possible to bridge the gap.’

But, instead of this, what happened? The people who should have met us with this much understanding, planted themselves down across the path, and declared:iThese people are leading us straight into Bolshevism,—or not far short of it! They are hand-in-glove with the proletariatell Not the least understanding was to be met with on that side. And under these circumstances it then grew too late; so that the leaders of the working class, who should have been left out of it, found it easy to step in and alienate the workers from us again. That is what spoilt the matter for us, and why it came to grief at that time.

But, in the same way, anything we might now do in respect of propaganda, would also inevitably come to grief, if the general kind of view were to be, for instance, as regards the paper: “Yes; but the articles in the Threefold Order are so difficult to understand!”—When anybody says that to me, I look upon it as my duty to tell him, with all politeness (politeness is necessary with such people as a rule); so I politely explain to him, that it is just for this reason,—that people have so long had a tendency to think everything un-understandable which comes from the real practice of life, and have always demanded that one should descend to a lower level when it comes to writing,—that now we find ourselves in trouble. And you—I say—are a representative of the people who have brought us into trouble. And when you demand, that one should write to suit the kind of understanding which passes current with you, you simply show yourself to be a specimen of the detrimentals who have brought us to this present pass. And so long as we are not in a position, (with all due politeness, of course, for the individual instance!),—so long as we cannot find a sufficient number of people with the courage at last to say, ‘A new day will have to come, with new people! There must be a clean sweep of everything to do with these horrible old parties; something quite new must come to life!’—until we can do this, all discussion as to the most effective ways of propaganda is so much talk for the cat! We are not living to-day in an age when anything whatever can be done by little measures; we are living in an age when it is an urgent necessity, that a sufficiently large number of people, holding the same language and the same ideas, should be capable of throwing themselves actively into the thing,—not merely of being ‘quite enthusiastic’ about it.

I think that many of you must be asking himself, why there should be this continual crescendo in the way of speaking; why the words that I myself use, for instance, should grow ever stronger and stronger? Well, for a very simple reason. Only think for a moment: when one has been trying to induce a part of mankind to wake up; when one has taken the practical steps to enable a part of mankind to wake up; and one sees people falling ever more softly and soundly asleep,—then one's voice too grows louder in proportion, then everything one has to say grows proportionately louder, because one feels the instinctive necessity of overcoming the sleepiness of one's fellow-men! And as regards their conceptions of the urgent social questions of the day, we truly cannot say that the sleepiness of our fellow-humanity has grown any less of late. Things are taken up, even in our own movement, from an utterly wrong end. I delivered a lecture recently on the idea of the Threefold Order, and the necessity of placing the spiritual life upon its own footing. And in reply, somebody said in the most good-natured, well-meaning way: ‘Here, amongst us, there is really no occasion to complain of the lack of freedom in spiritual life. We possess a very considerable degree of freedom in our spiritual life. Amongst us, the State really interferes very little in anything we may choose to do as regards our school-system.’—Let me say to you, that people who talk in this way are the very best testimony to the necessity of emancipating our spiritual life. People who still have some sense of how unfree they are, are people for whom one can find much more use. But the people, who no longer have even a sense of their own lack of freedom, who take the State-educational ideas, that have been pumped into their heads, to come from their own inner freedom, and have not the faintest notion of how far this public-educational slavery extends,—these are the people really, who are the drag upon everything. It is a question of taking hold of things by the right end. And people who, without knowing it, take slavery for freedom, are the people who, naturally, hinder us from getting forwards.

One may say, therefore, that the first matter above all, is to recognise, that all mutual understanding has been lost between the broad masses and those other people, whose special task for long years past it should have been, to hold such a language in the world, that these broad masses should not to-day be advocating, in their newspapers and everywhere, the kind of views which they are advocating. I read lately—in another country—the Whitsuntide number of a socialist newspaper. They were the queerest Whitsun articles, that were in it! Everything to do with ‘Spirit’ was rejected altogether, and it was pointed out instead, that the only kind of Spirit is the one which proceeds from the broad masses. Well, one really feels oneself wrought into such a state of mind by such Whitsun articles in a socialist paper of bolshevist tendencies, that one begins to say to oneself: ‘Where can I catch it? where can I hold of it, this “Spirit,” which is coming up like a smoke out of the broad masses?’ And then, when one really sets to work to try and form even some conception, let alone to grasp this Spirit of the broad masses,—then I can only say that one has after all the feeling: It is a far worse superstition, than the kind of superstition which sees a hobgoblin or a fairy in every bush and tree. The men of modern times have no notion really, under what forms of superstition they are living as a matter of fact. And what does it all amount to? Well, you know, it amounts after all to this: that people are much too easy-going to give their minds to the necessity of really building up a new spiritual life.

This is an experience which one has had very thorough opportunities of learning for many years past. Directly one approaches people with any appeal for the necessity of building up a new spiritual life, one finds a certain number of people no doubt, who, in addition to their other occupations in life, can make up their minds,—on Sunday afternoons, or Branch-evenings, or for the time they spend on anthroposophical reading,—to devote themselves to this new spiritual movement. But, as to trying to make any connection between this new spiritual movement and their other occupations in life,—this is something which they cannot make up their minds to do.

But there are numbers and numbers of other people, who come to one and say: ‘After all, what you want, is really what the better sort of Catholics, or the better sort of Protestants, want too. Why there was some clergyman, again, whose sermon from the pulpit was quite in the anthroposophical direction! More or less everything that you are aiming at is to be found in this or the other quarter as well.’—People who would like to make compromises, to the extent of being ready to let Anthroposophy be practically swamped by the sort of thing they are used to,—such people are to be found in plenty. People, who, even in matters that call for resolute will,—such as we spoke of in the public lecture yesterday—nevertheless still follow the principle ‘Wash my fur, but don't wet it by a single drop,’—such people are peculiarly plentiful in these days. And until we find means to put a clear understanding into as many heads as possible, that what is needed before all else is a new spiritual life, a spiritual life that lays hold on everything,—until we find means to do this, we shall get no further. When we have this new spiritual life,—when we no longer have the senselessness of the intellectuals to contend with,—then we shall once more have something that can speak to men in such a way, that the speaking has power to call forth social facts.

If people would but form a conception of what can be done by the power of the Word! Look over the whole civilised world today, whereever you may travel, by train or by motor-car; everywhere you see towns and villages, and in all these towns and villages churches: churches, that have been built. These churches were none of them there, not so very long ago. In the first centuries of our present, Christian era, all over this Europe, now strewn with churches, there was something very different. Yet they were but a small Few, who went out amongst the people,—though indeed amongst a fresher age of man, less given to sleep. And these small Few it was, who through the power of their words gave Europe the face it wears to-day. Had the people, who accomplished this, been of the same type of mind as—say the sample-dozen leaders of our collective 14 parties, probably not so many as a dozen of these churches would have been built. It is the inner power of the spirit, after all, which must create social facts. But then, this inner power of the spirit must find its carriers in men, who really have courage to carry it. And today we simply have to face the fact, that everything, which in those days was founded on its own inner grounds, can only now be maintained in place by measures of force, by prejudice, by custom,—and that, at bottom, it is not possible to maintain it, if people's minds are true and honest;—that a new spiritual life must be set in its place;—that there is no other possible way for us to go forwards, except by setting a new spiritual life in place of the old. Every sort of compromise is an impossibility to-day. And until people recognise that it will be inevitably necessary to put something entirely new in the place of all these old things, but something which shall draw from the spirit the power to create a new social order,—till then, we shall get no further.—And therefore I must say to you, that I regard it, in a way, as a matter of very minor importance, whether all the petty measures of propaganda are discussed in this manner or that,—whether it is done in this manner or that; it may all, from a certain point of view, be very good, or miserably bad: that is not the important matter; the really important matter, as I have said over and over again in our paper, The Threefold Order, is this: that we should find a sufficiently large number of people who will make up their minds to stand out courageously for our ideas, who will make up their minds not for ever to be wanting to drift back into the old grooves.

At the present moment, as you know, we are busy setting on foot the various businesses, collectively comprised under this Kommender Tag. What strikes me more than anything else about it is, that well-meaning people keep coming and saying: ‘Really, you know, that ought to be done quite differently; you ought to call in a specialist; you ought to call in a practical man.’—It is the most pitiable experience one can gb through, if one does for once give in and follow the suggestion. For such a suggestion really implies, that the person wants to import the old unpractical groove-drifting amongst us again. What we need, is not to import the old so-called practical men into our institutions; on the contrary, what we need, is clearly to recognise, that the people who may happen to-day to have the best reputation in any department, and know best how to handle the old routine, are the worst people for our purpose. And the best people for our purpose are those who are prepared to do new work from their own quite inner and spontaneous initiative, and who do not plume themselves in any way on what they have learnt under the old conditions. Unless we leave off pluming ourselves on anything we have attained to under the old conditions, we shall in no case get any further. This is what we must clearly recognise to-day.

And in conclusion I would say to you as regards our propaganda: Let us spread abroad in the first place what we have really been endeavoring to do for more than a year past; and don't let us always try to be over-clever and always want to twist round the attempts that have been made, and give them a different shape again; in order then—excuse the expression!—to lick one's fingers over one's own cleverness, and for ever be repeating: ‘They are so unpractical in everything they start! This ought to be done, and that ought to be done!’

Just reflect for a moment what it means: 49 numbers of the Threefold. Order—of our paper—flung away and come to nothing! And why did they come to nothing? The Threefold Order ought really by now to be so far on, that we could bring it out as a daily paper. Why do I say this? Because as a matter of fact today I can still only take the same standpoint as was expressed in the words I used when we first began this thing, in April and May of last year. Do you imagine that it was a form of speech, that it was a phrase, when I concluded a great number of my speeches in those days with the words: we must make up our minds to do whatever it might be, before it is too late!—For many things it is simply too late to-day. By the paths along which we attempted to do all manner of things in those days, we to-day can obviously get no further. To-day it is not in the least our business to enter into any sort of discussion with the old stock-in-trade arguments whether of the creeds or the parties. Our business today, is to stand firm upon the ground of what we have to say, and to introduce it into as many heads as possible. In no other way shall we get forwards. For as a fact, for many things it is now simply too late. And it may possibly very soon be too late also for other things, which it is still possible to do, namely for the spreading of our ideas,—if we are for ever turning our minds to all sorts of secondary matters, instead of going straight for the main thing, which is to spread our ideas.

I said, that this concern we have founded, the Kommender Tag; can after all be only an unsatisfactory substitute. And why? Simply because we are under no delusions that we can possibly be practical without basing ourselves upon practical actions. We are endeavoring to take an active share in practical business-life; and then people come and ask one: ‘How, exactly, ought one to set up a grocery shop, so as to be as much as possible on the lines of the Threefold Commonwealth?’ Of course, we are trying to found business undertakings in the Kommender Tag; but there it is a case of handling them really practically. And how, is one, for instance, to handle the matter really practically to-day, when one can only tell oneself: If I intend to carry on a particular kind of undertaking, then, in order to carry out the thing rationally, I must have another set of undertakings. For a particular set of industrial undertakings, for instance, I must have a particular set of agricultural undertakings. Well, but can you do it? It is all impossible as things are to-day. The State makes it quite impossible for you to make this particular kind of practical arrangement. So great is the external power of the State to-day. It is not a question of any want of practicality; but simply that the thing is made impossible on the other side by external power.—And therefore those persons, who actually now possess a standing in one or other department of economic business-life, should really not spend their time to-day in discussing subordinate questions, but should discuss together instead, how these various ‘business-estates’ of the Body Economic can make themselves free of the political State and everything involved with it,—how they can manage to slip out of it. So long as the technical experts, so long as all these various people are concerned with nothing but how to make arrangements that may best fit in with the life of the existing State, we shall get no step further;—not till they begin to discuss: How can we get free? how can we establish a really free economic life, where things are not ‘organised’ from above downwards, where, instead of ‘organisation,’ there is ‘association,’ in which the different ‘business-estates’ link up together through the actual course of business?—As yet there is not the first, elementary A.B.C. of this in our practical discussions of the Threefold system, but only the same old talk and the same old tinkering round and round, always with a respectful eye on existing conditions. All this roundabout talk leads nowhere to-day. We must be chary of the people who are for ever saying, ‘But how about this, and how about thatl! for the fact of the matter is, that we shall first be able to begin to discuss things sensibly, when we are a bit further on with the separation of the three systems; when we actually have thrown ourselves so completely into the propaganda for the threefolding of the body social, that a sufficiently large number of people in economic life definitely know: ‘Nothing we can say has any sense, so long as we still continue to reckon on the whole of our economic life being arranged for us by the State. Only in proportion as we manage to get free, will discussion begin to have any sense. Until then, everything we may say is nonsense.’—And, in the same way, there is just as little sense in discussing reforms in the spiritual life, until one is clear, that one can't even begin to converse on the subject, before one is actually living in a free spiritual system. One must at least be fully aware, that so long as one is living in a spiritual system which is dependent on the State, all one may say can have no sense,—that, so long as this is the case, one cannot reform anything.

This, you see, very clearly marks out the point which is the important one: It is a question, not of little things, but of big things; and the more this comes to be recognised, so much more will it be possible to accomplish in the field of practical life.

You will say: ‘What is the use of giving us such a philippic, when what we are asking is, how to carry on our propaganda?’ When you come to think over what I have said however, you will see, that even with what I might call an ‘elevenpence ha'penny propaganda’ (as they say in Austria, where they used to have shops in which every article could be bought for elevenpence halfpenny), that, even so, we shall get no further, so long as, even in our own circles, people discuss every petty detail of ways and means. We shall only begin to get further, when people have hearts and minds for the great motor forces of the world; for it is a question of these great motor forces to-day.

Well, I have said a great deal to the same effect before now, and all in vain;—namely that it is a question of the great motor forces of the world. Still, I shall never grow weary of persisting, in general principle, to decline everything which leans towards the making of compromises to-day. I shall never weary of pointing out, again and again, the necessity of bringing the great world-moving questions of the day really to the comprehension of the very broadest masses of the people. And for this reason too, I always feel myself obliged to deliver the public lectures in the style I did yesterday, and to defy all the over-clever people who say, that one ought to talk more intelligibly to the masses,—meaning as a rule themselves only and their own intellectual niveau. I shall always maintain the view, that it is the people who talk in this way, who are the detrimentals; these are the people whom we have to overcome. And we must come so far as to have the courage to say to ourselves: ‘Yes, indeed! The foundations must be laid of something quite new!’ The truth is—as I wrote lately in our paper,—that the old parties, practically speaking, no longer exist; they only exist any longer as lies and phrases, and are made up of people who, knowing of nothing new, drape themselves with the empty catchwords of the old parties; and all the while, the whole business is nonsense (including what has been going on in these last days), and directly proves how radically something new is needed.

(At the close of a desultory discussion Dr. Steiner concluded as follows:)

It is regrettable that so little has been said about the Threefold idea itself in the course of the discussion, and only about all sorts of other matters. I should like just to bring back the theme a little to the Threefold idea and to the things connected with it. I will therefore pick out several questions that have been raised, and so lead back to the theme of the lecture. One of the questions raised was; What my attitude is—or the attitude of the Threefold idea—towards Syndicalism?

Well, as you know, we have endeavoured, really, to find an attitude towards a great many movements of all kinds. I myself could only say the same about Syndicalism to-day, as I have often said about it before: that in certain circles of syndicalist tendencies one undoubtedly finds a consciousness of how much might be done by means of combining the various business-callings, the various branches of business, and that this, the ‘syndicalist’ idea, might lead in a way to certain fruitful results, at any rate in economic life. All this I am quite ready to acknowledge;—as also, for example, that Syndicalism takes up, in a way, a less slavish position towards the idea of the ‘State,’ than Marxian Socialism does for instance. This I am perfectly ready to acknowledge, and have often acknowledged it before. But all such movements in this direction belong, after all, not to the present day, but to a past one; and only project themselves on into the present day, because the people who adopted the name at an earlier date, have since been incapable of learning new conceptions. One might say really, that the whole set of party-shibboleths have lost their meaning for present-day conditions,—only that the people, who in past days belonged to the things these party shibboleths stand for, have not get made up their minds to label themselves with anything else but old party-shibboleths. Down to the end of 1914, you see, there was still a certain sense in people calling themselves by a party-name, such for instance as v.H.... and L.... still do to-day; but to-day there is no longer any sense in it. And yet people still go on calling themselves by the names of these parties. In the same way, to go on clinging to-day to bye-gone things like Syndicalism, has no real meaning any longer. And so, having made the attempt to approach such people as might be hoped to have brains still plastic enough to get beyond these old party-shibboleths,—so long as the attempt could be made, we made it. But one must learn a little wisdom from the circumstances in this case;—and indeed it is urgently necessary to-day to learn wisdom from circumstances. And therefore I must confess, that to-day I no longer feel any force in the question: What is my attitude towards Syndicalism? I can only assure you, that I have also tried to find an attitude towards Syndicalism; that is to say, I have tried to find people amongst the syndicalists who might be able, by means of a still more plastic brain, to understand the idea of the Threefold Order:—but that too was all in vain. And therefore, to-day, it is necessary to speak as I have spoken to-night, and to say, that our business is to take our stand on the firm ground of the Threefold idea, and not to trouble about anything else. For, what we have to do to-day is, to find a sufficiently large number of people who understand the idea of the Threefold Order; and whether they come to us from this camp or that, from the syndicalist camp, or any other, is to us a matter of complete indifference. We no longer trouble ourselves to-day about what is the attitude of the Threefold idea to the syndicalists; we can wait and see, what attitude the syndicalists will adopt towards the Threefold idea. Anything else would be so much wisdom learnt in vain in the course of the last year; and no one can work effectively to-day who is not capable of learning wisdom.

And then the question was asked: ‘In what way is it proposed to widen out the organisation of the ‘Kommender Tag,’ so that the Threefold movement may spread?’—Well, here, I must really beg you—especially in the question of an isolated case like this,—to bear in sight, that the Threefold idea, in its whole character, is something eminently practical; that we are dealing with something that is concrete, and not floating in a blue haze. The ‘Kommender Tag’ was founded, because it was recognised that the usual bank-system, as it is to-day, has gradually in the course of the nineteenth century come to be a injurious element in our economic life. I pointed this out when I was here last time, at another of the study-evenings. I showed that, more or less from the first third of the nineteenth century on, money has played a similar role in the economic life of modern civilisation, to that of abstract conceptions in our thinking-process: that it has gradually blotted out all concreteness of aim and effort; that it has spread itself like a cloak over the things that must find their expression in economic energies. And therefore it has become necessary to-day to found something, which is not merely a bank, but makes a centre of concentration for economic forces which are both a bank and, at the same time, engaged in concrete economic activity:—to found, that is, something which combines in itself real, concrete economic activities with the organisation of these special branches of economic activity,—in the same way as is done by a bank, where economic activities are included, but abstractly, without regard to the conditions of actual economy. That is to say, a practical attempt is here being made to overcome the injury done by the money-system.

To-day we have seen all sorts of people,—Gesell, [Silvio Gesell, originator of the Free-Money (‘stable money’) movement.—‘Gesell’ in German means ‘fellow.’] and other strange ‘fellows’ in life,—dancing around, and talking about ‘free money.’ Those are the utopians! Those are the abstractionists! What is wanted in reality, is to look at practical life, and learn to see where the centres of injury really lie. And one centre of injury lies in the fact, that the bank-system has taken the economic form that it has to-day. The bank-system in our economic life to-day plays the same part as a man's thoughts in the life of his soul, when he translates everything at once into abstractions, and troubles himself no further about the particular, concrete things which one sees and has to do with, but translates everything into lofty abstractions. A man who translates everything into lofty abstractions,—and that is the majority of people to-day,—never arrives at any real understanding of realities. Abstractions of this kind you can hear today on any Sunday from any pulpit. Abstractions of this kind have no longer anything to do with the actual life of the people who find it so thoroughly happy and comfortable to be lulled away from life in this manner for the space of a Sunday afternoon. And what for the individual souls life this substanceless abstraction is, that flies away to its airy cloud-castles, the same for economic life is the bank-system, that lives in the transaction of money. And so it was possible to make an experiment in little, which, let us hope, will grow into something quite big, and in which things could be so arranged, that the money is brought back as it were into the economic activities, and the economic activities carried up into money; so that money, here, again becomes something which serves to make economic activities more feasible and easier to set in motion. Just as our thoughts are not for the purpose of carrying us aloft into abstract sublimities where we feel happy and comfortable, but of enabling us to set in motion the concrete facts of life; so too, with money, the important thing is to bring it down into actual economic industry, to carry on the different branches of practical economy, and not to sit ourselves down in a bank and transact business, in money:—for money-trasactions in themselves are the most injurious element we have in economic life, in the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Here we have then simply a practical idea, taken up and also practically conceived. And until people recognise that it is a case here of quite practically conceiving ideas down into every particular, they will not succeed in understanding the League for the Threefold Social Order.

And now I should like to direct your attention to something which is not unconnected with the general note which I have been endeavoring to strike to-day: to a quarter, namely, which was alluded to by Mr.D.... (i.e. the Jesuits).—And although the cause is one, with which I, truly, will have nothing to do; yet you certainly find things advocated there in a very forceful manner. You may hear continually from that quarter: ‘Thousands and thousands of our followers may fall away; yet, though we should lose thousands and thousands, this matters nothing to us; the thing alone that could matter to us, would be the loss of a single truth!’ You may hear this over and over again from the quarter to which Mr.D.... alluded: ‘Thousands and thousands of our followers may fall away from us; but not a single truth must be let fall!’

Where people speak in this way on behalf of a cause, with which I, truly, will have nothing to do, it is easy to see, that they have here a very forceful manner of propaganda. And this is the thing which is needed7 to have strength to take up the stand, that it matters nothing to have numbers of followers; but that it matters everything to have strength to take our stand on the truths we possess, with no making of compromises, no sidelong glances to one side or another: "Can I get hold of this person? should I make myself agreeable to that person?" That is not what is needed to-day; but what is needed is, that we should win over as many people as possible to the ideas of the Threefold Order,—really not because one is enamoured of the Threefold Order, or because one is set on one's own notions; but because one sees that there is no other may of carrying on further.

Well, it is hardly necessary, I think, to go into the subject raised by Dr.H.... as to the licensed architects,—the State-architects,—and their relations with the legal profession. These are things which were all settled long ago in the most elementary discussions of the League. And you will agree that is quite out of the question, when we are talking on the lines of the Threefold Order, that we should take up a standpoint altogether off Threefold ground. For it would after all, you know, make a curious impression, if when we were talking—say—of the free spiritual life, we were to start a discussion, as to whether it might be advisable, from a certain point of view, to alter the old titles of the heads of the University Colleges and call them "Directors of Studies", or something of that sort! These are all questions which are based on the old forms of the social State. And the same with the State-architects: it really cannot matter, what their relations are with the legal profession; for, the moment one enters upon the Threefold Commonwealth, it is not possible to talk of Government-architects, since one is talking here on the basis of a political State, which is strictly democratic ground, and comprises in its sphere those things in which every full-grown man meets every other full-grown man as an equal; and it really cannot be a question of the line this democratic State would take as regards a person on whom some title is to be conferred, and things of that kind. In short, we must accustom ourselves, altogether, to go rather more into realities.

One meets with so many strange things in life, of which one is so often reminded. For instance, I was in company once with a certain socialistic celebrity—a very sound socialist—and we were discussing a very, very exalted Government official. I held this very, very exalted Government official to be totally incompetent, in fact a hopelessly impossible person; and I said, that I thought really the proper profession for this very exalted Government official would be, to give up his job and take to the business of a road-sweeper. You should just have seen the horror which overcame the socialistic gentleman at the suggestion that this person, with whom he was well-acquainted, could possible become a road-sweeper! Well, of course it was only just an idea; but still it seems to me that this idea was more in the direction of reality than—forgive me for saying!—the one put forward just now in this form, that ‘the gentleman should not look askance at the road-sweeper, nor the road-sweeper at the gentleman. Really, we shall not solve the social question simply by not looking askance at each other! The point of the matter really is, that in our present order of society the gentleman needs the road-sweeper, and so forth,—but, if he merely doesn't look askance at him, the social question will hardly be solved. And whether one plumes oneself on something, or whether one doesn't, are, after all, questions that have nothing whatever to do in reality with the actual business-facts and the grave realities of life at the present day. It really is not the important matter for us to-day, merely to demonstrate to people that the gentleman needs the road-sweeper, and the road-sweeper needs the gentleman. For, in the background, we have still, after all, just a little the notion, that the road-sweeper should remain a road-sweeper, and the gentleman should remain a gentleman, in the position where each happens to be placed to-day; only they should not look askance at each other,—which will certainly be an easier matter for the gentleman than for the road-sweeper! But in my opinion, all these things (which savour rather strongly of moralic acid!) will not help us to a blade of grass to-day; for the urgent matter is not, to-day, that we should merely not look askance at each other, but that we should turn our hands to making things different; and, first and foremost, that we should succeed in coming to an understanding, above and beyond classes. And this understanding will lead to a total reconstruction of the forms of life,—not merely to twisting eyes round from skewness to straightness, but to very different things besides. And if you go through the whole tendency that lies in the Threefold idea, you will see that, here, there can be a question of its leading in actual fact to something which mankind cannot but long for today, in so far as they understand anything of the forces that are striving to realisation in world-history. These are the things upon which we must turn our eyes to-day, and not upon something, which is mere moralising, and yet is linked with those forms of social life which happen to be in force at the present day.

No! to-day we must be clear, that we take our stand on the ground of a new spiritual life, and that we need something that proceeds from this new spiritual life itself. And though in detail the Threefold Movement may have managed things never so badly, yet, nevertheless again and again we must affirm, that this Threefold Movement takes its stand on the ground, that: Only through a change of thinking, only through a transforming of human thoughts and feelings in their innermost depths, can we ever look to reach a better state of things,—and through nothing else.

• 1. Die Kernpunkte der sozialen Frage published in English under the title of The Threefold Commonwealth.
• 2. This Introduction to the 2nd edition of the "Roots of the Social Question" ("Threefold Commonwealth") has appeared (translated) in No. 1 of the present Study Series.
• 3. "Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus," of which the first number appeared in July 11, 1919, and contains, amongst other things, an article by Dr. Carl Unger giving the history (up to that date) of the Threefold Movement.

My dear friends,

Today I would like to bring before you a few important considerations connected with the matters that we have now for a long time regarded as our task. When we reflect on the way in which spiritual science, as here intended, is able to consider and to give answers to the questions of life, we must above all take careful heed to the fact that this spiritual science, and indeed for that matter the whole present and the future time, makes new and different demands on man's powers of comprehension and of thought. He has to think in a different way from what he is accustomed to, in accordance with the habits of thoughts of the immediate past and of the present—especially the habits of thought arising from science and its popularization. You are well aware that all that spiritual science has to say concerning any sphere of life and hence too what it has to say on the social question, indeed especially what it has to say on the social question, is the expression of the results of research—results that have not been obtained on any merely rationalistic or abstract path, but that have been sought and found in the realm of spiritual reality. They can be understood, as we know, with the help of a sound and healthy human intelligence—they can, however, only be discovered when one rises above the ordinary consciousness, such as is comprised within rational thinking, abstract thinking, natural scientific research and so forth—rises above this ordinary consciousness to the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. What comes to light on the path of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—this it is, formulated in concepts and ideas that are capable of expression, that fills the content of the science which Anthroposophical research has to give.

We have to accustom ourselves—and this is what makes it so hard for many of our contemporaries to tread the necessary path from the usual thinking of today to the Spiritual Science of Anthroposophy—we have to accustom ourselves to quite a new and different conception of wherein the finding of truth consists. Today men ask so lightly: can this or that be proven? The question is justified of course. But, my dear friends, we have also to look at the question from the standpoint of reality. If we mean: can what the spiritual researcher brings forward be proved in accordance with the conceptions and ideas that we have already acquired, in accordance with the customary ideas which we have imbibed through our education, through our everyday life?—If we mean this, we are making a great mistake; for the results of spiritual research are drawn from reality.

Let me make clear to you by a quite trivial, simple comparison, how the ordinary thinking that runs on purely abstract lines may fall into error. One thought is supposed to follow from another. The error is that if people see: As a thought it does not follow—they concluded that it must be false, while all the time from the point of view of reality it still may be perfectly true. The consequences in reality are not always the same as the consequences in mere thought; the Logic of Reality is a different thing from the Logic of Thought.

In our time, the metaphysical legalistic way of thinking has taken such hold upon men that they are wont to think that everything must be comprehended with the Logic of Thought. But that is not the case. Listen to this, for example. Take a cube measuring—let us say—30 centimeters each way. Now if someone were to say to you: “This cube, measuring 30 centimeters each way, is raised up a meter and a half above the floor”—if you were not yourself in the room where the cube is, you would be able with your pure thought-logic to say one thing: you would be able to conclude from what was said to you: The cube must be standing on something. There must be a table there of the corresponding height, for the cube can certainly not hover in the air. This, then, you can conclude even when you are not present there, even when you have no experience of it.

But now let us suppose: A ball is lying on the cube; something is lying upon it. That you cannot conclude by thinking, that you must see. You must behold it. And yet the ball, too, corresponds to reality. The reality is thus filled with things and entities that have of course a logic in themselves, a logic, however, that does not coincide with the pure thought-logic; the logic of sight is a different thinking from the logic of mere thought.

This necessitates, however, my dear friends, that we should at length learn that we cannot only call proof the so-called logical sequences to which modern thinking has grown accustomed. Unless we learn this, we shall never arrive at a true understanding of things. In the domain in which I have been speaking to you now for some weeks—in the domain of social life, of the structure of human society, many new demands result simply from the fundamental premises that I have set before you concerning the three-fold division of society which will be necessary for the future. One such result is, for example, a quite definite system of taxation. But this system of taxation, once more, can only be found by calling to our help the logic of things seen. The mere logic of thought is insufficient. It is this that makes it necessary that men should listen to those who know something of these things, for when the thing has once been said, then the healthy human intelligence, my dear friends, will always suffice; it can always corroborate and “control” what the spiritual researcher says. The healthy human understanding, however, is something very different from the logic of thought, which is developed especially through the way of thinking that is prevalent today, soaked and steeped as it is in the natural-scientific point of view. From all this you will understand that spiritual science is not intended merely to make us receive a certain collection of ideas and then think that we can handle these ideas much as we would handle information we acquire through natural science or the like. That is absolutely impossible and is not to be imagined for a moment. If we think that we are making a great mistake. Spiritual Science makes a man think in an altogether new way. It makes him comprehend the world in an altogether different way than he has done before, it makes him learn not merely to perceive other things than before, but to perceive in a new way. When you enter into spiritual science you must always bear this in mind, you must be able to ask yourself again and again: Am I learning to look at the world in a new way through my receiving of Spiritual Science—not clairvoyance but Spiritual Science—am I learning to look at the world in another way from what I have done hitherto? For indeed, my dear friends, one who regards Spiritual Science as a collection of facts, a compendium of knowledge, may well know a great deal, but if he still only thinks in the same way as he thought before, then he has not received Spiritual Science. He has only taken up Spiritual Science if the manner, the form, the structure of his thinking has changed, if in a certain respect he has become another man than he was before. And this can only come about through the might and the power of the ideas which we receive through Spiritual Science.

Now if we are to think about the social question, it is absolutely essential that this change, which can only come about through Spiritual Science, should enter our thinking, for only in this light can that be understood to which I directed your attention yesterday. Yesterday I spoke to you of the economists of the schools, the present-day exponents of the theories of economists. I pointed out to you how utterly helpless they are in the face of realities. Why are they so helpless? Because they are bent on understanding with the Natural-Scientific type of thinking something that cannot thus be understood. We shall have to make up our minds to conceive the social life, not with the kind of thinking that is brought up on Natural Science but in an altogether different way. Only then shall we be able to find fruitful social ideas—fruitful in life, capable of realization.

I have already once drawn your attention to a thing that may well have astonished one or another among you; yet it needs to be deeply thought over. I said: The logical conclusion which one will tend to draw from such and such ideas, maybe from a whole “world-conception” are by no means always identical with that which follows from such a world-conception in real life. I mean the following: A man may hold a certain number of ideas or even an entire world-conception. You may envisage this world-conception clearly according to the ideas it contains and you may then perhaps draw further conclusions from it—conclusions which you will quite rightly presume to be logical, you may imagine that such conclusions, which you can logically draw from a world-conception, must necessarily follow from it. But that is by no means the case. Life itself may draw altogether different conclusions. And you may be highly astonished to see how life draws its different conclusions. What do I mean by this? Let us assume a world-conception which appears to you highly idealistic, and—we may assume—rightly so. It contains wonderfully idealistic ideas. You yourself will probably admit only the logical conclusions of your world-conception but if you sink this into another mind, if you take into account the reality of life even where it leads you across the chasms that separate one human being from another—the following may happen: and only Spiritual Science can explain the necessity of such a sequence. You instruct your son or daughter or your pupil in your idealistic world-conception, and they afterwards become thorough scamps and rascals. It may well happen in the reality of life that rascality will follow as the consequence from your idealistic philosophy!

That of course is an extreme case, though one that might well happen in real life. I only wish to bring it home to you that other conclusions are drawn in real life than in mere thought. Hence it is that the men of today are so far removed from reality, because they do not see through such things as these; they are not really willing to bring to consciousness what was formerly done instinctively. The instincts of past ages felt clearly enough that this or that would arise from one thing or another in real life. They were by no means inclined only to presume the consequences that follow by the logical thought. The instincts themselves worked with a logic of their own. But today men have come into a kind of uncertainty, and this uncertainty will naturally grow ever greater in the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Soul unless we make the counterbalance, which is: consciously to receive into ourselves the Logic of Reality. And we do receive it the moment we earnestly consider in its own essence and process the Spiritual that lives and moves behind the realities of sense.

I will tell you a practical case to illustrate what I have just explained in a more theoretic way. It will serve at the same time to illustrate another thing, namely how far we can go wrong, if we merely look at the external symptoms. In my lecture this week, I spoke of the symptomatic method in the study of history. Altogether, the symptomatic method is a thing that we must make our own, if we would pass from the outer phenomena to the underlying Reality.

A Russian author and philosopher of the name of Berdiayeff recently wrote an interesting article on the philosophical evolution in the Russian people in the second half of the nineteenth century and until the present day. There are two remarkable things in this essay of Berdiayeff's. One is that the author takes his start from a peculiar prejudice, proving that he has no insight into those truths, with which you must by now be thoroughly familiar—I mean the truth that in the Russian East, preparing for the Sixth Post-Atlantean Age (the age of the evolution of the Spiritual Life), altogether new elements are on the point of emerging, though today they are only there in embryo. Berdiayeff being ignorant of this fact, his judgment on one point is quite incorrect. He says to himself (and as a Russian philosopher he must surely know the facts), he says: It is strange that in Russia as against the Western European civilizations we have no real sense (especially in philosophy) for what in the West they call the Truth. Russians have been much interested in the philosophy of the West, yet they have no real feeling for it inasmuch as it strives towards “The Truth.” They only take up the truths of philosophy inasmuch as they are serviceable for life, inasmuch as they are directly useful to some conception of life. The Socialist, e.g., is interested in philosophy because he imagines that this or that philosophy will provide him with a justification for his socialism. Similarly the orthodox Believer will interest himself in some philosophy, not, like a Western man because it is the Truth, but because it gives him a justification or a basis for his Orthodox Belief. And so on. Berdiayeff regards this as a great failing in the Folk-Soul of modern Russia. He says: In the West they are far in advance of us. They do not imagine that Truth must follow life; they really believe that Truth is Truth; the Truth is there, and life must take its direction from it. And Berdiayeff actually adds the extraordinary statement (albeit not extraordinary for the men of the present day, who will take it quite as a matter of course, but extraordinary for the Spiritual Scientists) he adds the statement: The Russian socialist has no right to use the expression “bourgeois science,” for bourgeois science contains the truth; it has at last established the concept of Truth, and that is a thing that cannot be refitted. It is therefore a failing on the part of the Russian Folk-Soul to believe that this Truth too can be transcended!

Berdiayeff shares this curious opinion, not only with the whole world of professors, but with all their faithful followers, to wit, the whole bourgeois of Western and Middle Europe, the aristocracy especially so, and the rest. Berdiayeff simply does not know what is now germinating in the Russian Folk Soul, which comes to expression for this very reason in a frequently tumultuous and distorted form. He does not know that in this conception of Truth from the standpoint of life, crooked as it may be today, there lies a real seed for the conception of the future. In the future it will right itself, of that we may be sure. When once what is preparing today as a germinating seed will have unfolded, I mean the directing of all human evolution towards the spiritual life, then indeed will that which men call the “Truth” today have an altogether different form. Today I have drawn your attention to some peculiar facts in this respect. This Truth, my dear friends, will among other things bring to man's consciousness what the men of today cannot realize, that the logic of facts, the logic of reality, the logic of things seen is a very different thing from the mere logic of concepts. And this transformed conception of the Truth will have some other interesting qualities. That is the one thing which you see emerging in Berdiayeff's essay. It is remarkable enough, for it shows how little such a learned author lives in the real trend and meaning of the evolution of our time, which he might well perceive in his own nation above all, but cannot recognize, laboring as he does under this prejudice.

The other thing must be considered in quite a different direction. Berdiayeff, as the whole spirit of his essay shows, witnesses the rise of Bolshevism with great discomfort. Well, in that respect, the one man or the other, according as he is a Bolshevist or the reverse, will say that Berdiayeff is right or wrong. I do not propose to dilate just now upon this question. I will describe the facts, I will not criticize. But this is the important thing: In the sixties, so says Berdiayeff, there was already the tendency to regard Truth and Philosophy as dependent on life, and at that time materialism found entry into Russia. Men believed in Materialism, because they found it useful and profitable for life. Then, in the seventies, Positivism, such as is held by Auguste Comte for example, came into vogue. And after that, other points of view, for example that of Nietzsche, found entry into Russia among the people known as the Intelligentsia. And now Berdiayeff asks the question: What kind of philosophy do we find among the Intelligentsia of the Bolsheviks? For, indeed, a certain philosophy is prevalent among them. But how this particular philosophy can go with Bolshevism, that Berdiayeff is quite at a loss to explain. He simply cannot understand how Bolshevism can regard as its own philosophy—curiously enough—the doctrine of Avenarius and Mach.

And, truth to tell, my dear friends, if you had told Avenarius and Mach that their philosophy was to be accepted by such people as the Bolsheviks, they themselves would have been still more astonished and angry than Berdiayeff. They would have been most indignant (both of them, as you know, are now dead) if they had lived to see themselves as the official philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine Avenarius, the worthy bourgeois, who of course had always assumed that he could only be understood by people who—well, who wore at any rate decent clothes, people who would never do violence to anyone in the Bolshevist manner, in short, good “respectable” people, in the sense in which one used the expression in the sixties, seventies and eighties. And it is true, if we consider only the content of the philosophy of Avenarius, we are still more at a loss to understand how it happened. For what does Avenarius think? Avenarius says: Men labor under a prejudice. They think: within, in my head, or in my soul or wherever it is, are the ideas, the perceptions, they are there subjectively; outside are the objects. But, says Avenarius, this is not correct. If I were all alone in the world, I should never arrive at the distinction between subject and object. I am led to make the distinction only through the fact that other people are there too. I alone beheld a table, I should never come to the idea that the table is out there in space and a picture of it here in my brain. I would simply have the table, and would not distinguish between subject and object. I only distinguish between them because, when I look at the table with another man, I say to myself: He sees the table, and I too perceive it. The perception is in my head too. I reflect that what he senses I am also sensing. Such are partly theoretical considerations (I will not go into them more fully, you would say: All these things do not interest us) within which Avenarius' thought lives and moves. In 1876 he wrote his book Conception of the World According to the Principle of Least Action. For on such premises as I have here explained to you, he shows how the concepts we have as human beings have no real value, but that we only create them for the sake of mental economy. According to Avenarius, the concept “Lion,” for example, or the concept that finds expression in a “Natural Law” is nothing real, nor does it refer to anything real. It is only uneconomical if in the course of my life I have seen five or six or even thirty lions and am now to conceive them each and severally. I therefore proceed in a more economical way, and make myself a single concept “Lion,” embracing all the thirty. Thus all our forming of concepts is a mere matter of subjective mental economy.

Mach holds a similar view. It was Mach of whom I told you how he once got into an omnibus where there was a mirror. As he got in, he saw a man coming in from the other side. Now the appearance of this man was highly antipathetic to him, and he said to himself: “What a weedy-looking schoolmaster.”—only then did he perceive that there was a mirror hanging there and that he had simply seen himself. Mach tells the story to indicate how little one knows oneself, even in one's external human form how little self-knowledge man has. He even tells of another occasion when he passed a shop window which acted as a mirror and thus again met himself and was quite annoyed to come across such an ugly-looking pedant.

Mach proceeded in a rather more popular fashion, but his idea is the same as that of Avenarius. He says: there are not subjective ideas on the one hand, and objective things on the other. All that exists in reality is the content of our sensations. I, to myself, am only a content of sensation, the table outside me is a content of sensation, my brain is a content of sensation. Everything is a content of sensation, and the concepts men make for themselves only exist for the purpose of economy. It was about the year 1881; I was present at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna where Mach gave his lecture on the Economy of Thought, entitled: “Thought as a Principle of the Least Action.” I must say, it made quite a terrible impression upon me, who was then a mere boy, at the very beginning of the twenties. It made a terrible impression on me when I saw that there were men so radical in their ideas, without an inkling of the fact that on the paths of thought there enters into the human soul the first beginning of a manifestation of the super-sensible, the spiritual. Here was a man who denied the reality of concepts to such an extent as to see in them the mere results of a mental activity bent upon economy.

But in Mach and Avenarius—you will not misunderstand my words—all this takes place entirely within the limit of thoroughly “respectable” thinking. We should naturally assume that these two men and all their followers are worthy folk of sound middle-class opinion, utterly removed from any even moderately radical, let alone revolutionary ideas, in practice. And now all of a sudden they have become the official Philosophers of the Bolsheviks! No one could have dreamt of such a thing. Perhaps you may read Avenarius' booklet on the “Principle of Least Action.” It may interest you, it is quite well written. But if you were to tackle his “Philosophy of Experience,” I fancy you would not get very far, you would find it appallingly dull. Written as it is in an absolutely professorial style, there is not the slightest possibility of your drawing even the least vestige of Bolshevism as a conclusion from it. You would not even derive from it a practical world-conception of the most gentle radicalism.

I am well aware, my dear friends, of the objection which those who take symptoms for realities might now bring forward against me. An easy-going, hard-and-fast Positivist, for instance, would say: The explanation is as simple as can be! The Bolshevists took their Intellectuals from Zurich. Avenarius was a professor in Zurich, and those who are now working as intellectual leaders among the Bolsheviks were his pupils. Moreover there was a University lecturer there, a pupil of Mach's Adler, the man who afterwards shot the Austrian statesman Count Stügh. Many followers of Lenin, perhaps even Lenin himself, were well-acquainted with Adler. They absorbed these ideas and carried them to Russia. It is therefore a pure coincidence.

Needless to say I am well aware that a cock-sure hard-and-fast Positivist can explain the whole thing in this way. But did I not tell you the other day how the whole poetic character of Robert Hamerling can be shown to have arisen from the unreliability of the worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, who forgot to forward Hamerling's application for a post in Budapest, as a result of which someone else got the post instead. If only Kaltenbrunner had not been so slack, Hamerling would certainly have gone as a schoolmaster to Budapest in the 1860's instead of to Trieste. Now if you consider all that Hamerling became through spending ten years of his life on the shores of the Adriatic at Trieste, you will see that his whole poetic life was a result. This was the external fact. The worthy Rector Kaltenbrunner, headmaster of the Grammar School at Graz, forgot to forward his application and was therefore the occasion of Hamerling's going to Trieste. You see, these things must not be taken as realities but as symptomatic of inner things which come to expression through them.

Thus what Berdiayeff conceives in this way—that the Bolsheviks chose as their idols the worthy middle-class philosophers Avenarius and Mach—does indeed take us back to what I said at the beginning of the present lecture: The reality of life, the reality of things seen is very different from the merely logical reality. Of course you cannot deduce from Avenarius and Mach that they could have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. But, my dear friends, even what you can deduce by logic is only of importance as an external symptom. In effect, we only get at Reality by a research which goes straight for it. And in the Reality the Spiritual Beings work.

I might tell you many things which would indeed enable you to perceive it as a necessity, in reality of life, that such philosophies as that of Avenarius and Mach lead to the conclusion of the most revolutionary socialism of our time. For behind the scenes of existence it is the very same spirits who instill into men's consciousness philosophies after the style of Avenarius or Mach, and who instill once more into men's consciousness that which leads on to Bolshevism for example. Only in Logic you cannot derive the one thing from the other. But the Reality of Life performs this derivation. I beg you inscribe this deep into your hearts, for here too you will have something of what I am constantly emphasizing. It is needful to us to find the transition from the mere tangle of logical ideas, within which the people of today in their illusions imagine the realities of life to be imbued, to the true reality. If we look at the symptoms, and know how to value them, the thing does indeed become far more earnest. Here I will draw your attention to something to which another who is not a Spiritual Scientist will not pay so much attention; for he will take it more as a phrase, as something more or less indifferent. Mach, you see, who is a Positivist, and a radical one at that, comes to the idea that all things are really sensations. This doctrine, which young Adler also expounded in his lectures at Zurich, whereby he will undoubtedly have gained many adherents for himself, and for Mach and for Avenarius—this doctrine declares that everything is sensation, and that we are quite unjustified in distinguishing the physical from the psychical. The table outside us is physical and psychical in precisely the same sense as my ideas are physical and psychical: and we only have concepts for the sake of mental economy.

Now the peculiar thing in Mach was that instinctively, every now and then, he withdrew from his own world-conception—from his radical, positivist world-conception. He withdrew a little, saying to himself: These then are the results of truly modern thought. It is meaningless to say that anything exists beyond my sensation or that I should distinguish the physical and the psychical. And yet I am impelled again and again whenever I have the table before me, to speak not merely of the sensation, but to believe that there is something out there, quite physically. And again when I have an idea, a sensation or a feeling, I have not merely the perception of the phenomenon which takes place, but though by my scientific insight I realize that it is quite unjustified—still I believe that here within me is the soul, and out there is the object. I feel myself impelled again and again to make this distinction how does it come about? Mach said to himself: however does it come about that I am suddenly impelled to assume; in here is something of the soul, and out there is something external to the soul. I know that it is no true distinction, yet am I continually compelled to think something different from what my scientific insight tells me.

This is what Mach says to himself, every now and then when he withdraws a little from these things and considers them again. You will find it in his books. And he then makes a peculiar remark; he says: sometimes one has a feeling that makes one ask:—Can it be that we human beings are just being led round and round in a circle by some evil spirit? And he answers: Sometimes I really think so.

I know, my dear friends, how many people will read just such a passage, taking it as an empty phrase. Yet it is truly symptomatic. For here, every now and then, there peers over the shoulder of the human soul something that is real fact. It is indeed the Ahrimanic spirit who leads men round and round in a circle, making them think in the way of Avenarius and Mach. And at such moments Mach suddenly becomes aware of it. And it is the same Ahrimanic spirit who is working now, in the Bolshevist way of thought. Hence it is no wonder, my dear friends, that the logic of realities has produced this result. You see, however, that if we would understand the things of life, we must look into them more deeply. Truly this is of no small importance, especially for the domain of social life, today and in the near future. For the conclusions that must be drawn are not such as were drawn by Schmoller or Brentano, Wagner, Spencer, John Stuart Mill or whoever it may be. No, in the domain of social life, real conclusions must be drawn, i.e., conclusions according to the logic of realities. This is the bad thing, that in the social agitations and movements of today, and in all that they have produced, merely logical deductions—i.e., illusions—are living. Illusions have become external reality. I will give you two examples. The one is already well-known to you, you will only need to see it in the light in which I shall now place it.

The Marxian Socialists (and as I have often told you, this includes almost the whole of the proletariat today), the Marxian Socialists declare, under the influence of Marx: Economic life, economic oppositions, and the class oppositions that arise from them—these things are the true reality. Everything else is an ideological superstructure. What man thinks, what he creates in poetry and art, what he thinks about the State or about life in general, all this is a mere result of his economic mode of life. And for this reason the proletariat of today declares:—We need no National Assemblies to bring about a new social order. For in the National Assemblies there will be the bourgeois folk once more and they will have their say out of their economically-determined bourgeois minds. We have no use for that. We can only do with those who will voice the thoughts of Proletarian minds. It is they who must re-mold the world today. To this end we do not first need to summon National Assemblies. Let the few Proletarians who happen to be on top exercise a dictatorship. They have proletarian ideas, they will think the right thoughts. Not only Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, Karl Liebknecht in Berlin repudiates the National Assembly. He says: After all, it will be no more than a reassembly of the talk-shop—meaning the Reichstag, the Houses of Parliament.

What is the underlying reason, my dear friends? It is the same reason on account of which, in the main, I was driven out of the Socialist Working Men's College in Berlin sixteen years ago, as I told you recently when giving you the history of my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. In that College I had to lecture among other things on scientific matters; I conducted practical lessons in public speaking. But I also had to teach History. And I taught it in the way in which I assumed, objectively, that it should be taught. This was certainly satisfying to those who were my pupils, and if it could have been continued—if it had not been brought to an artificial end—I know it would have borne good fruit. But the Social-Democratic leaders discovered that I was not teaching Marxism or the Marxian conception of history. Nay more, they discovered that I even did such curious wild things as I will now relate (which incidentally were very well-received by the workers who were my pupils). I said, for instance, on one occasion: The ordinary historian cannot make anything of the story of the seven Roman kings, they even regard it as a myth. For the succession of the seven kings, as described by Livy, shows a kind of rise and decline. Up to Marcius, the fourth, it rises to a kind of climax. Then it declines to decadence in the seventh, Tarquinius Superbus. And I explained to my pupils that we were here going back to the most ancient period in Roman evolution, the period before the Republic, and that the change to the Republic had in fact consisted in this: that the ancient atavistic spiritual regularities had passed into a kind of popular chaos; whereas, in the more ancient period, as we can see quite tangible in the history of the Egyptian Pharaohs, the social institutions contained a certain wisdom, discoverable by Spiritual Science. It is not for nothing that we are told how Numa Pompilius received influences from the Nymph Egeria, to order the social life. Then I explained how men did indeed receive Inspirations for the social institutions which they were to make; and how in truth it was not merely the one monarch following the other as in later times, but these things were determined according to the laws received from the Spiritual World. Hence the regularity in the succession of the Egyptian Pharaohs and even of the Roman kings, Romulus, Numa Pompilius, and so on down to Tarquinius Superbus.

Now you may take the seven principles of man which I summed up in my Theosophy and regard them one after another from a certain point of view. You will find these seven principles in the succession of the Roman kings. Here, at this present moment, I am only hinting at the fact, and among you I need do no more. Nevertheless it is a thing which, rightly expressed, can well be described as an objective truth, throwing real light on the peculiar circumstances which the ordinary materialistic historian cannot understand. Today indeed, the “genuinely scientific” historians simply regard the seven kings as non-existent, and describe them as a myth.

So you see, I really went so far as this. And in other matters, too, I spoke to them in this way. If it is done rightly, it gives the impression of answering to the realities. Still it is not the “Materialistic Conception of History.” For that would mean that we should have to investigate what were the economic conditions in ancient Roman times, what was the relation of the tillage of the soil to the breeding of cattle and to trade and the life; and how the cities were founded, and what was the economic life of the Etruscans, and how the Etruscans traded with the young Roman people; and how under the influence of these economic elements, conditions took shape under Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, and so on, in succession.

You see, even this would not have been effected quite so simply. But here again the true Reality came to my assistance. Of course, such an audience did not consist merely of young people. There were many among them who had already absorbed the Proletarian thought to a considerable extent and who were well-equipped, well-armed with all these prejudices. Such people are by no means easy to convince, even when one is speaking of things remote from their domain of knowledge. On one occasion I was speaking about Art. I had described what Art is, and its influence, and suddenly from the back of the hall a lady cried out, interrupting: “Well, and Verism, isn't that Art?”

So you see, these people were not prone to take things simply on authority. It was a question of finding a way to them; not of finding the way to them by all manner of sly devices, but out of a sense of Reality and Truthfulness. And so it came about that one had to say—not only could, but had to say—“You folk are primed with ideas of the ‘Materialist Conception of History,’ which believes that all things depend on the economic conditions, and that the spiritual life is but an ideology, spreading itself out on the basis of the economic conditions, and indeed, Marx expounded these things with clear and sharp insight. But why did all this come about? Why did he describe and believe all this? Because Marx only saw the immediate and present age in which he lived. He did not go back to former ages. Marx only based himself on the historic evolution of man since the sixteenth century, and here in deed and truth there came into the evolution of mankind an epoch during which over a large part of the world the spiritual life became an expression of the economic conditions, though not exactly as Marx describes it. True, Goetheanism is not to be derived from the economic life; but Goethe was regarded even by these people as a man remote from the economic life.

Thus we might say that this was the mistake, that which held true only for a certain space of time, notably for the most recent time of all, was generalized. Indeed, only the last four centuries could be truly understood by describing them in the sense of the Materialist Conception of History.

Now this is the important thing: We must not proceed by the mere logic of concepts; for by the logic of concepts very little can be said against the carefully and strictly guarded propositions of Karl Marx. We must proceed by the logic of life, the logic of realities, the logic of things seen. If we do so, the following will be revealed. Beneath this evolution which has taken place since the 16th century in a way that can well be interpreted through the materialist conception of history—beneath this Evolution there is a deeply significant Involution. That is to say, there is something that takes its course invisibly, supersensibly, beneath what is visible to the outer senses. This is seeking to come forth to the surface, to work its way forth out of the souls of men; and it is the very opposite of Materialism. Materialism only becomes so great and works so in order that man may rear himself up against it, in order that he may find the possibility to seek the Spiritual out of the depths of his own Being during this age of the Spiritual Soul, and thus attain Self-consciousness in the Spirit. Thus the task is not, as Karl Marx believes, simply to look at the outer reality and read from it the proposition that economic life is the real basis of ideology; but the task is rather this: We must say to ourselves, the outer reality since the 16th century does not reveal the true reality. The true reality must be sought for in the spirit; we must find, above all, that social order which will counter-balance and overcome what appears outwardly or is outwardly observable since the 16th century. The age itself compels us, not merely to observe the outer processes but to discover something that can work into them as a corrective. What Marxism has turned upside down must be set right again.

It is extraordinarily important for us to know this. In this instance the logic of realities actually reverses the mere sharp-witted dialectics of Karl Marx. Alas, much water will have yet to flow down the Rhine before a sufficient number of people will realize this necessity, to find the logic of reality, the logic of things seen. Yet it is necessary—necessary above all on account of the burning social questions.

That is the one example. For the other, we may take our start from some of the things I told you yesterday. I said: It is characteristic how men have observed, ever since Ricardo, Adam Smith and the rest, that the economic order entails this consequence: That in the social life of man together, human labor-power is used like a commodity, brought on to the market like a commodity, treated like a commodity after the laws of supply and demand. As I explained yesterday, this is the very thing that excites and acts as motive impulses in the proletarian world-conception. Now one who merely thinks in the logic of concepts, observing that this is so, will say to himself: we must therefore find an economic science, a social science, a conception of social life, which reckons with this fact. We must find the best possible answer to the question: “Seeing that labor power is a commodity, how can we protect this commodity, labor power, from exploitation?” But the question is wrongly put, wrongly put not only out of theory, but out of life itself. The putting of questions wrongly is having a destructive, devastating effect in real life today. And it will continue to do so if we do not find the way to reverse it. For here once more the thing is standing on its head and must be set upright again, we must not ask: How shall we make the social structure so that man cannot be exploited, in spite of the fact that his labor power is brought on to the market like any other commodity, according to supply and demand.

For there is an inner impulse in human evolution which works in the logic of realities, although people may not express it in these words. It corresponds to reality and we can state it thus: Even the Grecian Age, the Grecian civilization which has come to mean so much for us, is only thinkable through the fact that a large proportion of the population of Greece were slaves. Slavery, therefore, was the premise of that ancient civilization which signifies so very much to us. So much that the most excellent philosopher, Plato, considered slavery altogether as a justified and necessary thing in human civilization. But the evolution of mankind goes forward. Slavery existed in antiquity and as you know, mankind began to rebel against it, quite instinctively to rebel against men being bought and sold. Today we may say it is an axiom: The whole human being can no longer be bought and sold; and where slavery still exists, we regard it as a relic of barbarism. For Plato, it was not barbarism; it went without saying that there were slaves, just as it did for every Greek who had the Platonic mind, nay every Greek who thought in terms of the state. The slave himself thought just the same, it went without saying that men could be sold, could be put on the market according to the laws of supply and demand, though of course not like mere cattle. Then, in a masked and veiled form, the thing passed over into the milder form of slavery which we call serfdom. Serfdom lasted very long, but here again mankind revolted.

And to our own time this relic has remained. The whole human being can no longer be sold, but only part of him, namely his labor-power. And today man is revolting against this too. It is only a continuation of the repudiation of slavery, if in our time it is demanded that the buying and selling of labor-power be repudiated. Hence it lies in the natural course of human evolution for this opposition to arise against labor-power being treated as a commodity, functioning as a commodity in the social structure. The question, therefore, cannot be put in this way: How shall man be protected from exploitation?—assuming as an axiomatic premise that labor-power is a commodity. This way of thinking has become habitual since Ricardo, Adam Smith and others, and is in reality included in Karl Marx and in the proletarian conception. Today it is taken as an axiom that labor-power is a commodity. All they want to do is, in spite of its being a commodity, to protect it from exploitation, or rather to protect the worker from the exploitation of his labor-power. Their whole thought moves along these lines. More or less instinctively or—as in Marx himself—not instinctively, they take it as an axiom. Notably the ordinary run of Political Economists who occupy the professional chairs assume it is an axiom from the very outset, that labor-power is to be treated, economically speaking, on the same basis as a commodity.

In these matters countless prejudices are dominating our life today: and prejudices are disastrous above all in this sphere of life. I am well aware how many there may be, even among you, who will regard it as a strange expectation, that you should spend your time in going into all these things. But we cannot possibly study the fullness of life if we are unable to think about these things. For if we cannot do so, we become the victims of all manner of absurd suggestions. How many an illustration the last four years have provided; what have they not brought forth? One could witness the most extraordinary things: I will only give you one example. Returning again and again to Germany—and in other places it was no different—every time, one found there was some new watchword, some new piece of instruction for the true patriot. Thus, the last time we went back to Germany, once more there was a new patriotic slogan: Do not pay in cash! Deal in checks as much as possible! i.e., do not let money circulate, but use checks. People were told that this was especially patriotic, for, as they thought, this was necessary in order to help win the war. No one saw through this most obvious piece of nonsense. But it was not merely said, it was propagated with a vengeance, and the most unbelievable people acted up to it—people of whom you might have supposed that they would understand the rudiments of economics—directors of factories and industrial undertakings. They too declared: pay in check and not in ready money, that is patriotic!

That fact is, it would be patriotic, but only under one assumption, namely this: you would have to calculate on each occasion how much time you saved in dealing in checks instead of ready money. True, most people cannot perform such a reckoning, but there are those who can. Then you would have to add up all the time that was saved, and come up and say: I have been paying my accounts in checks and have saved so much time, I want to spend it usefully; please give me a job! Only if you did so would it be a real saving. But of course they did not do so, nor did it ever occur to them that the thing would only have a patriotic importance on economic grounds on this assumption. Such nonsense was talked during the last four and a half years to an appalling extent. The most unbelievably dilettante propositions were realized. Impossibilities became realities, because of the utter ignorance of people—even of those who gave out such instructions—as to the real connections in this domain of life.

Now with respect to the questions I have just raised, the point is this: It must be the very aim of our investigations to find out—How shall we shape the social structure, the social life of man together, so as to loosen and free the objective commodity, the goods, the product, from the labor-power? This must be the point, my dear friends, in all our economic endeavors. The product should be brought onto the market and circulated in such a way that the labor-power is loosed and freed from it. This is the problem in economics that we must solve. If we start with the axiom that the labor-power is crystallized into the commodity and inseparable from it, we begin by eclipsing the essential problem and then we put things upside-down. We fail to notice the most important question—the question on which, in the realm of political economy, the fortunes and misfortunes of the civilized world will depend. How shall the objective commodity, the goods, the product, be loosed and severed from the labor-power, so that the latter may no longer be a commodity? For this can be done if we believe in that three-folding of the social order which I have explained to you, if we make our institutions accordingly. This is the way to separate from the labor-power of man the objective commodities, the goods, which are, after all, loosed and separated from the human being.

It must be admitted, my dear friends, that we find little understanding as yet for these things, derived as they are from the realities. In 1905 I published my essay on “Theosophy and the Social Question,” in the periodical Lucifer-Gnosis. I then drew attention to the first and foremost principle which must be maintained in order to sever the product from the labor. Here alone, I said, could we find salvation in the social question, and I emphasized that this question depends on our thinking rightly about production and consumption. Today men are thinking altogether on the lines of Production. We must change the direction of our thought. The whole question must be diverted from Production to Consumption. In detail, one had occasion to give many a piece of advice: but through the inadequate conditions and other insufficiencies, such advice could not really take effect, as one experienced—unhappily—in many cases. And it is so indeed; the men of today, through their faith in certain logical conclusions, which they mistake for real conclusions, have no sense for the need of looking at the Realities. But in the social domain above all it is only the Reality which can teach us the right way to put our questions. Of course people will say to you: Do you not see that it is necessary for labor to be done if commodities are to be produced? That is so indeed. Logically, commodities are the result of labor. But Reality is a very different thing from Logic.

I have explained this to our friends again and again from another aspect. Look at the thought of the Darwinian Materialists. I remember vividly the first occasion—it was in the Munich group—when I tried to make this clear to our friends. Imagine a real, thorough-going follower of Haeckel. He thinks that man has arisen from an apelike beast. Well, let him as a scientist form the concept of an ape-like animal and then let him form the concept of Man. If as yet no man existed and he only had the concept of the ape-like animal, he would certainly never be able to “catch,” out of this concept of the animal, the concept Man. He only believes what [in?] the ape-like creature, because the one proceeded out of the other in reality. Thus in real life men do after all distinguish between the logic of pure concepts and ideas and the logic of things seen. But this distinction must be applied through and through; otherwise we shall never gain an answer to the social and political questions, such as is necessary for the present and the immediate future. If we will not turn to that realistic thinking which I have explained to you once more today, we shall never come to the Goetheanic principle in public life. And that the Goetheanic principle shall enter into the world, this we desired to signalize by erecting, upon this hill, a “Goetheanum.”

In humorous vein, I would advise you to read the huge advertisement that appeared on the last page of today Basler Nachrichten, calling on everyone to do all in his power for the greatest day in world-history which is now about to dawn, by founding a “Wilsoneanum.” True, as yet, it is only an advertisement, and I only mention it in a jocular spirit. Nevertheless, in the souls of men, to say the least of it, the “Wilsoneanum” is being founded pretty intensely at the present moment.

As I said a short while ago, it has indeed a certain meaning that there is now a Goetheanum standing here. I called it a piece of “negative cowardice.” The opposite of cowardice was to come to expression in this action. And it is indeed the case, my dear friends, events are coming in the future—though this advertisement is only an amusing prelude—events are coming which will seem to justify this prophetic action which is being made out of the spirit of a certain world-conception. Though we need not take the half-page advertisement for a “Wilsoneanum” seriously, it is well for us to know that Wilsoniana will indeed be founded. Therefore a Goetheanum was to stand here as a kind of protest in advance.