The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I have already emphasized that the human being must be placed at the center of the considerations that will be incumbent upon you in the near future. If this is done to the fullest extent, many things can be put right in the views of the present, which, as I showed again in the last lecture, must inevitably lead to catastrophes. Now it is a matter of saying a few words, by way of example, to illustrate the things that are connected with this assertion: the human being must now be placed at the center of social considerations and social action.

We have a whole range of buzzwords, phrases, and so on among us. What many people assert before their fellow human beings has gradually become almost exclusively a phrase. We live in an age of phrases. And a reality that is guided and directed by phrases must obviously disintegrate into itself. This is connected with the fundamental phenomena of our present-day development.

Let us take something out of the whole sum of what is present in social life, and let us look at it as it is very often discussed today. Today, we hear from some who want to have a say in social matters that it is important, for example, for the proletarian movement to rise up against the unemployed income, against the unemployed acquisition. - Well, of course, there is always something real behind the assertion of such claims. But mostly something quite different from what the people who very often make such an assertion mean. For it must be clear that only by observing social processes, and not through abstractions, can we discover what is actually meant by “unemployed income” or “unemployed acquisition”. People have expressed themselves about these things in the most diverse ways. There are people, even Bismarck was one of them, who expressed themselves differently – they spoke of “productive classes”, but actually meant working classes – but who were of the opinion that, for example, farmers, tradesmen who work with their hands, and representatives of similar occupations were “productive people”, but that, for example, teachers, doctors and the like were not “productive people”. That what emanates from the teacher is not “productive work”.

Perhaps you know that Karl Marx made an economic discovery which has been much discussed, precisely in order to put the “productive work” that people meant into perspective. This discovery of Karl Marx is the well-known “Indian bookkeeper”. He was the person who, somewhere in a small Indian village, where the other people worked with their hands, sowing, harvesting, picking fruit from the trees and the like, was employed to keep records of these things. And Karl Marx decided that all the other people in this village did “productive work,” but that the hapless bookkeeper did “unproductive work,” and that he lived his unproductive life on the “surplus value” that was deducted from the labor income of the others. And from this unfortunate Indian accountant, a great many deductions are made, which have recently become common in a certain field of economic observation.

Of course, the work of a teacher can be integrated into the social process in exactly the same way as the “unproductive labor” that Karl Marx said the unfortunate Indian accountant performed. But let's look at it this way: a teacher is a skilled person, skilled as a fully human person. He teaches and educates very young children, elementary school children. And for the sake of simplicity, let us assume – the theory is not affected by this – that all the children the teacher educates and teaches become cobblers. And through his skill, by developing abilities in his children through teaching, through which they think wisely, wisely engage in life with their profession as cobblers, and through his practical guidance with all kinds of educational means, he makes his children more skillful; and they now become cobblers who, let's say, make as many boots every ten days as others make in fifteen days. Now, what exactly is going on here? Surely, according to genuine Marxist doctrine, all these shoemakers who have been created are engaged in 'productive labor'. If it had not been for the teacher and his skill, if he had been an unskillful teacher, they would have performed the same productive labor in fifteen days instead of ten. Now, if you add up all the shoes that will be made by these children after they have grown up, in the five days that have been saved by having a skilled teacher, you can say: this skilled teacher has basically made all these boots made, and at least in the economic process, in all that belongs to this economic process, that is, in everything that flows out of it for the maintenance of people and so on, in all this, the teacher was the actual producer. His being actually lives on in the boots made in the five days!

The point is that here one can apply a narrow-minded way of looking at such a thing, and then one will come to call only the cobbler's work “productive work”, and “unproductive work”, that is, work that maintains itself from the surplus value, but the teacher's work. But one distorts all reality with such a way of looking at things.

We can take a different approach that does not tend to one side or the other, but rather looks at the whole process of social life. But if we think in economic terms, purely economic terms, then we have to ask: what exactly is it that the teacher draws for his physical maintenance? Is it different in an economic sense, in other words, is it different in an economic sense from any other form of income? Is it different from anything else that, to use a Marxist term, is 'withdrawn' from purely physical work and, I would add, handed over to another person? In economic terms, it is no different at all! The reason for this is as follows.

Let us assume that what is known as “added value” is used for teachers, then it flows productively into the whole economic process in the way I have just characterized it. Let us assume that it is handed over to a financier, a person who is really called a pensioner and who actually does nothing but what is usually called “cutting coupons”. But does the fact that he cuts coupons exhaust the economic process? Of course not, the man eats and drinks and dresses and so on. He cannot live on the “added value” of what is delivered to him. He lives off what other people produce for him. He is merely a switchboard for labor, for the economic process.

And if you look at the matter quite objectively, you can only say the following: such a person, who lives somewhere as a financing pensioner, through whom the economic processes are switched, is in social life roughly the same as the resting point of a scale, of a balance beam. The resting point of a balance beam must also be there. All the other points move; the one point of rest of the balance beam does not move. But it must be there. Because there has to be a switchover. In other words, this issue cannot be decided at the national economic level. At most, one could say that if the number of these points of rest, these pensioners “cutting coupons”, became too large, then the others would have to work substantially more, work longer. But in reality it is nowhere like that, because the number of pensioners in relation to any total population never comes into consideration at all in this way, and because, in the first place, as we have the social process today, hardly anything would come of it if we were to change it from our present circumstances.

So you can't think about the whole thing like that at all. And if you go through the Marxist literature, you will see that precisely because of the compulsion to blame someone for all the ills of social life, as in the so-called unemployed acquisition, you will see that all the conclusions are inconclusive. Because they don't actually mean anything. They would only mean something if the economic process were to change significantly, if the pensioners did not receive their pensions. But that would not be the case at all. So with this way of thinking, you don't get anywhere near the matter.

Rather, it is a matter of focusing attention on the fact that such resting points are necessary for switching, for turnover in economic life. For there is an added value that corresponds exactly to all of Karl Marx's definitions of added value, and which, in all its functions, corresponds to the functions of Marx's added value, insofar as one thinks only economically: that is the tax burden. In terms of its nature and function, the tax is exactly the same as Karl Marx's surplus value. And the various socialist governments have not exactly proved, where they have appeared, that they have become particularly combative against surplus value in the form of tax payments! But it is precisely in such things that the absurdity of theories is revealed.

The absurdity of theories is never revealed by logic, but always by reality. This must be said by someone who strives to judge from this reality in all situations. As long as one remains in the economic sphere, it is impossible to associate any kind of reasonable meaning with the concept of “surplus value”. As long as we remain within the economic sphere, we are concerned with the realization of economic processes. And these can only be realized if there are control points. Whether these are in the hands of the state or of individual rentiers is only a secondary difference, from a purely economic point of view. Therefore, it is necessary to point out that everything associated with such a concept as “unemployed income” or “unemployed acquisition” is not based on economic thinking at all, but merely on resentment: on looking at the person who has such an “unemployed income” and who is basically regarded as someone who is lazy, who does not work. A legal or even moral concept is simply smuggled into economic thinking. That is the fundamental phenomenon of this matter.

In reality, it is something quite different with these things, namely, that our human life process, our civilization process, could not be maintained at all if, for example, what some people are striving for were to be realized, inventing the phrase “the right to the full yield of labor”. For there is no way to speak of a “full labor yield” when you consider that if I become a cobbler and work more skillfully than I would have worked if I had not had a skilled teacher, any possibility of me vindicating the right to the “full labor yield” is eliminated. For from what does it flow? Not even from the totality of the present! The teacher who taught me may have died long ago. The past is linked to the present, and the present in turn flows over into the future. It is absurd to want to overlook such things with narrow-minded concepts, and to see how the individual achievements of a person fit into the whole economic process.

But something else immediately emerges when one says to oneself: Well, in purely economic terms, there can be no question of a person somehow receiving a “full yield of labor,” because one cannot even grasp the concept. One cannot narrow it down, contour it. It does not exist. It is impossible. But something immediately emerges when one looks at reality. In reality, there are such transition points, such people, to whom the proceeds of others who work physically flow to some extent. Now, let us assume that the person to whom it flows is a teacher, then he does a very productive job in the sense that I characterized it earlier. But let us assume that he is not a teacher, but really a coupon-cutter. Let's start with not one coupon cutter, but two. One of them cuts his coupons in the morning, then lights a few cigarettes after breakfast, reads his morning paper, then goes for a walk, then he eats lunch, then he sits down in his rocking chair and rocks a little, then he goes to the club and plays whist or poker and so on, and so he spends his day. Now let's take another fellow who also clippeds his coupons in the morning, but let's say that then he occupied himself with, well, let's say, setting up a scientific institute, who therefore devoted his thoughts to setting up a scientific institute, which would never come into existence if he couldn't cut coupons, because if it were set up by the people who are there to do the work of cutting his coupons, it would certainly never be set up. He arranges it. And in this scientific institute, perhaps after ten years, perhaps after twenty years, an extraordinarily important discovery or invention is made. Through this discovery or invention, productive work is done in a similar way, but perhaps even more extensively, than the teacher was able to do with his children who became shoemakers. Then there is a certain difference between coupon-cutter A and coupon-cutter B – a difference that is extremely important from an economic point of view. And we have to say: the whole process of coupon-cutting was extraordinarily productive in the context of human life.

The question cannot be decided at all in purely economic terms. It can only be decided if there is something else besides economic life, something that, apart from economic life, separate from economic life, causes people, when they draw their sustenance from the community in whatever way, to give back through their own nature what they ; if, therefore, there is a free spiritual life that inspires people not to become financiers, but to apply their spiritual strength in some way, just as they have it, or to apply their physical strength, just as they have it.

When one looks at things as they really are in real life, one is led to the necessity of the threefold social organism. And above all, such insight into life makes us aware that all the stuff that is often put forward in terms of political economy, even by practitioners, is basically unusable, that something else must finally be put into people's heads, namely a holistic view of life. And it is this holistic view of life that ultimately leads to the threefold social order.

We must therefore endeavor to spread such ideas ever further and further. We must not disdain to point out how short-sighted the practical life of the present day is. We must combine these two activities: on the one hand, present the positive side of the threefold order, and on the other hand, be the harshest critics of what so often exists today as spiritual currents. We must get to know these schools of thought and become harsh critics of them. Only by holding up the absurdities that exist today to people as if in a mirror image will we be able to make progress and get through to them. And what we teach people in this way must at the same time be presented in such a way that they feel how we work with real concepts.

You see, a person who produces boots is most certainly a productive person. But in Marxist terms, a person who, say, produces beauty spots is just as productive. Because if you just look at the performance of physical labor, it is just as much physical labor as the other. What matters is to consider the whole process and to get an idea of how what someone does is shaped into the process of social life. People need to get a sense of these things. It cannot be done any other way.

Now, however, we will be obliged to respect the thought habits of today's people. But they must be clear about one thing: if you go out and talk to people for an hour and a quarter about such things as I am putting before you now, they will start to yawn and they will eventually leave the room, glad that it has stopped, because they are longing for a healthy nap. You think that is difficult, much too difficult! For people have completely lost the habit of following thoughts that are borne by reality. The fact that people have only ever followed abstractions, that they have been accustomed to following abstractions since they were schoolchildren, has made humanity lazy in its thinking. Humanity is terribly lazy in its thinking in the present day. And we have to take this into account, but in a useful way.

That is why we incorporate stories into our lectures about what has already been developed from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Maybe we tell people fewer anecdotes! It is very useful for today's lazy humanity to interrupt a difficult lecture with anecdotes from time to time, but we can spend our time better than that. In the meantime, let us tell you about our Waldorf school, about eurythmy, about our college courses, about the coming day, by inserting this in the necessary way into the course of our thoughts. This is something that breaks up the train of thought, which is initially a pleasant change for people - they then need to think less. Because, isn't it true, the essence of the matter can then follow. We can describe for a while how the Waldorf School came about, how it is organized; we can describe how thirty lecturers in Dornach have tried to fertilize the sciences from the perspective of spiritual science in the university courses. When you tell people that science should be fertilized, they don't need to think about how that happens in chemistry, in botany and so on, but they can stick with generally hazy ideas while you talk about it. And then they have time to slip into the thought bed between the thoughts that are put forward. We have again gained the opportunity to talk about some more difficult things in the next five minutes. But the other things are still extremely useful. For example, when we tell people how we created school reports in the Waldorf school, how we tried not to write “almost satisfactory”, “hardly sufficient” - which you can't distinguish at all whether someone has “hardly” or “almost sufficient” - but where we gave each child something like a small biography and a life verse. The people don't need to think much about how difficult it is, that is, they can think about how difficult it is to find a life verse for each child; but if you just say the result, it is painless to accept. So we can tell them what has been practically developed there. And in this way we can also tell people something about the facilities at the Waldorf School, how the building gradually became too small, how we had to build barracks because we didn't have the money to build a proper building. It is useful for people to hear sometimes that we don't have enough money; this can have very pleasant consequences. If we include such things in our reflections, it will be very objective, because it is objective, and will be very justified; but it can also create a pleasant change for the listeners.

Then we can tell about the university courses in Dornach, in Stuttgart. We can weave in that all of this still has to be done today for the most part by the poor Waldorf teachers, that so few people have come together who are really doing something in the sense of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Because the fact that Waldorf teachers are overburdened three times over is something that people are quite happy to accept, isn't it. Everyone then imagines that they too are overburdened. Well, and in this way we can, by actually speaking of what is already on the outside, show people something at the same time that they may like to hear again and again in between, but what they should also know, what they also need to know.

And then we also talk to them by name about the Day to Come. We try to give them a picture of how this Day to Come is set up. You can see from the brochures that have been distributed how it is set up. We teach people about the Coming Day with the help of the brochures that have been distributed and we tell them: Of course you will find that this Coming Day does not yet fully correspond to the associations about associations – we will talk about this tomorrow – and that it is still very much based on the present economy. But at the same time we say to people: we know that anyway, but it just shows how necessary it is for this economy to change, because no matter how hard we try, we cannot shape the ideal of an association out of the current economic system.

But it is necessary that you see our movement as a whole in your lectures. You should not be embarrassed, on the one hand, to present the spiritual side, the anthroposophical orientation to the people, but on the other hand, to also go into the practical things of the coming day and present all of this to the people. In your lecture, you do not need to make a direct appeal for money; that – I say it in parentheses – can be done by the other person, who is traveling with you and will approach the people only after the lecture; it is better that way. But although I put it in parentheses, that is how it should be done. As I said, you do not need to do it directly in the lecture, to promote the cause. But you can certainly let it be known that, without any selfish purpose behind it, in order to promote what is actually intended by the threefold order, you need, firstly, money, secondly, money, thirdly, money. And depending on which of you, according to the situation, finds this right, you can emphasize the first word money more strongly and then drop the tone or rise with the second tone. This is something that can somehow contribute to the inner formation of the matter.

I am not telling you this to imply anything more than that you have to be considerate of the way something is said. In a sense, when you walk into a room, you should sense whether you have to speak one way or the other. You can sense that, especially when you are among complete strangers. So you will have to take such things into account. If you want to achieve what is to be achieved now, you will not be able to go before the people with a finished concept, but you will have to adapt completely to the circumstances. You will only be able to do that if you approach the design and delivery of your lectures in the way I characterized yesterday. But we must not forget to keep referring back to what we have already achieved in the establishment of the school system, including practical institutions. After all, it is already the case in the present that people need this. And you would do well, especially when describing the threefolded social organism, to use the establishment of the Waldorf school for illustration, and likewise when describing the other economic life, to exemplify again and again what is intended by the coming day. I would like you to remember that the world must be pointed out very sharply to our various institutions, precisely through your lectures.

And behind all this there must be the awareness that from all corners and ends - as I have already said several times in these lectures - the opposition is there and more is to come, and that we do not have much longer time to bring to bear what we want to bring to bear and what must be brought to bear, but that we must tackle things sharply in the near future.

We must not take as an example – and I say this for those who have been in the anthroposophical movement for a long time – the way the anthroposophical movement as such has developed, because it is developing in such a way that its members are all too little interested in what is actually going on in the world. Now is the time to develop a keen interest in what is going on in the world. And we must be quite explicit and also critical of ourselves with regard to what is currently going on in the world today. Therefore, we must take an interest in these events. We must seek to explain the necessity of our movement on the basis of these events. We must repeatedly emphasize how these events are likely to lead modern civilization into decline. For people must learn to understand that if things continue as they usually do today, the decline of modern civilization will certainly result, and that the countries of Europe would at least have to go through terrible times if a foundation for a new beginning is not laid out of a truly active spiritual life and an actively grasped state and economic life.

We must also take away the phrases that are repeatedly uttered in the following way: Yes, all this may be very nice with the threefold order, but to introduce something like that, it would take not decades but perhaps centuries. - It is an objection that is made frequently. But there is no more absurd objection than this. For what is to arise in humanity, especially in the way of social institutions, depends on what people want and what strength and courage they put into their will. And what can naturally take centuries with carelessness and inertia can take the shortest possible time when active forces are applied. But for this it is necessary that we bring into more and more minds what can come from our spiritual science and be derived from observing our other institutions. Do not forget to point out such things as are to be created here in Stuttgart, for instance in the Medical-Therapeutic Institute. For it is also the case that it is precisely from such institutions that people can best learn to understand the fruitfulness of spiritual science, at least for the time being.

And if one can make such a thing plausible to people, there is also the consideration that it would actually be of no use at all for the further development of humanity if, in addition to the old Catholic religion, , the old Protestant creed, and the Jewish, Turkish creed, and so on, and in addition to many a sectarian creed, now also to establish a world view that would be “the anthroposophical” That would certainly have a meaning for people who meet every week, or twice a week, to indulge in such worldviews. It would have a subjective meaning for these people. But it would have no meaning for the world. For the world, only a worldview and outlook on life that directly engages practical questions has meaning. And that is why we find it all too often now that people are quite willing to be told something about the eternal in human nature, about life after death. One can also speak to a larger number of people without them scratching out one's eyes just because one says it, about repeated lives on earth, about the law of karma and so on. But today it is even more useful and important to teach people that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can contribute something to medicine, for example, to therapy, so that it can be seen how truly for the material world that which one conquers in the spiritual has a certain unique significance. For it is not enough just to rise to the spirit in its abstractness, but it is important to rise in such a way that this is the living spirit, which then has enough strength and power to have an effect on the material.

You should present this thought, this placing of the spirit in material life in the most diverse variations, to people again and again in the eyes of your soul. For the spirit wants to rule matter, not flee from matter. Therefore it is in a certain respect downright nefarious when people like Bruhm, who wrote the little book Theosophy and Anthroposophy, reproach Anthroposophy for wanting to draw into the everyday life what should hover in the heights of heaven, above reality, what should not be drawn down into material reality. One can hardly imagine a greater annoyance for human life than such teachers of the people, who need the lecterns and the universities to teach such stuff to the people. But that is happening today in all, all variants.

And what is particularly on the agenda today is that people say: Yes, anthroposophy may be an attempt to deepen the individual sciences, but anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion, anthroposophy has nothing to do with Christianity. And then people come and want to prove why anthroposophy has nothing to do with religion and Christianity. Then they come up with completely arbitrary concepts that they have of religion and Christianity. And they make it clear that these concepts, which they have of religion and Christianity, must not be challenged!

If only people would at least be truthful! Then one would be able to be a little more lenient with them. If people would come and say: Anthroposophy is now emerging; it speaks from different sources than I have spoken from so far at the theological faculty or in the pulpit. I now only have the choice of either giving up my job, but then I have nothing to eat, that's a fatal thing, or I'd rather stick to my job and reject anthroposophy! One would not exactly take such people very seriously for the cultural life of humanity, but they would speak the truth, just as the Graz law teacher spoke the truth, who proved the freedom of the human will every year before his students by saying: “People have free will!” Because if people had no free will, then they would have no responsibility for their actions. And if they had no responsibility for their actions, then there would be no punishments and no criminal law. But I am a teacher of criminal law. So I would not be teaching criminal law. But now I have to. And because there has to be a me at this university, there has to be a criminal law, so there must also be punishments, and thus there must also be a responsibility of people, and consequently also a free will of people. This is roughly how the Graz law professor taught his students about the freedom of the human will years ago. What he presented was not much different.

And theologians and other people would also act according to this scheme if they said what was true. They could also still cite the other side of the matter, they would then be equally true, and one would then be more lenient, they could still say: I could perhaps also take on the inconvenience of re-founding religion and Christianity. In the case of university professors, it could then happen that they would then have to migrate from the theological faculties, perhaps if they were in a larger number, to the philosophical faculty. If they are already professors, then it is easier than if they want to get into the university. But even if the life food were to be retained, it would still be difficult. But they do not want to go to the trouble and inconvenience of re-establishing the things. But if they just wanted to say these things, then at least they would be honest. Instead, they put forward all sorts of arguments that do not correspond to reality, but are only decorative, intended to cover up reality. We, however, must not be lenient in any way on these points, but must seek out untruthfulness and mendacity everywhere in these points and ruthlessly expose it before the world.

And we must not fail to point out the sloppiness in the thinking of some people, who simply express it by not taking certain assertions with all their moral depth. Not so long ago, someone heard me publicly characterize the mendacity of Frohnmeyer, who simply described something for Dornach in a lying, tendentious way that looks quite different from the way he described it in a tendentious way. And this person said: Well, Frohnmeyer just believed that it looked like that. - That's not what matters to me, to point out precisely that Frohnmeyer is saying something untrue in this case, but rather that Frohnmeyer shows that he makes assertions about something in Dornach that fly in the face of the truth. Anyone who does this in one respect also does it in other respects. He is a theologian. He lectures at Basel University. Theology draws from sources that are claimed to be sources of truth. Anyone who bears witness in this way, as Frohnmeyer does, who describes the statue of Christ as he has described it, shows that he has no concept of how to research the truth from the sources. If it were not for the fact that it is written in the history books when Napoleon was born and died, he could also tell lies about these things if he had to research them. What matters to me is that such people are described in all their corrupting effect on contemporary history, that it is shown that they do not fit into the situation into which they have been placed by the chaotic conditions of the times. On this point, we must be in no way lenient.

That is one of the formalities of your work in the coming weeks.

I am in a somewhat difficult position for today's lecture, because the subject matter makes it necessary to sketch out results from a very broad field of spiritual science, and some people might wish to hear substantiating, probative details about one or another of the results to be presented today. Such details can be given in the next lectures; today it will be my task to sketch out the field in question. Furthermore, I will have to use expressions and ideas about soul and body whose actual foundation lies in the lectures I have already given here; for I will have to strictly limit myself to the subject, to the explanation of the connection between the human soul and the human body,

It is a subject about which one can say that two intellectual endeavors of modern times are in the greatest possible misunderstanding about it. And if we look into these misunderstandings, we shall find that on the one hand the thinkers and investigators who in modern times have attempted to work in the field of soul-phenomena know little what to do with the great and admirable results of natural science, especially with reference to the knowledge of the human body. They are, so to speak, unable to build the right bridge between what they have to consider to be observations of soul phenomena and physical phenomena. On the other hand, it must be said that the representatives of natural scientific research work are as a rule so unfamiliar with soul observations, so unfamiliar even with what is meant when soul observation is considered, that they are in turn unable to build a bridge from the truly momentous results of modern natural science to soul phenomena. And so we find that when psychologists and natural scientists talk about the human soul and the human body, they speak completely different languages and basically cannot understand each other at all. And it is precisely this fact that today misleads, or one might even say confuses, those who try to gain insight into the great riddles of the soul and their connection with the riddles of the world on the basis of the current thinking.

I would like to start by pointing out where the error actually lies in thinking. A peculiarity has developed - I do not want to criticize this, but only state it as a fact - with regard to the way people today relate to their concepts, to their ideas. In most cases, he does not consider that concepts and ideas, however well founded they may be, are only tools for judging reality as it presents itself to us individually in each particular case. Today, man believes that once he has acquired a concept, this concept can be applied directly in the world. The misunderstandings I have just described stem from this peculiarity of modern thinking, which is transplanted into all scientific endeavor. Today, people do not consider that a concept can be completely correct, but that, although it is correct, it can be applied in a completely wrong way. In order to characterize this methodically in advance, I will discuss it using perhaps grotesque examples that could already occur in life. Someone might have the perfectly justified conviction that sleep, healthy sleep, is a good remedy. This can be a perfectly correct concept, a correct idea. If it is not applied correctly in a particular case, something like this can happen: someone visits someone who is unwell, who is ill in one way or another. He applies his wisdom by saying: I know how healthy sleep feels. When he goes out, someone might say to him: Well, look at that, the old man sleeps all the time. Or it may happen that someone else has the view that for certain illnesses, walking and moving around is extremely healthy. He advises this to someone. He only has to object: “You forget that I am a postman.

I only want to hint at the fundamental principle: that one can have perfectly correct ideas, but that these ideas only become useful when they are applied in the right way in life.

And so, in the various sciences, one can also find concepts that are strictly provable and correct, so that refutations of them would encounter difficulties. But the question must always be raised: Are these concepts also applicable to life? Are they useful tools for understanding life? — The mental illness that I have thus hinted at and explained by grotesque examples is extremely widespread in our thinking today. Hence many people are so unaware of the limits of their concepts that they are obliged to expand their concepts through facts, whether physical or spiritual. And perhaps there is no other field in which the expansion of concepts and ideas is as necessary as in the field we wish to discuss today.

With regard to what has been achieved in this field from a scientific point of view, which is, after all, the most important one at present, one can only say again and again: it is admirable, it is quite magnificent. On the other hand, there is also significant work in the realm of the soul, but it does not provide any insight into the most important soul questions, and above all, it cannot broaden its concepts in such a way that the impact of modern science, which is nevertheless directed against everything spiritual in some way, could be withstood. I would like to refer to two recent literary works that contain the results of research in these fields; works that show us very clearly how an expansion of concepts must be sought through an expansion of research. First of all, there is an extraordinarily interesting Physiological Psychology by Theodor Ziehen. In this psychology, even if the still fluctuating research results are developed through hypotheses, it is shown in a magnificent way how, according to modern scientific observations, the brain and nerve mechanism has to be imagined in order to get an idea of how our ideas are linked together and how the nervous organism works while we form ideas. But it is precisely in this area that it becomes quite clear that the scientific method of observation directed towards the soul leads to concepts that are too narrowly defined and do not penetrate into life. Theodor Ziehen is able to show that for everything that takes place in the process of imagining, counter-images can be found within the nervous mechanism. And if one goes through the field of research on this question, one finds that Haeckel's school in particular has achieved something extraordinary in this area. One need only refer to the excellent work that Haeckel's student Max Verworn did in the Göttingen laboratory on the question of what happens in the human brain, in the human nervous system, when we link one idea with another, or, as they say in psychology, when one idea associates with another. Our thinking is basically based on this linking of ideas. How one has to think of this linking of ideas, how one has to think of the realization of memory ideas, how certain mechanisms are present that store ideas, one might say, so that they can be retrieved from memory later, all this is beautifully presented in a coherent way by Theodor Ziehen. If you take a look at what he has to say about the life of imagination and about what corresponds to it as a human nervous system, you can certainly go along with it. But then Ziehen comes to a strange further conclusion.

We know, of course, that the human soul life is not limited to imagination. Regardless of how one thinks about the relationship between the other soul activities and imagination, one cannot ignore the fact that at least three other soul activities or abilities must be distinguished in addition to imagination. We know that feeling exists alongside imagination, that feeling activity exists in its entire wide range, and that will activity also exists. Theodor Ziehen speaks as though feeling were actually nothing more than a property of perception; he does not speak of actual feeling, but of the emotional tone of sensations or perceptions. The perceptions are there. They are there, not only as we think them, but endowed with certain qualities that give them their emotional tone. So that one can say: For feeling, a researcher of this kind is dependent on saying: What is going on in the nervous system is not enough for feeling. Therefore, he actually leaves out feeling itself and regards it only as an appendage to perception. One could also say: By following the nervous system, he does not arrive at the nerve mechanism of the soul that appears as the emotional life. Therefore, he leaves out the emotional life as such. But he also does not come to anything in the nervous mechanism that makes it necessary to speak of a will. Therefore, Ziehen virtually denies the right to speak of a will in the natural sciences in relation to the knowledge of soul and body. What happens when a person wills something? Let us assume that he walks, that he is in motion. Then, says the scientist, the movement, the walking, arises out of his will. But as a rule, what is actually there? There is nothing there except, at first, the idea of the movement. I present, so to speak, what will be when I move through space; and then nothing happens but that I see or feel myself, that is, that I perceive my movement. The remembered idea of movement is followed by the perception of the movement; there is no willpower to be found anywhere. — The will is thus virtually removed by pulling. We see that in the pursuit of nervous mechanisms, we do not come to feeling or to willing; therefore, we must more or less disregard these areas of the soul, and for the will, we must disregard them entirely. And then one usually says good-naturedly: Well, yes, we leave that to the philosophers, but the natural scientist has no reason to speak of these things, unless one goes as far as Verworn with regard to soul functions, who says: The philosophers have attributed much to the human soul life that from a scientific point of view turns out to be unjustified.

An important modern psychologist, who I have often mentioned here, came to a conclusion similar to Ziehen's, who started out from natural-scientific data, and who is more important than is usually thought of him: Franz Brentano. Only Franz Brentano starts out from the soul. In his Psychology, he tried to explore the life of the soul. It is characteristic that only the first volume of this book was published and nothing more since the 1870s. Those who are familiar with the circumstances know that precisely because Brentano works with limited concepts, in the sense characterized above, he could not get beyond the beginning. But one thing is extremely significant in Brentano: in his attempt to go through the phenomena of the soul and bring them into certain groups, he distinguishes between 'imagining' and 'feeling'. But in going through the soul, I would say, from top to bottom, he does not come to volition. For him, volition is basically only a subspecies of feeling. So even a psychologist does not come to volition. Franz Brentano refers to such things as the fact that even language suggests, when it speaks of phenomena of the soul, that what is usually called “volition” is basically exhausted in feeling within the events of the soul, the facts of the soul. For it is certainly only a feeling that is expressed when I say: I have repugnance for something. And yet, when I say, “I have repugnance for something,” I use the word “will” in such a way that language instinctively expresses how the will actually belongs to the emotional sphere of the soul life. From this single example you can see how impossible it is for this psychologist of the soul to get out of a certain circle. For it is unquestionable that what Franz Brentano gives is careful soul research; but it is also unquestionable that the experience of the will, of the transition of the soul life into external action, and of the arising of the external action from the will, is an experience that cannot be denied away. So the psychologist does not find what unquestionably cannot be denied away.

It cannot be said that all researchers working in the field of the newer natural sciences who are concerned with the life of the soul in its connection with the life of the body are materialists through and through. For example, the materialist draws a pure hypothesis about matter. But he comes to a very remarkable conclusion, namely that, wherever we look, there is nothing around us but soul-life. Even if there is something material out there, this matter must first make an impression on us in its processes; so that when the material facts make an impression on our senses, what we experience in our sensory perception is already a spiritual phenomenon. Now we experience the world only through our senses; so basically everything is a spiritual phenomenon, everything is psychic. This is the view of researchers such as Ziehen. According to this, the whole of human experience would actually be a soul experience, and we would basically have no right to speak of anything other than hypothetically — except for ourselves, except for our soul experiences. We live and weave within the realm of the soul according to such views and cannot get out of it.

Eduard von Hartmann characterized this view in a drastic way at the end of his manual on psychology, and this characteristic, although grotesque, is quite interesting to consider. He says: Let us take the example, in the sense of this panpsychism – we are simply forming such words – of two people sitting at a table and drinking, let us say, coffee with sugar, stemming from better times. One person is a little further away from the sugar bowl than the other, and what happens outwardly, for the naive person, is that one person says to the other, “I request the sugar bowl.” The other person hands the sugar bowl to the requesting person. How, then, Eduard von Hartmann asks, must this process be imagined if panpsychism is correct? It must be imagined that something is happening in the human brain or nervous system that forms itself in consciousness in such a way that the idea arises: I want sugar. But what is actually out there, the person in question has no idea about that. Then another idea joins the first one; but this is also only a mental image, that something that looks like another person – because what is objectively there cannot be said – that something that looks like another person is handing him the sugar bowl. Physiology, says Hartmann, now says that, objectively, the following happens: in my nervous system, when I am the one person, some process is formed which is reflected in consciousness as the illusion “I ask for sugar”. Then this same process, which has nothing to do with the process of consciousness, sets the speech muscles in motion; something objective comes about again on the outside, which one does not know what it is, but which is mirrored again in consciousness, whereby one receives the impression of speaking the words “I am asking for sugar”. Then these movements, evoked in the air, go to another person, who is again assumed hypothetically, and create vibrations in their nervous system. The fact that the sensitive nerves vibrate in this nervous system sets the motor nerves in motion. And while this purely mechanical process is taking place, something like the following is reflected in the consciousness of the other person: “I am giving this person the sugar bowl,” and whatever else is connected with it, whatever can be perceived, the movement and so on.

This is the peculiar interpretation that what is really going on outside of us remains unknown to us, is only hypothetical, but it appears that it is a nervous process that vibrates through the air into the other person, where it jumps from the sensitive to the motor nerves and performs the external action. This is quite independent of what is going on in the two minds, it happens automatically. But as a result, one gradually comes to no longer be able to gain any insight into the connection between what is automatically happening outside and what we are actually experiencing. For what we experience, if one adopts the point of view of the all-pervading soul, has nothing to do with anything that is objectively outside. Strangely enough, the whole world is taken up in the soul, I would even say. And individual thinkers have already raised very weighty objections. If, for example, a merchant expects a telegram with a certain content, only a single word may be missing, and instead of joy, displeasure, sorrow or pain can be triggered in his soul. Can we say that what we experience in our soul only takes place within the soul, or must we not assume, on the basis of the immediate results, that something has actually taken place outside that is also experienced in the soul? And on the other hand, if you take the point of view of this automatism, you could say: Yes, Goethe wrote “Faust”, that is true; but that only proves that the whole of “Faust” lived in his soul in the imagination. But this soul has nothing to do with the mechanism that described this idea. One does not get out of the mechanism of the soul life to what is out there.

This is how the view gradually emerged that is now very widespread, that what is spiritual is, so to speak, only a kind of parallel process to what is outside in the world, that it only adds to what is outside in the world, and that one cannot possibly know what is really going on outside in the world. Basically, one can then come to what I came to, namely that in my book “The Riddle of Man” I call this point of view, which developed in the 19th century and has become more and more valid in certain circles, the point of view of illusionism. Now one will ask oneself the question: Is not this illusionism based on very good foundations? — It almost seems so. It really seems that there is nothing to be said against it, that there may be something out there that affects our eyes, and that only the soul transforms what is outside into light and color, so that one is really only dealing with the soul, that one never goes beyond the limits of the soul, that one is never justified in saying: this or that corresponds to what lives in the soul. Such things only appear to have no significance for the highest soul questions, for example for the question of immortality. They have a deep significance for it, and some hints about this too will be possible today. But I would like to start from this very basis.

The school of thought that I have characterized here does not consider, above all, that with regard to the life of the soul, it only deals with what happens when impressions are made on the human being from the outside through the world of the senses, and the human being comes to form ideas about these impressions through his nervous system. These views do not consider that what happens there is only applicable to man's intercourse with the outer sense world, but for this intercourse, even when one examines the matter in terms of spiritual research, it shows quite special results. It shows that the human senses are constructed in a very special way. But what I have to say here about this structure, in terms of the subtleties of this structure, is such that it is in many ways not yet accessible to the external science that is already in existence today. In the organs that we have for the senses, something is built into the human body that is excluded to a certain extent from the general inner life of this human body. The eye is a good symbolic example of this. It is built into the organism of our skull almost as a completely independent being, connected to the rest of the organism only through certain organs. The whole thing could be described in detail, but that is not necessary for our consideration today. However, a certain independence does exist. And in fact such independence is present in all sense organs. So that, which is never taken into account, something very special happens in sensory perception, in sensory sensation. The sensory world continues through our sense organs into our own organs. What happens out there through light and color, or rather, in light and color, continues through our eye into our organism in such a way that the life of our organism does not initially participate in it. Thus light and color enter our eye in such a way that they do not hinder the life of the organism, I might say, the penetration of what is happening outside. In this way, as in a number of gulfs, the flow of external events penetrates through our senses to a certain extent into our organism. Now, the soul is immediately involved in what enters, in that it itself first gives life to what enters from outside in an inanimate state. This is an extraordinarily important truth that has come to light through spiritual science. Through our sensory perception, we are constantly enlivening that which continues into our body from the flow of external events. The sensation of the senses is a real living permeation, indeed even a living of that which, as dead, continues into our organization. But in this way, in the sensation of the senses, we really have the objective world directly within us, and by processing it with our soul, we experience it. This is the real process, and it is extraordinarily important. For with regard to sense perception, it cannot be said that it is only an impression, that it is only an effect from outside; what happens externally really goes right into our inner being, physically, is absorbed into the soul and imbued with life. In the sense organs we have something in which the soul lives, without our own body basically living in them directly. One day, the ideas that I have developed will also be scientifically examined in more detail, when correct views are formed by comparing the fact that certain animal species have certain organs in their eyes that are no longer found in humans. The human eye is simpler than the eyes of lower animals, even of animals that are very close to it. If one day someone asks: why, for example, certain animals still have the so-called fan in the eye, a special organ made of blood vessels, or why others have the so-called xiphoid process, another organ made of blood vessels, then it will be realized that in the animal organism, as these organs project into the senses, the immediate bodily life still participates in what takes place in the senses as a continuation of the external world. Therefore, the animal's sensory perception is not at all such that one can say that the soul experiences the external world directly. For the soul in its instrument, the body, still permeates the sense organ; the bodily life permeates the sense organ. But precisely because the human senses are so constituted that they are animated by the soul, it is clear to anyone who truly grasps the sense perception in its essence that we have external reality in the sense perception. On the other hand, all Kantianism, Schopenhauerianism, all modern physiology cannot achieve this, because these sciences are not yet suited to allow their concepts to penetrate to a proper conception of sense perception. Only when what takes place in the sense organ is taken up into the deeper nervous system, the brain system, only then does it pass over into that realm where the life of the body penetrates directly and where, therefore, inner happenings take place. So that the human being has the sense realm externally, and within this sense realm, as it were, the zone opposite the external world, where this external world can approach him purely, insofar as it can act on the senses. For nothing else takes place. But then, when the sensation becomes an idea, we are within the deeper-lying nervous system; then a nervous-mechanical process corresponds to each process of imagination. Then, whenever we form an idea that is taken from the sensory view, something always takes place in the human nervous organism.

And here we must now say: there is much to admire in what has been achieved by natural science, especially through Verworn's discoveries, with regard to the processes that take place in the nervous system, in the brain, when this or that is imagined. Spiritual science will only have to be clear about the following: When we confront the external world through our senses, we are confronted with external, real facts. When we imagine, for example, from memory, when we reflect, where we do not connect with the external, but connect with what has been taken in from outside, something in our nervous system comes to life; and that which takes place there in our nervous system, what lives in its structures, its processes, that is really — the more one delves into this fact, the more one comes to a wonderful image of the soul, of the life of imagination itself. Anyone who opens themselves up just a little to what brain anatomy and neuroanatomy can already tell us today will find that the brain's structure and the way it moves are among the most wonderful things that can be revealed in the world. But then spiritual science must be clear about one thing: just as we face the outside world, looking outwards, so we face our own bodily world when we are absorbed in the play of thoughts taken from the outside world. It is just that we are not usually aware of this clearly. But when the spiritual researcher rises to what he calls imaginative images, he recognizes that, while I would say it remains dream-like, it is nevertheless the case that when left to itself, the human being's imagination perceives its inner play in the brain and nervous system in the same way as it otherwise perceives the external world. By strengthening the life of the soul through such meditation as I have described, one can recognize that one is confronted with this inner nervous world no differently than with the outer sensory world; only that in the case of the outer sensory world, the impression is strong, and one comes to the conclusion: the outer world makes an impression; while that which comes from within, from the life of the body, does not impose itself in the same way, although it is a wonderful interplay of material processes, so that one has the impression that the perceptions play by themselves.

What I have said applies to everything I have so far indicated about man's relationship with the external sense world. The soul, permeating the body, observes external reality; the soul, on the other hand, observes the play of its own nervous mechanism. Now, however, a certain view – and this is where the misunderstanding arises – has formed the idea from this fact that this is the relationship between man and the external world. When this view raises the question: how does the external world affect man? then it answers it as it must answer it according to the wonderful results of brain anatomy and brain physiology, then it answers it as we now had to characterize what happens when man either devotes himself to ideas with reference to the external world, or later allows such ideas to play out from memory. This view says that this is man's relationship to the world in general. But it must lead to the conclusion that all life of the soul actually runs parallel to the outer world. For the outer world can certainly be quite indifferent to whether we imagine it or not; it runs as it runs; our imagining is purely added. Even what is a principle of this view applies: everything we experience is of the soul. But in this soul life, the outer world lives in one instance, and the inner world in another. And this is precisely the result: one time it is how the processes are outside, the other time it is how the processes are in the nerve mechanism. Now this view assumes: therefore all other soul experiences must also be related to the outer world in a similar way, including feeling and will. And if such researchers as Theodor Ziehen are honest, they do not find such relationships. Therefore, as discussed above, they partially deny feeling and completely deny the will. They do not find feelings within the nervous mechanism, and they certainly do not find the will. Franz Brentano does not even find the will within the soul. Why is that?

Once the misunderstandings I have described today have been dispelled and spiritual science is consulted for help on these matters, spiritual science will provide clarification. For the fact, which I have only hinted at, is this: What we call the realm of feeling in the life of the soul has, to begin with, however strange it may sound, absolutely nothing to do with nervous life in its origin. I am well aware of how many assertions of present-day science I am contradicting. I am also well aware of all the well-founded objections that can be raised. However, as desirable as it would be to go into all the details, today I can only present results. Ziehen is quite right when he finds neither feeling nor willing in the nervous mechanism, when he finds only thinking, so that he says: feelings are only sounds, that is, qualities, emphases of the life of thinking; for only the life of thinking lives in the nerves. There is no will at all for the natural scientist, because the perception of the movement that follows is directly linked to the thinking of the movement. There is no will in between. There is nothing of human feeling in the nerve mechanism; this consequence is just not drawn, but it is there. So when human feeling expresses itself in the body, what is the connection? What is the relationship between feeling and the body, if the relationship between thinking and the body is as I have just described it in relation to the relationship between sensory perception and the nerve mechanism? Now, spiritual science shows that, just as imagining is connected with perceiving and the inner nervous mechanism (however strange that may still sound today, it will one day be the result of natural science, but it can already be described as a thoroughly established result of spiritual science), feeling is similarly connected with everything that belongs to the breathing of the human body and what is connected with this breathing. In its origin, feeling has nothing to do with the nervous mechanism, but with that which is connected with the breathing organism. But now, at least one objection, which is so obvious, should be raised here: Yes, but the nerves excite everything that is connected with breathing! I will come back to this objection again when it comes to will. The nerves do not excite anything related to breathing, but just as we perceive light and color through our optic nerves, so we perceive the breathing process itself only in a duller way through the nerves that go from the central organism to the respiratory organism. These nerves, which are usually referred to as motor nerves for breathing, are nothing more than sensitive nerves. They are there to perceive breathing itself, just like the brain nerves, only more dullly. The development of feeling, in all that is present from affect up to quiet feeling, is physically connected with everything that takes place in the human being as a breathing process, and with everything that belongs to it, that is its continuation in one direction or another in the human organism. Once we understand that we cannot say: certain currents emanate from some central organ, the brain, and excite the respiratory processes, but rather the reverse is the case. The respiratory processes are there, they are perceived by certain nerves; through this they enter into a relationship with them. But this relationship is not such that the origin of feelings is anchored in the nervous system. And here we come to an area that, despite the admirable natural science of the present, has not yet been worked on at all. The bodily expressions of emotional life will be illuminated in a wonderful way once the finer changes in breathing and especially the finer changes in the effect of the breathing process are studied as one or other feeling arises in us.

The breathing process is quite different from that which takes place in the human nervous mechanism. For the nervous mechanism, one can say, in a certain respect, that it is a faithful reproduction of the human soul life itself. And if I wanted to use an expression – such expressions have not yet been coined in language, so one can only use loan images – for the way in which the human nervous system is wonderfully depicted in the soul life, I would like to say: the soul life paints itself into the nervous life, the nervous life is truly a painting of the soul life. Everything we experience in our soul in relation to external perception is reflected in the nervous system. It is precisely this that must make it understandable that the nervous life, especially of the head, is already at birth a faithful imprint of the soul life that comes from the spiritual world and connects with the bodily life. What may be objected to this connection between the soul, which emerges from the spiritual world, and the brain, with the head as its organ, from the point of view of brain physiology, will one day be put forward as proof of it. Before birth or conception, the soul prepares that wonderful formation of the head out of spiritual foundations, which is present as the formation of the human soul life. The head, for example, only becomes four times heavier in the course of a human life than it is at birth, while the whole organism becomes 22 times heavier in the course of further growth. The head, however, already presents itself at birth as something fully developed, if the expression is allowed: perfect. Even before birth, it is basically an image of the soul experience, because the soul experience works on the head from the spiritual world long before physical facts play out in the known way, which then lead to the existence of the human being in the physical world. For the spiritual researcher, the wonderful structure of the human nervous system, which is a reflection of the human soul life, is at the same time the confirmation that the soul comes from the spiritual, and that the forces lie in the spiritual that make the brain a painting of the soul life.

If I am to use an expression for the connection between emotional life and respiratory life that would characterize it in a similar way to the expression “the nervous system – a picture, a painting of the soul, of the life of the imagination”, then I would call the respiratory system and everything that belongs to it an imprint of the soul-spiritual life, which I would compare to pictographic writing. The nervous system is a real picture, a real painting; the respiratory system is only a pictographic script. The nervous system is constructed in such a way that the soul only has to turn to itself to find out what it now wants to experience within itself from the painting. With the picture writing, you already have to interpret, you have to know something, the soul has to deal with the matter more. It is the same with regard to breathing. The breathing life is less a faithful expression - if I were to characterize it more precisely, I would have to refer to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis; there is not enough time today - it is rather an expression that I would compare to the relationship between the pictorial writing and the meaning of the pictorial writing. The life of the soul is therefore more inward in the life of feeling, less bound to external processes. Therefore, the connection with the coarser physiology also escapes. For the spiritual researcher, however, it is clear that just as the life of breathing is connected with the life of feeling, so too, because this life of breathing is a less precise expression of it, the life of feeling must be freer, more independent in itself.

Thus we understand the body more fully when we consider it as a form giver to the life of feeling, than when we can only regard it as a form giver to the life of imagination. But because the life of feeling is connected with the life of breathing, the spiritual lives more actively and inwardly in the life of feeling than in the mere life of thinking — in that life of thinking which does not rise to imagination but is only a revelation of outer, sense experience. The life of feeling does not become as clear and bright, just as the picture writing does not express its meaning as clearly as a picture expresses it (I must speak more comparatively). But precisely for that reason, what is expressed in the life of feeling is more clearly present in the spiritual than in the ordinary life of thinking. The life of breathing is less a tool than the life of the nerves.

And when we now come to the life of the will, the fact is that when one begins to speak about the fact as a spiritual researcher, one can be decried as a bad materialist. But when he speaks of the relationship between the human soul and the human body, the spiritual researcher must consider the whole soul in relation to the whole body, and not just, as is often the case today, in relation to the nervous system. The soul expresses itself in the whole body, in everything that takes place in the body. If one now wants to consider the life of the will, where must one begin? We must begin with the lowest, most profound volitional impulses, which still appear to be completely bound to the bodily life, absorbed in the bodily life. Where is such a volitional impulse? Well, such a volitional impulse simply manifests itself when, for example, we are hungry, when certain substances in our organism have been used up and need to be replaced. We are entering the sphere in which the processes of nutrition take place. We have descended from the processes in the nervous organism through the processes in the respiratory organism and arrive at the processes in the nutritional organism; and we find the most subordinate volitional impulses bound to the nutritional organism. Spiritual science now shows that when we speak of the relationships of the will to the organism, we must speak of the nutritional organism. A relationship similar to that between the processes of imagining and feeling and the nerve mechanism, and between breathing and the life of feeling, only even looser, exists between the nutrition organism and the life of will in the human soul. Admittedly, more far-reaching things are connected with this. And here we must be completely clear about something that today is basically only asserted by spiritual science. I have been advocating it in narrow circles for many years, which I am now also publicly explaining here as a result of spiritual science. Today's physiology believes that when a sensory impression occurs to us, it propagates to the sensitive nerve and - if it admits a soul, the physiology - is absorbed by the soul. But then, in addition to these sensitive nerves, there are also so-called motor nerves, movement nerves, for today's physiology. Such movement nerves — I know how heretical it is what I am saying now — do not exist for spiritual science. I have really been studying this for many years and I know, of course, that one can come up with all sorts of things that seem so well founded. Take a person suffering from tabes dorsalis or anyone whose spinal cord is squashed, in whom a certain organ makes the lower part of the organism appear dead, and so on. None of these things refute what I am saying. On the contrary, if you look at them in the right way, they actually prove what I am saying. There are no motor nerves. What today's physiology still regards as motor nerves, as nerves of movement, as will nerves, are actually sensitive nerves. If the spinal cord is crushed at one point, then what is happening in the leg, in the foot, is simply not perceived, and then the foot cannot be moved because it is not perceived; not because a motor nerve is cut, but because a sensitive nerve is cut, which simply cannot perceive what is happening in the leg. But I can only hint at this, because I must move on to the important results of this matter.

Those who develop habits with regard to mental and physical experience know that what we call an exercise, for example, playing the piano and the like, is something quite different from what is today called “grinding out the motor nerve pathway”; that is not what it is about. For in all the movements we perform out of our will, the only bodily process that comes into consideration is a metabolic process. In terms of its origin, that which comes out of the will impulse comes out of the metabolism. When I move an arm, it is not the nervous system that comes into consideration at first, but the will itself, which, as you have seen, physiologists deny; and the nerve has nothing to do with it, except that what takes place as a metabolic process as a result of the will impulse is perceived by the motor nerve, which is in reality a sensitive nerve. We are dealing with metabolic processes in our entire organism as the bodily agents of those processes that correspond to the will. Because all systems in the organism are interconnected, these metabolic processes are of course also in the brain and connected with brain processes. The will, however, has its bodily manifestations in metabolic processes; nerve processes as such are only really involved in this sense in that they mediate the perception of will processes. All this will be demonstrated by science in the future. But if we consider the human being, on the one hand, as a nervous being, on the other hand, as a breathing being and everything that goes with it, and, thirdly, as a metabolic being – if I may use the expression – then we have the whole human being. For all the organs of movement, everything that can move in the human body, is itself connected with metabolic processes in its movement. And the will has a direct effect on the metabolic processes. The nerve is only there to perceive them.

It is somewhat awkward when one has to contradict a view that seems so well-founded as that of the two nerves; but at least one is entitled to point out that so far, with regard to either reaction or anatomical structure, no one has found any significant difference between a sensitive and a motor nerve. They are the same in every respect. When we acquire practice in something, we acquire this practice by learning to control the metabolic processes through our will. This is what the child learns after it first fidgets in all directions and does not perform any regulated movement of the will: to control the metabolic processes as they take place in their finer structures. And when we play the piano, for example, or have similar abilities, we learn to move our fingers in a certain way, to control the corresponding finer metabolic processes with our will. But the sensitive nerves, which are otherwise known as motor nerves, become more and more aware of which is the right grip and the right movement, because these nerves are only there to feel what is happening in the metabolism. I would like to ask someone who is really able to observe in a mental and physical way whether, on closer self-examination, they do not feel in this direction, how they do not grind out motor nerve tracts, but how they learn to feel, perceive, and vaguely imagine the finer vibrations of their organism, which they produce through the will. It is really self-awareness that we practice there. We are dealing here with sensitive nerves throughout. Let anyone observe how speech develops out of babbling in a child. It is based entirely on the will learning to intervene in a speech organism. And what the nervous system learns is only the finer perception of what takes place as finer metabolic processes.

Thus, we are dealing with something that expresses itself physically in the metabolism. And the expression of the metabolism is movement, even down to the bones. This could be demonstrated very easily by referring to the actual scientific results of the present day. But this metabolism expresses even less than breathing what takes place in the soul and spirit. If I have compared the nervous organism with a picture and the respiratory organism with a pictographic script, I can compare the metabolic organism with a mere sign writing, as we have it today in contrast to the pictographic writing of the ancient Egyptians or the ancient Chaldeans. These are mere signs, and here the soul must become more inward. But through the soul becoming more inward in the will, the soul, which, I might say, is only loosely connected with the body in the metabolism, enters with the greater part of its being into the region of the spiritual. It lives in the spiritual. And just as the soul connects with the material through the senses, it connects with the spirit through the will. Here too, the special relationship between the soul and spirit can be seen, which spiritual science observes through the means I have mentioned in the last lecture. It emerges that the metabolic organism as it exists today – to characterize it more precisely, I would have to go into Goethe's theory of metamorphosis – is only a preliminary indication of what the complete picture is in the nervous, in the main organism. In its metabolic activity, the soul, as it were, readjusts itself through metabolism, preparing what it then carries through the gateway of death into the spiritual world for the further life in the spiritual realm after death. But naturally it also carries over all that by which it lives with the spiritual. It is indeed most alive inwardly, as I have characterized, precisely where it is only loosely connected with the material, so that for this region the material process acts only as a sign for the spiritual; thus it is precisely in the volition. It is for this reason that the volition must be especially developed if one is to arrive at spiritual vision. This volition must be developed to that which is called actual intuition — not in the trivial sense, but in the sense in which it was recently characterized. Feeling can be developed in such a way that it leads to inspiration; and if it is trained in spiritual research, imagining can lead to imagination. But through this the other enters into soul life objectively, in accordance with its true reality, the spiritual. For just as we must characterize the sense perception in such a way that, after the human sense organs have been created, the external world sends gulfs into us, so that we experience ourselves in them, so we experience the spirit in the will. There the spirit in us sends its essence into it. And no one will ever understand freedom who does not recognize this direct life of the spirit in the will.

On the other hand, you see how Franz Brentano, who only investigates the soul, is right: he does not get to the will because he only investigates the soul; he only gets as far as feeling. The modern psychologist does not concern himself with what the will sends down into the metabolism because he does not want to become a materialist; and the materialist does not concern himself with it because he believes that everything depends on the nervous system. But since the soul is so closely connected to the spirit by its very nature that the spirit can penetrate into the human being in its original form, and the spirit sends its gulfs into the human being, what we place in the world as the highest, as moral will, as spiritual will, is really the direct life of the spirit in the soul. And because we experience the spiritual in the soul directly, the soul, in the forms that I characterized in my Philosophy of Freedom as underlying free will, is really not alone in the spirit, but is, to a high degree, in a higher and, above all, different way, consciously present in the spirit. It is only a misunderstanding of this presence in the spirit if, like the physiologist with regard to the will in Theodor Ziehen, the psychologist also wants nothing to do with the finer impulses of the will, which are nevertheless a truly real experience. They cannot be found in the soul, but the soul experiences the spirit within itself, and by experiencing the spirit in the will, it lives in freedom.

In this way, the relationship between the human soul and the human body is conceived in such a way that the whole soul is in relationship with the whole body, not just the soul with the nervous organism. And with that, I have characterized the beginning of a scientific direction that will become fruitful precisely through the discoveries of natural science, when these are viewed in the right way. It will show that the body, too, when regarded as an expression of the soul in its entirety, is proof of the immortality of the soul, which I characterized from a completely different angle in the last lecture and will characterize further from a different point of view in the next lecture.

A certain scientific-philosophical direction of recent times, because it could not cope with the soul-bodily life for the reasons indicated, has resorted to the so-called unconscious. Its most important representative, besides Schopenhauer, is Eduard von Hartmann. Now, the assumption of the unconscious in our mental life is certainly something entirely justified. But the way Eduard von Hartmann speaks of the unconscious makes it impossible to understand reality with him in a satisfactory way. In the example I mentioned, he makes a curious distinction between the two people sitting opposite each other, one of whom wants the sugar bowl from the other, and how the conscious descends into the unconscious, and what happens in the unconscious comes up again into consciousness. But such a hypothesis does not come close to the insights that spiritual science gains. One can speak of the unconscious, but one must speak of it in two ways: one must speak of the subconscious and of the superconscious. In the sense perception, something that is unconscious in itself becomes conscious by being enlivened in the way characterized today. In this way, the subconscious rises up into consciousness. Likewise, when the nervous organism is observed internally in the interplay of perceptions: the unconscious rises up into consciousness. However, one should not speak of the absolutely unconscious, but rather that the subconscious can arise into consciousness. The subconscious is then also only temporal, only relatively subconscious; the subconscious can become conscious. Likewise, one can speak of the spirit as the superconscious, which enters into the ethical idea or into the spiritual-scientific idea, which enters into the spirit itself, into the realm of the human soul life. There the superconscious enters into consciousness.

You see how many concepts and ideas need to be corrected if we are to do justice to life. And only by correcting these concepts will we gain a clear view of the truth with regard to the human soul. However, I will have to save it for next time to explain the far-reaching significance of such a consideration of the relationship between soul and body. Today, I would just like to conclude by pointing out that the more recent development of education has led us away from the ideas that can provide clarity in this area. On the one hand, it has narrowed the entire relationship of the human being to the outside world to that which applies only in relation to the sensual outside world in its relationship to the human nervous system. But as a result, a body of ideas has emerged in this field that is more or less materialistically colored; and because no one has turned their gaze to other connections between the human spiritual-soul and the physical, this gaze has become narrowed. And this narrowness of perspective has even been transferred to all scientific endeavors in general. That is why it must grieve one's soul to read how, in a relatively good lecture given by Professor Dr. A. Tschirch on November 28, 1908, as a lecture at the University of Bern on “Natural Research and Medicine” when he took over his rectorate - those listeners who are here more often will know that I only criticize those whom I respect in some other respect, and that I only say something detrimental on my own initiative when it is in defense – a strange confession can be found that arises so clearly from the misunderstandings hinted at and from the powerlessness to understand the relationship between soul and body. Then Professor Tschirch says:

He means the inner core of the world. All the antipathy towards possible spiritual scientific research arises from this attitude. That is why he continues: ‘We really have more important things to do.’

Now, anyone who can even utter the sentence, “We really have more urgent matters to attend to,” when faced with the great, burning questions of the soul, would have to be asked about the seriousness of their scientific attitude if it could not be understood from the characterized direction that their thinking has taken; especially when one reads the sentences that follow:

"The ‘interior of nature’, by which Haller probably meant something similar to what Kant later called ‘the thing in itself’, is still so deeply hidden from us at present that thousands of years will pass before we - always assuming that a new ice age does not destroy all our culture - even come close to it.

These personalities are so concerned with the spiritual, which is the “inner being”, that they are able to say: We have no need to concern ourselves with it today, but we can easily wait thousands of years. When science answers the burning questions of the human soul, the time has come for the complement of this science, which is spiritual science. For the attitude that has been characterized has led to the fact that the soul element has been virtually abolished, one might say, to such an extent that the view has arisen that the soul element is at most a concomitant of the bodily element – which the famous Professor Jodl, for example, has held as his conviction almost to our days; but he is only one among many.

But where does this way of thinking lead? Well, it celebrated true orgies when Professor Dr. Jacques Loeb, another man whom I greatly respect for his positive research, gave a lecture on “Life” at the first monist congress in Hamburg on September 10, 1911. There we see how something that is based only on a misunderstanding already gives way to human sentiment, and in this human sentiment towards the study of the soul – forgive the expression – becomes brutality, in that what may only be based on that conviction, which springs from the research, is downright made into a question of power. So Professor Jacques Loeb begins that lecture by saying:

"The question I propose to discuss is whether, given our current state of knowledge, there is any prospect of life, that is, the sum of life phenomena, being fully explained in physical and chemical terms. If, after serious consideration, we can answer this question in the affirmative, then we must also build our social and ethical way of life on a purely scientific basis, and no metaphysician can claim the right to make prescriptions for us about how we should live that contradict the consequences of experimental biology.

Here we have the striving for the conquest of all knowledge by that science of which Goethe's Mephisto says: “She is making an ass for herself and doesn't know how!” This is how it is stated in the older version of Goethe's “Faust” for the words:

Who can hope to recognize and describe a living thing
when they first try to expel the spirit,
Then they have the parts in their hand,
Sadly, only the spiritual bond is missing!
Chemistry calls it encheiresin naturae,
Mocks itself and does not know how.

Today in “Faust” it says: “Mocks itself and does not know how” – young Goethe wrote: “Drills a donkey for itself and does not know how.”

This is the effect of what has been built up on the basis of these misunderstandings: to abolish all knowledge that is not a mere interpretation of physical and chemical processes. But no soul science will be equipped to withstand such an impact if it does not have within itself the possibility of really penetrating into the physical realm. I recognize all that has been achieved by brilliant men like Dilthey, Franz Brentano and others. I fully recognize it. I appreciate all these personalities; but the ideas that have been developed are too dull, too weak to penetrate on their own so that they can take on what the scientific results are. A bridge must be built between the spiritual and the physical. This bridge must be created in the human being by our coming to strong spiritual-scientific concepts that also carry us over into an understanding of physical life. For it is precisely in the understanding of physical life that the great questions, the questions of immortality, of death, of destiny, and so on, are understood. Otherwise, if humanity does not develop an appreciation of this spiritual science, an appreciation of the seriousness of such serious times, then we may find ourselves confronted with views that express themselves in something like the following: You can now get your hands on a book that came over from America and was translated into German, a book by an American scholar, Snyder. In it there is a cute sentence, but it expresses the sentiment of the whole book, which is titled “The World Picture of Modern Natural Science”. And the translator, Hans Kleinpeter, points out that this sentiment must gradually lead to true enlightenment in the present and in the future. Now, I would like to read you a central sentence from this book to conclude:

And yet this is supposed to be something essential, something enlightening! But it is an attitude that is already related to what I have been dealing with today. And it is deeply significant of the modern age that such things can find followers at all, that they are presented as something special.

I also appreciate philology, including those sciences that are underestimated by some today. Where there is real science, in any field, I appreciate it. But if someone were to come and tell me: Goethe wrote Faust; sitting next to him was his scribe Seydel, perhaps writing a letter to his lover; the difference between Faust and Seydel's letter may have been whatever, the ink is the same in both! Both assertions are on the same level, only one is considered a great advance in science, the other is taken for granted as what those revered listeners who laughed at it testified to.

In contrast to this, we must fall back and build on that attitude which is also a scientific one, but which, out of the whole full soul of man and a deep contemplation of the world, has first laid the elements for a science, including that which is present in Goethe's scientific contemplations. The first elements for the further development of spiritual science lie in Goethe; and the true, genuine attitude towards a truthful world view is so beautifully expressed in many of his words. I would like to conclude this reflection by bringing to mind his all-round consideration of the relationship between spirit and external material being, especially with regard to the human body. As Goethe contemplates Schiller's mortal remains and, in this “partial” form, empathizes with the noble soul, with the relationship of the whole spirit and the whole soul to the whole human body, he coins words in his beautiful poem, which he has entitled “On Contemplating Schiller's Skull” — words from which we see the attitude that an all-encompassing contemplation of spirit and nature requires:

What more can man gain in life
than that God-Nature reveal itself to him,
how it allows the solid to flow into the spirit,
how it firmly preserves what the spirit has created!

And we can apply these words to the human soul and body and say:

What greater gain can a person have in life
than to have God-Nature reveal herself,
how she lets the material melt away in the spirit,
and how the spirit experiences itself in the material!

by showing him how the body is an expression and image and sign of the soul, and how it is precisely through this that it is the physical proof and revelation of the immortal soul and the eternal spirit.

In my last lecture I tried to show how it is due to misunderstandings if there is so little understanding between those who direct their research and attention to the soul and its processes and those who direct their attention to the material processes in the human organism, which proceed — well, as one will call it — as accompanying phenomena or also, as materialism maintains, as necessary causes for the psychic events. And I tried to show what the reasons for such misunderstandings are. Today I would like to draw attention to the fact that wherever real, true knowledge is sought, such misunderstandings, and also misunderstandings in a different direction, must necessarily arise if one does not take into account in the process of knowledge itself, which, in the course of more intimate, especially longer research, imposes itself more and more on the spiritual researcher as a direct experience, as an inner experience. It is something that at first seems very strange when it is expressed: In the field of world-views, that is to say in the field of knowledge of the spiritual-real or in general the knowledge of the sources of existence, if one, I might say, is too entangled in certain conceptions, in certain concepts, then one must of necessity enter upon such a view of the human soul that can absolutely be refuted, and just as well be proved.

Therefore, the spiritual researcher will increasingly deviate from what is otherwise customary in matters of world view, namely, to present this or that in support of one or the other view, which would be similar to what is called proof or even refutation in ordinary life. For in this field, as I said, everything can be proved with certain reasons, everything can be refuted with certain reasons. Materialism can be rigorously proven in its entirety, and it can be rigorously proven when it engages in individual questions of life or existence. And one will not be able to simply knock out of the field that which a materialist can cite in support of his views, if one simply wants to refute his view from opposite points of view. It is the same for someone who represents a spiritual existence. Therefore, anyone who really wants to research spiritual matters must not only know the arguments in favor of a particular worldview, but must also know all the arguments against it. For the remarkable result emerges that the actual truth only emerges when one allows what speaks for a matter and what speaks against a matter to take effect on the soul. And anyone who allows his mind to be fixed, I might say, on any web of concepts or images of a one-sided world view will always close his mind to the fact that the opposite can also assert itself in the soul, that the opposite must even appear right to a certain degree. And so he will be in a situation, like someone who wanted to claim that human life could only be sustained by inhalation. Inhalation presupposes exhalation; the two belong together. But this is always the case with our concepts and ideas that relate to questions of world view. We can put forward a concept that affirms something, we can put forward a concept that denies it; the one demands the other, like inhalation demands exhalation, and vice versa. And just as real life can only appear, can only reveal itself through exhalation and inhalation, when both are present, so can the spiritual only come to life in the soul when one is able to respond in an equally positive way to both the pros and cons of a matter. The affirmative concept, the affirmative idea, is within the living whole of the soul, so to speak, like an exhalation; the negative concept, like an inhalation; and it is only in their living interaction that that which relates to spiritual reality is revealed. Therefore, it is not at all appropriate for spiritual science to apply the usual methods that one is so accustomed to in everyday literature, where this or that is proved or refuted. The spiritual scientist realizes that what is presented in a positive way can always have a certain justification when it relates to questions of world view, but so can the opposite phenomenon. But when one advances in matters of world-conception to that direct life which lives in positive and negative concepts, just as physical life lives in inhalation and exhalation, then one comes to concepts which really take in the spirit directly, to concepts which are equal to reality. One must then, however, often express oneself differently than one expresses oneself according to the habits of thinking in ordinary life. But the way in which one expresses oneself arises out of the living, active inner experiencing of the spirit. And the spirit can only be inwardly experienced, not outwardly perceived in the way of material existence.

Now you know that one of the most important questions of our world view, and one that was also treated in the first lectures I gave here this winter, is the question of substance, of matter. And I would like to touch on this question today from the point of view I have just hinted at, as an introduction.

We cannot come to terms with the question of substance or matter if we keep trying to form ideas or concepts of what matter actually is; if we want to understand, in other words, what matter is. Anyone who has really wrestled with such questions, which are remote for many people, knows what such questions are all about. For if he has wrestled with it for a time, without yielding to any prejudice, then he comes to a completely different point of view regarding such a question. He comes to a point of view that makes him consider more important the way one behaves in one's soul when forming such a concept as that of matter. This wrestling of the soul itself is raised into consciousness. And then one arrives at a view precisely on these riddle-questions, which I could express in the following way.

He who wants to understand matter, substance, in the way it is usually understood, is like a person who says: I now want to get an impression of darkness, of a dark room. What does he do? He lights a light and regards this as the right method to get the impression of the dark room. It is, in fact, the most absurd thing one could do. And it is equally absurd — but one must become aware of this through a marked struggle — to believe that one will ever be able to cognize matter by setting the spirit in motion to illuminate matter with the spirit, as it were. Only where the spirit can be silent in our body itself, in the sensation of the senses, where the life of representation ends, only there does an external process penetrate into our inner being. There we can - by letting the spirit be silent and experiencing this silence of the spirit - have matter, substance, truly represented in our soul, so to speak.

One does not arrive at such concepts through ordinary logic; or if one does arrive at them through ordinary logic, then they turn out, I might say, to be much too thin to evoke real conviction. Only when one wrestles in the indicated way in one's soul with certain concepts, then they lead one to such a result as I have indicated.

Now the opposite is also the case. Let us assume that someone wants to grasp the spirit. If he seeks it, for example, in the purely external material form of the human body, he is like someone who, in order to grasp the light, extinguishes it. For the secret of the matter is that the external sensual nature itself is the refutation of the spirit, the extinguishing of the spirit. It reproduces the spirit just as illuminated objects reflect light. But nowhere can we, if we do not grasp the spirit in living activity, ever find it from any material processes. For that is precisely the essence of material processes: that the spirit has transformed itself into them, that the spirit has been transformed into them. And if we then try to recognize the spirit from them, then we misunderstand ourselves.

I wanted to say this by way of introduction so that more and more clarity can come about what the cognitive attitude of the spiritual researcher actually is, and how the spiritual researcher needs a certain breadth and mobility of the life of ideas in order to penetrate the things that are to be penetrated. With such concepts it is then possible to illuminate the important questions, which I also touched on last time here, and which I will only briefly mention in order to move on to our considerations today.

I said: As things have developed in the newer formation of the spirit, a one-sided view of the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical has increasingly come about, which is expressed by the fact that today the soul-spiritual is actually only sought within that part of the human body that lies in the nervous system or in the brain. In a sense, the soul-spiritual is assigned to the brain and nervous system alone, and one regards the rest of the organism more or less as an adjunct to the brain and nervous system when speaking of the soul-spiritual. Now I have tried to explain the results of spiritual research in this field by pointing out that one can only arrive at a true understanding of the relationship between the human soul and the human body if one places the whole human soul in relation to the whole physical body. But then it becomes clear that there is a deeper background to the structure of the human soul as a whole, into the actual life of perception, into the life of feeling and into the life of will. For only the actual life of perception of the soul is bound to the nervous organism in the way that modern physiological psychology assumes. On the other hand, the life of feeling — and here I must make it clear that I do not speak of it as it is presented to us, but as it arises — is related to the breathing organism of the human being, to everything that is breathing and is connected with breathing, in the same way as the life of presentation is related to the nervous system. So we must allot to the breathing organism the life of feeling of the soul. Then further: that which we call the life of will is in an equal relationship to that which we must call metabolism in the body; naturally right down into its finest ramifications. And by taking into account the fact that the individual systems in the organism are intertwined — metabolism naturally also takes place in the nerves —, I would like to say that at these outermost ends things interpenetrate. But a true understanding is only possible if we look at things in this way, if we know that the impulses of will can be attributed to metabolic processes in the same way as imaginative experiences can be attributed to processes in the human nervous system or in the brain.

Of course, such things can only be hinted at at first. And for the very reason that they can only be hinted at, objections are possible over and over again. But I do know one thing for certain: if we approach the subject with the whole range of anatomical and physiological research, that is, if we consider everything that anatomical and physiological research is, then there will be complete harmony between the spiritual scientific assertions I have made and the natural scientific assertions. On a superficial examination — let me just put forward the objection as a particularly characteristic one — objections can, of course, be raised against such a comprehensive truth. Someone might say: Let us first agree that certain feelings are connected with the respiratory organism; for the fact that this can be shown very plausibly for certain feelings cannot actually be doubted by anyone. But someone might say: Yes, but what about the fact that we perceive melodies, for example, that melodies arise in our consciousness? The feeling of aesthetic pleasure is connected with melodies. Can we speak here of some kind of relationship between the respiratory organism and that which quite obviously arises in the head and which, according to physiological findings, is so clearly connected with the nervous organism? As soon as we look at the matter properly, the correctness of my assertion immediately becomes completely clear. Namely, one must then take into consideration that with every exhalation an important process in the brain occurs in parallel: that the brain would rise during exhalation if it were not held down by the skullcap – breathing propagates into the brain – and vice versa; during inhalation the brain sinks. And since it cannot rise and fall because the skullcap is there, what is known to physiology occurs: the change in the blood flow occurs, what is known to physiology as brain breathing takes place, that is, certain processes that occur in parallel with the breathing process in the nerve environment. And in this encounter of the breathing process with what lives in us as sounds through our ear, what happens is that feeling is also connected to the respiratory organism in this area in the same way as the mere life of thinking is connected to the nervous organism.

I will only hint at this because it is something particularly remote and therefore provides a close objection. If one could agree with someone on all the details of the physiological results, no such details would contradict what was presented here last time and what has been presented again today.

Now it is my task to continue our discussion in a similar way to the last lecture. And for that I must go into a little more detail about the way in which the human being develops sensory perception in order to show what the actual relationship is between the sensory perception that leads to representations and the life of feeling and will, and indeed the life of the human being as soul, as body and as spirit.

Through our sensory life, we come into contact with our sensory environment. Within this sensory environment, natural science distinguishes certain substances, or, to be more precise, forms of substance, for it is these that are important here. If I wanted to speak in terms of physics, I would have to say aggregate states: solid, liquid, gaseous. But now, as you all know, physical and scientific research adds something else to these material forms. When science wants to explain light, it is not satisfied with just accepting the material forms that I have just mentioned. Instead, it reaches for what appears to it to be more subtle than these types of matter; it reaches for what is usually called ether. The concept of ether is, of course, an extraordinarily difficult one, and it can be said that the various thoughts that have been formed about what should be said about ether are conceivably diverse and manifold. Naturally, all these details cannot be discussed here. It should only be noted that natural science feels compelled to establish the concept of ether, that is, to think of the world not only as filled with the denser substances that can be perceived directly by the senses, but as filled with ether. The characteristic feature is that natural science cannot use its methods to determine what ether actually is. This is because natural science always needs material foundations for its actual work. But the ether itself always eludes material foundations, so to speak. It appears in connection with material processes, it causes material processes; but it cannot be grasped, so to speak, by the means that are tied to the material foundations. Therefore, a peculiar concept of ether has emerged, especially in recent times, which is actually extraordinarily interesting. The concept of ether that can be found among physicists today tends to say: ether must be that which, whatever else it may be, in any case has none of the properties that ordinary matter has. Thus, natural science points beyond its own material foundations by saying of the ether that it has what it cannot find with its methods. Natural science comes precisely to the assumption of an ether, but not to filling this ether concept with any content with its methods.

Now, spiritual research yields the following. Natural science starts from the material basis, spiritual research starts from the basis of soul and spirit. The spiritual researcher, if he does not arbitrarily stop at a certain boundary, is driven to the concept of ether in the same way as the natural scientist, only from the other side. The spiritual researcher attempts to include in his knowledge that which is active and effective within the soul. If he were to stop at what he can experience inwardly in ordinary soul life, then in this field he would not even go as far as the natural scientist who accepts the concept of ether. For the natural scientist at least formulates the concept of ether and accepts it. The student of the soul who does not arrive at a concept of ether on his own initiative is like a natural scientist who says: What do I care about what else is alive there! I assume the three basic forms: solid, liquid, gaseous bodies; I do not concern myself with what is supposed to be even thinner. This is indeed how the science of the soul usually proceeds.

But not everyone who has worked in the field of soul research does it this way; and particularly within that extraordinarily significant scientific development, which is based on German idealism that became established in the first third of the nineteenth century, — not in this idealism itself, but in what then developed out of it —, we find attempts to approach the ether concept from the other side, from the spiritual-soul side, just as natural science ascends from the material side to the ether. And if you really want to have the ether concept, you have to approach it from two sides. Otherwise you will not be able to come to terms with it. Now, the interesting thing is that the great German philosophical idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, despite their insistent thinking and conceptualizing, which I have often characterized here, still did not have the ether concept. They could not, so to speak, strengthen their inner soul life, could not so energize it that the ether concept would have presented itself to them. On the other hand, in those who allowed themselves to be fertilized by this idealism, who, so to speak, allowed the thoughts that were generated at that time to continue to work in their souls, although they were not as great geniuses as their idealist predecessors, this ether concept arose out of this soul research. We find this concept of ether first in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was also a disciple of his father, in that he allowed what Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his successors, Schelling and Hegel, had done in their souls to continue to work within him. But by condensing it, as it were, to greater inner effectiveness, he came to say to himself: When one looks at the soul-spiritual life, when one, I might say, measures it on all sides, then one comes to say to oneself: This soul-spiritual life must run down into the ether, just as solid, liquid, and gaseous matter runs up into the ether. The lowest part of the soul must, as it were, open into the ether in the same way that the highest part of the material opens into the ether at the top. And Immanuel Hermann Fichte formed certain characteristic ideas about this, through which he really did come from the spiritual-soul to the boundary of the ether. We read in his “Anthropology” 1860 - you will find the passage quoted in my last book “Vom Menschenrätsel” -:

“In the material elements....the truly enduring, that unifying form principle of the body cannot be found, which proves effective throughout our entire life.” “So we are pointed to a second, essentially different cause in the body.” “In that it contains that which is actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner, invisible body, but one that is present in all visible materiality. The other, the outer appearance of the same, formed from incessant metabolism, may henceforth be called 'body', which is truly not enduring and not one, but the mere effect or afterimage of that inner corporeality, which throws it into the changing material world, just as, for example, the magnetic force prepares a seemingly dense body from the parts of iron filings, but which atomizes in all directions when the binding force is withdrawn.

Now, for I. H. Fichte, an invisible body lived in the ordinary body, which consists of external matter, and we could also call this invisible body the etheric body; an etheric body that brings the individual particles of matter of this visible body into their forms, shapes them, and develops them. And I. H. Fichte is so clear that this etheric body, to which he descends from the soul, is not subject to the processes of the physical body, that for him it is enough to have insight into the existence of such an etheric body to get beyond the riddle of death. For I. H. Fichte says in his “Anthropology”:

I have shown with I. H. Fichte how he advances to such an invisible body of the soul. It is interesting that in many places in the heyday of German idealistic intellectual life, the same thing emerged. Some time ago I pointed out a solitary thinker who was a school director in Bromberg and who dealt with the question of immortality: Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in the 1860s. He initially approached the question of immortality like the others, by trying to get behind this question of immortality through ideas and concepts. But for him, more emerged than for those who merely live in concepts. And so the editor of that treatise on immortality written by J. H. Deinhardt was able to cite a passage from a letter that the author wrote to him in which Deinhardt says that although he had not yet communicate the matter in a book, but that his inner research had clearly shown him that during his life between birth and death, man works on the development of an invisible body, which is released into the spiritual world at death.

And so many other phenomena of German intellectual life could be cited in favor of such a direction of research and contemplation. They would all prove that in this direction of research there was a desire not to stop at what mere philosophizing speculation, mere living in concepts can yield, but to strengthen the inner soul life in such a way that it reaches the density that reaches the ether.

Of course, the real mystery of the ether will not yet be solved from within by following the paths these researchers have taken, but it can be said, so to speak, that these researchers are on the path to spiritual science. For this mystery of the ether will be solved as the human soul undergoes those inner processes through practice, which I have often characterized here and which are described in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Man does, however, gradually attain to really reaching the ether from within by going through these inner soul processes. Then the ether will be directly there for him. But only then is he capable of grasping what a sense perception actually is, what is actually present in sensory perception.

In order to present this today, I must, so to speak, approach the question from a different angle. Let us approach what actually takes place in metabolic processes for humans. Roughly speaking, we can think of the metabolic processes in the human organism as taking place in such a way that they essentially have to do with the liquid element of substance. This will be easy to see if one is even slightly familiar with the most viable scientific ideas in this field. What is a metabolic process lives, so to speak, in the liquid element. What breathing is, lives in the airy element; in breathing we have an interaction between inner and outer air processes, just as in metabolism we have an interaction between material processes that have taken place outside our body and those that take place inside our body. What happens when we perceive with our senses and follow it with our imagination? What does that actually correspond to? In the same way that fluid processes correspond to metabolism and airy processes to breathing, what corresponds to perception? Perceptual processes correspond to etheric processes. Just as we live, as it were, with metabolism in the liquid, we live with breathing in the air, we live with perception in the ether. And inner etheric processes, inner etheric processes that take place in the invisible body, of which has just been spoken, touch with external etheric processes in sensory perception. If one objects: Yes, but certain sensory perceptions are obvious metabolic processes! — it is particularly striking for those sensory perceptions that correspond to the so-called lower senses, smell, taste — a closer look would show that what is material belongs to the metabolism itself, and that in every such process, even in tasting for example, an etheric process takes place through which we enter into relationship with the outer ether, just as we enter into relationship with the air with our physical body when we breathe. Without an understanding of the etheric world, an understanding of the sensations is not possible. |

And what actually happens? Well, what happens there can basically only be understood when one has brought the inner soul process so far that the inner etheric-physical has become a reality. This will be the case when what I have recently called imaginative visualization in my lectures here has been achieved. When the images have been strengthened by the exercises that you can find in the book mentioned above, so that they are no longer abstract images, which we otherwise have, but are images full of life, then they can be called imaginations. When these images have become so full of life that they are imaginations, then they live directly in the etheric, whereas when they are abstract images, they only live in the soul. They spread into the etheric. And then, when one has so far brought it in one's inner experimentation that one experiences the ether as a living reality within oneself, then one can experience what happens in the sense perception. The sensation consists in this – I can only present this today as a result – that, as the external environment sends the etheric from the material into our sense organs, it creates those gulfs of which I spoke the day before yesterday, so that what is outside also becomes internal within our sense realm; for example, we have a sound, so to speak, between the sense life and the external world. Then, as a result of the outer ether penetrating our sense organs, this outer ether is killed. And as the outer ether enters our sense organs in a deadened state, it is revived by the inner ether of the etheric body counteracting it. This is the essence of sensory perception. Just as in the breathing process, death and life come into being when we inhale oxygen and exhale carbonic acid, so there is an interaction between the quasi-dead ether and the living ether in the sense of feeling.

This is an extraordinarily important fact for spiritual science. For that which cannot be found through philosophical speculation, on which the philosophical speculation of the last centuries has so often failed, can only be found through spiritual science. Sensory perception can thus be recognized as a fine interaction between external and internal ether; as the animation of the ether killed in the sensory organ from the inner etheric body. So that what the senses kill in us from the environment is inwardly revived by the etheric body, and we thereby come to what is precisely perception of the external world.

This is extraordinarily important, for it shows how, even when he is giving himself up to sense perception, man lives not only in the physical organism but also in the ethereal supersensible, and how the whole life of the senses is a

life and weaving in the invisible etheric. This is what the deeper researchers have always suspected in the characterized time, but it will be raised to certainty through spiritual science. Among those who recognized this significant truth, I will mention the almost completely forgotten J.P.V. Troxler. I have already mentioned him in earlier lectures here in earlier years. In his Lectures on Philosophy, he said:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that has an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner human being... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously dreams, in jest, of an entire inner spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spirit body; Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way... ."

These researchers were also aware that the moment one ascends from mere material observation to the observation of this supersensible organism within us, one has to pass from ordinary anthropology to a kind of knowledge that comes to its results by way of inner observation. It is therefore interesting that both I. H. Fichte and Troxler are clear about the fact that anthropology must be elevated to something else if it is to grasp the whole human being. I. H. Fichte says in his 'Anthropology':

"Sensual consciousness... with the entire, also human, life of the senses, has no other significance than to be the site in which the supersensible life of the spirit is realized, in that through free conscious deed it introduces the otherworldly spiritual content of the ideas into the world of the senses... This thorough grasp of the human being now elevates “anthropology in its final result to ‘anthroposophy’.”

We see from this current of German intellectual life, which, I would say, drives idealism from its abstractness to reality, the inkling of an anthroposophy. And Troxler says that one must assume a super-spiritual sense in conjunction with a super-sensible spirit, and that one can thus grasp the human being in such a way that one no longer has to deal with an ordinary anthropology, but with something higher:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... . in every anthroposophy.. . must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it juxtaposes to it as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

With Anthroposophy, something is not presented that emerges, as it were, out of arbitrariness, but something that inevitably leads to that spiritual life, which once it is engaged in, experiences concepts and ideas not only as concepts and ideas, but condenses them to such an extent - and I would like to use the expression again - that they lead into reality, that they become saturated with reality.

But, and this is the defect of this research, if one merely rises from the physical to the etheric body, one still does not get along; but one only comes to a certain limit, which must be exceeded, however, because beyond the etheric only the soul-spiritual lies. And the essential thing is that this soul-spiritual can only enter into a relationship with the physical through the mediation of the etheric. Thus, we have to look for the actual soul of the human being in that which now works completely super-etherically in the etheric, so that the etheric in turn shapes the physical as it is itself shaped, permeated, and lived through by the soul.

Let us now try to grasp the human being at the other pole, the will pole: We have said that the life of the will is connected with the metabolism. Inasmuch as the impulse of the will expresses itself in the metabolism, it lives, not merely in the external physical metabolism, but, since the whole human being is within the boundaries of his being, the etheric also lives in what develops as metabolism when a will impulse proceeds. Spiritual science shows that the opposite of sensory perception is present in the will impulse. While in sensory perception the outer ether is, as it were, animated by the inner ether, so that the inner ether pours into the dead ether, in the case of the will impulse, when it arises from the soul spiritual, then through metabolism and everything connected with it, the etheric body is loosened and driven out of the physical body in those areas where the metabolism takes place. So here we have the opposite: the etheric body, as it were, withdraws from physical processes. And therein lies the essence of acts of will, in that the etheric body withdraws from the physical body.

Now those revered listeners who have heard the earlier lectures will remember that, in addition to imaginative knowledge, I have distinguished between inspired knowledge and the actual intuitive knowledge. And just as imaginative knowledge is the result of such a strengthening of the soul life that one comes to the etheric life in the way indicated earlier, so intuitive knowledge is given by the fact that one learns, so to speak, in one's soul life to participate through powerful impulses of will, even to evoke what one can call withdrawal of the etheric body from physical processes. Thus in this area the soul-spiritual extends into the physical-bodily. When a volitional impulse originally emanates from the soul-spiritual, it finds the etheric, and the consequence is that this etheric is withdrawn from some metabolic area of the physical body. And from this working of the soul-spiritual through the etheric upon the bodily, there arises what may be called the transmission of a volitional impulse to some bodily movement, to some bodily activity. But it is only when we consider the human being as a whole in this way that we arrive at his actual immortal part. For as soon as we learn to recognize how the spiritual-soul element weaves in the ether, it also becomes clear to us that this weaving of the spiritual-soul element in the ether is independent of those processes of the physical body that are included in birth, conception and death. And in this way it is possible to truly rise to the immortal in the human being, to that which connects with the body that one receives through the hereditary current and which is maintained when the human being passes through the gate of death again. For the eternal spiritual is connected with that which is born and dies here, indirectly through the etheric.

It has become clear that the concepts presented by spiritual science are very much at odds with today's thinking habits and that it is difficult for people to find their way into these concepts. It may be said that one of the obstacles to this finding one's way in, besides others, is that so little effort is made to seek the real connection between the spiritual and soul life and the bodily in the way suggested today. Most people long for something quite different from what spiritual research can actually provide. What is it actually that takes place in man when he imagines? An etheric process that only interacts with an external etheric process. But in order for a person to be in this direction in a healthy mental and physical way, it is necessary for that person to become aware of where the boundary is where the inner and outer ether touch. This mostly happens unconsciously. It becomes conscious when the human being rises to imaginative knowledge, when he experiences inwardly the rain and movement of the ether, and his coming together with the outer ether, which dies in the sense organ. In this interaction between the inner and outer ether, we have, so to speak, the outermost limit of the effectiveness of the ether in general on the human organism. For that which is in our etheric body, for example, primarily affects the organism in terms of growth. There it is still active within the organism, forming it. It gradually organizes our organism so that it adapts to the outside world, as we see when a child grows up. But this inwardly formative grasp of the physical body by the ether must reach a certain limit. If it goes beyond this limit through some morbid process, then what lives and moves in the ether, but which should maintain itself in the etheric, encroaches upon the physical organism, so that what should remain as ether movement is, as it were, interwoven into the physical organism. What then happens? That which should actually only be experienced inwardly as an image, occurs as a process in the physical body. Then it is what is called a hallucination. When the ether process crosses its boundary into the physical, because the body, through its disease, does not offer the right resistance, then what is called a hallucination arises. Now, many people who want to enter the spiritual world actually desire hallucinations above all. Of course, the spiritual researcher cannot offer them that, because hallucination is nothing more than the reproduction of a purely material process, a process that takes place in relation to the soul beyond the boundaries of the body, that is, in the body. On the other hand, what leads to the spiritual world is that one goes from this boundary back into the soul and instead of hallucinations, one comes to imagination, and imagination is a purely mental experience. And because it is a purely mental experience, the soul lives in the spiritual world in the imagination. But in this way the soul also lives in fully conscious penetration of the imagination. And it is important to realize that imagination, that is, the right way to gain spiritual knowledge, and hallucination, are opposites and also destroy each other. He who hallucinates through a diseased organism blocks the path to true imagination; and he who has true imagination is most safely guarded from all hallucination. Hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive and mutually destructive.

But the same is true at the other pole of the human being. Just as the etheric body can encroach upon the physical body, can sink its formative power into the physical body, and thereby cause hallucinations, that is, purely physical processes, so on the other side, through certain morbid formations of the organism or through induced fatigue or other conditions of the organism, the etheric, as it was characterized in the act of will, can emerge in an irregular manner. Then it may happen that instead of the etheric really being withdrawn from the physical metabolic region in a correct act of will, it remains within, and the purely physical activity of the physical metabolic region encroaches upon the etheric , so that the etheric becomes dependent on the physical, whereas in normal will-manifestation the physical is dependent on the etheric, which in turn is determined by the soul-spiritual. When this happens through such processes as I have indicated, then, I might say, the compulsive act, which consists in the physical body with its metabolic processes forcing its way into the etheric, so to speak pushing itself into the etheric body, gives rise to the morbid counter-image of hallucination. And if the compulsive act is evoked as a pathological phenomenon, then one can again say: it excludes what is called intuition in spiritual scientific knowledge. Intuition and compulsive behavior are mutually exclusive, just as hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive. This is why there is nothing more soulless than, on the one hand, hallucinators, because hallucinations are just hints at bodily conditions that should not be; and, on the other hand, for example, the whirling dervishes. The dance of the dervish comes about through the physical body pushing into the etheric, so that it is not the etheric that brings about the effect from the spiritual-soul, but basically only regular compulsive actions occur. And anyone who believes that they can find revelations of the soul in the dancing dervish should first of all study spiritual science in order to realize that the dancing dervish is proof that the spirit, the spiritual-soul, has left its body; that is why he dances in this way.

And, I would like to say, only a little more extensive is that which is not dancing, but which, for example, is automatic writing, mediumistic writing. This also consists in nothing more than first driving the spiritual-soul out of the human being completely, and allowing the physical body, which has been pushed into the etheric body, to unfold as it does when it has become empty, as it were, of the inner ether and now comes under the control of the surrounding outer ether. All these subjects lead away from spiritual science, not toward it, although nothing should be objected to them from the standpoint of those from whom they usually meet with so much opposition. In the dancing dervish one can study what a danced art, a truly artistic dance, should be. The artistic dance should consist precisely in the fact that each individual movement corresponds to a volitional impulse, which can also become conscious to the person concerned, so that one is never dealing with a mere intrusion of physical processes into ethereal processes. Only spiritualized dance is artistic dance. The dancing of the dervish is only the denial of spirituality. Some will object: But it does show the spirit! It does, but how? You can study a shell if you take in and look at the living shell; but you can also study it when the living shell is gone, by looking at the shell: the shape of the shell is reproduced in the shell, the shape born out of life. But in a similar way, we also have a reproduction of the spiritual, a dead reproduction of the spiritual, when we are dealing with automatic writing or with a whirling dervish. That is why it resembles the spiritual as much as the shell resembles the mussel, and why it can be so easily confused. But only when we truly penetrate into the spiritual can we have the right understanding of these things.

If we start from the bodily, through the sensation of the senses, and ascend to the realm of the imagination, which then transfers itself into the soul-spiritual, we come to recognize in this way, in a spiritual-scientific way, that what is aroused by the sensations of the senses is, as it were, deposited at a certain point and becomes memory. Memory arises from the fact that the sensory impression continues in the body, so that not only can the etheric work from within in the sensory impressions themselves, but the etheric can now also be active in what the sensory impression has left behind in the body. Then what has gone into memory is brought up again from remembrance.

Of course, it is not possible to go into these things in more detail in the short time of a one-hour lecture. But one will never come to a real understanding of what imagination and memory are, and how they relate to the soul and spirit, if one does not advance in the spiritual-scientific sense on the path that has been indicated.

At the other pole, there is the whole current that flows from the spiritual-soul of the will impulses down into the physical body, through which the actions are effected. In the ordinary life of man, the sense life comes to remembrance and remains, as it were, in the act of remembering. Remembrance is placed before the soul-spiritual, so that the latter is not aware of itself, of how it creates and is active through the sensations of the senses. Only a vague, confused notion arises that the soul lives and weaves in the etheric, when this soul, living and weaving in the etheric, is not yet so strengthened in this etheric weaving that all etheric weaving breaks at the boundary of the physical. When the soul-spiritual interweaves the etheric body in such a way that what it expresses in the etheric body does not immediately break at the physical body, but is so sustained in the etheric that it reaches the boundaries of the physical body, but is still noticed in the etheric, then the dream arises. And the life of dreams, when it is really studied, will become proof of the lowest form of supersensible experience of man. For in dreams man experiences that he cannot unfold his soul-spiritual, because it seems too powerless, in will impulses within that which is present in the dream images. And because the will impulses are lacking, because the spirit and soul intervene so little in the etheric in the dream that the soul itself becomes aware of these will impulses, the chaotic fabric that the dream represents arises.

What dreams are on the one hand, on the other hand there are those phenomena in which the will, coming from the soul-spiritual, intervenes in the outer world through the etheric-physical , but is just as little aware of what is actually happening there as he is able to become aware in the dream, due to the weak activity of the spiritual-soul, that the human being is living and breathing in the spiritual. Just as the dream so to speak represents the attenuated sense perception, so something else represents the intensified effect of the spiritual-soul, the intensified effect of the will impulses; and that is what we call fate.

We do not see the connections in fate, just as we do not see in the dream what is actually weaving and living there as the real thing. Just as material processes always underlie the dream, surging into the ether, so the soul and spiritual anchored in the will surge towards the outer world. But in ordinary life the soul and spiritual are not organized in such a way that the spirit itself can be seen in its activity in what happens to us as the succession of so-called fateful experiences. At the moment we grasp this succession, we learn to recognize the fabric of fate, we learn to recognize that just as in ordinary life the soul obscures the spiritual through ideas, in fate it obscures the spiritual through affect, through sympathy and antipathy, with which it takes in the events that come to it as life events. In the moment when one sees through sympathy and antipathy in a spiritual-scientific way, when one really grasps the course of life's events objectively and calmly, one notices how everything that happens in our lives between birth and death is either the after-effect of previous lives on earth or the preparation for later lives on earth. Just as, on the one hand, natural science does not penetrate to the spiritual and soul, not even to the etheric, when it seeks the relationships between the material world and the imagination, so at the other pole, natural science cannot cope with its efforts today. Just as it clings to material processes in the nervous organism in the life of the imagination, so at the other pole it clings to something unclear, which, I might say, hovers nebulously between the physical and the soul.

These are precisely the areas where one must become fully aware of how world-view concepts can be both proven and refuted. And for those who insist on proof, the positive has much to recommend it; but one must also be able to experience the negative inwardly, in keeping with one's insights, as with exhalation one inhales. Recently, what is called analytical psychology has emerged. This analytical psychology is, I would say, inspired by good intuitions. For what does it want? This analytical psychology, or as it is usually called today, psychoanalysis, wants to descend from the ordinary soul life to that which is no longer contained in the ordinary present soul life, but is a remnant of earlier soul experience. The psychoanalyst assumes that mental life is not exhausted in the present mental experience, in the conscious mental experience, but that consciousness dips down into the subconscious. And in much of what appears in the mental life as a disturbance, as confusion, as this or that defect, the psychoanalyst sees an effect of what surges down in the subconscious. But what the psychoanalyst sees in this subconscious is interesting. When you hear what he lists in this subconscious, it is first of all deceived hopes in life. The psychoanalyst finds some person who suffers from this or that depression. This depression does not have to originate in the present conscious mental life, but in the past. Something occurred in mental experience in this life. The person has since emerged from it, but not completely; a residue remains in the subconscious. He has experienced disappointments, for example. Through education and other processes, he has come to terms with these disappointments in his conscious mental life, but in the subconscious they live on. There they surge, as it were, to the very edge of consciousness. There it then produces the unclear mental depression. The psychoanalyst thus searches in all kinds of disappointments, in deceived hopes of life that have been drawn down into the subconscious, for that which determines the conscious life in a dark way. He also searches for this in what colors the soul life as temperament. In what the soul life colors out of certain rational impulses, the psychoanalyst seeks a subconscious that, as it were, only strikes against consciousness. But then he comes to a broad area — I am only reporting here — which the psychoanalyst grasps by saying: 'The animalistic mud of the soul is playing up into conscious life'. Now, it is not at all denied that this basic sludge is present. In these lectures I myself have already pointed out how certain mystics have experiences in that something, be it for example the erotic, is subtly brought up and plays into consciousness, so that one believes to have particularly exalted experiences, while only the erotic, “the animalistic basic mud of the soul,” is brought up and sometimes interpreted in a deeply mystical sense. One can still see in such a poetically delicate mystic as Mechthild of Magdeburg how erotic feeling goes into the details of the images. These things must be clearly grasped so that no errors are made in the spiritual-scientific field. For anyone who wants to penetrate the spirit must be particularly aware of all the paths of error, not to avoid them, but to avoid them. But anyone who speaks of this animalistic basic mud of the soul, who only speaks of disappointed hopes in life and the like, does not go deep enough into the life of the soul: he is like a person walking across a field in which nothing can yet be seen and who believes that it contains only the soil or even the manure, whereas in fact this field already contains all the fruits that will soon come up as grain or other things. When speaking of the basic mud of the soul, one should also speak of what is embedded in it. Certainly, there are disappointed hopes contained in this basic mud; but at the same time, what is embedded in it contains a germinating power that represents what – when the human being has passed through the gate of death into the life that between death and a new birth, and then enters into a new earth-life, makes something quite different out of the deceived hopes than a depression, that makes out of them that which then in a next life leads to disillusionment, to hardening. What the psychoanalyst seeks in the disappointed hopes of life in the depths of the soul, if he delves deeply enough, is what is being prepared in the present life in order to intervene fatefully in the next life.

Thus, if we dig around and search through the animalistic mud of the ground without dirtying our hands, as is unfortunately so often the case with psychoanalysts, we find the spiritual and mental weaving of fate that extends beyond birth and death with the spiritual and mental life of the soul. Analytical psychology is precisely the kind of psychology that can be used to learn how everything is right and everything is wrong when it comes to questions of world view, namely from one side or the other. Nevertheless, there is an enormous amount that can be said in support of the one-sided assertions of the psychoanalysts; therefore a refutation will not greatly impress those who are sworn to these concepts. But if one learns to recognize what speaks for and against with the attitude of knowledge that was characterized at the beginning of this lecture, then it is precisely from the pros and cons of the soul that one will experience what really works. For, I might say, between what can be observed in the soul, as psychologists do, who only go to the level of consciousness, and what the psychoanalyst finds down in the animalistic mud of the soul, lies the realm that belongs to the spiritual-soul-eternal, which goes through births and deaths.

The exploration of the human soul also leads to a correct relationship with the external world. Modern science has not only spoken about the ether in an indeterminate way, but it is also spoken about in such a way that the greatest mysteries of the world are actually attributed to it: what then took on solid forms, became planets, suns and moons, and so on. In this view, the soul and spiritual processes at work in man are regarded as no more than a mere episode. There is only dead ether, back and front. If one gets to know the ether only from one side, then one can come to such a construction of the becoming of the world, to which the subtle Herman Grimm — I have quoted his saying before, but it is so significant that it can always be brought before the soul again — says the following words. By familiarizing himself with how one thinks that the dead etheric mist of the cosmos has given rise to that out of which life and spirit are now developing, and by measuring it against Goethe's world view, he comes to the following saying:

What appears here again within German intellectual life as a feeling born out of a healthy soul life is shown in a true light by spiritual science. For, as one learns to recognize, how the animation of the dead ether through the soul, through the living ether, comes about, then through inner experience one comes away from the possibility that our world building could ever have arisen from a dead etheric. And this riddle of the world takes on a quite different form when we become acquainted with the corresponding riddle of the soul. We now recognize the ether itself in its living form, we recognize how the dead ether must first arise out of the living. So that by going back to the beginning of the world, we must come back to the soul and see in the spiritual-soul the origin of that which is developing today. But while this spiritual-soul substance remains a mere hypothesis, a mere figment of the imagination, in relation to the outer riddles of the world, so long as one does not learn about the whole life and weaving of the etheric through spiritual science in the encounter of the living ether from within with the dead ether from without, it is precisely through spiritual science that the cosmic fog itself becomes a living, spiritual-soul substance.

As you can see, the riddles of the soul also open up a significant perspective for the riddles of the world. I must pause on this perspective today. You can see that a true contemplation of outer and inner life from the point of view of spiritual science leads across the ether into the spiritual-soul realm, both in the soul itself and in the outer world.

On the other hand, there is the attitude of knowledge such as I have described in the case of a man whom I mentioned last time. Today we can at least surmise that from the corporeal as conceived by spiritual science, the bridge leads directly up to the spiritual-soul, in which ethics, morality, and morals are rooted, which originate in the spirit, just as the sensual leads into the spiritual. But in its study of purely external material things, science has arrived at a point of view that denies that ethics is rooted in the spiritual at all. Today, people are still too embarrassed to deny ethics itself, but they say the following about ethics, which is at the end of Jacques Loeb's lecture, which I presented last time with reference to the beginning. There he says, who comes to a brutal denial of ethics through scientific research:

“If our existence is based on the play of blind forces and is only a work of chance, if we ourselves are only chemical mechanisms, how can there be an ethic for us?” The answer to this is that our instincts form the root of our ethics, and that instincts are just as hereditary as the formative components of our body. We eat and drink and reproduce, not because metaphysicians have come to the conclusion that this is desirable, but because we are mechanically induced to do so. We are active because we are mechanically compelled to do so by the processes in our nervous system, and, if people are not economic slaves, the instinct of “successful triggering or successful work determines the direction of their activity. The mother loves her children and takes care of them, not because metaphysicians had the idea that this was beautiful, but because the instinct of brood care, presumably through the two sex chromosomes, is just as firmly determined as the morphological characters of the female body. We enjoy the company of other people because we are forced to do so by hereditary conditions. We fight for justice and truth and are willing to make sacrifices for them because we instinctively want to see our fellow human beings happy. That we have an ethic is due solely to our instincts, which are chemically and hereditarily laid down in us in the same way as the shape of our body."

Moral action leads back to instincts! Instincts lead back to physical-chemical action! The logic is, however, very threadbare. Of course, one can say that one should not wait for the metaphysicians to work out some metaphysical principles before acting ethically, but that is the same as saying: should one wait for the metaphysicians or the physiologists to discover the laws of digestion before digesting? I would therefore recommend to Professor Loeb not to investigate the physiological laws of digestion in the same brutal way as he attacks the metaphysical laws of ethical life. But one can say: one can be an important natural scientist today – but the habits of thought are such that they cut you off, as it were, from all spiritual life, that you no longer have an eye for this spiritual life at all. But this always goes hand in hand with the fact that you can, as it were, prove a defect in thinking, so that you never really have everything that goes into a thought.

One can indeed have strange experiences in this regard. I have already presented such an experience here some time ago; but I would like to present it again because it ties in with the ideas of a very important contemporary natural scientist, who is also one of those whom I attack precisely because I hold him in high esteem in one field. This naturalist has made great contributions in the field of astrophysics and also in certain other fields of natural science. But when he wrote a book summarizing the world view of the present and the development of this world view, he makes a remarkable statement in the preface. He is, so to speak, enchanted by how wonderfully far we have come in being able to interpret everything scientifically, and with a certain arrogance, as is common in such circles, he points to earlier times when this was not the case. Goethe, saying: “Whether one can really say that we live in the best of times is not clear; but that, in terms of scientific knowledge, we live in the best of times for knowledge compared to earlier times, we can refer to Goethe, who says:

It is a great delight
to place oneself in the spirit of the times,
to see how a wise man thought before us,
and how we have then finally come so gloriously far.

With this, a great naturalist of the present day concludes, that is, with a confession that he takes from Goethe. He has only forgotten that it is Wagner who makes this confession and that Faust says to this confession when Wagner has left:

How can the mind not lose all hope,
When it is always stuck with stale evidence,
Digging for treasure with a greedy hand
And happy when it finds earthworms!

This great researcher forgot to reflect on what Goethe actually says the moment he refers to Wagner to express how wonderfully far we have come. One can, I would say, see where thinking leaves off in the pursuit of reality.

And we could cite many more examples if we were to delve a little deeper into contemporary scientific literature. Since I hold the aforementioned natural scientist in high regard, as I have said, it will certainly not be taken amiss if I were to assert the true Goethean attitude in the face of such natural science, which puffs itself up by also claiming to be able to provide information about the spirit. For although we can forgive many a monist for being unable to grasp the spirit due to the weakness of his thinking, it is dangerous when the attitude that appears in Jacques Loeb and in the characterized natural scientist, who characterizes himself as Wagner but believes he is characterizing himself as Goethe, spreads more and more into the widest circles through the belief in authority. And it does. Those who penetrate into what spiritual science can give in terms of attitude may, if they follow the example of the natural scientist, even if it may not seem reverent enough to some, come to the genuine Goethean attitude by taking up Goethe's words, with which I would like to conclude this lecture:

It is a great horror
to put oneself in the shoes of souls like that,
how greedily they touch the material
and rush past the spirit!

Those who represent spiritual science in the truly scientific sense, as it is meant here, cannot be surprised at the numerous biased judgments and rejections that it still encounters from all sides today. For they are able to see the scope and scope of the scientific results of the present and the recent past, which many people assume contradict this spiritual-scientific world view. On the part of those who believe that they stand on firm ground in the results of present-day research and can form a world picture for themselves that does not take into account the ideas of spiritual science, it is understandable that they do not yet engage in a real examination of what spiritual science has to say about its results. And so it turns out that it can be shown that spiritual science not only harmonizes with all the justified scientific results of the present day, but that these scientific results, when looked at closely, confirm what spiritual science has to say; and yet, one must find opponents, which becomes even more understandable when one considers the methods of scientific research in more concrete, specific things.

Not so long ago, Professor Dewar gave a lecture at the Royal Institution in which he attempted to speak about a future end state of earthly existence based on the view he has gained from the scientific results of the present. Let us consider for a moment what ideas this physicist, whose physical research has my full and unstinting approval, has about a final state of earthly existence, a state in which the human inhabitants of the earth, who now walk this earth, can no longer exist. Professor Dewar tries to utilize the physical ideas that are available to him today and finds, with a certain one-sided justification, that one must assume, according to the processes that can be observed by the physicist, that the earth is cooling down. And he calculates an end state in which the earth will have cooled down to, say, minus 200 degrees Celsius. He suggests that the Earth is evolving towards this final state. He is clear about the fact that everything that is now water in the oceans will of course have long since solidified; that the air that makes up our atmosphere today will be liquid, and that at a height of ten meters the Earth will be covered by this liquid air, in the form of a sea. The cold that will then prevail, he believes, will make much of what is on the earth today appear different. Of course, not only the temperature will change and with it the aggregate states of the individual bodies, but also many other things in the appearance of what will then be found on earth. Thus Professor Dewar, again quite correctly starting from physical ideas, finds that milk, which of course will then be solid, will glow in blue light. I don't know how this solid milk will be produced, but according to physical ideas it will shine in blue light. And there's more: egg white will be so luminous that you can read a newspaper by this light, which you can produce by painting the walls of the room with this egg white. I don't know who will read newspapers then, since I suspect that people will have long since frozen to death, but Dewar still uses this argument to form an idea of the former state of our Earth according to his world view, and many other things. On the liquefied air, which will then be the sea, there will only be very gaseous light bodies, hydrogen, helium, neon, krypton. He describes very nicely how one will feel quite differently then, because of course the resistance of these light gases will not be as strong as the resistance of the air for the present organism.

One can, by following the ideas of today's physics, paint this final state of the earth in great detail, and such a lecture is of course in our present time by the “non-authoritarian” people - one must say that out of courtesy, because today, of course, no one believes in authority - be said, because today, of course, no one believes in authority — is accepted as something extraordinarily significant, which finally shows how the “exact physicist” has to think about a valid world view.

If you recall what I said about the most important conditions necessary for spiritual scientific research, it was that through the inner exercises that the soul has to go through, it gradually comes to what I have called, using Goethe's words, the beholding through the eyes of the soul; that it has to undergo, in particular, a life in conceptions that are modeled on outer moral thinking. Not that it is to be confused with this, but the whole soul mood that the spiritual researcher has to develop within himself must be such that his own self relates to the ideas saturated with reality, which he must strive for, in the same way that a person relates externally to things that he considers morally good and to things that he considers morally bad. Here one is not satisfied with the fact that certain things can be designated as morally good and others as morally bad, but one knows that when one's affect speaks of the good, one must follow the good impulses, and when one's affect speaks of evil, one must suppress it. And when a person's soul is fully developed, he will act accordingly in his outer life. In this way, the relationship between the spiritual researcher and his own conceptual world must become a living one, not just a logical one. And in the life of the idea, of the concept, it happens that one cherishes certain concepts because they are capable of penetrating into reality. While other ideas announce themselves in such a way that they can be compared to what is to be avoided in the realm of moral life; they must, as it were, be pushed away from the horizon of consciousness. In this inner life of the soul, the ascent of the spiritual worlds is revealed, which can then be contemplated.

People like Professor Dewar are led away from such a striving for reality-imbued ideas precisely by their prejudices or, better, “prejudices”. For the spiritual researcher, it then becomes clear where the error actually lies in the structure of such a world view. In the style of this world picture, one could draw a comparison with regard to the final state of the earth if someone, on the basis of quite correct physical, chemical and physiological premises, calculates the development of, let us say, certain metabolic phenomena in man. One could interpret certain metabolic phenomena in the human body and calculate future conditions on the assumption that this metabolic process occurs in time at a constant rate, let us say, between the 30th and 40th year of the person's life. One observes individual processes and then calculates how these must take shape in 150 years according to the very correct assumptions of science. The only objection is that after 150 years people will no longer be alive, that the state will have already been reached where the soul has left the body and the body no longer follows the laws that are imposed on it by being filled with a soul, but instead follows external physical and chemical laws of the earth's environment.

If you say something like that today, you may be accused of saying something quite grotesque, something quite foolish. Nevertheless, anyone who does not thoughtlessly follow the scientific research of the present day, but who engages with the way in which certain assumptions are used to draw conclusions, knows that what I have just mentioned as a comparison is deeply justified. For it is absolutely true that after the time when milk would shine so beautifully in a blue light, when you could paint the walls with egg white so that you could read newspapers while doing so, the earth would be just as absent as the human body is after 150 years.

Today, the opinion is widespread that spiritual science forms lightly-dressed ideas out of thin air. And because of this assumption, the comparison of spiritual science and natural science naturally turns out in such a way that one says: on the one hand there is natural science, which reaches its results in an exact, thorough way; and on the other hand there is spiritual research, which indeed claims to be in full agreement with natural science, but which obtains its concepts through some kind of fantasy! Prejudices of this kind must first be overcome if spiritual science is to be further recognized. And spiritual scientific results are not to be had for nothing. One can study the difficulties that stand in the way of real results in spiritual research by considering people of knowledge who dedicate their lives to the struggle for real knowledge, who do not merely repeat what the course of external research is today, but who, being familiar with all the details of modern research, also strive for knowledge of the spiritual conditions of the world.

Recently, we were reminded of such a personality of knowledge, as the psychologist of the soul, whom I mentioned here recently in a different context, Franz Brentano, died a few days ago. The honored audience, who are here often, know that I rarely speak about myself. But today I would like to make one comment: that I really followed Franz Brentano's, the soul researcher, research path from its beginnings to his later struggles. And with him in particular, one could see very clearly how, for someone striving for knowledge of the spiritual world, it is difficult in the present day to achieve full strength, insofar as this is possible in everyone, even in today's age, due to opposing prejudices. Many obstacles stood in the way of Franz Brentano, which arose precisely from the fact that he did not live in the scientific age, which would have been his good fortune, but in the prejudices of the scientific age. And so it came about that Brentano, after writing some brilliant, profound works on Aristotle, then published a “psychology” in 1874. It was intended as the first volume of a multi-volume work in which he sought to ascend to an understanding of the actual life of the mind and soul. He never got beyond the first volume, and only in smaller writings did Brentano go on to add, I would say, a few splinters of what he had to say.

To be sure, Brentano's outer life was full of changes; and if one regards things only superficially, one could perhaps say that this changing outer life prevented Franz Brentano from finding the composure necessary to complete his “Psychology.” But that is not the case; rather, it turned out that Brentano failed because of the riddles of the life of the soul itself. He began to present them in the first volume of his “Psychology” in such a way that the path would have led him precisely to the point where the spiritual science that is meant here stands. But he could not get through because of his adherence to scientific prejudices. And since he did not want to develop mere concepts, but concepts containing reality, he left the whole matter alone.

Now, even at the time when he wrote his Psychology, Brentano started from the principle that the inner mental life can admittedly be perceived but not observed. It is a saying that seems as well-founded as possible for the simple reason that we ourselves are the mental life that we develop. So one can say: When any representation arises, we must have it; we cannot confront it and observe it. When we observe it, it has already passed, and so it must first be brought up again from memory. These and other difficulties are present. Therefore Brentano thinks that one can perceive the mental life, but not observe it. But he has not seen that if one could observe as he means, namely that this observation would be completely in line with the model of natural science, then one would never arrive at a science of the mental. If one could observe in this way, that is, if one's soul life were at a standstill, one would perceive nothing in this soul life but mirror images, mirror images of a reality. From these mirror images, just as little could be found out about reality as one can grasp the images of a mirror or the like. One cannot observe the soul life at all if one only wants to observe it in the immediate present. That is why I had to say here a few weeks ago: What matters when observing the soul and spirit is not that you, so to speak, place yourself in opposition to this soul and spirit and then observe it like a scientific object, but what matters is that you bring about such inner processes as, for example, this is: one gives oneself, as one says, to a very specific idea in a meditative state, again and again, but one then also observes how this idea works without being present; one hands over, so to speak – there is no need to decide on this from the outset – what one imagines to the objective course of the world. Whether it is pushed down into the so-called subconscious or handed over to some other sphere of the world's existence will become apparent in the further course of the performance. One lets what one has called into consciousness take effect without being present. And if one has then performed the other amplifications of consciousness described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” then one does indeed find that one cannot observe this soul-spiritual that reigns in oneself as Brentano wanted, but that one must observe it by considering it in its workings in time. The soul reveals itself only when we observe it in the course of a person's life; not by confronting it in the present, but by seeing how this soul works between birth and death. And this observation of the soul takes place with the same exactitude as external scientific research.

As I said, if I may add a personal note, I may perhaps say that in the last two lectures here I spoke about the relationship of the soul to the nervous human being, to the breathing human being, to the metabolic human being, and I tried, in full harmony with science, to show a result that I believe can be of tremendous importance for understanding the interrelation of the world. I have not formulated what I said in the last two lectures in this way before, but it is now exactly thirty-five years since I, as a very young man in Vienna, began the research that could ultimately lead to expressing what I have in the last two lectures. And I have been unremitting in this research. I have tried to pursue this research as I have also described recently: by handing over the ideas to objectivity, to see what becomes of the ideas themselves when they work spiritually without one being present. One will just realize that spiritual research is just as exact as external scientific research. This may be necessary if the circle of those who see in this spiritual science what is necessary for the future development of humanity is to become larger. It turns out, however, that in the path of this spiritual research, the ideas in the soul do not proceed as abstractly as they do when one does external scientific research, or when one reflects in the way one is accustomed to with regard to the external life. Rather, I would say that on the other side, when we are no longer personally present, the images that are pursued in their own course connect with the spiritual life, with the spiritual events, through their own inner essence, in a way that is different from the way they connect with the external world of the senses. Only in full swing, when one participates, can the spiritual world be observed.

An observation, as I now want to cite it, will, if undertaken without the prerequisite of an inner schooling of spiritual research activity, lead to nothing right, just as when working in a chemical laboratory, for those who cannot handle things, they lead to nothing; only after one has created the inner experimental things does the matter show up in the right light. What appears in its true form is what some thinkers have suspected, although they have hardly progressed beyond mere suspicion. All the soul life that we develop by coming into contact with the outside world, whether inanimate or animate, all this soul life, which usually lies within our consciousness, is accompanied by another soul life. And anyone who has created the inner conditions to observe such things correctly inwardly can become aware of how the soul — Eduard von Hartmann would call it: in the unconscious, but this unconscious, which I mean here, differs from Hartmann's precisely in that it can become conscious — is constantly working in this unconscious. Alongside the currents of the conscious soul life, there is another that constantly flows along, which - if one can direct the soul's gaze at it - is not subject to the laws that govern the external soul life, and which naturally correspond to the course of natural events. This soul life is also subject to laws, but they do not correspond to the laws that prevail in the ordinary conscious soul life. For the spiritual researcher, this subconscious soul life comes to the surface. For ordinary life, it also comes to the surface, but one does not know that it is coming to the surface. For example, one often believes that one has formed a particular idea or thought, and assumes that the whole process lies in the ordinary conscious soul life. It does not, but emerges from the subconscious soul life. The spiritual researcher can now observe how these two currents of soul life work together. And basically, when one speaks of clairvoyance not in a superstitious or theoretically mystical sense, but in an exact sense, this clairvoyance is nothing other than the ability to truly raise this parallel soul life and to be able to convince oneself that it is indeed subject to its laws, but that these laws are different from those of the conscious soul life. He who rises in a healthy way to such observations, as described in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, will not be driven into any kind of morbid or pathological states. On the contrary, what I indicated in the last lecture will happen here: he will make his soul life healthier and healthier if he proceeds correctly. But such a spiritual researcher will acquire a certain ability of the subconscious soul life to interact with the ordinary soul life. And while in ordinary life, for example when one listens when someone reads something to one, one believes that one is now completely absorbed in what is being read to one, as a truly trained spiritual researcher one no longer thinks so. One knows that the subconscious soul life runs away and often goes completely different ways than the ways of the ideas that are being read. And if one has sufficient skill not to become inattentive while listening, then between two words that one hears, things arise from the subconscious that are just as much the product of the soul as the things of the conscious soul life, but that run parallel to the stream of the conscious soul life; things of a completely different soul life. Certain thinkers have sensed this, for example by pointing out that a person not only dreams while sleeping, but that the dream life actually continues throughout the day while awake, only to be overshadowed by the ordinary conscious mental life. This is also true – and yet, again, it is not true. It is only something similar to the dream life. The dream life is only a chaotic shadow of what is going on. In the subconscious, there is a parallel current that is as fleeting for today's ordinary soul life as dreams are, and can therefore be compared to dreams, but which arises from a spiritual reality.

By observing these two currents — the soul-spiritual and the soul bound to external nature — in their interaction, one gradually learns to ascend to a conception that cannot be substantiated in this one lecture in its details, but which is to be presented according to its result. One learns to recognize that the ordinary life of the soul, as it is rightly described by the physiological psychologists of the present day, by the type of Theodor Ziehen, for example, whom I recently quoted, has as its necessary condition the outer physical life of the body. If we now pursue this outer physical life with the means of spiritual research, we find that this outer physical life and with it the soul experiences of ordinary consciousness bound up with it are connected with those effects that take place between Earth and Sun. These effects are only of a refined nature, but they are similar to the effects of the sun's surroundings, say, on the plant world and the like. We learn to recognize the real connection between the tools of our ordinary conscious soul life and the earth and sun, I could also say: of our whole world system, as astronomy or astrophysics speaks of this world system. But we also learn to recognize that the course of the other currents is fundamentally different from the laws that are implanted in the physical and thus also in the soul of the human being through the sun-earth life. In its own laws it is not connected with the laws of the processes of which the human being is conscious in body and soul. On the contrary, it often contradicts them. Whereas in the outer life of the soul the psychologist speaks of association, of the bringing together of ideas, here the inner subconscious life of the soul carries out a separation, and vice versa.

These are only hints at the far-reaching differences between external and internal experience. And if we recognize the connection between the soul and the body to a much greater extent, and again the connection between the human body and the whole solar-earthly existence, then we also get ideas about a final state of the earthly existence itself; ideas whose formation is difficult to describe even in today's language. I can only say: Everyone knows how the astronomer can calculate a future star constellation from a present one, how one can calculate future solar and lunar eclipses. What happens here through calculation happens when one finds the right relationship to what one learns about the two currents that I have indicated, in their relation to the final state of the earth. What is calculated there is seen inwardly here. We are not dealing with vague analogies in the sense intended by Fechner, but with a real inner vision of the final state of the earth. For one learns to recognize that something, which of course cannot be expounded in its details in a lecture, turns out to be a necessary result. I will lead up to this result by way of a comparison.

It is true that the way in which man as a physical being goes through the world is only possible because the soul — I do not want to say permeates him, lest one believe that I am making some kind of hypothesis — proves effective in him. If it can no longer prove itself effective, then this body follows different laws than those it follows between birth and death. It then follows the laws that it must follow because of its relationship to the external physical environment of the earth. It merges completely with its own laws into the surrounding laws of the earth. I would like to compare this with the result that emerges with regard to the life of our earth. Our Earth is progressing in its evolution, but in doing so it is undergoing inner transformations. These transformations cannot be known unless one is aware that the one real factor in the process of our Earth is what all spiritual beings perceive in their subconscious and develop in the manner indicated. Just as one cannot comprehend the development of a plant if one cannot form an idea of how the plant germ of the next year is prepared in the plant of this year in all its growth laws, if one does not see in all the shooting up of the leaves and so on the development of the fruit germ of the next plant, so one cannot comprehend our earth if one only applies the physical laws to it, as the geologist does. For what we experience in our subconscious manifests itself as something germinal in our earthly existence. If I may use an expression that is not quite correct, we will understand each other: it works and lives with us, but it is something that is not at all connected with the relationships of earth and sun. And so it turns out: just as a point in time occurs for the physical human being when his soul experience is separated from the physical, and the physical passes into the outer earthly environment, so a point in time occurs for the earth when the earth-sun effects cease. Just as the soul effects in the body cease from within, so the sun effects on the earth cease from without. Just as the body and soul, when separated, cannot be mixed, but dissolve, so from a certain point in time the Earth will become an impossible body in the universe. And just as the human body merges into its earthly environment, into its physical and chemical laws, so from a certain point in time the Earth will merge into the laws that we now follow in the indicated current.

As you can see, the reverse is the case with the earth and with man. The body of man passes over into the earthly environment. That which is earthly-solar in the earth passes over into the spiritual. Then, when this moment occurs, the lawfulness that we can perceive in the parallel current, which does not at all agree with the external laws of nature, prevails in this earthly body, which will then have died in the way I have described. And here the peculiarity comes to light, which today still looks like a crazy paradox: that the laws that we call natural laws today, are only valid until the end of the earth. And if someone tries, like Professor Dewar, to apply these laws beyond the end of the earth, he makes the same mistake as someone who calculates the laws of metabolism beyond physical death, for 150 years. The Earth will no longer exist at the point in time calculated by Professor Dewar because it will have been transformed into spiritual substance. And all spiritual and soul substance that can be observed in the second current, as I have described it, is absorbed into the spiritual and soul substance of the Earth, and lives within it, towards other formations of the world, towards future formations of the world that cannot be described at this time. But we are looking forward to a future final state of our earth, in which this earth will have gone through its death in such a way that it will have merged with a spiritual realm. Not even solidified milk will glow bluish, and egg white will serve as a candle, but everything that is now on earth under the law of the earth and sun, under what we today call natural laws, will one day live under completely different laws, under spiritual and soul laws, which will arise in the way I have described, from our own inner life. For we are already connected today, in a germinal way, with that which the earth is to become, through which the earth is immortal. Therefore, what lives down there in the soul life seems like a dream. It is precisely the germ of future worlds, and we are immortal because we live with this immortality of the general spirit.

In this way, one comes to a much more concrete view of the spiritual world than if one uses the abstract buzzwords of “mystical pantheism” and so on, which so many people still use so much today. In the spiritual science meant here, one should not seek a vague, nebulous pantheism, but concrete results based on exact spiritual and psychological observation.

The general thinking of our time is still averse to such reality-saturated conceptions, to which the spiritual researcher must advance in order to arrive at a world picture that encompasses all reality that we can attain, not just the outer physical. Anyone who has consciously followed the course of education in recent decades has been able to see how people basically do not love to immerse themselves in reality with their concepts. To grasp the living spiritual life by wanting to come to ideas that themselves live in a spiritual world - without being personally present, but only observing the inner life - is something that people in recent decades have not taken the time to do at all. Hence these numerous people, whom I would like to mention, the 'button counters' of spiritual science. I would like to call them button counters for the following reason: if you have consciously grown up with what many people have been concerned with as important concepts in recent decades, you can certainly understand that it has happened that way, but you also have to grasp it. For several centuries, certain people have repeatedly reflected on the social coexistence of people. Some have come to more individualistic concepts, others to more social concepts. Individualism and socialism have played a role in the most diverse variations in recent times when considering human coexistence, which must be thought of as imbued with the spirit. To those accustomed to concepts saturated with reality, this splashing about among all the socialists and individualists of recent times and down to our days, when one follows the lines of thought by which one became an individualist or a socialist, really does not appear to be based on deeper spiritual grounds, but rather as if one were counting at the buttons: Individualist-Socialist, Individualist-Socialist, and would have counted which button it stops at; only that it is not so noticeable when this button counting happens in thoughts. You splash around in such concepts that are not at all suitable for reaching into true reality, like these conceptual shadows that have been so idolized as individualism and socialism in recent decades.

But there is a very serious background to this, and it is connected with much that is already extraordinarily important for certain conditions in the present. For man does not always need to know how the general world picture, which arises from his ideas, feelings and will impulses, is connected with ordinary daily life, with social life. But he will cause tremendous harm if he, in particular, stands at an important point and proceeds from ideas and feelings that are not steeped in reality. When he theorizes about mere scientific concepts of a world view, as Professor Dewar does, these concepts appear to spiritual science as delusions, which he imposes on his listeners. It is one thing to view a world view from a scientific point of view, but if someone with the same spirit is involved in social work and transfers the same kind of spiritual to this external aspect, then it has a highly destructive effect, and often in life we look for what is actually missing in completely different places than where it should be sought. Because everything that happens on earth is connected. And just as a doctor sometimes has to diagnose an illness as something completely different from what one would initially believe after a superficial examination, so too does the person who has an overview of the situation sometimes have to look for the origins of some illnesses and some devastating effects in completely different places than what appears to be the case after a superficial examination. I would like to give an example of this, but how should I do it in this day and age, when, precisely with regard to this example, I could be seen to be allowing myself to be influenced in my judgment by the events of the times that affect us all so painfully? But precisely with regard to this example, I have a way of avoiding this appearance. In 1913, in Helsingfors, that is before the war, I gave a series of lectures on a completely different subject, but in the course of which, to mention just one example, I had to make an allusion to Wilson, and I will read out what I said about Wilson at the time in a different context. You will also see from what I said at the time that I certainly did not fail to recognize a certain significance, and also a certain spirit, that can be attributed to Wilson, but you will also see that it was not necessary, in order to form an opinion about this man, to first let the events of the last few years or weeks sink in – perhaps even – as was necessary with some people. I said at the time:

“There are some very remarkable essays that have appeared recently by the President of the United States of North America, Woodrow Wilson. There is an essay on the laws of human progress.”

Of course, Woodrow Wilson was already talking about the laws of true human progress back then.

"In it, he explains quite nicely and even ingeniously how people are actually influenced by the prevailing thinking of their age. And he explains very ingeniously how, in the age of Newton, when everything was full of thoughts about gravity, one felt the Newtonian theories, which in reality only applied to the heavenly bodies, to have an effect on social and even state concepts. One feels the after-effects of thoughts about gravity in particular in everything. This is really very ingenious, because one only needs to read up on Newtonism and one will see that words like attraction and repulsion, etc. are used everywhere. Wilson emphasizes this very ingeniously. He says how inadequate it is to apply purely mechanical concepts to human life, to apply concepts of celestial mechanics to human affairs, by showing how human life at that time was virtually embedded in these concepts, how these concepts influenced state and social life everywhere. Wilson rightly criticizes this application of purely mechanical laws in the age in which, so to speak, Newtonism has brought the whole of thought under its yoke. You have to think differently, says Wilson, and now constructs his concept of the state in such a way that, after he has demonstrated this from the age of Newtonism, Darwinism now peeps out everywhere.

What I wanted to say at the time was that Wilson now sees, by looking at a previous age: Newton was included in the concepts of the state, and people now followed that. What does he do? He now includes Darwinism because it is a comrade of the age of Darwin, just as people were contemporaries of Newton at the time. He is doing exactly the same thing, but he is naive enough not to notice it.

If all sorts of people have played with the concepts of individualism and socialism, and they have remained playing, well, that may be so; but if, with such defective thinking, as I wanted to say at the time, an important position is managed, then that has a completely different meaning. If you want to get to know our age, then you will have to get to know how to work with concepts that are divorced from reality, that are only shadows of something, where these concepts are justified, as in Wilson's case these social concepts, how to work with such shadowy, unrealistic concepts. One may still be quite far from such insight; but one will not understand reality and come to no conception of the world that corresponds to this reality, if one is not able to see through what kind of conceptual shells are used today in science and in the social fields. That is why people are least able to gain an insight when it comes to entering the real spiritual world and gaining a world view from it or through it. There are people who, whether through their own inner development or through external circumstances, are seized by the longing to know the spiritual. But where do they often look for it? They cannot bring themselves, because of a certain inner laziness of thought, to seek the spirit where it can really be found: on the path of the spirit itself. This is difficult, although, even if things have taken 35 years, it is entirely possible, when the results come to light, to find them immediately plausible. Above all, it requires that the inner soul be brought into such a mood and state that it is often not appreciated by exact researchers of the present day. This can be seen most clearly when an exact researcher who rightly has a reputation in the field of external natural science delves into the spiritual world.

Among the books that have caused the greatest sensation in the English-speaking world in recent months, apart from war literature, is the one that the naturalist Sir Oliver Lodge has written as his latest book. This book has a special reason. The reason for this is that the son of the naturalist Lodge, Raymond Lodge, was killed on the Western Front in August 1915. Now, Oliver Lodge always had a certain inclination towards the spiritual world. The death of his son added to his desire to penetrate into the spiritual world. And so it came about - I can only tell these things briefly, so some things will be inexplicable, but I still want to tell the case to confirm what is connected with the attracted train of thought - it came about like this: Even before the son fell, Sir Oliver Lodge had been made aware from America that something had happened to this son. When you read what was written to the Lodge family from America, indirectly through a medium – as these personalities are called – then a scientifically minded person – and Oliver Lodge is that, too – or let us say, a spiritually minded person , the impression is: Yes, what has been written to him could mean anything; at best, it can be interpreted to mean that Frederick Myers, the editor of a work on the scientific study of the soul's life, who died long ago, would take care of Sir Oliver Lodge's son. But the matter could be interpreted in one way or another. If Raymond Lodge had not fallen, it could be interpreted that Myers would protect him from death in battle; after death, it could be interpreted that he would be his helper and guide in the hereafter. I do not want to go into what is behind such things; they are not as harmless as one might think. Now Raymond Lodge fell. And Sir Oliver Lodge - who would completely refuse to intrude on the ways into the spiritual world to get to the immortal soul, which is represented in the spiritual science meant here - he came into contact with mediums that were, in his opinion, beyond reproach , and then it soon turned out for him that through these mediums the soul of Raymond Lodge communicated through the mediums, telling all kinds of things: how she was now living, what her wishes were with regard to the father, the family and so on. I would not mention this matter if I only wanted to relate what ordinary spiritualists report, because they lack objectivity; even where Lombroso and Richet are involved, objectivity still prevails. But Oliver Lodge is really a person who knows the exact methods, and who therefore also proceeds exactly in such a matter, so that also someone who has enjoyed an education in the methods of natural science in his scientific thinking and research, and who has learned to to develop real conscientiousness in natural science, which basically the spiritual researcher should also have, could have a certain respect for the exactness with which Oliver Lodge proceeds in describing the things he shares in his thick book. And while in the case of ordinary reports, it is of course always immediately apparent, if one is somehow even a little familiar with the things, where the observers have not seen anything, where the messages are missing about the arrangements and so on, with Sir Oliver Lodge one sees that a person is reporting who really knows how to handle and describe scientific methods.

Now, one thing that Sir Oliver Lodge states has made a particularly great and deep impression. I will not tell the other things, because they are, despite being stated exactly, according to the pattern of other sessions. But the one that made a particularly great impression is this: Sir Oliver Lodge relates that through the impeccable mediums – I can tell all this because you know I do not represent this direction – it has come out that Raymond Lodge had himself photographed with comrades before he was killed on the Western Front. And now Raymond Lodge's soul describes the picture through the medium, and in three photographs, as they are taken one after the other by the photographer, where, when one group is photographed, the same group sits, and only sometimes one, while in one shot he put his hands on his knees, then puts them on the chair or on the shoulder of the neighbor. With great accuracy, this medium describes, let us say, these photographs. While one – Oliver Lodge also admits this – could find some connections in the other things, so that some kind of quiet suggestion, as it usually is with such things, took place, or some other process that every spiritual researcher knows to transfer to the medium, what memories, reminiscences, especially subconscious reminiscences of the deceased Raymond Lodge came to life – while it went with everything else that was there, it did not go with this incident, because nobody could know about these photographs. These photographs were taken in the very last days before Raymond Lodge died, and had not yet arrived in England. Nobody knew anything about them, neither any of the family nor the medium. And indeed, a fortnight or three weeks later, the three photographs arrived, exactly as described by the medium. Now this naturally became an experimentum crucis for him, a proof of the cross, because here it was directly demonstrable: Nobody could know anything about it, it came from a world that is not the world in which Raymond Lodge used to live before he went through the gate of death.

This has not only had a great effect on Sir Oliver Lodge, who had a great affinity for such things, but it has made a great impression on the whole audience interested in such things. Oliver Lodge was indeed completely convinced and was also able to convince his family members who had previously been skeptical; the circle then expanded more and more. It is now strange how satisfying it is, especially today, not to have to face discomfort in order to penetrate into reality, how one can easily form ideas about the spiritual world in a light-hearted way.

The spiritual researcher knows that if something comes out in this way, it is certainly not a manifestation of a truly spiritual world. That is why in the last lecture I called what comes to light in this way the most soulless of all, the thing from which the spirit has been driven out completely, although it can sometimes imitate the spirit. When something comes out in this way, it is related to the spirit as the dead shell of a mussel is to the living oyster, when the oyster is outside. The shell comes out, the most material, the most sensual, the most sensual remnant, which sometimes reproduces the spiritual in its forms. For the spirit must be sought in a spiritual way. But how could Oliver Lodge, one may say this if one is familiar with real spiritual research, how could he yield to such dilettantism? Simply because he lacks the reality-saturated concepts to judge such things. If he had read just a little of the abundant German literature on these matters, which of course is also little considered today, but which is there, especially from the first half of the nineteenth century, is there in great numbers, then he would have known that, admittedly, he is not dealing with anything other than what was relegated to the field of deuteroscopy in German intellectual life in the first half of the nineteenth century. There have been reports of phenomena such as the often-cited case of someone who, through a particular state of mind — even Schopenhauer mentioned it — in a kind of dream consciousness, comes to the conclusion: Then and then you will have an accident here and here. Some somnambulists describe such accidents in the not-too-distant future so precisely that, for example, if they fall off a horse, they describe the scene in great detail. We are not dealing here with something that could expand human insight into the real spiritual world, but with a mere expansion of perception that relates to sensory reality. We are dealing with the transgression of the ordinary perception of space and time, which is entirely possible within certain limits. Now, in the case of Raymond Lodge, there was obviously nothing different than what happens in such cases. What did the medium tell Oliver Lodge? Nothing more than what happened afterwards. Although the photographs had not yet arrived at the time the medium described them, they did come later. Oliver Lodge and his family were waiting for them. There was an event that occurred; just as a somnambulist dreams, in a fortnight he will fall off a horse. So it is not something that would show someone who is truly a spiritual researcher the way into a real spiritual world, but rather something that relates to the real spiritual world as the oyster shell relates to the oyster. It reproduces it. But in what comes to light, can one suspect something, when one takes the things seriously? But because it is more comfortable than the actual entering into the spiritual world, many a person will love to investigate something of the spiritual world in this way. But one has to do with something much more belonging to materiality in a spiritualistic phantom than one has to do with the real bodily human being. This is precisely the peculiar thing about the way in which real spiritual research must become part of people's educational lives, that this spiritual research will deduce from the aberrations to which even great thinkers are exposed, people who are quite familiar with the exact methods of external research into nature.

Now, just as one must say that the laws of nature, as we abstract them from natural phenomena and apply them to the world, are not applicable in the characterized way for the final state of the earth, since the earth will change with all human soul and spiritual life as it has been described, so one can also say that for the initial state. There one must indeed learn how memory - that is, the life of representations that already live in our soul by themselves, so that we are no longer present - actually relates to the bodily life. And if one studies this in the same way as I have indicated for the soul life that one needs for the final state on earth, then one finds that an initial state of the earth cannot be calculated in the same way as current geologists do, who simply take the physical laws and then calculate what the earth might have looked like according to these physical laws so many millions of years ago. You could also take the laws of digestion and calculate what a seven-year-old child might have looked like as a physical being forty years ago. In this case, one would use exactly the same method as the geologist uses when calculating the state of the earth millions of years ago. It is really the case that the calculation is completely correct, and that the physical methods are also correctly applied, when one calculates from the metabolism of a seven-year-old child what that child might have looked like forty years ago – only it was not yet alive at that time. And so it is just not right that for the point in time for which the geologist gives such beautiful things – as I mentioned earlier, that Professor Dewar gives for the final state of the earth – the earth was not yet there. It had not yet emerged from its different life in the sun, it had not yet emerged, it had not yet lifted itself out. And for the initial state of the earth – I can only give a brief description of this – the situation is as follows: As we have to do with the final state of the earth, with the rising of the material earth in the sun-earth-law into a spiritual-soul state, so that we carry our own immortal-supernatural with us through future world cycles, so at the beginning of the earth's development we have to do with a descent - if one wants to use the expression, which is not very beautiful, of a spiritual-soul-like one; but in such a way that it does not become more spiritual, but is taken up, as it were, by what comes from the solar, so that within the material the spiritual-soul-like comes to realization, one can already say: is embodied. Here we have to do with the reverse process: with the origin of a spiritual from a spiritual that surrounds itself, envelops — “wraps,” one might say, in contrast to “develops” — in a material from the world of space, from the world of time. And here again we notice that for the beginning of the evolution of the earth the laws hold good which I have already mentioned for the parallel currents of the subconscious, and that the ordinary laws of mathematics come to an end there. However grotesque it may sound, it is nevertheless true. And I would like to say: Kant grasped a quarter-truth about this, in that he showed in his antinomies how it can be conceived that for certain initial and final conditions, it is possible to think in such and such a way; but just because he found a quarter-truth, the whole thing had more of a paralyzing effect on the world picture of reality than that it could have been beneficial. For Kant would not only have had to believe that space and time are tied to the human faculty of perception, but he would have been able to recognize, if he had penetrated to the real spiritual research, how that which lives in man as spiritual-soul is closely connected with the spiritual spiritual-soul happenings of the entire outer existence, first of all of the earthly existence, and how a thorough study of the spiritual-soul life yields a truly spiritual-scientific picture of the world, so that one can say: our world of space and time is bound to man's intercourse with the earth. Therefore, what we can discern through them is only valid from the beginning of the earth to the end of the earth. And one must get to know the other laws that are in the other current if one wants to talk about the beginning and end of the earth in such a way that a true, real picture of the world emerges. Then one recognizes that the human soul is older than the earth; that the human soul was already present in that spiritual, which has wrapped itself up, involved itself in that law of the earth, which comes about in the intercourse of the earth with the life of the sun.

Spiritual science thus goes beyond the world view that I recently mentioned, which made such a repulsive impression on Herman Grimm, who of course did not know these connections. I have already shared Herman Grimm's words at the time, I have shared them many times before, but they are so interesting that one can always let them affect one's soul again. For in them we have words that prove how a healthy, sensitive soul must relate to such worldviews, as Professor Dewar has presented them to the world in the manner described, and how they are so firmly entrenched in the education of the present that one is naturally still considered a real crank today if one agrees with such words as Herman Grimm has expressed. Herman Grimm was forgiven for that. They would say: oh, he is an art historian, he is – well, he is not generally familiar with the rules of exact natural science and its results; it is of no consequence. That is a good reason. But the serious spiritual scientist will not be forgiven if he cites Grimm's words, which he said in connection with Goethe's world view:

How could the children not believe it, how could they not indulge in this scientific fantasy! It's so easy to show. One need only pose as a teacher, take a 'droplet' formed from a certain substance, take a piece of card and slide it into the equatorial plane of the droplet, stick a needle in at the top, place it on the water; then turn it and show how the little droplets are formed, how the little world systems are formed. How could anything be more conclusive than this, that the great cosmic structure also came into being according to the Kant-Laplace theory? Unfortunately, sometimes it is good to forget oneself, but in this case, when one is conducting scientific experiments, one must not forget oneself – namely, the teacher forgot himself. Because if he had not turned, then none of the world system would have come about. If he wanted to describe this process correctly, he would have to think of a giant professor standing in space.

In short, the fact that today, despite being generally accepted by the scientific community, Herman Grimm can say:

Thus spiritual science provides a different picture of the world, one that can incorporate the spiritual and soul into the beginning and end state of the earth in such a way that this incorporation is truly supported, like any other scientific fact. The only difference is that these things must be investigated from the spiritual-mental side, and cannot be worked out on the basis of what applies only to the material processes of the earth, as long as the earth is this material body that it is.

People today are not even aware of the conceptual shadows in which they actually live. Only sometimes does one think a little more sharply; he then does not come away from these conceptual shadows, but he thinks a little more sharply and sometimes comes to very strange assertions. For example, Eduard von Hartmann, who could not get away from physical ideas, but who could think. Hartmann came to think about physical ideas as well. He thought in terms of these physical ideas and had the courage to express what arose from them. Take a very nice saying:

“That there is a real nature, and that the laws established by physics apply in this real nature, is itself only a hypothesis.”

What is actually behind this? That is to say: physics establishes laws; if you really think about it, the whole of nature is only a hypothesis. It is really only a hypothesis, because with the physical concepts you cannot grasp reality. And if those who form a world picture out of physical concepts do not – thank God – see the real nature illuminated by the sun, it would remain a hypothesis for them. Only external reality counts for them.

In the spiritual realm, one must achieve reality by being fully active in penetrating it. This is not so comfortable. It does not present itself automatically, like external nature. But a saying such as Eduard von Hartmann's shows quite clearly that the concepts prevailing in the physical field are also powerless to reach real nature. For he who can really think, who knows that nature is out there, but what the physicist wants to absorb from it, that only gives a hypothetical nature.

It is a momentous thought that Hartmann expresses, although it is, of course, a completely insane thought. It will come about that spiritual science enters into the educational life of humanity because the conditions for it are present. But some things will have to be understood again that are no longer understood today, that are only taken in by the sound of the words.

I have often referred to the first step of the view that one can arrive at when observing this second current of human soul life, which can become conscious, as imaginative presentation. One must penetrate to this imaginative presentation, which is not a form of self-conceit but a life in spiritual reality, in order to grasp reality at all. We shall have to understand such ideas that can inwardly quicken this penetration into spiritual reality. We shall have to understand not merely the sound of the words, but their deeper inner value, such as can be found by the hundred in the fragments, thrown down just so, of a great spiritual man who died only young: Novalis. And from what has been said today about life, death and immortality in the universe, one will get an idea of the depth that lies, for example, in such a word of Novalis: “We will only become physicists when we make imaginative substances and forces the measure of natural substances and forces.” That is to say, when we can also recognize from the imaginative, when we approach external nature.

Of course, people's attention had to be diverted from the spiritual for a time so that great progress could be made in the external, natural sciences. But man must not cut himself off from the spiritual world. The connection to real spiritual research must be found again.

Now, one should not think that one must break with all reason, with all that is sound, if one does not give in to the ideas that arise from a false interpretation of physics, as given by a man like Professor Dewar. However, the matter also has a moral aspect in a sense. And with regard to much, a different scientific attitude will have to prevail than the one that often dominates scientific people today if one wants to approach the study of the spiritual worlds in the right way in order to find that inner peace of mind that makes it possible to experience the spiritual world in such a way that the spiritual world becomes objective, that the spiritual world is really there before the soul's eye, not as a vague pantheism or mysticism. One will also have to develop certain things with regard to the inner eye of the soul, above all a certain composure and humility with regard to inner experience. I do not mean it in the sentimental sense, as some who call themselves mystics do, because I think nothing of all these stereotyped labels. But one will have to acquire a certain mood. For the tendency of the times has also become similar to those concepts, which only cling to the surface, and people believe that they are developing particular idealism when they use the usual shadow concepts to do a little abstraction from external sensual reality. We shall have to develop a different attitude, for even the attitude of science has surrendered to mere clinging to the outer life, an attitude which I will now summarize in a few words at the end. Not my words, but the words that a sensible German personality used when she translated a spiritual-scientific book — the sensible Matthias Claudius. Let me conclude with his words, in which I would like to show, so to speak, the soul power that must enter into the inner mood as a soul attitude if one is to go beyond such scientific delusions, as I have also characterized them today. Matthias Claudius said on this occasion, when he translated a book from the field of spiritual science - as was appropriate for the time, not as it would be for the present time - he said in his preface:

“... whether a man is vain and foolish about a moustache or about metaphysics and Henriade, or hates and envies a man because of a larger pumpkin” — he means the head “or because of the invention of differential and integral calculus, in short, whether one lets oneself be held and hindered by one's five yoke oxen” – he means the five senses – ‘or by one's polyhistorey’ – that is, by one's external erudition – ‘on the rope, seems basically the same and not different.’

And since inner soul life is really very closely connected with the soul's attitude, it will be necessary to pour out a yearning for an exploration of the spiritual world, as expressed in these beautiful words of Matthias Claudius. For when a person has realized within himself what is implied in these words, then he really does have a relationship with the spiritual world through his feelings. And that is a preparation for clearing away all the mists that arise, especially in the spiritual world, when one allows all the different kinds of arrogance and pride to take effect, which are particularly present in the present state of spiritual development.

The wishes that are to be considered first have already been expressed by you, and we will begin today by addressing some of them. I hope that everything can be covered in the three hours that we have available. In these few introductory remarks, I would like to speak about these matters as they arise out of anthroposophy. We do not want to consider how these things are currently being discussed in other fields, but rather we want to address the issues as they arise out of anthroposophy, especially in relation to the wishes that have been expressed.

The first question that has been raised, and with which many others can also be dealt with at the same time, at least in principle, is the question of the diseases of the luetic type. The diseases of the luetic type, which we have so far discussed only briefly, are those which, firstly, must be carefully distinguished from all kinds of secondary symptoms, neighboring symptoms, and so on, and which actually indicate to the most intense degree how the organism behaves in general in a diseased state. The reason why the symptoms of tuberculosis are such an important medical and therapeutic issue is that for them, quite unequivocally – let us speak without prejudice, you will see that we do not want to stop at prejudice – a specific remedy is available in the mercury cure. But a consideration of the mercury cure will show us how to deal with the evil that lies therein in a more appropriate way.

Every illness is fundamentally based on the fact that the three systems of the human organism – the nervous-sensory system, the rhythmic system and the metabolic-limb system – are not working together harmoniously. You only have to consider what this harmonious interaction is based on. In the metabolism-limb system, we have an activity of the human organism that takes place with the preferential involvement of the etheric body. But the other parts of the human organism also play a role in each system. So one cannot say, for example, that in the metabolism-limb system the two parts of the human organism, the physical organism and the etheric organism, work together, but rather that the two mainly work together. The other two, the astral body and the ego organization, also play a role. For example, in the main organization, that is, in the entire nerve-sense organization, we have the ego organization and the astral organization playing the main role, with the etheric and physical organizations playing a subordinate role. Above all, we must realize that the difference between the waking state and the sleeping state is that during sleep, the activities that emanate from the astral organism and the ego organism and are directly effected during the waking state continue, so to speak, through a kind of persistence of the organism. In the sleeping state, these activities resonate without the astral body and ego organization being present. Can you understand that? They continue, just as when I push a ball and the ball still runs away even when I stop pushing, so the activities of the astral body and the ego organization continue during sleep. Therefore, one should not say that if something is derived from the ego organization or the astral organization, it could not therefore be there during sleep. Sleep must only cease when there is danger that the astral or ego after-effects will cease. At that moment, sleep must in turn cease and wakefulness must occur.

These things cannot be taken in the same schematic way as they sometimes have to be presented in anthroposophy for the sake of laypeople's understanding.

What is really important now is to present the facts correctly. All these questions about causes should not really relate to the internal organization of the organism, but rather only to the external causes of the matter. These should always be known. The diagnosis should always be made up of a complete history of the disease. But speculating about causes within the organism does not actually lead to finding the right remedy.

If I now ask the question with this in mind, I have to say: what is it that is present in the case of syphilis itself? Let us therefore separate syphilis from all the other possible sexually transmitted diseases, from all gonorrheal diseases, from all chancre symptoms and so on, in other words, from all the things that basically — we will deal with this separately — do not belong to the actual syphilis, but are basically a different disease. The actual syphilitic disease is essentially based on the fact that the human ego organization is overburdened for the metabolic limb system, preferably for the metabolic system. In a sense, the human ego organization slides down into the abdomen. And all the symptoms that occur stem from the fact that the ego organization slides too far down into the abdomen. This is precisely how the processes arise that are expressed through the symptoms you are familiar with, those processes that cause the ego organization to predominate over the etheric organization, which is not supposed to be present in this part of the human organism. There is simply too strong an ego organization in the sexual tract. That is the fact. We must first look at this fact, rather than at the infection and so on; we must look at this fact, because it is there. And the cure must actually start from this fact.

Now let us consider the effect of mercury therapy on this condition. What actually occurs in the human organism with every mercury treatment? Mercury treatment, as you know, is a very old treatment, and it is sometimes extraordinarily beneficial, not only for luetic patients but also for others. But what happens during mercury treatment?

Mercury is one of those remedies that was actually found to be beneficial in times when medicine was based on a certain instinctive knowledge of the human organism. But what actually cures when one has to have a mercury treatment for syphilis? It cures exactly as much as one introduces into the blood in the correct dosage of the mercury preparation. It cures exactly as much. Now think about what the consequences of this are. Firstly, as far as I know, it is not common practice to inject mercury into syphilitic diseases. In recent years, however, this has become the norm because, as we shall hear in a moment, the earlier smear cures are no longer effective, or are too strong; but on the whole, this partial transition has also been brought about empirically because it was seen that there is something about the smear cure that leads to disaster.

And what is the case here? When you use the smearing cure, it basically leads to a partial, even general infection. It is calculated on the whole to enter the blood circulation. That is what it is calculated on. But when you use the smearing cure, there are other channels for the mercury impulse in the human organism. What is healing is essentially that which enters the blood; while that which does not enter the blood but comes through etheric channels is carried along in etheric channels that, for example, run along the nervous system, along the nerve cords, and this is all bad. All this spreads, so to speak, the ego organization throughout the whole organism, and you basically just get the evil spread throughout the whole organism in a different form, which, after years of internal preparatory processes, causes you to suffer from all those symptoms that occur as a result of the mercury cure.

Therefore, it can be said that the healing effect of mercury is already evident in the treatment of syphilitic diseases with mercury. What is the reason for this? We can really say, in very general terms, what the factors involved are, as I said in my general lecture yesterday. From a certain moment onwards, organic substances are no longer influenced by terrestrial forces, but by the cosmic forces that act peripherally from the periphery to the center of the earth. And from a certain moment on, everything that we get into our organism through ordinary digestion is also under the influence of cosmic forces, cosmic rounding-off forces, right cosmic rounding-off forces, when it has passed through the intestines.

Now, the ego organization primarily lives in these cosmic rounding-off forces. If it interferes too strongly with the metabolic system, then there is simply a tendency for the ego organization to atomize, to round off and organize individual links in the human organism instead of organizing the whole body according to its shape. And all the phenomena of syphilis, all the symptoms of syphilis, are the result of this partial atomization, this atomistic organization. Thus the ego organization intervenes in very small systems of the human organism, while these small systems should reserve themselves for the organization of their own etheric body, which alone, not by the detour of the ego organization, is subject to the cosmic-peripheral forces.

Now, mercury has the peculiarity that, when introduced into the human organism, it is the substance that most strongly and most intensely mimics the outer form of the cosmos in earthly terms. The moment the mercury is introduced directly into the blood circulation by injection, the tendency arises for the mercury to give up this partial organization, this small atomistic organization, and the ego organization is released again, acting through the whole organism and is thereby able to restore the state of health by reaction.

But all this depends on the patient never taking in more mercury than is absolutely necessary. This is a problem that can never really be solved. Because you must never expose yourself to the danger of giving just a little too much mercury during the mercury cure. You have to give exactly as much as can be absorbed into the circulation according to the respective medical condition, because everything else remains behind as a residuum and causes precisely those sequelae that then occur and that you know.

Therefore, when using mercury therapy, it will always turn out that one cures, but that the patient may have to pay for the cure quite heavily with the terrible consequences, which then also look syphilis-like, but which actually have to destroy the organism little by little and irrevocably. It is precisely the certainty of healing that mercury provides that shows how problematic its use is.

It was not always problematic. You see, not exactly for syphilis, but for many other diseases, mercury was always used, we may talk about it in the next few days. Mercury did indeed evoke a very specific emotional response in the highly instinctive patient. The patient knew when he had had enough. He was saturated with mercury. Today, of course, the instincts have degenerated. The patient can no longer provide a yardstick for what happens to him through the mercury. He no longer gets enough of the mercury, he becomes oversaturated. That is what usually happens today: The patient becomes oversaturated with mercury, and then the well-known consequences occur in a very devastating way, so that just as one can clearly see the effect of sulfur and phosphorus in the organism, and just as one can clearly see what happens in the organism when salt dissolves, so one can clearly see what happens in the organism when mercury is taken, but one must always pay close attention to the dosage. We know the basis for the effect of mercury.

Now the question is whether it would be possible to carry out such a treatment that would be harmless even if too much was dosed, because simply an excretion would occur if the dosage was too high. Mercury has the peculiarity of not being excreted outwards if too much is administered to the body, but of being excreted inwards. In this respect, it was extremely important to me in my younger years how Hyrtl simply took the bones from people who had been treated with mercury, and then smashed them open at autopsy, and how one could then find the small mercury droplets in the bones under the microscope. So the whole bone system had been contaminated with mercury. That is the peculiar thing about mercury: it is not excreted outwards, but the organism takes it up, and the whole ego organization of someone treated for mercury has to constantly deal with the organization of these tiny mercury droplets, mercury atoms, which are everywhere in the organism, especially in the calcareous parts.

And so we can already say: We must try to find something in nature that, when applied like mercury, is absorbed by the organism and replaces the ego organization in the organism, thus relieving and freeing it. But if too much of it is taken in, which is unavoidable, then it must be excreted not inwardly but outwardly, like anything else that is digested.

It is therefore important to come up with something that corresponds to the ego organization in the external nature and that can be prepared in such a way that it actually enters the blood circulation and, so to speak, creates a phantom of the ego organization in the blood circulation. It is necessary to introduce an artificial ego into the blood circulation.

And our doctors in particular should carry out the appropriate experiments, and without doubt you will see that you will get results that will certainly be surprising.

Take what you can gain from those parts of the plant that have become extremely hardened, that have thus transferred the root process of the plant to the rest of the plant. In the root process of the plant lies an extraordinarily strong imitation of the ego organization. The flower of the plant is of etheric organization. In what is below the flower, the plant plays around the astral organization; where the plant is rooted in the soil, the I-organization intervenes. In every strongly lignified root, which is still attached to the plant, which has not yet passed over into the inorganic because it has been separated from the living plant, we have impulses of the I-organization.

Now, however, if one were to take plant roots directly and extract substances from them to inject, one would hardly be able to cope for the reason that although the root of the plant contains the I-organization very strongly, it is, so to speak, a phantom of the I-organization, but what lives in it as impulses is limited to the nerve sense system and does not have a strong effect down into the rest of the organization. Therefore, one can say: If you only take hold of the root organization at the root, then you will hardly be able to form a preparation suitable for the purpose mentioned. On the other hand, there are plants in which the root organization has a strong effect on the whole plant. And one such plant, in which the root organization actually penetrates the whole plant right up to the fruit, is Astragalus exscapus, the tragacanth root, which is also known as wolfberry. It has fruits that look like pods, but they are as hard as stone and inside them are grains. I am talking about what is, as it were, completely cornified. Or take certain woods that are already used, where the effectiveness is based on what I say.

But then it is a matter of taking these grains from a plant, let us say from the tragacanth root, from the wolfberry, grinding them finely, but then treating them with the juice of one's own plant, that is, with the flower and leaf juice of one's own plant. In this way, one obtains a preparation that can perhaps be brought up to the third decimal place. In the third decimal, if it is now injected, it will actually introduce this phantom of the ego into the blood circulation, and then, under the influence of this preparation, in the case of actual syphilitic disease, which is already the disease of the whole blood, one has exactly the same picture as with the mercury cure, and then one has to ensure that the excess is driven out by means of strongly heating baths. So you will have to combine these two things: on the one hand, injection with a preparation as indicated, and then drive out what is in excess through strong baths.

But something else comes out as well. What comes out is what is present in the blood of the syphilis patient as harmful substances. This must also come out through perspiration. So we have to say: what has to be brought out must be brought out by sweat secretion alone. But first it has to be held. And it can be held by this rounding-off effect of the impulses contained in the wolfberry seeds. Now, you see, you can only cope with these things if you combine diagnosis and therapy closely.

Individualization is indispensable in medicine, and you can very well observe that especially in syphilitic diseases, the clinical picture in a fat person is quite different from that in a lean person. In a fat person, the syphilis toxin is extremely difficult to remove. I don't know if there are friends here who have experience in this. It is more difficult to remove the syphilis toxin from a fat person than from a thin person. A thin person eliminates it relatively easily. With a thin person, you may be able to do well by proceeding as I have described. But you must be sure that a reaction will occur, that there really is a strong perspiration, otherwise you will naturally get all kinds of internal diseases as a result, because the disease process will not occur. The reaction must be there. But it could be that in order to achieve the effect with fat people, too, so to speak, you have to resort to something else. And here it will be very good to turn to that which has already emerged more in nature, also in the astral process. It will be very good to take gallnuts in certain cases where you see that you cannot achieve a reaction with the usual plant. I mentioned them yesterday in a different context.

In the gallnuts you have already mentioned the essential roundness; the gallnut already shows you the mercurial nature in the vegetable kingdom. If you now treat the gall apple by grinding it on one side and taking the poison from the wasp that produced the gall apple on the other side and grinding it in with a very small dose, you will get a preparation that has a considerable effect and can even cause a reaction where it would otherwise be difficult to do so.

It is really the case with us that we actually have far too few cases of illness that we can observe piece by piece. I can imagine that for our friends who are treating physicians, bringing syphilis patients into the institute is not exactly ideal. But such things shed light on the whole therapy. You really learn something from such a treatment for the whole therapy, and I am also convinced that if someone sees how a patient who has been injected in this way and gets out of the bath, his skin looks different than it did before the bath ; how his skin looks, so that to the finer eye – one can perhaps see it with a microscope – it looks as if it is covered with little pockmarks, almost with smallpox, then one will learn how the organism is affected by something like this. So I think that this is the way to go in terms of syphilis treatment.

Because, you see, with this disease in particular, it is necessary not only to see to it that the patient is helped and then released, but it is also necessary to see to it that the patient endures the cure in his or her next life. And here I come to a question that was asked at the same time and that will be extremely interesting for most of you: meditation in addition to drug treatment, is there some kind of typical advice?

Well, I mention the previous syphilis just in connection with this question for the reason that in fact this question can perhaps be answered most intensively precisely in the case of syphilis. It will depend on whether the apparently cured syphilitic patient – and every syphilitic patient is initially only apparently cured, because it depends entirely on whether the disease can flare up again due to some later cause, and every apparently cured syphilis can flare up again later under certain circumstances – has made his organism anything other than a non-syphilitic patient. He has a different constitution, and it must be ensured that this different constitution is actually maintained for the future life, otherwise it will simply prove to be too weak in the face of certain attacks of ordinary life, and the syphilis can flare up again.

Now, of course, we will only deal with the question of meditative treatment in general, but it can be linked precisely to this. What happens with syphilis is that the ego organization becomes somewhat independent, which is not otherwise the case in a normal person. The syphilis patient has, through the injection, created a phantom out of his own organism, and as a result, for the rest of his life on earth, his ego organization is more independent than that of someone who has never had syphilis. He has this more independently, and this must be taken into account. So if you want to permanently cure a syphilis patient, you have to make sure that he begins to take a strong interest in pondering certain highly abstract thoughts over and over again in his mind, pondering them meditatively. You must therefore recommend that he meditatively think through, for example, geometric or mathematical problems, that is, in recurring rhythmic repetition, so that he never fails to actually maintain this artificial abstraction of his ego organization. You must accustom his thinking to entering into a certain inner constitution. Therefore, you will do him a great favor if you advise him: Every morning after you wake up, think about how a small triangle that resembles a large one behaves. They have the same angles but different sides. Think about it slowly at first: the same angles, different sides. Then think about it a little faster, then think about it even faster, then think about it so quickly that you can hardly keep up. Then start thinking more slowly again.

So thinking at different speeds, brought about by your own arbitrariness, will guide you in caring for this independent ego organization. That is one type of meditation. But wherever you see that the ego organization has become more independent through some healing process, you can try to make it possible for it to continue on its path through life by means of such a meditation, which, however, has to be applied particularly strongly in the case of the syphilis patient. Actually, the syphilitic patient must be encouraged to really supply his independent ego organization with such a meditation, which proceeds in a modified rhythm, on a permanent basis. Can you understand it?

These things lead us to consider other questions that have been asked. We will come back to everything again, I just want to have a context that is required by the matter.

Question about tragacanth.

They are pods. You open the pods and inside are seeds that are as hard as stones and have to be ground into a very fine powder.

Now another question that has been asked, which apparently has nothing to do with it – but inwardly things are connected – is about the occurrence of glaucoma. Today, I believe, glaucoma is hardly treated in any other way than by surgery, at most by homeopaths; but homeopathy is not yet rational. But now it is a matter of realizing what exactly such a phenomenon as glaucoma is based on. Glaucoma is, in a sense, viewed organically, according to the four limbs of human nature, physical body, etheric body, astral body and I, actually the opposite phenomenon of all possible ear infections from the overall process of the organism. The two things are almost polar. Ear infections are on one side, and glaucoma-like phenomena are on the other. If you just take the facts, it is like this: in glaucoma, there is a strong activity that infiltrates and substantially constitutes the vitreous humor of the eye. The vitreous humor becomes too intense internally in relation to its own substance. This results in a hypertrophy of the vitreous humor activity, and the glaucoma disease is actually based on this hypertrophy of the vitreous humor activity. But what then occurs?

The eye, as a sensory organ, is at the point where it is sufficiently independent according to the general bodily constitution, sufficiently objectively separated from the whole organism. If it is somewhat more separated from the whole organism than is the case with normal vision, then it is so diseased that the whole organism can no longer expand its activity over this organ.

In the case of glaucoma, it is extremely interesting to see how the etheric body – which is so extraordinarily important in the case of the eye – permeates the eyeball, so permeates it that the physical substance in the vitreous body appears quite strongly as a physical substance. If it goes beyond this boundary, it appears too strongly as a physical substance. The etheric body can no longer reach it, can no longer infiltrate it. So you have to make sure that the etheric body comes into action again, or that the physical activity in the eye is toned down. It is of course trivial, but true, to say that when something like this occurs, the entire organic activity in this part of the human organism is just too weak, partially paralyzed. It is too weak and must be stimulated. You can only stimulate it by making the exhalation of the human organism stronger than it is in the case of the person suffering from glaucoma at the time of his illness, or in the course of his illness. Therefore, if you can determine the correct moment, you will be able to self-correct the symptoms of glaucoma – but in relation to such partial illnesses the organism sometimes performs something extraordinary – by doing everything you can to organism to promote exhalation and thereby stimulate it to increase activity within the head, and you will then be able to counteract the activity within the glaucoma formation. And such a thing can be achieved by introducing calcium carbonate from bone meal into the human organism and combining it with some aerial roots of plants. This produces a preparation that does indeed regulate respiratory activity in the way it is needed in this case.

So I mean it like this: If we take calcium carbonate from bone earth and introduce it into the human organism, we get a correspondingly strong stimulation to exhale. But in order for the organism itself to become involved, we have to add some kind of impulse to this carbonic acid lime, so that it does not run sluggishly, so to speak, without the organism. These impulses are present in the roots that come from some trees or plants that climb rocks, roots that live outside in the air, and where what otherwise thrives in the ground as roots is carried out into the air. This changes the roots so that their impulses actually become more similar to respiratory activity, and this makes it possible to get the respiratory activity within oneself. One then feels it. Otherwise, the respiratory activity is stimulated quite involuntarily by the carbonate of lime. But if you mix the calcium carbonate with the sap of such aerial roots, then you get the urge to breathe in that way, and from that urge to breathe in that way, the strengthening of the whole human organization arises, which you need to balance what has been snatched from you in the formation of glaucoma.

It is precisely from such a case that one sees how it is necessary to look at the whole person everywhere. But the physical body is never the whole body. The physical body is always only a part; the physical body is liver, is stomach and so on, and the individual parts are connected with each other. The etheric body is already relatively strong for the whole person. And in a very grand sense, the whole human being is the astral body. It is just that this astral body is very strangely constituted. One might say that what is the astral body of a person up to the diaphragm – roughly speaking, locally confined – is quite different from what is the astral body below the diaphragm. What the astral body there does towards the head, towards the nervous-sense organization, is in its work, in its polarity, completely opposed to what is done in the metabolic-limb system. And consider the metabolism altogether, which essentially proceeds under the influence of the astral body. What we usually call metabolism is actually an activity of the human organism in which only the activity matters. In the metabolism, it is actually only a matter of absorbing and excreting substances. One might say that food as such, in substance, is basically not what interests the metabolism, but rather the overcoming of the outer substantial form of the food and the metamorphosis, not what the organism needs. But excretion begins right there in the metabolism itself. It actually goes from absorption directly into excretion. Only some of it is secreted. And this penetrates into the nerve-sense organization. The nerve-sense organization is of extraordinary importance in terms of substance, because the nerve substance is the metabolic substance taken to its logical conclusion.

As grotesque as this may seem, the reality is that the intestinal contents are, after all, nerve substance that has been left behind halfway through. The nerve substance, especially of the head, is the intestinal contents that have been processed to the end, the intestinal contents that have been transformed by the human organism, especially by the ego organization. The intestinal contents stop halfway and are excreted halfway. The contents of the nerve substance are driven to their very end and must then be processed by the organism as completely 'used up'. So the astral organism in the actual metabolism performs a completely different activity than the astral organism in the central nervous system. They are truly polar opposites. That is, one stops halfway, the other is carried to completion, and in between lies a zero point. It is actually the case that a complete polarity takes place. If you were to draw the etheric body, you would still draw it as an egg-shaped form, but you can no longer draw the astral body as an egg-shaped form. You have to draw it as two parts, above and below, which are actually quite different from each other in the way they work. And without understanding this, one can actually understand neither the healthy nor the sick human being. One must be clear that there is a completely different activity within the metabolism than within the nervous activity, within the nervous system. And only from this insight does the possibility arise to have a corresponding effect on the human organism. If, for example, you give a person preparations obtained from the flowers of plants, say, as essential oils, then you do not bring them from the lower part of the astral organism into the upper part, and they can only be used to bring about certain processes in the lower part, in the actual metabolic tract. The moment you use anything derived from the root of the plant, it expresses itself through from the lower to the upper tract of the astral body, and you have it in it because it in turn reacts from the head back to the organism. You have it in the whole organism.

Because you must understand that the ordinary view of the composition of the human organism is actually a terribly amateurish one. No, one would imagine that if, say, in some part of the human organism, after a certain period of life, new substance has appeared, that it has come through the process of ordinary metabolism, that is, the old substance has been shed, and through the process of ordinary metabolism the new substance has appeared. At least, that is how we imagine it. I do not believe that anyone who has studied medicine in any way today imagines it differently, as that substances in the human body, which are summarily different after a certain period of life, have come there by way of the usual metabolism, have been exchanged, other than through the metabolism.

But that is not the case. If you find a different substance in any part of the human organism after a certain period of life, it has never been excreted by the ordinary metabolism. The ordinary metabolism provides only the nervous system, only the internal structure of the nervous system, only the building blocks of the nervous system. Through the activity of the nerve-sense system, in connection with breathing, substances are then absorbed from the cosmic environment in an extraordinarily finely distributed state, which are incorporated into the organism by the nerve-sense organization and substantially replace what is lost. For the losses are much slower than one thinks. So the human body is never built up from food. Food only maintains the activity that is needed to organize the nervous system. The building, the substantial building, does not happen at all through nutrition, that is only chimerical, but it actually happens from the cosmos. So when you cut a nail that grows back, the substance that grows back is not from the food, which in turn has nothing else to do than to rebuild the nervous system, but it is the one that grows back, which actually replaces the organic substance in the human being substantially, absorbed from the cosmos.

This, of course, presents a very different picture of the composition of the human being than if one believes that the human being is a kind of tube, with food entering at one end, being exchanged in the meantime, and what is unusable being secreted. But the human being is not this tube. What happens in a tubular form takes place entirely within the human organism itself. That by which man is rebuilt after a certain period of life comes into the human organism through the senses with breathing and even with fine absorptions from the outside world through the senses. In this respect, the ears are extraordinarily important organs of absorption, as are the entire sensory organs that are spread over the body. So if you look at the human being properly, you will have to say from the outset that metabolism is the inner work of the human organism. The rhythmic organism and the nerve-sense organism are also involved in the construction of the human being.

Now, we will take it from there tomorrow and gradually answer the other questions that have been raised. Please tell me if you would like another session, since we only have so few hours. I think we will get to the individual problems that have been raised. If anyone still has problems, I would ask them to tell me tomorrow.

In connection with the question raised by Dr. Husemann yesterday, we have decided to read out two cases from the book that Dr. Wegman will soon be publishing. We can then build on the presentation of these cases to address the issues that arise from your question as a need for further knowledge.

Of course, I will ask that these cases be treated with the utmost discretion at first, because they will be an integral part of the forthcoming book.

These cases are intended to show how to arrive at a therapy, especially by means of diagnosis. This is to be made clear, and it is to be done on the basis of anthroposophy. In this book we will not be embarrassed to speak entirely in anthroposophical terms.

Dr. Wegman reads the “Fourth Case” described in the book “Fundamentals of an Expansion of Medicine Based on Spiritual Science” on pages 97ff. [pp. 107ff. in GA 27, 1984]: “A child who was brought to the clinic twice, first at four years old, then at five and a half years old. In addition, the mother and the sister of the mother were present.

It is important that the mother and sister were present, and you will see why in a moment.

"The diagnosis led from the child's illness to that of the mother and sister. We were able to determine the following for the child: it is a twin child, born six weeks prematurely. The other child died in the last embryonic stage. At six weeks the child became ill, screamed an extraordinary amount and was taken to hospital. There the diagnosis was pylorospasm. The child was partially breastfed and partially bottle-fed. At eight months it was discharged from hospital. On arriving home, it had a seizure on the first day, which repeated daily for the first two months. During the attack, the child became stiff and rolled his eyes. Before the attack, the child was anxious and cried. The child also squinted with his right eye and vomited before the attack occurred. At two and a half years of age, another attack occurred that lasted five hours. The child became stiff again and lay there as if dead. At four years of age, an attack occurred that lasted half an hour. For the first time, we were informed that this seizure was accompanied by fever. After the convulsions that occurred after the child was brought back from the hospital, the parents noticed paralysis in the right arm and right leg. At two and a half years old, the child made his first attempt at walking, which turned out that only the left leg could step and the right one was dragged. The right arm also remained without will. The same condition was still present when the child was brought to us. The task was to determine the state of the child's organizational limbs. This was attempted independently of the symptom complex. It turned out that there was a strong atrophy of the etheric body, which in certain parts took up only a very slight influence of the astral body.

That is essentially the finding. We are dealing with an etheric body that is atrophied in the most diverse places and does not absorb the effect of the astral body in the atrophied places. There are such gaps in the etheric body (see drawing). The astral body does not penetrate into the areas where the etheric body is atrophied. This was the case in various parts of the organism.

“The area of the right side of the chest was paralyzed in the etheric body. In contrast, there was something like a hypertrophy of the astral body in the stomach area.”

One must use unusual expressions here, just as the term “hypertrophy” is used for places that are too active, too lively.

"Now the task was to harmonize the symptom complex with these findings. There is undoubtedly a heavy demand on the stomach during digestion due to the astral body, but this is blocked due to the paralysis of the ether body at the transition from the intestines to the lymph vessels. As a result, the blood is malnourished. We must therefore take the nausea symptoms as particularly important symptoms. Cramps always occur when the etheric body becomes atrophic and the astral body gains direct influence on the physical body without the mediation of the etheric body.

This is something important in principle. The occurrence of spasms is based on the fact that the regular connection between the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body is not there. One has to imagine this in such a way that the astral body only acts on the physical body with the help of the etheric body. If there are such atrophic areas, then the astral body takes hold of the physical body to the exclusion of the ether body. Spasm occurs everywhere where this is the case. We know that where spasm occurs, the ether body does not mediate properly between the astral body and the physical body.

"This was present to a high degree in the child. If this condition becomes permanent during the growth period, as was the case here, then those processes that make the motor system suitable for the normal absorption of the will are lost. This was evident in the child in the unusability of the right side. We now had to relate the child's condition to that of the mother. She is 37 years old when she comes to us. She states that she was already as tall as she is now at the age of 13. She had bad teeth early on.

I ask you to note this in particular. She has not grown any more from the age of thirteen until now, so that all her growth up to sexual maturity was complete.

"She had bad teeth early on, suffered from articular rheumatism as a child, claims to have had rickets. Menstruation started relatively early. The patient reports having had a kidney disease at the age of sixteen and also speaks of convulsive conditions she has had. At twenty-five years of age, obstipation due to spasm of the anal sphincter, which had to be stretched. Now she also has spasms during defecation. The findings, established without any conclusion from the complex of symptoms in direct observation, show an extraordinary similarity to those of the child. Only everything appears in a much milder form. It must be borne in mind that the etheric body of a person undergoes a special development between the change of teeth and sexual maturity. In the case of our patient, this is expressed in the fact that the available forces of the etheric body, which are not very strong, only allow for growth up to sexual maturity. With this, the special development of the astral body begins, which, with its hypertrophy, now overgrows the etheric body and intervenes too strongly in the physical organization.

This was the case with both mother and child: the astral body intruded too strongly into the physical body.

"This becomes evident in the arrested growth at the age of thirteen. The patient is by no means dwarfish, but very tall, which is due to the fact that the growth forces of the etheric body, although weak, caused a strong expansion of the physical body when uninhibited by the astral body. These forces were not yet able to intervene regularly in the functions of the physical body. This manifested itself in the occurrence of articular rheumatism and later in convulsive states.

Joint rheumatism is also connected with the fact that the astral body directly engages with the joints of the physical body. This engagement can also cause inflammation where it can occur. So either we are dealing with spasms or with inflammation.

"Due to the weakness of the etheric body, the effect of the astral body on the physical body is particularly strong. This effect is destructive. In the normal course of life, this is balanced out by the anabolic forces at work during sleep when the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies. If the etheric body is too weak, as in the case of our patient, there is an excess of catabolism, which in her case was indicated by the fact that her teeth needed their first filling at the age of 12.

Due to the excessive intervention of the astral body, too much breakdown occurs. The physical body and etheric body build up; the astral body and ego organization break down. If there is now an excess of degrading activity, this is indicated by the fact that she has to wear fillings at the age of twelve. Each time she has become pregnant, her teeth have become worse.

"If the etheric body is particularly stressed, as in pregnancy, the teeth deteriorate each time. The weakness of the etheric body in relation to its connection with the astral body is still particularly evident in the frequency of dreams and in the healthy sleep that the patient has, despite all the irregularity.

If there is complete regularity in the connection between the astral body, etheric body and physical body, there is no excess of dreams. The moment the astral body can predominate because the etheric body is weakened, frequent and vivid dreams occur. And because the astral body is strong, it can easily come out and the sleep still remains healthy.

"The weakness of the etheric body is also evident from the fact that foreign processes take place in the physical body that are not mastered by the etheric body, and these show up in the urine as protein, isolated hyaline cylinders and salts.

These are the decomposition products that form due to the hypertrophy of the astral body. They must always be sought when one is dealing with a hypertrophy of the astral body.

"The relationship of these disease processes to those of the mother's sister is remarkable. The findings regarding the composition of the parts of the human being are almost exactly the same. Weak etheric body, hence predominance of the astral body. Only the astral body itself is weaker than in the sister. Therefore, just as in the sister, the menses begin early, but instead of inflammations, she experiences mere pains that arise from irritation of the organs, for example, the joints.

This is really very interesting. The mother and child have almost the same disease constitution. The sister, who is walking at the same time, only has weaker symptoms, everything to a lesser extent, everything, I would say, en miniature, in hints.

"The etheric body must be particularly active in the joints if vitality is to be normal. If the activity of the aetheric body is weak, the activity of the physical body becomes predominant, which is evident here in swelling and chronic arthritis. The weakness of the astral body, which has too little effect on subjective feeling, is indicated by a preference for sweet foods, which increase the astral body's sensitivity.

This is very interesting. In order to arrive at a diagnosis, one must actually ask what the person concerned likes to eat: sweet or bitter things, a preference for these or those sensory impressions. Some have a peculiar weakness with regard to olfactory impressions. All this shows that the astral body is to be engaged somehow. This preference of the astral body shows that it is not engaged; it is engaged immediately when it has sweets.

"If the weak astral body is still worn out by daytime life, then, if the weakness persists, the pains become more significant. The patient complains of increased pain in the evenings. The connection between the conditions of the three patients points in the ascension to the generation preceding the two sisters, in particular to the grandmother of the child. The cause must be sought in the latter. The disturbed equilibrium between the astral and etheric bodies in all three patients can only be explained by an equivalent disturbance in the grandmother of the child. This irregularity must be due to the defective formation of the embryonic organs of nourishment, especially of the allantois, in the grandmother's astral and etheric bodies.

This case is particularly interesting because it can be seen that the cause really lies in the inadequate development of the allantois of the grandmother. The whole condition of this astral body, which of course manifests itself more strongly in one person, the mother, and to a lesser extent in the other, can be traced back to the grandmother. It is not bound to one part, but constitutionally goes through the whole astral body and can only go back to that peculiar formation, the allantois, the embryonic period.

We have here an occult finding that must be taken up. But once we have come across it, the individual phenomena are quite suitable for verification. We must definitely get into the habit of verifying the causes from the causes. The composition of the symptoms actually only gives an unclear picture.

“This defective formation of the allantois must be sought in all three patients. We first established it in a purely spiritual scientific way. The physical allantois metamorphoses, passing over into the spiritual, into the efficiency of the forces of the astral body.”

What is more, we could only hint at this as a principle, in the physical allantois, which can only be embryonic as well; the entire organs that are present in the embryo are present in the born human being as the higher limbs. What is a physical accessory organ is, spiritually, in the adult state, so that we only have to see the physical correlate of the embryonic period in the allantois.

"A degenerated allantois produces a diminished efficiency of the astral body, which manifests itself particularly in all motor organs. All this is the case with the three patients. One can really recognize the nature of the allantois from that of the astral body.

It is important to know that the amnion is the physical correlate of the etheric body, the allantois is the physical correlate of the astral body, and the chorion is the physical correlate of the I organization of the adult.

"It will be seen from this that our reference to the ascendants does not come from a daring fantasy conclusion, but from a real spiritual scientific observation.

To those who may be disturbed by this truth, we would say that our statements are not motivated by a desire for paradox, but by a desire to share this knowledge with everyone. The mystical concepts of inheritance will always remain obscure if we are afraid to recognize the metamorphosis from the physical to the spiritual and vice versa in the succession of generations.

In therapeutic terms, such an insight can only lead to a view of the point at which the healing process is to be applied.

Now it moves into the therapeutic.

"If one had not been referred to the hereditary in such a way, but had simply noticed the irregularities in the connection between the etheric and astral bodies, one would have applied remedies that would have worked on these two parts of the person. But these would have remained ineffective in our case because the damage, which goes back generations, lies too deep to be balanced out in these links of the human organization itself.

It is particularly important that we consider this case. What is presented here ties in with yesterday's question. If one simply had the finding that the astral body and the etheric body are not in intimate harmony, one would have to take this or that remedy — then one would hardly achieve any particular effect. If one goes strictly further to the cause, then the therapy also becomes clearer. By being led away from direct observation into the succession of generations, the way was pointed to strict exactness.

"In such a case one must work upon the ego-organization and bring to bear in it everything that has to do with the harmonizing and strengthening of the etheric and astral bodies. This can be achieved by acting on the ego organization with, so to speak, intensified sensory stimuli (sensory stimuli act on the ego organization). In the case of the child, this was attempted in the following way: a bandage of the right hand was applied with a five percent pyrite ointment and at the same time the left half of the head was rubbed with emperor's sponge ointment.

And now we have the therapy: we work directly on the hand with pyrite, iron sulphide. This enables us to influence the astral body and the etheric body at the same time, thereby bringing about harmonization. We must work to bring the etheric body and the astral body closer together. This is the basis for healing. And for that we must apply means that go beyond the immediate, because it has been going on for generations.

"Pyrite, a compound of iron and sulfur, when applied externally, stimulates the I-organization to make the astral body more lively and to increase its affinity to the ether body. The substance of the Emperor's mushroom, with its special content of organized nitrogen, works in such a way that an effect emanates from the head, which, through the ego organization, makes the ether body more lively and increases its affinity to the astral body. The healing process was supported by eurythmy therapy, which sets the ego organization itself in lively activity. Thus, what is applied externally is guided into the depths of the organization. The healing process thus initiated was then further strengthened by means of measures that were intended to make the astral and etheric bodies particularly sensitive to the effect of the ego organization. In a rhythmic daily sequence, the following treatments were applied: baths with a decoction of Solidago, back rubs with a decoction of Stellaria media, and internally, tea made from willow bark (which particularly affects the receptivity of the astral body) and Stannum 0.001 (which particularly makes the etheric body receptive). We also gave poppy juice in a weak dosage to make the damaged self-organization recede in the face of the healing effects.

The mother received more the last therapy because, as a generation older, the forces of heredity had less effect. The same applies to the mother's sister. While the child was still in the clinic, we were able to see that it was easier to direct and that it was in a better mental state. For example, it became more obedient; and the movements it otherwise made very awkwardly, it now made more skillfully. Afterwards, the aunt told us that a great change had taken place with the child. It has become calmer, the excess of involuntary movements has decreased; it has become so skilled that it can play alone; and in terms of the soul, the former stubbornness has disappeared."

Perhaps you would like to say something? In this way, the diagnosis leads to the therapy. This is where the higher aspects of human nature come into play. The starting point is the clinical picture. In this case, the starting point is as follows: the sick organism was subject to a process that takes a certain course. This process must be reversed. By properly understanding the process, one arrives at the point of reversing the process by realizing how not only an organ, but the entire human interior is related to what is happening in the world.

So let us say you want to recognize how to treat some kind of damage, say to the gall bladder. Then you have to study the opposite process in the outside world; at least take this opposite process as an aid. If you recognize one of them, say, as the incoming process, you recognize the other as the outgoing process and thus have the closed circuit. Is there perhaps another question?

Sometimes with adults, sometimes with those who are psychically agile, one can arrive at a diagnosis. I have also tried this with children; but I have the impression that I have gone too far in this kind of diagnosis.

That you did not achieve what you intended by penetrating the soul? This is something that may be true or may be false. It depends entirely on how far one is able to coax the things one wants out of the child, and also on whether the child is communicative or not. It also depends on the memory effect; and on whether the right things from the soul are elicited. In principle, the child can give really great things, especially when there are condensed soul phenomena. If you expect the childish and it tells what it has seen of condensed soul phenomena, you can look very deeply into irregularities; these are always the correlate of this. You have to look at the case individually.

With adults, of course, it is fairly easy to penetrate the soul if you know the soul organism as such, if you know that people tell you anything. Now you move forward. Most of the time what they tell is not true. First of all, the patient does not say how it is. Now you have to find something to latch onto. You come across something that is mostly true. Once you have grasped that, you can move on. You have to distinguish whether one thing is true in relation to the other. An animal that has the beak of an eagle cannot at the same time have the feet of an ostrich. In the same way, things in the soul fit together. You have to guide the patient towards this. Until you have found the right point, you believe everything, that is, you believe nothing, but you make him understand that you believe everything. Once you have hooked on a point where the matter must be true, you then draw his attention very sharply to what cannot be. You then get a kind of soul organism that points very strongly to the physical organism. So it is useful to be based on a mental diagnosis.

A participant comments.

The direction you indicated yesterday is this: I make a diagnosis and then have the diagnosis before me. I know that when this turns out, these remedies are available to me. I can choose from among them. Now you wanted to know: how can one actually choose? The answer can only be given by saying: If I can choose between several remedies, I must assume that I have not yet completed the diagnosis and must continue the diagnosis until I arrive at a definite remedy. There is no such thing as an arbitrary choice. This was truly a happy case, and I was amazed. The fact that one goes from the condition of the child to the allantois of the grandmother is something that does not otherwise occur in the diagnosis. I was extremely astonished that this was the motif; on the other hand, the result shows that one must try to penetrate to the last cause.

Dr. Wegman reads the “Fifth Case” described in the book mentioned at the beginning on pages 114-116:

"A 26-year-old female patient came to our clinic with the severe consequences of influenza, which she had suffered through in 1918 with lung catarrh, and which had followed a pleurisy that had occurred in 1917. Since the flu, the patient had been unable to fully recover. In 1920, she was very emaciated, weak, and had a slight fever and night sweats. Soon after the flu, she developed lower back pain that continued to worsen until late 1920; and then, with severe pain, a curvature appeared in the lower back. There was also swelling of the right index finger. A rest cure supposedly brought improvement of the back pain. When she came to us as a patient, she had a suppurative abscess on the right thigh, distended abdomen with some ascites and catarrhal noises over the lung tips, both on the right and left. Digestion and appetite are good. Urine is concentrated, showing traces of protein. The spiritual scientific examination showed: hypersensitivity of the astral body and the ego organization; such an abnormality initially expresses itself in the ether body in that it does not develop the actual ether functions, but an etheric imprint of the astral functions.

This is very interesting when, as in this case, the etheric body is so weak that it does not perform its own functions but acts as a matrix, like wax, into which the astral body imprints its own functions. We have an etheric body that actually acts as a masked astral body. This is the case here.

"The astral functions are destructive. Therefore, vitality and the normal process in the physical organs must show signs of atrophy. This is always connected with processes that are, as it were, not human, but which take place in the human organism.

We must be strict about this. When something enters the human organism, whether it is from some aggregate state or warm air and so on, it must undergo a change in the human organism – roughly speaking, within the human skin. Nothing is the same outside of and within the human organism. The human organism has to work through everything that comes from outside. No heating process may take place in the body as it does in stone, where a temperature simply passes through and warms the stone. If we are warmed from the outside, like an inorganic body, we process the warmth that approaches us so deeply that it is completely revitalized. If a cold occurs, even if it is an internal cold of the internal organs, it does not come from within, but from an external imposition of heat.

This goes all the way down to the metabolic states. When a substance enters, it must be transformed in the human organism, right down to its most intimate processes. If we have ingested something – let's say a carbohydrate – another process takes place in the organism. The carbon-hydrogen-oxygen process, which takes place outside of human nature, must not be there in the same way. There is a process in the human being that is foreign to human nature. This is the basis for all disease states that are based on metabolic deposits. All of them are basically based on the fact that heat processes do not occur through the human being himself, but rather processes that arise as actual processes of matter because the human organization is not strong enough in some part. If, for example, the ego organization is too weak, one will find that the fat taken in is not processed in the right way. If the astral organization is too weak, one will find that carbohydrates are not processed properly. If the aether organization is too weak, one will find that the protein taken in is not processed in the right way. This is something to be aware of.

"The abscess, back pain, bloating, catarrhal phenomena in the lungs and also the inadequate processing of protein are caused by this. The aim of the therapy is to reduce the sensitivity of the astral body and the ego organization. This is achieved by administering silicic acid, which always strengthens the power of self-healing in the face of sensitivity.

So silicic acid always strengthens the power of self-healing in the face of sensitivity.

“We did this by adding powdered silicic acid to food and giving it as enemas. We also reduced sensitivity by placing mustard plasters on the lower back. Its effect is based on the fact that it causes sensitivity on its own and thus reduces it for the astral body and the ego organization.”

You see how one helps oneself: one applies mustard plasters to the lower back; this causes artificial sensitivity. This artificial sensitivity takes away the inner sensitivity of the astral body, thus creating an intimation. This is often the case when something is wrong in the human limbs, creating an intimation; in this case, a strong intimation of the astral body downwards. If it becomes strong enough, the sensitivity is no longer there. The sensitivity of the astral body decreases downwards. If the sensitivity moves upwards, it is increased.

"Through a process that dampens the hypersensitivity of the astral body in the digestive tract, we achieve a diversion of this astral activity to the etheric body, where it normally belongs. We achieved this by administering small doses of copper and carbo animalis. We counteract the possibility that the etheric body withdraws from the normal digestive activity to which it is unaccustomed by administering pancreatic juice.

This is only a help, a last resort.

"The abscess was punctured a few times. Large quantities of pus were drained off by aspiration. The abscess shrank and the swelling of the abdomen decreased as the pus formation steadily diminished and finally disappeared. While the pus was still flowing, we were surprised one day by a renewed rise in temperature. This did not seem inexplicable to us, since, given the constitution of the astral body described above, even slight psychic agitation can cause such fever. However, one must distinguish between the explicability of the fever in such cases and its severely damaging effect. For under the given conditions, such fever is virtually the mediator for a profound intervention of the catabolic processes in the organism. And one must immediately ensure a strengthening of the etheric body so that it paralyzes the damaging effect of the astral body. We used highly potentized silver injections and achieved a decrease in fever. The patient left the clinic with a 20-pound weight gain and in a strengthened condition. We are under no illusion that in this case, a follow-up treatment is still needed to consolidate the healing."

So the case is intended to show how one can really come to use therapeutically what is otherwise said more theoretically about the astral body and the etheric body. One can now be faced with the question that has always been raised by “well-meaning” people: Should one use the terms that have been used here as the naked truth and reality, or should one conceal them? “Well-meaning” people have said that one should not speak of the etheric body, but of functional processes or something similar. You can't get as far as the astral body that way. The fact of the matter is that most illnesses are not grasped in their essence if one does not go up to the astral body. The damage caused by the organization of the ego, that is, the severe damage caused by metabolic deposits: here the situation is such that this damage is already clearly present. On the other hand, the more insidious damage is the catabolic damage caused by the astral body. One really has to be very careful when talking about this.

Now the situation will be such that one can simply say – yes, that is what many people will say – one should not come to people with the astral body and the etheric body. But if you don't approach people with that, there is no reason at all to believe that something new is being presented here. People think that only a little of one or the other has been changed here, that it is done here just as it is done elsewhere, that at most there is a little progress. It is not like that! And that must be made clear to people with all the radical clarity. If one shows that these are not abstract things, but rather, in these many very concrete individual cases, points out how the individual cases are constituted, and then shows how the diagnosis leads into the therapy, and how, as soon as the therapy is applied, the healing progresses: it is indeed the case that this must be understood, otherwise one would have to despair of humanity's ability to understand at all. I am completely convinced that only this method can help us: to say things very boldly and courageously.

The question is how the scientific picture presents itself in the intimate study of carcinoma.

In the case of carcinoma, we are dealing with the fact that a sense organ is evoked at a point in the organization where there is no reason to evoke a sense organ. Take, I would like to say, the most radical sensory organization – just to understand the matter – take the eye. How does the eye come about? You know that it is actually formed partly from the outside; it is incorporated into the organism. Roughly speaking, the organism leaves out the eye socket. Then the eye is embedded. This indicates that essentially extra-human processes are at work in the formation of the eye. The eye is only embraced by the human being. When we have such a striking sensory organ as the eye, we can say that a foreign body is incorporated into the human organism. This is a radical concept because it is so unusual. Nothing like the shape of the lens or vitreous humor, or the substantial composition of the lens or vitreous humor, would ever arise from the human organism. Now, all that is deposited, which is partly even in the eye ethereal, not merely physical, is embraced by the astral body and the ego organization, which are actually as emancipated as possible from the physical and etheric in the eye. In the eye, the connection between the I, the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body is quite different than, let us say, in a piece of muscle. In a piece of calf muscle, you see a very intimate connection between the ego, the astral body, the aetheric body and the physical body. This is the normal constitution in this respect. If I were to write a chemical formula to describe the eye, I would say that the ego and the astral body are closely connected (see drawing I and A), and the other two are also closely connected! There is only a loose affinity between the etheric body and the astral body. This is only the case with the eye.

With other sense organs, for example with the ear, it is not so, there it cannot be so pronounced. There is actually a loose affinity between the ego organization and the astral body and again between the physical body and the ether body. It is somewhat different for each sense.

If there is a tendency towards a sense organization somewhere in the human organism where there should be no sense organization - and the tendency can arise in any part of the human organism; what should happen in another place, the tendency for it can arise in any other place - then you can see how the physical body and ether body on the one hand, and the astral body and I on the other, fall apart.

Take a very specific case. In the case of a severe physical insult, say to the mammary gland, the impact continues inwards in such a way that it shows, roughly speaking, a line of action within the skin that originates from the outside – in other words, a mechanical insult that continues inwards. In most cases of breast cancer, this will be the real origin. It could only be a prolonged process of overheating or burning. In the sense I am describing here, it will always be an insult that brings this about, speaking externally. Now, in this case, something occurs that strongly suggests the astral body at this point, which is otherwise absorbed by the etheric body. When the astral body suddenly appears at this point, it shows itself in, I would say, dim light; it appears as if it were burning. When it becomes so noticeable, then there is a tendency at this point towards the formation of a sensory effect, a carcinoma develops. There it is not a question of at least starting with the first seven vaccinations.

The connections there become particularly interesting when you see how one is connected with the other. Suppose you have someone who is no longer quite young. You are obliged to remove the carcinoma. But the thing that is present in a fairly strongly developed carcinoma manifests itself in such a way that actually in the whole body, because the organism is one entity, there is a tendency to allow non-human processes to take place. The carcinoma changes in its course in a very strange way. After a while, the localized carcinoma becomes a valve for concentrating the carcinomatous development. If you cut out the carcinoma, the valve is suddenly gone. But if you are dealing with an older person, this tendency to have something non-human in the person leads to the valve being in the lungs, which is the organ that most absorbs the inorganic, non-human. Therefore, especially in the case of carcinoma present in old age, you will dissolve the process into pneumonia. If the organism is sclerotic, the process in old age ends in pneumonia. This is because the old organism takes in the extra-human even more and more easily than the younger one. The organ that most easily takes in extra-human processes is the lung; it is damaged in the process. There is an organ that can easily absorb extra-human processes and is not damaged by them; that is the liver. It is very thick-skinned against extra-human processes. The lungs absorb them, but are damaged by them. That is the essential thing, that the lungs absorb easily and are damaged by it.

Question about the heritability of the predisposition to carcinomas.

This is connected with acquired ideas. In itself, there is no inclination in humans to fear carcinoma. This can be seen from the fact that this fear actually only exists among civilized people of educated classes. Country folk have no fear. They carry the carcinoma, die of it, without having had any knowledge of it. This is something that depends on education, and one must work against it.

To what extent is supersensible vision necessary in these two cases, and how is it applied?

The processes must be as follows: First of all, in order to get started at all, one must have complete mastery of spiritual scientific observation – this becomes apparent over time – and see how what can be established spiritually is connected with outward symptoms. If nothing else is indicated, then the purely spiritual finding is always apparent.

How does it express itself outwardly?

On the other hand, one could just as well say that it should, of course, be meditative. You can meditate on rheumatoid arthritis, you can meditate on diabetes. But that would only drive you back. Meditating on a disease process according to the symptoms is a very good way to arrive at spiritual scientific observation. It is just not easy to go the other way around. You can even do it like the homeopaths, who put together the symptom complex and then do the therapy. Only there it happens – I don't even say it can, I know it is so – again and again that symptoms are overestimated and underestimated, that they are put together wrongly, so that sometimes a symptom complex put together by homeopaths is a caricature of reality. When you meditate on this, you meditate on caricatures. If you have a real spiritual cause, that is decisive for the complex of symptoms, then you do not overestimate or underestimate any of the symptoms. You will have noticed that the symptoms we have presented are not caricatures, but well-formed complexes of symptoms. When you meditate, you come to the impossibility of making spiritual findings. And if someone says that is not possible, I must say: try it, but not with a randomly composed complex of symptoms, but with one that has been established by spiritual science.

What is eurythmy based on?

In the human organism everything is based on the fact that a conscious element goes back to an unconscious one. Eurythmy is based on the fact that when a human being comes into the world and wants to express himself, he does not lack a language as such, but the expression in the use of the movements of the limbs. This is rejected, he is not allowed to do it and cannot do it. Today this is not noticed, because it has already been beaten back by inheritance. All this integrates itself, metamorphoses itself, comes out bound to the air and lives itself into language. If one knows how this has lived itself into language, one knows that this is the origin of language, then one goes back from the movements to the language, in reverse order of consciousness. Here too it is the same: spiritual scientific diagnosis illuminates the symptom complex. If one forms it and meditates on it, one comes back to spiritual scientific diagnosis. I have to leave it at these three hours; I hope that we will meet again. But if you come more often, the little social being will become the key to future work.

In any case, it was nice to be able to talk about things again.

Automated Translation

Dear attendees! From my remarks yesterday, you will have gathered that the basis of the observation of the social problem on which this is built is not based on the aspirations or demands of this or that social class, this or that party, or on what emerges from interests that stem from very specific areas of economic, legal or other areas of life; but here we must build on what arises from the life forms and life necessities of contemporary humanity itself, insofar as these life necessities and life forms can be observed through a truly spiritual scientific investigation of what humanity has worked through in the course of its development to the present.

What use is it, dear attendees, to point out the necessity of this or that social legislative measure out of one-sided interest, out of a one-sided party tendency? And even if you succeed in realizing something that corresponds to such a demand, what if what you bring into the world as a result is beneficial on the one hand, but on the other hand, of necessity, must bring about all kinds of harm? That which is truly beneficial can only follow from an all-round, unprejudiced observation of the necessities of human society itself.

This observation of the necessities of life, as they exist in particular in present-day humanity, have actually, I might say, been revealed and revealed in abundance by that which has emerged, as I already indicated yesterday, from modern technical operations on the one hand – precisely that was to be shown yesterday – and from the capitalist economic system on the other. It is precisely these special forces, which have arisen out of modern technology and out of modern capitalism, that have produced demands of life, including social demands, demands of life that cannot be satisfied by a particular further development of capitalist or technical scientific forces, but whose satisfaction must be sought from quite a different direction.

I said yesterday: People's gaze has been hypnotized and focused solely on what the modern economic order has produced. And today's socialist agitator also has the opinion that what is effective in technology, in the economic order that has become through technology in the capitalist economic form, one must simply transfer it into something that can develop out of itself. For those who look more deeply into the developmental forces of humanity, it is clear that in our modern life through capitalism and technology, which as such were absolutely necessary in the course of human development and will continue to be necessary, that through technology and capitalism, phenomena have arisen that can almost be called forms of illness. These forms of illness must be cured. But some of the ideas of the modern man, whether he is a socialist or anti-socialist partisan, do not lead to a cure of the forms of illness that technology and capitalism have brought about, but rather to a continuation of these forms of illness. What must be striven for is to seek the healthy social organism behind those phenomena that are described as social forms of illness.

The one-sided view of economic life of the human being, of the modern human being, has certain ideas, such as you can find in the things that are eaten, so to speak, the extraordinarily justified striving of the modern proletarian. This view has given rise to certain ideas and certain connections between ideas which, if they were to permeate the social organism, could almost be compared, with regard to this social organism, to the ideas that Wagner in Goethe's “Faust” leads to his “homunculus”, to the creation of this homunculus! A social order could arise, an apparent, inanimate social order could arise from the realization of what is today often called, whether by socialist or antisocialist parties, the social idea, the will to socialism. For it is thought that there must be certain measures, there must be certain institutions that need only be realized, and then one has the right social organism. The considerations on which my present exposition is based proceed from something quite different. They do not at all want to give birth to such ideas, such concepts, such social aspirations, which lead to a kind of social homunculus; but they want to indicate the conditions under which a living social organism can arise!

For the starting point here is the realistic view that it would be just as foolish to try to build a social organism out of human ideas, however clever they may be, without that social organism having its own life force within it. It would be just as foolish to try to build a natural human organism from all kinds of chemical ingredients in a retort according to preconceived ideas of the connection between static forces.

The only thing that can be desired in social life is to seek out the conditions that must be realized if a social organism is to truly grow out of its own living conditions, out of its own necessities of life. This corresponds to a realistic, this corresponds to a truly practical way of thinking.

Therefore, it is important to recognize what the conditions of the social organism are. No matter how much the approach taken here is still regarded by some as impractical idealism today, the longer this realistic view of life and social life is regarded as impractical idealism, , the longer it will be inconvenient to address the true living conditions of the living social organism, the longer the disaster that has befallen humanity in such a catastrophic way will last.

If you know a little, dear attendees, what is alive in the development of humanity, you are not a “practitioner” in the sense of all those who sniff at the very closest things in life a little with the tip of their nose and then consider themselves practitioners from their narrow point of view and brutality rejects everything that does not want to follow their conditions, but is one a practitioner according to the general conditions of humanity, and one looks a little into the developmental conditions of humanity, so one knows that much of what can prevent later social disaster in the social fabric of humanity, very, very far back in its essence must be recognized! It is not easy to recognize too late what is happening in the social life of a nation, but it is very easy to do so in other fields. Once instincts are unleashed, as they are already beginning to be in a large part of the civilized world, the possibility of understanding is no longer there. Therefore, the appeal that arises in the heart of the one who recognizes the necessity that the seeds be sunk in the course of time, so that not disaster but salvation can occur in later time, is serious.

If we consider the social organism that is to emerge, which of course is not yet there, we first come to the conclusion that the following observation, the following premise, is necessary as a feeling, I could say: social forces have always present in the development of humanity; wherever any kind of cohesive human society had developed, whether a people, a state, a tribe or something similar, social impulses were always at work between people and their associations and organizations.

But up to that point in time, which I indicated yesterday as the point in the cycle at which human development passes from instinctive life to fully conscious life, up to that point in time, the social impulses also functioned more instinctively. And just the one sphere, the one area of our social life: the economic sphere with its modern technology, which has to be driven so consciously as an economy, with its modern capitalism, which has to be driven so consciously – just that has conjured up one-sidedness in one area of consciousness.

The old instinctive social life must give way to a fully conscious conception of the social organism. Our humanity must develop a sense of how the individual fits into the overall social organism. And without this social feeling, this social sense, arising from a real insight into the social organism, no salvation can come from the further development of humanity.

That people learn their multiplication tables, that people learn other things in life, is taken for granted today. It must gradually be taken for granted that the growing human being, through education, through school, takes in that which makes him feel like a member of the living social organism. And this living social organism, if it is healthy, is not an abstract homunculus-like unit, as it is often presented today: it is a structured organism.

And to make myself clear, esteemed attendees, I would like to start with a comparison today, but I will immediately note that this comparison is intended to be nothing more than a basis for establishing understanding and for averting misunderstandings.

I would like to say: just as the natural human organism is structured in such a way that it is actually a tripartite in the most eminent sense, so too is the social organism, when it is healthy, a tripartite structure in itself, not an abstract unity. The social organism is not any of these things: it is a threefold unity.

Dearly beloved, for decades I have tried to gain a truly scientific basis for the true threefold nature of the natural human organism. I have given hints about this in my book Von Seelenrätseln (The Riddle of the Soul). I have shown that present-day natural science, biology, will recognize the true organism as threefold when it passes over from that hustle and bustle which is now criticized by such biologists as, for example, [gap in transcript] himself, when it passes over from there to real science. This biology, this true science, which must first develop out of today's, will recognize the real organism as a threefold one.

I have tried to describe this threefold nature of the organism, as it is meant here, in such a way that the human being in his or her entirety is, firstly, the system that I would like to call the nervous-sensory system, which is more or less centralized in the human head. The second is the system that I would like to call the rhythmic system, which is more or less centralized in the rhythmic activities of the respiratory organs and the heart. And then, the third human being, so to speak, the third link of the human natural organism, that is the entire metabolic system. And it can be shown that the human being, insofar as he is active, is composed of these three systems.

But these three systems have a certain autonomy within them. The metabolic system, which is built on the digestive organs in the most eminent sense, cannot help but function independently and must be centralized independently within itself. Next to it, in a certain autonomy, is the lung-heart system, the rhythmic system, and next to that, in turn, is the head system, the nerve-sense system. And it is precisely through this that the living activity in the organism exists, that there is not an abstract centralization, but that these three systems each work within themselves with a certain relative independence; each wants to send the results of its activity into the other systems. The fact that they work alongside each other, on each other, is what makes the organism what it is.

Now I am far, far from simply bringing the social organism into a playful way, by an analogy game, into a comparison with the natural human organism. And the one who, from a superficial understanding of what I am going to present here, will say: Oh, yet another analogy game, as unfortunately created by Schäffle and now again in the book “Weltmutation”, yet another such analogical game in which the processes of the organism are transferred to the social order of society, which is governed by completely different laws; anyone who says that will judge what I actually want to present from a completely misleading point of view. My concern is not to transfer something that happens in the natural human organism to the social organism, but rather that realistic thinking, which teaches us to understand the human natural organism in the right way, realistic thinking is also applied to the social organism, and that the social organism, which is also a threefold nature, is objectively recognized in its living conditions, precisely by recognizing this threefold nature of it.

Those who seek analogies in a playful way, as in “Weltmutation” or in the works of Schäffle and many others, would simply say: the human natural organism has a spiritual part in the nervous-sensory system spiritual part, a regulating part in the rhythmic life of the respiratory and cardiac systems; and thirdly, in the metabolic system, it has that which is based on the coarsest material processes of the human organism. And what would such a system say by analogy with the social organism? It would compare the spiritual impulses that develop in the social organism with those that arise in the human head system, the nerve-sense system. It would thus compare the outer material economic life with that which is bound up in the human being with the coarsest material processes.

But anyone who simply observes the social organism in the same realistic way as one can observe the human being's natural organism, will, strangely enough, come to exactly the opposite conclusion! They will in fact come to observe all of it – whether one can describe it as the lowest or the highest, that is not the point here – but the first link of the social organism, the economic system. But this economic system cannot be analogously compared with the metabolic system of the natural human organism. Indeed, if one wants to use a comparison for the laws of economic life as they express themselves in the social organism, then these laws can only be compared with those laws that prevail in the so-called noblest system of the human organism, in the head system, in the nerve-sense system, the system from which human gifts arise, the system on which all human giftedness and also all human education must be based. In that which is connected with the natural gifts of the nerve-sense system, something enters into the natural, individual natural human organism that cannot be conjured up by mere learning, which brings the outside into the human being, but which must be brought out, depending on how it is predisposed in the human being, which must be demystified from a certain basis. Just as in the individual human development for education and shaping of life there is simply the intellectual gift, the physical and emotional disposition of the human being, so in the social organism there are natural foundations for all human living and working together, in addition to what can be achieved in this social organism through social thinking, that is, through the actions of people! By belonging to a social organism, man is related to certain natural foundations of all human existence through this social organism. The social organism is related to these natural foundations as the individual human organism is related to its innate talents, and no social thinking may deny these natural foundations in their influence on the shaping of all social life. No matter how beautiful the observations on the interaction of land, rent, capital, wages, entrepreneurial profit, and so on, and so on, if one does not understand how to correctly evaluate that which stands as a natural foundation, through which the social organism opens up to an element outside itself, then one does not arrive at a realistic observation if one cannot see this.

Just consider the following, esteemed attendees. Of course, it is of infinite, great importance what part human labor, as human labor, plays in the shaping of any social context of people. But this human labor is, after all, tremendously dependent on the natural foundation. Just as the developing human being is dependent on his or her predispositions, so the social organism is dependent on the natural foundation. Take the following example: Let us hypothetically assume a social organism whose main nutrient is bananas. The means necessary to transport the bananas from their place of origin to where they can be profitably consumed by humans, [to do so] a labor is necessary that is related to the labor necessary to bring the wheat from its point of origin to human consumption, a labor necessary from the material banana culture to the material wheat culture, a necessary labor in the social organism, which is approximately 1:100; that is to say: A hundred times more labor is required to develop labor power in the social organism where wheat production is concerned than where banana production is concerned.

Or assume something else: human labor must be employed to transform the natural product so that it can enter into the social process of circulation, to the point where it finds its end in consumption. You only need to consider the following: in Germany, in areas with medium yield, wheat yields seven to eight times the amount sown; in Chile, wheat yields twelve times the amount sown In northern Mexico, wheat yields seventeen times the amount sown, and in Peru seventeen times. In southern Mexico, it yields twenty-five to thirty-five times the amount sown! There you can see the influence that nature has. And this can also be applied to the yield of this or that raw material for any processing. There you see the relation, the ratio of the fertility of nature to human labor. What a different measure of labor is needed to produce the same yield, where wheat yields twenty-seven times its seed as a result, than where it yields only seven to eight times!

Now, these are radical examples. But the ratio of what nature, what ordinary production in general gives man to his labor, to the labor that is necessary, is just as different within each social context. There we have, I would say, the starting point of one link of the human social organism. Everything that flows out of the natural foundation into the process that takes place between the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities is just as much a closed system in the healthy social organism as the nervous-sensory system is a closed whole with relatively independent laws in the natural human organism.

And to allow something else to play a role in the economic organism, whose essential nature is in the circulation of goods, is just as unhelpful as it would be beneficial if the pulmonary-cardiac system were to play a role in the nervous-sensory system of the head. However strange it may still seem to people today when one speaks in this way, it is something that must underlie as a fundamental truth all, not only social thinking, but all social measures that can somehow be taken for the benefit of humanity in the healthy social organism in the present and future. That which takes place in the cycle of the commodity system must not flood and overwhelm the entire social organism, but must be a relatively independent system in its own right, with its own life. For anyone who then gets to the bottom of things in practice, this system of pure economic mechanism is already automatically distinguished from the other two systems.

The second system of the social organism is the one that encompasses everything that could be called public legal life and everything that regulates the other systems, in other words, that establishes the dignified relationship between people.

The establishment of a dignified relationship between people has nothing to do with the laws that govern pure economic life, with what leads to the circulation of goods within an economic body. The system of public law, the system of regulating life, the system that establishes the right relationship between people, will, just as the pulmonary and cardiac system, in the results of its activity, plays into the head system, so this system of public law, of public regulation of legislation, into what may be called political life in the broadest sense of the word; it will, especially if it develops relatively independently, also play a proper, vital role in economic life in the right, living way. Only the two systems must develop quite independently alongside one another, each according to its own laws, according to its own inner, essential impulses!

One could say that the great misfortune in recent times is that people have chaotically mixed up what can only flourish when it develops separately, in relative independence.

In older times, in keeping with human ideas and human needs in these older times, the three systems I have spoken of today were also in a corresponding relationship in the social organism.

The relationship that present and future humanity needs has yet to be found. However, we have started from many erroneous assumptions, out of a certain conservative attachment to what has been handed down from older times. Something has developed from older times, which was well founded in the old Roman conceptions of the state, developed through monarchies and other forms of state, that which one could call the constitutional state, the political state. Connected with this constitutional state, this political state, here and there was something of economic life, agriculture and forestry here and there. Other branches had claimed what was run as a state for themselves; so that, to a certain extent, the state, which was mainly a constitutional state, a political state, a political community, stood as a protective community with its armed forces against external influences, that this state also became an economist in a certain respect.

And when the modern era approached with its complicated economic systems of technology and capitalism, at first people found salvation in them, not separating the old economic areas that the constitutional state, the political state, had already incorporated, and establishing the two spheres neatly side by side: the rule of law, which aims to organize the relationship between people, and, on the other hand, the economic body. Instead, the two were conflated.

And more and more, the state, which actually has the task of regulating the relationship between people, was saddled with the postal system, telegraphy, railways, in short, the things that serve modern technology and modern economic life. What can be called the flooding of the purely political state system with the economic system developed. Under the influence of precisely those things that technology and capitalism have brought about for the detriment of modern humanity, modern socialist views have developed, so to speak, which, out of thoroughly good intentions and justified demands, want to take what can be called the “flooding of the constitutional state with economic life” to the extreme, but only out of a lack of understanding of old conditions that arise from a realistic observation of the social organism.

The salutary development does not lie in merging the economic social sphere with the political sphere, with the public legal sphere, with the sphere that has to regulate the relationship between people, but in separating each of these spheres to achieve relative independence.

We have seen, esteemed attendees, how damagingly the economic interest groups can operate when they do not organize according to economic impulses in their particular economic areas, but instead enter the representations of the political and legal state and want to push through what are purely economic interests, for which they want to establish rights and special privileges, where completely different foundations of political life should prevail. But what pulsates in economic life must be based solely and exclusively on the healthy conditions of economic life itself.

From what has arisen partly in external reality, partly in human perception, in human sentiment and in the elaboration of human demands from the confusion of economic life with pure politics, with pure state life, that is precisely what has been formed, disguised, and shaped into one of the most essential demands of the modern proletariat. The fact that economic life has flooded everything, that economic life has gradually, one might say, crept into political state life, has meant that an impulse in human activity has not been placed in its proper place – alongside other things, admittedly; but one of the most important, one of those that most deeply intervenes in the social problems of the present.

It will never be possible to separate the mere economic sphere from human labor, from character, from the character that everything in the economic sphere has, from the character of a commodity!

But, as I explained yesterday, the modern proletarian perceives this as the real inhumanity, that there is a labor market, a labor market in which the economic value of the commodity that is his labor power is simply determined according to the law of supply and demand. However the modern proletarian may express his demands, this demand, as something that is unconsciously at the center of all the other demands, even if one is unconscious of it: this demand, as something that is unconsciously at the center of all the other demands, even if one is unconscious of it, is the main thing: the removal of the commodity character from human labor. Human labor should no longer be a commodity!

If you were to socialize in the way that a large proportion of people, those people who want to socialize, intend to carry it out today, then you will not detach the labor force from the commodity, but on the contrary you will make this human labor force more and more into a commodity!

No abstract remedy can be given as to how the human labor force can be stripped of the commodity character – a commodity that can be bought and sold; rather, as stated at the beginning of today's lecture, it can only be said: Do not look for magic remedies, for remedies that are superstitious in the modern sense of the word, to cure socially, but look for the living conditions of the social organism. Then this social organism will develop with its own vitality. And as economic life, according to its own impulses, and the political body of the state, which has to establish the relationship between people, will simply develop side by side, again according to its own laws and impulses. This will happen in such a way that - not in such a way that one can say theoretically: This is how human labor will detach itself from the economic process, and human activity will develop. And it will fall naturally into that link of the social organism that can be described as the political link, as the link that regulates the relationship between people.

There is – and I already pointed this out at the beginning of the century in an article I wrote on the social question for my magazine Lucifer-Gnosis, which was published at the time – there is a certain law for human labor in the totality of a social organism. This law is evident to the true observer of the social organism as something fundamental in social life. So one could then, and still can today, speak of this law, which can be proven in all its details and is important for real knowledge of social life. One preaches to deaf ears with such a fundamental law among those who are there or there to teach people “correct concepts” about economics and the like.

This law, dear attendees, is the following: When someone works, be it manual labor or intellectual work within a larger social community, not within a small one, since the law is not expressed in the same way, but in a larger social community, as it alone comes into consideration in today's consideration of the social question, when a person works in a larger social community, it is impossible for him to benefit personally from what he has worked for as an individual within the social process, within what goes on in the body of society! He can never, so to speak, have the fruits, the results of his own labor. Today, of course, there would not be enough time for this, because it would require hours of individual observations to substantiate this in detail. I can only say that the law I have stated is a law that can be fully substantiated scientifically. What the individual works through his activity can only seemingly serve him in his result. In reality, what the individual works is distributed among the social organism to which he belongs. All people benefit from his work; and he, what he has within a social organism, cannot come from his own pocket if the social organism is healthy; but it comes from the work of other people.

This is simply due to the objective circumstances that take place. If I may use a rough comparison: you can no more live [in an economic sense] on what you work [...] than you can live in a physical sense by eating yourself!

It is a basic law of economic life that one cannot live on one's labor. If one lives on it, it works to the detriment of the social organism. The social organism is only healthy when each individual works for the others, and all others work for the individual.

This is not just a matter of ethical altruism, it is a law of a healthy, organic structure. Therefore, esteemed attendees, it falsifies the basic laws of the social organism if you simply pay for labor like a commodity - for the reason that you are starting from something that is not real. You want to give the worker his earnings; you want to let the person live off his life force. You do not integrate him into the social organism by doing this, but exclude him.

And because the modern economic order has led to the outward, masked, and seemingly settlement of the proletarian with what is supposed to be the product of his labor, it has, precisely through the counter-effect of resistance, produced in him that which he himself, with all his other astute knowledge, cannot develop, that which arises from the killing of social connections, that which is produced in him and he wants to be part of the social connection. He is exposed by that which commodifies his labor power; he wants to be reintroduced; he wants the deadly element to be set aside. This is contained in the one form of social demands that I already mentioned yesterday and to which I must return in this form today.

But if what is introduced into the social organism by labor, by human labor, what, under socialist ideas, wants to introduce more and more of this labor into the purely economic organism, were to take hold, then the proletariat would be increasingly pushed out of the social body.

The fundamental issue depends on the fact that alongside the mere economic body there is another, political body, with relative independence, which does not have to deal with what the circulation of goods is, but has to deal with what establishes the relationship between people. And in the most eminent sense, you can see it as soon as you can gain a relationship to the law that you do not work for yourself but for other people.

In the truest sense, human labor, the regulation of human labor, belongs in this second link of the social organism, in the political organism. It is the duty of the state to see that human labor is not abused. But human labor can never be accorded its rights among other human beings if these rights are to come from the mere economic body - the mere economic body, which is supposed to exist according to its own laws, independently, separate from the political, the purely political body, from the pure state body!

What has come about today, because people are so often accustomed to regarding it as right, what is often regarded as right today, yes, that does indeed speak against what is stated here. However, esteemed attendees, either we will make an effort to live according to the laws of a healthy social organism, or we will be driven into even more terrible catastrophes than we have already been driven into, simply because we have not striven for such a clean-cut distinction between the individual members of the social organism.

We can trace the causes of the war back to the confusion of economic and state affairs.

We will study, because we will be forced to study more and more closely the factors that led to the catastrophe in which we are now mired up to the point of crisis. We will find that among the many causes – I cannot, of course, discuss them exhaustively in this context – is the fact that states could be driven against each other by economic circles that had simply taken control of the political bodies for their own interests! If the political bodies had not allowed themselves to be led by the confounding of certain purely economic interest groups, dear attendees, then the catastrophe could not have taken on this character! The international politics of people, the international will of people, also depends on recognizing the laws of the social organism.

A third link of the social organism is then the spiritual life, dearest ones, this spiritual life, as it has gradually formed into a kind of ideology in the present stage of human development, into which old forms only protrude like remnants - I described it yesterday. But this spiritual life, which arose from certain social instincts and existed in a certain independence until the middle, until the end of the Middle Ages, has also been absorbed. Just as economic life is to be absorbed influence of certain modern aspirations, economic life has been absorbed by state life or vice versa, one could also say: this spiritual life has been absorbed by that life which should only regulate the relationship between people. How people should relate to each other, purely by the fact that they are legal subjects, must be the subject of a special social link in the social organism.

Spiritual life must be a special link in the social organism with relative independence. For the entire social organism, what comes from the spiritual life in its true form is just as important as the absorption of food and metabolism is for the individual human organism. This spiritual life in the social organism must be compared with the most primitive system - the so-called most primitive system - in the natural human organism.

Everything that can only arise from the physical and mental abilities of the human being belongs in this system; everything that can only be placed on the basis of the individual freedom of the human being. Everything that plays a role in the religious life of human beings belongs in this system. This includes everything that belongs in the school and education system, in the broadest sense, from the lowest to the highest level. In addition to much else, in addition to the cultivation of all the arts, in addition to all other cultivation of free spirituality, this also includes - and it would lead too far to give the details here, because it would take hours again - private and criminal law. Public law belongs to the second link of the social organism, public law that establishes the relationship between people in healthy human coexistence.

If, with regard to violated private interests, if, with regard to criminal offenses, a person is to judge another person, then such an individual relationship between the judge and the judged person is necessary before a true observation of reality, that the whole process can only be placed in the realm of individual freedom. One must, as a real judge, submerge oneself in the subjectivity of the person one has to judge, whether in a civil or criminal matter, to such an extent that it is not possible otherwise than for the impulse of individual human freedom to prevail.

I could cite many examples; I will mention just one: anyone who, like me, has observed for decades, through direct experience, the conditions that prevailed where, [officially] and [inofficially], many more individual nationalities lived alongside and mixed with each other than in Austria. Anyone who has observed this, anyone who has observed how much the court relationships contributed to the chaos into which the tremendous Austrian catastrophe has now led, knows the importance that must be attached to the incorrect regulation of the court relationships!

However, within such circumstances, it only manifests itself in a radical way. Consider this: we have an area where Germans and Czechs live together. If a Czech has committed some crime, he is tried by a judge who speaks German, because that is simply the way it is under the current political conditions. The Czech does not understand a word of what is being said about him. He knows he cannot trust his judge, who, according to national characteristics, is different from him.

All this – I can only touch on it briefly – should have led to the conclusion decades ago, in order to avoid this terrible present catastrophe, that it would have been necessary, however the other territorial borders were drawn, with regard to the legal relationships of private and criminal law, to proceed in such a way that for five or ten years everyone freely elects their judges, just as, incidentally, in the field of intellectual life, everyone is free to choose the school for their descendants and so on. This liberation of the school system, of the education system, of the whole of intellectual affairs, includes infinitely much more of the rest of the economic and purely state-run affairs of the social organism.

Naturally, people will be least willing to accept this necessary idea, because many see the nationalization of the school system, the extension of the state's tentacles over free spirituality, as the most sacred of all. Nevertheless, this is the opposite of what is salutary. That which should or can develop as spirituality with a real character can only develop if this spirituality is based purely on itself in the social organism, if the state organism has only to ensure that this spiritual life can develop freely.

The socialist agitators and their supporters have so far discovered only one area, and that out of a misunderstanding, which they treat in this way: the religious area. They hear within the socialist agitation areas: religion is a private matter - but not really because one wants to protect religion in its freedom from state and economic intervention, but because one has no real interest. They want to isolate it; they want it to live for itself, and perhaps die for itself.

The right thing would be to have the greatest respect for the spiritual life in all its individual aspects; then one would know that this spiritual life can only flourish if it has its own administration, its own organization, its adequate, relative independence. This spiritual life must be conceived in the broadest sense, not only in the sense of the actual spiritual ideas, not only in the sense of the actual spiritual achievements that emanate from these spiritual realms, but also in the sense of everything that extends as spiritual impulses to the other two realms. It must emanate from these realms; the technical ideas, that which actually sets the economic life in motion, will emanate from the spiritual-soul work.

But this spiritual and mental work must not be maintained, administered or legislated by the other two spheres; it must govern itself with relative independence so that it can act in the appropriate way, just like the [digestive] system on the two remaining systems of the natural organism, that it can act in the right way through its freedom, through its independence, on the two other social systems.

Thus, it is to be thought that the economic link of the social organism, the area that regulates the relationship of man to man, and the area that, as the actual spiritual area, is based on the individual freedom of all that arising from the spiritual, mental and physical faculties of man, that these areas live side by side in such a way that each has its own administrative and legislative body, as befits its own nature. Not the one parliament that confuses everything together is the salutary thing for the social development of the future, but the three representative bodies, of which one concerns all people: that of the political organism, which will probably be purely democratic in most of the territories of the earth, the civilized world; while the other two will be appropriate in their representation.

The economic body will be built on an associative basis. We can already see the beginnings of this today, in that man must grow together with what is available to him as a natural basis for his economic life, how he must join forces with other people; this union, as it is attempted today in cooperatives and union, and so on, must be built on purely economic foundations: the economic foundations of production, the economic foundations of consumption, the economic foundations of trade, which will regulate each other according to purely economic principles.

The political body, which is based on the legal relationship between people, will become more and more democratic in essence, because it deals with each person's relationship to the circulation of goods. That which is the spiritual realm will be built on what follows from the spiritual life of the individual's advancement in the spiritual life.

These three areas, in a healthy social organism, are effectively sovereignly juxtaposed, and thus responsible to each other like sovereign states. It is precisely because the individual members of the social organism are relatively independent that the delegations can work together in the right community!

One can admit that these ideas may seem too radical for many people today. However, they are not intended, esteemed attendees, to transform any social community overnight in the way that might seem natural when such things are expressed. No, the thinker of reality — and that is always the spiritual scientist, the true spiritual scientist — thinks extremely little of the formation of such theories as theories. He thinks much more of people permeating themselves in their whole will and in their immediate life with what follows as impulses from such a view of life, so that they give the corresponding direction to all the details of their actions, their measures.

It would certainly be a mistake to try to remodel the social organism overnight, as is being attempted in many fields today; but people have always been confronted with the necessity of organizing this or that. You can organize it in such a way that you are obsessed with the idea that everything, in a state of confusion, must be a state entity; or you can take what is most common to everyone and shape it in such a way that it is integrated into the gradual realization of these three coexisting links in the social organism. even more than many socialist thinkers of the present day, who do not dream of bringing about a different organization of the social organism overnight, but think of a slow development, the one who, because his observation is based entirely on these explanations, thinks that a direction is given to social development that is slowly being realized.

This realistic thinking does not speak of any kind of confused social revolutions, for example, that take place quickly. But what is discussed, dear attendees, is that one should be comfortable directing one's thoughts towards what follows from the realistic observation of the social organism itself.

What I have presented to you here, esteemed attendees, appears to me, from what I believe is an objective consideration of present-day events, to be particularly important for this present time, and particularly necessary for this present time to heal many things that need healing. And I may say: it is not merely on theoretical considerations that the ideas which I have presented to you today have been given their final form.

What I have explained to you – I could only give you an outline due to the short time – can be justified in all its details

can be expanded in all its details. This can already be done today in a completely scientific way! Anyone who wants to take this direction can already do so today by working together with those who are willing to devote their energy to giving the social organism a form that makes it truly healthy in the face of a realistic view of life. This can be done; it can be carried out in detail today – in detail, that which I could only present to you today in a comprehensive sketch.

These ideas did not arise out of mere theoretical consideration; they arose out of the observation of the conditions under which these conditions have developed, so that in the end nothing else could result from them but this European catastrophe.

Those who have immersed themselves in the inner workings of these conditions in the contemporary civilized world may have experienced something like, for example, - I could also cite others - me with regard to a certain point. I truly do not want to boast about these things in any way. But, dear ladies and gentlemen, these things are serious; and even if something that one uses for understanding looks like something personal, then perhaps it may be said today in the face of the terrible seriousness of the times.

It was still the time that preceded this [war] catastrophe, when [diplomats], politicians and statesmen and other clever people in Europe had a sunny smile when it was mentioned how peace, or something similar, was established and firmly established in the world. At the time, I had to give a lecture in Vienna, as part of a series of lectures, about what the deeper foundations of our social conditions are heading towards. I spoke at a time when the approaching catastrophe was not yet being noticed from the outside, when diplomats still had a sunny smile on their faces about the good deeds they had done. I spoke of the fact that something like a social carcinoma, like a cancer, was creeping through our social order long before the amateurish book “Weltmutation” (World Mutation) had appeared, with all sorts of socialism gimmicks! And I said at the time: The times are so serious that one feels something like an obligation to cry out to humanity, so that souls may be shaken, so that they may know: The right thing must be done at the right time, so that disaster later, unspeakable disaster would be averted.

That was said before the war.

During the war, however, urged on by the seriousness of the burning social issues, which were brought to the surface in their true form and manner during the catastrophe of war, I had presented to many an influential person within the social organism what was necessary for recovery. Outwardly, in theory, some people understood this; but they could not bridge the gap between theoretical understanding and will, because their understanding was not thorough enough.

Now one would like to believe that what influential people refused to understand during the war catastrophe, now, one would like to believe, now some of those who were brought to misfortune by this war catastrophe in Central and Eastern Europe and some others who have been given a reprieve, now they should understand, at the right time, show understanding for things! For two or three years ago, when things could still have taken a different course from that which they took in the autumn of 1918, I said to many people in Central Europe: What is expressed in these ideas of the threefold social organism must become foreign policy; then the whole course of events will be given a different direction, a more salutary direction. And I then said: You have the choice of either accepting these things at the right time through reason, because these things are not made up, these things are not programs, these things are not an abstract ideal, as abstract ideals have certain societies or parties, but these things are observed from the developmental forces of humanity; they simply want to and must be realized in the next ten, twenty, thirty years. Whether I or you or anyone else wants something in this direction is not what it depends on. What it depends on is whether the developmental forces that humanity must go through themselves want this, whether it is their will that this must happen. You have the choice of either using reason to help shape such a social organization, or revolutionary catastrophes and cataclysms will take place in the field, for which you are now also responsible. The choice between reason and the unleashing of the most terrible instincts, which can then no longer be overcome by mere understanding, this choice is set before people.

It is essential that people move away from the mere search for comfortable thinking, that people come to the point where those who are the real practitioners of life, because they see the formative forces of humanity development, that these people are no longer portrayed as “impractical idealists” and are thus rendered harmless or avoided, but that precisely what they have to say be made fruitful - that is what matters! In many areas, real life practice is quite different from the narrow-mindedness of those who often consider themselves the ultimate practitioners. What these “practitioners” have done over decades has led directly to the misfortunes of the present.

These ideas were also misunderstood in the opposite direction, in that it was believed that they were merely internal ideas, for shaping some kind of closed social organism within.

Now, it is understandable that people who have not learned anything, could not have learned anything, nor through the military catastrophes of recent years, could not understand the intervention and incisiveness of such social ideas coming from reality. Of course, such ideas could not find their way into a state-run country, for example, into a state-run country and life whose leader was able to write such a book over a long period of time, as Bülow did under Wilhelm II; that this book could still be taken seriously, that this book was not taken as an historical document of how Germany's misfortune was brought about by a lack of understanding of modern human development, is one of the special characteristics of our time, which will often give cause to be judged according to a special scientific field - I already mentioned it yesterday: “social pathology” or “social psychiatry”. I don't use that just as a “witticism”, I mean it very seriously.

But what would be necessary to realize, which has not been understood by those to whom I have presented these ideas so far, is that these ideas do not just apply to the inner shaping of some social territory, but that they must gradually become the basis of a true international foreign policy for every state, although each state can start them individually, on its own.

The issue at hand is that, furthermore, states do not negotiate with each other as if they were closed territories, but that each social entity negotiates with every other social entity – it can also be done unilaterally, so each state can start with it – or that each state negotiates with each other state, or one state negotiates with another state that still adheres to the old confounding, and gives its trust to the fact that on the one hand, the representatives of the purely economic body come into consideration, who in turn deal with the economic life of the outside world for themselves, from the foundations of the economic body, in political thought, political relationships, those factors that deal with the relationship between people in general, with the corresponding factors of the other social territory. Likewise, the spiritual representatives of the other territory with the spiritual representatives.

Thus, the so-called “national borders” take on a completely different meaning; what leads to conflicts through national borders is no longer, as it happens now, that everything is thrown together and welded together, but a conflict in one area is balanced by the other areas that work alongside it.

We need only look at the way in which this threefold structure will function across the whole earth in the international relations of nations [and establish something different] that is deeply organic compared to what is attempted out of good will but only out of abstract thinking: a league of nations, intergovernmentalism and the like. All this will not be built up like a human organism, but, brought about according to its conditions, it will become like a living social organism when the threefold nature outlined today is brought into the current that is expressed in the flowing social will and thinking and feeling of humanity.

The contradiction between these three ideas seems just as clear as the great, obvious power of these ideas.

Only when one advances from a mere abstract, from a merely theoretical thinking, which would have to lead to a social homunculus, to a realistic feeling, can one understand how these three ideas must relate to human social reality:

Freedom leads to the area in which spiritual life must unfold.

Equality leads to the place where the relationship between people develops in the political arena, which is what it should properly be called.

Brotherhood leads into the realm of economic life, where everyone should give and receive according to their economic means.

If one knows that the social organism is structured according to three relatively independent links, then one knows that these ideas must contradict each other, just as the laws of development contradict the threefold structure of a natural human organism. If one knows that the great, decisive ideas and impulses; then one is not surprised at the contradictions that arise when one wants to believe that these three ideas must be applied to a social organism in which everything is supposed to be jumbled up and welded together.

Thus, what humanity felt was necessary for social life at the dawn of modern times will only be able to become established in the true social reality of humanity if the three elements of this social reality of humanity are incorporated into the social organism through a realistic [observing, acting and willing] in the social organism.

I know how much prejudice and preconception still speak against these things today. However, without in any way lapsing into vanity or pride, I would like to express what it is all about in conclusion by means of a comparison. Many a person will say: Well, someone with a background in the humanities wants to solve a social problem in such a simple way. Yes, esteemed attendees, I may perhaps compare, for the sake of someone to whom this attempt at a solution seems so simple, so primitive, and does not seem appropriate in comparison to the great erudition economics teachers and other people, I may perhaps venture the comparison for such a person: Once upon a time there was a poor boy who worked as a servant on a Newcomen steam engine. He had to manually operate the two cocks that had to be pushed and pushed all the time, one of which was to let the condensation water into the engine and the other to let the steam into the engine. Then the little boy noticed that this opening and closing of the two cocks, which he had to push back and forth with his hands at the appropriate time, with regard to their swinging up and down, he came up with the idea of tying the cocks together with strings, to control the cocks with strings. And it turned out that the cocks opened and closed by themselves in his up and down, so the cocks that let the condensation water flow in on one side and the steam flow back out on the other. And from this observation of the little boy, one of the most important inventions of modern times emerged: the self-regulating steam engine.

It could also have happened that a “very clever person” would have come and said to the boy: You good-for-nothing, what are you doing there? Get rid of the strings! Take care of your cocks as before by hand, do what you are told! And don't think you can do anything special there!

As I said, you can compare things, but a comparison always has something of a limp. You can use the comparison for something else, that is, for something you look down on with a certain arrogance: for this humanities that now also wants to extend its experience to the social problem! But perhaps I may venture the comparison with the little boy after all. If the “very clever people” today find it extraordinarily foolish for someone from the humanities to dare to tackle the social problem, I would like to say to them: Such people just want to be nothing more than the little boy who just notices what the others have not noticed in all their cleverness and erudition, perhaps also wrong erudition.

For I believe I can be convinced of this, precisely from an insight into the social workings and rule of today's humanity and its demands. I believe I can be convinced of this: What matters is that if one observes in the right way how the three areas of the social organism can develop in their independence, one has discovered the life of this social organism. And just as life itself is control and regulation, so the social organism will regulate itself if only the laws of its individual areas are found in the right way.

That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is what inspires anyone who is serious, especially in today's serious times, with what is necessary for humanity in terms of social demands.

Let me conclude by saying that I actually compress everything that needs to be said in this regard into one sentiment: May there at least be enough people in the present who are moved by what must happen in the next 20 to 30 years because it lies within the developmental forces of humanity, may there be enough people today who open their hearts and minds to what humanity must do to lead the future, so that even greater disaster does not occur! Because if that which is believed by most of those who consider themselves practical – in their own sense, in the right sense – disappears, then there will not be a healing of the misfortune, but rather an immeasurable increase of this misfortune!

Therefore, may as many people as possible be found who open their hearts and minds to what must be done to make possible an understanding, an understanding between heart and heart, an understanding between soul and soul within the social coexistence of humanity, before the instincts are unleashed to such an extent that such an understanding between people, given the terribly animalistic instincts, will no longer be possible.

Dear attendees! Yesterday I tried to present the real nature of the social question as it arises from the consideration of what has gradually developed over the last few centuries, especially in the last century, in the minds of people, especially in the souls of the proletariat.

Today I would like to attempt to speak of possible solutions to this social question, of such possible solutions, dear attendees, that do not arise from some program, from some party demand, from human emotions; rather, I would like to speak of such possible solutions that arise from the developmental conditions and developmental forces of contemporary humanity.

However, if one wants to speak from such a point of view, then completely different things come into consideration than are considered by those who today are often preparing to comment on what has emerged as a proletarian social movement in the life of humanity.

If one has an eye for the developmental forces of humanity in the present, just as the natural scientist is supposed to have an eye for the developmental forces that a single person has at a certain age, say at the age of sexual maturity, then one must finally, I believe, come to realize that much of what that is currently emerging in an understandable way, in a completely understandable way, here or there, as a theoretical or practical or somehow-conceived attempt to solve social issues, that we are dealing with the revival of what is rightly regarded by many in another field as medieval superstition. It is as if certain superstitious ideas have already been exhausted in the more rapidly developing field of natural science, and as if, unnoticed by human thought because they only masquerade there, because they have taken on a different disguised form, they have been preserved to this day in the field of social life and its problems and its riddles.

To make it easier to understand what I actually mean, I recall the passage in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” where Wagner creates the homunculus, an artificial human being, in a retort. Goethe points to the medieval superstitious alchemy, which believed that a human being could be created in a chemical laboratory by artificially processing certain substances and forces in a thinking way, as an indication of what he wants to represent at this point in his “Faust”. The broadest circles consider such alchemical endeavors to artificially create an organism, a human body, to be a superstition based on the principles of current scientific thought. In the field of social thinking, as I said, this alchemical superstition continues to prevail to this day, without people noticing it because the matter is veiled. For much of what is thought and done to bring about the social structure, the social organization of human society today, resembles the efforts of that Goethean Wagner who wants to artificially create the homunculus in the laboratory. Today, people think they can concoct the social organism from some social materials and forces in an artificial way.

And if we examine more closely, esteemed attendees, what is emerging here and there as a so-called solution to the social question, we find that no attention is paid to the conditions for the solution of the social organism. Even in the experiments that are already being carried out on a large scale, no attention is paid to this. Instead, it is assumed that something artificial can be created in some way.

The spiritual scientific thinking, from which this consideration started and which also takes the method for the social question, this spiritual scientific thinking is based on reality and must therefore proceed in a completely different way than many socialist experiments of today. The question for the method represented here is not: How do you shape the social organism? but rather, how can we create the conditions of life through which the social organism can shape itself as a living being, through which it can come into existence? Just as in nature one does not artificially create an organism by some kind of thinking, but one has to create the conditions under which the natural organism has to form itself, and through which it can then develop out of its own life impulse, so it must also be done for a realistic view of life with regard to the social organism.

However, this, esteemed attendees, requires a radical change in the way many people think today, and that is a very uncomfortable thing for the widest circles today. People may still be willing to accept a change in some institutions, a change in some circumstances, if they are not too sleepy. But people are less willing to accept a different way of thinking, a transformation of their whole view of reality. However, such a reorientation, such a change of thinking, is necessary for the deep social problem that not only cuts into individual areas of life, but into the whole of contemporary life. What is at stake here is that one must, as it were, change one's path from social superstitious alchemy to real social insight, to real insight into the social organism.

Just as one can study and get to know the individual human natural organism by applying the scientific method impartially enough, so too can one, with vigorous thinking and research, see through the social organism in its living conditions. That is what it is about.

I have already taken the liberty of speaking about the individual human organism, the natural organism, here in Basel in previous lectures. Today I would just like to point out that it seems to me that no one will be able to understand the natural organism of the human being, the natural life body of the human being, despite all the progress in physiology and biology in the present day, without studying the three interacting but relatively independent parts of this organism. When I spoke from the same place here in Basel about these three links of the natural human organism, I took the liberty of pointing out that I was giving something - I have outlined it in my book 'Von Soul Mysteries», - something on which I have actually been working for thirty years, trying to justify what has emerged from spiritual scientific documents by all the means that modern natural science can provide in this regard today. So that I can say: anyone who wants to, anyone who does not want to dabble but will approach the subject scientifically, need not shy away from what I will only briefly mention here and what may still surprise some people who believe they have a deep insight into scientific matters.

This single human organism is not centralized in a simple way, but is actually decentralized into three relatively independent parts: one can say, into the nervous sensory system, which is centralized towards the head; one could also say, the head system. Then into the rhythmic system, which encompasses the lungs and the heart life, which has a certain inner independence from the head life. And then again the system of metabolism.

However strange it may seem, these three systems comprise everything that takes place in the human organism. But this is not a centralized administration, so to speak, that takes place in the human body, but rather there are three independent members, each with its own center, so to speak. They work independently. And precisely because they work independently alongside each other, they build on the overall process in this individual natural human organism. Each of these links, these three links of the natural human organism, in turn relates to the outside world: the head system through the senses, the heart-lung system through the lungs, through the respiratory organs, and the metabolic system through the digestive organs, which open to the outside.

And it is precisely on this independence that the harmonious interaction, the possible and purposeful interaction of the individual human organism is based. Anyone who thinks that they can present the human organism as a sum of processes regulated from a single center completely misunderstands the essence of the human organism. The essence of the individual human organism lies in this interaction, not in subordination.

What now comes to light in a healthy observation of this human life body must be transferred to the observation, indeed not just to the observation, but to the living in it, in relation to the social organism, the social life body. And there the matter becomes far more serious.

What is a mere theoretical, scientific matter of knowledge in relation to the human organism becomes a practical matter in relation to the social organism. In relation to the social organism, it becomes a practical matter that concerns every single person. This is not a matter of scientific knowledge, but of certain intuitions, a certain feeling for how to place oneself in human life in this threefold social organism. Just as one learns the multiplication table from childhood on, how to add, subtract and so on, in order to be able to calculate, so one will have to acquire from childhood on a feeling for being part of a human , which, if it is to be healthy, if it is not to resemble a homunculus, an artificially created human being, but rather a homo, a real human being who shapes himself out of his life impulses.

But lest I be misunderstood – nowadays one is almost always misunderstood when one expresses things that are, after all, quite obvious – lest I be misunderstood, I want to point out right away that what I am expounding here has nothing, not the slightest, with any kind of, as one can call it, playing with similes or analogies, which aims to study the human organism and then transfers what it believes it has found in the human organism to the social organism, to the social life body. Such things, as the economist happened to try in his social organism, the economist Schäffle, or as [Meray] has now tried in the so-called, in the so-titled “Weltmutation”, these things are mere playing around before a serious conception of reality. The point is not to carry on such gimmicks, to somehow transfer something from one to the other, but rather that just as healthy as the consideration of which I have spoken here must be for the natural human organism, just as healthy must be - and now not a scientific consideration, but a social feeling, a social understanding of all people for the three-part social organism. If one were to play a mere game of analogy, one might do the following: One would say: Well, the human being has a head; that is the organ for his spiritual. In the outer social organism, there is also something like a spiritual culture. So one compares the opposites that relate to the organ of the part, to the head, with what is found in the social organism as spiritual culture. Because political life, law, and public life have a regulating effect on human activities, one might compare the regulating pulmonary respiratory system with the police system, the political system, and the state system. And because, as people have always imagined, the metabolic system is the coarsest, the most material, it is compared to the materialistic culture of man, to the external economic life.

This would be obvious if one wanted to play a mere game of analogy. If one goes into reality, then one is dealing with the opposite. An analogy places the social organism alongside the individual natural human organism in such a way that both are standing on their own two feet. As paradoxical as it may sound, reality presents itself to us in such a way that, in relation to the individual natural human organism, the social organism is indeed standing on its head, according to human prejudice.

For the lawfulness that must be sought precisely for the so-called noblest system of the human natural organism, for the head system, this lawfulness corresponds to economic life in the social organism. This is found in economic life. The lung-respiratory system as a regulating system is found, however, as we shall see shortly, in the legal sphere, in the political state in the narrower sense. But what spiritual culture is in the social organism is subject, strangely enough, to the same laws or to laws that can only be compared to the laws of human metabolism in the natural organism. So, as you can see, dear attendees, a realistic observation turns everything upside down. This is to be understood in the following way.

In fact, for anyone who wants to examine the living conditions under which the social life body can develop, the healthy social life body is actually divided into three parts, and without life trying to work out these three parts in relative independence, so that they do not live centralized in some centralized state or the like, but each lives independently for itself, so that they have precisely this harmonizing effect on the whole, just as the three members of the human organism, as I have described, without this a healthy solution to the social problem, to the social puzzle, will never be found.

A structure must be created, and not by some abstract theory, even if this abstract theory were a party program, but by life itself, by the real factors of life in the social organism, the social body, in three independent structures: the economic structure, which has its own laws and can only live truly healthy through its own laws alone; a second structure, alongside this, or but developing in relative independence, a link that could be described as the actual political state link, as everything that a system of rights, a system of connections between human and human, has to establish; and a third relatively independent link, which needs its independence, its being based on its very own laws, that is everything that belongs to spiritual life.

Let us consider the economic sphere as the first limb of the healthy social organism. I said that if one wants to compare – but such a comparison must serve the purpose of understanding, not be some kind of arbitrary analogy – if one wants to compare, one can say that in economic life there is something for every limited social organism that develops in any territory, in any country, in any geographic area, there is something for such a social organism that could be compared to the original gifts, talents of the individual human organism.

Just as education – which is not life through mere learning, through mere imparting or any other artificial method – must neither ignore what is inherent in the nervous-sensory organism as an original gift, nor can it, so the economic life, which is the basis of the healthy social organism, is based on everything that constitutes the natural conditions of this economic life: the fertility of the soil, the raw materials available, everything that has to do with how these things can be processed, everything that connects man with the source from which he produces everything that is produced in trade and industry. This is the basis of economic life as a limited area, just as the gifts and talents of the individual human life are the basis of the talents of the social organism.

And indeed, this is where the great differentiations occur. This is where the social organism, as it were, receives something as a dowry. Just as a person receives his or her individual talents as a dowry, let us say a few examples, which I would say have a somewhat radical effect, to show what is actually meant.

Yesterday I spoke of the integration of human labor into the social organism. We will come back to this shortly. It is essential for the social problem of the present that human labor be stripped of the character of a commodity. But just as the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation are stripped bare of the mere metabolic life, so everything that relates to human labor power must be stripped bare in a healthy social organism, of all that springs from the laws that are peculiar to economic life.

But nevertheless, the life of breathing and the life of the heart are related to the life of metabolism. Human labor power is related to economic life in such a way that one can say: Depending on the preconditions of this economic life, human labor power is utilized in very different ways by it. Let us now look at the matter radically; but if it is not too strongly differentiated, the things are there after all; they are then only there to a lesser extent, but they still have an effect in the economic process. But let us look at something radical in order to visualize it. Let us say, for example, that we want to point to a country in which bananas could be a staple food, and want to compare such a territory of the earth, in which people can mainly feed themselves with bananas, with a country in which wheat yields an average harvest, such as in Germany. One can calculate the ratio of human labor required in one territory to that required in the other. The banana is so easy to transport from its point of origin to the point of consumption, and so easy to convert into what is then consumed. So little labor is required to make the banana into a consumer product in the economic process, compared to the labor required to make wheat into a consumer product in a country with an average wheat yield that the labor required for banana cultivation is 1:100 of the labor required for wheat cultivation, that is, one hundred times more human labor is required to make wheat consumable as a raw product for humans than for bananas.

But that also varies from territory to territory within the same article. If we look at the matter from a global perspective, there are major differences. But even on a more limited territory, such differences then arise. In Germany, if you look at the matter with a healthy average yield, wheat yields seven to eight times the yield compared to sowing, in Chile twelve times, in northern Mexico seventeen times, in Peru twenty times. There are regions where it yields twenty-five to thirty-five times as much. This requires a great difference in the human labor expended to bring a product, such as the conditions of the gifts and talents of human beings, that is given to the economic process to the point where it can be consumed, compared to the point of origin for such a product. Production of goods, circulation of goods, consumption of goods: these are the things that live in economic life, but which only economic life can embrace. Man has the need, precisely for such reasons – many similar ones could be added, such as the necessity in the multitude of human labor – man has the need to be connected, to be united with that which concerns the natural foundation, which concerns the other starting points of economic life.

This interconnectedness of human beings in the social organism with the economic conditions is what gives rise to the shaping of the laws that are peculiar to economic life. This economic life can only be based on the interpretation of those laws that arise from what has just been said. What is the basic aim of this economic life? Well, it can be said, esteemed attendees: that which must be active, must absolutely be active in this economic life, without which economic life cannot flourish, that is the human need, that is the need in general. There are also intermediate needs of these human needs: that is what can be called human interest. And certain thinkers in the field of social organization have rightly pointed out that only in the free activity of human interest, of direct human desire and of the interplay of desires and satisfactions in economic life, can the proper development of that economic life lie.

What is the aim of everything that now takes place in the interplay between need and the satisfaction of need in the production, circulation and consumption of goods? It is necessarily all aimed at the purpose of the commodity, at the consumption of the commodity, one could also say, at the most appropriate consumption of the commodity. Look around you wherever you want – if time allowed, I would expand on the concept of the commodity, but everyone feels that – if you want to look around you wherever you can in economic life, you will see that ultimately what matters in economic life is to consume what is produced in the most expedient way – in the most expedient way, I say, to consume.

What does that mean for the human labor force, esteemed attendees? If it has become clear in modern human life, precisely because of the flooding of this modern life with economic life in technology and capitalism, if it has become clear that the proletarian without property, whose own labor is brought to the labor market and is treated, precisely because it is on the labor market, as if it were a commodity, in terms of supply and demand, this is contrary to human dignity. For, in contrast to anything that may be a commodity, a person does not bring their own essence to market. But in the case of his labor power, he markets himself.

It is the abolition of this that the modern proletariat, out of a sense of human dignity, absolutely seeks. Perhaps here and there one will be found who, in full consciousness, can give the correct reasons for this demand; but in the subconscious, in the depths of human souls, in the depths of the proletarian souls, there lives what it is about. There lives a feeling in it: everything that comes onto the market of commodities is ultimately consumed in the most expedient way. But man must resist, absolutely resist, the mere consumption of his labor-power in the most expedient way in the labor-market of commodities. He feels that he has a value in himself, that he has something to preserve in himself, that he carries something in himself, which also lies in his labor-power, which must not be brought to the market of commodities, which must not be treated in the social organism as a commodity. Because in the tripartite social organism everything ultimately boils down to being consumed in the most expedient way, the modern proletariat cries out to the world: I do not want my labor power to become mere consumption for others.

This unconsciously underlies what I tried to work out yesterday as the one main aspect of the social question. And if you look at how it actually came about that, in the course of the development of modern technology and modern capitalism, labor was driven into the economic process, then, to understand this, you have to ask yourself: How did the economic conditions, the satisfaction of economic interests, the whirling up of the economy for the previously leading circles, for the previously leading classes, develop?

This is an essential and important question. They have not developed out of economic life, but precisely because in modern times there has been a fusion of state life with economic life that is no longer appropriate for these modern times; what has developed alongside the economy of humanity as the modern constitutional state, as the modern authoritarian state, is not what the proletariat was initially interested in, but what the so-called leading circles and leading classes were interested in. Within the development of modern technology and modern capitalism, these had an interest in regulating the economic underpinnings from the rights, as they were conceived, within the state adapted to the bourgeois and other ruling classes.

The oppressive aspect of economic life, the aspect that has created an unbearable situation for the proletariat in economic life, my dear attendees, does not come from economic life itself. It is a complete fallacy to believe that. And just as no defect in the metabolism or in the lungs can arise directly from a self-regulating metabolism, but only indirectly, so whatever in economic life has become oppressive for the proletarian world comes from – one need only study history, and one sees this if one is not blinded by prejudice, it stems from the history of conquests, from the history of the power relations and the legal relations that establish the power relations and the laws that oppress the proletariat. As I already mentioned yesterday, property relations are also based on laws. The oppressive nature of the proletariat's situation and the real pulse of the proletarian movement arise from such legal relationships.

Just as legal issues of the old state have worked their way down into economic life, the proletarian labor force, which has been pushed down into economic life by modern technical and capitalist development, must be taken up into legal life, which must now develop as an independent member in the healthy social organism alongside the economic member.

In this context, it really does not matter what they are called. If people prefer, they can call the economic organism the state and the other thing something else – the names are not important; what is important is that these two systems, these two links in the social organism, do not have a single centralization, but that each is centralized within itself, so that they can work side by side and harmonize precisely through their coexistence. That is what matters!

What can be state in the narrower sense can only encompass the regulatory system, that which takes place in the relationship between people. Just as the economic organism has interest in consumption, need and the satisfaction of needs, so the legal organism, the actual state organism, which must not be an economist, which must not engage in any economic activity at all, has the will to right at its core, in the healthy human [social] organism, which has the will to right at its core.

Rights can only exist in a state context. Economic interests can only exist in the economic body. And they must go side by side and together independently. That is it, if you look more closely, however little most people still believe it today, that is it, which has brought about such misfortune in modern life, which encompasses a representative body, an administration, economic life, and the state-regulating legal life. An independent system of representation is necessary for the purely political state. For the legal life, an independent representation, independent administration, for example in the Reichstag or in any ministry, is necessary. An independent administration, an independent ministry, but, to put it bluntly, for economic life, which is inherent in itself in terms of its administration and its perpetual further development, this will arise by itself. While the legal life of the state is concerned with the relationship between people, in that we must all be equal before the law, and while the legal life, if it is properly understood, can only result in a complete democracy, the economic life must be based on independent associations, on such associations that arise from the way people grow together, like the natural conditions previously characterized, in their economic life. Entire systems of associations will develop that, in a corresponding way, interpret the economic organism from the self-regulation of forces in such a way that it must and can be viable for everyone. These things are basically beginnings, yes; but beginnings in which many misunderstandings prevail. We have cooperatives – fine; we have trade unions, we have various other associations; certainly, such things have arisen out of the urge to serve the developmental forces of modern times. But partly from the form that such things have taken, partly from the fact that it is thought that economic life can be handed over to the state, to the community – in all these things it can be seen that in these new structures one does not want to include only what arises from the laws proper to economic life, but what must develop alongside economic life as an independent link in the social organism, namely, the political and legal life of the state, as described in the narrower sense. In contrast to all the concepts of labor and the position of labor in the social organism, as they haunt today, there will be, when these two elements of the healthy organism are juxtaposed, there will be, above all, as there is ownership in the old social organism, such a very different labor law in the new, healthy social organism, which will correspond to the present and the future.

As a result, dear attendees, one thing will happen: the fact that natural conditions are decisive to a certain extent for the formation of economic value in the circulation of goods is already ensured by these natural conditions themselves. But something else must become equally decisive. When what I have described occurs, when the relative independence of the legal sphere occurs, which in itself will comprehend the law of labor, then the value of the goods circulating in the economy will be limited in the same way as the natural conditions. Likewise, this value will be limited and determined by the labor that can be contributed to the economic process according to general human values and humane labor law. No true labor law can ever arise from the mere economic process itself, but only from the separate, relatively independent legal link of the healthy social organism.

This has been abandoned even in the heyday of capitalism, when the state, which is supposed to be merely a constitutional state, stretched its claws over the larger transport companies, especially railways and so on. And while what emerged as a social disease from the delusion of nationalization should be cured, a certain form of modern socialism seeks to continue the disease. That is what matters. For people do not see the following. They do not see what results in this area from a real understanding of the social organism.

Among the various schools that have emerged in modern times, one was already in the eighteenth century for economics. It is called the physiocratic school. This physiocratic school had, but in a terribly one-sided way, we would say today, according to the bourgeois method - it had the principle of the free circulation of economic forces and economic essence. The followers of this physiocratic system, who did not want the constitutional state to interfere in economic life, said the following. They said: Either the constitutional state issues laws that coincide with the laws that economic life already has of its own accord, in which case these laws are superfluous, or it issues laws that contradict the inherent laws of economic life – in which case these laws destroy the rightful existence of economic life; in that case they certainly should not be issued. – So said the physiocrats.

This seems extremely plausible – for what seems more plausible to the superficial person than such an either-or! But when it comes to the reality of life, such an either-or is nonsense, a folly. How so? In the following way: Economic life also develops when man does not want it to, when he interferes with it through all kinds of state laws; it develops independently through its own power, and it always has a certain tendency, always a certain directional force. After all, it tends to bring human coexistence into such a balance that it in turn has to be straightened out.

That is the great error of a certain radical socialism, that one believes that economic life could make people contented and happy if it followed its own laws. No, if it follows its own laws, then it will always end up in crisis-like conditions, which must be helped, and another system must intervene, just as the respiratory-pulmonary system must always intervene in the metabolic or head system to regulate it. Therefore, it is necessary to face reality: the laws of the constitutional state cannot run in the direction of economic laws. But because economic life requires constant correction, because otherwise it would consume people, it is precisely necessary that the laws of the constitutional state constantly limit, regulate, and correct mere economic life, just as metabolism is corrected by breathing. That is what matters.

Today, when we believe we are so practical, we have more and more abstract theories in our heads, not reality. We believe that something makes itself, and laws are there when we just think about what makes itself. Laws, institutions, and forces must often be applied in precisely the opposite sense of what is given from one side, so that a prosperous, healthy development can take place. That is what matters.

Therefore, the healthy spiritual-scientific method, which is based on reality, must not establish any abstract principles - and these are also party programs today - but must point to life. It must point out not how to think up that the labor power of the commodity character is stripped, but it must show what is to be created so that in the emerging social organism human labor power is really perpetually withdrawn from the commodity character. That is what is at stake here: the living shaping of reality. This is what is striven for by the much-maligned spiritual science, and what is most important in the present, what is truly urgently needed in the present: what is important is the living interaction. One cannot push the life of the social organism either economically or in mere rigid conservative legal codes.

Gladstone, one of the most superstitious bourgeois of modern liberalism, once said: “The Americans have such a perfect constitution that it could hardly be more perfect, that it has truly proven itself in all the individual circumstances of the American people.

Another Englishman, who, it seems to me, was cleverer, if perhaps not as great a statesman as Gladstone, said: it is no proof at all that the American administration is a perfect one, that it proves itself, Because if it were less than perfect, it would also prove itself, because the Americans are still such a healthy people – in the opinion of the person concerned – that they would do all this even with a less healthy constitution. And the latter is certainly more right than what Gladstone said, because it points to the living reality, because it really does not matter which laws prevail in a living context, but that people work together in such a way that the necessary damage that arises on one side is constantly corrected by the living forces on the other.

Imagine a homunculus in which the waste products of digestion are not produced inside, which in turn have to be removed by other forces – then you have thought up something that has no breath of life. Spintize, and even if it is in the sense of the most radical people of modern times, about a social organism that does not cause harm to people, that does not consume people, that does not need to have another link of the social organism besides itself other than the constitutional state, as the actual state, then you have thought up an unhealthy social organism. That is it, that one is always pushed again, by the practically minded, but in the most eminent sense impractical way of thinking of modern times, that one again penetrates to a conception of reality, to such thoughts that can submerge into true reality, that can speak of what conditions itself, not what wants to have conditionality out of human prejudices.

And as a third link, alongside the two links that I have mentioned – alongside the economic link and the strictly political or legal link – there must be development of that which encompasses spiritual life in the broadest sense, the spiritual life that exists in education, in all schooling, from the most elementary school up to the university; that which exists in the artistic life, and finally in the religious life, which must also include - this will again seem paradoxical to some today, although it arises from real factual considerations - that must also include [not] public law, the law that is conditioned by the relationship between human beings; it belongs to the second link.

But this third part must include everything that aims at private law and criminal law. There the individual human being is confronted with the individual human being in such an abnormal relationship that the public life of the constitutional state, although it is up to the one who - if I may express myself trivially - has to carry something out; but to pass judgment is the responsibility of a relationship between individual human beings. The execution of the judgment may in turn belong to the constitutional state.

Everything, dear attendees, belongs in this area, in this spiritual area, everything that must be based on the ground of the individual human soul and body, which can only arise from the individual, from the freedom of the human being, how it must be placed on the economic interest of the economic body, the independent one, and how it must be placed on the legal life of the political body, so must it be placed on freedom the body that encompasses the actual spiritual life. Modern social democracy has included a single area in an impulse that goes in the direction described here, but not out of an appreciation of this area, but precisely out of an underestimation of it: religion should be a private matter.

Of course it should be. And anyone who does not underestimate religion, but understands its full value, will demand this all the more! But in the face of the legal and economic state, all of intellectual life must be a private matter. And now that the social question of the present day is coming to a conclusion – for that is what it consists of, the merging of economic life with legal life, of the state with the economic organism – it is precisely through the emergence of the capitalist and technical world order in modern times that the merging has also occurred, which was not there at all before the point in time marked yesterday, before the fifteenth century. The amalgamation of intellectual life with state life. The interests of the emerging bourgeoisie, which were connected with the development of the modern state, also tended to have intellectual life absorbed into the organism of the state. Judges were needed, doctors were needed, theologians were also needed, teachers were needed, and so on and so forth. The state extended its omnipotence over the spiritual life as a result of this impulse.

This spiritual life must be redeemed again, and placed on its own ground, on the free individuality of the human being. Then, and only then, will it develop in a healthy relationship to the other two limbs of the social organism.

Sometimes things are very hidden and masked there. Perhaps only someone who, like the one speaking to you, has spent his whole life has avoided in any way bringing what he has striven for spiritually into any relationship with any state; who can therefore know how this spiritual life must develop when it is freely left to its own devices. And it must be left to its own devices if it is to develop.

The dependence of the spiritual life on the life of the state has not contributed in the slightest to the weakening of the impact of the spiritual life to the point of the dead ideology that the modern social question creates. For it is not only that the personalities who drive intellectual life come to depend on state life and have to serve the institutions of state life. Anyone who can look at these things in depth knows something else entirely: , he knows that the inner form, the content of spiritual life itself becomes dependent on its relationship to the other organisms, which can only be a healthy one if the spiritual life develops in complete independence. Otherwise, dependencies also conceal and mask themselves. If it occurs independently, if it occurs in complete freedom, if it is completely left to its own devices, then a healthy relationship with the legal and economic body will arise naturally in life. How we adjust our own impulses; otherwise, due to certain prejudices, we do not notice things. Let us take a case that could seem radical, but which is quite characteristic. Let us assume that some young student wants to take his doctorate in the field of philology. He is advised to write, say, about feeling words in some old Roman writer or about the [parenthesis] in Homer. Such a task even had to be done by a young friend of mine. For such a work, a young person needs a year of extensive work.

Those who are so asleep in today's scientific life will say: Well, scientific interests. Science demands such an investigation into the feeling words of an ancient Roman writer, or into the [parenthesis] in Homer. In this way, science is served. But there is something else to consider. The healthy relationship of such a work to the whole of human life must be considered. This must become transparent in the entire human [social] organism. The student who works for a year to determine the hidden [parenthesis] in Homer eats, drinks and dresses for a year. That is to say, a number of people have to work for this work, to work for a year to feed him, to clothe him, so that he can do in time that which certainly does not fit into the healthy human [social] organism in a proper interest! Because a spiritual achievement only fits into the healthy human organism with a proper interest if it is desired, if there is a need for it. That is what matters.

And something else is important. It depends on the healthy development of the spiritual part of the social organism that the spiritual part of human culture also has the corresponding momentum, that it really produces what is relevant to reality. From this spiritual life, for example, technical ideas also arise, that which, as a spiritual idea, constantly intervenes in economic life in a productive and creative way. This can only be born in a healthy way in a real spiritual life, not in a spiritual life that has been deadened to the point of abstraction, which can be described by the term ideology.

The important thing is not to fight against the leaders of the modern proletariat labeling spiritual life as ideology, but to recognize that spiritual life, which has emerged from the unfortunate amalgamation of spiritual culture with the other two links of the social organism, has reduced spiritual life to ideology. It is easy to describe modern intellectual life as ideology; but a productive, self-effective intellectual life must in turn occur in a healthy social organism. This will also have a healthy effect on economic and legal life. This in turn must be relatively independent.

That this life in spiritual culture, in the third link of the healthy social organism, must be built on itself, I believe I showed as early as the beginning of the nineties of the last century in my “Philosophy of Freedom” , which, I believe, is now being republished at the right time, and which shows that real freedom can only exist and is only justified where a true spiritual life can flourish.

Now there is far too little time to elaborate here on what I would like to say about the free spiritual life. But I would at least like to hint at it. I will hint at it by saying that a healthy consideration of the threefold human organism shows that what is produced out of the spiritual sphere will then intervene healthily in the other two organisms when the spiritual life is completely self-contained. For then, he who can have a leading position in economic life according to his own conditions will not only need the proletarian who toils and labors, and who will then no longer be there as such at all, but he will need the one who, as a spiritual worker, can be the consumer. But through labor legislation, he can preserve that part of his labor power, that is, of his life force, which must not be consumed in the labor market, but must be regulated by the second link of the healthy social organism. Today, at least within the capitalist economic system, the one who is in a leading - that is, today essentially capitalist - position has only an interest in the consumption of human labor in the proletarian. The healthy three-part social organism will not only have an interest in the working laborer, but also in the resting laborer, in the laborer who can consume what will strive for consumption. This will certainly not be what the young badger will do, spending a year writing about the sensory words of some old writer and doing a doctoral thesis, but it will be what is demanded, what is needed by spiritual life. A full unison, a living unison will arise between spiritual production and general human, spiritual consumption. No one will be excluded from what the spiritual life offers. And precisely because of the interconnection of the three parts of the social organism, which should be independent, so many people are actually excluded from what other people do.

Everything that is produced as the lifeblood of society in a healthy human organism must also flow in a healthy way into the other parts of the social organism. It will not be possible to say, esteemed attendees, that in the future, for example, in a constitutional state that will have a democratically oriented representation, the individual circles will also sit, that they can also form a party, an agricultural party and so on. This will not be the case for the reason that the interests that today develop in opposite directions will then develop in the same direction. Even the antagonism between the Conservative and Liberal parties will not exist in the future if the social organism is allowed to develop healthily, because in a constitutional state, the conditions that always arise concretely will not be oriented objectively towards conservatives, liberals and so on, according to the slogan, I say slogans.

So today I could only sketch for you, dear attendees, what is at stake, in that not only a transformation of circumstances, but a transformation of the whole life for the social organism must occur.

On February 28, I will give another lecture here. There I will give individual evidence and details, and also show that for everything I have hinted at today, only a sketch could be given, that for all this there is a proving, a reasoning science. So that is to take place here in this hall on February 28.

Today, I would just like to point out that this terrible catastrophe that has befallen humanity for four and a half years, as I already mentioned yesterday, has highlighted the social question as a major question of world history, on which every person must take a practical stand based on life.

It is necessary for each individual to take a position on what has happened. One will soon be convinced how the life of each individual depends on the position he will take on the social problem, on the social riddle in the future. That is why it happened that way, because I always these things - allow me here, a personal but in reality not personal, but quite objective remark - because I did not invent these things to make something up, but because I won them from the observation of the present human that I wanted to put them into practice more and more when this terrible catastrophe of war reached a certain point, where one could see that it would develop out of the absurdity of previous forces, that it would develop into the essential social problem of humanity. During that war catastrophe, I tried, for example, to present to individuals, sensed and adapted to the circumstances, that the time demands something like the social impulse, which I have also explained here in yesterday's and today's lecture.

In a sense, I wanted to show personalities who were still active at the time, but have now been swept away, what they need if they are to contribute to changing that which proves to be diseased in the social organism. And so I had to speak to many people, to those who still mattered at the time, about what I am saying here. It is not a program that has been thought out, not something that has been thought out, but reality, in that the forces that are at work within the development of humanity will bring about what will happen in ten or twenty years over a large part of Europe. And to many I said, I believed that their hearts and souls could be stirred by it, to many I said: You now have the choice, if you still want to join in, either to follow that which will happen because it must happen, out of reason, or you wait until social cataclysms and social revolutions come.

People were drawn into what they were drawn into more quickly than could be hinted at in those days. In those days, the word “could” meant “was allowed to”. That was the way one had to speak in those days. But people did not want to listen. We have also experienced similar things in other areas! We have experienced that statesmen, leading statesmen, as late as May 1914, announced to parliaments in the most prominent positions: We are in such a European context that peace is secured for a long time. — This can be proved to them. People are that far-sighted!

However, anyone who is serious about what is really going on would have had to speak differently to people at the time. Before this military disaster, I repeatedly had to hint at what I, in turn before this military disaster, said like the others, like the statesmen: Peace is assured, we now live in one of the best of worlds. I was told in Vienna: This tendency - namely the tendency that lies in the present social life - will become ever greater and greater until it destroys itself. He who has a spiritual grasp of social life sees everywhere the terrible growth of social ulcers. That is the great cultural question that arises for him who sees through existence; that is the terrible thing that has such a depressing effect and that, even if one could suppress all enthusiasm for spiritual science, if one could suppress what would otherwise open one's mouth for spiritual science, which could then lead one to cry out to the world, as it were, for the remedy for what is already so strongly on the rise and will become stronger and stronger if the social organism continues to develop as it has done so far. This is how cultural damage occurs, which can be seen for this, for the social organism, just as cancerous growths can be seen for the natural human organism.

Faced with the social question, we are faced with the possibility that people will continue to sleep through events, that they will not listen to what must necessarily be said to the social organism, just as it can be said to the natural organism when someone has a cancerous ulcer inside.

Not only did people refuse to see the full implications of what I mean in the course of the war catastrophe so far – they took what they understood of it, usually in such a way that it can only be seen as an expression of the internal politics of this or that state. I did not then and do not now mean it only as the domestic policy of this or that state territory, but I do mean it in such a way that I find it rooted in the developmental forces towards which humanity is heading. And I mean it first and foremost as the foreign policy of the various states.

That is what I have emphasized above all: that certain states, to whom it concerns, have to hold these things up to the world as their foreign policy. If we consider that one state is not so closely connected with another as they would have been, for example, these European states in 1914, that the unnatural mixing of the political and state problem to the southeast of Austria, the Austro-Serbian problem, of ill-starred memory, - the states would not have linked their economic and political interests in such a way, the social organisms would not have linked their interests in such a way as they were linked in Europe, and therefore alliances arose that necessarily developed to such an extent after a certain point that ultimately decisions were made from the most one-sided strategic-military points of view.

Let us assume that the states are in a relationship in which the threads are drawn, the legal ones, which will essentially be the same for all states - the actual political relationships will be the same for all states, especially in the case of a healthy organism - then the economic and intellectual threads will intertwine. More and more, the one will be corrected by the other. And precisely where today, at the borders, the contradictions have arisen as a result of the interconnection of the three areas, these contradictions will be corrected when, regardless of the political relationship, the system of economic efficiency extends across the borders.

I can only hint at this here. But it should mean, it should point out, that the various territories of the world, through what is characterized here as a healthy social organism, come into such a system that, in contrast, the League of Nations, as it is conceived today, will be an abstraction, into such a system that is based on reality, so that one reality increasingly excludes the damage of the others. That is what matters today.

Now, esteemed attendees, what I have presented is perhaps more uncomfortable for many than what these same many imagine as the solution to the social question today. Because you can very easily see from what I have presented – as I said, more on February 28 – but you can already see from what I have presented today that one cannot imagine: The social question has arisen, clever people will solve it, and then socialism will be here. But it is not like that. It is contrary to all development.

Of course, the social question is here because human development has entered a new stage of existence, because new forces have emerged. But since it has been here, this social question will not disappear for all time in the future development of humanity. Economic life will continue to be more and more a social question. It will not be possible to invent a socialism that will solve the social question at a stroke. But it will be possible to create a healthy social organism in which the social question will be solved in a living context through the active engagement of people, day by day, year by year, epoch by epoch, in an ongoing process. No solution of the social question that can be thought of today must be allowed to take place. I am not pointing out institutions to you that will eliminate the social question. It is there, it is there as a life force of future humanity. The life of this future humanity will consist in the fact that this future humanity will have to create something through which the solution of the social question will be experienced perpetually. The existence of the social question, the existence of social development, will be enriched, not impoverished; a new element of life will enter into the social organism. That is what matters: the self-regulation of social life through the three relatively independent social links, that is what matters.

When I consider this, and when I consider that the general prejudice that once prevailed against spiritual science is also applied when this spiritual science speaks about the social question, on the one hand it strikes me that a very well-known gentleman had it said to him when a certain goal was explained to him, which I am practically striving for in terms of rebuilding the ailing conditions of the civilized world – in a brief appeal, the person in question was able to read, in a few sentences, what I have explained to you yesterday and today – he replied: he would have thought that I would not point to such economic things for the recovery of the current human situation, but to the spirit.

Now, dear ones, this shows how the minds, how those who have worked with us for a long time, brought about the disaster, and even today do not want to see what is important. It is not enough to just preach: spirit, spirit and spirit. It is not enough to call out to people today: but rather that we use this spirit to immerse ourselves in the actual conditions and to control the actual conditions as they must develop in accordance with reality. It depends on how the spirit is applied in life. It does not depend on repeatedly pointing out in the abstract: Spirit, spirit, spirit must be placed back into humanity, then all will be well.

That is one thing that occurs to me. The other thing that occurs to me in response to what the clever people are saying: what does the spiritual scientist want in the social question? I would like to reply: he wants to adjust human thinking and feeling and willing to true reality, just as he does in everything else. This reminds me of the poor boy who once sat as a servant at a Newcomen steam engine. He had to take out and push in the two cocks alternately, which let in the condensate on one side and the steam on the other. And then this boy noticed that the balancer was jumping up and down. It occurred to him, because he was not forming theories, but was standing at the machine itself, it occurred to him: What would happen if I took two cords, pulled one at a time, and the other at the other? And behold, the balancer went up and down, and all by itself, one tap opened at the right time and came down again, and the other from the other side. And the boy could watch! You see, someone of the ilk of those people who observe everything that is observed from reality poorly and say, “You good-for-nothing boy, what are you doing! Get rid of the cords. – World history has done it differently. World history has allowed the self-control of the steam engine, one of the most important modern inventions, one of the inventions that has most comprehensively intervened in modern technical life, to emerge from this initially poor boy who tied the cockerel to the balance arm.

Not out of immodesty, and not to characterize something for the one who is already established in the teaching represented here, but to characterize those who would like to come, to speak in relation to the social aperçu that I have presented, to speak, so to speak, from the standpoint of their cleverness, as one would have said: “Stupid boy, quickly get rid of what you are doing, what nonsense are you up to?” Leave it alone! I would only like to say to them what occurs to me with regard to the little working boy, as I have told you. For people will soon have to realize, those who cannot do it with their minds will have to realize it with their lives and with their feelings - they will have to realize that they have to approach the reality of the social question in a realistic way. It is there; it has been knocking at the door of human life for long decades and has come in through the door. It will not allow itself to be thrown out again by anyone. The desire to throw it out will be the worst policy. But it will also be bad if people do not listen at the right time to what needs to be said about the social question. Because then it could be that communication from person to person, across class lines, is no longer possible because the instincts have been unleashed too strongly. We need only look at the fire signs that are rising on the world horizon today to realize that we have to deal with the issues at hand, otherwise it could well be too late due to the unleashing of human instincts that can no longer be calmed – perhaps not for decades!

Dearly beloved! The significant facts that have emerged in the social life of the entire civilized world today, and which are being spoken of loudly and clearly, have arisen out of the catastrophe of the World War, which has lasted almost five years. Those who look at the world today with an alert consciousness instead of being spiritually asleep, in order to perceive what is on the horizon, cannot help but come to the conclusion that only significant, far-reaching measures can meet the challenge that stands before humanity today as a requirement of world history.

The time when it was easy to talk about all kinds of understandings through which, in a certain way, the old could be maintained in a comfortable way, that time is well past. Today it can only be about a completely, completely different understanding, about man's understanding with the great world-historical forces that want to be realized sensually from the present into the near future.

But although one has heard enough from some people in the last four to five years to say that with the world war catastrophe, an event has befallen humanity such as has never occurred in the course of what is usually called history, on the other hand, one cannot experience many feelings for the fact that in a time in which things are happening that have not yet happened in history, thoughts and measures must also be conceived and taken that, in a certain way, have never been taken before in the history of humanity.

Can it be said, esteemed attendees, that in recent times much understanding has been shown for the world-historical situation and its demands, in which we have come to be? If one wants to answer this question, then it actually presents an almost hopeless picture for today. Because, if you will allow me a personal comment, in the spring of 1914 I tried to summarize the judgment that I had been able to form from an honest observation of the situation over the past decades regarding the European and world situation. In the spring of 1914, before the terrible events of that year occurred, I tried to express to a small circle – a larger one would probably have laughed at me with my views at the time – how I actually see this coming world situation. And I had to say: That which is observed by someone who really has an eye for observing the great destinies of men, must say: We live in a time in which social and great political life is unfolding as if there were a great social ulcer, a kind of cancer that must soon break out in a terrible way. And I added the words at the time: One would like to shout out such a realization, so that people understand what is actually at stake.

Of course, “statesmen” – I say that today with caution, because one would be wise to only mention statesmen in quotation marks today – (laughter), “statesmen” spoke differently in the spring and early summer of 1914. For example, in the German Reichstag. The foreign minister, who was responsible for the events, said something like this: Through the efforts of the European cabinets, one can say that there is hope that world peace will not be disturbed in the near future. This was said by a leading statesman in May 1914. One may well ask oneself: What do people actually see of what is being prepared?

Well, this peace, which was so secure, has, at least, brought about twelve million deaths and three times as many people maimed in Europe. One may ask: Were the responsible leaders at the time somehow prophetic? They certainly were not. And now, again, from the most authoritative quarters, we are hearing similar unfounded judgments about that which is now pulsating as the most important thing in human development. The most important thing in human development, which lives and which pushes towards events that are just as meaningful, much more meaningful than those that have taken place in such a terrible way, is the social question, that is the social movement.

Now, it cannot be said, my esteemed audience, that the people who belong to the leading circles to date, out of some kind of devilish malevolence – even today, when the water is running into their mouths, so to speak – out of some devilish malevolence, are showing themselves to be absolutely unintelligent towards what is to happen and what wants to be realized. But something quite different underlies it. And it is actually because of this quite different thing that I would like to speak from my point of view on this very question.

What is at the root of the matter can be seen if one takes a little time to study the origins of what is known as the social question, which today – as the loud facts testify – has become something completely different from what it actually was four or five years ago; but it is a question that has been around for more than half a century. Due to modern developments, people are separated from each other as if by a deep chasm, by an abyss. On the one hand, there are those who have never tired of praising the high civilization of humanity that modern times have brought about, tremendously and completely. What songs of praise have been sung about this modern civilization! One only needs to remember a few. How often have people, when it suited them, said: There we have modern achievements, modern means of transportation, through which one can travel long distances at speeds that would have seemed fabulous to ancient people. Thoughts flash across the seas with lightning speed. And what about the actual spiritual culture, how it has been showered with adulation. But one must ask oneself: on what foundation did all that live, which was literally inundated with this adulation? Without what has all this modern civilization not become possible? It did not come about without being built on the foundation created by the great mass of humanity who were not allowed to and could not participate, who were in an economic situation that prevented them from participating in all the things that were praised. (“Bravo!”) This civilization has grown up on this basis, the basis of the physical and mental hardship and misery of a large part of humanity, on this basis it has grown up, through which a large part of humanity has actually lost its human dignity. One only has to look – I would say – at the time when the social question first arose in its very first attempts.

The people who sang the praises of this modern civilization came together, well, in mirrored halls for all I care; they talked a lot about the divine order of the world, talked a lot about what makes people good; talked a lot about the fact that people have to love each other; talked a lot about brotherhood. They spoke about these things in well-lit rooms with well-heated stoves. Where did they get the coal for these speeches about brotherly love and loyal fraternity, speeches that were made with all kinds of justifications? Yes, until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was possible to determine the basis on which this modern civilization had developed, through an investigation that the English government had conducted at the time. This indulgence in all sorts of empty talk about brotherhood of man and so on arose only from the fact that in the coal mines people work from a very young age. Some children as young as nine, eleven, thirteen! So they were put down into the mine shafts and never saw the light of day except on Sundays, because they were led down into the shafts so early that the sun was not yet shining, and so late that the sun was no longer shining. Due to the nature of the mining work, it was inevitable that these workers in particular would lose all sense of shame; naked men with half-naked women had to work together down there, on the one hand doing the most terrible work, on the other hand constantly in mortal danger. Well, I don't need to describe this to you any further. These things have truly not improved through the merit of those who sang the praises of civilization, but through the organization of the oppressed, they have improved somewhat since then. But the abyss has remained. The gap is there. Not much understanding has been gained since then for what the proletarian social movement really is. (“Bravo!”)

Now, when you see something like this, you may well ask: what is it about the ruling circles that makes it seem almost hopeless that anything favorable will come from them in the near future? Above all, in an age when so much is said about spiritual progress and so on, above all it is – this must be said without reservation – thoughtlessness. (“Very true!”) This lack of thought has taken a terrible hold on people because, above all, they are far too lazy to look at the realities. And so it has come about that the most unfounded judgments can be heard today about what is pushing its way to the surface as a legitimate demand from the souls of the broad masses of the proletariat. Of course, one does not have to go as far as the former German Kaiser – admittedly a man who was as far removed from the demands of modern times as any human being can be – one does not have to go as far as he who once said: social-minded people are like animals (Pfuil) that gnaw away at the foundations of the German Reich and must be exterminated. One need not go as far as he did, but a greater understanding of what is necessary is certainly emerging from certain quarters that were previously in the lead.

What must be emphasized again and again is that what today appears to some as such a terrible fact, which above all arises out of the life of the proletariat, is a powerful world-historical critique of what the ruling classes have done over the centuries. Until now, it was mostly a criticism that came from the assemblies in a very significant way – you just have to know it – in which the proletarians, for decades, again and again, shouted in the face of those who were the leaders up to now: It can't go on like this! In those gatherings, which the proletarians struggled for after working all day, in those gatherings, in which - as those who have lived with the issues know - the most serious human questions were discussed in a meaningful way over decades, at the same time as people outside were sitting in some worthless theater or spent their time in an even more reprehensible way, or even played cards. During this time, tremendous intellectual demands have emerged from the depths of the proletariat, something quite different from a mere question of bread or wages, as many today would like to believe, conveniently. Not many on the part of those who were the leading circles until now have any idea of this.

If we now ask: what were the underlying reasons for the views of the proletarian world? – we come across three human areas, those areas that we encounter again and again in social life. Firstly, there is the area of spiritual life; secondly, the area of legal life; thirdly, the area of economic life. These three areas are also the basis for consideration, for true, realistic consideration of the social question, which is actually threefold: an economic, a legal and a spiritual question.

Allow me, esteemed attendees, to speak here in this Goetheanum, as elsewhere, but especially here, first of all about the proletarian question as a spiritual question. When speaking of the origin of the social question, namely the origin of the proletarian movement, much has been said, and it has always been pointed out again how, under the influence of modern technology, of modern industry, and under the influence of, above all, modern capitalism, that which is called the proletarian movement has developed. Of course, what has been said is all true, to a certain extent; but something else comes into consideration.

Above all, it is important to consider that with modern technology, with modern factory systems, with what must be described as the soul-destroying modern capitalism, a newer spiritual life befell humanity. This spiritual life was, however, initially developed in the bourgeois classes. The bourgeois classes have developed this newer intellectual life, which could be called scientifically oriented intellectual life, out of the old religious and other ideas. The proletarian world, which has been torn away from the circumstances in which it used to be, which has been led to the desolate machine, has been harnessed to the desolate capitalism, this proletarian world accepted this intellectual life of the bourgeois class with trust.

It is an important fact that in more recent times this proletariat has, so to speak, placed a last great world-historical trust in the bourgeoisie, and that this trust has been betrayed. («Very true! Bravo!») Let me speak first of this betrayal of world-historical trust.

I believe that I am not speaking out of some abstract theory, because I know how the intellectual life is lived within the proletariat, having worked at the Berlin Workers' Education School founded by the old Wilhelm Liebknecht. I myself taught the most diverse branches of this intellectual life. And from there I was able to gain access to the intellectual life of the various trade unions and cooperatives, as well as the political parties. There one saw how quite differently in the souls of the modern proletarians that which is called the modern, scientifically oriented enlightenment lives on. There you could learn not to think about the proletariat, as many believe today – that has no value – but to familiarize yourself so that you can think with the proletariat. That is what matters today. (“Very true!”) What matters most is to recognize that however enlightened we may be with regard to the newer natural science orientation, which has replaced the old religious orientation, it remains an enlightenment of the head. It remains an enlightenment alongside which all sorts of other things can persist in social life. One can be honestly convinced in one's mind by this newer scientific world view, just like the great naturalist Vogt or the popularizer of science Büchner, but if one belongs to the real leading circles, one is still part of a social order that is actually still made up of the old views. With their theoretical understanding, they accepted this scientific orientation; but they did not take it seriously for their whole being. This is what the modern proletariat had to do in its deepest soul.

Once, in Spandau, I stood on the podium at the same time as Rosa Luxemburg, who was recently tragically killed in Berlin. We were both talking about science and the workers. What Rosa Luxemburg said in her measured, thoroughly noble manner was, I would say, a perfect reflection of how the newer worldview affects the souls of proletarians. I will just hint at what Rosa Luxemburg said at the time. She said, for example, that the newer worldview had driven out of people the belief that they had all actually lived like angels at the beginning of the development of the earth; no, she said to the people, actually we were all quite indecent as humans at the beginning of the development of the earth and climbed around in the trees like climbing animals. That gives no reason to find justified the present class and rank differences. That gives a quite different idea of how people, in fact, should stand side by side in the world according to their physical origin. Yes, when this is said to the proletarian, who is compelled to make what used to be called a religious worldview out of these things, when it is spoken in such a way that it is received by the whole person, not just by the head, one can see what has struck the soul of the modern proletarian, how something completely different than a mere bread-and-butter question, which is certainly also the social question – we will talk about this in a moment – but something other than a mere bread-and-butter question, a question of human dignity, which is intimately connected with the other question that every human being must somehow ask, with the question: What am I actually in the world as a human being?

The medieval craftsman, who still said of his trade with a certain justification that it had a golden floor, could answer this question from his relationship to the craft. There was still a kind of professional honor for him from this relationship to the craft; there was also something that told him clearly: I have a certain value in human society. The dull machine, the soulless capitalism, they said nothing about that, absolutely nothing. They simply pointed out to the human being who had been put in front of one of these machines, who had been harnessed to capitalism, that this human being had to answer this question for himself in the modern scientific orientation: What am I actually as a human being? Above all, what is important from the world view, from science, is what has to do with human development, with human value and human dignity.

As I said, the proletarian placed his last great world-historical trust in what had been worked out – though it had been worked out by significant minds from within the bourgeois social order. He placed this last great trust because he believed that the question could be answered for him: What am I as a human being within human society?

Now, people said, based on their now enlightened worldview: human development is part of the divine order of the world. Or: it is the expression of the moral order of the world; or: historical ideas prevail. And what takes place in the human being is the result of historical ideas, of great world-historical thoughts.

The proletarian saw nothing when he was attached to his machine, harnessed to capitalism, by a divine world order, by a moral world order; he saw only modern economic life; he saw how all that what took place as intellectual life and what people called the divine world order, how it sprouts and emerges from what modern technology and modern capitalism have offered to the leading circles.

That then also became his view. His view was that basically everything that these leading circles have as intellectual life is basically a kind of luxury for them, in which those who are just as entitled to participate in what is produced as these leading circles are not allowed to participate. (“Very true! Bravo!”)

This was deeply ingrained in the souls of the proletariat. And in the scraps that fell from the table where what was concocted in bourgeois intellectual kitchens was offered to the people. They did not want to be fobbed off with that, but they placed above all the greatest value on understanding the spiritual life of humanity, understanding it differently than it has shaped itself out of the bourgeois development of modern times. What had developed there was, of course, seen as nothing other than a mirror image of what had developed in the state and economic life for the leading circles. It was rightly asserted that, in more recent times, this intellectual life was a mirror image of the economic life of those circles that had been favored by the newer economic life. This intellectual life was repeatedly called an ideology. The term “ideology” for this luxury intellectual life became that which, on the one hand, showed what the proletarian felt this intellectual life to be; on the other hand, it showed what he longed for: a real intellectual life that could penetrate his soul in such a way that this soul felt its connection with something that went beyond the most everyday interests in the machine and in capitalism.

Here, too, one need not always go as far as the late German emperor, who once called the proletarians not only enemies of the ruling circles, but enemies of the divine world order; (movement among the audience) but in a certain sense, one felt in the ruling circles in this area no different. What did the proletarian see of this whole intellectual life when he wanted to get a clear idea of it according to the truth? What did he see of it? Oh, what he saw of it – in one word it resounded again and again through decades and decades, since Karl Marx coined and processed this word in an understandable way for the proletariat, that is the word surplus value. Today, timid minds talk about this word surplus value in a very strange way. But the proletarian actually understood the following about surplus value: I have to produce this whole luxury intellectual life, this surplus value that feeds it. The proletarian felt nothing other than that he had to produce the surplus value for this intellectual life, and that this surplus value produces an intellectual life that erects a deep chasm between itself and the innermost needs of the soul. That is why Karl Marx and his followers found so much understanding in the souls of the proletarians, because from their deepest feelings – they did not even need to penetrate into everything theoretically – they experienced in their bodies what the added value actually means, which is subtracted from their labor and flows into channels that do not lead to their own habits of life. («Bravo!»)

Thus, in the realm of intellectual life, the first part of the modern social question arose, which is expressed in the concept of surplus value. The proletarian had to look into this surplus value; and what was produced from this surplus value escaped him, in that he could not participate in it as a human being. This is the first part of the social question, in so far as it took place in the realm of intellectual life. The proletarian could only see some kind of capitalism in this spiritual life, something that was entirely built on the basis of modern capitalism; certainly, on other foundations as well, but initially on this foundation of modern capitalism in the form of surplus value.

The second basis of life, from which the social demand arose, was the legal basis. What is justice? Dear attendees, talking about justice is actually just as difficult and just as easy as talking about the color blue to someone who is color-blind or blind, blind to what wells up in the healthy human mind, blind to what true justice is. A large part of humanity has indeed become blind under the influence of the modern economic system. That is why it is so difficult to talk to these people, just as it is difficult to talk about red or blue to a blind person. For if he wanted to stand on the legal ground and looked around him, what has the proletarian found on this legal ground in modern times? Rights? No, not rights, but privileges, especially for those who have come to these privileges through the modern economic order, or who have come to these privileges through old rights of conquest. What expressed itself on this legal ground was not the effect of the law; it was what the modern proletarian grasped with the word: class struggle. (“Bravo! Very true!”) The modern proletarian looked at the modern state by placing himself in relation to this modern state in such a way that he said to himself that this modern state did not represent what, as we shall hear shortly, every state should be: a living out of the law; but this state was the soil for the modern class struggle. And that is the second thing, in addition to surplus value: the modern class struggle, which confronted the modern proletarian; his class consciousness arose from this surplus value and the class struggle. His great longing is to overcome this class struggle. A social order in which there is no longer the terrible struggle of the rule of one class over another. That is the second form of the social question: the one against the rising class struggle.

The third form arises from economic life, if one has a healthy grasp of economic life. That which can actually be called economic life. What moves in this economic life? What should move in this economic life? Production of goods in the broadest sense, of course, that every human achievement that is required by human need is a commodity, production of goods, circulation of goods, consumption of goods.

But in more recent times, something else has been mixed into this economic cycle of production, circulation and consumption of goods, a remnant of an economic order of ancient times that had passed away, and which the modern capitalist people did not want to help overcome.

In ancient times, esteemed attendees, there were slaves; not only goods, not only what was produced by man or what was under man in nature, like the animal, was bought and sold on the goods market according to supply and demand, but man himself, who was a slave. Man was mixed among the goods. Man was pushed down into the economic order.

In the Middle Ages, serfdom existed for this purpose; less so, people were bought and sold. In more recent times, what remained was what Karl Marx again drew attention to. But in this area, one must be even more radical than Marx in view of the demands of modern times; he pointed out that within the modern commodity market, the human labor of the proletarian is still available as a commodity. This labor power is bought and sold on the market according to supply and demand, like any other commodity. (“Disgusting!”)

Basically, esteemed attendees, can the proletarian, as he has to live today, separate his humanity, his human dignity from his labor power? He must sell his labor power, sell in a certain sense his whole human being, when he sells his labor power [as a commodity]. (“Very true!”) That is the last remnant of the [medieval] world order in capitalism. That is the third great socialist demand, to divest human labor of the character of a commodity. Anyone who thinks sanely knows that human labor and human strength are something that cannot be compared to any commodity, that must not appear on the market like a commodity, that cannot be compared in price with any other commodity. Nevertheless, people are reluctant to remove from the economic cycle what human labor is.

People who are highly valued today because they played a certain, sometimes quite dubious role in the last period of the war, such as Rathenau, for example, he wrote in his latest book, “After the Flood” - by flood he means the last war catastrophe - he wrote: It would not really be appropriate to remove labor from the economic cycle. — That the actual proletarian demand for this is what such people sense; but in their anxious, thoughtless minds they do not find it advisable for the labor force to be stripped of the character of a commodity. Because – so Rathenau thinks – as a result, a great devaluation of money would flood over the entire modern economic order. — This is what is feared: the devaluation of money through the detachment of labor from the pure economic cycle. But it was precisely in this third demand, the detachment of labor from the mere pricing by the economic process, that the modern proletarian sensed that with which he summarized his question of human dignity and human value. Over the course of the last few centuries, and particularly in the nineteenth century, he had been drawn into the economic process in a new way.

This economic process, dear attendees, can be the subject of very interesting studies if we follow this modern economic process across the entire civilized world and see how it led to the terrible catastrophe of recent years. In essence, it was the economic process that grew out of capital that led to this terrible catastrophe, and we will not emerge from it merely as the people who want to conduct peace negotiations imagine. The fact that we will emerge in a completely different way is shown by the weather signs, for which, unlike in the case of world war, there are no hostile forces and neutral ones; it is shown by the social question, which will somehow stop at no territorial borders. This question, which will be an international question in the most eminent sense, and will bring international facts to the surface of human existence that the world has never seen before, shows this. This must be revealed at some point. Those who do not want to see it will be able to experience it first hand. (“Bravo, very true!”)

Now, esteemed attendees, in the economic process, the one who, although still in a cautious way, but in a very clear way, criticized the modern social order, as it was already possible in his time, found out, cautiously, but nevertheless very radically, pointed out to Goethe in the second part of “Faust” what it was actually due to. He lists the saints and the knights as actually originating from times gone by within the economic process, as he says. They stand every storm – so says the chancellor in the second part of Goethe's Faust: They stand every storm, the saint and the knight! – So says Goethe about the leading, guiding circles, the saints and the knights.

Now, in more recent times, dear attendees, these saints and these knights have changed somewhat. The saints have sometimes become quite unholy statesmen (laughter), and the knights have become modern militarism in its most diverse forms. (“Bravo, very true!”) They also stand and have stood their ground in every storm. But Goethe goes on to say something very true: they demand church and state as a reward, namely, everything that he understands by the spiritual life. And they also demand the state as a reward. (Laughter.) They have economic life for themselves anyway, they don't need to demand that first.

This is the part of Goethe's world view that still shines brightly in our time. And we need not stop at the old Goethe, but understand his applications in terms of the immediate present. («Hear, hear!»)

From all this we see that there is actually a threefold social question: the proletarian demands, as they arise as world-historical demands in this period, they show a threefold character, as I have stated. One is based on the spiritual, on the spiritual ground; the second is on the legal ground, the third is on the economic ground. Of the spiritual goods, the proletarian only recognizes that which he must provide as his basis, the added value. On the ground of the state, he sees himself only in the class struggle. And on the ground of economic life, he sees himself harnessed into the cycle of economic life, so that not only goods circulate in it, but also his own labor, that is, his flesh and blood.

Now I come to what I have had to form for myself from decades of observing European social conditions, from observing all that is being prepared and that will take shape in the coming decades. Of course, I can imagine that there are many here in this hall who will not entirely agree with the ideas that I can only sketch out here, as I present them. I can understand that. (Laughter.) But that is not the point. The point is that these ideas, as I intend to present them, are taken from reality. We can agree on this reality. If the agreement is built on an honest foundation, then an agreement will be found with those who are truly honest about the demands of modern times, which will be different from the one that people often talk about today.

During the war catastrophe itself, my dear attendees, I said to many a statesman – I emphasize once again, I say today “statesman” only in quotation marks – I said to many a “statesman”: said: What needs to be done is already clear today: You have the choice of either accepting reason today or letting what should and must happen befall you, facing revolutions and cataclysms. – One preached to deaf ears during the war catastrophe.

For example, not very far north of here during the war catastrophe, the world only had an ear for a personality who was considered to be quite practical at the time. What was not known about this personality – I am referring to Ludendorff – was that he was a visionary of the very first order , a person who was completely out of touch with reality, the likes of whom have not been seen since; anyone who had the opportunity to get to know this person, despite all the underlying reasons, knows that this person had not been fully compos mentis since August 5, 1914. Of course, you can make very clever strategic plans, but you can also be crazy. Every psychiatrist would have to admit that. (Laughter.)

The history of the war in recent years, ladies and gentlemen, will in many respects be a social psychiatry, a social doctrine of delusion. We will be able to learn a lot in this area; but we will have to have the courage to look into the truths. And this truth is, above all, that in recent years humanity has got itself so bogged down in false ideas that these false ideas have come to light in the horrors of this terrible war catastrophe.

When I ask myself: What is it that has actually caused everything that has developed in modern states over time to become the way it has become? I will start by giving you an example. The example is not taken from Switzerland. However, the social question is now an international question, and it must be studied where the examples are most clearly evident – the example is taken from Austria, which has now fallen to its fate. Austria would never have come to the disastrous Austro-Serbian conflict if social, legal and intellectual life in Austria had not developed in the way it did under the influence of completely wrong ideas, since the 1880s, when the development of a constitutional life, the constitutional life of the Austrian Reichsrat, began. What was that like? Members were elected by curia of the large landowners, the cities, markets and industrial centers, the curia of the chambers of commerce, the curia of the rural communities. The latter were only allowed to vote indirectly; the others were allowed to vote directly. (Laughter.) From these economic curia – for you will admit that they are purely economic curia – the members of the Austrian Imperial Council were elected. But this Austrian Reichsrat had to decide on the law. That is, one was guided from the outset by the view that legal life should develop only through the transformation of economic interests. Economic life was completely shifted into legal life. This has also been evident in other areas.

Of course, the German Reichsrat, for example, had universal suffrage. This had often been discussed, even direct suffrage – but it was precisely in more recent times that the new farmers' alliance was able to establish itself very firmly, that is to say, purely economic interests on the legal ground. I could now present you with countless examples of this kind, in which it is shown how precisely the blessings of modern times were sought, precisely the true progress of the times, by merging economic life with legal life. And today there are still people who cannot imagine that economic life should not actually be treated as one with the legal life. The propertied, leading classes, those who demand church and state as a reward, they initially found it convenient to include the telegraph, postal and transport systems in the sphere of the state. Then it went on and on. But especially for certain branches, they did not try to directly merge economic life and state life, but they tried to get the protection of the state for the dominant economic interests. And when one day one studies without prejudice why this war developed, then one will also find among the causes the unfortunate amalgamation of economic interests with legal and state interests in Central Europe. (“Bravo!”)

On the one hand, there is the attempt to fuse state life with economic life. On the other hand, intellectual life has been linked to state life. This intellectual life – after all, it was seen as a very special advance in modern times that this intellectual life did not develop independently, but was harnessed into state life. Indeed, most people today cannot even imagine that it is possible and necessary to retreat in this area, that one must work towards emancipating intellectual life again, detaching it from the state, and allowing economic life to develop on its own free foundation. People have developed and are still developing all kinds of short-sightedness in this area. This intellectual life, one can see, and I believe I have the right to say so, ladies and gentlemen, because I believe that this gives me the right, that throughout my whole life I have never stood on any ground other than that of the freely developing spiritual life, never in the spiritual life of any servant of one or the other state, nor was it the servant of any economic system, but always tried to develop the spiritual life from its own foundations. Therefore, I know what it means to have kept this intellectual life free. But has it been kept free in more recent times, when it has become more and more intertwined with state life? Well, much has been made of the fact that in the Middle Ages, certainly, the times, we would not wish them back, of course not, in the times of the Middle Ages, science was the drag-bearer of theology. Of course that was the case, and it must never return. But is it much different in more recent times in other areas? Of course, that which is formed as science within the state, the state institutions, is no longer as strongly in the background of theology as it was in the Middle Ages, but it is most certainly in the background of the state.

Not only are the scientific institutions and the schools administered by the state, but the state's influence has penetrated into the very content of intellectual life. Science has not become what it is in many constitutions of one country or another: free research, free teaching. No, science has become a servant of the state. There are already states in which modern science does not follow in the footsteps of theology, but, as the last few years have shown, this science is very strongly attached to the sword cord (laughter) and the garrison order is not completely out of touch with the garrison order, and that which has developed as the proletariat's view of this science is perhaps not so unimportant after all when it says: this science as an ideology is only a reflection of the prevailing economic and state order. Have similar conditions not prevailed in the fields of mathematics and physics in more recent times? It's not so clear-cut there, you can't just serve the state; but on the other hand, in areas that directly affect human life, you can serve the state quite strongly. In many cases, science, especially history – you can see it in that, but also in other branches of science – became a servant of the state. The respective rulers decided what was taught; the respective rulers appointed their theologians, lawyers, physicians, philologists, and so on, and science became a clear reflection of the state order, but science can only flourish if it is left to its own devices and develops on its own terrain.

Take history. Do you think that the history of the Hohenzollerns would be written in the future in the same way as it has been written by German professors in the past? (“No!”) That will not be the case. (Laughter.) This history of the Hohenzollerns was a perfect reflection of the intellectual life of the ruling powers. One need not go as far as the famous physiologist – he was otherwise a capable man, “honorable men they all are,” as Shakespeare says – who once spoke in a brilliant assembly and said: We German scientists are the scientific protection force of the Hohenzollerns. – Oh, it was a sincere word. (laughter)

You see, dear attendees, it was a sincere word, but not exactly the description of a desirable state. We need not go that far. But we can see how things will be quite different if the teacher at the lowest level of the school system no longer knows that he is treated according to the maxims of the mere political order, but that he is only administered by an administration that grows purely out of the soil of spiritual life itself. What happens when political life and spiritual life come together has been seen in the German Reichstag, but it can also be seen in other areas. In the German Reichstag we had the so-called Center Party, a party based purely on religion. It entered into coalitions with all kinds of other parties, and what was taken out of purely religious foundations flowed into the law of the Reich. These things, which could be multiplied a hundredfold as examples, testify that it is necessary that in the future that which has just been merged under the influence of modern capitalism - spiritual life, legal life or political life and economic life - that this in turn must be separated again, that a threefold social organism must come into being, that there must be a standing side by side, like sovereign states, an independent administration of spiritual life, an independent administration of political or state life, an independent administration of economic life. Only then will these three areas combine in a proper way to form a unity, when each of these three areas can develop out of its own strength.

Let us take the example of economic life. There we can see how this economic life is dependent on the one hand on the natural foundations, depending on the social territory in question, whether the soil is fertile or more or less infertile, depending on whether this or that thrives or does not thrive, the economic life of this or that is also. We can learn this from extreme examples. In a banana-producing country, where bananas are an important food, it turns out that the labor required to bring bananas from their place of origin to the consumer is a hundred times less than the labor required in our own, in our own Central European regions, to bring wheat from sowing to consumption. Of course, such extreme examples do not exist in the individual territories of our regions; but the individual economic branches of production differ so much from each other that different human labor is needed for them, and so on, and so on. Economic life depends on the natural foundation on the one hand. One can improve this natural foundation through all kinds of technical achievements; but a limit has been created on this side. On the other side, this limit must be met by another limit, which comes from the independent constitutional state. This other side will be created when we no longer see such peculiar things, which, while supposedly working with modern human rights, only cover up delusions.

Such institutions are, for example, the modern employment contract. As long as the worker has to conclude a contract, like a commodity, with the so-called entrepreneur, there can be no question of a legal relationship between entrepreneur and worker. Even if the entire employment relationship is removed from the economic process and placed in an independent legal organism, if real democracy prevails within the independent legal organism, where what applies equally to all people comes into consideration, if decisions are made on this legal basis regarding the duration and type of work, if a decision has already been made about the work before this work is even applied in the economic process, as is decided in the earth itself by the forces of nature about fertility and infertility before the economic process begins, only then is a real legal relationship possible between the so-called worker and employer, which must take on completely different forms in the future.

First of all, it must be determined how long one may work, how one works, and so on; then it must be determined what the relationship between the worker and the supervisor must be before the economic process can even be considered. But then the employment contract will only be able to extend to the appropriate distribution of what the worker and the supervisor produce together. Only then will justice be able to prevail in this area. (“Bravo!”)

Do not think, honored attendees, that by saying this I am somehow advocating a return to the old piecework wages. Only someone who fails to take into account what I am proposing here, in the context of a completely healthy social organism, would think that. The old piecework wages were also a wage. What I am proposing here is a contractual relationship, based on a self-evident legal relationship, between the person who performs the physical work and the person who, through his individual abilities, is to direct this work for the benefit of the social organism, not for his own capitalist, personal, selfish gain.

This is what I have to say about something quite different from, say, a renewal of the old piecework wage. The wage relationship ceases altogether. And what takes its place is a contractual relationship for the work produced. Then the worker will know where his surplus value goes; because then he will be in a position to stand freely in relation to the labor manager, because his relationship to the work is created on the basis of the law, then he will know how he can carry out the distribution in this free contract.

On the one hand, there is the employment relationship, but this can only be created if it is as independent as the relationship between the economic process and the rule of law in modern times.

Oh, I know, esteemed attendees, how many prejudices there are against this independent constitutional state on the one hand and the independent economic state on the other. But that is just what people have been deluding themselves about in recent times. The state as such has become a pure idol for the people, not to say a pure god. One can apply a saying of Goethe to this idol or god-state, although it is a saying that Faust speaks to the sixteen-year-old Gretchen in relation to religious questions: “The All-embracing, the All-sustaining, does not it grasp and sustain you, me, itself?” The modern capitalist, the modern employer, could say to the employee, much as Faust said to God: ‘The All-embracing, the All-sustaining, does it not embrace and sustain you, me, itself?’ And in private he might even think: but especially me. (Laughter.)

Dear attendees, the habit of thinking has become a strong one, and it will resist this autonomization of economic and state life. It will not be possible to achieve what must be achieved by way of mere cooperation, of cooperation encompassing the whole state. On the contrary, it will be necessary to separate legal life from economic life. Then, on the one hand, economic life will be able to develop merely as the circulation, production and consumption of goods, and what Social Democracy has always talked about will be realized, namely that it is no longer the case that production must be for production's sake, but that production is for consumption. (“Bravo!”)

But this cannot develop in any other way, my dear attendees, than if there is an independent legal basis that extends, on the one hand, to labor law, but on the other hand, mainly extends to so-called ownership, to so-called property, namely private property.

Anyone who wants to come to terms with private property, or more precisely, wants to come to terms with it, should, above all, be aware that for the social organism, for social life, the ownership relationship can only be a legal relationship. Initially, it is a privilege, a class relationship; but it is a legal relationship by nature. After all, what is ownership? Everything else is wishy-washy. What is important about property in social life is the right to dispose of some thing. That is a right, and it comes into consideration as a right, comes into consideration as a right, in that the right must be the object of the political state, in that this right is determined and regulated from person to person. In a purely democratic way, the economic state is that which arises out of human needs and out of necessary production. Thus, the constitutional state is that which arises out of that in which all people are equal, which concerns all people. We have an understanding from person to person, which must be established on democratic ground. The economic organism will develop out of what has been shown in the beginnings, but only in such beginnings, in the cooperative and trade union systems and so on, out of the various professional groups, out of the interests that develop between production and consumption, where associations are formed, and on the basis of these associations, which are managed purely appropriately, the economic state will be managed, for my part I say the economic state; I could also say the economic organism will be managed, the economic cycle, in which only goods will circulate. And in this economic organism, above all that which is still administered by the state laws today will prevail. Not the state will have to determine by laws what the currency is, which actually causes the strong price fluctuations, but in the economic organism that which is the administration of money can arise out of the mere administration of this economic organism. Money is what, after the natural economy, causes people living in a social organism to engage in a common economy. Money can be nothing other than the instruction that I have, on the basis of the fact that I myself have produced something, the instruction that I have, that at the right time, on the basis of what I have produced, I can get something else from someone else that they have produced. But this can only be achieved on the basis of the economic organism.

The actual state ground will only contain that which can be built on a democratic basis, on the legal basis, on the legal basis where all people are equal.

And spiritual life, which must be separated as the third element from the other two: today, spiritual life truly lives in very strange connections with state life, with political life. When I lectured on the same subject in Basel last Wednesday, a speaker in the discussion replied – I disagreed with much of what he said, but one point he made was something that really spoke of the mixing, the unnatural combination of spiritual life, or part of spiritual life, with economic life.

With regard to intellectual life, modern social democracy has only one link from which it says: religion must be a private matter, a religion separate from state life. Whatever the motive for this may be, the continuation of what this demand implies for intellectual life as a whole, the separation of intellectual life from state and economic life, is the key to the future. Otherwise, strange customs will continue to arise that point to the unhealthiness of our social life. As I said, this gentleman pointed out that, in this latest nuance, I don't know how to describe it without hurting its feelings, so let's just say that in this National Assembly of the German Reich there is once again a coalition between the Center Party and the Majority Socialists. (“Yuck!” and laughter) The Center Party and the Majority Socialists, they're going out together. The Center Party is made up of Catholic people, isn't it, very good Catholic people – yes, I don't know how Catholics can get together by working together in this way, even if it is with the majority socialists, but always with the social democrats, if you have seen the last pastoral letter from the Bishop of Chur, and read what it says! It says nothing less than that anyone who rebels as a soldier violates the divine world order, and that therefore no sins can be forgiven in confession by anyone who professes any social party. That is the latest pastoral letter, dated February 2, 1919. Yes, I wonder how that squares with the coalition of the Center Party and the Social Democrats in the German National Assembly? There the good Catholic people have allied themselves with others, of whom the Archbishop of Chur demands that no sins be remitted to them in confession, so they will have to go to hell laden with sins. So we see them walking hand in hand in the German National Assembly, these Catholics with those who cannot even be absolved of their sins in confession. I just want to know what is supposed to become of this coalition on its way to hell. Yes, the whole thing really does look quite ridiculous. But these absurdities, esteemed attendees, are realities in our present time. We can only escape from these realities and find our way back to a healthy state if we really commit ourselves to the threefold social order, striving ever more earnestly to ensure that the entire spiritual life, from the lowest school level up to the highest university level, is truly on its own ground. Anyone who is familiar with intellectual life knows that this intellectual life can only flourish from its own inner forces if it is independent of both the state and economic life. But if the person who is supposed to produce spiritually has to obey the instructions of a state, or even if he is a slave to this or that capitalist, this or that clique – some people are unaware of it, don't even know it, believe they are only following their genius by painting a picture, and in truth they are not following their genius at all, but they are following the capitalist economic order. (“Very true.”) People are just not sufficiently clear-minded to see the laws of modern social life in which they are immersed.

But this is the task above all: to look into it. Then one will also come to understand what this threefold social organism means. With the dawn of modern times, at the end of the eighteenth century, three significant words emerged from the French Revolution, and already at its beginning, like the motto of modern times: liberty, equality and fraternity. In the course of the nineteenth century, quite clever people, honorable men, have repeatedly emphasized how these three qualities contradict each other, how freedom is incompatible with equality; because if all people are equal, then the individual cannot develop freely. Now, in the book that will be published in the next few days about the social question, I will show that the progress in the development of what is called capital can only lead out of the damage of modern capitalism if everything that is capital is related in a certain way to the link of the social organism where individual spiritual abilities are administered. There it will be possible for that to occur – I can only hint at this here, you will find it more clearly explained in my book – which today, within certain limits, is only admitted for the most insignificant property that one can have in our present-day capitalist, materialistic time. What exactly is the most insignificant, most contemptible property for the leading people? The spiritual. At least, to be fair, it is still allowed to be transferred to the public domain, to become common property, 30 years after the death of the person who produced it. In the near future, things will have to be quite different with material goods. We will have to find the same way of transferring material goods to the public domain as we have only found for the most shameful matter, intellectual property. This spiritual property is rightly transferred. Because however it may be with the material abilities of a person and so on, you need talent and so on to produce something; but if something has been produced on the basis of the social community, then just as language is only found in the community, so all material goods can only have come about through the social community, and only have a relationship to this community in so far as one's abilities are linked to it. As long as a leader's abilities can be linked to a production company, he will continue to lead it in the future. Ways and means must be sought to ensure that material goods, like intellectual goods today, are included in the cycle of capital, of the means of production.

This is what must be considered, this is what must be incorporated into the future development of humanity. (“Bravo!”) There must, however, be freedom in the realm of intellectual life. But, as I said, people have always shown, very astutely, that this freedom would contradict equality. On the other hand, they had proved that equality would contradict fraternity. It would indeed contradict if it were understood according to the principle: And if you will not be my brother, I will smash your skull. Well, people talk like that, at least some people. But these three, they will be what flows into my heart, equality, freedom and fraternity.

What matters is that we do not merely examine them for superficial contradictions, but that we ask deeper questions, for example, about what lies behind them. And here it becomes clear to us that when these three meaningful social impulses were heard, people were still hypnotized by the unitary state, quite obviously hypnotized by the unitary state: the state that maintains you and yourself and me, but especially maintains me.

People were hypnotized by it. But these three impulses have their meaning precisely when the threefold social order is carried out. People still talk about it today; they use buzzwords: individualism, socialism, democracy. Certainly, dear attendees, just as liberty, equality and fraternity are three impulses, so too are individualism, democracy and socialism three impulses. They can only be understood if we know that individualism is that which is connected with the individual abilities and talents of the human being. This must be in the realm of spiritual life, democracy in the realm of the state, where the equality of all people comes into consideration, where what happens concerns all people, where labor law and property law - there will be no ownership - but management law will come into consideration. That which develops as socialism in the future will prevail in the field of economic life. And it will be the same with freedom, equality and fraternity. Freedom must be in the field of spiritual life. Therefore, the spiritual life must also be able to develop freely. Fearful minds, who say: But if the school is free, what will it turn into? Well, I think people know little about the modern labor movement. The modern worker has every interest in not falling back into the subservience of the ruling classes through some kind of ignorance. If you leave it up to him to send his children to school, then he will certainly do so. Others may stay away, however: those who belong to the class that already know what their little attempt at education has actually cost them and how often they skipped school while they were training. They didn't just skip school for days at a time, but sometimes skipped school to such an extent that their certificates are now of very little value.

Freedom in the field of intellectual life, equality in the field of political or state life, fraternity in the broadest sense in the field of economic life through associations and cooperatives, which will truly extend fraternity to the whole of economic life: Only then, my dear attendees, when it is realized that the social organization must be tripartite, will it be known how freedom in spiritual life, equality in democratic state life, and fraternity in economic life will develop alongside each other in the future. This will be the fulfillment of what has been resounding through humanity for more than a century.

So, looking at the interrelationships, at what is actually in the forces that already lie in the historical development of humanity today, will lead to the necessary recognition of these three elements, which I have only been able to sketch for you and which you will find further developed in my book.

But I believe, dear attendees, that however much people today, with all sorts of buzzwords, because it would be convenient for them to be able to remain in the old order, will struggle against such thoughts, it should be realized, however, in what way these thoughts are new. Many a person today says that he considers this or that to be good for the future. Oh, one can consider many things to be good! But I certainly do not imagine that I am any smarter than other people when it comes to the details of what should happen. That is why I am not proposing a utopia; on the contrary, what I have presented is the opposite of a utopia. What I have presented can be tackled anywhere, regardless of one's starting point. No matter how far the [revolution] has progressed in Eastern Europe or how far away it still is in other parts of Europe, it can be started anywhere by starting from a specific, real point and working, on the one hand, towards establishing free schooling and free spiritual life; on the other hand, establishing economic life that is independent of the state, which must develop in the future in the form of a cooperative, namely through the fraternization of production and consumption. This is the most real thing, the most practical thing that can be conceived at all in the present. For it is not based on some kind of program, it is based on the reality of the human being. It is said again and again: If you want to introduce a threefold social order, where is the unity? The unity will be the human being, esteemed attendees, because when it is objected: Do you want to restore the old class order, the lower class, the military class, the teaching class? Certainly, there is nothing particularly wrong with the lower class today, because people need it.

The military estate – well, so much has been said about it in recent years that I don't need to repeat the things! The teaching estate – well, that has become not unlike the teaching profession, the civil service. For it is not a matter of establishing new estates; it is a matter of the administration, the organization, which is completely separate from the human being, that is tripartite. The human being himself will be in all three organisms; insofar as he has individual abilities to develop, he will belong to the spiritual organism, will have relationships to it, will have to decide how he wants to integrate himself into the spiritual organism, and will, of course, belong to the state organism with regard to that which is the same for all people. The law applies to the economic organism that everyone must be included. The human being will be the unit. But in this way the human being will be able to be placed in terms of his true human dignity. That is what matters, that people are no longer divided, but rather that the social order itself is divided.

I believe, esteemed attendees, that those who are most likely to understand such a social order can arise from the proletariat. The proletarian truly has no reason to have much preference for the old orders that have been transferred to modern times, which some people today would still like to find so comfortable if only they were not challenged too much. (Laughter.) The proletarian has learned to rely on himself. He has learned to look for something other than what some people have received so far. He has perhaps also learned that new thoughts are necessary, that one must rethink, that one must not merely transform a few institutions with the old habits of thought, but that new thoughts are necessary, that rethinking is necessary. The fresh intellect of the modern proletarian is underestimated in many circles; it will find itself in such thinking. One should entertain such thoughts in a time when people so often say: The catastrophe of war has revealed something that has never been seen before in history. Those who absolutely do not want to believe that one needs these thoughts should consider that in such a time, when events have occurred that have not yet occurred, thoughts must also arise that are unfamiliar, unfamiliar to those people who only live in the old well-worn tracks. But I do believe that the proletariat, as it feels dissatisfied with the legacy of the old bourgeois order, will find its way into what is necessary as a new social order, especially for the healthy threefold social organism. Therefore, I believe that it is not in vain that it is spoken into the souls of the proletarians when this social order of the future is spoken of, which I believe wants to and must be realized because it lies within the innermost human impulse for the near future.

At the same time, this is what fills me with the hope that those who will come from the proletarian world will understand a reasonable, progressive movement in this sense, towards a healthy social organism. Then, precisely from the proletariat, would come that humanity which, through what it now strives for, out of need and misery, out of contempt for its human dignity on the part of the other classes, what it strives for , but for its class, it would develop out of what must become the development of the future, not for the benefit of one class, but for the benefit of all humanity, which must be striven for: the liberation of all humanity, the liberation of that in humanity that is worthy of liberation.

But this can only come about through social views that are not based on some kind of idea, but on observation of life. It is certainly true that enough words have been exchanged to date; but the only thing that can be done is to deepen our understanding of what can happen and what can be transformed into action. I wanted to talk to you about such views, which do not just repeat worn-out words and old views , but I wanted to speak to you of such thoughts that can be realized everywhere where there is goodwill. These are thoughts that should soon be transformed into deeds, because they must be transformed into deeds according to the demands of world history and are also required by people, more or less unconsciously, for the next stage of development. (Lively applause.)

We will now take a short break of about five minutes. Then there will be a free discussion. Those who wish to speak or have something to say on the subject should do so voluntarily and give me their name, or if someone wants to ask a question in writing, there will also be an opportunity to do so. Rudolf Steiner: Well, it seems that is not the case, dear attendees. I do not take this as a sign that you all agree with everything I have said, but nor do I take it as a sign that you all disagree with what I have said. But I do think that, yes, in fact, in terms of discussions, the matter is quite difficult today; because most discussions in this area are very often conducted in such a way that people bring their preconceived point of view with them; and those who take the questions at hand take the questions seriously, know how difficult it is to arrive at views that are grounded in reality, to arrive at reasoned views that can really lead to what we all long for. In our time, more than one would think, schoolmastering and the like is the order of the day.

And I myself, after having written the “Appeal” that has been signed by a whole series of people in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and which I presented at the Goetheanum, have recently had to learn, to my great satisfaction, that it was highly unusual for the doctor to come from Dornach, from the Goetheanum, when we know that book on the social question, which will be published soon. I myself have had to experience, for example, that someone told me it was highly remarkable that the doctor is coming from Dornach, from the Goetheanum, where we know that the spirit is constantly being talked about, and yet the whole appeal says nothing about the spirit. Well, it does say that spiritual life should be built on itself, and I have confidence that if it is built on itself alone, it will develop healthily. But I am not convinced by the declamations that one hears again and again today, that people will become healthy in their social lives if they turn away from matter and turn to the spirit – no, I am not convinced by these declamations.

Now you see, my dear audience, I am not looking for the spirit where people always talk about the spirit, but I believe that the real spirit is the one that has the strength to immerse itself in practical real life, that really has understanding for life. A spiritual worldview that only ever talks about spirit and ghosts, for my part, whatever it calls this spirit, that only ever has this lip service of the spirit, such a worldview seems to me, especially in the present time, not at all to point to something future, but rather it seems to me to be precisely the most terrible result of the order that is coming to an end.

This is what I would like to say in response to people telling me to speak more of the spirit: I do not seek the spirit in what is said, not in the what, but in the how, how life is understood, how one tries to understand life. And so, precisely because this view of the School of Spiritual Science that is to be established is taken as a starting point, I have been met with a number of objections, because people have expected something different. But the work that spiritual science, as it is meant here, actually wants to do is something that serves life. And in our time, dear honored attendees, those who devote themselves above all to those questions that today do not speak to us through mere words, but that speak through facts, serve life.

And do we not see it? Party views are walking around among us like mummies. Thoughts have been left behind by facts everywhere. Facts of greater force have emerged from the catastrophe of the world war; these facts must be dealt with. They will not be dealt with if we continue to dwell on the thoughts we have formed so far. We must learn to think differently today.

That is what I would like to have evoked as a kind of feeling. And in this feeling, in the feeling that a new era must come and that a new era is indeed heralded by the demands, however they may arise, that express themselves through the loudly speaking facts throughout Europe, however much some may resist them, in this feeling I would like to be understood by you above all. For when people find themselves more and more in common feeling, in common feeling, then that among them will be able to revive, which we are striving for through something that also wants this threefold social organism that I have established. I would like you to understand me in this sense. And so we can understand each other without having a discussion, which, as it seems, is not desired. But just because I would like to be understood in this way, I may also add to what I have already said today: It is a real source of great satisfaction for me to be able to welcome you here today, to these rooms, where I believe you will form an opinion that is different from those that have been formed here or there. I hope that you will be able to form the opinion that it is not just some kind of luxury ideas that are developed here in these rooms, but that serious and honest efforts are made to serve the highest interests of humanity. In this sense, these rooms aspire to be a university for spiritual science. And it gives me a very special inner and heartfelt joy to be able to welcome the ladies and gentlemen of the surroundings here in these rooms, especially when discussing such an important question. I hope it will truly not be the last time within these walls. (“Bravo!”)