The Rudolf Steiner Archive

By linking much of what has been said lately with various outside information, you will have gathered one thing, namely, that our anthroposophical movement has entered a state that expects of each individual seeking to participate in it that he associate this participation with a profound sense of responsibility. I have repeatedly alluded to this but it is not always envisaged thoroughly enough. Just because we are placed within our movement, we must not lose sight of the terribly grave time presently faced by European civilization and its American cousins. Even if we ourselves would say nothing about the connection between the impulses generated by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and contemporary historical events—although it is certainly necessary to speak up—such events would make an impact on our activities and inevitably would play a part in them without our having a hand in the matter. Therefore, the point is not to shut our eyes to the importance of what is indicated by such words.

From the interpretations put forward by Dr. Boos²⁰ yesterday, a number of friends who had not realized it before may have understood the necessary and practical connection existing between the idea of the threefold social order and the aims of anthroposophy.

The course of world events presently resembles that of an unusually complicated organism, and from all the various phenomena that must be carefully observed, the direction being taken by this organism becomes obvious. Much is happening today that initially makes an insignificant appearance. These seemingly unimportant events, however, frequently point to something immensely incisive and drastic. Again, things go on that clearly show the extraordinary difficulty we have in freeing ourselves from old familiar ideas in order to rise to a perception of what is in keeping with the times.

You can see from a number of newspaper reports of the last few days²¹ the effect made on the world by what issues forth from Dornach, how certain aspects of it are received by a number of persons. We should give these matters serious consideration, recognizing that every word we utter today must be well thought out. We should not say important things without assuming the obligation to inform ourselves about the course of world affairs in what is currently a most complicated organism. At the earliest opportunity I shall have to go into additional matters that have a bearing here; today I only wish to introduce the subject by saying that because of the connections of our movement with general world affairs it is above all else our duty to acquire a full understanding of the fact that we can no longer indulge in any sectarianism whatever in our movement. I have often mentioned this. The present time makes it necessary for us to rely on each individual co-worker, but each one bearing the full responsibility for what he represents in reference to our movement. This responsibility should take the form of an obligation never to say anything that does not appear through inner reasons to have the right relationship to the general course of contemporary world events. Sectarian activities are least of all in harmony with present-day world events. What is to be advocated today must be of a nature that can be represented before the whole world. It must be free in word and deed of any sectarian or dilettante character. We should never allow fear to deter us from sailing between Scylla and Charybdis.

Indicating a certain Scylla, many people may certainly say: How am I supposed to inform myself about what happens today when the course of events has become so complex, when it is so difficult to deduce the inner trends of facts from the symptoms? However, this should not lead to the Charybdis of doing nothing; it should induce us to steer the correct course, namely, to make us aware of our obligation to be in harmony with world events as far as possible, using all available means. It is certainly easier to say: This is anthroposophy and I am studying it; based on it, I engage in a little thinking, researching one or the other subject which I then represent before the world. If we wish to be active in the way indicated above without looking left or right, wearing blinkers in a sense in face of the great, important events of the present, we head straight for sectarianism. We are duty bound to study the contemporary course of events and, above all, to base our observations on the judgment we can acquire through the facts engendered by spiritual science itself.

Throughout the years, facts have been gathered together here for the purpose of enabling each individual person to form a judgment on the basis of these facts. They must not be left out of consideration when, based on our observations, a person wishes to give an opinion about something that is happening today. I mean to refer to this only in general terms, but plan to discuss it in greater detail at the first opportunity.

Today I should like to present something that will supplement what I said last Sunday about the nature of the human sense organism.²² I shall begin by pointing out a certain contradiction that I have often dwelt on before. On the one hand, without the general public knowing much about it, but nevertheless thinking along these lines, there exists the condition today of being infected in a sense with the natural scientific mode of thinking. On the other hand, we have one type of person still holding to the old traditional belief regarding moral or religious ideals; another has only skepticism and doubt, while for a third it is a matter of indifference. This great contradiction basically stirs and vibrates through all humanity today: How is the inevitable course of natural events related to the validity of ethical, moral and religious ideals?

I now wish to repeat what many of you may have already heard me say.²³ On the one side, we have the natural scientific world concept. It supposes that by means of its facts it can determine something about the course of the universe, in particular, that of the earth. And although it may consider its assertions to be hypothetical, they are imprinted into humanity's whole thinking, attitude and feeling. Our earthly existence is traced back to a kind of nebular condition. It is thought that everything arising out of this nebula is brought about entirely through the compulsion of natural laws. Again, the final condition of our earth's existence is also viewed as being based upon inflexible imperative laws, and concepts are formed about how the earth will meet destruction. Scientists base this kind of view on a widely accepted fundamental concept—even taught to school children—that the substance of the entire universe is indestructible, regardless of whether it is pictured as consisting of atoms, ions or the like. It is thought that at the beginning of earth's formation this substance was in some way compressed, then changed and metamorphosed, but that fundamentally the same substance is present today that existed at the beginning of earth evolution and that it will be present at the end, although compressed in a different form. It is supposed that this substance is indestructible, that everything consists only of transformations of this substance. The concept of the so called conservation of energy was added to this by assuming that in the beginning there were a number of forces which are then pictured as undergoing changes. Basically, the same sum of forces is again imagined to exist in the final condition of earth.

There have been only a few brave spirits who have rebelled against ideas of this kind. One of these I have often mentioned as a typical example, namely, Herman Grimm,²⁴ who has said: People talk of a nebulous state, of the nebulous essence of Kant-Laplace, at the beginning of the earth's or the world's existence. From it, it is supposed that everything on the earth, including the human being, has been compressed through purely natural processes. Furthermore, it is assumed that this undergoes changes until it finally falls back into the sun as a cinder. Now, Herman Grimm is of the opinion that a hungry dog nosing around the bone of a carcass presents a more attractive picture than this theory of Kant-Laplace concerning world existence, and that from a cultural and historical point of view people of the future will find it difficult to grasp how it had been possible for the nineteenth and twentieth century to have fallen victim to such pathological thinking. As I said, a few courageous individuals have opposed these ideas. The latter are so widespread today, however, that when somebody like Herman Grimm rejects them, it is said of him: Well, an art historian need not understand anything about natural science. When someone who claims that he is knowledgeable about natural science raises objections, he is regarded as a fool. These ideas are taken today as self-evident and the significance of this attitude is sensed by very few people. For, if this conception has even the slightest justification, all talk of moral and religious ideals is meaningless, for according to this conception these ideals are simply the product of human brains and rise up like bubbles. The social-democratic theorists label these ideals an ideology which has arisen through the transformations of substance, and which will vanish when our earth comes to an end. All our moral and religious concepts are then simply delusions. For the reality postulated by the natural scientific world-view is of a kind that leaves no room for a moral or religious outlook, if this scientific view of life is accepted in the way it is interpreted by the majority of people today. The point is, therefore, that, on the one hand, the time is ripe and, on the other, urgently requires that a world conception be drawn from quite different sources than those of today's education.

The only sources that make it possible for a moral and religious world concept to exist side by side with the natural scientific one are those of spiritual science. But they must be sought where they find expression in full earnestness. It is difficult for many people nowadays to seek out these sources. They prefer to ignore the glaring contradiction that I have once again brought to your notice, for they do not have the courage to assail the natural scientific world-view itself. They hear from those they look upon as authorities that the law of the conservation of matter and of energy²⁵ is irrefutable, and that anyone who questions it is a mere dilettante. Oppressed by the tremendous weight of this false authority, mankind lacks the courage to turn from it to the sources of spiritual science.

External facts also demonstrate that the well-being of Christianity, a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, depends upon our turning to the sources of spiritual science. The external course of events does indeed show this. Look at the so-called progressive theologians and what is expounded by the more advanced representatives of Christianity. Materialism has, after all, fastened its hold even upon religion. One can no longer understand how the spiritual, divine principle that is indicated by the name, Christ, is united with the human personality of Jesus of Nazareth. For, today, it is only through the sources of spiritual science that insight concerning this union can be acquired.

Thus, matters have reached the point where even theology has grown materialistic and speaks only of “the humble man from Nazareth,” of a man who is reputed to have taught something more sublime than others, but in the end is only to be considered as a great teacher. One of the most eminent among present-day theologians, Adolf Harnack,²⁶ actually coined the words: “It is the Father, not the Christ, Who belongs in the Gospel.” In other words, the Gospel is not supposed to speak of Christ, because theologians such as Harnack are no longer familiar with the Christ; they know only the teacher from Nazareth. They are still willing to accept his teaching. The teachings concerning the Father, the Creator of the world, belong in the Gospel, but not a teaching about Christ Jesus himself!

Without doubt, Christianity would continue on this path of naturalization, of materialization, if a spiritual-scientific impulse were not forthcoming for it. In all honesty, no conception concerning the union of the divine and the human natures in Christ Jesus can be derived by humanity from what has been handed down to it by tradition. For that we require the uncovering of new sources of spiritual science. We need this for the religious life and also for giving the social conditions of our civilization the new structure demanded by current events. Above all, we need a complete reconstruction of science, a permeation of all scientific fields with what flows from the spiritual-scientific sources. Without this, we cannot progress. Those who think that it is unnecessary to be concerned with the course of the religious or the social life, the course of public events throughout the civilized world or the accomplishments of science; those who believe they can present anthroposophy in sectarian seclusion to a haphazardly thrown together group that is looked upon as a circle of strangers by the rest of the world, are definitely victims of a grievous delusion.

The sense of responsibility in face of the whole trend of present events underlies everything that I say here. It is the basis of every sentence, of every word. I have to mention this because it is not always understood with all seriousness. If people today continue referring to mysticism in the same manner as was done by many during the course of the nineteenth century, it is no longer in harmony with what the world currently demands. If the content of anthroposophical teaching is merely added to what otherwise takes place in the course of world events, this is also not in harmony with present-day requirements. Remember how the problem, the riddle of human freedom has been the central theme of the studies I have conducted for decades. This enigma of human freedom must be placed by us today in the center of each and every true spiritual-scientific consideration.

This must be done for two reasons. First, because all that has come down to us from the old Mysteries, all that has been presented to the world by the initiation knowledge of old is lacking in any real comprehension of the riddle of human freedom. Sublime and mighty were the traditions those mystery teachers could pass on to posterity. There is greatness and power in the mythological traditions of the various peoples that can indeed be interpreted esoterically, although not in the way it is usually done. Something grand is contained in the other traditions that have as their source the initiation science of ancient times, if only the latter is correctly understood. One aspect is lacking, however; there is no reference at all to the riddle of human freedom in the initiation science of the ancient Mysteries, in the myths of the various peoples—even when they are comprehended esoterically—or in the traditions deriving from this initiation science. For, whoever proceeds from a present-day initiation knowledge, from an initiation of today, knows how present initiation compares to that of the past. He knows that in the course of its worldwide evolution mankind is only now entering the stage of real freedom, and that formerly it was simply not necessary to give to human beings an initiation science impregnated completely with the riddle of freedom. Today, hardly anybody has an inkling of what this riddle of freedom includes, what condition the human soul finds itself in when it becomes clearly aware of the burden it shoulders due to this enigma. New light must be shed, after all, on all initiation knowledge due to this riddle of human freedom. We observe how certain secret societies carry on in direct continuation from former times, some of them being quite strongly involved in present-day life. They only preserve the traditions of the past, however, only imitating and continuing on in the sense of the old practices. These societies are nothing more than mere shadows of the past; indeed, they represent something that can only do harm to mankind if it is active nowadays.

We have to realize that if anyone today were to teach even the loftiest former mysteries, they would be detrimental to humanity. No one who understands the nature of present initiation can possibly teach in a timely sense applicable to our age what was once taught in the Egyptian, Chaldean, the Indian or even those still so near our time, the Greek mysteries. After all, what has been propagated up to now as doctrine concerning Christianity has all been produced by these traditional teachings. What is needed is that we comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha anew based on a new teaching. This is what must be considered on the one side.

On the other side, we see the course of world events. We see how the striving for the impulse of freedom rises up from subconscious depths of the human soul; how, at the present time, this call for freedom resounds through all human efforts. It does indeed pervade them, but there is so much that resounds in human striving that is not clearly understood, that only echoes up from subconscious levels yet to be permeated by clear comprehension. One might say that mankind thirsts for freedom! Initiation science realizes that it must produce an initiation knowledge that is illuminated by the light of freedom.

And these two, this striving of humanity and the creation of a new initiation wisdom, illuminated by the light of freedom, must come together. They must meet in all areas. Therefore, a discussion of the social question must not be based on all sorts of old premises. We can only speak of it when we view it in the light of spiritual science, and that is what people find so difficult. Why is that?

Mankind is indeed striving for freedom, freedom for the individual, and rightfully so. I emphasize: rightfully so. It is no longer possible for human beings to cooperate with group souls in the sense of the ancient group system. They have to develop into individualities. This striving, however, seems to be at variance with what is acquired by listening to initiation science, something that must obviously originate from individual persons in the first place. The ancient initiate had his own ways and means of seeking out his pupils and passing on to them the initiation wisdom, even of gaining recognition for them, himself and his Mystery center. The modern initiate cannot allow that, for it would necessitate working with certain forces and impulses of the group soul nature, something that is not permissible today. Thus, humanity's condition today is one where everyone, proceeding from whatever his standpoint happens to be, wishes to become an individuality. For that reason, he naturally does not care to listen to what comes from a human being as initiation science. Yet, no progress can be made until it is understood that men can become individualities only when, in turn, they accept the content of initiation science from other individualities. This is not only related to isolated ideological questions. It is connected with the basic nature of our whole age and its effects on the cultural, political and economic spheres. Humanity is yearning for freedom, and initiation science would like to speak of this freedom. We have, however, only just reached the point in the stage of mankind's evolution where sound human reasoning can grasp the idea of freedom. Today, we must gain insight into much that can be gathered from anthroposophical literature, and that I should like to summarize in turn from a number of viewpoints. It must be understood today what sort of being man is. All the abstract chatter concerning monism misses the point of true monism which can only be attained after one has gone through much else, but it cannot be proclaimed from the first as a world conception.

Man is a twofold being. On the one side, we have what may be called man's lower nature—the word leads to misunderstandings, but there are few words in our language that adequately express what one would like to convey from the spiritual-scientific standpoint—namely, the physical, corporeal organization of which he consists in the first place. I have described the latter to you in my last lecture in connection with the sense organization. Today, we shall not go into that but refer to it again tomorrow. Those of you, however, who have studied anthroposophical literature to any extent at all, have some idea of man's physical, bodily organization and know that it is connected to the surrounding environment. What constitutes the outside world and dwells out there in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, also constitutes us human beings in the physical, corporeal sense. In a way we are its concentration, elevated to a higher level, and figuratively one could say that we are the crown of creation. In the physical, bodily sense we are a confluence of the effects of forces and substances occurring outside and appearing before us through our sense perceptions.

On the other side, we have our inner life. We have our will, our feeling, our thinking and our conceptual capability. When we reflect upon ourselves, we can observe our own will, feeling and thinking, and permeate these with what we call our religious, moral and other ideals. Here, we arrive at what may be termed the man of soul and spirit. Again, this term may easily lead to misunderstandings, but it must be used. We cannot manage if we do not turn the gaze of our soul on one hand to this soul-spiritual human being, and on the other to the physical, corporeal man. But whether we study the facts of nature impartially or contemplate spiritual science, it is necessary to come to the realization: This physical, bodily organization is not really available to what human science, currently existing in the exoteric world, is able to grasp in any sense. If I am to clarify this schematically by means of a sketch, I should like to say: When I condense all that constitutes the human physical organization and its connection with the whole surrounding world (red in sketch), this continues to a certain point. I shall indicate that here by a line. Despite all modern amateurish objections of psychology, beyond this point and polarically differing from it, we have what may be called the soul-spiritual nature of man (yellow), that, in turn, is linked with a world of soul and spirit. That world appears most abstract to present-day human beings, because they grasp it only in the sense of abstract moral or religious ideals that have also become increasingly abstract conceptions. Yet, in regard to both sides of human nature, we are obliged to say: What is looked upon today as science encompasses neither man's physical body nor his soul-spiritual nature. We cannot recognize the physical corporeal nature of man. You can discover the reasons for this in my little book, Philosophy and Anthroposophy.²⁷ For, if man would penetrate into himself with inner vision, that is, if he were to look into the very depths of his being and perceive what is going on there, he would be able to do so exactly in the sense of what modern science deems "exact." Then, however, man could not be the being he is today, for he would have no memory, no facility of recollection. When we look at the world, we retain its pictures in our memory. This means that impressions of the world reach only as far as this barrier (see arrow in sketch). From there, they strike back into the soul and we remember them. What thus strikes back out of our own selves into memory conceals from us our physical bodily nature. We cannot look into it, for if we were able to do so all the impressions would merely be momentary, nothing would be thrown back to form recollections. It is only because this barrier acts as a reflector—after all, we cannot look behind a mirror either, its impressions are reflected back to us—that we cannot see inside ourselves. The impressions are reflected back to us unless we rise to spiritual science. If they were not thrown back, we would not have the reflected impressions of memory in ordinary life. We must be so organized as human beings in life that we have memories. Due to this, however, our physical bodily organization is concealed from us. Just as we cannot see through a mirror to what lies behind it, we cannot look behind or under the mirror of memory and behold the way the physical body of the human being is organized.

This is true psychology; this is the true nature of memory. Only when spiritual-scientific methods penetrate through this reflector in such a way that no use is made of the faculty of memory—as I have already mentioned in public lectures—and, instead, without recollection, one works each time with new impressions, only then are the true forms of body and soul discovered.

It is the same in the other direction. If, with our ordinary powers of cognition, we could penetrate the soul-spiritual concerning which I told you last Sunday that this is what is in truth located behind the world of the senses rather than atoms and molecules—and if we were not prevented, so to speak, by the boundaries and barriers of natural science, there would not be present in us something that is, in turn, needed in human life and must be developed by us between birth and death, namely, the capacity for love. The human capacity for love is created in us by the fact that, in this life between birth and death, if we do not advance to spiritual science, we have to forego penetrating the veil of the senses and seeing into the spiritual world. We retain the capacity of memory only by renouncing all ability to see into our own physical body. Thereby, however, we are exposed to two great illusions. The dogmatic adherents of the natural scientific world conception are at the mercy of one of these illusions. They pay no attention to initiation knowledge and do not come to the realization—in the way I described it to you last Sunday²⁸—that behind the veil of the senses there is no matter, no substance, no energy, of which natural science speaks, but soul-spiritual being through and through. Today, I must still reiterate with the same emphasis what I stressed in my commentary on the third volume of Goethe's scientific writings, namely, Goethe's Theory of Color.²⁹ Out there is the world's carpet of colors, the red, blue and green; out there are the other perceptions. No atoms and molecules are concealed behind it all, but spiritual beings. What is driven to the surface from these spiritual beings lives and expresses itself in the world's carpet of colors, in its relationships of sound and warmth and all the other sensations the world transmits to us.

Those, however, who are dogmatic followers of the natural scientific world view today do not realize this. They have no desire to listen to initiation science. In consequence, they begin to speculate about what is hidden behind color, warmth, and so forth, and arrive at a material construction of the world. However well founded this construction may seem for example, the modern theory of ions—it is always the result of speculation. We must not speculate about what is behind the world of the senses; we may only gain experiences there by means of a higher spiritual world. Otherwise, we must content ourselves to remain within the phenomena. The sense world is a sum of phenomena and must be comprehended as such.

Thus, we are given a picture of nature today which is then extended to include the state of the earth at its beginning and at its end—a picture that excludes an ethical and religious world view for the honest thinker.

The victims of the second illusion are those who Look within. For the most part, they do not go beyond what is reflected. Ordinary man in everyday life perceives the effects of memory—he recalls what he experienced yesterday and the day before, indeed, years ago. Someone who becomes a mystic today brings any number of things to the surface from within which he then clothes in beautiful mystical words and theories. But as I have recently pointed out,³⁰ these things are but the bubbling and seething of his inner organic life. For, if we penetrate this mirror, we do not come to what a Master Eckhart or Johannes Tauler have in their mysticism. We arrive at organic processes of which, it is true, the world today has scarcely any idea. What is clothed in such beautiful words is related to these organic processes as the flame of a candle is related to the flammable material—it is the product of these organic processes. The mysticism of a John of the Cross, of a Mechthild of Magdeburg, or of Johannes Tauler and Master Eckhart³¹ is beautiful, but nevertheless, it is only what boils up out of the organic life and is described in abstract forms merely because one lacks the insight into how this organic life is active. He can be no true spiritual scientist who interprets as mysticism the inwardly surging organic life. Certainly, beautiful words are used to describe it, but we must be capable of taking a completely different viewpoint from that of the ordinary world when referring to these matters. We ought not to adopt the humanly arrogant standpoint and say: The inner organic life is the lower form of life. It is not elevated if its effects are designated as mysticism. On the contrary, we are impelled into the life of the spirit when we discern this organic life and its effects and realize that the more we descend into man's individual nature, the more we distance ourselves from the spiritual. We do not approach it more closely. We draw near the spirit only by way of spiritual science, not by descending into ourselves. When we do the latter, it is our task to discover how the collaboration of heart, liver and kidneys produces mysticism; for that is what it does.

I have often pointed out that the tragedy of modern materialism is that it actually cannot perceive the material effects, indeed, that it cannot even reach as far as the material effects. Today we have neither a true natural science nor a genuine psychology. True natural science leads to the spirit, and the kind of psychology progressing in the direction that we have in mind today leads to insight into heart, liver and kidneys, not the abstractions our modern, amateurish psychology speaks of. For what is frequently called thinking, feeling and willing today is an abstract set of words. People lack insight into the concrete aspects, and it is easy to accuse even sincere spiritual science of materialism just because it leads into the nature of material elements in order to guide us in this way to the spirit.

It will be the specific task of true spiritualism to unveil the nature of all matter. Then it will be able to show how spirit is effective in matter. It must be taken quite seriously that spiritual science ought not to be concerned with the mere logicality of knowledge, but has to aim for a knowledge that is action. Something must be done—with regard to knowing. What is taking place in the process of cognizing must become involved in the course of world events. It must be something factual. It was just this that I was trying to indicate last Sunday and the days before. It is a matter of arriving at the realization that spirit as such must be comprehended as a fact; no theory concerning the spirit may be developed. Theories should only serve to lead to living experience of the spirit. This is the reason why it is so often necessary for the true spiritual scientist to speak paradoxically. We cannot persist today in talking in the customary formulations when we speak about spiritual science; otherwise, we come to what an erroneous theosophy has led to. It mentions any number of the members of man's being—the physical man, the etheric and astral being—each one more tenuous than the last. Physical man is dense, the etheric is less so, the astral being is still more rarefied. There are utterly tenuous mental and other states that are increasingly delicate, a perceptible mist, but all remain a mist, they all remain matter! That, however, is not the point. What does matter is that one learns in substance itself to overcome material. This is why one must frequently employ words that have a different connotation from the one customary in everyday life.

Therefore, we must say—and that matter will become clearer to us tomorrow: Take, on the one side, a person who is of a thoroughly materialistic mind and has been led astray, shall we say, by present-day materialism, one who cannot raise himself to a view of anything spiritual and, according to theory, is a complete materialist, considering any mention of the spirit pure nonsense. Suppose, however, that what he says concerning matter is intelligent and really to the point. This man, then, would have spirit. Although, by means of his spirit, he might uphold materialism, he would have spirit.

Then, let us look at another person who is a member of a theosophical society and adheres to the viewpoint: This is the physical body, then comes the more rarefied etheric body, followed by a more tenuous astral body, mental body, and so on. It does not take much spirit to make these assertions. Indeed, such a theory can be represented with very little spirit. The expounding of such a spiritual world is then, strictly speaking, a falsehood, because in reality one only pictures a material world phrased in spiritual terms.

Where would a person look who is genuinely seeking for the spirit? Will he seek it by turning to the materialistic theorist who has spirit, albeit in a logical manner, or will he turn to the one who makes plausible statements, so to say, but whose words refer only to matter? The true spiritualist will speak of the spirit in connection with the former, the one who represents a materialistic world conception, for there spirit can be present, whereas no spirit need be present in expounding a spiritual view. What is important is that spirit is at work, not that one speaks of spirit.

I wished to say this today merely to clear up certain matters that seem paradoxical. The spirited materialist may be more filled with spirit than the exponent of a spiritual theory who presents it spiritlessly. In the case of true spiritual science, the possibility no longer exists merely to dispute logically about ideological standpoints. It becomes imperative to grasp the spirit in its actuality. That is impossible unless one first comprehends some preliminary concepts such as those of which we have spoken today and shall be considering further tomorrow.

• 20. Dr. Roman Boos's descriptions, given on August 13, 1920, were not recorded. He reported orally on them to Dr. Steiner.
• 21. Refers to a news report carried by the French, German and Swiss press, according to which the German Foreign Minister, Simons, had supposedly told a reporter of the “Impartial” that he was a follower of the reforms suggested by Rudolf Steiner (the threefold social organism). See, among others, “Basler Nachrichte,” 1920, #345, August 14, in which an article is quoted from the “Vossische Zeitung” of August 6. In the lecture of April 22, 1921, in answer to a particularly crude article in which Simons was described as “the favorite disciple of the Theosophist, Steiner,” Rudolf Steiner made the following comment: “In the weekly magazine which is primarily the mouthpiece of widespread public opinion, we note in the last issue that public sentiment was being worked up against Simons' policies. It goes without saying that neither anthroposophical spiritual science nor the threefold movement have anything to do with Simons' politics. It is out of a spirit of deep untruthfulness that anthroposphical spiritual science is lumped together with Simons' policies.”
• 22. See Lecture III of this volume.
• 23. See the lecture of March 18, 1920; printed in “Menschenschule,” Pamphlet 6, 1958.
• 24. Hermann Grimm: 1828–1901, Goethe-Vorlesungen, Vol. 2, Berlin, 1877.
• 25. This law was first proclaimed by Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878), doctor and scientist. See Rudolf Steiner: Erdensterben und Weltenleben, GA 181, Lecture XII (not included in English translation of this cycle). Dornach, 1967.
• 26. Adolf von Harnack: 1851–1930. The quotation literally says: “Not the Son, but only the Father belongs in the Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it.” In Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig, 1900.
• 27. Rudolf Steiner: “Durch den Geist zur Wirklichkeits-Erkenntnis der Menschenraetsel: Philosophie und Anthroposophie. Vier Maerchen (aus den Mysteriendramen). Anthroposophischer Seelenkalender. Der Seelen Erwachen, 7.u. 8. Bild,” Berlin, 1918. Compiled upon requests by friends and published in book-form for the German soldiers on the front.
• 28. See Lecture III of this volume.
• 29. See Note #4
• 30. See Lecture II of this volume.
• 31. See Note #17

Dear attendees!

It is my task today to speak about the place that is to be a center of activity for everything that can radiate from the work in which you have participated here in such a deeply satisfying way over the last eight days. I may say in a deeply satisfying way, for the reason that you will believe me when I say that I am connected with this work in the deepest sense and therefore may express the deepest satisfaction about the course of this congress.

Now, my dear attendees, the Goetheanum is, so to speak, a physical manifestation of that which, in the most diverse ways and in the most diverse fields, would like to emerge as the result of anthroposophical spiritual science in the world. When it first emerged in the world, anthroposophy naturally did not immediately have its own place of activity, and it could not even be thought of, not even remotely, to build a place of activity for it. After about a decade of activity, a number of people who believed in the anthroposophical worldview came up with the idea of creating such a center for anthroposophy. The idea had initially come from the impressions gained from the performance of the mystery plays, which we started in Munich in 1910. It struck a number of our friends how unsuitable the architecture of an ordinary theater, such as we had to use to stage the mysteries at the time, is for what is actually artistically intended by anthroposophy.

And so the plan arose to found a kind of college for anthroposophy. The first attempt was to build in Munich. Land had already been acquired in Munich. But now the question was that precisely because anthroposophical spiritual science wants to be what has been spoken of here again in these days, the same could not be said for such a building as is otherwise the case. You have a society or an association, as you will, that has set itself some goal and believes it needs its own building. You get in touch with some master builder, an architect, and receive his suggestions. The building is constructed in the antique, Renaissance, Gothic style or similar, and then the events of the respective association or society are held in such a building.

Those who are thoroughly connected with their own soul life, as it should be, with an anthroposophical worldview, can never agree to such an outward agreement for a framework, for a wrapping of that which is to be created through anthroposophy. Because it has been emphasized over and over again: Anthroposophy is, on the one hand, a science of the spirit, of the supersensible, arising from the deepest sources of human knowledge. But it is not a theory, it is not a sum of abstractions, it is not something about the world and about life; it becomes, as it develops, life itself, it takes hold of the deepest inner impulses of the whole, of the full human being, and pursues everything from the inner being of this full human being, whatever it can be for him. In this way, it not only stimulates the impulses for scientific research, but also for artistic creation.

Not as if out of the true anthroposophical spirit – I have already mentioned this in my evening lectures – not as if out of this spirit an allegorizing or symbolizing art wanted to arise; that would not be art at all. Not ideas are to be transformed into symbolic or allegorical forms. No, anthroposophical spiritual knowledge penetrates into the depths of the human soul and takes its origin from sources that can flow into the world in other currents than in the field of the presentation of ideas. And so the one stream of the presentation of ideas arises as the one, and the other stream, the stream of artistic creation, in addition to many others, from the same source. But it is not about the translation of spiritual science into art or into sham art, but rather about an elementary, very original, I would say, expression of the artistic. In Dornach today, one can see how nothing symbolic or allegorical is striven for, but how what is intended to be art is conceived as art and created out of the artistic.

I would like to express myself with an image: if the relationship between the anthroposophical worldview and art is really as I have just described it, then this anthroposophical worldview must not allow itself to be built a place from the outside, in some style that for the Greek, for the Renaissance, for the Gothic worldview. Instead, the anthroposophical worldview must be housed in a building that has arisen out of the most original impulses of anthroposophy. Then the matter must be such that, for example, speaking takes place from the podium, singing or reciting or acting in eurythmy takes place on the stage, and so on; that which emerges in this way to the people must, so to speak, be the one language, and the other language must be the building forms, must be the architecture that envelops that which wants to reveal itself within the space. Anthroposophy must not accept a style from outside; Anthroposophy itself, being intimately related to the artistic, must appear as a creator of style.

This is what was there, I would like to say, with the same inner spiritual necessity as - now I would like to express myself through an image - as the nutshell cannot be different in its formation, in its design, than it is. The nut fruit and also the nutshell arise from the same lawfulness, from the same forms and life forces. He who sees the one can judge the other. This must also be the case with the structure for the anthroposophical world view. Therefore, what was to become the style for such a structure could arise out of all that was alive in the ideas of anthroposophy.

It is understandable that this met with resistance at first from all those who cling to the old, who cannot imagine that the development of humanity can only come about through the constant emergence of new and new metamorphoses of human labor, human creativity and human insight, and so – and I emphasize this – it was not the police or the government that rejected us at first, but the art world rejected our styles for Munich. It is not our fault that the building was not built in Munich, where it was originally intended to be. Of course, in the end people grew tired of submitting, I might say, to the yoke of what would have been dictated to them from the old ways of thinking. Those who knew what kind of architectural style must arise from the anthroposophical worldview were not allowed to have their wings broken.

And so it happened that through the donation of a friend, our project on the hill near Basel, in Dornach, in the northwestern corner of Switzerland, could be realized, and that the foundation stone could be laid in the fall of 1913. Of course, we fell into the most difficult period of Western cultural development. But we have at least already come so far that a whole series of university courses have been held in the building since last fall, which is still far from completion.

Now I would like to characterize in just a few words how that which lives in anthroposophy has poured out into an architectural style. That, ladies and gentlemen, is precisely the essence of anthroposophical research, of anthroposophical knowledge: that the concepts, that the whole forms of knowledge live, unfold in free activity, and this led, I would like to say, in a very elementary, naive way, to transferring the old architectural styles, which are based on the geometric, symmetrical, mechanical-static, into the organic. And so the previous architectural styles are, I would like to say, external images of that which can live in the static, in the carrying, in the load-bearing and in the symmetrical, in the geometric.

Of course, the Dornach building and my words here are not a criticism – it would be foolish towards these architectural styles – but it is a matter of drawing on progress. In this case, it could only consist of the geometric, the symmetrical, the static being transferred into something that, in all its forms of expression, in all its formation, also represents the organic, just as the inorganic is otherwise represented in architectural styles. I am well aware, esteemed attendees, of all the objections that can be raised against such a thing; but it had to be done at some point, based on the fundamental impulses of an anthroposophical attitude. There had to be a building idea that is lived and woven through the contemplation of the organic.

And consider what that actually means in terms of the human body itself. Take the smallest organ, perhaps it will be most illustrative. Please take your earlobe, a very small organ, it has a certain shape and size. If you feel the whole meaning of the human organic structure, feel it artistically, then you will say to yourself: firstly, this earlobe could not be in any other place in the human organism than where it is, and secondly,

in the place where it is, it could not be other than it is. The same had to be achieved with all the individual forms in the construction of the Goetheanum. One had to connect inwardly with the metamorphosing formative forces that otherwise live in the organic, and one had to experience what must of course be observed as the basis for every building idea: the geometric, the symmetrical, the static. One had to experience this through what can be experienced in this way in harmony with organic creation. Every single shape, every door, every window, every column, every detail [of this building] had to be individually felt. And the whole, in turn, had to be the one that, as a unified organic building idea, could absorb these individual organic building elements.

One difficulty arose from the fact that the matter was initially conceived for Munich in such a way that, in fact, only interior design would have been considered in the main. The building was to be surrounded by houses that anthroposophical members wanted to acquire, so that the exterior architecture would have been of little consequence. When the building had to be moved to Dornach, the space available was a completely open field on a hill, on a Jura hill, in a Jura configuration. There were unobstructed views in all directions and a clear view of the building. The mountain formations were there, and the whole thing had to be adapted to them. Since the interior design could not be changed much due to the haste with which I promoted the matter at the time, it was necessary to design the exterior in accordance with the finished interior. That is the thing that still leaves me somewhat dissatisfied today, because the person who will fully appreciate the whole can already see a certain discrepancy between the exterior and the interior design. However, every effort has been made to overcome the difficulties as far as possible. And in such a matter, basically only something incomplete can be created in the first attempt. But that is also the only reason for the Dornach building, to start a new architectural style, which cannot arise from any other foundations than those that can be made at all for modern civilized life from the knowledge of the spirit of the world.

The way the Goetheanum presents itself to the observer when approaching from afar is connected with the overall task: one is dealing with something that arises in the depths of the human soul, be it art or science, and that the person who has fathomed it has a duty to communicate to others. We are dealing with something that comes from the bottom of the heart, with something that is taken from the whole soul by someone who truly understands. This can be felt. And it may be demanded of the one who can feel it that this is now translated into contemplation. As I said, nothing should be thought up, no idea should be cast into form. But what I have just hinted at can be felt, can be experienced inwardly, this relationship of an intimate unity to a receptive other unity and the union of the two. By feeling this, it arose for me quite naturally only in contemplation, not as an allegory or as symbolism, a double-domed building, designed in such a way that two domed spaces met in a segment of a circle. And it seems to me that in this form of construction one can feel everything that a soul can feel in relation to anthroposophy and the world, as it must actually be felt as the ideal relationship, as the blissful relationship. And I believe that, just by looking at the outer form, one can feel this when approaching the hill at Dornach, just as one feels the inner necessity of the form of the nutshell compared to the form of the nut fruit; one can feel that there is something in the two juxtaposed domes of a large and a smaller dome structure that should be explored in the most intimate way, and yet at the same time wants to openly communicate with the world. That is what is expressed first in the external forms that I will take the liberty of showing you.

Yes, please, now the first picture (Fig. 5).

You see, dear attendees, here is the road that leads to the west side of the building. The building is a concrete structure down to the upper terrace. From here on, it is a wooden structure. You first enter the concrete structure. In the concrete structure - we will see later - is stored. Then you go up the stairs and come to a foyer and from there to the actual auditorium. You can see here in this motif how an attempt has been made to transfer the otherwise existing forms of construction, which, as I said, are based on the purely geometric, symmetrical, static or dynamic, into organic forms, but not in a naturalistic sense, not in such a way that natural forms would have been imitated. No one can ask what something depicts, just as one cannot ask what a plant leaf or a human ear depicts. It is something that has its inner form of life and vitality and life force within itself; something that justifies itself through its own form and its own unfolding of life.

When you create such a form, you do not feel that you are imitating something, but rather you feel, as a human soul, inwardly connected to that which lives metamorphosing in the plant from leaf to flower to fruit, shaping and reshaping everything, if I may use this Goethean expression. And that is what we have here, not something copied, but something formed in such a way that is otherwise only formed in the organic world. Those who then see the building itself may perhaps be able to see how we have tried to sense artistically from the material all around. It was rather difficult – I will have to come back to this later – to find forms for the concrete, a new material.

The next picture (Fig. 6): You can see the entrance to the west portal again. Here you go in, here left and right up, then you enter a vestibule, then the actual auditorium. The second, smaller dome is now completely covered by the larger dome of the auditorium. All the individual such secondary forms are in complete harmony, and in fact in organic harmony with the larger forms.

The next picture (Fig. 7): Here you can see the building from the southwest side; here the entrance, here the west portal; here the south side, here a transverse building, which we will see in more detail; here the entrance from the south side. You can see how this main form reappears here in some window forms, but actually in such a way that the main form is formed quite differently than the window forms. It is really the case that, when designing in this architectural style, one has to form organic shapes in such a way that, let us say, at the bottom of the plant there is an entire unnotched leaf, further up the leaf is notched, becomes of a very different shape, then in the sepal again something else. One must have the possibility, so to speak, to slip with one's feeling through all the possible forms that arise within, which are quite different according to external sensuality, but are inwardly spiritual and yet quite the same.

Here the large dome, there the small one. One of the issues, for example, was to find the right roofing for this building. The building had to appear as a unified whole, and, I would say, fate brought it about: While I was still occupied with the idea of building, I had to undertake a lecture tour in Norway, from Kristiania to Bergen, and from a train I saw the wonderful slate quarries of Voss. And just as this Voss slate presented itself to me in brilliant sunlight at the time, I said to myself at that moment: this belongs to the covering of this building. And indeed, a certain necessity for it will be felt by anyone who comes to Dornach and sees the wonderful grey-blue of this slate, shining and radiant in the sunlight.

The next picture (Fig. 8): Here you see the building from the south side. I emphasize, here would be the entrance, here is the side wing, as there is one on each side of the building. Here are the storerooms for the equipment, dressing rooms for performances, here the dome of the stage area. This is where the two domes meet. And it is precisely at the point where they meet that these side wings are located.

The next picture (Fig. 2): Here we have the construction from the northeast, and you can see the stage area, the dressing room, the storage room, [the large dome partially covered by the small dome]. Here is the so-called boiler house, which is completely made of concrete, and it is perhaps the one that is most [challenged by individuals], and that is because, firstly, an attempt was made to find a form out of the concrete material with a real sense of the material, but then to find a form in the way that is only possible for utility buildings. The lighting and firing systems had to be accommodated in it. It was important to see what the whole thing looked like and how it would appear. That was the nut to crack, so to speak, and the concrete shell had to be built around it according to the same principles. And I tried to think it through to the point where the whole shape of this building is only complete when the smoke comes out here, when it is in full operation. The shapes of the smoke clouds actually belong to the whole shape.

The next picture (Fig. 3) offers a completely different view. There is a small domed structure nearby that had to be built for a reason that I will explain later. This composition of a building with two domes is intended to be another metamorphosis. Here the domes are intertwined, intersecting, while there they are separate, on the adjoining building. But this then means that all the details of the structure had to be designed differently.

The next picture (Fig. 20): Here you can see the floor plan. Here is the entrance; below that would be the room for storing clothes. Here are the stairs. You go up these stairs and come into the vestibule, which we will see in a moment. Now you enter the auditorium. Here is the space below the organ, which is slightly elevated, with the other musical instruments. Here are the rows of benches for about a thousand spectators, here on each side are seven columns. These seven columns are, as we shall see, only symmetrical in relation to the only axis of symmetry that the whole building has, and which runs from west to east. The whole building is symmetrical in relation to this west-east direction, so that the capital of the second and third column is not a geometric repetition of the first column, but the capitals are progressive, metamorphosing forms from the first to the seventh column, and only this column is symmetrical with this one, the second with the second here and so on, so only symmetrical in relation to the one axis of symmetry. The rest in the course of this axis of symmetry is perceived in organically progressive transformation.

The next picture (Fig. 21): Here is an average in accordance with the axis of symmetry. Here are the storerooms, the stage rooms, the smaller domed room, the large domed room, here is the floor of the auditorium rising, here the entrance, here then the anteroom, here you come in, put your things down here, here is the staircase. You come into the anteroom here and go into the auditorium under the organ here.

The next picture (Figure 22): Here I have taken the liberty of showing you the model, cut in the same section as the one I have just shown you. This is the first model of the structure, which I made in Dornach during the winter of 1913–1914, partly out of wood and partly out of wax. The structure was then built according to this model. The model contains the essential building idea.

The next picture (Fig. 10): Here we have the west portal, the main entrance, seen in more detail.

The next picture (Fig. 12) shows a detail. If you approach from the south side, you will see a similar detail here. You saw it earlier at the building itself. But here you see a concrete house, the house of the friend who provided us with the land back then. An attempt has been made to design this house as a concrete mold for the residential building in the style that it must have next to the building.

The next picture (Fig. 13): This is a side wing. You can see here the window forms in more detail, that is, the forms that the main form, which is on the west portal, takes on in metamorphosis. The next picture (Fig. 11): Here is such a metamorphosis of the main form above the west portal at one of the side entrances.

The next image (Fig. 14): Here, isolated so that it can be seen better, is a motif of one of the side entrances, and the concrete walkway, a gallery, a terrace.

The next picture (Fig. 23): Imagine, dear attendees, that you have now gone down through the gate in the concrete building that I have often pointed out to you. You enter; here are the stairs leading up to the auditorium, here is the stairwell. You see, I have dared to replace the usual pillars or columns with something that is organically designed, and in such a way that, artistically speaking, it can only be in the overall organism of the building as it is, tapering outwards with reference to its curves towards the gate, where it has little to bear, bracing itself here, as a muscle braces itself where it has to bear, because here the whole weight of the building rests. But it was not attempted to make it out of thoughts, so that one can say that something is meant to express something. It does not express anything other than, for example, the human thigh expresses in its architectural structure. It expresses itself, that is, what it is for the organism as a whole. And one must have the feeling that it cannot be otherwise.

Of course, when people with habitual ways of thinking approach something like this, their desire to ridicule is stirred up. And since they can usually only think in a naturalistic way, they don't really know what to imagine by it. It seems organic to them, but they can only imagine the organic in naturalistic terms, as an imitation. Then along came an obviously very clever critic who noticed, as it seems, that it represents a certain strength. It has to bear weight, it has to represent a certain strength. But since he can only think in naturalistic terms, an elephant's foot occurred to him. But then again, it seems to him that something of an artistic-critical conscience has arisen, and he felt that it does not look like an elephant's foot. But now he already has this idea of the elephant's foot, it was already on his mind. He thought, but it must be an elephant foot. But now it was not as thick and clumsy as an elephant foot, and he thought it was rachitic, and now, in order to do justice to both these impressions, he said it was a “rachitic elephant foot”.

The next picture (Fig. 24): You see, at this point I felt how it must be for someone who enters our auditorium via these stairs. They must, so to speak, receive the feeling that Inside, my spiritual powers will be balanced by spiritual insight. Now, the whole feeling was realized for me in such a way that I had to make three such perpendicular forms, which stand perpendicular in the three directions of space. Believe it or not, it is still true: only when I had already done it in this way, when I had the model, did it occur to me that it reminds me of the three semicircular canals that are perpendicular in the ear and that, when injured, cause people to faint. One must unite one's own experiences of the soul with the sense of the creative forces of nature, then one discovers things that are by no means – I must keep saying it – symbolic or allegorical, but that come entirely from artistic feeling and yet have an inner necessity in themselves.

It is true that I actually prefer it when what I say about the building tonight is not expressed at all, but only felt when looking at the building, because the building should speak for itself. I don't really like talking about the building the way I am doing tonight. But not everyone can see the building over and over again; in art, one speaks of artistic works, and so perhaps one may try to talk about the building through a surrogate.

The next picture (Fig. 23): you can see here the staircase that was only hinted at there, here the form just discussed, here the “rachitic elephant foot”. You can see here, for example, this curve. I hope that whoever enters the building will feel the necessity of these forms at this point from the sense and view of the entire building.

The next picture (Fig. 26): Here you see a concrete mold – formed out of the wood above, it is somewhat different – for a radiator cover. This is also a form that arises from the feeling of saying to yourself, what do I have to put in front of a radiator, which grows out of nature like an organic thing, but which does not bring it to life, only the conclusion is for a radiator.

The next picture (Fig. 27): Now we have gone up the stairs and are here in the anteroom, which is only the anteroom, which is already quite in the area of timber construction. Here you see a column, and quite distinct from the sense of space in this place, you see this one column capital with its various curves, which reach out in the most diverse ways in the most varied directions in space, formed out of the sense of space itself. When you come to Dornach, I would ask you to see that in this room which is perhaps most clearly visible because it is the simplest. You will see that the whole thing is carved out of wood and it must be said again and again wherever there is an opportunity, that friends have devotedly worked for many years to bring about this building, because all of it is carved by hand after very crude carpentry work, all of it is carved by hand by our friends themselves, including this wall, which is individually designed in a variety of curves in different directions.

What I would particularly ask you to see is precisely the treatment of the wall. The whole building idea of Dornach resulted from the fact that the wall had to be conceived differently than one has been accustomed to, always thinking of walls. Walls are something final and limiting for the old architectural styles. Here they are not, here the thought should not arise: when you are inside the Dornach building, you are in a closed room. This thought should not arise. You come in and you should feel all the walls as if they were designed in an artistic way that actually makes the walls artistically transparent, so that you feel inside as if the wall does not close you off, but through its own form, which artistically makes the wall transparent, connects you with all the secrets of the macrocosm, allows you to look out, to look out inwardly, spiritually and soulfully into the vastness of the world.

The next picture (Fig. 28): We have entered through the space below the organ, are standing in the auditorium, looking back and see here, somewhat elevated, the organ space.

The next picture (Fig. 30): But this is not yet the finished organ motif, rather it is the model, which you can see here is still unfinished. The framing of the organ should also be developed in such a way that one has the feeling that the organ has not been placed in some corner or on some side, but that one has the feeling that the organ grows out of the whole organic structure as a necessary element. This motif would then have to be added later, in keeping with the height of the organ pipes. That was the first wax-wood model.

The next picture (Fig. 29): Here is the organ motif, here you enter. This is directly above the organ. These are the two columns to the right and left of the axis of symmetry. There you can see the sequence of columns. This sequence of columns with the architrave-like structure above it, I was already able to show in the first model earlier. But here I may draw attention to the fact that you see here the simplest capital motif; now the following capital motif is somewhat more complicated, the third again more complicated and so on. It is the case that the same formative forces, the same formative maxims that can be seen in nature, ascending the plant stem, metamorphosing the leaves, are at work here. The leaves are outwardly different in shape, but inwardly, in the sense of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, they are ideally or spiritually the same.

If you now feel this form, descending, this ascending, but not in thought, but in artistic contemplation, and then connect with the creative forces of nature in such a way that you can really can deduce one from the other in the same way that the next plant leaf, which is shaped differently, emerges from the previous one, then you get these following forms; but, as I said, they are meant artistically. And it follows from this that it is actually of no particular value to focus attention on only one capital; what is important is that each capital emerges from the one that precedes it. For it is precisely this living transformation of one into the other that brings life to the building. And the same applies to the architraves.

I might say that you make some astonishing artistic discoveries. When I had designed the capitals according to the same principles as the advancing bases and architraves, I was able to follow a line of development. The idea of development has become a central tenet of modern knowledge. But one has – just look at this in the works of Herbert Spencer or others who have developed the idea of development in an abstract form, not in an inwardly living form – one has always believed that development progresses in such a way that first there is the primitive, simple form, then comes the complicated and so on and more and more complicated, and the last form is the most complicated. You can think that up if you think abstractly, but you can't express it artistically. If you express it artistically, the most complicated form is in the middle, then it becomes simpler again. One is simply pushed by artistic feeling to ascend to a middle most complicated form, and then to pass into the simpler one.

Then, however, one comes to realize that nature itself does it that way. The human eye is indeed the most perfect in the series of living beings, but not the most complicated. In its simplification, it no longer has the organs, for example, the fan and the xiphoid process, which are found in certain animals that have less perfect but more complicated intermediate forms of eyes. That is what I would particularly like to emphasize here.

Nebulous mystics, people who want to ramble on about everything, naturally ask: Why are there seven pillars on each side? There is no other answer to that than: Why are there seven colors in the rainbow, seven tones and the octave as a repetition of the prime in the tone scale? It is an inner necessity. And precisely when one feels this inner necessity quite objectively, then one does not lapse into nebulous mysticism. That something was done in nebulous mysticism in the Dornach building is simply a calumny.

The next picture (Fig. 33): Here I present to you – here the organ motif – the two first forms, the simplest with the architrave motifs above them. I will now show the following in such a way that I always show a column, then this column together with the next, then the next in turn together with the next, and so on, so that you can see how the lively sense of progression from one column capital to the next and from one architrave motif to the next takes place.

The next picture (Fig. 34): Here, then, the first column, isolated, leaning down, rising up, but the whole thing sensed in its polyhedral spherical form.

The next picture (Fig. 35): The first and second columns, progressing from a simpler motif to a more complicated one, as well as with the motifs above them.

The next picture (Fig. 36): The next is the second column by itself. The next picture (Fig. 37): The second and third columns continue. The next picture (Fig. 38): The third column by itself.

The next picture (Fig. 39): the third and fourth columns. It is becoming even more complicated, and from these motifs one gets one such that any observer will believe that it was actually conceived as a single entity. However much it may seem familiar to you, if you have heard anything about mysticism – I hope not in a mystically nebulous way – it is simply obtained here by a metamorphic transformation of this motif. You can see it here, I would say, already in the forms.

The next picture (Fig. 40): This is the column still by itself, which was the fourth here.

The next picture (Fig. 41): Here you have the column that we just had. From this, then, by simply letting this motif continue to grow through metamorphosis, not by actually only developing this motif, this motif emerges. I believe that someone who had formed this concept intellectually, not emotionally, would have placed the same motif here [on the architrave above the fourth column] over the motif [on the fifth capital]. This did not occur to me because here [on the capital] I am dealing with columns in which the motifs that enclose a polyhedral shape can be felt. These motifs arise differently than those [of the architraves], where the surfaces are mounted; there they are distributed differently in space, and can only be understood from a sense of space.

The next image (Fig. 42): This [fifth] column on its own. It looks like a caduceus, but is simply the metamorphosis of the previous chapter.

The next picture (Fig. 43): This column and the one that emerges from its metamorphosis. When you have arrived at this most complicated one, the motif simply wants to become simpler again. It discards certain complications, it becomes more perfect, but simpler.

The next image (Fig. 44): This is the [sixth] column capital by itself.

The next picture (Fig. 45): So it has jumped over from one side to the other, it is this motif and then it becomes this through transformation.

The next picture (Fig. 46): This is the last motif.

The next picture (Fig. 47): Here you have the last column of the auditorium, here is the slit between the auditorium and the stage, here is the first stage column. Here you can see into the stage area. Here is the dome of the stage area seen from the inside. It is still equipped with scaffolding. It is under construction.

The next image (Fig. 48): I will now take the liberty of showing the metamorphosis of the pedestal figures in quick succession, so that it does not take us too long. You will see how one pedestal motif – for the columns of the auditorium – develops into the other.

The next picture (Fig. 49): So it gets more complicated. The next picture (Fig. 50): The third pedestal.

The next picture (Fig. 51): Next picture. The metamorphosis advances in this way. It is always the case with this metamorphosis, when it is felt through, that it tends to slope downwards again and new forms arise, expanding. The necessity for further development can only be felt artistically, not speculated upon.

The next picture (Fig. 52): The fifth base motif. The next picture (Fig. 53): The sixth motif. The next picture (Fig. 54). The seventh motif.

The next picture (Fig. 55): Here you can see into the stage area from the auditorium. This is the painting of the small dome, below it the stage area. The auditorium would then be here. You can see here into the small stage area from the auditorium facing east. This is the end of the auditorium. It is a motif; here the auditorium, then comes the curtain, which then belongs to the small stage area. It is the conclusion to the east. Below it will be the nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group, which I will talk about later, covered here by a wooden roof, which, in its various forms, synthesizes everything that is distributed over the other forms of the capitals and architraves.

I would also like to show some columns from the small domed room, i.e. the stage area. These columns are made according to the same principle, but because of the small size of the room, because of the whole complex, the capital forms are different again, but they are asymmetrical in relation to the west-east axis.

The next picture (Fig. 58): Another column from the small domed room. The next picture (Fig. 59): Yet another. The next picture (Fig. 60): Yet another.

The next image (Fig. 57): Once again, the view from the auditorium into the small domed room. Here are the columns of the stage area. Performances will take place here. I have redesigned the bases of these columns in the small domed room as twelve seats. This was possible because this room can also be used as a meeting room. And because a meeting of twelve people was not intended to be mystical, but arose from the overall architecture.

The next picture (Fig. 67): Here you can see what I just called the roofing. The columns of the small domed room would be here. Carved out of the wooden wall in various forms, these forms synthetically summarize the others. Below that is the nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group (Fig. 93).

Now I come to the painting of the small dome. In this small dome, what must be aimed for in painting is gradually, perhaps, already achieved, despite all imperfections, not in the sense of artistic perfection, but in the sense of artistic intention. In one of my mystery dramas, I have a character suggest how painting should actually develop, so that gradually one no longer seeks the pictorial motif from the drawing, from the forms, but that one seeks it from the color and color harmony. That is how I had the character express it, that “form becomes the work of color”.

Now, since everything depends on the color in this painting of the small dome, it cannot be shown in these black-and-white afterimages, what is meant. But I think you can gain something from the fact that you might feel that something is wrong with these reproductions, that what you see is actually nonsense. And this feeling that it is actually nonsense is just an expression of the fact that one actually feels the necessity, it must be created from the color everywhere. And the human form, no matter how individualized it is, is thoroughly felt from the color.

The next picture (Fig. 72): Here this child, which – here would be the first column, the other column of the auditorium here, here the curtain, here this orange-reddish-yellowish child painted – which stretches out its hands and its gaze towards this fist figure [Fig. 70]. Of course one can see a fist-like figure; but for the person painting, what matters is the blue bruise and how it relates to the other spots, that is, to the orange-yellow spots and so on. The colors represent a whole world, a cosmos in itself, with something creative in it; one can extract the form from what the colors speak to one another in the universe. It is the conversation of color, the color word, the creative color word. If one really feels all this artistically, then, just as the world is rightly described as emerging from the word, human, superhuman, and subhuman figures arise from color as it intensifies into the color word.

The next picture (Fig. 70): This is where the child would be, here the only word in the entire structure, here a kind of fist figure emerging out of the blue. As I said, the feeling arises from the color, and we are transported to the sixteenth century, to the culture of the sixteenth century. It is the dawning of that culture which we ourselves still carry within us in our spiritual life, the culture that rushes towards abstract knowledge. Those who do not experience it as it is largely experienced today by people, but who experience it with the whole, with the whole human being, feel the Faustian struggle within our modern knowledge. This Faustian struggle has led to the fact that only in recent times has man come to the full feeling of the I, and now of the unformed, inartistically written I, which is experienced darkly within. What can be borne is only that which one has in knowledge, when one feels it out of the fullness of the human being in the proximity of the child; for that which we will see in a moment, what is painted here, is linked from the brownish blackness below the fist, it is linked to the danger of modern knowledge for those who feel from the fullness, it is linked to death, because our knowledge only delivers the dead to us. And whoever not only thinks through theoretically, but inwardly experiences that our concepts themselves are corpses as concepts, always feels death standing beside him out of the Faustian striving, and so he longs for birth, which shows itself on the other side in the child.

The next picture (Fig. 71): Below Faust – here it would be Faust – [Death] is taken out of the black-brownish area.

The next picture (Fig. 73): Here the fist figure is merged out of the blue as a larger area, here the child, stretching out its hands, arms, and gaze, with Death below. Above it, a kind of inspirer, as these figures, which have been tried to be created out of colors, always represent - one can feel that, it is always initiated quite instinctively from the color harmony - the initiates, who receive the secrets of the world from inspirers. Here, then, is Faust, and above him is his inspirer.

The next picture (Fig. 74): This is the inspirer of Faust; below it, Faust would be taken out of the blue, yellowish, reddish colors.

The next image (Fig. 75): A Greek figure as you go further into the dome. Here there would be Faust with his inspirer, here a Greek figure with the inspirer above.

The next picture (Fig. 76): The inspirer; yellow and yellowish-white, sunny like an Apollo countenance, here below somewhat like an Athena countenance; but all this is drawn from the color word.

The next picture (Fig. 77): These are inspirers, spiritual beings that do not incarnate in the flesh, but who have an inspiring effect on those who live on earth in the flesh as human beings.

The next image (Fig. 78): An Egyptian person, inspired by the two preceding ones. An Egyptian initiate, brought out of the brownish-bluish-blackish coloration.

The next picture (Fig. 79): We are moving more and more towards the east, towards the center of the dome, so to speak. Here below is a type of human being that lived as an intellectual being in the whole zone from Persia north of the Black Sea in ancient times, and then developed in Central Europe in the Germanic being; here, in the arms of the child, is the aging human being who carries within himself the memory of the boy.

The ambivalence, the dualism that manifests itself in the Germanic nature when it becomes knowledge, reveals itself, precisely in this Germanic nature, always reveals itself by confronting powers: the Luciferic, which you see here, taken out of the yellowish-reddish, the Ahrimanic taken out of the brownish-yellowish. The Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, we shall see again later in the central figure, they are the two essential ingredients of the human being. Man can only be understood as a kind of state of equilibrium, which must be continually striven for, but which is continually in danger of falling out of itself, of falling towards what would present itself on one side, and on the other side, if the extremes were to develop one-sidedly. This is what man would be like if he had only a heart and no intellect. Then the rest of the human form would adapt to what the heart makes of the human being. This is how man would look if he only had reason and no heart: the Ahrimanic, ossified in himself.

This secret of human existence can be expressed in three ways: physically, psychologically and spiritually. In the luciferic form, which man does not become, but which he contains latently within him, towards which he always strives as towards one side of his nature, what is expressed is that which develops into pleurisy, which constantly places man in danger of fever. On the other hand, man carries within himself the forces of aging; he is always in danger; in morbid cases he succumbs to the physiological pathology of sclerosis, calcification. Between these two states man lives.

Here dualism is depicted, as it does not yet extend to the complete interpenetration of forms, in a kind of physiology that extends down to the animal kingdom, a kind of centaur. But then, something like this has been done before. I have just tried to reproduce the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Wilson in these figures, so that what is contemporary, what was particularly annoying in this period, is also immortalized to some extent.

The next picture (Fig. 81): Here we see the ahrimanic figure just discussed; that is, what the human being tends towards: physiologically in sclerosis, in calcification; psychologically, it is all that in man tends towards pedantry, towards moral intellectualism, and so on; spiritually, all that is actually most alive when man awakens and returns to his physical being.

The next picture (Fig. 82): the Luciferic figure all to itself. I have just discussed it physiologically. The psychic — that which drives people to enthusiasm, to wanting to go beyond themselves with their heads, so to speak, to falling into mysticism, into false theosophy — is something that can be found particularly in mystics and mystical societies. People are often in this mood of enthusiasm, of soulfulness, so that they are always half a meter above their physical head with their soul head, and with a certain inner arrogance - I have already spoken of this - they would then like to look down on their fellow human beings. Spiritually, this is the human being in the moment of falling asleep, of dreaming. These forces, to which the human being tends one-sidedly, are strongest in the moment of falling asleep, while the others, the Ahrimanic ones, are strongest in the moment of waking up.

The next picture (Fig. 82): The Germanic initiator, above him Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. He is holding the child by the arm, shining next to his dark figure.

The next picture (Fig. 83): Here we are already quite close to the eastern side of the small dome. Here is the Russian man, who actually always has his own shadow beside him. The one who sees spiritually actually always sees a real Russian twice, because the Russian always has the second man, the other, the double, with him spiritually. This is something that will only develop in the future; now it is rushing towards destruction, devastation and ruin. But out of this terrible devastation, out of this murder of human civilization, the good core of Russian-ness will one day develop. As here the Germanic has been shown, here is the Russian. Here the inspirer, out of the blue.

The next picture (Fig. 84): Here, if you note this point, you will find above the Russian – there is only one, as I said – the inspiring stars, above which there is a kind of cloud that forms the centaur, which, via the stars from the cosmos, stimulates that which is still present in the Russian today in an embryonic state of soul and spirit.

The next picture (Fig. 85): I will show you that from the other side in a moment. So over here [far right of the image] would be what I have just shown. Here is the actual central motif [directly to the right of the image], and here is the same inspiring angel from the north side; but it is created out of the orange and then, accordingly, this centaur figure. Below, there is again the one Russian who appears in two.

The next picture (Fig. 86): We are now in the middle. Here you see the Russian and here the inspiring blue angel and here the orange one, here in the middle the representative of humanity. Those who feel can feel the Christ in him. He stands there as the representative of human equilibrium; from his right side he sends out the rays of love, which, like serpents, entwine the ahrimanic form – that is, the sclerotic, pedantic, materialistic-intellectual human being; here above is the luciferic figure, which is physiologically, psychologically and spiritually what I have indicated.

This will be in the far east. This is painted on the inside of the dome, and below it, though differently designed, as it must be for the sculpture, is the nine-and-a-half-meter-high wooden group, which also has the Representative of Humanity in the center, who brings balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic.

It so happened that the famous and influential Frohnmeyer wrote a pamphlet, a defamatory pamphlet about anthroposophy, and in this pamphlet he makes the monstrous claim that “when one comes to Dornach, one can see, as Steiner claims, that this is what the Christ looked like in objective reality.” I don't say to anyone else that I see him that way and don't impose him dogmatically on anyone, but I could only shape him as I saw him, he is the one who walked in Palestine according to my vision. Above that is the Luciferic-Ahrimanic.

Frohnmeyer now says that he depicts a Christ there as objective, who has Luciferian traits above and animalistic traits below. He [supposedly] saw it that way. Lucifer is above, the Christ is shaped entirely humanly, below is Ahriman, here is still a piece of wood, it is not yet finished in the wood. But someone writes it down who doesn't feel the slightest obligation to research the truth, just as in the other case, as Mr. Kolisko told it today, someone writes down the objective untruth and then apologizes by saying that he didn't have time to research the truth.

Pastor Frohnmeyer was confronted with the matter. He then said that he had not seen it himself, but had copied it from another pastor, and since it had already appeared a long time ago, he simply believed he could copy it. We did, in fact, send a correction from Dornach, but it was not included. This is how things are spread today; it is the level of conscientiousness with which people work today. But one must keep saying: what should a theology look like that is shaped only in this way? The person in question was also a lecturer at the University of Basel.

The next picture (Fig. 87): the figure of Lucifer in itself – here the figure of Christ would be underneath – this has been brought out of the red.

The next picture (Fig. 88): the Ahrimanic figure by itself. You see here the head, which is as it should be in a being that has only intellect and no powers of the heart.

The next picture (Fig. 90): the painted representative of humanity, the Christ.

The next picture (Fig. 91): Here is my original model of the plastic Christ, seen in profile, who is thus a wooden figure. And in the middle again this Representative of Humanity; above it, repeated twice, the Luciferic figure; below it, twice, the Ahrimanic figure. And then, on the side, an elemental being growing out of the rock, which I will show you in illustrations so that you can see how asymmetry has been attempted in the Dornach sculpture. The next picture (Fig. 92) is my original model for the Christ of the wooden figure. The asymmetry is taken so far that, because the left arm is directed upwards and the right downwards, and the whole figure, not just the face, should have physiognomy, the whole figure should be soul, that the held-up arm on the left corresponds to the forehead, and the held-down arm corresponds to the forehead. This asymmetry, which is only subtly hinted at in humans, has been attempted here. Such things had to be dared because the sensual should not be imitated, but on the contrary, the spiritual, concrete [forming] behind the sensual should be observed, which underlies the sensual formation.

The next picture (Fig. 98): This is a piece [of the execution model]. Here would be Christ. Here is Lucifer, who aspires to the right hand of Christ. Here is this being, growing out of the rock as an elementary being in complete asymmetry. You see, here it is attempted to overcome the usual way of composing. Usually, one composes figures that one puts together. Here, the whole group, which consists of a series of figures, is conceived as a unit, and the individual figures are taken out of the whole down to their fingers, noses, eyes and eyebrows, so that, of course, when the left is at the top, an asymmetry results, but one that is taken from the life of the whole.

The next picture (Fig. 101): once again the striving Lucifer. Here would be the second Luciferian figure, here the Christ figure.

The next picture (Fig. 99): This is my original Ahriman-Mephistopheles model. Mephistopheles is, of course, only a later metamorphosis of Ahriman, who signifies physiologically, psychologically and spiritually what I have said. This model underlies all the Ahriman figures. It was originally designed by me for the wood group in 1915.

The next picture (Fig. 106): Now I come back to showing you this heating house, here in profile, so to speak, since I have already told you how it came about. It is often perceived as annoying; but people do not consider what would be there if one had not tried to shape something out of the concrete material, out of this brittle material, which might be more perfect later on. There would be a red chimney here! I wonder if it would be more beautiful in reality.

The next picture (Fig. 107): the boiler house, seen from the front. As I said, it is only when the smoke comes out that you feel a certain necessity for these outgrowths.

The next picture (Fig. 103): This is the house that was built nearby, the glass house that is now used as a construction office. Some eurythmy practice rooms are inside. It had to be built originally because the glass windows for the building were cut inside it. These glass windows came about in such a way that what is otherwise only artistically executed – that the wall is artistically transparent – is formed in these glass windows right down to the physical level. The motif that had been specified was engraved with a diamond pencil from monochrome glass panes by friends who worked on it for years with tremendous dedication and devotion. This had to be done first in this house. The glass panes are large and a separate studio building had to be erected for this purpose. But it is designed entirely in the style of the whole. Two domes, standing apart from each other, determine the very different shape of the building up to the gate; the whole asymmetry, so down to the stairs, everything is individualized. Those who come here will see that the lock and the door handle are individually designed.

The next picture (Fig. 104): the gate lifted out. The staircase individualized so that it can only be as it is at this location. Here (Fig. 105) the lock, which also returns in various metamorphoses on the building, then the gate.

The next picture (Fig. 112): Here you see a sample of windows, engraved out of a [same-colored] glass pane. One could allegorize and symbolize many things from these colors; but what the person who feels the matter artistically likes best is to simply stand in front of it and let this whole interplay of the light color tone with the dark color tone take effect on them because the interplay – the glass panes are, after all, arranged in succession in different colors – this entire play of colors undulates in the building, but in such a way that it does not make anyone nervous, but on the contrary = as has been attempted – has a healing effect.

The next picture (Fig. 110): other motifs. Such Ahrimanic figures, scratched out.

Now, dear attendees, that was what I took the liberty of bringing to you as a single image from this Goetheanum in Dornach. It is precisely the place where we should find the center of what has been cultivated here for a week, through this week, which was actually dedicated to Goethe's name, Goethe's essence and Goethe's work. And everything that the Goetheanum stands for should be dedicated to this. Perhaps it will have emerged from what I dared to say in the course of these discussions, that what wants to come before the world in anthroposophy can work both artistically and cognitively.

Unfortunately, we are not yet finished; a great deal of effort and, in particular, a great deal of sacrifice from our friends is still needed; unfortunately, it cannot come from the central states at the moment because of the currency difficulties. The sacrifice of other friends is needed if the building is to be completed. It cannot be completed otherwise than by this spirit of sacrifice being renewed. But it must be said that for a long time this spirit of sacrifice has been revealed in the most beautiful, significant and understanding way for Dornach. And from the feeling of the cultural significance of our cause, we cannot thank enough – I would say, from the genius of this anthroposophical sense, we cannot thank enough – those who have been able to possess this spirit of sacrifice. May it continue to exist so that Dornach does not remain a torso, but can be completed.

In the past week, a worthy and beautiful contribution has been made by our friends in Stuttgart and those who have joined them, and this is also intended to serve Dornach; and since I do not belong to the organizing committee, but am only an invited guest, it will not out of place if I also include myself – one knows how much effort a congress committee has, how it has to consider all the details and the big picture and prepare them over a long period of time – to express my heartfelt thanks to this committee, even now that we are at the end of this event.

And then, we must indeed consider, my dear attendees, what calls are going out into the world today. Everywhere we hear, in the broadest circles, the ethical needs - if only in words - of what, in deepest reality, spiritual science wants to bring to the world. Do we not hear everywhere the yearning and speak of world brotherhood, which is to come about through all kinds of world covenants in the most diverse areas of life, but unfortunately out of the old? World brotherhood is sought; it is believed that this or that external event could lead to it.

But, my dear attendees, this world brotherhood cannot be found unless one has the deepest conviction that it actually exists, but is hidden for our time in the deepest subconscious depths of the human soul. But that is where it must be sought. That which is in the depths of the human soul must be sought and realized in the outer life, in social life. Then there will be world brotherhood, then this world brotherhood will be able to create the outer institutions that belong to it. But this world brotherhood cannot be brought about through external institutions. This world brotherhood, however, can only be found if man searches his deepest inner being in the spirit, at the point where his own being is bound together with the world spirit.

Knowledge and art, so they should arise from anthroposophical attitude and anthroposophical insight, as we tried to show in this week. Then, when knowledge and art emerge from human spirituality, which experiences world spirituality within itself, then this experience will also be a deeply religious one, one that will arise in man, entirely in the spirit of Goetheanism, that Goetheanism that sought in Goethe himself the harmony of the three most ideal fruits of life: science, art and religion.

If these fruits of life are there, then social life can also flourish for the benefit of humanity. If we speak less of the religious, it is perhaps precisely out of true religious experience, out of that religious experience that arises when science is sought in a spiritual way, art in a spiritual way.

And in this sense, esteemed attendees, the conclusion may well sound as the beginning sounded! Our dear friend Uehli began with Goethe, and may this event end with Goethe, with his words, through which he expressed his attitude towards science, art and religion; for he said what can also be our motto, which only must be developed further, in accordance with the insight that we do not have before us the Goethe who died in 1832, but the one who has developed with the world, whom we want to serve with his further education and development. But as a shining motto, everything that comes out of this work in the spirit of Goetheanism will be able to draw on what lies in his words, with which this event should come to an end:

He who possesses science and art also has religion
He who does not possess both, may have religion

My experience in reading this writing

A discussion of ¹ with the anthroposophy of Alois Mager could be of profound interest to me. This prompts me to write down here, as a kind of soliloquy, the thoughts that have arisen in me while I was studying Mager's writing “Theosophy and Christianity”. (I must confess that I have only now found the time to read the writing, which was published as early as 1922).

There are few people who believe that one can be fair to an opponent. But regardless of the reasons that such people have for their opinion, it seems to me that there are few conditions for me to be unfair to Alois Mager from the outset, even if he appears as my opponent.

He belongs to an order that I hold in high esteem and love.

Not only do I have many memories of noble, lofty, and far-reaching intellectual achievements that can be attributed to the order in general, without going into the work of the individual members of the order to whom this achievement is owed; but I have also had the good fortune to know and esteem individual members of the order. I have always had a sense for the spirit that prevails in the writings on science by such personalities. While I feel that much of what comes from other contemporary scientific works is foreign to me, there is not a little that comes from this side that touches my soul without any foreignness, even when the content seems to me to be incorrect, one-sided, or prejudiced.

And so I was also able to take up with much sympathy what Alois Mager wrote without reference to anthroposophy. This applies to his thoughts on the life of the soul in the presence of God, which are deep in mind and spirit, in particular.

I expected Alois Mager to be an opponent. For I know that from the side to which he belongs, either only silence about my anthroposophy can come, or opposition. Anyone who has illusions about this knows little about the world.

But what Mager presents had to seem significant to me.

And I would like to write down here the thoughts that have come to me about this, like a soliloquy.

The essay “Theosophy and Christianity” discusses in four chapters, essentially the Anthroposophy I have described. Mager admits this. On page 31f. we find the words: “I consider it futile to broadly present the goals and teachings of neo-Indian theosophy. We must devote a separate treatise to Steiner's Anthroposophy and its relation to science. There the essentials of Theosophy will be discussed as well.

The first chapter, “Theosophy in the Past and Present,” contains a spirited argument that what Mager calls Theosophy was revealed in a great spiritual way in the non-Christian world in Plotinus and Buddha. Mager sees the search of the human soul to come into contact with the divine in a way that naturally follows from the nature of this soul, most vividly realized in the two minds mentioned. For, what appears on Christian ground in this way, Mager does not judge, of course, as coming naturally from the nature of the soul, but as a result of the prevailing divine grace.

It seems unnecessary to me to point out here that, especially in earlier times, the state of soul indicated, even if not in the scientific formulation of Plotinus or in the religious depth of Buddha, was much more present in the spiritual life of humanity than Mager assumes when he orients his whole presentation towards the two personalities.

But what strikes me most is this: Mager wants to judge the anthroposophy I have presented. He wants to discuss what part of humanity is actually seeking by taking the anthroposophical path of the soul among many others. He wants to develop the content of what is alive in anthroposophy, otherwise what should give meaning to his investigation. Now the whole essence of what I have called anthroposophy is immediately distorted if, in order to explain its content, one refers to earlier descriptions of the spiritual worlds.

I have said that I am recording these thoughts as a soliloquy. I do this in order to be able to present unreservedly what only I myself can know with complete certainty from the subjective experience of the matter immediately, but which I must know in just this way.

And here I cannot do otherwise than to emphasize again and again that everything essential to my anthroposophy comes from my own spiritual research or insight, that I have borrowed nothing from the historical record in the matter or in the substantiation of the matter. If something I had found myself could be illuminated by being shown in some form or other as already existing elsewhere, then I did so. But I never did it with anything but what had been given in my own view before. Nor did I have any other method while I was referring to the theosophical society's own writings in my own writings. I presented what I had researched and then showed how one or the other appears in those writings.

Only the terminology has been borrowed from what already existed, where an existing word made such borrowing desirable in terms of its content. But this has as little to do with the essential content of anthroposophy as the fact that language is used to communicate what has been self-explored has to do with the independence of what is said. One could, of course, also assume that a well-known linguistic expression is borrowed when one uses it in a presentation of something completely new.

In the strictest self-knowledge, I have repeatedly asked myself whether this is the case, whether I can speak with my own exact knowledge when I say that what I present as a spiritual view comes from my directly experienced view, and that the historical given plays no role in this. In particular, it was always important to me to be clear about the fact that I did not take any details from what had been handed down historically and insert them into the world of my views. Everything had to be produced within the immediate life of contemplation; nothing could be inserted as a foreign entity.

In wanting to bring this into clarity within myself, I have avoided all illusions and sources of illusion with the greatest effort of consciousness. After all, one may rely on a clarity of self-awareness that knows how to distinguish between what is experienced in consciousness in direct connection with the objective being and what emerges from some uncontrollable depths of the soul through something read or otherwise absorbed.

I now believe that anyone who really engages with the presentation in my writings should also be able to see through my relationship to spiritual observation as a result. Alois Mager does not do this. For if he had tempted correctly, he would not have presented the content of anthroposophy with reference to Plotinus and Buddha first, but would have shown first how this content arises from the continuation of the development of modern consciousness on the basis of the spirit of science.

But what led Mager to write his first chapter leads him in the sequel (page 47) to say: “What strikes us most and most irrefutably about Steiner's Anthroposophy is that it is composed of pieces of thought and knowledge from all peoples and all centuries. Greek mythology, which Steiner became acquainted with at the gymnasium, provides him with the Hyperboreans, Atlanteans, Lemurians, and so forth. He borrowed from the oriental mystery religions, from the Gnostic and Manichaean teachings. The Kant-Laplacean Urn Nebula served as a model for his spiritual primeval world being...

This conclusion drawn by Mager about my anthroposophy is a complete objective untruth, in view of the true facts. It is dismaying to see that a fine mind, which wants to apply the means of its objective search for truth correctly in order to arrive at a true-to-life context, misses the truth and presents an illusion as reality.

This sense of dismay overshadows all the other feelings I have about Mager's writing, for example that it is antagonistic towards me, that it becomes quite strangely unjust in many places and so widens.

My consternation is heightened when I come across another objective untruth. In the second chapter, “Anthroposophy and Science”, Mager gives a commendable account of anthroposophical ideas, considering the brevity of the presentation to which he is obliged. Indeed, he proves himself to be a good judge of certain impressions that are given to spiritual perception as a finer materiality, for example, between the material and the soul. One can see that he has many qualities that enable him to engage with anthroposophy, if it were not for the inhibitions that come from other sides.

But now, in this chapter, there is another objective untruth. Mager first tries to put my way of spiritual thinking on the same level as spiritistic or vulgar occult practices. He even uses Staudenmaier's book “Magic as Experimental Science” for this purpose, which a sense of spiritual differences should have protected him from.

But now he comes to the following assertion: “The world view that Steiner presents to us, which at first glance appears imposing and seemingly complete, is not the result - as a philosophical world view is - of rational, scientific knowledge, but is gained through spiritual vision, anthroposophical clairvoyance” (page 45). “Steiner has all the knowledge he ever sipped and caught in his life, as he floated and wandered through all fields of knowledge, with an incomparable skill in clairvoyant threads into a bizarre unity.” Mager presents everything as if I had given my ideas about the spiritual world on the basis of an unchecked, unscientifically applied clairvoyance.

Is there nothing to be said against such an assertion, considering what can be found in my writings about Goethe, in my “Theory of Knowledge of Goethe's World View”, in “Truth and Science”, in my “Philosophy of Freedom” ? I have presented this as a philosophical primal experience, that one can experience the conceptual in its reality, and that with such an experience one stands in the world in such a way that the human ego and the spiritual content of the world flow together. I have tried to show how this experience is just as real as a sensory experience. And out of this primal experience of spiritual knowledge, the spiritual content of anthroposophy has grown. I endeavored step by step to use 'intellectual, scientific knowledge' with the precision that I acquired in the study of mathematics to control and justify the spiritual view and so on. I only worked in such a way that the spiritual view emerged from 'intellectual, scientific' knowledge. I have strictly rejected all spiritualism and all vulgar occultism.

Again, Mager's scientific approach does not lead to an understanding of the true facts, but to the assertion of objective untruths about anthroposophy and my relationship to it.

Indeed, one is bound to be dismayed when one sees that an 'investigation' into anthroposophy gradually erodes the very soil in which anthroposophy is to be found.

The anthroposophical spiritual researcher sees through the reasons for such mental states, which cannot come to objective facts, from his insights; but Mager is not to be presented here from the point of view of anthroposophy, but merely from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, which he indeed wants to assert in his writing.

I ask now: can it still be fruitful to deal with what an opponent presents, when one sees that everything falls to nothing, that he presents to the world about Anthroposophy? Can one discuss assertions that cannot possibly refer to Anthroposophy because they not only paint a distorted image of it, but a complete opposite?

(It is no wonder that Mager is unjust to me even in small matters. A clear misprint in one edition of my Theosophy, where the numbering of “mind soul” and “sentience soul” is incorrect – despite the fact that what comes before and after makes it quite clear that this is a misprint — he uses it to make the following comment: “It is characteristic of Steiner's scientific method that he places the intellectual soul before the sentient soul here, which contradicts his usual presentation.”

In view of what has been presented, there is no opportunity to enter into a discussion about whether, in Mager's description of Aristotle's psychology in the third chapter, “Soul and Soul Migration”, which Mager even finds quite stimulating, there is the seed for transforming ideas about the soul from what can be observed externally to what is seen spiritually internally; whether, then, the path from Aristotelian intellectualism to anthroposophy does not emerge as a more straightforward one.

What we basically have been able to foresee for a long time has quickly befallen the world through all sorts of events that have taken place recently. As a result, we have become witnesses of serious events, the full significance of which only a later time will truly be able to grasp. And much, I might say, even in outward form, of what underlies these serious events, is quite beyond our ken today. But for us, my dear friends, one word in particular is significant in these serious times, which I would like to express in the following way: For years we have tried to deepen our spiritual knowledge, we have tried to make the knowledge, feelings and perceptions of the spiritual worlds our own, and also everything that is connected with this knowledge, feeling and perception. But now we are actually faced with having to take a test, in a certain sense, to see if we are able to hold fast to the great ideals that are mapped out for us through the knowledge and feeling of the spiritual world, even under the impact of all the difficulties that are now happening. Where friends sit together in our branches, who are united for the most part by a common feeling, it is certainly easier to hold fast to what spiritual science should bring to humanity, but we must always and everywhere keep in mind the great ideals that are already expressed in our first principle. We are not a society that spreads within homogeneous masses of people; rather, we seek to spread the reconciling spirit throughout the whole earth. In this context, we are subject to a certain test, because it is truly difficult in the times in which we now live to fully develop the sense of objectivity in relation to the Highest, namely in relation to Justice.¹

Precisely for the reasons that will emerge from my words today, the inhabitants of Central Europe, and above all the German people, currently find it easier than others to be objectively just. But even here it is necessary not to abandon ourselves to mere immediate feelings, but as serious anthroposophists we must try to penetrate with understanding into the language that today must express justice in the spiritual sense.

Not because I want to present it as something personal, but because the matter is symptomatic for me, I want to mention the following: the first volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” may be in the hands of some of you. The second volume was printed in the second half of July up to page 204. It ended in the middle of the lines. The passage was precisely what struck me as strange and symptomatic. I had to characterize the two French philosophers Boutroux and Bergson. I tried to do so as objectively as possible. Then I had to make the transition to Preuss, an unheeded, powerful thinker. After presenting French contemporary philosophy, I had to move on to what had been thought this side of the Rhine, in Germany. But the page was blank, because war broke out. I often had to look at the empty spaces of the thirteenth page.

And at that time, various voices came from across the Rhine. You are well aware of those voices. They spoke of German barbarism and the like, and hurled the most hateful accusations and slanders at us. One would say that it was distressing to experience what one was subjected to. Respected representatives of French intellectual life were stirring up hatred and passion among the people. And in this case, the personal can be seen as symptomatic: If in a book on the history of the development of philosophy one had to deal with French philosophy, and if one tried hard to do full justice to it, then it could truly fill one's soul with bitterness when, while trying with all one's might to immerse oneself with the greatest possible objectivity in the philosophy of the West, one had to experience that this philosophy, regardless of all the facts, cries out about the “barbaric nature beyond the Rhine”. It was all the more bitter because one of the worst attackers and haters of the German character was Maurice Maeterlinck.

It is strange: the first work by Maeterlinck to appear, and which already fully expresses his essence and his character, is based entirely on Novalis, is entirely drawn from Novalis, and Maurice Maeterlinck would be nothing without Novalis. All his later works arose entirely from this first foundation drawn from Novalis. This also sheds light on how our time understands justice. Today it is by no means sufficient to hear the voices that are spoken here and there under the influence of passion; rather, it is necessary that we visualize the facts. If one lets these speak, it leads to objectivity. And such objectivity is not the same as being indifferent to these relationships.

Great things are happening in our time, monstrous things. And a future time will need to refer to significant events of the past when speaking of the events of our time, in the sense of how we speak of repetitions. Not just one, many things come together to form a repetition, a composite repetition of significant historical events.

Just as in the heyday of Greco-Latin civilization the Romans had to fight the Punic Wars against Carthage, and just as the memorable Battle of Mylae decided the fate of the Romans, who had to flourishing Greco-Roman culture, against the submerging forces of the Carthaginian Empire, which was still strong on the outside, we find something like a repetition of certain events at the starting point of the present war. This may be said here today. A remarkable battle took place between the Romans and the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians had an enormous fleet, which made Rome, with its few ships, seem powerless. So the Romans came up with the unusual idea of building gangplanks that led from ship to ship and, to a certain extent, transformed the naval battle into a land battle, enabling the Romans to achieve a great victory on familiar ground. Just as something unprecedented happened at that time, something that few people could have imagined took place in Liège, which shows a certain relationship to the events described and which future times will speak of as a very first event. I mention these things only because I want to draw attention to the significance of the events within which we are standing in the present.

These are the very days when important decisions in the East and the West are on a knife edge. It is heartbreaking to consider what is facing each other, and especially in these days, when the decision, so to speak, stands before man's gaze as something uncertain, attention may be drawn to something else that is of tremendous importance to be remembered.

I may speak about these things as I will speak, because I am, so to speak, prepared by my karma. I was born in the realm of which it is said that it contributed so much to the war between nations; but growing up, I see that I was destined to be homeless even in childhood. I had no opportunity to experience the peculiar feelings of connection with my fellow countrymen and fellow people. Moreover, my childhood fell at a time when I myself became acquainted with hatred of Germans in Austria, when German-Austria was still under the impression of Prussia's victories, when even the Germans in Austria hated the Reich Germans. There was no opportunity to create a bias for Germany in me. This homelessness, given to me by my karma, entitles me to speak objectively, fully aware that it is precisely there that the anthroposophical attitude can speak through my words. It is not appropriate today to speak prophetic words. Therefore, he who says: where the victory may remain at last is doubtful, may go unheeded. But a victory, an important victory, which is also connected with a spiritual contemplation, which is indelible for all times to come, has already been won. What is this victory? It was won before the outbreak of the war. This victory can be characterized in the following way: Was not the center of Europe connected with the East for a long time? We are truly not speaking of the people who live in the east of Europe. We are well informed about this nation, and anyone who wants to learn the truth about the relationship of this nation to the development of nations should read the lecture cycle “The Mission of Individual National Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology”. The people in the East are different, and so is the triad that currently stands at the forefront of German intellectualism there: tsarism, Russian militarism, which has suffered a defeat, and the lying pan-Slavism. There were threads that went from the heart of Europe to this triad, even if not to its last leaf.

On July 31 of this year, the declaration of war severed and swept away this thread between Germany and Austria's leadership and Tsarist Russia. That was a great victory... [The following is unclear. The meaning seems to be something like that the events that took place at that time between the European center, the Western Powers and Russia, called for reflection on world history. Cf. also the footnote on page 13.]

Significant features of world history lie therein. One need not close one's eyes to the unnaturalness of the alliance between Europe's west and northwest and the east if one stands on anthroposophical ground of justice. Let us only try to continue to practice in these difficult times what we have learned through spiritual science itself and through some of what has been forced upon us.

When we were in dispute with Mrs. Besant, it was even an Indian scholar who said about the way Mrs. Besant shouted for tolerance, Mrs. Besant was doing it as if you were to call out to a person who has had his hand cut off and is defending himself: Be tolerant, otherwise you will start the fight! It shows a lack of thought not to realize that it is absurd to demand that the other person should let his hand be cut off without defending himself.

I have often had to hear it said in recent weeks that if Austria had not started the war with Serbia, it would have been “tolerant”. — Exactly the same case! You tell the one who is about to have his hand cut off: Be tolerant! - We have many ways of gaining objectivity from what is happening so painfully around us, but to do so we must be able to think properly. Learning to think is also one of the tasks of Theosophy. There is a cycle about the folk souls. But if we cannot understand it in the most sacred seriousness in these serious times, then all our previous work with this cycle would be a theoretical game. Only then will these things have become part of our flesh and blood when we know how to feel our way through them, where it is a matter of gaining clarity as is necessary now. In the penultimate lecture of the cycle, I tried to show that the various folk souls relate to one another in the same way as I tried to describe in the last picture of The Portal of Initiation in relation to the interplay of the three soul forces. The content of the speech, the words that each of the three personalities speaks there, must be spoken exactly as they are, since each of the personalities represents one of the three soul members of the human being.

In the penultimate lecture of the cycle on the soul of nations, you are pointed to how, if we take the nations of Italy and Spain, the third post-Atlantic age can be seen to resonate in our time: the character of the people is expressed as the sentient soul. In the case of France, it is the intellectual soul, in the case of England, the consciousness soul, and in the center of Europe, it is the I.

Do we not know that there can be struggles in our own soul, that the individual members can be in conflict with each other? Attention is drawn to this in the second drama, the “Testing of the Soul”. We can gain an insight into what is taking place in our time if we allow everything that is expressed there to take effect on us. And we must try to bring this image into such clarity in our soul that we know how to seek the I in the center of Europe. Thus, in the midst of these days of peace, we have, as it were, in the quiet spiritual work of that cycle, presented to our souls the foundations of something that now weighs heavily on the world. Basically, much of what is happening now will become clear to us if we consider everything that was expressed in the above-mentioned cycle. Only then will we attain the necessary objectivity.

It has happened in all wars that one side blames the other. For us, my dear friends, it is not appropriate to think like that; for us, it is appropriate to think differently. I will explain it with an example.

Imagine someone has grown old and then place yourself next to a child, fresh and full of strength. Would it be wise for the old man to resent the child and say: You child in your youthful power, it is your fault that I carry the infirmities of old age! It is no wiser, for example, to accuse the Germans of being responsible for the war. We must realize that what is happening is rooted in the karma of nations. In the life of nations, too, there is youth and old age; and just as in the life of an individual the freshness of childhood is not to blame for the fact that old age no longer has that freshness, so it is also foolish to make such accusations in the life of nations.

But we must not be blinded by all the talk; we must look at the facts, at the objective reality. The deeper foundations of current events still elude discussion today – apart from the fact that such a discussion would cause bad blood among some people – but I can draw attention to what is important in a different way.

As Anthroposophists, we know that Europe's I rests in the German spirit. - That is an objective occult fact. I would like to call upon a man who was not a Theosophist - he lived in the German spirit - to characterize what the attitude of the I had brought about. I know that this is not the attitude of a single person. It is the spirit of Herman Grimm, who in the spiritual sense still had Goethe's blood in his veins. He speaks the wonderful words: “The solidarity of the moral convictions of all men is today the church that unites us all. We seek more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious aspirations of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that the ethical world view knows no national distinction. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this can be done through war. The assurance that peace is our most sacred wish is no lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.

Take as an answer what anthroposophical teaching brings us. Our spiritual movement wants to bring about the possibility of satisfying such longing. And then there are more words from Herman Grimm: “People as a totality recognize themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which not being allowed to exist they consider a misfortune and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt their inner disputes. With anxious endeavor they seek their right here. How hard the French are trying to present the war against Germany that they are planning as a moral imperative, demanding that other nations recognize it, even the Germans themselves!"

In response to this image, let us take what anthroposophy says about the realms of the hierarchies. It is touching to see how the human spirit, in its best and highest personalities, is full of the deepest longing for what spiritual science wants to bring, but passes it by, does not find it, and how then, with anxious endeavor, people seek their right here.

Then there is another remarkable fact. Herman Grimm says: “How the present-day French are endeavoring to present the war they have in mind against Germany as a moral duty, demanding recognition of it from other nations, yes, even from the Germans themselves!” That is all too well thought out. Is the effort to present this war as a moral imperative not noticeable today from what is coming towards us from the West?

And then there is a third saying by Herman Grimm that I would like to read to you. Again you will find how it is fulfilled in what our movement brings: “The inhabitants of our planet, all conceived as a unity, are filled with an understandable sensitivity that even the most primitive peoples sense and are wary of violating. People today recognize the right of individual self-determination in spiritual matters for each and every one. Even savage human creatures can be led to these thoughts.” But in saying this, Herman Grimm expresses nothing other than the very first principle of our society.

There you can see how our anthroposophy is an answer to the call that the German spirit sounded in the voices of the best of its spiritual life. The heart of Europe has a deep yearning for spirituality. This also sheds light on the fact that wherever Germans go, they adapt to the customs of the country, sacrificing their previous ways of life, not giving up their spiritual culture, but sacrificing their nationality.

All this, my dear friends, is on the one hand suitable for us to be fair, and yet not to close our eyes to what really needs to be considered.

There have also been surprises for the occultist in recent times; and I may say that during my course in Norrköping I was able or had to speak a word that was based on such a surprise. It is true: that these events would have to happen could be foreseen for years, and that they would have to happen this year according to fate. But at the beginning of July there was nothing more to say than that we would gather for the Munich cycle, and then, when we would part – so one could expect – we would face significant events. Then came the assassination in Sarajevo. Although I have often emphasized how different things are on the physical plane from the spiritual plane, and how often the opposite image appears, it was still a surprise to me when I was able to compare the individuality that went through this assassination before and after death. Something remarkable happened: this personality became a cosmic force. I mention this to draw attention to the fact that on the physical plane things are symbolic of the spiritual, and that, strictly speaking, all events on the physical plane can only be explained when seen through the spiritual plane. Some of you know that I once said: 'The horror was in the astral world, but could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear. I said: The horror hovered in the astral world, it could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear, which worked against it as a hindrance. — It was on July 20 that I knew that the forces of fear had now become forces of courage, of daring. An indescribably magnificent fact: the forces of fear became forces of courage. It was no longer inexplicable what took place on the physical plane as such a unique phenomenon: that enthusiasm. That is a fact that was unique to me, and as far as I know, was not known to any occultist before.

Now, you have all witnessed how this enthusiasm seized people in a few days, people who were truly peace-loving before, like a wave of courage washing over them.

Soon came the times when one heard with sadness the enormous sacrifices this war demands. And when I was in Berlin in the first days of September, deep pain moved my soul when I realized what blossoms of German souls had to be sacrificed in the field. I could not help brooding over this pain, and this gave rise to occult research, for which I had no merit. It is in pain that occult knowledge is bestowed upon the soul. The anxious question arose before my soul: if the flower of the leaders of the individual corps masses are carried off in particular, what will become of us then?

And there one could see how it was the fallen ones who, after death on the battlefield, helped those who had to fight after them. That was the result of clairvoyant research. When the dead help the living, it is a consolation in the midst of pain. My dear friends, spiritual science must reach into life at the moments when comfort seems impossible, when the right frame of mind cannot be found. Even there, spiritual knowledge can give the right frame of mind, it can still offer comfort. I know there will be souls in our community who will draw courage from such knowledge in the midst of sad events.

From the study of spiritual science, we know that spiritual beings are the guides and directors of the course of humanity. In the spiritual world, it is prescribed that one thing or another will happen by a certain point in time. Let us assume that it was destined for the people of the Earth to achieve a certain degree of love in order to fight egoism by the year 1950 or 1970. All spiritual science wants to produce this ability to love. It does so in a similar way to how wood produces warmth in a stove. It can be generated through the word; and within our current, attempts are being made to generate it through the great teachings of anthroposophy. But if the response of human souls to the word were insufficient, if things were to proceed too slowly, so that by the time prescribed the capacity for love and sacrifice had not been sufficiently developed, then another teacher must intervene.

In Dornach, it has been symbolically demonstrated. Actually, the intention was to have the building completed by the beginning of August. Nothing came of it; it was not predetermined by karma that the whole building should be completed by that time and should look down from its hill, towering above the area from the east and southeast, as a symbol of the spirit. But the columns with the domes rise up into the wide landscape as a spiritual observatory. In our building, the question of how to create a room with good acoustics will also be resolved. I was able to verify that the right acoustics have been found. The sound, as tested from a certain point, showed that the acoustics were the right ones for the building. But in these acoustics, our friends could not first hear the word of spiritual life. Instead, they first heard the echo of the thunder of guns from the south of Alsace. Instead of light from the spiritual world, vast masses of light from the searchlight of Fort Istein moved into the building and illuminated it. A peculiar symbolism! A symbolism that may perhaps be mentioned after all. Sometimes a different teacher is needed!

Was it not an enormous teacher? Does it not stand in violent opposition to materialism? Then think of all that took place in just one week! Think of the sum total of the fight against selfishness! Think of the sum total of the capacity for sacrifice, of human love that arose!

When I recently returned from Vienna, karma put a newspaper into my hand. It contained an account by an Austrian soldier who went to the field. He begins by describing how, during the journey to the theater of war, the soldiers are shown kindness from all sides, and at the end there is a passage – the warrior has in all likelihood never approached Theosophy – in which he says: “We who go into the field try to stand up for the just cause with all our courage and with all we have; but those who stay at home can also work.” Then come the big words, he says: “Those whom God hears, pray; those who cannot pray, gather all their thoughts and willpower into a fervent desire for victory...” and in this way he does his part! For many years we have spoken of the power of feeling. So now in a simple soldier lives what we have cultivated in years of work. No matter what the immediate result may be, one thing the event will produce is spirituality in the human soul, which would otherwise not have found it for a long time.

These events are great. They can only be compared with great events of the past, which cyclically overlap each other. Just as the struggle of the Romans against the Carthaginians, and the wars of the great migrations, were important and influential for the emerging culture of the peoples, so the struggle in the midst of which we stand is no less significant. And from some of the words I speak, one thing will be able to live in your hearts: that those who today shed their blood in the field, in battle, offer this blood as a sacrifice for something that must happen. It must happen for the good of humanity. And when we look at the great sacrifices, at the pain, one thing can fill us, if not with joy, then at least with great inner satisfaction: that holy blood flows, sanctified by the events; and those who shed it will become the most important members for future times. Much will become clear to us if we can bring ourselves to see in the flowing blood a hallowed sacrificial blood. If we imbue our souls with this truth, then the spirit will bear fruit in us. I may say it: what that simple soldier said can be fulfilled in the souls of our dear anthroposophical friends.

The thoughts that are cherished in the anthroposophical soul as convictions will resonate particularly strongly there; and this is necessary if the formula that we put at the beginning of our remarks is to have an effect. Among the fighters there are already those who serve in the right faith.

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,
May your wings bring
Our souls' imploring love
To earthlings who trust in your protection,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may help to radiate
The souls it lovingly seeks.

My dear friends! The purpose of my lecture today was to enable us to confront the meaning of what we have learned in our thoughts with current events, so that we can pass the test, so that we can look at events and circumstances with a just eye. Spirituality will also come through that great teacher who is now moving through Europe. But man is born to freedom. Much depends on those who are united with us in the spiritual movement. If the anthroposophical thoughts are now right in the time of trial in your souls, then that space, which is now filled with passions flowing in confusion, will be filled with brightly shining spiritual thoughts, with holy, genuine feelings. Such feelings will live on forever.

Many a night I pray that there may be many anthroposophists sending out such radiant, luminous thought-power; and if we can also find the right volition for it, we will have the opportunity to fulfill our place in true service of love. Let us be mindful of where we may bring love actively into the world. Our karma will bring it about, whether we are here or there, that this or that will be demanded of us, for which we are currently destined.

With tears in my eyes, I read a letter from a young Austrian to his mother, who on July 26 heard the words spoken in Dornach, and how what Anthroposophy can give in terms of attitude and strength lives in his heart, and lets him fulfill his duty where fate has placed him. And the same feelings and thoughts came to me from the letter of another young friend who had also attended that meeting in Dornach and then gone to the front. Such thoughts and feelings are what must live in souls today: where duty presents itself, we seek to fulfill it, exercise our judgment and be mindful where our love is required. Then one thing will be fulfilled in the future: When the peoples of Europe will no longer face each other in battle, the thoughts that we are sending out now will remain, they will be the strongest, they will represent an eternity. What we feel now will be a blessing when it is combined with the feeling that victory is inevitable: the victory of the spirit.

Remarkable words were spoken by a statesman in Germany this spring. Regarding our relationship with Russia, he said that Germany was on friendly terms with Petersburg, which was determined not to pay attention to pressurizing. And in July it was said about England that the relaxation was progressing, that the negotiations with England had not yet been concluded, but that they would be continued in this sense. Such was the language of a notable statesman in July. Read these words again now and try to realize how human judgment stands before the flood of events. But one thing can be illuminated from these words: we did not want the war! Oh, one would like – understand me correctly! – to be non-German, to put it grotesquely, so that these words would receive the attention they deserve, so that they could be given the emphasis they deserve.

But the human soul needs something lasting, not something that is spoken of today in terms that prove untenable tomorrow; it needs something that is the truth today and that is the truth tomorrow. It will only find such truth by connecting with the spirit. We can trust in the spirit's triumph. Those who connect with the spirit will find the right path to that wisdom that can only arise from the connection with the spirit. Just in the week before the outbreak of war, I had to read sentences in a newspaper like the following: Despite Liebknecht's reprimand, I believe that in political life one does not need to tell the truth unless it would come out or harm oneself. The saying is shaped by the materialism of our time, in which we would suffocate were it not for this war, and which our movement has taken upon itself to overcome. In contrast to the incredible nature of such a saying, our movement's first sentence is: “Wisdom lies only in truth.”

This shows how much we need the Spirit of Truth if we want to grasp things in their reality. For it is a matter of penetrating to that objectivity which can only be attained through the Spirit of Truth. Then it will be possible even today to recognize what a later time will recognize: that this war is a conspiracy against German intellectual life.

The saying that addresses the national spirit can help us to achieve such objectivity:

Spirit of my earthly home!
Unfold the light of your age
To the soul endowed with Christ,
So that striving, it may find
In the choir of the spheres of peace
You, resounding with the praise and power
Of the Christ-devoted human sense!

Much can come from this for our souls and for finding the right path if we vividly unite with this soul, which can come to us from such a saying. But then I know that something will happen, that an important link in what is to develop will be there, something that will live in the anthroposophical soul and that anthroposophy will bring into the world, that hopes will be met that I can express in summary with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

That, my dear friends, is what matters: we want to practice labor of love, to watch attentively for the demands of the day. And then we want to look into the circumstances without prejudice and clearly in order to achieve the kind of objectivity that is necessary today and that is so difficult for many to achieve. Perhaps those of our friends from outside the movement who hear these words can also help to clarify them.

If we can achieve such objectivity and such a willingness to work and love, then a strength can arise from such efforts that can be utilized by those spirits who send their work into the destinies of nations and who also stand by humanity to help and guide in these serious and difficult times.

• 1. Note from the editors: The transcription of this lecture cannot be considered completely reliable. There are indications of gaps in the written record of the spoken words, and even of errors. The reader is referred to the notes at the end of the volume.

[ 1 ] In the social movement of the present day there is a great deal of talk about social institutions, but very little about social and unsocial human beings. Very little regard is paid to that “social question” which arises when one considers that institutions in a community take their social or anti-social stamp from the people who work them. Persons of a socialistic turn of thought expect to see in the control of the means of production by the community what will satisfy the requirements of a wide range of the people. They take for granted that, under communal control, the co-operation between men will necessarily take a social form as well. They have seen that the industrial system ordered on lines of private capitalism has led to unsocial conditions. They think that, when once this industrial system has disappeared, the anti-social tendencies at work in it will also necessarily be at an end.

[ 2 ] Undoubtedly, along with the modern private capitalist form of industrial economy there have arisen social evils—evils that embrace the widest range of social life; but is this in any way a proof that they are a necessary consequence of this industrial system? Now, an industrial system can, of its own proper nature, effect nothing beyond putting men into situations in life that enable them to produce goods for themselves or for others in a useful, or in a useless, manner. The modern industrial system has brought the means of production under the power of individual persons or groups of persons. The achievements of technical science were such that the best use could be got out of them by a concentration of industrial and economic power. So long as this power is employed in the one field—the production of goods alone—its social working is essentially different from what it is when this power oversteps the bounds and trespasses on the other fields of civil rights or spiritual culture. And it is this trespassing on the other fields, which, in the course of the last few centuries, has led to those social evils for whose abolition the modern social movement is pressing. He who is in possession of the means of production acquires economic dominion over others. This economic dominion has resulted in his allying himself with the forces to be found in the governments and parliaments through which he could procure other posts of vantage also in society, as against those who were economically dependent on him: posts of vantage which, even in a democratically constituted state, bear in practice the character of rights. Similarly, this economic dominion has led to a monopolizing of the life of spiritual culture by those who held economic power.

[ 3 ] Now, the simplest thing seems to be to get rid of this economic predominance of individuals, and thereby do away with their predominance in rights and spiritual culture as well. One arrives at this “simplicity” of social conception when one fails to remember that the combination of technical and economic activity, which modern life demands, necessitates allowing the most fruitful possible expansion to individual initiative and personal worth within the business of economic life. The form which production must take under modern conditions makes this a necessity. The individual cannot make his abilities effective in business if in his work and schemes he is tied down to the will of the community. However dazzling the thought of the individual producing not for himself but for society collectively, yet its justice within certain bounds should not hinder one from also recognizing the other truth, that society collectively is incapable of originating economic schemes that permit of being realized through individuals in the manner desirable. Really practical thought, therefore, will not look to find the cure for social ills in a reshaping of social life that would substitute communal production for private management of the means of production. The endeavour should rather be to forestall evils that may spring up along with management by individual initiative and personal worth, without impairing this management itself. This is only possible if the relations of civil right amongst those engaged in economic industry are not influenced by the interests of industrial and economic life.

[ 4 ] It cannot be said that those who manage the business of economic life can, although occupied by economic interests, yet preserve a sound judgment as to relations of right, and that, because their experience and work have made them well acquainted with the requirements of economic life, they therefore will be able to settle best the life also of civil rights that should grow up in the round of economic business. To hold such an opinion is to overlook the fact that out of any special sphere of life man can only develop the interests peculiar to that sphere. Out of the economic sphere he can develop economic interests only. And if out of this sphere he is called on to produce moral and civil interests as well, then these will merely be economic interests in disguise. Genuine moral and civil interest—interests of Rights—can only spring up upon a ground specially devoted to the life of Rights, where the only consideration will be, what the rights of a matter are. Then, when people proceed from considerations of this sort to frame rules of right, the rule thus made will take effect in economic life. It will then not be necessary to place restrictions on the individual in respect of acquiring economic power; for such economic power will only result in his rendering economic services proportionate to his abilities—not in his using it to obtain special rights and privileges in social life.

[ 5 ] A similar objection is, that relations of right after all show themselves in people’s dealings with one another in business, so that it is quite impossible to conceive of them as something distinct and apart from economic life. Theoretically that is right enough, but it does not necessarily follow that in practice economic interests should be paramount in determining these relations of right. The manager who spiritually directs the business must necessarily occupy a relation of Right towards the manual workers in the same business; but this does not mean that he, qua business manager, is to have a say in determining what that relation is to be. But he will have a say in it, and will throw his economic predominance into the scales if business co-operation and the settlement of relations in Right take place in one common field of administration. Only when Rights are ordered in a field where business considerations cannot in any way come into question, and where business methods can procure no power as against this system of Rights, will the two be able to work together in such a way that men’s sense of right will not be injured, nor economic ability be turned into a curse instead of a blessing for the community as a whole.

[ 6 ] When those who are economically powerful are in a position to use their power to wrest privileged rights for themselves, then amongst the economically weak there will grow up a corresponding opposition to these privileges; and this opposition will, as soon as it has grown strong enough, lead to revolutionary disturbances. If the existence of a special province of Rights makes it impossible for such privileged rights to arise, then disturbances of this sort cannot occur. What this special province of Rights does is to give constant orderly scope to those forces which, in its absence, accumulate within men, until at last they vent themselves violently. Whoever wants to avoid revolutions should study to establish an order of society which shall accomplish in the steady flow of time what otherwise will seek accomplishment in one epoch-making moment.

[ 7 ] People will say that the social movement of modern times is immediately concerned, not with relations of Right, but with the removal of economic inequalities. To such objection one must reply that the demands stirring within men are in nowise always correctly expressed in the thoughts they consciously form about them. The thoughts thus consciously formed are the outcome of direct experiences ; but the demands themselves have their origin in complexes of life that are much deeper-seated, and that are not directly experienced. And if one aims at bringing about conditions of life which can satisfy these demands, one must attempt to get down to these deeper-seated complexes. A consideration of the relations that have come about between industrial economy and civil right shows that the life of civil rights amongst men has come to be dependent on their economic life. Now, if one were to try superficially, by a lopsided alteration in the forms of economic life, to abolish those economic inequalities that the dependence of rights on economics has brought with it, then in a very short while similar inequalities would inevitably result, supposing the new economic order were again allowed to build up the system of rights after its own fashion. One will never really touch what is working itself up through the social movement to the surface of modern life until one brings about social conditions in which, alongside the claims and interests of the economic life, those of Rights can find realization and satisfaction on their own independent basis.

[ 8 ] It is in a similar manner, again, that one must approach the question of the spiritual life and its bearings on that of civil rights and of industrial economy. The course of the last few centuries has been such, that the spiritual life has been cultivated under conditions which only to a very limited extent allowed of its exercising an independent influence upon the political life—that of civil rights—or upon industrial economy. One of the most important branches of spiritual culture—the whole manner of education and public instruction—took its shape from the interests of the civil power. According as State-interests required, so the human being was trained and taught; and State-power was reinforced by economic power. If anyone was to develop his capacities as a human being within the existing provisions for education and training, he had to do so on the ground of such economic power as his sphere in life afforded. Accordingly, those spiritual forces that could find scope within the life of political rights or of industrial economy acquired entirely the stamp of this life. Any free spiritual life had to forego all idea of making itself useful within the sphere of the political state, and could only do so within the industrial economic sphere, in as far as this remained outside the sphere of the political state’s activities. In industrial economy, after all, the necessity is obvious for allowing the competent person to find full scope—since all fruitful activity in this sphere dies out when left solely under the control of the Incompetent whom circumstances may have endowed with economic power. If, however, the tendency common among people of a socialistic turn of thought were carried out, and economic life were administered after the fashion of political and legal ideas, then the result would be that the culture of the free spiritual life would be forced to withdraw altogether from the public field. But a spiritual life that has to develop apart from civil and economic realities loses touch with life. It is forced to draw its substantial contents from sources that are not in live connection with these realities, and in course of time works this substance up into such a shape as to run on like a sort of animated abstraction alongside the actual realities, without having any useful practical effect upon them. And so two different currents arise in the spiritual life. One of them draws its waters from the life of political rights and the life of economics, and is occupied with the requirements which come up in these from day to day, trying to devise systems by which these requirements can be met—without, however, penetrating to the needs of man’s spiritual nature. All it does is to devise external systems and harness men into them, without paying any heed to what their inner nature has to say about it.

The other current of spiritual life proceeds from the inward craving for knowledge and from ideals of the will. These it shapes to suit man’s inward nature. But knowledge of this latter kind is derived from contemplation: it is not the gist of what has been taught by the experience of practical life. These ideals have arisen from conceptions of what is true and good and beautiful; but they have not the strength to shape the practice of life. Consider what conceptions of the mind, what religious ideals, what artistic interests, form the inward life of the shopkeeper, the manufacturer, the government official, outside and apart from his daily practical life; and then consider what ideas are contained in those activities which find expression in his bookkeeping, or for which he is trained by the education and instruction that prepare him for his profession. A gulf lies between the two currents of spiritual life. The gulf has grown all the wider in recent years because that particular mode of conception that in natural science is quite justified has become the standard of man’s relation to reality. This mode of conception sets out to acquire knowledge of laws in things and processes that lie beyond the field of human activity and human influences; so that man is as it were a mere spectator of that which he comprehends in a scheme of natural law. And though in his technical processes he sets these laws of nature working, yet hereby he himself does no more than give occasion for the action of forces which lie outside his own being and nature. The knowledge that he employs in this kind of activity bears a character quite different from his own nature. It reveals to him nothing of what lies in cosmic processes in which his own being is interwoven. For such knowledge as this he needs a conception of the universe that unites in one whole both the world of man and the world outside him.

[ 9 ] It is a knowledge such as this for which that modern spiritual science is striving that is directed to Anthroposophy. Whilst fully recognizing all that the natural science mode of conception means for the progress of modern humanity, anthroposophical science yet sees that all that can be arrived at by the natural science mode of knowledge will never embrace more than the external man. It also recognizes the essential nature of the religious conceptions of the world, but is aware that in the course of the new-age evolution these conceptions of the world have become an internal concern of the soul, not applied by men in any way to the reshaping of their external life, which runs on separately alongside.

[ 10 ] It is true that, to arrive at such a form of knowledge, spiritual science makes demands upon men to which they are as yet but little inclined, because in the last few centuries they have grown habituated to carrying on their practical life and their inner soul-life as two separate and distinct departments of their existence. This habit has resulted in the attitude of incredulity that meets every endeavour to make use of spiritual insight in forming an opinion about life’s social configuration. People have in mind their past experience of social ideas, that were born of a spiritual culture estranged from life: and when there is any talk of such things, they recall St. Simon, Fourier, and others besides. And the opinion people have formed about ideas of this sort is justified, inasmuch as such ideas are the outcome of a tendency of learning which acquires its knowledge not from living experience but from a process of reasoning. And from this people have generalized and concluded that no kind of spirit is adapted to produce ideas that bear sufficient relation to practical life to admit of being realized. From this general theory come the various views which in their modern form are all more or less traceable to Marx. Those who hold them have no use for ideas as active agents in bringing about satisfactory social conditions. Rather they maintain that the evolution of the actual facts of economic life is tending inevitably to a goal of which such conditions are the result. They are inclined to let practical life take more or less its own course, on the ground that in actual practice ideas are powerless. They have lost faith in the strength of spiritual life. They do not believe that there can be any kind of spiritual life able to overcome the remoteness and unreality which characterize the form of it that has predominated during the last few centuries.

It is a kind of spiritual life such as this, nevertheless, which is pursued by anthroposophical science. The sources from which it seeks to draw are the sources of actual reality itself. Those forces which sway the inmost nature of man are the same forces that are at work in the actual reality outside man. The natural science mode of conception cannot get down to these forces, being engaged in working up an intellectual code of natural law out of the experiences acquired from external facts. Nor are the world-conceptions, founded on a more or less religious basis, any longer at the present day in touch with these forces. They accept their traditions as handed down to them, without penetrating to their fountain-head in the depths of man’s being. Spiritual science, however, seeks to get to this fountainhead. It develops methods of knowledge which lead down into those regions of the inner man where the processes external to man find their continuation within man himself. The knowledge that spiritual science has to give presents a reality actually experienced in man’s inner self. The ideas that emerge from it are not the outcome of reasoning, but imbued through and through with the forces of actual reality. Hence such ideas are able to carry with them the force of actual reality when they come to give the lines for social aim and purpose. One can well understand that, at the first, a spiritual science such as this should meet with distrust. But such distrust will not last when people come to recognize the essential difference that exists between this spiritual science and the particular current recently developed in science, and which to-day is assumed to be the only one possible. Once people come to recognize the difference, they will cease to believe that one must avoid social ideas when one is bent on the practical shaping of social facts. They will begin to see, instead, that practical social ideas are obtainable only from a spiritual life that can find its way to the roots of human nature. People will clearly see that in modern times social facts have fallen into disorder because people have tried to master them by thoughts which these facts were constantly eluding.

[ 11 ] A spiritual conception that penetrates to the essential being of man finds there motives for action which in the ethical sense too are directly good. For the impulse towards evil arises in man only because in his thoughts and sensations he silences the depths of his own nature. Accordingly, social ideas that are arrived at through the sort of spiritual conception here meant must by their very nature be ethical ideas as well. And being drawn, not from thought alone, but from life, they possess the strength to lay hold upon the will and to live on in action. In the light of a true ethical conception, social thought and ethical thought become one. And the life that grows out of such a spiritual conception is intimately linked with every form of activity that man develops in life—even in his practical dealings with the most insignificant matters. So, through this spiritual conception, social instinct, ethical impulse, and practical conduct become interwoven in such a way as to form a unity.

[ 12 ] This kind of spirit, however, can thrive only when its growth is completely independent of all authority except such as is derived directly from the spiritual life itself. Legal regulations by the civil state for the nurture of the spirit sap the strength of the forces of spiritual life. Whereas a spiritual life that is left entirely to its own inherent interests and impulses will reach out into everything that man performs in social life. It is frequently objected that mankind would need to be completely changed before one could ground social behaviour on the ethical impulses. People do not reflect what ethical impulses in men wither away when they are not allowed to grow up from a free spiritual life, but are forced to take the particular turn that the politico-legal structure of society finds necessary for carrying on work in the spheres it has mapped out beforehand. A person brought up and educated under the free spiritual life will certainly, through his very initiative, bring with him into his calling much of the stamp of his own personality. He will not let himself be fitted into the social works like a cog into a machine. But, in the long run, what he thus brings into it will not hamper, but increase, the harmony of the whole. What goes on in each particular part of the communal life will be the outcome of what lives in the spirits of the people at work there.

[ 13 ] People whose souls breathe the atmosphere created by a spirit such as this will put life into the institutions needed for practical economic purposes, and in such a way that social needs too will be satisfied. Institutions that people think they can devise to satisfy these social needs will never work socially with men whose inner nature feels itself out of unison with their outward occupation. For institutions of themselves cannot work socially. To work socially requires human beings, socially attuned, working within an ordered system of civil rights created by a living interest in this Rights system, and with an economic life that produces in the most efficient fashion the goods required for actual needs.

[ 14 ] If the life of the spirit be a free one, evolved only from those impulses that reside within itself, then civil life will thrive in proportion as people are educated intelligently, from real spiritual experience, in the adjustment of their civil relations and rights. And then, too, economic life will be fruitful in the measure in which men’s spiritual nurture has developed their capacity for it.

[ 15 ] Every institution that has grown up in men’s communal life is originally the result of the Will that dwelt in their aims; and their spiritual life has contributed to its growth. Only when life becomes complicated in form, as it has under the technical methods of production of the modern age, then the Will that dwells in the thoughts loses touch with the actual social facts. These latter then take their own automatic course. And man withdraws himself in the spirit to a corner apart, and there seeks the spiritual substance to satisfy the needs of his soul.

It is from this mechanical course of affairs, over which the will of the individual spirit had no control, that those conditions have arisen which the modern social movement aims at changing. It is because the spirit that is at work within the civil life of rights and in the round of industry is no longer one through which the individual spiritual life can find its channel, that the individual sees himself in a social order which gives him, as an individual, no scope civically nor economically.

People who do not clearly see this will always raise an objection to the conception of the body social as an organism consisting of three systems, each to be worked on its own distinct basis—i. e., the Spiritual life, the State for the administration of Rights, and the round of Industrial Economy. They will protest that such a differentiation will destroy the necessary unity of communal life. To this one must reply that right now this unity is destroying itself in the effort to maintain itself intact. The life of rights, that grows up out of economic power, in its actual working undermines this economic power, because it is felt by those economically inferior to be a foreign body within the social organism. That spirit coming to be dominant in civil rights and economic life, when these control its workings, condemns the living spirit—which in each individual is working its way up from the soul’s depths—to powerlessness in the face of practical life. If, however, the system of civil rights grows up on independent ground out of the sense of right, and if the Will of the individual dwelling in the spirit is developed in a free life of the spirit, then the Rights system and Spiritual force and Economic activity all work together into a unity. They will be able to do so when they can develop, each according to its own proper nature, in distinct fields of life. It is just in separation that they will turn to unity; whereas, shaped from an artificial unity, they become estranged. [ 16 ] People of a socialist way of thinking will, many of them, dismiss such a conception as this with the phrase that it is not possible to bring about satisfactory conditions of life through this organic formation of society; that it can only be done through a suitable economic organization. In so saying they overlook the fact that the men at work in their economic organization are endowed with wills. If one tells them so, they will smile, for they regard it as self-evident. Yet their thoughts are busy constructing a social edifice in which this “self-evident” fact is left out of account. Their economic organization is to be controlled by a communal will. But this, after all, must be the resultant of the individual wills of the people united in the organization. These individual wills can never find scope, if the communal will is derived entirely from the idea of economic organization. But the individual wills can expand untrammelled if, alongside the economic province, there is a civil province of Rights, where the standard is set, not by any economic point of view, but by the sense of right alone; and if, alongside both the economic and civil provinces, a free spiritual life can find place, following the impulsion of the spirit alone. Then we shall not have a social order going by clockwork, to which individual wills could never permanently be fitted. Then human beings will find it possible to give their wills a social bent, and to bring them constantly to bear on the shaping of social circumstances. Under the free spiritual life the individual will will acquire its social bent. Under a self-based civil state of Rights, these individual wills, socially attuned, will result in a communal will that works aright. And the individual wills, socially centred, and organized by the independent system of rights, will exert themselves within the round of industrial economy, producing and distributing goods as social needs require. [ 17 ] Most people to-day still lack faith in the possibility of establishing a social order based on individual wills. They have no faith in it, because such a faith cannot come from a spiritual life that has developed in dependence on the life of the State and of industrial economy. The kind of spirit that does not develop in freedom out of the life of the spirit itself, but out of an exterior organization, simply does not know what the potentialities of the spirit are. It looks round for something to guide and manage it—not knowing how the spirit guides and manages itself, if it can but draw its strength from its own sources. It would like to have a board of management for the spirit as a sort of branch department of the economic and civil organizations, quite regardless of the fact that industrial economy and the system of rights can only live when permeated with the spirit that follows its own leading.

[ 18 ] For the reshaping of the social order, goodwill alone is not the only thing needful. It needs also that courage which can be a match for the lack of faith in the spirit’s power. A true spiritual conception can inspire this courage: for such a spiritual conception feels able to bring forth ideas that not only serve to give the soul its inward orientation, but which, in their very birth, bring with them the seeds of life’s practical configuration. The will to go down into the deep places of the spirit can become a will so strong as to bear a part in everything that man performs.

[ 19 ] When one speaks of a spiritual conception having its roots in life, quite a number of people take one to mean the sum-total of those instincts in which a man takes refuge who travels along the familiar rails of life and holds every intervention from spiritual regions to be a piece of cranky idealism. The spiritual conception that is meant here, however, must be confounded neither with that abstract spirituality which is incapable of extending its interests to practical life, nor yet with that spiritual tendency which as good as denies the spirit directly it comes to consider the guiding lines of practical life. Both these modes of conception ignore how the spirit rules in the facts of external life, and therefore feel no real urgency for consciously penetrating its rulings. Yet only such a sense of urgency brings forth that knowledge which sees the social question in its true light. The experiments now being made to solve the social question afford such unsatisfactory results because many people have not yet become able to sec what the true gist of the question is. They sec this question arise in economic regions, and they look to economic institutions to provide the answer. They think they will find the solution in economic transformations. They fail to recognize that these transformations can only come about through forces that are released from within human nature itself in the uprising of a new spiritual life and life of rights in their own independent domains.

The times themselves speak clearly enough, demanding that we should apply to the conditions and activities of these times those feelings and modes of thinking which we have acquired from our studies of Spiritual Science. Not only do outward circumstances speak clearly, but our conceptions of Spiritual Science also justify us in a certain way, especially in what we have to say today. In many of our basic ways of looking at the world, we have started from one fundamental fact of human evolution, from the fact that this evolution is accomplished by successive stages of which the most important and most related to us began with the great Atlantean Catastrophe, namely this Post-Atlantean Epoch. Four periods of it have passed by, while we are now living in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period. This period of development, which began in the 15th century of our Christian era, is the one which we can designate as the period of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul. Other soul forces have been especially evolved in other periods of civilization. In our civilization which has followed the Greco-Latin civilization from the first half of the 15th century, humanity must gradually develop the Spiritual Soul. The preceding period, which commenced in the 8th century B.C. and finished in the 15th century A.D., was pre-eminently the period in which humanity developed the Intellectual or Mind Soul.

Now we need not give a full description of these cultural stages, but we will particularly look at what is a peculiarity of our age—this age which has comparatively few centuries behind it. Each age lasts on average about 2000 years. Therefore much remains to be done in this period of the Spiritual Soul. The task of humanity—of civilized humanity in this age of the Spiritual Soul—will be that of laying hold of the whole human being and making him entirely dependent on himself, of lifting into the full light of consciousness much of that which in earlier periods man felt instinctively and judged instinctively.

Many present difficulties and much that is chaotic around us in our era, become quite explicable when one knows that the task of our era is to raise that which is instinctive to the plane of consciousness. What is instinctive in us happens to a certain degree by itself, but to achieve a conscious result one must make an inward effort, above all, to begin to think truly with one's whole being. Man tries to avoid this, he does not willingly take a conscious part in the shaping of world conditions. Here is a point over which many are indeed deceived today. Men today think the following: Well, today we live in the period of the development of thought. People are proud of the fact that there is more thinking nowadays than in the past. But this is an illusion—one of the many illusions in which humanity lives today. This comprehension on which people pride themselves today is mainly instinctive. Only when the instinctive nature which has appeared in the evolution of humanity and which so proudly speaks of thought—only when this instinctive nature becomes instead an active element, when the intellect does not depend merely on the brain but springs from the whole man, when it is separated from rationalism and is lifted to the plane of Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition—only then will that gradually emerge which seeks to emerge in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Period, the period of the Spiritual Soul. That which meets man today and which is clearly indicated even in the worldly thought of the present epoch is something which one continuously needs to mention the appearance of the so-called Social Question.

But he who has earnestly studied our anthroposophically oriented Spiritual Science will easily perceive that the essential impulse in the shaping of the social order (whether belonging to the State or not) must come from that which human beings can develop out of themselves, as it is this which regulates the relationship between people. Everything which the human being develops out of himself naturally corresponds to certain impulses which are ultimately found in our soul and spirit life. If one looks at the matter this way, one is able to ask: Must attention not then be directed above all to the social impulses or to the social instincts, movements or forces emerging in human nature? We can, if you like, call these social impulses, social drives; but we must keep in mind that they should not only be thought of as mere unconscious instincts since when we speak of social instincts today, we must take into account that we live in the age of the Consciousness Soul and that these drives seek to press up into consciousness.

Now, if these things are to count for us, then we must find social impulses which seek to become reality. But in so doing we must recognize the terrible one-sidedness of our age, which should not of course be deplored, but which should be looked at calmly because it has to be overcome. Man has such a great inclination in our day to look at things one-sidedly. But a pendulum cannot swing from the central point out to one side without also swinging back to the other. Just as little as a pendulum can swing to one side only, can social impulses of men be expressed by only one side. This is because the social impulses are quite naturally opposed by anti-social impulses in the human being. Precisely because one finds social impulses or drives in human nature, one also finds the opposite. This fact must above all be considered.

The social leaders and agitators, for example, live in the illusion that they need only spread certain ideas or need only appeal to a class of man who is willing and disposed (provided ideas are there) to help forward the social impulse. It is an illusion to act in this way, for in so doing one forgets that if social forces are working, then anti-social forces are also present. What we must be able to do today is to look these things straight in the face without illusion. It is only from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science that they can be looked at straightly without illusion. One is tempted to say that people are sleeping through the most important thing of all in life when they do not begin to look at life from the viewpoint of Spiritual Science.

We must ask ourselves: What is the relation between people with regard to social and anti-social forces? We need to see that the relationship between people is fundamentally a complicated matter. When one person meets another, I would say we must look into the situation radically. Meetings of course point to differences which vary according to specific circumstances; but we must fix our eyes on the common characteristics, we must clearly see the common elements in the meeting, in the confrontation between one person and another. We must ask ourselves: What really happens then, not merely in that which presents itself to the senses, but in the total situation, when one person stands opposite another, when one person meets another? Nothing less than that a certain force works from one person to the other. The meeting of one with another leads to the working of a certain force between them. We cannot confront another person in life with indifference, not even in mere thoughts and feelings, even though we may be separated from them by distance. If we have any kind of relation to other people, or any communication with them, then a force flows between us creating a bond. It is this fact which lies at the basis of social life and which, when broadened, is really the foundation for the social structure of humanity.

One sees this phenomenon most clearly when one thinks of the direct interchange between two people. The impression which one person makes on the other has the effect of lulling the other to sleep. Thus we frequently find in social life that one person gets lulled to sleepiness by the other with whom he has interchange. As a physicist might say: a “latent tendency” is always there for one man to lull another to sleep in social relationships.

Why is this so? Well, we must see that this rests on a very important arrangement of man's total being. It rests on the fact that what we call social impulses, fundamentally speaking are only present in people of our present day consciousness during sleep. You are, in so far as you have not yet attained clairvoyance, really only penetrated by social forces when you are asleep, and only that which continues to work out of sleeping into waking conditions works into ordinary waking consciousness as a social impulse. When you know this, you do not need to be surprised when your social being seeks to lull you to sleep in your relationship with others. In the relationship between people the social impulse ought to develop. Yet it can only develop during sleep. Therefore in the relationship between people a tendency is shown for one person to dull the consciousness of the other so that a social relation may be established between them. This striking fact is evident to one who studies the realities of life. Above all things, our interchange with one another leads to dulling the consciousness of one another, in the interests of a social impulse between people. Of course you cannot go about continually asleep in life. Yet the tendency to establish social impulses consists in, and expresses itself by, an inclination to sleep. That of which I speak goes on subconsciously of course, but it nevertheless actually penetrates our life continuously. Thus there exists a permanent disposition to fall asleep precisely for the building up of the social structure of humanity.

On the other hand, something else is also working. A perpetual struggle and opposition to falling asleep in social relationships is also present. If you meet a person you are continuously standing in a conflict situation in the following way: Because you meet him, the tendency to sleep always develops in you so that you may experience your relationship to him in sleep. But, at the same time, there is aroused in you the counter-force to keep yourself awake. This always happens in the meeting between people—a tendency to fall asleep, a tendency to keep awake. In this situation a tendency to keep awake has an anti-social character, the assertion of one's individuality, of one's personality, in opposition to the social structure of society. Simply because we are human beings, our soul-life swings to and fro between the social and the antisocial. And that which lives in us as these two forces, which may be observed between people communicating, can from an occult perspective be seen to govern our life. When we meet social arrangements and structures in society, even if these arrangements seem far-fetched from the seemingly wise consciousness of the present, they are still a manifestation of this pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The national economist may reflect upon what credit, capital and interest are. Yet even these things which make for regularity in social transactions are only outward swings of the pendulum between social and anti-social forces. The person who seeks to find healing remedies for these times must intelligently and scientifically connect with these facts. For how is it that social demands arise in our time? Well, we live in the age of the Spiritual or Consciousness Soul in which man must become independent. But on what does this depend? It depends on people's ability during our Fifth Post-Atlantean Period to become self-assertive, to not allow themselves to be put to sleep. It is the anti-social forces which require development in this time, for consciousness to be present. It would not be possible for mankind in the present to accomplish its task if just these anti-social forces did not become ever more powerful; they are indeed the pillars on which personal independence rests. At present, humanity has no idea how much more powerful anti-social impulses must become, right on until the 30th century. For men to progress properly, anti-social forces must develop

In earlier periods the development of the anti-social forces was not the spiritual bread of humanity's evolution. There was therefore no need to establish a counter-force. Indeed none was set. In our day, when a person on his own account, for his individual self, must evolve antisocial forces, which are evolving because man is now subjected to this evolution against which nothing will prevail, there must also come about that with which man resists them: a social structure which will balance this anti-social evolutionary tendency. The anti-social forces must work inwardly so that human beings may reach the height of their development. Outwardly, in social life, structures must work so that people do not totally lose their outer connections in life. Hence the social demands of the present. They can in a certain sense be seen as the demand for a justified outer balance to the inward, essentially anti-social evolutionary tendency of humanity in the Fifth Post-Atlantean Epoch.

From this you can see that nothing is accomplished by seeing things in a one-sided way. As men live nowadays, certain words (I will not say ideas or feelings), certain words have certain values. The word “anti-social” arouses a degree of antipathy. It is considered as something evil. Very well; we perhaps need not trouble ourselves whether it is considered good or bad, since it is quite necessary. Be it good or bad, it is connected with the necessary tendencies of evolution in our time. It is simply sheer nonsense to say that the anti-social impulses must be resisted, for they cannot be resisted. One must grasp the essential inner development of mankind in our time, understand the evolutionary tendency. It is not a matter of finding prescriptions for resisting the anti-social forces; but of so shaping, of so arranging the social order, the structure, the organization of that which lies outside of the individual, that a counter-balance is present to that which works as anti-social force within human beings. Therefore it is vital for our time that the individual achieves independence, but that social forms provide a balance to this independence. Otherwise neither the individual nor society can develop properly.

In earlier periods there were tribes and classes. Our age strives against this. Our age is no longer able to divide people into classes but must consider them in their totality and create social structures which take this totality into account. I said yesterday in my public lecture that slavery could exist in the Greco-Latin Period; one was the master, the other the slave. Then men were divided. Today we have as a remnant just that which disturbs the working-man so much, namely that his power to work is sold; in this way something belonging to him is organized from outside. This must go; it is only possible to organize socially what does not integrally belong to the human being, such as his position or the function to which he is appointed, in short, something which is not an inner part of the individual. All this which we acknowledge with regard to the necessary development of social democracy is really so, and must be so understood.

Just as no man can claim to do arithmetic if he has never learned his multiplication tables, so too he cannot claim to discuss social reforms and the like when he has never learned those things which we have just explained: namely, that socialism and anti-socialism exist quite concretely in the way described. People in some of the most important positions in society, when they begin talking about present social demands, often appear to those who know, as individuals who wish to begin building a bridge over a rushing stream without having the most elementary knowledge of mechanics. They may well be able to put up a bridge, but it will collapse at the first opportunity. It seems with social leaders or with those who look after social institutions, that their plans will be shown to be impossible; for the things of reality demand that we work with them, and not against them. It is therefore tremendously important that those things which form the backbone of our anthroposophical thought and consciousness should one day be taken seriously.

One of the impulses which ensoul us in the sphere of our anthroposophical movement is that we, in a sense, carry into the whole of man's life that which most people apply only to youth. We sit on the “school-bench” of life long after we have become grey. This is one of the differences between us and others, who believe that at the age of 25, or sometimes 26, when they have finished lazying about with their education, that they are ready for the rest of life—at most there may still be some amusing additions to one's education.

But when we approach the very nerve of Spiritual Science, we feel that the human being really must continue to learn throughout his whole life if he wishes to tackle the tasks of life. It is vital that we should be permeated with this feeling. If we do not get rid of the belief that people can master everything with the faculties they have developed up to their 20th or 25th year, that then one only has to meet in Parliament or some other forum to decide all affairs—as long as we do not get rid of this view, we shall never be able to establish healthy conditions in the social structure of mankind.

The study of the reciprocal relation between the social and the anti-social is extremely significant for our time. Just this anti-social tendency is of the utmost importance to understand because it must make itself felt and must be developed in us. This anti-social spirit can only be held in balance by the social. But the social must be nursed, must be consciously cared for. And in our day this becomes truly more and more difficult because the anti-social forces are really in accord with our natural development.

The social element is essential; it must be cherished. We shall see that in this Fifth Post-Atlantean Period there is a tendency to take no notice of the social in merely acting naturally. Rather it must be acquired consciously in working with one's soul forces, while formerly it was felt instinctively in man. What is necessary and must be actively acquired is the interest of man in man. This is indeed the backbone of all social life.

It almost sounds paradoxical to say today that no clear conception of the so-called difficult ideas of economics can be gained if the interest of one for another does not increase, if people do not begin to compare the illusions which have sway in social life with present realities. One who really thinks about it recognizes the fact that simply by being a member of society one is in a complicated relation to others. Imagine that you have a $5 note in your pocket, and you make use of this $5 note by going shopping one morning, and you spend the full $5. What does it mean that you go out with a $5 note in your pocket? The $5 note is really an illusion—it is worth nothing in reality (even if it is metal money. At this point I do not want to discuss the theories of the Metalists and the Nominalists with regard to money; but even if it is metal money, it is still an illusion and of no real worth). Money is namely only a ‘go-between’. And only because in our day a certain social order exists, an order belonging purely to the State, therefore this $5 note which you have spent in the morning for different items is nothing else than an equivalent for so many days of labour of so many men. A number of men must have completed so many days of work, so much human labour must have flowed into the social order—must have crystallized itself into merchandise—in order for the apparent worth of the bank note to have any real value, but only at the command of the social order. The bank note only gives you the power to call into your service so much labour, or to put it another way, to command its worth in work. You can picture it in your mind: There I have a bank note, which assigns to me, according to my social position, the power over so many men. If you now see these workmen selling their labour hour by hour, as the equivalent value of that which you have in your purse as the $5 note, then you begin to get a picture of the real facts.

Our relationships have become so complicated that we no longer pay attention to these things, especially if they do not concern us closely. I have an example which easily clarifies this. In the more difficult considerations of economics, in the areas of capital and interest and credit, things are quite complicated; so that even university professors and political economists, whose position should mean possession of adequate insight, really have no knowledge. Thus you can see that it is necessary to look at things correctly in these areas. Of course we cannot immediately take in hand the reform of the national economy, which has been forced into such a helpless condition by what is nowadays taught as political economy. But we can at least ask with respect to national education and other such matters: What must be done so that social life and forms are consciously established in opposition to anti-social forces? What is really required? I said that it would be difficult in our time for people to develop sufficient interest in each other. You do not have sufficient interest if you think that you can buy yourself something with a $5 note and do not remember the fact that this brings about a social relationship with certain other human beings and their labour-power. You only have an adequate interest when in your picture you are able to substitute for each apparent transaction (such as the exchange of goods for a $5 note) the real transaction which is linked with it.

Now, I would say that the mere egoistic, soul-stirring talk of loving our fellow-men and acting upon this love at the first opportunity, that this does not constitute social life. This sort of love is, for the most part, terribly egoistic. Many a man is supported by what he has first gained through robbing his fellow-men in a truly patriarchal fashion, in order to create for himself an object for his self-love, so that he can then feel nice and warm with the thought, “You are doing this, you are doing that” One does not easily discover that a large part of the so-called love of doing good is a masked self-love. Therefore, the main consideration is not merely to think of what lies nearest to hand, thereby enhancing our self-love, but to feel it our duty to look carefully at the many-sided social structures in which we are placed. We must at first lay the foundations for such understanding. Yet few today are disposed to do so.

I would like to discuss one question from the viewpoint of general education, namely: How can we consciously establish social impulses to balance those anti-social forces which are developing naturally within us? How can we cultivate the social element, this interest of man in man, so that it springs up in us—going ever further and deeper, and leaving us no rest? How can we enkindle this interest which has disappeared so pitiably in our age, the age of the Spiritual Soul? In our age true chasms have already been created between people. Men have no idea about the manner in which they pass one another by without in the least comprehending each other. The desire to understand the other in all his or her uniqueness is very weak today. On the one hand, we have the cry for social union; and on the other, the ever-increasing spread of purely anti-social principles. The blindness of people toward each other can be seen in the many clubs and societies which people form. They do not provide any opportunity for people to get to know one another. It is possible for men to meet one another for years and not to know each other better at the end than they did at the beginning. The precise need of the future is that the social shall be brought to meet the antisocial in a systematic way. For this there are various inner soul methods. One is that we frequently attempt to look back over our present incarnation to survey what has happened to us in this life through our relations with others. If we are honest in this, most of us will say: Nowadays we generally regard the entrance of many people into our life in such a way that we see ourselves, our own personalities, as the center of the review. What have we gained from this or that person who has come into our life? This is our natural way of feeling. It is exactly this which we must try to combat. We should try in our souls to think of others, such as teachers, friends, those who have helped us and also those who have injured us (to whom we often owe more than to those who, from a certain point of view, have been of use to us). We should try to allow these pictures to pass before our souls as vividly as possible in order to see what each has done.

We shall see, if we proceed in this way, that by degrees we learn to forget ourselves, that in reality we find that almost everything which forms part of us could not be there at all unless this or that person had affected our lives, helping us on or teaching us something. When we look back on the years in the more distant past to people with whom we are no longer in contact and about whom it is easier to be objective, then we shall see how the soul-substance of our life has been created by the people and circumstances of the past. Our gaze then extends over a multitude of people whom we have known in the course of time. If we try to develop a sense of the debt we owe to this or that person—if we try to see ourselves in the mirror of those who have influenced us in the course of time, and who have been associated with us—then we shall be able to experience the opening-up of a new sense in our souls, a sense which enables us to gain a picture of the people whom we meet even in the present, with whom we stand face to face today. This is because we have practiced developing an objective picture of our indebtedness to people in the past. It is tremendously important that the impulse should awaken in us, not merely to feel sympathy or antipathy towards the people we meet, not merely to hate or love something connected with the person, but to awaken a true picture of the other in us, free from love or hate.

Perhaps you will not feel that what I am saying now is extremely important—but it is. For this ability to picture the other in oneself without love or hate, to allow the other individual to appear again within our soul, this is a faculty which is decreasing week by week in the evolution of humanity. It is something which men are, by degrees, completely losing. They pass one another by without arousing any interest in each other. Yet this ability to develop an imaginative faculty for the other is something that must enter into pedagogy and the education of children. For we can really develop this imaginative faculty in us if, instead of striving after the immediate sensations of life as is often done today, we are not afraid to look back quietly in our soul and see our relationships to other human beings. Then we shall be in a position to relate ourselves imaginatively to those whom we meet in the present. In this way we awaken the social instinct in us against the anti-social which quite unconsciously and of necessity continues to develop. This is one side of the picture.

The other is something that can be linked up with this review of our relations to others. It is when we try to become more and more objective about ourselves. Here we must also go back to our earlier years. Then we can directly, so to speak, go to the facts themselves. Suppose you are 30 or 40 years of age. You think, “How was it with me when I was ten years old? I will imagine myself entirely into the situation of that time. I will picture myself as another boy or girl of ten years old. I will try to forget that I was that; I will really take pains to objectify myself.” This objectifying of oneself, this freeing of oneself in the present from one's own past, this shelling-out of the Ego from its experiences, must be specially striven for in our present time. For the present has the tendency towards linking up the Ego more and more with its experiences.

Nowadays man wants to be instinctively that which his experiences make him. For this reason it is so very difficult to acquire the activity which Spiritual Science gives. The spirit must make a fresh effort each time. According to true occult science, nothing can be done by comfortably remaining in one's position. One forgets things and must always be cultivating them afresh. This is just as it should be because fresh efforts need to continually be made. He who has already made some progress in the realm of Spiritual Science attempts the most elementary things every day; others are ashamed to pay attention to the basics. For Spiritual Science, nothing should depend on remembering, but on man's immediate experience in the present. It is therefore a question of training ourselves in this faculty—through making ourselves objective—that we picture this boy or girl as if he or she were a stranger at an earlier time in our lives; of bestirring ourselves more and more, of getting free of events, and of being less haunted at 30 by the impulses of a 10 year old. Detachment from the past does not mean denial of the past. We gain it in another way again, and that is what is so important. On the one hand, we cultivate the social instinct and impulses in us by looking back upon those who have been connected with us in the past and regarding our souls as the products of these persons. In this way we acquire the imagination for meeting people in the present. On the other hand, through objectifying ourselves we gain possibilities of developing imagination directly. This objectifying of our earlier years is fruitful insofar as it does not work in us unconsciously. Think for a moment: If the 10 year old child works on unconsciously in you, then you are the 30 or 40 year old augmented by the 10 year old. It is just the same with the 11, the 12 year old child and so on. Egoism has tremendous power, but its power is lessened when you separate the earlier years from yourself and when you make them objective. This is the important point on which we must fix our attention.

The following pre-condition for social activity must be made clear to those people who raise social claims in unreasonable and illusory fashion: Understanding about how man can develop himself as a socially creative being must first be present in this period, when anti-social forces are growing ever stronger as part of human evolution.

What will then have been achieved? You will discover the whole meaning of what I have now explained if you consider the following: In 1848 there appeared a social document which continues to work into the present day in radical socialism, and in Bolshevism. It was the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx, which contains ideas which rule the thoughts and feelings of many working men. Karl Marx was able to dominate the labour world for the simple reason that he wrote and said what the working man thinks and understands, as a working man. This Communist Manifesto the contents of which I do not need to explain to you, appeared in 1848. It was the first document, the first seed in what has now borne fruit, after the recent destruction of opposing movements. This document contains one slogan, one sentence which you will often find quoted today by most socialist writers: “Workers of the world, unite!” It is a sentence which has run through many socialist groups. What does it express? It expresses the most unnatural thing that could possibly be thought today. It expresses an impulse for socializing, for uniting a certain mass of people. On what is this uniting, this union, to be built? Upon its opposite, upon the hatred of all those who are not members of the working class. This associating, this banding together of people is to be brought about through splitting up and separating mankind into classes. You must ponder this, you must think about the reality of this principle which is a genuine illusion, if I can use this expression, and which has been adopted in Russia, now in Germany and the Austrian countries, and which will eat its way further and further into the world. It is so unnatural precisely because, on the one hand, it shows the necessity of socializing, but on the other it builds this socialization out of the anti-social instinct of class hatred, and class opposition.

However, these things need to be considered from a higher perspective, otherwise we shall not get very far; above all, we shall not be able to participate in the healthy development of mankind in the present. Nowadays Spiritual Science is the only means of seeing things truly in their totality; it is the only means for understanding our time. Just as one is adverse to entering into the spirit and soul foundations of man's physical constitution, so one also avoids, out of fear and lack of courage, studying those things in social life which can only be understood out of the Spirit. People are afraid, cover their eyes and put their heads in the sand like ostriches when they are confronted by real and important things. Of what does human interchange in fact consist? As we have seen, it consists of one person trying to put the other to sleep, while the other tries to resist and stay awake. This is the archetypal phenomenon of social science in Goethe's sense. This archetypal phenomenon points to something which mere material thinking cannot grasp; it points to that which can only be understood when one knows that in human life one is not only asleep during sleep—when we slumber along for hours, oblivious to the world—but the same applies to daily waking life, where the same forces which lead to sleep and wakefulness also play into the social and anti-social forces of man. All thinking about social forms can bear no fruit if we do not make the effort to take these things into account.

With this in mind, we must not be blind to the events taking place in the world, but must carefully watch what is coming to pass. What, for example, does the socialist of today think? He thinks that he can invent socialist slogans and call to men from all countries—“Workers of the world, unite!” and by so doing, establish a sort of international Paradise.

This indeed is one of the greatest and most fatal illusions. People are not abstract, but concrete. Fundamentally, the human being is individual. I have tried to make this clear in my Philosophy of Freedom, in contrast to the relativism of Neo-Kantianism and socialism. Men are also different according to their groupings over the world. We will discuss one of these differences so that we may see that it is not possible to simply say:—“You begin in the West, and carry out a certain social system, then you go to the East and then home again, as if taking a world tour.” But the attitude of taking a world journey lives in those who wish to spread socialism over the whole earth. They look upon the earth as a globe on which they, by starting in the West, can eventually arrive in the East. But people on the earth are different—and exactly in this difference dwells an impulse which is the motive force of progress.

You can see how, in this way, provision is made for the Consciousness Soul through birth and heredity. This actually comes to expression in the English-speaking people of today. They are organized for the Consciousness Soul through their blood, their birthright, and their inherited faculties. Because the English-speaking peoples have been especially prepared for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul they are, in a way, representatives of the fifth Post-Atlantean period. People are thus differentiated according to where they live and how they are constituted.

The Eastern peoples must effect and represent the true development of humanity in another way. Beginning with the Russian people, and passing on to the people of the Asiatic countries—one finds an opposition, a revolt against the instinctive elements natural to the evolution of the Consciousness Soul. The people of the East wish to save the soul treasure of intellectuality of the present age for the future. They do not want it to be mixed with experience, but wish to liberate and preserve it for the next period. During this period, a true union can take place between the human being and the evolved Spirit Self. Thus, if the characteristic force of our present period is in the West, and can indeed be best cultivated as a quality among the English-speaking peoples, the people of the east, out of their national inheritance, seek to prevent the coming-to-pass in their souls of that which is most characteristic of the present period—so that it may develop in them as a germ for the following period, which begins with the 30th century. From this we can see the fact that certain laws prevail in human life, and in human evolution. In the realm of nature people are not surprised that they cannot burn ice, that a regular law underlies this phenomenon. But with the social structures of humanity, people fancy that the same social form, based on the same social principles, can, for example, be made to work in Russia, as in England, Scotland, or America. This is impossible, for the whole world is organized by underlying principles so that one cannot simply create identical forms at will all over the globe. This is a point which we must not forget.

In the Central European countries there is a middle condition of affairs. There, it is as if one were in a balanced condition, between the extremes of the East and the West. Looked at in this way, we see the Earth population divided into three parts. You cannot say: “Workers of the world, unite!” For the workers are of three sorts, are three varieties of people. Let us look at the people of the West again. We find a special disposition, a special mission for all who speak English by nature (single cases may be different)—a disposition for the cultivation of the Consciousness Soul. This disposition expresses itself in not detaching from the soul its characteristic quality of intelligence, but connecting this intelligence naturally, instinctively, with events in the world. To naturally, even instinctively, place oneself in the life of the world as a consciousness soul individual is the task of the English-speaking people. The expanse and greatness of the British Empire rests on this quality. Indeed herein lies the original phenomenon behind the expansion of the British Empire—that which is hidden in the impulses of its people exactly coincided with the inner impulses of the age. In my lectures on the European folk souls, you will find what is essential in this matter. Much is contained in this series of lectures which were given long before the war, but which provide material for judging this war-catastrophe objectively.¹

Now, the very capacities connected with the evolution of the Consciousness Soul give the English-speaking peoples a special genius for political life. One can study how the political art of dividing society and creating social structure has spread from England to those countries where things have remained backward, where the remnants of the fourth Post-Atlantean period have remained. This influence has spread even to the division of Hungarian society, to this Turanian member of the European peoples. It is only from the English heritage that a foundation for the political thinking of the fifth Post-Atlantean period can come. The English are specially suited to the realm of politics. It is of no use to pronounce a judgment on these things, the necessities of the case alone do so. One may feel sympathy or the opposite—that is a private affair. Objective necessity determines the affairs of the world. It is important that these objective necessities shall be clearly placed before us at this time.

Goethe, in his Legend of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily, has treated the forces of the human soul as three members, or forces; Power, Appearance, and Knowledge or Wisdom—or, as the Bronze King, the Silver King and the Golden King. Many remarkable things are spoken of in this legend, regarding the governing relationships which are being prepared for the present and which will live into the future. We can point out that what Goethe symbolizes by the Bronze king, the force of Power, is that which spreads over the world through the English-speaking peoples. This is necessary because the culture of the Consciousness Soul coincides with the special qualities of the British and American peoples.

In the Central European countries, which are now in such a state of chaos, there is an unmistakable equilibrium between the Leaning of the intellect toward the Consciousness Soul, and the desire to be free from it; there, sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other. None of the Central European nations is really suited for political life. When they desire to be political, they are disposed to lose contact with reality. Whereas the political thinking of the Anglo-American nations is firmly anchored in the soul, in the Central European countries, it is not, for the second soul force dominates—Semblance and Appearance. However, the people of the Central European countries manifest an intellectuality of special brilliance. Compare anything that the English-speaking people have to say about the nature of thinking—and you will find the thoughts strongly linked to solid earth-realities. But if you take the brilliant feats of the German mind—you will find that they are more an aesthetic shaping of thoughts, even if the aesthetic shaping has a logical form. It is especially noticeable how one thought leads to another so that thoughts of value appear in dialectical form, shaped by an aesthetic will. If one wishes to apply this to solid earth-realities—if one wishes by this means to become a politician—then one easily becomes untrue; one easily falls into a so-called dreamy idealism which seeks to establish united kingdoms, with decade-long calls for unity—but in the end sets up a mighty State by force. Never before has there been such a contrast in political life as the one between the dream of unity in 1848 and that which was really established in 1871.² There you see the swing of the pendulum, the shift from that which really strives for aesthetic form, which can become untrue, an illusion, a dreamy picture when one wishes to apply it to politics. Here, there is simply no disposition for politics. When the Central European people become politicians they either dream or they lie. I should add that these things must not be discussed with sympathy or antipathy in order to accuse or to acquit. Rather, they must be said, because on the one hand they correspond with a need, and on the other with a tragedy. These are things that we must heed.

And if we then look to the East, things are quite different again. We have seen that the German, if he wants to be political, falls into a dreamy idealism or, at its worst, into untruth. The Russian on the other hand becomes ill or actually suffers a death if he desires to be political. This may seem strange, yet a Russian person has a constitution which creates a disposition towards disease, towards death, with intensive political involvement. The Russian Folk Soul has absolutely no affinity with that quality in the English and American Folk Soul which creates a political capacity. But because of this, the East has the task of carrying the intellect separated from its natural connection with the world of sense experience into the future age of the Spirit-Self.

One must therefore know how different abilities are spread among the people of the earth. This becomes visible in many areas. You have, for example, heard about the super-sensible experience called “The Meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold”. There are marked differences in this meeting with the Guardian. Where this meeting, this initiation, is effected entirely independent of nationality, then it is objective and complete. But when this initiation occurs through special groups or societies connected with a particular people or nation, then it is one-sided. The English-speaking peoples are those who, when not guided by higher spiritual leaders but by their own Folk Soul, are especially suited for bringing to the Threshold those spiritual beings who surround and accompany us in this world of Ahrimanic spirits, and whom we take with us when we approach the super-sensible world, if they have developed a certain liking for us. They then lead us primarily to an experience of the power of sickness and death. You will therefore hear it said by the greater number of Anglo-Americans initiated into the super-sensible Mysteries, that the first more important event in their cognition of the super-sensible world is the encounter with those powers expressing sickness and death. They learn to know this as an external, outward experience.

If you turn to the Central European people what will you find, when those who are being initiated are not taken out of their nation and raised to universal humanity, but when the Folk Spirit co-operates with them? Then the first important experience which comes to our notice is a conflict between those spiritual beings who belong to higher worlds, to the other side of the Threshold, and certain other beings who are here in the physical world, on this side of the Threshold but who are invisible to ordinary consciousness. The Central Europeans will first become aware of this conflict. The experience of this conflict makes itself felt to the genuine seeker after truth in the Central European countries as a being penetrated with the powers of doubt. One becomes acquainted with all the powers of “many-sidedness”. In Western countries, there is a stronger inclination to be satisfied with exact truth; whereas in the Central European countries there is a tendency to immediately see the other side of the question. There, in the searching for truth, one trembles in the balance. Everything has two sides. One is regarded as a Philistine in Central Europe if one ventures a one-sided opinion. But this causes tragic suffering when nearing the Threshold. We must pay attention to this struggle which takes place at the Threshold, between spirits which belong only to the spirit world, and those belonging to the world of sense—this struggle which conditions all that calls forth doubt in man, this vacillation with regard to the truth. It is this experience of doubt which creates the European need to be trained in the truth—in philosophy—so as not to fall prey so easily to the generally recognized impulses of truth in society.

When you turn to the Eastern countries—and the Folk Soul acts as sponsor at the initiation—then one primarily experiences the spirits that work upon human egotism. One sees all that gives rise to human selfishness. The Westerner who approaches the Threshold does not see this. Instead, he sees the spirits that permeate the world and humanity with sickness and death in the broadest sense, as injurious, destructive and degrading for humanity. The Neophyte of the East, however, sees all that comes forward to tempt man as selfishness. Therefore, the ideal which proceeds from Western initiation is making men healthy and keeping them healthy, and giving mankind the possibility of healthy development. In the East, on the other hand, there springs up, as instinctive knowledge in connection to a religious orientation toward initiation, a feeling of one's own insignificance when faced with the sublime powers of the spiritual world. The man of the East, when meeting the spiritual world, is shown how selfishness may be cured, and egotism destroyed because of its dangers. This is even expressed in the external character of people from the East. Much of the Eastern character which is inexplicable to people from the West arises precisely from what is expressed at the Threshold of the spiritual world.

So we can see the differences in human qualities when we look at the inner development, the inner shaping of the psycho-spiritual development of humanity. It is important to keep this clearly in mind. In certain occult circles of the English-speaking people who were under the guardianship of the Folk Spirits, prophetic sayings could be found during the second half of the 19th century which referred to the things we have been discussing, things which are happening today. Think of what could have happened if the people of Europe, with the exception of those speaking English, had not stopped up their ears and blindfolded their eyes, so that their attention was directed from the truth of these things. I will tell you of a formula which was frequently repeated during the second half of the 19th century. The following was said:—“The State must be abolished in Russia, so that the Russian people may develop, for in Russia social experiments must be carried out, which could never be done in Western countries”. This might seem unsympathetic to non-English ears, but it contains a high degree of wisdom and insight. And he who can connect himself with these things so that he can believe in their efficacy as impulses in whose realization he can take part, this person is truly of the present age.³ Those who do not see the reality of these forces set themselves against the time.

These matters must be clearly understood. It was, of course, the inevitable lot of Central and Eastern Europe to block their ears and blindfold their eyes to occult facts; to give no heed to them, to work on lines of mysticism, abstract teaching, and abstract intellectualism. But we are now in a time when this must cease. Pessimism and despair must not be created by such contemplations as these. Rather force, courage, and the will to help is needed. In this sense we should always remember that we do not work against, but rather with the issues of our time—out of the spiritual scientific impulse of the Anthroposophical Movement. Let us see to it that we do not sleep away our opportunities. Spiritual Science can lead us to the conscious cultivation of social faculties. It can, for example, show us the forces at work in the human being when he is free from the body, what he is experiencing between going to sleep and awaking. But more importantly it can give us a direction in conscious waking life for developing social capacities. We of course cultivate the powers most necessary for our age when we are consciously thinking about those things which can only forcefully penetrate into our soul during waking hours. We could not develop, we would be powerless, if we only had to evolve during sleep. It is for our waking life that the following is therefore important.

Two powers are working in the present. One is the power which since the Mystery of Golgotha has worked in different metamorphoses through the ensuing periods of earth evolution as the Christ Impulse. We have often said that just in our age a reappearance of the Etheric Christ will take place. This reappearance of the Christ is indeed not far off. That He is coming again is no cause for pessimism, nor should it give rise to a nebulous longing and a desire for soul-warming, self-seeking, theosophical theories. The Christ Impulse has various forms, but in His present form He wishes to help humanity realize that spiritual wisdom now being revealed by the spiritual world. This wisdom wants to be realized and the Christ Impulse will be a help in this realization. It is on this realization that all depends. At this critical moment humanity is faced with a momentous decision. On the one side stands the Christ Being, calling us of our own free will to do what we have been speaking about today, to consciously and freely receive the social impulses which can heal and help humanity. Freely, to receive them. Therefore, we do not unite ourselves on those levels where hatred forms a foundation for love as in the cry, “Workers of the world, unite!” But we unite by striving to realize the Christ Impulse, by doing those things which are the will of Christ for this age.

Opposed to this will stands the adversary who is called in the Bible “the unrighteous Prince of this World”. He makes his presence known in various ways. One of these ways is to take those forces which allow us as free beings to serve that which we have been talking about today, to take this force of free will and to place it at the service of the physical. This adversary, the Prince of this world, has various instruments; for example, hunger and social chaos. By this means, through external compulsion, and physical measures, the force of free will is subverted to the service of apparent necessity. See how humanity today shows that it will not of its own free will turn to a truly social life, and to a recognition of true progress for mankind. It wishes to be compelled. And yet, this compulsion has not even led people to make the basic distinction between the Spirit of the super-sensible world, the Christ Spirit and the adversary, the unrighteous Prince of this world. Look at this situation and see if this does not explain why in so many places today men oppose and struggle against the acceptance of any true spiritual teaching, against true spiritual deeds, and against Spiritual Science. They are possessed by the unrighteous Prince of this world.

Now think for a moment; think how you of your own free will turn to spiritual life; think humbly of yourselves, but also earnestly and strongly as the missionaries of the Christ-Spirit today, who have to combat the unrighteous Prince of this world, who lays hold of all those who unconsciously allow themselves to use forces out of the future to realize their own aims. If you think of yourselves in this light there is no room for pessimism—indeed it leaves you no time for a pessimistic view of the world. It will of course not shut your eyes and ears to that which has happened, sometimes in a terrible manner—and which is tragic to behold in its true form. But you will preeminently keep the following before your souls—“I am, in any case, called to look at everything without illusion; I must be neither pessimistic nor optimistic, so that forces may awaken in my soul which give me the power to aid the free development of the human being, to contribute to human progress in the place and situation where I am”. Even if the faults and tragedies of the age are very visible to Spiritual Science this should not be an incitement to pessimism or optimism, but rather a call to an inner awakening so that independent work and the cultivation of right thinking will result. For above all things, adequate insight is necessary. If only a sufficient number of people today were motivated to say, “We absolutely must have a better understanding of things”; then everything else would follow. It is just in regard to social questions that there is a need to consciously strive for insight and understanding. The development of the will activity is planned for, it is coming. If we in daily life would only wish to educate ourselves about social issues, and develop new social ideas, then (according to an occult law), each of us would be able to take another human being along. Each one of us can therefore work for two if we have the will. We could achieve much if we had an earnest desire to acquire insight at once. The rest would follow. It is not so bad that not many people can do much about the situation of society today, but it is incredibly sad if people cannot at least make up their minds to become acquainted with the social laws of Spiritual Science. The rest would follow if serious study would take place.

This is what I have desired to communicate to you today regarding the importance of knowing and recognizing certain things about the social situation of the present, and how such a recognition can lead to a life impulse for the future. I hope we will again have the opportunity of speaking together about the more intimate aspects of Spiritual Science.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner The Mission of Folk-Souls. Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1970.
• 2. The reference is to the distinction between the dreams of the German revolution of 1848 and the creation of the German Empire of 1871 by the Prussian State.
• 3. Here and in other references to Russia in this lecture, Rudolf Steiner appears to be referring to the political attitudes and behaviour of Germany and Austria toward Russia during the time of the Russian revolution when the actions of the central powers certainly strengthened the hands of the Bolsheviks against more moderate social democratic forces.

First, in case it should mislead, a word about the English title. The German original bears the formidable superscription: Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit; and the modest little English word “tension” signifies very much more than the diplomatic and political strain, which is more or less chronic now between the Western democracies on the one hand and Russia and the Communist countries on the other. At the same time the book which follows is far from irrelevant to that strain, of which it is in a measure prophetic.

“The spectre of Eastern Europe,” we read on page page 115 (and these words were spoken in 1922), “gazes threateningly across to the West.” But it is only at surface level, and when something specific is amiss, that a “tension” betokens an unnatural strain, or one that threatens disaster unless it is relaxed. Thus both modern psychology, and modern theology, often speak of “holding in tension” as a normal and healthy activity. The clash of two opposites—such for instance as individual freedom and responsibility—will always create a tension. Whether the tension snaps in a neurosis or a war, or whether it is “held” in health and strength and peace, will often depend on whether the clash is merely encountered as a bewildering contradiction, or is understood in depth as a necessary and life-engendering polarity.

Since the end of the nineteenth century the world has been moving steadily in the direction of a single closed economy; and now willy-nilly it seems on the way to becoming a single social unit also. The only question is: of what kind is that unity to be? A living unity, as distinct from the monolithic unity of mere spatial cohesion, always (as Coleridge among others has pointed out) springs from a polarity; and polarity involves, not only the two opposite extremes or poles, but also, as its tertium quid, the vibrant tension in the midst between them. It is a principal object of this book to furnish an understanding in depth of what most unites the habitable globe, historically and culturally, into an organic whole, and this necessarily involves an understanding of the abiding tension between East and West.

To understand anything in depth involves some knowledge of how it came into being, and here the attempt is made to view the relation between typically Eastern and typically Western modes of consciousness in the light of the whole process of the evolution of human consciousness. In this Rudolf Steiner was up against the difficulty that the very existence of such a process was then—and it is still today—not generally recognized. That this is surprising “in an age permeated with evolutionary concepts” has recently been pointed out by Mr. Charles Davy, in his book Towards a Third Culture, in the course of which he defines the evolution of consciousness as “a constant-direction change in the normal experience of the perceived world.” It is the more surprising because it would seem that, without such a concept, little can be accomplished in the way of understanding man and his problems. Examples of this abound in the ensuing pages. Thus, just as the concept of biological evolution is necessary before we can distinguish whether the resemblance of one living form to another is due to a superficial analogy or to a true homology rooted in their nature and growth, so does the concept of evolution of consciousness enable us to discern the purely superficial nature of the resemblance between “division of labour” in oriental antiquity and in modern times. Or again, in the same lecture (8) in which the above example occurs, compare with the usual chatter about “escapism” Steiner's treatment of the old conflict between the image of the artist as a “committed” human being and the image of “art for art's sake.”

In his book, The Yogi and the Commissar, which appeared in 1945, Arthur Koestler began by placing his Yogi and Commissar at the opposite poles of a “spectrum” of human nature or social behaviour—an ultra-violet and an infra-red pole, between which all human types subsist. The Yogi, he said, accepts the inner spirit as the source of energy; he attempts to produce change from within. The Commissar does not believe in any “within;” he attempts to change the behaviour of man by manipulation from without. Koestler defines his Commissar as “the human type which has completely severed relations with the subconscious.” And there is more to the same effect. But this promising introduction is never developed; nor does Koestler so much as notice the paradox implicit in his own striking choice of labels—redolent, as they are, of a polarity between East and West, and yet with the “Yogi” corresponding, not to the Eastern (as one would expect), but to the anti-communist Western pole.

Let the reader contrast with this brilliant but inadequate aperçu the counter concepts of “maya” and “ideology” which Steiner builds up in Lecture 4 on the historical foundations (including a careful appraisal of actual yoga) which he has laid in the first three lectures. They are the fruit of understanding in depth, because they are rooted in a deep grasp of the whole history of man and of his place on earth and in the cosmos.

In the threefold nature of man, as Steiner expounded it, the rest is as it were implicit. Past, present and future; religion, art and science; the slow shift of the earth's cultural centre of gravity from orient to Occident, and with that the transition from an ancient instinctual wisdom to our modern self-consciousness, subsisting in free but lifeless thoughts—all this (such is the message of the following pages) can really only be contemplated and understood in understanding and contemplating threefold man. In his head, taken alone, the human being, qua thinker, does really reach a “commissar's” inner emptiness. He also experiences “the terror of that emptiness,” as Steiner points out on page 104 and as the Existentialists have since so heavily stressed. But there is a way, of which Existentialism knows nothing as yet, by which humanity can fill its experienced emptiness with spiritual substance. If a man is willing to follow that way and to develop his dormant powers, if he will learn how to hold his conscious but empty thinking in tension with the opposite pole of his being, his unconscious but substantial will, then not only his nerves and senses but the whole man can become a sense-organ, capable of re-experiencing in freedom the instinctual wisdom by which mankind was formerly nourished—but also controlled. He finds (we are told on page 94) “the cosmos stored up as recollection inside him.”

Thus the problem of the relation between East and West leads quickly into an exposition of both the philosophical basis and what may be called the “methodology” of that spiritual science, or anthroposophy, with which the name of Rudolf Steiner is principally associated. This is, of course, the original feature that marks our book off from any other on the same subject. It may also be, for many, a stumbling-block in the way of according to the thoughts it contains the candid attention which their intrinsic quality would otherwise command. For, if the method is presented as open to all—as indeed it is—the actual development of the dormant powers referred to depends on certain qualities, of character and otherwise, which few human beings have as yet brought with them into the world. Among those few, though he never expressly makes the claim, Steiner himself was pre-eminent. Readers who become aware, or who already know, how much the findings of anthroposophy, including this very concept of the evolution of consciousness, depend on Steiner's own raids on that stored up cosmic memory (elsewhere more technically referred to by him as the “Akashic Record”) and who are perhaps inclined to dismiss for that reason their claim to attention, will find here a reasoned justification of the method of spiritual science, which asks no more than to be fairly considered on its merits.

For this reason among others “the Vienna Course,” as it is often called, seemed a good choice to make, out of the voluminous material available, for a special book to lay before the English public, under a well-known imprint, shortly after the centenary of Steiner's birth in 1961, when through public lectures, a broadcast talk and other avenues, the attention of many was no doubt drawn for the first time to his work and its practical results.

Another reason for the choice is, that the relation between spiritual science and natural science is here clearly and fully stated at the outset. The reader will be left in no doubt of Steiner's immense respect for the science of the West, as it has actually developed since the scientific revolution; perhaps also in little doubt of his thorough acquaintance with the natural science of his own day. That can in any event in fact be demonstrated from other sources. To the present writer the most significant ground for the claim of spiritual science to be a science, and to merit careful investigation alongside the deferential attention paid as a matter of course to the established sciences, is the one which is glanced at on page 56, and more fully stated on pages 69, 70. It is a ground which has broadened a good deal during the forty years that have elapsed since these lectures were delivered, and it is this. If we look aside for a moment from their proven efficacy in the field of straightforward physical manipulation and consider rather their claim (abandoned now altogether in some quarters) to furnish us with knowledge about the nature of man and the world, it must be admitted that the matter dealt with by the established sciences is coming to be composed less and less of actual observations, more and more of such things as pointer-readings on dials, the same pointer-readings arranged by electronic computers, inferences from inferences, higher mathematical formulae and other recondite abstractions. Yet modern science began with a turning away from abstract cerebration to objective observation! And this is the very step which spiritual science claims to be taking again today. Once grant the possibility that observations other than those made with the passive and untrained senses are possible, and you have to admit that the method of cognition which Steiner describes is more scientific, because more empirical, than the method of the schools.

In addition to the twenty or so books which he wrote, most of which are translated into English, Rudolf Steiner delivered several thousands of lectures, many of them in courses or cycles, in different parts of Europe. His followers saw to it that most of these were taken down in shorthand and afterwards transcribed for the use of the Movement. Later the transcriptions, unrevised by the lecturer, were in many cases made available as printed books; and this is the case here. Audiences varied widely in size, nationality, educational background and other respects, and Steiner was wont to vary his style accordingly. The reader may like to know that these particular lectures were given during a “West-East Congress” of the Anthroposophical Movement in Vienna in June 1922. They provided each evening a sort of temporary culmination of the various themes which had been studied during the day, and the usual number in the audience was about two thousand.

Steiner remarked afterwards, in a written report, that public conferences of this magnitude represented a new departure from his normal practice of approaching only those who were in a manner predisposed to listen sympathetically to what he had to say. Surely it was no small achievement to shepherd an audience of two thousand, not all of them sympathetic, through such unfamiliar and subtle catenations of thought as the reader will find in Lecture 2! Some of those who are familiar with the literature of anthroposophy have detected in this particular cycle a special note—a touch of almost apologetic urbanity—which is found nowhere else. Perhaps this also makes them a suitable choice for the purpose mentioned above.

Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. The years that have passed since then have been crowded and fateful ones, changing the face of the world and the colour of its thought. It would be surprising if there were nothing here that “dated.” For instance, a contempt for Western technological achievement, as something philistine and unspiritual, can no longer be regarded as the characteristic oriental reaction it was in 1922, when he was speaking. Indeed the whole difference between the spiritual—or unspiritual—life of Orient and Occident daily becomes increasingly blurred. But is not this a symptom of the very trend to which Steiner was drawing attention? The elimination of a tension-holding middle between the two extremes leads here, as elsewhere, to their chaotic and sinister interaction. Even in 1922 the typically Western materialism of the German Karl Marx was streaming back to Germany and the West from Eastern Europe. Since then, we have seen the rise and fall of a largely Westernized Japan, the succumbing of China to the crudest materialism of all, the incipient industrialization of India. Almost as these lines were being written the elimination of anything that could be called Middle Europe was carried to its absurdly logical conclusion, and the interval between East and West reduced, in Berlin, to the thickness of a wall.

An Austrian subject, born in a part of Europe which is now just behind the iron curtain, Steiner was himself a child of that vanishing Middle Europe. Nowhere perhaps could the disappearance after 1914 of the old order, rich in ancient hierarchy and symbol, rotten in so much else, be experienced as vividly as in Austria-Hungary. Nowhere was the need so apparent, and (for a short time after the first World War) the opportunity so promising for the construction of a new social order, which might unite in a single organism the impulse of humanity towards the future with the wisdom it inherited from the past. It was this fleeting opportunity which he had been seeking to exploit during the brief period in 1919 and the early twenties when the Threefold Commonwealth Movement was founded and vigorously propagated, and when for a time his name was well known in Central Europe.

The opportunity passed that might have brought quick returns from a lightning campaign. But few of the problems have been solved. That “faith in the supreme power of the State” (page 166) which he noted as accompanying the growth of technology, has only gone on increasing; and everywhere within it, between class and class, between one State and another, and between East and West, antagonisms swell and proliferate. Koestler's Yogi had his emotional energies fixed on “the relation between the individual and the universe,” his Commissar on “the relation between individual and society.” In the second half of this book an attempt is made to show how the two relations coalesce in the threefold nature of man. A reconstruction of society is, no less than is a rebirth of individual psychology, implicit in the findings of spiritual science and would follow naturally and inevitably from a wider understanding of these. Whereas a society “planned” on abstract principles must inevitably strangle all progress, if only because (as F. A. Hayek has recently argued on purely empirical grounds) the unpredictable, free individual spirit is your only source of novelty and change.

Once again all turns on the basic fact of the evolution of human consciousness. On the one hand such an evolution necessarily involves changes in the social structure, but on the other hand that structure, and the changes which it demands, cannot be understood except in the light of that evolution. In the long run the views on diet of a man who had never heard of bread would be about as practical as the views on social reform of a man who is unaware that humanity is evolving from a typically oriental condition, in which the existence of the individual is latent in society, to a typically occidental one, in which the existence of society is latent in the individual. “What is needed,” says Steiner, on page 164, “is prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe.”

In Europe and, as he elsewhere makes clear, in America. Perhaps few passages in this book could be more immediately fruitful in removing perilous misunderstandings than the closing pages of Lecture 9, where much, over there, of what we on this side of the Atlantic are apt to despise as emotionally crude or intellectually superficial, is related to a certain un-European conception of the human will; and it is emphasized that this very conception, primitive as the terms in which it is expressed may be, nevertheless “carries within itself striking potentialities for the future.”

But it is time the reader was left to make his own acquaintance with the ideas which follow in the form in which Steiner himself expressed them. He will be disappointed if he seeks in them a schematic diagram of the nature or history of humanity or a panacea for its personal and social ills. But it may be otherwise if with an open mind he travels through these pages expecting only what he will find: a patient examination into the way in which we form our ideas and the historical and geographical factors by which that way is conditioned, and, along with that, a preliminary contribution towards the unfreezing of certain hidden reserves of energy, imagination and wit, which would seem to be essential if human civilization is to be rescued from decline.

London,
February 1962.

Owen Barfield

Impulses connected with the spiritual world, whatever their direction, can only be understood from the viewpoint of spiritual science. As we have seen, playing into today's events there are impulses which we have traced back to human beings, but only to those who know how to handle spiritual impulses in one way or another.

We must ask ourselves: Why do certain people do the kind of things we have been talking about? Which leads to the next question: Why are we living in an age when untruth—untruthfulness—is working as a dominant force in the world, a force which drives human beings with a veritable passion that could, if only it would turn towards the truth instead, bring about infinitely much in the way of healing?

These things are indeed connected with what are, at the moment, the deepest impulses of humanity. We can gain a closer understanding of them, in a manner appropriate for our time, by including in our considerations the most urgent task of that spiritual-scientific view of the world which we have made our own. Remember that our anthroposophical spiritual science seeks to understand certain spiritual aspects which exist in the world, certain forces which are at work in the world of human beings in so far as they develop not only between birth and death but also between death and a new birth. It is difficult for people today to think about these things in the right way, because they have lost certain faculties which were once present in human evolution; for a while these faculties had to go underground, but now they must light up again through spiritual science.

We know well enough that in olden times the human soul was linked with the spiritual world in a way that was more elementary, more natural; such links did not have to be brought about by active spiritual work but existed of themselves. We called them atavistic. We know, too, that in those days it was impossible for human beings to doubt the existence of life after death. The possibility of such doubt only arose for an interim period which is now to be succeeded by an age in which all shall know about life between death and a new birth.

In those olden times something else—a third condition—came as naturally to the human soul as waking and sleeping do today. In today's state of being awake, human beings are restricted entirely to the physical world which they can perceive with their senses; they live between birth and death in a world which they can experience through their senses and through their understanding which is bounded by the brain. And in sleep they are unconscious. The entities of ego and astral body in which they live between falling asleep and waking up are not yet strong enough to supply them with a comparable consciousness. We know that the astral body has only been developing since the time of ancient Moon and the ego only since the beginning of Earth evolution. Both are young measured against cosmic evolution and they are not yet strong enough to achieve consciousness when left to themselves between going to sleep and waking up.

Dreams, however, with all their manifold pictures, do rise up out of sleep. These dreams can contain a great deal that belongs to the spiritual world. There is a great deal in dreams which belongs to the spiritual world, but the human soul as it is today is not capable of seeing beyond the dreams in order to discover what it is that lives in these dreams. Dreams are deceptive pictures woven out of a veil of maya. When they are rightly interpreted they yield experiences of earlier times or prophetic indications for the future. They also reveal the interplay which takes place between the living and the dead during sleep. Everything can come to us through dreams. But, at the present stage of their evolution, human beings do not understand the strange language of dreams. Dream pictures remain incomprehensible, and this is quite natural. Just as Europeans cannot interpret the sounds spoken by the Chinese, so people today cannot interpret the picture language of dreams.

Thus during this interim period the human being is totally restricted in consciousness to whatever he can discover through those older instruments, the physical body and also the etheric body, which have been developing since the time of ancient Sun and ancient Saturn and are therefore so constituted that they can offer him consciousness as long as he is in them, that is, between waking up and going to sleep.

Now the spiritual science for which we are striving gives us concepts of the super-sensible world working in and behind the sense-perceptible world. The concepts and ideas given to us by spiritual science and which we make our own are related to nothing that can be perceived by the senses. They relate either to what lies between death and a new birth, or to the super-sensible world which lies beyond the world of the senses. Comprehension of these is not, or ought not to be, a mere comprehension of certain theories. We are not concerned with knowing one thing or another but with achieving a certain inner mood of soul when we take in truths relating to the super-sensible world.

It is difficult to describe these things in words because our language has been coined for the external, physical plane, so we have to exert ourselves when applying it to super-sensible conditions. You could say that everything to which we ordinarily apply our understanding lives coarsely, densely in our soul because our brain is always at our disposal and is trained to deal with ideas and concepts relating to the physical plane. But to explain things which do not relate to the physical plane we have to exert our soul to such an extent that, when we study spiritual science, our brain plays an ever-decreasing part. When we experience difficulties in understanding what spiritual science gives us, this is only because our brain impedes our understanding. Our brain is adjusted and adapted to the coarse concepts of the physical plane and we have to exert ourselves to acquire the subtler concepts—subtler only in so far as human comprehension is concerned—of the spiritual world. This exertion is entirely healthy, it is certainly good, because with spiritual science we then live in our soul in a new way, quite different from that required by physical knowledge and understanding and ideas. We transport ourselves into a world of mobile, subtle pictures and ideas, and that is significant.

It is possible for all of you to be aware of the point at which you are sufficiently within the sphere where the etheric body more or less lives on its own, using the brain only in faint vibrations. It is the point at which you begin to feel that you no longer have to exert yourself to think the thoughts given by spiritual science, in the way in which you have to exert yourself to think everyday thoughts. You know very well that you yourself make the thoughts which you think about everyday matters on the physical plane; you develop the concepts in accordance with the daily requirements and conditions of life, in accordance with sympathies and antipathies and with whatever is prepared by your senses and by your brain-bound understanding. With spiritual science, however, once you really enter into it, you will begin to sense: I have not thought all this myself; it has already been thought before I think it; it is floating there as a thought and merely enters into me. When you begin to feel: This is floating in the objective thinking of the universe and merely enters into me—then you will have won a great deal. You will have experienced a relationship to that delicate etheric, floating and weaving world in which your soul lives. After that it is really only a matter of time, though it might be quite a long time, before you gradually enter that sphere which we share with those among the dead with whom we are karmically linked.

I said that in olden times there was no question of discussing whether immortality existed or not. People then had a third condition apart from sleeping and waking, an in-between condition which was not merely a state of dreaming. It was an elementary and natural condition, in which human beings saw their dead spiritually face to face. They were there and they lived together with them. In those earlier times, when people did something, or when something happened to them which was a little out of the ordinary—and this of course happened and still happens all the time, for we are not only creatures of habit—they then felt beside them one or another of those who had gone through death before them, either long, or not so lang, ago. They felt as though the dead person acted with them, or joined in their counsel. So when the soul of a person living on the earth decided to do something, or when something happened to that person, this soul felt that there was one who had died who joined in the action or the suffering. The dead were present. So there was no discussion about immortality or the lack of it. It would have been as pointless as questioning whether someone with whom we are speaking is actually there or not. Whatever we experience is a reality, and in olden times people experienced how the dead shared in all that happened.

We know the reasons why those times had to go into the underground of existence. But they will return, though in a different form. The manner of their return will be brought about by human beings who achieve the mood of soul which can be achieved through spiritual science, through actively living in the pictures of the spiritual world given by spiritual science. This will enable the soul to attain a delicate attuning, and then into this delicate attuning the souls of the so-called dead will enter. Of course they are always present, but what matters now is that we should be aware of how they enter into our soul-sphere. Of course, the dead always surround those of us with whom they were karmically linked during life. But to enable them to enter our consciousness we must go to meet them with the fine attuning I have just described. For you see it is always possible for the dead to gain entry into human souls if these souls lead their life in a mood such as that described just now, where the concepts and ideas formed by these souls live, somehow, in a super-sensible sphere. From the bodily, physical aspect of man the dead have to flee, for at the moment they cannot enter there. Neither can they enter those thoughts which only rise up from the brain after the manner of the physical world. And because today human beings mostly entertain only thoughts that rise up from the brain, it is so very difficult for the dead to make contact with the living.

But if the living go to meet the dead by developing the fine attuning that arises when one concerns oneself a great deal with super-sensible ideas, then the dead can enter that floating and weaving world which extricates itself from the bodily aspect and takes no account of it. Today everything depends on whether human souls will find it possible, in some measure, to tread the path which leads to the dead. For then the dead will come to meet them. There must be a meeting in a common realm.

I have often stressed that what spiritual science has to say about the super-sensible world, the concepts and ideas we develop—all this is there for both the living and the dead. That is why I have recommended the practice of reading to the dead: that is, of unfolding thoughts orientated to them which refer to the super-sensible world. Doing this is a way of offering them a bridge and it is one which can reach not only those who have died recently, but all those who have died, even a very long time ago.

In this way the living have the possibility of approaching the dead. And similarly the dead have the possibility of working into the thoughts of the living. When you have absorbed the spirit of spiritual science you will be able to form from such arguments a fair conception of the fact that in the materialistic age we human beings have lived through for so long the dead can have less and less influence on the course of events here in the physical world where human beings have turned towards more materialistic ideas relating only to the physical plane, ideas which are of no use to the dead. So events in the physical world now run their course without any, or with only very little, influence from those who have passed on. This will have to change. Active communication must once more be established between the living and the dead. Those who have died must become able to work into the physical world, so that what takes place there no longer goes on solely under the influence of conceptions which arise in this physical world.

So our pursuit of spiritual science is indeed intimately bound up with giving the dead an opportunity to work here in the physical world. It must be said that a grave and lofty aim of our work in spiritual science is the creation of a link between the spiritual world, where the dead have their home, and the physical world. Then the dead will no longer have to say to themselves that they are more or less exiles from the physical world owing to the fact that the living, down here, cannot develop thoughts through which the dead might bring their influence to bear in this physical world.

Many, for sure, will say: I have been striving to open myself to the ideas of spiritual science, but I have seen no sign of any influence emanating from the dead. My dear friends, these things demand a good deal of patience. You must take into account the degree to which for centuries the life of mankind on the physical plane has tended towards materialism and against anything that might make it possible for the dead to work here in a suitable way. Amongst all that has been going on for centuries, certain feelings, certain sensations have developed which human beings now entertain quite unconsciously towards the spiritual world. To these feelings and sensations, what comes today from spiritual science frequently appears as no more than abstract theory. One may well be convinced that what spiritual science has to say about the spiritual world is true. And yet it has not thus far entered so fully into one's whole soul life as to enable one to develop those sensations and feelings which do not disturb the delicate and subtle play of what comes over from the dead.

It is not easy to see these things in their proper light. People today are the children, or the grandchildren, or the great-grandchildren, or even the great-great-grandchildren of those who have lived during recent centuries and who have, under the influence of rising materialism, turned their sensations and feelings in certain directions. These directions are now expressed in every detail of these feelings and sensations. We can have the best will in the world to turn in the right way to someone who has died, to remember someone in the right way. But the whole disposition of our feelings and sensations working, perhaps one could say, through our blood which flows down to us from our ancestors, is not suited to placing before our soul in a proper way the delicate and intimate manifestations and revelations which come from the dead. Instead our feelings are like flickering lights, excitable flickering lights which interpose themselves in front of these subtle impulses which are today still so very delicate and intimate.

But though this may be the case we need not be discouraged, but should always cling to the positive aspect. And the positive aspect is that we genuinely strive for that condition which in certain moments of life, as the fruit of studying spiritual science, can give us a peacefulness of soul. What matters is that peacefulness of soul, the fine attuning in that peacefulness of soul, which makes it possible for us to receive these delicate, intimate manifestations and revelations from the kingdom of the dead.

Something else, too, is necessary, and that is the goodwill to resist all that untruthfulness about which we have been speaking in these lectures. All these untruthfulnesses that buzz about in the world enter into what might be called the spiritual aura and generate there a thick fog which the dead find impossible to penetrate. This thick fog contains all that black rubbish which comes, for instance—to name only one source—from today's journalism, in the form of untruths which are printed and repeated, creating an aura of untruthfulness spanning the earth. It is no exaggeration to say that it is exceedingly difficult for the dead to penetrate this black fog. Therefore, with the help of ideas such as those we have been developing concerning the absolutely concrete untruthfulness buzzing about in the world, it is necessary to endeavour to reach clarity, to really make the effort in this field to recognize the purely external truth of the physical plane in so far as this can become accessible to us, in order not to cover our soul with a dense fog through which the spiritual world simply cannot penetrate. You will understand how very necessary this is.

In conjunction with the concepts we have just been discussing, let us now touch on the question: What is the aim of those secret societies which send impulses of the kind we have been describing into the world, impulses which then live in the life of untruthfulness and which have led, out of this untruthfulness, to the painful events of today? What do these secret societies want? Among others—we cannot go into everything—there is one particular thing they want: They want to materialize materialism even further; they want to create even more materialism in the world than would come about as part of the natural evolution of mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean period. They want even more materialism. This is only one aspect of what they are aiming for, but it is the aspect we want at least to touch on here. With this aspect in mind such societies are founded and with this aspect in mind people are persuaded to join them, people who are approached during their lives because they are deemed suitable.

There are the most varied types of such societies. One type, much in evidence in the West and taking all kinds of forms, includes organizations which practise ceremonial magic. Ceremonial magic can, of course, be good magic, but we are speaking now of those societies which do not practise ceremonial magic for the good of mankind in general, but for the good of certain groups of people, or certain specific aims which are not general human aims.

Let us look first at those societies which practise ceremonial magic from this point of view. As we have said, it can be good, but in these societies it is not good. Certain kinds of ceremonial magic have definite effects on the human physical body. Everything physical is, after all, a manifestation of the spirit. Certain spiritual aspects which come into being under the influence of ceremonial magic can have an effect on the human physical body, specifically on the system of ganglia, as I described it the other day, and also on the spinal system. The cerebral system is the most difficult of all to influence by means of ceremonial magic. All this has to be done via the detour of the spiritual element, but it can be done and it can become effective.

Imagine certain secret societies carrying on a form of ceremonial magic directed towards its grey or black aspects. Imagine they influence their members in a way that affects even their physical body, even the delicate vibrations and weavings of their physical body, so that something spiritual flows into this physical body.

What is the consequence? The consequence is that something now comes about which was suitable in earlier periods of human evolution but is no longer permissible today. Such procedures make it possible for the spiritual world to influence those human beings who participate, even though they do not turn towards it along the path I have described. This means that it becomes possible for the dead, as well as other spirits, to influence the members of a circle created by ceremonial magic. In this way today's materialism can be made hyper-materialistic.

Imagine a human being—and there are countless such in the West—who is entirely materialistic, not only in his view of the world but also in all his feelings and sensations. And then imagine this materialistic disposition increasing to a high degree. Such a person must of necessity develop an urge to exercise an influence on the material world, not only while he lives in his physical body but also after he has died. He is bent on the following: When I die I want to have some abode through which I can affect the people I have left behind on the earth, or who are trained in such a way in relation to me. There are indeed certain people today whose materialistic urge is so great that they strive for means by which they can cultivate connections with the physical world even beyond death. And such means, through which a person secures for himself the possibility of affecting the material world from beyond death, are abodes of certain kinds of ceremonial magical practice.

This is something that can have immense consequences. Imagine a number of people brought together to form a certain brotherhood. These people know: Others have gone before us; their urge to exercise their power was so great that their life on earth was not enough for its gratification, so they want to go on gratifying it even after death. For them we are creating an abode, and through the acts of ceremonial magic we perform, they work into our bodies. Because of this we gain greater power than we have; because of this we are enabled to exercise a certain degree of magical power over other, weaker people who stand outside such brotherhoods. When we speak words, when we give a speech, these dead souls work in us because we have been prepared by sharing in these acts of ceremonial magic.

It is one thing if somebody who simply participates honestly in the cultural processes of our time gives a speech in parliament or writes a newspaper article. But it is something entirely different if a person who belongs to a circle of ceremonial magic, and is thus strengthened by the power urges of some who have died, gives a speech in parliament or writes an article for a newspaper. The latter exercises an immensely greater degree of influence in the direction of his wishes than would be the case if he did not have this backing. This is one side of the matter.

The other side is that those who enter the circle of certain societies practising ceremonial magic are securing for themselves a power that reaches beyond death, a kind of ahrimanic immortality. For these people this is their main concern. For them, the society they enter provides a kind of guarantee that certain forces—which should by rights only live in them until the moment of death—will continue to live, even beyond death. More people than you might think are nowadays filled with this idea of guaranteeing for themselves an ahrimanic immortality, which consists in exercising influence not only as an individual human being, but also through the instrument of a society of this kind. Such societies exist in the most varied forms, and individuals who have attained certain degrees of advancement in these societies know: As a member of this society I shall become to some degree immortal because forces which would otherwise come to an end at my death will continue to work beyond death.

What these people then experience through this ceremonial magic makes them quite oblivious to a thought which would concern someone who takes such things truly seriously and in a genuinely dignified way. This is that the more a person gains by way of materialistic immortality, or rather ahrimanic immortality, the more he loses of the consciousness of true, genuine immortality. Yet materialism has taken such a hold on many souls today that they remain unconcerned about this and are tricked into striving for ahrimanic immortality. It could indeed be said that societies exist today which, from a spiritual or occult point of view, could be called ‘insurance companies for ahrimanic immortality’!

It is only a small number of people in each case who understand all these things. For as a rule these societies are organized in such a way that the ceremonial magic they practise influences only those who are unaware of the implications, merely desiring to make contact with the spiritual world by means of symbolic ceremonies. There are many such people. And those who have this desire are by no means necessarily the worst. They are accepted as members of the circle of ceremonial magic among whom there are then a few who simply use the rest of the members as instruments. Therefore one should beware of all secret societies administered by so-called higher grades whose aims are kept hidden from the lower grades. These administrative grades usually comprise those who have been initiated to a stage at which they only have a vague idea of what I have just been explaining to you. They comprise those who are to work positively in connection with certain goals and aims which are then realized by the wider group of those who have been merely inveigled into the circle of ceremonial magic. Everything these people do is done in such a way that it leads in the direction required by the higher grades but is strengthened by the forces which come from ceremonial magic.

Those who know how huge a number of such societies exist in the West can begin to gain an idea of what immensely effective tools such societies of ceremonial magic can be for certain far-reaching plans for the world. As you have seen, the chief aim is to prolong into our time a way of proceeding in which the spiritual world works into the sense-perceptible, physical world in a manner that was right in earlier times. For our times, however, the right procedure is for human beings to go towards the dead and meet them half-way. In the mood we have just been discussing, however, a path is sought which was appropriate in earlier, atavistic times but which today is brought about through the medium of ceremonial magic.

This should give you an idea of the disproportionate lengths to which exaggerated materialism, materialism that is hyper-materialistic, is prepared go in order to cross the border to the spiritual world, a border which today should only be crossed by means of attuning the soul to that mood which can be achieved through contemplating super-sensible concepts. An attitude appropriate for today is one that never accepts things which are given out by many secret societies, and which are not understood, for indeed a great deal that has not been understood is today both given out and accepted. Today it is appropriate to treat what these societies give out as something that is at most a failure to give the spoken word its true value, that is, something that uses words as mere concepts.

In much that today buzzes about in the world by way of untruthfulness and by way of egoism, in much that has even led to the canonization of egoism—not by the Pope, of course—in much that has led to the coining of the phrase sacro egoismo, which has become a new saint, though not canonized by the Pope, in much that today buzzes about in the world by way of egoisms and untruthfulnesses, influences and impulses are at work which gain extra strength from the world of the dead, in the manner described. And by searching for these impulses you will be led on to link up with other impulses about which you may find information in my book The Spiritual Guidance of Man. The lectures on which this book is based were given in 1911 in Copenhagen, for the most varied reasons. You will find there a description of how certain angelic powers remained behind in the third post-Atlantean period, in order today to unfold a force resembling that developed during the ancient Egyptian epoch. In those lectures I said:

‘Anything wonderful can become a tempter and seducer of mankind if people follow it one-sidedly; and then if this one-sidedness starts to take a hold, the great danger arises that all kinds of good endeavours begin to manifest as fanaticism. True though it is that mankind progresses by means of its noble impulses, it is equally true that an over-enthusiastic, fanatical pursuit of these most noble impulses can lead to all that would be worst for their right unfolding.’

The lecture then goes on to describe how certain forces which had their proper place in the third post-Atlantean period are now starting to work in our time. One may now add that just as an individual quite rightly finds a connection with his proper angel, so is it also possible for him to find a connection to those retarded spirits of the Egypto-Chaldean period, those retarded angels, if he seeks those forces and impulses which, in fact, are exaggerated ahrimanic forces coming in the manner described from the realm of the dead. These retarded angels play an important role in the secret societies I have been describing to you. There they are important helpers and leading spirits. A great deal that goes on in such secret societies is aimed at bringing Egypto-Chaldean elements in the old way into the present time. When these matters are no mere tomfoolery but stand fully in occult life, this takes place under the influence of retarded beings from the hierarchy of the angels who become leaders there. These are the beings from the hierarchy next above man who are sought by these societies.

This points to something exceedingly important. When we understand how the living testaments of these societies—not written testaments left over for those still alive, but testaments which are forces going beyond death—when we understand how these work and are preserved, which is something that ought not to happen, then we understand something of the magical power wielded by such societies which often enables them to impress the stamp of truthfulness on to something untrue. And indeed, one of their important magical functions is to spread untruth in the world in such a way that it gives the effect of being the truth. For in this working of the ‘untruth in what is true’ lies one of the mighty strengths of evil. This strength of evil is then put to considerable use in all kinds of quarters.

This I wanted to say today, in order to give you the esoteric background to the more exoteric matters I have been describing. Tomorrow we shall continue with this and endeavour to enter even more deeply into certain aspects.

In the preceding meditations I have spoken to you about three successive but interrelated supersensible modes of knowledge: imaginative knowledge, inspired knowledge and intuitive knowledge. And I have tried to explain to you the views of the world and life that can be arrived at by applying these modes of knowledge. Today I will only add to what I said yesterday the knowledge to be gained through such supersensible insight into the innermost nature of the human being himself, the knowledge about which the human being longs for an answer because not only does the satisfaction of a religious or theoretical need somehow depend on it, but the possibility that the human being may only become fully human at all. All human striving ultimately aims at this: Man wants to become fully human.

That which forms the actual center of our being and which we initially face with the ordinary consciousness that we, so to speak, summarize it in the only point that we then express with the word “I”, we actually face in ordinary life as something unknown. And it is precisely this mode of knowledge, as it is meant and characterized here, that gradually leads to the self-knowledge that is initially accessible to the human being. I would like to use a comparison to make it clear what I actually mean. When we look around us with our eyes, we see things through light, which itself is supersensible, but which, in its effects in the colors of objects, makes them perceptible to us for this one sense. But we can also say that we see that which is not illuminated by light. If we have a white surface somewhere with a dot in the middle, we see the white through the effect of light, as we can imagine. But we also perceive the black dot, that which confronts us as dark. We know something of this black point. If we reflect properly, it is something like this in our ordinary lives with our perception of the self. We perceive the things around us. We also bring thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will from our own soul life to our consciousness. That is, so to speak, the illuminated part. But what belongs to us in all of this, the I, that we actually perceive only as a black spot. In our ordinary consciousness, we only know about it through the fact that we perceive nothing. I would like to expand the comparison even further. I would like to remind you how you actually have to put together your entire life on earth so far in your memory from the parts that you can see because you have lived through them in an awake state. But when you look back, you connect these experiences, which you have spent while awake during the day, in a single continuous stream of reminiscence. But these experiences are everywhere interspersed with what happened while you were asleep, let's say, dreamless sleep. And dreams also mostly belong to what has been forgotten, so that we can say in general: while you were asleep. In fact, in remembering you would always have to imagine these intermediate pauses if you wanted to place the complete stream of your experiences before your soul. But yesterday we saw that the I with the astral body - that is the actual soul being with its center, the actual self - dwells outside the physical body from falling asleep to waking up. They only emerge from their unconsciousness, in which they are during sleep, when they are not left to their own devices, but when they can submerge into the etheric body, the time body, and into the spatial or physical body. With the help of these supports – we cannot call them tools in the proper sense, as we saw yesterday – they have thoughts, mental images and, through mental images, feelings and impulses of will, which are more dream-like and also asleep. In order for the I and the astral body to truly unfold the forces that they have within them, it is necessary for them to submerge into the etheric body and the physical body. Thus, when we look back on our life on earth in our ordinary consciousness, we never actually remember the true form of the I and the astral body, but only what arises when this I and this astral body have support in the physical and etheric bodies.

From this you will see that it is more than a mere comparison when I speak of the fact that the I and the astral body, that is, the actual soul being, is like a dark point within that which is actually perceived. We would have to see the true form and capacity of this ego and this astral body in retrospect if we saw them not only as dark inclusions, but as realities, as we otherwise perceive realities. But we lift these soul entities out of their indeterminacy, their imperceptibility, through imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. As I discussed yesterday, we first lift the thinking part of our soul out of the dark uncertainty by immersing it in the physical body. This thinking part initially only uses the physical body as a kind of thinking power, which is present in this physical body in the form of air-like substance. And then, when sensory perceptions, emotional experiences, will impulses or desires are added to thinking when fully awake, where the soul must fully submerge into the physical body, where everything in the physical body must be utilized by the soul, then what would otherwise would otherwise be mere fleeting thoughts, as long as the processes take place only in the airy substance of the body, can, as it were, condense into the ability to remember and into that which, as thoughts, as mental images, connects with sensory perception or emotional experiences or volitional impulses.

We can study the human organism in a much more detailed way with the means of knowledge I have mentioned than we can without them. Ask yourself what a person usually has as a mental image of their physical body when they do not think about it too much. Of course, if you think about it a little, something else immediately arises. He has the mental image that the physical body is limited by the skin, and that inside it is actually a closed mass, which one thinks of as more or less solid or semi-solid. But we must take into account that hardly ten percent of the human body is really solid, that for the most part we are a column of liquid, that we constantly carry air within us, that through the airy we are constantly not separate from the outside world, connected to the outside world. The air that was just outside is then inside me; the air that I have inhaled, that has been processed in the body, is then outside. So that man, if he is to be understood completely in terms of his physical body, must be seen as a solid, liquid, air-like substance. And all this is permeated by the warmth element, which works in these different substances.

When, upon awakening, the soul descends into the body, it is the case with the purely conceptual that it does not descend further than what is present in our body as air-like substance. The thought takes hold of the airy element. It is quite wrong to speak of the thought merely in terms of vibrational nerve processes and the like. All this is revealed to the imaginative view that the mere thought, which also lives in dreams, first takes hold of the airy element. Then, as this air-shaped element enters into certain processes, the thoughts are transferred to the watery element, and from there they imprint themselves on the solid, salt-like element. This makes it possible for the reflexes to arise later as memories, and this through processes that I unfortunately do not have time to describe, although they are very interesting.

In this way one can gain an intimate insight into the workings and weavings of the soul within the body, graduated according to the aggregate states of the human physical body. This physical body gradually becomes transparent. One sees the weaving and workings of the soul within it. One sees that which I had to say remains actually obscure to ordinary consciousness. I put it like this yesterday: When we have the simplest volitional impulse, we first have the mental image that something should be carried out, for example, that the arm should be raised. Then this mental image shoots into our organism to become will. This eludes ordinary consciousness, just as sleep states do. In relation to the will, ordinary consciousness also sleeps in the waking state of the human being. But then one sees the effect again, and that again as a mental image. But then, when one studies the matter with the means of knowledge characterized here, one sees that when the thought becomes an impulse of will in us, this thought first has an effect in the air element of the human physical body. Then it is transferred again to the solid and liquid elements, and it is through the impulse of will that matter is, as it were, burned. In the liquid part of the human physical organism, matter is reduced to nothingness, as I described it yesterday. But because this is taking place, because matter is being reduced to nothingness, empty spaces are created in our physical body, so to speak. These empty spaces create a completely different dynamic. We become immersed in them. So that when we see through something with these means of knowledge, which becomes an act of will, we first perceive the thought, then perceive how the thought shoots into the body, how it destroys matter there, how we witness the rearrangement of the material. This is how the other state of equilibrium comes about, namely that matter is returned to nothing. This witnessing of a different equilibrium leads to the physical body also following this evocation of a different equilibrium in its movements, so that action then occurs, the action that is directly bound to the human being's physical body. In this way, the human being's will also becomes transparent in the soul, transparent down to the last details.

Just to show you that anthroposophy is truly not something that just rambles and rambles in vagueness, but that it enters into the very concrete facts of the world, I would like to give you a small example where there is also a will impulse. This example is taken from language. We have - I will choose a characteristic word, I could also choose another word - we have the German word “hier”. I say: “The box lies here.” What actually happens in the human organism when it comes to pronouncing the word “hier”? The first thing that happens is that what lives in the breath is first grasped in the subconscious. And this, what lives in the breath, is now the thought. The thought lives in the breath. We only have a real mental image of the thought when we know, from anthroposophical knowledge, that the thought can really live in the inhaled air, that it is a force that can act on the inhaled air. Only when we cannot go into these details do we come up against all the difficulties of psychology, taken physically. If we believe that thought can directly move a bone, that is, can have such a robust effect on physical matter, we cannot get by. But if we know that thought is something that is transmitted in a roundabout way through the warmth element into the air element, then what is stimulated there is continued into the rest of the organism, and we begin to grasp what is there with an impulse of will. So we can say: First of all we have the experience of breathing. This experience remains unconscious. Only the insight characterized here can transcend it. Then the second element is added: we inwardly experience that which now continues out of the breathing process into the liquid element of the organism. We experience that which signifies a direction in the speech organism. In the arm, it would mean an outstretching of the arm. We perceive this in the i. So we perceive the continuation of the thought-air into the watery element, so to speak the stretching movement. We see through imagination the transition from the breathing movement into the stretching movement. And then this stretching movement is formed in the right. If I were to say only “here,” I would have to draw it: 1st breathing process 5, 2nd stretching movement ie (the horizontal is drawn). But if I now draw the stretching movement as it is experienced unconsciously when I pronounce “here,” I must draw it like this: I perceive the breathing process, perceive the direction of the stretching, which is not carried out, but rolls along in the r. And then I have really experienced inwardly what is present as a volitional impulse when I pronounce the word “here”. In this way, we can follow the impulses of will that express themselves in language when we use our imagination to look into the whole weaving and ruling of the soul that permeates the physical body and the etheric or formative body.

With imagination, we can initially gain an overview of the kind of things I have described here. When inspiration comes into play, we see how the soul plays within; how the physical body and the etheric body are something that exists externally in space and time, and how, on this, yes, I cannot say it well: like on an instrument, because this is in turn constantly being created by the soul processes, but like on a support, a ground that is constantly being worked on, the soul plays. Through inspiration, we thus advance to the actual seeing of the work of the soul in a physical organism.

When we then ascend to intuition, we perceive something else. Then we perceive: there is a law in the world that has nothing to do with physical law, but a law that certainly takes hold of people. I can perhaps express myself best about this fact in the following way: When one looks back at a later age on the way in which one's life on earth has passed, then one finds that, if one is honest with oneself, one must admit that one is actually nothing other than what one has become here in one's physical existence on earth as a result of one's experiences. Consider only: solely from this life. Consider how you learned to think, how you learned to feel, how you may have been stimulated to do this or that by meeting a particular person at a particular point in your life, which in turn may have had an effect on your character. Put together all the individual experiences you have gone through and ask yourself whether you would have become something different in relation to what you are for the outside world if different experiences had entered into your existence. If you follow this train of thought properly, you will soon see how something has been living in you from the very beginning, unconsciously drawing you to that which has become so important in your life. It is interesting how sometimes people who have reached a certain age and who have not used their lives to dream, but to grasp the facts of life that have come to them in a deeper sense, how such people, when they look back on their lives, came to say - Goethe's friend Knebel, for example, was such a person - “When I look back on my life, everything is like a dream.” , when they look back on their lives, came to say to themselves: When I look back on my life, everything is so systematically ordered. Not even the smallest event could be missing if I were to be exactly the same in my earthly existence as I am today. If the smallest event were missing, there would be a slight change, but a change nonetheless. Just think what, say, the sixty-year-old Goethe would have been if he had not experienced Italy. With Goethe, it is almost tangible. He did not go to Italy on a whim, but because there was a deep yearning within him. But these deep longings are not just there, if we want to analyze them precisely, so that we can always explain them, the following from the earlier, but they are born with us. We really find something planned in life. Of course, one could be deceived about that at first. I have only mentioned this because, after all, one can approach through the most ordinary observation that which is now given by intuitive knowledge. Intuitive knowledge really does give a full insight not only into what is going on in our organism in terms of the soul, but it also gives an insight into what works in us as the center, the I, the actual self-being. And this self-being reveals itself to intuitive insight at the third stage of supersensible knowledge. It reveals itself in such a way that we really do not stand passively in relation to the facts of the external world, but that we are drawn to them through that which is in us, and not through heredity, but from the deepest central soul being, which has been drawn into us from a spiritual-soul world at birth and has taken on a physical earthly body. Through intuitive insight one comes to realize that this I does not actually enter into earthly life in such a way that it would have to be passively surrendered to the random facts that come its way, but that it is strongly attracted by one fact and strongly repelled by another. It positively seeks its way in the world. In short, it is born carrying within itself the predisposition to its destiny.

And if we then further develop this intuitive insight into the nature of the human self, we come to realize that this ego has undergone repeated earthly lives. These repeated lives on earth did, however, begin at a certain point in time, before the I was so little different from its surroundings in its ancient form of existence that there was no such thing as a change between life on earth and spiritual-soul life. The repeated lives on earth will continue to be experienced until a point in time when the ego will again be so similar in its entire inner makeup to the spiritual world that it will no longer need an earthly life.

Thus, when we fully recognize the ego, we look back on repeated earthly lives. In other words, we look at the entire life of a person as proceeding in such a way that we have parts of that life between birth and death or conception and death, other parts between death and a new birth; that is, in repeated earthly lives the person lives out his full existence.

The usual objection is that people do not remember these repeated lives. This only applies to the ordinary consciousness. The moment intuition sets in, what happens through the repeated lives on earth becomes just as much an inner view of the soul as memories within a single life on earth. So it is here that anthroposophy does not come to its results through abstract proofs, as is the case with ordinary philosophy, but by first preparing the soul for higher knowledge and then recognizing these things through intuition. But this means that anthroposophical knowledge proves to be a continuation of the knowledge we have today in science, but it is a continuation that must work in a completely different way from the mere scientific knowledge that is recognized today.

Often the question is asked: how does anthroposophy prove what it asserts? Those who ask this question and who, because the usual form of proof is not available in anthroposophy, deny that anthroposophy is scientific, do not consider the following – I can only explain these things approximately, but they are absolutely and precisely true. The person who proceeds to prove something shows, by the very fact of proceeding to prove, that what has to be proved is not present in his intuition. Actually, we prove everywhere where we have no intuition. If I have to prove that yesterday a human being was here in this room, I shall need proof only if I myself have not seen the person here. This is basically the case with all proofs, and this is also the case with the proofs in the historical development of mankind. When, in their older, more instinctive knowledge, men had a view of what they called the divine being, they needed no proofs. The proofs of the existence of God began their life in historical evolution only when the view was lost. Proofs begin everywhere when there is no view.

The anthroposophical method, however, consists in first preparing the human soul so that it can then be perceived. When this is described – and this is the peculiar thing about anthroposophy – it can be brought into the forms of common sense and understood in the same way that a non-artist can understand a work of art, even though he cannot make it. Therefore, it cannot be objected that Anthroposophy cannot be grasped with common sense. It can only be investigated by someone who is an anthroposophical researcher himself. It can be understood by anyone who wants to apply their common sense without prejudice.

Thus we see that it is first of all knowledge of man, self-knowledge, knowledge of what the I really is, whereas otherwise, with our ordinary consciousness of the I, we have only a void, a darkness, a gloom, so that a knowledge is imparted of the real I, but that this I can then be seen in its eternity, and in this eternity as continuous through repeated earthly lives. Just as I have shown you that the human organism becomes transparent to the soul right down to the will, so too – as I have already hinted at in the previous days – the outside world is also made transparent. The soul-spiritual of the outside world is recognized through imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Many people who get to know superficially what is presented through anthroposophy, perhaps even only from the writings of its opponents, very often say that anthroposophy is a rehash of old worldviews, for example, of Gnosticism, which, after all, still prevailed among very many people in the first Christian centuries. They therefore say that we are dealing with something that has basically been refuted by the evolution of humanity over time, or at least has been overcome. Anyone who really focuses only on what has been presented in these lectures will not be tempted, even if they are also familiar with Gnosticism and anthroposophy, which certainly appears with new means and methods of knowledge and takes into account the consciousness of present-day humanity, to somehow combine it with Gnosticism. This anthroposophy works in such a way that it presupposes the scientific development of the last centuries. Of course, Gnosticism did not take this into account, because its existence preceded the development of science. But there is something else that could lead one to the temptation to lump anthroposophy together with gnosticism. The only way to avoid doing so is to really delve into the essence of anthroposophy. The only thing that anthroposophy might have in common with gnosis is that it also takes into account, in a certain way, what is a prevailing worldview in our time, and that is agnosticism, which is in a certain respect the opposite of gnosis and is also the opposite of anthroposophy, but in a different respect.

This agnosticism can first be characterized in terms of its theoretical aspect. It is present when a person speaks in the way, for example, Herbert Spencer spoke. Many others have followed in his footsteps, but they are not fully aware that they are agnostics, although they are actually agnostic in their entire way of thinking. He said: We see the world of the senses around us. We have the intellect, which rises from observation and experiment to the contemplation of the laws in this world. - To this we add what we can survey from ordinary consciousness as phenomena of the soul. Here too, a makeshift search is made, for it is only makeshift, for some kind of law. But then those who do not simply reject every supersensible reality, contenting themselves with the intellectual comprehension of sense perceptions and inner soul experiences as they present themselves to ordinary consciousness, , said: Yes, but one cannot penetrate with human abilities to what now lies as some or many origins behind these appearances; one cannot achieve a real gnosis, a real gnosticism, no knowledge. One is an enlightened person precisely because one admits that the origins of things cannot be known or investigated. Agnosticism in this form has taken hold in wide circles. It also exists in different variations. This agnosticism, when it appears philosophically, is a kind of opposite to anthroposophy, and I could, if I felt like it, start from this point in time to turn polemically critical, abusive if you will, against contemporary agnosticism, depending on my mood. What can be said about it, insofar as it really brings corruption to the human forces of progress in civilization, can soon be read in the journal “Die Drei”. I explained it in a lecture I gave at a Stuttgart School of Spiritual Science course. As I said, one could also approach the matter from this side. But I do not wish to do that today. I should like to show that this agnosticism also has its origin in the evolution of the human spirit.

Of course, errors can arise in the individual spheres of life. Then we become critics of these errors. We must root out these errors and illusions. But when something arises with such widespread popularity as agnosticism, then we can indeed fight it, the fight can be justified, but we must also ask: Yes, how is it that within the spiritual development of humanity something like agnosticism has arisen?

Now, anyone who sees more deeply into these matters must ask themselves the following: We once had to advance to that in the development of humanity, which I strictly defended on one of the last lecture evenings for the external natural sciences, especially the inorganic natural sciences; we had to advance to pure phenomenalism, as Goethe also demanded. To that pure phenomenalism, which no longer uses thinking to construct all kinds of atomic worlds behind sense perceptions that can no longer be perceived; which uses thinking merely to read sense perceptions, to remain within the phenomenal world, to arrange the phenomena in such a way that they appear to us as archetypal phenomena in the Goethean sense. All this has been done in the most diverse variations here in recent days. I do not want to deny that something of the kind does not live in a great number of people of the present time. Nevertheless, on the one hand, there is a definite tendency to theorize, where we, so to speak, once we have entered into thinking, pierce through the sensory carpet and continue with thinking for a while beyond sensory perception, where there is no longer anything for thinking to create. There we then posit atoms and all sorts of other things. This corresponds to a kind of law of inertia. Thinking will, in accordance with our present position, our present relationship to the world, actually only be applicable in such a way that we can apply it in the service of grouping, of interpreting phenomena in relation to one another, thus remaining within the phenomenal world, so to speak, reading the phenomenon and not underlying things with all kinds of explanations.

When someone writes down the word “table”, they have details. They try to combine the individual letters into a word. They read. They would start the wrong activity if they said: T, and then had to assume that processes were taking place that combined the T. Then the i. Thus he who, in following an inner law of thought, penetrates the sensory tapestry with his thoughts, instead of reading in the sensory world, exempts himself from having to do so. One penetrates the sensory world and puts forward hypotheses, which is not to say anything against phenomenal atomism. Some people in the present are well aware that there must be a pure phenomenalism. That is simply the direction in which natural science is tending. The natural scientists themselves, after all, are more concerned with experimenting and observing than with reflecting on the methods. Therefore, one cannot really blame them when all kinds of constructs are added to the phenomena. Then they believe they have facts in these constructs. But certain philosophical minds feel that it must come to pure phenomenalism. In particular, among Western thinkers – in the East it is quite different – we often have such personalities who see clearly that the science of the external world must ultimately come to a pure grasp of phenomena and use thinking only to allow the phenomena to interpret themselves reciprocally. “All fact is already theory,” says Goethe. And in William James, the American who established pragmatism, a philosophical interpreter arose in response to pragmatism. In Europe, he has emerged somewhat more blatantly in the so-called “as-if philosophy,” where it is said that one should not interpret anything into the phenomenon. But one must still ascend to something that is no longer an appearance, so one does not say of what arises: it is there, but one acts as if it were there. Much clearer than this “as-if philosophy” is that of William James, who actually gives up any substantial effect of the power of thought. He is clear about the fact that with thinking one can only group external facts and come to a point where one can then control these external facts in practice in the service of human development, of civilization. So that he actually sees nothing in all the laws that man penetrates to but practical guidelines, so to speak, for getting along with the world.

In principle, this is something that phenomenology tends towards. If we study it in its purity in Goethe, where it appears in a wonderful way with its full justification, we recognize that it was bound to arise, it must be there. Only through pure phenomenality can man fully enlighten himself about what is actually in his environment. But then everything that goes beyond the phenomenon is initially something that man cannot cope with. If one knows nothing of methods of knowledge that ascend into the supersensible worlds, that is, that ascend from phenomena as facts to other, but now supersensible facts, then, by tending towards phenomenalism, one must ultimately say to oneself: Only phenomena exist at all. When I examine them with my thinking, I do not discover anything that lives on behind them, other than the phenomena themselves. For the archetypal phenomena are ultimately also only phenomena. So that I actually get nothing out of them but practical principles for using the phenomena in the service of human beings.

Assuming that this were already fully developed; that phenomenalism were there, and thinking were to consist only in regulative principles ordering phenomena, then we have something that we could no longer call knowledge in the sense of the older concepts of knowledge, for example, gnosis. For what did that consist of which, in the past, out of instinctive human worldview, was always called knowledge? In my book 'The Riddles of Philosophy' you can read more about this in Greek times: Cognition consisted in the fact that when one looked at the world, one did not merely perceive the sense perceptions - sounds, colors, qualities of warmth - but that one perceived the thought objectively outside, outside oneself, like a color. Goethe still claims for himself that he sees his ideas in the world as the Greeks saw the ideas in the world, namely as sense perceptions. But now imagine a person in this mental-sensual activity. He looks at something, not just the colors, but the thoughts. By looking at the thoughts, he feels within himself, he experiences within himself not something passive as today, where we have only the sensual before us, but he felt activity within himself. This is the reason for Plato's assertion that there is something active in seeing, something like grasping. He felt something like activity, something that connected him as a human being with what he saw as an object outside. And this was knowledge, this feeling, this experience of an activity, it was not merely the acceptance of a passive thing. This way of experiencing knowledge is today found only in some retarded individuals, in some people who live more by their instincts than by their intellects, or it can be newly acquired by those who, in the anthroposophical sense, work their way up again into higher knowledge, but now fully consciously and not instinctively, as was still the case with gnosticism. But today ordinary consciousness is increasingly approaching the point where it is passively surrendered to external phenomena, where thinking is no longer considered a phenomenon, where it lives only in it as a guiding principle for ordering phenomena more and more practically and putting them at the service of humanity.

What is accomplished there with the phenomenal world does not lead to knowledge in the old sense. Those who, for example, still have the religious content with the God impulse from old traditions, like Spencer, for example, and then see what is called knowledge today, but which is no longer knowledge, gnosis, they profess that they say: One does not actually come to the source in this phenomenal existence. Agnosticism! And basically this agnosticism has two sides. On the one hand, it takes away everything that makes us strong as whole human beings when we have an activity in cognition. On the other hand, however, we have to go through this phase of human development, to be purely passively devoted to the phenomena. It is part of the overall development of the human race to develop this phenomenalism in the Goethean sense, because it conveys to us a level of truth that is necessary for the overall development of humanity.

What follows from the fact that we come to the phenomena and are thus, if we know nothing but the external phenomena, drawn into agnosticism? It follows that if we want to remain human, we have to approach the spiritual world in a different way than by interpreting the external sense world. And for that part of the external world that underlies the sense world, we cannot find it within the sense world. There was a time in my life when I was acquainted with a number of so-called teleologists. These people would come and say that the mechanistic worldview, pure phenomenalism, was not enough for the external world. One of these people even wrote a book, which was admired by many, about “empirical teleology.” He tried to show that mere causality is not enough, that one can also determine a certain purpose in natural phenomena, purely empirically. People felt very exalted about the mere mechanism, which has a certain justification in external natural science, by introducing a kind of teleology in this way.

I said to people at the time, including this Nikolaus Cossmann: just look at a clock. This clock can be explained completely mechanistically when it is in front of you. There is nothing there that causes us to assume little demons inside that make the wheels turn or anything like that. Any nebulous mysticism is excluded if you just look at the thing. I strictly held the view that the world of phenomena must be explained from itself. All interpretation and carrying in of teleology and the like is harmful. But the clock was made by a clockmaker. I will not get to know the clockmaker from the clock, but I can get to know him as a person. I choose methods other than analyzing the clock to get to know the clockmaker. I seek him out, perhaps in a social context, somewhere other than his shop. - At the moment when one is clear about the fact that the external world is to be grasped phenomenally, at that moment one has not, so to speak, demystified it, but one has shown the necessity of seeking this spirit, this supersensible, on other paths, through other means and methods of knowledge. And these are precisely the ones I have described. They must be added to the phenomenalist methods of knowledge.

As you can see, anthroposophy is currently endeavoring to fully establish and accept phenomenalism because it is clear that what leads to spiritual worlds must be achieved with these other methods of knowledge. This also includes what underlies the external sense world as a spiritual being.

So you see, on the one hand I could have repeated what I said in Stuttgart, as I mentioned earlier. I could have said: mental images become weak within agnosticism, because they are only passively devoted to the external world. But because we have weak mental images, we also have weak feelings. Feelings live in man in such a way that he must stir them up himself. They become sentimental, or else they remain dull, so that they become untruthful. Feelings thus become nebulous, sentimental or dull. As a result, a naturalistic or untruthful tendency has entered into our art, because art particularly emanates from the world of feeling. But because mental images do not enter into the impulses of the will as strong forces, we lack the right kind of determination today. In particular, we lack determination when it comes to taking on something new. We let what seems unfamiliar to us pass us by as a sensation. This is basically how it has been with anthroposophy for twenty years. Many people have heard about it, but they cannot decide, out of their usual experiences of the soul, to let it be more than a sensation. Agnosticism weakens us in our will. It even weakens us in the face of religious experience today. As a result, many people who have long aspired to have an elementary religious experience end up immersing themselves in traditional religions. How many honest seekers have recently returned to Catholicism. Or one returns to oriental mysticism. Because agnosticism weakens our mental images, we do not feel strong enough for elementary religious experiences.

Anthroposophy adds to the passive processing of the world in phenomenalism the impetus of imagination, inspiration and intuition, and thus even comes to a real grasp of that which, as supersensible, enters into our historical existence. She comes to a real grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha. She comes to a grasp of the Mystery of Golgotha in such a way that she can see how the pure, divine being, the Christ-being, has taken possession of the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This in turn gives real meaning to the mental images of the resurrection, of the connection between the living Christ and our own human development on earth, while it is actually deeply significant that theologians, who are considered enlightened in recent times, have said: Yes, one must just look at the life of Jesus. The resurrection, they say, arose as a belief, but one can only speak of an arising faith. What actually happened in the Garden of Gethsemane cannot really be spoken of. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, will speak of these things, which can only be grasped as supersensible, which cannot be grasped if one wants to grasp them with the usual historical methods taken from the world of the senses. I could speak at length about the deadening of our religious life through the widespread agnosticism of today. But I will only hint at that. It has already been discussed elsewhere.

But there are two sides to every coin. One can also speak of agnosticism in such a way that it has emerged as a necessary phase of development in the more recent history of mankind; that it is, so to speak, the accompanying phenomenon of pure phenomenalism, which we have to work our way towards. But even if this pure phenomenalism is of extraordinary interest to us as we work our way into it, we cannot gain from it that which is most important to us for our innermost humanity. We must gain that in a different way.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found the moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition, which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. Especially resented was my ethical individualism. But it was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being, the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation, if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world at that time. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse disappears when a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he succumbs to all kinds of illusions.

But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their emotional life knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's people. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of what could be grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely externally phenomenal facts.

Now let me add something personal, not out of vanity or silliness, but because it is relevant. I have already mentioned that I completed my “Philosophy of Freedom” in 1894. I am convinced that this “Philosophy of Freedom” could not have been written by someone who is not a pure phenomenalist in relation to natural science. For, although I am a pure phenomenalist in the field of natural science, what was I compelled to do in order to found moral truth? I was compelled to introduce into this “Philosophy of Freedom” the moral intuition which I have already characterized here as something thoroughly supersensible and spiritual. My ethical individualism was particularly resented. But that was necessary. I had to show that in the individual human being the moral impulse can be intuitively experienced in an individualistic way through ordinary consciousness, whereas otherwise intuition can only be attained through higher exercises. This was how it had to be done in order to give the moral world a foundation if one was a pure phenomenalist who already ascended into the spiritual world in those days. For in the face of pure phenomenalism, the moral impulse is lost if a person is only completely honest with himself. If he is dishonest, he comes to all kinds of illusions. But anyone who has met people who have wrestled with worldviews not in theory but in every fiber of their soul knows what the tendency towards phenomenalism, which has agnosticism in its wake, can mean for today's human beings. I have met people who say to themselves: If we grasp the world with today's scientific means, we see only natural processes in it. We can hypothetically trace it back to a primeval nebula or something similar, which is the event of our earth. We can follow it to the end, to the heat death or something similar. But then we see how we can develop the moral world within us for a long time - it is only a haze and fog that rises above the only real thing, which begins with the primeval nebula and ends with the heat death. And after the heat death there will be the great field of corpses for all that not only lived on earth, but also what strove there for moral impulses, for religious inwardness. All this will be buried. Certainly, not many people feel this discrepancy for their own spiritual life, but there are people who feel it. I have met them, with all the inner tragedy that made them doubt not only the reality of something grasped in religious terms, but also the reality of a moral world order. They are haze and mist, rising from the merely outwardly phenomenal facts.

This is rooted in the way our society is organized. Millions and millions of people, especially those in proletarian circles, only see reality in external, economic phenomena. What is spiritual – law, morality, art – is nothing, as they say, but an ideological superstructure, something that arises merely as a sham, an ideology. And so we have progressed in the agnostic direction to the point where one speaks of ideology. I myself, having been very active in working-class circles, have experienced the sense in which ideology is spoken of there, which, after all, is basically only the fault of those who, today, also from the direction of science, speak of everything spiritual, not quite clearly, not quite honestly, but actually in the sense of an ideology. We have arrived at the opposite pole of human development compared to the one that was once the oriental worldview. It spoke of Maya and of the true essence. Everything that is only accessible and attainable to the senses was Maya to it, was illusion. And the real, the truly real, was that which is now graspable for man above the sensual. Today we live in a worldview that presents exactly the opposite. For those who are agnostic, the sensory world is the only reality. They could just as easily say maya as ideology about that which can be grasped beyond the sensory world. We should translate this word in this way. Our maya is the spiritual; once the maya was the sum of sensory phenomena.

But this forces us, precisely because we had to arrive at this point, to take our paths of knowledge to the other side. For if we now ascend through imagination, inspiration, and intuition into the spiritual world, then we recognize precisely that which leads us to the actual essence of humanity. And we find the strong impulse to ascend into these worlds when we become fully aware that the sense world may only be explained from within itself, with its own methods. This gives us the impetus. But then, if the sense world can only be explained from its own methods, then thinking serves only as a tool of explanation in it. Then thinking has significance for the sense world only as a servant, for the mutual interpretation of phenomena, in order to bring the phenomena together in such a way that they explain each other. Then thinking, as we have it in pure phenomenalism or agnosticism, is merely an image. Then it no longer contains any reality. The Gnostic felt the reality of thought by looking at it. Our thinking has a mere image existence.

What follows from this if we really ascend to this pure thinking and grasp our moral impulses in it? Now, if I have a mirror here, with images in it, the mirror images cannot force me to do anything through causality. If I want to be led by mirror images, my thinking in the world development of humanity has progressed so far that it really only has the character of an image, so it no longer contains causality for me. Then, when I have moral impulses, pure thinking is formed into impulses of human freedom. By arriving at phenomenalism, and thus at pure image-thinking, and by being able to grasp moral impulses through the power of pure image-thinking, we also pass through the stage of freedom. We educate freedom into our human nature by going through this phase of human development. This is what I wanted to present in my Philosophy of Freedom. But we only become free when we have a thinking that is image-thinking, that proceeds entirely within the physical body, as I have described. At the moment we look further back, we see not freedom but fate. You see, here we have the opportunity to recognize that which we call human destiny, because it rules in the unconscious, because we only come to its rule when we ascend to intuition. Because we find spiritual laws in this destiny that work through repeated lives on earth, we have a spiritual necessity in it. But by entering into life on earth, we free ourselves from necessity for certain actions, and only follow the image-containing thinking, and in the present epoch of humanity we are thereby educated to freedom. There is no contradiction, if one looks into the matter properly, between destiny and freedom. However, in order to be able to present the concept of fate to the world correctly later on, it was necessary that the concept of freedom be presented first in the “Philosophy of Freedom”.

You see, what needs to be done is not a blind railing against agnosticism, because in a certain respect it is only the other side of phenomenalism. We read in natural phenomena, but if we merely read them, we do not find in them what we have to seek on the higher paths of knowledge. But precisely for that reason we need them fully only when we no longer bring forth instinctively from our human nature that which is the impulse of our thinking. In ancient times, even in the times of Gnosticism, man brought forth not only hunger and thirst from within himself, but also active thinking. He was not yet a technician in the modern sense. One only becomes one when one embodies pure thought outwardly in matter. I am even convinced – please forgive me for bringing up something very personal – that if I had studied philosophy in the conventional sense, instead of being educated at a technical university and finding my way into this technical life of the present, I would not have written the Philosophy of Freedom, because it is precisely the opposite pole to the experience of pure fact. And the pure fact, which is experienced in the outwardly mechanistic, and which then also leads to phenomenalism, is absolutely what, on the other hand, first evokes the full opposite pole. Otherwise, we instinctively bring something from within us that dreams little demons into the clock. We first seek the truly spiritual through inner powers of knowledge, which we must first gain when we can no longer approach our physical environment through instinctive forces and bring into it what arises from instinctive observation. On the one hand, the age of technology, with its machines, is precisely the fertile soil for a spiritual, anthroposophical worldview. And in this sense, a clear knowledge of the spirit must be brought about through anthroposophy, precisely from a non-mystical view of the world. We must not arrive at a new gnosis, based on active thinking by instinct, but we must seek for true spirituality in the outer sense and the inner human being, on a path of knowledge to be attained by practice.

We must close this course at some point, and since I wanted to present to you today what anthroposophy is in contrast to the prevailing agnosticism, we who have participated in this course are obliged to part.

Anthroposophy, as I have already mentioned, arose entirely out of the scientific spirit of modern times. Anyone who compares my earliest writings with my later ones will recognize this. It then took on the form in which simple human minds found each other and tried to satisfy certain religious needs within this anthroposophy. It may be said that there have been quite a number of such simple human souls who have found what is most essential, what is absolutely necessary for the human being, already in this anthroposophy.

It has always been a strange relationship with the scientists themselves. I can still see some of them sitting in front of me – I like to be specific – I can see a botanist sitting in front of me, for example. He was a theosophist in the sense that you may also be familiar with, in the sense of orientalizing mysticism, as it prevails in theosophical societies, for example. I had one of the most learned botanists in front of me, so it was natural for me to talk to the gentleman about botany. For me it was something natural. But he did not want to hear about it. No, no, botany must remain what it is in the university cabinet, not only with him, but also with other botanists. It should remain precisely in the way one acquires practical knowledge through the botanizing drum and works with the microscope. He should not interfere with that! Immediately, when I started a botanical topic, he talked about the etheric body, the astral body and even higher bodies. It was the rule in this theosophical movement that one first talked about all possible bodies, until far up, where they became more and more misty. They did not characterize things as I have done here, by pointing out that the etheric body is a time organism, by trying to present the matter concretely, by characterizing the astral body as that which comes from the spiritual-soul realm and inwardly shapes the body. I have tried to give a characteristic of sleep, even if it is still incomplete. I have always tried to give a concrete description. But people like those I am talking about now were not interested in that. If only one had the words for it: physical body, etheric body, astral body, then further kama manas, and then one went into the highest regions, which became thinner and thinner, but always remained material. It was a strange theosophical materialism that confronted me particularly crudely once when I was at a theosophical congress in Paris. Various lectures were held there. I asked a personality, who was actually very advanced, how she had liked the lectures. She said: Yes, it left wonderful vibrations, wonderful resonances. I felt as if she had said: One smells something extraordinarily good in this room after these lectures. — It was all transferred into the material. One knew nothing of the real spirit. And the man of whom I have just spoken always started from what lay in this direction. I always started from something else, for example, the secrets of root formation, stem formation, flower formation, the spiral tendency of plants, their germination or the like. Nothing, nothing - anthroposophy must not come into it, away with it! The astral body and buddhi and atma kept coming up, as did the rounds and the globes and everything else that is doing the rounds in the world in this sense. In short, I am only giving these as specific examples, but it was actually quite futile to approach scientists in their own scientificness.

But then, with the exception of a few people who had been involved in philosophical work from the very beginning, such as Dr. Unger, more and more younger people were coming forward. And we would never have been able to found the Freie Waldorfschule in Stuttgart if a number of people had not been truly seized by the anthroposophical spirit in the individual subjects of science in the anthroposophical sense. For only in this way could it also be transferred into pedagogy and didactics. This has also made it possible to expand more and more what used to be available only to simple minds, and to really return to science in a certain way. Today we can already see a broader field. And you were to be given a sample of this broader field, in which we can already work today, thanks to a number of younger forces who are working with extraordinary dedication on the development of the anthroposophical spirit in the individual concrete sciences. One may say that much would also be desirable in another direction. Work in the therapeutic-medical field is still in its infancy. We have also made all kinds of attempts, for example in the economic field. However, it is precisely in the latter that it is clear – and this can perhaps also be seen from events in recent weeks – that it is still not possible to work fully in the practical economic sphere. Hopefully, the things we have begun will continue to progress, and it will eventually be possible to work in this field in the same way as work is being done today in some areas of science itself, and as work can be done in a thoroughly future-proof way in education and didactics through the Waldorf school.

Following on from this, I would now like to express my heartfelt thanks to those here in Holland who, as friends of the anthroposophical movement, have made these college courses possible. It is certainly no easy task to organize such an event, and above all, in order to muster the necessary work in such a case, a deeper understanding of the matter is needed. That this has come about here, fills us - and I am convinced that I also speak from the hearts and souls of all those who were allowed to speak here during this course week - with a deep feeling of gratitude, and I would like to express this to you; first of all to you, who are the organizers of this course. And I would like to combine this feeling of gratitude with the hope that those who have now turned their attention to what has been discussed here over the last few days will feel that some suggestions have been given to them with the little that could be achieved here in such a short time. We cannot do more than give such individual suggestions. If you have the opportunity to develop these suggestions by trying to penetrate further into what has already been worked out, but which is still little known to the world, what has been worked out through the anthroposophical movement, the anthroposophical work, then you will see that this anthroposophical movement is not only not what its enemies and opponents would like to present it as, who mostly, because they cannot be objective, become personal, but that the anthroposophical movement not only is it not what its enemies and opponents would have us be, but that the Anthroposophical Movement is at least sustained by a truly serious scientific spirit.

And on the other hand, I may perhaps indulge in the hope that the lectures I have tried to formulate here this evening may contribute something to showing how unconscious longings live in a large part of civilized humanity in our time, which, when brought to consciousness, represent nothing other than the desire for something like anthroposophy. But the fact that such a longing exists can also be seen from all kinds of negative instances.

There is a personality in our time, Oswald Spengler, who is also known here in Holland, who wrote the book about the necessary decline of the Occident. I have witnessed how, especially among the youth of Central Europe, this book about the “Decline of the Occident” has made a deep, devastating impression. In this book, however, we are dealing with the work of a man who is fully at home in twelve to fifteen sciences, who truly does not speak from lightly-basted knowledge, but who speaks only from the negative authorities that are effective in our time.

One such negative instance is, for example, agnosticism, when it represents the other side of phenomenalism and one only wants to stop at this phenomenalism. The other, the positive, is part of it. This positive seeks to reach anthroposophy on the spiritual path of knowledge. In this sense, I would like at least a little bit of anthroposophy to have spoken to your souls, given your sincerity. Often, when representing anthroposophy, one has the feeling that it has been around for decades, but we are always at the beginning. And now, after decades, we are talking about the very beginning again, despite having spoken to thousands upon thousands of people over the decades. One feels this — not because of anthroposophy, which can wait — one feels it because of the longings of the time as something tremendously oppressive. But that is also why there is such deep satisfaction when people do come together who want to know what anthroposophy is and who, through their studies and serious engagement with life, have a certain ability to judge. Anthroposophy does not have to fear judgment. I can assure you of that from the spirit of anthroposophy. Critics with the ability to judge will always be most welcome to anthroposophy. Up to now, they have mostly become its adherents after they have got to know it. The more objectively one engages with anthroposophy, even if it means criticizing it, the better for anthroposophy. Anthroposophy is not something that works on the basis of blind faith in authority or that counts on a lack of criticism. It prefers those listeners and readers and collaborators who bring their full, discerning soul nature to it, not the kind that often comes from the agnosticism of the present, but the kind that comes from the truly unbiased human soul.

If one can have the feeling that, even if it was a beginning, such beginnings must ultimately lead to something that is connected with the deepest longings and necessities of human development, then one can say that one leaves such a course with a certain satisfaction. And so I believe that those who have spoken here will leave with a certain satisfaction and, above all, with a grateful heart from what has taken place here. But they would like to hope that some stimulating things may also have taken place for the honored audience.

In this spirit, allow me to conclude this course by saying to you in the warmest possible way, out of this anthroposophical spirit: If we have perhaps connected with each other through some thoughts, then we seek the ways to continue to be together, to work together in spiritual work. In this spirit, I bid you farewell for today.

Question and Answer Session

The Hague, April 12, 1922

Question about multidimensional space.

Rudolf Steiner: If I have the usual coordinate system, I have characterized three-dimensional space. Now, let us just discuss it schematically, we proceed from certain algebraic assumptions by abstractly continuing the same process that leads from the plane into three-dimensional space, and we arrive at the fourth dimension, the fifth and so on, at an n-dimensional space. And then it is even possible, let's say, to construct bodies – Hinton did that – to construct the tessaract, but that is not a real body, but the projection of the real tessaract into three-dimensional space. Now the thing is this: in purely theoretical-abstract terms, of course, there is nothing to be said against such derivations. In theory, one can also pass from three-dimensional space to the fourth dimension of time, if one proceeds within the calculation formulas in such a way that one takes into account the leap that is actually made, because it is different after all, if one passes from the first to the second dimension and to the third dimension of space, than if one passes into time. But if you refine it, ... then you can pass over into time. In this way one arrives at an abstract four-dimensional space. If one remains abstract, one can go on doing this as long as one remains in the purely intellectualistic, as long as one is not compelled to follow the matter vividly. But then one is confronted with a problem which, while the purely abstract train of thought leads to a regressus ad infinitum, vividly becomes an elasticity problem. We could also think of the pendulum as continuing to swing forever. But in the dynamic, we will get a state of vibration. That is how it is in reality. If you can get into imaginative thought, you simply can no longer carry out the process in infinitum by assuming a fourth and so on dimension. Then, if I call the first dimension +a, the second +b, the third +c, if I take real space, I am obliged not to write the fourth +d, but by the nature of things I am obliged to write -c. So that the fourth dimension simply cancels out the third bit by bit and only two remain. So instead of four, I end up with two dimensions. And so I am also forced, if I assume the fifth, to set - b, and with the sixth - a. That is, I come back to the point. Elasticity has struck back to the starting point. And that is not something that exists only in the imagination, for example, that is, a subjective experiment, but it is realized in the way I described the day before yesterday. As long as we have, let us say, the earth here and look at the root of the plant, we are really dealing with a special formation of gravity. Here one is in the ordinary dimensionality of space. But if one wants to explain the form of the blossom, then one cannot get away with that. Then, instead of taking the point of origin of the co-ordinates, one must take infinite space, which is, after all, only the other form of the point. And then one comes to going in centrifugally instead of going out centrifugally. You come to this wave surface. Instead of the thing spreading out, it pushes in from the outside, and then you get those movements, which are sliding or scraping movements or pressure movements, where you would go wrong if you took coordinate axes from the center of coordinates, but you have to take the infinite sphere as the center of coordinates and then all the coordinates going towards the center. So, one also gets the qualitatively opposite coordinate axis system as soon as one enters the etheric. The fact that this is not taken into account is the mistake in the ordinary ether theory. Herein lies the difficulty in defining the ether. Sometimes it is seen as liquid, sometimes as gas. The mistake here is that one starts from the coordinate system seen from the center. But as soon as one enters the ether, one must take the sphere, and construct the entire system not from the inside outwards, but the other way around.

Things become interesting when they are followed mathematically and cross over into the physical, and much could still be contributed to the solution of borderline problems if these theories, which begin to become very real here, were developed. But there is still a terrible lack of understanding for this. For example, I once gave a lecture at a mathematical university society where I tried to introduce these things. I explained that if you have the asymptotes of a hyperbola here and the branches of the hyperbola here, what you have to imagine on the right here, spreading out, you have to imagine on the left here, spreading together, so that a complete reversal takes place. These things gradually lead to a more concrete treatment of space. But today there is little understanding for this. Even pure analysts often show a certain dislike of synthetic geometry. And this newer synthetic geometry is the way to get out of the purely formal mathematical and to the problem where one has to grasp the empirical. As long as one calculates with mere analytical geometry, one does not approach the realms of reality. There one has only developed the end points of the coordinates, the geometric location of the coordinates and so on. If one remains with constructing with the linear and with circles, then one stands in lines within them, but is compelled to take a certain visualization to help. This is what makes synthetic geometry so beneficial for getting out of the formal and showing how to think the mathematical in nature.

Question: What does Dr. Steiner mean when he says that the physical body is a spatial body and the body of formative forces is a temporal body? The physical body also lives in time, growing and decaying.

Rudolf Steiner: Yes, that is only imprecisely thought, if I may say so. In order to trace this back to an exact thinking, you would first have to undertake an analysis of the concept of time. Just consider: as the usually meant reality stands before us, space and time are interwoven. One can only think such things when one distinguishes between space and time. In ordinary objective knowledge, you have not given time at all. You measure time with nothing but spatial quantities, and changes in spatial quantities are the means of recognizing what then counts as time. Just imagine a different way of measuring time. Otherwise, you always measure time according to space. This is not the case in the moment when you move on to the real experience of time. People usually do this unconsciously. Actually, thinking is elevated into consciousness through imaginative knowledge. But you have a truly temporal experience when, for example, let us say, on April 12, 1922 at 4:4 minutes and so many seconds, you take your soul life.

When you take your soul life in this moment, it has a temporal cross-section. You cannot say that there is any spatial cross-section within this temporal cross-section. But within this temporal cross-section lies your entire earthly past, and if you want to draw schematically, if that is the flow of your experience from a to b, you have to draw the cross-section A to B. You cannot avoid placing all of your experience in this cross-section, and yet there is a perspective in it. You can say that experiences that lie further back in time are represented with less intensity than those that are closer in time. But all of this is represented in the one cross-section. So that you get different relationships when you really analyze time. We can only form a mental image of time if we do not use the analysis that we are accustomed to in physics, according to space-cognition means, but only by reflecting on our soul life itself. But in your soul life, even if you only have abstract thoughts, you are in the time body. What is important is that we are now able to understand this time body as an organism. You see, when you experience any indisposition, let us say a digestive disorder, in the stomach, you may be able to see that it affects other areas of your spatial organism as well. The spatial organism is such that the individual areas are spatially dependent on each other. In the case of the temporal organism, although we have a later and an earlier, later and earlier are connected in an organic way. I sometimes express this by saying: Let us assume we have a very old person. We find that when such an old person speaks to younger people, for example to children, that his words bounce off the children, that his words are of no use to the children. And we find another person. When he speaks to children, it is something quite different. His words flow by themselves into the child's soul. If you now study — one only does not study these things because one very rarely considers the whole human being, one does not, so to speak, pause with one's attention long enough to observe, for example, the basis of the blessing of an older man or woman, one must sometimes go back to early childhood. Today, observation does not extend that far. Anthroposophy has to do that. Go back and you will find that those who can bless in old age, who have this peculiar spiritual power in them that their words flow into young people like a blessing, have learned to pray in their youth. I express it figuratively: folded hands in youth become blessing hands in old age.

There you have a connection between what influences other people at a later age and what, let's say, pious feelings and the like were present in the life in early childhood. There is an organic connection between the earlier and the later. And only when you know the whole person do you see how he has an infinite number of such connections. Today we are stuck with our whole life outside of this reality. We imagine that we are full of reality, but we are abstract creatures in our culture of life. We do not pay attention to true reality. For example, we do not pay attention to such things. We also do not pay attention to the fact that when we teach a child, we must avoid, if possible, giving him sharply contoured concepts, especially in primary school. These are really for a later age, as if one were to constrict the limbs and prevent them from growing larger. What we pass on to the child must be an organism, must be mobile. Now you are gradually approaching what I mean by an organism. Of course, it is only possible within the imagination. But one can still arrive at a mental image of an organism, if one is clear about the fact that what takes place in time in the human being does not relate to the spatial organism, but to the temporal organism. Now you see that there is a reality in time. You can also see this in mathematics. There was once a very nice discussion about this. I believe it was Ostwald who pointed out - not a supporter of the humanities, but someone who is not exactly a materialist - that the organic processes that take place in time cannot be reversed with the mechanical process. But the fact is that you can't even get close to the time processes with the usual calculations. You actually always remain outside of the time processes with the usual calculations. They do not follow the processes as such. If, for example, you insert negative quantities into a formula for the lunar eclipse, you get the more distant things, but you do not move away with the things. You only move in the spatial sphere. And so you only get a correct concept of what the human physical body actually is if you can separate the spatial from the temporal. In the case of man it is of fundamental importance, because one does not arrive at any understanding at all if one does not know that with him everything temporal proceeds as an entity for itself, and the spatial is ruled by the temporal as by something dynamic, while with a machine the temporal is only a function of that which has a spatial effect. That is the difference. For humans, the temporal is real, while for a mechanism, the temporal is only a function of space. That is what it ultimately comes down to.