The Rudolf Steiner Archive

An unbroken thread has run through all the discussions held here over many years: It is vitally important that those who are moved by the impulses of spiritual science should develop a sense, a feeling for the extent to which this spiritual science enters into everything that mankind has brought to the surface during the course of human evolution—I mean to the surface of spiritual life or, indeed, all life, for it is absurd to maintain that spiritual life can exist in isolation. In fact, everything that seemingly belongs to materialistic life is nothing other than an effect of spiritual life.

To begin with, the connections between material life and spiritual life are little understood because spiritual life is frequently seen today as nothing more than the sum of abstract philosophical, abstract scientific, and abstract religious ideas. From what has been said on other occasions you will have grasped that religious ideas are today often most strongly afflicted by abstraction, by ideas and feelings which can quite well be developed without any direct, real spiritual life. An abstract culture of this kind cannot enter into material life; only a truly spiritual culture can do this, a culture whose source lies in the life of the spirit. If man's future evolution is to avoid being swept into total degeneracy, a true spiritual culture will have to enter ever more strongly into external life. Very few people realize this today because very few have any feeling for what spiritual life really is. I have stressed frequently that just now it is extremely difficult to speak about the position spiritual science holds in the many painful events of our time.

A number of years ago we chose as our motto these words by Goethe: ‘Wisdom lies solely in truth’. Our choice was not dictated by the superficial whims that often govern such decisions these days. We chose this motto bearing in mind that the human being needs to be prepared in his entire soul, in his whole nature, if he intends to absorb spiritual science into his soul in the right way, making it the real driving force of his life. The wide preparation he needs if he wants to penetrate in the proper way into spiritual science today is encapsulated in this motto: ‘Wisdom lies solely in truth’. Of course the word ‘truth’ must be seen as something serious and dignified in every connection. Even superficially we find that the level of culture we have reached today—highly praised though it is—both in Europe and the world at large, shows how little souls are moved by what is expressed in this motto.

Please do not assume that I mean our anthroposophical circles in particular! This would be a total misunderstanding. Spiritual science, certainly to begin with, must, in an ideal sense, recognize its relationship to modern culture as a whole. Inevitably I have to mention many things belonging to today's culture which make it well-nigh impossible to relate in a proper way to spiritual science. But in this I refer least of all to our anthroposophical circle which seeks to penetrate consciously into the spiritual needs of our time, and endeavours to find whatever might bring healing to it without disparaging anything that it has brought into being.

There are, of course, fundamental inner necessities which were not unforeseen. But leaving these aside, we have outwardly entered upon a time in which, within that spiritual life which rises to the surface to the extent that anyone can see it in his soul, people are not in the least inclined to take truth in its truest sense, in its most fundamental meaning. In no way, not even for the sake of the inmost impulses of their soul, not even in those joyful moments of inner sensitivity, do people illuminate with the full light of truth what interests them most of all. Instead they illuminate it—especially at the present time—with the light that derives from their membership of a particular national or other community. Consciously and unconsciously people today form judgements in accordance with this type of viewpoint. The quicker the judgement, that is, the fewer the true insights that go to make up this judgement, the more comfortable it is for the souls of today. That is why there are so many utterly impossible judgements today pertaining both to the wider issues and to individual events. These judgements are not based on any kind of intimate knowledge; indeed there is no wish to base them on any such knowledge. People strive to distract attention from what is really at issue and look instead at some other matter which is not at all the point.

In this vein people speak today about the differences between nations; judgements are made about nations. Amongst ourselves this obviously ought not to take place, but in order to gain a proper yardstick we sometimes have to be clear about what is going on around us. So, judgements are made about nations, and yet there is no understanding for someone who does not make such judgements but, instead, judges what is real. Those judgements about nations never touch on what is real. Yet when someone judges those things that are realities and in the course of doing so has to say one thing or another about some government or other, or about a particular person, or about something that has taken place in politics,—whether about everyday happenings or more far-reaching matters—then he himself is judged as though his intentions were quite other than is in fact the case. How easy it is for someone to pass a judgement about some statesman who is involved in what is going on today. If this comes to the ears of a person who belongs to the same nation as the statesman in question, then this person immediately feels himself affronted. This is because he takes something that is said about a reality and relates it, not to this reality but to something that is quite indefinable if it is not viewed in the light of spiritual-scientific reality; he relates it to his nation, as he says, or to some other nation.

Thus the oddest judgements buzz about in the world today. People belonging to a particular nation form judgements about other nations without realizing that such judgements carry no content whatever; they consist of no more than the words that express them and contain nothing that has been in any way experienced. Just consider what is entailed in forming a judgement about a whole nation—and are not judgements about whole nations scattered around in all directions these days! And not only that. People are fervently committed to their judgements without having the slightest inkling of even the most scanty evidence on which such a judgement should be based. Of course you cannot expect everybody to be in possession of such evidence. But you can expect of every single individual that he pronounce his judgements with a certain modicum of reserve, refraining from placing them in the world as absolute statements. Even if we do not go as far as this, we must be quite clear about the difference between a judgement that carries content, a sentence that carries content, and a sentence that is empty of all content. We could say: The great sin of our culture today lies in the fact that it lives in sentences that bear no content, without realizing how empty these sentences are. More than at any other time we can experience today: ‘Then words come in to save the situation. They'll fight your battles well if you enlist'em, or furnish you a universal system.’

Indeed, we are experiencing even more; we are experiencing how history is being made and politics carried on with words that have no content. What is depressing is that there is so little inclination to realize this very thing. Only rarely have I met a genuine sense for what is really going on in this field. But in the last few days I did come across some passages which do show a sense for this great deficiency in our time:

‘With astonishment we hear from the prophets of our time that the old words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity were no more than “tradesmen's ideals” due to be replaced by something new. Professor Kjellén said this ...’

I must point out—this is necessary nowadays—that the professor is not a German but a Swede; he belongs to a neutral country.

‘in his paper on “The Ideas of 1914” in which he compared the old slogan of 1789 with the new one of 1914: Order, Duty, Justice! Looking more closely we find that these so-called new words are in fact quite old and pretty threadbare. Comparison between the two reveals the ancient conflict that characterizes human spiritual life, the conflict between an inner world of free personal activity and an outer world of rigid laws, coercive measures. Even as long ago as the time of Christ, justice as the fulfilment of the law was balanced by mercy, duty by love, and the legal order by voluntary imitation of Christ.

To give him his due, Professor Kjellén does not advocate the unconditional abolition of the words Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, even though they have become superfluous upon the demise of the "ancien regime". He suggests a synthesis beween them and those new ones of 1914: Order, Duty, Justice. But there is nothing new in this synthesis either. It was enough of a reality in the England of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to allow for the imperfection of every human institution.

The fact that this synthesis has now become ineffecive only goes to prove that all values and counter-values, together with whatever temporary synthesis may be current, become empty phrases as soon as the divine spark that gave them life is extinguished. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity signify one formula that gains its power from a social conscience. Order, Duty and Justice, on the other hand, must presuppose the suggestive power of a higher authority if they are to become effective. Herein, and not in the predominance of one or another formula, is revealed the deficiency that is so decisive for the destiny of modern mankind: The force of a social conscience is lacking in too great a majority for the liberating values to dominate, and the force of authority is too much lacking for those values that bind from outside to dominate. Values which are not deeply rooted in evolution can rapidly turn to empty phrases and fall prey to misuse ...’ and so on.

Thus, occasionally a chord is struck that reveals a genuine sense of what is going on. I need not be surprised at these words which stand out for me like an oasis in today's desert of empty phrases. They were written, after all, by my old friend Rosa Mayreder. They are to be found in the November 1916 issue of the Internationale Rundschau and they point to much about which we spoke together many years ago. So I need not have been surprised to find these words standing out for me; but in many ways I was delighted to hear how the thoughts of such a personality have developed over the years. Though she cannot bring herself to rise to a view of the world based on spiritual science and has ever taken a standpoint of unfruitful criticism, yet she has to say:

‘All the problems found in the external structure of the world can be traced back to one single source-the power problem.’

If only we could take heed of this, we should be far less inclined to live our lives in empty phrases!

‘At the centre of all the quarrels and disturbances that dominate the human condition stands the battle of groups and individuals for power. This battle for power between whole groups of nations or states is, beyond all empty phrases, the true cause of every war. War cannot be separated from power-seeking; those who desire to combat war must first devalue the principle of power—just as, quite logically, the early Christians did. The guise in which the power principle now appears is worse than any it may have donned in the past; for now it threatens the human soul in all its most beautiful and noble traits. It could be called the mechanization of life through the technical and economic mastery of nature. It is the tragic destiny of man forever to become the slave of his own creations because he is incapable of calculating their consequences in advance. Thus it has happened that even where he has used his ingenuity and inventiveness to coerce the elemental forces into his service, he has once again become the slave of the unforeseeable effects they assume through their combination with the power principle. Modern technology, which makes human life so much easier in so many ways, and modern economics, which so infinitely increases man's material wealth, having now become the tools of modern imperialism, turn against the essential being of the individual. Massed together in a soulless multitude, human beings are ground up by the machinery of party interests that drives today's civilization. The individual becomes a spare part, a cog; he can hold his own only to the extent to which he has the strength. But the values of soul quality established by past cultures perish in the process ... At present such cultural values survive only in countries which lie outside the realm of imperialistic competitiveness, or in rural areas and small towns where there is still a degree of leisure and repose, where the demands made on the individual do not exceed his capacity to fulfil them. These are the indispensable preconditions for a harmonious art of living; but they are sucked under by the murderous maelstrom of excesses prevailing at the centres of modern civilization ...’

Voices such as this prove that there are some—not very many—who understand what is lacking today. Yet these people recoil from grasping the living impulse of spiritual science. The very thing most able to grasp reality is kept at arm's length. The main reason for this is that there is a fundamental impulse lacking in their striving, and that is the fundamental impulse for truth. There is an urge to seek for the truth in empty phrases. But however enthusiastically they fill their being with these phrases, this urge will never lead them to the truth. To find the truth it is necessary to have a sense for the facts, regardless of whether these are to be found on the physical plane or in the spiritual world.

Let us look at life as it is today: Has the urge for truth kept pace with the sagacity and with the immensely admirable progress that are embodied in external culture? No. We can even say that in a certain sense people have lost the good will to look properly and see whether what is there in reality is rooted in any way in the truth. But it is essential to develop this feeling for truth in daily life, for otherwise it will be impossible to raise it up to an understanding of the spiritual worlds.

To show you what I mean, let me give you an example, not only of the lie of the empty phrase but also of how actual lies surge and billow on the waves of present-day civilization, influencing real life. There are many events we can now look back on which have shaken Europe to its foundations. It is necessary to go back many decades and to recognize over these decades the essential characteristics of these events if we want to form a judgement about what is today causing the whole world to quake; but we must have an eye for the realities.

I have told you before that in certain secret brotherhoods in the West—I have proof of this—there was talk in the 1890s about the present war. The pupils of these brotherhoods were given instruction by means of maps which showed how Europe was to be changed by this world war. The English brotherhoods in particular discussed a war that was to take place—indeed, that was to be guided into being and properly prepared. I am speaking of facts, but there are certain reasons why I have to refrain from drawing maps for you, though I could quite easily draw for you the maps which figured in the teachings of those western secret brotherhoods.

These secret brotherhoods, together with everything affiliated to them, were counting on tremendous revolutions which were to take place between the Danube and the Aegean Sea and between the Black Sea and the Adriatic in connection with the great European war they were discussing—every sentence I say here is quite deliberate. One of the sentences which figured in their discussions, and which I shall quote more or less literally, went: As soon as the dreams of Pan-Slavism have developed just a little further, a good deal will take place in the Balkans which is in accord with the developments in Europe. They meant in accord with the secret brotherhoods.

This is one great network that I want to bring to your awareness. The dreams of Pan-Slavism were discussed over and over again by these secret brotherhoods. They spoke of political dreams, of political revolutions, not of cultural dreams which would have been fully justified; have not we in our spiritual-scientific movement discussed more thoroughly than anyone else what lives in the soul of the East! Having seen what kind of role the dreams of Pan-Slavism played, let us now turn for a while to the realities of the physical plane. I will give one example. For many decades there existed, under the protection of the Russian government, a ‘Slav Welfare Committee’. What could be nicer than a ‘Slav Welfare Committee’ under the protection of a mighty government? I will now read you a short letter that has to do with this Committee, dated 5 December 1887. It says the following:

‘The President of the Petersburg Committee of the Slav Welfare Society has approached the Foreign Minister with a request for weapons and ammunition for the Nabokov expedition.’

The request was not for warm underwear for little children, it was for ammunition for a certain expedition connected with stirring the revolution in the different Balkan countries! You may perhaps see from this how something that is a lie, a conscious lie, can float about in public life. A ‘welfare committee’,—how innocuous, indeed worthy!—carries on the business of the various revolutionary committees connected with the Russian government who have the task of stirring up the Balkan states.

I could easily quote you ten, even twenty, such little notes. Let me add one more: In the fateful year of 1914 a certain Mr Pasic occupied a high position in the government of a certain Balkan country. No doubt you remember the name. While the Obrenovich dynasty were still the rulers of Serbia, this Mr Pasic was exiled to another Balkan country. You might ask what he was doing there. I do not want to criticize this gentleman but I would like to read you another short letter. It starts: ‘Secret communication from the President of the Committee of the Slav Welfare Committee in Petersburg to the Consular Administrator in Rustshuk, dated 3 December 1885, Nr. 4875.’ I quote the file number so that you don't think I am making this up or merely recounting an anecdote:

‘On the instruction of the Director of the Asiatic Department I have pleasure in sending to Your Honour herewith 6000 roubles with the humble request that this sum be paid to the Serbian emigrant Nicola Pasic through the kind offices of the widow Natalya Karavelov who resides at Rustshuk. Please be so good as to confirm receipt and further disposal of this sum.’

You see how even those who worked for the innocuous ‘Slav Welfare Society’ played a certain part in the fateful events in Europe. Would it not be a good thing to develop an instinct for truth by not being so careless as to take things at their face value according to a name or a phrase and, instead, cultivating the will to examine them a little? Unless this is done, conclusions are reached entirely thoughtlessly, and thoughtlessness in forming judgements is what takes us further and further away from the truth. The fact that thoughtlessness in judgement takes us away from the truth can never be countered by the excuse that we did not know this or that. The judgements we carry in our soul are facts that work in the world; we should never forget that what we carry in our soul works in the world, though on the whole it is subject to what is at work governing the whole wide range of life.

To digress for a moment, the strangest judgements about the relationships between the various states can be heard these days. The words for this—an empty phrase in the place of the truth—are ‘international relations’. Judgements are reached by people who make not the slightest effort to consult the evidence, even though this would sometimes be quite easy to find. I do not refer, of course, to those who are united with us here in the Anthroposophical Society. Nevertheless, we do stand in the world and it does influence us via at least one fatal indirect route, for we always allow ourselves to be influenced by what some people have called a major power: the Press! The effect of the Press really is most disastrous, for it falsifies and blurs virtually everything. How little would be written if those who write were really called upon to write properly! Who does not write today about the relationship of Romania to Russia, or Romania to any of the other states? It does not even occur to them that a fundamental prerequisite for saying anything about these relationships is to read the memoirs of the late King Carol of Romania. Those who write without having done this only write things which are not worth reading, even by the simplest people.

Times are grave; therefore only grave and earnest views of the world and of life can serve in these times. So it is important to sense something of a feeling that I have often described as essential: above all not to judge rashly but, instead, to look at things side by side and wait for them to speak. In the course of time they will say a good many things to us. To acquaint oneself with as many aspects as possible is the best preparation for penetrating thoroughly into the difficult and complicated conditions of life today.

Without wishing to express any judgement I should like to tell you something which will demonstrate the proper way to place the kind of thing I have to tell side by side with other things that happen. The important part played by the Romanian army in the Russo-Turkish war is well known. After the Russians had demanded permission to march through Romania, and after they had been refused, a moment arrived in this war when Grand Duke Nikolai, who was already playing an important part at that time, wrote to Romania as follows: ‘Come to our assistance, cross over the Danube however you wish and under whatever conditions you wish. But come quickly, for the Turks are about to finish us off.’ As a result, as we know, the intervention of the Romanian army led to a favourable outcome for Russia.

After this, King Carol of Romania wanted to take part in the peace negotiations. He was not admitted. So he took up quite a vehement position vis-á-vis the Russian government, in consequence of which he underwent rather a peculiar experience. There were Russian troops stationed in Bucharest and it was quite easy to be convinced that the intention was to remove the King; the situation being as I have just hinted, you can easily understand that such intentions might indeed exist. So King Carol demanded the withdrawal of the Russian troops, whereapon he received an exceedingly brusque, indeed quite atrocious reply from Gorchakov, the then Foreign Minister. He thought for a while—such people do think from time to time—and comforted himself with the notion that at least Tsar Alexander would not agree and that it was only Gorchakov who was taking such liberties. So he wrote to the Tsar and received a reply from which I quote verbatim the main sentences:

‘The embarrassing situation brought about by your ministers has not in any way altered the cordial interest I feel for you; I regret having had to hint at the possible measures which the attitude of your government would force me to take.’

I am telling you these things only as an example of how to place the events of recent decades side by side, so that out of these events one judgement or another may present itself. Only the events themselves can help us to form judgements with real content. And the events of recent decades are such that they cannot be judged summarily because far too many threads lead to each one. Furthermore, it is necessary with every judgement to bear in mind the proper motivation, the proper perspective. In this connection the most painful experiences can be had. I must admit that in the face of the great accumulation of unkindness I am now meeting in just this connection I cannot but reach the painful conclusion that there is very little inclination in the world to give judgements their proper perspective and also very little will to understand someone who tries to judge things in this way, thus finding the right perspective for his judgements.

Without stating my own opinion one way or the other, I must admit that outside Germany I have hardly met a single judgement about Germany that is really understanding and friendly. Judgements have been pronounced with immense confidence, yes, but not with genuine understanding. On the other hand, there are innumerable extraordinarily benevolent judgements about everything in the periphery. Nobody need believe that this surprises me. It certainly does not. I am not in the least surprised, but I do try to understand why it is so. The reason is that there is absolutely no will to gain a proper perspective. People do not even suspect that a judgement about what lives today in Central Europe has to be made from a perspective that differs utterly from that needed to judge what lives in the periphery. They have no idea what it means that with everything contained in Central Europe each single individual is vulnerable and threatened, and therefore that the scale of affairs is at a human level, whereas in the periphery the scale is that of state and political affairs which require to be judged from an entirely different perspective. Each is judged on the same basis, but this is meaningless in this case.

As I have already said, I am not stating an opinion but speaking about the form in which judgement is passed. Nowhere in the world is account taken of the fact that something that is not meant to relate to a particular nation is, nevertheless, inappropriately seen in relation to that nation. Nobody takes into account that the British Empire covers one quarter of the earth's land surface, Russia one seventh, France and her colonies one thirteenth. Together this amounts to about half of the total land surface of the earth! I can well understand that the benevolence directed towards this side can be quite easily accounted for, simply mathematically. Obviously one is dependent on what dominates one half of the earth! I quite understand. But the terrible thought to be considered is that this is not admitted and, instead, all kinds of moral statements and empty phrases are used. If only people would say: We cannot help but go along with one half of the earth! At that moment everything would be almost alright. But people will do anything to avoid saying this. By the way, I might as well just mention that Germany, with all the colonies she has ever possessed, covers one thirty-third of the earth's land surface.

These things must definitely be taken into account, and I ask you: Is it not essential to include such things in one's judgement? What was meant by ‘imperialism’ in the essay quoted earlier was, of course, the spread of domination over the territories of the world. The British Empire is obviously the largest. This is indisputable. I am not speaking of opinions but of facts. Please do not think that my remarks are aimed at any particular person belonging to any particular nation.

Bearing in mind what has just been said, it is not surprising to learn that the British Empire had, and still has, the highest export figures. We have to know this and take it into account. However, a remarkable circumstance arose: Germany's exports started to catch up with the British. Not very many years ago a comparison showed that Germany's export figures were very low and those of Britain very high. Now let me write on the blackboard the figures for January to June 1914. For this period Germany's export figure was £1,045,000,000 and that of Britain £1,075,000,000. If another year had passed without the coming of the World War, it is possible that the German export figure might have been larger than the British. This was not to be allowed to happen!

These things can be seen without any need to let feelings come into play in one direction or another. What individual people, who strive for objecivity, think about the events of the present day is far more important than any subjective sympathies or antipathies and, above all, far more important than what throbs through the daily press in such a disastrous way. I shall go into these things more deeply from a spiritual point of view quite soon. But I would be failing in my duty if I were to throw spiritual light on these matters without pointing to the realities of the physical plane. I cannot make everything comfortable for you and avoid hurting anyone's feelings by lifting the forming of judgements up into cloud-cuckoo-land. It is essential that I let the light of what can be said about the spiritual situation shine also on what one can and ought to know about the physical plane. So let me draw your attention to something which may interest you and which will not cause too much offence now, since I believe that all our friends here present are obviously entirely free of any prejudice. I have to carry out my duty conscientiously and this involves creating a proper basis.

There are some people today who strive to look at things clearly and see them for what they really are. Though it might seem that everyone is biased there are, in fact, varying degrees of prejudice and we should not lose sight of this. Without recommending or praising it in any way, I want to mention an article which, interestingly enough, has been published here in Switzerland: On the History of the Outbreak of the War Based on the Official Records of His Majesty's British Government by Dr Jakob Ruchti. This article diverges considerably from what is heard everywhere across half the world these days about the so-called guilt of the Central Powers. The style of the article is formally scientific, even rather pedantic, after the manner of historical seminars. And the records quoted are chiefly those of the British Government. Out of consideration for people's feelings I shall not repeat the conclusion reached, since it diverges greatly from the judgement usually heard in the periphery about Central Europe. At the end of the article we read:

‘But history cannot be permanently falsified; the myth cannot stand up to the scrutiny of scientific research; the sinister web will be brought into the light and torn to pieces, however artfully it has been spun.’

This article, the fruit of a historical seminar at a Swiss university, was even awarded a prize by the University of Berne. So there exists today an article that has been awarded a prize by a Swiss university, an article which endeavours to reveal the facts in a light that differs from that found at the periphery very frequently nowadays. This is worth taking into consideration, for no one would dare to accuse the historical faculty of the University of Berne of having perhaps been bribed.

There is yet another fact I want to mention. For some time a discussion has been going on between Clemenceau, Mr. Archer and Georg Brandes. Georg Brandes is a Dane, a Danish writer. Most of you will know of him, since he is one of the most celebrated European writers. Do not think that I am mentioning him today because I have any particular liking for him; indeed he is a writer I particularly dislike, for whom I have very little sympathy.

Without any further introduction, let me now read to you the article Brandes wrote recently, following an argument with Grey, Mr. Archer and Clemenceau. I must repeat, though, that I am counting on my earlier statement about our present circle proving true: namely, that discrimination will be exercised and that no one will believe that it is my purpose to pick holes in any particular nation. I am not giving my opinion, I am merely reading to you an article by Georg Brandes. He writes:

‘Since I have met with personal insinuations both in foreign newspapers and in those anonymous letters through which the flower of the Danish gutter airs its perfumes, I must say the following once and for all: I have the honour of being a member of three distinguished London clubs, and was president of one, vice-president of another; I am an honorary member of three learned societies and an honorary doctor of a Scottish university. Thus, strong links attach me to Great Britain. I owe England's literary and artistic world a debt of deep gratitude and I have ever been strongly attracted to British life and letters. The German Reich and Austria-Hungary, in contrast, have never awarded me the slightest honour of any kind, not even the tiniest Little Red Bird Fourth Class; I have never been a member of any German club or learned society and have never received even the smallest award from a German university.’

I, too, have never heard of any inclination on the part of a German society to award any honour to Georg Brandes, but they do heartily abuse him!

‘Because of my remarks about Northern Schleswig I have been regularly and violently slandered in the German press for the last twenty years. It cannot, therefore, truly be claimed that I have been bribed to take up cudgels for Germany.’

Very true! This, dear friends, by way of a brief introduction. I might add that Brandes was a most intimate friend of Clemenceau. I myself have seen in Austria on the estate of friends of theirs, a bench on which—so I was told—Clemenceau and Brandes once sat in the most beautiful and affectionate concord and on which the names ‘Clemenceau and Brandes’ had been carved. Since then this bench in that beautiful Silesian hermitage has been known as the Clemenceau-Brandes Seat. Lecturing in Budapest, Georg Brandes once said:

‘Since I cannot speak Hungarian I shall not be able to speak to you in Hungarian, and since I dislike the German language every bit as much as you do, I shall not speak to you in German either. I shall give this lecture in French.’

As you see, there is not the slightest reason why any German should have a particular affection for Georg Brandes. His article continues:

‘It cannot, therefore, truly be claimed that I have been bribed to take up cudgels for Germany. If I have spoken without taking sides about what I see to be the truth, I have done so for reasons other than those so stupidly hinted at by Mr Clemenceau when he suggested that I was currying favour with the Kaiser.’

I do not know whether one or the other name has been eradicated from that seat since the appearance of these words! Brandes continues:

‘Mr Archer bases his argument on the premise that the Central Powers alone (namely, certain persons) are to blame for the war and made preparations for it. This same premise turns up repeatedly among the Allies: the assumption that incomplete preparation for the war proves one side to be the lamb and the other wolf.

In my opinion the unpreparedness for war of a certain country on the Continent in the summer of 1914 proves nothing more than a certain carelessness, negligence, sloppiness and lack of foresight among the appropriate authorities. A certain nation might therefore very well have hoped, by means of war, to regain possession of some confiscated provinces. It is quite easy to imagine that public opinion has all along considered such a war to be a holy duty but that, even so, negligence meant that the military forces were unprepared.

And what applies to a land force applies just as much to a sea force.

I.

On 27 November 1911 a question was asked in the English Parliament as to whether the April 1904 Anglo-French agreement about Morocco could be interpreted, either by the French or the English Government, to include military support by land or sea, and under what circumstances. The answer amounted to a statement that diplomatic support did not commit to either military or maritime support. On the same day Sir Edward Grey said: “Let me try to put an end to some of the suspicions with regard to secrecy ... We have laid before the House the secret Articles of the Agreement with France of 1904. There are no other secret engagements ... For ourselves we have not made a single secret article of any kind since we came into office.” On 3 August 1914 Sir Edward Grey read out in Parliament, among other things, the following passage from a document that he had sent to the French ambassador in London on 22 November 1912: “You have pointed out that if either Government had grave reason to expect an unprovoked attack by a third Power, it might become essential to know whether it could in that event depend upon the armed assistance of the other. I agree that, if either Government had grave reason to expect an unprovoked attack by a third Power, or something that threatened the general peace, (an exceedingly vague expression) it should immediately discuss with the other whether both Governments should act together to prevent aggression and to preserve peace, and, if so, what measures they would be prepared to take in common.” In the same speech, Grey says: “We are not parties to the Franco-Russian Alliance. We do not even know the terms of that Alliance.” ’

Brandes adds, in brackets: ‘A really extraordinary statement.’

‘On 10 March 1913 Lord Hugh Cecil said in the Debate on the Address: “There is a very general belief that this country is under an obligation, not a treaty obligation, but an obligation arising out of an assurance given by the Ministry in the course of diplomatic negotiations, to send a very large armed force out of this country to operate in Europe ...” Here Mr Asquith interrupted the speaker with the words: “I ought to say that this is not true.”

On 24 March 1913 the Prime Minister was asked again whether under certain circumstances British troops could be mustered in order to land them on the continent. He replied: “As has been repeatedly stated, this country is not under any obligation not public and known to Parliament which compels it to take part in any war.” Does this reply conform to the truth? When rumours surfaced again in the following year, Sir Edward Grey answered on 28 April 1914: “The position now remains the same as stated by the Prime Minister in answer to a question in this House on 24 March 1913.” To yet another question on 11 June 1914 Sir Edward Grey replied: “There are no unpublished agreements which would restrict or hamper the freedom of the Government or of Parliament to decide whether or not Great Britain should participate in a war.” Without any exaggeration this can be called sophistry.
After all, there existed the letter of 22 November 1912 to Monsieur Cambon which, in the dreadful bureaucratic style of diplomatic language, unequivocally committed England to participation in any military recklessness into which Russia might lure France.’

The style is indeed excruciating.

‘Even more extraordinary was the conclusion of the speech by the Foreign Minister: “But if any agreement were to be concluded that made it necessary to withdraw or modify the Prime Minister's statement of last year, it ought, in my opinion, to be, and I suppose that it would be, laid before parliament.”

The whole world knows that this did not happen.

II.

These passages from parliamentary speeches prove that Great Britain was not unprepared for a war with Germany. Mr Archer regards it as quite definite that Germany passionately longed for a war with Great Britain.

It has been proved that England's declaration of war was so unexpected by the German government that it caused consternation. It is possible to call the German government naive in this connection, but there is absolutely no doubt that they were painfully surprised. As C. H. Norman conclusively proves, Kaiser Wilhelm had good reason to hope for England's neutrality. In the years 1900-1901 he had prevented a European coalition that would have forced England to grant favourable peace terms to the South African republics. He had shown his friendship for England by refusing to receive in Berlin a deputation of Boers who were being fêted throughout Europe. In the well-known interview in the Daily Telegraph he expressly publicized the fact that he had refused the invitation of Russia and France to join them in taking steps to force England to bring the Boer War to an end. Neither France nor Russia have ever dared to deny this.’

I could add a good deal out of that letter in the Daily Telegraph which would speak far more clearly than Georg Brandes is doing; but I don't want to add anything myself!

‘So the Kaiser was not all that keen on a war with England at that time. And it will not be easy to convince any thoughtful person that six years after the publication of that interview he was all of a sudden eagerly planning to go to war with the whole globe. It is obvious, of course, that his Government made a false calculation. But they did not want war with England in 1914, and the uncontrollable hate of the German people against the English which burst out so repulsively was obviously the result of the surprise of discovering in Great Britain an unexpected and uncommonly powerful enemy.

To the last minute, Germany sought through her diplomats to win England's neutrality. They worked cautiously. The German Chancellor proposed to Sir Edward Goschen (the British Ambassador in Berlin) that he would stand for the inviolability of French territory if Germany should happen to conquer France and Russia. But Sir Edward Grey's attitude was negative because Germany would not extend this guarantee to include the French colonies.

Now Prince Lichnowsky, the German Ambassador in London, asked whether England would agree to remain neutral if Germany refrained from violating Belgium's neutrality. Sir Edward Grey refused. He wanted to retain a free hand. (“I did not think we could give a promise of neutrality on that condition alone.”) Would he agree if Germany were to guarantee the integrity of both France and her colonies? No. (“The Ambassador pressed me as to whether I could formulate conditions on which we would remain neutral. He even suggested that the integrity of France and her Colonies might be guaranteed. I said that I felt obliged to refuse definitely any promise to remain neutral on similar terms, and I could only say that we must keep our hands free.”)

Sir Edward Grey afterwards maintained that Prince Lichnowsky had certainly over-stepped his authority in making these offers. Surely he could only say such a thing because he was, and still is, convinced that Germany had an invincible urge to do battle simultaneously with Russia, France, England and Belgium.’

Please forgive me for adding something here. From what I have just read to you we may see that a single sentence from Grey would have sufficed to prevent the violation of Belgium's neutrality. However, I do not blame Grey in any way, for he is the puppet of quite other forces about which I shall speak later. On the contrary, I regard him as a perfectly honest but exceptionally stupid individual; but I do not know how far it is permitted today to express such judgements! Anyway, one sentence from Grey would have sufficed to prevent the violation of Belgian neutrality, and it is possible to add: A single sentence and the war in the West would not have taken place. Some day the world will hear about these things.

I think that these things weigh quite heavily, for they are facts. Brandes continues:

‘As I said earlier, and this is obvious to common sense, Germany was prepared for a German-Russian war, should this arise from the invasion of Serbia by Austria. But Germany did not want to molest France (or Belgium) if she remained neutral. France, however, was determined to go to the aid of Russia. The wisdom of this policy will be judged by future generations, but meanwhile its consequence is that ten million people are spending seven days every week miserably murdering one another. Without the knowledge of Parliament, the English Foreign Ministry had committed Great Britain to assisting France in the event of a European war. Given the new and strong sympathy for France, public opinion in England might even have approved of this commitment had it been public knowledge. But if all the details had been known it would certainly not have approved of the constraint under which England was placed, for England was to be forced to go to war because of France's relationship with Russia, the only power with nothing to lose in the case of a war. Russia's population is so enormous that the loss of life occasioned by a war would hardly be worth considering, and if national passions were aroused and if the war were to lead to a victory, then this could only serve to strengthen the position of the conservative Government.

If the political position had been fully known, public opinion in Great Britain would have recognized that the consequences of a conflict could contain nothing good for the freedom or the well being of mankind. If the Allies were to win, this would only lead to an immense increase in the might of Russia, the victory of a governmental system opposed to that of Great Britain. For the Russian people, who as a people have won the heart of Europe, such a victory would bring no progress.

III.

I do not believe that my esteemed opponent, Mr Archer, can detest Prussian militarism more than I do. It is caused by the two long and threatened borders, that between Germany and Russia on the one side and that between Germany and France on the other.’

Note that this is said by a person who has never been awarded even the tiniest Little Red Bird, not even fourth class!

‘It is excusable vis-á-vis France by the fact that the French have occupied Berlin twenty times or so, whereas the Germans have only taken Paris twice. It is obnoxious because of its caste system and its arrogance. But it can hardly be said to be worse than the militarism of other countries.’

Says Georg Brandes, who does not possess even the tiniest Little Red Bird, not even fourth class!

‘Europe, including England, was worried to note during the Dreyfus Affair what forms French militarism was capable of taking.’

Of course I agree whole-heartedly with Georg Brandes!

‘As for Russian militarism, in the year 1900 our idyllic and amiable Russians, about whom my esteemed friend Wells is so enthusiastic, and who have captured the hearts of the rest of us too, cold-bloodedly slaughtered the total Chinese population of Blagoveshchensk and surroundings. The Cossacks tied the Chinese together by their pigtails and launched them on the river in boats which sank. When the women threw their children on the beach and begged that they at least might be spared they slaughtered them with their bayonets. “Even the Turks have never been guilty of anything worse than this mass murder in Blagoveshchensk,” wrote Mr F E Smith, the former English press censor, in 1907, the very year of the Anglo-Russian agreement which guaranteed and at the same time undermined the independence of Persia.

The same English writer confirmed the description of Japanese militarism by the correspondent of The Times. On 21 November 1894 the Japanese army stormed Port Arthur and for four days a rabble of soldiers slaughtered the civilian population, men, women and children, with the utmost barbarity: “From dawn till far into the night the days passed with murder, plunder and mutilation, with every imaginable kind of nameless cruelty, until the place presented such a picture of horror that any survivor will shudder at the memory to the day he dies.” ’

These things which Georg Brandes says, even though he does not possess even the tiniest Little Red Bird fourth class, were of course well known to someone who wrote: ‘War brings with it the horrors of war and it is not surprising if the most modern methods are used in war.’ Yet I heard the other day that particularly this sentence in my pamphlet has been taken amiss. It can only be taken amiss by people who know nothing about history and have no idea of the cause of such a thing. Georg Brandes continues:

‘So we see that militarism, whatever its nationality, is much the same everywhere. I wish Mr Archer would read a lecture which Dr Vöhringer gave about German Africa on 30 January 1915 in Hamburg. He would learn from this what the German inhabitants of the Cameroons, about fifty men and women, suffered when, surprised by the declaration of war, they were locked up by English officers and handed over to black guards who mistreated them. They suffered hunger and thirst. If they begged for water they were given slop buckets, and a British officer said, “It doesn't matter whether the German swine have anything to drink or not.” On the journey from Lagos to England they were not even given water for washing.’

I did not bore anyone reading my pamphlet by telling things like this; yet it has been taken amiss that I do not join in the tune that is being sung everywhere. It is not what the pamphlet says that has been criticized but the fact that it does not say what is being said everywhere. It has been taken amiss because it does not scold in the way everyone else is scolding. Georg Brandes continues:

‘This is what English militarism looks like. Is it any better than Prussian militarism when English nationalism, as with any other nation, is stoked up to the point of madness?

IV.

Let Mr Archer and other eminent gentlemen in and outside Great Britain bring to an end the eternal discussion, into which I too have been dragged, about who is guilty of having started the war and about who ought to bear the consequences of its outcome! Let them turn instead to the only important and crucial question, namely how to find the way out of this hell of which we can in truth say, as in Macbeth:

Oh horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee ...

The appetite of those who wage war is insatiable. Has it not been decided in Paris to carry on the trade war even after the cessation of hostilities? Is there never to be an end to this madness?

In any case the war will have to end with an agreement; and since the war is of an economic nature, the agreement will have to be an economic one. As a free trade power, England has shown the way to the whole world. Tariff agreements will be unavoidable; governments will be forced to make mutual concessions and it will be necessary to strive for greater freedom of trade so that finally world free trade can be achieved.

A citizen of the country which has suffered the most from the war right from the start, a Belgian manufacturer from Charleroi, Monsieur Henri Lambert, has spoken the redeeming word that can smooth the way for peace: The only intelligent and farseeing policy, in this case tariff policy, is a just policy which does not begrudge life to the other party. He has pointed out that a permanent improvement of the European situation can only be reached if the country seeking peace is obliged to abolish or at least reduce tariffs, of course only under an arrangement that is totally just to both sides. The abolition of tariffs seems to be the only sensible and effective means of preventing the economic tactic known by the English as “dumping”, of which they so passionately accuse the Germans.

Tariff agreements will also be unavoidable in the unlikely event that the war is fought to the point of a crushing victory for one side or the other. If this were to happen, millions and more millions of human beings would be sacrificed on the battlefields or would perish at home of wounds, sickness and deprivation. Supposing the victors were to decide (in accordance with the economic conference in Paris) to discriminate against the conquered to such an extent by means of tariffs that they were brought down to a lower economic level, this would be a relapse for mankind as a whole to the system of national slavery.

The underdog would, as a matter of course, make every effort to rise up again; he would utilize any dissension among the conquerors and be free again within half a century. Alliances never last as long as fifty years.

So, a peaceful future for Europe depends on free trade. As Cobden says, free trade is the best peacemaker. Indeed, it seems to be even more: it is the only peacemaker. In olden times, horses whose task it was to go round and round on a treadmill had their eyes put out. Similarly, blind to the reality around them, the unfortunate nations of Europe are going round and round on the treadmill of war, voluntarily and yet under compulsion.’

This is the judgement of a neutral citizen, but one who does not base his judgement on empty phrases; he includes a number of facts in his judgement, showing how it is possible to measure these facts against one another in the right way. My endeavour has been not to express an opinion but to indicate something that is needed in our time if we are to seek the truth. Why should it not be possible to suspend judgement, at least in one's own soul, if one has neither the time nor the will to bother about the facts in a suitable way? Spiritual science can show us that judgements made today, and so frequently clothed in such words as: ‘We are fighting for the freedom and the rights of the small nations’, are indeed the most irresponsible empty phrases. Someone who knows even the least part of the truth must realize that such talk is comparable to that of the shark negotiating for a peace treaty with the little fishes who are going to be his prey. It will naturally not be understood immediately, perhaps not until some meditation has taken place, that much of today's talk resembles the suggestion: Why don't the sharks enter into an inter-fish agreement (international is a word much used today) with the little fishes they want to eat?

People who today speak about the coming of peace say that the murder will not cease until there is a prospect of eternal peace. It is virtually impossible to imagine anything more crazy than the notion that murder must continue until, through murder, a situation has been created in which there will be no more war. It is hardly necessary to have knowledge of spiritual matters today in order to know that once this war in Europe has come to an end only a few years will pass before a far more furious, far more devastating war will shake the earth outside Europe. But who bothers today about things that are a part of reality? People prefer to listen to statesmen who declame that this or that must be achieved in the interest of freedom and the rights of small nations. People even listen when lawyers, quite competent lawyers, who have become presidents appear in the toga of a Moslem prince to conduct cases in Romania ... only this is not noticed because in this instance we speak of a ‘republic’. What more is there to be said if people are still willing to go to lectures given by such people about artistic and literary matters, about the relationships between the myths and sagas and literary materials of West and Central Europe, quite apart from other facts such as the one I mentioned to you the other day: that Maeterlinck was applauded loudly for calling Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and others ‘mediocre intellects’. But I do not wish to influence your judgement in any way; I merely draw your attention to the fact that for the forming of judgements perspectives have to be sought, as well as quite other things, if the judgement is to become truth.

We must realize that the population crowded together in Central Europe has to be judged from an entirely different viewpoint because, here, human values are under threat. For the peripheral countries, on the other hand, the viewpoint can be that of state and political values, at least for some time to come, until certain other conditions are brought about by the prolongation of the war for many years. In Central Europe we have to do with the treasure of the spirit, with the development of the soul and with everything that has been created over the centuries. It would be utter nonsense to believe that we have to be similarly concerned about the periphery; it would be thoughtless to express any such thing. Of course there is much everywhere with which fault can be found. But it is one thing—comparing greater with lesser matters—to find fault with things that take place inside a closed fortress and another to find fault with what occurs among the besieging army. I have as yet heard no judgement from the periphery that takes any kind of account of these things.

In order not to be onesided, I shall now, in conclusion, turn to something else. In order to be just, it is always thought to be a good thing to judge both sides by saying: Here it is like this and there it is like that, and so on. But the question is never asked: Is it really so? A Swiss newspaper recently published articles which, in order to be just to both sides, pointed out in quite an abstract way that lies were told in both camps. But supposing what is said there is not true? The article was about untruthfulness in the world war, but the article is, in itself, because of the way it is written, totally untruthful. Now I want to read to you—in fear and trembling, I might add—something out of a German magazine, selected at random, in order to show you the difference. What is written all around Germany is well enough known, and it is also well known that it is surely not written out of any benevolence towards the nations of Central Europe. Even in articles expressing judgements that are a little less vitriolic there are still plenty of very unkind statements against the nation who, after all, brought forth Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and others.

I came by chance across this article on human dignity by Alexander von Gleichen-Russwurm. The article is motivated by the fact that the Germans have been called barbarians, and are indeed still called barbarians in the periphery. Gleichen-Russwurm—he is Schiller's grandson—is not particularly offended that the word ‘barbarian’ is used. On the contrary, he shows rather nicely what the ancient Greeks and Romans meant by ‘barbarian’, which was certainly nothing dreadful. I shall not go into this aspect. He then goes on to discuss the various nations. The article is like many others we may find today written by people in Central Europe who are equivalent, say, to Maeterlinck. Pardon me! Gleichen-Russwurm distinguishes between nations and governments and in some cases he does so in words—I am only passing them on to you, they are not my words—that may seem terrible if a reader or listener feels offended because he is a member of that nation. I am confident there is no one among us here who will feel thus; we are all anthroposophists and can understand such things. It is not because of the words used to describe governments that I want to read you this article, but to show you how Gleichen-Russwurm—not a very famous man but one who is roughly on a par with Maeterlinck as far as intelligence goes—in no way recoils from saying to his own people within the fortress what a courageous, thoughtful and honest man has to say if he does not intend to throw sand in their eyes. Obviously, though, what is said inside the fortress ought not to impinge on the periphery because basically it has nothing to do with that. Think tactfully and you will understand what I mean. Gleichen-Russwurm says:

‘The Russian people are good natured and gentle, whatever the Cossacks, who are not related to them, might do. The criminal Tsarist Government has brought about the war, yet the greatest poet of the nation, Tolstoi, who will ever retain our respect, has preached abhorrence of war in most moving words.

The atrocities committed by the French mob, the stupidity of their ministers and the uncultured remarks of Paris journalists and writers, cannot undo the fact that France is the country of that saint of charitable love, Vincent de Paul, who still has many followers, nor that the majority of French people are hardworking and peaceful by nature.

England remains the birthplace of Shakespeare and has given the world gentle poets, selfless philanthropists and philosophers of the highest worth. Yet the country is ruled by liars and tricksters and the English people, who are proudest of their own culture, have brought into being the worst kind of modern barbarism through their manner of conducting the war.

Italy's characterless bandit Government is despicable. Everything connected with Italy recently has been disagreeable and repulsive even to her friends. Yet since Goethe we have received such rich treasures of culture, artistic sense and natural beauty from her that we shall keep her in our hearts, unforgotten and still fruitful.

The hate our enemies bear towards us has perhaps preserved what is most valuable in our nature. The bitterness shown us nowadays, our recognition of the unprecedented antipathy facing us on all sides, is like the warning whispered by the slave to the victor: “Memento mori!”

Even if spoken by vile mouths it ensures that noble-mindedness does not become overbearing, that triumphal jubilation does not degenerate into arrogance or hubris—the presumptuousness the Greek poets warned their heroes to guard against.

Schiller, concerned for the dignity of man, considered that noble human beings pay not only by what they do but also by what they are.’

You see, it is possible to form very derogatory opinions about those who are participating in current events, without falling into the trap of scorning whole nations. Judgements of this kind may be found by the hundred and if, one day, statistics are drawn up from 1914 onwards showing the way other nations are judged by Central Europe and by the periphery, the result will be a revelation of a remarkable cultural and spiritual nature! But nothing is further from anybody's mind meanwhile. At present Mr Leadbeater is compiling statistics comparing the criminal records of Germany and England, and recently announced in large print in the Theosophical Review how many more criminals Germany has than England. Then, in the next issue someone else pointed out that a certain figure had been inserted under the wrong heading and that a rectification would show the situation to be quite different. I seem to remember that he put down twenty-nine thousand criminals for England, forgetting a hundred and forty-six thousand; for Germany he included them all. But whereas the table showing Germany as the country with the greatest number of criminals is printed in large letters in the Theosophical Review, the refutation appears in minute print right at the end of the next issue.

Statistics like this will one day be superseded by others and then something of what is said in that article ‘On the History of the Outbreak of the War’, which was awarded a prize by the University of Berne, will be found to be true:

‘But history cannot be permanently falsified; the myth cannot stand up to the scrutiny of scientific research; the sinister web will be brought into the light and torn to pieces, however artfully it has been spun.’

It has been necessary to say these things in preparation for speaking next time on matters which a number of people are greatly looking forward to hearing about but which, I must repeat, may not be made as comfortable as some might imagine. I myself have no need to express one opinion or another. As a spiritual scientist I am used to looking at facts purely as they really are, without any falsification, and to speaking about them as such. I know very well what objections some people—though of course nobody from this circle—are likely to make with regard to certain atrocities and other things which are told and stirred up over and over again without any proper perspective. I know these objections, but I also know how shortsighted it is to make them and how small a notion someone who makes them can have about how matters really stand and how the blame is really distributed.

When we had our dispute—if I can call it that—with Mrs Besant, she managed to load all the blame on to us. According to someone who until that time had been her devotee but who then withdrew his esteem, she acted according to the principle: If a person attacks another person, and if the one who is being attacked cries for help, then the attacker can tell the one who is crying for help that he is wrong not to let himself be slaughtered. Many judgements made today are of a similar nature. The strangest situations can be met in this respect. Kind-hearted, well-meaning people who would never form such a judgement in everyday life, nevertheless do so with regard to political matters about which they know nothing. These people lack clarity in their judgements. But clarity is the fundamental prerequisite for the formation of any judgement, though it is not a justification for the delivery of this or that judgement in one or another direction.

When we look at the world around us as our senses and intellect perceive it, we have something we may call, metaphorically speaking, a great cosmic edifice. We form concepts, ideas, and images of what it is like and what goes on in it. What happens in this cosmic edifice, even down to the details, affects us so that we develop certain sympathies or antipathies for this or that, and these then are expressed in our feeling life. Prompted by our will we do this or that, and thus intervene in the processes going on in this cosmic edifice.

At first, people think that this building of the cosmos consists of separate parts, and so they study these parts and find them made up of still smaller parts, which they then examine, and so on. Finally, scientists arrive at what they call the smallest parts, the molecules and atoms. As I told you, nobody has ever seen these molecules and atoms; they are hypothetical—in a certain sense the hypothesis of their existence is justified, as long as we keep in mind that it is only a hypothesis. In short, we are to some extent justified in thinking that the cosmic building consists of parts or members, and there is nothing wrong with trying to get a clear picture of these. However, the people who give rein to their fantasy in thinking about the atom and who perhaps even talk about the life of the atom, or have still wilder notions about it—well, they are simply speaking about the nothing of a nothing, for the atom itself is merely hypothetical. To build a hypothesis upon other hypotheses is nothing else but building a house of cards; not even that, for in a house of cards we have at least the cards, but in speculations about the atom, we have nothing.

Based on the insights to be gained from spiritual science, people should admit that if they want to see more of the cosmic edifice than our senses perceive, they must arrive at a different perspective. They must come to a way of thinking that is as different from our thinking in everyday life (which is also that of ordinary science) as our usual, everyday way of thinking is from dreams. We dream in pictures, and we can have a whole world in these pictures of ours. Then we wake up and are no longer confronted with the pictures of our dreams but with realities that impinge upon us, that push and tug at us, demanding attention. We know this from life itself, not on the basis of a theory, for no theory can enable us to distinguish between dreams and so-called everyday reality. Only our direct experience of life can teach us this.

Now, it is also true that we can wake up from everyday life experiences, which we may call by analogy “a dream life,” to a higher reality, the reality of the spirit. And again, it is only on the basis of life itself that we can distinguish between this higher spiritual reality and that of everyday life.

Now, what we see when we enter this world can be described with the following image—of course, one could use many different analogies to show the relationship between spiritual reality and ordinary reality, but I want to use a special image for this today. Let's imagine we are looking at a house built out of bricks. At first glance, the house appears to be composed of individual bricks. Of course, in the case of a house we can't go beyond the individual brick. However, let's assume the house doesn't consist of just ordinary bricks but of ones that are in turn extraordinarily artful constructions. Nevertheless, on first seeing the house we would only see the bricks, without having any idea that each brick in turn is a small work of art, so to speak. That is what happens in the case of the cosmic edifice.

We need only take one part of this cosmic edifice, the most complete one, let's say, the human being. Just think, as a part of this cosmic edifice, the human being seems to us to consist of parts: head, limbs, sense organs, and so on. We have tried over time to understand each part in its relation to the spiritual world. Remember, just recently I told you that the shape of our head can be traced to our previous earthly incarnation. The rest of our body, on the other hand, belongs to this incarnation and bears within it the rudiments of the head for the next life on earth.

I also spoke about the twelve senses and connected them with the twelve forces corresponding to the twelve signs of the zodiac. We said that microcosmically we bear within us the macrocosm with its forces working into us primarily from the twelve signs of the zodiac. Each of these forces is different: the forces of Aries differ from those of Taurus, which in turn differ from those of Gemini, and so on. Similarly, our eyes perceive different things than our ears. The twelve senses thus correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac, but there is more to it than that.

We know that the rudiments of our sense organs were developed already on old Saturn, then evolved further during the old Sun and the old Moon periods up to the time of our earth. During our earth period, we have become self-enclosed beings with completely developed sense organs. In the Moon, Sun, and Saturn periods, human beings were much more open to the great cosmos, and the forces of the twelve signs of the zodiac affected the essential core of the human being. While the rudiments of our sense organs were being formed, they were affected by the forces of the zodiac. Thus, when we speak of the connection between the senses and the signs of the zodiac, we mean more than a mere correspondence. We seek those forces that have built our sense organs into us. We do not speak superficially of some vague kind of correspondence between the ego-sense and Aries or between the other senses and this or that sign of the zodiac.

We speak about this correspondence because during the earlier periods of our earthly planet the senses of the human being were not yet developed to the point of being enclosed in the organism. It was only through the twelve forces that the sense organs were built into our organism. We are built up out of the macrocosm, and when we study our sense organs, we are actually studying world-embracing forces that have worked in us over millions and millions of years, and have produced such wonderful parts of the human organism as the eyes and the ears. It is indeed true that we study these parts for their spiritual content, just as we would have to study each brick in order to examine the artistic structure of a house.

I could explain this with yet another image. Suppose we had some kind of structure artistically built up out of layers of paper rolls, some of them standing upright, others at an angle—all of these arranged artistically into some kind of a structure. Now imagine we had not just rolls of plain paper, but inside each roll a beautiful picture had been painted. Of course, just looking at the rolled up paper, we wouldn't see the paintings on the inside of the rolls. And yet, the paintings are there! And they must have been painted before the paper rolls were arranged in the artistic structure.

Now suppose it is not we who build up this artful structure of paper rolls, but the paper rolls have to form it by themselves. Of course, you can't imagine they could do this by themselves; nobody can imagine it. But let's suppose because the pictures are painted on all the paper rolls, the latter now have the power to arrange themselves in layers. And that gives you a picture of our true cosmic edifice. We can compare the paintings on the rolls with all that happened during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon periods, and is woven into every individual part of our cosmic building. These are not dead pictures, but living forces that build up everything meant to exist on earth. And we draw out what is artfully hidden in the structure made up of the individual rolls of the cosmic edifice—which science describes. This is what confronts us in our outer life. I have given much thought to finding an analogy corresponding as closely as possible to the facts of the matter and have come up with this image of the paper rolls with their living, active pictures. When you think this analogy through, you will find that when we first look at this structure, we cannot know anything about the paintings inside the rolls. If the structure is rather artful and ingenious, we can get an artful and ingenious description of it; however, it will not contain a word about the paintings inside the rolls.

You see, that's how it is with the conventional sciences. They describe this artistic structure, while ignoring completely the paintings on the inside of each roll. Now, you may wonder if a description of the elaborate structure of the rolls allows us to get an idea and to really know what is inside each roll as long as the rolls are rolled up and part of the whole structure? No, it does not! Conventional science is completely unable to arrive at the idea that the spiritual underlies our cosmic edifice. Therefore, simply continuing along the lines of conventional science will not lead to an understanding of spiritual science; something else must be added, something that has nothing to do with ordinary science.

Now picture all these layers of rolls; we can easily describe them and find them interesting and beautiful. Maybe some rolls are more slanted than others; maybe some are curved, and so on; all this can be nicely described. But in order to find out that there is a picture inside each roll, we will have to take out one of the paper rolls and unroll it. In other words, something special must be added to the human soul if we are to advance from the ordinary scientific outlook to that of the science of the spirit. The soul must be taken hold of by something of a special nature. This is what is so difficult to understand for our materialist culture. Yet, this must be understood again as it was in earlier cultural epochs when a spiritual world view permeated the physical one. In ancient times, people were always aware that everything they had to know about the spiritual content of the world was based on the spiritual taking hold of the soul. That is why people back then spoke not only about science, but also about initiation and the like.

Another analogy, one taken from the ancient traditions of spiritual science, will make the matter completely clear to you if you think it through. In spiritual science we speak of an “occult reading of the world,” and rightly so. What conventional science is doing cannot be called “reading the world.” If you look at what is written on a page of some book or other publication and you can't read at all, then what is written there will of course remain completely in comprehensible to you. Still, you could describe the handwriting; you could describe the lines, loops, and crossbars; you could tell what the individual letters look like and how they are combined. It will be a nice description, not unlike the one contemporary science gives of outer physical reality or the one contemporary history provides. However, this is not the same as reading.

Obviously, people do not learn to read by taking a page from a book, without having any idea what it means to read, and trying to figure out the meaning of the text from the shape of the letters. Reading is taught in childhood. We learn to read not by describing the shape of the letters, but because something spiritual is conveyed to us, and we are mentally and spiritually stimulated to read. It is the same with everything we call the higher and lower degrees of initiation. Initiation was not based on teaching souls to describe what was outside them, but on teaching them to read it, to decipher, so to speak, the meaning of the world. Thus, it was with good reason that what is spiritual in the world was called “The Word,” for the world has to be read if it is to be understood spiritually. And we do not learn to read by memorizing the shape of the letters but by receiving spiritual impulses.

That is what I want to make clear through the presentations in our circles. As you remember the themes running through our lectures, you will see I have always tried to use images. Today I am also using them, for it is only through images that one can lead the way into the spiritual. As soon as images are crammed into concepts applying only to the physical plane, they no longer contain what they should. This confuses people because they cannot grasp what is given in images in such a way that it is a true reality for them. Right away, they think of the images themselves in completely materialistic terms. When we look at more primitive cultures, we see that people then did not have our modern concepts but thought in images and expressed their reality in them. Even in Asian cultures, which are somewhat atavistic because they have kept features from earlier times, you find that to meaningfully express something profound, people always speak in images, images that definitely have the significance of a reality.

Let us take an example where the image really has the significance of an immediate reality, of a coarse and rough reality, so to speak. Europeans frequently find it very hard to understand Asians who have preserved older, atavistic ideas of reality; they often have only a very rough understanding of Asians. There is a very beautiful Asian novella telling the following story.

Once upon a time there was a couple, and they had a daughter. The daughter grew up and was sent to school in the capital because she showed special talents. On leaving school, she married a merchant, an acquaintance of her father. She had a son and died when the boy was four years old. The day after the mother's funeral, the child suddenly said: “Mother has gone upstairs to the top floor, and she must be there now!” And the whole family went upstairs.

Now we must put ourselves into the Asian soul in order to understand what follows. I am telling you something bordering closely on reality. Yet if a European were told by a four-year-old that his mother, who had been buried the day before, was upstairs and if he were then to go up with a candle to look around, he would of course find nothing there. The whole thing would be denied. In other words, we have to try to put ourselves into the Asian mind.

Well, the family went up there with a light and found the mother actually standing there before a dresser and staring at it. All the drawers were closed, and the people felt that there had to be something in the dresser that was troubling her. They emptied the drawers and took the items that had been in them to the temple to store them there. In that way those things would be removed from the world. They believed that now the soul would not return anymore; they knew it would return only if something was still binding it to this world.

However, the soul returned anyway! Every evening when the family looked upstairs, she was there. Finally, the family went to a wise guardian of the temple; he came, said he must be left undisturbed, and recited his sutras. And, when the “hour of the rat” struck—in the Orient, the time between midnight and two in the morning is called the hour of the rat—there was the woman again, staring at a certain spot on the dresser. He asked her if anything was there, and she gave him to understand by a gesture that there was indeed something. He opened the first drawer but nothing was in it, the second, nothing, the third, nothing, the fourth and still nothing. Then it occurred to him to lift up the paper lining of the drawers, and there between the last layer of paper and the bottom of the drawer he found a letter. He promised to tell nobody about this letter and to burn it in the temple. He did so, and the soul never returned again.

Now this oriental story actually agrees with reality; it expresses reality. It would be very difficult to present this matter in European concepts. Besides, the conceptions of modern Europeans are still too coarse. They think when something is real, then everybody must be able to see it. Europeans generally allow only for two things; either everyone sees something, and then it is a reality, or not everyone sees it, and then it is subjective and not objective. Now this distinction between subjective and objective applies only to the physical world but has no meaning in the spiritual world. There we cannot call anything others do not see subjective but not objective.

Now you may say that such things as told in that story also exist in Europe. Indeed, they do, but Europeans are generally glad to say it is only fiction and is not necessarily true. That is why it is so much easier to speak about the spiritual world in fiction. Fiction does not lay any claim to truth. People are content when they do not have to believe what is said in stories and the like. However, the objection that this is after all only a novella does not count. Europeans obviously have little understanding of Asians or they would not say such things. What Europeans call novellas, or art, is a most superfluous and useless game to Asians and means nothing to them. They even make fun of our telling stories about things that do not exist. Asians do not understand this. In what they call works of art, they tell only about what really exists, albeit in the spiritual world. That is the profound difference between the European and the Asian world views.

That Europeans write novellas about things that do not exist is, according to the Oriental view, a highly superfluous activity. In their view, all our art is only a rather superfluous and useless occupation. Clearly, we have to understand the Asian art works we possess as Imaginations of spiritual reality; otherwise we will never understand them at all. We Europeans in turn judge Asian stories not by Asian standards but by our own and call them fanciful and beautiful fiction, products of the fertile, unbridled Oriental imagination.

People will gradually have to realize that we have to speak more and more in images. Of course, if we were to speak in pictures only, we would be going against modern European culture, so we can't do that. But we can gradually allow ordinary thinking, applicable only on the physical plane, to turn into thinking about the spiritual world, and then into pictorial thinking, which develops under the influence of the spiritual world. Natural scientists also develop a view of the world, but if they think their view is clear and comprehensible, they make the same mistake as we would if we claimed we could paint a portrait, and the subject would then step out of the canvas and walk around the room.

In my latest book, Vom Menschenrätsel, I move from the usual logical presentation to a pictorial one.¹ This has to become our general style of presentation if spiritual science is really to become a part of Western civilization. A philosophical treatise about the same matters would cite innumerable logical arguments, would turn the most elaborate and artificial phrases; yet it would be virtually dead. It would aim only at understanding the outer layering of the rolls, not what lives as paintings on the inside of each roll. These things become meaningful only when we apply them in our lives, for that is how we learn to understand life. So-called logical proofs have to be imbued with life before we can understand spiritual science in a living way.

As you know, some people are musical and others are not, and there is a very great difference between those who are musical and those who are not. In terms of the soul a musical person is quite different from an unmusical one. I do not mean this as a criticism of unmusical people; it is simply a statement of fact. Those who look more closely at life may perhaps not go so far as to agree with Shakespeare's statement, “The man that hath no music in himself ... Is fit for such treasons, stratagems and spoils ... Let no such man be trusted.”²

Though we may not arrive right away at that conclusion, there is a certain difference in the souls of musical and unmusical persons.

Now, you may want to know why there are musical and unmusical people. If you look for an answer in psychology, which follows along the lines of the natural sciences, I do not think you will find much that could cast a light on this question. If psychology were to explain why one person is musical and another is not, if it were to deal with such subtleties, then it would finally do some good.

However, there is yet another difference between human beings. We find people who go through life and are, in a sense, hardly touched by what goes on around them. Others go through life with so open a soul that they are deeply affected by what is going on around them. They feel deep joy over some things and suffer over others; they feel happiness about some things and sadness about others. There are those who are dulled to impressions and those who are sensitive and empathize with all the world. There are people who shortly after entering a room that is not too crowded have a certain rapport with the others, because they can feel very quickly what the others feel by way of so-called imponderables. On the other hand, there are individuals who come into contact with many people but do not really get to know a single one of them because they do not have the gift I have just described. They judge others by what they themselves are, and when these others are different from them, they really consider them more or less bad people.

Still, there are those who give their time and attention to others, sharing their experiences. As a rule these are people who can also empathize with animals, with beetles and sparrows, who can feel joy with some events and sorrow with others. Notice how often this happens in life, especially at a certain age; young people are happy about all kinds of things. They are up one minute and down the next, while other people call them stupid because, to their minds, nothing really matters much anyway. So, there exist these two types of people. Of course, the two qualities are sometimes more and sometimes less developed; they are not necessarily very pronounced but are still clearly noticeable.

Now, the spiritual scientist, trying to understand the world from his point of view, comes to the conclusion that those people are musical in this life who empathized with everything and moved easily from joy to sorrow and from sorrow to joy in their previous life. This was internalized, and that is how the rhythmical flexibility of the musical soul developed. On the other hand, people who were dulled in their sensitivity to outer events in the preceding incarnation do not become musical. Nevertheless, they may have other excellent qualities, may even have been great world reformers and have influenced world history.

Imagine a person living in Rome at the time when Michelangelo and Raphael produced their great works and not seeing anything but immorality in the Rome of that time. Now Rome was indeed immoral and decadent. But this individual ignored everything that was not immoral, for instance, the art of Michelangelo and Raphael. Perhaps he became a very important personality, a reformer who accomplished great things. What I am telling you is not meant as malicious criticism. Still, people are unmusical because in the previous incarnation they did not receive vivid impressions of things that do deeply impress other souls.

Think how transparent life would become and how well we would be able to understand others if we approached them with such knowledge. And when we keep in mind that spiritual science imbues our souls with a longing to perceive in pictures, then all this should seem to us something desirable.

Of course, if everything were limited to concepts and if spiritual science were to dissect everyone and investigate what the person was like in previous incarnations, then people would do well to be on their guard against spiritual science. No one would venture forth among people anymore if they would analyze like this. However, this would happen only if we worked with crude concepts. If we stay with pictures, the latter lay hold of our feelings, and we arrive at an emotional understanding of others, which we do not need to transform into concepts. We turn it into concepts only when we express it as a general truth. It is quite all right to talk about the flexibility of the soul in a preceding incarnation and musicality in a later one, as I have done, but it would be in poor taste if I were to approach a person who is musical and describe what he or she was like in the previous incarnation based on this talent. These truths are derived from individual details, but the point is not to apply them to details. This must be understood in the deepest sense.

Most people may understand truths like these, but when we go a bit further, then what is meant to enlighten humanity can easily lead to nonsense. For example, we often speak about reincarnation in general terms, and at one time, I talked to one of our branch groups about the relationship between reincarnation and self-knowledge, a theme that deserves some attention. I said it would be good to try to apply certain concepts we acquire from spiritual science to our efforts to understand ourselves. I explained that at the beginning of our life karma often brings us into contact with people who were connected with us at about the middle of our previous life, when we were in our thirties. In other words, we are not right away with the people we were with at the corresponding time in our earlier incarnation. This is how I have explained various rules of reincarnation; you can also find in my lectures how reincarnation can be applied to self-knowledge. Well, what did all this lead to in those days? It turned out that shortly thereafter a number of people founded a sort of “Club of the Reincarnated.” Yes, indeed, there was a clique that explained who each member had been in the preceding incarnation or even in all previous lives. Of course they had all been exceedingly eminent figures in human history, that goes without saying, and they had all been connected in their earlier lives.

That was a nuisance for a long time. Naturally this is all terrible because it violates what I have emphasized, namely, that if you are to know anything about your previous incarnation, in our era you will not understand it from within yourself. Rather, your attention will be drawn to it through some outer event or through another person. In our time it is generally false when somebody looks within and then claims to have been this or that person. If we are to know anything, it will be told to us from outside.

Those who founded the “Club of the Reincarnated” would have had to wait a long time before being told about their previous incarnations. Yet they had all been important personalities, the most important in human history! When the thing became known, and those people were asked why they had done all this, they answered that they did it because I had said in a lecture one should cultivate self-knowledge in the light of reincarnation. Since then they had all been busy thinking about who they had been in previous lives and how they had been connected with each other.

In such a case we sin against the reverence we should have for the great spiritual truths. This reverence consists in staying appropriately with the image, with the metaphor; only when it is really necessary should the picture be left behind, and should we go beyond the metaphor. In spiritual science we have to develop reverence and to realize that this sophistry, this putting things into the concept, is always a bad thing. It is always bad to think about spiritual matters in the same way we think about things on the physical plane. Indeed, when we acquire this reverence, we also develop certain moral qualities, which cannot unfold if we don't carry all this in our soul in the right way. Accordingly, spiritual science will also lead to a moral uplifting of our modern culture.

Now we Europeans say—and rightly so—that because we can see the Christ Mystery in our spiritual life, we have an advantage over other cultures, for example, over the Asian or oriental ones. What those cultures know about the spiritual does not include the Christ Being. The Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, Persians, do not include the Christ Being in their thinking about the spiritual interrelationships in the world. We are therefore right in calling the Asian world view atavistic, a relic of an earlier age. Though those people may have an exceedingly lofty understanding of the world, as, for instance, in the Vedanta philosophy, their inability to understand the Christ Mystery makes their world view an atavistic one. To be able to penetrate deeply into certain connections is not necessarily a sign of great spiritual heights.

For example, I used to know a man who was among us for a long time and even belonged to the “Club of the Reincarnated,” and he propounded excellent theories about certain conditions of life on Atlantis. Continuing along the lines of my book on Atlantis, this person came to very interesting conclusions that were true. Yet, he was so loosely connected to our movement that he left it when external reasons made it convenient for him to do so. Under certain conditions, it takes only a particular formation of the etheric body to see into supersensible regions. However, if spiritual science is to flow in a living way into our culture, it has to take hold of the whole person so that he or she can grow close to its deepest impulses. And then spiritual science will create what our culture, which is developing more and more into a materialistic one, is lacking.

Thus, we are right in saying we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over the Asian cultures. But what do Asians say about this? Now, I am not telling you something I just made up; I am telling you what the more reasonable Asians really say. They agree we have the advantage of the Christ Mystery over them. They say, “That is something we do not have, and that's why you Europeans think you are on a higher stage of cultural development. However, you also say, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and your religion tells you to love one another. But when we look at how you live, it does not seem as though you are doing that. You send missionaries to us in Asia who tell us all kinds of great things; however, when we come to Europe, we find people do not at all live as they should if all we've been told were true.” Well, that's what the Asians say.

Now just think whether they are so entirely wrong. At a religious convention where people from all religions were to speak, this case was discussed, and the Asian representatives said what I have just told you. They said, “You send us missionaries, which is very nice. However, you have had Christianity for two thousand years now, and we cannot see that it has advanced your moral development so much beyond ours.”

There are good reasons for this, my dear friends. You see, Asians live much more in the group-soul and much less as individuals. Morals are in a sense innate to them, inborn through the group-soul. Europeans, precisely because they are developing their I, must leave the group-soul behind and must be left to their own resources. That is why egoism inevitably had to appear. It goes hand in hand with individualism. People will only gradually be able to come together again by understanding Christianity in a higher sense.

Much has prevented those who have thought about Christianity, even the best of them, from truly understanding the consequences of the Mystery of Golgotha. Granted, it is certainly very “profound” to say we must experience the Christ in our own inner being. You see, there is what I would like to call a symbolical theosophy. As you know, I have always spoken out against this theosophy that wants to explain everything as symbols. It explains even the resurrection of Christ as merely an inner experience even though in reality it is a historical event. Christ really did rise again in the world, but many a theosophist finds it easier to deal with the matter by claiming it is merely an inner process. As you know, this was the special skill of the late Franz Hartmann; in every lecture he repeatedly explained theosophy to his audience by saying that one has to understand oneself inwardly, to comprehend God in oneself, and so on.³

Now if you understand the Gospels properly, you will not find any grounds for the idea that the Gospels advocate people should experience the Christ only inwardly. There are theosophical symbolists who reinterpret various passages, but in reality everything in the Gospels confirms the truth of the great word, “Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.” The Christ is a social phenomenon. The Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha as a reality, and He is here as a reality, belonging not to the individual but to the common life of all people. What He does is what is important. These things can often be better understood in pictures than in abstract concepts.

Just recently we went to see a friend on leave from the front lines of the battlefield, where he has since returned. This friend was kind enough to get us a taxicab, and when he returned with it and pulled up, he told us he had had a conversation with the driver. This driver was an altogether peculiar man, for when we had arrived and were about to get out, he opened the door and after he had been paid, he gave us two little pamphlets called “Peace Messenger.” He was making propaganda for the spiritual world while working his job! Then our friend told us that this driver had told him the essential thing is for people to find the Christ, everything depends on the Christ. In other words, our friend had picked out a cab at the taxi-stand and gotten into a conversation with the driver, who told him the world will advance only when people find the Christ, whom they have not yet found.

Well, the cab driver added a few other things and said, “You see, with Christ it's like this. Just think, I am a very respectable man, an exemplary man, and I have children who are all good for nothing. But am I any less respectable and exemplary a man because I have children who are no good? They all know me, or think they know me, but they are still good-for-nothings. That's how I think of the Christ. He belongs to us all, He is the person we all look to but that does not mean everybody necessarily really understands Him.”

This cab driver has created a marvelous picture of the special life of Christ, of His isolated life! He has discovered that Christ is living among us, living with us, belonging to us all and not to any one individual. He saw his sons who were all no good as the individuals, who were good for nothing and would have to struggle before reaching an understanding. If this cab driver had wanted to express this extraordinarily significant idea in philosophical terms, nothing would have come of it. But his picture reflects wonderfully what we are trying to understand. Of course, such a picture is not quite sufficient; an individual may understand it, but you will not influence our culture with it. I just wanted to show you that even the simplest soul can light on a true picture. This is how things should really flow into pictures. I have tried to achieve this particularly in the style of my latest book, which deals with non-theosophical matters. However, in its presentation this book is “theosophical,” if we want to use that expression.

It is important to understand our teachings more and more between the lines, so to speak, if we want to grasp correctly that they have to become life, the life of each one of us. And what weighs so heavily upon one's soul is just this awful difficulty of integrating these things into life.

You see, if these things are important to you, and particularly if you really know our rationalist culture, you will realize that what pulsates through spiritual science has to live in all branches of culture. It must influence thinking, feeling, and willing, only then will it fulfill its mission. To feel connected with our cause really takes quite some inner strength. It is a pity that it takes such an infinitely long time for people to feel thoroughly connected with the impulses of spiritual science. In the meantime, we can see people passing by and ignoring precisely what they should be focusing on.

Now let me tell you about another case. There was a very learned gentleman who used to be a member of our Society; in fact, he was tremendously learned, but his erudition did not satisfy him. He was profoundly unhappy in spite of all his learning, which included a knowledge of oriental languages and the culture of the Near East. Now this man came and asked for advice. In such a case my advice will necessarily have to show that through an understanding of spiritual science the spirit can enter into a science such as oriental philosophy. So I indicated that he should permeate all this scholarly material with what he had received from spiritual science. However, for him the two things merely continued to exist side by side. On the one hand, he pursued his oriental studies as this is done in the universities; on the other hand, he pursued spiritual science. The two never came together for him; he could not permeate the one with the other.

Now just think how fruitful it would be if someone who knows so much—and this man did indeed know a tremendous amount—were to take his science and learning and imbue it with theosophy! He wouldn't even have to let it be known that he thinks theosophically if he feared people might look askance at him for that. Still, he could then present all this in his university lectures. That man could very well have penetrated the culture on the Euphrates and the Tigris and the one a bit further west—he was particularly at home in Egyptology—with spiritual science and could have accomplished something remarkable. In any case, he could have achieved something more fruitful than the popularizing stuff produced by our common writers. Recently a piece by such a popular writer appeared in a widely read daily paper. The fellow had written an article on the discovery of a sphinx-like figure during construction for the Baghdad railway—well, even if his name is Arthur Bonus, he is still definitely not a “good one!”⁴ This article is absolutely terrible!

The ideal we have in mind, my dear friends, is to let our thinking be carried by what spiritual science gives us. And it should be the same in life too, in our everyday life with each other. Spiritual science can be carried into everything. If we did not intend this, did not have this ideal, then spiritual science would not be able to bear fruit. The challenge to make it fruitful meets us everywhere.

Just think, there are excellent historians who write about the history of England at the time of James I, let's say.⁵ Then there are excellent historians who write books about the life of Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit.⁶ As you know, I have to be careful what I say when I speak about Jesuitism. That is, I must not say too much that is positive—or at least what can be misunderstood as positive. Nevertheless, it is true that most people know about this Suarez only that in one of his writings he is supposed to have explicitly preached regicide. But this is not true. In general, people often know things that are untrue but don't as often and as thoroughly know things that are true.

Now, excellent books about this Suarez are available nowadays; most of them are written by Jesuits. You can read these books about Suarez, the successor of Ignatius of Loyola, and understand them.⁷ That does not mean that you will become, or have been, a Jesuit, nor that you have to put up with people drawing such conclusions. The facts are clear, and when we connect them, we can answer one of biggest questions of modern history. These two individuals, James I and Francisco Suarez, the Jesuit philosopher, are complete opposites. At the time of James I, a very ahrimanic new development was inaugurated. Another development began with Suarez that was very luciferic. Their combined influence, and particularly their fights against each other, shaped much of what lives and weaves in the present age.

Here we come to mysterious connections. I don't want to blame anyone with what I am going to say now. For example, we find that a great deal of what these days is called historical materialism or Marxism, the Social Democratic outlook, can be traced directly to Suarez. Now please do not take this to mean that I am saying the Social Democrats are Jesuits. Nevertheless, there are in a certain sense good reasons for connecting the Social Democrats with the Jesuits. By the same token, many members of the opposing party, that is, those who oppose social democracy, can be traced back directly to what was inaugurated by James I.

With this, I have indicated something that lives in many people's thoughts. Particularly in occult communities you find two main streams, and from these flows something that is not occult. These two main streams produce two typical, contrasting figures: James I of England, in whom an extraordinary initiate-soul lived, and Suarez.

Now, if you read the biography of Suarez, you will not understand it at all if you have not really grasped spiritual science. Suarez was one of those people who are at first bad students and don't learn anything. According to the contemporary materialist view, such people are hopeless cases and not good for anything. However, one can easily prove that many great geniuses did not learn anything when they were in school. Well, Suarez was also one of the bad students, and even in college he was not yet what one might call a bright man. Then all of a sudden he changed, and every biography of him describes this sudden awakening. The gift of brilliance suddenly awakened in him, and he wrote extraordinarily interesting books, which are, unfortunately, not widely known. This happened all of a sudden, kindled by some of the things I told you about in my lectures on the spiritual exercises of the Jesuits, which Suarez also practiced. Through these he awakened something in himself that enabled him to develop special mental and spiritual forces.

Thus, the biography of Suarez proves—as it can also be proved in the case of James I—that he turned around, so to speak, and came from the unspiritual into the spiritual. This soul, which later achieved outstanding accomplishments, was born at a certain moment. Its development did not proceed in a straight line, but took place in a sudden jolt, produced either by karma or by an influence on the person in question that can be compared to how we learn to read in elementary school: not by describing the shape of the letters, but by receiving an impulse through which we learn to understand the letters.

Here, you see again how spiritual science can guide us in understanding these historical connections, and then we can see life quite differently. If you take in spiritual science in a living way, then your attitude to life really changes, an you can think of other things to do than what you have been doing. It is hard to imagine that a person who takes in spiritual science in a living way could come up with the strange idea, for example, that he or she is Mary Magdalene reincarnated. This would not occur to such a person; instead he or she would focus on other contents of the soul.

It is hard to have to watch how slowly the development in the direction I indicated proceeds. People really take Spiritual science far too much as merely a theory or as simply something to be enjoyed. However, it must be studied in a living way. Now that we are together before parting or some time at the beginning of summer, when we will have to return to Dornach, I would like to discuss briefly a few important points we must consider in this regard.

You see, my dear friends, if things had turned out as many people adhering to older traditions had expected at the time when we first established spiritual science here fourteen years ago, we would have become a sect. For all the ideas brought over from England were headed toward the formation of a sect. And many people felt very comfortable being completely secluded in their small circles. Then they could call the other people outside their circles fools. There was very little control over this. However, this kind of thing had to stop.

Spiritual science has to reckon with our whole culture. We have always considered this culture, and we have emphasized particularly in public lectures what one can get into European heads these days—regardless of how many objections were raised. Now I don't want to criticize—that would be silly—but still, we have to understand that our movement really must not become a sect and must not even have any characteristics of a sectarian movement if it is to fulfill its task. We can accomplish much if we take the general culture into account. People outside our movement for the most part write nonsense about it—if they write about it at all. You may say this does not matter in a deeper sense. On the contrary, it matters very much! That is why we have to defend ourselves and do what we can to stop it. We have to do everything possible so that eventually people will not write nonsense but something better.

However, in a spiritual sense it is even more harmful when what was intended only for members of our immediate circle is brought in the wrong way before the public so that our lecture cycles are now sold in second-hand bookshops. Granted, we may not be able to prevent this. Still it happens again and again, not only that our lecture cycles can be bought in second-hand bookshops but other equally detrimental things as well. For instance, somebody just recently told me about a person he had worked with for a long time. He said that person did not write anything on his own initiative but belongs to a somewhat dubious clique, which has complete control over him. He himself only sits down and goes ahead with his writing. Now this person has written many brochures about our spiritual science and even big books. In those you find not only quotations from my printed and published works, but also long passages from the cycles. In other words, it is not just that one can buy these cycles in second-hand bookshops, but, in fact, anyone wanting to write a stupid book these days is able to get hold of them. Such people then buy two or three cycles and copy passages that sound completely absurd when taken out of context, and then they can make a book out of all that.

These are the problems that result from our having to face the public while at the same time being a Society. However, we have to understand this problem if we want to overcome it. As I said, I do not want to criticize, for that would be totally useless; instead, I want to describe the problem. I want to show you where the difficulties lie, and we just have to watch for them. In the immediate future even more abominable things will be done against our Society than we have had to endure up to now. We won't be able to change that in the twinkling of an eye. Still, we must not ignore both the encouraging, pleasant elements and the annoying ones in the way the world judges our movement as though we were trying to become totally unmusical in the next incarnation.

You see, those who think purely egoistically—as I said, this is not meant as criticism, but merely as description think that spiritual science has more to say about certain relationships in nature than ordinary science. Thus, people turn to me for medical advice even though I have emphasized repeatedly that I am only a teacher or cultivator of spiritual science, and not a physician. Of course, people may want some friendly advice and to refuse that would be absurd. If people come for friendly advice, why should it be denied them even if it concerns matters of natural science? However, after everything that has happened, I have to request that nobody seeks my advice on medical matters who is not in the care of a physician. People who think selfishly do not consider that such things are not permissible nowadays and that they bring us into conflict with the world around us, and that is detrimental to our spiritual science. We have to make an effort to improve things; we have to advocate everywhere that there should be more than just the officially authorized medicine, which is based on pure materialism. We can certainly do this, but we must not just selfishly think of what is good for us individually if this could interfere with what our movement must be.

Spiritual science can give advice, and it would be absurd if it didn't. It would be pathetic indeed if one could not give some advice to a person suffering from this or that ailment. However, it is a great risk to give advice when the following happens—and I am telling you a true story here. Someone was ill in a town where I had just previously said that I definitely do not want people to turn to me in case of illness. I had said so publicly and officially. Now, someone became ill and was admitted into a sanitarium, where he remained for some time. A long-standing member of ours who had always been connected with the most intimate aspects of our cause wrote to this sanitarium, explaining that the patient in question could now be discharged because Dr. Steiner gave such and such advice. The member wrote this to the physician, who replied that this just goes to show we don't mean it when we claim theosophy wants to be nothing but theosophy and does not want to meddle in other people's business.

Yes, indeed, my dear friends, we have to pay attention to such things. If we ignore them, it will not be for the good of the movement. Of course, this is only one case, but variations of this are happening again and again. This leads to a peculiar feature of our movement, about which I have to speak now. What I am referring to is that the new good side of our movement comes to light less rapidly than other new developments that have also never before been there. They prove that our movement is indeed something new; however, these are peculiar novelties.

For example, let us suppose this or that were written in my published books. If no cycles were getting into the wrong hands, people outside our movement would refute what is in my books. Well, let them do it, but then they would present their opinion. It would never occur to people out there who do not belong to our Society to copy sentences from my books to prove I am a “bad guy.” No one would do this; instead people out there would present their own opinions. What happens in our Society, however, is that someone accepts our teaching—swallows it hook, line, and sinker, as the saying goes—but then refutes me with my own teaching. You can see an example of this in an as yet unpublished exposition.

As you may remember, in an earlier edition of Riddles of Philosophy—the book then was called Views of Life and World in the Nineteenth Century—I explained that Leverrier discovered the planet Neptune merely on the basis of his calculations about Uranus, before Neptune had been seen.⁸ Neptune was first seen at the Berlin observatory, but its existence was already known earlier simply because of calculations. I referred to this example to show that something may follow from calculations, that we can know of a fact merely on the basis of our thinking.

Well, just recently someone wrote that he has applied this very obvious and convincing idea, but in a different field. He claims to have found that something is wrong in our movement, that there are disruptions and interferences like the ones Leverrier found in observing the planet Uranus. If Uranus does not move the way it should according to calculations based on the general laws of gravity, then obviously something is interfering. Similarly, according to this individual, something supposedly interferes with our movement. So he propounds the hypothesis that there is something disruptive here, interfering with everything. And then, in the same way Leverrier discovered Neptune, this individual discovered that the evil interferences in our movement are in me. As the astronomers in the observatory here turned their telescope to the place where Neptune was said to be, so this person focused his spiritual telescope on me and found the evil there.

This is a special case; the methods I have given are all applied to my character and I am refuted with myself. In this man's circle a letter was written recently—not by him but by others from his circle—saying that I have no right to complain about this refutation because I myself had always said spiritual science was the common property of everyone and that it would be wrong to think spiritual science originated with the spiritual investigator. Well now, when things get this confused, there can be no simple, clear explanation for them. This, indeed, is something new arising in our Society. Outside, where the old still holds good, others are refuted by means of what the critics themselves think. But within our Society people do not take their own thoughts, but what they read in the lecture cycles and use it against me.

For example, in the letter I mentioned you can find many quotations from my book An Outline Of Occult Science and others.⁹ Everywhere you'll find exhortations to read this or that for yourself so you'll see I am actually an evil, bad guy. Now, the letter does not claim what I say is bad. On the contrary, because it is good, it can be used as evidence. This is something entirely new arising in our midst, a novelty based on the theory that our teaching can be accepted and then used to slander the one who is trying to popularize it. That is indeed something new!

This may be a particularly blatant case; still, on a smaller scale such things occur very frequently. If we so much as say anything about such things, then we get threats! Recently a letter informed us that articles and pamphlets, whose titles constitute a direct threat, would soon appear in shop windows and newspapers. As I said, if we dare make a sound, this is what happens. This is a novelty, something new in our movement, and we must pay attention to it.

We can see difficulties cropping up before they have fully emerged, so to speak, for we can predict what will happen. Tell me, should we really never talk about such a case as the one I have mentioned; should we always keep quiet about it? That is certainly possible. However, since the members themselves are not trying to discover such things, nobody in our circles would ever find out. Therefore, we must speak about it. But what happens when we speak about it? Pretty soon you will probably read in another letter—of course, this is just a hypothesis for now that I have been speaking about a private letter before a large number of members. And this is simply because there are certainly people here who will immediately report somewhere or other what I have said tonight. That is happening all the time. Not talking about these things is no good, but talking about them only encourages what is repeatedly being done. We can predict the outcome.

I do not want to criticize; I only want to point out that in a movement where spiritual science lives, that is, where occult things pulsate, difficulties do indeed arise, and we must pay attention to them. If we ignore them, they will continue and get worse. Yes, we have to be prepared for the attacks to get more and more trenchant. If we were a small sect, this would not be the case. But our movement had to become just what it has become, and so that's the way it is.

Much of what comes from outside is understandable although many attacks ostensibly from the outside actually can be proven to have originated within our circles. Just today we have learned that in Dornach we practice eurythmy, which supposedly consists in dancing to the point of reaching a trance, as the dervishes do, and so on. We were told this news was reported by members. Members have reported that we dance until we reach a state of trance! In reality this was told to one of our members by people totally unconnected with us, but these people said they had heard it from members whose names they mentioned.

These difficulties come up because we have united spiritual science and the Society, and we must examine them carefully. If we ignore them, we cannot progress properly and we risk the dissolution of our Society and its total annihilation. True, all this does not harm spiritual science as such, but it does harm what spiritual science is also trying to be. It is harmful when people come and tell me that much of what they read about spiritual science interested them, but then they sat at a table in a boarding house and heard a lady prattle on about theosophy and say all kinds of things, and, of course, they feel they cannot join a Society where such a lot of rubbish is talked that's supposed to be theosophy. Now, this is not an isolated case; this happens again and again in one way or another.

Speaking about these things at the end of a serious talk may be misunderstood. However, it is absolutely necessary, my dear friends, that you know about them and pay attention to them. Our Society must be the carrier and helper of spiritual science; however, it can easily develop in such a way that it works against what spiritual science is to bring to world evolution. Naturally, in the individual case it is easy to understand that much of this damage could not be prevented. Yet we can be sure that the damage will look quite different if we pay attention to it and if we ourselves try to keep to a certain line, a certain direction, so to speak. Sometimes it is indeed extremely difficult, but also necessary, to take a hard line in a certain direction. Then novelties like the ones I just described will be rightly judged. It does not happen anywhere else that a person is refuted with his own works, for the idea of accepting a person's teaching in order to refute him with them is in itself absurd and foolish. Of course, if someone talks nonsense, you can use his nonsense against him, but that is not the point here. Rather, the new twist here is that the teaching is accepted and the person is refuted on the basis of his teaching.

On a smaller scale, things like that are very widespread. And they are not far removed from another evil I will also speak about before coming to a close. Indeed, it happens nowhere else as often as in our movement that somebody does something one can condemn, in fact, has to condemn. Then people take sides. For example, somebody may say something against the leading personalities in our Society, or against long-standing members, or against the Vorstand, as we unfortunately have to call it. Yet, even if the allegations are completely unfounded and perhaps only made up, clearly revealing the accuser's underlying motivation, you will rarely find that people try to discover whether the unfortunate Vorstand is right. Instead, people immediately take sides with the person who is wrong.

In fact, that is the rule here: people take sides with those who are wrong, and write letters asking the victims of the attack to do something to preserve the friendship, to straighten things out again—after all, one must show love. When somebody commits an unkind deed against another, people do not write to the one who did the deed. Instead, they write to the one who suffered it that he should show some kindness and that it would be very unloving not to do something to set things right again. It never occurs to them to ask this of the one who is wrong. Such peculiar things happen in our circle.

Of certain other things we will not even speak; nevertheless, there may of course come a time when we have to speak about them too. Today, we wanted to talk about a serious topic since we are living in a serious time and our movement is to influence it in a serious way. Still, we absolutely had to point out these peculiar things. You must pay attention to them, for things are indeed happening that you will find hard to believe if you hear about them. Nevertheless, we constantly have to deal with such things, and nobody should misunderstand that I had to speak about them; instead you should all reflect on them a bit.

It is our intention not to have as long a break between lectures as we had in the past. We may be able to meet again in fall; however, it is better not to promise anything specific in this time of uncertainties and obstacles. And so I ask you to use the picture I have tried to paint in this winter of our souls and to let your souls dwell on it during this summer. Bring to life in your souls, in a kind of meditation, what we have talked about and reflect on the basic requirements for the integration of our spiritual science into the general culture.¹⁰

And so let us now part, my dear friends, in the realization that we can do much to help integrate what we take seriously into our times if we are all really committed to it. People now sacrifice much more than ever before in such numbers and in so short a time. We are living in a hard time, a time of suffering. May the hardships and sufferings also be a summons to us. No matter how difficult it may be to incorporate the spiritual into human evolution, it has to happen. However much or however little we can do as individuals, let us do it! Let us try to understand the right way to do our part so that what cannot come about of itself but has to be done through people will result. Of course, there will also be help from the spiritual world. Thus, let us remain united in thoughts like this even when we will be apart for a while. People who are united in spirit are always together. Neither space nor time can separate them, and particularly not a more or less short span of time. Let us remain united in thoughts that try again to penetrate a little bit what I have said here in these days to your souls.

We must take in the full weight of the significance of the truths connected with the Mystery of Golgotha. Let us realize that in order to understand this or that we have to be in the solitude of our souls and return there again and again. But let us also understand that we belong to humanity and that the One Who went through the Mystery of Golgotha brought something from spiritual heights to the earth for all human beings, for the working together of all people. And let us remember that He said: “When two or three are gathered together in My Name, there am I in their midst.”

Through all we experience in solitude we can prepare ourselves for what the Christ is destined to be to the world through us. But Christ is in our midst only if we try to carry into the world what we strive for in solitude, and we can do that only if we understand the conditions for carrying it into the world. Let us look at these conditions! Let us open our eyes, and, above all, let us have the courage to admit that things are as they are and must be dealt with accordingly.

When I speak here about Christ, I do so knowing that He is helping because He is an actively living being. We can feel His presence among us; He will help us! But we have to learn His language, and His language today is that of spiritual science. That is the way it is for the present. And we have to find the courage to represent and support this spiritual science as much as we can among ourselves and before others.

This summer, let us reflect upon this and let us meditate on it until we meet again.

• 1. See Lecture Two, note 4.
• 2. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1.
• 3. Franz Hartmann, 1838–1912, doctor and theosophist. Founded his own movement within theosophy.
• 4. Translator's note: The Latin word bonus means “good.”
• 5. James I, 1566–1625, King of Scotland as James VI and of Great Britain as James I. Son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Succeeded to English throne at death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. During his reign group of scholars prepared new version of the Bible in English, called in his honor King James Bible (1611).
• 6. Francisco Suarez, 1548—1617, Spanish theologian and scholastic philosopher. Joined Society of Jesus (1564), considered foremost Jesuit theologian.
• 7. Ignatius of Loyola, 1491–1556, Spanish religious. Founded Society of Jesus in 1539. Began composition of his Spiritual Exercises in 1523.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
  
  Urbaine-Jean-Joseph Leverrier, 1811–1877, French astronomer. Investigated disturbance in the motion of Uranus (1845), making calculations indicating the presence of an unknown planet, which was discovered in 1846 and named Neptune.
• 9. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, 3rd ed., repr., (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1989).
• 10. After these words, Rudolf Steiner spoke about the day care nursery the members of the Anthroposophical Society in Berlin had organized:
  
  “I would like to add here that our dear friends who organized and cared so devotedly for our day care nursery are concerned that it might be forgotten—not completely of course, but perhaps almost forgotten. Naturally, we will have a kind of vacation, but after that the nursery will have to open again. Then we will need some money and, above all, some dear friends who will help with the day care—of course, only those who can help. Maybe there are women here who could help with the cooking or something like that. All this is needed. Those who have worked in the nursery and know something about such matters can tell you that its results are very good. The children gained something from having come here,- something has been made of them. Therefore, I would like to ask that the women who could take on this task again do so as a labor of love. Of course, if you take on such a task, you have to stay with it. If you cannot make a certain commitment to it, it is better not to take it on. For example, we cannot have somebody promising to be in the nursery at 5 o'clock and then send a note in the afternoon to cancel; we will not be able to find somebody else to fill in on such short notice. We have to know about cancellations at least one day in advance. Thus, I now ask those friends who can work in the nursery to contact Frau Dannenberg, who, together with others, has done so much for the nursery, so that the nursery can open again in winter.”

It is my task at this time to explain certain matters directly related to practical life and to the outer existence of mankind in general. This is to some extent an interlude in our present studies, in order to bring out the quality which Spiritual Science in our time must above all possess—that of immediate relation to real life. We shall presently come to those parts of our subject which deal more with the inner life of man. All in all, this is the focus and aim of our present studies: On the foundations of Spiritual Science, to gain an idea of the individual man's position in practical life, even in his calling or profession. I would entitle the whole of this course of lectures (including the last three or four) ‘The Karma of Vocation.’ But it is necessary first to gain a broader basis; I must explain some other things, connected with our question in a wider sense.

As we have already seen, what man achieves for the world—no matter in what profession—is connected, intimately, even with the farthest cosmic future of mankind; it cannot be set aside as mere prosaic toil. Man enters into the social order of life in a certain way. His Karma impels him to some particular calling. While we are speaking of this question, no calling need be thought inherently prosaic or poetic. For we now know that what man does within the social order, is the first seed of something, which is not only of significance for our Earth, but will go on and on evolving when the Earth passes through the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan states. A living grasp of our several callings, a recognition of simple and straightforward human life in its significance, can be brought home to us most intensely through these spiritual studies. For it is the task of our spiritual-scientific movement not only to provide euphonious theories, but to bring to our souls that which will tend to place us rightly into life according to the Spirit of our Time—each in his place. Therefore, our Truths are always such as to be strong enough, for life itself really to be judged and understood through them. We will not just enthuse in a multitude of pleasing, comforting ideas; we will receive ideas which can carry and sustain us throughout life.

If you will remember something I have often emphasised, you will see how this spiritual-scientific movement tends to bring near to our souls what is of real significance for life. I have often pointed to an important fact of life; and if those whose task lies in the sphere of learning are not too obtuse, it may well be that this fact will play an important part in Science comparatively soon. Nowadays there is much emphasis on Heredity and all that is connected with it in man's life. Repeating as they generally do, like parrots, the scientific world-conception of to-day, educationists, when they speak of the choice of callings, will also tell us of the inherited qualities which the teacher must take into account if he wishes to pass judgment on the questions that so frequently arise as to the future calling of a young person who is about to enter into life. But the question of heredity is generally treated, nowadays, only in this wise:—Children, they say, inherit certain characteristics from their parents or earlier ancestors. And in this connection they are generally thinking more or less of physical heredity—that which is entirely contained in the physical line. For the external scientists of to-day cannot yet take the step of recognising the repeated earthly lives of man—the carrying-over of human qualities from former incarnations.

They talk of heredity; but they will only gain a right idea of the question of heredity when they consider it in conjunction with what you may already know, even if you only understand the content of the booklet on Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy Human life runs its course in this way: There is a first section, approximately to the seventh year—to the change of teeth; a second, lasting until the fourteenth year; a third, until the twenty-first; and so on. (For instance, there is another period until the twenty-eighth year.) You will find some further details in a booklet reproducing the content of my recent lecture at Liestal, where I pointed out once more, from another standpoint, these truths of human evolution between birth and death and its division into seven-year periods. Broadly speaking, as you know, the physical body is to some extent inwardly perfected between birth and the change of teeth, the etheric from then onward to the time of puberty, and afterwards the astral body.

Let us to-day consider this time of puberty, which takes its course from about the fourteenth to the sixteenth year. (It varies, as you know, with climate, nationality, etc.) At this time the human being becomes ripe to bring descendants into life. The study of this period is therefore immensely important—especially for a natural-scientific theory of heredity. For up to this time the human being must have developed all those qualities which make him able—out of himself—to convey such qualities to his descendants. He cannot wait until a later time for the development of these faculties. In a subordinate sense, no doubt, characteristics subsequently acquired can also be transmitted to the descendants; but speaking in the sense of natural science, man is undoubtedly so organised that at the age of fourteen to sixteen he becomes completely ripe for inheritance. We cannot therefore say that the main qualities which enter into his development after this time of life are of any great significance for the question of heredity. Natural Science will therefore have to find out the reasons why man ceases, from this moment onward, to develop in himself foundations of heredity. In the animal the thing is different. Throughout its life, the animal does not essentially get beyond this point of time. This is what we must really comprehend.

Without entering further into many things which would have to be considered in this connection, I wish to say at once what really underlies this matter from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Take now the moment of birth. Before it, we have a long period of time which man spends in the spiritual life between death and a new birth. There, the processes take place which I have so often described in outline in a certain way. Naturally, all that takes place in that time between death and a new birth influences the human being. But above all, that which takes place in the spiritual between death and a new birth contains much that is related to the development of the bodily nature between birth and the age of fourteen to sixteen. What man works out, on Earth, very largely in his unconsciousness, this above all he works out between death and a new birth from the standpoint of a higher consciousness. Here upon Earth, man looks through his eyes and other senses upon the mineral, plant and animal world. ... When he is in the spiritual world with the Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai and Exusiai, ... and with those human beings who have also passed through the gate of death and who in some way can be near to his soul, then, looking downward, his attention is directed above all to that which is connected with the life of humanity during this time. And from thence, as I have explained even in exoteric lectures, all that which underlies heredity is likewise determined. And as you know from an earlier lecture, the result of the past vocational life also emerges like a relic of the processes between death and a new birth—appearing physiognomically as it were, in the gestures and in the whole inherited tendencies too. In the human being at this time of life—even in the way he walks and moves his hands and in other respects deports himself—you can see the result of his vocational life in the last incarnation. Then comes the period from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year, which is to some extent in opposition to the preceding one. During this period, the hereditary impulses cannot work on in the same way, for as we have seen, the point of time at which man has these impulses fully developed is already passed. External science takes no account of such questions; but it will have to do so, unless it wishes to be void of all reality.

Now this is also the point of time when man is led by vague unconscious impulses towards his new calling; and into this, the processes which lie between death and a new birth do not work nearly so much. For in this epoch the impulses of his former incarnation are especially at work. When circumstances work so as to drive him into this or that calling, the human being believes—and others around him too believe—that outer circumstances alone are in reality bringing it about. But the outer circumstances are subconsciously connected with what is living in the human soul—living in it directly from the conditions of the former incarnation. Observe the difference: In the preceding period—from the seventh to the fourteenth year—our former incarnation, fertilised by what takes place between death and a new birth, goes into our bodily organisation, making it the image of our former calling. But in the following period the impulses no longer work into us—no longer impress their gestures on us—but lead us along the paths of life to our new calling.

See what an infinitely fruitful thought will arise from these considerations, for the whole educational system of the future. If only our outer worldly culture could make up its mind to reckon with repeated lives on Earth instead of setting up fanciful theories—theories which cannot but be fanciful, because they do not reckon with the true reality but with a fragment of it—with the realities which are immediate and present between birth and death.

Here we can gain an outlook, of what untold importance it will be for Spiritual Science to enter into those circles which have to do with the human being's education and development, and with the influences which are brought to bear upon the life of man in the external social order. Of course we are here looking out upon wide perspectives,—but they have very much to do with the reality. For in the evolution of the world, chaos does not prevail. Order prevails—or, if it be disorder, even so it will always be explicable out of the spiritual life. He, therefore, who knows the laws connected with repeated lives on Earth, can meet life in a very different way with his advice and active help. He can say things and institute things, connected with the real course of life.

You must remember, in a certain sense everything in the world is cyclic. We know the great cycles of post-Atlantean time: the Indian, ancient Persian, Egypto-Chaldean, Graeco-Latin, our own, and that which will follow it. The souls of men return in each of these cycles—more than once, or in some cases only once. But life on this Earth is not only cyclic in this all-embracing sense. It is also cyclic in the sense that certain conditions can be determined if we are able rightly to understand those that preceded them. For instance, if someone understands what was spiritually at work in the first centuries of Christian evolution—say, from the third to the seventh century A.D.—if he knows these spiritual impulses, then he can also understand what social needs can be at work in our time. There is a cyclic evolution, and if a man is destined to place himself into this cyclic evolution in a certain way, we make him unhappy if we advise him to behave differently. Now in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch men will have to place themselves into life more and more consciously. Therefore a knowledge of these laws will also have to emerge increasingly. It must be made possible for a man to see himself in real connection with all that is going on in his environment. It is not only that we should learn to choose the right callings for our children; but that we ourselves should be able to develop the right thoughts as to our own relation to the world, no matter where in life we may be placed. For as you know, thoughts are realities. In future it will matter more and more what a man thinks about his connection with all that is going on in the world around him—in the evolution of the Spirit of the Time. In these matters, more and more consciousness will have to take hold of the human soul.

Remember how I tried to characterise the streams of life that arose with the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. I showed how there arose throughout the Western regions that stream which rather tends to make the human being a Bourgeois. (For so we called it, choosing a comprehensive and, as it were, approximate term). Bourgeoisdom has come to expression in Western Europe and in America. With this ideal of the Bourgeois we then contrasted the Eastern goal. (It is only a goal for the present: it is not so clearly expressed, for the Western culture is comparatively more advanced than the Eastern.) What is the Eastern goal? It is the ideal of the Pilgrim. These two ideals—Bourgeois and Pilgrim—stand over against each other. Unless we realise how much this signifies for life, we cannot possibly enter into that understanding of life which is dawning more and more. The people of former centuries and millennia—they could confront life without conscious understanding. For they were guided by the Divine-spiritual powers. We must approach life with conscious understanding—increasingly, the more we develop into the future which is now at hand.

Such things as I just now explained to you—the two streams, one of which is based on heredity and the other on salvation, liberation,—such things must be thoroughly understood if we would claim any judgment upon the life of present time. For these things force themselves upon us. It is not merely my statement; it can be said out of the realities of the time, for it has been felt and to some extent even known for a long time past by those who have confronted life not sleepily and obtusely but with full, wide-awake attention. I have already spoken of this peculiarity of our time: there are many human beings in our time who have a real feeling for the things which are emerging, but are unable (remember what I told you about Jaurès)—unable to rise to an understanding of reincarnation and Karma. Unable to take hold either of individual Karma or of World-Karma, they cannot penetrate what they so well perceive.

In many places in modern history, we find human beings who had an open eye for what was happening, though they could never rise to the point of explaining things from the standpoint of repeated earthly lives;—nay more, though they themselves, just because they could not accept repeated earthly lives, largely contributed to bring about the very things they criticised so sharply. That indeed is characteristic of the men of to-day, even of those who see most clearly. They criticise existing things, while they themselves are working to bring about the very things they judge so truly. So do unconscious impulses play into our human life.

Take for instance a man who saw many things with extreme clarity; a man who clearly observed the life around him, notably his own particular surroundings. I refer to John Stuart Mill, the famous English philosopher,—born in 1806 and died in 1873. Many people of our time regard him as the renewer or essential continuer of Logic; but he also developed social insight, far-reaching social ideas. He turned his attention to the social evolution of that world especially, with which he was familiar in his own environment. And he wanted to find an answer to the question, which for him assumed a tragic form: Into what harbour are we steering? What is the tendency and ultimate goal of that social character which has been stamped, to begin with, upon the life of the nineteenth century? The type of humanity, said Mill, which the nineteenth century developed, is essentially the Bourgeois. Wherein does the Bourgeois differ from the earlier types of humanity which evolved in the course of ages? He asked himself this question, and he replied, The Bourgeois differs in this respect: In former times the individual was of far greater importance. (I am clothing it now rather in our ideas; John Stuart Mill expressed practically the same in other words.) Through the man of former time, a stronger individuality was speaking; one felt the active rising of the soul beyond the immediate and outward physical realities. The Bourgeois type tends to reduce everything to a dead level—tends to equalise all men in the social order. And what is the upshot of this equalising process? Not the equalising in greatness of the human soul, but in nonentity,—so says John Stuart Mill. And he outlines a human future for this fifth post-Atlantean age. Human beings, in their social life together, will more and more become the mincemeat of Bourgeois nonentity. He felt this as a tragical conclusion.

Men feel such things in different ways, however, according as they are born out of the Western or the Eastern culture. The Russian thinker Herzen made himself thoroughly familiar with these observations by John Stuart Mill, but in his soul the thing worked differently. While the Western thinker describes this perspective of Bourgeoisdom with a certain nonchalance, the Eastern suffers terribly to think that Europe—as Mill and Herzen even said—should be steering towards a kind of Chinese state. Both Mill and Herzen (as you may see from Herzen's book, published in 1864)—the one with a more Eastern, the other with a more Western colouring,—regard what has arisen in China as a stage already attained, compared to which Europe is only tending in the same direction—tending to a new China, a senile civilisation where men are the mere mincemeat of Bourgeois nonentity. A narrowing of intellect will come, says John Stuart Mill,—a narrowing of intellect and vigour, a wearing down of individuality; in a word, all that will tend to a dead level,—a constant flattening of life, greater and greater superficiality, to the exclusion of the all-embracing human interests. So says John Stuart Mill, and Herzen only confirms it with a more tragic feeling: reduction of all things to the interests of the ledger, mercantile Bourgeois prosperity. Thus, in the 1860's, John Stuart Mill and Herzen! Mill, speaking in the first place of his own country, declares: England is on the way to become a modern China! Herzen replies: Not only England but all Europe! As you may see from Herzen's work of 1864, Herzen and Mill at that time were more or less agreed as to what Herzen thus expresses: If an un-awaited resurrection does not occur,—leading to a re-birth of human personality, giving it strength to overcome this Bourgeoisie,—Europe despite its noble ancestry and Christianity will become a modern China.

These words were spoken in 1864. But Herzen had no opportunity to reckon with repeated earthly lives and Karma. Such a perception, therefore, he could only receive in deepest tragedy, and he expressed it thus: We are not the doctors, we are the pains of our time. Conglomerated mediocrity—that is the state we are approaching. (It can perhaps better be expressed by the English term which Herzen and Mill employed—‘conglomerated mediocrity’—than by any German words.) And Herzen says, out of deep tragical feeling: The time will come in Europe, when modern scientific realism will have gone so far that men will no longer seriously believe in anything belonging to the other world—the super-sensible. People will say that the only goal we have to follow is in the outer physical realities. Men will be sacrificed for these realities, nor will there be any other perspective than that the human beings sacrificed are the mere bridge for those who follow after them. Thus will the individual be sacrificed to the polyp-state of the future.

Such words were really spoken at that time. Europe, says Herzen, has only one difficulty in becoming very rapidly a modern China, and that is Christianity. Christianity cannot so easily be overcome. But he still sees no hopeful outlook, for he finds even Christianity made flat and superficial—superficial in the Revolution, and the Revolution, he says, made still further superficial in the middle-class Liberalism of the 19th century—conglomerated mediocrity! ... Looking to what was said by Mill, and mindful of the downfall of ancient Rome, Herzen declares: I see the unavoidable breakdown of old Europe. At the portals of the old world (meaning Europe) there stands no Catilina, but only death.

There is another author, who learned very much from Mill and Herzen,—I refer to the contemporary Russian writer Merejkowsky. He, too, sees clearly many things that are there around him in the present time. But he cannot make up his mind to receive the sustaining ideas of Spiritual Science. Merejkowsky says, not without justification, The sceptre of former ages has been replaced by the yard-rule, the bible by the ledger, and the altar by the counter.

But the fault is, these things are merely criticized. For as you know, it is inevitable for the yard-rule, the ledger and the counter to play the part they actually play in this fifth post-Atlantean age. It must be so. It is according to an unavoidable World-Karma. The point is not to criticize or to condemn, but to pour into this world of yard-rule, counter and ledger the Spirit which alone can grapple with them,—that is, the Spirit of Spiritual Science.

These things are very serious. I want to let you feel, as I always do on such occasions: I am not setting forth what I myself happen to want to say. What I express, is said in agreement with those men who have observed life openly and un-asleep. Views and opinions everyone can have, but the question is: How do we stand in our time with our opinions, how are they rooted in the soil of our time? Can we confirm them by the facts? Our age is assuming a certain character,—a character clearly perceived by those who want to see. We cannot give to our age any character we like; that is out of the question. We must see how the spiritual evolution of mankind progresses, from cycle to cycle.

As I have told you, there are occult societies who have knowledge of these things out of old tradition—out of the ancient atavistic secret doctrine. And as you also know from former lectures, these societies, notably in the West—(but Eastern people have become their followers)—have assumed an impure character. That does not prevent them from preserving certain secrets of existence. But they preserve them in a way which is not allowable in our time. He above all, who, obedient to the spiritual message of the time, communicates that part of Spiritual Science which is now being made public according to the true spirit of our age,—he above all encounters opposition. Opposition which undoubtedly often proceeds from unclean sources. For the opposition is guided and directed everywhere by spiritual powers; that we must not forget.

So we can understand it, if opposition arises on all hands precisely to that form of Spiritual Science which has to live within our movement. These thing's are so easy to manipulate nowadays. Time and again they declare: ‘It must not be; it is not allowable for such a science to be created for wider circles.’ And then they summon up all kinds of powers which have the public ear to-day, so as to render Spiritual Science harmless. University Professors go from country to country proclaiming themselves in duty bound to stand up against my Spiritual Science above all, because—as they say—our time must concentrate on the Reality (meaning that Reality which they alone can see) and not on these things which divert men from it.

There is sometimes no little method in such attacks. Anyone who is not blind, can see how they select the right places according to the political constellations; the places where they think their reputations as Professors will be most effective, or where they think they will best be able to heave us out of the saddle. They think they will make most headway by choosing the right places and using the right words, (I mean not inherently right, but according to the passions of today).

These things, however, are all of them part of a larger whole. Nothing is more feared, nothing is more anathematised in certain quarters, than the possibility that a number of people might discover something of the real character of life in our time. For in those quarters especially, where the aforesaid occult brotherhoods exist, they have the deepest interest in keeping people in the dark, as to the things which are connected with the real laws of life. If one keeps people in the dark, one can work among them most effectively oneself. One can no longer work effectively when they begin to know how they are really standing in the present time. That is a danger for those who want to fish in clouded waters,—who want to keep their esoteric knowledge to themselves and apply it so as to mould men in their social relationships in the way they want to have them.

There are members of occult brotherhoods to-day, fully convinced within their brotherhoods that spiritual powers everywhere prevail in our surroundings, and that a bond exists between the living and the dead. Within their occult brotherhoods they speak in no other terms than of the real laws of the Spiritual World,—those laws of which we in our Spiritual Science possess a part which must be made public to-day. They speak of all these things, inasmuch as they have received them from old atavistic tradition. Thereupon, they will write newspaper articles against the very same things, branding them as medieval superstitions. Often they are the very same people, who in the occult societies cultivate Spiritual Science as a traditional doctrine, and in the public journals write against it, characterising it as ‘medieval superstition,’ ‘outworn mysticism’ and the like. They think it right that they should keep this knowledge to themselves, while other men remain stupid, ignorant of the principles by which they are being led and guided. (Of course there are also many very peculiar members of occult brotherhoods, who know about as much of the world as they can reach with the ends of their noses. They too join in the chorus, saying how impossible it is to make public in our time ‘the content of the Mysteries.’)

But there are many ways of keeping people befogged. Just as Spiritual Science gives us certain ideas and concepts as a true key to find our entry into the Spiritual World (I mentioned this in the Liestal and in other public lectures) so one can find certain concepts wherewith to ‘have on toast’ that part of the population which cannot abide the complete flattening of the intellect by the Natural Scientific outlook, whereof Mill and Herzen speak. It is always possible to form concepts in a certain manner. If only people knew how concepts are formed in public life to-day, in order to prepare the souls of men for what one wants! Many a man, if he knew this, would presently bestir himself to approach true spiritual science, which tells of these things in a honest and upright way. To-day I will not refer to all manner of lofty concepts which are being proclaimed to men as high ideals, not with the object of their attaining what these ideals imply, but with an altogether different purpose. I will not speak of that to-day, but will make clear by a simple example how easy it is to ‘have on toast’ people who feel a certain need to satisfy their mystic longings.

I will choose the silliest example I can. Someone might say: Number, even by the Pythagoreans of old, was held to contain the secrets of the World-order. Much is contained in the relationships of number. Take for instance these two sets of numbers. Nicholas II. of Russia—he was

born in the year	1868
came to the throne in	1894
has reigned for	22 years
and is now	48 years old
Add up the numbers:	3832
Halve it and we get:	1916,—

the most important year of the War. A very occult relationship of numbers; for now take George V. of England:

He was born in the year	1865,
his reign began in	1910;
he has reigned for	6 years
and he is	51 years old
Add up the numbers:	3832
Halve it:	1916.

How intimately the destinies of these two coincide! See how great a part the Pythagorean laws of Number are playing in the world! But that is not all, for there is Poincaré:

He was born in	1860,
he reigned since	1913.
That is,	3 years
and he is	56 years old
Add up the numbers:	3832.
Halve it:	1916.

See how the Numbers correspond among the three Allies!

One of the silliest examples, of course, for if I were now to step down and ask one of the ladies—needless to say, I shall not do so—when she was born, since when she has been a member of the Anthroposophical Society, how old she is (of course, I shall ask no such question), and how many years she has been in the Society, and if I were then to add up the numbers and halve the sum, I should get the very same number—exactly the same. An ideal example! Assume, for instance, some lady or gentleman, X. or Y,

was born in	1870,
joined the A.S. in	1912
has been in it for	4 years,
and is now	46 years old.
Add up:	3832,
Halve it:	1916.

A very silly example, no doubt. But I can assure you, many things, in which such ‘Mysteries of Number’ are sought out, depend upon no more than this. They are only a little less obvious. And it is just as easy in other spheres to put concepts together so as to throw sand in people's eyes. You only need skilfully choose your paths and not let people know what lies behind it. Even in the example I have just given, many people fall into the trap. How deeply significant, that destiny should choose the year 1916! But if we had reckoned it for 1914 it would have come out just as well. The fateful year for the three Allies would have coincided with the outbreak of the War. Any number can be put together on the same principle. Many a thing that is construed to-day—only out of somewhat different foundations of thought—is no more profound than this. Only, when it is a little more hidden, people do not see through it. If plenty of words are added—‘profound,’ ‘cosmic,’ ‘abysmal depths’ and so on,—and especially if all manner of numerical relations are adduced, one can gain countless followers and make it appear that one is speaking out of very special depths of human knowledge.

Nevertheless, there is something more in the methods chosen by certain people to throw sand in other people's eyes. Such and such ideas are proclaimed in this quarter or that, and certain statements are then added. The origin lies in some occult association which wishes to attain a certain purpose. One only need know the ways and means that are adopted.

Such things should become impossible in future; and to this end a number of people must develop, not the narrow, limited intelligence and vigour to which Mill refers, but the sustaining intelligence and vigour of life which come from Spiritual Science. This Science will fertilise our human intellect and energy of life. Then only shall we face the facts of life, in such a way that we cannot be deceived.

You see, it is not unconnected with these things:—There was a certain fear and horror when from the European East to the West there shone across the strange phenomenon of such an individuality as Blavatsky, who appeared as it were from the blue sky. (For her appearance made itself felt, long before it was fulfilled.) I have often pointed out how important this really was for the whole course of the nineteenth century. She appeared at the very moment when the conflict raged most furiously between the so-called ‘esotericists’ and the so-called ‘progressive’ occultists. It was the reactionarists who in this connection called themselves the esotericists. Those who wanted to keep everything from the world—those who wanted to keep all the occult secrets for themselves—called themselves ‘esotericists.’ They applied the word with this meaning. Into the midst of this conflict, the life of Blavatsky fell; and through her peculiar constitution—for immense forces were working out of her subconsciousness—there was a danger that the spiritual secrets might be revealed. People might discover something in the true and real sense; such was the danger. Beneath this danger they lived from 1840 onward—practically since Blavatsky was born, since her early childhood. And ever since that time, efforts were made so to arrange things as to enlist Blavatsky in the service of the Western Occult Brotherhoods. Had this succeeded, only what the Western brotherhoods considered suitable and in their interests would have emerged. But it all took a strange turn. I have told you how the ‘Grand Orient’ first made efforts to get hold of her. But she made conditions which could not be fulfilled. The effort failed. Thereupon she made a great deal of trouble for an American, Western brotherhood; for with her temperament, she constantly boiled over and eluded them,—escaped from what they wanted of her. Thereupon she was expelled, and they knew of no other resource than to condemn her to a kind of occult imprisonment and so bring her into an Indian occult brotherhood whose pursuit of occultism they considered harmless for the so-called Western brotherhoods, because it went along their lines. For they said to themselves: What if all manner of things are brought to light from Indian sources, that will not greatly disturb our circles. Most of the occultists who were working with serious occultism in those quarters said: What, after all, will emerge, now that we have surrounded Blavatsky with all the pictures which shut her off from a real knowledge of the Spiritual World! She will only absorb such things as may happily unite at their tea-parties so many old maids of both sexes (I am really quoting!) She will not greatly disturb our circles.

In reality, things only became unpleasant when our stream emerged, which took things in real earnest, giving access to the sources of a real Spiritual World. Here you will see how deep-seated were the foundations of the conflicts which resulted. For in fact there was something in Blavatsky of those impulses which must come from the Eastern World, and, moreover, there was a certain necessity for a kind of synthesis with the Western world. But the point was this:—In recent times they had fallen more and more in the pursuit of certain purposes and aims, which, as I indicated once before, were not the purposes of truth alone,—purposes which they pursued in the way I recently described to you. Of a truth, these were sometimes quite other aims than those of truth alone!

You must consider this:—If one knows how the cycles of humanity take their course,—if one knows what character the world to-day must have according to its Archai, this or that having prevailed in former times, each at its proper place in evolution,—if one is cognisant of these things, then one can work in a certain way. If on the one hand one possesses traditional Occult Science, while on the other hand in public journals and in public life one attacks the same Occult Science as mere medieval superstition, then indeed one can work in muddy waters and attain important objects,—whatever it may be that one desires to attain. For things in the world are connected, only people need not always know what the connection is. For many human beings, the connection can take place in the unconscious.

We must be able to turn our gaze, as I said before, in the right directions. Much depends on this. We must look to the right places. Often something quite insignificant will appear there; but the insignificant, seen in the right connection, often explains far more than is explained by what would seem important or significant. For in many things in the world it is indeed as Hamlet says of good and evil: Nothing in itself is good or evil, but man makes it so in thought. So it is with many other things. A thing is important not by virtue of what it appears to be, directly, in the outer Maya—in the great illusion. Things are only recognised in their true significance when we unite them with the right concepts. I will give you an example from the most recent times in Europe, without thereby wishing to encroach on any party or political tendency.

People to-day are fond of thinking at short range, and so there may be those who in their thought refer the outbreak of the present War in Europe to the murder of the heir apparent, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. I do not say that that is wrong, I do not say that there is not some truth in it. They can explain certain events by referring them back to that assassination, which took place in July, 1914. But there may also be those who point out that it was printed in a Western journal in January, 1913, that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be murdered in the near future for the good of European humanity.

We can go back, that is to say, to the actual murder; but we can also go back to what was printed in a Western paper already in January, 1913, namely, the statement that he would be murdered.

Or again, we can go back to the murder of Jaurès on the eve of the war, which, as I indicated recently, will in all probability never be fully cleared up. But we can also go back further, and point to the time to which I just referred. Almost as far back as the other saying—that is to say, in the year 1913,—we can find this statement:—If the conditions in Europe should lead to war, Jaurès will be the first to die. We can look up a certain so-called occult almanac, which was sold for 40 francs. Here in this almanac, which, destined for the year 1913, must have been printed in 1912, we can read the following: In Austria, the man of whom it is commonly supposed that he will rule, will not come to the throne, but in his stead a young man, of whom it is not yet supposed that he will rule after the old Emperor. This was printed in a so-called occult almanac for 1913,—printed therefore already in the autumn of 1912. And in the same almanac for 1914 (printed, therefore, in 1913), the same remark was repeated. Evidently, in 1913, the attempted assassination had failed. In all these things the connections will be exposed, once people see things clearly. I mean the connection between what is there in the external reality, and what is brewed in unclean, hidden waves beneath. Some men will begin to recognise the threads that run from public life into this or that brotherhood. And they will recognise moreover, how foolish it is of other brotherhoods still to declaim, even to-day, that certain Truths of the Mysteries must be preserved in silence. These people may be quite innocent; for they are children, albeit they may be old members of this or that Masonic order for example, claiming also to have occult sources. They may be quite innocent. Nevertheless, they too assist the gloom and darkness which are prevailing among men.

I recently chose the example of a very ‘enlightened’ pastor and professor. I pointed out especially the discontinuity prevailing in his thought. (I mentioned it quite briefly here, and dealt with it further at St. Gall and Zurich.) He too, it must be admitted belongs to an occult brotherhood. But he is not one of those who work unfavourably, save by his limitations. For in their occult brotherhood they do acquire a certain limitation. They are purposely kept in a certain narrow sphere. This too, some heads of occult brotherhoods make it their task to bring about.

Above all, it is necessary for people to open their eyes. But our eyes must first learn to see. And we can only learn to see if we allow the direction of our sight to be guided by the understanding we have first received of the Spiritual World. These people always reckon upon qualities on which one seldom calculates in vain in human affairs. Thus, as I mentioned once before, they tried to put me off the track on one occasion. At the time when Alcyone was nominated, I also could have been nominated in a certain way. Thereby, all that pulses and flows through our movement could have been nicely swept out of the world,—if I had let myself in for what was suggested to me pretty strongly: I was to be nominated as the reincarnated St. John! In certain quarters they would then have undertaken to proclaim: Alcyone is so and so; and he—he is the reincarnated St. John. Then the whole movement would not have had to undergo what afterwards ensued.

Vanity, needless to say, is one of many things that make men stupid. Catch people's vanity, and you can attain much, especially if you also know the ways and means of joining certain concepts. As I said before, it was done in the Theosophical Society, but in a too amateurish way. The others do it more skilfully,—more in accordance with realities. One cannot do much to the purpose if one has to reckon with a personality like Annie Besant, who herself is full of passions, and under whom those who were near her heaved many a bitter sigh. One need only know the sighs of those who were in Annie Besant's environment for years, their sighs and their anxieties: what situation would she not bring them into through the fact that she, too, had now been caught in the aura of a certain Indian occultism. For in this connection she had brought with her some strange qualities, coming from strange foundations,—qualities which proved highly inconvenient to a number of people in the Theosophical Society. Many people (men especially) sighed bitterly when they had tried again and again to bring Annie Besant into a sensible line. And there were women too, who sighed, but they subjected themselves time and again. They wanted to cultivate Theosophy in the way that is customary in those circles. But they pursued it in such a way, that it also became—in the theosophical domain—rather like ‘conglomerated mediocrity.’ They tried to carry what John Stuart Mill describes as conglomerated mediocrity, into the pursuit of Spiritual Science. I myself experienced it. A missionary of the Theosophical Society was working in a town belonging to the Section of which I was General Secretary. I went there to give lectures; indeed, I was invited by the said missionary. But when I arrived there, she said to me: We will gradually learn to do without the lectures. After all, they are of no real use. We must arrange afternoon tea-parties and invite the people. They will learn to know each other at afternoon tea—and, she opined, especially over the bread-and-butter. But the lectures (and she said all this with a certain gesture of deprecation)—the lectures will in time grow less and less important. She too, one must say, was wrapped in a regular veil from certain quarters; and indeed there are many such, who. work as missionaries and often do not know what wires they are pulled by. Sometimes not even wires are necessary; very thin cords or even strings are sufficient. Truly, it is piteous, to see how the most sacred and solemn affairs of mankind are sometimes treated.

Now they were especially afraid of this: What would happen if Blavatsky remained sound and healthy, and yet brought to light that which was there in the depths of her nature? Then, they thought, the situation might become very dangerous even politically, owing to her special constitution and her peculiar connection with her own, Russian nationality. So they made a very special effort to eliminate—to put out of action—the object of their fears. And indeed, if what was living in Blavatsky had been able to come forth effectively already at that time (beginning in the 1860's and 70's) many things would have taken a different course—things with respect to which people like Mill and Herzen saw quite truly. But alas, Ahrimanic powers succeeded at that time in eliminating or side-tracking many things. Well, we shall presently see how our own Spiritual Science may yet be treated under the present sorrowful conditions. Those who can recognise its significance for the great tasks of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch will think rightly about it. For it is really true, this Spiritual Science reckons only with the interests of pure humanity. You, by this time, should be in a position to know that this is so, and to perceive the true distinctions. Take for instance the way we have frequently discussed Goethe's Faust, and even presented it on the stage. One need have absolutely no national motives in the background, to present Goethe's Faust to mankind in its occult depths. On the other hand I leave it to you to judge, whether or no one need have national motives in the background, and very peculiar ones at that,—to do as Maeterlinck did recently: to represent Goethe and Schiller and Lessing as ‘mediocre minds’ and write long articles upon their mediocrity, for which articles one gains the support of the great newspapers in the world to-day. Whether or no there are national motives behind such an action, I leave to you to judge. (Nay, perhaps there are motives far deeper than merely national ones.)

But I will ask you now to place two things side by side. I have told you in these lectures of a book recently written by the Chinese author Ku Hung Ming—a work of genius in some respects. In this book Ku Hung Ming explains that it is the only salvation for the Europeans at the present time to turn to Chinese culture. For, says Ku Hung Ming, the Europeans will then be able to replace their worthless ‘charters of liberty’ by the ‘charters of faithfulness’ which can only come out of the Chinese spirit. Ku Hung Ming is a brilliant and incisive thinker, and he confirms at this point what was long ago foreboded by John Stuart Mill and Herzen; confirms it, moreover, out of a deep knowledge of the Chinese culture. Not only so; we find the same foreboding in a thinker who came forward, not as a philologist or schoolmaster or theologian, but as a man of practical affairs. I refer to Max Eyth, of whom I spoke the other day, who was a business man to begin with, passed through several other callings and had a real knowledge of life.

Ku Hung Ming describes the Chinese life and culture, and from his graphic descriptions we can gain a vivid idea of what it is. And we get this impression: How right were John Stuart Mill and Herzen (you need only read Herzen's work of 1864)—how right were they when they described the doctrines of Confucius and Laotze as the final and logical consequence which must result if Europe is taken hold of by the so-called positive realism, born of the conglomerated mediocrity of Bourgeois nonentity. For the logical conclusion of what is pursued in our Universities to-day and passes thence into the people as the modern World-conception, is the Chinese spirit; with the sole difference that the latter found its way to this conclusion, out of an earlier history and civilisation, 600 years before the Christian Era. Ku Hung Ming clearly outlines what the Chinese spirit is. Mill and Herzen described the path which is being trodden by that civilisation of Europe which will only take its stand on external, positivist realism. There you have it from both sides at once: from the one side, the prophecy that the Chinese spirit will take hold of Europe, and from the other side the dictum that the Chinese spirit is Europe's only salvation.

Maybe there is yet a third side! I may perhaps raise this very question now at the conclusion of this lecture: What if there be yet a third side, where they may find it very convenient and in their interest that a Chinaman of all people should now be giving the Europeans good advice, to choose the only possible salvation? What if it were no mere matter of chance that the teaching of Ku Hung Ming, of all people, should now be thrown into Europe?—a teaching, however brilliant from the Chinese standpoint, well enough adapted to confuse those who do not receive it with clear and open minds—minds awakened by Spiritual Science. A teaching, I repeat, only too well adapted to confuse men, and, maybe, to lead them in the very direction in which one wants them to go,—into a Chinese state. John Stuart Mill and Herzen recognised quite truly how the sails are set, by certain occult brotherhoods, in this direction. They really want a Chinese system. For the intentions of certain brotherhoods can most readily be instilled into a Chinese Europe. Why should it not be according to the will of such a brotherhood that a Chinaman of all people should now be advising Europe to lend an ear to all the good that might come to them out of the Chinese spirit? May they not well expect that even the most ‘enlightened’ will be carried away by the good advices which a Chinaman can give, now that in Europe herself they no longer know which way to turn?

I have told you how important is this Chinese book. But I also feel obliged (from the standpoint which must always be maintained in our Spiritual Science) to draw your attention to this fact: Such publications as the book—or rather, books—of Ku Hung Ming (for two have already appeared) should be followed with attention, but one should also know that there are definite purposes behind them—far-reaching purposes. We do wrong not to make ourselves acquainted with them, but we do equally wrong to be ‘taken in’ by them. And it is especially important to observe with care and attention all that sets itself up to-day as mysticism or occultism, arising frequently from very cloudy sources. Those who will bear in mind what I have frequently set forth, will certainly endeavour to see truly in these matters. For the modern world stands in the midst of many other streams. And the question is whether individuals have the goodwill to see clearly and openly.

For instance we must be able to appreciate the difference between the stream we have already mentioned and a certain other stream, which to this day possesses far more power than is commonly imagined. I mean the stream proceeding from certain Roman Catholic sources, behind which there are often real principles of Initiation, though, needless to say, those who are brought out into the world from this quarter are led by the leading-strings. Let us now contrast what may well be contrasted: On the one hand the Roman Church, and on the other hand those Occult Brotherhoods of which I spoke—the Roman Church which works in the way that is well known to you, and on the other hand the Brotherhoods, which, needless to say, attack the Roman Church to the knife. Yet they themselves go to such lengths as I described: While they possess the occult knowledge and make use of it, in public they stigmatise it as ‘medieval superstition,’ in order to keep men in the stream which they desire,—in order to make use of them. Contrast with this the Roman Church. You need only take such an event as the Encyclica of the 8th December, 1864, where the standpoint of the Roman Church concerning freedom of conscience and of religious ceremonies is proclaimed ex cathedra. The principles of freedom which are commonly believed are quoted and condemned somewhat in this fashion:—Some people say, Freedom of conscience and religious ceremony is the right of every man. That is delirium—madness, in other words. It is madness, delirium, for an orthodox Catholic—following the Roman see—to claim freedom of conscience and religious ceremony!

That is the one stream. The other finds it preferable not to say such things, but to do things whereby the freedom of conscience—and, above all, the freedom of individual conviction, the placing of individual convictions, into the general life of mankind,—shall be effectively annulled. There you have two contrasting movements—movements which are very important in the present time, and on which much depends.

Considerations such as these at the close of the present lecture, are given with a definite purpose, so that those who stand within our spiritual-scientific movement may resolve within their souls not to be among the sleepy ones, but to be among those who try to see life as it is. You are not a spiritual scientist by merely receiving the knowledge of Spiritual Science and believing in it. You are only a true spiritual scientist when the spiritual-scientific truths transform you into a man who sees clearly and has the will to observe with attention what is going on around him,—to observe it in the right way and at the right points in life, so as to gain a true judgment of the position into which he himself is placed in the world. This, too, is necessary, if we would speak in a fruitful way about the ‘Karma of Vocation.’

These studies we shall presently continue. Then will the necessary light be thrown on what belongs more to the every-day life—the immediate human life of the individual—the Karma of Vocation.

The decision to construct the first Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland was made in May, 1913, when Rudolf Steiner visited the future building site. Construction began within a few weeks and the exterior of the building was completed in April, 1914. Work on the interior proceeded at a slower pace and lasted through World War I (1914-1918). In 1914, Rudolf Steiner had begun a scaled-down model of the Christ sculpture that was later to be installed in the Goetheanum.. As the work on the sculpture itself began, he frequently explained its significance in his lectures.

One of Rudolf Steiner's lecture tours, May 6 through May 18, 1915, took him to Vienna, Prague and Linz. In all three cities he stressed that the Christ figure in the sculptured group would have to be portrayed as a being in equipoise between the polar forces of Lucifer and Ahriman and that this being was symbol of, and model for, man's own existence here on earth. The Linz lecture, which is here translated, presents the group in a world-historical context and relates the significance of the Lucifer-Christ-Ahriman configuration to the events surrounding World War I. Steiner sees a parallel between Christ's central, but equalizing position and Central Europe's mission in World War I. He implies that Germany's and Austria's militarism and political intransigence alone did not lead to war against the world powers in the East (Russia) and the West (France, England and, since 1917, the United States). According to Steiner, World War I was the earthly expression of a struggle between luciferic forces in the East and ahrimanic forces in the West, and it was Central Europe's destiny to mediate between these forces.

The fundamental polarization of East and West that Rudolf Steiner saw emerging more than six decades ago is now a political reality. While most historians today concede that World War II was in part caused by the circumstances surrounding World War I, few would accept Rudolf Steiner's statement from his Linz lecture that World War I was “destined by the European karma” or, to state it more concretely, that it was unavoidable. If the war could not have been avoided, then the question of who was to blame or who caused it is, as Steiner says, irrelevant. Based on this position, Steiner suggests that only one question has relevancy: “Who could have prevented the war?<” This question seems to contradict Steiner's statement that World War I was destined by the European karma. A quick glance at the historical record may help to clarify what Steiner meant.

In suggesting that the Russian government and possibly England, could have prevented the war, Steiner simply deals with possibilities outside the realm of what had to happen according to European karma. Russia's instigation of the two Peace Conferences in the Hague (1899 and 1907) was indeed self-serving and hypocritical, for it was Russia that, in 1914, mobilized its armed forces without considering British proposals for peace negotiations. Under these circumstances and considering the political immaturity of the German leadership, it was not surprising that the German Kaiser and his generals over-reacted to the Russian mobilization and interpreted it as a declaration of war. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II, who were cousins, frantically exchanged telegrams in which one beseeched the other to preserve the peace, but to no avail. The war machinery was already overheated by the forces of chauvinism and materialism so that even from this vantage point Steiner was correct in maintaining that war was unavoidable.

Regarding the possibility of preventing the war, a glance at the major Western powers involved in the controversy, and at Germany, reveals the following historical facts. France, for thirty years an ally of Russia, did nothing to prevent the war because she did not attempt to delay the hasty Russian mobilization. Her representatives said later that France regretted the Russian action, but there seems little doubt that France was more interested in presenting herself as the innocent victim of an attack. On the other hand, England's foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, could have prevented the war if he had taken earlier measures to discourage Germany's militarists from asserting themselves in their country, but in view of the English tradition and the English Constitution, this was probably not possible. Finally, the confusion in Germany itself was caused by a lack of understanding of who had legitimate authority to make decisions. Eventually, the political decisions were made by generals who managed to spread the belief that the fatherland was in peril and that Germany herself was not the attacker, but the attacked. Thus, theoretically, any one of these three powers could have prevented the war but that, as Rudolf Steiner points out in the lecture, is not the real issue.

Furthermore, the war did not emerge out of a French or Russian moral conviction that was responsive to German militarism. Rather, the goal of crushing German militarism emerged well after the war had begun. The war could be interpreted, in this sense, to be inevitable because it was not generated from a goal, but exploded and then developed its goals. In this war of attrition, materialism camouflaged itself with nationalistic sentiment and strove for absolute expression and triumph.

It is against such a background of perplexity and misguided fervor that Rudolf Steiner's message to Central Europeans must be read. In rejecting the question of who had caused the war, Steiner dismissed as equally irrelevant the question of who was to blame for materialism. Materialism was there, as was Ahriman. Steiner admonished the Central Europeans to counterbalance materialism by adopting a spiritual perception of life and by striving for an encounter with the Christ.

This profound spiritual responsibility that Steiner put on the Germans in 1915 was disregarded and the challenge passed by. After World War I it was not the Christ, but Adolf Hitler who, under the guise of “savior,” emerged as Germany's Nemesis and was thus catapulted into a central position. When Hitler was finally destroyed, Central Europe broke up into two parts, one of which disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, while the other aligned with the West.

As it stands today, Rudolf Steiner's call to instate the Christ in His central position has yet to be fully received and responded to not only by the people living in what is left of Central Europe, but also in the rest of the world.

Some day when the building in Dornach that is dedicated to the spiritual sciences is completed, it will contain, in a significant spot, a sculpture dominated by three figures. In the center of this group a figure will tower as if it were the manifestation of what I would call the most sublime human principle ever to unfold on earth. Hence, one will be able to experience this representation of the highest human principle in the evolution of the earth-the Christ, who in the course of this evolution lived three years in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. A special task in the portrayal of this Christ figure will be to make two ideas visible. Firstly, it will be important to show how the being that we are concerned with dwells in a human body. Secondly, it must also become apparent how this human body, in every facial expression and in every gesture reflects a magnificent degree of spiritual refinement, which descended with the Christ from cosmic and spiritual heights into this body in its thirtieth year. Then there will be the remaining two figures of the group, one to the left and the other to the right of the Christ figure, if that is the proper name for the figure that I have just sketched. This Christ figure is placed in such a way that it seems to be standing in front of a rock that towers noticeably at His left side, with its peak extending over His head. On top of the rock there will be another figure, winged but with his wings broken, who for this reason begins to fall into the abyss. One feature in the Christ figure that must be worked out with special artistic care is the manner in which he raises his left arm, for it is precisely this gesture that precipitates the breaking of the wings. It must not appear, however, as if the Christ Himself were breaking the wings of this being. Rather, the interaction of the two figures must be portrayed artistically to show how the Christ, by the very motion of raising his hand, is expressing his infinite compassion for this being. Yet this being cannot bear the energy flowing upward through arm and hand, an energy that is evidenced by indentations that the fingers of the extended hand seem to leave in the rock itself. When this being comes into proximity with the Christ being, he feels something that may be expressed in the words: I cannot bear the radiation of such purity upon me.

This feeling dominates so essentially as to break this upper beings wings and cause his imminent plunge into the abyss. To make this visible will be a particularly important artistic task and you will see how the meaning of this interaction could easily be misunderstood. Imagine, for example, an artistic portrayal of the Christ suggesting that merely by raising His hand He would radiate such power onto the being that his wings would be broken, forcing the plunge into the abyss. In that case it would be the Christ Himself who irradiated this being, as it were, with hatred, and thereby caused his descent. Such an impression must under no circumstances be conveyed. Rather, the being must be portrayed as having caused his own fall, for what is to be shown plunging downward, with broken wings, is Lucifer.

Now let us consider the other side of the group, toward the right of the Christ figure. There, the rock will have a ledge and, therefore, will be concave underneath. In this depression there will be another winged figure, who with his arm-like organs turns toward the ledge above. You have to visualize this as follows. To the right is the depression in the rock and in it stands this winged figure with wings entirely different from the figure on top of the rock. The wings of the figure on top of the rock resemble those of an eagle, whereas the figure in the depression has bat-like wings. This figure virtually buries himself in the cave, working in shackles, ever busy undermining the earthly realm.

The Christ figure in the middle has his right hand directed downward and the left one upward. Again, it will be an important artistic task not to show the Christ as wanting to shackle this figure; rather, he has infinite compassion for this being, which is Ahriman. Ahriman cannot bear this compassion and he writhes with pain from what the hand of the Christ exudes. This radiance from Christ's hand causes the golden veins down in the rock depression to wind around Ahriman's body like strong cords and shackle him. What is happening to Lucifer is his own doing; the same is true with Ahriman. This concept is going to take form as a sculpture that will be set up in a significant place in the new building. Above the sculptured group we will attempt to express the same motif through the medium of painting, but then the concept must be expressed differently. To summarize, the group of three figures: Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman will stand at the bottom as a sculpture, and above, the same motif will appear as a painting.

We are injecting this configuration of a relationship between Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman into our Dornach building because the science of the spirit reveals to us in a certain way that the next task regarding the comprehension of the Christ impulse will be to make man finally understand how the three forces of Christ, Lucifer and Ahriman are related in this world. To this day there has been much talk about Christianity and the Christ impulse, but man has not yet gained a clear understanding of what the Christ impulse has brought into the world as the result of the Mystery of Golgotha. Certainly, it is generally admitted that there is a Lucifer or an Ahriman, but in so doing, it is made to appear that from these two one must flee, as if one wished to say, “I want nothing to do with Lucifer and Ahriman!”—In yesterday's public lecture <¹ I described the way in which the divine-spiritual forces can be found. If these forces did not want to have anything to do with Lucifer and Ahriman, either, the world could not exist. One does not gain the proper relationship to Lucifer and Ahriman by saying, “Lucifer, I flee from you! Ahriman, I flee from you!” Rather, everything that man has to strive for as a result of the Christ impulse must be seen as similar to the equilibrious state of a pendulum. In the center, the pendulum is in perfect balance, but it must oscillate to one side or the other. The same applies to man's development here on earth. Man must oscillate to the one side according to the luciferic principle and to the other according to the principle of Ahriman, but he must maintain his equilibrium through the cultivation of Paul's declaration, “Not I, but Christ in me.”

To understand the Christ in His quintessential activity we must conceive of Him as a reality, as a working force. That is to say, we must realize that what wove itself into our evolution here on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha was present as a fact. It is not important how well or how inadequately this fact has been understood by mankind up to this time; what is important is that it has been present, influencing human development on earth. Much could be said to explain exactly what man has not understood about the Christ impulse up to this time; the science of the spirit will have to contribute its share to bring about a full comprehension of how the Christ impulse has come from spiritual heights and influenced man's development on earth through the Mystery of Golgotha. In order to realize how the Christ has become a working force, let us visualize—as has been done elsewhere—two events in the annals of man's evolution that have influenced the development of the entire Western world.

You will remember an important event from history when Constantine, son of Constantius Chlorus, defeated Maxentius and thus introduced Christianity externally into the mainstream of Western civilization. Constantine had to fight that important battle against Maxentius so that he could establish Christianity in his western empire as the official religion. Had this battle not taken place as it did, the entire map of Europe would have been different. But this battle really was not decided by military skill, that is, not by the intellectual prowess available to people in those days, but by something entirely different. Maxentius consulted the so-called Sibylline Books, the prophetic oracles of Rome, which guided him into leading his army out of the assured safety of Rome's walls into the open field, in order to confront Constantine's army. Constantine, on the other hand, had a dream before the battle in which he was told, “If you approach Maxentius under the banner of the Mystery of Golgotha you will reach a great objective!” Indeed, Constantine carried the symbol of the Mystery of Golgotha—the cross—when he led his forces into battle, even though his army was three-fourths smaller than that of Maxentius. Enthused by the power emanating from the Mystery of Golgotha, Constantine won that historical battle resulting in the external introduction of Christianity to Europe. When we realize the extent to which people in those days understood the Christ impulse purely by intellectual means, it is not surprising to find that there ensued an endless theological quarrel. People argued whether or not Christ was consubstantial with the Lord in all eternity, and so on. Let us say this, that the degree of knowledge of the Christ impulse available to human beings in those days is not important, but rather the fact that the Christ impulse was present and that through his dream it guided Constantine to bring about what had to happen. What is important is the actuality of the Christ and His real and visibly active power. Only in the science of the spirit do we begin to understand what the Christ impulse is.

Another historical event was the struggle between France and England. It changed the map of Europe in such a way that we can say that if France had not been victorious over England, all conditions and relationships would have become different. But how did this victory happen? It happened because the Christ impulse has worked itself into the subconscious of the soul up to the present time, when it is increasingly becoming a conscious force. So we can see in the evolution of the Western spirit how the Christ impulse seeks out in the souls of men those conditions by which it can become effective in some individuals. Legends have preserved for us the manner in which the Christ impulse can assert itself within the Western spiritual tradition. In part, these legends refer generally to ancient pagan ages, but they take us back to those heathen times in which an understanding of Christianity was beginning to germinate.

If the soul does not consciously seek initiation as delineated in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, but becomes saturated with the Christ impulse as if by way of natural initiation, then the most favorable period for this process is from December 25 to January 6. We can understand this clearly by realizing that for occult knowledge it is evident that the earth is not only what geologists describe. Geologists conceive the earth's components as being similar to the skeleton of man. Yet the spiritual also belongs to our earth whose aura has been permeated by Christ. During the day's twenty-four hours, this earth sleeps and is awake just as we are. We must familiarize ourselves with the fact that the state of wakefulness on earth occurs during the winter, and the state of sleep during the summer. The earth spirit is most awake in these twelve or thirteen days from Christmas to the Epiphany. In ancient ages when, as you know from the various presentations in my lecture series, human beings elevated themselves to a sort of dreamlike clairvoyance to reach a spiritual understanding of the world, in those ages the most favorable time for this process was summer. Thus, it is quite natural that whoever wants to elevate himself to spiritual heights by means of a more dreamlike clairvoyance will have an easier time of it during the summer, when the earth is asleep. Therefore, St. John's midsummer-day was in ancient ages the most propitious time to raise the soul to the spiritual level. The old way of spiritual interaction with the earth has been replaced by a more conscious elevation that can best be reached during the earth's wakefulness.

For this reason, legends inform us that unusually endowed people, who are particularly suited by their karmas, pass into an extraordinary state of consciousness that resembles sleep, but only on the surface. its inner quality is such that it can be inspired by those forces that elevate human beings to the domain we call the spirit world. A beautiful Norwegian legend² tells us that Olaf &Åsteson, in church on Christmas Eve, falls into a sleeplike state and when he awakens on January 6 is able to relate the experiences he had in this condition. This Norwegian legend does in fact describe the experiences that one perceives first as the soul world—and then as something that feels like the spirit world, but with everything being expressed as images, as imaginative forms.

This time of year has been most favorable in those epochs when human beings were not as advanced as they are in our time. Now it is no longer possible for the Christ impulse to penetrate the souls of men in this way, as if by natural initiation. Nowadays man must make a conscious effort and climb to initiation in a way similar to that achieved through the instructions given in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. We are living in an age when natural initiations are becoming increasingly rare and will eventually disappear. Yet one initiation that could still essentially be called a natural initiation took place when the Christ impulse worked itself into the soul of the simple country girl, The Maid of Orleans. It was she who caused the victory of the French over the English. Again, not the human mind nor the talents of military leaders were decisive factors in changing the map of Europe so magnificently, but rather the Christ impulse working itself into the subconscious of the Maid of Orleans and inspiring her to radiate its presence in all of history.

We would now have to examine whether something similar could have occurred in the Maid of Orleans by way of natural initiation and ask whether her soul was inspired in the nights from the 25th day of December to the 6th of January. From her biography it seems difficult to demonstrate that she was even once in a sleep-like state during the twelve or thirteen special days when the Christ impulse could have entered her soul, inspiring her to act as its human shell on the battle grounds of France. Yet, that is precisely what happened. There is a time when the karma of a particular individual can facilitate such a sleep-like state in a human being. During the last few days prior to a person's birth he lives in the mother's womb in a dreaming, sleep-like state. He has not yet perceived with his senses what is happening in the world outside. If by virtue of his karma a person were especially suited to receive the Christ impulse during these last few days in the womb, then these days could also be days of natural initiation. Strengthened by and saturated with the Christ impulse, such a person would have to be born on the sixth day of January. Joan of Arc was born on that day. It is her special mystery that she was born on the 6th day of January and had spent the time from Christmas to the day of Epiphany in a peculiar sleep-like state in the womb of her mother where she received her natural initiation. Now consider the profound connections beyond the external developments that we are accustomed to call history. As a rule, the external events that are reconstructed from historical documents are of the least significance. What is of decisive historical significance is the plain date in our calendar indicating that Joan of Arc was sent into this world on the 6th day of January. Thus, supernatural forces become active in the sentient world and we must read the occult signs that present this fact to us. They tell us that the Christ impulse had already streamed into the Maid of Orleans before her physical birth, as if by way of natural initiation.

I want to explain these facts in order to instill in your souls a feeling for the fact that the external preception must take into account unknown forces and connections beyond what we ordinarily call history. European history has been guided by the Christ impulse since the Mystery of Golgotha, whereas Asia retained a world view that is not vet fully sensitive to the Christ impulse. To be sure, Europeans have been led into considering the wisdom of India as something especially profound. Not only is it characteristic of Hindu thought, if not of all Asian religious perception, however, that its entire attention is directed to the time preceding the appearance of the Christ impulse, but also that the state of religious perception is preserved as it was in those days. If something remains behind in the evolutionary process it can be interpreted to have absorbed something luciferic, and for this reason Asian religious evolution is the carrier of a luciferic element. A glance at the religious development of Asia will inform us that it contains much of what mankind as a whole once possessed but was later forced to abandon. We must in part cleanse Western culture of the luciferic remnants and in part we must elevate them in such a way that the Christ impulse can enter.

Moving from Asia to the East of Europe, we notice how Russian orthodox Christianity has remained stationary at an earlier stage of Christian development, refusing to advance and thereby keeping something of the luciferic element. In short, we can detect a luciferic remnant in the East, which, I would say, a wise guiding force left behind for the evolution of mankind in general.

Looking to the West and especially to American culture, a different characteristic quality stands out. The characteristic feature of American culture is to explain everything from external appearance. This kind of perception can certainly lead to great and significant achievements, but still, externals are usually expected to provide answers to all questions. Suppose we in Europe, and especially in Central Europe, notice a person who earlier in his life did not yet have an opportunity to dedicate himself to Christ and to the spiritual cosmic forces. If some event in this person's life brought about his conversion, we want to know what had gone on in his soul. We are not interested in learning that there was a leap forward in his development because such a phenomenon could certainly be found everywhere. The most incorrect pronouncement made by the empirical sciences is that nature does not make any leaps.³ Yet there is a tremendous leap from a green plant leaf to the red petal of a flower, and there is another significant leap from petal to the calyx. This pronouncement is therefore patently false; the truth of all development rests precisely on the fact that leaps occur everywhere. Hence, when a person who for some time was leading an external existence is suddenly induced by something to turn to spiritual things, we are not interested in the fact that it happened. What does interest us is the inner force and power that can bring about such a conversion. We will want to look into the soul of such a person and ascertain what has caused such a reversal. The inner workings of the soul will interest us.

How would the American proceed? He would do something quite peculiar. In America, conversions of this sort have been observed frequently. Well, the American would ask the people who have experienced conversions to write letters. He would then gather all these letters into a bundle and say, “I have received these letters from some two hundred people. Fourteen percent of all these souls experienced a conversion out of sudden fear of death or hell: five percent claimed altruistic motives; seventeen percent because they aspired to ethical ideals; fifteen percent had experienced pangs of conscience; ten percent acted in obedience to what they were taught; thirteen percent because they saw that others were converted and imitated them; nineteen percent because they were forced by a good whipping at the appropriate age, and so on.” In this fashion the most extreme souls are isolated, sorted and tallied and the result is claimed to be founded on “scientific data.” The findings are then compiled in books that are sent out and billed as “soul science.” For these people all other evidence is unsound, or as they claim, rests on subjective notions. There you have an example of the externalization of the innermost phenomena, and so it goes with many, many things in America. At a time that cries out for special spiritual deepening, the most external brand of spiritism is rampant in America! Everything there has to be tangible.

That is a materialistic interpretation of spiritual life. We could mention many other instances from which it would be possible to see how the culture of the West is seized by the ahrimanic principle, and what principle causes the pendulum to swing to the other side. In the East we are confronted by the luciferic and in the West by the ahrimanic principle. In Central Europe we have been assigned the immensely important task of finding the equilibrium between East and West. Therefore, the plastic group in our building in Dornach must represent what we consider the most significant spiritual task of our age, that is, finding the equilibrant relationship between Lucifer and Ahriman. Only then will it be recognized how the Christ impulse was meant to influence evolution on earth, when the Christ is not simply brought to preeminence, but is known in the proper way as exemplary force in balance with Lucifer and Ahriman.

The following may illustrate that no clear understanding has yet been reached concerning the relationship of man and of Christ to Lucifer and Ahriman. In a period, even the greatest phenomena are not always free from a one-sided attitude that may characterize the age. It is impossible to overestimate the significance of Michelangelo's magnificent painting The Last Judgment, which can be found in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Christ is portrayed in triumph, directing the good people to the one side and the wicked to the other. Let us look at this Christ figure. It does not possess the features we would like to emphasize in the Christ of our building in Dornach. Even though Lucifer towers above, it must be shown that the Christ raises His hand in compassion. Lucifer is not supposed to be toppled by the power of Christ, but plunges down by his own power because he is unable to bear the radiance of the Christ nearby, and the Christ looks up and raises his brow toward Lucifer. Similarly, Ahriman is not conquered by any hatred from Christ, but because he feels he cannot stand the forces emanating from Him. The Christ, however, towers in the middle as the One who is carrying the Parcival principle into the new age and who, not through His power but through His very being, induces others to overcome themselves, rather than being overcome by Him. In Michelangelo's painting, we see a Christ who uses His very power to send some to heaven and others to hell. In future, such an image will no longer be seen as the genuine Christ, but rather as a Christ having luciferic qualities. Of course, this observation does not detract from the greatness of the painting, in fact, we acknowledge it. We simply must admit, however, that Michelangelo was not yet capable of painting the genuine Christ because the development of the world had not yet advanced to such a point when this could be done. There has to be a clear understanding that we cannot turn our attention just to the Christ, but must set our sight on the threefold configuration: Christ, Lucifer, Ahriman. I can only hint at this, but spiritual science will eventually bring to light the full content of the mystery, Christ in relation to Lucifer and Ahriman.

Now consider the following. Looking eastward we can make out luciferic forces even in the eastern regions nearest to us, while in the West we see ahrimanic forces. As a matter of fact, in spiritual scientific consideration we must adopt a mode of perception by which neither objects nor nations, nor the spirit of nations, are observed with sympathy or antipathy, but rather in accordance with their characteristics. What is called the national mentality of a person steeped in the heritage of his people depends to a large degree on the activity of the physical body and the ether body. From the time of our falling asleep to the moment of our awakening we live with our spiritual-intellectual being as astral body and ego, and during this period we also live outside our habitual national identity. Only during the time from our awakening to the time when we fall asleep do we partake in our nationality, because then we are immersed in our physical body. For this reason man overcomes his sense of national identity little by little during his stay in kamaloka. There he strives toward a union with humanity as a whole in order to live most of the time between death and rebirth in the sphere of humanity as such. Among the characteristics discarded in kamaloka is one that specializes us as members of a nationality.

In this connection the various nationalities differ considerably from one another. Let us, for instance, compare a Frenchman with a Russian. It is a Frenchman's particular trait that he is especially persistent in holding onto, and dwelling in, what the collective soul of his people carries into his physical body and ether body during his life between birth and death. This can be seen in his definitive idea—not as an individual but as a Frenchman—of what it is to be French. Above all, he stresses the importance of being French and what that means to him. But this notion held by Frenchmen or by anyone else from a Romance culture about their nationality affects the ether body by clearly imprinting the idea of nationality on it. A few days after the Frenchman has passed through the gate of death he loses his ether body; it is then a closed entity that has a prolonged existence in the etheric world. The ether body is unable to dissolve for a long time because it is impregnated with, and held together by, the Frenchman's idea of nationality. Thus, if we look to the West we see the field of death filled with firmly defined ether bodies.

Now, if we take a closer look to the East, at Russian man, we recognize his peculiar trait; his soul, upon passing through the gate of death, carries an ether body that dissolves in a relatively short period of time. That is the difference between the West and the East. When the ether bodies of Western Europeans are separated after death, they tend to maintain a certain rigidity. What the Frenchman calls “Gloire” is impregnated in his ether body as a national Gloire. He is condemned for a long time after his death to turn his spiritual sight onto this ether body, and to look at himself (The Russian, however, looks little at himself after his death.) Through all this, Western European man is exposed to the ahrimanic influence because his ether body has been infected by materialistic thinking.

The speedy separation and the diffusion of the ether body is accompanied by a feeling of sensual pleasure, which is also present as a most peculiar ingredient of national sentiment. How is this expressed in the East (Central Europeans do not understand this just as they do not empathize with the East.) Consider Dostoevsky and even Tolstoy or those leading writers who are constantly speaking of “Russian man”; their jargon is an expression of an undefined sensual pleasure surging from their national sentiment. Even in Solowjow's philosophy, we find a vague and stifling quality that the Central European man cannot reconcile with the clarity and purity he seeks. This search for clarity and purity is related to what is active in Europe as spiritual power.

In Central Europe there exists another condition, an intermediate state and something I can now dwell on in greater detail than was possible in yesterday's lecture. I mentioned that something exists in Central Europe that could be called the inner disposition toward striving. As a Central European, Goethe could have written his Faust no differently in the eighteen-forties: he was always striving! This striving is innermost nature. It was in Central Europe where the mystics made their appearance—those mystics who were not satisfied with the mere knowledge of the divine-spiritual principle but wanted to experience it in their own souls. To experience the Christ event internally was their very endeavor. Now take Solowjow who proceeds above all from a historical premise that the Christ died for mankind. That is correct, but Solowjow is a soul who, similar to a cloud, perceives spiritual life as something outside himself. Somehow he thinks that everything is viewed as a completed event, while Central European man demands that everyone experience the Christ event again in himself. Solowjow stresses time and again that Christ has to die so that man can be human. Meister Eckhart, in contrast, would have responded like this: “You are seeing Christ in the same way in which one looks at something external.” The point is that we should not look only at historical events, but that we should experience the Christ within ourselves. We must discover something within ourselves that passes through stages similar to those experienced by Christ, at least spiritually, so that we can rediscover the Christ event within ourselves.

Now it will certainly seem strange and fantastic when mankind nowadays is told that in Central Europe the close association of the “I” with the Christ principle had put a stamp on the entire development of the area, to the effect that even the linguistic spirit of a people took up this association and equated “I” (Ich) and “CH” (Christ): I-CH conjoined became “Ich.” In pronouncing “Ich” in Central Europe one utters the name of Jesus Christ. That is how close the “I” wants to be to the Christ, longing for the most intimate closeness with Him. This living together, as one, with the spiritual world, which we in Central Europe must strive to attain in all intellectual fields, is not known in the West or in the East. Therefore, something in the twentieth century is necessary so that the Christ principle can gradually spread over the entire European continent. I have frequently emphasized in several lecture series⁴ that in November 1879 the spiritual being we call the Archangel Michael had reached a special stage of development. Michael had become, so to speak, the leading spirit who is now preparing the event that has to take place in the twentieth century. This is alluded to in my first mystery play⁵ as the appearance of the etheric Christ on earth. It will come to pass that at first a few, and gradually more and more souls will know that the Christ is really here, is again on this earth, but as an ether body and not as a physical body.

Certain preparations are necessary. When some souls in the course of the twentieth century become clairvoyant to life in the etheric world—and that will happen—they would be disturbed by those ether bodies that are residual from Western Europe. The spiritual eye would perceive them first of all and would have a distorted vision of the Christ figure. For this reason Michael has to fight a battle in Europe. He has to contribute something to the diffusion of these rigid ether bodies from Western Europe. To accomplish this task, he must take the ether bodies from the East, which strive for diffusion, and join with them in a struggle against the West. The result of this is that since 1879 a violent struggle has been in preparation between Russian and Western European ether bodies and is now raging in the entire astral world. This furious battle between Russia and France is indeed going on in the astral world and is led by Michael; it corresponds to the war that is now being waged in Europe. We are often shaken by the knowledge that the events in the physical world take place as exact opposites to those occurring in the spiritual world, and that is precisely what is happening in this case. The alliance between France and Russia⁶ can be blamed on the seductive powers of Ahriman or, if you will, on the ahrimanic element, the twenty billion francs that France gave to Russia. This alliance is the physical expression of a struggle raging between French and Russian souls, a struggle that has an impact on Central Europe as it strives in its innermost soul for an encounter with the Christ. It is the karma of Europe that we in Central Europe must experience in an especially tragic way what the West and East must settle between themselves. The only possible interpretation of the external struggle between German and French elements is that the German element lies in the middle and serves as an anvil for both East and West. Germany, which is hammered by both sides in the conflict, is in reality the subject of their own controversy. That is the spiritual truth and quite different from what is happening in the physical world. Consider how different the spiritual truth is from what is happening in the physical world! This must strike contemporary man as grotesque, but it nevertheless is the truth, which must have a shocking effect on us.

There is yet another extraordinarily important matter worth mentioning. Surely history seems to be contradicted when we see that England, even though she has in the past always been allied with Turkey against Russia, now has to fight with Russia against Turkey. We can understand this contradiction only through occult observation. On the physical plane England and Russia are allies in the fight against the Turkish element, yet occult vision, perceiving this struggle from below through the physical plane and then onto the astral plane, sees that in the North it is Russia and in the Southeast it is Turkey that appear to be allied with England. This is due to the fact that the alliance between England and Russia is only of significance on the physical plane, but has no corresponding value in the spiritual world since it rests entirely on material interests. From below one sees that England and Russia are allied in the North only on the physical plane. In the Southeast, looking through the physical plane, one perceives on the astral plane a spiritual alliance between the English and the Turks while they are both fighting the Russians. Thus, on the physical plane, England is an ally to Russia and on the astral plane Russia is attacked by England. This is how we must see the events as they unfold in external reality inasmuch as they reveal themselves as external history. What is behind this history is something entirely different.

There will be a time when people will speak about the present events differently than they are doing now. You will have to admit, the entire war literature contains something rather unpleasant. True, some valid statements are made, but there are also many disagreeable ones. Above all, there is one thing that is disagreeable. There is much talk about how it is still too early to discuss the question of who has caused the war and so on. People delude themselves about the facts when they say that at a later date the documents in our archives will surely bring to light who is to blame for the war! In reference to the external events, however, the matter can be resolved fairly easily, provided one judges dispassionately. Chamberlain, in his War Essays⁷ is correct (even though he is in error about the details) when he says that it is possible to know the key issues of this war. All that is without a doubt accurate, but it leaves the proper question unasked. For example, there is but one question that can be answered unequivocally, if only it is properly posed, and this question is: Who could have prevented the war?—The constantly recurring question: Who is to blame for this war? and many other questions just are not appropriate. Who could have prevented the war? The answer to this question can be no other than that the Russian government could have prevented the war! Only in this fashion will it be possible to find the appropriate definition for the impulses that are at work in each situation. Of course, war had been desired by the East for decades, but had it not been for a certain relationship between England, Russia and France, it could not have broken out. Therefore, one might ascribe the greater blame to England. Yet all these conjectures do not take into consideration the underlying causes that made this World War a necessity. It is naive to believe that war could have been avoided. People these days talk as if it did not have to come about when it was, of course, destined by the European karma.

I wanted to allude to some of this by sketching the spiritual differences between East and West. It is not important that we look for external causes. All we have to know is that this war was a historic necessity. When that is understood the individual causes do not matter.

What is important is the proper attitude toward the various effects, for one effect can impress our souls in an especially significant way. It is remarkable and a characteristic phenomenon that a war like this one produces many unexpended ether bodies. Since this is the biggest war in man's conscious history, this phenomenon is present to a corresponding large degree. Ether bodies are produced that are not worn out. You see, the ether body that man carries with him can support him for a long period of time, until he reaches seventy, eighty or ninety years of age. But in a war human beings are sacrificed in the prime of their lives. You know that man, when he passes through the gate of death loses his ether body after a short period of time. A person dying in a war, however, loses his ether body when normally it could have supported his physical body for a long time, in many cases for decades. Those ether bodies entering the etheric world prematurely are preserved with all their powers. Consider now the countless number of unexpended ether bodies of those going through the gate of death at an early age. There is something distinctive about these ether bodies. I would like to illustrate this fact with an example that concerns our Movement, and after that I wish to explain how the ether bodies of the young soldiers who have gone through the gate of death will emerge in the etheric world in the near future.

This fall we witnessed in Dornach the death of little seven-year-old Theodor Faiss; his family belonged to the Anthroposophical Society and was employed not far from our building project. The father used to live in Stuttgart before moving to Dornach. He worked as a gardener in the vicinity of the building and lived there with his family. He himself had been drafted soon after the beginning of the war and at the time of the event I would like to relate, he was staying in a military hospital. Little seven-year-old Theodor was really a sunny child—a wonderful, lovely boy. Now, one day the following happened. We just had a lecture that I delivered in Dornach about the work that goes on in the building. After the lecture someone appeared and reported that little Theodor's mother had not seen him since late in the afternoon. It was ten o'clock at night and we could not help thinking that a terrible accident had happened. This afternoon a horse-driven furniture van had been in the vicinity of the so-called canteen; it was seen on a narrow street where it was forced to turn. To my knowledge, no van as huge had reached that spot in decades. Little Theodor had been in the canteen before the van had turned. He had been delayed there, otherwise he would have gone home earlier with the food that he had fetched from the canteen for supper. It so happened that he covered the short distance to his home in such a way that he reached the very spot where at that moment the van turned over and fell on him. Nobody had noticed the accident, not even the coachman because he was tending to his horses when the van turned over and did not know that the child was buried under it. When we were informed that the child was missing we tried to heave the vehicle up again. Friends fetched tools and alerted Swiss soldiers to help us with the task. Naturally the child had been dead since five-thirty in the afternoon. The van had crushed him immediately and he had died of suffocation.

This case can be used as an example of what I have often tried to explain by means of a comparison: causes are mistaken for effects, and vice versa. I have frequently used the following example. A person falls into the river and people hurry to the spot where it happened. When they find a rock, they conjecture that the victim had stumbled over it and this caused him to fall into the river and drown. Thus, they are sure that the man had died because he fell into the river. If one were to conduct an autopsy, however, it might turn out that he had suffered a heart attack and as a result, was already dead when he fell into the water, but he fell into the water because he had died. You will frequently encounter a similar confusion of cause and effect when life situations are assessed, and even more frequently in the general sciences.

The situation with little Theodor was that his karma had expired, so that it is actually possible to say, “He himself ordered the van to the place of the accident.” I have told you this externally tragic case in detail because we are here concerned with a child's ether body, which could have supported his life for decades. This ether body has passed into the spiritual world with all of its unexpended powers, but where is it? What is it doing? Since that day, anyone attuned to occult perception who is working artistically on the building in Dornach or is there simply to pursue his thoughts will know that the entire ether body of the child, with all its powers, is enlarged in the aura of the Dornach building. We must distinguish that the individuality is elsewhere; it goes its own way, but the ether body was separated after a few days and is now present in the building. I will never hesitate to assert that the powers needed for intuition are those of this ether body that was sacrificed for the building. The relationships behind ordinary life are often quite different from what we are able to suspect. This ether body has become one of the protective forces of the building. Something tremendously stupendous lies in such a relationship.

Now let us consider the vast amount of power that ascends to the spiritual world from the unexpended ether bodies of these who are now walling through the gate of death as a result of military events.

The way in which events are connected is different from what people can imagine; the karma in the world takes its course in a different way. It is the task of spiritual science to replace fantastic notions with spiritually true ideas. For example, we can hardly imagine something more fantastic and untrue, from a spiritual perspective, than what has taken place in the last few decades. Let us ask what has been accomplished by the (Hague) Peace Conference⁸ which aimed at replacing war with law, or international law, as it was called. Since the Peace Conferences were held, wars have never been more terrible. During the last few decades this Peace Movement counted among its special patrons the very monarch who has waged the bloodiest and most cruel wars ever known in history. The launching of the Peace Conferences by the Russian Czar must therefore be considered the biggest farce in world history; it is also the most abominable. This must be labeled a luciferic seduction of the East; the details can be easily traced. No matter how one may view the situation, the human soul is shocked by the fact that in the beginning, when the war impulses made their way into Central Europe, the people there made few comments about the situation, even in places where they gathered for the purpose of discussion, such as the German Parliament in Berlin. Little was said, but the events spoke for themselves. In contrast, there was much talk in the East and West. The most shocking impressions come from the debates among various political parties in the St. Petersburg Duma. Representatives of these parties uttered, with great fervor, endless variations of absolutely meaningless phrases. It was terrifying to see the luciferic seduction at work. The fires raging in this war, however, are intended to warn and admonish the human race to be on guard.

From what is now happening, a few souls must come to a realization that we cannot go on like this; human evolution must take up the spiritual! Materialism is confronting its karma in this, the most terrible of all wars. In a certain sense, this war is the karma of materialism. The more this fact is realized by human beings, the more they will abandon their arguments about who is to blame for the war, and then they will have to realize that this war has been sent into world history to admonish man to turn to a spiritual perception of human life in its entirety.

Not only does materialism cause human souls to embrace materialism, it also perverts man's logic and dulls his feelings. We in Central Europe are still lacking a full understanding of what I have stated before. We in Central Europe must be most intimately engaged in the continued development of the Christ impulse. To do this we must, among other things, try to understand the minds that have already sown the seeds. Just one example. Goethe wrote a theory of color, which physicists regard as something—well—something that deserves no more than an indulgent smile, as if they wanted to say, “What did the poet know about colors? He was nothing but a dilettante.” Since the 1880's I have tried to gain acceptance for Goethe's theory of color in spite of the findings of modern physics.⁹ Why does nobody understand that? The answer is that Central Europe has been imbued with the materialistic principle that has come to us from the British folk soul. Newton, whom Goethe had to oppose, has been victorious over everything emanating from Goethe's spirit. Goethe also established a theory of evolution that demonstrates how human beings, simply by grasping spiritual laws, can progress from the state of greatest imperfection to one of greatest perfection. People found this too difficult to understand. When Darwin published his theory of evolution in a more comprehensible fashion, it was readily accepted. Darwin, a materialistic thinker who was inspired by the British folk soul has conquered Goethe, a man whose perceptions resulted from a most intimate dialogue with the German folk soul.

Ernst Haeckel's experiences were tragic. During his entire life he nourished himself intellectually by leaning on the ideas of Huxley and Darwin; his materialism is basically an English product¹⁰ Yet when the war broke out, Haeckel was enraged about what emerged from the British Isles. He was one of the first to return British medals, diplomas and honors; instead, he should have returned his brand of Darwinism and physics, which is tinged with English thought. This is what we have to realize if we are to understand how Central Europe can strive for an intimate harmony with the laws of the world.

The greatest damage is done when what is poured into a child's soul induces the child to develop merely materialistically later in life. This trend has been on the increase for several centuries. Ahriman has even inspired one of the great British writers to compose a work that is calculated to impress the child's soul materialistically. The intent is hardly noticeable because ordinarily, one does not see all this as preparatory to a materialistic orientation. The work I am talking about is Robinson Crusoe. The description of Robinson is so shrewd that once the mind has accepted the ideas in the Robinson tale, it cannot avoid thinking materialistically thereafter. Mankind has not yet recovered from the ill effects perpetrated by the inventors of Robinson tales; they existed before and exist now. Much more could be said. These statements are not made to say something derogatory about the people of the West who have to be what they are. Rather, I wish to point out how the people in Central Europe must discover the connections to great values that are just now germinating but will grow to determine future developments. In this regard, the significance of Austria is especially noteworthy. During the past few decades several men there aspired to profound accomplishments, for example, Hamerling¹¹ in the area of literature, Carneri¹² who set out to deepen Darwinism, by extending it to the moral realm, as well as Bruckner¹³ and other artists from a variety of disciplines. What matters here is the concern of a people for these things.

Now let us consider the unexpended ether bodies that are still in existence. They were cast off by human beings who had learned, through a great event, how to sacrifice themselves for their people's spiritual commonalty, a commonalty no longer present for them, at least on the surface. If a spiritual scientist today asserts that there is a collective soul of people and that it exists as archangel and so forth, he will be ridiculed. What is called a people's collective soul by the materialists is nothing but the abstract sum of attributes that the people of a nation possess. The materialist considers the people as nothing but the sum of human beings who co-exist in the same geographic area and share a sense of commonalty with each other. We, on the other hand, speak of a people's spiritual commonalty in such a way that we know that the spirit of a people is present as a real being of the rank of an archangel. Even though somebody who sacrifices his life for his people is not fully conscious of the real spirit of his people, he nevertheless confirms by the manner in which he goes through death that he believes in a continuity of life alter this death. He believes that there is more to a people's spiritual commonalty than meets the eye, that is, it is related to, and co-exists with, the super-sensible world. All those going through death confirm in a more or less conscious way that there is a super-sensible world, and that realization is imprinted on their ether bodies. In a future time of peace, the unexpended ether bodies will be among people living on earth and will continually send the following sounds into the music of the spheres: there is more in the world than what mere physical eyes can perceive! This spiritual truth will ring forth as part of the music of the spheres through ether bodies that the dead have left behind. These are aside from what they are taking along as their individuality, which they retain during their lives between death and rebirth. We must listen to what lives and echoes from these ether bodies, because they were discarded by people who went through death and in so doing, affirmed the truth of the spiritual world. Mankind's greatest sin will be to ignore what the dead call out to us when their ether bodies speak. One's glance at the spiritual world will be infinitely enriched if one considers that those who have lost loved ones—fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters—may tell themselves that those who were sacrificed continue to live for humanity, as a reminder of what is yet to come!

If one were to rely only on what is taking place in the physical world, there would be little hope for the successful continuation of the spiritual movement through which a spiritual scientific world view is to be cultivated. Recently, a good and faithful colleague aged thirty or so died. My words to this soul that had gone through the gate of death requested that it should continue to work in our spiritual scientific field as faithfully and as courageously as it had done here on earth, utilizing all of its acquired knowledge. This colleague had worked diligently with us here on the physical plane; my message to him for his life between death and rebirth was that he should continue to work with us after death as he had done in life, for we are counting on these so-called dead as we are counting on the living. Our spiritual-scientific world view must be alive to such a degree that the gap between the so-called dead and the living can be overcome: we must feel the dead among us as if they were alive. We want not only theory, but life. Thus we wish to point out that when there is peace, there will be a living tie between those on earth and those who have gone through the gate of death. Man will be able to learn, and must learn, from the dead how they contribute to the great spiritual progress that must take hold on earth.

Sometimes life offers us an opportunity to see how human logic alone does not suffice. I would like to mention an example—not for personal reasons but because I want to characterize the way our Movement is viewed by the public. A few years ago an article was printed in a respected South German journal¹⁴ by a famous contemporary philosopher about our spiritual science. This treatment of spiritual science was intended to impress the public purely because the essay was authored by a famous philosopher. The editor took great pride in the fact that he was able to present an article about spiritual science by such a famous man. Of course, everything was skewed and the facts about spiritual science were distorted. But what did it take for the editor to realize that the account about spiritual science that he had sponsored in his monthly journal was distorted? The war broke out and the author of the article sent several letters to the editor. These letters contained some of the most disgusting remarks about Central European culture that one could imagine. The professor had railed and sneered at it. The editor then printed these letters in his journal as examples of the stupidity of this kind of thinking, commenting that anyone who writes this way belongs in an insane asylum. We are confronted by a curious fact. A good editor needed such an experience in order to see that the author, whose article on spiritual science had severely damaged the public image of the Movement, belonged in an insane asylum. If the man belongs in an insane asylum now, however, then the same was true before, when he wrote the article on spiritual science!

So it goes in the world! To be a judge of what is going on, man must garner other supports than those ordinarily available to him. The spiritual scientist who can clearly demonstrate that truth finds its own way, is on firm ground. Spiritual science, however, must be active in the evolution of mankind so that what is necessary, happens. Early in history Emperor Constantine had to accomplish his mission so that the Christ impulse could bear on the subconscious from the spiritual world. Later, the Christ impulse became active in the Maid of Orleans; what had to happen did indeed take place. Today, the Christ impulse must continue to bear on man, but more on his consciousness. In the future, there must be souls who will know that up there in the spiritual world there are those who sacrificed themselves as individuals and who admonish us to emulate their own belief in the active force of the spiritual, which they attained in death. The forces in the unexpended ether bodies beckon to the future, as well: to understand their message is to admit it into one's soul. Below, however, there must be souls who will perceive this truth and prepare for it through the proper and active understanding of our spiritual science. Our spiritual science must cultivate souls on this earth who will be capable of sensing what the ether bodies of the dead up there will say to us in the future. These souls will know that in the beyond there are forces to admonish human beings who had to be left on earth. When spirit-conscious souls down here harken to the hidden sounds of the spiritual world, then all bloodshed, all sacrifices and all suffering, past and future, will bear fruit. I do hope that quite a few souls come together through spiritual science and perceive the voices from the spiritual world that are resounding especially because of this war. Summarizing the final words of today's reflection, I wish to say a few words to you that are merely an expression of my feeling for what I want to instill in your souls.

From the warrior's valor,
From the blood of battles,
From the pain of the bereaved.
From a people's sacrifice
Will the spirit fruit arise—
Will the souls embrace the spirit
Consciously, with inner eyes.

With such feelings in our hearts we forever want to imbue ourselves with the meaning of the rose cross so that we can perceive it in the proper way as the motto for our doing, weaving and feeling. Not the black cross alone. He who tears the roses from the black cross and has nothing left but the black cross, would fall into the clutches of Ahriman. The black cross in itself represents life when it strives to embrace inanimate matter. Also, if one were to separate the cross from the roses, keeping only the latter, one would nor find the proper thing. For the roses, separate from the cross, tend to elevate us to a life of selfish striving toward the spiritual, but not to a life in which we reveal the spirit in a material world. Not the cross alone, not the roses alone, but the roses on the cross, the cross carrying the roses: That is our proper symbol.

• 1 . “Die übersinnliche Erkenntnis und ihre stärkende Seelenkraft in unserer schicksalstragenden Zeit” (“Supersensible Perception and Its Strengthening Soul-force in Our Time of Destiny”). Corresponding remarks can be found in the Berlin lectures of April 16 and 23, 1915, published as: “Aus schicksalstragenden Zeit”, (“From a Time of Destiny”) Bibl.-No. 64 in the Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works [of Rudolf Steiner]), Dornach, 1959.
• 2 . “Welten-Neujahr. Das Traumlied von Olaf &Åsteson” (“Cosmic New Year. The Legend of Olaf &Åsteson's Dream”), Hanover lecture of January 1, 1912. Published as a separate edition in Dornach, 1958; Gesamtausgabe (Complete works), Bibl.-No 158.
• 3 . In this form the pronouncement was first made by Karl von Linné in his Philosophia Botanica, Stockholm, 1751, no. 77.
• 4 . Cf. especially “Die spirituellen Hintergründe der äusseren Welt—Der Sturz der Geister der Finsternis” (“The Spiritual Background of the External World—The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness”), 14 lectures, Dornach, September 29 to October 28, 1917. Gesamtausgabe (Complete works), Bibl.-No. 177, Dornach, 1965.
• 5 . “Die Pforte der Einweihung” (“The Portal of Initiation”), first scene. Gesamtausgabe (Complete works), Bibl.-No 14, Dornach, 1962.
• 6 . The alliance was negotiated in 1897 by President Faure of France and Czar Nicolas II of Russia.
• 7 . Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Neue Kriegsaufsatze (New War Essays), Munich, 1915, p.36.
• 8 . “The reference is to the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 and 1907, which were both initiated by Czar Nicholas II.
• 9 . Rudolf Steiner was asked in 1882 to edit Goethe's scientific writings in Kürschner's Deutsche National-Literatur. Volume I was published in 1883; it contained writings on the formation and transformation of organisms. Rudolf Steiner's introductions and critical commentaries to the four volumes were published as a special edition, entitled: Rudolf Steiner, , Dornach, 1926. A German edition was published in Freiburg, 1949. Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Bibl.-No. 1. Cf. the correspondence between Karl Julius Schröer, Joseph Kürschner and Rudolf Steiner in Blätter für Anthroposophie,. 13 Jg. No. 2, February 1961.
• 10. Ernst Haeckel: “I have always readily acknowledged the magnificent contributions of the small insular British empire to the enrichment of human civilization. These were possible because of its advantageous insular position and its geographic alliances. In addition I worked on Darwinism for the past fifty years and had many personal dealings with Darwin, Huxley, Lyell, John Murray and many other famous natural scientists in England and Scotland; these were pleasant and fruitful personal relationships.” Haeckel, Ewigkeit. Weltkriegsgedanken über Leben und Tod, Religion und Entwicklungslehre (Eternity, World War Reflections on Life and Death, Religion, and the Theory of Evolution), Berlin, 1915, p.65 and 114.
• 11. Robert Hamerling, 1830-1889. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Literatur 1886-1902 (Collected Essays on Literature, 1886-1902), Bibl.No. 20, Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Dornach, 1957; Mein Lebensgang (The Course of My Life), Bibl.-No. 28, Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Dornach, 1962; “Robert Hamerling, ein Dichter und ein Denker und ein Mensch” (“Robert Hamerling, the Poet, the Thinker and the Man”), Dornach, 1939.
• 12. Bartholomäus Ritter von Carneri, 1821-1909. Cf. Rudolf Steiner, “Carneri, der Ethiker des Darwinismus” in Methodische Grundlagen der Anthroposophie 1884-1901 (“Carneri, the Moral Philosopher of Darwinism” in Methodological Foundations of Anthroposophy, 1884-1901), Bibl.-No. 30, Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Dornach, 1961: also “Vom Menschenrätsel” (“On the Riddle of Man”) and Mein Lebensgang (The Course of My Life).
• 13. Anton Bruckner, 1824-1896.
• 14. Wincenty Lutoslawski, “Rudolf Steiner's sogenannte ‘Geheimwissenschaft’” in Hochland, 8.Jg., 1.Heft Oktober 1910, S.45-58. (“Rudolf Steiner's so-called ‘Occult Science’” in Hochland, VIII, 1, October 1910, p.45-58). Professor Karl Muth, editor of the journal, writes an editorial comment in No. 7 of the same year, in which he describes Lutoslawski as an “author who is eminent as a man and as a thinker.” Later, in Krisgshefte der Suddeutschen Monatshefte, Munich, February 1915, p.623-631, Muth refers to his correspondence with Lutoslawski and writes, among other things: “in addition to making several small contributions to Hochland, Lutoslawski also published in this journal three lead articles which aroused considerable attention among the readers: one article on the theosophy of Rudolf Steiner, another one on exercises to strengthen the will, and the third one on his conversion to the Catholic faith. His published notes contain peculiar biographical clues ... Where in Germany—except in an inane asylum—would there be a human being like this lector of philosophy from the University Geneva—a man who seems to be completely disoriented as he confronts the magnitude of our contemporary world-historical situation with complete blindness and a paucity of ideas! The relief which his overwrought brain received through his epistolary outpouring did not satisfy him; he now insists that his latest letter should come to the attention of the public as well.”

Allow me today to make a few suggestions, perhaps in a somewhat aphoristic form, about the interrelationship between body, soul and spirit in humans and then, based on this, to make a few comments about the relationship of humans to birth and death and to the universe in general. It goes without saying that all of this can only be hinted at. But those of the honored audience who have heard some or all of this year's winter lectures will find much of what can only be presented in aphorisms today more or less substantiated in the previous reflections, which, after all, dealt in detail with important questions of the life of the mind and soul. Especially during this winter and last winter, I often allowed myself to make the observation that spiritual science, as it is intended in the considerations presented in these lectures, is not something that wants to enter the spiritual cultural development of humanity today as if by the arbitrariness of an individual, but that it is deeply rooted in the spiritual life as it has gradually developed over time to our days. So that one can say: Especially when one looks through the nineteenth century, in many places there is a kind of approach to such a spiritual science. But due to very understandable circumstances, it has been brought about that in the course of the nineteenth century, and especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, the extraordinarily successful and, in its successes, by the spiritual science absolutely not to be doubted by spiritual science, has occupied the minds, and that as a result the beginnings of an actual spiritual-scientific world view have been more subdued than might otherwise have been the case.

In particular, it seems to me that Goethe's world view contains the most significant first steps towards a spiritual science and that basically, if Goethe's world view is really penetrated, one cannot doubt that in this Goethean view of the world there really is something like a germ from which spiritual science can develop. Certainly, in the course of the nineteenth century, people believed that they understood Goethe very deeply. They also honestly tried. But what is present in him as the most significant seeds of a spiritual-scientific view of the world can only be gained if one not only tries to turn one's soul's gaze directly to what Goethe himself , but when one tries to put oneself completely into the way he thought, how he looked at things, when one, so to speak, not only wants to be his observer, but his successor. It is well known, and I have also pointed this out several times in these lectures, how Goethe raised himself to a meaningful view of nature, let us say first in his observation of the metamorphosis of plants. What did he want to achieve with this metamorphosis of plants? Well, he wanted to show, first of all, that the plant being that expresses itself in roots, leaves, petals and fruit consists of individual members, but in such a way that these individual members arise from each other, are transformations of each other. He wanted to gain a comprehensive view of the plant being, for example, by trying to show that What we see as a colored petal is, from a certain point of view, essentially the same as the green leaf of the plant, only a metamorphosed, transformed leaf. And the fine organs that we find in the blossom, which we recognize as stamens, and so on, are in turn transformed petals, right up to the fruit. For Goethe, everything in the plant comes into being through the leaf transforming itself backwards and forwards, as it were. For him, the whole plant becomes a leaf, but a leaf that takes on different forms. In this way, spiritual contemplation in Goethe's sense, I would like to say, the intense focus on the individual part of the plant, rises to a whole of the plant, but to a whole that is spiritual, and that he now calls the type of the plant. It is remarkable that during his journey in Italy, Goethe believed that he was able to awaken more and more thoroughly in his mind what cannot be perceived with the outer senses in the plant, but what lives in the plant sensually - Goethe calls it a sensual-supersensible form - and what is expressed in different forms as a leaf, as a flower petal, as a stamen and so on. He also calls this type, which is sensual and supersensory, the idea of the plant. And I have already spoken here in earlier times about what was said after a botanical lecture given by the Jena professor Batsch, between Schiller and Goethe, who had both listened to the lecture. Schiller had found that it was all very nice and good, but that it did not form a whole, that it all crumbled away into mere details, that there was no overview. Goethe took a sheet of paper and sketched an ideal plant in front of Schiller's eyes, a plant that cannot be found anywhere in the physical world, but which he believed he could grasp as a sensual and supersensual form and that lives in every plant, so that every plant is only a particular manifestation of this, as he said, primal plant. So Goethe drew something that can never be found here or there with the naked eye. Schiller, who was not yet completely at home with such things at the beginning of the 1790s, could not find his way at all in what Goethe wanted with this primal plant. He said, “Yes, that's an idea, it's not a view; you can't see it anywhere!” Goethe became annoyed at this objection and said, “If what I have drawn here is an idea, then I perceive my ideas with my eyes!” Now, that was certainly a somewhat extreme way of expressing it, a slight exaggeration. But Goethe felt that he had not merely recorded an abstract idea, but something that arose in his soul with such inner necessity as arises for the eye in the individual plant life when the eye focuses on the individual plant. This life, with the sensual and the supersensual, as he called it, was a reality for Goethe; it was a reality for him.

Now Goethe pursued such observations with zeal and real effort. Those who have studied Goethe's endeavors know that he made all possible observations with real scientific effort, together with the Jena professors, especially with Loder. Goethe pursued the endeavors with zeal in order to arrive at something that could justify a similar approach for the whole realm of living beings. And it is well known – one need only read Goethe's scientific writings – how he then tried to find out for the human and animal forms as well how the various organs are basically only transformations of a basic form of the organ. And as I said, you can read about it in Goethe's scientific writings, how he, as it were, through a flash of inspiration, but one that was prepared for by his careful anatomical studies, found a happily burst animal skull on his second Italian journey and how the bones of the head, in their shell-like form, are only transformed and how their original form is that which we find superimposed on each other in the spine as vertebrae. One such vertebra, of which there are 30 to 33 stacked on top of each other, is transformed in a corresponding way, so to speak, puffed up by its inner driving forces – forgive the trivial expression – and internally shaped to match certain parts of the cranium, so that for Goethe the cranium is a transformed vertebra.

I am well aware of how this Goethean way of looking at things has been transformed by modern views. That is not what matters now, but the way of thinking, not the details. Now, one can assume that perhaps at the very moment when it dawned on him that the cranial bones are transformed vertebral bones, something is at work and driving in the vertebral bone, which, while remaining hidden in the vertebral bone, remained hidden in the vertebra, rises up, —- the idea occurred to him that the entire human brain is also transformed nervous substance, a transformed nerve link, just as such nerve links are now organized in the spinal cord. This means that not only the outer covering of the spinal cord and the skull present themselves as transformation forms of each other, but that the brain shows itself at a higher level as a transformation of what is found inside the spinal cord bone column as nerve organs, ganglia, if you will call them, superimposed on each other. This thought suggested itself at the time when Goethe had formulated the other thought with what he considered absolute certainty. But he did not elaborate on this thought, so that it cannot be found in his writings for the time being.

Perhaps I may mention that I have been intensively involved with Goethe's scientific studies for more than thirty years now and that it was clear to me from the beginning that the last thought must have been added to the first one by Goethe. But of course it would be something special if one could prove that Goethe really conceived this thought in connection with the first one. And when I was allowed to work in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar from 1890 to 1897, it was natural for me to pursue such things. And already in the early 1890s, in about 1891, I was able to open a notebook that Goethe kept during the same period in which he made his discovery about the whirling nature of the skull bones. And in this notebook, written in Goethe's distinctive pencil letters, we find the following entry: “The brain itself is only a large main ganglion. The organization of the brain is repeated in every ganglion, so that each ganglion can be seen as a small subordinate brain.”

Thus the brain, the whole brain, is only that which we find in every link of the nervous system, at a different stage of development! Today I would like to draw your attention not so much to this fact as such, but to how Goethe's mind must have been predisposed in order to recognize such things and to assert such connections in what surrounds us sensually and physically in the animal, plant and human organization. What was Goethe actually striving for? Well, we saw it. He strove to find a sense-supersensible to what mere sensory observation can give, something that can only be grasped in the spirit, but which is just as much a reality as what can be seen with the eyes. So that Goethe came to the extreme saying: “Then I see my idea with my eyes!” Of course, he could only mean the eyes of the soul, because you cannot see ideas with your outer eyes.

In order to show how what Goethe thought about external connections contains the germ of what spiritual science has to say today, I now have to take a leap, so to speak. But this leap will appear natural to anyone who tries to gradually penetrate the spirit of Goethe's way of looking at things. If one wants to make progress in this way of looking at things, which Goethe, out of what I would call his instinctive genius, initially applied to the outer form of life, it is necessary for the human soul to undergo those inner developments that I have been talking about for years and particularly again this winter. As I mentioned last time, mentioned last time, you will find a brief indication of it in a few pages in the essay I wrote for the recently published journal 'Das Reich', which summarizes some of the material that you will find described in detail in my books 'Occult Science', 'Theosophy' or 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. I would like to say: that which makes the soul capable of looking at the world through the instrument of the physical organism must be elevated through special soul exercises, which I cannot describe again today, but which I have often described here. Through these inner exercises, through these inner soul-searchings, the soul must be enabled to see the soul-spiritual as such, to perceive it as such. To make that which appears more instinctively in Goethe the subject of conscious observation is the ascent from one spiritual science to another.

Now I have described — and as I said, you can read about it in the writings and essays mentioned — how the soul, through certain inner soul activities that it undertakes with itself, really brings about experiences that are of a completely different nature than the experiences one has in ordinary life through the instrument of the body; how the soul, by giving itself inner impulses that it would otherwise not give itself in outer life, can truly detach an inner element from the physical, just as - to repeat what was said the day before yesterday - oxygen is detached from hydrogen in the well-known chemical experiment. Through such soul exercises, the soul comes to experience itself purely in the soul element, to contemplate the soul aspect separate from the bodily. Since one cannot prove everything again and again, I would just like to point out that today I will present this only as the result of previous lectures, but that I have said a great deal about this detachment of the soul from the body.

When the human being comes to perceive the soul and spiritual as such, detached from the physical, the physical becomes something different and the soul-spiritual also something different. Just as there is no longer water, but oxygen and hydrogen, when you decompose the water in a chemical experiment, so the physical becomes another, the spiritual becomes another, of course only before the inner contemplation. But then, when the soul is fertilized by such real, now inner spirit-soul contemplations, then one gradually comes to look at the outer world quite differently than before. For this outer world is, after all, permeated by the spiritual everywhere. And then, I would say, the whole of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis becomes much more intense, much more saturated. He who, through the instrument of the outer body, first looks only at the outer sense world and its course, sees only that which is expressed in material existence. He can sense that the spirit reveals itself through material existence. But the spirit itself, how it rules and weaves in the material, can only be seen when the soul forces I spoke of in the earlier lectures are developed. But then the organs that one sees with physical eyes in humans and other living beings also appear in a completely different light. And then what is contained in Goethe's natural science is greatly expanded. Then, only by a straightforward continuation of what is contained in Goethe's ideas, one learns to recognize how the whole human head comes to us as the expression of what the human being actually is in the world from within. This whole human head appears to us as a complicated transformation product of something else. We know – this can be best understood by looking at the skeleton – that the human being visibly consists of two parts: the head and the rest of the organism, which is connected to the head in the skeleton only by small connecting links. So that we can really divide the human being into the head part and the rest of the physical organism when we look at it purely from an external, bodily point of view. And now, if, as I said, one fertilizes one's views through inner vision, one comes to the conclusion that the whole head is a complex transformation of the rest of the organism. On another level of development, the rest of the organism is, in a corresponding way, something similar to the head, just as the vertebra of the spinal column is something similar to the skull. The entire human head is transformed from the rest of the human organism. And one clearly gets the idea that this human head is, so to speak, like the rest of the organism, which has furthered the formative forces within it. The rest of the organism has remained at a certain stage; the laws of formation are held at a certain stage. In the head they have been further developed, further processed into form, further poured out into sculpture, I would say. The whole human head – the rest of the human being transformed, taken externally, bodily!

I would have to speak at length if I were to go into the details in this regard. But if one were to be able to hold an anatomical-physiological course here for weeks and go into the individual organs found in the head and in the other human organism, one would be able to prove in the strictest scientific sense, down to the last detail, how the basic idea, which I can only hint at now, can be absolutely proven. But now, in order to approach, as it were, an understanding of the whole, complete human being, one must consider the whole significance of what has been recognized, the whole, complete significance. In the human being as he stands before us, we have, in fact, two things before us: we have his head before us at a very different stage of development and formation than the rest of the organism, and we have the rest of the organism before us, of which we can say: In it lie formative forces that are only fixed at an earlier stage; if they were developed, they could become the head. Likewise, we can say: if the head had not fully developed its formative forces today, but had left them at an earlier stage, it would not have become the head, but would have presented itself in an external form as the rest of the organism.

We gain further insight into these conditions when we now consider the soul of man. And this soul of man can only be considered if one really rises from ordinary human knowledge to what I meant earlier and can only hint at today, with higher knowledge, with inner, supersensible vision. As you know, there is also a so-called psychology, a science of the soul. And especially in our time, this science of the soul wants to arise through exactly the same approach that is used in external natural science. People who still had something of the earlier approach to the soul in them and yet wanted to take full account of the entirely justified demands of modern natural science, tried to understand the soul life of the human being as it unfolds. Franz Brentano is a truly significant psychologist who still had something of an older science of the soul, which now seems to have been overcome, in him and wanted to take full account of modern science. However, in his “Psychology”, which was published in 1874, he could not rise to anything other than to classify what lives in the soul. This soul life is usually divided into thinking, feeling and willing. Brentano divides it somewhat differently. Franz Brentano is just such an observer of the soul who cannot rise to spiritual insight, but who wants to apply the way of looking at things, which one otherwise has only for external nature, for sensory perception, to the life of the soul. He only comes to a classification. Even in outer nature, Goethe does not seek to arrive at a mere classification, at what is called a system, but he seeks to arrive at a metamorphosis, he tries to present the transformation, and thereby, as it were, to follow that which lives supernaturally in its various transformations of form and to have an overall unity in the whole. Brentano, the psychologist, also breaks down the life of the soul and again cannot cope with the individual phenomena of the soul. It must truly be said that it is a hard nut to crack when one looks at the psychology of the present day, as it has developed in the nineteenth century in particular, with the eye of a psychologist of the soul who is trained in the way I have often described here. There you find this inability to get anywhere other than mere classifications: thinking, feeling and willing.

That which Goethe wants to have illuminated through all material, that which lives, this transformation and transmutation, this life, now not in an immobile contemplation that places thing beside thing and divides, but in a mobile, in a living, this life in such a contemplation must be applied in particular to the life of the soul if one really wants to grasp the life of the soul. You cannot just look at thinking, feeling and willing. That is quite impossible, one can only come to the division into thinking, feeling and willing. But when one examines soul life with the sharpened gaze of spiritual research for thinking, feeling and willing, then one finds in it a much more intense kind of metamorphosis, transformation than in what shines through the outer form of living nature. One grasps, so to speak, the transformation itself.

Can we recognize the essence of a thought if we grasp it only as a thought? No, we cannot! This is shown by spiritual insight. The thought transforms itself in the soul itself into feeling, and feeling in turn into will. And one must be able to grasp the metamorphosis of thinking, feeling and willing in one's inner mobility, then one grasps the soul. This can only be done by separating the soul from the physical body. And then one notices in direct inner experience what happens when we have a thought and compare it with a feeling, and compare feelings again with the will. We come to look inwardly at every thought that arises from the transformation of feeling. Every thought is a transformed feeling, and if we want to look at it inwardly, we must always perceive in the thought the incomplete, but half-dying of feeling. The life of thought is a dead emotional life. In thought lives, I might say, the rest of the emotional life. The life of feeling is transformed, but in such a way that the life of feeling passes, as it were, from a living state, of which one can be inwardly aware, into a more dead state.

When you say it like that, it sounds abstract. But when you experience it inwardly through soul-vision, when you really experience everything that makes your feelings turn into thoughts, for example when you have felt something vividly in the present and later you visualize this feeling only through a memory and then follows the path of how the feeling became a thought, then one experiences something so intensely inwardly, as one experiences, for example, 'when one sees a family member pass from life to death with an original, healthy family feeling. In the inner life of the soul, this very soul life, if one wants to recognize it, is permeated with intense inner liveliness, with intense inner participation. And no one should believe that the ascent from the external observation of nature to what is called the observation of the soul life is only something abstract or only that which is often addressed as confused mysticism, which mostly consists only of building a world view out of a dark feeling; but true soul science arises from the inner experience of the metamorphosis of soul facts,

But thought, too, can be awakened again into feeling, and it can transform itself into will. When, as has been indicated here several times, one watches how a thought seizes us as an ideal and then throbs through us, permeating the soul with enthusiasm until it becomes will, then one experiences, I might say, a birth, when one has raised the experience in question to the level of soul observation. This inner soul experience is what results from the exercises described, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But through this, as you can see, an inner soul life is opened up that lies behind the ordinary soul life. The ordinary soul life proceeds in thinking, feeling and willing separately. But this soul life, which I have just described, lies behind the thinking, feeling and willing that is usually turned towards the outer sense world. It is not something that the spiritual researcher creates; it is something that he experiences only within the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, something that he merely comes upon. He creates it no more than someone who comes in from outside and sees the table here now creates the table, although he creates its image by entering and looking at the table. In the same way, the spiritual researcher creates an image of the soul life that lies behind the ordinary soul life; but this soul life is present in every human soul. It lies, if one may say so, below the threshold of ordinary consciousness, which is turned towards the outer world or towards sensory perception in general.

I would like to say that there are also approaches to finding this soul life. Such approaches are to be found precisely in the development of thought in the nineteenth century. Because there is a yearning in all human beings for knowledge of the soul, such approaches have even gripped people in the broadest circles. We have one of these approaches in the concept, which Eduard von Hartmann did not exactly develop but did work with, in the concept of unconscious soul life. He did, after all, derive all conscious mental life from unconscious mental life. But the situation is somewhat skewed when it comes to Hartmann's unconscious, because it is only characterized in negative terms. If one says: What underlies the conscious is an unconscious, then one is saying no more than: everything that is outside of this table is a non-table, is a table. Now, if I describe everything that sits and stands here as non-table, as untable, I have not yet said anything special. It cannot be described in any other way than negatively if one stops at the level of conscious mental life with the realization. And that is what Eduard von Hartmann wants. One must inwardly fertilize the soul life, as has often been described here, and this ordinary soul life must descend to the other, so that the subconscious, unconscious soul life is grasped by an expanded consciousness, by a consciousness different from the ordinary consciousness that is turned towards the world of the senses.

You see, a soul life is grasped through spiritual insight. This soul life, which is grasped and appears directly in spiritual insight, what is it if not that which works inwardly in man and of which one must imagine that the outer body is somehow its expression, its revelation? But just as we have our ordinary conscious soul life, so its advantage lies precisely in the fact that this conscious soul life does not directly affect the body. Just imagine if the conscious soul life did affect the body - yes, it is really not an exaggeration when I present the following. Let us assume that we see the hand of a stranger and want to grasp its form. If this form did not appear to us as a mere idea, but permeated us, becoming truly alive within us, then our hand would have to metamorphose and become like the other person's hand. We would have to be able to absorb it completely, to make alive within us that which we can only visualize in abstract terms. And if we were to stand face to face with a whole, full human being who made such a strong impression on us that the impression was not just present in an abstract idea, we ourselves would have to take on the form of that person. Thus that which functions as ordinary conscious soul-life would not fulfill its task in the world at all if it were not so completely separated from our bodily life that it does not interfere with the bodily life and allow it to develop independently.

But we need only go back in human development to see at least a hint of what we can call – as I pointed out the day before yesterday – the shaping from within of the forms of the human organism. When we look at people, especially in their very earliest childhood, we see how what is within them is vividly shaped into what they later develop. We see how the spiritual enters into the bodily form. Of course, there are many objections to the assertion that I am now making. However, as I said, it is not possible to cover all the bases in a single lecture. These objections can be easily overcome if one can only talk about them in detail. So we see a vivid manifestation of what is inside a person, in the person's youth, in childhood, and in pathological conditions. We see how the soul and spirit intervene vividly in physical development. The ordinary soul life — one might say, thank God — cannot intervene in physical development; it would not fulfill its task. But read this excellent chapter in Schleich's new book: “On the Switching Mechanism of Thoughts”, this beautiful, I would say epoch-making chapter: “Hysteria - a Metaphysical Problem”, then you will see how it is referred to how, in fact, the soul-spiritual, what is grasped in thoughts, affects the plastic formation of the body in pathological states. We are healthy precisely because it is not so in the normal state. I will cite only the most primitive example from this book. The examples have always been known to anyone who deals with such things; but through the way in which they are introduced in this book, something epoch-making has indeed happened. The one example: a doctor enters a lady's room, in which a fan is humming. She says – she is hysterical, it is a pathological condition with which he is dealing –: There is a big bee! At first, the doctor wants to disabuse her of the idea that it is a big bee; after all, it is only a fan. Then she says: If it were to sting me! At first the doctor also wants to make it clear to her that that would not be so bad either. But at that moment the eye swells up into a lump the size of a chicken's egg.

This is how we see the effect of the mere thought. And as I said, thank God our ordinary thoughts are not such thoughts. And that is precisely why they are the right thoughts for ordinary life, that they cannot. They do not take this plasticizing form, they do not go down into the organism. For that, pathological conditions must arise; but then we see how thought can take hold of material life. Schleich quite rightly calls this an 'incarnation of thought'. But one must not think that one can remain within the ordinary life of the soul when speaking of such things. The ordinary thoughts that a person has are there for the purpose of understanding the world and as a basis for action. If a person is in good health, these thoughts certainly do not intervene in the ordinary life of the soul in a plasticizing way. But in a normal way, if you look at it spiritually, you find that what forms the human being, from childhood on, what shapes the forms, is now based on the same principle in a healthy way, just as the spiritual and soul life, which is still unconscious and remains unconscious as such, remains plastically formative. And it is precisely in this that man's further experience consists, namely, that what first enters the organism, what first takes hold of the organism, later separates itself from the organism, exists spiritually and soulfully on its own, and is experienced precisely as spiritual and soul-like. This is what the further development of man as an individuality consists of.

I have presented certain trains of thought to you; but these trains of thought are not really invented, not logically combined in any way, but they are lifted out of the soul's vision. And as I said, it is not a game of analogies, but it arises from the observation of the soul from the developed soul-spiritual knowledge that the same thing that can later intervene as a plastic principle in pathological conditions intervenes in the normal way in childhood life. The thoughts that I have thus suggested lead further, not by logical spinning, but by continuing the soul-spiritual view of the world. From the contemplation of bodily life, the thought was suggested: the human body, apart from the head, contains the same formative forces as the head, only at a less advanced stage; the head contains the same formative forces as the rest of the body, but at a far more advanced stage. These thoughts combine with each other in the inner vision. This more intimate acquaintance with the life of nature is attained by becoming acquainted with the spiritual and soul life in nature as well. In the higher vision, one must still clarify the following through the more intimate acquaintance with the subconscious spiritual life, as I have just described it. And one can do this through this more intimate acquaintance. Certain thoughts, I might say, only surmised by philosophers, become inwardly completely clear through the kind of knowledge meant here. Again and again, philosophers chew over and over - I do not mean this in a disparaging way - to gain some kind of concept of substance, of matter. In his Ignorabimus speech, D'Bois-Reymond presented in such a brilliant way all that can prove that what matter actually is, or, as he says, where matter haunts in space, cannot be grasped through knowledge. —- Matter basically always remains something unrecognized for ordinary knowledge; it remains outside of ordinary knowledge. Through spiritual knowledge one really comes to realize that matter itself cannot be perceived and that matter cannot enter into our inner being, just as little as the brass of a signet, which I imprint in the sealing wax, can enter into the substance of the sealing wax, although everything that is to enter, let us say the name Müller, passes from the signet to the sealing wax. What is externally material cannot be brought into the interior. But that which is to be brought in comes in in a similar way to the name Miller coming into the sealing wax. That which is in us cannot penetrate outwards to where matter is in space. Ordinary knowledge cannot grasp matter. Matter is simply imperceptible. I would have to talk at great length again if I wanted to explain in detail — which can be done — that matter cannot possibly be perceived as such. Matter can only ever be hypothetically added to the perceptions.

What is the actual basis for this? It is based on the fact that we do not perceive anything material at all. If only matter were spread out and we ourselves consisted of matter in the ordinary sense, we would be unable to perceive anything. Matter is not perceptible! How does matter become perceptible? Matter becomes perceptible because, in addition to matter (you don't have to force this 'in addition to'), there is still ether, etheric essence, in the world around us. When I speak of etheric essence, I must of course refer to what I have often said here, that the concept of ether as it is meant here does not correspond to any concept of ether as postulated by physics, although it can of course overlap with it in many ways. But finally, what kind of ether concept does modern physics have? This modern physics, which is actually on a wonderful path with those who research with all the tools of modern natural science, who make every effort to develop and increasingly develop the scientific way of thinking and attitude? From individual physicists, who must be taken very seriously indeed, in a completely different sense than the amateurish talk of a monistic worldview, we already have the sentence: If you want to have any idea at all about ether, then you can only do so by not imagining any material properties in the ether; ether must be imagined in such a way that all material properties are kept away from it. And now we are experiencing the marvelous fact that two opposing views of things are colliding. In the midst of these turbulent times, we are experiencing the clash of two worldviews with regard to the external, physical world, a fact of unspeakably great significance for anyone who is able to judge such a thing in its full gravity. We are now also experiencing the fact that what physicists have never really tackled in the right way, namely gravity, is being investigated. And there we experience it – I can only hint at these things in a purely historical way – that on the one hand the more materialistic view asserts itself and, as it were, tries to gain insight into the ether from ideas about the material, that is, from purely material properties. And on the other hand, we have a wonderful method of investigating gravity, which, as has already been said, seeks to strip away the material and dematerialize the natural in order to understand gravity. In short, if we want to understand the direction in which real science is heading today, we cannot rely in any trivial way on the talk of the so-called monistic world view, but we have to go into this true and serious scientific endeavor, which is permeated by truly impressive methodological discipline which, in attempting to go from matter up to the ether, strives more and more to achieve what I just meant by individual physicists even saying: the ether can only be imagined if it is no longer imagined with material properties.

In spiritual science, the ether now reveals itself through inner vision and through inner knowledge, just as one otherwise comes to know the external, the sensual existence. This is only possible through the first stage of spiritual vision. You can read about it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. There, as the first step in spiritual insight, I use the term, please do not misunderstand me, imaginative knowledge. But that is just a term. What is meant is the kind of knowledge — I have often presented this in the last lectures here as well — in which the human being does not simply accept the perceptions, but has to build the perceptions himself. Just as one builds up externally what one also has in reality when one notes it down, so imaginative knowledge will inwardly express what one experiences spiritually. But through this knowledge one does indeed arrive at a conception of ether that cannot be conveyed by external material representations. And then one arrives at the fact that ether is spread out in the world and forms the possibility that things, figuratively speaking, turn their surface towards us so that they can be perceived, and that ether is within us, meeting the outer ether. Ether from within, ether from without meet, and in this way that which flows towards us ethereally from things, that which ethereally rises from us in the organism, is encompassed. This encompasses itself inwardly, and only through this does that which we call perception arise. What makes it so difficult to understand sensory perception is precisely the lack of knowledge of the facts just described.

Take the human eye! This human eye gives images of our surroundings precisely because the material processes from outside continue within the eye, so to speak. What happens in our inner eye is, without our consciousness being present, only a continuation of the laws of light that exist outside in the world. And when the outer ether continues into our eye and is grasped by the inner ether, this is how this perception of light arises. What I am about to say is a direct continuation of what is written in Goethe's beautiful and significant chapter on physical colors and their perception.

Thus we ascend from external matter to the ether, and in so doing we come closer to what lives within us. For that is the other thing now. Matter rises to the ether; we have ether within us; the inner ether enters into interaction with the outer ether. That is the one process. And now let us look at it from the other side. We have seen that when we have our soul life, the conscious soul life, which in a healthy state must not interfere with matter but which nevertheless contains the possibility of formative forces, this conscious soul life leads us down into a subconscious soul life. And this subconscious soul life has, I would say, a completely different power than the conscious soul life. The conscious soul life is the abstract soul life, the soul life that does not hurt us. I would like to give just one example of this: in the conscious soul life we can say a lie calmly, it does not hurt us. But if the lie arises in the subconscious, it hurts; that is, it has the power to develop into reality. It is only in our subconscious mental life that we have a mental life that is capable of forming itself, a mental life that is no longer separate from matter, but can now intervene in matter, although initially it can only intervene in the matter that is available to it. This subconscious mental life can now in turn intervene in what is in us as ether. And in that which is behind matter as ether, and in that which is below our consciousness as subconscious soul life, there arises an interaction that lies below our consciousness and above matter. This takes place in our subconscious. If you follow this train of thought, you can now easily explain the morbid states of mind as well. There is not enough time to go into them. I have often used the term subconscious here, which may even rightly appear dreadful at first to some people, and which really challenges one to make bad or good jokes about it. But the term should not be important. If we take a comprehensive view of the whole human being, he consists, of course, of matter, just as the other external things consist of matter, of the etheric being that he has within and that enters into relationship with the external ether, and of the subconscious soul life, which can now intervene in the ether in a formative way. And that which arises in the interaction between the subconscious soul life, which we discover in the spirit-sight, into which we dive in the spirit-sight, and the weaving, surging ether, that is precisely the imagination, the first step of spiritual vision.

And then, when through knowledge a person has struggled through to that which is not consciously experienced in him, but which is still inner life, then he also experiences how this inner life proves to be related to that which now lives in the external, but is not matter, cannot be imagined as material at all - even according to today's physics - how this becomes one in him.

We can grasp even more closely what I have often characterized in these lectures as the inner human being in the human being. The conscious soul life goes down to a subconscious soul life, and this subconscious soul life is now more powerful than this conscious one and organizes itself together with the etheric life. In this way we actually have that which is present in the human soul life. And when a person awakens this soul life within himself through the exercises described in the repeatedly mentioned books and essays, only then does he really perceive what can be called the spiritual world, just as he perceives the outer sensual world with his physical organism. In the thorough organization of his etheric body lies the possibility of perceiving and knowing a spiritual world, and of knowing that he himself comes from this spiritual world.

And now the thought broadens and is combined with the other thought, which was gained from Goethe's world view. For once one has grasped the inner human being, one can now begin to ask oneself: Yes, what about these two parts of the human nature, the head and the rest of the body, which are at different levels of development? Here we come to the fact that what can be imagined spiritually and soul-wise must be brought into quite different relationships with the head than with the rest of the organism. When one grasps the spiritual man in clairvoyance – but not in the way it is meant in spiritualism or in trivial superstition, but really in the sense that is always characterized here – the spiritual man who underlies the outer man, also the man who has ordinary consciousness — for that is nothing directly soul-like, but only something that lies below it — if one can grasp this person, one sees this inner person in a completely different connection with the main part of the person and with what the rest of the person's body is. And what we find is this: When we examine the head, we find in the head a plastic formation, a shaping, such that the soul-spiritual has flowed completely into the form, the soul-spiritual is completely shaped in the form and has even shaped itself in this form in such a way that it still retains some of its formative powers. And these retained formative forces are those that we can then develop as our thoughts. But what is developed in our thoughts only abstractly out of the head lies in the form in which it can only be achieved subconsciously, at the basis of the formation of our head. And in a completely different way, the spiritual-soul substance underlies the rest of the human organism. These formative forces do not penetrate so deeply into the rest of the human organism; there they retain a certain independence; there the soul-spiritual lives much more strongly alongside the physical body. If I may speak figuratively, imaginatively and figuratively – please allow me this tautology – I would therefore like to say: When the seer has the human head before him, he has a spiritual-soul form, but in addition, only extremely sparsely, a spiritual form. If he has the other human organism before him, he has the bodily form, but the spiritual is richly developed, only it has not yet become as organized in the material as it is in the head. In the head the spiritual has flowed into matter much more than in the rest of the organism. The human head is much more material than the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is such that the spiritual has not yet flowed very much into the material and still has greater independence.

Now the spiritual insight of which I have spoken comes to a real understanding of the essential meaning of what I have just expressed. What forces of development are there in the human head that have reached a point that lies much, much further ahead in development than what can be observed in the rest of the organism? If one learns to look at what underlies the head, one learns to transfer the spiritual vision to the human head, then one oneself comes to experience soulfully what has been processed in the human head. When one experiences inwardly in soul what formative forces are at work in the human head — today I can only hint at these things in aphorisms — then one finds that what is processed there expands directly into a spiritual world, that one must really think of the formative forces as coming from the spiritual world, even if this passes through the human hereditary currents. Here again we have a beautiful point of contact between modern natural science and spiritual science. There are such points of contact everywhere. Today there are natural scientists who, through their natural research, also admit that such cosmic formative forces are at work in what builds up in the human being while he is developing in the mother's body. So we have something in the human head that is formed from the cosmos. In the human head there is an immediate imprint of the cosmos when one looks at the soul.

If we now ascend further to the spiritual, to the way I have described it to you, we come back further. We gain the following knowledge of the head: at birth, actually soon after conception, this human head is so constituted that its formative forces pass entirely into the material, leaving only a little of the soul behind, living out their full potential in the material. But these formative forces lead back to a time before conception. They lead up into the spiritual world, so that what arises from the cosmos in the formation of the head, the human being has essentially experienced in the spiritual world before he was conceived or born. And when we go from the soul to the spiritual, we will then, within this spirit, recognize in the formation of the head what comes from an earlier life on earth. It is precisely by observing the human head in a spiritual-scientific context that one passes directly from the present earth life into the earlier earth life. And this is supplemented by the other thought, when one now observes what is present in the rest of the organism, apart from the head. In this remaining organism, the soul-spiritual life is still separate, the whole human life, as it is led from birth to death in dealing with the outside world, in relation to other people, to the things of this world, to nature and all the spiritual conditions in which we live, to all social conditions; this is expressed in what is spiritual about us, in the rest of the organism, summarized in the human heart. This is not just a picture, but a real spiritual-physiological fact. But because this human organism has taken on its fixed form at birth, it can initially only remain spiritual-soul-like. However, it is present as formative forces, it remains present as formative forces, and it goes through death as formative forces. If we follow what is in the human organism, apart from the head, then we find that the spiritual view points us to what lies after death. And if we look at the human being spiritually, we find that this is transformed into the next earthly life.

And further: Concrete observation teaches us that the head, as it is now shaping itself with its inner formative powers, is the result of our physical life in a previous earthly existence, apart from the head. Our head has truly been transformed from an earlier life on earth, and our present organism, apart from the head, with all its experiences, retains the formative forces in a spiritual-soul way, and when it departs with death, it gives them to the spiritual world, and they develop so that they can participate in the formation of our head in the next life on earth. And we arrive at the great, significant law: in what our head is inwardly formed — mind you, inwardly formed — we have the result of the formation of what the rest of the organism, apart from the head, was predisposed to in a previous life on earth; and in what struggles and forces in the rest of our organism, we have what goes into the formation of the head in the next life on earth. Once this knowledge is acquired, it will be possible to draw a strict scientific distinction between what lies within the line of inheritance and what does not lie within the line of inheritance. In this field, natural science still has, I might say, very significant doors to open if it wants to meet what spiritual science has to say about the spiritual and soul life.

I would like to draw attention to just one point. Of course, natural science today rightly attributes certain characteristics that we have to the principle of inheritance; we have them from our father and mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on. But we should not think that the natural scientist is saying something when he comes and says: Yes, the spiritual scientist attributes inner formative forces to earlier earthly lives; we learn all this from inheritance! The spiritual researcher does not deny that which can be scientifically explained from heredity, which may lie in the physical line of reproduction, as the spiritual researcher is generally on the ground of natural science. But, as I said, natural science must first open up certain doors and follow certain guidelines. Just think about the following: as I pointed out the day before yesterday, a person reaches sexual maturity at a certain age and is then able to produce offspring. At that point, he has all the abilities within him to pass on to the next generation what he has in the way of physical-bodily formative forces. He must have it in himself. No new abilities can arise later. What a person acquires later in the way of abilities, which he in turn partially incorporates, as he previously incorporated the ability to reproduce, does not pass into the reproductive current, but these abilities work and have an effect in the person in such a way that they form the germ for that which goes through the gate of death, between death and new birth through the spiritual world and in a next life on earth, it is embodied anew in the way I have described. There is then a transition, and one can say - as grotesque as it may still sound today - the formation of the head, but, as I said, the head is formed from within. The formation of the head contains forces that we must seek as the spiritual and soul element accompanying the body, which exists independently of the head, in an earlier life on earth. But what we now have in addition to our head, before the spiritual and soul has completely poured into the physical, that prepares the configuration and shape of the head in a next earthly life. This is certainly still a paradoxical assertion today, and yet, it is how a comprehensive doctrine of metamorphosis for the whole person is built, a doctrine of metamorphosis that encompasses spirit, soul and body and shows how the reality within the human being goes through birth and death and how this reality in the human being is related to the universe. What is it that directly belongs to our earthly life? What directly belongs to our earthly life as an individual human being living between birth and death? Our head! What we usually find to be the most spiritual on the outside is most closely related to the earth. What is less related to the earth also passes into other than earthly worlds in the time between death and a new birth. And when, after the person has passed through the gateway of death, the spiritual has gained the strength to transform itself into the formation of the head, then it has attained its goal.

As you can see, spiritual science speaks in a very concrete way about what belongs to the eternal part of man. And in a very concrete way it can indicate how the human being is embedded in the whole universe. It can point out how that which is in the human head is so occupied by the forces of the earth that the whole spiritual and soul life has poured itself into the head, and how that which exists outside the head is only preparing to be joined to it in the next life on earth. We see how one earthly life follows another, in order to link up to eternity like chain links. When man – not now in an external, abstract description, but inwardly – grasps what can be experienced as the inner man, when the subconscious, the ethereal takes hold and the inner man becomes active, then the soul is seized and it can be understood beyond birth and death in connection with the universe. And when man has awakened this in himself, then a spiritual world also becomes visible before this inner man, a concrete spiritual world, as before the physical eyes, which develop out of transformed matter, the physical world becomes visible. The spiritual and soul worlds present themselves in a definite, concrete way. And just as we become acquainted with concrete physical things and beings through our bodily organization in the physical world around us, so we become acquainted with a spiritual world in concrete individual forms through the higher man, through the man who lives spiritually and soulfully in man. But the spiritual-soul in man must be grasped in a living way, otherwise it remains a mere inkling that can only be found in a conceptual construction. One can only come to the spirit, to the soul, by descending from the ordinary consciousness to the subconscious and really developing a new consciousness for the subconscious and thereby forming a higher human being in the human being with what otherwise pervades matter as ether. This is possible through experience, through real inner experience on the paths described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”. If one does not attain this spiritual level, then one remains within that which of the soul-spiritual asserts itself in the physical organism. One basically remains in that which is present in man between birth and death, and then one comes to that unclear mysticism, which unfortunately is confused by many with true, but now brightly clear mysticism, which is attained in the way I have just described, through the experience of the inner concrete spiritual-soul man. And because confused, hazy mysticism is confused with that which becomes bright and clear within, that is why spiritual scientific striving is still so often misunderstood today. The nebulous inner self, felt only through the detour of the body, does not really expand into a cosmic self, but becomes blurred in a general sense of the world. It is difficult to express this. That unclear, blurred mysticism is only what the soul can experience with the help of the bodily instrument. The soul must first be released from the body, then the soul-spiritual is truly experienced. And the spiritual must be seen, but not with the same powers of cognition with which the conceptual-legal, natural-legal in the sensual world is seen; because that is seen with the help of the bodily instrument, that does not even go through the gate of death with us. Natural laws are only meaningful between birth and death – not for nature itself, but for us. But when a person awakens the inner man and the spiritual world is around him, then he beholds a concrete spiritual world in which spiritual beings are as physical beings are in the physical world. And then it does not come to what otherwise a yes also quite commendable, but just limited metaphysics comes: in all possible ways one comes from a mere inkling of the spirit, which one veils with concepts, to pantheism, this foggy construct that sees an All-spirit everywhere, just as if one did not want to see individual plants and animals everywhere, but an All-nature. Whether one sees will everywhere, as Schopenhauer did, or finds a panpsychism by philosophical means, all these “pane” come about only because the soul-spiritual works only with the tool of the human head. And basically, mere philosophical idealism, which I have repeatedly tried to describe truly in all its magnitude this winter, could not lead to anything other than a conceptual understanding of the world; for the real spiritual world is only attained in the way I have indicated. But precisely when one works out this concrete view — and today I could only work it out aphoristically — what I have said can really be fully reconciled with the scientific world view, and does not offend any religious feeling. You will soon be able to read about this in my little work 'The Task of Spiritual Science', which will be published in the next few weeks. All that I have described so far only enables man to understand the world around him in all its phenomena. The spiritual world is present in the outer world in its effects, but these effects can only be fully understood when one grasps the spiritual foundations of these effects. Only when we have grasped the soul-forming forces that underlie the world, the spiritual forces of action, can we gain insight into what the world actually is.

Goethe first wanted to see the weaving and surging of the spirit, which had remained unconscious to him, in the reflection of the external material, and he could only perceive this in the living material through his metamorphosis. If the way of thinking that Goethe had is extended to body, soul and spirit, a true science of body, soul and spirit will really appear. Then such a science will also be possible, as I indicated the day before yesterday for understanding the individual national souls and for the historical development of humanity in general as it unfolds on earth.

One can say: there has always been a longing to achieve such a spiritual science. Today we call it anthroposophy, that is, I will try to justify this name for you. Anthroposophy because anthropology looks at the human being as one would if one only used the external organs of the human being. Anthroposophy arises when one lets the inner, awakened human being focus on what it means to be human. In earlier lectures I quoted a saying of Troxler from 1835, from which it can be seen how such an anthroposophy has been longed for. For in the time when Goethe's world view was more or less unconsciously at work in the better souls everywhere, there was already a longing and hope for such an anthroposophy. And as proof of this, let me quote a saying that Immanuel Hermann Fichte — whom I also mentioned in one of the last lectures — made in 1860; it should prove to you that what is being sought here today as spiritual science is something longed for and hoped for in the spiritual movement of the nineteenth century, even if it was somewhat subdued for the reason given. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great philosopher, says in his “Anthropology” at the end, 1860: “But anthropology already ends in the result, justified from the most diverse sides, that man, according to the true nature of his being, as in the very source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. In contrast, sense consciousness and the phenomenal world arising from its vantage point, with the entire human sensory life, have no other significance than to be the place in which the supersensible life of the spirit is carried out, in that the spirit, through its own act of free consciousness, introduces the otherworldly spiritual content of the ideas into the world of the senses... This thorough grasp of the human being now elevates “anthropology in its final result to ‘anthroposophy’.”

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is truly nothing arbitrarily invented, but something longed for and hoped for by the best minds of the nineteenth century. And I am convinced that it is based on a real penetration into the spirit of Goethe's world view. When, a few years ago, the question arose as to the name of the society within which this spiritual research, which is meant here, would be cultivated, I would have liked to have named this society the “Goethe Society” if the name had not already been given to another Goethe Society. It was named the Anthroposophical Society; but for good reasons, because you see: what appears today as spiritual science is long awaited and long hoped for, and it is that which today, I might say, is brought to the surface from subconscious depths of the soul, only the fulfillment of those hopes that were truly not present in the worst minds.

And such hopes were present in yet another way, in a remarkable way and, I might say, arising from the Goethean worldview, in a spirit that lived so completely with his soul in the Goethean worldview – in Herman Grimm. Here, something wonderful comes to light. Herman Grimm is, after all, a historian, especially an art historian. He tried, really out of Goethe's spirit — I am not saying now how he was able to grasp it, but how he was able to assimilate it and spiritualize it — to present the developmental process of historical phenomena in the sense of such a Goethean world view. What is he coming to? At one point in an essay he wrote about Macauley, Herman Grimm tried to understand how one can understand historical development and the place of the individual human being in history. He tried to form a concept about it: What is the place of the human being in the development of history? He still shrank back, because when he wrote the essay – it was at the beginning of the seventies – the time was not yet ripe to describe spiritual science in such a way as one can describe it today – even if it is still often regarded as fantasy or something worse. He does not attempt to ascend to spiritual science, but to form a thought, which he says he initially wants to just let be a fantasy, a thought through which he can imagine: how does the individual human being initially stand in the universe from an historical point of view?

Grimm then utters the following words: “It is conceivable that the spirit of a human being, released from the bonds of the body, might hover above the earth like a mere mirror of what is happening.” — He formally apologizes at the time because no spiritual science could be present: “I am not stating an article of faith here, it is just a fantasy. Let us assume that for some people immortality takes this form” — we have it, the fantasy, immortality takes this form for spiritual science! — ”that they float above the earth, unhampered by what previously blinded them, and reveal to them all the destinies of the earth and of man before the birth of the planet...” Herman Grimm had to imagine life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth at least hypothetically, in order to really imagine and think about the way in which man is embedded in history. And so he said: Now, how can we understand the individual human being? - “Now, suddenly, let us dream on” - one must dream, of course, but the dream becomes truth! “If this spirit, which so freely surveyed things, were forced to join the body of a mortal man again.” That is to say, in order to be able to imagine history and man's place in history, Herman Grimm necessarily had to think of repeated lives on earth. Only in this way could he imagine history.

This is how deeper spirits looked at history and the historical becoming and the inner standing of man. But as I said, such things flowed, I would say, under the prevailing stream of the more materialistic development of the world view in modern times and will probably be carried to the surface by our time, because our time already senses that the spirit and the soul must be recognized again. Indeed, this is felt most acutely when one tries to understand the historical development of humanity. And today it is obvious to seek to understand the historical development of humanity because we are at such a significant stage of this historical development. When one looks at such a view of history, for which Herman Grimm had to imagine repeated lives on earth, and then looks at another historical conception, one becomes very aware of how far mere adherence to the material can go, especially when one wants to understand historical development.

In this context, I have a spirit in mind, of whom I will present a few sentences to you at the end, because he is, of course, quite far removed from any understanding of the spiritual, of the soul. And yet a certain mind wants to explain historical development, for example why religions arose in different forms, why there was initially polytheism, then monotheism arose, and within monotheism Christianity arose, and within Christianity Protestantism arose again. Yes, that there is something spiritual and soulful at work inside, of course he cannot rise to that. But from what can be observed externally, albeit only in a rough way, when one looks at the outside world, including the outside world of history, only through the instruments of the body, he now tries to make clear how the history of religions has developed. He says – the words are not particularly important to the idea presented, but I will read them in the introduction: “As long as consolidation progresses, the organism that will prevail will be the living one that functions best at the given moment, and this tendency is just as evident in abstract thought as in trade and war.” So if you want to understand how a later state arises from an earlier one, then, in his opinion, you can see how the later state became more favorable than the earlier one.

And he applies this to religions: “The development of religions provides the most striking proof of this principle. Monotheism is cheaper than polytheism.” That is to say, people gradually strove to get more for less in the spiritual realm. So they advance from polytheism to monotheism, which is cheaper! It does not need such a widespread cult as polytheism! So: “Monotheism is cheaper than polytheism.” Consequently, the two great monotheistic religions were able to survive in Cairo and Constantinople, the two commercial centers of the first Middle Ages, while the Roman cult perished, along with the Greek and Egyptian and the various Persian religions.

So we have the later monotheistic religions because they are cheaper! They have only one God, so they need a simpler cult, are cheaper! Then he continues: “In the same sense, Protestantism is cheaper than Catholicism.” If you only look at the exterior, you cannot deny it, the Protestant church does not have as much decoration, has not developed as much worship, is cheaper.

“That is why Holland and England – I am not saying this! – adopted Protestantism when they snatched trade with the Orient from Italy and Spain.” Because the Dutch and the English wanted to have it cheaper, they adopted Protestantism!

“Atheism, finally, is cheaper than any religion, and it is a fact that all modern commercial centers tend towards skepticism, that the modern state itself seeks to reduce the costs of worship to a minimum.” Here we have cost as a principle of the progress of religions! However, this is again an example of the approach that I took the day before yesterday: that one can see how, from the different cultures, the endeavor is either to think more spiritually and psychologically about the course of human development, or more in terms of what can only be achieved through external observation.

The author is Brooks Adams, an American, and Roosevelt wrote the preface to this book! I will add nothing more to these thoughts, they show, as it were, the asymptote to which a purely external world view must lead. Of course, what is grasped as spiritual-soul will often appear to a purely external view of the world like mere dreaming. Dreaming — yes, people today would even forgive one for dreaming from a materialistic point of view. I am convinced that if someone, in a dream, could invent a machine that he then constructs in external reality, people would believe in this dream. All that is needed is the power to recognize in its reality that which is found only within the soul and spirit.

That this spiritual power belongs to the developmental and educational principles of the world-view development that has found expression in German spiritual life is precisely what I have tried to explain in the various lectures during this difficult time of trial. And when one has gained an insight into what spiritual science will and must be for the future of humanity, and sees how, ever since there has been a German development, the educational principles of this German development have been, shall we say, dreaming towards this spiritual science, then that also gives a firmness and certainty to stand still within the spiritual life of one's own nation and to have no need to vilify other spiritual lives and to utter such words of hatred as we heard only the day before yesterday, in order to gain inner strength, so to speak, inner justification in rejecting what is alien. German spiritual life can gain inner justification and inner strength by considering what lies within itself.

And so, at the conclusion of this lecture, let me express, as something that can take root in the soul as a feeling, the comparison of what spiritual science wills with what often lives as germs precisely in German cultural life. The way in which the soul and spirit are anchored in German cultural life gives us the inner certainty that Germanness cannot be overcome, because it is destined for greatness in the evolution of the world and of humanity, according to what it contains as germs within itself. We can say today: England possesses one quarter of the total dry land area, Russia one seventh, France one thirteenth, the German element barely one thirtieth of the land! Thus, those who expand over a quarter, plus a seventh, plus a thirteenth of the dry land, are opposed to those who have barely spread over a thirtieth of the dry land. And so those who have spread out over this one-thirtieth and who today consciously stand on this one-thirtieth in relation to what stands on a quarter, plus three-sevenths, plus three-tenths must imbue themselves with what can be experienced from the grasp of the innermost being. There is no doubt that inner necessities can be experienced: those who stand on a thirteenth plus a seventh plus a quarter in relation to those who stand only on a thirtieth, they must not overcome the latter, as they often say today in their fanatical ideal of hatred. For that which lives on this one thirtieth seems, by its inner nature and essence, to be destined for that which, within the earthly context, can still be called a long, long time and, for the human imagination, a temporal eternity. This German essence carries within itself the certainty of its continued existence. And from this certainty emerges what can be summarized in a few words: they will not overcome it, because if the world is to have meaning, they must not overcome it!

Dear attendees! For many years now, I have been able to give spiritual science lectures in this city every winter. Even in these fateful times, our friends in the spiritual science movement have asked me to give this lecture today. Now it will seem understandable that in this time, in which such tremendous but also such painful things are happening, in which something so immeasurably significant for European and world history is preparing, that in this time I want to tie such considerations to what moves us all, to that which those who stand in the East and West and who have to stand up for what the great duty of the time demands through blood and death. In such a time, words also want to be directed where feelings and emotions take them, where blood and death defend the great goods of Central Europe, where tremendous decisions must be made. And so today my words are dedicated to the contemplation of that which is being defended in our present time, which is being attacked, defamed and reviled from all sides in this our time. I would like to begin by touching on what I would call the basic principle and aspiration of spiritual science, and then show how this basic aspiration, this innermost impulse of spiritual science – which wants to be a motive that penetrates into the spiritual cultural movement of the present and into the future – how these spiritual scientific impulses are firmly anchored in the supporting forces of the German spirit. And then some highlights will be thrown on the way in which Germany's enemies today disparage, misunderstand and more of this kind this German spirit, this German nature, this Germanness in the east and the West.

I have often had the opportunity to explain here how spiritual science wants to be the true successor of the scientific world view, but that it is in turn the opposite pole of this scientific world view in that it wants to approach the worlds of spiritual life with a truly scientific character. For the spiritual-scientific world view, spirit is not just something that can be grasped in terms, ideas, or abstract concepts. Rather, for spiritual science, spirit is that which reigns in a world that is behind our sensory world, that contains the reasons and driving forces for everything that our sensory world and life, including historical development, offer us, and that takes place within the sensory world. As I said, I can only touch on this today and must refer you to the reading.

Spiritual science prepares the human soul, if he wants to prepare himself for it, so that a realization, a real experience of this soul takes place, which is not bound to the forces of the body, is not bound to the senses, not bound, like the ordinary mind, to the brain, but spiritual science prepares the soul for a body-free cognition through what has been mentioned here more often: meditation, concentration of the life of thought. You can find a more detailed description in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds?” or in the second part of the book “The Secret Science” or in the book “Theosophy”. These books describe the paths that lead people, through inner activity and inner experience, to free the soul-spiritual from its bondage to the body, so that it can dwell in the life and activity, in the reign and work of the spiritual world. What still appears to many people today as fantasy, as absurdity, is to be introduced into today's culture precisely through spiritual science. It is understandable that people say: spiritual science contradicts everything that the five senses comprehend.

It is understandable that people who speak in this way regard spiritual science as a form of dreaming or fantasizing. But people once also regarded the Copernican worldview as a form of dreaming and fantasizing, which, it was said, should also contradict the five senses and their statements. Just as people's thinking habits have become accustomed to accepting the Copernican worldview, so people's thinking habits will also find it increasingly more and more soul-satisfying, a necessary soul experience, a necessary soul harmony to accept spiritual science , which shows how the soul can truly penetrate into a spiritual world in a body-free knowledge, a spiritual world that is not merely a sum of concepts and ideas, but something very concrete, a real spiritual world, a living spiritual world. Thus, as a spiritual researcher, one looks at something that must come, as Copernicanism once entered into human development.

When we take a good look at this view of the living spirit and the relationship of the human soul to it, and then look at what has been prepared over many centuries in the development of the German people and the German character, we may say that all the forces that the German character has applied over the course of many centuries are ultimately aimed at leading to this spiritual science. There is nothing that spiritual science could not find as a germ of itself in what the German spirit has striven for over the centuries. Let me first present you with a characteristic example from more recent times.

The German essence, which for example in the second half of the eighteenth century, when Lessing, when Herder entered the horizon of this German essence, could not be satisfied with a spirit that is only an abstraction, only a sum of ideas. Herder, the great pioneer of the German intellectual world, once called out to Voltaire: “Ideas can only [bring forth ideas].”

For Herder, it was about man finding a way in his soul to experience a truly living, vibrant and vital spiritual world through inner development, just as he lives in the world of the senses through his eyes and ears. And history was not to be understood in such a way that one could speak of history being dominated by ideas, but for Herder history was such that real spiritual beings are active within historical activity, to whom man can look up as to beings of a supersensible world, just as he looks down into the realms below him to the sensual beings of the three natural kingdoms. And so convinced was Herder, the great predecessor, indeed one can say, the teacher of Goethe, that true science of the spirit comes to a real spirit and that humanity is aiming to find such a spiritual science, that he himself, Herder, expresses with beautiful words: [“The human race will not pass away until everything has happened! Until the genius of enlightenment has traversed the earth!”]

By enlightenment he means that knowledge which the German mind has always sought, not through the outer senses and the intellect, but through the inner experience of the soul, which, however, takes one further than happens in everyday life. In his way, Herder took up again what we encounter centuries earlier in the German mystic who stood at the dawn of modern times. In the moment when Angelus Silesius speaks in his images, in which he gives instructions for the path of the soul into a spiritual world. He expresses in one of his images: “It is not I who live and die, but the God-spirituality reigns in me, it is born in me, it lives and dies in me.

The German soul has always sought such a connection with the living spirit. And so the soul's intimate search for this connection with the active spirit was so intense that even the idea of immortality for Angelus Silesius follows directly from the spiritual inner knowledge, the spiritual inner life. For in that he was conscious that the eternal God reigns in me, he also knew that this eternal God is in my soul at the moment of death, where the eternal God cannot die. Since that which lives in the soul is at the same time experienced by God, the idea of immortality is experienced from the spiritual. The idea of immortality, of merging into a spiritual world, is an experience for Angelus Silesius.

As the soul becomes aware of the God within it, it knows that this God cannot die, that death leads into the spiritual world.

And let us think of the great mystic at the beginning of the modern era of German intellectual life, Jakob Böhme. Not to preach a false allegorical activism, but to point out that the life of the senses is only understood when man comprehends that which is not only alive between birth and death, but which passes through the gate of death, I would like to quote Jakob Böhme. He realized that man must penetrate the secrets of death during life. That his powers are kindled when he knows what calls him to a new life in dying, that these powers must already be recognized in this life. That is what the wonderful saying of Jakob Böhme means:

He who does not die before he dies;

He perishes when he dies.

When such words resound from the German spiritual life, one feels how the best souls of German development are permeated by the living supporting forces of the spirit. For it is the supporting power of the German spirit through which the soul, in its highest striving, knows itself to be inwardly and vitally connected with the spirit, so that it experiences that what it can do as the highest, the spirit itself does in it. The soul feels carried by the concrete spirit, not merely by ideas and concepts, which are an abstraction of the human mind and reason and which do not vividly represent the spirit that truly prevails in life. This spirit therefore develops its carrying capacity for the whole of German intellectual life.

And when we look at our best intellectuals, one can see how this sustaining power of the German spirit works in their hearts and souls, how they demonstrate it everywhere in their lives and in their intellectual endeavors.

Truly not to evoke sentimental feelings in you, esteemed attendees, but to show how the sustaining power of the German spirit works in the best German minds right down to the most immediate life, two great minds are taken as the starting point for today's reflection. And these two great minds, let them be considered at the moment of death, Schiller is the first.

We can look into the last days of our Schiller, right into his death chamber, through a friend, the son of the translator of Homer, Voß, the so-called younger Voß. There you see how this Schiller, as his last weeks approach, one could say, already walks around as if he were almost dead, but still participates in all that can be called intellectual interests in his Weimar residence. You can literally see how the strong cohesive forces within him carry him through his last weeks and days with intellectual life. Then we are led into the death chamber. We experience with the description of the young Voß, how Schiller can hardly look out of his eyes, which always looked so benevolent, so loving, so spirited. He has his youngest child brought to him. Voß describes how his eyes, from which on one side death, but also still the mighty soul of fire, how his eyes look at the child. And we can believe that Voß is right when he says in his description that something like the thought spoke from these eyes: “You, my child, I have to leave you so small, I should have been a father to you in so many ways.” Then the dying Schiller handed the child back and turned away, towards the wall.

In reliving these moments, we as a German nation feel as if we could relate to Schiller as this child did. We feel that the sustaining power of the German spirit, which Schiller carried into death, lives on in the German people. But looking up at such great minds, we have to say: Not only much that is great, much that is powerful has been achieved by them, but also much that is embryonic and has yet to be developed. Schiller's thoughts also apply to the German people, that he could still have given them much. But how was Schiller also connected to what can be called the fundamental power of the German spirit? We have a remarkable document that was only found long, long after Schiller's death. In this document, Schiller expresses the following beautiful words about the spirit that the one who gets to know it feels as its supporting force.

He who forms and rules the mind
must ultimately become master, because
finally, at the goal of time, if the
world has a plan, if human
life has any meaning at all, finally
must custom and reason triumph,
the brute force of form succumb
and the slowest people will catch up with all the
fast, fleeting ones.
[...]
Him

– the German –

is destined for the highest,
and just as he is in the middle of
Europe's nations,
he is the core of humanity,
they are the flower and the leaf.
He is chosen by the world spirit, during
the struggle of time
to work on the eternal construction of human education
, to preserve what time brings,
therefore he has appropriated what was previously foreign
and preserved it within himself.
Everything that was estimable in other times
and peoples, that arose, developed and faded with the times,
he has preserved;
the treasures of
centuries are not lost to him.
Not to shine in the moment and
to play his role, but to win the great
process of time. Every nation
has its day in history, but
the day of the Germans is the harvest of
all that time.

Thus Schiller felt connected to what can be called the driving force of the German spirit.

And if we now turn our gaze to another great mind, to a mind that, so to speak, has summarized all the power of the German mind, a philosopher who, out of a strong humanitarian character, has created a philosophy of dramatic clarity, we turn to the speaker of the “Speeches to the German Nation,” we turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

Let us also look to him for the driving force of German intellectual life, with which Fichte felt so connected that he knew how to inspire German hearts in a rare way through his speeches during one of Germany's most difficult times. Let us see how the driving force of the mind had an effect on his immediate, everyday life. When Germany took up its great struggles against Western foreign domination, Fichte consulted with himself as to whether he was called to help in any way, and in the end he knew that he could achieve the most through intellectual activity. His wife, however, devoted herself to nursing. She was the one who brought the fever home from the military hospitals, but she recovered. But Fichte was infected by his wife's illness. And as he lay there sick, it was remarkable how, in the last days, his philosophical thoughts, which are among the strongest of this kind in the development of mankind, among the most luminous, how they merged into the feverish fantasies of the dying man. And strangely, Fichte, the clear-thinking, diamond-bright philosopher, he guided in his soul, which was completely occupied with the spirit that reigns through the German being, his philosophical thoughts in such a way that he believed himself outside on the battlefields, in the midst of the armies, as Blücher's Rhine crossing took place.

Thus we see a confluence of the highest intellectual development even in the feverish fantasies of a dying German. His son brought him a medicine. Fichte felt as if he were connected to the power of the German spirit, which he firmly believed would lead the German people to victory. He pushed the medicine away and said, “I do not need medicine, for I feel that I shall recover.” Then he died. These were, so to speak, his last moments. This is the Fichte from whose soul the sustaining power of the German spirit speaks in such a way that one sees how, in his case, knowledge is directly grasped by the will that rules in his soul, so that one can say: In every word of Fichte we feel this power of the German spirit penetrating through, which cannot but confess that the spirit is not an abstraction, but something that permeates and flows through the world and works in it, and in which the soul knows itself, can experience itself. How beautifully Fichte expresses something like this when he says:

There is no doubt about it, it is the most certain thing there is, [indeed the basis of all other certainties, the only absolutely valid objective, that there is a moral world order, that every rational individual is assigned his or her specific place in this order and counted on for his or her work.

That is the confession of the spiritual world made by the sustaining power of the German spirit. And so closely does Fichte feel connected with this spiritual world that he once said the following to his students in words that are as much thoughts as they are the will welling up from the whole soul: “You stars that walk above me, you mountains all, ... if you all collapse at once, when lightning strikes you, when the elemental forces crush you so that not a speck of dust remains of you, you tell me nothing about the nature of my own soul. This defies your power, this is not eternal, as you are not eternal.” Thus Fichte spoke out of the direct power of connection with the spiritual world in his own soul. This is not mere philosophical speculation, these are not just thoughts, but this is inner soul life, a confluence of the soul with the spirit. This is the result of the sustaining forces of the German spirit.

And as a spiritual scientist today, one can truly refer to Fichte. One example among many that can prove how one can refer to Fichte today with today's spiritual science: It is written in the “Addresses to the German Nation”, and many may perhaps overlook it, but it is important for those who do not want to grasp Fichte merely on the surface of his words, but want to penetrate into the depths of his views. Fichte held the “Addresses to the German Nation” before his people, for his people, through which he wanted to stir up the German spirit in the German hearts, so that the German essence would triumph in Europe. And the means he recommended at the time was a completely new kind of education. Regardless of one's opinion of his plan today, one must admit that it was a grand and bold idea, an idea that truly contained something of the fundamental strength of the German spirit. But Fichte knew that by expressing this before an audience that was indeed willing to receive the word dedicated to the service of humanity, by expressing what characterized his plan, he was saying something that had to permeate all ideas about the education and development of the human being. In doing so, he demanded something completely new of people. And so he made a comparison between what he thought of as something new for previous habits of thought and what they had already grasped as a /Lücke im Text>.

And now we ask ourselves: How could spiritual science, which is a science of the spiritual life, how could it use a comparison if it wanted to characterize what it wants, what it strives for? After all, spiritual science wants to lead to a real inner enlightenment, so that the soul outside the body looks at the body with its physical experiences in the same way as one looks at an external object. In this way the spiritual researcher gains knowledge of how this soul behaves after death, how the soul looks at the body with spiritual eyes, how it surveys it like an external element. And so today, by standing firmly on the ground of this spiritual science, the spiritual scientist comes to say: this new thing behaves like a soul that leaves the body and looks back at the body. One would take a symbol that today, however, people still see as a reverie. But let us ask what symbol Fichte himself chose when he wanted to characterize the new of his education system in relation to the old.

[Time seems to me like a shadow that stands over its corpse, from which an army of diseases has just driven it, and laments and cannot tear its gaze away from the once so beloved shell and desperately tries all means to get back into the dwelling of the plague. The invigorating breezes of the other world, into which the departed has entered, have already taken her in and surround her with a warm breath of love; the secret voices of her sisters already greet her joyfully and welcome her; she is already stirring and expanding within all directions, in order to develop the more magnificent form into which it is to grow; but as yet it has no feeling for these breezes or hearing for these voices, or, if it had, it is absorbed in pain over its loss, with which it believes itself to have been lost at the same time.

That is the living Fichte! Must we not say that what today's spiritual science wants to unfold and recognize out of a real knowledge of the spirit, we encounter it where Fichte abandons himself to the deep intentions of his spirit and chooses a comparison that is deeply rooted in the supporting forces of the German people. It is the confession of the real, living, flowing and weaving spirit. And so it is rooted in the best of this German intellectual life.

And do we not see how these supporting forces of the German spirit also work in Goethe? Is it not already apparent from the fact that Goethe, even in his youth, had to declare himself unsatisfied with everything that can only enter the human soul as concepts and ideas through speculation of the intellect, as a reflection of the external world of the senses, that he felt something like the Faustian urge not only to indulge in abstract concepts and sensual perceptions, but to unite with the innermost powers of the soul with the spirit that rules the world. And it was out of this urge, which then sought to express itself artistically, that Goethe created what he presented in his Faust; in that Faust, which in its entirety represents a work of art that no other nation can have. For everything that man can strive for through the deepest powers of his soul on the path to the spiritual world is to be seen in this Faust. Do we not see how Faust, after feeling unsatisfied in the outer world of the senses, wants to reach the sources of life? How he passes through error and overcoming, through temptation and seduction, and how he first stands and recognizes in the spirit that seizes him in his innermost self, at the same time, what surges and weaves as spirit through the world. Thus, in the first part of the drama, Faust comes to recognize this spirit that reigns not only in nature but also in the human soul. He feels a connection to this spirit, which he perceives as a living entity truly rooted in German intellectual life, in the following words, which could be quoted again and again:

[Exalted Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for a kingdom,
the power to feel and enjoy it. Not
only dost thou allow cold-eyed visitors,
allow me to look into her deep chest,
as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
past me, and teach me my brothers
in the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And neighbor trunks squashing down
And the hill muffled hollow thundering,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show
Then myself, and my own chest
Secret deep wonders open up.]

How these sublime words express how man, when he has found the sustaining powers within himself, also wants to find them in all that is sensual. And how Faust is then led back, after he has thus recognized the spirit, to the rule of the spirit in his own breast.

Then You lead me to the secure cave, and then You show me myself, and in my own breast deep, secret wonders are revealed.

We can call this: the weaving of the spirit in the spirituality of the world, in which beings are of a supersensible nature, as in the sense world there are beings of the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom. And so we see how this spirit reigns and works in our greatest and sustains them.

But we also see how, in German spiritual culture, efforts are being made to truly unite with this spirit, to penetrate with it in a living way, to marry with it. One could point to hundreds of important historical events to show how in German intellectual life the longing arises to unite with the spirit that has carried the German essence through the centuries; to seek how it works not only in the present, but how it has worked through all the times of development. And wherever a German can find something, wherever the spirit confronts him as a figure, wherever he has encountered it, there you can see how fervently the German is able to grasp the German spirit that can carry him. I would like to give an example, an event during Goethe's lifetime.

A world view of German intellectual life emerged, the so-called Romanticism; a view that wanted to go back to an earlier stage of German intellectual life, because something occurred, so to speak, in which the German spirit appeared before the German soul in a form in which it wanted to grasp the German spirit with religious fervor. That was the case when, after the republican masters of the West, of that West that claims today that it had to fight against the German “barbarians”, when these masters, just as the masters of the West today - of course, they did it in their opinion back then and they also do it today for the freedom and for the rights of the people - went to war. These gentlemen invaded the Lower Rhine region and the Dutch territories. We can see these gentlemen ravaging palaces, churches, monasteries, and everything in their path. As in those days, the devastation was immense and incalculable, and the finest works of art in these regions were scattered and looted all over the world. Of course, the gentlemen said at the time that they were fighting for freedom, justice and humanity. And then you could see how the remains of these devastated works of art turned up again, of course only sparse remains, fragments in the Rhenish cities. The broken, the devastated, then came into the hands of a number of people, including the brothers Boisserée, who professed the worldview of the young Romantic school. And at that time something emerged in this school that can be called /gap in the text]. Something emerged for these younger German Romantics that they perceived as the divine rule of the German spirit itself, which they tried to introduce into life. And if we were to study the development of art in Central Europe in the nineteenth century, we would find how that which emerged from the devastated ruins, from the sustaining forces of the German spirit, continued to work in poetry and in the best works of art. We would find it everywhere.

But not only did this power impress itself on the soul of what was already there, the souls were also prepared for such a seizure. And even if he does not belong to the younger, but to the older Romanticism, one of those German poets is - one may believe it, more and more he will be appreciated in his wonderful way of thinking - I mean Novalis. He is one of those in whom the sustaining power of the German spirit reveals itself so clearly that in much of what he has left us, in part fragmentarily, we see something that emerges from the unconscious of his soul, but which only needs to be developed in order to lead to what humanity will one day have to grasp as spiritual science.

And one can say: the world has already grasped to some extent what Novalis developed out of the sustaining power of the German spirit. This is even being grasped not only by the “barbaric Germans,” as the enemy nations are now expressing themselves, but even by some French writers who understand something of the nature, even among those who today so revile the German essence and decry it as “barbaric.” We know, of course, how not long after the outbreak of the war Maurice Maeterlinck could not find enough words to revile and insult German “barbarism”.

Now one would like to point out to Maeterlinck another, perhaps a different French spirit, who has delved into what Novalis can give of himself, who has written about what Novalis has inspired in his soul. And this French poet, philosopher and artist, what did he find in Novalis, in the now so despised, let us say in Maurice Maeterlinck, so despised German “barbarism”? He felt compelled to say: Yes, what Sophocles, even Schiller and other poets have produced, what the figures of the poets do, Hamlet and so on have to do with each other and with their surroundings, these are certainly feelings and sensations that interest earthly souls. But, as this French writer says, one must assume that if beings were to gaze down from the cosmos, they could not be interested in what Schiller, Sophocles and others created, and what these figures have to do with each other. But Novalis would be a person – so this French poet-philosopher believes – who has something to say from his soul about things that could not only interest earth people, but that must interest even spirits who visit the earth from heavenly spheres.

He speaks such words in connection with Novalis, in reference to what he experienced with Novalis. We must call these words literally before our soul:

But if he needed other evidence, it would lead him among those whose works almost touch silence. She would open the gate of the kingdom where some loved her for her own sake, without worrying about the small gestures of her body. They would climb together to the lonely plateaus where consciousness rises [by one step] and where all those who are restless about themselves [feel] attentively survey the immense ring that connects the world of appearances to our higher worlds. She would go with him to the boundaries of humanity; for at the point where man seems to end, he probably only begins, and his most essential and inexhaustible parts are [only] in the invisible, where he must be constantly on his guard.

He is always talking about Novalis. He wants to turn to areas where Novalis dwells, to worlds for which human words are no longer sufficient to characterize them. That is why he says “their works almost border on silence”. He then continues:

On these heights alone are thoughts that the soul can approve of, and images that resemble her and are as commanding as she is. There, humanity has ruled for a moment, and these dimly lit peaks are perhaps the only lights that announce the earth in the spiritual realm. Their reflection truly has the color of our soul. We feel that the passions of the mind and body would resemble the tolling of bells in the eyes of a [strange] reason; but [the people I am talking about have] come out of the small village of passions in their works and said things that are also of value to those who do not belong to the earthly community.

So this French poet-philosopher on Novalis, on that which Novalis has inspired in him. This Novalis, who is borne entirely out of the primal power and destiny of the German genius. Would this poet-philosopher not hurl at Maurice Maeterlinck when he comes and speaks of “barbarism”: Look to Novalis, whose works are so sublime that they “almost touch silence”.

One might think that these words, coming from the philosophical poet, would be hurled at Maurice Maeterlinck. But the fact of the matter is that these words I just read were actually written by Maurice Maeterlinck himself! Admittedly, by the Maurice Maeterlinck who lived years ago and allowed the German spirit to influence him; not by the Maurice Maeterlinck who now calls the Germans a “barbarian people”.

Such are the experiences of Germanness in European culture today, besieged as it is in a great fortress. It may be said that this Germanness, so misunderstood today, has truly not always been misunderstood in this way in the world. The world has felt the sustaining power of the German spirit. And one can present evidence of how this German spirit has been regarded in the world. It is somewhat uncomfortable to express certain sympathetic, I would even say emotional judgments about the German spirit in German. So then another way must be chosen. Let us first consider what a leading English thinker of the nineteenth century in America had to say about the German essence. Emerson, a great and characteristic personality, once brought the German character before his soul. And to show how the sustaining power of the German spirit has been felt and sensed, Emerson says, speaking of Goethe – and we shall see from the words themselves how he sees in Goethe almost the representative of the newer German spirit – Emerson says:

One [quality] in particular, which Goethe shares with his entire nation, makes him stand out in the eyes of both the French and English public: that everything in his work is based solely on inner truth. In England and America

— please, it is not in German, but written by an American, an American Englishman in English —

in England and America, talent is respected, but one is only satisfied when it is working for or against a party of one's convictions. In France, one is already delighted when one sees brilliant thoughts, no matter where they want to go.

And it was not a German who said this; it was said by an English American to characterize the Germans, the German character!

In all these countries, however, talented men write to the extent of their gifts. If what they present stimulates the discerning reader and contains nothing that offends against good manners, it is considered sufficient. So many columns, so many pleasantly and usefully spent hours. The German mind has neither the French vivacity nor the Englishman's understanding, honed by practicality, nor, finally, the American spirit of adventure. But what it does have is a certain probity that never stops at the outward appearance of things, but always comes back to the main question: “Where is this going?”

One might think that it was said by a German, it would be vainly oriented.

The German public demands of a writer that he stand above things and simply express himself about them. Intellectual agility is present, well and good: what does it stand for? What is the man's opinion? Where does he get all these thoughts from?

The English [...] always see only the individual, they do not know how to grasp humanity as a whole according to higher laws.

The Germans think for Europe.

Consider, not a German is saying this!

For this reason, the terms of distinction used in high-level conversation are all of German origin. While the English and the French, who are mentioned with distinction because of their acumen and erudition, approach their studies and their point of view with a certain superficiality and their personal character is not too deeply connected with what they have taken up and with the way they express themselves, is not too deeply connected, Goethe, the head and content of the German nation, speaks, not because he has talent, but the truth concentrates its rays in his soul and shines out from it. He is wise in the highest degree, even though his wisdom may often be obscured by his talent. However excellent what he says is, he has something even better in mind [...] He has that awe-inspiring independence that arises from dealing with the truth.

Now, of course, one could say that Emerson has been dead for a long time, and that this is a characteristic that was already given about the German character a decade ago. After all, such minds as the one who is regarded as the most important French philosopher today [gap in the text], after the speech he gave in which he portrayed the Germans of today as devoid of everything that lived in them during their great era. One also finds in him, in this French philosopher with the name that sounds so beautifully French, at least before the war, one also finds in him an emphasis on how these Germans have become so different in recent times.

And so it is that we also look again at what is being said on the German side, but instead listen to an English voice. And now we will even choose critical voices that were uttered not long ago, barely two years before the war; voices characterizing the German essence. Lectures were held in Manchester under the title “Germany in the Nineteenth Century.”

The preface emphasizes why these lectures on the German character were given in Manchester. It is said that the newspaper people in England should learn something about the German character. Perhaps two things can be seen from this introduction, this preface: that at the time, those who gave these lectures as learned Englishmen considered the newspaper people to be in need of such an education. But the other thing can also be seen; I can leave it to your judgment whether what was said to the newspaper people was of much use, based on today's experience. But what was said to the English newspaper people back then? As I said, the lectures were not given in German in Leipzig or Berlin or Hamburg, but in English for the English foreigners. There it was said:

The highly favored elite among Descartes' and Newton's countrymen knew the spirit of science unquestioningly; but the passionate urge for knowledge was taught to modern Europe, if at all, mainly by thousands of German researchers.

As I said, not spoken in Berlin or Leipzig, but in Manchester!

Imagination, feeling, and will asserted their right to be heard alongside or beyond reason, and under their transformative pressure the universe became deeper, wider, and more wonderful. The irrational was recognized as a source of enlightenment; wisdom was sought from children and flowers; science, philosophy, and poetry came close together.

This was how the German essence was characterized in Manchester.

Over here in England, this revival of the imagination gave birth to noble poetry, but left the sciences and philosophy almost untouched. One of the keys to understanding the whole period is the fact that, while in England and France the poetic, philosophical and scientific movements flowed mostly in separate channels, in Germany they touched or merged completely. Wordsworth sang and Bentham calculated; but Hegel caught the genius of poetry in the net of his logic; and the thought that discovers and explains, and the imagination that creates, worked together in fruitful harmony in the genius of Goethe.

In Faust, at the end of his eventful life, we see a portrayal of present-day Germany, a Germany of restless, daring will and action, and we can understand all the better why the great citizen of the world, in whose eyes state and nationality were subordinate and sometimes harmful ideals, nevertheless claims his unassailable position as the highest poet of the German Empire alongside Bismarck, his creator.

Thus, the German character was characterized by English scholars in Manchester.

You will have come across a name that, after the outbreak of war, could not find enough words to describe the high morality that guided the British government in declaring war on the German Reich: Haldane. He wrote the preface to the lectures that were collected and in which you can find what I have just read. And that Lord Haldane wrote the following in the preface, although it was some time before the war:

The source of the stream of

— Germany's —

spiritual and political life lies in the Reformation. But at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a current unique in world history began to flow in a way that has been as continuous as it has been characteristic since that time. Since the days of ancient Greece, the world has not seen such a spectacle of the closest fusion of the life of the statesman with that of the thinker. The spirit of Germany today is to a great extent practical and concrete. [...] Only the influence of true knowledge can dispel the clouds of mistrust and free us from the burden of arming ourselves against attacks that in reality none of us has in mind.

Thus spoke this leading English intellectual. You know how he spoke after the outbreak of the war. The same scholar who spoke the words that were read out spoke even more words back then in Manchester to enlighten the newspaper people. He said:

On the whole, there is no question that the establishment of the German Reich has been beneficial to world peace.

Spoken in Manchester.

This explanation will seem strange to those who know nothing but the events of the present and for whom history is nothing more than an ever-changing, dazzling cinematograph. But history should be something more. It is for history to shed light on the tangled web of the present, and in that higher light, things that seem hurtful will take on a natural appearance. For if we look to the past, we find that our ancestors looked at France with far greater fear than the wildest rabble-rousers today fear Germany. And our ancestors had good reason to fear them. [...]

To sum up, it can be shown that the founding of the German Empire was an asset for Europe and therefore also for Great Britain. For the events of the years 1866-1871 put an end once and for all to the possibility of waging predatory wars against the previously unprotected center of Europe, and thus removed a temptation to war that had so often often tempted into the wrong channels; they put the German people in a position to develop their hitherto stunted political abilities, and they helped to establish on a firm basis a new European system that has preserved the peace for forty years. This blessing resulted from the fact that German unity achieved in one fell swoop what Great Britain, despite all her expenditure of blood and money, had never been able to accomplish, namely, to secure the balance of power in such a decisive way that a great war became the most dangerous of all ventures.

It is fair to say that these words were spoken in praise of the sustaining power of the German spirit, indeed, one might even say of the soul-sustaining power of the German spirit for Europe. Can one say more than this Englishman said in Manchester to the newspaper people, with whom it then had such a good impact!

And right up to the most recent days, we can follow such phenomena. We have seen how Emerson expressly emphasized how little the English can actually understand of what is the fundamental force of the German character. But once they have really got to their feet and got to know this German spirit, they have learned to think differently about it. Just a few words should be mentioned, which an Englishwoman wrote down shortly before the outbreak of the war, after spending eight years in Germany. She did not get to know it in the way that most English people get to know Germany, but she was in schools, clinics, she got to know philosophy and other lecture halls. I could now quote many words that are deeply characteristic, but I will just read one passage that was written by an English expert on the German character. Miss Wylie writes the following words:

Forty years ago, Germany was fighting for its existence. And it is still fighting for it today. It is completely wrong to believe that Germany has already reached its peak. It is fighting a quiet but determined battle against powerful rivals whose power and experience was gained generations ago. (...]

At every border and across the water, opponents sit, both commercially and politically, eagerly awaiting the moment when Germany slackens just a little, so that they can pounce on her and bring her down.

There is truly no need to boast about the sustaining power of the German spirit; one need only listen to what people have to say when they are speaking out of consciousness, and not out of unconsciousness, if that is said by the countries whose objectivity has been proven. If you look around, you will find many judgments similar to these about the German character and its sustaining power. This sustaining power of the German spirit is demonstrated precisely by the fact that this German spirit, in every soul of the German being that seeks the path to the spirit, has an illuminating effect on these souls, so that it can indeed be said: In what emerged as German idealism at the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth century lie the seeds for an ever-more-vibrant and vibrant spiritual experience. And so it came about that not only in the course of the nineteenth century, through spirits who in later times would play a great role, Troxler and Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, great beginnings of today's spiritual science can be found; of that which we ourselves can bring out of the spiritual world again. These fundamental forces of the German spirit can be found in the entire development of German intellectual life. And here again is a case in point, the case of one of the best, the deepest, the most German of Germans from the second half of the nineteenth century: Herman Grimm.

Herman Grimm is an extraordinary art historian who has written about many artists and works of art with inner experience. One often has the feeling: where does Herman Grimm get what he has to say about art and works of art not from ordinary evidence but from direct experience of aesthetic judgment? Then one must go to the artistic and poetic works that he has produced. There one finds in his novellas that the sustaining power of the German spirit is also evident in them, which is transferred there, albeit not as spiritual science, but into the artistic. Of course, one cannot cite artistic products as evidence for the results of spiritual science. But if the spiritual scientist can say that the sayings in the work of art are almost expertly correct for the described spiritual experiences, then it is permissible to point to such an occurrence, as is to be done today.

Herman Grimm always wants to point out that one can only understand the world if one is able to look not only at what [gap in the text], but also at what protrudes from the supersensible into the sensual. He then presents spiritual processes that show how he strives to show that the world is more than just the sensual world. There he wrote a novella: 'The Songstress'. He describes the fate of a somewhat flirtatious songstress who is nevertheless endowed with a deep soul. There is a man who loves the songstress, but she rejects him. The novella continues in an extremely meaningful way until the songstress's death. A friend leads the singer straight to the house where her lover, whom she rejected, committed suicide. The suicide occurs the moment she enters. She is consumed by guilt and is unable to sleep from that hour on. The friend, the owner of the house, has to watch over her. Now Herman Grimm describes how the singer sees the spirit of the deceased rising up in bed and approaching her. And Herman Grimm presents this in such a way that it is clear from this description that he does not want to reflect on an imagination; rather, in a spiritual experience that the guilt-ridden singer has, he wants to show how forces are effective beyond death, and wants to point to the fate that works beyond death. The singer dies after her beloved; she is, as it were, taken. Spiritual science would say: what can be announced as the next phenomenon to appear to a person after they have passed through the gate of death is presented to the soul of the singer: the appearance of the etheric body, which has to bear the fate that is to be borne beyond death.

But this is not the only case with Herman Grimm. He has written a cultural-historical novel: “Unüberwindliche Mächte” (Insurmountable Forces).

The most important thing is: the young heroine Emmy is portrayed. Emmy is also brought to the point where the fate of the beloved dead man affects the living, not only through the inner forces of the soul, but in such a way that this effect is meant by the soul - after passing through the gate of death - still having a real effect on life. Herman Grimm describes how Emmy, as it were, dies after her beloved. And we find a wonderful scene at the end of the novel 'Unüberwindliche Mächte' (Insurmountable Forces). Emmy dies, and Herman Grimm describes how a figure rises out of the dying Emmy, out of the physical body, a figure with arms similar to the physical arms, with a face similar to Emmy's face, which disappears over and into the spiritual world. Herman Grimm is able to grasp the moment of death artistically, just as spiritual science can grasp it in a living vision.

One can see that the sustaining power of the German spirit also works in this poet's soul, which comes from German idealism to grasp the living spirit life. The fact that Herman Grimm can present the matter in a novelistic way, but in the fullest reality, that he is capable of doing so, is the power of spiritual life that prevails through the German spirit. Herman Grimm felt - he had, after all, grown up entirely in what had entered into German intellectual life from Goethe's intellectual life - he felt with all his soul in the stream of German intellectual life. He knew this German spiritual life because every phase of this German spiritual life was a phase of his own life. And how did Herman Grimm characterize this mood of the German being in 1895, shortly before his death? Anyone who knows German life knows that this description is true; what I am about to read from Herman Grimm is true as words that are intended to represent the mood of the German being. He wants to express – he who has so often pointed out how dear to him repeated lives on earth are – he wants to express how German spiritual life aims to recognize the spiritual world, but not to develop a nationality in a one-sided way, but to absorb the most general human element. The words are beautiful, but also deeply significant for the characterization of German intellectual life, which Herman Grimm spoke in 1895.

The solidarity of the moral convictions of all people today is the church that unites us all. We are seeking more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious endeavors of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that no national distinction applies to the ethical worldview.

Then he continues:

We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this could happen through war. The assurance that keeping the peace is our [all] most sacred wish is not a lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.

This is how Herman Grimm describes the mood in Central Europe. But then he shows that he is not a dreamer, but that he can judge the situation well. For he continues:

Recognizing people as a totality, they see themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which they consider it a misfortune not to be allowed to exist, and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt to their internal disputes. With anxious eagerness they seek their right here. How the French today are trying to present the war against Germany, which they are planning, as a moral imperative, demanding recognition of it from other nations, even from the Germans themselves.

Anyone who is familiar with the mood in Central Europe will know that Herman Grimm spoke the truth at the time. And they will then be able to judge what is actually meant when those who today want to assert this truth from Central Europe are repeatedly called out from left and right, from west and east: “Who wanted the war?” One must say that this “who wanted the war” comes across as if a number of people with threatening gestures are standing around a house and the master of the house sees that they want to attack the house, and he then goes out and can't help but beat them up. And then the question would be: “Who wanted this beating?” It is the same logic. Yes, one can even say many things about this logic that prevails in the world today. One can even say: this logic is - one is almost embarrassed to say it, because it is so flimsy when it is said: “We did not want the war, but in Central Europe it was wanted.” it is the same logic as when it is said: “Yes, we could not wage war if the Germans had not invented gunpowder, because then there would be no war; so who wanted the war?” It would be the same logic if the people in Central Europe wanted to blame us for using printing ink to accuse the German people of being “barbarians”. The Germans, after all, invented the process of printing with printing ink on paper. But with this intention it does indeed look strange to those who not only look at what has happened in the last few months before the war, but look at what has been preparing for decades as the driving impulses. Those who have really been able to look with open eyes at what is going on in Europe, who have wanted to see it, have already seen how this war, so to speak, in its basic impulses, was preparing itself from the East. And the one who would correctly ask the question today: Who could have prevented the war? will of course have to point to Russia. But those who saw clearly knew that. We see this in the words that were spoken long before the war.

As for me, I am in no doubt for a moment that a conflict between the Germanic and Slavic world is imminent, that it will ignite either through the Orient, specifically Turkey, or through the nationality dispute in Austria, perhaps both, and that Russia will take the lead in it on one side. This power is already preparing for the eventuality; the Russian national press is spewing fire and brimstone against Germany. [...] The German press is already sounding its warning cries. It has been a long time since Russia gathered itself after the Crimean War, and it seems that it is now considered expedient in [St. Petersburg] to take up the Oriental question once again. If the Mediterranean Sea was once to become a “French Sea”, according to the expression that was more pompous than true, Russia has the even more positive intention of making a Russian lake out of the Black Sea and a Russian pond out of the Sea of Marmara. It is an established goal of Russian policy that Constantinople must become a Russian city and Greece a direct vassal state of Russia, which finds its lever of support in the common religion and in Pan-Slavism. The Danube would then be closed at the Iron Gate by the Russian turnpike.

But this was not said recently, but in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War; and it was said by those who were not speaking off the top of their heads, but who knew how forces were gradually gathering from the east , how the Austrian soul was permeated with distorted Slavophilism, in order to finally lead to what led to the war today and which the Western powers fell for.

I would like to read you one more passage that can show you how the connection with the active forces and impulses presents itself to those who really want to see them. When looking at what happened in the summer of 1914 and what then led to the war from the eastern side, could one not use the following words - I will read out words that could be coined for the time in the first half of 1914:

[...] a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, [...] I was personally suspected in my intentions. These attacks increased during the following year, 1879, to strong demands for pressure to be exerted on Austria in matters where we could not readily attack Austrian law. I could not lend my support to this, because if we alienated Austria, we would necessarily become dependent on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such dependence have been tolerable? I had previously believed it could be, telling myself: We have no conflicting interests; there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who explained such things to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our policy (for a certain period) to the Russian one would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

What has happened, however, shows that the European center can save itself from such an attack. The words I have read to you could be a characteristic of the forces that played in 1914. But I have in fact only changed a few words that were not written or spoken in 1914, but were said by Bismarck in the German Reichstag on February 6, 1888. And I will now read them to you in their true form. You will see how they correspond to what I read to you as being appropriate for the spring of 1914. Bismarck said these words when he spoke out against the military bill in the Reichstag:

[...] a kind of press campaign gradually began in St. Petersburg, attacking German politics and personally suspecting me of ulterior motives. These attacks intensified during the following year, until in 1879 there were strong demands for pressure to be exerted on Austria in matters where we could not readily challenge Austrian law. I could not lend my hand to this; for if we estranged ourselves from Austria, we would necessarily fall into dependence on Russia if we did not want to be completely isolated in Europe. Would such dependence have been tolerable? I had believed earlier that it could be, saying to myself: We have no conflicting interests, there is no reason why Russia should ever break off friendship with us. At least I had not directly contradicted my Russian colleagues who had explained this to me. The incident at the Congress disappointed me, and showed me that even the complete subordination of our policy (for a certain period) to the Russian one would not protect us from coming into conflict with Russia against our will and against our aspirations.

So one can say: The balance of power between the European East and the Center had to be characterized in 1888 in exactly the same way as for the year 1914. One dares to say again that people were living in Central Europe in 1914 who brought about this war. Anyone with a healthy sense of fact will not be able to make such an assertion. One must, however, have a healthy sense of facts. How was the mood prepared in this European East, which then led to the fact that this firebrand, through the connection of the East with the West, finally led to the present-day siege of the European center - what was prepared there in the European East?

We saw, among other things, the mood of Slavophilism emerge in the nineteenth century. Among these Slavophiles there were idealists, but there were also people who later transformed the Slavophile sentiment into complete absorption and idolization of what is now present in Russia; they did not see Russia's mission in pursuing the inner soul forces of the Russian people, but in the power and might that now prevails there. And those who are the best among these Slavophiles have worked in such a way that the conviction has spread widely that the culture of Western Europe, and especially of Germany, is a culture of decline and that a rebirth of European life must come from the East. This has become a dogma. And this dogma has slowly and gradually become established in what can be called Russian life. Certain perceptions of this Russian life are completely imbued with it. The best minds, by being interwoven with Russian life, are also interwoven with this idea of Slavophilism.

Even the great Soloviev had a time in his life when he was a Slavophile, when he believed, albeit in a different way than [Aksakov, Katkov and Danilevsky], that something could already be in Russian life that had the mission to cover all of Europe, so to speak, with a new culture. But then he became more and more familiar with what had become of Slavophilism in present-day Russia. He learned to consider how what had become of Slavophilism in present-day Russia would have to affect the European center, the European West. And there it was, at the time when he said the following to himself – these are Soloviev's, the Russian philosopher's, own words; he says that Slavophilism had become a “commodity of the fair trade” that “filled all the dirty streets, squares and alleys of Russian life with wild, animalistic shouting”. These are Solowjow's own words. At the time when Solowjow was faced with the question of conscience that it is important to ask yourself from time to time; that question of conscience that goes like this: “Why doesn't Europe love us?”

He actually wanted to raise the question: What must Europe see when it looks at us? And Solowjow, the great philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, answers this question from the Russian spirit:

Europe [...] looks at us with apprehension and with displeasure, [since the elemental power of the Russian people is dark and mysterious, its spiritual and cultural powers inferior, but its demands] clear, definite and great.

These are not the words of a German, but of a Russian, about the forces that have been at work for decades and that have now been expressed with the firebrand. Solowjow continues:

[The clamor of our nationalism can be heard loudly in Europe, which wants to destroy Turkey and Austria, beat the Germans, conquer Constantinople and, if it succeeds, India as well. But if we are asked what we will do for humanity after taking and destroying all of that, we can only remain silent or babble senseless phrases.

"Thus [...] the most essential, indeed the only important question that an honest and reasonable patriotism should address is not Russia's power and mission, but Russia's sins.]

Thus the great Russian on Russian character. Must not then the question be put from the center of Europe to the east: “What do you want?” If you could somehow get the center of Europe in your hands, what do you want?” The best, the most significant, the most beneficial Russian of the nineteenth century answers:

If we are asked [what we will do to benefit humanity after conquering and destroying everything, we can only remain silent or spout meaningless phrases.

Then we see what it is that needs to be defended, what the forces that have taken up the defense of the German character to the left and to the right have to defend in reality.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it is no wonder that this German essence, this fundamental force of the German spirit, is misunderstood everywhere. It arises, one might say, from the intimate association of the individual German with the German spirit, which the individual German must feel to be a living one. And from this arise those misunderstandings that we encounter everywhere when we ask people who are not as enlightened as we have come to know them today among other nations. We sometimes hear that what Herman Grimm, who also knew Goethe well, said about the German character with reference to Lewes' biography of Goethe is true; what Herman Grimm said about this book is true: Lewes wrote a book about Goethe, that is, he wrote a book about a man who was born in Frankfurt, to whom he attributes Goethe's works, and who he claims died in 1832. But the way he describes him, what he presents as the soul of the man in the book, bears no resemblance to the feelings of anyone who feels connected to Goethe in German intellectual life.

And so, wherever we try to find a relationship to the German spirit, we only find misunderstandings. Finally, I would like to mention something that may be a more or less inconsequential but perhaps interesting episode.

The movement to which we belong had some connection with the movement that started from Adyar. [Our friends could no longer go along with it because of their lack of involvement in German intellectual life and its supporting forces] when English materialism, masquerading as Theosophy, went so far that the absurdity was believed by some that the spirit of Christ had revealed itself in a little Hindu boy. We know under what guises all this was practiced. It was then that the German sense of truth arose and the German mind had to turn away from those activities calling themselves theosophical. Now, however, the president of that movement has the following to say, inspired by the English spirit, about the connection between the separation of the German spiritual-scientific movement, which is united in the Anthroposophical Society. The following was truly written in England. Please excuse me for bringing my insignificant person into the whole context, but this was written months after the war had broken out.

Now, looking back in the light of German methods as revealed to us by the war, I realize that the long-standing efforts to capture the Theosophical Society and place a German at its head, the anger against me when I frustrated these efforts, the complaint that I had spoken of the late King Edward VII as the protector of European peace instead of giving the honor to the Kaiser - that all this was part of the widespread campaign against England, and that the missionaries were tools, cleverly used by the German agents here to carry out their plans. If they could have turned the Theosophical Society in India, with its large number of officials, into a weapon against the British government and got them to look up to Germany as their spiritual leader, instead of standing up, as it has always done, for the equal alliance of two free nations, then it could gradually have become a channel for poison in India. To achieve this, it was first necessary to overthrow her president, who, as is well known, has stood for the alliance of the two peoples for the last twenty years.

So, we are supposed to have been annoyed that she did not present the German Kaiser, but Edward VII, as a stronghold of peace, and therefore broke away from her, while the break occurred because we could not go along with what was said on that side about the Christ presence. But then she gives us far too much honor by mentioning all that the German spiritual science movement is said to have done to initiate the present war; that is, those who spoke on the other side about our spiritual science movement. Now we are learning about their plans from an English point of view. It is remarkable what we are said to have done, what we are said to have intended. One can see how this is viewed from this side, which necessarily had to happen for the sake of the German sense of truth, the German sense of truth, for the sake of what feels like being within the supporting power of the German spirit. Then one must say: When one sees how this German spirit with its supporting power has worked in hundreds and thousands, how it has brought German idealism, which contains the seeds for grasping and experiencing the living spirit , then one must say that Goethe's words, which Friedrich Lienhard also cites in his pamphlet 'Germany's European Mission', are deeply true. Goethe spoke these words in 1813 in a conversation with Luden:

The destiny of the Germans is not yet fulfilled. If they had had no other task than to break up the Roman Empire and create and organize a new world, they would have perished long ago. But since they have continued to exist, and in such strength and efficiency, I believe that they must still have a great destiny.

This conversation of Goethe's is still valid today. And if we now live in these fateful times, we, dear attendees, feel that everything that has to do with the great historical development of the German character, which stands before us as a living organism. If we look at what has lived in the German spirit, what has lived in a Wolfram von Eschenbach, in Herder, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and in Herman Grimm, we see what has been achieved by the German spirit in terms of spiritual and intellectual power, as if from a single source. This is the driving force of the German spirit.

Now the German spirit has another task. It must flow into the sacrificial deeds that must be accomplished through death and blood in defense of what we wanted to contemplate with these admittedly insufficient words today. But what this shows us is that the German spirit, as it has emerged, has not yet fulfilled its task in the world, that it is to be defended, because it has a mission for the world that it must still fulfill in order to fully grasp the living spiritual life. And so, when we consider the fundamental strength of the German spirit, we can draw hope and confidence for the future of Germany. But all of this also speaks to our feelings and emotions, which on the one hand make us look wistfully, but also consolingly, but also with the greatest admiration, at what Germany has to do now in this fateful time. Our feelings and sentiments are with all those who bleed and suffer, but who also accomplish great deeds in the East and the West, when we see in all this only another expression of the German character. And those who, as mothers and fathers, as brothers and sisters, lose a dear relative, they know that they lose him for that which must be worked out as German spirit, as German future, as the whole German essence that still has something to do in the world, to which one must look as to an essence that has not yet been completed.

And so let us summarize, in terms of feeling and sentiment, the impulses that arise from this contemplation, in the words: Yes, this German essence, we see it growing, and only a lack of understanding can speak of a decline of this German essence. Rather, something else is true. What is true is what I, in summary, would like to express the thoughts of this evening in words that express how what can be observed in the German character ultimately comes together in our minds in a hope, a confidence, a certainty of the further development of the German character:

The German spirit has not yet accomplished
What it is to bring to the world.
It lives in hopes for the future,
It hopes for future deeds full of life; —
In the depths of its being, it feels powerful
Hidden things that must still mature.
How can a wish for his end arise in the power of the enemy without understanding, so long as life reveals itself to him, which holds him in the roots of his being?

Without doubt, the questions raised by social problems are among the major concerns of many today. We are dealing with social issues wherever there is a genuine concern with present conditions in humanity's evolution and with the impulses that threaten the future. The contemporary way of viewing and dealing with social issues, however, suffers from a fundamental defect. This is the same defect that afflicts so much of our mental and moral life and indeed our entire civilization: the prevailing intellectualism of our age. The social problems are so often examined merely from the limited viewpoint of intellectualism. Whether the social question is approached from the "left" or from the "right," the overly intellectual aspect of each approach is revealed by the fact that certain theories become the starting point from which it is said that this or that ought to be established, that this or that ought to be abolished. Generally, little account is thereby taken of the human being himself, as if there were no individually distinctive qualities in each human being, as if there were only a generality, "man." No attention is paid to the uniqueness of the individual human being. This is why the entire consideration of social issues has become so abstract, something that rarely affects the social feelings and attitudes that are active between one person and another.

The inadequacy in our consideration of social issues is most clearly evident in the domain of health care, of hygiene. In so far as it is a public matter, concerning not the individual so much as the whole community, health care or hygiene—possibly more than any other social domain—is a subject suitable for social consideration.

It is true that there is no lack of advice, available either in talks or in the literature, concerning hygiene in public health. It should be asked, however, how does such advice about hygiene come into the social life? It must be mentioned that whenever individual rules concerning the proper care of health are promulgated as the result of medical or physiological science, it is generally the trust in a scientific field that provides the basis for accepting such rules, rules whose inner validity one is not actually in a position to test. It is purely on the basis of authority that statements about hygiene emerging from libraries, examining rooms, and research laboratories are accepted by large segments of the population. There are those who are convinced, however, that in the course of modern history over the last four centuries a longing for democratic regulation of all issues has arisen in humanity. Then they encounter this entirely undemocratic belief in authority demanded in the domain of health care or hygiene. This undemocratic attitude of belief in an authority conflicts with the longing for democracy that has reached a kind of culmination today, although often in a highly paradoxical way.

I know very well that what I have just said may seem paradoxical, because issues of health care are often simply not considered in relation to the democratic demand that matters of public interest concerning every mature citizen be judged by that community of citizens, either directly or indirectly through representation. It must certainly be said that it may not be possible for the views concerning hygiene, the hygienic care of public life, to be fully subject to democratic principles, because such matters do, in fact, depend on the judgment of specialists. On the other hand, should one not strive toward greater democratization than contemporary circumstances permit in a domain that is as close, as infinitely close, to the concerns of every individual, and thus to the whole community, as the care of public health?

We certainly hear a great deal today about the necessity for proper air, light, nourishment, sanitation, and so forth, but the regulations laid down to order these things cannot, as a rule, be tested by those to whom they apply.

Now please do not misunderstand me. I would not like to be accused of taking any particular side in this lecture. I would not like to treat in a one-sided way what today is generally treated one-sidedly, in a partisan way or from the standpoint of a certain scientific conviction. I have no desire to uphold ancient superstitions of devils and demons passing in and out of human beings in the form of disease, nor to support the modern superstitions that the bacilli and bacteria pass in and out of human beings, causing the different diseases. We need not occupy ourselves today with the question of whether we are really faced with the results of the spiritualistic superstitions of earlier times or with the materialistic superstitions prevalent today. I would prefer to consider something that permeates the whole culture in our time, especially in so far as this culture is determined by the convictions of modern science. We are assured today that the materialism of the middle and last third of the nineteenth century has been overcome, but this statement is not very convincing to those who really know the nature of materialism and its opposite. The most one can say is that materialism has been overcome by a few people here and there who realize that the facts of modern science no longer justify the general explanation that everything in existence is merely a mechanical, physical, or chemical process taking place in matter.

The fact that a few people here or there have come to this conclusion, however, does not mean that materialism has been overcome, for usually when it comes to a concrete explanation or forming a view of something concrete, even these people—and the others as a matter of course—still reveal a materialistic tendency in their way of thinking. True, it is said that atoms and molecules are merely harmless, convenient units of calculation about which nothing more is asserted than that they are abstractions; nevertheless, the considerations are atomistic and molecular in character. We are then explaining world phenomena out of the behavior or interactions of atomic and molecular processes, and the point is not whether we picture that a thought, feeling, or any other process is connected only with material processes of atoms and molecules; the point is the orientation of the entire attitude of our soul and spirit when our explanation is based only on atomic theory, the theory of smallest entities. The point is not whether verbally or in thought a person is convinced that there is something more than the influence of atoms, the material action of atoms, but whether he is able to give explanations other than those based on the atomic theory of phenomena. In short, not what we believe is essential but how we explain, how we orient our souls within. Here I must say that only a true, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can help eliminate the defect of which I have spoken.

That this must be the case I would now like to show concretely. There is hardly anything more confusing today than the distinctions that are so often emphasized between man's bodily nature and his soul and spirit, between physical illnesses and the so-called psychological and mental illnesses.¹ This view of the relevant relationships and distinctions between such facts of human life as a diseased body and an apparently diseased soul suffers from the materialistic, atomistic way of thinking. For what is really the nature of the materialism that has gradually come to be the world view of so many of our contemporaries and that, far from being overcome, is today in its prime? What is its nature? The nature of this materialism does not lie in observing material processes, in looking into the material processes that also take place in the human corporeality, in reverently studying the marvelous structure and activity of the human nervous system and other human organs, of the nervous system of the animal or organs of other living beings. This does not make one a materialist. Rather one is made a materialist through omitting the spirit from the study of these material processes, through looking into the world of matter and seeing only matter and material processes.

What spiritual science must assert, however, is this (and today I am only able to summarize this point): wherever material processes appear outwardly to the senses—and these are the only processes that modern science will admit as observable and exact—they are but the outer manifestation, the outer revelation, of activities behind which and in which lie spiritual forces and powers. It is not characteristic of spiritual science to look at a human being and say, "There is his physical body—this body is a sum of material processes, but the human being does not consist of this alone. Independent of this he has his immortal soul." It is far from characteristic of it to speak like this and to build up all kinds of abstract and mystical theories and views about this immortal soul that is independent of the body. This does not at all characterize a spiritual world view. It can definitely be said that, in addition to his body, which consists of material processes, the human being also has an immortal soul, which then enters some kind of spiritual realm after death. This does not make one a spiritual scientist in an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We can be spiritual scientists in the true sense only if we realize that this material body with its material processes is a creation of the soul element. We must learn to understand, down to the smallest detail, how the soul element—which was already active before birth, or, let us say, before conception—fashioned and molded the structure and even the substantiality of the human body. We must really be able to perceive everywhere the immediate unity of this body and the soul element and how, through the working of the soul-spiritual in the body, the body as such is gradually destroyed. This body undergoes a partial death with every passing moment, but only at the moment of death is there a radical expression, you could say, of what has been happening to the body in each moment as the result of the soul-spiritual. We are not spiritual scientists in the true sense until we perceive concretely and in detail this living interplay, this continuous influence of the soul in the body, and endeavor to say: the soul element incorporates itself into the entirely concrete processes, into the functions of the liver, the process of breathing, the action of the heart, the working of the brain, and so forth. In short, when we describe the material part of the human being we must know how to portray the body as a direct result of the spiritual. Spiritual science is thereby able to place a true value on matter, because in the separate concrete, material processes it observes not merely what is confirmed by the eyes or yielded by the abstract concepts of modern science through outer observation; spiritual science is spiritual science only when it shows everywhere how the spirit works in matter, when it regards with reverence the material workings of the spirit.

Such a view guards one against all the abstract chit-chat about a soul independent of the bodily nature, for where the life between birth and death is concerned, man can only spin fantasies about this. Between birth and death (with the exception of the time of sleep), the soul-spiritual is so utterly given up to bodily activity that. it lives in it, lives through it, manifests itself in it. We must be able to study the soul-spiritual outside the course of earthly life, realizing that human existence between birth and death is but the outcome of the soul-spiritual. Then we can behold the really concrete unity of the soul-spiritual with the physical bodily element. This is an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for then it becomes possible to see the human being with all his individual members as an outcome of the soul-spiritual.

The mystical, theosophical views that evolve all kinds of noble-sounding, beautiful theories about a spirituality that is free of the body can never serve the concrete sciences of life, they can never serve life. They can serve only the intellectual or psychological craving to be rid of the outer life as soon as possible, and then they weave all sorts of fantasies about the soul-spiritual in order to induce a state of inner satisfaction.

In this anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement it behooves us to work earnestly and sincerely to develop a spiritual science that will be able to enliven physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology, and anthropology. No purpose is served by making religious or philosophical statements to the effect that the human being bears an immortal soul within him and then working in the different branches of science just as if we were concerned only with material processes. Knowledge of the soul-spiritual must be gained and applied to the very details of life, to the marvelous structure of the body itself. You will come across many mystics and theosophists who love to chatter about the human being as composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, and so forth, yet they haven't the least inkling what a wonderful manifestation of the soul life it is when a person blows his nose! The point is that we must see matter not simply as matter but as the manifestation of the spirit. Then we will begin to have healthy views concerning the spirit, views that are full of content, and with them a spiritual science that may be fruitful for all the other sciences.

This in turn will make it possible to overcome the specialization in the various branches of science resulting from the materialistic trend of scientific knowledge. I have no desire whatever to deliver a diatribe against specialization, for I am well aware of its usefulness. I know that certain things must be dealt with by specialists simply because they require a specialized technique. The point I would make is that the person who holds fast to the material can never reach a view of the world that is applicable to life if he becomes a specialist in the ordinary sense. For the range of material processes is infinite, both outside in nature and within the human being.

For instance, we may devote a long time—as long, at any rate, as professional people devote to their training—to the study of the human nervous system. If material processes are all we see in the working of the nervous system, however—processes described according to the abstract concepts of modern science—we shall never be led to any universal principle upon which a world view can be based. As soon as you begin to look at the human nervous system, for example, from the viewpoint of spiritual science, you will find at once that this nervous system cannot be considered without your finding the spirit active there, which leads us inevitably to the soul-spiritual underlying the muscular, skeletal, and sensory systems, and so on. The spiritual does not separate into single parts as does the material. Characterized very briefly, the spiritual unfolds like an organism with its members. Just as I cannot truly study a human being if I look merely at his five fingers and cover the rest of him, so in spiritual science I cannot study a single detail without being led by perceiving the soul-spiritual within this detail to a whole. If I were to become a brain or nerve specialist, I would still be able, in observing this single member of the human organism, to form a picture of the human being as a whole—I would reach a universal principle in relation to a world view, and I could then begin to speak about the human being in a way comprehensible to every healthy-minded, reasonable human being.

This is the great difference between the way that spiritual science is able to speak about the human being and the way that specialized, materialistic science is bound by its very nature to speak. Take the simple case of a textbook in common use today that is based on such a specialized, materialistic science. If you do not know very much about the nervous system and try to read a textbook on the subject, you will probably lay it aside. If you do manage to get through it, you will not learn much that will help you to realize the worth and dignity of the human being. If, however, you listen to what can be said about the human nervous system on the basis of spiritual science, you will be led everywhere to the entire human being. Spiritual science so illuminates the entire human being that the idea arising within you suggests the worth, the essence, and the dignity of the human being.

The truth of this is nowhere more evident than when we observe not the healthy human being in his single parts but a person who is ill, where there are so many deviations from the so-called normal condition. When we are able to observe the whole human being under the influence of some disease, everything nature reveals to us in the sick person leads us deeply into cosmic connections. We are led to understand the particular constitution of this human being, how the atmospheric and extraterrestrial influences work upon him as the result of his particular constitution, and we are then able to relate his human organization to the particular substances of nature that will act as remedies. We are thereby led into wider connections. When we add to our understanding of the healthy person all that we are able to learn from observation of the sick person, a profound insight will arise into the interconnections and deeper significance of life. Such insight, however, becomes the foundation for a knowledge of the human being that can be shared with everyone. True, we have not as yet accomplished very much in this direction because spiritual science has only been able to be active for a short time. The lectures given here must therefore be thought of merely as a beginning.² By its very nature, however, spiritual science is able to work upon and develop what is contained in the separate sciences in such a way that what everyone should know about the human being can be introduced to everyone.

Think what it will mean if spiritual science succeeds in transforming science in this way, succeeds in developing forms of knowledge about the human being in health and illness that are accessible to general human consciousness. If spiritual science succeeds in this, how different will be the relations of one human being to another in social life; what a greater understanding one person will have for another, far greater than there is today when people pass one another without the one having the slightest understanding for the particular individuality of the other. Social issues will be removed from intellectual considerations when the most diverse realms of life are based upon objective knowledge and concrete experiences of life. This is evident especially in the domain of health care. Think what a social effect it would have were there to be a real understanding of what is healthy in one person, what is unhealthy in another; think what it would mean if health care were taken in hand with understanding by the whole of humanity. Certainly this does not mean that we should encourage scientific or medical dilettantism—most emphatically not—but imagine that a sympathetic understanding of the health and illness of our fellow man were to awaken not merely feeling but understanding, an understanding that grows from a view of the human being—think of the effect it would have in social life. Then indeed it would be realized that social reform and reconstruction must proceed in their separate realms from expert knowledge, not from general theories—whether from Marx or Oppenheimer—which lose sight of the human being as such and want to organize the world on the basis of abstract concepts.³ Healing can never spring from abstract concepts but only from a reverent awareness of the individual spheres of life. And hygiene, the care of health, is very special because it leads us most closely to the joy of our fellow man through his healthy, normal way of life, or to his sufferings and limitations through what lives in him more or less as illness.

This is something that directs us immediately to the particularly social way in which spiritual science can be active in the domain of hygiene or health care. For let us say that someone nurtures the knowledge of the human being in this way, the knowledge of the healthy and sick human being; if he now specializes to become a physician, and if such a person is placed within human society, he will be in a position to bring about enlightenment within this society, he will find understanding. The relationship of such a physician to society will not be merely the usual one in which, unless one is the doctor's friend or relative, one goes to the physician's house only when something hurts or has been broken; rather a relationship will develop in which the physician is continuously the teacher and advisor for a prophylactic health care. In fact, there will be a continual participation of the physician not only in treating an illness that he discovers in someone but in maintaining a person's health in so far as this is possible. A living social interaction will take place between the physician and the rest of society. In turn, medicine itself will be illuminated by the health of such a knowledge. Because materialism has extended itself even into medical considerations in life we have become truly entangled in some strange conceptions.

Thus on the one hand we have all the physical illnesses. They are investigated by observing the abnormalities of the organs or the various processes that are thought to be of a physical nature and are to be found within the boundaries of the human skin. Then the goal is to seek to rectify what is found to be wrong. In this case, the view of the human body in its normal and abnormal conditions is completely materialistic. Then, on the other hand, there are the so-called psychological or mental illnesses.' As a result of materialistic thinking, these are considered to be merely diseases of the brain or nervous system, although efforts have also been made to find their causes in the organ systems of the human being. Because there is generally no conception of the way in which the soul and spirit work in the healthy human body, however, it is impossible to arrive at a conception of the relationship of mental illness—so-called men-tal illness—to the rest of the human being. Thus mental illness is even thought about materialistically by that curious hermaphroditic science, psychoanalysis, though it definitely does not understand the material either. Mental illness stands there without our being able to bring it together in any meaningful way with what actually takes place in the human organism. Spiritual science is now able to show—and I have recently drawn attention to this—that what I have been speaking about here is not merely a program but is something that can be pursued in detail, as has been attempted during the opportunities offered here in the recent course for physicians.⁴ Spiritual science is able to show in detail how all so-called psychological and mental illnesses have their source in disturbances of the organs, in organ deterioration, in enlargement and shrinking of the organs in the human organism. A so-called mental illness arises sooner or later whenever there is some irregularity in an organ, in the heart, in the liver, in the lungs, and so on. A spiritual science that has penetrated to the point of knowing the spirit's activity in the normal heart is also able to discover in the deterioration or irregularity of the heart the cause of a diseased life of spirit or soul, called mental illness today.

The greatest fault of materialism is not that it denies the existence of the spirit; religion can see to it that due recognition is given to the spirit. The greatest error of materialism is that it provides us with no knowledge of matter itself, because, in effect, it considers only the outer side of matter. It is just this that is the defect of materialism, that it lacks insight even into matter. Take, for example, psychoanalytical treatments where attention is merely directed to something that has taken place in the soul and is described as a "complex,"" which is a pure abstraction. A more appropriate way to pursue this would be to study how certain soul impressions, which were made on a person at some period of his life and are normally bound up with the healthy organism, have come into contact with defective organs, e.g., with a diseased rather than a healthy liver. It must be considered that this may have happened long before the moment when the defect becomes organically perceptible.

There is no need for spiritual science to be afraid of showing how so-called psychological or mental illness is invariably connected with something occurring in the human body. Spiritual science must show emphatically that when merely the soul element, the soul "complex""—a deviation from the so-called normal soul life—is studied, the most that can be achieved is a one-sided diagnosis. Psychoanalysis, therefore, can never lead to anything more than something diagnostic, never to a real therapy in this domain. In mental illness, therapy must proceed by administering therapy for the body, and for this reason there must be detailed knowledge of the ramifications of the spiritual in the material. We must know where to take hold of the material body (which is, however, permeated with spirit) in order to cure the disease of which abnormal conditions of soul are simply symptoms. Spiritual science must emphasize again and again that the root of so-called mental or psychological illnesses lies in the organ systems of the human being, but it is possible to understand abnormal organ function of the human being only when the spirit can be pursued into the minutest parts of matter.

Looked at from the other side, all those phenomena of life that seemingly affect merely the soul or work in the soul element—for instance, all that is expressed in the different temperaments and the activity of the temperaments in the human being, what is expressed in the way the child behaves, plays, walks—all this is studied today only from a soul-spiritual point of view, but it also has its bodily aspect. Faulty education of the child may come to expression in later life in some familiar form of physical illness. In certain cases of mental illness, we must often look to the bodily element and look for the cause there; however, in certain cases of physical illness, we must look to the spiritual in order to find the cause. The essence of spiritual science is that it does not speak in abstractions about a nebulous spiritual aspect as do mystics or one-sided theosophists; rather it traces the spirit right down into its material workings. Spiritual science never conceives of the material as modern science does today, but it always penetrates to the spirit in all study of the material. Thus it is able to observe that an abnormal soul life must inevitably express itself in an abnormal bodily life, although the abnormality may, to begin with, be hidden from outer observation.

On all sides today, people form entirely false pictures of a serious, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This may have a certain justification when they listen to people speak who do not truly penetrate to what is actually important but speak only of abstract theories such as that the human being consists of such and such, that there are repeated earthly lives, and so forth. These things are, of course, full of significance and beauty; but the point is that we must work earnestly in this spiritual scientific movement, truly entering into a particular subject, into the individual spheres of this life.

In the widest sense, such a spiritual scientific movement leads again to a socially minded community of human beings, for when one is able to perceive how a soul that appears sick radiates its impulses into the organism, when one can really feel this connection between the organism and the soul that appears to be ill—feels this with understanding—and when on the other hand one knows how the general ordering of life affects the physical health of the human being, how the spiritual, which apparently exists in social arrangements only outwardly, works into the physical care of health of the human being, then one will stand in a completely different way within human society.

A true understanding of the human being will be gained, and we will treat each other quite differently. Individual character will be understood quite differently, knowing that one person possesses certain qualities and another possesses quite different ones. We will learn how to respond to all variations, to see them in relation to particular tasks; it will be known how to make use of the different temperaments in human society in the right way and particularly how to develop them in the right way.

In relation to health care or hygiene, one domain of social life in particular—that of education—will be most strongly influenced by such a knowledge of the human being. We cannot, without a comprehensive knowledge of the human being, evaluate the consequences of allowing our children to sit in school with bent backs so that they never breathe properly, or the repercussions of never teaching children to speak the vowel or consonant sounds loudly, clearly, and in a well-articulated way. As a matter of fact, the whole of later life depends on whether the child in school breathes in the right way and whether he is taught to speak clearly and with good articulation. I say this merely by way of example, for the same thing applies in other realms. It is an illustration, however, of the specific application of general hygienic principles in the sphere of education. The whole social significance of hygiene is revealed in this example.

It is also apparent that, rather than further specialization, life demands that the specialized branches of knowledge be brought together to form a comprehensive view of life. We need something more than educational norms according to which the teacher is supposed to instruct the child. The teacher must realize what it means for him to help the child to speak clearly and articulately. He must realize what it will mean if he allows the child to catch his breath after only half a phrase has been spoken and does not see to it that all the air is used up in the phrase being uttered. There are, of course, many such principles. A proper appreciation and practice of them, however, will live in us only when we are able to measure their full significance for human life and social health; only then will they give rise to a social impulse.

We need teachers who are able to educate children on the basis of a world view that understands the true being of man. This was the thought underlying the course I gave to the teachers when the Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded.⁵ All the principles of the art of education that were expressed in that course strive in the direction of making human beings out of the children who are being educated, human beings in whom lungs, liver, heart, and stomach will be healthy in later life because as children they were helped to develop their life functions in the right way, because, in effect, the soul worked in the right way.

This world view will never give a materialistic interpretation to the ancient saying, "A healthy soul lives in a healthy body"" (Mens sana in corpore sano). Interpreted materialistically, this means that if the body is healthy, if it has been made healthy by every possible physical method, then it will, of itself, be the bearer of a healthy soul. This is pure nonsense. The only true meaning is that a healthy body shows me that the force of a healthy soul has built it up, has molded it and made it healthy. A healthy body proves that an autonomous, healthy soul has worked in it. This is the true meaning of this saying, and only in this sense can it be an underlying principle of true hygiene. In other words, it is quite inadequate to have, in addition to teachers who are working from an abstract science of education, a school doctor who turns up every fortnight or so and goes through the school with no real idea of how to help. What we need is a living alliance between medical science and the art of education. We need an art of education that teaches the children in a way conducive to real health. This is what makes hygiene or health care a social issue, because a social issue is essentially an educational issue, and this, in turn, is essentially a medical issue, but only if medicine, hygiene, are fructified by spiritual science.

These matters are extraordinarily significant in relation to the theme of hygiene or health care as a social issue. For if one works with spiritual science and if spiritual science is something concrete for the human being, then one knows that contained within spiritual science is something that distinguishes it from what is contained in mere intellectualism—and natural science in the present is also mere intellectualism—from what is contained in mere intellectualism or in a merely intellectually developed natural science or in a merely intellectually developed history or jurisprudence today. All the sciences today are intellectualistic; if they claim to be experiential sciences, this is based only on the fact that they interpret intellectually their experiences based on sense observation. What is offered in spiritual science is essentially different from these intellectually interpreted results of natural science; it would be most unfortunate if what lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely a picture but a real power that worked more deeply on the human being. Everything intellectualistic remains only on the surface of the human being. This sentence is to be taken very comprehensively.

There are people who study spiritual science only intellectually, who make notes: there is a physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, reincarnation, karma, and so forth. They make notes of it all, as is the custom in modern natural or social science, but they are not sincerely devoting themselves to spiritual science when they cultivate this way of thinking. They are simply carrying over their ordinary way of thinking into what they encounter in spiritual science. What is essential about spiritual science is that it must be thought in a different way, felt in a different way, must be experienced not in an intellectual way but quite differently. It is for this reason that by its very nature spiritual science has a living relationship to the human being in health and illness, but a relationship altogether different from what is often imagined.

By now, some people must be sufficiently convinced of the impotence of our purely intellectual culture in dealing with those suffering from so-called mental illnesses. One who suffers from such an illness may say to you, for example, that he hears voices speaking to him. No matter what intellectual reasoning you use with him, it proves useless, for he makes all kinds of objections, you may be sure of that. Even this might indicate that one is dealing here with an illness not of the conscious or unconscious soul life but of the organism.

Spiritual science teaches, moreover, that one cannot come to grips with these so-called psychological and mental illnesses by means of the kinds of methods that take recourse to hypnotism, suggestion, and the like; one must rather approach mental illness by physical means, which means by healing the organs of the human being. This is exactly where a spiritual knowledge of the human being is essential. Spiritual knowledge knows that so-called mental illnesses cannot be affected by soul or spiritual procedures, because mental illness consists precisely of the fact that the spiritual member of the human being has been pressed out, as it were, as is normally the case only in sleep. As a consequence, the spiritual member grows weak, and we must cure the bodily organs so that the soul and spirit may be taken up again in a healthy way.

When, as a result of spiritual scientific work, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition arise, they are able to penetrate into the whole organism, as they proceed not from the intellect or the head alone but from the entire human being.⁶ Through real spiritual science, the physical organization of the human being may be permeated with health. The fact that there are dreamers who feel ill or show signs of the opposite of health in their spiritual scientific activities is no proof to the contrary. There are so many who are not really spiritual scientists at all but who simply amass intellectually vast collections of notes about the results of spiritual science. Spreading the real substance of spiritual science is in itself a social hygiene, for it works upon the whole human being and regulates his organic functions when they develop extreme tendencies in one direction or another, either toward dreaminess or the reverse. Here we have the overwhelming difference between what is given in spiritual science and what appears in merely intellectual science. The concepts arising in the domain of intellectualism are far too weak to penetrate the human being and to work healthily upon him, because they are merely analogies. Spiritual scientific concepts, on the other hand, have been drawn from the entire human being. Lungs, liver, heart, the entire human being and not the brain alone have participated in building up spiritual scientific concepts, and what they have derived from the strength of the entire human being adheres to them, penetrates them, as it were, in a sculptural way. If one then permeates oneself with such concepts, if one receives them cognitively through the sound human intellect, they work back again onto the entire human being in a hygienic, health-engendering way. This is how spiritual science can penetrate and give direction to hygiene, health care, as a social concern.

In many other ways too—now I can only offer an example—spiritual science will be able to lay down guidelines for the life of humanity in the domain of health, if it gains a firm footing in the world. Here let me give just one brief indication. The relationship of the waking human being to the sleeping human being, the great difference between the human organization in waking and sleeping, is one of the subjects that spiritual science must study again and again. How the spirit and soul act in waking life, when they permeate each other in the bodily, soul, and spiritual aspects of the human being, how they act when they are temporarily separated from each other in sleep—all these things are studied conscientiously by spiritual science. Here I can do not more than refer to a certain principle that is a well-founded result of spiritual scientific investigation.

In our life we occasionally see so-called epidemic illnesses that affect whole masses of the population and are therefore essentially a social concern. Ordinary materialistic science studies these illnesses by examining the physical organism of the human being. It knows nothing of the tremendous significance that the abnormal attitude of the human being to waking and sleeping has for epidemics and the susceptibility to epidemic illnesses. What takes place in the organism during sleep is something that, if it becomes excessive, predisposes the human being to so-called epidemic illnesses. There are people who, as the result of too much sleep, initiate certain processes in the human organism, processes that ought not be set in motion because waking life should not be broken up by such long periods of sleep. These people have a much stronger predisposition to epidemic illnesses and are less able to resist them.

You yourselves can assess what it would entail to explain to people the proper proportion of sleeping to waking. Such things cannot be dictated. You can, of course, tell people that they must not send children with scarlatina to school, but you cannot possibly dictate to people in the same way that they must get seven hours of sleep. And yet this is much more important than any other prescription. People who need it should have seven hours of sleep, and others for whom this is not necessary should sleep much less, and so on.

These matters, which are so intimately connected with the personal life of human beings, have a tremendous effect upon social life. How these social effects come about, whether a larger or smaller number of people are obliged, owing to illness, to be absent from their work, whether or not a whole region is affected: all these things depend upon the most intimate details of man's life. Here hygiene plays an immeasurably important part in social life. Regardless of what people may think about infection or non-infection, with epidemics this element really plays a part in social life. Here external regulations are of no avail; the only thing you can do is to educate people within society so that they are able to understand the physicians who are trying to explain prophylactic measures. This can give rise to an active cooperation in the maintenance of health between the physician who understands his profession and the layman who understands the nature of the human being.

I have described here an aspect of hygiene or health care as a social issue that is utterly dependent on a free spiritual life. We must have a spiritual life in which within the spiritual realm there are those engaged in nurturing this spiritual life, even in so far as it extends into the various practical domains such as hygiene; they must be completely independent of everything that does not yield pure knowledge, that does not bring about the nurture of the spiritual life. What the individual can achieve for the greatest benefit of his fellow man must grow entirely out of his own capacities. There should be neither governmental norms nor a dependence on economic powers. The individual's achievements must be placed entirely in the sphere of the intimate, personal connections that only exist between individuals, in the trust, based on understanding, that those who require the services of a capable person can bring to that person. There, a spiritual life is needed—independent of all authority, governmental or economic—which is active in a manner that arises purely out of spiritual forces. If you consider what can bring about a hygiene intimately united with insight into human nature and social behavior, you will also recognize that the spirit obviously must be managed by those who nurture it; not the specialists active as experts in governmental agencies but rather those active in spiritual life must be the sole managers of this spiritual life. This becomes especially clear if one goes into the individual branches of activity, such as hygiene, with real experience, as is required by the separate, concrete realms "“ and this could be shown to hold good in other realms as it does for hygiene. When hygiene or health care exists as a real social institution, based on social insight arising from the free spiritual life, then the economic aspects of such a hygiene can be handled in a totally different way, especially if the independent economic life is constituted as I have described in my book The Threefold Social Order.⁷

If the forces for the nurture of hygiene or health care that are latent in society, resting in its womb, as it were, are taken up with human understanding, if they result in social institutions, then out of the independent economic life, without consideration of dependence on profit or governmental impulses, can emerge what is necessary to support a genuine hygiene. Only then will the kind of idealism enter economic life that is necessary for the nurture of hygiene in human life. If the mere profit motive prevails in our economic sphere, it always has the tendency to become increasingly incorporated into the political state, and the generally accepted opinion is that one must produce what yields the most profit. If this idea continues to prevail, then the independent impulses of a free spiritual life cannot manifest in the domain of hygiene or health care, and spiritual life will then become dependent on political or economic forces; then the economic will govern the spiritual, but the economic must not prevail over the spiritual. This fact is most evident to one who wants to arrive at what the spirit demands in the economic life, to one who wants to serve a genuine and true hygiene.

The forces of the free spiritual life in the threefold social organism arrive at the insight which becomes a matter of public concern; an understanding of the human being becomes a public concern in the threefold social organism. The human being must stand within a free spiritual life in order that a firmly grounded hygiene can be nurtured. On the other hand, people must develop the idealism through which the products of the economic life are met with an understanding that results not merely from a sense for profit but out of insights emerging from the free spiritual management of hygiene or health care. Once this insightful, social human understanding has arisen, this human idealism, there will emerge a willingness to work economically simply because the social situation of humanity requires hygienic service. If these requirements are met, people will be able to meet democratically in parliaments or other such gatherings. For then, out of a free spiritual life, the recognition emerges of the necessity for hygiene as a social phenomenon; attention to what is necessary for hygiene as a social issue emerges from an impartial and professionally managed economic life through the high intentions that would be developed within it. Then mature human beings will deliberate on the ground of the economic life out of their insight and understanding of the human being as well as out of their relations to an economic life at the service of hygiene. Then people will be able to meet as equals within the legislative, rights, or economic life concerning the measures that are necessary regarding hygiene and the care of public health.

Were all this to come about, however, laymen or dilettantes would not do the healing; rather, the mature person will encounter as an equal and with understanding whoever advises him on matters of hygiene, namely, the experienced physician. For the layman, the understanding of the human being that is nurtured in social life, with the help of the physician, makes it possible to meet expert knowledge equipped with understanding, so that in a democratic parliament the layman is able to say "yea"" with a certain understanding and not merely out of pressure from authority.

When we consider impartially how the spiritual, legislative, and economic members of the social organism work together in such a special domain, we discover the complete justification of the idea of the threefold nature of the social organism. This idea is met with disapproval only when it is understood merely abstractly.

Today I was able to give you no more than a sketchy indication of what speaks for the necessity of the threefolding of the social organism if one thinks correctly about a particular, concrete domain such as hygiene. If those paths are followed, toward which I have only been able to point today in their beginnings, one will see that whoever meets the impulse of the threefold social organism with abstract concepts will work against it in a certain way. Such a person will generally bring up the obvious objections. Whoever enters the various domains of life with a full inner understanding, however, entering into the individual realms that matter so much in social life, whoever truly understands something in a concrete realm of life and takes the trouble to understand something about true practical life in any domain, will be led again and again in the direction that has been suggested by the idea of threefolding the social organism.

This idea did not arise out of a dreamy or abstract idealism; it arose as a social demand of our time and of the near future, especially out of the concrete and sober observation of the individual domains of life. By penetrating these individual domains of life with what is active out of the impulse for threefolding the social organism, one will find for all these domains just what they so desperately need today. This evening I only wished to give a few indications concerning how what emerges out of spiritual science regarding the social life can penetrate human society as a social concern, arising out of a socially nurtured understanding of the human being. Striving for a realization of the threefold social organism can fructify what can be accepted today only on the basis of belief in authority, through a completely blind subjection. Through the enrichment that hygiene or health care can receive from a medicine fructified by spiritual science, it can become a social, a truly social concern. It can become a democratically nurtured, common public concern in the truest sense.

In the discussion following the lecture, Rudolf Steiner added the following comments in response to prepared questions.

In matters such as I have discussed today, it is essential that one be able to enter into the whole spirit of what has been expressed. For this reason, it is difficult at times to give appropriate answers, for the questions have already been formulated in such a way that they bear the stamp of contemporary thinking and attitudes. Before answering such questions, it may first be necessary to reformulate them or at least to provide some sort of appropriate explanation. Having said this, I will begin at once with the question that may appear to many of you to be so exceedingly simple that it ought to be able to be answered with a few sentences or even with one sentence:

"How can a person rid himself of the habit of sleeping too long?"

In order to answer this question appropriately, it would be necessary for me to give an even longer lecture than I have already given, because I would first have to bring various elements together. It is possible to say the following, however. The intellectual attitude of soul is almost universal in humanity today. It is particularly those who believe they are judging or living out of feeling or who believe, for one reason or another, that they are not intellectual who are most subject to the intellectual attitude of soul. The fundamental character of the intellectual soul and organ life is that through it our instincts are destroyed. The correct instincts of the human being are destroyed. It is actually so that one must point to primeval humanity, or even to the animal kingdom, to discover instincts that are not yet entirely destroyed. On another occasion a few days ago, I pointed to a very telling example. There are birds who, out of greed, feed on certain insects, for instance spiders. After consuming these spiders, which are poisonous to them, the birds get convulsions, seizures, and die a miserable, agonizing death soon after swallowing the spider. If henbane is in the vicinity, however, the bird flies there, sucks the healing sap from the plant, and thus saves its own life.

Now, just think how there we see developed something that in the human being is shriveled down to the few reflex instincts such as the movements we make without any deep deliberation to encourage the departure of a fly that has alighted on our nose. A defensive instinct arises in response to this insulting stimulus. In the bird feeding on the spider, the consequence of the effect the spider has in the bird's organism is a defensive instinct to this insult, driving it to do something very reasonable. We would still be able to find such instincts among ancient populations if only we interpreted history properly. In our time, however, we have different experiences.

It has always been exceedingly painful to me, accustomed as I am to seeing a fork, knife, and spoon next to a plate, to see instead a scale next to the plate of someone sitting down to eat. This really happens! Such a person weighs the piece of meat and only then knows how much meat he should eat for his particular organism. Just think how bare of all truly original instincts humanity has become to require such a measure! The important thing, then, is that one not remain stationary within intellectualism but rise instead to a spiritual scientific way of knowing. You will now believe that I am speaking pro domo, even if also pro domo of this great house, but I am not speaking pro domo. I am really speaking about what I believe to have recognized as the truth, quite apart from the fact that I myself represent this truth. It can readily be seen that if one penetrates not only into what is intellectual but into what needs to be grasped by way of spiritual science and which therefore confronts humanity more in a pictorial sense, it becomes noticeable that by taking hold of knowledge not accessible to the mere intellect one is again led back to healthy instincts, if not in a single life then perhaps -more so in those matters that lie in the underpinnings of life. Whoever concerns himself, be it ever so briefly, with developing this completely different soul attitude, which must be developed if one really wants to understand something of spiritual science, will again be led back to healthy instincts in matters such as the proper requirement for sleep. Animals do not sleep too much under normal conditions, and primeval man did not sleep too much either. It is only necessary to educate oneself again to have healthy instincts, which were lost by virtue of the intellectual culture prevalent today. It can be said that a truly effective means of ridding oneself of the habit of sleeping too long is to be able to take up spiritual scientific truths without falling asleep as a result. If a person falls asleep at once upon hearing spiritual scientific truths, then he will be unable to rid himself of the habit of sleeping too long. If one succeeds, however, in being truly present inwardly while working through spiritual scientific truths, then this inner human aspect will be activated in such a way that one can actually discover the exactly appropriate time needed for sleep for one's own organism.

Again, it is exceedingly difficult to give intellectual rules prescribing the amount of sleep an individual person requires who is suffering, let us say, from a kidney or liver disorder that has not made him ill in the ordinary sense. As a rule, such a prescription would not lead to anything of consequence. To induce sleep in an artificial way is not the same as when the body, out of its own need for sleep, refuses the entry of the spirit only for as long as is necessary. It can thus be said that a proper hygiene emerging out of spiritual science will also bring the human being to the point at which he can determine in the right way the proper amount of sleep for his own organism.

The other question that was posed here also cannot be answered so simply: "How can a person know how much sleep he needs?"

I would like to say that it is not at all necessary to reach the answer through discursive thinking; that is not necessary at all. It is necessary to acquire those instincts that can be acquired not by receiving collections of notes out of spiritual science but by the way in which one understands spiritual science if it is understood with full inner participation. Once this instinct is achieved, a person is able to discern in an individual way how much sleep is appropriate for him. This is what can be said as a rule in response to such a question. As I said, I can give only a kind of direction for how questions like this can be answered; this may not be what is expected, but what is expected is not always what is right.

"Is it healthy to sleep in a room with the window open?"

Such a question, too, cannot actually be answered in general terms. It is certainly conceivable that for one person, sleeping in a room with an open window is very healthy, depending on the particular construction of his respiratory organs; for another person, however, it might be better to air out the room before sleeping and then close the windows while sleeping. What is necessary, in fact, is to gain an understanding of the relationship the human being has to his environment in order then to be able to make a judgment in each individual case in accordance with this understanding.

"How, from a spiritual scientific point of view, do you explain the development of mental disturbances associated with crimes that are committed, that is, how, in such a situation, can one recognize the bodily illness which lies at the foundation of the mental disturbance?"

If one were to try to deal with this question thoroughly, it would really be necessary to enter into a discussion of all criminal and psychiatric anthropology. I would simply like to say the following: first, in considering such matters, one must presuppose that the organic predisposition of someone who becomes a criminal is abnormal right from the outset. In this direction, you need only follow up the relevant studies by Moriz Benedikt "“ the first really significant criminal anthropologist⁸ "“ and you will see how in fact the pathological investigation of the forms of single human organs can be brought into connection with this predisposition to criminality. There you already have an inherent abnormality, although materialistic thinkers, such as Moriz Benedikt, naturally draw the wrong conclusions from their findings, because it is certainly not an absolute requirement that whoever shows signs in this direction is inevitably a born criminal. What is important is that one is definitely able to work on the defects within the organism "“ I mean the organ defects, not the already existing mental illness, but the organ defects "“ and to have an effect especially through education and later through the appropriate spiritual element, if only the state of affairs is studied from a spiritual scientific point of view. Therefore the conclusions arrived at by Benedikt are not correct. Such organ defects can already be discovered, however.

Then one must also be clear about the fact that there are also non-intellectual elements in ordinary human life, more in the realm of feelings or emotions, which set off reactions. These work first on the glandular activity, the secretory activity, but from there they have an influence on the other organs. In connection with this issue, I would advise you to read an interesting little book concerning the mechanics of emotions that has been put out by a Danish physician.⁹ There you can read much that is of value for the topic under consideration. Take the bodily predisposition that can be traced in everyone who truly comes into consideration as a criminal; add to that everything that has had consequences for the apprehended criminal, consisting of emotional disturbances and the continuation of these emotional disturbances into the organs; then you have the path by which to seek for those defective organs which as a consequence bring forth mental illness, specifically the mental illness associated with committing a crime. In this way, we must attempt to obtain a clear idea about such connections.

"What is the relationship of theosophy to anthroposophy? Is the theosophy which was presented here previously no longer fully recognized?"

I would simply like to say that nothing has ever been presented here other than an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and what has been presented here today has always been presented in this way. The common identification of our presentations with so-called theosophy is simply based on a misunderstanding. This will remain a misunderstanding because, within certain limits, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science moved for a time within the framework of the Theosophical Society; even in the framework of that society, however, the representatives of an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science never presented anything other than what is presented here today. This was tolerated in the Theosophical Society only so long as matters didn't look too heretical. The anthroposophists were thrown out, however, as soon as it was noticed that anthroposophy was something completely different from the abstract mysticism manifested so often in theosophy. This expulsion was undertaken by the other side, but what is presented here never had any other form than it has today. Of course, those who concern themselves with matters superficially and who listen only to those who haven't gotten beyond a superficial comprehension as members of the Anthroposophical Society "“ for one needn't always be outside in order to understand anthroposophy superficially or to confuse anthroposophy with theosophy; one can also be in the Society "“ those who therefore achieve only a superficial knowledge of what is going on get confused about the issues. What I have characterized here today regarding a particular area has never been presented here in any other way.

Of course there is continuous work, and certain things may be said today in a much more precise, thorough, and intensive way than was possible fifteen, ten, or even five years ago. This is just the nature of working, that one progresses in the formulation of making oneself understood in such difficult matters as spiritual science. It is really unnecessary to engage in any discussion with those who, out of ill will, attribute to us all kinds of changes of world view because of a more recent, more complete expression of something said incompletely on an earlier occasion. Discussions with such ill-willed persons are really a waste of time, because spiritual science, as it is meant here, is something living and not something dead. And whoever believes that it cannot progress and wants to nail it down where it is and where it once was, as happens so often, does not believe in what is living; he would prefer to make it into something dead.

"Would you please say something about the origin of an epidemic such as influenza or scarlet fever? How does it come about if not by the spreading of bacteria? In many illnesses the causative agent has been scientifically determined. What is your position in relation to this issue?"

If I were also to deal with this question concerning which I have indicated that I do not wish to take sides, I would have to give another entire lecture. Nevertheless, I would like to direct your attention to the following: a person may be impelled, in accordance with his knowledge, to direct attention to the fact that for illnesses accompanied by the occurrence of bacilli or bacteria, there are deeper causes "“ acting as primary causes "“ than the mere occurrence of bacteria; such a person does not assert that bacteria don't exist. It is one thing to assert that bac-teria exist and that they increase during the course of an illness; it is quite another to seek the primary cause of the illness in the bacteria. What needs to be said regarding this I have developed in great detail in the course that is being held here now [4], but it takes time to deal with the issues properly. This also applies to certain elements that must be considered before this question can be dealt with, and this cannot be done so quickly in a question-and-answer period such as this. Nevertheless, I will point out the following, the human constitution is not such a simple matter as one often imagines. The human being is a multi-membered being. Right at the beginning of my book, Riddles of the Soul,¹⁰ I stated that man is a threefold being. First there is what can be called the nerve-sense man, then the rhythmic man, and thirdly the metabolic man. This is the human being. These three members of human nature work into one another and may not, if the human being is to be healthy, interact with one another without in a certain way maintaining a separation of the different realms. For example, the nerve-sense man, which is far more than contemporary physiology imagines it to be, may not extend its influence without consequences on the metabolic man, unless its effects are mediated by the rhythmic movements of the circulatory and respiratory processes which, as is well known, extend into the outermost periphery of the organism. This working together, however, can be interrupted in a certain way. This working together is brought about by something very specific. (When such questions are posed "“ if you will pardon me "“ one must also answer in accordance with the facts; I will attempt to be as decent as possible, but it is nevertheless necessary to say a few words that must also be listened to as related to the facts.) It is so, for example, that in the lower man processes occur that are incorporated into the entire organism. If they are incorporated into the entire organism, then they will work in the right way; if, however, they are heightened by various processes, either directly in the lower body, so that they become more active, or through the corresponding processes, which are always there in the human head or in the human lung being diminished in their intensity, then something very curious takes place. Then it becomes evident that, in order to have a normal life, the human organism must develop processes that may develop to the extent that they are integrated into the entire human being. If a process is heightened excessively, however, then it becomes localized; a process arises, for example, in the lower body of the human being, through which there is an improper separation of what goes on in the head or lung, which corresponds to certain processes in the lower body. Processes always correspond to one another in such a way that they proceed parallel to one another; thereby what ought to be present in the human being only to a certain extent, whereby he maintains his vitality, the soul- and spirit-bearing vitality, is brought beyond a certain level. This then encourages an atmosphere, as it were, in which all kinds of lower organisms, all kinds of tiny organisms, can develop. The nurturing element for these small organisms is always present within the human being, only it is spread out over the whole organism. If it becomes concentrated, it provides the life soil for small organisms, for microbes. The reason they can thrive there, however, must be sought in the exceedingly fine processes in the organism which then prove to be the primary cause.

I am really not speaking out of an antipathy for the bacillary theory. I certainly understand the reasons people have for believing in the bacillary theory. You must believe that if I did not have to speak this way because of the facts I could well recognize these reasons. Here, however, we have a knowledge that necessarily leads to the recognition of something else which impels one to speak in the following way: I see a certain landscape in which there are many exceedingly beautiful and well cared-for cattle. I now ask, why are there favorable conditions in that area? They come from the beautiful cattle, I determine. I explain the conditions of life in this area by explaining that beautiful cattle have moved in from somewhere and then spread over the landscape. "“ Don't you agree that such an explanation does not correspond with the facts? Instead, I must look for the primary causes: the diligence, the understanding of the people in that area, and they will explain to me why such beautiful cattle develop on this soil. I would give quite a superficial explanation if I were to say: here it is beautiful, a nice place to live, because beautiful cattle have moved in. The same logic is applied when I find a typhus bacillus and then claim that a patient has typhus because typhus bacilli have moved in. To explain typhus, entirely different factors are necessary than merely to draw attention to the typhus bacillus. In submitting to such erroneous logic one is led astray in many other ways. The primary processes that provide typhus bacillus with the foundation for its existence certainly bring about all kinds of other problems that are not primary. And it is very easy to confound completely or even interchange what is secondary with the actual original form of illness. This is as much as I can say now that could lead to a proper perspective on these issues and show what must be done in order to put in its proper place what is justifiable within limits.

Maybe you can see, nevertheless, from the way in which I have given this answer "“ even if I have done so only sketchily and could easily be misunderstood "“ that I am not at all concerned here with the popular hollering about the bacillary theory; we are interested rather in studying these matters very seriously.

"Please give us a few examples of how bodily organic disturbances bring about soul-spiritual illnesses."

This question would naturally, if it were answered thoroughly, lead much too far, but here, too, I will point out just a few things. You see, in the historical development of medical thinking it is not, as is presented today, that the healing art began with Hippocrates and then developed further. So far as can be traced, very curious things are found in Hippocrates' writings, and rather than the mere beginnings of contemporary intellectual medicine we have in Hippocrates remnants of an ancient, instinctual kind of medicine.

In addition, we find something else, however. In this ancient, instinctual medicine, as long as it was still valid, one did not speak of psychological depressions of a certain kind, which is indeed a very abstract kind of expression; rather one spoke of hypochondria, i.e., cartilage in the lower body. It was known, therefore, that when hypochondria occurred, one was dealing with disturbances in the lower body, with a hardening in the lower body. One cannot say that the ancients were more materialistic than we are.

Similarly, it can very easily be shown that certain chronic lung defects are definitely connected with what could be called a false mystical sense of the human being. And so one could point to all kinds of things completely apart from what the ancients suggested for the organic realm with the temperaments, again all corresponding to a proper instinct. For them, the choleric temperament originated out of the white gall; the melancholic temperament arose out of the black gall and whatever the black gall brings about in the lower body; the sanguine temperament arose out of the blood; and the phlegmatic temperament arose out of the phlegm, what they called phlegm. When they saw deviations of the temperaments, these suggested deviations in the corresponding organic aspects. How this was regarded in the instinctual medicine and hygiene may again become part and parcel of a soul attitude in a strictly scientific way and can be supported from the standpoint of our contemporary knowledge.

Here is another question concerning which great misunderstandings can arise: "Do you know about iris diagnosis? Do you acknowledge it as a valid science?"

It is generally correct that in an organism, and especially in the complicated human organism, conclusions regarding the whole can be arrived at out of all kinds of details, if these details are looked at in the right way. Furthermore the role that the isolated part plays in the human organism is very significant. What the iris diagnostician investigates in the iris is on the one hand very isolated from the rest of the human organism; on the other hand, it is inserted into the rest of the organism in a remarkable way so that it is actually a very expressive organ. Especially in such matters, however, one ought not to schematize, and the error in such matters often lies in the fact that a schema is made. It is definitely so, for example, that people with different soul and bodily constitutions show different signs in the iris from other people. A prerequisite, then, for a meaningful application of this technique would be such an intimate knowledge of what happens in the human organism that whoever had this knowledge actually would no longer need to look into a single organ. To be dependent on an intellectual adherence to certain rules and schemas is of little, if any, value.

"What relation do diseases have to the course of world history, especially those that have arisen more recently?"

A whole chapter of cultural history! Well, I will only comment on the following: in order to study history one must have a sense for what can be called symptomatology; that is, much of what is taken today as history can be considered only a symptom for what lies much deeper, that is, the spiritual stream carrying these symptoms. Thus what resides in the depths of the development of humanity is also symptomatic or comes to expression in this or that disease of an era. It is interesting to study the relationships between what works in the depths of the evolution of humanity and what takes its course in the symptoms of this or that disease. The existence of certain diseases may point to impulses in historical development that could elude a symptomatology not applying such a method.

This question, however, could lead to something else, which is "˜also not unessential when one pursues the history of humanity. Diseases, regardless of whether they occur in a single person or in a society by way of an epidemic, are in many instances also reactions to other excesses. From the point of view of public health, these other excesses may be taken as much less serious; from a moral or spiritual point of view, however, they are nevertheless considered to be very serious. But you must not apply what I just said to the question of healing or hygiene, for that would be very wrong. Diseases must be healed. In hygiene, it is important to be active in furthering or helping the human being. One may not say, "I will first see whether it may be your karma to have this illness. If so, I must let you have this illness; if not, then I can cure it." This way of looking at the issue is not valid if one is concerned with healing. What may not be valid regarding our intervention in the case of helping another human being, however, may nevertheless be objectively valid in the world outside. And there it must be said that much of what develops as a disposition to moral excesses engraves itself so deeply into the organization of the human being that reactions then appear in certain diseases and that the disease is the suppression of a moral excess.

In the individual person it is not of much significance to pursue these things, because the individual ought to be allowed to go through his individual destiny, and one really ought not to meddle in this, just as one doesn't meddle with the personal mail of other persons, unless, from the viewpoint that is so close at hand, it is "opened by government decree in times of war." Just as little as one ought to snoop into other people's personal mail, so little ought one to meddle with another person's individual karma. With the history of the world it is a different matter, however; there one ought to be concerned, because there the individual human being plays, you could say, only a statistical role. One must always point out that statistics are very helpful in letting life insurance companies know what the mortality rate is according to which they can determine their rates. These things are quite accurate. The calculations are correct and everything is very scientific. But one needn't simply die at the moment that has been specified by statistics; one also needn't live as long as has been calculated. Other issues arise when the individual human being comes into consideration. If groups of human beings, or even the whole historical development, come into consideration, however, it can be very helpful not to be superstitious but rather to be very scientific. If one studies to what extent symptoms of an illness occur that are corrective for other excesses, then one can, in fact, already look for certain repercussions of the illness or at least a calling forth by the illness of something that would have occurred in a completely different form if the disease had not arisen.

These are only a few indications of how something might be considered that is touched on by this question.

Now, however, our time has progressed so far that we will follow the others who have already left us.

• 1. In German, these illnesses are called Seelen-oder Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the soul or spirit as opposed to diseases of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of soul and spirit in bodily phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of soul-spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalents, psychological and mental illnesses.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner is referring here to a number of lectures given by various scientists during the medical course at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
• 3. Karl Marx (1818-1883); Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1944), an economist.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, 20 lectures given in Dornach, 1920, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner, The Study of Man, lectures given at the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, 1919; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, reprinted 1981.
• 6. See chapter five in Rudolf Steiner's An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y., reprinted 1984.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner, The Threefold Social Order, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y.
• 8. Moriz Benedikt (1835-1920), professor of neuropathology at the University of Vienna; founder of criminal anthropology.
• 9. Carl Georg Lange (1834-1900), professor of pathology in Copenhagen.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenrätseln, 1917; excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner Press London, 1970.

A public lecture at the Stuttgart Art Building

When the spiritual science, the aims and nature of which I have been honored to present in lectures in Stuttgart every year for almost two decades, gained greater currency, namely when artistic work was created from this spiritual science, the intention arose to create a central building for this spiritual science that would be particularly appropriate for it, somewhere where it would be fitting. This idea has become a reality in that we performed the Mystery Dramas in an ordinary theater in Munich from 1909 to 1913. These plays were intended to be born out of the spirit of this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science in their entire structure and attitude.

What the supporters of this spiritual science had in mind, on the one hand, as the actual meaning of their world view, and, on the other hand, as the artistic expression of this world view, was initially brought about by the intention, just mentioned, to stage their own play, which was to be the representative, the outward representative of this spiritual science. In Munich, this did not succeed due to the lack of cooperation on the part of the relevant artists. Since I have set myself a different task today, I do not want to talk about everything that led to the construction of this building on a hill in a remote location in northwestern Switzerland, in the canton of Solothurn, where, at the time we began building, there were no restrictive building laws and one could build as one wished. As I said, all this has led to the fact that I do not want to go into it today. But I would like to talk about the sense in which the intention should be understood, especially for the spiritual science meant here.

When one speaks of world views, world view directions or world view currents, then one usually has in mind a sum of ideas that often have a more or less theoretical or popular character, but which mostly exhaust themselves in the fact that they simply want to express themselves through communication, through the mere word, and then at most expect from the world that the word, which is formulated in a certain way programmatically, is actually carried out in reality. From the outset, what is meant here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not predisposed in the same way as other world views. It is, if I may express it this way, imbued from beginning to end with a sense of reality. That is why it had to lead, even in difficult times in this present age, to direct penetration into what the attempt at a social reconstruction of modern civilization is. If a world view that is more in the realm of ideas needs a structure of its own for its cultivation, then, depending on one's means, one usually contacts someone whom one assumes to be professionally capable of constructing a structure from the relevant styles. One contacts such a personality or a series of such personalities in order to then create, as it were, a house, a framework for the cultivation of such a worldview. However, this could not have corresponded to the whole structure of our anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for the simple reason that this spiritual science is not something that expresses itself only in ideas, but because it wants to express itself in all forms of life.

Now I would like to use a simple comparison to suggest how this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science had to express itself in its own framework, both in terms of trees and in artistic terms. Take any fruit, let us say a nut. Inside the nut is the fruit, and around it is the shell. Let us first look at the hard shell inside the green shell. If you study the whole configuration, the shape of the nut shell, you will say to yourself: it could not be any different than it is, because the nut is as it is. You cannot help but think to yourself: the nut creates its shell, and everything about it that is visible through the shell must be an expression of what the nut itself is. Thus, a frame is quite appropriate in nature, in all creation, for what it frames.

If you do not think abstractly, if you do not think theoretically, if you do not think from a world view that moves only in ideas, but that wants to be in all reality and in all life, then you feel compelled to do everything you do in a certain way, as the creative forces in the universe do. And so, if we had built with some alien architectural style, with something that had grown out of those building methods that are common today, a framework for an anthroposophically oriented worldview and its cultivation, there would have been two things: on the one hand, a building that expresses itself entirely from within, that says something for itself, that stands in its own artistic formal language. And then one would have entered and represented something inside, cultivated something that could only relate to the building in a very superficial way. One would hear words spoken in such a building, one would see plays performed on the stage (since these are intended) and other artistic performances; one would have heard and seen and beheld something that wants to present itself as something new in modern civilization. One would have turned one's eye away from what one might have seen on the stage; one would have turned one's ear away from what one might have heard, and one would have looked at the building forms — these would have become two essentially different things. The spiritual science meant here could not aspire to this. It had to strive in harmony with all world-building. It had to trust itself to express itself in artistic forms as well as in building forms. It had to claim that what forms itself into words, what forms itself into drama or into another form of artistic expression, is also capable of directly shaping itself into all the details of what is now the shell. Just as the nut fruit creates its shell out of its own essence, so too did a spiritual science such as this, whose essence is not understood in the broadest circles today because it breathes precisely this spirit of reality, had to create its own framework. Everything that the eye sees in this framework must be a direct expression of what is present as living life in this world view, as must the formed word.

And there were some pitfalls to avoid. For those who have a certain inclination to make a building appropriate to a worldview are often, let us say, somewhat mystical or otherwise inclined, and they then have the urge to express what is expressed in the worldview in external symbols, in some mystical formations. But this merely leads to such a framing becoming something in the most eminent sense inartistic. And if one had performed a building bearing symbols, one would have wanted to express in allegorical or symbolic form what underlies anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, so nothing would have emerged but something in the most eminent sense inartistic.

Indeed, I must even admit that some people who have come to what is referred to here as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science with their views and currents of life, as contributors or advisors, in the early days of our work in Dornach, were quite inclined to express everything that spiritual science contains in old symbolic or similar forms. I might also mention that those people, who are so numerous, who either out of a certain lack of understanding or out of malicious intent talk about the Dornach building, keep coming to the world with the idea that one can find symbols for this or that, allegorical expressions for this or that.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, it must be admitted that even in what I have to show you this evening, anyone who does not look closely and with a lively sense of perception can find something to use as an expression: There are many allegorical or symbolic elements. In reality, there is not a single symbol or allegory in the Dornach building, but everything that is there is there entirely so that the inner experience of the spirit, which on the one hand is to be grasped in ideas that are expressed in lectures or the like, is experience is to be completely dissolved into artistic forms, that nothing else is asked for in artistic creation in Dornach than: what the line is like, what the form is like, what that is which can be shaped as an artistic form of expression in sculpture, in architecture, in painting, and so on. And many a person who comes to Dornach and asks what this or that means is always given the same answer by me: I ask them to look at the things; basically, they all mean nothing other than what flows into the eye. People often say that this or that means this or that. But then I am obliged to talk to them about the distribution of colors and the like.

I have now tried to show how the building, as a shell, very much in the spirit of nature's own creation, forms the framework for anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. But for that very reason the whole idea of the building had to strive for something new. Now, in all that I am going to say today, I ask you to bear in mind that, of course, much criticism can be made of the Dornach building, that many objections can be raised. And I give you the assurance: the person who perhaps objects most of all is myself. For I am fully aware that the Dornach building is a beginning; that the Dornach building stands as a first attempt to create a certain stylistic form that cannot even be characterized in words today, because its details are not formed from abstract thoughts, but from what is experienced in a living way in that beholding of the spirit that is meant by our spiritual science.

I may mention just one difference at the outset: if we compare the various architectural styles, which, in a certain development of form, still find expression today wherever buildings are constructed, it is apparent everywhere that, basically, the mathematical, the geometrical, the symmetrical, that which perhaps follows in the rhythm of the line, the mechanical, the dynamic, etc., all flow into architecture. From the basic feeling – I am not saying from the basic idea, I am saying from the basic feeling – of our spiritual science, the daring attempt was once made, I know it, to create an organic building idea, not a mechanical-dynamic, but to create an organic building idea, and this under the influence of that which Goethe incorporated into his great, powerful view of nature under the influence of the idea of metamorphosis. The Dornach building, as far as this can be realized in architecture, should not merely represent the symmetrical, the dynamic, the mechanical, the geometrical; it should represent something that can be looked at, I do not say grasped, but looked at as a building organism, as the form for something living.

In this case, however, it is a matter of every detail in an organism being exactly as it should be in its place. You cannot imagine the ear lobe in a human organism being formed any differently than it is. So we tried to make our building in Dornach a completely organic, internally organic unit by placing each individual part in the whole in such a way that it appears as a necessary structure in its place; that every detail is an expression of the whole, just as a fingertip or an earlobe is an expression of the whole human organism.

That is one thing that has been attempted. As I said, it is a beginning, an attempt, and I know how many imperfections it has and how much can be objected to from the point of view of architecture and sculpture and so on. The other thing is what I would like to say in advance, namely that our world view itself demands that the whole idea of building be formulated differently from the way in which the idea of building is usually formulated. If we consider ordinary buildings – I will mention just one – we find that they are closed off from the outside by walls to a certain degree. Even the Greek buildings were closed off to a certain degree. What is required by the Dornach building is that the wall itself be treated in a completely different way than it is usually treated. The person who enters the Dornach building should not have the feeling that, having a wall around him, he is closed off in an inner space. Rather, everything should be artistically designed so that, to a certain extent, the wall itself is suspended; that the wall itself - please do not misunderstand me - the wall itself becomes artistically transparent, so that one gets the feeling - transparent is of course only spoken in comparison - you are not closed off, but everything that is wall, everything that is dome, opens up a feeling that it is broken through, that it cancels itself out, that you are in a feeling connection with the whole great universe. Far out into infinity, the soul is meant to feel connected to this through what the forms evoke; the forms of the columns, the walls, the forms of the dome paintings, etc.

The building in Dornach is a double-domed structure, consisting of a small and a large domed space that do not stand side by side but interlock. The small domed room, that is, the circular room covered by a smaller dome, will be used for presenting mystery dramas, for dramatic performances in general, for other artistic performances, such as eurythmy. But there are also other things planned. Then there is the large domed room, which is connected to the smaller one in the segment of the dome. It is intended as an auditorium; so that those who approach this building must immediately be imbued with a certain feeling by this outer form.

We will begin by looking at our building as it presents itself to someone approaching it from the northeast.

So, as you can see, we have a double-domed structure. This is the auditorium, and here is the stage. The two domes are inserted into each other by, if I may say so, a special technical feat, because this insertion was difficult. The person who approaches this building – which, I believe, is particularly appropriate in its artistic expression of the special mountain formation of the Jura region in which it is built – should have the feeling that something is present that reveals itself in a duality. The person who enters the building finds themselves in the large domed room. Inside, he may have the feeling: here something is seen, something heard. And this something, which is experienced in a sense in the heights of spiritual life, which is to reveal itself to an inclined audience, should already express itself as a feeling to those who approach the building.

But initially, every single detail of the outer forms is attuned in such a way that one has an impression from the outside, so to speak – I could not express it in terms of ideas or thoughts – but through the forms, through the artistic language forms, one has an impression from the outside of what is actually being proclaimed inside as spiritual science. I would now like to show you another approach to the building, which presents itself when approaching it from the north:

Here is the building, here the main entrance, here a nearby building that has experienced very special challenges. I would just like to mention in this picture: the lower part of the building is a concrete structure. It has a walkway here. The entire building stands on the concrete rotunda. The entire double-domed structure is a wooden construction.

I note that the task was not only to create a shell for spiritual science in this building, but also to find a style for this very special institution that could be derived from concrete. That, ladies and gentlemen, is what is not really understood today, that we have to create out of the material everywhere. Today we see how sculptors create things that they shape, I would say, by having some kind of novelistic idea or a novelistic harmony of ideas, which are then shaped in any material, in bronze or the like. But we have to come back to having such an intense feeling for the material that we ourselves, even with this brittle, I mean artistically brittle, this abstract concrete material, gain the ability to create forms of design out of the material.

It is certainly the case that today people will not understand you if you say to them: I am going to paint a picture; in the middle I have this or that figure, on the sides this or that figure, I now want to do that, can you do something like that? And one answers: Yes, you can do anything, but it is a matter of what becomes of the colors. You cannot talk about a picture differently than from within the colors. Even in many artistic circles today, there is little understanding when one tries to think that which lives artistically as something quite separate from everything that is not direct contemplation, direct experience of feeling.

As the third picture, I would like to show you another aspect of the building. You can see the small dome, the large dome. Here, seen from the outside, the auditorium. The whole thing sits on the concrete substructure here. Here are the side wings, which fit into the building at the point where the two domes merge.

This is a slightly closer view of the structure. You will be entering from down here. The cloakrooms are located in the concrete substructure. There is a stairwell at the front of the interior. You can come up to this level through the wooden structure, but you can also come up here, where there is a walkway. You can walk around a large part of the structure here during the intervals between performances.

This is the main entrance from the terrace. You can already see that all the forms from the dynamic geometry have been transposed into the organic, into the living. There is nothing in this building that has not been created in the spirit in which I meant the design of the earlobe on the human body earlier. So everything, every detail and the whole, is designed in such a way that not geometric forms, but organic forms are present; but not, I would like to point out, organic forms that are modeled on this or that organic limb. That was not the intention at all. When I had first designed this structure in the wax model, from which the building then emerged, it was not a matter of reproducing anything naturalistically in organic forms, but rather of immersing myself in the creative essence of nature itself, of making what Goethe calls the truth, so to speak, of how nature lives in its creation.

Now, of course, nature does not create such structures. Therefore, one does not find those organic forms in nature that can occur in such a structure, but by having the whole structure like an organic being in its intuition, in its imagination, the inner creation is formed in such detail that detail that, without imitating anything in nature, one is compelled to shape a structure like the one above the main entrance in the same way that a plant leaf is shaped out of the essence of the plant organism. So without imitating anything naturalistically, natural creation should reveal itself everywhere without symbolism and allegory, purely by proceeding in the design of the building forms as one can imagine that nature itself lives in its creation.

Once again, closer to the building. We are in front of the main entrance. This is where people will enter first. These are the cloakrooms. Then you come up through the stairwell and enter a vestibule, which I will also show later. This is the north side. Behind here are the storage rooms, the rooms for the equipment and the cloakrooms for the stage plays.

Another view of the main entrance. Here, the smaller dome is completely covered by the large dome. The two side wings were intended as dressing rooms for the performers.

This is a piece of the side wall. Next to it is the house that the man who was able to give us the land for this building had built. This house was built for him in a style that is certainly, since it is all a beginning, completely thought out in all its individual forms using the concrete material. That is what I would like to say about this house.

Here you can see one of the side wings, which, as I said, are intended to provide dressing rooms for those performing in the stage festival. If you walk around here, you will come to the main entrance. Here is a piece of the facade of such a side wing. It has been attempted to follow Goethe's idea of metamorphosis – not in a pedantic way, but in the spirit of transforming the ever-identical, of transforming the ever-uniform, to form everything as an organic unity, so that the motif above the main entrance is repeated here, but in a different form. As you will see in Dornach in general, what Goethe calls changeability in organic structures has been tried to be expressed in the building idea everywhere.

Here is the floor plan, here is the entrance, and there is the auditorium, which will hold about nine hundred to a thousand people. When you come out of the main entrance here, you walk through the space that is vaulted by the organ room above. You then come in here. The line that goes in this direction is the only symmetrical one in this building. Nothing else is oriented in a symmetrical way except for what lies to the left and right of this axis of symmetry. Therefore, as you enter the room, you see a row of columns. These columns are formed in such a way that only the symmetrical pairs always have the same pedestals, the same capitals and the same decoration in general. The formation of the capital progresses as one moves from the entrance towards the stage, so that each successive capital is formed in such a way from the previous one that the space of the architrave above a column is formed from the spatial design of the architrave above the previous column, so that the metamorphosis view is expressed in the right sense.

It is, I dare say, a great thing to attempt such a thing: here you have a first capital with very definite forms that arise inwardly for you as you shape them. And as you say to yourself, now it is so that it must remain in the place where it is, then the feeling comes: That is also to be transformed, just as in a plant growing out of the ground, a subsequent leaf is something metamorphosed in relation to the preceding leaf. There you shape the next form out of the previous one. There the next form presents itself as something absolutely necessary. People often come to Dornach and ask: What does this or that chapter mean? My task is simply to say: look! It is not a matter of someone finding an abstract, complicated meaning, but of sensing how the following chapter always grows out of the previous one in organic necessity.

The smaller dome, framed by twelve columns, and the fourteen columns here, will provide space for the presentation of stage plays. Often, people also count when they come: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven columns! Then they say: They are mystics, they bring in the superstitious number seven. I can only say: Then nature is also superstitious. The rainbow has seven color shades, we have seven tones in music, the octave is the repetition of the prime. What is so self-evidently expressed in nature is repeated in the direct experience of creating something metamorphic. And I may well say: it was far from my mind to pursue some mystical number seven, but it was obvious to me to think of one capital out of the other. And then a wonderful thing happened – if I may call it a miracle – that just as there are seven colors in the rainbow, without any mysticism, simply by shaping the form, when you are finished with the seventh form, you can't think of anything more. That's how you get the seven forms. With the seventh, you can't think of a single small artistic idea, so you just know you've finished.

This is a section through the original model. It is cut through the axis of symmetry, so that you can see the formation of the columns in progress, the architraves on top, the bases. So this is the model on which the construction was based.

Another section, a kind of drawing section through the building. Here is the concrete substructure. Here we have to show how the two domes are joined together. But here too, two domes are joined together, leaving the space between them free.

I originally had a specific idea in mind when arranging the double dome. When building such a thing, the most important thing is the acoustics, and I had the idea that if you connect two such domes with a connection that is as light as possible, a kind of soundboard must be created.

Furthermore, not for mystical reasons but for very real ones, I had the seven columns made out of different types of wood. All of this, of course, yields a great deal when one tries to think and feel it all together. But many people know how difficult it is to get the acoustics right in a hall. Basically, everything was thought out, down to the choice of materials – as I said, the columns are made of different types of wood – and into this soundboard, so that both the sound that develops in the musical sense and the sound of the spoken word are accentuated in a beautiful acoustic way throughout the entire room.

Just as the whole thing is an experiment, and one could not think that the most perfect thing could be created in the very first attempt, so I could not indulge in the illusion that the perfect acoustics had been created. But we were able to experience how the intuitions revealed something in the very last few days. The organ was installed as the first musical instrument. It was completed, and it became apparent to us that the entire structure, in terms of music, reveals itself acoustically in a very unique way. And I dare to hope – things are not yet ready, that can prove this – but when everything is there, including the curtain, that then the acoustics, including those for the spoken word, will also reveal themselves. But in any case, the one rehearsal for the intuitive design of a space with regard to the acoustics, the one rehearsal in terms of the music, seems to me – and as it seems to everyone who has heard the organ there in the last few days – to have actually been successful.

A little way into that staircase, which you enter when you come through the main entrance into the interior. You see here a capital above a column. You see this capital formed in a very special way. Every single form, every single surface, every single curve is conceived with the space in which it is located in mind. The line and surface run this way because this is where you come out, because there is little to bear. Here the column braces itself against the building. Here the individual forms must be shaped differently. Just as nature creates differently when it creates a muscle, depending on what it has to bear, so we must experience how the forms must be when each individual link in its place is to be thought of as it can only be in this place through the nature and essence of the whole.

This is the staircase itself. The staircase goes up here. What I showed before is the vestibule above the concrete room. This is where I am standing, and this is where you would stand when you enter the building. Here is the banister for the staircase that leads up from the lower concrete substructure to the building, which is then made of wood, to the actual auditorium. I have tried here to transform a support from the merely geometrically mechanical to the organic.

Let me reiterate: I am, of course, aware of all the objections from the point of view of conventional architecture, but it has at least been attempted, and I have the feeling, however imperfect everything is, however many objections there may be, that a start has been made that paves the way for a new architectural style that will be further developed. Perhaps it will lead to something quite different from what has been built in Dornach, but if you don't even start with something, nothing new will come of it. Therefore, even if it goes completely wrong, something new should be attempted here: the development of the mechanical-dynamic form into organic forms. The concrete is worked in such a way that the beam expresses in its own form what it bears; on the other hand, it is shown here how it only forms outwards, bearing nothing.

Here you can see a radiator screen. The individual radiators are covered at the bottom with concrete screens and at the top with wooden screens. These screens are designed in such a way that their plastic forms reflect something that, in its formation, is, so to speak, in between animal and plant forms. It comes from the earth, as if organically grown, but not symbolically, but artistically designed. In creating this, one has the feeling of something coming into being if the earth itself allowed something like this to grow out of its principle of growth. If you take this staircase, you will come to the room that was shown before, and through that you then enter the actual auditorium.

So this is where you come in, enter the auditorium. Here on the left and right are the first two columns. You can see how the simplest capital structure, the simplest architrave structure, is used here. And now you will see how each subsequent capital structure attempts to create something that necessarily grows out of what has gone before, just as a subsequent plant leaf, which is more complicated and more dissipated in form, always grows out of the one that went before.

Here is the first column individually. It is always important to me that one sees that the essential is not: what does the individual column mean? Some people have done a terrible disservice by always talking about the meanings of the Dornach columns; it is important to me that the artistic form must be questioned. Therefore, I will always show the one column and the next one, so that it becomes clear how simply, artistically, the next form was attempted to be derived from the preceding one.

So here, continuing from the simple column – that is the left aspect – we have the second column. It is designed in such a way that what goes down here goes up there. Just as a plant leaf develops from another, this capital form is derived from the preceding one through artistic experience, and this architrave form from the preceding one.

The second column by itself. Now the following two columns, always to illustrate how the next column is to be artistically designed from the previous one. There now follow several column pictures, initially single ones, then in twos.

Everything that one experiences artistically is actually formed in one's imagination as a matter of course. One cannot help it, it just happens. One can hardly say anything else about it either. But the strange thing is: when one simply transfers one's own experience into the forms, then one gradually feels how one creates in harmony with nature's own creative process. One feels the life that lies in the shaping of one metamorphosis out of another, in intimate harmony with natural creation. And so I believe that those who experience – not intellectually, but with lively feeling – what develops there as one capital out of the other actually get a more vivid sense of development than can be given by anything in modern science. For when we speak of development, we usually mean that each successive structure is more complicated than the one that precedes it. This is not true. When one inwardly experiences a development such as this evolution of columns and architraves, then at first the simple develops into the complicated. But then one reaches a height, and then the structures become simpler again. You are amazed when you see the results of artistic necessity, how you create in harmony with nature. Because that is how it is in nature too. An example: the most perfect eye is the human eye, but it is not the most complicated eye. The animal eye is much more complicated than the human eye; in certain animals there are fans and xiphoid processes; in humans this has been absorbed again. The shape is simplified. You don't follow that when you create something like this from abstract ideas, but it presents itself to you as something self-evident in the form.

The next two columns. Here we come to something that the abstract mystic or mystical abstractor might say: “He formed the caduceus here.” I did not form the caduceus, I let the preceding forms grow. It formed by itself. It emerges organically, by itself, from the preceding form. I had to say to myself: “If the preceding column grows just like that, it will come out like that, one from the other.”

Two consecutive columns showing how the forms become simpler as development progresses.

Here we are already approaching the gap where the auditorium borders on the stage.

Here the first column of the stage area; here the last of the auditorium, here the gap for the curtain.

Here you can see into the small domed room. If you stand in the auditorium and look that way, you get a view similar to this. The top of the dome, initially carved and then painted. We won't look at the painting here, we'll come to that later.

Here I would like to show the order of the individual columns, so that one can get an overview of how the matter progresses from the simplest. All the individual columns are formed individually for each column, and symmetry is only found in relation to the main axis of symmetry of the building.

Here are the figures on the pedestals. I also tried to give the pedestals a metamorphic appearance.

I would like to ask you to take a look at something that is not quite finished yet: the room in which the organ is built. The idea was to avoid making the organ look as if it had simply been placed in the room, and instead to make the whole structure appear to grow out of the room. That is why the architecture around the organ is designed to match the way the organ pipes have to be constructed. It is not finished, as I said. There are still things to be added here.

This is what you see when you enter the small domed room from the auditorium. The end of the small domed room. A number of forms have been carved out of the wood. All of them have been carved out of the rounded surface of the wood, a number of forms that are a summary of the forms found on the capitals and architraves. So that, standing in the auditorium, one has the forms of capitals and architraves, and when one looks up into the small domed space, as a conclusion to all this on a spherical surface, which is like the formal synthesis, the formal synthesis of what can be seen on the individual forms of the architraves and capitals. And now I have to move on to something about which I will have to say a few words.

This is what the small domed room looks like when it is painted. Both domed rooms are painted with motifs that actually only arise when you live very inwardly with what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. When you live very inwardly with this, then, I would like to say again, picturesqueness also emerges all by itself. Just as the word is formed by wanting to express the inner spiritual experience through the word, so this inner spiritual experience, which is truly not so poor that it could only express itself in abstract thoughts and ideas, but can express itself in everything that is a form of life and the purpose of life, is transformed. And motifs that are just as much alive in the one who lives in the inner contemplation of the spiritual world, as it is conveyed through spiritual science, are also painted in the large and small dome in such a way that one does not have the feeling of being closed off by the dome, but rather that one has the feeling, through what is painted on the wall, that the domes form themselves far out into infinity. I want to discuss, because I can't explain everything, only what is painted here in the small domed room, so that you can see it immediately when you look from the auditorium into the small domed room.

There is a central figure. It represents to me, as it were, the representative of humanity as such. At the same time, it is the artistic expression of that which lives in the human form. So that even in its natural human form, the human being must constantly seek balance between two extremes. What the human being actually is is something that should be expressed by the content of all anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This cannot truly be said in one or even many lectures, but comes to expression in the fullness of all spiritual science. But one can say the following, which is still somewhat abstract but already points to what is experienced as human essence in the human being. One can express it in soul terms as follows:

In fact, human beings are always engaged in an inner battle between something that works in him in such a way that he wants to rise above his station. All that is fanciful, enthusiastic, mystical, theosophical, that seeks to lift man in the wrong way above himself, so that he no longer remains on the firm ground of reality, all that is one extreme. This is what some people tend towards, what every human nature secretly tends towards, and what every human nature must overcome through its health. Enthusiasm, fantasy, one-sided mysticism, one-sided theosophy, in short: everything that makes man want to rise above himself, is one thing in the soul. The other thing that is in the human soul and must be overcome through inner struggle is what constantly pulls him down to earth; expressed in spiritual terms: the philistine, the bourgeois, the materialist, the merely intellectual, the abstract, the calculating. And that is the essence of man, that he seeks to find harmony between the two opposite poles.

In physiological terms: the same thing that appears physically when a person wants to go beyond themselves is also expressed physiologically in the fact that a person can become feverish, develop pleurisy, that human nature is led into dissolution. The other extreme, that which develops in the soul as mere intellect, as narrow-mindedness, as philistinism and materialism, is what causes the ossification of human nature and leads to one-sided calcification, to ossification. Between these two physiological extremes, human nature fluctuates and seeks balance.

The intention is not to present an idea, but rather – both pictorially up there and sculpturally in the group of figures down here – to show how the representative of humanity lives in the middle between the two extremes that I have depicted. And so, above the central figure, which expresses the representative of humanity, there appears, at the top, a luciferic figure that expresses everything that is enthusiastic, fanciful, feverish, and pleurisy-ridden, etc., that wants to lead people beyond their heads. And at the bottom, protruding out of the cave, is the representative of everything ossified, everything philistine, everything that leads to sclerosis in its one-sidedness.

This central figure is designed in such a way that there is nothing aggressive about it. The left arm points upwards, the right downwards. Every effort has been made to represent love embodied in this representative of humanity, right down to the fingertips. And just as I am convinced that the trivial figure of Christ, as we usually see it, bearded, only came into being in the fifth or sixth century, so I am convinced, from spiritual scientific sources, which I can't talk about, but only because of lack of time, I am convinced that the figure that is depicted here is a real image of the one who walked in Palestine at the beginning of our era as the Christ-Jesus figure. And there should be nothing aggressive about it, even if the figure of Lucifer is painted, poetically shaped, falling and even breaking into pieces, not through an attack on the part of Christ Jesus, but because in his Luciferic nature he cannot bear the proximity of embodied love.

And if Ahriman, down there, the representative of the ossifying principle, the being that carries within itself everything that seeks to bind human beings to the earth, everything that does not want to let them go, suffers torment, ground. This is not because the figure of Christ hurls lightning bolts, but because this ahrimanic entity, through its own soul condition, so to speak, out of embodied love, casts lightning bolts for its own torment.

Here I really tried to depict love both plastically and pictorially in this central figure. And in a similar way, the inner experiences of spiritual science are given in the pictures on either side of this central group. But I can only show you the content of what is painted here. But that is not the main thing. In the first of my Mystery Dramas it is stated that in truth only that corresponds to modern ideas about painting in which the form of the color is the work. And here in this small dome an attempt was once made to create everything that was to be created out of color. If someone asks about the meanings, they are at most what one has tried to attach to the color scheme. I have to keep saying: one sees the color spot there or there, and what is in its vicinity as color spots, that is more important to me than what is meant there in a novelistic way.

An attempt has been made to realize this – I know all the counter-arguments – but it has been made, to realize what appears to me to be the case: I actually perceive every line in nature, when it is reproduced by drawing or painting, as a lie. The truth in nature is color. One is not concerned with the horizon line, but above with the blue firmament, below with the green sea, and where the two colors meet, the line and the form arise by themselves. This is how I have tried to paint here: everything from the color. The line should be the creature of the color.

Here you can see a section of the painting more clearly.

Here is a kind of rule of thumb. Here is the only word written out with letters that can be seen as a word in the whole structure. Nowhere is there anything symbolic that could be expressed in words; only here at this point, where an attempt has been made to convey the sensation as an experience through color, which occurred around the 16th century, when humanity developed more and more towards an individualistic soul life; there, knowledge took on very special forms. Those who speak of knowledge in such abstract terms, as many epistemologists do, really know nothing of the inner experience of knowledge. Today, knowledge is only known by those who can see before their soul how, in the process of limiting human life, childhood emerges from the spiritual world.

Here the child and on the other side, death. In the middle, the realization, the realization that brings it to the individualism of the ego-grasping. That which humanity has felt as actual cultural thoughts, for example in the 16th century, is attempted here to be expressed through color. I can only show you the content, which is not the main thing. But I think that precisely because this content is imperfectly depicted here, it evokes the feeling that something is still missing here, without which this thing cannot truly be what it should be. Anyone who sees this should feel that there should be color: here the child in its particularity, here the self, there a kind of fist-like figure, and below that death.

Here a little further. With the first figure we were still touching the auditorium. Here we come to the middle of the small domed room. There we have a figure that is supposed to represent how the spiritual was experienced by a cognizant human being in ancient Greece. The sensations, as they pass through human spiritual culture, should be seen in colors on the wall.

Here is the figure, which is, as it were, the inspiring figure above the Faust figure. You always see the inspired below, with a kind of genius above. Here is the genius of Faust, who appears as a kind of inspirer of Faust.

Here is the figure that can be seen above the Greek figure as an inspiring figure. It was a natural development that the genius of the sentient and cognizant entity was depicted as Apollo with the lyre. This is a higher inspiring entity that is always above the one who is down below, who is sitting down below, as it were, on the column. The inspiring figures are painted in the dome space.

Here below is an Egyptian figure, leading the Egyptian soul-life. The two figures shown before (Fig. 75) stand above her and represent the inspirers; the entities that are meant to pour the soul-life into them. Fig. 44 (Fig. 77):

Here I have tried to show how the civilization that I would describe as that of the Persian Zarathustra culture, which dates back to primeval times and has a view of the world as dual, ambivalent, as a world in which light and darkness cast their effects, how this view of the world has spread from Asia through Central Europe, and how it is still expressed in Goetheanism, where man experiences it. That is the essence of our Germanic-German culture: we always experience this contrast between light and darkness, which is already expressed in the old Zarathustra culture, this contrast that cuts so deeply into our souls when, on the one hand, we feel something that wants to grow beyond us like light; on the other hand, something that, like heaviness, wants to pull us into the earth. This is how the dualism that is felt should be expressed.

Above them you can see two figures. Sometimes you get fed up when you have been working on something like this for months. I got fed up while forming these two figures, in these figures, in which the inadequate and the ugly come to life, to recreate something like Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. That was something like a bugbear. But the other thing is that, basically, something lives in the Germanic-German soul when it experiences the thought of realization, which can only be endured if one recognizes full life in harmony with where life innocently enters physical existence from spiritual worlds.

Here you have, so to speak, an inspiring summary of everything that appears as duality: the being of light, the Luciferic, that which tempts people to fall into raptures; the other is the pedantic, the philistine, the Ahrimanic, which would like to drag people down. No civilization experiences this dualism as deeply and dramatically as the one within which there is a transitional context for contexts that go back to ancient times to the Zarathustra culture and find their expression in all that has become Goetheanism, which we still feel by spiritual science itself compels us to present the representative of humanity as he must seek the balance between the Luciferic, the mystical, the enthusiastic, the theosophical, and the Ahrimanic, the pedantic, ossified, philistine, sclerotic, and so on.

Here is the one figure, the ahrimanic, philistine, pedantic one, with the forehead set far back; the whole built as man would become if he were pure intellect. Only by the heart working its way up into the head do we avoid one extreme, how we would become if we only developed the things that form the skull, but which cannot form themselves according to their own inner forces because this is counteracted by the heart and the whole of the rest of the human being.

Here the other aspect, counteracting the Ahrimanic aspect. Between these two aspects, man must always seek his equilibrium. Christ is the great Master who leads us on the path to find this balance.

Here we come up against the central group. This is what will arise when dualism has developed to the point where the human being feels himself to be twofold, as a higher and a lower human being; that he has his shadow within himself, but as a shadow that he digests spiritually and mentally.

As a kindly genius that is above him.

Here a centaur, inspiring him what needs to be overcome in us as animality. Up here the centaur form, inspiring a future culture, next to the genius, the angelic, what approaches man on the other side.

Here is the central figure, Christ, not by attaching a vignette to him, but by placing him as the central figure. One should feel artistically: this is the figure in which the divine has appeared on earth. One should feel it from the form, from the line, from the surfaces and here from the color.

Figure 53 (illustration unclear): Here, at this point, it has, so to speak, been completely successful, even if it is only an attempt, to create everything out of color, without line.

Here is the head of the Representative of Man. Above it, Luciferic; below, Ahrimanic. This is the head that appears to me, from the spiritual vision – as far as one can form it – as the true form of the one who lived in Palestine at the starting point of Christianity as the Christ.

Here is the figure of Lucifer, collapsing into himself. It is painted in red and worked out of red. Picture 56 (Fig. 86): Below, the figure of Ahriman.

Here is the head, as the human head would be if it were not softened by the rest of the human being.

Here is the lightning bolt that must be drawn from the Christ principle.

Here I then move on to showing an illustration of a group of people. This group of people now also represents the representative of humanity. Above them are two figures, one again representing the rapturous, the mystical and so on. And as paradoxical as it may sound, this is designed in its forms as it presents itself in an inner spiritual vision if one wants to represent what man would be like if he formed himself according to the feverish, the pleuritic, the enthusiastic-fantastic.

Here the head, here the arm, and the peculiar thing that arises: that the larynx, ear and chest come together and merge into the wing. You feel what becomes an expressionist work of art. This is something that the non-understanding person might call symbolic. It is not symbolic, it is observed as only an organic-physical form can be observed.

Here again this figure, and here the figure at the very top on one side of the group of wood. It turned out that we needed something purely to balance the gravity conditions so that the whole group would support itself. It became so that I had to dare to create something quite asymmetrical, a kind of elemental spirit, growing out of the rock form, but here made of wood. If you abandon yourself to the rock formations, look at them and let your imagination create, saying to yourself: nature has decided on their formation, but if they were to continue, what would arise? You end up with something that approaches the higher form but is not it. I tried to create that in this figure. Above are two luciferic figures, below two ahrimanic figures, and up there this entity, which was dared to be formed completely asymmetrical, because it occurs in a place where the symmetrical would be in contradiction to the whole, and which looks somewhat mischievously humorously at what is forming there as the human struggle. I say “mischievously humorous” because there are indeed entities in the spiritual world that look with a certain humor at the inner tragedy of the human soul struggle. Picture 62 (Fig. 94):

Here you see a photograph of my original wax model of the Ahriman figure, the Ahriman head, the original pedant, the original philistine, the head that would have formed if the other human-forming forces had not counteracted the head-forming forces. Once you have created something like this, you know that you have nothing more to add to it. If you then want to create the head for Ahriman, who lives down in the rocky cave and is in conflict with Lucifer, this head also undergoes a metamorphosis, and the place where it needs to be in the body goes through a corresponding metamorphosis.

Here, seen from the side, is the head of the central figure, of whom I have just shown the painted form; that figure, carved out of wood, is, in my opinion, supposed to represent Christ Jesus walking in Palestine.

It is remarkable; while I was creating this, it became clear to me once again that one should actually create all Christian motifs in wood. The warmth of the wood – this statue is made of elm wood – is necessary for Christian motifs. An Apollo, an Athena is better in marble; Christian motifs are better in wood. It was always a real pain for me to see Michelangelo's Pieta in Rome, the mother with the body of Christ on her lap. I would have liked to see this Pieta - which I nevertheless greatly admire, of course - in wood instead of marble. I don't yet know the reasons myself. Such things cannot be easily explained. But I think the Aperçu is correct that everything Christian must be represented in wood.

Now, regarding the group that I just showed, which forms the center of the building, there is one more thing. If we follow the development of architecture, and consider only two or three stages, we must say: let us look at a Greek temple. It is not quite complete if it does not have its god inside. You cannot think of a Greek temple in general, but only of a temple of Apollo, a temple of Athena. It is the god's dwelling.

Let us move from Greek architecture to Gothic. The Gothic cathedral is not complete unless the community is within it.

We live in an age in which the community is becoming individualized. Therefore, the social question is the most important question of our time, because people live according to their individuality. Grasping the deepest nerve of our contemporary culture, we must look at what a building that belongs to a community must be a framework for today: for the people themselves. Therefore, the representative of human self-knowledge, the trinity between man, as he struggles in his soul between the enthusiastic-mystical and the pedantic-philistine, materialistic, this trinity should be placed at the center of the building, just as the god stands in the Greek temple, as the community praises in the Gothic cathedral. In this way, the spectator area should be pervaded by the pictorial and plastic sound of the “know thyself,” not in abstract forms, but artistically embodied in the Trinity of which I have so often spoken and which, in my opinion, is the Trinity of the culture of the future of humanity. Therefore, this wooden figure did not have to be erected at the center of the building, but as the central figure of the building.

Here an adjoining building, a neighboring building. Again a metamorphosis of the two domes. Here the architectural idea has been developed into a different form. The main building has windows for which a special type of glasswork has been invented. What I said earlier – that those inside this building feel at one with the whole universe, not closed off – should be expressed through the windows. That is why all the windows are large panes of glass in a single color. These panes – red, green, blue – are engraved, etched out of the glass, which then gives the glass its visual effect. This visual effect is there when the sun shines through the windows. This glass etching was tried for the first time in this building. And here, with the glass window in front of you without sunlight, you can physically feel a kind of score; together with the sun, it becomes a work of art. And you feel in the building: when the sunlight floods in through red, green, and blue panes, what the sun paints with its light lives in these windows, so that it is a representation of human death, sleep, waking, and so on; but nowhere is it symbolic, rather these states of consciousness are experienced vividly within.

These glass windows were to be made in this smaller building. And because the first person to work there was called Taddäus Rychter, this house was called “the Richter house”. So it does not have this name because we want to implement the threefold social order, as some people have said, and so we would have built a legal building in which we would have had our own jurisdiction. That is not the case. This should be noted by those who have done something wrong; they will be convicted according to Swiss law.

This is the entrance gate. Everything about it, down to the locks and door handles, is designed in line with the organic architectural concept, so that everything has to be the way it is in its place. Hence the need for a separate lock for these structures.

Here you can see the one that has experienced the most challenges. One day I said to myself: there must be a heating house, a firing plant, near the building. One could have done something that would not have been in the spirit of the overall architectural concept of the Goetheanum; a red chimney would have stood there. But I tried to create a utilitarian building out of concrete. I tried, in turn, to form a shell around the heating elements and the firing machines that are inside, just as the nut fruit forms a shell around itself. Also around what comes out as smoke. The whole is only complete when smoke comes out. So there, too, an attempt is made to carry out a building idea in such a way that, despite the utilitarian idea being carried out, what is created out of the utilitarian form is that which, in utilitarian building, the artistic form-giver currently strives for.

The same building from the side.

By now, enough time has passed and I have kept you waiting for a long time with a large number of pictures that were intended to show you something that is being built in Dornach as the Goetheanum, as a free university for spiritual science. What I have shown you in a series of pictures is intended to provide an initial framework for the work that has arisen from the spirit of spiritual science, which I have now been able to present in Stuttgart for almost two decades. A building was to be erected in Dornach that would not only have an external connection to this spiritual science, in that it serves the cultivation of spiritual science, but that would also be an expression in every detail of life in this spiritual science, just as the word that is formed and through which this spiritual science is proclaimed is intended to be a direct expression of the ideal that can be experienced in this spiritual science.

This spiritual science should not be abstract, theoretical, unworldly or unreal. This spiritual science should be able to intervene in reality everywhere. Therefore, it had to create a building style, a framework that emerged from itself just as a nutshell emerges from a nut. Of course, one will rightly be able to object to some things that are also before my mind's eye. But there was always a certain sense of encouragement while I was working on this building idea and all its details, what went through my mind when I was a very young man in the 1880s and heard the Viennese architect von Ferstel, who built the Viennese Votivkirche, give his inaugural address on the development of architectural styles. With a certain emphasis, Ferstel, the great architect, exclaimed: “Architectural styles are not invented, architectural styles arise.

I always said to myself: But then we live today in a time in which everything spiritual must change in the human soul in such a way that a new architectural style must necessarily arise from this change of the spiritual. And that something like this must be possible was always before me. I believed that it must be possible, and therefore I did not shrink from seeking such an architectural style, even if it was initially in a very imperfect design, from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. A second time, if I were ever to supervise such a building again, it would be quite different. But one only learns by approaching reality, when one wants to deal not with abstract ideas, with something symbolic and allegorical, but with something vividly artistic and real in life. Spiritual science needs at least the beginning of a new architectural style, a new artistic formal language. No matter how imperfect it may be, present-day human civilization demands it! And those who have stood by me in such great numbers have seen it with me and have submitted to the first attempt at realizing this aspiration. And even if many still look with a sneer at what rises up as the Goetheanum, as a free college on the Jura hill in northwestern Switzerland — which is now difficult to reach from here, but otherwise easy to reach because it is only half an hour across the border — what stands there is already visited by thousands and thousands from all countries, especially from Switzerland itself. The eurythmy performances are also well attended, every Saturday and Sunday, and the lectures that I already give for the public in this school enjoy a certain interest even in circles that do not belong to the Anthroposophical Society. Dornach is beginning to open up to the world. It will still cost great sacrifices. We will still need many resources to really develop what is intended. But from what is there today, what is still unfinished, it can be seen that there can be a world view that not only thinks but also builds. On the other hand, we would like to show the world through the Federation for Threefolding that this world view can also have a socially constructive effect on the immediate life of the individual and of humanity. However great the faults of this structure, which is the external representative of our world view, our spiritual-scientific world view, and however much it is still rightly subject to criticism today, it had to be ventured. It had to be placed in our present civilization. And in the face of all contradictions - or rather in the face of all approval of the present - I would like to say, in harmony with all the friends who have helped me in such great numbers in erecting this building, in the face of what is intended here, the modest, summarizing word:

What has been willed must first become the right thing in later times, but a start had to be made. And speaking on behalf of all those who have been active in Dornach, I can summarize the attitude out of which flowed what I have tried to show you today: we dared to do it despite the difficulties, and we will continue to dare to do it!

Report by Rudolf Steiner on the Berlin School of Spiritual Science

[My dear friends!]

Allow me to say a few words today about the course of the Berlin School of Spiritual Science and then, tomorrow, to conclude with a reflection that should be of particular interest to you as a further elaboration on this very topic.

The Berlin School of Spiritual Science had organized its program in a special way. The aim was to show the relationship between certain branches of life and science in the present day and the anthroposophical world view. Each day was to be devoted mainly to a particular branch of science or life. The week was organized so that it began on Sunday, which was to be devoted to inorganic natural science; Monday was to be devoted to organic natural science and medicine; Tuesday to philosophy; Wednesday to education; Thursday to economics; Friday to theology. Saturday should be devoted to linguistics, and then on Sunday the whole thing should come to a certain conclusion with a performance of eurythmy at the Deutsches Theater.

The program was so well thought out that each day was to begin with a short lecture by me. Only the first Sunday could not begin in this way, since I could not yet be in Berlin at that time. So on Monday I had to summarize both inorganic and organic science in my introductory words; then the day should have a unified character. After my introductory remarks, two more lectures took place in the morning; then there was a short break for refreshments, but – as had already been announced – no refreshments were available in the Singakademie rooms, and a discussion was scheduled to take place from 1 to 2 p.m. The last lecture of the morning was then to follow from 2 to 3 p.m. It was a bit of a strenuous program!

In the evening, there were lectures, some of which were held by me in the Philharmonie, and some of which were held by others in the rooms of the Berlin University. Every evening there was a lecture, and for the other lectures, except for mine, there was still some kind of discussion in the evening after these lectures. So the days were extremely full.

Now, the entire structure of the program can actually be called interesting, especially through the formulation that the individual 'daily programs had experienced. To some extent, each day had an overall title, and the formulation of these overall titles for the days is really interesting, because they reveal so much that is significant. If you go through these formulations of the daily programs, each individual day has something positive in its formulation, except for Friday, which was dedicated to theology.

This is significant, not so much in terms of an awareness of the times, but in the way the program formulators related to the development of anthroposophy on the part of those who formulated the program. One simply felt compelled to formulate the other daily programs in a positive way. And we only need to look at these formulations to find out what is significant.

Sunday, March 5: “From hostile mechanistics to true phenomenology” - so in the formulation of the program, the hope is expressed that through anthroposophy one will come to find a phenomenology as the basis of inorganic science.

The program for Monday is summarized even more positively: “Ways of anthroposophical human knowledge in biology and medicine”. And the program for Tuesday on philosophy is just as positive: “The foundation of anthroposophy from the philosophical consciousness of the present”.

The program for Wednesday was equally positive: “From modern pedagogical demands to their realization through anthroposophy” — so here, too, the idea is that there are such pedagogical

demands in the present that can be realized through anthroposophy.

Thursday, which was devoted to social science, had a very auspicious title in the overall formulation of the program, although what was presented was less auspicious. Thursday even had an extremely auspicious title that sounds very positive: “National Economic Outlooks”.

Saturday, which was devoted to linguistics, bore the title: “From dead linguistics to living linguistics”.

So you see, these title formulations are the basis for everything: the aim is to point out the path that leads from the present into the anthroposophical shaping of the spiritual path in question. One has an idea of how the individual disciplines take their starting point from the given scientific formulations of the present and run into certain other insights, which are to be given by anthroposophy — everywhere absolutely concrete ideas about possible paths. Only - as I said - Thursday has the extraordinarily promising title: “Outlook”, even “economic outlook”, which is an abstract formulation, but which, in its abstractness, points out that one does not want to go, but to leap.

If we then look at Friday in the general formulation of the daily program, it reads as follows: “The Decline of Religion in Contemporary Theology and the New Foundation through Anthroposophy”. - So here, first of all, it is formulated quite negatively: The decline of religion in contemporary theology, and the new foundation - so it is only pointed out, even in a negative way, that there is something like anthroposophy, and that through it theology and religion can experience a renewal. It is not shown in this title in such a concrete way how the path out of the present confusion can lead into the anthroposophical formation.

If you compare this with the formulation from Sunday, for example: 'From mechanistic materialism hostile to life to true phenomenology', you even have a very specific term for what is to come in the word 'phenomenology'. Likewise, in the word 'human knowledge' from Monday, you pointed to something very specific. In philosophy you pointed to the philosophical consciousness of the present, and so to something concrete; in education you pointed to the pedagogical demands of the present, and in linguistics you said, at least, that we must move from the study of dead languages to the study of living languages, and so you formulated something concrete too.

Now, it is extraordinarily significant that this entire university course, which essentially culminated both internally and externally in the Friday event, which basically – especially the feeling that arose – had a theological character, which, while otherwise extremely well attended, on Friday, the theological day, had an attendance such that it was “packed”, overcrowded —, [it is extremely significant] that this course, in the formulation of the day for the theological program, had something negative,

Of course, these formulations arose out of the circumstances of the moment, and the speakers tried in all honesty and sincerity to express these circumstances as they arose, on the one hand from an awareness of the present and on the other from an idea of what can become of this awareness of the present through anthroposophy.

If we then go through the individual days, we naturally encounter things that are mostly familiar to us. Sunday: From mechanistic materialism hostile to life to true phenomenology: The point here, then, is to point out how we should overcome all speculation about atomism, about a mechanistic view of inanimate nature, how we should come to a pure observation of what is present in phenomena, in appearances, how these appearances themselves should speak for themselves, how they themselves should provide their theory. So it is expressed in this formulation that one wants to pursue Goetheanism in natural science.

In organic natural science, it is then expressed that the entire scope of organic natural science must be based on knowledge of the human being, that it is therefore necessary not to study nature in its kingdoms in a fragmented way, as is currently the case, but that, above all, one should start out from getting to know the human being, and from there explore the other kingdoms of nature.

If we then look at philosophy, the question on Tuesday was how philosophical consciousness has reached an end of a kind. It is interesting to think of this formulation in connection with Hegelianism, for example. In his philosophy, which dates back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, Hegel said that all philosophy of the present is an end in itself, and that basically, in philosophy, one can only look back on how things have come about, but that further development is not possible.

Now, on this Tuesday, it should be shown how a beginning, a new beginning, can arise from the end of philosophy, if one allows this beginning in the anthroposophical sense.

In education, the aim was to show that all truly thinking people today actually make certain educational demands, but that these cannot be met by the pedagogy currently being developed. These demands, which are basically made by all thinking people, can only be met by anthroposophy.

In linguistics, it should be shown how language itself, as a living organism, should be understood in the context of the human being, and not merely from the dead records, as is the case with contemporary linguistics.

As for social science, it can only be said that Emil Leinhas, in an extraordinarily illuminating way, has said something quite significant about the monetary problem of the present day based on his sound knowledge; but, as you yourself may sometimes feel, not an awful lot of positive things can be said about the monetary problem of the present day. You will already feel this here in Switzerland, in this country with its almost supreme currency. But you will believe that not much positive can be said about the money problem when you cross the border! So it is true that not an enormous amount of positive things could be said. The next two lectures did not bring any such positive results either, and this national economic day in particular showed how, basically, the cultivation of the national economic within our anthroposophical movement is what has actually failed through and through. For we have basically not been able to bring it about, despite the fact that the necessity in this area has been emphasized time and again. We have not been able to bring it about that in economics, on the part of those who are involved in economic life itself, something truly future-proof would have been put forward; namely, something that would meet the extremely difficult demands of the present. And so, for this day, the title “Nationalökonomische Aussichten” was basically something of a dancing promise; but what the day then brought was a more or less limping follow-up to this dancing promise.

As for theology, the three titles of the lectures that followed my introductory words were just as interesting as the general formulation of the day's program. The first title of Licentiate Bock's lecture was: “The Decline of Religion into Psychologism”; the second of Licentiate Doctor Rittelmeyer was: “The Decline of Theology into Irrationalism”; and the third lecture by Doctor Geyer was: “The Decline of Theology into Historicism”. So we have been given a threefold description of the decline of theology and religion in these days.

In a sense, the situation of the time had naturally led to theologians speaking, who explained how they come to a dead end within their theology today, based on their particular experiences of thought and feeling. Basically, there was a tendency among theologians to show how they come to a dead end within the theology that is presented to them at the present time.

And if we then consider what has been presented in a positive way, what has been said this Friday can be summarized as follows: Theological consideration of religion – as Mr. Bock, the licentiate, was probably thinking – comes down to looking only at the spiritual experience that can be described as a religious experience, perhaps as an experience of God. It is found that among the various inner experiences of the soul, the human being also has the religious experience, the experience that in a certain respect points to a divine one; but that, if one is unbiased, one can say: Yes, you just have a subjective experience. You have something purely psychological. There is absolutely no guarantee that this experience corresponds to anything in the objective world. The subjective experience of God is not such in modern theology that it can lead to a real acceptance of God, let alone to a view of the essence of the divine in the world. It stifles, as it were, the religious element in the consciousness of man in the psychological fact: Yes, we need a religious life. But there is nothing that can provide the certainty that this need will somehow be satisfied. The psychological fact is there that man needs religion, but the present knows of no content of this religion. - The result of the first lecture by Licentiate Bock would be something like this.

Dr. Rittelmeyer then explained how theology had become tired of rationalism, how it had come to no longer want to formulate the essence of the divine in the world in thought, that it no longer wanted to say: this or that is the content of the divine that permeates and animates the world. Thought was to be excluded from theology. The rational, the one stemming from reason, should be eliminated, and the irrational, the one that excludes thought, should become the content of theology. So that in fact in theology one arrives at nothing but the most extreme abstractions. One no longer wants concrete thoughts, one wants the most extreme abstractions. One does not dare to say: the essence of God can be grasped by this or that thought. One dares only to say: the Being of God is the Unconditional, the Absolute. One pins down a completely indeterminate concept, the “irrational,” that which no reason can grasp.

Would it not be so, in every other area of life, it would be strange to characterize something so negatively. If someone were to ask, for example, “Who is the head of the Goetheanum?” – [And one would answer:] The board of directors is the one who is not the board of directors of any other institution. – One would not get any information about who the board of directors of the Goetheanum is. Of course, you don't get any information about it if you say: The ratio of the divine being consists in the fact that God is the irrational, that which cannot be grasped by reason. – It is all just negation.

Rittelmeyer then linked this to some of the things these contemporary irrationalists have to say. For example, how man behaves inwardly when he wants to rise to this God, who can only be grasped in an irrational way. How does he experience this rising? He experiences it in silence. This is not the silence of mystical experience, which can be very positive, but the absence of speech, the cessation of speaking to oneself inwardly in thought. It was then further explained how this silence should take place in worship. It is out of the absolute powerlessness to formulate anything at all, to take refuge in silence.

It was interesting to hear two gentlemen speak, a private lecturer and a pastor, who defended this irrationalism in turn in order to show that irrationalism is particularly prevalent in the present day. For example, one private lecturer said: Yes, that would be quite right, it would be nonsense, for example, to say that one could find God less in nature than in the spirit. Nature is no more distant from God than is the spirit. Knowledge of the spirit provides no more for God than does knowledge of nature, for God is precisely the absolute that breaks through everywhere. This was repeated very often: that God is the absolute that breaks through everywhere.

Theology... Faust would have said “unfortunately” not just once, but three times; Faust would have to be rewritten: I have now studied, alas, philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine and, alas, alas, alas, also theology. So when one has to hear again and again: God is the absolute, which breaks through everywhere... one imagines it everywhere, and then it breaks through, breaks out... but it is precisely the indeterminate that breaks through everywhere! The last lecture was that of Dr. Geyer, who dealt with the decline of theology in historicism. Geyer tried to show how theology gradually came to have nothing creative of its own, but only to observe what had already been, always studying history, what had already been, in order to arrive at a content - but which naturally leads to the fact that at most one can say: In the past, people had a religious consciousness, but today they only have the opportunity to look at these different stages of religious consciousness in the past and choose something they still want to keep. Unfortunately, by making that choice, they are left with nothing of all that is served up to them from the different epochs of the past.

I myself began this day's program by noting that anthroposophy does not want to appear as a religion, that it wants to be a knowledge of supersensible worlds, and that, if theology wants to be fertilized by it, it may do so. Anthroposophy will, of course, say what can be said about the supersensible worlds, and it can wait to see what theologians can use from Anthroposophy for themselves.

For anyone who is able to see the big picture of the present situation, one deficiency has become very apparent today – but one that naturally arises from the circumstances. At least, if the topic of the day had been exhausted – as has been attempted with the other topics of the day and, with the exception of social science, has been achieved to a certain extent – a Catholic theologian should also have spoken. For all the lectures that have been given have been given solely from a Protestant perspective.

A Catholic theologian would have been in a completely different position from these three Protestant theologians. A Catholic theologian does not have a historically handed down theology, but a historically handed down and eternally valid theology, a theology that must be grasped in the present as vividly as it was grasped, let us say, in the third or second centuries of the Christian era. Of course, the councils and, in the eighteenth century, the Pope, who had become infallible, added many things. But these are individual dogmas, these are additions. But the whole essence of Catholic theology is something that, first of all, does not depend on the development of time, and that, in itself, through its own way of knowing, should have a perennial, an everlasting character.

Perhaps if a more progressive man had spoken about Catholic theology, it might have been possible to present the struggles of Catholic thinkers such as Cardinal Newman in an extraordinarily interesting way. If a less advanced Catholic theologian had spoken, he would have presented the essence of the eternal doctrine of salvation, that is, Catholic theology. Then questions of tremendous importance would have arisen. [For example] the question: What exactly is given in Catholic theology for today's man? In Catholic theology, as it appears today, there is undoubtedly nothing living for the present consciousness. But it was once something living. Its content is based entirely on the results of old spiritual knowledge, even if it is atavistic. What Catholic theology contains, say, about the fact of creation, of redemption, about the content of the Trinity, about all these things, these are real concepts, this is something that – only that it has content, which modern consciousness can no longer grasp, but instead dresses it up in abstract, incomprehensible dogmatics or does not dress it up at all, but accepts it as incomprehensible, dry dogmatics.

It was particularly the development of Catholic theology in the nineteenth century in such a way that it was no longer recognized what is contained in the dogmas. On the other hand, there is – or was, in the case of this university course in Berlin – an interesting experience.

On Friday, in my introduction, I said the following, based on my direct experience, which you already know: I said that the one who experiences what is in our natural environment and in what follows on from this natural environment comes, if he is not somehow inwardly crippled, to an awareness of the Father-God. Those who, during their lifetime, recognize the inadequacy of the Father-God and experience a kind of inner rebirth come to an experience of the Son-God, the God-Son. And then, in the same way, by progressing further, one comes to the spiritual experience.

Now a Protestant private lecturer, Lizentiat X., thought: Aha, there is the Trinity, you have to construct it. And he called it a construction, not realizing that there were experiences on which it was based... that was quite foreign to him. Well, those experiences on which the Catholic dogmas are based have become just as foreign to the modern consciousness of the nineteenth century.

These Catholic dogmas, of course, originally go back to spiritual realities. But they are no longer understood, they have become empty concepts. But in the nineteenth century, people wanted to get back to being able to revive a little externally what lives in Catholic theology. You are well aware that this urge to at least be able to understand a little of what lives in Catholic theology arose particularly under the pontificate of Leo XIII, hence the Catholic decree at that time, the Roman decree for all Catholic theologians to return to the study of Thomistic philosophy, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, because all later philosophy is no longer useful for grasping something like what lies in Catholic dogmas. All philosophy that followed Thomas Aquinas is only useful for understanding natural existence, for providing a foundation for the natural sciences, but not for understanding spiritual realities. These are indeed unknown even in the Catholic Church, but they are formulated in Catholic dogmas – they were formulated at a time when these spiritual realities were still known. For this purpose, all later post-Thomistic philosophy is no longer suitable. Therefore, when the need was felt to understand something of what lies in the Catholic dogmas, the renewal of the study of Thomistic was demanded, which is indeed the actual philosophical endeavor within Roman Catholicism today.

There are historical realities at the root of this. And if we compare what is actually necessary to gain access to spiritual things again, we can see that, of course, Thomistic theology alone is not enough to revive what is contained in the old dogmas that have become ossified in Rome. A completely different approach is needed.

Please just remember what a completely twisted view I put forward for such a contemporary literary historian before I left here, in the last lectures, where, by going beyond everything that is space and time, I was able to show you how Hamlet is a pupil of Faust, how Hamlet sat at the feet of Faust for ten years, during those ten years when Faust led his pupils by the nose straight and crooked, how Hamlet was one of those who were led by the nose straight and crooked and criss-cross at the time. Such connections, which are of course an abomination to the present-day literary historian – but then, almost nothing of significance can be said today in the intellectual field that would not be an abomination to the official representatives – is that it is almost the stigma of the real truth today that it is an abomination to the public representatives of real science... Well, if you take this for such a profane area, then you will see what is necessary to really come to that agility of mind that can provide a basis for grasping what is preserved in the dogmas. How one must go back to a completely different state of mind in order to enter into the way one lived in such dogmas is shown precisely by the development of Cardinal Newman.

In Berlin today, it is perhaps still taken for granted that such a university course only addresses Protestant points of view and disregards the Catholic point of view; but you still won't get a picture of what actually prevails there today if you are not somehow able to discuss the Catholic point of view, especially today, when we once again need to look at the whole world.

We have to get beyond just talking today. You know about parochial science and parochial politics. But there is also such a thing as a parochial worldview; it comes across very strongly when you see something like the event on Friday evening, when Dr. Theberat gave a lecture on the topic: “Atomistic and Realistic Consideration of Chemical Processes.” That is to say, Dr. Theberat, who is now employed at our research institute in Stuttgart, tried to show how atomism must be abandoned and how phenomenology must also be introduced into chemistry. Dr. Kurt Grelling then entered the debate. I do not want to talk about Dr. Kurt Grelling, who more or less follows the recipe: Yes, all sorts of things are said in anthroposophy, but all that is not yet probable to me. What is certain, however, is that 2 x 2 = 4, and one must hold to what is certain: 2 x 2 is 4, this is certain. He asserted this already last summer in the Stuttgart course and then even called in two university teachers to help him assert this, that 2 x 2 = 4, on a special evening.

Of course, one could not contradict him. I mean, I only want to hint symbolically at what he said; because 2 x 2 is really 4. I could not contradict him. I could not even contradict him when he said last Friday, again completely out of context: I had admitted in Stuttgart that 2 x 2 = 4. Of course, I cannot deny that. I don't just mean 2 x 2 is 4, but rather things that are just as valuable in the overall context, he put forward at the time... but actually I want to say something else with this. He then claimed: Yes, the question that is being put forward can be decided on the basis of phenomenology, it cannot be decided from the point of view of natural science, but only from the point of view of philosophy.

Now, I am not saying that this is just a Göttingen thing, but at least it is not thought in a cosmopolitan scientific way today, because in England, for example, one would not be able to make sense of a sentence like that. If someone says: This cannot be decided scientifically, this can only be decided philosophically - because this difference is something that is, isn't it, a parochial worldview. This formulation is only known within certain Central European circles.

In any case, when we are talking about such questions, we need a broader perspective today. And it is impossible, for example, to keep talking about the center, west and east – formulation of the Vienna Program: there is constant talk of the west and the east and the center, which I do not criticize, I think it is quite great-spirited when there is talk of the west and the east and the center – but I think you then have to broaden your concepts a bit, they then really have to span these areas. You cannot, of course, embrace the world from a limited point of view. Well, for example, something is missing in relation to the western development of religious life if one completely leaves out Catholicism. Because this western religious life has nothing in it of what one touches when one speaks only of Protestant theology. One does not even come to talk about how... let us say, for example, Puritanism in England or the High Church in England or things like that.

I am not putting all this forward as a criticism, because the things that have been put forward were, of course, excellent. But I would still like to talk in the narrower anthroposophical circle about what needs to be said in connection with all that has happened.

And then it would have become clear how current thinking is not at all able to approach what was once the source of the theological content. So that in Berlin there was no bridge between what modern Protestant theology is and what is now to come from Anthroposophy to enliven religious consciousness. There were only ever indications that this should come from anthroposophy. But how it should be developed was not actually discussed.

These are things that may give you an idea of the struggle on anthroposophical ground, which has now found its most beautiful expression in Berlin. It was clear from the participation of the most diverse circles in Berlin – the lectures were extremely well attended, even the morning lectures – and it was clear from the participation of wide circles that something is definitely alive in the anthroposophical movement, which strikes strongly and intensely at the consciousness of the present.

And sometimes we also did not hold back on our part in the sharpness of expression, which should be characteristic of what is. I remember, for example, with a certain inner joy, when on Saturday Dr. Karl Schubert, who was speaking within the framework of “Anthroposophy and Linguistics” and who also wanted to show how linguistics should play a role in the political life of thinkers and races, became spirited in the debate. He wanted to point out what linguistics is today when you look at it... and what it must become through anthroposophy. It was spirited when he then said: Yes, he had been to Berlin, studied linguistics with a wide variety of teachers, and then came to anthroposophy to enliven this linguistics... and only then did it become clear to him... and there he found what this present linguistics is: a dunghill! And then he banged on the table! Well, there was no lack of spirited expressions to characterize the present situation. So it was already strongly felt what one could feel. The opponents have not exactly... yes, spirited I can't really say, I don't want to say anything that — well, I won't say anything like that!

The evening events were such that one tried to give a picture of the anthroposophical content. It was particularly significant this time that both Dr. Stein and Dr. Schwebsch, two teachers at the Waldorf School, gave vivid pictures of the educational work in the Waldorf School itself.

I would like to say, between the lines, that one could experience many strange things. The whole course ended on Sunday, and I had to give the final evening lecture on Sunday, but the morning events ended with a eurythmy performance at the Deutsches Theater, in front of a full house, which was an extraordinarily successful event.

I hardly need to say that if you should come across any newspapers, you will read the opposite of what happened. But a gentleman, for example, who wrote an article in a Berlin paper that some consider to be pro-Anthroposophy... well, I don't want to comment on that – he then asked another paper, a large paper, if he could also write an article about this college course. They asked: pro or contra? He said, because he thought his article was pro: pro. They said: No, we only take contra.

So they don't care what anyone writes, they just buy “contra”! And of course you won't get any idea of what happened there if you get other reports from outside.

It is a pity that apart from this eurythmy performance at the German Theatre, and the short eurythmy performances on Thursday and Sunday, more eurythmy was not performed; for that might perhaps have led to the situation – along the lines of the Stuttgart Anthroposophical Congress – that the honored attendees would not have had to bear the burden of these packed days quite so heavily. Because I could well imagine that it was quite hard! You see, take any of the days, an average day, when there were no meetings for a number of people, well, the person who experienced everything heard five lectures and a discussion. That is a bit much for a person today: five lectures and a discussion in one day! There were actually two discussions on a normal day. So one had the opportunity to live in such thoughts from 9 a.m. to [3:00 p.m.] and then again from [8:00 p.m.] to about [10:30 p.m.]. Of course, it would have been much better if, in between, as was the case in Stuttgart, witty eurythmy lectures could have taken place.

Yes, I was in a city and had the opportunity to speak to a theologian. He said: We were at a theological meeting in Eisenach; they showed us something like eurythmy there! Well, it must have been something else, but that is what he thought. 'I don't know,' he said, 'what we theologians should make of it; we were all quite amazed, we didn't know how we came to see something like that. But on the whole the result is an extraordinarily significant one, and otherwise, I would say, the inner characteristics of the times presented themselves in an extraordinarily eloquent way. For example, at the theologians' conference, a gentleman asked to speak who once had to give a lecture on the whole field of anthroposophy in one evening; he came to the Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag in Berlin that morning Berlin and bought, or rather was given, the books he needed to prepare for his evening lecture, in which he wanted to explain to a larger audience what anthroposophy is, because he was the one who had to give the lecture. Then the gentleman in question seems to have heard one of my philharmonic lectures in Berlin. He ranted terribly about it in a lecture he gave afterwards; among other things, he said that he had actually seen, when he looked around with the opera-goer during my lecture, that someone had even slept on individual benches. And on that theological morning, he spoke.

You couldn't really see the context of this discussion, neither with the topic of the day nor with what

what had been said, nor with anything else. I just kept hearing: “The Gospels shall greet us.” But I had no real idea how it related to the whole. Then he explained that the things had all been so significant that one must have the most ardent desire to unite the whole into one book in order to sell it. Yes, that is the essence of the present-day culture: essence.

I wanted to give you a kind of overview of what has been going on. I don't want to fail to mention that a very pleasing influence has emerged in Berlin, particularly within the German anthroposophical movement: the student influence. With a real inner devotion and with extraordinary zeal, one could see a part of the student body attached to anthroposophy. And that afternoon during the week, it was Friday, when I was with the students to discuss in their way what they wanted to know, that afternoon was a very beautiful part of this entire college course for me.

It is perhaps also worth mentioning that such an afternoon also took place in Leipzig – with a small group of university students devoted to anthroposophy. But the fact that, if one really wants it, a scientific discussion can take place between well-meaning people of current scientific practice and anthroposophy was demonstrated on that very afternoon in Leipzig, when the well-known anatomy professor Spalteholz was there and actually talked to me mainly about the relationship between current natural science and anthroposophy in front of the students. I believe that the students present learned an extraordinary amount from this conversation.

You can see from such a fact that it is actually quite unobjective reasons that official science, slandered and hereticized, is the one that is anthroposophical; while, if if someone were to be found who would deign to enter into a dispassionate discussion, such as Professor Spalteholz in Leipzig, then something very fruitful could come out of it, even if a full understanding is not reached. A complete understanding cannot yet be reached today because there is an abyss between the two sides. But at least a beginning can be made by saying in front of young people what can be said by both sides if we listen to each other. That is the essential thing, and that was the case on that Saturday, March 4, when a number of Leipzig students were with Professor Spalteholz and me to talk about anthroposophy and science. And in fact, many extremely important things were discussed.

Tomorrow we will then address a specific question. I just have to say that tomorrow evening will begin with an artistic eurythmy performance, in which new students will perform, supported by some older eurythmy performers. We will start with the eurythmy performance at [7:30] p.m., and then my lecture will follow.

Today we want to look at the social organism once more, and in such a way that we bring it into parallel with the human natural organism. When such a parallel is made, it must be taken as a means of understanding some things better with reference to the social organism. On the other hand, you must not be too obtrusive to the outside world with such parallels, because the latter today has a strong distrust of such parallels and believes that one wants to play an idle game with analogies. Then people want to reject it. This will be especially necessary for you to consider. From a spiritual-scientific point of view, the parallel, which we have already drawn several times, and which we will pursue today from a certain point of view, definitely leads to the goal, definitely enlightens. It clarifies many a social phenomenon in the present. But I would like to ask you to keep it more in the background until the common prejudices against a parallelization of the human natural organism with the social organism have run their course. I myself use this parallel to the outside world. But I refuse to play an idle analogy game. That is what I did in my Zurich lectures on the social question, and that is what I am doing in the paper that will now appear on the social question. But this caution is not always used by connoisseurs of the anthroposophical worldview. That is why I expressly urge caution. Now, with this restriction, let us once again consider the social organism from a certain point of view today.

We divide the ordinary natural organism into three parts, into the head system, we can also say the nervous-sensory system, into the lung-heart system, we can also say the rhythmic system, and into the metabolic system. All activity of the human organism is exhausted in these three systems. What goes on in the human body can be brought under one of these three categories. It is remarkable that each of these systems has its own connection with the outside world. From this it can be seen that it is not arbitrary to divide the natural human organism into these three systems. The nervous-sensory system is connected with the external world through the senses, the respiratory system through the respiratory organs, the metabolic system through the nutritional organs. Each of these systems stands by itself in a segregated relationship with the external world.

Now, in the same way, we can divide the social organism into three members - into a first, second and third member - so that they are independent. In the social organism we then have to distinguish as the three members the economic system, the state system or legal system and the system of spiritual organization.

I. Head system Economic system

Nervous-sensory system

II. lung-heart system state system
Rhythmic system

III. metabolic system spiritual organization

I ask you to take into account what I have written on the blackboard, because it is very important. The head of the social organism is the economic system. The rhythmic system, the circulation system, the lung-heart system, that is the state system. And the metabolic system, that is decided in the spiritual organization. That is why I always said: If one wants to imagine the matter correctly, one must imagine, in relation to the human natural organism, that the social organism is upside down. If one plays an idle analogy game, then one will believe that the spiritual organization in man corresponds to the head system. This is not the case. The mental organization corresponds to the metabolic system. We can say that the social organism nourishes itself from what the people in the social organism accomplish spiritually. The social organism has its head endowment in the natural basis. If a certain people lives in a rich area with many ore mines, with rich mineral resources, with fertile soil, the social organism is gifted, to the Genialı it can be gifted. If the soil is barren, if there are few mineral resources, then the social organism is foolish, untalented.

So you don't have to just analogize, but you have to just, when you make the parallel, go to the right thing. You know, one must also go against the mere playing with concepts out of the spiritual-scientific experience and look for the right thing in other fields. If people merely play a game of analogy, they will say, for example: One can compare the waking state of man with summer, the sleeping state with winter. You know that this would be quite wrong. I have repeatedly explained to you that if you draw this parallel, seasons and human life, then you must just the other way round regard the summer as the sleeping state and the winter as the waking state of the earth. Thus you must regard economic life as the head of the social organism. And that which people accomplish spiritually - mind you, in the effect on the social organism - you must regard as the food of the social organism.

This matter is extraordinarily important in order to understand our time in particular. Our time, I emphasized yesterday, basically has a hard time with any solution of the social question, and that is because predominantly antisocial drives are present in the present humanity. Anti-social drives are present in the relationship of individual human being to individual human being. Sometimes, however, the antisocial instincts conceal themselves, hide themselves. For example, today they are hidden behind the national aspirations that are intensively asserting themselves across the earth. With these national aspirations one associates today something which is still taken for granted, whereas the self-evident thing for the real development of man in our time consists in the fact that an international element should begin in the most decisive sense. But there it is still difficult to talk to the people of today. For other nations, all people usually see that the international should begin; only for their own, usually not. If one wants to talk about these things with people today, one encounters what I once encountered in another field many years ago on the floor of the Anthroposophical, then Theosophical Society.

I had to explain that animals have group souls, and that when the animals die, they enter into the group souls, that they do not have an individual re-embodiment. Then a lady, who had a dog, which she loved very much, replied: With all other animals this may be the case, but for this, her dog, it does not apply, he had already acquired such a decided individual soul that he will experience a personal reincarnation. It was very difficult to approach the lady. But later, when this lady was gone and they were still together for a while, another lady said: She could not understand how such a clever woman could not see that her dog had no individual soul; she had understood that right away! But her parrot, it has an individual soul! That is a completely different matter! - This is a very instructive example of how people judge when things are touched which are directly connected with their personality.

But there are the most different reasons why in the present time certain obstacles arise to what one can reasonably call socialization. If you look over various things that you know from our anthroposophical spiritual science, it will be clear to you that spiritual life has first gone in a descending line within human development. Certainly, people today are proud of their far advanced spiritual development; however, in what they think, what they feel, there is actually no spirit.

Look back only to the third post-Atlantean cultural period to go no further. The source from which people drew at that time may certainly have been atavistic clairvoyance, but out of this atavistic clairvoyance people gained a broad wisdom, a wisdom which was spiritually substantial. Today's people look back with a certain arrogance on what the Chaldeans, what the Egyptians have produced. This arrogance is very, very unjustified. However, what is brought to light philologically and scholastically about the wisdom of the Agyptians and Chaldeans is not very productive. But that is, after all, "the master's own mind". It does not reach the deep insights that the ancient Egyptian priests, the ancient Egyptian mystery leaders, the Chaldean priests, the Chaldean mystery leaders had through their clairvoyant wisdom, which, however, still had atavistic overtones. Even within the Greco-Latin culture there was more wisdom than in what people think and feel today, what flows into their ideas, into their concepts of the spiritual. Basically, today man has become poor in spiritual life. And a particular impoverishment of spiritual life has occurred precisely since the advent of the fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, since the middle of the 15th century. A tremendous amount of real spiritual life has been lost.

And more and more the human mind became, so to speak, parched. Therefore it limited itself more and more to creating pictures of the outer sensual life. Man no longer wants to believe in real revelations from the spiritual world, nor does he want to hold on to them. But the spiritual content that man develops in himself has not only a subjective meaning for him. In so far as what man develops inwardly spiritually has a meaning in the life of man to man, in so far what man has in his head, has in himself, is at the same time food for the social organism; the social organism feeds on it. Therefore you will understand that he who speaks of the social organism with understanding must say that this social organism has been starving since the middle of the fifteenth century. The decline of the real spiritual life means a gradual starvation of the social organism, the social organism on all territories. And one may already say: The social organism has become a rather lean personality today and threatens to become even leaner and leaner. If today someone should design a symbol of the social organism, expressed by the human personality, he would have to design a lean personality, not a fat one. A well-fed little monk, for example, should not be painted today as a symbol of the social organism.

If you take this into account, then you will also be able to understand that, on the contrary, while the stomach of our social organism, which we actually fill with our spiritual achievements, is quite empty, today it is precisely the head, namely the economic life of the social organism, that is the one that is particularly active. The social organism today thinks very much, the social organism develops abundant intellectuality. It is perhaps a somewhat dangerous comparison, but it should actually be made. You know, too much malnutrition, when there is a strong intellectuality, at the same time brings this intellectuality somewhat into disorder. Now, one must not believe that our social organism has the tendency to go crazy. But many things that happen today, and for which not only people are responsible, but already that which pulsates through the world as social thinking, shows itself pathologically in this social organism. And it is precisely for this reason that we speak of the necessity of bringing the social organism to health, because we feel how sick it is. But we want to refrain from this for the time being, as I said, even though the comparison has to be used once. The comparison had to be used for the reason that you may see that human development really proceeds in a lawful way, that it is not merely because people subjectively want this or that to happen, but that what happens is subject to a continuous lawfulness, we have once entered the period when the social organism suffers from hunger, and when it thinks too much, when it develops its head system too much.

This does not mean that today there is too much economy. There is much too little farming. Mankind would have to produce much more, but this will only happen when the social organism is properly divided into its three parts. But economic life is really thought of as if it were all alone in the world. When I look at the social organism from this point of view, how it unilaterally wants to negotiate everything, everything according to the head of the social organism, according to the economic life, then I always have to think how from a certain confusion of the social organism with the individual human organism the Austrian poet Hermann Rollet - it is now a very long time ago - once expressed to me a great concern about the future of mankind. Hermann Rollet was a very dear man. He compiled that beautiful book about the Goethe portraits. He alone was, as it was fashionable in the seventies, eighties of the last century, a very enlightened man and therefore proud of how far people have come with their head culture today. And he once expressed to me his deep concern about what will become of people if they become more and more clever, if they think more and more. The head will develop more and more at the expense of the other organism. And he meant that the human beings would really have to roll over the earth as mere heads, as spheres, if the earth continues to develop. Thus he expressed a real concern. And this concern does not apply to the individual human being. But it does apply in a certain way, at least for today, to the social organism, which has its head in the economic system, and which threatens to become more and more head.

What I am saying to you is a very, very practical thing for today's life. I have now spoken several times in proletarian circles. The proletarian world itself understands you well, but it is held back for the time being by its leaders. They are not deeply involved in individual thinking, but in what passes over to them from social thinking, from the thinking of the social organism. If one puts forward in these circles what is appropriate and absolutely necessary today, that the social organism must be divided into an economic organization, into a political-legal or state organization, and into a spiritual organization, one can be quite sure that the program will be answered: Yes, but everything must result from the economic system, what is the use of the other links? If the economic life is put on its right basis, then the rights and then also the spiritual life will arise by itself. - People are not aware of the fact that this is not individual thinking, but that this is thinking which rushes through their heads from the social organism. Above all, it thinks too much, that is, it thinks only in terms of economy. It cannot yet decide to develop its heart and lungs, namely a real separate state. He cannot even become clearly aware of his stomach, that is, of the necessity of the intervention of the individual human faculties in the social organism.

I want you to understand that such talk today, which only wants to accept the economic system, is deeply rooted in human development, and that it will therefore take strong forces to bring about a reversal in this way. Think for a moment that it will become necessary for spiritual life to be emancipated, to be turned in on itself, that people will have to understand: From the lowest school up, everything must be separated from the state and be able to develop independently of economic life. Today, neither the bourgeois circles nor the Social Democrats want this. From their point of view, the Social Democrats will rightly point out again and again that healthy economic life in former times was supported by two pillars, by intellectual life and by state life. Popularly, this is expressed by saying that human economic life must be supported, as it has always been, by the throne, state life and the altar, spiritual life. Some say this with 'disgust, those who are still in old ideas say it with enthusiasm: Throne and altar are necessary. In more recent times, the throne has sometimes become a presidential chair, but this makes a difference only in the outer aesthetics; and the altar has sometimes become a Wertheim cash box, but this also makes only an outer difference. It is actually not a profound difference in terms of feeling. Newer people often like the Wertheim cash register as much as older people liked the altar.

Now this still points back to a time which in a certain way had sense and receptivity for the free spiritual life. Think, it is not so very long ago that the free colleges, the universities, were absorbed by the state. The universities used to have their own prestige, their own honor. They were autonomous, autonomous bodies. They have completely lost this autonomy. They educate public servants, good, well-behaved public servants in all fields. On the other hand, there is a hypertrophy of the social head system, the economic life. Everything is thought out by the economic system, and the perspective of office and machine instead of throne and altar is not a perspective that points to things that can make the social organism viable! I have often said to you that the world would become a big bookkeeping, which would be led by a kind of workshop life. The very individual human faculties that form the nourishment for the social organism would atrophy and be paralyzed if the throne and altar were replaced by the office and the factory, the office and the machine.

But all this is connected with the fact that the present human life together, i.e. the individual life, triggers in man above all a thinking which is oriented towards the economic life, which has only sense and interest for the economic life. This has come about in more recent times because modern technology has taken hold, and with modern technology the modern type of capitalism. First of all, the leading circles became dependent on what one could call the social mind oriented only to the economic system. I have pointed out again and again how man has been absorbed, so to speak, by the objective social mind, by the flooding by the mere head system with which the social organism around us thinks. We are caught up in this thinking today.

You know, I have often pointed out to you, how the human personality with its own thinking has been gradually eliminated even in capital life. Today the objective capital is the one which works over the earth. The human personality has actually been eliminated where capital is operating properly. Soon one is at the bottom, soon at the top, soon everything is lost, soon everything is gained again, and the shares work for themselves, work more and more for themselves. I usually use a sym'ptom as an example. In the first half of the 19th century and into the last third, the individual bankers were the decisive ones. But then, for the big companies, it became more the corporations. America, which is somewhat lagging behind in its development, has just now made the transition, will now make the transition from far-reaching individuality to the objective effect of capital, and will probably show this phenomenon to a quite outstanding degree. But the individual banker was so powerful that one already hits his position in social life well if one pays attention - I think it was in the forties, I have already told it here once - how the finance minister of the King of France went to Rothschild to - well, what does a finance minister do? -to pump him for the state of France. Rothschild was just busy with a cobbler or a carpenter, and this business was as important to him as the finance minister of the King of France, perhaps even more important. The finance minister lets himself be announced. The servant goes in, comes back and says: "Mr. Rothschild asks you to wait a little, there is a carpenter in there. - What, a carpenter? I am the Minister of Finance of the King of France! - The servant replied: Mr. Rothschild says you would like to wait. - But the minister tears open the door and rushes in: "I am the finance minister of the King of France! - Please, take a chair, I have to deal with the gentleman here first. - But, I am the Finance Minister of the King of France! - Well, please, take two chairs!

Through something like this you can see, although it is only a symptom, the personal power. Personal initiative has more or less ceased in this form and was in the process of ceasing before the catastrophe of the war broke out in the field of economic life. That which thinks in the economic life itself, the social intelligence, got the supremacy over the individual intelligence of the single people. At first, this social intelligence, this social mind born out of economic life, out of the hypertrophy of economic life, is very sober. And that is just what should strike the connoisseur of social life from a higher point of view, how sober today the thinking born out of economic life has become. First of all, a kind of new groupthink appears among people. But this groupthink is uncommonly sober. It was born out of the bourgeoisie during the capitalist period, has developed into philistinism, has spread widely as philistinism, and has now taken hold of socialist thinking as its most sober product.

On this point, my dear friends, there is something very, very remarkable to be said. The circumstances that have taken place have brought it about that the largest part of the proletarian masses is free-spirited, unbelieving. The number of people leaving the church in these circles is very, very large. Those who do not leave often do so only because they do not consider the matter very important. But one often hears something else. One often hears it emphasized that the proletarian's substitute for the old religions is precisely the socialist doctrine. This is possible only out of a certain enthusiasm, not out of a true enthusiasm; for, of course, socialist teaching, thinking only from the standpoint of economic life, is something terribly sober and cannot somehow assume a religious character.

But from this you will see that the seriousness which I have often spoken to you in these lectures is also really, one might say, a sacred commandment of world history. If, on the one hand, we follow the human development since the age of the consciousness soul by means of spiritual-scientific observation, and if, on the other hand, we take into consideration what we encounter precisely within socialist thinking, proving the anthroposophical view, then we say that a tremendously important phenomenon of the social organism is its gradual starvation. It 'starves to death, if real spiritual life does not come into people, if spiritual life does not take hold of people! Just as the individual man must starve if he does not have food to enjoy, so must a social organism starve if men do not come to spiritual life. It is really upside down, the social organism. The individual man needs food in order to live; the social organism needs human talents, human gifts, human inner revelations, so that from these gifts, from these inner revelations, may come forth that which alone can make the social organism healthy!

Remember, as I have often emphasized: You cannot build something like the Gotthard tunnel today if you do not know differential and integral calculus as the director of such a construction. But it comes from Leibniz, the English say: from Newton; well, they may say it. But whether it is one or the other: Not only the one who puts the stones on top of each other built the Gotthard tunnel, but Leibniz or Newton helped to build it. This is only one example of how out of the spiritual life also the most all-material really comes into being. If you eliminate the spiritual individual abilities, you also destroy the economic life. It can never be a question of establishing a world bureaucracy, by which quite certainly the free initiative of the spiritual faculties is eliminated! This world bureaucracy, which is the ideal of Trotsky and Lenin, would of course starve the social organism.

Just who honestly means it with the social question in the present, must emphasize again and again: What is necessary above all is a free development of intellectual science. This is not somehow the introduction of something impractical into the present life, but it is the most practical thing of all, because it is directly, really necessary. Precisely because the individual abilities of people have been suppressed for so long, precisely because of this, the objective events in 1914 hit people over the heads. There was nothing in the heads but sometimes even great ideas. The objective events hit people over the heads. Individual abilities had declined. People could not master the external life. Their concepts, their ideas, their imaginations were too narrow. They could not extend themselves over the objective events. And there was not the slightest bit of mutual understanding left. So these last four and a half years had to be the great disciplinarian of mankind, teaching them that it was necessary that spiritual life really flow into the social organism as food.

These connections are understood when one is able to really consider the social organism in this respect as a tripartite system. One must learn to understand that in the social organism the economic life must independently cultivate its external relations, that state body must enter into connection with state body and spiritual life with spiritual life. One unified state system should not negotiate with another unified state system. It must be like in the human organism, where each of the three systems develops its special relations with the outside world. By regulating the international relations of the people in such a way that, as it were, one member only ever enters into correspondence with the other member, the best way is to work against such conflicts as, for example, broke out in 1914. Just think how much more complicated it will be when two territories come into conflict, because initially the conflict can only arise between state system and state system. It cannot be fought out, because the spiritual organization and the economic system, if they are freely centralized in themselves, still have to have their say.

One must only be clear about how differently life will be organized when this threefold structure comes into being. On the other hand, however, we must be clear about how thoroughly people today are prejudiced against such rethinking and relearning. If one wants to raise the question again and again: Why is there so much resistance to spiritual science? - It is not the difficulty of comprehension, as we have often emphasized, but only the inability of people to make the decision to change their habits of thought, as these habits of thought have gradually formed in the last decades, even centuries. It is much more comfortable for people to muddle along in a straight line. It is therefore no wonder that at present people are again thinking of the expression coined in Bern to found a "superstate", the League of Nations with a superparliament. Not true, the old states have worked so favorably, have shown what they can achieve in the last four and a half years! Now, to establish "supra-states", "supra-parliaments", that is quite a sign that people do not want to slip out of the old thinking nets, that they want to stay inside in these old thinking nets. While the individual state must be broken down into its three members, people want the opposite. They want to weld the whole earth - with the exception of those who are now excluded for the time being - into one big state. They want the opposite of what is founded in the forces of development of the time. For this reason, those who are involved in spiritual science should really understand and also incorporate it into their will that a strong push is necessary against that which is still going in the completely opposite direction today. This onslaught is necessary. This must be said again and again. And since we must get used to looking at things inwardly, it will be good to try quite often to experience the social from this point of view, which I have characterized again today, meditating inwardly, because this can stimulate our will.

We will continue to talk about this tomorrow. Tomorrow at five o'clock there will be the public eurythmy performance here, and I think that at half past seven or a quarter to eight I will continue this lecture.