The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Dear Friends,

The gravity of the present moment for the Anthroposophical Society has awakened a sense of responsibility in the hearts and minds of members around the world. The tragic loss of the Goetheanum, and the message which Dr. Steiner has given to the Society during the recent meetings at Dornach and Stuttgart and through his lectures at Dornach during the last few months, have made it clear to us that the Society must rise to a new awareness of its task as the bearer of a spiritual impulse necessary for our time.

In the desire to take a real step forward in unity and in the consciousness of our task, a General Assembly of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain took place at the London headquarters on Wednesday, May 23. From the numerous and varied votes in the discussion, a true unity of desire and intention emerged, and before breaking up, the assembly authorized the undersigned to take steps to give expression to this. First of all, we send warm greetings, on behalf of the entire Society in this country, to the groups and members in all other countries and would now like to share with them the outcome of our meeting.

My dear friends!

It will be different for me too, and I will have to speak to you today from a different background than I have been able to do in these meetings in past years. For we are still under the impression of the passing of our beloved anthroposophical building, the Goetheanum. I do not need to emphasize again and again what that actually means. The words of the Chairman have brought this home to you today; and I am convinced that these words were spoken from the soul of each of you. It is indeed the case that an accident beyond a certain level can only be revealed in silent language, and that words are really not enough to express what has been lost for us with the Goetheanum.

In the lectures that I had to give at the General Assembly of the Swiss Anthroposophical Society and the General Assembly of the Goetheanum Association in the meantime between the two assemblies and following them, I had to talk about everything that I feel compelled to say at this time.

Much of what I have to say at this time is, of course, said precisely in view of the great stroke of fate that has affected us. It should also not be overlooked how this stroke of fate has shown that there is a great deal of shared feeling among the members of the Anthroposophical Society. But, my dear friends, what I would say came to expression in a way that was self-evident to us at the time, when we were under the immediate and momentary impression of the Goetheanum fire, was that we did not want to give up the continuity of the work of our spiritual life. That must always inspire us. And it is particularly important that we know how to act in the sense of what I said yesterday: to work from the center of our spiritual life and not to be deterred by the most painful or uplifting impressions from the outside world in this actual inner work and attitude that comes from the center. The real perspective of the anthroposophical movement depends on this. It does not depend on how many and what kind of blows of fate come from outside. These must be accepted with the attitude that arises from the anthroposophical view of life. But the question of whether the inner energy needed to work out the center of spiritual life slackens despite all strokes of fate, or despite all favorable strokes of fate, depends on what is to be achieved and can be achieved with the anthroposophical movement.

But we must always remind ourselves of what is necessary for such work, especially in these very difficult times.

I would just like to note that in a spiritual movement of the kind that anthroposophy is, if it is to find the right path, success and failure must be taken as meaningless, and that only that which arises from the inner strength and impulses of the cause itself means anything. But a great deal depends on the consciousness of those united in the Anthroposophical Society.

My dear friends, you only have to consider the following: attitudes and impulses of consciousness do not materialize overnight. We cannot say today what the successes of the impulses of consciousness and attitudes of the day before yesterday are. If you did that, you would end up in a completely different direction than anthroposophy can take. For example, if you were to take the matter in this external way, you would be able to say: We rely on our good luck. But then, if this luck is not there in the way you imagine it, you would also say: We lose our courage, our energy. I might have imagined that at the time when we were struck by the terrible misfortune, there might have been souls, even among anthroposophists, who would have said: Yes, why did the good spiritual powers not protect us in this case? Can one believe in the impact of a movement that is so abandoned by the good spirits?

Such a thought, my dear friends, is linked to appearances, not to that which comes unerringly from the inner center of the matter, through appearances alone. If we want to take it seriously that our attitudes, thoughts and, in particular, our impulses of consciousness are realities, then we must believe in them ourselves, in these impulses of consciousness, in these thoughts, in these feelings, not in the help that they can get from outside, but in their own power. Then one must be sure that what one draws from such impulses will, despite all outward appearances of failure, reach its true goal, the goal prescribed for it in the spiritual world; even if it were to be completely destroyed for the time being by external circumstances in the external world.

He who can ever entertain the belief that a spiritual idea, which is rightly willed, can be completely destroyed by anything in the external world, even if the destruction takes place in the external Maja, does not really believe in the power of spiritual impulses, in the power of spiritual energy. It must still be possible to say at the moment when everything external perishes: Success is certain for that which is willed from within. But then one may only speak of success in the sense of that which lies within the inner impulses, the thoughts, the intentions of consciousness themselves. The things that take place in the outer world usually happen in such a way that they often only become explainable after decades, or perhaps even longer. And to judge the government of the spiritual world by the current constellations, if I may say so, would be to be timid about this spiritual world. The spiritual world must give itself its strength and power. Now there is nothing within the earthly world except human minds in which this power can find a home, can be understood; not organizations, not institutions, however beautiful or ugly they may be, can in any way prove or disprove what is really willed by the spirit.

Those who seek to prove or disprove the truth or falsehood of the spiritual by outward appearances are on the wrong path, for they do not stand within the center of spiritual impulses but outside it. The innermost part of the human soul is the only thing that can be used to judge what is at issue here; external connections can never be decisive. On the other hand, however, this means that people who want to be the leaders of such a spiritual movement must strive more and more for this inner strength and develop an understanding of what it actually means to work from the inner center of a spiritual movement. It seems to me, my dear friends, that it is urgently necessary, especially at this moment, to become fully aware of how difficult this is and how it cannot be sufficiently fulfilled by what is often expressed by saying, “I have the anthroposophical attitude, I have the anthroposophical will.” It cannot be satisfied by that in any way.

And here I would like to mention a word that I have often spoken, often spoken since the Goetheanum fire, and which I would like to see really understood; I have often said it: The first Goetheanum, the form of the first Goetheanum, this home of anthroposophy, as a building, as it stood there, cannot be rebuilt.

You see, my dear friends, when such a word, which is meant in the spirit, is spoken, it must be felt as a reality, one must make the assumption that one can look at it from the most diverse sides, as one can look at realities from the most diverse sides, that one can often only gain the right perspective for such a word from a certain starting point. For such a word was spoken initially out of spiritual obligation. And at the moment when the word is spoken out of spiritual obligation, there is absolutely no need to carry around on one's physical hands all the reasons, the so-called reasons, for such a word.

Today, at this hour, it is less incumbent upon me to speak of the external circumstances, but I would like to speak today particularly about something that is connected with the inner impulse of this word: the first Goetheanum cannot be rebuilt. And please allow me to speak of it with all seriousness; because only this seriousness towards the task of reconstruction can give the friends the right attitude.

You see, we can report an external fact today. This external fact is that the legal investigations that followed the Goetheanum fire have now been concluded; one can say that they have been concluded so that the authorities have now been able to decide to pay us the sum insured of three million and some hundred thousand francs. The payment has been made. These three million are there; and this fact can be recorded for the time being today. So, since June 15, we have had these three million.

Now, my dear friends, it could turn out that souls would breathe a sigh of relief at the fact that we now have these three million for the construction and at most have to raise another three million through the willingness of our friends to make sacrifices. One could characterize the fact in this way. One could now record this June 15 as an extraordinarily joyful event in the development of the anthroposophical movement.

My dear friends, it is not. And if I am to shed light on the matter for you today from a perspective that is wholly in keeping with anthroposophical life, then I must speak differently. For me, for example, this fact, which may be described as extraordinarily joyful by some and extraordinarily sad by others, is extraordinarily painful. And one of the feelings of suffering that I have had since the Goetheanum fire is that I have had to say to myself: what has happened now must be brought about, must be brought about in the best and most energetic way, must happen of necessity; but something must be brought about that actually has nothing to do with the center of the anthroposophical movement, that lies completely outside the center work of this movement.

You see, my dear friends, the saying: The first Goetheanum cannot be rebuilt, has not only an aesthetic, not only an opportunistic, not only an external-historical background, but also an anthroposophical-moral one. And it is this anthroposophical-moral background that I would like to talk about today.

Let us look back to 1913, 1914, and ask ourselves: what were the reasons behind the decision to build the Goetheanum and to start this construction project? What was pursued at that time and in the period leading up to December 31, 1922, or January 1, 1923, was based on the fact that every single franc that was invested in the Goetheanum flowed from the willingness to make sacrifices of those who, in some way, professed their belief in the anthroposophical movement. The Goetheanum was built entirely out of inner understanding. Every franc flowed out of inner understanding for the cause.

My dear friends, the following is truth, is real truth, because reality coincides with the inner core of the matter: at the moment the last lecture was given at the Goetheanum, we had a home for anthroposophy that had been built with the sacrificial pennies and sacrificial cents of those who were wholeheartedly committed to the cause. From the hill in Dornach, the building shimmered, having incorporated anthroposophical will and anthroposophical willingness to sacrifice into every cubic centimeter of wood and stone. This moral substance was built into the first Goetheanum.

My dear friends, now we will begin to build with three million francs, many of which come from the pockets of those who not only have no inner interest in the Goetheanum, but have an interest in this Goetheanum not being there. And when the Goetheanum again shimmers down from the hill of Dornach, it will not only be built with anthroposophical willingness to make sacrifices, but also with what is common outside of anthroposophy in the structure of the present world.

Then, my dear friends, there will be a very different structure, seen from the inner spiritual point of view. There will most certainly be people who will not only not accompany with any deep sympathy, but perhaps even with a kind of curse, what, according to the social context that now exists, comes out of their pockets and is built into the Goetheanum.

I have often said that within a movement such as anthroposophy's, it is a matter of being awake, not sleeping. What I have told you now is not said in a sleeping state, but in a waking one. For us, words such as “blessing of a thing”, “connection of blessing with beautiful qualities of the human mind” must not be a mere phrase; for us they must be a fact. And so the first Goetheanum was built with the inner feeling that we were doing something that, from its right causes, takes the path forward in such a way that this path is the path of the causes themselves. Now we are building the Goetheanum in a tragic direction, my dear friends. A tragically built Goetheanum is different from the Goetheanum that we were able to tackle in 1913, 1914.

You see, my dear friends, anthroposophy is often criticized for being too intellectual. No, it leads through what lies in its real impulses to the deeper feelings of humanity. In 1913, one could begin building with a joyful heart; today, when one begins, it is almost inevitable that one begins in tears. I am giving you just such a description, which comes from the inner center of spiritual thinking; and such thinking differs quite essentially from thinking that takes its impulses from external facts. Thinking that is linked to external facts would probably not express the words I have just spoken; instead, it would be excitedly joyful that June 15 brought us the three million.

My dear friends, I have often spoken, perhaps unjustifiably in the eyes of many of you, about the fact that there is an inner opposition within the Anthroposophical Society to what I sometimes have to represent from the center of anthroposophy; today I do not want to characterize this opposition again; but I would just like to ask the question: Has the feeling that I have just expressed been present everywhere in the course of the last few months, since the Goetheanum fire? If another feeling has been present, it has been an example of inner opposition. It was a feeling that should no longer have been reckoned with, after the anthroposophical movement has gone through the three periods of its existence.

When we stood here on the hill in Dornach, bowed down with grief on the first day after the fire, while the flames were still licking outside, many anthroposophists gathered around the still burning building. One or another said something. In the end, it really did not matter to me what anyone said, because the content of the words is only a symptom for the actual spiritual background; but I would like to say that what was said on that first day after the outbreak of the terrible disaster differed in two respects. Anthroposophists spoke the word, for example: Now we no longer have the Goetheanum, now we want to build it in our hearts. It was an elementary feeling that already had something to do with the center of the movement. But there were other voices that spoke like this: The Goetheanum is insured; will it be possible to rebuild it with the insurance money?

My dear friends, I do not want to lead you into impracticality in any area of life. I have nothing against these things being considered as practically as possible. But it depends on the intentions. It depends on whether one recognizes the difference between what was there before and what will necessarily have to be built now. For no one should say, in the anthroposophical field, that it does not matter what the intentions are, as long as the Goetheanum is rebuilt. Attitudes and thought impulses, especially impulses of consciousness, do not work overnight, but move in the currents of the spiritual world and must not be judged by mere external facts, which are only symptoms for them, not an immediate reality.

Now, in everything that had to be done after the fire – please forgive me for mentioning this too – I tried, as far as it was possible under the influence of the necessary facts, to shape our actions from the center of the matter. Therefore, I calmed the friends who, in the first few days, saw it as the most necessary thing to use all possible means to protect our interests – for example, during the negotiations with the insurance company. I tried as far as possible to remove from our actions everything that did not come from the core of the anthroposophical movement itself.

My dear friends, must we not think that we have to learn to take our affairs into our own hands, that we have to learn not to proceed as we would on unanthroposophical ground? It was certainly not to impose more work on myself that I tried to conduct all negotiations in such a way that they were conducted by us on our own side.

I knew that I was taking on a responsibility towards our friends. Because if the outcome of June 15 had been worse, people would naturally have said: If you had taken the right lawyers at the time, things would have been different. But such responsibilities have to be taken on when it comes to the higher duties arising from the center of anthroposophical work. They have to be taken seriously. And they are no longer taken seriously if one does not, as far as possible, remain within the designated center in specific cases. One immediately describes one's powerlessness when one declares oneself unable to deal with matters that are one's own, from the center of anthroposophical impulses. Of course, we can never set out today to do what should actually be done, I would say, as the most radical thing: to use the three million for some charitable purpose, and to build the Goetheanum again only out of the sacrificial willingness of the friends.

My dear friends, as I said, do not regard me as a person who wants to tempt you not to be practical. But my concern now is not just to focus on the external deeds; my concern is to utter the words that should shape our thinking, to utter them quite openly. If we make them shape our thinking, then they will also, in the nobler sense, have the right results.

Those who say, “So we have to use the three million for charitable purposes and have to wait until the building can be rebuilt out of a willingness to make sacrifices,” would of course be wrong now. They would again be confusing what must be done with what suits their selfish, ambitious intentions. The energy and strength do not lie in choosing the easiest path, even if the easiest path can be described as extraordinarily moral in an egoistic sense; but the energy lies in the fact that, even if the path has to be a tragic one, one plunges, if I may say so, into the tragedy. But this must not be done unconsciously; one must plunge into the tragedy consciously and know that one is in a realm in which one cannot do what is purely anthroposophical; one must know that one must do what one has to do, despite the fact that it is not anthroposophical, but must balance it out with an all the stronger anthroposophical element. When you weigh something, you don't take away from the pan on the side where the weights are too heavy for the other side; you add to the other side.

We will need that. We will have to create the counterweights through an even stronger anthroposophical approach to counteract what we are tragically being led into, as something that, for the most part, perhaps for half of it, must happen un-anthroposophically. I can say that it would perhaps have been easiest for me to say: I will only lend a hand in building the Goetheanum if the three million insurance money is used for charitable purposes and the building fund is created entirely through donations. It would have been easier because it would have caused less pain. But we must not shy away from pain, my dear friends, if we want to work in the realm of reality. But neither should we want to ignore the pain. We should not just keep telling ourselves: we are doing what is most beautiful, what is best. We cannot do that in the earthly world, least of all in the present. Therefore, we should not let our heads sink and say: then I will lose heart altogether. When the gods sometimes seem to fade away, as if they were not there, as if humanity had been abandoned by them, the wisdom of the gods consists in people receiving impulses to seek them out even more in the places where they have hidden, but not to complain about their disappearance and inaction. Wanting the earth only as a soft resting place and only finding it divine when it presents itself in such a way that it always corresponds to what one would like, can never form the attitude of a spiritual movement, because that is not strength, that is powerlessness. And we will not perform the Goetheanum, which is colorfully tragic, out of powerlessness, but only with the development of strength, with the awareness that where the gods seem to have withdrawn, they must be sought all the more by us in their place, where they seem to be hidden.

My dear friends, I wanted to develop thoughts of encouragement. And since it is quite difficult to speak between the lines, today I have added some things to the lines themselves, I would say with a certain clarity. But what I have added to these lines is really necessary if we want to develop the right attitude in the near future for the reconstruction of the Goetheanum and also for other things. It would not help at all to lull ourselves into this or that illusion; but it helps solely and exclusively to face ourselves without a veil with the eyes of truth, in this case the inner truth that flows from the moral side of anthroposophy.

If that can happen, then what should actually happen would happen: that the Anthroposophical Society, in the midst of today's world events, would be a place where people do not indulge in the illusions in which everyone lives today. Because for much of what is happening in the present, you can expose the illusions. Since 1914, people have been living with a certain relish in illusions because they do not have the inner courage to admit the truths. If the Anthroposophical Society, the association of the Goetheanum, could develop awakening soul power in the midst of a world full of illusions, then, my dear friends, the tragic situation in which we now find ourselves, and about which we should not be under any illusion, would be counterbalanced as it is in every real tragedy.

Study the tragedians of all times. You will see that the tragedy consists in the fact that everything external seems to collapse and that only within oneself is the strength to lead beyond the catastrophe. When this occurs in art, some people like to look at it, although today there are not many, because tragedies are no longer very popular. But if it is to happen in reality, then things must happen as I have characterized them. Then something must happen that makes the Anthroposophical Society, the Goetheanum Association, stand out in its inner spiritual attitude like an island formation within a world based on illusions. Then what is a real power can radiate into the world based on illusions.

My dear friends, if we take the words in the right way that I had to speak to you, then there will be much intention, much endeavor, much striving for a different state than the one we are in, in our feeling. Then we will not be blinded by much satisfaction, especially not much self-satisfaction. We will banish from us the thoughts of satisfaction and self-satisfaction and awaken in us those thoughts that can arise from a purely spiritual view of things. Then we will have right thoughts of building up out of the spirit.

My dear friends, it was in all seriousness, but also, I believe, with complete objectivity, that I wanted to speak to you today. And I thank the board of the Goetheanum Association for giving me the opportunity to speak these words at this event about what is so closely linked to the fate of the Goetheanum, the past and the possibly coming Goetheanum.

Emil Leinhas: The draft is still incomplete. But we worked together harmoniously. (He reads the draft.)

Dr. Maier, Dr. Heyer and Dr. Peipers speak to this.

Alexander Strakosch: The question of the executive council still needs to be clarified.

Dr. Steiner: The passage about antagonism does not quite correspond to fact. From the personal reasons for the resistance against anthroposophical spiritual values, the antagonism that has arisen to me would not have been of any further significance; it would have appeared as a foolish episode. It is only through the reasons given by the various enterprises since 1919 that the attacks are used as a means to an end by an antagonism that for the most part has no interest in the attacks themselves,

used as a means to an end, in order to eliminate the anthroposophical movement.

Marie Steiner: The opponents are treated too lightly, it is immediately said that the compilation of the quotations forms the basis for attack, while the opposition does, after all, make use of mean methods.

Dr. Steiner: One is the opposition that uses defamation; the other is what the opposition does by creating a distorted image. Then the question arises as to whether, under certain circumstances, this opposition should not be attacked a little more boldly, which is only possible and necessary by using individual words.

Is it not true that the opponents are often protected by a certain official reputation, because to the outside world Dr. Jeremias, mentioned yesterday by Dr. Rittelmeyer, is the well-known orientalist of the University of Leipzig, while in fact, if Dr. Rittelmeyer's description is correct, he is a very mean person. He visited me repeatedly, discussed individual questions in a serious manner, asked to be allowed to attend the lecture in Leipzig. There was no reason not to let him attend. Afterwards he turns out to be a mean hypocrite. Such examples are actually something that one can no longer do without in characterizing opponents. One must tear this mask off people. I give this only as an example. We must be clear about what it means when someone has wormed their way in under the mask of someone who 'wants to recognize' and then comes out as a vile slanderer. If we do not manage to reveal this meanness among people who are simply protected by their official positions, if we do not succeed in doing so, then things will be difficult.

Dr. Rittelmeyer: I was present at the meeting. There he personally exposed you, Doctor. He said that he distinguished between anthroposophy itself and the person of the founder of anthroposophy. The goods train could contain goods that were good even if the locomotive was defective.

Dr. Steiner: Such a thing must be exposed to the world. That is the case today. But on the other hand, the special way of fighting must be characterized, which consists in the opponents not engaging in a discussion, but instead they accept the matter in part, like Goesch, but at the same time they act with the most vile, unobjective, purely personal slander. This is the very precise fact; in the present situation, we cannot shy away from characterizing it. It may be necessary to give individual examples. But this does not need to be given by name; perhaps it is even not good to give names, perhaps the names can be avoided and the people can simply be characterized.

You will get a characteristic of Seiling by saying: There was a person who was particularly disgusting to Dr. Steiner because of his fanatical devotion, which was reinforced by a hand kiss at every visit. But now he is being used by the opposition to compile all kinds of slander. Everyone has the opportunity to point this out at the right moment. You achieve more by such a characterization than by mentioning names, because then you can point out such people at the appropriate moment.

Jeremias is an old type who has ingratiated himself, who, for example, came to see Frau Doktor in the box at the theater in Leipzig and paid his respects there. The combination of this box visit in those days with what Dr. Rittelmeyer has told us characterizes the man as a creep. One only needs to say: One of the opponents, who was present at one of the defamatory meetings, made himself unpleasantly noticeable not quite a year ago by paying his respects to Dr. Steiner in the Leipzig theater box during a eurythmy performance in the most boorish way. He demanded it. He appeared on stage and wanted to be brought to the box. He pushed his way into the intimacy. Masks like this must be drawn with a strong characteristic.

I did not meet Leisegang personally; only those who can vouch for them personally should characterize them.

I would also like to say the following. If you listen to the discontent today, one basic tone shines through everywhere. It is unpleasant for me to say this, but one tone shines through everywhere. That is that no one has ensured that the anthroposophical is truly represented in society. I ask you to comment on the extent to which this reproach is justified. I am only reporting what is felt from the various sides. It is felt that within the Anthroposophical Society itself, the representation of anthroposophy has been neglected, that other things have taken the place of anthroposophy and that the inner life has been lost as a result. A more 'scientific', external activity has taken its place, and with it a certain externalization. People express this by saying that anthroposophy is becoming more intellectualized. We have to meet the mood of the young, which is moving towards internalization, without lapsing into enthusiasm. This is particularly felt in academic circles. They do not want this food to be served to them, as it has been served to them in the college courses; they want an internalization of the human soul life. It is a debacle that the college courses have been perceived by young people as something that is just a slightly different infusion of what they already had. They were told things that they already had at university.

The call should include the will to really pursue anthroposophy, to pursue anthroposophy from the perspective of knowledge as well as from the perspective of the soul and from the perspective of morality and religion. That should be in the call. Then, in addition to the things that have been listed – we have already discussed this – there should be something in it about the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society. The agitation in certain circles has already reached a pathological state. People give the impression of being in a pathological state of agitation. There should be something in the appeal that people can personally relate to. It should say something about a group of people who have taken the lead. These are the seven or nine people who have provisionally taken charge of the affairs of the Society until the delegates' assembly is convened. It should not be about the “Central Board” – the word itself is a red rag – it should not be about the Central Board, but about the seven or nine who have the appeal on their conscience; they should be presented as the leaders. If you talk about the central board now, it will simply lead to this or that group breaking away, to the society disintegrating as a result, and other groups forming for anthroposophy.

One can only say that people are absolutely fed up with the Stuttgart leadership, but they are of good will. The moment they see people taking something seriously in hand, they are ready to follow. The mood is a psychologically curious and characteristic one. Young people are waiting for something to happen. That is what I have to say about the content of the call.

The passage about the inner work would have to be elaborated. It should come out that there is a will to respond to what is expressed by some more naively and by others more educatedly, namely that people say: We don't learn anything about real anthroposophy; we are presented with all kinds of things that we don't want to hear. That is what is said. Some say it more naively, others more educatedly. But it comes from all circles. It is remarkable: however idealistically one speaks, it is not enough for people. If the idea is to deepen anthroposophy, the soul side must never be neglected. It is always emphasized that there is no heart or soul left in the Anthroposophical Society. That is the delicate point, that people say: You can't get through to the gentlemen in Stuttgart at all; you can't get through to them on a human level, they are too reserved, you can't get close to them. — So this is a delicate point. It belongs in this chapter, where things have to be said as they really are. You have to express how you want to improve something without making a paternoster. A way should be found in the future to ensure that the human relationships between individual anthroposophists are cultivated or at least recognized, regardless of whether they have leading or non-leading positions.

So the goal of the last few days, after going over everything that has gone before, was to finally come up with an appeal that makes sense. But no matter how much sense it makes, if the forces that should be here in this circle are not behind it, it will have no consequences. The further discussion of the appeal should not just lead to negative talk, as has been the case recently, but should have a certain content (substance). One must express what one wants to improve in the near future through the appeal, in order to correct some of the mistakes that have emerged in Stuttgart. We would like to hear something about how the Stuttgart personalities want to support the appeal. Because the fact that you agree with it is only one side of the coin. The other side is that people should not think: Now that the appeal has been printed, we will go back to the Waldorf School, become office managers at Kommender Tag and so on. Something tangible should emerge in this direction, showing that the appeal is being supported. The appeal is only valuable if people support it.

Emil Leinhas: What the appeal says must be worked out in the assembly of delegates.

Dr. Steiner: This point would have to be dealt with much more thoroughly and attentively. If this group is to have any significance in the continuation of the matter, then this point would have to be dealt with much more thoroughly. They would have to decide to pay a little more attention to such things. One would really have to pay attention to it.

You see, when you mention the name of Rudolf Meyer in Berlin, for example. This Meyer is a characteristic personality for the reason that he does not represent an aberration in the sense that things come from the head, because he wants to be a personality who wants to present everything from his own experience. What some people in Stuttgart are accused of – predominantly intellectualism – is not so much attributed to Meyer.

You just have to reduce what arises from the circle of members, mostly from a correct feeling but from a false interpretation, and ensure that a correct view of it takes hold. There is too much complacency in Meyer's work. That which comes from a real inwardness is never complacent and does not repel; that which comes from an apparent experience and appears tremendously complacent repels as a result. What people say about it is irrelevant. Reality must be grasped somehow. There must be some place where it is grasped. What is lacking is the kind of immersion in a certain, truly spiritual life that is far removed from all nebulousness. What people always call “dialectical” is just talking about things in such a way that the soul is missing from this talk. And if that does not enter into reality, if acumen, pointedness and such things overwhelm people too much, then they feel repelled.

The Stuttgart gentlemen feel that if someone does get through to one of them, they leave as if they have lost their sense of self; everything is thrown at you so rationally that you lose yourself in the process. — I would be uncomfortable if I were asked to name names. When the gentlemen from Stuttgart talk to them, the people feel as if they have been emptied of their substance and their will. Well, that is not true, it has to do with the fact that a “system” has now really been formed in Stuttgart, namely that the people here live as if in a fortress with high walls and do not know what is going on among the people who belong to the Society. They speak from within the fortress, without concern for what is going on in the Anthroposophical Society; and the people who come here feel that they are not listened to when they come with their experiences; they feel that they are not listened to at all.

Sometimes the feeling that people have has been expressed as follows: In Stuttgart, the human personalities switch off. — I was confronted with the statement that The people of Stuttgart send us gentlemen here who come with their notebooks, ask their questions, write something down, and then these notebooks are put into the archive, because all things end up in the archive; the personality does not come to us, but instead brings a notebook and then takes it to the archive; we would like to have human contact with personalities.

I only relate the things that are said. These things may be terribly distorted when expressed, but there is much more in the distortion that comes from the bad experience. This sentiment perhaps expresses an even stronger truth than is being expressed. Thought must be given to how this can be remedied. Otherwise there is really nothing left to be saved.

If the delegates' conference really does take place and such judgments are formed, then we will not get anywhere either. Likewise, it would be good if the misgivings that go out were also consciously brought up here. Dr. Rittelmeyer said that “powerful slogans” should be issued from here. Such slogans are indeed being issued. Marie Steiner: I would like to say something about this that relates to Munich. I was sorry to hear about the things that are happening around the work of the young priest Klein. Such things as 'idolization' and 'worship' can lead a young man to believe that he can lead old people. I then asked whether these things were true. The answer was the question: Why did they want to destroy the anthroposophical work in Munich? The report culminated in the sentence that only a few months ago this gentleman had received the order from a member who is here: The religious work should be supported and the branch work should be ignored. It was said that this “motto” had been issued by a prominent personality. As a result, things have happened that have led some members to believe this. In Munich there were special conditions, branch difficulties of a special kind, from which such opinions could arise. He, the reporter, stood as one of the

accusers.

Dr. Peipers: When Klein was with me, I had the impression that something could be hoped for from the religious movement in Munich.

Dr. Steiner: You seem to have said that. People have understood that the leadership in Stuttgart wants to put the Munich work to sleep and replace the anthroposophical movement with a religious revival. We will have to reveal the things that come from the “Stuttgart system” as misunderstandings. Such facts are creative! So this is a “slogan” that came from Stuttgart: the Munich branch work should be put to sleep; everyone should concentrate on the work of religious renewal. If this were said by someone who is a leading figure in the religious renewal movement, there would be no objection. But when it is said by leaders of the anthroposophical movement, such a slogan will cause the anthroposophical movement to perish.

Dr. Peipers: I refused to support it.

Marie Steiner: But what has just been said refers to your conversation with Klein. I was told that you wanted to give a large sum of money for the religious renewal, and that you think the anthroposophical work should be put on hold. But these words have had an effect.

Dr. Peipers: What people say is so easily misinterpreted.

Marie Steiner: These slogans fly on like arrows.

Emil Leinhas comments on this.

Dr. Steiner: The person who issued this slogan belongs to the “big heads” in Stuttgart, and for that reason alone this slogan would have been decisive in Munich. So the religious movement is cutting off our water. The Munich people are indignant that the anthroposophical work in Munich is being destroyed by the Stuttgart leadership.

Dr. Peipers: I have been told that the Munich people are no longer doing any work at all.

Dr. Steiner: We will explain everything as a “misunderstanding”. But that does not prevent these things, which were coined as slogans in Stuttgart, from having a destructive effect; that is to say, that the “Stuttgart system” is dissolving anthroposophical work as it reaches the periphery.

The term “bighead” is related to drawings in cartoons. People like that have been depicted in cartoons as having huge heads and small bodies. In Austria they are called “bigheads”. So misunderstandings are creative.

You can't form an opinion about these things if you don't start from the same assumptions as those presented here. Most of what has been done here must be left out; that would have to be negotiated. So far, all that has happened is that people have signed the appeal. The assembly of delegates must take place, and at that the gentlemen must not appear as they did here, sitting around the table and waiting calmly for the others to act. Everyone must express their opinion there, but the next thing—I have to leave very early tomorrow morning—is that here, in a skillful way, the youth movement, for example, must be reassured, because they are waiting for an answer. One must enter into negotiations with them on a broader basis. Today they are waiting for someone to say: something has happened here. Now the ground on which everything has taken place so far will have to expand. We will admit the youth and negotiate with them, and from tomorrow on it must be done without curtains.

Another suggestion has been made regarding negotiations with young people.

Dr. Steiner: It would be better than the leaders of the youth movement attending our meetings here. That would be an achievement. Above all, I would like to point out that within the youth movement, the word seems to have been dropped that the opposition to society should be organized. It would be very good if this organization of the opposition were actually understood. I imagined that, in addition to Dr. Palmer, Mr. von Grone and Mr. [Wolfgang] Wachsmuth could also relate to this dissatisfaction in society. I believe that people in Stuttgart could understand the dissatisfaction. Why should we only meet in phrases of harmony? If you show understanding for what people are dissatisfied with, something will have happened. Not from above, but by showing that you yourself have some of the sting of dissatisfaction, you will achieve something with young people. If the other person feels: This is someone who is content too, then he says to himself: I don't want anything to do with him. Take this as a humorous presentation of something that is meant seriously.

Jürgen von Grone speaks to this.

Dr. Steiner: Now this has not been achieved in Stuttgart. Dissatisfaction that arises from the matter is sometimes very fruitful; but if this dissatisfaction is not reckoned with in terms of what people feel, but is passed over, then it has a destructive effect.

Marie Steiner: It refers to what was said in the cycle.

Dr. Steiner: Indeed, one must say that. We have had these two phases of the academic youth movement, which must be characterized as follows: First, the Hochschulbund was founded. The celebrities left the student leaders alone and did not stand behind them. The bond between the student leaders and the Stuttgart celebrities dissolved. Now the student leaders didn't know what to do, and then these kinds of student associations were formed, which Maikowski chose. Now, Maikowski is a person who is extremely easy to convince of something if you only know how to speak his language. Now any connection between this youth movement and the Stuttgart gentlemen was impossible. The young people were no longer open to anything that came from these gentlemen. Illusions arose. It is still the same today as it was when these people organized the “Pedagogical Youth Course” here. I think that the term “organization of the opposition” arose because people feel that they cannot get close to the gentlemen from Stuttgart. The older ones outside all have a very similar feeling.

The essentials should be discussed. I would characterize the situation as follows: there are many questions in Stuttgart to which one avoids giving an answer. This is one of them: if you talk to a lot of people today, they feel the need to talk about how the branch work is organized. The leading personalities, on the other hand, do not feel the need to talk about the organization of the branch work. But this must be done. It must even be included in the call, just as the communication of the anthroposophical spiritual heritage should be done. Now it could also happen that people avoid talking about these questions. The most important questions are kept quiet here at all.

Ernst Uehli: The branch leaders are always asking how the branch work should be organized.

Emil Leinhas speaks to this.

Dr. Steiner: The main question is this: How can we get the branch work to be such that it satisfies us? All we hear is: How can we talk to the gentlemen in Stuttgart? How can we approach the gentlemen in Stuttgart so that they hear from us what we would like to have? The point is that there are questions to which an answer is avoided. A positive answer should be given to this. We should talk here about what answer we give to those who say: We are purely lost members, we used to enjoy the cycles; who should we turn to so that someone knows that we are not satisfied now?

Alexander Strakosch speaks appreciatively about the earlier work of Miss Stinde and about individual branches.

Dr. Unger speaks about the difficulties that arise from the new forces. One can only explain the branch work by example; descriptions should be given.

Emil Leinhas: People want to see personalities who themselves have anthroposophy within them.

Marie Steiner: The demand that one encounters is much greater after lectures than after reporting. There is an urgent demand for Dr. Steiner's lectures.

Dr. Unger asks about the way of reading.

Marie Steiner: One must read quite simply and sympathetically, not too quickly. Rhetorical behavior should be eliminated as far as possible and one should be permeable only to the content. It does not do for someone to read the lectures quickly while in the rush of business. One would have to read the matter through four times. You need to have a sense of the punctuation. Furthermore, the content must be able to flow through you. You have to work through the lectures thoroughly and then erase the personal element. You have to be able to live with them for several hours beforehand.

Emil Leinhas talks about the question of reading or lecturing.

Marie Steiner: Above all, a certain attitude of soul must be present. One must avoid the terribly insistent intellectual emphasis, always leaving oneself out and wanting to show oneself off as little as possible.

Dr. Peipers: Both must be done: reading aloud and lecturing.

Dr. Unger: The archives must be converted into reading rooms. It is hardly possible to give a presentation if you were not present at the lecture yourself. Courses should be held at different levels.

Marie Steiner: There is so much material in the cycles that it would take several lifetimes to absorb it all. If someone wants to do special studies, the opportunity for such purposes is also given. So this possibility is also there for particularly serious specialized work. It has been shown that there has been a strong need for this. Much of what has been presented has been said to be something that could be heard elsewhere, and that is not what is needed for a special branch work.

Dr. Steiner: We have digressed from what can be fruitful in the present moment. We have digressed from what could be fruitful for this evening, for standing behind this call. The way it is done in the branches is not what is meant at the present moment. What the members are now expressing as something that leaves them unsatisfied is something quite different. What the members mean is that they have the feeling that they hear too little about anthroposophy. Whether it is read to them or presented in an anthroposophical way is not the subject of today's discussion. The question is: what can be done so that the anthroposophical can be brought before the world, and first before the branches, in the right way?

Surely, to do that, the question would have to be addressed much more thoroughly. For the dissatisfaction that prevails goes back to the history of the last four years. You must not forget what compromises have been made by the speakers who have been wildly let loose out onto the branches and onto the world. What a stir there has been when cabbage has been talked about again and again! Mr. Uehli spoke in the Elberfeld branch. The most important thing is not what he said; the most important thing is that Damnitz was terrified. He is convinced that he can only achieve something personally by reading aloud. But people have come, brought up by the bad education in Stuttgart, people have appeared who have presented their own cabbage. These are the bad habits of Stuttgart that have been introduced into the “Association for Threefolding” through the bad habit of lecturing. What a load of nonsense is presented to the audience! The dissatisfaction goes back to what was done here in Stuttgart. An absolute failure in education has come from Stuttgart. We should meet the dissatisfaction halfway. There was this course of lectures of mine before a horde was unleashed on the German audience. Look at the echo of what has been done by this horde! What has been done out there is sometimes so grotesque that it surpasses everything. Whether it was the duplication of the lectures or the speakers' lack of control over them, there was no spirit in it. There was a hideous bureaucratic operation in it, there was no inwardness in it. Horribly duplicated transcripts were sent to people in a truly bureaucratic manner. This special thing that has been introduced here, this impersonal bureaucracy, the lack of inner attitude, everything that has been introduced as special nonsense from the “Bund für Dreigliederung” (Federation for Threefolding), still has an effect, it has not yet been completely eliminated. This comes into everything, connected with the matter. There must be the will to refrain from many things that have been done and to do many things that have been neglected. Someone has to take responsibility for this; then things will improve. Similarly, it happens that, again, people who should be given the things are simply deprived of everything indiscriminately. On the other hand, someone who is merely sensationalistic gets things. A certain care should be taken here. When you hire people, it is also the case that you do not exercise care. You have to exercise care! You must not give the feeling that it is categorized, compartmentalized, but that there is a human impulse behind it. What is the use of saying that human relations must be cultivated if you then proceed in an inhumane way in the way you handle things? When you say something like that, nobody feels affected because you can't see how terrible the system is in the way it is handled. Often those who have practiced the mischief the worst are the ones who now criticize it the worst. As I said, in Elberfeld, gentlemen appeared who had been raised by the mischief that occurred in the threefolding movement. Damnitz would not have objected at all if free good lectures had been given. He himself said what he opposed. There were a few gentlemen at the Stuttgart Congress who felt called upon to give free lectures in Elberfeld-Barmen. I am convinced that they talked pure nonsense and that anthroposophy was discredited as a result. Damnitz himself might have said that he could not do it either. This system, that everyone should talk their own talk — I am not speaking against independence, but against this unwillingness to distinguish between what should be and what should not be —, it is easy to end up in speculative-dialectical discussions.

Of course, poor performance can always be undermined. But there is a great difference between a way of doing things that has emerged in recent years and a way of being human that is behind things. You can tell whether a performance is good or bad on the basis of the individual performances. I have nothing against someone giving their own lecture. On the contrary: as much as possible. I have demanded it myself: giving one's own lectures. Whether someone gives a lecture or their own lecture: within our movement, everything should serve to cultivate our cause, not to discredit it. That is what matters. Things are all relative. I can well imagine that it is handled differently in different branches. In one branch there will be someone who reads aloud; in another there will be someone who speaks on their own initiative.

Sometimes there are also strange conceptions. I know of a branch – and this also applies to the things I have just mentioned, because it leads to an overall judgment – whose leader would never have allowed himself to merely read out lectures, but instead got the material from me on things that I had not even presented myself. The personalities concerned chose the topics themselves. Now it is impossible to decide whether something like this is a lecture in its own right or not. It depends on the personality concerned whether it is more or less free or unfree.

The question of promoting the anthroposophical cause through shared attitudes: yes, this is a matter of principle. We would have to learn to distinguish certain things. Of course, you sometimes come up against things that are difficult to judge. And then, because you come up against such things, the judgment in the widest circle becomes confused. Isn't it true that sometimes it will be dreadful after all.

Enthusiasm must arise! And enthusiasm can only arise when one takes hold of something in the right way, for example, when one brings anthroposophy into the world in the appropriate way. Here one develops enthusiasm for many things that have nothing to do with the anthroposophical cause. On the other hand, it would not easily occur to someone to do the same for the things that grow on our soil, for example, eurythmy. To put eurythmy, with all that it entails, into the whole movement with enthusiasm, that is how one would work for the anthroposophical cause! While it actually detracts a little from our cause when something is arranged like a concert in our rooms next Saturday. That is something that distracts in the most eminent sense; what does it have to do with our cause?

Paul Baumann comments.

Dr. Steiner: This brings us to the point where it is a matter of having an anthroposophical attitude or not. That is why I say: we are touching on the limits here. The Stuttgart center is the starting point, where everything that is anthroposophy is being messed up. If it is at all possible, a singer is brought in to sing on our premises. In this way, we completely lose sight of the essential. Then we deserve to be treated by the world as it is when really perfidious ideas of anthroposophy arise. That is part of what it is about. I am not surprised that the whole Anthroposophical Society is being ruined from Stuttgart, that all feeling for what is actually supposed to be given with Anthroposophy has been lost.

Marie Steiner: The ladies who work here at the Eurythmy School are often asked by members what they actually do here. So, people have no idea that there is a eurythmy school here.

Dr. Steiner: If we stoop to wanting to be a dumping ground for anyone who could be anywhere else, without having anything to do with anthroposophy, then the movement loses its momentum.

Marie Steiner: There are only ladies who have come from out of town to go to the Eurythmy School here. There is not a single person from Stuttgart in this course.

The foundations are discussed.

Dr. Steiner: I would also like to see this transformed into something positive; I would like to see enthusiasm arise for carrying the anthroposophical into the world in the appropriate light. We really have no right to establish things externally and then not use them to cultivate the matter. That is what is so terrible. We have brought about the external possibility of cultivating the anthroposophical by making material sacrifices; we must also make use of this possibility. We have to come to the point where the journal 'Anthroposophie' is something completely different, where it serves the anthroposophical cause, where one does not just have the feeling that every week there is the worry that it will be full. That's part of it when I say you have to stand behind the call.

The call has now been successfully made. What difficulties! The necessary changes can be made easily; but the call has really been made. The discussion about standing behind the call is again such that in the next few weeks things could go back to the way they were before, with more or less reading aloud or speaking oneself. That is not what the people who are dissatisfied today mean. Things are going nowhere because people are not engaging with them.

Dr. Unger and Emil Leinhas speak; others make suggestions.

Dr. Steiner: I fear that if we only have lectures and eurythmy performances in the evenings, I fear that many will shirk the task of addressing the seriousness of the situation on the agenda. The lecturers will not be concerned with discussing the fate of the Anthroposophical Society. I fear that it would be something that could be excellent in itself, but that will not become what we need at the present moment. We have had brilliant such events. We have had the congresses one after the other. We have had them in Vienna, in Stuttgart, in Dornach. Yes, the things were excellent in themselves. But they did more harm than good to the anthroposophical movement because they were never utilized.

Emil Leinhas advises lectures by Dr. Steiner and reports about the institutions.

Dr. Kolisko comments on this.

Dr. Steiner: They also need to be treated. If today's discussion, from the moment we finished discussing the appeal, takes this course, it is a prime example of how this delegates' meeting must not be. It must not be like this! Couldn't the question of why this committee of 30 has become so sterile be discussed a little, when the cleverest people in Central Europe are sitting together? Perhaps it would be useful to ask why this illustrious circle has remained so barren?

Dr. Schwebsch speaks to this.

Dr. Steiner: I know that there are personalities sitting here who consider the whole thing unnecessary, that one is dealing with the question of the consolidation of the Anthroposophical Society. If these things had never been dealt with, if no effort had been made to deal with them, then you would not be sitting here today. There would be no funds to support the Waldorf School. You can be sure of that, that it was once different. The Society was founded out of life, and that is what made it possible for you to be sitting here today and to find that all this is unfruitful. If it had always been like that, if, for example, many people like you had been at the starting point of society, then you would not be able to sit there today. You are like the famous person who wants to pull himself up by his own hair. Therefore, you would already be obliged to found the matter more deeply. Why don't you say the important thing yourself, which you lack here and which would raise the matter? Life is not just for our pleasure. If it is only about comfort, then one should not hold thirty-session meetings. Why don't you make it better yourself? One can also sit here and still not be there.

Marie Steiner: One must struggle when it comes to group-spirit insights.

Toni Völker: They have not understood how to take you, Doctor, as an esoteric teacher. They have not understood how to bring the esoteric into practical life. That seems to me to be the problem.

Dr. Steiner: The things that are to be discussed here - and actually discussed in real terms - have become necessary because of what has gradually emerged in society. But what used to be found in society, that a word of mine remained in a narrower circle, that no longer exists today. And so it has become impossible to talk about the necessary things in real terms. Today it is the case that I should not really make the claim to say a word in a narrower circle, because every word is carried out into the world. In the sense of esotericism, of esoteric truths, we can speak more than we used to. Now there is more esoteric content in the public lectures than there used to be in the cycles; but in the past it was still possible, in a sense, to bring something into narrower circles that remained in those narrower circles. But today that is out of the question; today it is absolutely out of the question.

Toni Völker: If you bring the esoteric into life, then the conditions could not arise as they are now. It would depend on doing things instead of talking about them.

Dr. Steiner: The things that one would never have dreamed of, that one would not even have imagined would come out of the circles, appear in the brutal articles in the newspapers; they have been discussed for years, and Father Kully writes about them in the newspapers. There should be an inclination to reflect on why society has become like this. This decline of society is linked to the course of events as it has developed in Stuttgart over the past four years. It has led to the Anthroposophical Society being so terribly run down. Gossip prevails over seriousness. Triviality prevails over what should be in this direction, in the direction of reverence. It would have been good if the time that has now been used for trivialities had been used to address the terrible situation of the Society with a little more clarity. The Anthroposophical Society should become a reality. It has become a shadow, but this shadow is truly a very Ahrimanic product. The Anthroposophical Society is full of Ahrimanic holes.

Ernst Uehli: The Society has sinned through the threefold social order movement. There was this circle of thirty, but no real action was taken. What was discussed was not put into the realm of the will. Dr. Röschl: The specific questions are not being addressed. I always have the thought: What am I supposed to do there?

Dr. Steiner: Things would improve immediately if we did not continue to tempt each other in the moment when we clearly see things. Of course, things also have their justification. On the other hand, the course of the negotiations lies in a certain psychological state of the group. If you have listened to how the discussions have gone, you will have noticed that a large part of the speeches, the requests to speak, for weeks has amounted to someone saying, “I propose that we talk about this or that.” Such a way of proposing has only emerged in this circle. It would not happen anywhere else for someone to speak up and say, I propose that we talk about this and that. — Here in this circle it has happened all the time. Elsewhere, people start talking about what they think about something. I could show how few people have said anything about their topic. A large part of the debate also boils down to someone saying: I fully support this and that. That doesn't change the material substance of the matter. One evening consisted of one person after another saying that they fully supported this or that. Just think, if this psychological moment were considered, how the content of what is said simply proves this: one does not feel oneself as a reality. One does not feel as a reality; one allows oneself to be a mere shadow. Look back and see how often these things have happened! It is easier to ask questions than to give answers. Look at the matter from the psychological side.

I would like to say the following. Things can be discussed in all good will. You are asking for something that you should not ask for. The one who talked about the seminar knows exactly what happened since he spoke to the gentleman in question.⁵ If he brings up the matter, it could be that he has been thinking about it since he found out. He could bring the results of experience instead of the results of not thinking.

In general, in the thirties, there is a tendency to demand a lot from others but as little as possible from oneself. This cancels out so much; the calculation cancels itself out. Almost the impossible is demanded of others, and no one expects to demand the same of themselves. There is a lot in that. Therefore, I cannot fully agree when Dr. von Baravalle constantly says, “I have nothing from this circle.” Why does he never ask, “How much does the circle have from me?” This question should be raised by each individual. Because this takes its toll. This is the case here as long as the circle exists. There is so much cursing; everyone knows what damage the Thirty-Party has done; so one would assume that the damage would be stopped. Since everyone knows, everyone could have thought about it today. The cursing and not thinking about it has become such a habit, and people keep falling back into it.

Today the call has come about. It has emerged from the intellect of this illustrious body. Do you think it completely out of the question that this appeal could not have been made even after the third session? The appeal is an emanation of intellect. That it was not already accomplished three weeks ago is a lack of an outpouring of will. You would become terribly clever if we wanted to continue waiting for ten years. I do not think that the drafting of the appeal was helped all that much by yesterday's meeting. It is a matter of will. One must decide on these things. One must want something. Why can't we want something? Why is there only negativity, only rejection of the other? Why can't we commit ourselves to the other? Actually, it takes much more sophistry to recognize the other's faults as precisely as if we all had the intention of seeing the positive in the other as well. If we were to use only a quarter of it for the positive, much would come of it.

We are now clear about the fact that from now until the delegates' meeting, which must take place as soon as possible, this committee of seven will lead here [Dr. Unger, Dr. Kolisko, Emil Leinhas, Dr. Palmer, Dr. Rittelmeyer, Miss Mücke, Mr. von Grone]. I wanted this committee of seven to do such a good job that the delegates would want it to stay.⁶

I have to give an answer this evening: when should we hold the delegates' meeting? I think in two weeks. We can plan for three days. It would be good if we could use this room for the daytime meetings and the Sieglehaus hall for the evening lectures.

The members comment on this.

Dr. Steiner: It would be better to send a report on the course of the meetings to the foreigners, because the whole thing should be treated as a closed one. The call, which does not concern foreigners, should not be sent.

Mr. Leinhas: Austria, Holland and Scandinavia have considered themselves to be part of this.

Dr. Steiner: I don't know if, if it is sent to Austria, it should be sent to the leadership in Austria and left to them to distribute it in Austria. It can be sent to the leadership in Vienna, and they should distribute it with their own signature.

Emil Leinhas: The local groups have no central office in Vienna. Dr. Steiner: As far as I'm concerned, it can also be sent.

Emil Leinhas: Mr. Steffen would probably have to be sent the appeal for information.

Dr. Steiner: You can give him the appeal privately. Officially it's none of his business. Mr. Leinbas: February 25, 26, 27 or 24? Eurythmy in the evening and two lectures.

Marie Steiner: I would have to be here for the rehearsals.

Dr. Steiner: I am very concerned that the enthusiasm is waning. I am extremely concerned about it. I will have to decide to come back on Monday. Only the shell of the building is there; the matter of the 'inner life' still needs to be carefully worked out. It must be presented on Monday in a form that can still be completely corrected. It can be printed on Tuesday. The envelopes can already be ready. It can go out on Tuesday.

• 5. It is not known what is being referred to here.
• 6. This body then became the executive council of the “Anthroposophical Society in Germany”.

The six lectures collected in this volume were given by Rudolf Steiner to members of the Anthroposophical Society during his visits to England in the year 1922. He came three times, giving altogether about thirty lectures on educational, social and general anthroposophical subjects. Nine years had elapsed since his preceding visit in May 1913 when he had spoken so significantly of the new Michael Age and of Christ-event of the 20th Century. The intervening time was marked by the catastrophes of war and social revolution. Meanwhile the first Goetheanum had been built at Dornach, Switzerland, as a centre for the world-wide movement.

During the years of war, Rudolf Steiner had put forward his epoch-making conception of Threefold Man and of the Threefold Social Order, on which was based the attempt, in the years 1913–21, to give shape to the social events of the time out of a deeper spiritual understanding. It was in the midst of this attempt that many practical activities, notably educational and medical, evolved under Dr. Steiner’s guidance, bringing the truths of Initiation Science to bear on the concrete tasks of daily life. Thus in the year 1913 the Waldorf School had been founded at Stuttgart by Emil Molt, with Rudolf Steiner as its educational director. The quick development of the school attracted the attention of thoughtful men and women in England, many of whom had been impressed by Dr. Steiner's book on the social and international problems of the time, the first English edition of which. The Threefold State, had been published by Messrs. Allen and Unwin in 1920.

he sculptress Edith Maryon, one of Dr. Steiner’s closest and most trusted fellow-workers at the Goetheanum, had in the past been linked by ties of friendship and common spiritual endeavour with the distinguished educationist Professor Millicent Mackenzie. Arising out of their correspondence. Professor Mackenzie arranged for a party of English teachers and educationists to visit Dornach at Christmas and New Year, 1921–22. Here, in the famous Weisse Saal of the Goetheanum, where the fatal outbreak of fire was discovered a year later. Rudolf Steiner gave a course of sixteen lectures for the special benefit of the visitors from England. Among those present were Miss Margaret Cross of The Priory School, King's Langley, and also some of those who were to form, three years later, the College of Teachers of the newly founded school, now known as Michael Hall.

Miss Cross was a member of the ‘New Ideals in Education’ Committee, whose annual conference for 1922 was to be devoted to the subject of Drama and Education, in connection with the Shakespeare Festival. At her suggestion it was decided to invite Dr. Steiner, both as educationist and as a distinguished Goethe scholar, to take an active part. So then in April 1922 he spoke at Stratford-on-Avon, side by side with eminent representatives of English life and letters—John Masefield and John Drinkwater among others, also Professor Cornford and Sir Henry Newbolt. The interest aroused is shewn by the fact that Dr. Steiner was invited to give a third lecture in addition to the two original planned.

It was decided to arrange a more extensive conference at Oxford during the long vacation, where Rudolf Steiner would have the opportunity to speak at greater length, both on the theory and method of the Waldorf School and on the Threefold Order. Through the kind hospitality of Principal L. P. Jacks, who found in The Threefold State ideas akin to his own, the Conference on ‘Spiritual Values in Education and Social Life’ was held at Manchester College during the second half of August. The joint organizers were Professor Millicent Mackenzie and Mr. Arnold Freeman of the Sheffield Educational Settlement. Principal Jacks was present at the beginning and gave the address of welcome. Among other well-known speakers who took part were Mr. A. Clutton Brock, Mr. C. Delisle Burns, Professor J. S. Mackenzie and Dr. Maxwell Garnett. During the morning sessions Dr. Steiner gave the course of nine lectures since published under the title The Spiritual Ground of Education and three further lectures on the social question. A group of Dornach artists gave Eurhythmy performances at Keble and there was also a small demonstration by children, to illustrate the part of Eurhythmy in education.

During his three visits to England in the year 1922 Dr. Steiner gave a number of other public and semi-public lectures—on the anthroposophical path of knowledge, on the knowledge of the Christ-Impulse, and on education. Some of these have since been printed. They include for example the memorable address on The Mystery of Golgotha given in Manchester College Chapel, Oxford, on Sunday evening, 27th August.

In the midst of these many activities, opportunities were also found for the members' lectures here reproduced. The different local groups which had been working side by side throughout the war were joining forces to create what afterwards became the ‘Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain.’ In the autumn of 1921 a small library-office and the use of a lecture-hall had been rented at Grosvenor Street from the Royal Asiatic Society, and it was here then that Dr. Steiner gave the first of these members' lectures. Meanwhile a more permanent headquarters was acquired at 46 (now 116) Gloucester Place. Save for the one at Oxford, the remaining lectures were given here. Dr. Steiner gave every encouragement to the efforts which were being made to enlarge the scope of the spiritual movement in this country, and to the practical activities arising from it.

We have translated freely, believing that a free translation will be most able to call forth an immediate impression of the words as Rudolf Steiner spoke them. It should be remembered that all the lectures to English audiences had to be interpreted as they were given; Dr. Steiner generally divided them into three sections, each of which was followed immediately by the interpretation. The resulting breaks are in most instances apparent. The present written translation is based on the full shorthand reports of the original. Though of outstanding excellence, these reports themselves are not free from occasional uncertainties.

he titles here chosen, for the series as a whole and for the single lectures, are not due to Dr. Steiner himself. All through the later years of his life he was lecturing frequently to the members of the Anthroposophical Society, at Dornach and wherever else he traveled, no special subject being indicated, as a rule, beforehand, except for conferences and other such occasions. We came to the lectures with unbounded expectation, knowing always that some fresh illumination would be given, some further insight awakened, concerning the spiritual world and its relation to human life.

In view of the deliberations that have been going on here with reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society as their object, I would like to shape today's lecture in a way that may help my hearers form independent judgments in these decisive days. To this end I shall be speaking somewhat more briefly and aphoristically than I usually do when discussing aspects of anthroposophy, and shall confine myself to commenting on the third phase of our anthroposophical work. This evening I will speak for the same reason on the subject of the three phases of the Anthroposophical Movement.

We often hear references being made these days to the great change that came over Western spiritual life when Copernicus substituted his new picture of the heavens for the one previously held. If one were to try to state just what the nature of this change was, it might be put as follows. In earlier times man thought of the earth realm as the object of his study and the chief concern of learning, with little or no attention being paid to the heavenly bodies circling overhead.

In recent times the heavenly bodies have come to assume a great deal more importance than they used to be accorded. Indeed, the earth came to be thought of as a mere grain of dust in the universe, and man felt himself to be living on a tiny speck of an earth quite insignificant by contrast with the rest of the cosmos and its countless thousand worlds. But if you will permit me to give just a sketch of this matter for the sake of characterizing the third phase of our Anthroposophical Movement, it must be pointed out that by reducing the earth to a mere grain of dust on the one hand, man also lost the possibility on the other of arriving at valid judgments about the rest of the universe other than those based on such physical and more recent chemical concepts as may apply. Research that goes beyond this and devotes itself to a study of soul and spiritual aspects of the universe is ignored. This is, of course, quite in keeping with the whole stance of modern learning. Man loses the possibility of seeing what he calls his soul and spirit as in any way connected with what rays down to us from the starry world. You can judge from certain passages in my book, An Outline Of Occult Science, how intent anthroposophy is on creating a renewed understanding of the fact that the whole universe is suffused with soul and spirit, that human thoughts are connected with cosmic thoughts, human souls with cosmic souls, human spirits with cosmic spirits, with the creative spirituality of the universe. Anthroposophy aims at re-creating the possibility of knowing the cosmos as spirit.

In this quest anthroposophy encounters a serious obstacle on its path, an obstacle that I am going to describe without reservation.

People come forward, quite rightly proclaiming anthroposophy with great enthusiasm. But they emphasize that what they are proclaiming is a doctrine based not on their own experience but on that of a spiritual investigator. This makes for instant conflict with the way of thinking prevailing in present day civilization, which condemns anyone who advances views based on authority. Such condemnation would disappear if people only realized that the findings of spiritual research recognized by anthroposophy can be arrived at with the use of various methods suited to various ways of investigation, but that once they are obtained, these results can readily be grasped by any truly unprejudiced mentality. But findings acceptable to all truly unprejudiced mentalities can be made and still not lead to fruitful results unless those presenting anthroposophical material do so with attitudes required for anthroposophical presentations that are not always prevailing.

Let me be explicit. Let me refer to my book, The Philosophy of Freedom, published about thirty years ago, and recall my description in its pages of a special kind of thinking that is different from that generally recognized as thinking today. When thinking is mentioned—and this holds especially true in the case of those whose opinions carry greatest weight—the concept of it is one that pictures the thinking human spirit as rather passive. This human spirit devotes itself to outer observation, studying phenomena or experimenting, and then using thought to relate these observations. Thus it comes to set up laws of nature, concerning the validity and metaphysical or merely physical significance of which disputes may arise. But it makes a difference whether a person just entertains these thoughts that have come to him from observing nature, or proceeds instead to try to reach some clarity as to his own human relationship to these thoughts that he has formed at the hand of nature, thoughts that, indeed, he has only recently developed the ability to form about it. For if we go back to earlier times, say to the thirteenth or twelfth or eleventh century, we find that man's thoughts about nature were the product of a different attitude of soul. People of today conceive of thinking as just a passive noting of phenomena and of the consistency—or lack of it—with which they occur. One simply allows thoughts to emerge from the phenomena and passively occupy one's soul. In contrast to this, my Philosophy of Freedom stresses the active element in thinking, emphasizing how the will enters into it and how one can become aware of one's own inner activity in the exercise of what I have called pure thinking. In this connection I showed that all truly moral impulses have their origin in this pure thinking. I tried to point out how the will strikes into the otherwise passive realm of thought, stirring it awake and making the thinker inwardly active.

Now what kind of reader approach did the Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader as he read to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relation to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing at the moment of awakening that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color-filled, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level. He should be able to say, “Yes, I have certainly thought thoughts before. But my thinking took the form of just letting thoughts flow and carry me along. Now, little by little, I am beginning to be inwardly active in them. I am reminded of waking up in the morning and relating my sense activity to sounds and colors, and my bodily motions to my will.” Experiencing this awakening as I have described it in my book, The Riddle of Man, where I comment on Johann Gottlieb Fichte, is to develop a soul attitude completely different from that prevalent today. But the attitude of soul thus arrived at leads not merely to knowledge that must be accepted on someone else's authority but to asking oneself what the thoughts were that one used to have and what this activity is that one now launches to strike into one's formerly passive thoughts. What, one asks, is this element that has the same rousing effect on one's erstwhile thinking that one's life of soul and spirit have on one's body on awakening? (I am referring here just to the external fact of awaking.) One begins to experience thinking in a way one could not have done without coming to know it as a living, active function.

So long as one is only considering passive thoughts, thinking remains just a development going on in the body while the physical senses are occupying themselves with external objects. But when a person suffuses this passive thinking with inner activity, he lights upon another similar comparison for the thinking he formerly engaged in, and can begin to see what its passivity resembled. He comes to the realization that this passive thinking of his was exactly the same thing in the soul realm that a corpse represents in the physical. When one looks at a corpse here in the physical world, one has to recognize that it was not created as the thing one sees, that none of nature's ordinary laws can be made to account for the present material composition of this body. Such a configuration of material elements could be brought about only as a result of a living human being having dwelt in what is now a corpse. It has become mere remains, abandoned by a formerly indwelling person; it can be accounted for only by assuming the prior existence of a living human being.

An observer confronting his own passive thinking resembles someone who has never seen anything but corpses, who has never beheld a living person. Such a man would have to look upon all corpses as miraculous creations, since nothing in nature could possibly have produced them. When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a left-over and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness. To understand ordinary thinking, one has to see that it is dead, a psychic corpse whose erstwhile life is to be sought in the soul's pre-earthly existence. During that phase of experience the soul lived in a bodiless state in the life-element of its thinking, and the thinking left to it in its earthly life must be regarded as the soul corpse of the living soul of pre-earthly existence.

This becomes the illuminating inner experience that one can have on projecting will into one's thinking. One has to look at thinking this way when, in accordance with mankind's present stage of evolution, one searches for the source of ethical and moral impulses in pure thinking. Then one has the experience of being lifted by pure thinking itself out of one's body and into a realm not of the earth. Then one realizes that what one possesses in this living thinking has no connection whatsoever with the physical world, but is nonetheless real. It has to do with a world that physical eyes cannot see, a world one inhabited before one descended into a body: the spiritual world. One also realizes that even the laws governing our planetary system are of a kind unrelated to the world we enter with enlivened thinking. I am deliberately putting it in an old-fashioned way and saying that one would have to go to the ends of the planetary system to reach the world where what one grasps in living thinking has its true significance. One would have to go beyond Saturn to find the world where living thoughts apply, but where we also discover the cosmic source of creativity on earth.

This is the first step we take to go out again into the universe in an age that otherwise regards itself as living on a mere speck of dust in the cosmos. It is the first advance toward a possibility of seeing what is really out there, seeing it with living thinking. One transcends the bounds of the planetary system.

If you consider the human will further as I have done in my Philosophy of Freedom, though in that book I limited the discussion entirely to the world of the senses, keeping more advanced aspects for later works because matters like these have to be gradually developed, one finds that just as one is carried beyond Saturn into the universe when the will strikes into formerly passive thinking, so one can advance on the opposite side by entering deeply into the will to the extent of becoming wholly quiescent, by becoming a pole of stillness in the motion one otherwise engenders in the world of will. Our bodies are in motion when we will. Even when that will is nothing more than a wish, bodily matter comes into movement. Willing is motion for ordinary consciousness. When a person wills, he becomes a part of the world's movement.

Now if one does the exercises described in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, and thereby succeeds in opposing one's own deliberate inner quiet to this motion in which one is caught up in every act of willing, if—to put it in a picture that can be applied to all will activity—one succeeds in keeping the soul still while the body moves through space, succeeds in being active in the world while the soul remains quiet, carries on activity and at the same time quietly observes it, then thinking suffuses the will just as the will previously suffused thinking.

When this happens, one comes out on the opposite side of the world. One gets to know the will as something that can also free itself from the physical body, that can even transport one out of the realm subject to ordinary earth laws. This brings one knowledge of an especially significant fact that throws light on man's connection with the universe. One learns to say, “You harbor in your will sphere a great variety of drives, instincts and passions. But none of them belong to the world about which you learn in your experiments, restricted as they are to the earthly sense world. Nor are they to be found in corpses. They belong to a different world that merely extends into this one, a world that keeps its activity quite separate from everything that has to do with the sense world.”

I am only giving you a sketch of these matters today because I want to characterize the third phase of anthroposophy. One comes to enter the universe from its opposite side, the side given its external character by the physical moon. The moon repels rather than absorbs sunlight; it leaves sunlight just as it was by reflecting it back from its surface, and it rays back other cosmic forces in a similar way. It excludes them, for it belongs to a different world than that that gives us the capacity to see. Light enables us to see, but the moon rays back the light, refusing to absorb it. Thinking that lays hold on itself in inner activity carries us on the one side as far as Saturn; laying hold on our will leads us on the other side into the moon's activity. We learn to relate man to the cosmos. We are led out of and beyond a grain-of-dust earth. Learning elevates itself again to a concern with the cosmos, and we re-discover elements in the universe that live in us too as soul-spiritual beings. When, on the one hand, we have achieved a soul condition in which our thinking is rendered active by its suffusion with will, and, on the other hand, achieve the suffusion of our will with thinking, then we reach the boundaries of the planetary system, going out into the Saturn realm on the one side while we go out into the universe on the other side and enter the moon sphere. When our consciousness feels as much at home in the universe as it does on earth, and then experiences what goes on in the universe as familiarly as our ordinary consciousness experiences things of earth, when we live thus consciously in the universe and achieve self-awareness there, we begin to remember earlier earth lives. Our successive incarnations become a fact experienced in the cosmic memory to which we have now gained access.

It need not surprise us that we cannot remember earlier lives on earth while we are incarnated. For what we experience in the intervals between them is not earthly experience, and the effect of one life on the next takes place only as a result of man's lifting himself out of the realm of earth. How could a person recall his earlier incarnations unless he first raised his consciousness to a heavenly level?

I wanted just to sketch these things today, for they have often been discussed by me here before. What I had in mind was to indicate the regions in which, in recent years, anthroposophy has been carrying on its research. Those interested in weighing what has been going on surely recall how consistently my more recent lectures have concerned themselves with just these realms. Their purpose was gradually to clarify the process whereby one develops from an ordinary consciousness to a higher one. Though I have always said that ordinary thinking can, if it is unprejudiced, grasp the findings of anthroposophical research, I have also emphasized that everybody can attain today to a state of consciousness whereby he is able to develop a new kind of thinking and willing, which give him entry to the world whereof anthroposophy speaks. The essential thing would be to change the habit of reading books like my Philosophy of Freedom with the mental attitude one has toward other philosophical treatises. The way it should be read is with attention to the fact that it brings one to a wholly different way of thinking and willing and looking at things. If this were done, one would realize that such an approach lifts one's consciousness out of the earth into another world, and that one derives from it the kind of inner assurance that makes it possible to speak with conviction about the results of spiritual research. Those who read The Philosophy of Freedom as it should be read, speak with inner conviction and assurance about the findings of researchers who have gone beyond the state one has oneself reached as a beginner. But the right way of reading The Philosophy of Freedom makes everyone who adopts it the kind of beginner I am describing. Beginners like these can report the more detailed findings of advanced research in exactly the same way in which a person at home in chemistry would talk of research in that field. Although he may not actually have seen it done, it is familiar to him from what he has learned and heard and knows as part of reality. The vital thing in discussing anthroposophy is always to develop a certain soul attitude, not just to project a picture of the world different from the generally accepted one.

The trouble is that The Philosophy of Freedom has not been read in the different way I have been describing. That is the point, and a point that must be sharply stressed if the development of the Anthroposophical Society is not to fall far behind that of anthroposophy itself. If it does fall behind, anthroposophy's conveyance through the Society will result in its being completely misunderstood, and its only fruit will be endless conflict!

Now I want to try to improve the present state of things by speaking briefly about the three phases of the Anthroposophical Society. A start was made with the presentation of anthroposophy about two decades ago. I say two decades, but it was definitely already there in seed form in such writings as my Philosophy of Freedom and works on Goethe's world conception. But the presentation of anthroposophy as such began two decades ago. You will see from what I am about to say that it did begin to be presented as anthroposophy at that time.

When, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, I gave my first Berlin lectures (those printed under the title, Mysticism at the Dawn of the New Age), I was invited by the Theosophical Society to participate in its work. I myself did not seek out the Theosophical Society. People who belonged to it thought that what I was saying in my lectures, purely in pursuit of my own path of knowledge, was something they too would like to hear. I saw that the theosophists wanted to listen to what was being presented, and my attitude about it was that I would always address any audience interested in hearing me. Though my previous comments on the Theosophical Society had not always been exactly friendly and continued in the same vein afterwards, I saw no reason to refuse its invitation to lay before it material that had been given me for presentation by the spiritual world. That I presented it as anthroposophy is clear from the fact that at the very moment when the German section of the Theosophical Society was being founded, I was independently holding a lecture cycle [From Zarathustra to Nietzsche. History of Human Evolution Based on the World Conception of the Orient up to the Present, or Anthroposophy, 1902–3. No manuscript of these lectures is available.] not only about anthroposophy but with the name anthroposophy included in the title. The founding of the German section of the Theosophical Society and my lecture cycle on anthroposophy took place simultaneously. The aim, right from the beginning, was to present pure anthroposophy.

That was the start of the first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement. It was first exemplified in those members of the German section who were ready to absorb anthroposophy, and further groups of theosophists joined them.

During this first phase, the Anthroposophical Society led an embryonic existence within the Theosophical Society. It grew, as I say, within the Theosophical Society, but developed nevertheless as the Anthroposophical Society. In this first phase it had a special mission, that of counterposing the spirituality of Western civilization, centered in the Mystery of Golgotha, to the Theosophical Society's course, which was based on a traditional acceptance of ancient Oriental wisdom.

This first phase of the Anthroposophical Movement lasted until 1908 or 1909. Anyone who goes back over the history of the Movement can easily see for himself how definitely all the findings made on the score of prenatal existence, reincarnation and the like—findings made on the basis of direct experience in the present, not of ancient traditions handed down through the ages—were oriented around that evolutionary development in man's life on earth that centered in the Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ impulse. The Gospels were worked through, along with a great deal else. By the time it became possible for the Anthroposophical Movement to make the transition over into artistic forms of revelation, as was done with the presentation of my mystery plays, the content of anthroposophy had been worked out and related to its central core, the Mystery of Golgotha.

Then came the time when the Theosophical Society was sidetracked into a strange development. Since it had no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, it committed the absurdity, among others, of proclaiming to the world that a certain young man of the present was the reincarnated Christ. Certainly no serious person could have tolerated any such nonsense; it appeared ridiculous in Western eyes. But anthroposophy had been developed as part of Western civilization, with the result that the Mystery of Golgotha appeared in a wholly new light in anthroposophical teaching. This led to the differences with the Theosophical Society that culminated in the virtual expulsion of all the anthroposophists. They didn't mind that because it didn't change anthroposophy in any way. I myself had never presented anything but anthroposophy to those interested in hearing about it, and that includes the period during which anthroposophy was outwardly contained by the Theosophical Society.

Then the second phase of the Anthroposophical Movement began. This phase was built on a foundation that already included the most important teachings about destiny, repeated earth-lives, and the Mystery of Golgotha in a spiritual illumination fully keyed to present day civilization. It included interpretations of the Gospels that reconciled tradition with what modern man can grasp with the help of the Christ who lives and is active in the present.

The second phase, which lasted to 1916 or 1917, was spent in a great survey of the accepted science and practical concerns of contemporary civilization. We had to show how anthroposophy can be related to and harmonized with modern science and art and practical life at their deeper levels. You need only consider such examples as my lecture cycles of that period, one held in Christiania in 1910 on the European folk souls, the other at Prague in 1911 on the subject of occult physiology, and you will see that anthroposophy's second phase was devoted to working out its relationship to the sciences and practical concerns of the day. The cycles mentioned are just two examples; the overall aim was to find the way to relate to modern science and practice.

During this second phase of the Society's life, everything centered around the goal of finding a number of people whose inner attitude was such that they were able to listen to what anthroposophy was saying. More and more such people were found. All that was necessary was for people to come together in a state of soul genuinely open to anthroposophy. That laid the foundation for an anthroposophical community of sorts. The task became one of simply meeting the interest of these people who, in the course of modern man's inner evolution, had reached the point where they could bring some understanding to anthroposophy. They had to be given what they needed for their soul development. It was just a matter of presenting anthroposophy, and it was not a matter of any great concern whether the people who found their way to anthroposophy during the Society's first two phases foregathered in sect-like little groups or came to public lectures and the like. What was important was to base absolutely everything on a foundation of honestly researched knowledge, and then to go ahead and present it. It was quite possible to do this satisfactorily in the kind of Anthroposophical Society that had been developing.

Another aspect of the second phase was the further development of the artistic element. About halfway through it, the plan to build the Goetheanum took shape. A trend that began with the Mystery Plays was thus carried into the realms of architecture, sculpture and painting. Then eurythmy, the elements of which I have often characterized in my introductory talks at performances, was brought into the picture. All this came into existence from sources to which access is gained on the path sketched in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, sketched in sufficient detail, however, to be understood and followed by anyone really desirous of taking that path.

This second phase of the Society's life was made especially difficult by the outbreak of the frightful war that then overran Europe and modern civilization. It was especially hard to bring the tiny ship of anthroposophy through the storms of this period, when mistrust and hatred were flooding the entire civilized world. The fact that the Goetheanum was located in a neutral country in a time when borders were closed often made it hard to reach. But the reasons for believing in the sincerity of anthroposophical efforts were more firmly founded on fact, even during the war, than any reasons for mistrusting it afterwards. It can truly be said that the war period brought no real disruption of the work; it continued on. As I have already mentioned, a large number of individuals from many different European countries confronting one another in hate and enmity on the battlefields worked together in a peaceful and anthroposophical spirit on the Goetheanum, which we have now lost in the terrible disaster of the fire.

Then came the third phase of the Movement, the phase in which a number of individuals started all kinds of activities. As I have stressed here as well as elsewhere, these undertakings were good things in themselves. But they had to be started with an iron will and appropriately followed through. The Threefold Movement, later called the Union for Free Spiritual Life, the Union for Higher Education, and so on, had to be undertaken with the clear intention of putting one's whole being irrevocably behind them. It was no longer possible, in the third phase, to rest content with the simple presentation of anthroposophy and merely to foregather with people whose inner search had led them to it. Instead, a number of individuals wanted to undertake this or that project, and they did so. This created all kinds of groupings in addition to the original purely anthroposophical community.

One of them was the scientific movement. It was built on the foundation of relationships of anthroposophy to science that had been established during the second phase. Scientists made their appearance in our midst. They had the task of giving modern science what anthroposophy had to offer. But there should have been a continuation of what I had begun in the way of building relationships to contemporary science. Perhaps I may remind you of lectures I gave during the second phase of the Movement. I was always calling attention, for example, to the way modern physicists come to their particular mode of thinking. I did not reject their thinking; I accepted it and took it for my own point of departure, as when I said that if we start where the physicists leave off, we will get from physics into anthroposophy. I did the same thing in the case of other aspects of learning. This attitude, this way of relating, should have continued to prevail. If that had happened, the result would have been a different development of scientific activity than the one we have been witnessing during this third phase. Most importantly, we would have been saved from what I described at the earlier meeting as fruitless argumentation and polemics. Then we would presently be faced with a positive task, and could say that anthroposophy does indeed have a contribution to make to science, that it can help science go forward along a certain path, and in what specific way that can be accomplished. The outcome would have been a different attitude toward science than that evidenced in a recent issue of Die Drei, indeed in several issues that I looked over in connection with the cycle of lectures on science given by me last Christmastide in Dornach. I was horrified at the way science and anthroposophy were treated there; it was harmful to both. Anthroposophy is put in an unfavorable light when anthroposophists engage in such unfruitful polemics. I say this not for the sake of criticizing but to point out what the task of the scientists in the Society is.

Something of the same kind ought to be happening in other respects as well. Let us take a case in point; I called attention to it on the occasion of my last lecture here.

In the third phase of the Movement, we saw the Union for Higher Education come into being. It had an excellent program. But somebody should have stayed with it and put all of himself behind it, made himself fully responsible for it. My only responsibility was for anthroposophy itself. So when someone else starts an independent enterprise founded on anthroposophy, that project becomes his responsibility. In the case I am discussing, nobody stayed with that responsibility, though I had called attention to the necessity of doing so at the time the program was being drawn up. I said that programs of this kind should be started only if an iron determination exists to carry them through; otherwise, they ought never to be launched. In this case it was the group guiding the Society that failed to stay behind it.

What was the outcome? The outcome was that a number of young people from the student movement, motivated by an intense longing for true anthroposophy but unable to find what they were looking for in the Society, sought out the living source of anthroposophy. They said expressly that they wanted to know the artistic aspects of anthroposophy as well as the others. They approached Frau Dr. Steiner with the intention of being helped by recitation and declamation to experience what I might call the anthroposophical swing of things.

Another development was taking place alongside this one, my dear friends. In the third phase of the Movement, the spiritual worlds were being described in the way I described them at the beginning of my lecture today when I gave a short sketch of a certain matter from the standpoint of purely spiritual contemplation, from a level where it is possible to show how one develops a different consciousness and thereby gains access to the spiritual world. The first and second phases were concerned with relating the Movement to the Mystery of Golgotha, to science, to the practical conduct of life. The third phase added the direct portrayal of spiritual realms. Anyone who has kept up with the efforts that were made during these three phases in Dornach and here too, for example, anyone with a real feeling for the advance represented by the third phase over the first and second phases, anyone aware to what extent it has been possible in recent years to spread anthroposophy beyond the boundaries of Central Europe, will notice that we are concerned with bringing into being a really new third phase in direct continuation and further development of the first two phases. Had we not entered the third phase, it would not really have been possible to develop the Waldorf School pedagogy, which is based on taking man's eternal as well as temporal nature into account.

Now please compare the discussions of yesterday and the week before with what I have just been saying in the interests of frank speaking and without the least intention of criticizing anyone, and ask yourselves what changes these three phases of our work have effected in the Society. Would not these same discussions, identical as to content, have been just as conceivable sixteen or eighteen years ago as they are today, when we have two decades of anthroposophical work behind us? Does it not seem as though we were back at the founding of the Society?

I repeat that I have no desire to criticize anybody. But the Anthroposophical Society can amount to something only if it is made the nurturing ground of everything that anthroposophy is working to achieve, and only if our scientists, to take an example, always keep in mind that anthroposophy may not be neglected in favor of science, but rather made the crowning peak of science's most recent developments. Our scientists should take care not to expose anthroposophy to scientific attack with their fruitless polemics.

Teachers have a similar task, and, to a special degree, people engaged in practical life. For their functions are of the kind that draws the heaviest fire against anthroposophy, which, despite its special potential for practicality, is most viciously attacked as being impractical.

So the Society is presently faced with the necessity of being more than a mere onlooker at really anthroposophical work going on elsewhere, more than just the founder of other enterprises that it fails to provide with truly anthroposophical zeal and enthusiasm. It needs to focus consciously on anthroposophical work. This is a completely positive statement of its mission, which needs only be worked out in detail. If this positive task is not undertaken, the Anthroposophical Society can only do anthroposophy more and more harm in the world's regard. How many enemies has the Threefold Movement not created for the Anthroposophical Movement with its failure to understand how to relate itself to anthroposophy! Instead, it made compromise after compromise, until people in certain quarters began to despise anthroposophy. We have seen similar things happen elsewhere. As I said in my first lecture here, we must realize that anthroposophy is the parent of this movement. That fact should be recognized. If it had been, a right relationship to the Movement for Religious Renewal, which I helped launch, would have resulted. Instead, everything in that area has also gone amiss. I am therefore concerned, on this grave occasion, to find words that can serve as guides to positive work, to get us beyond fruitless talk of the sort that takes us back two decades and makes it seem as though no anthroposophical work had been accomplished.

Please do not take offense at my speaking to you as I have today, my dear friends. I had to do it. As I said in Dornach on January 6th last, the Anthroposophical Society is good; it is capable of listening receptively to even the sharpest parts of my characterization. But the guiding elements in the Society must become aware that if the Society is to earn its name in future, they must make themselves responsible for keeping it the conscious carrier of the work. The conflicts that have broken out will end at the moment when the need for such a consciousness is clearly and adequately recognized in a spirit of goodwill. But there has to be goodwill for that need to be brought out into the open and any fruitless criticism dropped. Furthermore, there is no use giving oneself up to comfortable illusions, making compromises in adjustments between one movement and another, only to end up again in the same old jog-trot. It is time to be absolutely serious about anthroposophical work, and all the single movements must work together to achieve this goal. We cannot rest content to have a separate Waldorf School movement, a separate Movement for Religious Renewal, a separate Movement for Free Spiritual Life. Each will flourish only if all feel that they belong to the Anthroposophical Movement.

I am sure that everyone truly concerned for the Movement is saying the same thing in his heart. That is the reason I allowed myself to express it as sharply as I did today. Most of you were already aware of the need for a clear statement that could lead to the establishment of the consciousness I have described as so essential.

The Movement has now gone through three phases, during the last of which anthroposophy has been neglected in favor of various offspring movements. It must be re-discovered as the living spiritual movement demanded by modern civilized life and, most especially, by modern hearts. Please take my words as meant to serve that purpose. If they have sounded sharp, please consider them the more sincerely offered. They were intended not as an invitation to any further caustic deliberations but as a challenge to join in a Movement guided by a true heart for anthroposophy.

In the morning, Rudolf Steiner was visited by Emil Molt, Hans Kühn and Roman Boos in the “Gruppe” workroom.

Rudolf Steiner: It is quite terrible how little understanding there is in Germany of foreign policy. Even social policy must be treated as foreign policy today, because if the foreign policy is bad, all the fruits of a good social policy would only go to the Entente. - At all costs, further bloodshed should be avoided in Germany through rapid intervention. This will hardly be avoidable in Berlin anyway. For me, the most important task at the moment is to give the four lectures in Zurich. There is an international audience there. I will send these lectures to print immediately afterwards.

January 25, 1919, in the afternoon, at Hansi's house

Roman Boos begins by reporting on the socio-political commission of the “Federation of Intellectual Workers” in Stuttgart and the draft of the “memorandum”, and Emil Molt on the previous socialization efforts in Württemberg and the fact that belonging to the Anthroposophical Society has been perceived as compromising.

Rudolf Steiner: The most important thing is foreign policy. Above all, things like what is happening in Paris should be prevented. Poincare's speech, for example, has gone unchallenged. It is absolutely necessary to give a presentation of the outbreak of war from a suitable place. (Rudolf Steiner asks about Professor Wilhelm von Blume, but suggests that he does not expect much from this approach.) It is an absurdity that Ebert, Scheidemann and Erzberger are making peace. They let everything happen. The necessity to speak about the actual causes of the war is of the utmost importance.

Emil Molt asks: Would something be possible with Eisner?

Rudolf Steiner: Eisner has begun to address the question of guilt, but has not pursued it further. It would be possible to approach Eisner. He is a bit of a fantasist, but he is receptive. Graf Lerchenfeld would not be the right person; there are class prejudices. He also has a habit of playing hide and seek. He does not say anything about spiritual science being behind it, and then you notice it anyway.

Emil Molt reports on Heydebrand's attempts in Berlin, also concerning] Prince Leopold.

Rudolf Steiner: Heydebrand is unsuitable because of his name. Prince Leopold was considered a great personality, but when I saw him, I thought he was a bit of a fool. As for Heise's book: Heise is not a writer. You would have to sift through the material. Heise also presents it one-sidedly. Regarding Mrs. Kautsky (with whom Heydebrand was): I knew her when she was still a young aunt, now she will be an old aunt. A publication of the war genesis by the Foreign Office would be done by Kautsky. But he can't do that. He writes in a style that only party members can understand. It would have to be discussed in a way that is understandable to an international audience, especially from the German side, about the causes of the whole catastrophe.

Without considering foreign policy, especially the question of guilt, we will get nowhere. It is disastrous that there is no interest in foreign policy in Germany. One must describe where it leads when nothing is done in this regard. One can calculate this in numbers, as Rathenau did in “Zukunft”. This appeal by Rathenau should be distributed in leaflets. One should tell people: This is what happens when you do not take up the spiritual impulses!

Roman Boos notes that Carl Unger wants to publish a lecture. Rudolf Steiner does not address this. He points to the signature under “The Guiding Thoughts of the Federation of Spiritual Workers” and says:

Rudolf Steiner: “Federation of Spiritual Workers” is a Bolshevik method.

In response to a question from Emil Molt, he explicitly confirms that it is not right to distribute these ideas anonymously and not to keep the magazine in his own hands.

Emil Molt suggests to Rudolf Steiner that they work out “something we can all sign”. He suggests founding a federation where Rudolf Steiner could appear.

Rudolf Steiner: There should already be a backing.

Emil Molt: The Anthroposophical Society is not suitable for this; it is not supposed to deal with politics.

Rudolf Steiner: Why? Who says that?

The three (in unison): The draft statutes.

Rudolf Steiner: But these are from 1911 and were long ago wiped out by the war. The Anthroposophical Society can certainly deal with politics. I always talk about politics too.

The three of them: Dr. Unger as well. But not the Society as such.

Rudolf Steiner: Why not?

The three of them: Otherwise a situation could develop like the one with the politicized Entente Freemasonry.

Rudolf Steiner: It would have been very good if German masonry had embarked on such great political plans.

Hans Kühn: Could the Society act as a party?

Rudolf Steiner: It is not an association, only a society. The individual has complete freedom. One does not need to choose this name for a party. Non-Anthroposophists should also be accepted as members.

Addendum

Rudolf Steiner: What am I supposed to do in Berlin? There is no point in giving lectures. The threads will not be picked up after all. Mrs. Kinkel, for example, is a very nice lady. But when people come to inquire after a lecture and she takes them around the branch house and tells them something, it is of no use.

We have to wait until people see that they can't do anything. They will prove that they can't achieve anything, they will run themselves into the ground.

When Roman Boos' draft of the memorandum was handed over:

Rudolf Steiner: “We will talk about it then.” Not so much about the content as about the way it is presented. It's easy to make a mistake with this.

Newsletter from the Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science.

In the letter which the committee of the General Anthroposophical Society sent to the members of the Society in response to my announcement of a youth section, there is a reference to the fact that I consider “being young to be so important that it can become the subject of a spiritual scientific discipline in its own right”. |

I really do consider this matter to be so important. Anyone who reads the description of my life in the weekly journal “Goetheanum” will understand why I think so. When I myself was as young as those who speak in this letter, I felt lonely with the state of soul that I now find alive in broad circles of young people. My contemporaries felt differently than I did. The life of civilization, of which this letter says that it no longer allows young people “to arrive at a worldview through any profession” and that young people “can no longer be led to any profession” through their “striving for a worldview,” was on the rise at that time. It was felt by young people as the latest stage in the development of humanity. They felt “liberated” from the extravagances of the ideological striving and secure in the prospect of professions that rose above the “safe” foundations of “science”.

I too saw the “bloom” of this civilization. But I could not help sensing that no genuine fruit of humanity would be able to arise from this bloom. My contemporaries did not feel this. They were carried away in the experience of “blooming”. They did not yet lack the fruit because they wasted their enthusiasm at the sight of the barren bloom.

Now everything has changed. The flower has withered. Instead of the fruit, an alien structure has appeared that freezes humanity in man. Youth feels the cold of civilization without a worldview.

In my contemporaries, there was an upper class of consciousness. They could rejoice in the fruitless blossom because its fruitlessness had not yet been revealed. And the blossom was radiant “as a blossom”. The joy of radiance covered the deeper layers of consciousness; the layers in which the yearning for true humanity lives inexorably in man. The youth of today can no longer find joy in the withered blossom. The upper layers of consciousness have become barren, and the deeper layers have been laid bare; the longing for a worldview is evident in the hearts, and it threatens to wound the soul life.

I would like to say to today's youth: do not scold the “old people” who were young with me forty years ago too much. Of course, there are superficial people among them who even today vainly flaunt their emptiness as superiority. But there are also those among them who, in resignation, bear the fate that has denied them the living experience of their true humanity.

This fate placed them in the last phase of the “dark” age, through which the grave of the spirit was dug in the experience of matter.

But youth is placed at the grave. And the grave is empty. The spirit does not die and cannot be buried.

Being young has become a mystery for those who experience it today. Because in being young, the longing for the spirit is laid bare. But the “light” age has dawned. It is just not felt yet because most people still carry the after-effects of the old darkness in their souls. But anyone who has a sense of the spiritual can know that it has become “light”.

And the light will only become perceptible when the riddles of existence are reborn in a new form.

Being young is one of the first of these riddles. How do you experience being young in a world that has become frozen in growing old? This is the question of feeling that lives in young people today.

Because being young has become such a human riddle, it can only find a living solution in “a spiritual scientific discipline of its own”.

In such a discipline, being young will not be spoken of in empty phrases, but the light that must fall on being young will be sought in it, so that one can perceive oneself in one's humanity.

Today, being young means wanting a world view that can fill one's life's work with warmth. It fears the professions that a civilization without a world view has created. It wants to see the profession grow out of humanity, not humanity crushed by the profession. To find one's way in the world without losing one's humanity in the search, requires a living relationship of the soul to the world. But this only awakens in the experience of the world view. The announcement of the Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society was made in such an attitude. In such an attitude, the Council would like to unite young anthroposophists in a youth section to work towards a life of true humanity. But there is something else I would like to say to our younger members. If we succeed in giving the Youth Section the right content, those who have understood in their anthroposophical lives how to grow old in the right way will want to join forces with the youth. Let us hope that the young people will not then say: we will not sit at the same table with the “old”. For Anthroposophy should have no age; it lives in the eternal that brings all people together. Let the young find in the Anthroposophical Society a field in which they can be young. But the “old”, if they take up Anthroposophy in their whole being, will feel the pull of the young. They will find that what they have conquered through old age is best communicated to young people. After all, young people will struggle in vain for true humanity if they flee the humanity into which they must one day enter. In the course of the world, the old must rejuvenate itself again and again if it does not want to fall prey to the formless. And young people will find what they need with the genuine “old” anthroposophists, if they do not want to arrive one day at an age of their own, from which they would like to flee, but cannot.

Yesterday I undertook to give you a sort of report on the events that took place in Stuttgart. I went on to say that I would like to convey something of the substance of the lectures I delivered there. So I will do that today, and tomorrow try to add further comment supplementing yesterday's report.

The first lecture on Tuesday was conceived as a response to a quite definite need that had developed and made itself clearly felt during the discussions of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday; they have been described to you at least from the standpoint of the mood that prevailed there. The need I refer to was for a survey of the essentials of community building. Community building by human beings working in anthroposophy has recently played an important role in the Society. Young people in particular—but other, older ones as well—entered the Society with a keen longing to meet others in it with whom they could have a type of experience that life does not afford the single individual in today's social order. To say this is to call attention to a thoroughly understandable longing felt by many people of our time.

As a result of the dawning of the age of consciousness, old social ties have lost their purely human content and their purely human strength. People always used to grow into some particular community. They did not become hermits; they grew into some quite specific community or other. They grew into the community of a family, a profession, a certain rank. Recently they have been growing into the communities we call social classes, and so on.

These various communities have always carried certain responsibilities for the individual that he could not have carried for himself.

One of the strongest bonds felt by men of modern times has been that of class. The old social groupings: those of rank, of nationality, even of race—have given way to a sense of belonging to a certain class. This has recently developed to a point where the members of a given class—the so-called higher classes or aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat—make common cause. Thus communities based on class have transcended national and even racial and other such loyalties, and a good many of the elements witnessed in modern international social life can be ascribed to these class communities.

But the age of the consciousness soul, which began early in the fifteenth century and has come increasingly to the fore, has recently been making itself felt in human souls with growing urgency and vehemence. This has made human beings feel that they can no longer find in class communities any elements that could carry them into something beyond merely individual existence. On the one hand, modern man has a strong sense of individuality and cannot tolerate any interference with his life of individual thought and feeling. He wants to be recognized as a personality. That goes back to certain primal causes. If I may again resort to the terminology I used yesterday, I would say that since the end of Kali Yuga—or, in other words, since this century began—something has been stirring in contemporary souls, no matter how unconsciously, that could be expressed in the words, “I want to be a distinct individual.” Of course, not everybody could formulate it thus. It shows itself in many kinds of discontent and psychic instability. But underlying them is the desire to be a distinct personality.

The truth is, however, that no one can get along on earth without other human beings. Historic ties and bonds like those that unite the proletariat in a sense of class belonging, for example, do not supply anything that on the one hand can satisfy the urge to be a distinct individual and on the other unite individuals with their fellowmen. Modern man wants the purely human element in himself to relate him to the purely human element in others. He does indeed want social ties, but he wants them to have an individual character like that experienced in personal friendships.

An endless amount of what goes on between human beings in contemporary life can be traced to a craving for such human communities. It was quite evident a while ago when a group of younger people came to me wanting to bring about a renewal of Christianity. It was their belief that such a renewal could be achieved only by making the Christ impulse very much alive in the sense that anthroposophy has demonstrated. This longing felt by younger theologians, some of whom were just completing their training and were therefore about to assume pastoral duties, others of whom were still studying, was the element that gave birth to the latest offshoot of our Society, the Movement for Religious Renewal.

Now quite a variety of things had to be done for this Movement for Religious Renewal. It was of first concern to bring the Christ impulse to life in a way suited to the present. To do this meant taking very seriously indeed the fact I have so often stressed: that the Christ not only spoke to human souls at the beginning of the Christian era but has carried out the promise that he made when he said, “I will be with you always, unto the very end of the earth.” This means that he can always be heard whenever a soul desires it, that a continuing Christ revelation is taking place. There had to be an ongoing evolution from the written Gospels to immediately living revelation of the Christ impulse. This was one aspect of the task of religious renewal.

The other was one that I had to characterize at once by saying that religious renewal must bring communities into being, that it must build religious communities. Once a community has equipped an individual with knowledge, he can do something with it by himself. But that direct experience of the spiritual world, which is not based on thought but rather on feeling and is religious by nature, this experience of the spiritual world as divine can only be found by forming communities. So a healthy building of community must, I said, go hand in hand with the healthy development of religious life.

The personalities who undertook the launching of this Movement for Religious Renewal were, at the outset, all Protestant theologians. Their attention could be called to the fact that it was just the Protestant denominations that had recently been tending to lay increasing emphasis on sermons, to the neglect of ritual. But preaching has an atomizing effect on communities. The sermon, which is intended to convey knowledge of the spiritual world, challenges the individual soul to form its own opinions. This fact is reflected in the particularly pronounced modern antagonism to the credo, the confession of beliefs, in an age when everyone wants to confess only to his own. This has led to an atomization, a blowing apart of the congregation, with a resultant focusing of the religious element on the individual.

This would gradually bring about the dissolution of the soul elements of the social order if there were not to be a renewed possibility of building true community. But true community building can only be the product of a cultus derived from fresh revelations of the spiritual world. So the cultus now in use in the Movement for Religious Renewal was introduced. It takes mankind's historical evolution fully into account, and thus represents in many of its single details as well as in its overall aspects a carrying forward of the historical element. But its every aspect also bears the imprint of fresh revelations, which the spiritual world can only now begin to make to man's higher consciousness.

The cultus unites those who come together at its celebration. It creates community, and Dr. Rittelmeyer said quite rightly, in the course of the Stuttgart deliberations, that in the community building power of the cultus the Movement for Religious Renewal presents a great danger—perhaps a very grave one—to the Anthroposophical Society. What was he pointing to when he said this? He was calling attention to the fact that many a person approaches the Society with the longing to find a link with others in a free community experience. Such communal life with the religious coloration that the cultus gives it can be attained, and people with such a longing for community life can satisfy it in the Movement for Religious Renewal. If the Society is not to be endangered, it must therefore also make a point of nurturing a community building element.

Now this called attention to a fact of the greatest importance in this most recent phase of the Society's development. It pointed out that anthroposophists must acquire an understanding of community building. An answer must be found to the question whether the community building that is being achieved in the Movement for Religious Renewal is the only kind there is at present, or whether there are other possibilities of attaining the same goal in the Anthroposophical Society.

This question can obviously only be answered by studying the nature of community building.

But that impulse to build community, which modern man feels and the cultus can satisfy, is not the only one that moves him, strong though it is; there is still another. Every human being of the present feels both kinds of longings, and it is most desirable that each and every one should have his need met by providing community building elements not only in the Movement for Religious Renewal but in the Anthroposophical Society as well.

When one is discussing something, one naturally has to clothe it in idea form. But what I am about to present in that form really lives at the feeling level in people of our time. Ideas are a device for making things clear. But what I want to talk about now is something that modern man experiences purely as feeling.

The first kind of community building that we encounter the moment we set out on earthly life is one that we take quite for granted and seldom think about or weigh in feeling. That is the community built by language. We learn to speak our mother-tongue as little children, and this mother-tongue provides us with an especially strong community building element because it comes into the child's experience and is absorbed by him at a time when his etheric body is still wholly integrated with the rest of his organism and as yet quite undifferentiated. This means that the mother-tongue grows completely at one with his entire being. But it is also an element that groups of human beings share in common. People feel united by a common language, and if you remember something I have often mentioned, the fact that a spiritual being is embodied in a language, that the genius of language is not the abstraction learned men consider it but a real spiritual being, you will sense how a community based on a shared language rests on the fact that its members feel the presence of a real genius of speech. They feel sheltered beneath the wings of a real spiritual being. That is the case wherever community is built.

All community building eventuates in a higher being descending from the world of the spirit to reign over and unite people who have come together in a common cause.

But there is another, individual element eminently capable of creating community that can make its appearance when a group foregathers. A common tongue unites people because what one is saying can live in those who are listening to him; they thus share a common content. But now let us imagine that a number of individuals who spent their childhood and early schooldays together find an occasion of the sort that could and indeed often does present itself to meet again some thirty years later. This little group of forty- or fifty-year-olds, every one of whom spent his childhood in the same school and the same region, begins to talk of common experiences as children and young people. Something special comes alive in them that makes for quite a different kind of community than that created by a common tongue. When members of a group speaking the same language come, in the course of meeting and talking, to feel that they understand one another, their sense of belonging together is relatively superficial compared with what one feels when one's soul-depths are stirred by entertaining common memories. Every word has a special coloring, a special flavor, because it takes one back to a shared youth and childhood. What unites people in such moments of communal experience reaches deeper levels of their soul life. One feels related in deeper layers of one's being to those with whom one comes together on this basis.

What is this basis of relationship? It consists of memories—memories of communal experiences of earlier days. One feels oneself transported to a vanished world where one once lived in company with these others with whom one is thus re-united.

This is to describe an earthly situation that aptly illustrates the nature of the cultus. For what is intended with the cultus? Whether its medium be words or actions, it projects into the physical world, in an entirely different sense than our natural surroundings do, an image of the super-sensible, the spiritual world. Every plant, every process in external nature is, of course, also an image of something spiritual, but not in the direct sense that a rightly presented verbal or ceremonial facet of the cultus is. The words and actions of the cultus convey the super-sensible world in all its immediacy. The cultus is based on speaking words in the physical world in a way that makes the super-sensible world immediately present in them, on performing actions in a way that conveys forces of the super-sensible world. A cultus ritual is one in which something happens that is not limited to what the eyes see when they look physically at ritualistic acts; the fact is rather that forces of a spiritual, super-sensible nature permeate ordinary physical forces. A super-sensible event takes place in the physical act that pictures it.

Man is thus directly united with the spiritual world by means of the physically perceptible words and actions of the cultus. Rightly presented, its words and actions bring to our experience on the physical plane a world that corresponds to the pre-earthly one from which we human beings have descended. In just the same sense in which forty- or fifty-year-olds who have met again feel themselves transported back into the world they shared in childhood does a person who joins others at the celebration of a genuine cultus feel himself transported back into a world he shared with them before they descended to the earth. He is not aware of this; it remains a subconscious experience, but it penetrates his feeling life all the more deeply for that very reason. The cultus is designed with this intent. It is designed with a view to giving man a real experience of something that is a memory, an image of his pre-earthly life, of his existence before he descended to the earth. The members of congregations based on a cultus feel especially keenly what, for purposes of illustration, I have just described as taking place when a group comes together in later life and exchanges memories of childhood: They feel transported into a world where they lived together in the super-sensible. This accounts for the binding ties created by a cultus-based community, and it has always been the reason why it did so. Where it is a matter of a religious life that does not have an atomizing effect because of its stress on preaching but instead emphasizes the cultus, the cultus will lead to the forming of a true community or congregation. No religious life can be maintained without the community building element. Thus a community based in this sense on common memories of the super-sensible is a community of sacraments as well.

But no form of sacrament- or cultus-based community that remains standing where it is today can meet the needs of modern human beings. To be sure, it may be acceptable to many people. But cultus-based congregations would not achieve their full potential or—more important still—reach their real goal if they were to remain nothing more than communities united by common memories of super-sensible experience. This has created an increasing need for introducing sermons into the cultus. The trouble is that the atomizing tendency of sermons as these are presently conceived by the Protestant denominations has become very marked, because the real needs arising from the consciousness soul development of this Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch have not been taken into account. The concept of preaching in the older confessions is still based on the needs of the Fourth Post-Atlantean period. In these older churches, sermons conform to the world view that prevailed during the period of intellectual soul development. They are no longer suited to the modern consciousness. That is why the Protestant churches have gone over to a form of presentation that makes its appeal more to human opinion, to conscious human understanding.

There is every good reason for doing this, of course. On the other hand, no really right way of doing it has yet been found. A sermon contained within the cultus is a misfit; it leads away from the cultus in a cognitive direction. But this problem has not been well recognized in the form preaching has taken in the course of man's ongoing evolution. You will see this immediately when I remind you of a certain fact. You will see how little there is left when we omit sermons of more recent times that do not take a Biblical text. In most cases, Sunday sermons as well as those delivered on special occasions take some quotation from the Bible for their text because fresh, living revelation such as is also available in the present is rejected. Historical tradition remains the only source resorted to. In other words, a more individual form of sermon is being sought, but the key to it has not been found. Thus sermons eventuate in mere opinion, personal opinion, with atomizing effect.

Now if the recently established Movement for Religious Renewal, built as it is in all essentials on an anthroposophical foundation, reckons with fresh, ongoing revelation, with a living spiritual experience of the super-sensible world, then it will be just the sermon factor that will bring it to recognize its need for something further. This something is the same thing that makes fresh, ongoing, living knowledge of the spiritual world possible, namely, anthroposophical spiritual science. I might express it by saying that sermons will always be the windows through which the Movement for Religious Renewal will have to receive what an ongoing, living Anthroposophical Society must give it. But as I said when I spoke of the Movement for Religious Renewal at the last lecture I gave over there in the still intact Goetheanum, if the Movement for Religious Renewal is to grow, the Anthroposophical Society will have to stand by it in the liveliest possible way, with all the living life of anthroposophy flowing to it from a number of human beings as the channel. The Movement for Religious Renewal would soon go dry if it were not to have at least some people standing by it in whom anthroposophical cognition is a really living element.

But as I said, many individuals are presently entering the Society, seeking anthroposophy not just in the abstract but in the community belonging that satisfies a yearning of the age of consciousness. It might be suggested that the Society too should adopt a cultus. It could do this, of course, but that would take it outside its proper sphere. I will therefore now go on to discuss the specifically anthroposophical way of building community.

Modern life definitely has other community building elements to offer besides that based on common memories of pre-natal experience of the super-sensible world. The element I have in mind is one that is needed by the present in a form especially adapted to the age of consciousness.

In this connection I must point out something that goes entirely unnoticed by most human beings of our time.

There has, to be sure, always been talk of idealism. But when idealism is mentioned nowadays, such talk amounts to little more than hollow phrases, even in the mouths of the well-meaning. For ours is a time when intellectual elements and forces have come especially strongly to the fore throughout the entire civilized world, with the result that there is no understanding for what a whole human being is. The longing for that understanding is indeed there, particularly in the case of modern youth. But the very indefiniteness of the form in which youth conceives it shows that something lives in human souls today that has not declared itself at all distinctly; it is still undifferentiated, and it will not become the less naive for being differentiated.

Now please note the following. Imagine yourselves back in times when religious streams were rising and inundating humankind. You will find that in those bygone periods of human evolution this and that proclamation from the spiritual world was being greeted by many people with enormous enthusiasm. Indeed, it would have been completely impossible for the confessions extant today to find the strength to carry people if, at the time of these proclamations, souls had not felt a much greater affinity for revelations from the spiritual world than is felt today. Observing people nowadays, one simply cannot imagine them being carried away by anything in the nature of a proclamation of religious truths such as used to take place in earlier ages. Of course, sects do form, but there is a philistine quality about them in great contrast to the fiery response of human souls to earlier proclamations. One no longer finds the same inner warmth of soul toward things of the spirit. It suffered a rapid diminution in the last third of the nineteenth century. Granted, discontent still drives people to listen to this or that, and to join one or another church. But the positive warmth that used to live in human souls and was solely responsible for enabling individuals to put their whole selves at the service of the spirit has been replaced by a certain cool or even cold attitude. This coolness is manifest in human souls today when they speak of ideals and idealism. For nowadays the matter of chief concern is something that still has a long way to go to its fulfillment, that still has a long waiting period before it, but that as expectation is already very much alive in many human souls today. I can characterize it for you in the following way.

Let us take two states of consciousness familiar to everybody, and imagine a dreaming person and someone in a state of ordinary waking consciousness.

What is the situation of the dreamer? It is the same as that of a sleeping person. For though we may speak of dreamless sleep, the fact is that sleepers are always dreaming, though their dreams may be so faint as to go unnoticed.

What, I repeat, is the dreamer's situation? He is living in his own dream-picture world. As he lives in it he frequently finds it a good deal more vivid and gripping—this much can certainly be said—than his everyday waking experience. But he is experiencing it in complete isolation. It is his purely personal experience. Two people may be sleeping in one and the same room, yet be experiencing two wholly different worlds in their dream consciousness. They cannot share each other's experience. Each has his own, and the most they can do is tell one another about it afterwards.

When a person wakes and exchanges his dream consciousness for that of everyday, he has the same sense perception of his surroundings that those about him have. They begin to share a communal scene. A person wakes to a shared world when he leaves dreams behind and enters a day-waking state of consciousness. What wakes him out of the one consciousness into the other? It is light and sound and the natural environment that rouse him to the ordinary day-waking state, and other people are in the same category for him. One wakes up from dreams by the natural aspects of one's fellowmen, by what they are saying, by the way they clothe their thoughts and feelings in the language they use. One is awakened by the way other people naturally behave. Everything in one's natural environment wakes one to normal day consciousness. In all previous ages people woke up from the dream state to day-waking consciousness. And these same surroundings provided a person with the gate through which, if he was so minded, he entered spiritual realms.

Then a new element made its appearance in human life with the awakening and development of the consciousness soul. This calls for a second kind of awakening, one for which the human race will feel a growing need: an awakening at hand of the souls and spirits of other human beings. In ordinary waking life one awakens only in meeting another's natural aspects. But a person who has become an independent, distinct individual in the age of consciousness wants to wake up in the encounter with the soul and spirit of his fellowman. He wants to awaken to his soul and spirit, to approach him in a way that startles his own soul awake in the same sense that light and sound and other such environmental elements startle one out of dreaming.

This has been felt as an absolutely basic need since the beginning of the twentieth century, and it will grow increasingly urgent. It is a need that will be apparent throughout the twentieth century, despite the time's chaotic, tumultuous nature, which will affect every phase of life and civilization. Human beings will feel this need—the need to be brought to wake up more fully in the encounter with the other person than one can wake up in regard to the merely natural surroundings. Dream life wakes up into wakeful day consciousness in the encounter with the natural environment. Wakeful day consciousness wakes up to a higher consciousness in the encounter with the soul and spirit of our fellowman. Man must become more to his fellowman than he used to be: he must become his awakener. People must come closer to one another than they used to do, each becoming an awakener of everyone he meets. Modern human beings entering life today have stored up far too much karma not to feel a destined connection with every individual they encounter. In earlier ages, souls were younger and had not formed so many karmic ties. Now it has become necessary to be awakened not just by nature but by the human beings with whom we are karmically connected and whom we want to seek.

So, in addition to the need to recall one's super-sensible home, which the cultus meets, we have the further need to be awakened to the soul-spiritual element by other human beings, and the feeling impulse that can bring this about is that of the newer idealism. When the ideal ceases to be a mere abstraction and becomes livingly reunited with man's soul and spirit, it can be expressed in the words, “I want to wake up in the encounter with my fellowman.”

This is the feeling that, vague though it is, is developing in youth today, “I want to be awakened by my fellowman,” and this is the particular form in which community can be nurtured in the Anthroposophical Society. It is the most natural development imaginable for when people come together for a communal experience of what anthroposophy can reveal of the super-sensible, the experience is quite a different one from any that the individual could have alone. The fact that one wakes up in the encounter with the soul of the other during the time spent in his company creates an atmosphere that, while it may not lead one into the super-sensible world in exactly the way described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, furthers one's understanding of the ideas that anthroposophical spiritual science brings us from super-sensible realms.

There is a different understanding of things among people who share a common idealistic life based on mutual communication of an anthroposophical content, whether by reading aloud or in some other way. Through experiencing the super-sensible together, one human soul is awakened most intensively in the encounter with another human soul. It wakes the soul to higher insight, and this frame of mind creates a situation that causes a real communal being to descend in a group of people gathered for the purpose of mutually communicating and experiencing anthroposophical ideas. Just as the genius of a language lives in that language and spreads its wings over those who speak it, so do those who experience anthroposophical ideas together in the right, idealistic frame of mind live in the shelter of the wings of a higher being.

Now what takes place as a result?

If this line (Dr. Steiner draws on the blackboard) represents the demarcation between the super-sensible and the sense world, we have, here above it, the processes and beings of the higher world experienced in the cultus; they are projected by the words and ritualistic acts of the cultus into the physical world here below the line. In the case of an anthroposophical group, experience on the physical plane is lifted by the strength of its genuine, spiritualized idealism into the spiritual world. The cultus brings the super-sensible down into the physical world with its words and actions. The anthroposophical group raises the thoughts and feelings of the assembled individuals into the super-sensible, and when an anthroposophical content is experienced in the right frame of mind by a group of human beings whose souls wake up in the encounter with each other, the soul is lifted in reality into a spirit community. It is only a question of this awareness really being present. Where it exists and groups of this kind make their appearance in the Anthroposophical Society, there we have in this reversed cultus, as I shall call it, in this polar opposite of the cultus, a most potent community building element. If I were to speak pictorially, I would put it thus: the community of the cultus seeks to draw the angels of heaven down to the place where the cultus is being celebrated, so that they may be present in the congregation, whereas the anthroposophical community seeks to lift human souls into super-sensible realms so that they may enter the company of angels. In both cases that is what creates community.

But if anthroposophy is to serve man as a real means of entering the spiritual world, it may not be mere theory and abstraction. We must do more than just talk about spiritual beings; we must look for the opportunities nearest at hand to enter their company. The work of an anthroposophical group does not consist in a number of people merely discussing anthroposophical ideas. Its members should feel so linked with one another that human soul wakes up in the encounter with human soul and all are lifted into the spiritual world, into the company of spiritual beings, though it need not be a question of beholding them. We do not have to see them to have this experience. This is the strength-giving element that can emerge from groups that have come into being within the Society through the right practice of community building. Some of the fine things that really do exist in the Society must become more common; that is what new members have been missing. They have looked for them, but have not found them. What they have encountered has instead been some such statement as, “If you want to be a real anthroposophist you must believe in reincarnation and the etheric body,” and so on.

I have often pointed out that there are two ways of reading a book like my Theosophy. One is to read, “Man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., and lives repeated earth lives and has a karma, etc.” A reader of this kind is taking in concepts. They are, of course, rather different concepts than one finds elsewhere, but the mental process that is going on is in many respects identical with what takes place when one studies a cookbook. My point was exactly that the process is the important thing, not the absorption of ideas. It makes no difference whether you are reading, “Put butter into a frying pan, add flour, stir; add the beaten eggs, etc.,” or, “There is physical matter, etheric forces, astral forces, and they interpenetrate each other.” It is all one from the standpoint of the soul process involved whether butter, eggs and flour are being mixed at a stove or the human entelechy is conceived as a mixture of physical, etheric and astral bodies. But one can also read Theosophy in such a manner as to realize that it contains concepts that stand in the same relation to the world of ordinary physical concepts as the latter does to the dream world. They belong to a world to which one has to awaken out of the ordinary physical realm in just the way one wakes out of one's dream world into the physical. It is the attitude one has in reading that gives things the right coloring. That attitude can, of course, be brought to life in present-day human beings in a variety of ways. They are all described and there to choose from in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. But modern man also needs to go through the transitional phase—one not to be confused with actually beholding higher worlds—of waking up in the encounter with the soul-spiritual aspect of his fellowman to the point of living into the spiritual world just as he awakes from dreams into the physical world through the stimulus of light and sound, etc.

We must rise to an understanding of this matter. We have to come to understand what anthroposophy ought to be within the Anthroposophical Society. It should be a path to the spirit. When it becomes that, community building will be the outcome.

But anthroposophy must really be applied to life. That is the essential thing, my dear friends. How essential it is can be illustrated by an example close at hand. After we had had many smaller meetings with a varying number of people there in Stuttgart and had debated what should be done to consolidate the Society, I came together with the young people. I am not referring to the meeting I reported on yesterday, which was held later; this was a prior meeting, but also one held at night. These particular young people were all students. Well, first there was some talk about the best way to arrange things so that the Society would function properly, and so on. But after awhile the conversation shifted to anthroposophy itself. We got right into its very essence because these young men and women felt the need to enquire into the form studies ought to take in future, how the problem of doctoral dissertations should be handled, and other such questions. It was not possible to answer them superficially; we had to plunge right into anthroposophy. In other words, we began with philistine considerations and immediately got into questions of anthroposophy and its application, such as, “How does one go about writing a doctoral dissertation as an anthroposophist? How does one pursue a subject like chemistry?” Anthroposophy proved itself life-oriented, for deliberations such as these led over into it quite of themselves.

The point is that anthroposophy should never remain abstract learning. Matters can, of course, be so arranged that people are summoned to a meeting called for the purpose of deciding how the Society should be set up, with a conversation about anthroposophy as a further item on the agenda. This would be a superficial approach. I am not suggesting it, but rather a much more inward one that would lead over quite of itself from a consideration of everyday problems to the insight that anthroposophy should be called upon to help solve them. One sees the quickening effect it has on life in just such a case as the one cited, where people were discussing the re-shaping of the Society only to end up, quite as a matter of organic necessity, in a discussion of how the anthroposophist and the scientific philistine must conceive the development of the embryo from their respective standpoints. We must make a practice of this rather than of a system of double-entry bookkeeping that sets down such philistine entries on one page as “Anthroposophical Society,” “Union for a Free Spiritual Life,” and so on. Real life should be going on without a lot of theory and abstractions and a dragging in of supposedly anthroposophical sayings such as “In anthroposophy man must find his way to man,” and so on. Abstractions of this kind must not be allowed to play a role. Instead, a concrete anthroposophical approach should lead straight to the core of every matter of concern. When that happens, one seldom hears the phrase, “That is anthroposophical, or un-anthroposophical.” Indeed, in such cases the word “anthroposophy” is seldom spoken. We need to guard against fanatical talk.

My dear friends, this is not a superficial matter, as you will see. At the last Congress in Vienna I had to give twelve lectures on a wide range of subjects, and I set myself the task of never once mentioning the word “anthroposophy.” And I succeeded! You will not discover the word “anthroposophy” or “anthroposophical” in a single one of the twelve lectures given last June in Vienna. The experiment was a success. Surely one can make a person's acquaintance without having any special interest in whether his name is Mueller and what his title is. One just takes him as he is. If we take anthroposophy livingly, just as it is, without paying much attention to what its name is, this will be a good course for us to adopt.

We will speak further about these things tomorrow, and I will then give you something more in the way of a report.

A members' lecture and a class lesson of the general pedagogical section of the Free University were held during the pedagogical event in Bern. And during the anthroposophical course at the Goetheanum during Easter week, the members of the first class were also brought together for two such class lessons. Following this course, the medical section organized two lecture series, one for younger doctors and medical students and the other for practicing doctors. We will report further on the progress of these events, which are still ongoing. However, we can already express our deep satisfaction at how strongly the participants feel the need to enrich their professional training with a spiritual view of the human being as a whole and their art of healing with a spiritual healing will that is permeated by a true understanding of the human being.

In a eurythmy performance for the members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wanted to show how the impulses that were present at the Christmas Conference at the Goetheanum can develop with a certain inevitability. The new impulse that entered anthroposophical work at this conference must also assert itself by not only bringing what has arisen in the moment to life in our events, but also by allowing what has been worked on earlier to develop further in subsequent events. The verses with which the spiritual foundation stone was laid in the hearts of the members of the Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference were presented again at this Easter Conference in a eurythmic art performance. In connection with them, Albert Steffen's spirit-filled, soul-warm poems were eurythmized, which cast a consecratory mood over this conference. Further events, taking into account the Austrian mood, entwined themselves around this content of the eurythmy performance. We had such an Austrian celebration, into which our Christmas conference, which is so meaningful for society, resonated fully.

Despite the difficulties that arise for many members due to the current situation, our Easter conference was well attended. The somewhat uncomfortable way in which the audience has to participate in the events in our inadequate rooms may well trigger the wish that fate will soon grant us the opportunity to have a Goetheanum again at the site of the one that has been taken from us.

(continued in the next issue).

I would have to read a book to you if I wanted to share with you all the extraordinarily kind words and the words of intimate connection with what has been lost here as a result of the terrible catastrophe. I will therefore only share the names of those who have signed such words of sympathy and commitment to the cause. Some of them show how deeply the hearts of many people have been touched by what may be communicated to the world from here. Some of them are also signs of truly heartfelt desires and energetic resolutions to regain what we have lost. The widespread sympathy for our work and for our loss will certainly be a source of strength for many of you, and for this reason alone I am allowed to make this announcement here. For our cause should not be merely a theoretical one; our cause should be one of labor, of philanthropy, of devoted service to humanity, and therefore, what should be said from here should also include the communication of what is being done or intended to be done. I will only take the liberty of mentioning those names that do not belong to personalities who are here, because what the hearts of those who are here have to share has been expressed more silently, but no less deeply and clearly, in these days, in these days of truly pain-stricken togetherness. So you will allow me not to mention the dear friends of the cause who have expressed their sympathy in writing. They know them, of course. (The names were read out.)

We may assume that what has been attempted here is deeply rooted in many hearts, and I would like to fill this evening's lecture by interrupting the reflections of these days, as it were episodically, and remember that it was a course that brought a large number of friends from outside to join the friends who otherwise try to work on the anthroposophical matter here at the Goetheanum. And in particular, I would like to turn first in my thoughts to the young and younger friends who have come here for this course and who, to the greatest satisfaction of all those who are serious about anthroposophy, have recently found their way into this movement in such a beautiful, deep and heartfelt way.

We must be absolutely clear about the significance of young souls, souls that are striving to acquire all that can be acquired by a young person today in the way of science, art and so on, finding each other to work within the anthroposophical movement. These younger friends who have come here for this course are among those who came here recently, saw the Goetheanum, saw it again and probably thought that they would leave it in a different state than they did on their return journey. And if I turn first to these younger friends in my thoughts, it is because everyone who cares about the anthroposophical movement must feel that everything that concerns any group or individual within the movement is their direct concern. The younger friends are, for the most part, those who want to find their way to anthroposophical work from what is called spiritual life today. And in particular, I would like to speak first to those who belong to academic life and have felt the urge from within it – but hardly generated by it – to join with other people within the anthroposophical movement for further striving.

Above all, it is the holy earnestness of the striving for the fulfillment of the human soul with spiritual life that has driven these young people. Within anthroposophy, however, there is talk of a spiritual life that cannot be acquired in direct contemplation in the easy way that is particularly loved today. And it is made no secret of the fact – not even in the literature, from which anyone in the broadest circle can see for themselves what they will find within anthroposophical work – that the paths to anthroposophy are difficult. But difficult only for the reason that they are connected with the deepest, but also with the most powerful, of human dignity, and because they are also connected, on the other hand, with what is most urgently needed in our age, our epoch, what may be said that the discerning person, who knows how to properly appreciate the phenomena of decline in our time, must recognize the necessity of such progress as is at least attempted by the anthroposophical movement.

Now it must not be forgotten that the anthroposophical cause can be of value to the modern man in many ways. He can benefit from it if he really tries with all his heart to gain a direct insight into the spiritual worlds, and thus convince himself that everything imparted from the spiritual worlds is absolutely based on truth. But I must emphasize again and again that, however necessary it is for individuals or perhaps an unlimited number of people to take this serious and difficult path in the present, on the other hand, anyone with unbiased, healthy human understanding can gain insight into the truth of anthroposophy that is completely based on real inner reasons.

This must be emphasized again and again, so that the objection, which is quite invalid, does not seemingly gain validity: that actually only the one who clairvoyantly looks into the spiritual world can somehow gain a relationship to what is proclaimed as truth in the anthroposophical movement. Today's general intellectual life, civilization and culture, they indeed bring forward so many prejudices that it is difficult for the human being to come to full awareness in the healthy human mind, to convince himself of the truth of the anthroposophical cause without clairvoyance.

But it is precisely in this area that the Anthroposophical Society should lead the way and focus its work, so that the prejudices of contemporary civilization are increasingly overcome. If the Anthroposophical Society does its duty in this direction, then one can hope that those inner powers of knowledge will arise even without clairvoyance in those who, for whatever reason, cannot strive for the exact clairvoyance that must be spoken of here; that they can still come to a fully-fledged conviction of the validity of anthroposophical knowledge.

But there is another very special path that younger academics can now find for themselves to anthroposophy. Consider what academic study should and could actually provide today as a solid starting point for coming to one's own view – and I say this expressly: for coming to one's own view – of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge, if science and knowledge and inner life within our school system were present in the way that the possibility for this is actually available today.

But consider how little younger people today are inwardly connected with what they are supposed to strive for as their science, as their knowledge, within the present civilization. Consider how it cannot be otherwise today, more or less, than that the individual sciences approach younger people as something external. They approach with a system that is not at all suited to letting the often extraordinarily significant, so-called empirical knowledge speak for itself in its full value. Yes, today within every science that is cultivated, there are harrowing truths, sometimes harrowing truths in details, in specialties. And there are, in particular, such truths that, if properly presented to young people, would act as a kind of mental microscope or telescope, so that, if properly used by the soul, they would unlock tremendous secrets of existence.

But precisely those things that would be tremendously revealing if they were properly cultivated, that would carry hearts and minds away if they came from the depths of humanity and personality within academic life to the youth, precisely those things must be said today in many cases are often brought to young people within a spun-out, indifferent system, often with indifference, so that the relationship of young people to what our empirical science has produced in the most diverse fields of information remains a thoroughly external one. And one would like to say: Many, indeed most, of our young academics today go through their studies without any inner interest, letting the subject pass by, so to speak, more or less as a panorama, in order to be able to take the necessary repetitions for the exams and find a permanent position.

It may sound paradoxical to say that the hearts of academic youth should also be involved in everything that is presented to them. I say that sounds like a paradox, although it could be so! For the possibility exists, because for those who have a subjective disposition for it, sometimes even the most dry of books or lectures can be enough to be deeply moved, if not by the power of the writer or lecturer, then perhaps by their own power, and this can happen even to the heart. But I must say: sometimes it goes quite deeply to the soul when one notices, perhaps even in the best of the young friends who come to the anthroposophical movement, that through no fault of their own, but through their destiny within today's civilization ization life, not only have they received nothing for their hearts from the current field of knowledge, but – perhaps some will not forgive me for saying this, but most of the young academics here will probably understand – but also nothing for their minds.

Today, as a result of the development of natural science, which I have tried to characterize during this natural science course, we have arrived at a point in the development of civilization where it is possible that, without any Anthroposophy, through the mere practice of the life of science and knowledge by fully human beings, young people would have to experience what I would call a kind of deep mental oppression from ordinary natural science. Yes, contemporary science is such that precisely those who study it diligently and earnestly and take its things seriously feel something like a mental oppression, can feel something of what comes over the human soul when it wrestles with the problem of knowledge. For anyone who looks around a little from this or that point of view, which is available within natural science today, will be confronted with great world problems, world problems that are often, however, I would say, clothed in small formulations of facts. And these formulations of facts urge one to seek something in one's own soul, which, precisely because these scientific truths are present, must be solved as a riddle. Otherwise one cannot live, otherwise one feels oppressed.

Oh, if this oppression were the fruit of our scientific studies! Then not only the longing for the spiritual world would arise from this oppression, which takes hold of the whole person, but also the gift to look into the spiritual world. Even if one takes knowledge that cannot satisfy the human being, it is precisely through the unsatisfactory, when properly approached to the soul and heart, that the highest striving can be kindled.

This is what is sometimes felt as so terrible, so devastating, within the field of knowledge in the present day, that no claim is made to allow people to feel how the things that are present in the present can affect the whole person that he is prevented in his young life from even approaching what is most human in nature, if he does not, precisely out of a particularly predisposed yearning, free himself from that which only afflicts him with the obstacles that are placed in his way.

And if we look away from the natural sciences to the humanities, we see that during the natural science era they have reached a state in which, if a young person could devote themselves to them with a guide that would treat these humanities from a fully human point of view, they would at least give them what I would call a spiritual sense of breathlessness. All the abstract ideas, the results of documentary research and all the other things that are contained in the humanities today, if they were to be brought to young people with at least a human interest, could pursue the goal of awaken in him the urge to ascend into the fresh air that is to be brought into the field of today's spiritual contemplation through anthroposophical world view.

Anyone who has followed the spirit of my lectures on the scientific development of modern times will certainly not be able to say that I have criticized this natural science of the present unnecessarily. On the contrary, through my lectures I have proved its necessity, have tried to prove that natural science and, finally, also spiritual science of the present time can be nothing but foundations, for they served and must serve as the foundations of civilization, which must be laid once and for all so that further building can be done on them.

But man cannot help it, he is human, full of humanity in body, mind and soul. And since today's young people have to live in an age in which they are inevitably confronted with something that does not include the human being at all, the noblest and most powerful human striving could nevertheless be aroused if only that which is necessary but not humanly satisfying were to be offered to them today in the highest sense of the word, out of full humanity. If that were to happen, our young people would need nothing more than to hear about the achievements of today's physical and spiritual sciences at the academies themselves, and from this they would receive not only the innermost urge but also the ability to absorb spiritual science in a fully human way. And from what would then live in young people, it would become clear all by itself that the anthroposophical form of science would also become the one necessary for us to advance in human civilization.

I believe that our younger friends, if they reflect on the words I have spoken, which may sound somewhat paradoxical, will find that they go some way to characterizing the main suffering they had to endure during their academic years. And I can assume that for the majority, this suffering is the reason why they came to us. But for many, this suffering belongs to the past, a past that can no longer be caught up with. For what one should actually have in a certain period of youth, one can no longer have in the same form later. But nevertheless, I believe that one thing can serve as a substitute. What can replace what one can no longer have is the realization of the task that younger people in particular have among us, to cultivate anthroposophical life in the present.

Set yourselves this task: to do for the anthroposophical movement what you already know from your own conviction, that it needs you to do, or what you can become convinced of over time in your innermost being, in your very individual innermost being, that it is necessary for the further civilization of mankind, then you will be able to carry something in your heart for longer than this earthly life lasts: Then you will be able to carry the consciousness of having done your duty to humanity and the world in an age of greatest human difficulties. And that will be a rich reward for what you may rightly lose.

If you have a true sense of the situation of young people in our age, you will also look in the right way at the fact that academic youth has found its way into our circles, and then, if I may express myself express myself, the talent will gradually emerge on the part of those within the Anthroposophical Society who, let us say, do not belong to it as young people, to develop a relationship with this youth in this or that respect.

But I believe there is a word that can come from our present mourning, that I can also speak to the oldest members of the Anthroposophical Society, and that is this: That the human being who today truly understands himself as a human being can indeed experience this within the Anthroposophical Society, which in turn must be taken seriously if civilization of humanity is to continue, if the forces of decline are not to gain the upper hand over the forces of ascent. It has almost come to this within general culture and civilization of the present day that it almost sounds comical when someone says: When a person is in his spiritual-soul life between falling asleep and waking up, he should have ensured that his spiritual-soul life can behave in the right way during this time. But within the anthroposophical movement, you learn that this spiritual-soul, as it lives between falling asleep and waking up, is the germ that we carry into the eternity of the future. What we leave behind in bed when we sleep, what is visible to us when we perform our daily work from morning to evening, we do not carry out through the gate of death into the spiritual, into the supersensible world. But we do carry out that which is subtlest in the spiritual, that which exists outside of the physical and etheric bodies, when a person is between falling asleep and waking up. We will now disregard the significance of the life of sleep for a person here on earth. However, through anthroposophical spiritual science, it can become clear to a person that the subtle, substantial, which, imperceptible to the ordinary consciousness, between falling asleep and waking, is precisely what he will carry with him when he has passed through the gate of death, when he has to fulfill his task in other worlds than this earthly world.

But the tasks he has to perform there, he will be able to perform them according to how he has cultivated this spiritual-soul life. Oh my dear friends, in that spiritual world, which is around us just as the physical world, those human soul beings also live a present existence, who are not in a physical body right now, but perhaps have to wait for decades, centuries, for their next embodiment on earth. These souls are there, as we physical people are on earth. And in what happens here among us physical people, what we later call historical life, not only do earthly people play a part, but so do those forces that reach out from people who are currently between death and a new birth. These forces are there. Just as we reach out our hands, so these beings reach their spirit hands into the immediate present. And it is a desolate historiography when only the documents that deal with earthly matters are recorded, while the true history that unfolds on earth is influenced by the spiritual forces from the spiritual world that are active in those who are between death and a new birth. We also work with people who are not embodied on earth.

And just as we commit a sin against humanity if we do not educate young people in the right way, so we commit a sin against humanity, a sin against the noblest work that is to be done from the invisible worlds by not embodied human beings, we commit a sin against the evolution of humanity if we do not cultivate our own spiritual nature so that it passes through the portal of death in such a way that it can develop there more consciously and more consciously. For if the soul and spiritual aspects are not cultivated on earth, it happens that this consciousness, which in a certain way immediately and then more and more between death and a new birth begins to shine, remains clouded in all those souls who do not cultivate a spiritual life here. When a person becomes aware of his full humanity, then the spiritual belongs to it.

Those who truly understand the impulses of the anthroposophical movement should realize that what has been acquired through anthroposophical spiritual science is a world-life treasure, a world-life power; that it is a sin in the higher sense to neglect to cultivate that which must be there in order to further develop the earth, in order to further develop mankind on earth, because its absence must lead to the downfall of the earthly. And in many ways, it depends on feeling the deep seriousness of connecting with a spiritual, comprehensive human cause, in addition to what one may more or less accept in theory from spiritual science.

And this is not something that applies only to a particular category of people, it is something that certainly applies to young and old alike. But this also seems to me to be the one thing in which young and old can come together, so that a spirit may prevail within what is the Anthroposophical Society.

May the younger people bring their best, may the older people understand this best, may understanding on one side find understanding on the other, then only will we move forward. Let us, from the sad days we have gone through, from the painful suffering we have been imbued with, let us take resolutions into our hearts that are not mere wishes, not mere vows, but that sit so deep in our souls that they can become deeds. Even in a small circle, if we want to make up for the great loss, we will need deeds.

Youthful deeds, if they are in the right direction, are deeds that can be used around the world. And the most beautiful thing that one can want as an older person is to be able to work together with those people who can still perform youthful deeds. If one knows this in the right way, oh my dear friends, then youth will indeed come to meet you with understanding. And only then will we ourselves be able to do what is necessary to compensate for our great loss, when the young, who can offer us what was once necessary for the future, can see – and most certainly then to their own satisfaction – beautiful examples of what older people can do to compensate for this loss. Let us endeavor to see the good and powerful in each other, so that strength may be added to strength. Only in this way shall we make progress.